Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Quebec and the Canadas 9781442670051

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction Quebec and the Canadas, 1760 to 1867: A Legal Historiography
1. Les débuts de la littérature juridique québécoise, 1767–1840
2. Les revendications des nouveaux sujets, francophones et catholiques, de la Province de Québec, 1764–1774
3. “A just and obvious distinction”: The Meaning of Imprisonment for Debt and the Criminal Law in Upper Canada’s Age of Reform
4. The Law of Nations in the Borderlands: Sovereignty and Self-Defence in the Rebellion Period, 1837–1842
5. Minority Groups and the Law in Quebec, 1760–1867
6. Être « demanderesse » en Justice: Permanences civilistes dans la Province de Québec, de la Juridiction royale de Montréal (1740–1760) à la Cour des plaids communs de Montréal (1760–1791)
7. “To shudder at the bare recital of those acts”: Child Abuse, Family, and Montreal Courts in the Early Nineteenth Century
8. Married Women’s Property Law Reform, Couples, and Fraud in Canada West / Ontario, 1859–1900
9. From Shaved Horses to Aggressive Churchwardens: Social and Legal Aspects of Moral Injury in Lower Canada
10. “Possession of arms among these men … might lead to serious consequences”: Regulating Firearms in the Canadas, 1760–1867
11. Grand Juries and “Proper Authorities”: Low Law, Soft Law, and Local Governance in Canada West / Ontario, 1850–1880
Contributors
Index

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ESSA Y S I N THE HI S T O R Y O F C A NA D I A N LA W VO L U ME X I Quebec and the Canadas

PATRONS OF THE SOCIETY

Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP Gowlings Lax O’Sullivan Scott Lisus LLP McCarthy Tétrault LLP Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP Torkin Manes LLP Torys LLP WeirFoulds LLP

The Osgoode Society is supported by a grant from The Law Foundation of Ontario.

The Society also thanks The Law Society of Upper Canada for its continuing support.

ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF CANADIAN LAW VOLUME XI QUEBEC AND THE CANADAS Edited by G. BLAINE BAKER AND DONALD FYSON

Published for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History 2013 www.utppublishing.com www.osgoodesociety.ca Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4815-9

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Publication cataloguing information is available from Library and Archives Canada.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

foreword p r e fac e

vii ix

Introduction: Quebec and the Canadas, 1760 to 1867: A Legal Historiography 3 g. blaine baker 1 Les débuts de la littérature juridique québécoise, 1767–1840 96 s y lv i o n o r m a n d 2 Les revendications des nouveaux sujets, francophones et catholiques, de la Province de Québec, 1764–1774 131 michel morin 3 “A just and obvious distinction”: The Meaning of Imprisonment for Debt and the Criminal Law in Upper Canada’s Age of Reform 187 j e f f r e y l . m c na i r n 4 The Law of Nations in the Borderlands: Sovereignty and SelfDefence in the Rebellion Period, 1837–1842 235 bradley miller

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5 Minority Groups and the Law in Quebec, 1760–1867 278 d o na l d f y s o n 6 Être « demanderesse » en Justice: Permanences civilistes dans la Province de Québec, de la Juridiction royale de Montréal (1740–1760) à la Cour des plaids communs de Montréal (1760–1791) 330 dav i d g i l l e s 7 “To shudder at the bare recital of those acts”: Child Abuse, Family, and Montreal Courts in the Early Nineteenth Century 370 i a n c . p i l a rc z y k 8 Married Women’s Property Law Reform, Couples, and Fraud in Canada West / Ontario, 1859–1900 427 lori chambers 9 From Shaved Horses to Aggressive Churchwardens: Social and Legal Aspects of Moral Injury in Lower Canada 460 eric h. reiter 10 “Possession of arms among these men … might lead to serious consequences”: Regulating Firearms in the Canadas, 1760–1867 503 r . b l a k e b ro w n 11 Grand Juries and “Proper Authorities”: Low Law, Soft Law, and Local Governance in Canada West / Ontario, 1850–1880 538 mary stokes contributors index

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Foreword THE OSGOODE SOCIETY FOR CANADIAN LEGAL HISTORY

In 1981 the Osgoode Society launched its publishing program with the first volume of Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Nine more volumes have appeared since, and we are delighted to now publish Volume XI, which, perhaps surprisingly, is the first one devoted exclusively to what is now Ontario and Quebec. Anchored by a comprehensive introduction exploring the main themes of the pre-Confederation legal history of the region, this volume has six essays on Quebec/Lower Canada/ Canada East (three in French), three on Upper Canada/Canada West, and two that straddle both jurisdictions. The subjects covered range widely and include women’s representation in Quebec courts, grand juries, western law and Aboriginal peoples, gun use and control, Quebec legal literature, married women’s property, and imprisonment for debt. We are grateful to Professors Baker and Fyson for conceiving of this project and for working hard to make it a very significant contribution to our understanding of Canadian legal history. The purpose of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History is to encourage research and writing in the history of Canadian law. The Society, which was incorporated in 1979 and is registered as a charity, was founded at the initiative of the Honourable R. Roy McMurtry and officials of the Law Society of Upper Canada. The Society seeks to stimulate the study of legal history in Canada by supporting researchers, collecting oral histories, and publishing volumes that contribute to legal-historical scholarship in Canada. It has published ninety-two

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books on the courts, the judiciary, and the legal profession, as well as on the history of crime and punishment, women and law, law and economy, the legal treatment of ethnic minorities, and famous cases and significant trials in all areas of the law. Current directors of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History are Robert Armstrong, Kenneth Binks, Susan Binnie, David Chernos, Thomas G. Conway, J. Douglas Ewart, Violet French, Martin Friedland, John Gerretsen, Philip Girard, William Kaplan, C. Ian Kyer, Virginia MacLean, Patricia McMahon, Roy McMurtry, Dana Peebles, Paul Perell, Jim Phillips, Paul Reinhardt, Joel Richler, William Ross, Paul Schabas, Robert Sharpe, Lorne Sossin, Mary Stokes, and Michael Tulloch. The annual report and information about membership may be obtained by writing to the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, Osgoode Hall, 130 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5H 2N6. Telephone: 416-947-3321. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www .osgoodesociety.ca. R. Roy McMurtry President Jim Phillips Editor-in-Chief

Preface

We are grateful, as co-editors of this collection of essays, for the support shown this project by the Osgoode Society, particularly the Society’s Editor-in-Chief, Jim Phillips, and Philip Girard, its Associate Editor. We would also like to thank the staff at University of Toronto Press for their support and patience, and especially Wayne Herrington and Len Husband. Our greatest debt is, however, to the contributors to this volume, who comprise a welcome cross-section of backgrounds, academic disciplines, and career paths. They come from law schools, law and society groups, history departments and women’s studies centres, and from such diverse geographic locations as Boston, Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Thunder Bay, and Vancouver. But they share a major research interest in the legal history of Quebec and the Canadas. As can be seen from the essays in this collection, these scholars’ legal history touches on broad themes such as culture (Normand and Reiter), politics (Miller, Morin, and Stokes), social hierarchies (Gilles, Pilarczyk, and Fyson), and economic relations (Chambers and McNairn). A few of the papers were drawn from as yet unpublished doctoral theses (Miller, Pilarczyk, and Stokes), some of them are elaborations or continuations of work already published by their authors on similar themes (Brown, Chambers, Gilles, and Normand), and some of them represent new research directions for their authors (Fyson, McNairn, and Reiter). Three of the essays are in French, which expands the Osgoode Society’s pat-

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tern of drawing leading Quebec historians into its fold (in its State Trials project, for example) but, for the first time in the Society’s experience, with a bilingual publication. The papers in this text are arranged in an order based on both chronology and theme. Depending on how one counts, some four of the essays deal exclusively with Lower Canada or Canada East, four more of them focus on Upper Canada or Canada West, and the remaining four papers feature elements of Quebec or both Canadas. We are pleased to have at least begun presentation of the Canadas as a related whole. The earliest volumes of Essays in the History of Canadian Law were sometimes criticized for a surfeit of central-Canadian (read Ontarian) content, too little comparative material, and an apparent aversion to the twentieth century. Later entries in that series have gone far towards filling those gaps, to the point where Quebec and the Canadas were at risk of being left out of emerging national and continental syntheses. We hope we have helped to avert that danger, and that this collection will encourage others to build on the often novel scholarly blocks that it provides. We also hope that it will be of interest to mainstream scholars and students in the humanities, law, and the social sciences for whom legal history, its theory, practice, or historiography have not otherwise been preoccupations. G. Blaine Baker and Donald Fyson

ESSA Y S I N THE HI S T O R Y O F C A NA D I A N LA W VO L U ME X I Quebec and the Canadas

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Introduction Quebec and the Canadas, 1760 to 1867: A Legal Historiography g . b l ain e b ak e r *

The essays in this volume deal with various aspects of the legal history of the Province of Quebec, Upper and Lower Canada, and the Province of Canada between the British conquest of that region in 1759 and confederation of most of the extant British North America colonies in 1867. That geographic area, the backbone of the modern Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, was unified politically for more than half of the period under consideration and has sometimes been treated as an institutional, social, or commercial whole by contemporary historians.1 Montreal was, moreover, the transportation, economic, and cultural centre of that St Lawrence and Great Lakes watershed for much of the time in issue. It therefore seemed appropriate to attempt to bridge or compare the diversities of language and culture, high, low, and informal law in this inaugural collection of central-Canadian legal histories. These chapters were assembled on the premise that it is suitable at this stage in the writing of Canadian legal history to continue “sinking deep fence posts” in that field of inquiry (in the form of geographically or topically focused papers), while leaving the “stringing of wire” between those posts (in the form of a synthetic history) for the future.2 Indeed, it is striking that many of the reviews of pioneering, comprehensive treatments of modern Australian, English, and American legal history by authors such as Alex Castles, Anthony Manchester, Morton Horwitz, and Lawrence Friedman effectively characterized those accounts as partial or premature installations of weak fence wire among

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too few posts.3 More recently published historical syntheses of those jurisdictions’ law look very different from their predecessors.4 The chapters in this volume are therefore intended to augment other region- or topic-specific collections of Canadian essays, with a view to promoting further work of their kind.5 This anthological genre has not yet completed its useful, and perhaps required, course. In a similar vein, this introduction is an “anchor” historiographic overview, rather than a summary of the chapters that follow. It does, however, situate those ensuing chapters in a general historiography. Solid surveys of writing in Canadian legal history have been produced, but they have not done the task to which this introduction is addressed, since they often dealt with longer or shorter runs of time, larger or smaller geographic areas, or fewer subjects than those covered here.6 Several wide-ranging forays into the theoretical aspects of Canadian legal history have also appeared, and that scholarship has sometimes been inspirational or corrective.7 The work of another group of researchers who have produced archival guides or reflected on the relationship between primary legal sources and writing in Canadian intellectual, social, or economic history also bears notice.8 Official sources of law provided the resource base for most of the chapters in this collection, although the studies published here deal with a range of “high” and “low” topics in legal history. High law is generally thought to have to do with superior court judges, reported judicial decisions, and formal legal doctrine, while low law is about daily legal events and their impact on ordinary lives.9 While that recently articulated distinction has helped to ameliorate the over-reliance in much pioneering Anglo-American legal history on appellate court judgments, it has tended to deflect scholarly attention from the powerful role of informal normativity in people’s lives. Good Canadian studies of the unofficial norms that animated censorious events like charivaris, white-capping, and duelling have appeared, but they are rare.10 That state of affairs seems regrettable, since legal historians’ potential collaborators among contemporary “law and society” and “legal pluralism” scholars are often pursuing themes from informal, implicit, and customary normativity in productive and theoretically sophisticated ways.11 Less systemic historiographical gaps than that one will also be identified on a topic-by-topic basis in this survey, in part by reference to suggestive non-Canadian literature on analogous themes. This introduction comprises sections on constitutions and governance, legislative law reform, privately made obligations and facilita-

Introduction

5

tive law, regulatory private law, family relations, criminal law and its administration, international relations, the legal professions, and legal culture. Those headings are deliberately broad and slightly novel, to allow for good integration of subthemes with legal or social focus and with inter-provincial application. Constitutions and Governance Constitutional history has long been a popular field of inquiry among political and legal historians of the Canadas, but in recent years scholarly engagement with it has gone into decline. Standard works by authors like Jacques-Yvon Morin, Phillip Buckner, Peter Waite, William Ormsby, and McGregor Dawson remain helpful on the framework of local constitutional events of 1763, 1774–5, 1791, 1840–1, and 1867.12 But, as several commentators have observed, the dominant characteristic of work in that field has been formalism.13 Exceptions to that generalization include book- and article-length studies of the Canadas’ early constitutionalists and those provinces’ inaugural parliamentary institutions.14 Perhaps most engaging has been a series of studies of Upper Canadian courts’ and politicians’ embrace or abuse of the “rule of law,” neatly summarized historiographically by Peter Oliver.15 Revisionist scholarship set in the immediate post-Confederation era, which, strictly speaking, lies beyond the purview of this collection, has also begun to shed retrospective light on the presumptions of the Fathers of Confederation about how federal and provincial prerogatives set out in the British North America Act, 1867 were to be policed in political, executive, and judicial forums, and on the conceptual relationship between private and provincial rights.16 Issues related to the colonial reception of imperial law have, however, been the leading constitutional concern of local legal historians for some time.17 Internal or lawyers’ approaches to that process of transplantation, rather than humanistic or contextual ones, have tended to dominate those inquiries. Internal history is typically written from the standpoint of legal-looking things like statutes, doctrine, and courts, while configurational or external approaches to legal history generally attempt to situate juridical events, artefacts, or processes in companion social, economic, or cultural developments.18 Official English and customary Parisian law were plainly incapable of transatlantic travel on their own, and statutory declarations about their British North American arrival or perpetuation cannot have made that “transplant” much

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more direct. There is, moreover, a large ancillary issue about the late eighteenth-century content and even the existence of those bodies of European law that will be canvassed later in this introduction.19 Norms of most kind travel in mind’s-eye, oral, or written form, and it is therefore gratifying that local scholars have begun to reconstruct the workaday processes (lawyerly and popular) by which regional and national law were transported to and publicized in Quebec and the Canadas.20 That is a project for which assessments of analogous legal transplants to other parts of Britain’s first and second empires might provide guidance.21 The ways and means of legal and other normative migrations must be more mysterious than analysis of statutory reception edicts has traditionally allowed. The imperial and Canadian states’ late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury relationship with First Nations communities has recently come to be understood in more detail and with greater nuance than was formerly the case.22 Characterizing those relations as multinational seems well warranted for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but a caveat should be added for the mid-nineteenth century. The “deinternationalization” of Aboriginal relations is a major theme of the union period, as the imperial state withdrew from that sphere of diplomacy and governance while the colonial state was shown to be unwilling or unable to police encroachment on Native lands by settlers who had difficulty understanding Aboriginal rights.23 The same is more or less true in the use of natural resources other than land.24 With that point about the subsumption of Natives into the colonial state in mind, it can be said that revived academic curiosity about Native communities has sometimes been a result of interest among local scholars in the justice system’s treatment of diverse minorities, including racial, ethnic, religious, and gender-based ones.25 The focus of that burgeoning historical scholarship, at least insofar as it relates to Aboriginal groups, has tended to be criminal law during the post-Confederation period.26 But historians examining First Nations have increasingly made that subject their specialty and would argue against Native groups being viewed as one among many minorities. James Miller’s ambitious synthesis of governmental treaty-making practices over the course of nearly two centuries (including the 1760–1867 period), for example, is important for its descriptions of inter-“national” recognition, negotiation, and coexistence among the imperial and Canadian states and First Nations.27 Studies of post-contact Aboriginal self-government in the Canadas have also begun to appear, and they can profitably be read

Introduction

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alongside pluralistically oriented accounts of Native legal autonomy in other colonial settings.28 That kind of scholarship often calls into question traditional disciplinary boundaries between history and anthropology, for the distant and the recent past, and should help to encourage heightened collaboration of the sort mentioned earlier in this survey between students of implicit and explicit normativity.29 Further examination of First Nations laws, along those lines, probably should be a research priority. This subsection of the introduction is augmented by Donald Fyson’s chapter in this collection which asks, historically and historiographically, why groups such as women, blacks, non-francophones, and Natives had significantly different experiences with the law of Quebec, Lower Canada, and Canada East, and how comparisons among those experiences can be helpful.30 The history of public administration and bureaucracy, namely that of legislative delegates, is another aspect of governance that has not been fully explored by local historians, legal or others. A spate of surveys of the emerging welfare state has appeared, but those overviews often preceded the kind of accounts that are specific to agency or subject matter that would have made them richer.31 Insofar as detailed studies are available, they tend to deal with temporal cross-sections of particular administrative agencies or parastatal enterprises, and their focus has most often been Upper Canada or Canada West.32 More recently, the Board of Railway Commissioners and agents of the state charged with responsibility for occupational safety as well as compulsory education have attracted book-length treatments.33 Work has also started on issues related to financing the early Canadian administrative state.34 But nothing like the United States’ “commonwealth” histories of nineteenth-century state action exist for the Canadas.35 Nor is there anything comparable to Harry Arthurs’s work on legal pluralism and administrative justice in Victorian England.36 Those studies and their sequels effectively called into question the dominance of economic laissez-faire and the rule of nationally administered, court-made law as nineteenth-century, Anglo-American motifs.37 Bureaucratic culture, a topic that combines inquiries into implicit normativity with questions about the informal accountability of the state’s administrative delegates, has also been underexplored in local literature.38 Incorporated business enterprises, whether they were involved in the provision of transportation, financial, or manufacturing services, were traditionally regarded as governmental delegates (especially prior to the introduction of incorporation by registration) and policed

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by courts with many of the same prerogative writs (notably quo warranto) that were used to censure other agencies of the Anglo-American state.39 Routine delegations to them in letters patent or special acts of incorporation of powers to expropriate land, operate lotteries, limit the liability of their shareholders, and benefit from Crown immunity in certain kinds of civil law suits reflected the special status and responsibility for public utility that characterized many of those governmental agents. Early work on Canadian corporate enterprises was undertaken by commentators such as Eugene Labrie, Bray Hammond, and Frederick Wegenast.40 But R.C.B. Risk’s investigation of the foundations of the business corporation in Ontario has become the starting point for study in this field.41 Institutionally, Risk documented a shift from the use of special acts of incorporation, to incorporation under sectorspecific general laws, to incorporation by bureaucratic registration. Substantively, he showed that patterns in the use of corporate forms during the union period moved from public utilities like transportation enterprises, to financial services such as banks, to manufacturing concerns. That essay has now been followed by a handful of companyspecific studies.42 But its detailed, charted tallies of incorporations during that period is the leading account for any British North American place or time. Questions about the relationship of public to private power, the legitimacy of delegations of governmental authority to artificial legal people, and about increasingly streamlined processes for achieving state concessions have not yet been fully explored for the 1760–1867 period. Those issues of corporate governance and social responsibility become all the more poignant when mid-nineteenth-century beliefs about incorporation as a means to advance public utility and extend the state are contrasted with early twentieth-century assumptions that incorporated business enterprises were in competition with the public good such that a better-equipped governmental sector was required to oversee and regulate them.43 On a closely related point, pioneering work on Canadian corporate share markets and their regulation has begun to appear for the post-Confederation period, but the pre-Confederation Canadas have not yet attracted much attention in that regard.44 The overall sequence of events in municipalities, another kind of administrative delegate of the nineteenth-century Canadian state, paralleled what characterized incorporation at large. Special acts creating local governments (often as “police”) began to appear in provincial statute books of the 1820s, and the legal ways and means of municipal

Introduction

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operation were standardized by the Municipal (Baldwin) Act of 1849. Again, however, only a modest amount has been written about early devolutions of power to municipalities.45 And relatively little work has been done on the traditional municipal jurisdiction of justices of the peace.46 Mary Stokes’s chapter in this collection on the suasive, supervisory role of grand juries in the local government of Canada West’s Grenville and Leeds County begins to redress those omissions in an imaginative fashion.47 Largely through their non-criminal “presentments,” grand juries pressed some municipalities for augmentation of hospitals, asylums, and houses of refuge, despite those juries’ status as collateral legal institutions that did not rank in conventional hierarchies. Although Blake Brown’s chapter on gun control in this volume does not deal exclusively with the regulatory activities of local government, it has a great deal to say about municipal initiatives in that substantive field.48 Whether pre-Confederation Canadians were able to purchase, possess, or use firearms freely are not questions that have often been asked, and Brown shows that gun control was regularly undertaken coincidentally by municipalities concerned about the noise of weapons’ discharge or seeking to restrict guns’ presence at public meetings and polling stations. The causal connection between law-making by local governments and social impact is indirect but potent in Stokes’s and Brown’s accounts. Legislative Law Reform The prevailing motif in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American legal history, very simply stated, is that state law was “modernized” to facilitate a release of creative human energy, which gave that community “progressive” developments like industrialization and the emergence of corporate-commercial capitalism. Accounts of those symbiotic processes feature themes like the creation, transformation, or nationalization of law, and they typically emphasize the role of lawyers and judges as social engineers.49 Historiographic challenges associated with assessing that kind of normative shift have been highlighted by reference to the fragmentary character of scholarship in seventeenthand eighteenth-century legal history against which more recent changes must be measured.50 Theoretical problems related to descriptions of that shift have been identified as that model’s downplaying of the autonomous or relatively independent nature of legal ideas, and the scheme’s functional or instrumental simplicity.51

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Current indications are that in the Canadas, in contrast to tendencies documented for neighbouring states, significant and socially influential changes to official law often came through legislation and less regularly through case law. That is, admittedly, a sweeping generalization, which presupposes that formal legal change was relevant to daily life. But Canadian political historians have routinely characterized the union period as one that involved the statutory creation and early growth of foundational institutions that twentieth- and twentyfirst-century inhabitants of the St Lawrence and Great Lakes watershed have come to take for granted.52 Legislation related to land registry, general incorporation, municipalities, bankruptcy, compulsory schooling, professional regulation, seigneurial lands, married women’s property, judicial reorganization, and private law codification initiatives was enacted in speedy succession during the years immediately following the rebellions of 1837–8 or during the union period. Indeed, the British North America Act, 1867 can be viewed as a kind of finale to that era of fast-paced legislative utilitarianism, conceived by the same small group of political law reformers who spearheaded the changes mentioned in the last sentence. The introduction of responsible government to the Canadas in the late 1840s presumably bolstered the new-found prominence of legislative law-making that fuelled those quickly moving episodes of law reform. It is also striking that local lawyers migrated in unprecedented numbers during the union period from their pre-rebellion executive postings in administrative roles to elected office, thus suggesting a shift in prevailing conceptions of elite legal professionalism.53 Lower Canada’s appointed Special Council (1838–41) seems to have set the tone for the avalanche of legislative law-making that followed in elected legislatures, and scholars have begun to examine the output of that stopgap organ of colonial government as well as imperial influences on it.54 The staged abolition of seigneurial land tenure and the codification of private law in Canada East were, arguably, the union legislature’s most ambitious law reform initiatives, and it is most likely that the former facilitated or provoked the latter. Seigneurialism was a settlement scheme structured by a series of entitlements enjoyed by seigneurs and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, roughly similar to medieval English feudalism. Cens et rentes were annual ground rents owed by censitaires to their seigneurs, lods et ventes were land sale taxes payable by purchasing censitaires to seigneurs on each alienation, and droits des banalités were monopolies held by seigneurs on flowing water and mill sites.55

Introduction

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Statutory disassembly of that provincial regime had begun in Britain in the 1820s and was continued locally in the Island of Montreal after 1840.56 An ad hoc administrative agency or royal commission was eventually empanelled with judges drawn from the Superior Court of the early 1850s to assess seigneurialism’s operation, provide a valuation formula for the duties owed by censitaires to their seigneurs, and draft an abolition law for application across the province. Less than seems warranted has been written by social, economic, or legal historians about that process.57 And that historiographical gap exists despite the availability of suggestive studies of analogous reorganizations of land tenure in neighbouring jurisdictions.58 A key feature of the introduction of freehold tenure in Canada East is that almost no one (privileged censitaires like Molsons, Redpaths, Allans, Van Hornes, and McGills included) proceeded through the de facto voluntary commutation process of 1854, with the result that the provincial government determined in 1935 to introduce mandatory blanket commutation by the state with compensation paid by censitaires to a public underwriter in long-term instalments.59 That solution helps to underline a point often made in studies of law reform to the effect that grand initiatives are routinely favoured by an elite bar amidst public ambivalence, a variation on Max Weber’s vexing “England problem” of disorganized law somehow facilitating rapid and systematic industrialization.60 Quebec’s corporatecommercial magnates seem to have been fully capable of manipulating a “pre-capitalist” regime of land tenure to their satisfaction and did not hurry its demise. That was so, despite the apparent perception of British legislators and the Colonial Office that seigneurialism required abolition because it discouraged investment from overseas in Quebec, Lower Canada, and Canada East. A related feature of local land ownership was that a checkerboard of immovables held in freehold and seigneurial tenure had come into existence in Lower Canada as a result of the freehold patenting of wild lands in the Eastern Townships, and due to spotty elective commutations of seigneurialism under British and provincial statutes mentioned in the last paragraph. There was significant informed local opinion that freehold tenure (in which about 40 per cent of Lower Canadian land was held) carried with it a comprehensive regime of English-inspired law in respect of activities that occurred on those lands.61 It remains unclear which regional English customs were thought to prevail in those areas. Similar to many of their North American neighbours, and like several more distant European states, the Canadas witnessed debate among

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aspiring law reformers about the efficacy of repackaging private and judicial law in codal form.62 As was so in those companion movements, Canadian legal codification appears to have been the prerogative of a mandarin legislative bar and attracted limited public interest.63 Owing to good archival work by commentators like Brian Young and John Brierley, much is known about the personalities, politics, and processes of those reforms in Canada East by the union legislature.64 Less is understood about the content of legal change wrought by the Civil Code of Lower Canada or the motives for those substantive changes.65 Insofar as more traditional work on sources of private law like Roman and natural law are concerned, preliminary local conclusions are consistent with reports of broader North American trends. Repackaging Roman and contemporary European law was widely thought to be one way of demonstrating learnedness, and thus achieving juridical stature.66 Although intellectual history has not been a preferred field of inquiry by Canadian historians at large, treatments of local culture, philosophy, and ideology have begun to appear for the 1760–1867 period.67 That work will, presumably, promote greater reflection on pre-Confederation Canadian legal thought in much the same way that a recent renaissance of writing about post-Confederation intellectual history has given a boost to the cultural dimensions of scholarship in Canadian legal history during the later period.68 Closely related to law reform by codal means were companion consolidations of Canadian statutory law, reorganizational processes about which less than is due has been written.69 Those compilations merit examination as law reform events because they involved much more deletion, regrouping, rewriting, and retitling of legislation than had been attempted in revisions of statute law in the colonies of Britain’s first empire. They were modelled after similar exercises in New York (1828), Massachusetts (1837), Nova Scotia (1851), and New Brunswick (1854) and resemble codes of private law insofar as they were set up in books and chapters in topical clusters that often followed the nomenclature and sequencing used in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury European codification. It is tempting to characterize those consolidations of sessional statutes as forerunners of codes, as has been done with such other forms of legal writing as manuals, institutional works, and treatises. But those types of literature often coexisted with and engaged each other, rather than proceeding sequentially one after another.70 Moreover, they are all manifestations in law of prevailing methodologies and themes in the natural sciences, and can usefully be

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scrutinized from that perspective.71 As is so in other topics, however, not much has been written for any Canadian place or time about the seemingly pervasive interface between the physical sciences and evolving conceptions of legal science.72 Safeguarding the integrity of Quebec’s private law, especially insofar as that tradition was epitomized by the Civil Code, has been the leitmotif of much technical legal analysis and scholarly writing about contemporary law in that jurisdiction.73 But deployment or embrace of the Code as a pillar of cultural identity has not generally been highlighted by legal historians of the law reform process that produced it or in studies of the period that immediately followed its promulgation.74 The promotion of cultural nationalism through law was an increasingly common late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century phenomenon throughout the North Atlantic world, and the experience of Quebec and Ontario appears to fit that pattern.75 That linkage is therefore an important one for examination by legal historians and cultural anthropologists of Canada’s later periods.76 Pioneering historians of legislative law reform in the Canadas’ neighbouring British North American jurisdictions have highlighted bankruptcy, court structure, married women’s property, and criminal law as leading topics.77 That emphasis appears to apply with equal force to Upper Canada and Canada West and, allowing for the prominence of seigneurial land tenure reform and private law codification, with nearly equal force to Lower Canada and Canada East. Evelyn Kolish’s work on imprisonment for debt in Lower Canada and her study of the introduction of insolvency legislation in that jurisdiction broke new scholarly ground on two closely related fronts.78 Those essays are paralleled by Jeffrey McNairn’s chapter in this collection on the legal and cultural dimensions of Upper Canadian imprisonment for debt.79 The jailing of insolvent borrowers (which amounted to the state holding debtors for payment of ransom by their friends or families to discharge debts) is shown in those studies not only to have raised practical issues about how debtors were to be accommodated in a prison population of more hardened criminals, but also to have challenged emerging conceptual boundaries between contract, extracontractual obligations, and criminal law. As with other local processes like the reform of married women’s property law and the impact on municipal government of grand juries, the political boundary of Confederation probably should be transcended to assess the social effects of union-era bankruptcy reforms.80 There has been a recent groundswell

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of monographic American literature on nineteenth-century insolvency practice that will not only be useful comparatively to studies of Canadian attitudes towards investment and commercial debt, but should also help to show how local legislators participated in continental statute-drafting or copying exercises.81 Comprehensive descriptions of court structures and changes to them have been provided for Quebec and the Canadas by Donald Fyson and Margaret Banks.82 Although technical, those accounts are an essential introduction to their subject matter. Their implicit themes of wider accessibility to official dispute resolution, monopolistic aspirations on the part of the state for its law, and heightened grandeur for judicial processes and the facilities in which they occurred are echoed in a companion local literature on the location, design, and decoration of judicial space.83 The increasing resemblance of provincial temples of justice to sectarian temples brings to mind the work of Edward Thompson’s “Warwick school” and others on the majesty and power self-consciously conveyed by eighteenth-century English and colonial American courts on circuit.84 Perhaps the best studies of court reform and judicial activity that are currently available have assessed the impact on Upper Canadian land and credit markets of the lack of an institutionalized court of chancery, the process by which that court came into existence at mid-century, and its operation.85 An underdeveloped comparative feature of that literature is that neighbouring jurisdictions like Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and New York were abolishing courts of equity just as legislators concluded that institutionalizing chancery in Canada West was important to the smooth functioning of markets for landed property. Jean-Maurice Brisson’s masterful treatment of judicial law’s evolution in Quebec, Lower Canada, and Canada East rounds out internal scholarship on court structure and procedure for that part of the Canadas.86 Because mid-nineteenthcentury amendments to procedural law across the Anglo-American legal world (including mergers of law and equity) happened alongside David Dudley Field’s New York Code of Procedure, assessments of that prototype and its widespread, wholesale incorporation into the judicial law of other jurisdictions should be helpful as attention is addressed to scholarly gaps like those that exist in Upper Canada and Canada West’s civil court processes.87 The judiciary, by which is meant its composition, its common law and statutory prerogatives, and its peccadillos, was of great interest to earlier generations of central-Canadian historians of judicial law and has recently come under

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new scrutiny.88 By contrast, one weakness in the modest local literature on procedural law and its mid-nineteenth-century refinement is the relative lack of work on the court-based, executive, or legislative supervision of the colonies and their judges by imperial authorities.89 Finally, on the reconfiguration of pre-Confederation court structure and judicial processes, Blake Brown’s pan-Canadian study of the jury recently vaulted local scholarship on that institution into a rich international historiography.90 The reform of married women’s property-holding regimes has been ranked with insolvency, judicial law, and criminal justice as a leading focus of British North American legislators’ mid-nineteenth-century attention, and Canada West appears to fit that profile. Significant parliamentary reconsideration of the legal status of women in Canada East and post-Confederation Quebec would not occur until after the turn of the twentieth century.91 Studies of married women’s property reforms in Canada West are, however, a bright spot in the Canadas’ legal historiography.92 Lori Chambers’s chapter in this collection complements that broadly based literature with its treatment of opportunities for fraud that were presented to married couples by the mingling of pre-reform, popular conceptions of female incapacity to own or contract with liberalized legislative provisions, and by documenting with reported and unreported case law the ways in which they did so.93 It was frequently unclear which spouse owned property that was used in common, and who had the right to alienate land, goods, or money. That confusion did not always change the way that creditors protected or failed to safeguard their interests in interactions with married debtors, since they as well as courts and husbands often continued to treat wives as subordinate. Major reforms of England’s criminal justice system were enacted in the early 1830s, echoed in Upper Canada in 1833 and Canada East in 1841. Those statutory amendments were largely about the reduction of capital offences, which necessitated physical changes to prisons. Neither significant local adjustments nor a smattering of lesser reforms has, however, attracted much academic attention.94 Indeed, they are often dealt with only incidentally in studies of pre-Confederation Canadian social control or the administration of criminal law.95 Considerable scope therefore remains for work on the policies, processes, and substance of criminal law reform in Quebec and the Canadas, study that should be aided by a good supply of writing about imperial prototypes for those changes and the politics that made them possible.96

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Suggestive parallel accounts also exist of the reception elsewhere in Britain’s second empire of model imperial law revisions.97 The shelf space required to accommodate the legislative output of the Province of Canada for the late 1840s, 1850s, and early 1860s is one indicator of the hold that political utilitarianism gained on local legal culture during that period. Seemingly because responsible government made elected legislators the new political sovereign, Victorian science made inductively based expertise the controlling methodological approach to juristic issues, and Benthamism made utility the ethical standard of the day, legislation was advertised as an exemplar of those merged values. Law-reform initiatives that were intended to create or restructure incorporated business, transportation, financial and manufacturing enterprises, municipal government, education, creditor–debtor relations, court structure, family property, and the regulation of antisocial behaviour reflect a new faith in the capacity of statute books to effect social reorganization and manifest a distinctive idea of lawyerly professionalism.98 But the legislative upending of seigneurial land tenure in Canada East and the recasting of that region’s modified private law in codal form, together with the intercolonial negotiation of the British North America Act, 1867, are perhaps the most striking testimonials to the Canadas’ distinctive merger of statecraft, law practice at the legislative bar, and faith in the possibility of social engineering through law. Privately Made Obligations and Facilitative Law “Facilitative law” is typically said to denote opportunities provided by the state to its constituents to make law for themselves. Modern contract law, for example, is paradigmatic facilitative law. There is a developing strand of legal historical scholarship set in Quebec and the Canadas that deals with arbitral practices and “choice-of-forum” or “choice-of-law” understandings that were designed to avoid aspects of official law perceived to be obnoxious or inefficient, or to place conflict resolution beyond the organs of the state.99 The slow emergence of that scholarship is probably a function of the limited availability of primary sources on which it must be based, the eccentric character of private international law, and the lack of a long-standing academic interest in alternative dispute resolution. Studies of law practices active in the Canadas, places where one might look for creative uses of facilitative law, are not plentiful.100 And some of those that have been undertaken

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are more like collective biographies than examinations of those firms’ work. Notarial deeds, a unique public resource available to legal historians of Quebec, Lower Canada, and Canada East, are another promising place to look for facilitative private legal ordering, and inaugural studies of that kind have been undertaken.101 Studies of notaries’ use of marriage contracts to avoid application of the Custom of Paris, together with research on relatives’ recurrence to family councils to interdict mad, spendthrift, or drunkard family members, show special promise in that regard.102 There is also instructive British and American scholarship on facilitative law and extrajudicial dispute resolution for those jurisdictions’ Georgian, Victorian, and antebellum periods.103 Mutual agreements about the provision of goods, services, or credit that allow for recurrence to the state’s enforcement mechanisms in the event of breach of those promises have been a more familiar use of facilitative law than the robust exercises of private law-making canvassed in the last paragraph. The bare-bones theory of contemporary contract law, it bears recollection, is that the parties to an exchange make a transaction-specific legal system for themselves, within minimal formation or “constitutional” constraints intended to enable the state to recognize that “polity” and compel adherence to its terms. Eighteenth-century Anglo-American institutional works typically had little to say about that kind of generic contract law.104 But a monographic literature on that topic had begun to appear in England and the United States by the first decades of the nineteenth century, often based on the earlier work of Continental European writers such as Robert-Joseph Pothier.105 Discussion among North Atlantic legal historians about the refinement of that body of facilitative law and its impact on the marketplace has continued for several decades.106 Most of that debate has happened from the perspective of reported judicial decisions, with the awkward result that modern knowledge of the little legal systems whose construction was promoted by nineteenth-century contract law is based largely on pathological transactions in which something went wrong. Early twenty-first-century understandings of exchange relations during Quebec and Lower Canada’s old regime remain sketchy, despite several modern case studies of seigneurial practices.107 Indeed, local business history, a field of inquiry that might be expected to produce enterprise-specific accounts that include references to the legal infrastructures in which entrepreneurs operated, remains in its infancy.108 Moreover, Canadian articles on commercial legal history that do exist were, for the most part, produced before the appearance of general eco-

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nomic histories for the region and did not, therefore, benefit from their provision of broad themes.109 Contracts of employment and labour relations have been slightly better treated than exchange relations for Lower Canada and Canada East, through a handful of urban studies that were written largely from unreported judicial decisions and newspaper commentary.110 They describe a mixed regime of status-based, legislative and contractual provisions, whose application by lower courts tended to favour employers. What is most notable about that historiography is its modest volume, a reflection of the recent vintage of most scholarly work done in this field. Montreal was, by a considerable margin, the financial, commercial, and manufacturing centre of the Canadas during the period in issue, but there is not much sense in which that prominence has yet been reflected in local legal historians’ production on employment and labour relations or in the subfields that abut those topics. Surveys of the contract jurisprudence of Upper Canada and Canada West span the 1789–1867 period, with temporal overlap among four leading studies.111 Commercial reality is slightly skewed in those papers by their authors’ adoption of political rather than economic boundaries for their inquiries. With that limitation in mind, it can nonetheless be said that those articles depict a judiciary that was supportive of commercial activity, but in modest and purportedly principled ways. Simple agreements, negotiable instruments, and financing vehicles were the stock in trade of reported judicial decisions, and the conflicts that underlay those cases regularly involved customary shipping, grading, and lending practices. Risk’s work, in particular, sometimes reads like nascent cultural history, with passing references to the Canadian loyalist myth, the Victorian idea of progress, and English liberalism. Those kinds of allusions are generally not found in American studies of similar topics, whose authors have been most interested in techniques of market subsidization used by the judiciary and less curious about the presumptions that made that instrumentalism seem appropriate.112 Regulatory Private Law “Regulatory private law” is meant to denote regimes of official normativity in which the state (rather than participants in a self-willed legal regime) stipulates the scope of an interpersonal relationship or its content, and determines the remedial consequences of harmful actions.

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It therefore contrasts with facilitative law, although those normative forms comprise a spectrum of rights and duties. Customary and official legal diversity among and within colonies and states is a historiographic theme that is now firmly established for the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. In the American setting, that tradition of informal and formal pluralism is said to have been largely responsible for reactive midnineteenth-century efforts to promulgate standardized interstate law through nationally oriented legal texts, university-based legal education that aspired to teach unified rules rather than the local law associated with apprenticeship training, and the constitutionally anticipated articulation of a federal common law.113 The vigour with which those initiatives were pursued helps to confirm modern scholarly descriptions of the seaboard colonies’ and states’ “many legalities” that came to be regarded as impediments to the new United States’ political and economic integration.114 Legal-source-oriented American history has therefore often emphasized the nineteenth-century homogenization or demise of established Germanic, Dutch, French, Spanish, and British juristic traditions.115 Work on diverse customs in jurisdictions like colonial and antebellum Massachusetts, for example, has been obliged to confront significant variation in the local law of regions like Plymouth as opposed to Massachusetts Bay and to account for differences in the ways lawyers managed dispute settlement when they were called on to do so in such diverse forums as town hall meetings, parish sessions, agricultural work bees, taverns, and courts. An overlay of sporadic legislative reform further complicates those Massachusetts historians’ task.116 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English legal pluralism has been less fully documented.117 But studies of that jurisdiction’s late nineteenth-century treatise-writing initiative, the related formalization of law-training in university settings, and the decentralization of Westminster’s courts have often proceeded on the assumption that there was persistent local diversity in regulatory private law that was in need of national standardization.118 The distinctiveness of regulatory private law in Quebec, Lower Canada, and Canada East has also been a prominent subject of study by legal historians of that jurisdiction. Derived largely from the seventeenth-century Custom of Paris (but also from the Customs of Vexin and Normandy), and introduced to New France after 1627 by the Company of One Hundred Associates, local private law was, at least

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officially, regional European law. The British conquest of New France called that system of state law into question, although it was ultimately reintroduced fifteen years later by the Quebec Act.119 Modern scholarship has tended to focus on the acclimation of British immigrants to the Custom of Paris in the decades immediately following the Conquest, and on initiatives undertaken by Canadiens to preserve the Custom in daily life.120 David Gilles’s chapter in this collection advances that historiographical trend by focusing on the perpetuation of Parisian norms in family matters litigated in Montreal’s Court of Common Pleas during the period leading up to the Constitution Act, 1791.121 Less conventionally sourced work has identified law students’ apprenticeships and notaries’ practices as places where local amalgamation or reconciliation of competing provincial legal traditions occurred.122 Evelyn Kolish has extended the period for study of legal diversity and sharpened the theme of trans-systemic conflict that was often a latent motif in earlier literature.123 Another cluster of modern secondary sources has explored the impact of the French Revolution on the juristic culture of Quebec and Lower Canada, and concluded that local law became detached from metropolitan legal dynamism after the interposition of France’s Napoleonic Code between its former legal colony and pre-codal imperial law, and due to Canadian apprehension about European political insurgency.124 One of the consequences of that separation was more prolific production of local legal writing, broadly defined to include pamphlets, broadsheets, essays, reports of single cases, practice manuals, and treatises, than occurred in neighbouring North American jurisdictions.125 Sylvio Normand’s chapter on that embryonic literature in this collection shows that publications about parliamentary, constitutional, and criminal law (in French and English) predominated, in part because those fields seemed to require acculturation by Britain’s francophone subjects, the explanation of local legal vernacular to a new European metropolis, and the adaption of imperial law to a colonial setting.126 The potential is plainly significant for comparative studies of the distinctive values, institutions, rules, and effects of diverse early-modern and modern legal systems across British North America, the North American continent, and elsewhere in the first and second British empires. That project has been commenced.127 But it would benefit from greater focus on particular socio-legal issues, heightened sensitivity to the fact of intra-jurisdictional, intercolonial, interprovincial, and interstatal legal diversity, and refined methodological underpinnings.128 Contemporary legal scholars sometimes undertake comparisons among

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jurisdictions with “mixed” legal systems, namely regimes that are not based purely on either civil or common (nor Islamic, nor Talmudic, nor canonic) law, and aspects of that work may be instructive to historians.129 The example of colonial and antebellum Massachusetts already mentioned suggests, however, that the historical challenge is larger than that posed by modern systems of mixed official law. Once the law of contract or contractual obligations has been characterized as an aspect of facilitative private law, as was done in the last section of this survey, the law of torts or delicts, the law of trusts or the administration of the property of another, and the law of restitution remain as discrete elements of regulatory private law. Those “lawyers’ categories” of North Atlantic normativity were latent for much of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with less internal coherence, conceptualization, or empirical grounding in juridical events than they have more recently acquired.130 Moreover they all required interests in real or personal, immovable or moveable property for material infrastructure, and those bundles of assets and ideas were themselves in flux during much of the period with which this collection is concerned.131 A further challenge is that historians have often organized inquiries into the role of regulatory private law around themes like economic costs, allocations of loss, and juridical subsidizations of progress, and produced a literature in which the language of law has been mixed with that of social needs or instrumental change. In view of that eclecticism, one of David Flaherty’s venerable observations bears repetition: depending on its focus and method, legal history can come out looking like social, business, political, labour, women’s, or cultural history, and each of those interpretive standpoints has something to contribute to comprehensive understandings of law in context.132 Relatively little history of land law in Quebec or the Canadas has been written, a state of affairs that is especially striking in view of the size of that region and the centrality of natural resources to its economic development. The political and demographic challenges of settling the colonies appear to have been taken up mostly by executive and legislative branches of government, and there is a smattering of scholarship on those initiatives that has not yet addressed their legal dimensions.133 An exception to that generalization is Vivien Nelles’s masterful study of the statutory and administrative framework for development of forestry, mineral, and hydroelectric resources in Canada West and Ontario.134 Local concern about the security or publicity of ownership interests in land, and about financing the acquisition or improvement

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of landed property, was reflected in the statutory introduction of title registration regimes to both Canadas in the years following the rebellions of 1837–8. Those bureaucratic initiatives have been described as attempts to modify in Upper Canada the still-current English practice by which landowners or their solicitors maintain archival accumulations of title documents, and to displace in Lower Canada the Continental European tradition of quasi-public notarial retention of “acts” related to immovable property. Lower Canada’s ancien régime has been said to have been particularly problematic from investment and developmental standpoints as the result of an implicit general charge customarily borne by deeds to land, its system of secret hypothecs, and its establishment of priorities among interests in land based on social statuses such as seigneur, woman, or minor rather than chronology of dealing or registration.135 Fragmentary indications are that, much like the law associated with seigneurial tenure’s abolition and the Civil Code’s reformulation of selected interpersonal relations on the basis of the idea of free will, the opportunity for state-managed registration of interests in land was largely ignored in regional practice.136 Again, however, relatively little is known about land-based transactions in the Canadas or their financing, events that presumably would have given rise to concerns regarding security that bureaucratized land registration was designed to allay.137 It appears that much conveyancing was financed by instalment contracts, rather than mortgages or hypothecs, in which title passed from vendor to purchaser after all instalments had been paid. It is also known that, as a matter of statutory pre-emption or financial policy, early chartered banks were not significant mortgage lenders and left much of that terrain to creditors like building societies, cooperatives, and private investors.138 The sparsity of secondary literature on local land ownership, sale, and financing means that contemporary students of those topics may be obliged to commence their inquiries with older Canadian legal treatises on those subjects, themselves few in number and typically lacking context.139 Social cost or allocation of loss issues that arose from land use in the Canadas have generally been described as judicial rather than legislative prerogatives. The transforming property torts of trespass, nuisance, and negligence figure largely in accounts of those developmentally or industrially based calculations. Liability for damage to the land of an abutter was very nearly strict in older regimes, and the prevailing Anglo-American account of mid-nineteenth-century legal change starts with the attribution to judges of concern about the entrepreneurial hin-

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drance those regimes imposed on savvy new users of property for the overflows and emissions their dynamic activities caused. Techniques like the substitution of fault for strict liability, leniency towards owners with legislative authorization for their activities like corporations, and an expansion of the requirement that nuisances cause publicly shared rather than private harm are then characterized in that account as forms of judicial subsidization of development that were designed to minimize the impact of legal protection for older, “sleepy” uses of adjoining properties. Local studies of that transition for the western portion of the Canadas are scarce and sometimes evince disappointment by their authors that Canadian courts lagged behind their English and American counterparts in their continuing preference for established or static riparian and industrial activity.140 Assessments of that doctrinal transition in the eastern part of the Canadas have not yet been undertaken, although post-Confederation scholarship suggests that Quebec courts maintained a similarly conservative approach to the sanctity of landed property, more or less immune to broader North Atlantic judicial trends. That work also shows that relevant reported litigation was infrequent, which implies that non-judicial decision-makers such as legislatures or public administrators were handling competing landuse issues in a generic rather than case-by-case fashion.141 Workplace accidents are a related social issue that has attracted the sustained attention of Anglo-American legal historians interested in regulatory private law’s implication in industrial development. The traditional law of obligations required “masters” to compensate their “servants” for injuries suffered in the workplace, an increasingly onerous burden for employers with expanding workforces, physical plants powered by unreliable steam-powered equipment, or staff working beyond an employer’s direct supervision. Non-Canadian accounts of courts’ response to the escalating costs of injuries to workers that those changes imposed on employers have fixed on decision-makers’ articulation of the “fellow-servant” rule, the concept of contributory negligence, and the volunti non fit injuria maxim as cost-limiting protections for progressive employers.142 Studies of workplace accident litigation in the Canadas have tended to focus on Ontario’s post-Confederation period, leading up to the legislative enactment of a socialized and bureaucratically administered workers’ compensation scheme in 1914. Insofar as those accounts treat the earlier period as background for administrative occupation of the twentieth-century field, they tell a story similar to that provided in greater detail by British and American schol-

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ars, but one that lacks self-conscious judicial subsidization of change.143 Quebec’s 1909 transition to bureaucratic compensation was among the earliest in North America, and published studies of that reform provide circumstantial indications that the provincial law of contractual and delictual obligations applicable to workplace injuries had evolved during the previous two or three generations in much the same way as that law had transformed in sibling jurisdictions.144 Eric Tucker’s article-length study of that aspect of socio-legal change in Ontario merits mention for its efforts to find an interpretive theory suited to local events.145 Rande Kostal’s scrutiny of an 1882 Hamilton Powder Factory explosion is also worthy of note for its author’s adoption of the “case in context” format associated most closely with English legal historian Brian Simpson.146 Among the aims of that literary genre are to reclaim the parties’ understandings of the episode in issue, to contrast that vision with the meaning or identity the event acquired in law when sprung loose from the social setting that gave rise to it, and to explain the motives of legal digest, manual, or text-writers for their involvement in that conceptual metamorphosis. The law of restitution and trust law (the law of the administration of the property of another) are residual aspects of regulatory private law that seem to have played more frequently in local courts’ definition or refinement of family relations than in their engagement with economic issues. Internal or external historical scholarship that touches on those dimensions of legal doctrine is, however, virtually non-existent for any Canadian time or place, and reading in those areas must again begin with pioneering treatise literature.147 The history of secular and sectarian charities is another place where trust-based infrastructures would be expected to have played large roles, but Quebec and the Canadas currently lack a legal history of charitable contribution and administration. That kind of study would also shade into work on law and religion, where more has been done.148 Indeed, but for concern about the length of this introduction, a case could have been made for the inclusion of a subsection on the state and religion under the general heading of “Constitutions and Governance” that would have regrouped several secondary sources used here for other purposes.149 Family Relations A distinguishing feature of histories of the family set in Quebec or the Canadas is that they have tended to focus on the state’s subordination

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of family members like wives and mothers, or on particular incidents of marriage such as the capacity to own property.150 Extra-provincial scholarship has, by contrast, often been able to provide more integrated descriptions of the legal dimensions of family life.151 In-depth treatments of specific aspects of family life are, perhaps obviously, necessary grounding for holistic studies of that subject, and students of the history of family relations in Quebec and the Canadas are on the verge of being able to synthesize from issue- and topic-specific studies comprehensive legal histories of family relations. The crimes of prostitution, rape, and abortion have been the basis for a series of contributions by Constance Backhouse to the larger history of Canadian women’s rights and social control that is not otherwise rich in studies of particular criminal offences.152 Marie-Aimée Cliche and Ian Pilarczyk have, likewise, done work on infanticide, but that material is a better historiographic fit with companion criminological scholarship treated later in this introduction than it is with studies of the history of family relations. Collectively, that writing shows a developing sensitivity of the Canadas’ lower courts to the plight of increasingly desperate women, often in the context of family relations. Examinations of the tort of seduction or breach of promise to marry, shifting patterns in the award of child custody by courts, and assessments of everyday criminal proceedings related to child and spousal abuse are, arguably, closer to state law’s fundamental construction of family relations than is research on prostitution, rape, or abortion.153 Child custody applications and prosecutions or civil actions based on spouse abuse almost invariably collided with presumptions about paternal property and spousal unity or “coverture.” Researchers of those themes have therefore faced analytical challenges similar to some of those encountered by students of matrimonial property law.154 Detailed commentary on the concept of coverture and its effects might, however, best be deferred pending more extensive work on the idea of legal identity and its expansion and contraction over time on such other juridical persons or non-persons as slaves, mechanical devices, animals, outlaws, and incorporated businesses. There is, admittedly, specificity about the way that gender informed the legal personality of pre-Confederation married women, but fragmentary indications are that some commentators of the day thought of juridical identity as an interconnected melange.155 Non-Canadian historical writing suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that inter-generational wealth transfers across the North Atlantic

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world have often been based on family relations.156 Studies of the history of wills, trusts, and inheritance law can therefore be usefully included at this juncture. The consensus of scholarship in those fields is that early reception of the English statutory law of wills in Lower Canada did not significantly affect succession practices among francophones, who continued to defer to inheritance rules provided by the Custom of Paris until late in the nineteenth century.157 Little work has been done on inheritance practices among English-speaking members of that community or for Upper Canada or Canada West, with the result that not much can now be said historically or historiographically about Canadians’ embrace of freedom of willing or trust-based management of testamentary assets.158 Identification of the family relations that were preferred for testamentary purposes and how those preferences varied across space and time would also be helpful. It is worth noting, moreover, that there are at least four case studies of the creation and administration of early twentieth-century Canadian estates that could be used as models for scholarship of their kind in other places and times.159 Criminal Law and Its Administration The scope and quality of scholarship on the criminal justice history of the Canadas enables that writing to stand out, historiographically, among other aspects of local legal history. That prominence is probably related to the range and depth of inspirational European and American work in that field and to its attraction for scholars with such diverse backgrounds as criminology, women’s studies, social history, penology, psychology, and law. Common sub-topics in that literature include substantive criminal law and its reform, popular resistance to state law, work-a-day law enforcement and the prosecution of offences, and appendages of the criminal justice system like police forces and prisons. Several Canadian historiographic essays on that material have recently been prepared by others, thus justifying a slightly streamlined approach to it in this survey.160 The suggestion is not that material on crime and social order deserves short shrift, but rather that it has been synthesized and assessed accessibly in a way that recent local writing on facilitative law, international relations, or the legal professions has not otherwise been sorted or appraised. Contrary to received lore, scholarship on crime and social order has not depicted Quebec or the Canadas as peaceable kingdoms.161 Labour

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protest,162 religious and ethnic strife,163 and general resistance to authority164 have all begun to be documented in burgeoning provincial writing on social unrest. There is also a developing literature on criminal behaviour in family settings, like abortion, spouse and child abuse, and infanticide, which dovetails with treatments of the courts’ protection of women in more public settings.165 Perhaps the most ambitious work in Canadian criminal justice history has been three collectively written volumes (with more to come) on “state trials” under the editorship of Barry Wright, Murray Greenwood, and Susan Binnie.166 Although some of the conclusions offered in those essays about the use of criminal law to dampen political dissent, stifle military rebellion and invasion, and generally to advance the state’s prerogatives had been anticipated or echoed by other scholars, that collection calls commitment to the rule of law by the executive and judicial branches of local government into substantial question.167 Several of the chapters in those collections also deal with the interface between military, martial, and state law, a theme that has been pursued in limited ways by a few other authors.168 The prosecution of crime, by its victims, by the judiciary, and later by the attorney-general, has also been broached as a research topic.169 More extensive studies of criminal prosecution elsewhere in the Anglo-American world suggest that Canadian scholars have work ahead of them in this field.170 The inauguration in the 1830s of Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, and rural police forces, together with their early management, has been treated from an institutional perspective in a handful of recent articles.171 Those accounts are roughly similar to analogous histories of police forces in a range of North Atlantic communities during the same period.172 The other major appendage of the modern criminal justice system, the prison, has also been a focus of local academic attention.173 Juvenile justice is a related topic that shows early promise of scholarly development, in the Canadas and beyond.174 Issues complementary to convict imprisonment and reform, such as sentencing at trial, transportation, and the executive prerogatives of clemency, mercy, and pardon, have not yet been treated at full length by legal historians of the Canadas.175 International Relations This part of the introduction reviews writing related to Quebec and the Canadas on the subjects of private international law, public inter-

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national law, and maritime and admiralty law. Relatively little local scholarship has been produced on any of those topics. It bears recollection that private international law, or conflicts of law, is the component of a state’s law that tells its courts how to choose among alternative and usually foreign systems of substantive law for application to a particular dispute. It is relevant when the facts in issue are more closely connected to a jurisdiction other than that in which litigation has been brought, the controversy involves legislation with a “choice-of-law” provision, or when the litigants have stipulated contractually that a body of law other than that of the dispute-settlement forum should govern the transaction. Conflicts of law is often central to inter-jurisdictional commerce and political comity among states. For a variety of reasons, neither the courts nor the legal literature of Britain or its first empire had much to say about private international law. Continental Europe’s early-modern jurists were, by contrast, very interested in conflicts issues.176 The relevant point is that virtually nothing has been written about private international law or its commercial and political implications for Quebec or the Canadas. There are, however, several first-generation Canadian conflicts texts into which local nineteenth-century case law was integrated.177 There is also a handful of studies of neighbouring jurisdictions in which the business and constitutional dimensions of early conflicts rules have been explored.178 That scholarship has local relevance not merely because its geographic subjects abut the Canadas, but also because it often dealt with New England conflicts law that appears to have been widely adopted in British North America. The implication of Quebec and the Canadas in the emergent law of international relations has not been much more extensively treated in modern secondary literature than their inhabitants’ involvement in discussions of the applicable law of conflicting private legal regimes. Local scholarship on issues that arose from international relations has typically dealt with the extradition of accused or convicted criminals, or with runaway American slaves.179 A few recent papers have addressed a broader sweep of international legal doctrine, assessed the balance between the strategic or political aspects of international relations and the principles of international law, and highlighted the juridical disabilities of dependent territories as compared to nation states.180 Bradley Miller’s chapter in this collection shows that the discourse of international law was locally ubiquitous in the years immediately following the Canadian rebellions, particularly on the meaning of political

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borders, the limits of state sovereignty, the scope of national self-defence, and the role of pre-emptive military strikes. By prioritizing their security interests, Canadians expanded the doctrines of self-defence and pre-emption, and minimized the significance of boundaries and sovereignty as barriers to force. Scholars of the Canadas’ borderlands are thus well situated to engage with a suggestive transnational literature on analogous themes.181 Peripheral attention has also been paid to the mid-nineteenth-century teaching of international law in the Canadas, the early prerogative of a disciple of Friedrich Karl von Savigny’s historical school of jurisprudence who operated Collège Ste-Marie’s law school in Montreal and who cut across the grain of received legal wisdom in several eccentric but theoretically intriguing ways.182 Although a North Atlantic treatise literature capable of supporting that kind of jurisdictionally extroverted instruction did exist by mid-century, similar teaching initiatives have not been discovered in studies of law training programs operated by Laval’s Quebec City law school or by the Law Society of Upper Canada at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall.183 The nineteenth-century emergence of foundational concepts of international law like sovereignty, comity, and the legal personality of states appears to have been closely linked to the construction of self-regarding juridical people in domestic private law, the internal unification of state-managed legal systems, and the promotion of cultural nationalism through law, all of which would benefit from examination through local and transnational prisms.184 Admiralty and maritime law was, by most historiographic indications, a key infrastructure for the coastal trade that knit together a seaboard continental market among the North American colonies of Britain’s first empire.185 That internationally unified body of shipping and commercial law traditionally applied to transactions in respect of which ocean tides ebbed and flowed, but nineteenth-century courts that were engaged in an expansion of constitutionally mandated federal American common law extended that jurisdiction’s reach to inland waterways like the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi River system.186 The role of Canadian admiralty law or courts has not yet attracted much attention from historians of any stripe.187 Indeed, one looks mostly in vain for references to the state in business histories of Canadian shipping concerns, or for recognition that maritime piracy was promoted and regulated by royal letters patent like “marque and reprisal” in much the same way that proprietary North American colonies and overseas trading companies were controlled.188 There is thus

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much open ground to be occupied in the history of local maritime and admiralty law. The Legal Professions Studies of lawyers are often divided among inquiries into the profession’s structure, ushering people in (education) and out (discipline) of the guild, law work, and legal personalities. That rubric will help to organize the historiographic material on lawyers that follows. The comparatively large size of this portion of the survey is a function of a premise of much of the literature cited in this introduction to the effect that law rarely persists or changes on its own, but is stewarded by human agents. Those stewards’ professional socialization and outlook are therefore linchpins of law’s implication in social or cultural change over time. Robert Gidney and Wynne Millar’s seminal study of the professions of law, medicine, and divinity in Upper Canada, Canada West, and Ontario not only provides comparative perspectives on the formal structure, practice, and culture of those traditional professions, but also offers state-of-the-art “sociology of the professions” insights into related matters like growth rates, economic advancement, and social status.189 Nothing like that book has been produced for the eastern part of the province, but a couple of institutional studies of the notariat have stood the test of time.190 There is also a semi-popular history of the Montreal section of the provincial bar.191 Apprenticeships, followed by judicially convened oral examinations, were the route to law practice in Lower Canada and Canada East until the incorporation of the region’s bar in the late 1840s. Self-governance on the neighbouring Upper Canadian model that had prevailed there for five decades was then combined by the union legislature with a statutory provision that reduced the length of apprenticeship for aspiring lawyers in Canada East who had completed college-based instruction in law, and that enactment quickly led to the creation or expansion of provincial law schools.192 Studies of those schools have revealed a penchant of Canada East’s bar to influence legal education through the college boards of governors and part-time faculties they often dominated. But themes that structure accounts of the professionalization of law study elsewhere in the North Atlantic world (like a perceived need to raise practice standards, homogenize private law through the wide dissemination of legal literature and law school graduates, and a

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desire to achieve heightened “scientific” credibility in the eyes of literate laity and the non-legal academy) have not yet emerged from local research.193 In contrast with those developments in Canada East, the Law Society of Upper Canada would maintain a Toronto-based, non-academic approach to legal education until the third quarter of the twentieth century, although auxiliary components of that institution’s practical program like entrance, intermediate, and bar examinations, term-keeping, and mandatory participation in student clubs and lectures ebbed and flowed during the pre-Confederation period.194 Because apprenticeship was perennially at the core of legal education in both Canadas, it would be useful to know much more about the conditions, patterns of learning, and attitudes associated with it than is now understood.195 Justifications and processes for the disciplining or disbarment of lawyers practising in the Canadas have not yet been addressed in published scholarship. Rare but suggestive work on lawyers’ professional discipline in turn-of-the-twentieth-century western Canada and midtwentieth-century Ontario is, however, available.196 That literature has tended to mirror unsettling but dominant interpretations of the early twentieth-century imposition of formal practice standards in sibling Canadian professions and urban American bars that often treat the proclamation and application of canons of ethics as techniques of harsh control over immigrant practitioners, night-school graduates, and rebellious political activists.197 More modest disciplinary infractions for the earlier period might instead involve compromises of professional independence that occurred when lawyers went to work as salaried employees of private, charitable, or government employers.198 The disciplinary practices of self-governing occupations are often as revealing of prevailing conceptions of professionalism as are their education and other initiation rituals. Understanding the work undertaken by lawyers in any British North American place or time might best begin with Carol Wilton’s thoroughgoing introductions to her edited collections of essays on the history of Canadian lawyers in business and law firms in historical perspective.199 Those anthologies also contain five papers on pre-Confederation British North American law practices.200 Institutional genealogy and biographical information has sometimes had pride of place in those kinds of studies, while analysis of firm culture, management techniques, and developmental strategies has been scarcer.201 That historiographical tendency presumably has to do with the paucity of surviving law-

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firm records, an apparent consequence of long-lived commitments to lawyer-client privilege and confidentiality.202 Nonetheless, the general picture of elite law practice in urban pre-Confederation settings that has emerged is one of small, informal, and sometimes shifting partnerships in which corporate-commercial work (especially at the legislative bar), rather than litigation, was emphasized. That deep involvement in solicitors’ work has been shown to have regularly resulted in shared ownership by lawyers of their clients (as they were often paid for their services “in kind”), which also led to lawyers’ participation in the operation of those clients in a period before corporate ownership had been separated from management responsibilities.203 Election to legislative office has sometimes been characterized in that literature as an extension of private law practice, with service of pre-existing clients continuing in a visible and unapologetic fashion from public platforms. The law practices themselves appear to have been thought to have been devisable but not saleable, except perhaps in respect of notaries’ greffes. Careers were occasionally redirected by appointments to the judiciary, but typically as default rather than preferred positions.204 That overview of British North American law work is necessarily tentative in view of the unrepresentative character of the legal practices that have been studied, and as a result of the near-absence of small-town and rural practitioners from the historiographical record.205 It also bears note that almost no work has been done on the learning, sociability, self-definition, or networking that was likely going on in lawyers’ voluntary associations or the other kinds of clubs to which they routinely belonged, although there are instructive non-Canadian studies of that kind of engagement by lawyers.206 Juristic biography has virtually exploded as a field of Canadian scholarship in the last generation, and monographic treatment of leading legal (and sometimes also political) personalities of the pre-Confederation period has been one aspect of that locally unprecedented activity.207 An older genre of court history organized as collective biography is enjoying new life too, both on the Canadas and nationally.208 There is also a prosopography of Canada West’s government leaders, which is relevant because the majority of them were lawyers pursuing a species of mid-nineteenth-century law practice in political office.209 The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, a monumental, multi-generational exercise in collective scholarship is, however, the most significant repository of factual and interpretive essays on leading legal personalities of Quebec and the Canadas.210 Seven tomes cover the period in

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issue, approximately a fifth of the entries in them (which vary in length from 750 to 10,000 words) treat jurists, and each volume is superbly indexed in several ways. Standard criticisms of biographical writing are that it often individualizes social events or processes that are better understood in larger context, that biographers tend to identify too closely with their subjects, and that biographies can turn out as apologia for the groups or institutions of which their subjects were part.211 Those complaints are apt in legal biographies in which “great men” have predominated, literary tone has been hagiographical, and the juristic formation of subjects chosen for their political, institutional, or economic prominence has been downplayed. Those criticisms are less compelling in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, largely as a result of its high editorial standards, its concision that allows little room for hyperbole, and especially the potential it offers for cross-referencing and thus interconnection among companion entries. Legal Culture There has been a pronounced international turn to “cultural” studies of law in the last decade or two, accompanied by noteworthy exhortations to do more of that kind of work in a theoretically self-conscious and methodologically rigorous way.212 Canadian historians at large have not, however, generally been known for their contributions to contemporary international debates in the theory of history or for their scholarship in local intellectual history.213 A recent and broadly based development in modern legal historiography can therefore be said to coexist with delayed production of the kind of studies in cultural history that would facilitate heightened participation by local legal historians in transnational trends. There have, nonetheless, been a few pioneering studies of British North American legal culture.214 More modest assessments of cultural artefacts like law libraries, methods and patterns in the production of legal literature, styles of judicial reasoning, and integration of legal ideas into public discourse or opinion have, however, been the norm. Contextualism is the methodology drawn from intellectual history that has prevailed in much of that local legal scholarship, and it involves reconstruction of the cultural setting in which historical subjects worked and the provision of explanations or interpretations of ideas, texts, or institutions with reference to those settings. Alternative approaches to intellectual history that are well represented in Continental European and American writing, such as the structural-

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ism associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida’s textualism, and the techniques of new criticism and deconstruction, have not yet found much expression in studies of British North American legal culture.215 Work on the acquisition, composition, and use of law libraries in Quebec and the Canadas has found representation in a series of studies of legislative, bar association, and law firm collections in Lower Canada and Canada East, although the emphasis in those accounts has tended to be the acquisition or composition of those libraries rather than their use.216 Striking features of those accumulations of books are their jurisdictional eclecticism and extensive inclusion of texts drawn from the humanities and the natural sciences. That literary pantheism is also an emerging theme in a sparser dossier of studies of law books in Upper Canada and Canada West, where the emphasis has tended to be the use of legal and other texts by lawyers rather than their accumulation.217 Helpful comparative points of reference are available for a number of neighbouring North American jurisdictions. Generally, those companion studies show that leading lawyers and institutions took written sources of law increasingly seriously as the nineteenth century advanced, and that local production of legal literature did not dampen enthusiasm for foreign texts.218 Further scholarly work of that kind is not solely of bibliophilic relevance, since published, portable sources of law, rather than reception provisions in the charters of the Company of One Hundred Associates or the Hudson Bay Company and in statutes like the Quebec Act or the Constitution Act, 1791, were crucial vehicles for the transmission of imperial and extra-colonial law.219 The literature of the law, another key component of legal culture, is best understood to include everything from primary sources like codes, statutes, regulations, by-laws, and judicial decisions to secondary materials such as broadsheets, legal manuals, institutional works, treatises, and law-journal commentary. The shifting and relative prominence of each of those forms of juridical writing has regularly been shown to be historically contingent, and that status is itself revealing of lawyers’ attitudes towards legal method and authority, and their views about the interplay among companion systems of normativity. In light of the overview of writing about codification, statutory consolidations, and legislative law-making that was provided earlier in this historiography, it seems appropriate to focus here on published judicial decisions as a form of primary legal literature. Relatively little scholarship has been undertaken on historical patterns in the publication of case law anywhere in the North Atlantic world.220 Two Lower Canadian essays

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enable that part of the Canadas to deflect that generalization, but the story they tell appears to be consistent with trends for that form of legal writing elsewhere in the Anglo-American world.221 Local case reports were first compiled privately in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and published sporadically until semi-official reporting was initiated during the early union period. A first generation of provincial law journals also reproduced judicial decisions selectively.222 Those developments have been described as part of the institutionalization, decentralization, and expansion that characterized the mid-nineteenthcentury Canadian state. Perhaps most intriguing was the dissemination of judicial decisions to literate laity through pamphlets, broadsheets, and the daily or weekly press, an understudied interface of legal and popular culture that was also played out in the transformation of some lower courts into de facto public theatre.223 Magistrates’, coroners’, municipal, and parish manuals were standard reference tools for “everyday law,” and their production in original and “cribbed” form was prolific across the nineteenth-century Anglo-American legal world. They are typically organized alphabetically around a series of topical headings like “absentees” or “wreck,” and comprise simple statements of law often paraphrased from legislation or companion institutional works. Over a dozen of those “how to” books for legal and other bureaucrats were produced in the Canadas, but only one type of them has attracted scholarly attention.224 There is, by contrast, a good extra-provincial literature on those guidebooks that is sometimes revealing of their authors’ motivations and typically provides glosses on low legal culture in those books’ home jurisdictions and, by implication, in other places like the Canadas to which they were sometimes exported.225 Eighteenth-century institutional works by well-known European compilers like Jean Domat, Charles Viner, and William Blackstone appear to have been in wide circulation in North America, and eventually spawned local versions of their kind.226 Institutes of law are enumerative digests that survey juridical information more-or-less comprehensively, but without generalization or other forms of abstraction. Scholarly attention has been addressed to several American and a Nova Scotian version of those institutional works, but their only central-Canadian treatments have occurred in overviews of doctrinal legal writing.227 That historiographical gap is regrettable since the history of books has become a dynamic dimension of cultural scholarship in the last quarter-century, principally because it has begun to demonstrate

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how authors’ minds can be reconstructed on the basis of their texts and because it helps to show how particular ideas were marketed or received at specific times.228 Local opportunities along those lines have so far been left in abeyance, not only in respect of legal manuals and institutes, but also in respect of treatises. The legal treatise is a distinctive form of literature insofar as each deals with a branch of law that is thought to have internal unity, and does so through the empirical collection of case law and inductive generalization from those raw materials to broad principles. Judicial decision-makers can then reason deductively from that abstract and spartan framework to tangible results in future litigation. Norms divinely given in nature and the commands of sovereigns thereby gave way to rules synthesized in an objective and orderly fashion that were said to be independent from and scientifically superior to the laws of morality, metaphysics, and politics.229 “Precedent-based legal reasoning,” “stare decisis,” “mechanical jurisprudence,” and “legal formalism” are the labels typically attached to that methodological, thematic, and linguistic transplant from the natural sciences (astronomy, botany, and zoology) and natural history (geology and paleontology) to law.230 Anglo-American legal treatises existed in small numbers during the early-modern period, began to appear in substantial quantities by the first decades of the nineteenth century, and came close to compacting civil liability into an all-inclusive, near-codal literature by the early years of Canadian Confederation. That transatlantic initiative in professionalization was facilitated by increased public case-reporting and by production of the institutional works mentioned in the last couple of paragraphs. It was also aided formally and substantively by the existence of Continental European literary prototypes, and by widespread North Atlantic debate about the viability of private law codes that were thought to represent the zenith of that species of scientific methodology in law.231 The mid-nineteenth-century North Atlantic world witnessed a welldocumented groundswell of social networking and informal learning through literary societies, historical associations, and debating clubs, but organizations that gave expression to the era’s enthusiasm for natural history and the natural sciences appear to have predominated.232 Membership lists of those scientific organizations often read, in part, like “who’s whos” of the local legal professions, and lawyers’ participation in them has been described in the Canadas’ sibling jurisdictions as a crucial conduit between the increasingly iconic Victorian sciences and state law.233 Initial exploration of the history of natural science and

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informal scientific associations in the Canadas has been undertaken.234 But connections between the history of science, local legal culture, the development of law publishing, and popular learning have not yet been drawn.235 Surveys show that legal treatise-writing was rare in Upper Canada and Canada West, although British and local publishers did a developing trade in English texts modified with Canadian footnotes.236 By contrast, the production of that genre in Lower Canada and Canada East was disproportionate to the size of that jurisdiction and its bar. The cessation of European writing on French provincial legal customs after the early nineteenth-century introduction of the Napoleonic Code, together with the distinctive mixture of state laws that took root in Lower Canada and Canada East, have been highlighted by legal-source-oriented historians as practical and nationalistic causes of that production. But the local interface among legal manuals, institutional works, sessional and consolidated legislative law, and treatises has not yet been explored from prevailing international interpretive standpoints like incipient legal imperialism, professionalization, or the appropriation of prevailing scientific methods. Nor has the colonial tendency to produce unacknowledged versions of metropolitan works been exhaustively reviewed.237 Insofar as judicial reasoning in the Canadas has been the subject of informed commentary, mainstream opinion was succinctly captured by R.C.B. Risk a generation ago when he concluded that local courts were “deferential to apparent authority, unwilling to initiate change, and inclined to consider issues in terms of precedents and doctrine … All these elements combined to make our courts – and our entire legal community – a legal colony, forbidden and eventually unwilling to consider its own destiny openly. The courts during [the union] period did not participate in change and innovation, even vicariously as spectators and beneficiaries on the sidelines … Distinctively Canadian needs and wants that seemed to affect law and require differences [from the European experience] were usually appropriately the subject of legislation.”238 Risk’s observations were the result of research based in Canada West, he did not examine unreported judicial decisions or everyday litigation extensively, and he painted with the broad but selective brushes of property, commercial, and corporate law. Other commentators have, moreover, used adjectives like principled to describe the courts of Canada West’s conservative posture.239 More recent, narrowly focused,

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and archivally based nineteenth-century studies like Ian Pilarczyk’s work on child abuse and Eric Reiter’s inquiry into the expanding attributes of moral injury and legal personality (both in this volume) have, by contrast, identified creative judicial responses to compelling social circumstances.240 Pilarczyk’s chapter focuses on age-based and intergenerational power relations of a sort that are presumably relevant to family, childhood, and legal historians, and does so in an otherwise understudied period. Reiter’s chapter is also unique socio-legal history, that includes culturally oriented accounts of the reception in the Canadas of old French and contemporary German law. In the absence of more detailed work of that kind, however, the apparent imprint of Victorian science on a local version of stare decisis and the triumph of legislative utilitarianism to which Risk alluded provisionally frame modern understandings of the judiciary’s role in the Canadas. It also bears note that American observers of the day viewed the Canadian justice system in much the same way as Risk described it.241 Examination of the integration of legal ideas into public discourse or opinion is, arguably, a historiographical high point in the North Atlantic world. 242 That scholarship has been complemented by several British North American studies. Greg Marquis has shown how Canadian wage labourers and political activists from lower and middling social orders were able to make potent public use of the rhetoric of “British justice” and the rule of law in their campaigns for fairer treatment in the workplace or for legislative reform. Tom Johnson also used a species of discourse theory to appraise the strategic substitution by Canada East’s seigneurs of the language of market-based appraisals, economic entitlement, and exchange value for that of a just price and feudal incidents in the Seigneurial Court with a view to maximizing their return on seigneurial commutations.243 Jeff McNairn’s widely applauded study of the rise of deliberative democracy in Upper Canada touches on the construction of public opinion in electoral and legislative settings, and on the expression of that sentiment in vocabulary derived from mandarin legal language.244 Nuance has been added to that description of the workings of early British North American political democracy by Sylvio Normand’s discussion of the procedural aspects of constructing “public discursive space” in Lower Canada, and by Michel Morin’s depiction in this collection of the Quebec Gazette’s role (as well as that of local petitions and ordinances) in publicizing constitutionalism in Britain’s newly acquired francophone colony.245 Histories of the rebellions of the late 1830s show that French Canadians were keen to em-

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brace liberty, self-government, and British parliamentary institutions, but Morin’s essay locates the roots of a local desire to take advantage of those concepts and processes in the 1764–74 period. In service of an even more ambitious deployment of that theory of rhetoric, it bears repetition that Anglo-America lawyers frequently sidestepped official law through their use of the state’s permissive or facilitative mechanisms to make private norms for clients that sometimes conflicted with statal regimes. Contractual terms, choice-of-law and choice-of-forum provisions are the most obvious of those private legal regimes, but they also include corporate and associational by-laws.246 Lawyers’ unpublished precedent files and commonplace books, personal guides for that kind of private lawmaking, appear to have been highly valued legal literature that was regularly circulated among fellow practitioners on a selective basis.247 The contradiction between that privately made law in action and formal, state law in books has led some commentators to posit a cultivated gap in lawyers’ minds between the ideal and the actual in the law, simple legal images and complex realities, which installed the icon of law in books as a selfserving professional mask.248 Conclusions The fledgling Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History was occasionally criticized in the 1980s for an Ontario-centric outlook, and its inaugural editor conceded disappointment with his inability to attract much Quebec scholarship to his two collections of essays.249 Those states of affairs have changed significantly in the last thirty years. Writing on the legal history of Atlantic and Western Canada is thriving in the Osgoode Society’s portfolio and elsewhere, and verges on the displacement of central-Canadian material.250 The Society has also published several distinguished Quebec monographs, and the work of Quebec authors has begun to be integrated (albeit, until this volume, in English-language texts) into its collections of essays.251 Overall, much more scholarly energy has recently been committed to the writing of post-Confederation, and especially twentieth-century, Canadian legal history than to pre-Confederation work set in any part of the country. That orientation, perhaps naturally, also resulted in a downplaying of themes related to the Province of Quebec, Upper and Lower Canada, and the Province of Canada between the British conquest and Confederation.

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Another striking feature of some contemporary studies of Canadian legal history has been their integration into larger treatments of the British empire or diaspora.252 That merger shows promise for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But British North American communities appear in earlier periods to have had more in common, economically and normatively, with their geographic neighbours than with the widely-dispersed subjects of a weak British colonial bureaucracy that had few techniques for the export of imperial law or policy. An analogous point has been made forcefully by Allan Greer in the context of the social history of New France and Britain’s seaboard American colonies, and it was the animating premise in several recent anthologies of North American prairie legal history.253 Pre- and postConfederation Canadian legal history may be obliged to keep different comparative company for those reasons. A few intriguing studies of the intermingling of diverse and sometimes informal local norms now exist for the Canadas.254 Their expansion offers the potential of a more thoroughly integrated North American legal historiography, at least for the colonial, antebellum, and pre-Confederation periods. That is so because there has been a slow emergence of scholarship of that intercolonial and interstatal kind in recent American legal historiography, with which the opportunities for Canadian engagement are promising.255 In a closely-related vein, American legal historians have begun to ask probing questions about unarticulated theories of responsibility or moral agency that underlay private, judicial, administrative, and legislative rule-making during the long nineteenth century, and about the local vernaculars in which those theories were expressed.256 British work of that kind has been hindered by Britons’ delayed development of interest in modern socio-legal history, but construction of a scaffolding of internal English legal history that will help to support it is underway.257 That emerging scholarship is crucial not only to an understanding by North American historians of the contours of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperial law and customs that were available for transmission to the new world, but also to more abstract old world and comparative studies of the implicit metaphysical or ethical underpinnings of official, customary, and private normativity.258 European social and political thought appears from early historiographic indications to have enjoyed significant currency across the Canadas and elsewhere in nineteenth-century North America.259 But the self-contained character of much European intellectual history, and the internal emphasis that prevails in continental legal

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history, limit the potential for engagement with that work by Canadian legal historians.260 Comparisons with the implicit normativity, low law, or high law of British and continental European regions by legal historians of the Canadas may ultimately be shown to be not merely enriching but necessary. Efforts have thus been made in the footnotes of this survey to identify leading secondary sources in what is, overall, a slim and sometimes one-dimensional metropolitan literature. Companion American and British North American sources are, by contrast, more ambitious, plentiful, and seemingly relevant to emerging themes in the legal history of Quebec and the Canadas than many existing imperial studies. Efforts have therefore also been made in the notes to this introduction to highlight methodologically and thematically important components of that literature. Since continuing self-education through wide reading in this specialized field remains essential, the periodic production of historiographic or stock-taking reviews with robust integration of non-Canadian secondary sources should be ongoing.261 The importance of those kinds of surveys to sibling scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and in the contemporary law-teaching community who do not themselves do research or writing in modern legal history is also hard to overstate. One cannot help but be struck by how little of the material discussed in this essay has been integrated into mainstream Canadian teaching or scholarship.262 Much has changed on the production end of things in this field since Harry Arthurs highlighted a lack of engagement with historical themes by legal academics in Law and Learning, which was prepared for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the early 1980s.263 But less appears to have changed on the reception end since then.

NOTES * I am grateful to Angela Fernandez, Donald Fyson, and Brian Young for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The Osgoode Society’s editors and its anonymous reviewers also provided useful input. 1 See, for example, A. Greer and I. Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); G.J.J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation, 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas: The

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2

3

4

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Growth of Canadian Institutions (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967); D. Creighton, The Empire of the St Lawrence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); J.E. Hodgetts, Pioneer Public Service: An Administrative History of the United Canadas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955); G.N. Tucker, The Canadian Commercial Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936). The wire and fencepost analogy was used by English legal historian Brian Simpson and American legal historian John Langbein in a 1980 conversation with the author to suggest a manageable approach to research by a first and second generation of Canadian legal historians. See A.C. Castles, An Australian Legal History (Sydney: Law Book, 1982); A.H. Manchester, A Modern Legal History of England and Wales, 1750–1950 (London: Butterworths, 1980); M.J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); L.M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1973). Compare C.W. Brooks, “Review,” English Historical Review 98 (1983): 433; M. Tushnet, “Review,” Wisconsin Law Review [1977]: 100; J.H. Smith, “Review,” University of Toronto Law Journal 24 (1974): 108; G.E. White, “Review,” Virginia Law Review 59 (1973): 1130. See also E. Moglen, “The Transformation of Morton Horwitz,” Columbia Law Review 93 (1993): 1042. Compare W.R. Cornish, ed., The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1820– 1914, vol. 12, Private Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); W.R. Cornish, ed., The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1820–1914, vol. 11, English Legal System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); M. Grossberg and C. Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America: The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); M. Grossberg and C. Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America: Early America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); B. Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995). See, for example, B. Walker, ed., The African-Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); B. Wright and S. Binnie, eds., Canadian State Trials: Political Trials and Security Measures, 1840–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); L.A. Knafla and J. Swainger, eds., Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670–1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); C. English, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Two Islands, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); P. Girard, J. Phillips, and B. Cahill, eds., The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle (Toronto: University of Toronto

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Press, 2004); F.M. Greenwood and B. Wright, eds., Canadian State Trials: Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837–1839 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); C. Wilton, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Inside the Law – Canadian Law Firms in Historical Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); F.M. Greenwood and B. Wright, eds., Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1608–1837 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1996); H. Foster and J. McLaren, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: British Columbia and the Yukon (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1995); J. Phillips, T. Loo, and S. Lewthwaite, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Crime and Criminal Justice (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1994); P. Girard and J. Phillips, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Nova Scotia (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1990); C. Wilton, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Beyond the Law – Lawyers and Business in Canada, 1830–1930 (Toronto: Butterworths, 1990); L.A. Knafla, ed., Law and Justice in a New Land: Essays in Western Canadian Legal History (Toronto: Carswell, 1986); T.G. Barnes, P. Waite, and S. Oxner, eds., Law in a Colonial Society: The Nova Scotia Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 6 See, for example, J. Phillips, R.R. McMurtry, and J.T. Saywell, “Introduction: Peter Oliver and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law: A Tribute to Peter N. Oliver, ed. J. Phillips, R.R. McMurtry, and J.T. Saywell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 1; K.J.M. Smith and J.P.S. McLaren, “History’s Living Legacy: An Outline of Modern Historiography of the Common Law,” Legal Studies 21 (2001): 251; D. Fyson, “Les historiens du Québec face au droit,” Revue juridique Thémis 34 (2000): 295; G.B. Baker, “R.C.B. Risk’s Canadian Legal History,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law: In Honour of R.C.B. Risk, ed. G.B. Baker and J. Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 17; C. Wilton, “Introduction: Inside the Law – Canadian Law Firms in Historical Perspective,” in Wilton, Essays, 3; R. Baehre, “The State in Canadian History,” Acadiensis 24 (1994): 119; C. Wilton, “Introduction,” in Wilton, Beyond the Law, 3; V. Masciotra, “Quebec Legal Historiography,” McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 712; A. Morel, “Canadian Legal History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 21 (1983): 159. 7 See, for example, G.B. Baker, “Introduction: Canadian Legal Thought,” in A History of Canadian Legal Thought: Selected Essays, ed. G.B. Baker and J. Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 3; R.B. Brown, “A Taxonomy of Methodological Approaches in Recent Canadian Legal History,” Acadiensis 34 (2004):145; M. McCallum, “Canadian Legal History in the Late 1990s: A Field in Search of Fences,” Acadiensis 25 (1998): 151; G. Marquis, “Law, Society, and History: Whose Frontier?” Acadiensis 21

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(1992): 162; J.-M. Fecteau, “Prolégomènes à une étude historique des rapports entre l’État et le droit dans la société québécoise de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à la crise de 1929,” Sociologies et Sociétés 19 (1986): 129; D.H. Flaherty, “Writing Canadian Legal History: An Introduction,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. D.H. Flaherty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 3; R.C.B. Risk, “A Prospectus for Canadian Legal History,” Dalhousie Law Journal 1 (1973): 27. 8 For reproductions of archival material or guides to it, see, for example, P.N. Oliver, The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison, 1856–1878 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); E. Kolish, Guide des Archives judiciaires (Quebec: Les Publications du Québec, 2000); G.B. Baker, K.E. Fisher, V. Masciotra, and B. Young, Sources in the Law Library of McGill University for a Reconstruction of the Legal Culture of Quebec, 1760–1890 (Montreal: McGill University, 1987); R.A. Douglas, ed., John Prince, Seventeen Ninety-Six to Eighteen Seventy: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). For reflection on the relationship between archival sources and scholarship in Canadian legal and social history, see, for example, J.-P. Garneau, “Les richesses d’un patrimoine à redécouvrir: archives judiciaires et pratiques de l’écrit dans le Québec britannique, 1785–1825,” Revue de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec 1 (2009): 58; J.S. Hagopian, “The Use of Land Registry Offices for Historical Research,” Ontario History 87 (1995): 77; E. Kolish, “L’histoire du droit et les archives judiciaires,” Cahiers de doit 34 (1993): 289; B. Curtis, “Canada Blue Books and the Administrative Capacity of the Canadian State, 1822–67,” Canadian Historical Review 74 (1993): 537; J.-M. Fecteau, “La gestion de la mémoire collective: le Comité interministériel sur les archives judiciaires et le principe de la destruction partielle,” Archives 22 (1991): 79; E. Kolish, “Aspects of Civil Litigation in Lower Canada: Towards the Use of Court Records for Canadian Social History,” Canadian Historical Review 70 (1989): 337; L. Lavallée, “Les archives notariales et l’histoire sociale de la Nouvelle-France,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 28 (1974): 385. 9 See generally D. Hay, “Legislation, Magistrates and Judges: High Law and Low Law in England and the Empire,” in The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Lemmings (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005). Compare P. Karsten, Between Law and Custom: “High” and “Low” Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora, 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10 See, for example, C. Morgan, “In Search of the Phantom Named Honour: Duelling in Upper Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 529; A. Greer, “From Folklore to Revolution: Charivaries and the Lower Canadian

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12

13

14

15

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Rebellion of 1837,” Histoire sociale / Social History 15 (1990): 24; R. Hardy, “Le charivari dans la sociabilité rurale québécoise au XIXe siècle,” in De la sociabilité: spécificité et mutations, ed. R. Levasseur (Montreal: Boréal, 1990), 59; B. Palmer, “Discordant Music: Charivaries and Whitecapping in Nineteenth-Century North America,” Labour / Le Travail 5 (1978): 5. See, for example, R.A. Macdonald, Lessons of Everyday Law (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); D. Jutras, “The Legal Dimensions of Everyday Life,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 16 (2001): 45; J.-G. Belley, Le contrat entre droit, économie et société (Cowansville, QC: Yvon Blais, 1998). See J.-Y. Morin and J. Woehrling, Les constitutions du Canada et du Québec: du Régime français à nos jours (Montreal: Thémis, 1994); P.A. Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985); P.B. Waite, The Life and Times of Confederation, 1864–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); R.M. Dawson, The Government of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); W. Ormsby, The Emergence of the Federal Concept in Canada, 1839 to 1845 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). See also J.M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976). See, for example, P.H. Russell, “Overcoming Legal Formalism: The Treatment of the Constitution, the Courts and Judicial Behavior in Canadian Political Science,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 1 (1986): 5; M. Gold, “Constitutional Scholarship in Canada,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 23 (1985): 495. See also B. Ryder, “The Demise and Rise of the Classical Paradigm,” McGill Law Journal 36 (1991): 309. See, for example, J. Ajzenstat, “Canada’s First Constitution: Pierre Bédard on Tolerance and Dissent,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 23 (1990): 39; K.D. Milobar, “The Constitutional Development of Quebec from the Time of the French Regime to the Canada Act of 1791: A British Perspective” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1990); G.W. O’Brien, “Parliamentary Procedure in Upper Canada, 1792–1820,” Ontario History 74 (1982): 284; P. Tousignant, “Problématique pour une nouvelle approche de la constitution de 1791,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 27 (1973): 181; H. Brun, La formation des institutions parlementaires québécoises, 1791–1838 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1970). See also J. Garner, The Franchise and Politics in British North America, 1755–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); A. Bernard and D. Laforte, La législation électoral au Québec 1790–1967 (Montreal: Les Éditions Sainte-Marie, 1969). See P.N. Oliver, “Power, Politics and the Law: The Place of the Judiciary

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in the Historiography of Upper Canada,” in Baker and Phillips, Essays, 443. Essays that helped frame that debate include C. Wilton, “Lawless Law: Conservative Political Violence in Upper Canada, 1818–1841,” Law and History Review 13 (1995): 111; P. Romney, “From Constitutionalism to Legalism: Trial by Jury, Responsible Government, and the Rule of Law in Canadian Political Culture,” Law and History Review 7 (1989): 121; P. Romney, “From the Rule of Law to Responsible Government: Ontario Political Culture and the Origins of Canadian Statism,” Historical Papers, Canadian Historical Association 23 (1988): 86; G.B. Baker, “So Elegant a Web: Providential Order and the Rule of Secular Law in Early Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada,” University of Toronto Law Journal 38 (1988): 184. 16 See, for example, J. Swainger, The Canadian Department of Justice and the Completion of Confederation (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000); R.C.B. Risk and R.C. Vipond, “Rights Talk in Canada in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Good Sense and Right Feeling of the People,” Law and History Review 14 (1996): 1; G.B. Baker, “The Province of Post-Confederation Rights,” University of Toronto Law Journal 45 (1994): 77; G. Bale, Chief Justice William Johnstone Ritchie: Responsible Government and Judicial Review (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991); R. Yalden, “Unité et Différence: The Structure of Legal Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Quebec,” University of Toronto Faculty Law Review 46 (1988): 365; A.I. Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation, 1867–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 17 See, for example, W.R. Lederman, “The Extension of Governmental Institutions and Legal Systems to British North America in the Colonial Period,” in Continuing Canadian Constitutional Dilemmas, ed. W.R. Lederman (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981); J.E. Côté, “The Reception of English Laws,” Alberta Law Review 15 (1977): 29; E.G. Brown, “British Statutes in the Emergent Nations of North America: 1606–1949,” American Journal of Legal History 7 (1963): 95. See also M. McCallum, “Problems in Determining the Date of Reception in Prince Edward Island,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 55 (2006): 3; B. Cahill, “How Far English Laws Are in Force Here: Nova Scotia’s First Century of Reception Law Jurisprudence,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 42 (1993): 113; D.G. Bell, “The Reception Question and the Constitutional Crisis of the 1790s in New Brunswick,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 29 (1980): 157. 18 See, generally, M. Stuckey, “Early Modern English Humanism and Antiquarianism: The Prosopographical Method and Reflections on HistoricoLegal Tradition,” Journal of Legal History 33 (2012): 31; R.A. Cosgrove, “The Culture of Academic Legal History: Lawyers’ History and Historians’

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19 20

21

22

23

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Law, 1870–1930,” Cambrian Law Review 33 (2002): 33; R.W. Gordon, “J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography,” Law and Society Review 10 (1975): 325. See infra, text at notes 113–29. See, for example, E.H. Reiter, “Imported Books, Imported Ideas: Reading European Jurisprudence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 445; C. Veilleux, “Le livre à Québec, 1760–1867: les gens de justice et leurs œuvres,” Cahier de doit 34 (1993): 93; G.B. Baker, “The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire,” Law and History Review 3 (1985): 219. Compare B.J. Hibbitts, “Her Majesty’s Yankees: American Authority in the Supreme Court of Victorian Nova Scotia, 1837–1901,” in Girard, Phillips, and Cahill, Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 321; H.R. Baker, “Creating Order in the Wilderness: Transplanting the English Law to Rupert’s Land, 1835–51,” Law and History Review 17 (1999): 209; H. Foster, “Long-Distance Justice: The Criminal Jurisdiction of Canadian Courts West of the Canadas, 1763–1859,” American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990): 1. Compare H. Foster, B.L. Berger, and A.R. Buck, eds., The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008); M.S. Bilder, “The Lost Lawyers: Early American Legal Literates and Transatlantic Legal Culture,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 11 (1999): 47; D.G. Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). See, generally, H.P. Glenn, “A Chthonic Legal Tradition,” in Legal Traditions of the World: Sustainable Diversity in Law, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 61–98; Law Commission of Canada, Indigenous Legal Traditions (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); K. Coates, “Writing First Nations into Canadian History: A Review of Recent Scholarly Works,” Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 99. See, generally, M. Lavoie, “C’est ma seigneurie que je réclame: la lutte des Hurons de Lorette pour la seigneurie de Sillery, 1760–1880” (PhD thesis, Laval University, 2006); H. Foster, “Canada: Indian Administration from the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to Constitutionally Entrenched Aboriginal Rights,” in Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, ed. P. Havermann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 351; S. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1998); M.D. Walters, “The Extension of Colonial Criminal Jurisdiction over the Aboriginal Peoples of Upper

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Canada: Reconsidering the Shawanakiskie Case (1822–26),” University of Toronto Law Journal 46 (1996): 273. See, generally, M.D. Walters, “Aboriginal Rights, Magna Carta, and Exclusive Rights to Fisheries in the Waters of Upper Canada,” Queen’s Law Journal 23 (1998): 301; K. Abel and J. Friesen, Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1991); B.E. Hill, “The Grand River Navigation Company and the Six Nations Indians,” Ontario History 63 (1971): 31. Compare D.C. Harris, Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). Compare M. Morin, “Les insuffisances d’une analyse purement historique des droits des peuples autochtones,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 57 (2003): 237; A. Bealeau, “Les pièges de la judiciarisation de l’histoire autochtone,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 53 (2000): 541; P.G. McHugh, “The Common Law Status of Colonies and Aboriginal Rights: How Lawyers and Historians Treat the Past,” Saskatchewan Law Review 61 (1998): 393. See, for example, S.A.M. Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870–1905 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012); C. Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); J.W. St G. Walker, Race, Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada: Historical Case Studies (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1997). See J.R. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). See also B. Morito, An Ethic of Mutual Respect: The Covenant Chain and Aboriginal–Crown Relations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012); R.J. Talbot, Negotiating the Numbered Treaties: An Intellectual and Political Biography of Alexander Morris (Saskatoon: Parich, 2009); V. Lytwyn and D. Jacobs, “For Good Will and Affection: The Detroit Indian Land Deeds and British Land Policy, 1760–1827,” Ontario History 92 (2000): 9. See, for example, M.D. Walters, “According to the Old Customs of Our Nation: Aboriginal Self-Government on the Credit River Mississauga Reserve, 1826–1847,” Ottawa Law Review 30 (1998): 1; D. Schulze, “The Privy Council’s Decision Concerning George Allsop’s Petition, 1767: An Imperial Precedent on the Application of the Royal Proclamation to the Old Province of Quebec,” Canadian Native Law Report 2 (1995): 1; D.M. Johnston, “The Quest of the Six Nations Confederacy for Self-Determination,” University of Toronto Faculty Law Review 44 (1986): 1. Compare L. Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia,

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30 31

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1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); F.P. Pucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); K. McNeil, Common Law Aboriginal Title (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Compare S.G. Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar: An Investigation into Legal Sensibilities in Nunavik (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); R.A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); W. Cronin, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). See also text at notes 10–11. See D. Fyson, “Minority Groups and the Law in Quebec, 1760–1867,” in this volume. See, for example, B. Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Curtis, “Canada Blue Books”; J.I. Gow, “L’administration publique dans le discours politique au Québec, de Lord Durham à nos jours,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 23 (1990): 685; C. Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, Monopoly’s Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); R.B. Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, 1791–1893: A Study of Public Welfare Administration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). See, for example, D. Shanahan, “Tory Bureaucrat as Victim: The Removal of Samuel Jarvis, 1842–47,” Ontario History 95 (2003): 38; D. Leighton, “The Compact Tory as Bureaucrat: Samuel Peters Jarvis and the Indian Department, 1837–1845,” 73 Ontario History 73 (1981): 40; D. Owram, “Management by Enthusiasm: The First Board of Works in the Province of Canada, 1841–1846,” Ontario History 70 (1978): 171; H.P. Gundy, “The Family Compact at Work: The Second Heir and Devisee Commission of Upper Canada, 1805–1841,” Ontario History 66 (1974): 129; Hodgetts, Pioneer Public Service; H.G.J. Aitken, The Welland Canal Company (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). See also M.J. Piva, “Getting Hired: The Civil Service Act of 1857,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 3 (1992): 95. See, for example, K. Cruikshank, Close Ties: Railways, Government, and the Board of Railway Commissioners, 1851–1933 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1991); E. Tucker, Administering Danger: The Law and Politics of Occupational Health and Safety Regulation in Ontario, 1850–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); B. Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London, ON: Althouse, 1988).

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34 See, for example, M.J. Piva, The Borrowing Process: Public Finance in the Province of Canada, 1840–1867 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992); B. Forster, A Conjunction of Interests: Business, Politics and Tariffs, 1825–1879 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); G. Paquet and J.-P. Wallot, Patronage et pouvoir dans le Bas-Canada (1794–1812) (Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1973). Compare T. Alborn, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); R. Stanley, Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 35 Compare M.S. Heath, Constructive Liberalism: The Role of the State in Economic Development in Georgia to 1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); L.B. Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); O. Handlin and M.F. Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York: New York University Press, 1947). 36 See H.W. Arthurs, Without the Law: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). 37 Compare W.J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); W.E. Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); W.C. Chase, The American Law School and the Rise of Administrative Government (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); S. Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administration Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also J.L. Mashaw, “Administration and Bureaucracy: Administrative Law from Jackson to Lincoln,” Yale Law Journal 117 (2008): 1568. 38 But see D. Fyson, “Judicial Auxiliaries across Legal Regimes: From New France to Lower Canada,” in Entre justice et justiciables: les auxiliaires de la justice du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle, ed. C. Dolan (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 383. Compare J.A. Berkovits, “Wardens and Prisoners: Aspects of Prison Culture in Ontario, 1874–1914,” in Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell, Essays, 67; G.B. Baker, “Willis on ‘Cultured’ Public Authorities,” University of Toronto Law Journal 55 (2005): 335. 39 See, generally, C. Stebbings, Legal Foundations of Tribunals in NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); R. Harris, Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization,

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1720–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J.W. Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970). See F.E. Labrie, “The Pre-Confederation History of Corporations in Canada,” in Studies in Canadian Company Law, ed. J.S. Ziegel (Toronto: Butterworths, 1967), 1:33; B. Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 631–70; F.W. Wegenast, The Law of Canadian Companies (Toronto: Burroughs, 1931). See R.B.C. Risk, “The Nineteenth-Century Foundations of the Business Corporation in Ontario,” University of Toronto Law Journal 23 (1973): 270. See also A. Schrauwers, Union Is Strength: W.L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace, and the Emergence of Joint Stock Democracy in Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); J.-M. Fecteau, “Les petites républiques: les compagnies et la mise en place du droit corporatif moderne au Québec au milieu du 19e siècle,” Histoire sociale / Social History 25 (1992): 35. Compare M.S. Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Harris, Industrializing English Law; B.A.M. Patton, “From State Action to Private Profit: The Emergence of the Business Corporation in Nova Scotia, 1796– 1883,” Nova Scotia Historical Review 16 (1996): 21. See, for example, C.I. Kyer, “Gooderham & Worts: A Case Study in Business Organization in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” in Baker and Phillips, Essays, 335; P. Baskerville, The Bank of Upper Canada (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1987), i–clii; B. Young, In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816–1876 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986). See also E. Kavanagh, “A Company with Sovereignty and Subjects of Its Own: The Case of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1763,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26 (2011): 25. See, generally, J.E. Hodgetts, From Arm’s Length to Hands On: The Formative Years of Ontario’s Public Service (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); H.L. Schacter, Frederick Taylor and the Public Administration Community: A Reevaluation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); D. Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). See, for example, D. McKeagan, “Development of a Secure Securities Market in Montreal from 1817 to 1874,” Business History Review 51 (2009): 59; C. Armstrong, Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms: Buying and Selling Securities in Canada, 1870–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); R.C. Mitchie, “The Canadian Securities Market 1850–1914,” Business History Review 62

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(1988): 56; J.F. Whiteside, “The Toronto Stock Exchange and the Development of the Share Market to 1885,” Journal of Canadian Studies 20 (1985): 70. Compare S. Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation: Cultural and Political Roots, 1690–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 45 See, for example, D. Fyson, “The Canadiens and British Institutions of Local Governance in Quebec, from the Conquest to the Rebellions,” in Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions and Identities in Post-Revolutionary British North America, ed. N. Christie (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2008), 45; A. Baccigalupo, “Histoire des administrations municipales québécoises,” in Papers in Public Law, Public Legal History, Natural Law and Political Thought, ed. M.J. Palacz (Barcelona: Catédra de Historia del Derecho y de las Instituciones, 1992) 157; J.I. Little, “Colonization and Municipal Reform in Canada East,” Histoire sociale / Social History 14 (1981): 93; C. Whebell, “Robert Baldwin and Decentralization, 1841–49,” in Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Ontario: Essays Presented to James J. Talman, ed. F.H. Armstrong, H.A. Stephenson, and J.D. Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 48; F.-J. Audet, Les députés de Montréal ville et comtés 1792–1867: études biographiques, anecdotiques et historiques (Montreal: Éditions des Dix, 1943). See, generally, G. Marquis, “The Contours of Canadian Urban Justice, 1830–1875,” Urban History Review 15 (1987): 269. 46 But see W.T. Matthews, “Local Government and the Regulation of the Public Market in Upper Canada, 1800–1860: The Moral Economy of the Poor,” Ontario History 79 (1987): 297. See also Fyson, “Canadiens and British Institutions”; K.M.J. McKenna, “Women’s Agency in Upper Canada: Prescott’s Board of Police Record, 1834–1850,” Histoire sociale / Social History 36 (2003): 347; S. Lewthwaite, “Law and Authority in Upper Canada: The Justices of the Peace in the Newcastle District, 1804–1840” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2001). 47 See M. Stokes, “Grand Juries and ‘Proper Authorities’: Low Law, Soft Law, and Local Governance in Canada West / Ontario, 1850–1880,” in this volume. See also F. Rivet, “La vision de l’ordre en milieu urbain chez les élites locales de Québec et Montréal: le discours des grands jurys, 1820-1860” (MA thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2004); D. Fyson, “Jurys, participation civique et représentation au Québec et au Bas-Canada: les grands jurys du district de Montréal (1764–1832),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 55 (2001): 85. Compare H. Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); R.M. Ireland, Little Kingdoms: The Counties of Kentucky, 1850–1891 (Lexington: University Press

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of Kentucky, 1977); J.M. Beck, The Evolution of Municipal Government in Nova Scotia (Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1973). See R.B. Brown, “‘Possession of arms among these men … might lead to serious consequences’: Regulating Firearms in the Canadas, 1760–1867,” in this volume. See also R.B. Brown, Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Compare H. Schweber, The Creation of American Common Law, 1850–1880 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Horwitz, Transformation of American Law; W.E. Nelson, The Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). See, generally, S.N. Katz, “The Problem of a Colonial Legal History,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. J.P. Green and J.R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 457; H. Hartog, “Distancing Oneself from the Eighteenth Century,” in Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in the Law, ed. H. Hartog (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 256; D.H. Flaherty, “An Introduction to Early American Legal History,” in Flaherty, Essays, 3. See, generally, W. Forbath, H. Hartog, and M. Minow, “Legal Histories from Below,” Wisconsin Law Review [1985]: 759; R.W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984): 57; D. Sugarman, “Theory and Practice in Law and History,” in Law, State, and Society, ed. B. Fryer (London: Croom, Helm, 1981), 70. See, for example, J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Careless, Union of the Canadas; Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan. On the lawyerly composition of the Canadas’ legislatures, see, generally, F.H. Armstrong, Handbook of Upper Canadian Chronology (Toronto: Dundurn, 1985); F. Ouellet, “Les classes dominantes au Québec 1760–1840: bilan historiographique,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 38 (1984): 223; D. Forman, Legislators and Legislatures of Ontario, vol. 1 of 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). See, for example, S. Watt, “State Trial by Legislature: The Special Council of Lower Canada, 1838–1841,” in Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials, 248; I. Radforth, “Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform,” in Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan, 64; B. Young, “Positive Law, Positive State: Class Realignment and the Transformation of Lower Canada,” in Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan, 50. For formal descriptions of seigneurialism, see, generally, C. Dessureault,

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“L’évolution du régime seigneurial canadien de 1760 à 1854: Essai de synthèse,” in Le régime seigneurial au Québec 150 and après: bilans et perspectives de recherches à l’occasion de la commémoration de 150e anniversaire de l’abolition du régime seigneurial, ed. A. Laberge and B. Grenier (Quebec: FIEQ, 2009), 23; J.-F. Niort, “Aspects juridiques du régime seigneurial en NouvelleFrance,” Revue générale de droit 32 (2002): 443; L. Deschêne, “L’évolution du régime seigneurial au Canada: le cas de Montréal aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Research Sociology 17 (1971): 143. Compare S.F.C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See Canada Trade Act, 3 Geo. IV (1822), c. 119 (UK); Canada Land Tenures Act, 6 Geo. IV (1825), c. 59 (UK); Lower Canada Free and Common Soccage Act, 9–10 Geo. IV (1828), c. 127 (UK); Saint Sulpice Ordinance, 3 Vict. (1840), c. 30 (LC). But see B. Grenier, “Le dernier endroit dans l’univers: à propos de l’extinction des rentes seigneuriales au Québec, 1854–1971,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 64 (2010): 75; T. Johnson, “Perceptions of Property: The Social and Historical Imagination of Quebec’s Legal Elite, 1836–1856” (SJD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1989); J.-P. Wallot, “Le régime seigneurial et son abolition au Canada,” in Un Québec qui bougeait, ed. J.-P. Wallot (Trois-Rivières, QC: Boréal, 1973), 255; F. Ouellet, “L’abolition du régime seigneurial et l’idée de propriété,” in Éléments d’histoire sociale du Bas-Canada, ed. F. Ouellet (Montreal: Hurtubise, 1972). Even less is now known about the operation or adumbration of seigneuralism on the Upper Canadian side of the Ottawa River, in the St Clair River Valley, or southward through the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi system. But see W.R. Riddell, Michigan under British Rule: Law and Law Courts, 1760–1796 (Lansing: Michigan Historical Commission, 1926); W.R. Riddell, The Life of William Dummer Powell (Lansing: Michigan Historical Commission, 1924). See, for example, M.E. McCallum, “The Sacred Rights of Property: Title, Entitlement, and the Land Question in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island,” in Baker and Phillips, Essays, 358; B. Rudden, “A Code Too Soon: The 1826 Property Code of James Humphries; English Rejection, American Reception, English Acceptance,” in Essays in Memory of Professor F.H. Lawson, ed. P. Wallington and R.M. Meakins (London: Butterworths, 1986), 103; S.B. Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). See Seigneurial Lands Act, 25–6 Geo. V (1935), c. 82 (PQ). Compare M. Weber, Law and Economy in Society, trans. M. Rheinstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). See, generally, D. Sugar-

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man, In the Spirit of Weber: Law, Modernity, and the Peculiarities of the English (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). See, generally, J.I. Little, “Contested Land: Squatters and Agents in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada,” Canadian Historical Review, 80 (1999): 381; R.C. Harris, Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), plate 51; J.E.C. Brierley, “The Co-existence of Legal Systems in Quebec: Free and Common Soccage in Canada’s pays de droit civil,” Cahier de doit 20 (1979): 277; G.F. McGuigan, “The Emergence of the Unincorporated Company in Canada,” University of British Columbia Law Review 2 (1964): 31. Compare J.L. Halperin, The French Code, trans. T. Weir (London: University College of London Press, 2006); G. Birtsch, “Reform Absolutism and the Codification of Law: The Genesis and Nature of the Prussian General Code (1794),” in Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. J. Brewer and E. Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 343; M. John, Politics and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); C.M. Cook, The American Codification Movement: A Study of Antebellum Legal Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); H.E. Strakosch, State Absolutism and the Rule of Law: The Struggle for the Codification of Civil Law in Austria, 1753–1811 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967). See, generally, S. Normand, “La codification de 1866: contexte et impact,” in Droit québécois et droit français: communauté, autonomie, et concordance, ed. H.P. Glenn (Cowansville, QC: Yvon Blais, 2005), 43; A. Morel, “La codification devant l’opinion publique de l’époque,” in Livre Centenaire du Code civil, ed. J. Boucher and A. Morel, 2 vols. (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1970), 1:27. Compare R.W. Gordon, “Review,” Vanderbilt Law Review 36 (1983): 431; G. Parker, “The Origins of the Canadian Criminal Code” in Flaherty, Essays, at 249. See B. Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); J.E.C. Brierley, “Quebec’s Civil Law Codification Viewed and Reviewed,” McGill Law Journal 14 (1968): 521. See also D. Brown, The Genesis of the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1989), 70–118. But see J.-M. Brisson and N. Kasirer, “The Married Woman in Ascendance, the Mother Country in Retreat: From Legal Colonialism to Legal Nationalism in Quebec Matrimonial Law Reform, 1866–1991,” in Canada’s Legal Inheritances, ed. D. Guth and W.W. Pue (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001), 406; F.M. Greenwood, “Lower Canada (Quebec): Transformation of Civil Law, from Higher Morality to Autonomous Will, 1774–1866,”

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Manitoba Law Journal 23 (1996): 132; A. Morel, “L’émergence du nouvel ordre juridique instauré par le Code civil du Bas-Canada (1866–1890),” in Le nouveau Code civil: Interprétation et application, ed. P.-A. Crépeau (Montreal: Thémis, 1993), 49; J.W. Cairns, “The 1808 Digest of Orleans and the 1866 Civil Code of Lower Canada: An Historical Study of Legal Change” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1980). 66 See, for example, S. Normand and D. Fyson, “Le droit romain comme source du code civil du Bas Canada,” Revue du Notariat 103 (2001): 87; R. La Rue, “La codification des lois civiles au Bas-Canada et l’idée de loi naturelle,” Cahiers de doit 34 (1993): 5; J.E.C. Brierley, “Quebec’s Common Laws (droits communs): How Many Are There?,” in Mélanges Louis-Philippe Pigeon, ed. E. Caparros (Montreal: Wilson et Lafleur, 1989), 109. Compare C. Winterer, The Cultures of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 99–151; M.H. Hoeflich, Roman Law and Civil Law and the Development of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); J.E. de Montmorency, “Robert-Joseph Pothier and French Law,” Journal of Comparative Legislation 13 (1914): 265. 67 See, for example, M. Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838) (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2010); L.-G. Harvey, Le Printemps de l’Amérique française: américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québécois, 1805–1837 (Montreal: Boréal, 2005); Y. Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec (St Laurent: Fides, 2000); J. Ajzenstat, The Political Thought of Lord Durham (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); J. Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); L. Armour and E. Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981). 68 See, for example, Baker and Phillips, History of Canadian Legal Thought; M. Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991); R.C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). Compare B. Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism: The Intellectual Legacy of Adam Shortt, O.D. Skelton, W.C. Clark, and W.A. Mackintosh, 1890–1925 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); F. Roy, Progrès, harmonie, liberté: le libéralisme des milieux d’affaires francophones de Montréal au tournant du siècle (Montreal: Boréal, 1988); A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical

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Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979). But see N. Larsen, “Statute Revision and Consolidation: History, Process, and Problems,” Ottawa Law Review 19 (1987): 321; M.A. Banks, “An Annotated Bibliography of Statutes and Related Publications: Upper Canada, the Province of Canada, and Ontario, 1792–1980,” in Flaherty, Essays, 358. Compare A.H. Manchester, “Simplifying the Sources of the Law: An Essay on Law Reform. Lord Cranworth’s Attempt to Consolidate the Statute Law of England and Wales,” Anglo-American Law Review 2 (1973): 395; E.C. Surrency, “Revision of Colonial Laws,” American Journal of Legal History 9 (1965): 189. See, generally, P. Girard, “Of Institutes and Treatises: Blackstone’s Commentaries, Kent’s Commentaries, and Murdoch’s Epitome of the Laws of Nova Scotia,” in Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise, ed. A. Fernandez and M.D. Dubber (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012), 43; B. Wright, “Renovate or Rebuild: Treatises, Digests, and Criminal Codification,” in ibid., 181; C. Macmillan, “Stephen Martin Leake: A Victorian’s View of the Common Law,” Journal of Legal History 32 (2011): 3. See, generally, R. Berkovitz, The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); W.C. Dimock, “Rules of Law, Rules of Science,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 13 (2001): 203; H. Hovenkamp, “Evolutionary Models in Jurisprudence,” Texas Law Review 64 (1985): 645. But see R. Vipond and G. Feldberg, “The Law of Evolution and the Evolution of the Law: Mills, Darwin, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Legal Thought,” in Baker and Phillips, Essays, 561; S.E. Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); A.W. Rasporitch, “Positivism and Scientism in the Canadian Confederation Debates,” in Science, Technology, and Culture in Historical Perspective, ed. L.A. Knafla, M.S. Straum, and T.H.E. Travers (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1976), 206. See, generally, J.E.C. Brierley and R.A. Macdonald, Quebec Civil Law: An Introduction to Quebec Private Law (Toronto: Emond-Montgomery, 1993), 5–73; S. Normand, “Un thème dominant de la pensée juridique traditionnelle au Québec: la sauvegarde de l’intégrité du droit civil,” McGill Law Journal 22 (1987): 557; J.-G. Castel, “Le juge Mignault, défendeur de l’intégrité du droit civil québécois,” Canadian Bar Review 53 (1975): 544. See, for example, B. Young, “Overlapping Identities: The Quebec Civil Code of 1866, Its Reception and Interpretation,” in Le Code Napoléon, un ancêtre vénéré? Mélanges offerts à Jacques Vanderlinden, ed. R. Beauthier and I.

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Rorive (Brussels: Bruylant, 2004), 259; Young, Politics of Codification; Morel, “La codification devant l’opinion publique”; Brierley, “Quebec’s Civil Law Codification.” See, generally, H.L. McQueen, “Legal Nationalism: Lord Cooper, Legal History, and Comparative Law,” Edinburgh Law Review 9 (2005): 395; S. Jacobson, “Law and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective,” Law and History Review 20 (2002): 307; R.A. Cosgrove, Our Lady the Common Law: An Anglo-American Legal Community (New York: New York University Press, 1987). For the beginnings of that kind of work, see, for example, P. Girard, “Who’s Afraid of Canadian Legal History?,” University of Toronto Law Journal 57 (2007): 727; N. Kasirer, “The Annotated Criminal Code en version québécoise: Signs of Territoriality in Canadian Criminal Law,” Dalhousie Law Journal 13 (1990): 520; D. Howes, “From Polyjurality to Monojurality: The Transformation of Quebec Law, 1875–1929,” 32 McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 524; G.G. Tremblay, “La pensée constitutionnelle du juge Pierre-Basile Mignault,” Cahiers de doit 34 (1983): 257; H.B. Neary, “William Renwick Riddell: Judge, Ontario Publicist and Man of Letters,” Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette 11 (1977): 144. See, for example, J. Phillips and B. Miller, “Too Many Courts and Too Much Law: The Politics of Judicial Reform in Nova Scotia, 1830–1841,” Law and History Review 30 (2012): 89; P. Girard, “Married Women’s Property, Chancery Abolition and Insolvency Law: Law Reform in Nova Scotia, 1820–1867,” in Girard and Phillips, Essays, 80; J. Phillips, “The Reform of Nova Scotia’s Criminal Law, 1830–41” in Proceedings, Canadian Law in History Conference 1987, ed. W.W. Pue and B. Wright, 3 vols. (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1987), 3:480. Compare G. Drewry, “Lawyers and Statutory Reform in Victorian Government,” in Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, ed. R. McLeod (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 27; S.E. Finer, “The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas, 1820–50,” in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, ed. G. Sutherland (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 11. See E. Kolish, “Imprisonment for Debt in Lower Canada, 1791–1840,” McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 602; E. Kolish, “L’introduction de la faillite au Bas Canada: Conflit social ou national?,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 40 (1987): 215. See J.L. McNairn, “‘A just and obvious distinction’: The Meaning of Imprisonment for Debt and the Criminal Law in Upper Canada’s Age of Reform,” in this volume.

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80 See generally T.G.W. Telfer, “Interests, Ideas, Institutions and the History of Canadian Bankruptcy Law, 1869–1880,” University of Toronto Law Journal 60 (2010): 603. Compare Lori Chambers, “Married Women’s Property Law Reform, Couples, and Fraud in Canada West / Ontario, 1859–1900,” in this volume; Stokes, “Grand Juries.” 81 See, for example, B.H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); D.A. Skeel, Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); E.J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 82 See D. Fyson, The Court Structure of Quebec and Lower Canada, 1760–1860 (Montreal: Montreal History Group, 1994 – available in slightly revised form online at www.profs.hst.ulaval.ca/dfyson/courtstr/); M.A. Banks, “The Evolution of the Ontario Courts, 1788–1981,” in Flaherty, Essays, 492. Compare D.G. Bell, “Maritime Legal Institutions under the Ancien Régime, 1710–1850,” in Guth and Pue, Canada’s Legal Inheritances, 103; D. Gibson, and L. Gibson, Substantial Justice: Law and Lawyers in Manitoba, 1670–1970 (Winnipeg: Peguis, 1972). 83 See, for example, J.D. Honsberger, Osgoode Hall: An Illustrated History (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2004); A. Giroux, “Early Courthouses of Quebec,” in Early Canadian Court Houses, ed. M. Carter (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1983); M. MacRae and A. Adamson, Cornerstones of Order: Courthouses and Town Halls of Ontario, 1784–1914 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1982). Compare M.J. McNamara, From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); B. Cuthbertson, “Halifax Homes of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court,” in Girard, Phillips, and Cahill, Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 243. 84 Compare D. Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E.P. Thompson (London: Pantheon, 1975), 17; J. Glick, “On the Road: The Supreme Court and the History of Circuit Riding,” Cardozo Law Review 24 (2003): 1753; A.G. Roeber, “Authority, Law, and Custom: The Rituals of Court Day in Tidewater Virginia, 1720–1750,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1980): 29. 85 See D.R. Klinck, “Doing Complete Justice: Equity in the Ontario Court of Chancery,” Queen’s Law Journal 32 (2006): 45; K. Johnson, “Claims of Equity and Justice: Petitions and Petitioners in Upper Canada, 1815–1840,” Histoire sociale / Social History 28 (1995): 219; J.C. Weaver, “While Equity Slumbered: Creditor Advantage, a Capitalist Land Market, and Upper

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Canada’s Missing Court,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 28 (1990): 871; J.D. Blackwell, “William Hume Blake and the Judicature Acts of 1849: The Process of Law Reform at Mid-Century,” in Flaherty, Essays, 132; E. Brown, “Equitable Jurisdiction and the Court of Chancery in Upper Canada,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 21 (1983): 275. Compare M. Lobban, “Preparing for Fusion: Reforming the Nineteenth Century Court of Chancery,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 389, 565; J. Cruickshank, “The Chancery Court of Nova Scotia: Jurisdiction and Procedure, 1751–1855,” Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1992): 27. See J.-M. Brisson, La formation d’un droit mixte: l’évolution de la procédure civile de 1774 à 1867 (Montreal: Thémis, 1986). See generally Lobban, “Preparing for Fusion”; S.N. Lubrin, “David Dudley Field and the Field Code: An Historical Analysis of an Earlier Procedural Vision,” Law and History Review 6 (1988): 311; D.S. Clark, “The Civil Law Influence on David Dudley Field’s Code of Civil Procedure,” in The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World, 1820–1920, ed. M. Reimann (Berlin: Dunker and Humblot, 1993), 63. See, for example, J.H. Aitchinson, “The Courts of Requests in Upper Canada,” Ontario History 41 (1949): 125; W.R. Riddell, The Bar and the Courts of the Province of Upper Canada or Ontario (Toronto: Macmillan, 1928); W.R. Riddell, “Judges in the Executive Council of Upper Canada,” Michigan Law Review 20 (1922): 716; W.R. Riddell, “Judges in the Parliament of Upper Canada,” Minnesota Law Review 3 (1918): 163. See also J. McLaren, Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Oliver, Conventional Man; E. Kolish and J. Lambert, “The Attempted Impeachment of the Lower Canadian Chief Justices, 1814–15,” in Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials, 450. But P.A. Howell, The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 1833–1876: Its Origins, Structure, and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); D.B. Swinfen, Imperial Control of Colonial Legislation, 1813– 1865: A Study of British Policy toward Colonial Legislative Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); J.H. Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950). See R.B. Brown, A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Compare M. Constable, The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Concepts of Citizenship, Law, and Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); J.S. Cockburn and T.A. Green, eds., Twelve Men Good and True: The English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); T.A. Green,

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Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Jury Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See, generally, D. Baillargeon, Brève histoire des femmes au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2012); Brisson and Kasirer, “Married Woman in Ascendance”; J. Stoddart, “Quebec’s Legal Elite Looks at Women’s Rights: The Dorion Commission, 1929–31,” in Flaherty, Essays, 323. See also R. Sharpe and P. McMahon, The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2007). See, for example, P.A. Baskerville, A Silent Revolution: Gender and Wealth in English Canada, 1860–1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); S. Ingram and K. Inwood, “Property Ownership by Married Women in Victorian Ontario,” Dalhousie Law Journal 23 (2000): 406; L. Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); C. Backhouse, “Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Law and History Review 6 (1988): 211. Compare S. Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990); M. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); N. Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Marriage, Women and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). See Chambers, “Married Women’s Property Law Reform.” See also Chambers, Married Women and Property Law; B. Young, “Getting Around Legal Incapacity: The Legal Status of Married Women in Trade in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lower Canada,” in Canadian Papers in Business History, ed. P. Baskerville (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Public History Group, 1989). But see D. Fyson, “The Trials and Tribulations of Riot Prosecutions: Collective Violence, State Authority and Criminal Justice in Quebec, 1841–1892,” in Wright and Binnie, Canadian State Trials, 161; M. Dufresne, “La réforme de la justice pénale Bas-Canadienne: le cas des assauts communs à Québec,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 53 (1999): 247; M. Dufresne, “La justice pénale et la définition du crime à Québec, 1830–1860” (PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 1997); J.D. Blackwell, “Crime in the London District, 1828–1837: A Case Study of the Effect of the 1833 Reform in Upper Canadian Penal Law,” Queen’s Law Journal 6 (1981): 528; A. Morel, “La réception du droit criminel anglais au Québec (1760–1892),” Revue juridique Thémis 13 (1978): 449. See also G.B. Baker, “Strategic Benthamism: Rehabilitating United Canada’s Bar through Criminal Law Codification, 1847–54,” in Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell, Essays, 257.

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95 See, for example, D. Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Montreal: Hurtubise, 2010) (where the treatment is a little more than incidental, especially on pre-1841 Lower Canadian reforms); J.-M. Fecteau, La liberté du pauvre: sur la régulation du crime et de la pauvreté au XIXe siècle québécois (Montreal: VLB, 2004); D.R. Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791–1849 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). See also text at notes 160–75. 96 See, for example, L. Farmer, “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate: The Criminal Law Commissioners,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 397; J.A. Hostetler, The Politics of Criminal Law Reform in the Nineteenth Century (Chichester, UK: Barry Rose Law Publishers, 1992); K.J.M. Smith, Lawyers, Legislators and Theorists: Developments in English Criminal Jurisprudence, 1800–1957 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). 97 See, for example, B. Wright, “Criminal Law Codification and Imperial Projects: The Self-Governing Jurisdiction Codes of the 1890s,” Legal History 12 (2008): 19; E. Kolsky, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 631; M.L. Friedland, “R.S. Wright’s Model Criminal Code: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of the Criminal Law,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1981): 307. 98 See, generally, Baker, “Strategic Benthamism”; Little, State and Society; Radforth, “Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform”; Curtis, Building the Educational State. See also E. Tucker, “The Gospel of Statutory Rules Requiring Liberal Interpretation According to St Peters,” University of Toronto Law Journal 35 (1985): 113, for discussion of local judicial deference, through generous mid-nineteenth-century rules of statute interpretation, to legislative action. Compare F.P. Walton, The Scope and Interpretation of the Civil Code of Lower Canada (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1907), and A.H.F. Lefroy, The Law of Legislative Power in Canada (Toronto: Toronto Law Book and Publishing, 1897), for examples of much more restrictive approaches to statutory law that had come to prevail two generations later. 99 See, for example M. Morin, A. Decroix, and D. Gilles, Les tribunaux et l’arbitrage en Nouvelle France et au Québec de 1740 à 1784 (Montreal: Thémis, 2012); G.B. Baker, “Law Practice and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal: The Torrance-Morris Firm, 1848–1868,” in Wilton, Essays … Beyond the Law, 45; J.E.C. Brierley, “Arbitrage conventionnel au Canada et spécialement dans le droit privé de la province de Québec” (PhD thesis, University of Paris, 1964).

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100 See, for example, C. Moore, McCarthy, Tétrault: Building Canada’s Premier Law Firm, 1855–2005 (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005); G.B. Baker, “Ordering the Urban Canadian Law Office and Its Entrepreneurial Hinterland, 1825 to 1875,” University of Toronto Law Journal 48 (1998): 175; T.D. Regehr, “Elite Relationships, Partnership Arrangements and Nepotism at Blakes, a Toronto Law Firm, 1858–1942,” in Wilton, Essays … Inside the Law, 207; C. Cole, Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt: Portrait of a Partnership (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, 1995); B. Young, “Dimensions of a Law Practice: Brokerage and Ideology in the Career of GeorgeEtienne Cartier,” in Wilton, Essays … Beyond the Law, 103; D. Mitchell and J. Slinn, The History of McMaster, Meighen (Montreal: McMaster, Meighen, 1989). 101 See, for example, G. Postolec, “La reproduction sociale à Neuville au XVIIIe siècle: l’apport foncier au mariage,” in Transmettre, hériter, succéder: la reproduction familiale en milieu rural France-Québec, XVIIe–XXe siècle, ed. R. Bonnain (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1993); S. Dépatie, “La transmission du patrimoine dans les terroirs en expansion: un exemple canadien au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 44 (1990): 141; G. Bouchard, “Les systèmes de transmission des avoirs familiaux et le cycle de la société rurale au Québec du XVIIe au XXe siècles,” Histoire sociale / Social History 16 (1983): 35. 102 See, for example, B. Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); T. Nootens, Fous, prodigues et ivrognes: familles et déviance à Montréal au XIX siècle (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); B. Bradbury, P. Gossage, E. Kolish, and A. Stewart, “Property and Marriage: The Law and Practice in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” Histoire sociale / Social History 26 (1993): 9; H. Dion, Les contrats de mariage à Québec (1790–1812) (Ottawa: Musées nationaux du Canada, 1980). 103 See, for example, C.N. Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended: The Role of Extra-Judicial Dispute Resolution in Antebellum Kentucky and New Jersey,” American Journal of Legal History 48 (2006): 39; J.A. Jaffe, “Industrial Arbitration, Equity and Authority in England, 1800–1850,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 525; B.H. Mann, “The Formalization of Informal Law: Arbitration before the American Revolution,” New York University Law Review 59 (1984): 443; E. Moglen, “Commercial Arbitration in the Eighteenth Century: Searching for the Transformation of American Law,” Yale Law Journal 93 (1983): 135. Compare B. Garnot, “Justice, infrajustice, parajustice et extrajustice dans la France d’ancien régime,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés 4 (2000): 103.

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104 See, generally, W. Prest, “Blackstone as Architect: Constructing the Commentaries,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 15 (2003): 103; R.B. Robinson, “The Two Institutes of Thomas Wood: A Study in EighteenthCentury Legal Scholarship,” American Journal of Legal History 35 (1991): 432; J.W. Cairns, “Eighteenth-Century Professional Classification of English Common Law,” McGill Law Journal 33 (1987): 225. 105 See R.-J. Pothier, A Treatise on the Law of Obligations, or Contracts, trans. F.X. Martin (Newburn, NC: Martin and Ogden, 1802), trans. W.D. Evans (London: Strahan, 1806), (Philadelphia: R.H. Small, 1826). See generally S.M. Waddams, “Nineteenth-Century Treatises on English Contract Law,” in Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action, 127; M.H. Hoeflich, “Translation and Reception of Foreign Law in the Antebellum United States,” American Journal of Comparative Law 50 (2002): 753; D. Masicotte, “Droit des contrats et pratiques contractuelles en droit romaine et dans la coutume de Paris: aspects juridiques de la location immobilière à Montréal aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Cahiers de doit 37 (1996): 1053. 106 See, for example, S.M. Waddams, “What Were the Principles of Nineteenth-Century Contract Law?,” in Law in the City: Proceedings of the Seventeenth British History Conference, London, 2005, ed. A. Lewis, P. Brand, and P. Mitchell (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 305; J. Wightman, Contract: A Critical Commentary (London: Pluto, 1996); P.S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); A.W.B. Simpson, “Innovation in Nineteenth-Century Contract Law,” Law Quarterly Review 91 (1975): 247. 107 See, for example, L. Pelletier, La seigneurie de Mount Murray: autour de la Malbaie, 1761–1860 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008); F. Noel, The Christie Seigneuries: Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760–1854 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 53–92; C. Baribeau, La seigneurie de la Petite-Nation, 1801–1854: le rôle économique et social du seigneur (Hull, QC: Éditions Asticou, 1983), 61–80. Compare J. Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008). 108 See, generally, B. Forster, “Business and Economic History,” in Canadian History: A Reader’s Guide, ed. D. Owram (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 2:123. Compare V. Knowles, From Telegrapher to Titan: The Life of William C. Van Horne (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); B.G. Wilson, The Enterprises of Robert Hamilton: A Study of Wealth and Influence in Early Upper Canada, 1776–1812 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1983); D. McCalla, The Upper Canada Trade, 1834–1872: A Study

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of the Buchanans’ Business (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) (where there is some discussion of commercial contracts). Compare D. McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); M. Bliss, Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987); F. Ouellet, Economic and Social History of Quebec, 1760–1850: Structures and Conjunctures (Ottawa: Institute of Canadian Studies, 1980). See also text at notes 110–11. See, for example, I.C. Pilarczyk, “The Law of Servants and the Servants of Law: Enforcing Masters’ Rights in Montreal, 1830–1845,” McGill Law Journal 46 (2001): 779; I.C. Pilarczyk, “Too Well Used by His Master: Judicial Enforcement of Servants’ Rights in Montreal, 1830–1845,” McGill Law Journal 46 (2001): 491; G.L. Hogg and G. Shulman, “Wage Disputes and the Courts in Montreal, 1816–1835,” in Class, Gender and the Law in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Quebec: Sources and Perspectives, ed. D. Fyson, C.M. Coates, and K. Harvey (Montreal: Montreal History Group, 1993), 127; J.-P. Hardy and D.T. Ruddel, Les apprentis artisans à Québec, 1660–1815 (Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1977). See also J. Fingard, Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); R. Tremblay, “Un aspect de la consolidation du pouvoir de la bourgeoisie coloniale: la législation anti-ouvrière dans le Bas-Canada, 1800–1850,” Labour / Le Travail 8 (1981): 243. Compare text at notes 142–6. See J. Webber, “Labour and the Law,” in Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, ed. P. Craven (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 171; P.D. George and P. Sworden, “The Courts and the Development of Trade in Upper Canada, 1830–1860,” Business History Review 60 (1986): 258; W.N.T. Wylie, “Instruments of Commerce and Authority: The Civil Courts in Upper Canada, 1789–1812,” in Flaherty, Essays, 3; R.C.B. Risk, “The Golden Age: The Law about the Market in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” University of Toronto Law Journal 26 (1976): 307. Compare J.P. Couturier, “Courts and Business Activity in Late Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick: A View from the Case Files,” Acadiensis 26 (1997): 77. See, for example, H. Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); T.A. Freyer, Forums of Order: The Federal Courts and Business in American History (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1979); J.W. Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the NineteenthCentury United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956). But see S.L. Blumenthal, “The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common

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Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law,” Law and History Review 26 (2008): 99; J. Gordley, The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); P.A. Hamburger, “The Development of the Nineteenth-Century Consensus Theory of Contract,” Law and History Review 7 (1989): 241. 113 See, generally, M.H. Hoeflich, Legal Publishing in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); R.H. Newmyer, “Harvard Law School, New England Legal Culture and the Antebellum Origins of American Jurisprudence,” in The Constitution in American Life, ed. D. Thalen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 74; S. Jay, “Origins of Federal Common Law,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 133 (1985): 100. 114 Post-Confederation Canadians appear to have been less concerned about the construction of a unifying federal common law than their American neighbours (despite the scaffolding provided by sections 91 and 94 of the British North America Act, 1867), perhaps because there seemed to them to be less late nineteenth-century interprovincial legal diversity than there was interstate variety of law in early nineteenth-century America, perhaps because the rise of the provincial rights movement diminished the political strength of federalism, or perhaps because captains of industry were increasingly interested in north-south ties with American markets for natural resources rather than east-west Canadian linkages that would have been facilitated by standardized federal law. See generally C. Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, “Private Property in Peril: Ontario Businessmen and the Federal System, 1898–1911,” in Enterprise and National Development: Essays in Canadian Business and Economic History, ed. G. Porter and R.D. Cuff (Toronto: Samuel Stevens Hakkert, 1973), 20; E.E. Palmer, “Federalism and Uniformity of Laws: The Canadian Experience,” Law and Contemporary Problems 30 (1965): 250; F.R. Scott, “Section 94 of the British North America Act,” Canadian Bar Review 20 (1942): 525. 115 See, for example, G.R. Hornaday, “The Forgotten Empire: Pre–Civil War Southern Imperialism,” Connecticut Law Review 36 (2003): 225; D.L. Hulsebosch, “Imperia in Imperio: The Multiple Constitutions of Empire in New York, 1750–1777,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 319; W.M. Offatt, Of Good Laws and Good Men: Law and Society in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1710 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); A.G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); G. Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). See also C.L. Tomlins and B.H. Mann, eds.,

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The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Compare W.E. Nelson, “The Utopian Legal Order of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” American Journal of Legal History 47 (2005): 183; C.A. Desan, “The Constitutional Commitment to Legislative Adjudication in the Early American Tradition,” Harvard Law Review 111 (1998): 1381; W.E. Nelson, Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725– 1825 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Allen, In English Ways; Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law; M. de W. Howe, “The Sources and Nature of Law in Colonial Massachusetts,” in Law and Authority in Colonial America: Selected Essays, ed. G.A. Billias (Barre, VT: Barre Publishers, 1965) 1; Surrency, “Revision of Colonial Laws”; G.L. Haskins, “Codification of the Law in Colonial Massachusetts: A Study in Comparative Law,” Indiana Law Journal 30 (1954): 1. But see A.C. Loux, “The Persistence of the Ancient Regime: Custom, Utility and the Common Law in the Nineteenth Century,” Cornell Law Review 79 (1993): 183; M. Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Arthurs, Without the Law. See, for example, D. Sugarman, “Legal Theory, the Common Law Mind, and the Making of the Textbook Tradition,” in Legal Theory and Common Law, ed. W. Twining (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 26; W. Twining, Blackstone’s Tower: The English Law School (London: Stevens, 1994); B. Abel-Smith and R. Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System (London: Heinemann, 1967). See, generally, H. Neatby, The Administration of Justice under the Quebec Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937). The only Englishlanguage introductions to, or glosses on, the Custom of Paris appear to be N.B. Doucet, Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada (Montreal: Lovell, 1841), and W.S. Johnson, Chapters in the History of French Law (Montreal: Walter Seeley Johnson, 1957). F. Olivier-Martin, La coutume de Paris (Paris: Sirey, 1925), and L.C. Le Caron, Coutume de la ville prévôté et vicomté de Paris: un droit civil Parisien (Paris: Estienne Richer, 1637) are standard French-language versions of that Custom. A considerable amount has been written about local applications of the Custom of Paris, mostly for the pre-Conquest period. See, for example, D. Fyson, “The Conquered and the Conqueror: The Mutual Adaptation of the Canadians and the British in Quebec, 1759–1775,” in 1759 Revisited: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, ed. P.A. Buckner and J.G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 19; D.

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Fyson, “De la Common Law à la Coutume de Paris: les nouveaux habitants britanniques du Québec et le droit civil française, 1764–1775,” in La coutume dans tous ses états, ed. F. Garnier and J. Vandrand-Voyer (Paris: La Mémoire du droit, 2011); A. Decroix, “La controverse sur la nature du droit applicable après la Conquête,” McGill Law Journal 56 (2011), 489; J.A. Dickinson, “L’administration chaotique de la justice après la Conquête,” in Canada: Le rotte della libertà, ed. G. Dotoli (Fasano, Italy: Schena, 2005), 117; S. Normand, “François-Joseph Cugnet et la reconstitution du droit de la Nouvelle-France,” Cahiers aixois d’histoire des droits de l’outre-mer français 1 (2002): 127; Masicotte, “Droit des contrats”; A. Morel, “La réaction des Canadiens devant l’administration de la justice de 1764 à 1774: une forme de résistance passive,” Revue du Barreau 20 (1960): 55. See D. Gilles, “Être ‘demanderesse’ en Justice: Permanences civilistes dans la Province de Québec, de la Juridiction royale de Montréal (1740– 1760),” in this volume. See also J.-P. Garneau, “Droit et affaires de famille sur la Côte-de-Beaupré: histoire d’une rencontre en amont et en aval de la Conquête,” Revue juridique Thémis 34 (2000): 515. Compare J. Gwynne, “Women as Litigants before the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754– 1830,” in Girard, Phillips, and Cahill, Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 294. See, for example, D. Gilles, “L’arbitrage notarié, instrument idoine de conciliation des traditions juridiques après la conquête britannique? (1760–1784),” McGill Law Journal 57 (2011): 135; J.-P. Garneau, “Une culture de l’amalgame au prétoire: les avocats de Québec et l’élaboration d’un langage juridique commun au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Canadian Historical Review 88 (2007): 147; J.-P. Garneau, “Appartenance ethnique, culture juridique, et représentation devant la justice civile de Québec à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Dolan, Entre justice et justiciables, 405. See E. Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: le débat du droit privé au Québec, 1760–1840 (Lasalle, QC: Hurtubise, 1994). Compare J. Ll. Edwards, “The Advent of English (Not French) Criminal Law and Procedure into Canada: A Close Call in 1774,” Criminal Law Quarterly 26 (1974): 464; B. Laskin, The British Tradition in Canadian Law (London: Stevens and Sons, 1969). See, for example, F.M. Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1993); M. Morin, “La perception de l’ancien droit et de nouveau droit français au Bas-Canada, 1774–1866,” in Glenn, Droit québécois et droit français, 1; L. Knafla, “The Influence of the French Revolution on Legal Attitudes and Ideology in Lower Canada, 1789–1798,” in Canada et la Révolution française, ed. P. Boulle and R. Lebrun (Montreal: Centre interuniversitaire

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d’études européennes, 1989) 95. Compare D.R. Kelley, Historians and the Law in Post-Revolutionary France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Compare Hoeflich, Legal Publishing; M.L. Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law, 7 vols. (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1998); G.O.W. Mueller, Crime, Law, and the Scholars: A History of Scholarship in American Criminal Law (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969). See also A.C. Castles, Annotated Bibliography of Printed Materials on Australian Law, 1788–1900 (Sydney: Law Book, 1994); W. Twining and J. Uglow, Legal Literature in Small Jurisdictions (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1981). See S. Normand, “Les débuts de la littérature juridique québécoise, 1767– 1840,” in this volume. See also Normand, “François-Joseph Cugnet”; R. Crête, S. Normand, and T. Copeland, “Law Reporting in NineteenthCentury Quebec,” Journal of Legal History 16 (1995): 147; S. Normand, “Profil des périodiques juridiques québécois à XIX siècle,” Cahiers de doit 34 (1993): 165; S. Normand, “Une analyse quantitative de la doctrine en droit civil québécois,” Cahiers de doit 23 (1982): 1009. Compare L. Newton, “The Birth of Joint-Stock Banking: England and New England Compared,” Business History Review 84 (2010): 27; Ford, Settler Sovereignty; L. Campbell, “Truths and Consequences: The Legal and Extralegal Regulation of Expression in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1820–1840” (PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 2008); B. Kercher and J. Young, “Formal and Informal Law in Two New Lands: Land Law in Newfoundland and New South Wales under Francis Forbes,” in English, Essays, 147; L. Bronstein, Land Reform and WorkingClass Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); D.G. Bell, “A Perspective on Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 37 (1988): 86; G.L. Haskins, “Influence of New England Law on the Middle Colonies,” Law and History Review 1 (1983): 238; L.A. Knafla and T.L. Chapman, “Criminal Justice in Canada: A Comparative Study of the Maritimes and Lower Canada, 1760–1812,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 21 (1983): 245; M.S. Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); W.R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); A. Smith, The Commerce Power in Canada and the United States (Toronto: Butterworths, 1963). For tentative discussions of theory and method in comparative legal his-

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tory, see, for example, P. Girard and J. Phillips, “Rethinking ‘the Nation’ in National Legal History: A Canadian Perspective,” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 607; C. Valke, “Comparative History and the Internal View of French, German and English Private Law,” Canadian Journal of Jurisprudence 29 (2006): 133; T. Skokpol and M. Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 175. Compare V.V. Palmer, “Quebec and Her Sisters in the Third Legal Family,” McGill Law Journal 54 (2009): 321; K.G.C. Reid, “The Idea of Mixed Legal Systems,” Tulane Law Review 98 (2003): 35; J.E.C. Brierley, “La notion du droit commun dans un système de droit mixte: le cas de la province de Québec,” in La formation du droit national dans les pays de droit mixte (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’Aix Marseille, 1989), 103. See, generally, G.E. White, Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History – Expanded Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); G.S. Alexander, “The Transformation of Trust as a Legal Category, 1800–1914,” Law and History Review 5 (1987): 303; A. Kull, “James Barr Ames and the Early Modern History of Unjust Enrichment,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 25 (2005): 297. See also J. Bell and D. Ibbetson, European Legal Development: The Case of Tort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); D. Ibbetson, A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). See, generally, Bronstein, Land Reform; G.S. Alexander, Commodity and Property: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776– 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); J.S. Anderson, Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law, 1832–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). See Flaherty, Essays, 4. See, for example, A. Browde, “Settling the Canadian Colonies: A Comparison of Two Nineteenth-Century Land Companies,” Business History Review 76 (2002): 299; J.K. Johnson, “Land Policy of the Upper Canadian Elite Reconsidered: The Canadian Emigration Association, 1840–41,” in Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J.M.S. Careless, ed. D. Keane and C. Read (Toronto: Dundurn, 1990), 218; L.F. Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). See H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines, and HydroElectric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967). See also R. Wrightman and N.M. Wrightman, The Land Between: Northwestern Ontario Resource Development, 1800 to the 1900s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Compare G. Wynne, Timber Colony: A Historical Geography of Early Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

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135 See generally E. Kolish, “Le Conseil législative et les bureaux d’enregistrement (1836),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 35 (1981): 217; R.C.B. Risk, “The Records of Title to Land: A Plea for Reform,” University of Toronto Law Journal 21 (1971): 465. See also G. Taylor, The Law of the Land: The Advent of the Torrens System in Canada (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2008). 136 Compare Morel, “La codification devant l’opinion publique”; Brierley, “Quebec’s Civil Law Codification”; Young, In Its Corporate Capacity. 137 But see G. Paquet and J.-P. Wallot, “La Coutume de Paris et les inégalités socio-économiques au Québec (1760–1840): Un survol,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Italie et Méditerrané 110 (1998): 413; S. Normand and A. Hudon, “Le contrôle des hypothèques secrètes au XIXe siècle: ou la difficile conciliation de deux cultures juridiques et de deux communautés ethniques,” Recueil de droit immobilier [1990]: 171; D. Bilak, “The Law of the Land: Rural Debt and Private Land Transfer in Upper Canada, 1841–1867,” Histoire sociale / Social History 20 (1987): 179; P. Desjardins, “La Coutume de Paris et la transmission des terres – le rang de la Beauce à Calixa-Lavallée de 1730 à 1975,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 34 (1980): 331; D. Gagan, “The Security of Land: Mortgaging in Toronto Gore Township, 1835–1895,” in Armstrong, Stephenson, and Wilson, Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Ontario, 140. See also P.A. Baskerville, “Chattel Mortgages and Community in Perth County, Ontario,” Canadian Historical Review 87 (2006): 583; D.G. Burley, “Good for All He Would Ask: Credit and Debt in the Transition to Industrial Capitalism – The Case of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Brantford, Ontario,” Histoire sociale / Social History 20 (1987): 79. 138 See generally D.G. Paterson and R.A. Shearer, “Terminating Building Societies in Quebec City, 1850–1864,” Business History Review 63 (1989): 384; Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada; R. Rudin, Banking en français: The French Banks of Quebec, 1835–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). 139 Compare W. De M. Marler and G.C. Marler, The Law of Real Property: Quebec (Toronto: Burroughs, 1932); J.D. Falconbridge, The Law of Mortgages of Real Estate (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1919); G.H. Macaulay, The System of Landed Credit ou la banque du crédit foncier (Quebec: Desbarats and Derbishire, 1863). For discussion of early treatises as sources for legal history, see, generally, Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” 120–3; M.J. Horwitz, “Treatise Literature,” Law Library Journal 69 (1976): 460. 140 See, for example R.C.B. Risk, “The Law and the Economy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ontario: A Perspective,” University of Toronto Law Journal 27 (1977): 403; Risk, “The Last Golden Age: Property and the Allocation

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of Losses in Ontario in the Nineteenth Century,” University of Toronto Law Journal 27 (1977): 199. See also J. Getzler, A History of Water Rights at Common Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Compare J. Muir, “Instrumentalism and the Law of Injuries in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia,” in Girard, Phillips, and Cahill, Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 361; A.W.B. Simpson, “Legal Liability for Bursting Reservoirs: The Historical Context of Rylands v. Fletcher,” Journal of Legal Studies 13 (1984): 209; J.P.S. McLaren, “Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution: Some Lessons from Social History,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 3 (1983): 155. See, for example, E.H. Reiter, “Nuisance and Neighbourhood in LateNineteenth-Century Montreal: Drysdale v. Dugas in Its Contexts,” in Property on Trial: Canadian Cases in Context, ed. E. Tucker, J. Muir, and B. Ziff (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2012), 213; J. Nedelsky, “Judicial Conservatism in an Age of Innovation: Comparative Perspectives on Canadian Nuisance Law 1880–1930,” in Flaherty, Essays, 281. See also J.P.S. McLaren, “The Tribulations of Antoine Ratté: A Case Study of the Environmental Regulation of the Canadian Lumbering Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 33 (1984): 302; J. Benedickson, “Private Rights and Public Purposes in the Lakes, Rivers and Streams of Ontario 1870–1930,” in Flaherty, Essays, 365. See, generally, J.L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); J.F. Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); D. Pothier, “Workers’ Compensation: The Historical Compromise Revisited,” Dalhousie Law Journal 7 (1983): 309. See, for example, J. Sylvestre, “Improving Workplace Safety in the Ontario Manufacturing Industry, 1914–1939,” Business History Review 84 (2010): 527; Tucker, Administering Danger; R.W. Kostal, “Legal Justice, Social Justice: An Incursion into the Social History of Work-Related Accident Law in Ontario, 1860–86,” Law and History Review 6 (1988): 1; E. Tucker, “The Law of Employers’ Liability in Ontario 1861–1900: The Search for a Theory,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 22 (1984): 213; R.C.B. Risk, “This Nuisance of Litigation: The Origins of Workers’ Compensation in Ontario,” in Flaherty, Essays, 418. See also Muir, “Instrumentalism and the Law of Injuries”; Webber, “Labour and the Law”; P. Craven, “The Law of Master and Servant in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” in Flaherty, Essays, 175. See A. Stritch, “Power Resources, Institutions, and Policy Learning: The Origins of Workers’ Compensation in Quebec,” American Journal of Political Science 38 (2005): 549; J.A. Dickinson, “La législation et les travailleurs

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québécois, 1894–1914,” Relations industrielles 41 (1986): 357; T. Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal, 1897– 1929 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 120–30. See, generally, R. Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). See Tucker, “Law of Employers’ Liability.” See Kostal, “Legal Justice, Social Justice.” For other British North American examples of that genre set in the nineteenth century, see, for example, Reiter, “Nuisance and Neighbourhood”; P. Girard, “Taking Litigation Seriously: The Market Wharf Controversy at Halifax, 1785–1820,” in Baker and Phillips, Essays, 213; W.E.B. Code, “The Salt Men of Goderich in Ontario’s Court of Chancery: Ontario Salt v. Merchants Salt Co. and the Judicial Enforcement of Combinations,” McGill Law Journal 38 (1993): 519. Compare A.W.B. Simpson, Leading Cases in the Common Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). But see J. Harvey, “The Protestant Orphan Asylum and the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society: A Case Study in Protestant Child Charity in Montreal, 1822–1900” (PhD thesis, McGill University, 2001); M. Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920 (Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1987). See also M. Faribault, Traité théorique et pratique de la fiducie ou trust du droit civil dans la province de Québec (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1936); G.S. Challies, The Doctrine of Unjustified Enrichment in the Province of Quebec (Toronto: Carswell, 1940); G.H.L. Fridman and J.G. McLeod, Restitution (Toronto: Carswell, 1982); D.W.M. Waters, The Law of Trusts in Canada (Toronto: Carswell, 1974). See, for example, M.H. Ogilvie, “What Is a Church by Law Established?,” Journal of the Church Law Association 2 (1997): 258; A.H. Oosterhoff, “Religious Institutions and the Law in Ontario: An Historical Study of the Laws Enabling Religious Organizations to Hold Land,” Ottawa Law Review 13 (1981): 441; Oosterhoff, “The Law of Mortmain: An Historical and Comparative Review,” University of Toronto Law Journal 27 (1977): 257; F.G. Morrisey, “The Juridical Status of the Catholic Church in Canada (1534–1840)” (PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 1972). See, for example, Schrauwers, Union is Strength; R.R. Healy, From Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006); Greenwood, “Lower Canada”; A.M.C. Alexander, “By the Light and Law of Nature, Thou Shalt Be Judged: A Study of the Synchronicity in Late-Eighteenth-Century Nova Scotia of Law and Religion,” Dalhou-

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sie Law Journal 14 (1991): 277; Baker, “So Elegant a Web”; Young, In Its Corporate Capacity; D. Howes, “Property, God and Nature in the Thought of Sir John Beverley Robinson,” McGill Law Journal 30 (1985): 365. See, generally, R.W. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003); S. Godfrey, Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British North America, 1740–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); J.R. Miller, Equal Rights: The Jesuit Estates Act Controversy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979). But see Bradbury, Wife to Widow; S. Olson and P.A. Thornton, Peopling the North American City: Montreal, 1840–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); F. Noel, Family Life and Sociability in Upper and Lower Canada, 1780–1870: A View from Diaries and Family Correspondence (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); M.-A. Cliche, “Les procès en séparation de corps dans la région de Montréal, 1795–1879,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 49 (1995): 3; C. Backhouse, “Pure Patriarchy: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Marriage,” McGill Law Journal 31 (1986): 264; Dion, Les contrats de mariage. See, for example, C. Clarkson, Domestic Reforms: Political Vision and Family Regulation in British Columbia, 1862–1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); H. Hartog, Man and Wife in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); M. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Several of Backhouse’s pioneering essays have been collected in C. Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1991). See also text at notes 153 and 165. See, for example, P. Brode, Courted and Abandoned: Seduction in Canadian Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); L. Chambers and J. Weaver, “The Story of Her Wrongs: Abuse and Desertion in Hamilton, 1859–1892,” Ontario History 93 (2001): 107; M.-A. Cliche, “Puissance paternelle et intérêt de l’enfant: la garde des enfants lors des séparations de corps dans le district judiciaire de Montréal, 1795–1930,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 37 (1997): 53; M. Bailey, “Servant Girls and Masters: The Tort of Seduction and the Support of Bastards,” Canadian Journal of Family Law 10 (1991): 152; R.J. Coombe, “The Most Disgusting, Disgraceful, and Iniquitous Proceeding in Our Law: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” University of Toronto Law Journal 30 (1988): 64; C. Backhouse, “The Tort of Seduction: Fathers

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and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Dalhousie Law Journal 10 (1986): 45; Backhouse, “Shifting Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Custody Law,” in Flaherty, Essays, 212; I.C. Pilarczyk, “‘To shudder at the bare recital of those acts’: Child Abuse, Family, and the Montreal Courts in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in this volume. Compare S. Lettmaier, Broken Engagements: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See, for example, Bradbury, Wife to Widow; Chambers, Married Women and Property Law; Bradbury et al., “Property and Marriage”; Backhouse, “Married Women’s Property Law.” See, generally, A. Fernandez, “Tapping Reeve, Coverture, and America’s First Legal Treatise,” in Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action, 63; T. Sutton, “The Deodand and Responsibility for Death,” Journal of Legal History 18 (1997): 44; J.A. Bush, “Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5 (1993): 417; E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: Faber, 1987); G.B. Baker, “Legal Identity: From Maine and Durkheim to Graveson, Tribe and Vining,” Western Ontario Law Review 19 (1981): 307; M. de W. Howe, “The Process of Outlawry in New York,” Cornell Law Quarterly 13 (1938): 559. See, generally, L.M. Friedman, Dead Hands: A Social History of Wills, Trusts, and Inheritance Law (Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2009); T.L. Ditz, Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, 1750–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); J.R. Goody, J. Thirsk, and E.P. Thompson, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See, generally, Bradbury, Wife to Widow; Desjardins, “La Coutume de Paris”; Bouchard, “Les systèmes de transmission”; M.D. Castelli, “Le douaire en droit coutumier ou la déviation d’une institution,” Cahiers de doit 20 (1979): 315; A. Morel, “Un exemple de contact entre deux systèmes juridiques: le droit successorial au Québec,” Annales de l’Université de Poitiers n.s., 4 (1963): 1. But see B. Elliott, Irish Migrants in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004); D.H. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984); D.P. Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). Compare M. Stairs, “The Duty of Every Man: Intestacy Law and Family Inheritance Practice in Prince Edward Island, 1828–1905,” in English, Essays, 217; N. Davis, “Patriarchy from the Grave:

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Family Relations in 19th-Century New Brunswick Wills,” Acadiensis 13 (1984): 91. See C.I. Kyer, “The David Fasken Estate: Estate Planning and Social History in Early Twentieth-Century Ontario,” in Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell, Essays, 410; C. Backhouse and N. Backhouse, The Heiress versus the Establishment: Mrs Campbell’s Campaign for Legal Justice (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2004); B. Ziff, Unforeseen Legacies: Reuben Wells Leonard and the Leonard Foundation Trust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); M.M. Orkin, The Great Stork Derby (Don Mills, ON: General Publishing, 1981). See, for example, G. Marquis, “Law, Crime, Punishment and Society,” Journal of Canadian Studies 36 (2001): 166; J. Phillips, “Crime and Punishment in the Dominion of the North: Canada from New France to the Present,” in Crime History and Histories of Crime, ed. C. Emsley and L.A. Knafla (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996) 163; G. Marquis, “Towards a Canadian Police Historiography,” in Law, Society and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History, ed. L.A. Knafla and S.W.S. Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 477; S. Lewthwaite, J. Phillips, and T. Loo, “Introduction,” in Phillips, Loo, and Lewthwaite, Essays, 3; R.C. Smandych, C.J. Matthews, and S.J. Cox, Canadian Criminal Justice History: An Annotated Bibliography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). See, generally, Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People; J.D. Phillips, “Educated to Crime: Community and Criminal Justice in Upper Canada, 1800– 1840” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2004); Murray, Colonial Justice; Lewthwaite, “Law and Authority”; J.C. Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City, 1816–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); J.M. Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses: la pauvreté, le crime, et l’État au Québec, de la fin du XIIIe siècle à 1840 (Outremont, QC: VLB, 1989); D. Hay, “The Meanings of the Criminal Law in Quebec, 1764–1774,” in Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada, ed. L.A. Knafla (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981), 77. Compare Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men; T. Loo, Making Law, Order and Authority in British Columbia, 1821–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See, for example, W. Nelson, “Rage against the Dying of the Light: Interpreting the Guerre des Eteignoirs,” Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 551; E. Tucker, “That Indefinite Area of Toleration: Criminal Conspiracy and Trade Unions in Ontario, 1837–77,” Labour / Le Travail 27 (1991): 50; B.D. Palmer, “Labour Protest and Organization in Nineteenth-Century Canada, 1820–1890,” Labour / Le Travail 20 (1987): 61; R. Tremblay, “La grève des ouvriers de la construction navale à Québec (1840),” Labour /

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Le Travail 9 (1983): 243; J. Burgess, “L’industrie de la chaussure à Montréal, 1840–1870: le passage de l’artisanat à la fabrique,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 31 (1977): 187. See, for example, D. Horner, “Shame upon You as Men: Contesting Authority in the Aftermath of Montreal’s Gavazzi Riot,” Histoire sociale / Social History 44 (2011): 29; D. Horner, “Solemn Processions and Terrifying Violence: Spectacle, Authority, and Citizenship during the Lachine Canal Strike of 1843,” Urban History Review 38 (2010): 36; Fyson, “Trials and Tribulations”; R. Bleasdale, “Class Conflict on the Canals of Upper Canada in the 1840s,” Labour / Le Travail 7 (1981): 9; M.S. Cross, “The Shiners’ War: Social Violence in the Ottawa Valley in the 1830s,” Canadian Historical Review 53 (1973): 1. See, for example, M.A. Poutanen, “Images du danger dans les archives judiciaires. Comprendre la violence et le vagabondage dans un centre urbain du début du XIXe siècle, Montréal (1810–1842),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 55 (2002): 382; M.S. Cross, “The Laws Are Like Cobwebs: Popular Resistance to Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North America,” Dalhousie Law Journal 8 (1984): 103; S. Kenny, “Cahots and Catcalls: An Episode of Popular Resistance in Lower Canada at the Outset of the Union,” Canadian Historical Review 65 (1984): 184. See, for example, Pilarczyk, “‘To shudder at the bare recital’”; I.C. Pilarczyk, “So Foul a Deed: Infanticide in Montreal, 1825–1850,” Law and History Review 30 (2012): 575; M.-A. Cliche, Fous, ivres ou méchants? Les parents meurtriers au Québec, 1715–1965 (Montreal: Boréal, 2011); M.A. Poutanen, “Regulating Public Space in Early-Nineteenth-Century Montreal: Vagrancy Laws and Gender in a Colonial Context,” Histoire sociale / Social History 35 (2002): 35; S. Ramos, “A Most Detestable Crime: Gender Identities and Sexual Violence in the District of Montreal, 1803–1843,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 12 (2001): 27; M.A. Poutanen, “To Indulge Their Carnal Appetites: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal, 1810–1842” (PhD thesis, University of Montreal, 1997); Poutanen, “Reflection of Montreal Prostitution in the Records of the Lower Courts,” in Fyson, Coates, and Harvey, Class, Gender and the Law, 99; C. Backhouse, “Nineteenth-Century Canadian Rape Law,” in Flaherty, Essays, 200; Backhouse, “Involuntary Motherhood: Abortion, Birth Control, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Windsor Year Book of Access to Justice 3 (1983): 61. See Wright and Binnie, Canadian State Trials; Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials: Rebellion and Invasion; Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures.

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167 Compare J. McLaren, “The Rule of Law and Irish Whig Constitutionalism in Upper Canada: William Warren Baldwin, the Irish Opposition, and the Volunteer Connection,” in Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell, Essays; J. McLaren, “The King, the People, the Law, and the Constitution: Justice Robert Thorpe and the Roots of Irish Whig Ideology in Upper Canada,” in People and Place: Historical Influences on Legal Culture, ed. J. Swainger and C. Backhouse (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003), 11; J.M. Fecteau, “Mesures d’exception et règle de droit: les conditions d’application de la loi martiale au Québec lors des rebellions de 1837–1838,” McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 465. 168 See, for example J.-M. Fecteau, “This Ultimate Resource: Martial Law and State Repression in Lower Canada, 1837–8,” in Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials: Rebellion and Insurrection, 207; J.-M. Fecteau and D. Hay, “Government by Will and Pleasure Instead of Law: Military Justice and the Legal System in Quebec, 1775–83,” in Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 129; D. Hay, “Civilians Tried in Military Courts: Quebec, 1759–1764,” in ibid., 114. See also R.A. McDonald, “The Trail of Discipline: The Historical Roots of Canadian Military Law,” Judge Advocate General’s Journal 1 (1985): 1; E.K. Senior, British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981); Senior, “The Influence of the British Garrison on the Development of the Montreal Police, 1832 to 1853,” Military Applications 43 (1979): 63. 169 See, for example, D. Fyson, “The Judicial Prosecution of Crime in the Longue Durée,” in Agency and Institutions in Social Regulation: Toward an Historical Understanding of Their Interaction, ed. J.-M. Fecteau and J. Harvey (St Foy, QC: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2005) 107; P. Romney, Mr Attorney: The Attorney-General for Ontario in Court, Cabinet and Legislature 1791–1899 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). See also Swainger, Canadian Department of Justice. 170 Compare J.H. Langbein, The Origins of the Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); S. Landsman, “The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Adversary Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England,” Cornell Law Review 75 (1990): 497; D. Hay, “The Criminal Prosecution in England and Its Historians,” Modern Law Review 47 (1984): 1. 171 See, for example, M. Dufresne, “La police, le droit pénal, et le crime dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle: L’exemple de la ville de Québec,” Revue juridique Thémis 34 (2000): 409; A. Greer, “The Birth of the Police in Canada,” in Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan, 17; M. McCullock, “Most Assuredly Perpetual Motion: Police and Policing in Quebec City,

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1838–1858,” Urban History Review 19 (1990): 100; H. Boritch, “Conflict, Compromise and Administrative Convenience: The Police Organization in Nineteenth-Century Toronto,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 3 (1988): 141; N. Rogers, “Serving Toronto the Good: The Development of the City Police Force, 1834–1884,” in Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, ed. V. Russell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). Compare J.M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); D. Hay and F.G. Snyder, Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); G. Marquis, “A Machine of Oppression under the Guise of the Law: The St John Police Establishment, 1860– 1890,” Acadiensis 16 (1986): 58; E.H. Monkonnen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See, for example, F. Fenchel, “Entre petite criminalité et grande misère: la prison des hommes à Montréal et sa population (1836–1912)” (PhD thesis, University of Montreal, 2008); J.-M. Fecteau, F. Fenchel, M.-J. Tremblay, J. Trepanier, and G. Cucumel, “Répression au quotidien et régulation punitive en longue durée. Le cas de la prison de Montréal, 1836–1913,” Déviance et société 30 (2006): 339; P.N. Oliver, Terror to Evil-Doers: Prisons and Punishments in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); R.C. Smandych, “Beware of the Evil American Monster: Upper Canadian Views on the Need for a Penitentiary, 1830–1834,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections 33 (1991): 130; J. Laplante, Prison et ordre social au Québec (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1989); C.J. Taylor, “The Kingston, Ontario, Penitentiary and Moral Architecture,” Histoire sociale / Social History 12 (1979): 385. Compare R. Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Hindus, Prison and Plantation; M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978). See for example, J.-M. Fecteau et al., “Une politique de l’enfance délinquante et en danger: la mise en place des écoles de réforme et d’industrie au Québec (1840–1873),” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés 2 (1998): 75. Compare N. Hathaway Steenberg, Children and the Criminal Law in Connecticut, 1635–1855: Changing Perspectives of Childhood (New York: Routledge, 2005); M.K. Rosenheim and A. Simmons, A Century of Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). But see P. Connor, “The Purest of Gifts: Royal Clemency, Patronage, and the Politics of Identity in Upper Canada, 1791–1841” (PhD thesis, York University, 2012); F.M. Greenwood and B. Boissery, Uncertain Justice:

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Canadian Women and Capital Punishment, 1754–1953 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2000); B. Wright, “Harshness and Forbearance: The Politics of Pardons and the Upper Canadian Rebellion,” in Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment and Discretion, ed. C. Strange (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996); B. Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong: The Treason Trials and Transportation to New South Wales of the Lower Canadian Rebels after the 1838 Rebellion (Toronto: Dundurn, 1995); P. Tremblay and G. Therriault, “La punition commune du crime: la prison et l’amende à Montréal de 1845 à 1913,” Criminologie 18 (1985): 43; A. Morel, “Les crimes et les peines: évolution des mentalités au Québec au 19ième siècle,” Revue de droit de Sherbrooke 8 (1978): 385. Compare J. Swainger, “A Distant Edge of Mercy in British Columbia, 1872–1880,” in Foster and McLaren, Essays, 201; J. Phillips, “The Operation of the Royal Pardon in Nova Scotia, 1749–1815,” University of Toronto Law Journal 42 (1992): 401; J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 400–49. See, generally, H.E. Yntema, “The Historic Bases of Private International Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law 2 (1953): 297; A.N. Sack, “Conflicts of Laws in the History of English Law,” in Law: A Century of Progress, 1835–1935, ed. A. Reppy (New York: New York University Press, 1937), 3:342; E.-M. Meijers, “L’histoire des principes fondamentaux du droit international privé à partir du moyen âge,” Recueil des Cours 49 (1934): 547. See E. Lafleur, Conflict of Laws in the Province of Quebec (Montreal: Theoret, 1898); W.S. Johnson, Conflict of Laws, 3 vols. (Montreal: J.D. de Lamirande, 1933–7); J.D. Falconbridge, Essays on the Conflict of Laws (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1947). See also text at notes 99–103. See, for example, G.B. Baker, “Interstate Choice of Law and Early American Constitutional Nationalism,” McGill Law Journal 38 (1993): 454; F.K. Juenger, “David Dudley Field’s Contribution to the Conflict of Laws,” in Liber Memoriales François Laurent, 1810-1887, ed. J. Erauw (Brussels: E. Story-Scientia, 1989), 837; W.E. Nelson, “The American Revolution and the Emergence of Modern Doctrines of Federalism and Conflict of Laws,” in Law in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1800, ed. Colonial Society of Massachusetts (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), 419. See, for example, B. Miller, “Emptying the Den of Thieves: International Fugitives and the Law in British North America / Canada, 1819–1910” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2011); P. Brode, The Odyssey of John Anderson (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1989); A.L. Murray, “The Extradition of Fugitive Slaves from Canada: A Reevaluation,” Canadian Historical

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Review 43 (1962): 298. See also B. Miller, “A Carnival of Crime on Our Border: International Law, Imperial Power, and Extradition in Canada, 1865–1883,” Canadian Historical Review 90 (2009): 639. See, for example, B. Miller, “The Law of Nations in the Borderlands: Sovereignty and Self-Defence in the Rebellion Period, 1837–1842,” in this volume; R. Baehre, “Diplomacy, International Law, and Foreign Fishing in Newfoundland, 1814–30: Revisiting the 1815 Treaty of Paris and the 1818 Convention,” in English, Essays, 353; F.M. Greenwood, “The Prince Affair: Gallant Colonel or the Windsor Butcher,” in Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials: Rebellion and Invasion, 160; C.V. Cole, “The St Pierre and Miquelon Maritime Boundary Case and the Relevance of Ancient Treaties,” Canadian Yearbook of International Law 31 (1993): 265. Compare C.G. Anderson, Canadian Liberalism and the Politics of Border Control, 1867–1967 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012). See, for example, L. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); D.M. Golove and D.J. Hulsebosch, “A Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,” New York University Law Review 85 (2010): 932; M.W. Janis, America and the Law of Nations, 1776–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); C. Sylvest, “International Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” British Journal of International Law 75 (2004): 9. See R. St J. Macdonald, “Maximilien Bibaud, 1823–1887: pionnier de l’enseignement du droit international au Canada,” Canadian Yearbook of International Law 26 (1988): 61; R. St J. Macdonald, “An Historical Introduction to the Teaching of International Law in Canada,” Canadian Year Book of International Law 12 (1974): 67. See also E.H. Reiter, “From Shaved Horses to Aggressive Churchwardens: Social and Legal Aspects of Moral Injury in Lower Canada,” in this volume; S. Riesenfeld, “The Influence of German Legal Theory on American Law: The Heritage of Savigny and His Disciples,” American Journal of Comparative Law 37 (1989): 1. Compare P. Macalister-Smith and J. Schweizke, “Bibliography of the Textbooks and Comprehensive Treatises on Positive International Law of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of International Law 3 (2001): 75; S. Normand, Le droit comme discipline universitaire: une histoire de la Faculté de droit de l’Université Laval (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005); G.B. Baker, “Legal Education in Upper Canada: The Law Society as Educator, 1785–1889,” in Flaherty, Essays, 49. Compare text at notes 113–29.

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185 See, generally, D. Owen and M.C. Tolley, Courts of Admiralty in Colonial America: The Maryland Experience (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1995); A.G. Stone, “The Admiralty Court in Colonial Nova Scotia,” Dalhousie Law Journal 17 (1994): 363; R. Bridwell, “Mr Nicholas Trott and the South Carolina Vice-Admiralty Court: An Essay on Procedural Reform and Colonial Politics,” South Carolina Law Review 28 (1976): 181; C. Ubbelohde, The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). 186 See, generally, S.L. Snell, Courts of Admiralty and the Common Law: Origins of the American Experiment in Concurrent Jurisdiction (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007); H.J. Bourguignon, The First Federal Court: The Federal Appellate Prize Court of the American Revolution, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977); L.K. Wroth, “The Massachusetts Vice-Admiralty Court and the Federal Admiralty Jurisdiction,” American Journal of Legal History 6 (1962): 250. 187 But see K. Mercer, “Northern Exposure: Resistance to Naval Impressment in British North America, 1775–1815,” Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 199; H. Foster, “Mutiny on the Beaver: Law and Authority in the Fur Trade Navy, 1835–1840,” Manitoba Jaw Journal 20 (1991): 15; A. Braen, “Le droit maritime du Québec à l’aube de la codification,” Revue générale de droit 16 (1985): 429. See also J. Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 188 Compare P. Baskerville, “Donald Bethune’s Steamboat Business: A Study of Upper Canadian Commercial and Financial Practice,” Ontario History (1975): 135; T.E. Appleton, Ravenscrag: The Allan Royal Mail Line (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974); G. Tulchinsky, “Une entreprise maritime canadienne-française: La compagnie du Richelieu, 1845–1854,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 26 (1973): 559. 189 See R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See also C. Moore, The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario’s Lawyers, 1797–1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Compare P. Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdock of Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); R.A. Willie, These Legal Gentlemen: Lawyers in Manitoba, 1839–1900 (Winnipeg: Legal Research Institute of the University of Manitoba, 1994); H.T. Holman, “The Bar of Prince Edward Island, 1769–1852,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 41 (1992): 197. 190 See A. Vachon, Histoire du notariat canadien, 1621–1960 (Quebec: Presses

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de l’Université Laval, 1962); J.-E. Roy, Histoire du notariat au Canada, 2 vols. (Levis, QC: Revue du notariat, 1900). Although the role of notaries elsewhere in British North America typically was and is more circumscribed than in Quebec, the functions of British Columbia’s notaries approach those of their analogues in French Canada. Compare J. Brockman, “A Cold-Blooded Effort to Bolster Up the Legal Profession: The Battle between Lawyers and Notaries in British Columbia, 1871–1930,” Histoire sociale / Social History 32 (1995): 209; C.W. Brooks, R.H. Helmholz, and P.G. Stein, Notaries Public in England since the Reformation (London: Society of Public Notaries, 1991). See G.-E. Rinfret, L’histoire du Barreau de Montréal (Cowansville, QC: Yvon Blais, 1989). See also J.M. Doyon, Les avocats et le Barreau, une histoire (Montreal: Corporation des services du Barreau du Québec, 2009); C. Veilleux, Aux origines du Barreau québécois, 1779–1849 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1997); C. Veilleux, “Les gens de justice à Québec, 1760–1867” (PhD thesis, Laval University, 1990). See, generally, Normand, Le doit; R.A. Macdonald, “The National Law Program at McGill: Origins, Establishment, Prospects,” Dalhousie Law Journal 13 (1990): 211; Macdonald, “Maximilien Bibaud”; S.B. Frost, “The Early Years of Law Teaching at McGill, Dalhousie Law Journal 9 (1984): 150. Compare B.A. Kimball, The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C.C. Langdell, 1826–1906 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); C.W. Brooks and M. Lobban, “Apprenticeship or Academy: The Idea of a Law University, 1830–60,” in Learning the Law: Teaching and the Transmission of Law in England, 1150–1900, ed. J.A. Bush and A. Wijffels (London: Hambledon, 1999) 353; W.P. La Piana, Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See, generally, C.I. Kyer and J. Bickenbach, The Fiercest Debate: Cecil A. Wright, the Benchers, and Legal Education in Ontario, 1923–1957 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1987); Baker, “Legal Education”; G.B. Baker, “The Juvenile Advocate Society: Self-Proclaimed Schoolroom for Upper Canada’s Governing Class,” Historical Papers, Canadian Historical Association (1985): 74; B.D. Bucknall, T.H.C. Baldwin, and J.D. Lakin, “Pedants, Practitioners and Prophets: Legal Education at Osgoode Hall to 1957,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 6 (1968): 137. Garneau, “Une culture de l’amalgame,” provides an uncommonly detailed account of legal apprenticeship in Lower Canada at the turn of the nineteenth century (despite the fact that law training is not the primary

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subject of that study). See also W.R. Taetero, “John A. Macdonald Learns: Articling with George Mackenzie,” Hist. Kingston 29 (1979): 92; J.J. Lefebvre, “Brevets de cléricature des avocats de Montréal au deuxième quart du XIXe siècle,” Revue du Barreau 14 (1994): 308. Studies of law practice in the Canadas are almost uniformly disappointing in their treatment of student life in the firms. Compare sources cited in note 100. See, for example, J.A. Smith, “Artificial Conscience: Professional Elites and Professional Discipline from 1920 to 1950,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 32 (1994): 65; W.W. Pue, “Becoming Ethical: Lawyers’ Professional Ethics in Early Twentieth-Century Canada,” Manitoba Law Journal 20 (1991): 227; P.M. Sibenik, “The Black Sheep: The Disciplining of Territorial and Alberta Lawyers, 1885–1928,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 3 (1988): 109. Compare S.D. Carle, “Race, Class and Legal Ethics in the Early NAACP,” Law and History Review 20 (2002): 97; C.D. Naylor, “The CMA’s First Code of Ethics: Medical Morality or Borrowed Ideology?,” Canadian Studies 17 (1982): 20; J.S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). See, generally, J. Benedickson, “Aemilius Irving: Solicitor to the Great Western Railway, 1855–1872,” in Wilton, Essays … Inside the Law, 100; Young, In Its Corporate Capacity; Swainger, Canadian Department of Justice. Compare R.W. Gordon, “The Independence of Lawyers,” Boston University Law Review 68 (1988): 1. See Wilton, “Introduction,” in Wilton, Essays … Inside the Law; Wilton, “Introduction,” in Wilton, Essays … Beyond the Law. See Baker, “Law Practice and Statecraft”; Young, “Dimensions of a Law Practice”; Regehr, “Elite Relationships”; Benedickson, “Aemilius Irving”; P. Girard, “The Making of a Colonial Lawyer: Beamish Murdock of Halifax, 1822–1842,” in Wilton, Essays … Inside the Law. See also Baker, “Ordering the Urban Canadian Law Office.” See, for example, Moore, McCarthy, Tétrault; Cole, Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt; Mitchell and Slinn, History of McMaster. See, generally, J. Slinn, “The Histories and Records of Firms of Solicitors,” Business Archives 58 (1989): 22; B. Danet et al., “Obstacles to the Study of Lawyer–Client Interaction,” Law and Society Review 14 (1988): 905; H.B. Zobel et al., “Lawyers’ Papers as a Source of Legal History,” Law Library Journal 69 (1976): 303. See, generally, P. Baskerville, “Professional vs Proprietor: Power Distribution in the Railway World of Upper Canada / Ontario, 1850–1881,” Historical Papers, Canadian Historical Association (1978): 47; A.D. Chandler, The

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Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); T.V. Gourvish, “A British Business Elite: The Chief Executive Managers of the Railway Industry, 1850–1922,” Business History Review 47 (1973): 289. See, generally, J. Swainger, “Judicial Scandal and the Culture of Patronage in Early Confederation,” in Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell, Essays, 222; Swainger, “A Bench in Disarray: The Quebec Judiciary and the Federal Department of Justice, 1867–1878,” Cahiers de doit 34 (1993): 59; Baker, “Law Practice and Statecraft.” But see E. Bloomfield, “Lawyers as Members of Urban Business Elites in Southern Ontario, 1860 to 1920,” in Wilton, Essays … Beyond the Law, 112. But see Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture; G.B. Baker, “Public Frivolity and Patrician Confidence: Lower Canada’s Brothers-in-Law, 1827 to 1833,” in Mélanges Paul-André Crépeau, ed. J.E.C. Brierley, N. Kasirer (Cowansville, QC: Yvon Blais, 1997), 43; M. Nantel, “The Advocates’ Library and the Montreal Bar,” Law Library Journal 27 (1934): 85. Compare M.R. Belknap, To Improve the Administration of Justice: A History of the American Judicature Society (Chicago: American Judicature Society, 1992); N.E.H. Hull, “Restatement and Reform: A New Perspective on the Origins of the American Law Institute,” Law and History Review 8 (1990): 55; M.J. Powell, From Patrician to Professional Elite: The Transformation of the New York City Bar Association (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988). See, for example, Talbot, Negotiating the Numbered Treaties; M.A. Banks, Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); G. Bergeron, Lire Etienne Parent: Notre Premier intellectuel (1802–1874) (St Foy, QC: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1994); A.M. Evans, Sir Oliver Mowat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); P. Brode, Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1984); B. Young, George-Étienne Cartier: Montreal Bourgeois (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981); G. Parizeau, La vie studieuse et obstinée de Denis-Benjamin Viger (Paris: Fides, 1980); J. Schull, Edward Blake, 2 vols. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975–6); M. Prang, N.W. Rowell: Ontario Nationalist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); A. Désilets, Hector-Louis Langevin: un père de la confédération canadienne 1826–1906 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1969); L.F.S. Upton, The Loyal Whig: William Smith of New York and Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). See also K.M.J. McKenna, A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family, 1755– 1849 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994).

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208 See, for example, C.E. Haliburton, A Biographical History of the Judges of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004 (Kentville, NS: Judges of Nova Scotia, 2004); D.R. Verchere, A Progression of Judges: A History of the Supreme Court of British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998); P.E. Audet, Les officiers de justice: des origines de la colonie jusqu’à nos jours (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1986); I.-J. Deslauriers, La Cour supérieure de Québec et ses juges 1849-1er janvier 1980 (Quebec: Deslauriers, 1980). Compare Riddell, The Bar and the Courts; A.W.P. Buchanan, The Bench and the Bar of Lower Canada Down to 1850 (Montreal: Burton’s, 1925); D.B. Read, The Lives of the Judges of Upper Canada and Ontario from 1791 to the Present Time (Toronto: Rowsell and Hutchison, 1888). 209 See J.M.S. Careless, ed., The Preconfederation Premiers: Ontario Government Leaders, 1841–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 210 See R. Cook, F.G. Halpenny, and J. Hamelin, eds., Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vols. 3–9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1988, 1985, 1976 (available in slightly revised form at www. biographi.ca/EN/index.html); R. Fraser, ed., Provincial Justice: Upper Canadian Legal Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). See, generally, P.B. Waite, “Journeys through Thirteen Volumes: The Dictionary of Canadian Biography,” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 464. 211 For discussion of those criticisms, see, generally, P. Girard, “Judging Lives: Judicial Biography from Hale to Holmes,” Australian Journal of Legal History 7 (2003): 87; H. Pelletier-Baillargeon et al., “Biographie et histoire,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 54 (2000): 67; E. Homberger and J. Charmley, The Troubled Face of Biography (New York: St Martin’s, 1988). 212 See, generally, P.H. Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); D. Nelken, Comparing Legal Cultures (Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth, 1997); W.W. Fisher, “Texts and Contexts: The Application to American Legal History of the Methodologies of Intellectual History,” Stanford Law Review 49 (1997): 1065. 213 Compare D. Owram, “Intellectual History in the Land of Limited Identities,” Journal of Canadian Studies 24 (1989): 114; R. Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); C. Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); S. Gagnon, Quebec and Its Historians, trans. J. Brierley (Montreal: Harvest House, 1985).

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214 See, for example, Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture; J. Vanderlinden, “Aux origines de la culture juridique française en Amérique du Nord,” Journal of Civil Law Studies 2 (2009): 26; G. Parker, “Canadian Legal Culture,” in Knafla, Law and Justice, 3. 215 But see text at notes 243–8. 216 See, for example, G. Gallichan, “La bibliothèque du Barreau du Québec: l’émergence d’une institution,” Cahiers de doit 34 (1993): 125; Veilleux, “Le livre à Québec”; G. Gallichan, Livres et politiques au Bas Canada: 1791–1849 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1991). Contra Reiter, “Imported Books, Imported Ideas”; and Reiter, “From Shaved Horses,” which include careful studies of the use of the European law books in Canada East. 217 See, for example, Baker, “Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought”; A.R. McCormick, “The Libraries of the Law Society,” Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette 6 (1972): 55; O.A. Cudney, A Chronological History of the Legislative Library in Ontario (Ottawa: Canadian Library Association, 1969). Ontario’s county law libraries were not created until the 1870s and therefore do not fall within this survey’s time frame. See, generally, H.A. Aylen, “County Bar Associations in Ontario,” Fortnightly Law Journal 5 (1935): 103. 218 Compare Hoeflich, Legal Publishing; D.J. Hulsebosch, “An Empire of Law: Chancellor Kent and the Revolution in Books in the Early Republic,” Alabama Law Review 60 (2009): 377; W. Laurence, “Acquiring the Law: The Private Law Library of William Young, Halifax, 1835,” Dalhousie Law Journal 2 (1998): 490; S. Elliott, “The Library of Richard John Uniacke, 1753–1830: Attorney General of Nova Scotia,” Bulletin of Maritime Libraries 21 (1957): 258. 219 For studies of the production of English and American legal treatises designed to export metropolitan law to outlying and overseas regions, see, for example, L. Farmer, “Of Treatises and Textbooks: The Literature of the Criminal Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action, 146; D. Sugarman, “A Hatred of Disorder: Legal Science, Liberalism and Imperialism,” in Dangerous Supplements, ed. P. Fitzpatrick (London: Pluto, 1991), 34; R.K. Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 220 But see J. Oldham, “Underreported and Underrated: The Court of Common Pleas in the Eighteenth Century,” in Law as Culture and Culture as Law: Essays in Honour of John Phillip Reid, ed. H. Hartog and W.E. Nelson (Madison, WI: Madison House Publishers, 2000), 119; E.C. Surrency, “Law Reports in the United States,” American Journal of Legal History 25

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(1981): 48; V.V. Veeder, “English Reports, 1537–1865,” in Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, ed. Association of American Law Schools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1908), 2:123. See Crête, Normand, and Copeland, “Law Reporting”; E. Whan, T. Myers, and P. Gossage, “Stating the Case: Law Reporting in NineteenthCentury Quebec,” in Fyson, Coates, and Harvey, Class, Gender and the Law, 55; W.R. Riddell, The First Law Reporter in Upper Canada and His Reports (Toronto: Canadian Bar Association, 1916). See also M. Foote, ed., Law Reporting and Legal Publishing in Canada: A History (Kingston, ON: Canadian Association of Law Librarians, 1997); J. Nedelsky and D. Long, Law Reporting in the Maritime Provinces: History and Development (Ottawa: National Library, 1981). See, generally, Normand, “Profil des périodiques juridiques.” Compare S. Vogenour, “Law Journals in Nineteenth-Century England,” Edinburgh Law Review 12 (2008): 26; R. Zimmermann, “Law Journals in NineteenthCentury Scotland,” in ibid., 9; J. Fishman, “An Early Pennsylvania Legal Periodical: The Pennsylvania Law Journal, 1842–1848,” American Journal of Legal History 45 (2001): 22. See, generally, M. Morin, “Les revendications des nouveaux sujets, francophones et catholiques, de la Province de Québec, 1764–1774,” in this volume; Normand, “Les débuts”; P. Craven, “Law and Ideology: The Toronto Police Court,” in Flaherty, Essays, 248. Compare L. Farmer, “With All the Impressiveness and Substantial Value of Truth: Notable Trials and Criminal Justice, 1750–1930,” Law and the Humanities 1 (2007): 57; A.S. Konefsky, “Law and Culture in Antebellum Boston,” Stanford Law Review 40 (1988): 1119; J. Oldham, “Law Reporting in the London Newspapers, 1756–1786,” American Journal of Legal History 31 (1987): 73. See M. Leslie, “Reforming the Coroner: Death Investigation Manuals in Ontario, 1863–1894,” Ontario History 100 (2008): 221. See, for example, J. Phillips, “A Low-Law Counter-Treatise: Absentees to Wreck in British North America’s First Justice of the Peace Manual,” in Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action, 202; Bush, “Free to Enslave”; J.A. Conley, “Doing It by the Book: Justice of the Peace Manuals and English Law in Eighteenth-Century America,” Journal of Legal History 6 (1985): 257. See J. Domat, Les lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel (Luxembourg: André Chevalier, 1702); C. Viner, A General Abridgement of Law and Equity, 24 vols. (Aldershot, UK: G. Strahan, 1742–58); W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1765–9). Compare E.D. Armour, A Treatise on the Law of Real Property, Founded on Leith and Smith’s

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Edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1901); R.E. Kingsford, Commentaries on the Laws of Ontario: Being Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (Toronto: Carswell, 1896); A. Leith, Commentaries on the Laws of England Applicable to Real Property by Sir W. Blackstone: Adapted to the Present State of the Law in Upper Canada (Toronto: W.C. Chewett, 1864); W.C. Keele, The Provincial Justice (Toronto: Upper Canada Gazette, 1835); H. Des Rivières Beaubien, Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada, 2 vols. (Montreal: L. Duvernay, 1832–3). See Brierley and Macdonald, Quebec Civil Law, 17–23; R.A. Macdonald, “Understanding Civil Law Scholarship in Quebec,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 23 (1985): 573; Normand, “Analyse quantitative.” Compare M.H. Hoeflich, “American Blackstones,” in Blackstone and His Commentaries: Biography, Law, History, ed. W. Prest (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009), 181; J.H. Langbein, “Chancellor Kent and the History of Legal Literature,” Columbia Law Review 93 (1993): 547; P. Girard, “Themes and Variations in Early Canadian Legal Culture: Beamish Murdoch and His Epitome of the Laws of Nova Scotia,” Law and History Review 11 (1993): 101. See, generally, C. Tomlins, “Toward a History of the Literature of the Law,” in Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action, 220; M.H. Hoeflich, “Legal History and the History of the Book: Variations on a Theme,” University of Kansas Law Review 46 (1998): 415; A. John, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–57. See, generally, A. Fernandez and M.D. Dubber, “Putting the Legal Treatise in Its Place,” in Fernandez and Dubber, Law Books in Action, 1; J. Davies, “Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Legal Literature,” Cambrian Law Review 29 (1998): 22; A.W.B. Simpson, “The Rise and Fall of the Legal Treatise: Legal Principles and the Forms of Legal Literature,” University of Chicago Law Review 48 (1981): 632. See, generally, N. Duxbury, The Nature and Authority of Precedent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); L. Goldstein, Precedent in Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); F.G. Kempin, “Precedent and Stare Decisis: The Critical Years, 1800–1850,” American Journal of Legal History 3 (1959): 28. See, generally, Cook, American Codification Movement; Farmer, “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate”; Lubrin, “David Dudley Field”; A. Rodger, “The Codification of Commercial Law in Victorian Britain,” Law Quarterly Review 108 (1992): 570; N.J.O. Liverpool, “The History and Development of the St Lucia Civil Code,” in The Civil Codes of Quebec and St Lucia, ed. R.A. Landry and E. Caparros (Ottawa: University

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of Ottawa Press, 1983), 303; K.M. Bindon, “Hudson’s Bay Company Law: Adam Thom and the Institution of Order in Rupert’s Land, 1839–54,” in Flaherty, Essays, 43. See, generally, G. Morton, B. DeVries, and R.J. Morris, Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); H. Murray, Come, Bright Improvement: The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); G. Bernatchez, “La société littéraire et historique de Québec, 1824–1890,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 35 (1981): 179. See, generally, D.A. Finnigan, “Natural History Societies in Late-Victorian Scotland and the Pursuit of Local Civic Service,” British Journal of the History of Science 38 (2005): 53; S.J.M.M. Alberti, “Placing Nature: Natural History Collections and Their Owners in Nineteenth-Century Provincial England,” British Journal of the History of Science 35 (2002): 291; C. Rosenberg, “Science and Social Values in Nineteenth-Century America: A Case Study in the Growth of Scientific Institutions,” in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, ed. C. Rosenberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 135. See, for example., H. Gagnon, “Pierre Chasseur et l’émergence de la muséologie scientifique au Québec, 1824–36,” Canadian Historical Review 75 (1994): 205; C. Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); R.A. Jarrell, “The Social Functions of the Scientific Society in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” in Critical Issues in the History of Canadian Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. R.A. Jarrell and A.E. Roos (Thornhill, ON: HSTC, 1983), 31; S. Frost, “Science Education in the Nineteenth Century: The Natural History Society of Montreal, 1827–1925,” McGill Journal of Education 17 (1982): 31. Compare G.B. Baker, “Popularizing the Rule of Law: Sheldon Amos and the International Scientific Series, 1874–1909,” Journal of Legal History 33 (2012): 151; J.R. Hackney, Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); H. Schweber, “The Science of Legal Science: The Model of the Natural Sciences in Nineteenth-Century American Legal Education,” Law and History Review 17 (1999): 42. See, generally, H. Kay Jones, Butterworth: History of a Publishing House (London: Butterworth, 1980), 32–67; M.W. Maxwell, “The Development of Law Publishing 1799–1974,” in Then and Now, 1799–1974, ed. J. Burke and P. Alsop (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1974), 121; C.R. Brown, “The History of the Carswell Company Limited,” Law Library Journal 33 (1940): 205.

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237 But see S. Normand, “Le droit civil canadien de Pierre-Basile Mignault ou la fabrication d’un palimpseste,” in Le Faux en droit privé, ed. N. Kasirer (Montreal: Thémis, 2000), 133; M.A. Banks, “Thompson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, 1828: An Undetected Case of Plagiarism,” Parliamentary Journal 20 (1979): 1. See also Normand, “Les débuts.” 238 Risk, “Law and the Economy,” 438, 424. Risk later revised that assessment, slightly more favourably, after he determined that Ontario’s late nineteenth-century courts were even less innovative. See R.C.B. Risk, “Sir William R. Meredith CJO: The Search for Authority,” and R.C.B. Risk, “A.H.F. Lefroy: Common Law Thought in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canada,” in Baker and Phillips, History of Canadian Legal Thought, 66, 179; R.C.B. Risk, “Canadian Courts under the Influence,” University of Toronto Law Journal 40 (1990): 687. 239 See, for example, B.J. Hibbitts, “Progress and Principle: The Legal Thought of Sir John Beverley Robinson,” McGill Law Journal 34 (1989): 454; D.J. McMahon, “Law and Public Authority: Sir John Beverley Robinson and the Purposes of the Criminal Law,” University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review 46 (1988): 390; Howes, “Property, God and Nature.” 240 See Pilarczyk, “‘To shudder at the bare recital’”; Reiter, “From Shaved Horses.” See also Pilarczyk, “So Foul a Deed”; Hogg and Shulman, “Wage Disputes”; Kostal, “Legal Justice, Social Justice.” 241 See, generally, B.J. Hibbitts, “Our Arctic Brethren: Canadian Law and Lawyers as Portrayed in American Legal Periodicals, 1829–1911,” in Baker and Phillips, Essays, 241. 242 Compare R.A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); W.H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); L.F. Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979). 243 See G. Marquis, “Doing Justice to British Justice: Law, Ideology and Canadian Historiography,” in Canadian Perspectives on Law and Society: Issues in Legal History, ed. W.W. Pue and B. Wright (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 43; T. Johnson, “In a Manner of Speaking: Towards a Reconstitution of Property in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec,” McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 636. See also K. Lord, “Representing Crime in Words, Images and Songs: Exploring Primary Sources in the Murder of Mélina Massé, Montreal 1895,” Histoire sociale / Social History 43 (2010): 429; Coombe, “The Most Disgusting.” 244 See J.L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). See also M.M.P. Stokes, “Petitions to the Legislative Assembly of

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Ontario, 1867–1877: A Case Study in Legislative Participation,” Law and History Review 11 (1993): 145; R. Vipond, “Alternative Pasts: Legal Liberalism and the Demise of the Disallowance Power,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 39 (1990): 126. See S. Normand, “La publication de procès et la constitution d’un espace public au Québec/Bas-Canada,” Ottawa Law Review 42 (2010): 1; Morin, “Les revendications des nouveaux sujets.” Compare Morin, A. Decroix, and D. Gilles, Les tribunaux et l’arbitrage; Brierley, “Arbitrage conventionnel”; Jaffe, “Industrial Arbitration”; Mann, “Formalization of Informal Law”; Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended”; Moglen, “Commercial Arbitration.” See, generally, M.H. Hoeflich, “The Lawyer as Pragmatic Reader: The History of Legal Commonplacing,” Arkansas Law Review 55 (2002): 114; M.J. Powell, “Professional Innovation: Corporate Lawyers and Private Lawmaking,” 18 Law and Social Inquiry 18 (1993): 423; J.-M. Fecteau, “État et associationisme au XIXe siècle québécois: éléments pour une problématique des rapports État/société dans la transition au capitalisme,” in Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan, 134. Compare L. Karpik, Les avocats: entre l’État, le public et le marché, XVIIIe– XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); D. Sugarman, “Simple Images and Complex Realities: English Lawyers and Their Relationship to Business and Politics, 1750–1950,” Law and History Review 11 (1993): 257; R.W. Gordon, “The Ideal and the Actual in the Law: Fantasies and Practices of New York City Lawyers, 1870–1910,” in The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post–Civil War America, ed. G.W. Gawalt (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 51. See, for example, D.G. Bell, “The Birth of Canadian Legal History,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 33 (1984): 317; L.A. Knafla, “Review,” American Journal of Legal History 27 (1983): 389; D.H. Flaherty, “Preface,” in Flaherty, Essays, x. See, for example, Gavigan, Hunger, Horses; L. Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture; C. Moore, The British Columbia Court of Appeal: The First Hundred Years (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010); J. Swainger, ed., The Alberta Supreme Court at 100 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007); English, Essays; Bannister, Rule of the Admirals; Foster and McLaren, Essays; Girard and Phillips, Essays; Girard, Phillips, and Cahill, Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. See also Knafla and Swainger, Laws and Societies; Knafla, Law and Justice.

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251 See, for example, Fyson, Magistrates, Police; Boissery, Deep Sense of Wrong; Young, Politics of Codification; Greenwood, “Lower Canada.” See also Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials; Phillips, Loo, and Lewthwaite, Essays. 252 See, for example, McLaren, Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered; P. Girard, “Liberty, Order, and Pluralism: The Canadian Experience,” in Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600 to 1900, ed. J.P. Greene (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Foster, Berger, and Buck, Grand Experiment; J. McLaren, ed., Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); D. Hay and P. Craven, eds., Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Swainger and Backhouse, People and Place; Karsten, Between Law and Custom; Knafla and Binnie, Law, Society and the State. 253 See A. Greer, “National, Transnational and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History,” Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 695; T. Freyer and L. Campbell, eds., Freedom’s Conditions in the United States: Canadian Borderlands (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); J. McLaren, H. Foster, and C. Orloff, eds., Law for the Elephant, Law for the Beaver: Essays in the Legal History of the North American West (Regina, SK: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1992). See also E. Mancke, “Another British America: A Canadian Model for the Early Modern British Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997): 1. 254 See, for example, Kavanagh, “Company with Sovereignty”; Healy, From Quaker to Upper Canadian; E. Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770–1879 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); R.K. Loewen, Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and New Worlds, 1850–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Baker, “So Elegant a Web.” Compare C. Madsen, Canadian Military Law from Confederation to Somalia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999); Alexander, “By the Light and Law of Nature”; M.-C. Pitre, “Les Acadiens et les juges de paix: étude des relations entre les Acadiens du Gloucester et le monde de la justice, 1784–1867,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 39 (1990): 185; R.A. Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); Bell, “Perspective on Legal Pluralism.” 255 See, for example, E.H. Pearson, Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,

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2011); Tomlins and Mann, Many Legalities of Early America; Offatt, Good Laws and Good Men; B.H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Hindus, Prison and Plantation; Allen, In English Ways. See, for example, S.A. Siegel, “Francis Wharton’s Orthodoxy: God, Historical Jurisprudence, and Classical Legal Thought,” American Journal of Legal History 46 (2004): 422; L.A. Grossman, “James Coolidge Carter and Mugwump Jurisprudence,” Law and History Review 20 (2002): 577; T.A. Green, “Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Age of Pound: An Essay on Criminal Justice,” Michigan Law Review 93 (1995): 1915. See, for example, I. Alexander, Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010); P. Mitchell, The Making of the Modern Law of Defamation (Oxford: Hart, 2005); T. Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (New York: Routledge, 1998); C.W. Allen, The Law of Evidence in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); V.M. Lester, Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment for Debt, and Company Winding-Up in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Although dated, D. Sugarman and G.R. Rubin, “Towards a New History of Law and Material Society in England, 1750–1914,” in Law, Economy and Society, 1750–1914: Essays in the History of English Law, ed. G.R. Rubin and D. Sugarman (Abingdon, UK: Professional Books, 1984), 1, provides a good overview of that kind of material. A comparable American survey can be found in W.E. Nelson and J.P. Reid, The Literature of American Legal History (New York: Oceana Publications, 1985). Compare P. Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); N. Duxbury, Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); R.W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); M. Loughlin, Public Law and Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); R. Cocks, Sir Henry Maine: A Study in Victorian Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); K.J.M. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); G.J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). See, generally, Ducharme, Le concept de liberté; Blumenthal, “Mind of a Moral Agent”; Ajzenstat, Political Thought of Lord Durham; Harvey, Le Printemps de l’Amérique française; Lamonde, Histoire sociale; Armour and Trott, Faces of Reason; F.W. Smith, Professors and Public Ethics: Stud-

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ies of Northern Moral Philosophers before the Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956); A.B. Leavelle, “James Wilson and the Relation of Scottish Metaphysics to American Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 57 (1942): 394. See, generally, D.R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2002); M. Ermath, “Mindful Matters: The Empire’s New Codes and the Plight of Modern European Intellectual History,” Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 1065; J.G.A. Pocock, “Introduction: The State of the Art,” in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1. For a representative cross-section of contemporary writing in modern European legal history, see, for example, Smith, Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise; Garnot, “Justice, infrajustice, parajustice et extrajustice”; Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism; Beauthier and Rorive, Le Code Napoléon; Palacz, Papers in Public Law; Kelley, Historians and the Law; Karpik, Les avocats; Halperin, French Code; John, Politics and the Law; Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, Family and Inheritance. There is apparently no historiographical source like Sugarman and Rubin, “Towards a New History of Law,” or Nelson and Reid, Literature of American Legal History, for Continental Europe or for any particular Continental jurisdiction. Compare sources cited in notes 6 and 7. That conclusion is, admittedly, impressionistic. But it is worth noting, in that regard, that none of the Canadian secondary sources cited in this chapter (of which these are almost a thousand) was used in Western University’s mandatory Foundations of Canadian Law course between 2005 and 2010, and none of those sources was used in McGill University’s required Legal Traditions or Foundations of Canadian Law courses during the same period. See Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law, Law and Learning (Ottawa: Information Division, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 1983).

1 Les débuts de la littérature juridique québécoise, 1767–1840 s y lv io n or m an d*

L’imprimé occupe depuis longtemps une importance considérable dans la pratique du droit au Québec. Au cours de la période couverte par cette étude, il est manifeste que plusieurs praticiens ont l’habitude de lire ou de consulter des ouvrages juridiques qui, il faut bien le reconnaître, proviennent pour une très grande part de l’étranger. Avant 1840, la production éditoriale canadienne reste limitée. Elle mérite tout de même d’être appréciée en tenant compte du caractère colonial de la culture des juristes et des contours encore imprécis du champ juridique. Une description de cette production et de ses caractéristiques sera proposée. Une évaluation de la production Durant la période étudiée, la production d’ouvrages juridiques – une fois retranchée la législation – est relativement limitée. Avant l’Union des deux Canadas, elle est réduite à une centaine de titres (voir le tableau). Cette production a été rassemblée sous l’appellation de littérature juridique.1 Ce vocable – peu usité – permet de retenir une gamme de publications relativement étendue soit, en plus des ouvrages de doctrine, des essais, des procès et des recueils. Cette conception élargie de la production d’ouvrages juridiques se justifie notamment à cause du caractère moins spécialisé des publications de l’époque.

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Tableau: Production éditoriale, 1767–1840 Recueils* Études

Procès

L

R

1767–80 1781–1800 1801–20 1821–40

4 4 5 18

2 6 14 21

2 8 6

4 2

Total

31

43

16

6

F

A

Total

2

1 3

6 12 34 50

2

4

102

Total 28 * Les recueils ont été séparés en quatre catégories, soit les recueils de textes à portée législative (L), de règles de pratique (R), de formules (F), et d’arrêts (A).

Les débuts de la littérature juridique québécoise ont peu attiré l’attention des chercheurs. Quelques ouvrages, à cause de leur singularité, ont été l’objet de travaux ou, au moins, de commentaires généraux. L’intérêt le plus marqué est venu des spécialistes de l’histoire littéraire qui se sont penchés sur le corpus des essais dont certains sont consacrés à l’évolution constitutionnelle de la colonie.2 En revanche, ces chercheurs ne manifestent guère d’intérêt pour les ouvrages à contenu doctrinal. Chez les juristes, cette production ancienne a exercé un attrait limité. Il y a tout de même des commentaires sur les premières publications juridiques, à la faveur de travaux qui se rattachent surtout à l’histoire de la pensée juridique ou à l’histoire culturelle.3 Il va de soi que la production éditoriale étudiée n’a pas actuellement de portée en droit positif. Il demeure que l’époque est révélatrice par les thèmes abordés des préoccupations qui ont profondément marqué la pensée et la culture juridiques québécoises, à une période structurante du champ juridique. En cela, cette recherche, par la période considérée et par l’absence de portée sur le droit actuel, s’inscrit dans une perspective archéologique.4 Le format retenu pour la présente étude ne saurait conduire à une analyse approfondie de l’ensemble du corpus. Il permet tout de même de saisir les lignes de force de cette littérature.

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Durant tout le régime français, l’absence d’imprimerie a empêché la production d’ouvrages portant sur le droit colonial. Il faut, par ailleurs, reconnaître qu’au cours de cette période il n’existait vraisemblablement pas de marché pour absorber une éventuelle production. En effet, l’interdiction des avocats dans la colonie et la taille réduite de la population auraient rendu périlleux tout projet de publications, même modeste. De cela, il ne faut certes pas conclure à l’inexistence d’écrits portant sur le droit. Des juristes jouissant d’une compétence reconnue ont, en effet, produit des textes destinés à présenter certains aspects de la situation du droit dans la colonie. Des administrateurs ont ainsi fait parvenir aux autorités métropolitaines des mémoires traitant du droit colonial, que l’on pense, par exemple, au procureur général MathieuBenoît Collet.5 Ce dernier propose d’ailleurs de colliger en un code, intitulé « Code civil pour la Nouvelle-France et autres colonies françaises », divers textes à portée législative, ignorés faute d’une diffusion adéquate. Le projet reste lettre morte. Par ailleurs, des écrits étaient certainement destinés aux Canadiens. Les conférences données par le procureur général Louis-Guillaume Verrier aux jeunes Canadiens susceptibles de prétendre à une nomination à la fonction de membres du Conseil supérieur en constituent un exemple. Ces conférences, à l’époque où elles ont été prononcées, furent prises sous la dictée, d’après le témoignage de Verrier.6 Même si elles n’ont pas laissé de traces, elles témoignent de l’existence d’une pensée juridique coloniale. Le thème de la nécessaire adaptation du droit métropolitain à la réalité de la colonie semble récurrent dans les écrits des juristes sous le régime français. Une littérature juridique embryonnaire existe, dès cette époque, même si sa diffusion était limitée, vu l’impossibilité de recourir à l’imprimé. La diffusion d’une littérature manuscrite est attestée dans la colonie pour d’autres disciplines que le droit.7 L’imprimé juridique apparaît à la suite de la Conquête britannique, avec l’introduction des premières presses. La production d’ouvrages juridiques durant la période qui nous intéresse, soit de 1767 à 1840, peut être divisée en trois types de publications: les études, les procès et les recueils. Les études constituent un groupe assez hétéroclite. Ils rassemblent de la littérature doctrinale (traité, dictionnaire, manuel, etc.) et des essais.8 Le deuxième type comprend des procès. Il peut s’agir de la publication de différentes pièces liées au procès ou encore de la narration plus ou moins élaborée d’une affaire. Le dernier type rassemble des recueils soit des publications qui regroupent des sources juridiques de différentes natures, soit des lois et des règlements, des règles de pra-

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tique, des formules et des jugements des tribunaux. Le caractère technique des publications de cette catégorie est indéniable. L’évolution de la production durant la période considérée (voir le tableau) montre que les études connaissent un départ lent, puis une croissance importante, après 1820. Les recueils atteignent leur apogée durant les années 1801– 1820. Les procès, pour leur part, montrent une progression constante. Finalement, le total des publications croît sensiblement tout au long de la période. La présente recherche, centrée sur les ouvrages, ne considère pas l’apport de la presse au droit. Le sujet pourrait, à lui seul, donner lieu à un travail d’envergure. Il demeure que les journaux sont à l’époque d’importants lieux de diffusion de connaissances et d’informations sur le droit. La presse publie fréquemment des nouvelles qui portent sur des questions juridiques. Elle fait paraître des extraits de publications, notamment des traductions d’ouvrages étrangers. Elle diffuse les règlements de police,9 les ordonnances et les lois de la province et s’intéresse à l’activité des tribunaux par la publication d’avis judiciaires et le compte rendu de procès.10 Par ailleurs, grâce à la publicité, les livres de droit à vendre, dont ceux en provenance de l’étranger, sont connus, de même que les encans de bibliothèques privées.11 En somme, la presse bénéficie au droit et à la communauté juridique. Les ouvrages étudiés paraissent à l’initiative d’auteurs – qui seraient parfois mieux désignés comme rédacteurs ou traducteurs – dont le nombre est réduit. À quelques exceptions près – notamment le médecin Jacques Labrie – ils appartiennent à la communauté juridique et se sont illustrés comme avocats, fonctionnaires, greffiers de cours ou juges. Par ailleurs, des auteurs ont eu l’occasion de faire une carrière politique que l’on pense à Augustin-Norbert Morin, Joseph-François Perrault ou Jonathan Sewell. L’activité éditoriale se situe à différents moments dans la carrière, elle peut même être précoce, comme chez Justin McCarthy qui publie son premier ouvrage à 23 ans. Si la plupart des auteurs ne font paraître qu’un ouvrage dédié au droit, quelquesuns se distinguent par un nombre relativement élevé de titres. Ainsi, François-Joseph Cugnet publie pas moins de quatre ouvrages doctrinaux. L’auteur le plus prolifique de l’époque demeure toutefois JosephFrançois Perrault avec dix titres, sans compter la traduction en français de deux ouvrages de langue anglaise et la publication d’un mémoire lié à un procès; encore faut-il ajouter que cet auteur publie plusieurs autres ouvrages non liés au droit. La production étudiée est révélatrice d’un droit colonial redevable au

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droit des métropoles. Les éléments structurants du droit canadien sont, en effet, tributaires des droits français et anglais. La production éditoriale reflète cet état de fait et doit être considérée en tenant compte des caractéristiques de la pensée et de la culture juridiques de l’époque. Pendant longtemps, les gens de justice estiment et valorisent l’abondante production métropolitaine qui répond à leurs besoins. Les catalogues et les inventaires des bibliothèques des praticiens du droit montrent que plusieurs possédaient des collections respectables d’ouvrages en provenance de l’étranger.12 Par ailleurs, malgré la qualité de la production étrangère, elle s’avère parfois mal adaptée à un droit colonial qui présente des singularités par rapport aux droits métropolitains. Aussi, des juristes de la colonie cherchent à combler cette lacune. Leur travail constitue une illustration d’un processus d’acculturation. Une autre préoccupation se manifeste chez les auteurs soit de rendre compte de nouvelles institutions ou d’institutions sensiblement transformées à la suite du changement de métropole. Les exemples les plus significatifs concernent des matières qui relèvent du droit constitutionnel, du droit parlementaire et du droit pénal. Des ouvrages sont justement consacrés à ces matières. Ils visent à les faire mieux connaître par les Canadiens et à les présenter dans la langue qui leur est familière: le français. Un des traits de la production de l’époque demeure la publication d’ouvrages qui poursuivent des fins politiques. Plusieurs publications qui traitent de questions juridiques sont le reflet de tensions dans la colonie. Ainsi, les tenants d’un système constitutionnel conforme à celui de la métropole font part de leurs doléances dans des publications. De même, le droit tel qu’il est appliqué dans la province est l’objet de critiques et de revendications. Il ne serait certes pas exagéré de considérer que les enjeux autour de questions juridiques ont contribué à alimenter la formation d’une opinion publique coloniale. Un certain nombre de facteurs vont converger durant la période afin de favoriser la publication de sources juridiques (lois, règles, formules ou arrêts). Ces publications ont comme caractéristiques fondamentales de présenter des sources coloniales. En plus de faire écho à une préoccupation de la société à l’égard du droit qui s’applique dans la province, ces publications révèlent la structuration d’organes administratifs ou judiciaires provinciaux. La présentation matérielle des publications est à la fois le reflet de l’époque et des spécificités qui marquent la littérature juridique. Les éléments paratextuels des ouvrages de la période étudiée sont révé-

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lateurs de traits particuliers de la production.13 À n’en pas douter, les publications métropolitaines servent de modèles. Les ouvrages présentent fréquemment une facture qui les fait ressembler à la production de l’Ancien Régime. Le titre-sommaire, qui s’étend sur plusieurs lignes, est parfois adopté. Les ouvrages de François-Joseph Cugnet constituent de bons exemples à cet égard. L’épître dédicatoire est également un élément paratextuel significatif. Située au début de l’ouvrage, elle se présente sous la forme d’un texte, plus ou moins élaboré, par lequel l’auteur offre son ouvrage à une personnalité à qui il désire rendre hommage. Certains auteurs de textes à teneur doctrinale honorent le gouverneur général de la colonie. En cela, ils adoptent un comportement semblable à leurs devanciers français qui souvent dédiaient leurs ouvrages au roi. Il en va ainsi de Cugnet, pour son Traité de la loi des fiefs, de Joseph-François Perrault, pour sa traduction du traité de Richard Burn et de Henry Des Rivières Beaubien pour son Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada. Outre le gouverneur, d’autres personnalités marquantes reçoivent un tel hommage. Perrault présente sa traduction de Lex parliamentaria à Jean-Antoine Panet, orateur de l’Assemblée législative, et, son Code rural, à Alexander Carlisle Buchanan, agent britannique d’émigration, tandis que Justin McCarthy offre son Dictionnaire de l’ancien droit du Canada au juge Jonathan Sewell. Par ailleurs, des auteurs s’éloignent de ces traditions. Ils adoptent des titres courts et, plus significatifs encore, ils dédient leurs ouvrages à des personnes avec lesquelles ils ne se situent pas dans un rapport de subordination. La dédicace que Perrault insère dans son Dictionnaire portatif et abrégé des loix et regles du Parlement provincial de Bas Canada tranche de ses précédentes en ce qu’il dédie l’ouvrage « À mes compatriotes de la province du Bas Canada » et d’ajouter « En rédigeant ce petit ouvrage je n’ai eu d’autre vue que de vous faciliter la connaissance des loix constitutionnelles de votre parlement […] ».14 Le même Perrault dédie un ouvrage sur les huissiers à un jeune apprenti qui se destine à l’exercice de cette fonction.15 Cette manière de faire est révélatrice de la propension de Perrault pour des publications destinées à des groupes déterminés de lecteurs. La très grande part des ouvrages présentent le nom de l’auteur sur la page de titre. Il existe tout de même quelques exceptions où le nom de l’auteur n’est pas mentionné. Les ouvrages concernés sont des essais à contenu politique. Robert-Anne d’Estimauville signe une brochure « un vrai canadien », alors qu’Augustin-Norbert Morin se présente comme « un étudiant en droit ». Dans ces deux cas, les auteurs désirent

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demeurer anonymes, sans doute afin de ne pas subir de préjudices, encore qu’il y a fort à parier que l’identité des auteurs ait pu être connue. La langue des publications est une donnée caractéristique. Le français et l’anglais se côtoient. Il y a même une place pour le bilinguisme. Celui-ci se manifeste sous deux cas de figure soit des ouvrages dans lesquels se trouvent des passages dans l’une et l’autre langue et des ouvrages qui se présentent sous deux versions. Le lieu de prédilection du bilinguisme demeure la publication de recueils de lois et de règlements, ce qui n’étonne guère étant donné le bilinguisme de la législation dans la province. Dans le corpus des ouvrages étudiés, une bonne part sont des brochures, soit des publications qui comptent moins de 50 pages. Le format des publications s’explique d’autant mieux que le fonctionnement artisanal de l’imprimerie et la taille réduite des ateliers ne favorisent guère la publication d’ouvrages élaborés. Il demeure qu’un certain nombre d’ouvrages, notamment ceux de Cugnet avec leurs 412 pages au total, constituent des projets ambitieux. L’imprimeur William Brown, qui s’est lancé dans cette aventure, y consacre par moins de cinq mois de travail – de janvier à mai 1775 – entrecoupés, il est vrai, d’autres travaux.16 La petitesse de la communauté juridique rend aléatoire la production d’ouvrages. À cette époque, le monde de l’édition est peu structuré. L’éditeur, tel que défini actuellement, est un acteur encore inexistant. Un auteur qui désire faire paraître un ouvrage entre en contact avec un imprimeur et le convainc, moyennant financement, d’imprimer un certain nombre d’exemplaires. L’ouvrage est par la suite diffusé par l’imprimeur, des libraires ou l’auteur lui-même. L’édition juridique n’acquerra son autonomie que durant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Il n’est certes pas étonnant que les auteurs et les imprimeurs de certains projets de publications recherchent et obtiennent parfois le soutien financier de l’État. Cugnet,17 pour ses traités, et Perrault, pour sa traduction de Lex parliamentaria,18 bénéficient ainsi de subventions. Le gouvernement soutient l’imprimeur John Neilson qui publie un résumé en français et en anglais du procès de David McLane.19 L’absence d’appui de cette nature entrave certainement des projets de publications qui ne peuvent être envisagés, faute d’être assurés d’un lectorat suffisant.20 Des imprimeurs regrettent peut-être de s’être engagés dans des aventures qui se révèlent hasardeuses. Ludger Duvernay encaisse des pertes pécuniaires à la suite de la parution du traité de Des Rivières Beaubien,

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paru en trois tomes, et qui compte pas moins de 900 pages.21 La pénétration du marché, il faut en convenir, est loin d’être aisée. La communauté juridique, admirative de la production métropolitaine, y compris des commentateurs de l’Ancien Droit, conserve une certaine méfiance à l’égard de la production coloniale. Dans ce contexte, faire concurrence aux traités français demeure un défi. Ce même phénomène se rencontre ailleurs en contexte colonial.22 Cette difficulté à écouler les ouvrages publiés explique que le mode habituel de publication commence par la diffusion d’un prospectus qui a pour objet d’annoncer le projet.23 Le prospectus qui est publié à l’initiative d’un auteur ou d’un imprimeur propose une description plus ou moins détaillée du contenu de l’ouvrage à paraître et invite les personnes intéressées à s’engager à souscrire l’achat d’un exemplaire. La publication d’un ouvrage exige des sommes considérables que l’imprimeur seul ne peut assumer. Sans une mise de fonds par l’auteur ou un nombre suffisant de souscripteurs, plusieurs ouvrages n’auraient pu voir le jour. Même les traités de Cugnet, qui bénéficient pourtant d’un soutien financier, ne peuvent vraisemblablement paraître sans le recours à la souscription.24 L’annonce de l’éventuelle publication de ces traités est faite par l’entremise de l’hebdomadaire Gazette de Québec / Quebec Gazette.25 Elle rappelle le contexte de la publication, décrit les ouvrages à paraître et précise le calendrier de parution échelonné de février à juin 1775. Pour sa part, l’ouvrage de Jacques Labrie sur la constitution britannique est précédé d’un prospectus de quatre pages décrivant l’essai à paraître.26 Il est précisé sur ce document que la parution aura lieu lorsque le nombre de souscripteurs souhaités se seront manifestés auprès d’une des 13 personnes habilitées à recevoir les souscriptions. L’usage de la souscription nous révèle les titres d’un certain nombre de projets d’ouvrages qui, en l’absence d’un nombre suffisant de souscripteurs, n’ont pu voir le jour. Ainsi, en 1809, Jean Mackay, avocat du Haut-Canada, se propose de faire paraître un ouvrage, intitulé Les lois criminelles anglaises, qui inclurait des extraits de Blackstone traduits en français.27 Pour sa part, Denis-Benjamin Viger envisage, en 1812, de publier un Dictionnaire de la jurisprudence civile du Bas-Canada28 qui comprendrait de 900 à 1 000 pages. Basé sur l’œuvre de Claude-Joseph de Ferrière,29 l’ouvrage de Viger constitue un bel exemple d’acculturation, en ce qu’il retranche du texte français, ce qui ne convient pas à la province et y ajoute des développements adaptés. Finalement Justin McCarthy annonce, en 1820, la publication d’un Dictionnaire des lois du Canada.30 Si ces trois cas illustrent la difficulté pour un auteur à trouver

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preneur, ils montrent également le dynamisme de juristes qui se lancent dans des projets d’ouvrages pour le moins ambitieux. La communauté juridique de la colonie est de très petite taille durant la période couverte par cette étude. Aussi, le tirage des ouvrages devaient être réduits à quelques centaines d’exemplaires. Les traités de Cugnet, édités en 1775, sont tirés à 400 exemplaires.31 Il en va de même pour un ouvrage de Joseph-François Perrault.32 Ce chiffre demeure élevé, prenant en considération le nombre de juristes que compte alors la province. Il est vraisemblable que le public ciblé s’étendait au-delà de la seule communauté juridique. En revanche, lorsque le public s’annonce d’emblée restreint, le nombre d’exemplaires est établi en conséquence. Ainsi, les députés demandent seulement 200 exemplaires de la traduction de Lex parliamentaria.33 Exceptionnellement, le nombre d’exemplaires d’une publication peut être plus élevé. Les autorités coloniales vont jusqu’à commander 2 000 exemplaires de la brochure qui rend compte du procès de David McLane. Dans ce cas précis, il est manifeste qu’une diffusion étendue dans la population est visée. De 1767 à 1840, la production éditoriale en droit est quantitativement peu importante. Les ouvrages produits subissent l’influence de modèles étrangers, notamment pour leur présentation. Malgré l’ascendance des métropoles, il demeure que la production est marquée par le contexte colonial. Les embûches à la publication en l’absence d’éditeurs et d’un nombre de lecteurs potentiels sont le reflet de cette situation. Le survol de la production révèle que les contours du champ juridique québécois sont encore imprécis et que l’acculturation est un trait de la culture juridique.34 Le corpus sera maintenant considéré en examinant le contenu des ouvrages. Il permettra de saisir le contexte des débuts de la doctrine, de constater que les ouvrages traitant de questions juridiques ont pu contribuer à la formation d’une opinion publique et, finalement, que la diffusion des sources du droit colonial est une préoccupation qui se manifeste tôt. La naissance d’une doctrine coloniale Alors que l’absence de presse avait empêché l’établissement d’une doctrine juridique en Nouvelle-France, le Régime anglais permet son émergence avec l’introduction des infrastructures nécessaires. Les propos porteront surtout sur la production qui jette les bases de cette doctrine. L’attention sera mise sur les ouvrages qui établissent un état du droit colonial français à la suite de la Conquête et sur ceux qui ont pour fina-

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lité de faciliter la compréhension des nouvelles institutions de tradition anglaise. L’existence d’un droit colonial distinct, à certains égards, du droit métropolitain est déjà reconnue sous le Régime français. Louis-Guillaume Verrier, procureur général du Conseil supérieur, tient compte du phénomène dans les conférences qu’il donne sur le droit dans le but de préparer les futurs conseillers: « Ils [les étudiants] ont régulièrement assisté à mes Conférences dans lesquelles ils ont vû le premier volume des Institutions de M. Argou, au droit français. Je leur ai montré en même temps l’aplication qu’y peuvent avoir les Règlements et usages particuliers à la Colonie ».35 Après la Conquête britannique, les nouveaux administrateurs sont, très tôt, confrontés à des questions sur le droit applicable dans la province et sur l’administration de la justice. C’est dans ce contexte qu’est réalisée une première synthèse sur le droit au Canada. Le gouverneur Guy Carleton confie cette tâche à François-Joseph Cugnet qui a la réputation de posséder de bonnes connaissances juridiques.36 La confection de ce texte est intéressante comme exemple de la genèse d’un texte imprimé. Cugnet rédige d’abord un texte manuscrit intitulé: Coutumes et usages anciens de la province de Québec.37 Diffusé auprès des administrateurs de la colonie, le texte soulève les critiques du procureur général Francis Maseres38 et du juge en chef William Hey.39 Le texte est revu par un comité de Canadiens – un Select Committee of Canadian Gentlemen – possédant une connaissance du droit coutumier dont les abbés Joseph-André-Mathurin Jacrau et Colomban-Sébastien Pressart du Séminaire de Québec40 et des seigneurs. Au-delà de l’expertise de chacun, l’exercice vise peut-être à recevoir l’adoubement de groupes sur lesquels les nouveaux dirigeants entendent s’appuyer. Le travail terminé, les autorités britanniques décident de le diffuser sous la forme d’une série de publications parues, à Londres, en 1772 et 1773.41 Ces publications sont couramment désignées sous l’appellation d’Extrait des Messieurs. Le titre donné aux ouvrages est cependant en langue anglaise quoique le contenu soit rédigé en français. Par ailleurs, l’édition est confiée à l’imprimeur du roi, ce qui confère un caractère de publications officielles à ces ouvrages. L’Extrait propose une présentation du droit tel qu’il est censé avoir été appliqué dans la colonie, sous le Régime français. La facture de ces œuvres reprend la forme habituelle des ouvrages qui traitent du droit coutumier. L’exposé, ainsi que le reconnaissent les auteurs, est redevable aux commentaires de la coutume faits par Claude de Ferrière: « Ce

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n’est donc icy qu’un relevé des articles de cette coûtume; mais comme il était nécessaire, pour donner l’intelligence de ces articles, d’y joindre des explications, on les a prises dans le Commentaire Abrégé de M. de Ferriere sur le coûtume de Paris ».42 La mise en parallèle des textes montre, en effet, une étroite parenté entre le commentaire canadien de la coutume et le texte qui a servi de modèle. Il y a là un cas d’hypertextualité pour reprendre le terme retenu par Gérard Genette pour qualifier cette relation entre un texte – l’hypertexte – et un texte antérieur – l’hypotexte.43 L’hypertextualité est une relation textuelle qui caractérise la culture coloniale et qui restera longtemps florissante au Québec. Les auteurs n’ont pas souhaité élargir le propos pour inclure un développement sur des aspects du droit non traités dans la coutume, tel le droit des obligations. Par ailleurs, le texte tient compte des particularités du droit canadien, notamment en ce qui a trait au droit régissant le régime seigneurial,44 aux lois de police et au droit criminel. L’Extrait des Messieurs a connu une certaine diffusion dans la province, même si elle reste difficile à évaluer. Encore au milieu du XIXe siècle, lors de la codification du droit civil, les commissaires y réfèrent.45 Ces publications, destinées d’abord et avant tout aux autorités britanniques, leur ont permis de se faire une idée du droit canadien. La rédaction de ces textes correspond à une période de consultation à l’initiative de Londres qui entend mieux saisir l’état du droit et de l’administration de la justice, en vue d’une éventuelle intervention du parlement. Au même moment, les administrateurs provinciaux font d’ailleurs connaître leurs vues sur la question du rétablissement, en tout ou en partie, du droit coutumier français.46 Les travaux visant à clarifier le contenu du droit canadien exercent à n’en pas douter une influence sur les rédacteurs de l’Acte de Québec qui considèrent vraisemblablement que ce qu’ils désignent à l’article VIII comme les « Laws of Canada » réfèrent en gros à ce qui est décrit par les Messieurs. François-Joseph Cugnet, dans l’année qui suit le rétablissement des lois du Canada, publie les quatre traités dont il a été question plus haut, qui constituent les premiers ouvrages de doctrine à paraître dans la province. En préface à son traité sur les fiefs, Cugnet reconnaît d’emblée qu’il ne se prétend pas auteur et qu’il risque même d’être qualifié de plagiaire.47 Il s’efforce tout de même de proposer un texte où il présente des spécificités du droit canadien. Il réfère précisément à cet objectif lorsqu’il précise qu’il « a ramassé les usages et coûtumes particuliers suivis en cette province, en vertu des edits, reglemens, ordonnances et declara-

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tions qu’a rendu à cet égard sa majesté très chrétienne, qui y ont été reçûs comme loix propres au païs ».48 Dans ce même ouvrage, Cugnet recourt à l’italique afin de mettre en exergue ses propos sur le droit canadien. Au-delà de cette description du droit suivi au Canada, l’auteur cherche à conforter le régime seigneurial qui, depuis la Conquête jusqu’à l’Acte de Québec, avait évolué dans l’incertitude. D’ailleurs, sur la page de titre, il précise que son traité sera « utile à tous les Seigneurs de cette Province, tant nouveaux qu’anciens Sujets, aux Juges et au Receveur-général des Droits de Sa Majesté ». Cugnet – lui-même seigneur – en plus de chercher à assurer la continuité du régime seigneurial, inscrit l’institution sous la tutelle du nouveau souverain. L’ouvrage contribue au maintien d’un ordre de choses qui avait prévalu sous le Régime français et à le rendre légitime malgré le changement de métropole. Au-delà de l’effort réalisé pour décrire un droit fidèle à la tradition française, Cugnet fait état de transformations apportées au droit à la suite de la Conquête. Ainsi, il introduit un développement où il se montre favorable à la liberté de tester, une modification non négligeable du droit canadien, confirmée par l’Acte de Québec. En effet, dans la section consacrée aux testaments dans son traité sur le droit coutumier, il précise que le testateur peut léguer la totalité de ses propres et non seulement le quint, comme le mentionne l’article 292 de la coutume: « je suis du sentiment que cette Province étant sous un gouvernement libre, cette restriction [au quint] ne devrait plus avoir lieu; et que cette province devrait suivre à cet égard, la disposition des lois Romaines qui me paraît être la même de celles d’Angleterre ».49 Cugnet soutient son interprétation même s’il est conscient que, loin de faire l’unanimité, elle trouve des détracteurs. Ces ouvrages, où l’auteur prend rarement ses distances par rapport aux sources dans lesquelles il puise, ont le mérite d’offrir une présentation du droit colonial. Ce portrait, aussi simplifié qu’il soit, n’avait pas, jusque-là, d’équivalent. En Nouvelle-France, aucune publication n’avait été diffusée pour dresser un tableau du droit colonial et le mettre à la portée des praticiens du droit. Ce n’est d’ailleurs qu’après la Conquête que paraissent, en France, des ouvrages traitant de cette question. En effet, il revient à Émilien Petit, au cours des années 1770, de consacrer des études où il compare le droit public applicable dans les diverses colonies d’Amérique, en fait les Antilles françaises.50 Les travaux réalisés par des auteurs canadiens contribuent à tracer le contour d’un ordre juridique dont le périmètre, il faut en convenir, est souvent difficile à cerner. Les interrogations posées par l’effet de la Conquête sur le droit

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incitent à un travail de systématisation qui conduit à des publications qui font peut-être prendre conscience à la communauté juridique de l’existence d’un droit, certes héritier des traditions française et britannique, mais tout de même propre à la province. L’idée de l’existence d’un droit canadien spécifique par rapport au droit anglais et présentant des singularités au regard du droit français prend, dès lors, forme. Au contenu pédagogique des premiers ouvrages consacrés au droit canadien, il faut ajouter la portée politique – sinon idéologique – dont ils sont le reflet. Cette portée est particulièrement présente pour les tout premiers ouvrages de doctrine à paraître. Le texte de ces ouvrages ne pouvait certes pas rivaliser avec les traités de droit coutumier français. En revanche, l’Extrait des Messieurs et plus encore les traités de Cugnet présentent un ordre juridique dominé par le roi d’Angleterre, mais qui pour l’essentiel est resté fidèle à la tradition française. Le souvenir de l’Acte de Québec dans la pensée juridique va renvoyer à cette image des choses. L’autre versant de l’acte, qui a trait aux droits politiques et a pour effet de remettre à plus tard la constitution d’une chambre d’assemblée, est occulté. Outre l’Extrait des Messieurs et les traités de Cugnet, le traité de droit d’Henry Des Rivières Beaubien demeure une œuvre marquante de l’époque.51 L’auteur rédige des commentaires, plus ou moins élaborés, sur le droit colonial dans le but, suivant ses dires, de tenter une synthèse des lois civiles de la province. En plus de faire paraître des ouvrages ayant pour objet d’exposer le droit qui prévalait sous le Régime français, des auteurs vont s’efforcer de présenter le droit anglais qui a été introduit dans la province à la suite du changement de métropole, soit le droit criminel, le droit constitutionnel et le droit parlementaire. Leur objectif est de décrire des institutions qui, d’une part, sont étrangères aux Canadiens en ce qu’elles se rattachent à une tradition qui leur est inconnue et, d’autre part, de rédiger un exposé en langue française. Le défi est de taille. Les auteurs le relèvent en recourant à la traduction d’ouvrages britanniques.52 Les traductions s’imposent rapidement en droit pénal. Le traité de Richard Burn, The Justice of Peace and Parish Officer, que le gouverneur Murray avait d’ailleurs fait distribuer aux nouveaux juges de paix,53 constitue un ouvrage de référence fort utile. Joseph-François Perrault, conscient de l’intérêt que présentait l’ouvrage et prenant en considération la méconnaissance de la langue anglaise par plusieurs de ses compatriotes, décide d’en traduire des extraits en français.54 En avantpropos, il précise que le but avoué de ce travail est « de faciliter aux

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Magistrats Canadiens & aux autres Officiers subalternes, l’exécution de leurs devoirs, & mettre toute la Province en état de juger de la valeur du bienfait dont elle jouit par l’introduction de ces lois humainement pénales ».55 La tâche est semée d’embûches et le traducteur reconnaît avoir reçu l’assistance de Canadiens et d’Anglais. Quoique la chose semble rare, Perrault prend la liberté d’insérer des ajouts dans le texte. Il signale ainsi que les catholiques sont exempts de prêter le serment du test à la suite de l’Acte de Québec.56 L’introduction du parlementarisme met les Canadiens devant des institutions avec lesquelles ils ne sont guère familiers. La connaissance limitée que plusieurs députés ont de la langue anglaise fait qu’ils peuvent difficilement compter sur la consultation des ouvrages britanniques pour parfaire leurs connaissances. Dans un premier temps, Jonathan Sewell, nouvellement installé comme avocat dans la province, collige des documents, qu’il rend disponibles en anglais et en français, sur le fonctionnement de la Chambre des communes.57 De plus, l’Assemblée législative charge Joseph-François Perrault, alors député, de traduire le fameux traité britannique Lex parliamentaria, attribué à George Petyt.58 À l’instar de ses compatriotes, Perrault voue une grande admiration au parlementarisme britannique. Il estime les Canadiens privilégiés de vivre « sous une forme de Gouvernement si supérieure aux autres ».59 Perrault insiste sur les problèmes particuliers que lui pose la traduction de l’ouvrage, en ce que la langue française ne lui fournit pas toujours un vocabulaire adapté à chacune des réalités décrites, ce qui l’amène à conserver des termes anglais. L’ouvrage permet aux députés, et plus précisément aux Canadiens à qui il est destiné, de comprendre le fonctionnement d’un régime parlementaire de type britannique et ainsi de mieux faire valoir leurs droits. La description des institutions de la métropole les incite même à modeler leurs revendications sur les privilèges de la Chambre des communes de Londres, et ce, au grand désespoir de Britanniques établis dans la province.60 Ces traductions ont comme caractéristique principale de porter sur des parties du corpus juridique où le droit anglais prévaut désormais. Il est vraisemblable que la mise à la disposition des praticiens de textes portant sur le droit criminel et le droit parlementaire a facilité la pénétration de ces droits dans la colonie61 et a participé à leur appropriation par les Canadiens. Elle a, de plus, inévitablement amené une acculturation des emprunts faits au droit anglais. La production doctrinale est limitée durant la période considérée. Les publications présentent souvent comme caractéristique de prendre

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appui sur des ouvrages étrangers, encore que les auteurs s’efforcent de présenter la spécificité du droit canadien. Les Messieurs et Cugnet, qui commentent le droit coutumier, s’inspirent des travaux d’auteurs français. Pour sa part, Joseph-François Perrault préfère traduire des ouvrages britanniques plutôt que de les adapter. À la défense de ces auteurs, il faut préciser qu’il n’était guère aisé pour un Canadien de tenter de produire un texte original sur le droit issu des métropoles. Le respect à l’égard de la doctrine étrangère va d’ailleurs perdurer fort longtemps. Pierre-Basile Mignault, lorsqu’il lance, au tournant du XXe siècle, le traité qui fera sa renommée adapte un traité français.62 Ce phénomène d’hypertextualité est vraisemblablement un trait important de culture coloniale qui prévaut dans la province. La formation d’une opinion publique Aux côtés des œuvres de doctrine destinées surtout aux juristes, la période connaît des publications qui traitent de sujets liés au droit, mais qui présentent un caractère politique. Il faut dire que le changement de métropole et la mise en place d’institutions judiciaires et parlementaires de tradition britannique se prêtent à l’expression de commentaires et d’opinions. Les nouvelles institutions incitent les Canadiens à prendre position. La nature des questions traitées dans les ouvrages explique l’éventail, parfois divergeant, des positions adoptées par les auteurs. Le ton est souvent polémique. Les auteurs ou les initiateurs de ces publications sont fréquemment des acteurs de la vie politique qui cherchent par leurs publications à entrer en dialogue avec une population plus ou moins étendue afin de gagner ses faveurs. En somme, ils veulent obtenir l’adhésion de l’opinion publique à leurs vues. Les publications qui poursuivent une telle finalité peuvent être regroupées en deux corpus distincts: le premier est constitué d’essais et le second de procès. Les essais sont en nombre relativement réduit. Il s’agit d’ouvrages qui traitent principalement de questions constitutionnelles. L’essai le plus marquant, et le plus commenté, demeure l’Appel à la justice de l’État, de Pierre Du Calvet.63 L’ouvrage est écrit par un homme resté profondément meurtri à la suite de son emprisonnement, sous le mandat du gouverneur Frederick Haldimand.64 Soupçonné d’intelligence avec les révolutionnaires américains, Du Calvet est arrêté en septembre 1780 et détenu jusqu’en mai 1783, sans qu’aucune accusation n’ait été portée contre lui. Une fois libéré, il n’a de cesse d’obtenir réparation en

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cherchant la condamnation du gouverneur. Ses démarches ne produisent pas les résultats escomptés et il se rend à Londres où il tente de bénéficier du soutien de diverses personnes. Insatisfait des résultats, il recourt à la publication pour narrer son histoire et exprimer ses doléances. Du Calvet ne se limite toutefois pas à faire état de ses propres vexations, il prend le parti des Canadiens en s’élevant contre l’organisation constitutionnelle de la province. L’auteur, qui adopte un ton pamphlétaire, s’exprime dans une série de lettres adressées à des personnes liées au pouvoir, dont le roi luimême. Une de ces lettres, la plus importante, a comme destinataires ses compatriotes canadiens. Après un rappel de son infortune où il s’en prend au gouverneur, Du Calvet passe à la critique des institutions coloniales et propose des réformes. Le tout récent Acte de Québec, loin de recevoir ses éloges, est présenté comme un texte ambigu et comme le fondement du totalitarisme institué par Haldimand. Fort de ce constat, il avance des propositions de réforme. Il souhaite le rétablissement de l’habeas corpus, l’imposition de limites aux pouvoirs du gouverneur et la démocratisation des institutions coloniales à commencer par l’introduction d’une chambre d’assemblée, faisant par là sienne une doléance des commerçants britanniques. Du Calvet se prononce également en faveur de la liberté de presse. Finalement, au nom du droit des gens, il demande l’octroi de la citoyenneté britannique aux Canadiens. Dans un texte d’opinion comme celui-ci, la réaction à l’égard de l’Acte de Québec est diamétralement opposée à celle d’un Cugnet. Les deux auteurs font de cette loi une lecture à ce point différente – en considérant chacun une partie seulement du texte – qu’on pourrait croire qu’ils fondent leurs propos sur deux textes différents. Du Calvet entend réhabiliter son honneur par ses poursuites judiciaires et la publication de son ouvrage. Au-delà de ses intérêts personnels, il se montre sensible à la situation des Canadiens qui en raison de leur état de vaincus sont devenus « étrangers, intrus, esclaves civils, dans leur propre pays ».65 Sa promotion d’une société démocratique constitue une réponse à cet état de soumission. L’ouvrage, diffusé dans la colonie, contribue à la formation d’une opinion publique. Pour les uns, liés à l’administration coloniale, il s’agit d’un brulot, pour les autres, favorables à l’émancipation des esprits, il encourage l’éveil des consciences. La constitution britannique est l’objet de l’attention des auteurs. Dans un court texte signé par « un vrai canadien », Robert-Anne d’Estimauville en donne une présentation succincte au bénéfice de ses com-

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patriotes afin qu’ils puissent mieux apprécier « l’admirable constitution sous laquelle ils ont le bonheur de vivre ».66 Sa description insiste sur les pouvoirs que détiennent les trois composantes du parlement impérial (le roi, la Chambre des lords et la Chambre des communes) et sur l’équilibre établi entre chacun d’eux. L’auteur vénère cette constitution, mais il estime qu’elle ne saurait connaître un tel achèvement ailleurs qu’en Angleterre.67 L’auteur reconnaît que la cause du mauvais fonctionnement des institutions coloniales réside dans le défaut d’analogie avec le parlement impérial et d’ajouter qu’une « telle analogie ne peut exister dans aucune des portions subordonnées de l’empire britannique ».68 Le député Jacques Labrie réagit vivement à l’opuscule de d’Estimauville qu’il présente comme une « ébauche informe ».69 Son essai, comme cela se produit fréquemment à l’époque, comprend la traduction d’un extrait tiré d’un ouvrage d’Henry Brooke, précédé d’un historique basé sur les travaux de ce même auteur, ainsi que ceux de Jean-Louis de Lolme. Le tout est suivi d’un commentaire sur la constitution du BasCanada. Labrie est un fervent admirateur de la constitution britannique dont il vante, à son tour, l’équilibre institué entre ses différentes composantes. Dans un parallèle avec la situation canadienne, Labrie s’en prend au conseil législatif, composé de personnes qu’il estime dépourvues d’indépendance d’esprit, en ce qu’elles sont redevables de leur élévation au pouvoir du gouverneur.70 Ceci l’amène à conclure que le Bas-Canada ne possède pas une constitution à l’image de celle de la métropole et que l’édifice s’écroulera à défaut de revoir sa composition. Un thème voué à un avenir florissant apparaît à cette époque: celui de la sauvegarde des institutions canadiennes. Cette question est inextricablement liée à la situation politique. Joseph-François Perrault, sous la forme d’une lettre ouverte adressée au rédacteur du journal patriote Le Canadien, analyse le système judiciaire mis en place dans la colonie, après la Conquête, et prend la défense de ce qu’il appelle « nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois ».71 S’il se montre favorable à l’introduction du droit criminel anglais, il critique vigoureusement les transformations apportées aux institutions civilistes qui, à son avis, ont complexifié l’administration de la justice. Or, l’accès à la justice constitue un thème auquel Perrault est profondément attaché. En guise de solution, il propose une réorganisation des tribunaux. De plus, il défend l’idée de la prévalence des lois françaises sur le territoire du BasCanada: « En vain prétend-on que c’est à nous à nous conformer aux lois anglaises, c’est au contraire aux Anglais qui viennent s’établir ici à

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se conformer aux nôtres, à devenir de vrais Canadiens, et à travailler à faire disparaître cette distinction odieuse d’Anglais et de Canadiens […] ».72 L’intervention de Perrault révèle un changement dans sa pensée. Alors qu’au début du siècle, il se situe proche du parti des bureaucrates, il adopte dans cette brochure une perspective nettement plus critique. Une brochure traite d’une question d’une portée limitée, soit la langue de rédaction des procédures judiciaires. Encore ici, le texte prend la forme d’une lettre ouverte, adressée cette fois-ci au juge Edward Bowen. Il est signé par « un étudiant en droit », plus tard identifié comme étant Augustin-Norbert Morin. Clerc auprès de l’avocat DenisBenjamin Viger, proche du parti canadien, Morin s’en prend à ce juge qui avait renvoyé une affaire au motif que le « writ ou ordre de sommation » avait été rédigé en français, alors que, d’après lui, il aurait dû l’être en anglais.73 Dans ce texte qui pose la question du bilinguisme du système judiciaire, Morin proclame que les Canadiens sont des « hommes libres » et que la Conquête n’a pu les dépouiller de leur droit naturel à l’usage de leur langue.74 Sur un ton direct et avec assurance, il signale les dangers d’une politique qui porterait atteinte au droit des Canadiens de s’exprimer en français, il rappelle la teneur de l’acte de capitulation, de l’Acte de Québec ou de l’Acte constitutionnel de 1791, et il retient que la métropole n’a jamais restreint le droit des Canadiens. La question envisagée présente un caractère clairement juridique. Toutefois, elle ne saurait être traitée sans mettre en exergue les aspects politiques qu’elle sous-tend. Morin qui, déjà à l’époque où il rédige son texte, s’est adonné au journalisme ne manque pas de construire une argumentation qui permette d’atteindre des visées politiques. Le second groupe de publications qui participent à la constitution d’une opinion publique se distingue de celui des essais. Il s’agit d’un ensemble de brochures qui ont pour but de diffuser du matériel lié à des procès.75 Un examen rapide de ce corpus peut laisser croire que ces publications sont destinées exclusivement à des juristes. Or, pour une très grande part, il n’en est rien. Elles ont pour but de rejoindre une population qui va au-delà de la communauté juridique. La présentation de certaines d’entre elles permettra d’illustrer ce rôle. Une distinction importante sur les modalités d’administration de la justice entre le Régime français et le Régime anglais concerne la publicité des procès. Alors qu’en Nouvelle-France, les tribunaux royaux ne semblent pas siéger en séances publiques, il en va autrement à la suite de l’introduction d’institutions judiciaires de tradition britannique. Le

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public, admis dans les salles d’audience, est à même de suivre l’évolution d’un procès, au jour le jour. La présence de journalistes ajoute à la diffusion des affaires par les comptes-rendus qu’ils en font. Le caractère public des procès incite les différents auditoires à se forger une opinion sur les affaires qui sont amenées devant les tribunaux. Ils peuvent ainsi se faire leur propre idée sur la culpabilité d’un prévenu, la crédibilité d’un témoin, la valeur des arguments des procureurs et la qualité de la décision d’un juge. Le public devient un tiers dans l’arène judiciaire. Il va de soi qu’une très large part des affaires judiciaires présentent un intérêt limité à celui des parties. Il demeure que la présence d’un auditoire lors de la tenue des procès peut faire basculer une affaire judiciaire dans la sphère publique et échapper ainsi à ses seuls protagonistes. Les publications des procès sont loin d’adopter une présentation uniforme, tantôt elles diffusent différentes pièces liées à une affaire, tantôt elles présentent la narration d’un procès. Les initiateurs de ces publications poursuivent généralement trois objectifs distincts, ils veulent le rétablissement d’une réputation, souhaitent l’intervention d’une autorité ou cherchent à exercer une influence de nature politique. Quelques exemples permettront de saisir le contenu de ces publications. Durant la période couverte, des personnes amènent dans l’espace public des différends qui auraient pu être réglés par les seuls protagonistes. Au début du XIXe siècle, Louis Bourdages et Joseph Cartier, qui font partie de l’élite de la région du Richelieu, s’opposent sur la milice. La publication de brochures,76 dans lesquelles sont reproduites des pièces au soutien de leurs prétentions respectives, fait sortir l’affaire de l’ombre et accorde une diffusion au conflit. Le but de la démarche est de gagner le public aux vues de chacun des protagonistes. Au-delà de la publicité apportée à une affaire, certaines personnes qui s’estiment lésées se fondent sur la publication d’une affaire pour requérir l’intervention d’une autorité. Le procès de Baptiste Cadien est un cas type.77 À la suite d’une condamnation à mort du métis pour meurtre, la brochure permet de revenir sur le procès et de faire état des démarches faites pour l’obtention de la grâce. Le but de la publication est d’émouvoir l’opinion publique et d’infléchir les autorités provinciales. Un groupe de publications s’éloignent de cas liés à des considérations personnelles pour s’étendre à des questions politiques qui concernent toute la province. La première affaire a été fréquemment commentée,78 il s’agit du procès de David McLane. Le prévenu, d’origine américaine,

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est soupçonné de sédition par les autorités coloniales qui craignent le soulèvement du Bas-Canada alors qu’au tournant du XIXe siècle un climat de suspicion s’est abattu sur la colonie. L’homme est arrêté et poursuivi pour haute trahison. Son procès attire une foule considérable. McLane est condamné à être pendu et éviscéré sur la place publique. En plus d’attirer les curieux, l’affaire est couverte par la Gazette de Québec / Quebec Gazette. La publicité est amplifiée par la publication de brochures diffusées, en anglais et en français, dans la colonie79 et même par une brochure destinée au public américain.80 Ces publications sont une initiative des autorités coloniales qui souhaitent marquer l’opinion publique et éliminer toute tentative de révolte. Il est manifeste que cette affaire a suscité la discussion. Vers la fin de la période, une série de brochures est consacrée à la Révolte des patriotes. À cette occasion, des rixes font des victimes. Des personnes sont alors poursuivies pour meurtres par les autorités provinciales. Les affaires Cardinal81 et Jalbert82 en sont des illustrations intéressantes. Les publications présentent une description du procès fondée sur une narration des propos des différents acteurs dans le but d’établir la preuve de la culpabilité ou de l’innocence des prévenus. De plus, le contexte politique dans lequel s’inscrivent les événements est jugé déterminant, au point que la page de titre de deux brochures comprend l’inscription suivante: « Procès politique ». Le lecteur, même sans connaissance en droit, peut saisir le propos et accorder son appui aux prévenus ou à la Couronne, au nom des principes qu’il privilégie. Quelques affaires, quoiqu’elles trouvent leur source dans les mêmes événements, présentent un contenu juridique affirmé. Les troubles de 1837 entraînent la suspension de l’application de l’habeas corpus dans la province. Des juges déclarent cette suspension inconstitutionnelle. Leurs jugements sont cassés en appel et les juges qui les ont rendus suspendus.83 Ces décisions, malgré leur complexité, sont publiées84 dans l’intention de rejoindre un large public et d’obtenir un soutien populaire au bénéfice des juges suspendus, sinon du mouvement insurrectionnel. L’arrivée de presses dans la province était de nature à favoriser la formation d’une opinion publique. Les ouvrages présentés ici ne peuvent certes pas être considérés comme les témoignages les plus significatifs de la prise de parole dans la province. Il demeure qu’ils se caractérisent par des propos centrés sur des questions à caractère juridique, encore qu’ils puissent, pour certains d’entre eux, être vus comme appartenant davantage au monde de la politique.

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La diffusion des sources La diffusion des sources juridiques devient une préoccupation au cours de la période étudiée ainsi que le montrent les recueils de diverses natures qui sont édités. Ces recueils ont pour but essentiel de faciliter l’administration de la justice en mettant des sources à la disposition des agents du droit. De loin, les recueils les plus populaires sont voués à la publication de textes à portée législative (16). Les règles de pratique (6), les formulaires (2) et les recueils d’arrêts (4) demeurent marginaux (voir le tableau). Les recueils de textes à portée législative sont relativement variés. Les plus originaux sont les recueils de règlements de police.85 Il s’agit de règles qui régissent le commerce, la salubrité ou les comportements dans les villes et qui, avant la création des municipalités, sont établies par les juges de paix. Dans un premier temps, la publicité de ces textes est vraisemblablement assurée par une publication des règlements dans les journaux et par un affichage public.86 Au début des années 1810, les règles, applicables dans les villes de Québec et de Montréal, sont publiées sous la forme d’une brochure qui regroupe des règlements épars. Cette mise en forme permet un recours aisé à ces règles et facilite l’administration de la justice. À cet égard, une note liminaire – qui semble annoncer la diffusion assez large de la brochure – invite les citoyens de la ville de Québec à dénoncer les contrevenants et à suggérer des améliorations à la réglementation.87 Les recueils sont soit unilingues français ou anglais, soit bilingues, c’est-à-dire avec une présentation des textes en regard. Des lois votées par l’Assemblée législative du BasCanada sont également diffusées sous forme de brochures.88 Il s’agit de textes législatifs utiles à un certain nombre de personnes appelées à intervenir dans le domaine de la milice, des ports et de la voirie. Les règles de pratique des tribunaux constituent une série de publications qui, malgré le caractère technique de leur contenu, ont influencé l’évolution du droit bas-canadien. Le recueil le plus fameux à avoir été diffusé dans la province l’est à l’initiative des juges Jonathan Sewell et James Monk. Réagissant à l’état de confusion qui règne dans l’administration de la justice, les juges décident d’intervenir. Prenant appui sur une loi de 1801, ils édictent avec leurs collègues, en 1809, des règles de pratique applicables à la Cour du banc du roi.89 Ces règles, rédigées en anglais, se présentent sous la forme d’un volume qui est divisé en 11 sections et compte près de 400 pages. Les règles traitent de l’instance judiciaire et de ses différentes phases. Un long appendice présente pas

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moins de 83 modèles de formules – à contenu obligatoire – appelées à être copiées et recopiées dans les années qui suivront. L’initiative des juges Sewell et Monk soulève l’ire de l’Assemblée législative qui condamne le geste et porte une accusation contre les juges.90 Les députés relèvent notamment que, par ses règles, la cour a modifié les droits civils reconnus aux Canadiens et empiété sur les droits de l’Assemblée en exerçant un pouvoir législatif.91 L’affaire amène le Conseil privé à trancher le différend. Le tribunal rejette finalement les accusations portées contre les deux juges.92 Un type de publications, quoique rare, mérite d’être présenté: le formulaire. L’usage de la formule préconstituée est relativement fréquent à l’époque qui nous intéresse, et ce, tant en droit de tradition française qu’anglaise.93 Les praticiens canadiens utilisent volontiers des modèles étrangers. Il demeure qu’au début des années 1810, des formulaires sont publiés dans la province, à l’initiative de Joseph-François Perrault.94 Le moment de parution de ces formulaires coïncide avec la publication des règles de pratique des tribunaux. La publication de formulaires n’est vraisemblablement pas sans lien avec les efforts des juges de la Cour du banc du roi de tenter par les règles de procédure d’améliorer le fonctionnement des tribunaux. Les formulaires participent, sans doute à l’atteinte d’un pareil objectif. Perrault qui, à titre de protonotaire, est un agent important de l’appareil judiciaire, entend sans doute faciliter l’administration de la justice par ce type de publication. Le premier recueil a pour but de fournir les formules usuelles utilisées par l’instance inférieure du tribunal itinérant qu’est la Cour du banc du roi.95 Perrault prépare ce recueil pour venir en aide aux personnes chargées, en dehors des villes, d’émettre les différentes pièces de procédures requises pour les actions les plus fréquentes, comme l’action pétitoire, le bornage, la réclamation de cens et rentes ou l’injure verbale. L’usager de ce recueil, après avoir entendu la partie demanderesse, n’a qu’à identifier la formule, la recopier en complétant les espaces laissés en blanc, notamment pour l’identification des parties ou l’inscription de détails pertinents (montant d’argent réclamé, date, etc.). Le second formulaire est présenté comme un manuel à l’usage des huissiers.96 Malgré son titre, il s’agit, pour l’essentiel, d’un formulaire. Dans les deux cas, les formules proposées par Perrault sont inspirées de la tradition civiliste. Outre ces formulaires, d’autres ouvrages contiennent des formules sans toutefois que cela soit annoncé dans le titre. Ainsi, le traité de Richard Burn traduit par Perrault fournit de multiples exemples de

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formules qui sont traduites en français comme les extraits retenus de l’ouvrage. Cette initiative mérite d’être soulignée. En effet, Burn précise dans son traité que certains types de formules, suivant le droit britannique, « seront en Anglais & écris d’une manière ordinaire & lisible, & et non pas d’une écriture de Cour ».97 Cette obligation avait pour but de forcer les officiers de justice à écrire en anglais plutôt qu’en latin afin de rendre la justice plus accessible au citoyen ordinaire. Cette question, transposée dans la colonie, a pu conduire à soutenir que les formules utilisées en droit criminel devaient être rédigées en anglais. Or, Perrault traduit l’ensemble des formules puisées chez Burn en français sans plus de précision comme si la logique du système – la recherche d’accessibilité – demandait la traduction en français des formules anglaises pour tenir compte de la langue de la majorité de la population. Plus tard, au cours des années 1830, la question de la langue des procédures est posée avec acuité, notamment par David Chisholme, greffier de la paix du district de Trois-Rivières, qui soutient que l’anglais doit prévaloir même lorsque les parties sont francophones.98 Il aurait été vraisemblable qu’au début du XIXe siècle un nouveau genre d’ouvrages, typique de la production juridique, fasse son apparition: le recueil d’arrêts. Durant la période étudiée, aucune publication périodique, vouée à la jurisprudence, ne voit le jour. Dès 1815, le juge Pierre Bédard déplore l’absence de ce type de publication qu’il voit comme une solution à l’état de confusion dans lequel se trouve alors le monde judiciaire.99 Des jugements publiés auraient favorisé la stabilité de la jurisprudence. Au cours des années 1830, l’idée de lancer un recueil d’arrêts est évoquée, une aide pécuniaire est même demandée à la Chambre d’Assemblée, mais le projet ne se concrétise pas.100 Pourtant, autour des années 1820, les colonies britanniques voisines possèdent déjà leurs séries de rapports judiciaires périodiques: Terre-Neuve dès 1817, le Haut-Canada en 1823 et le Nouveau-Brunswick en 1825. Les raisons de cette absence de recueils périodiques sont difficiles à identifier. La crainte d’une clientèle insuffisante est un motif vraisemblable, de même que la motivation insatisfaisante des jugements. De surcroît, le poids de la tradition juridique civiliste dans la colonie pouvait laisser perplexe les praticiens qui trouvaient leurs « autorités » dans la doctrine plutôt que dans les arrêts. Les juges prennent donc connaissance des décisions de leurs collègues surtout à partir de communications personnelles.101 Malgré l’absence d’une publication périodique, quelques recueils isolés sont publiés. Deux premiers ouvrages semblent, a priori, présen-

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ter une portée historique. Il s’agit d’une initiative de Joseph-François Perrault, alors protonotaire et gardien des archives judiciaires de la colonie française, qui collige et publie des décisions rendues, d’une part, par la Cour de prévôté102 et, d’autre part, par le Conseil supérieur.103 La présentation liminaire de ces ouvrages montre bien que le dessein de Perrault ne s’inscrit pas, comme il serait possible de croire, dans une démarche archéologique. Il cherche plutôt à montrer que certaines modalités de l’administration de la justice en Nouvelle-France gagneraient à être introduites dans la province. Ainsi, il insiste sur le rôle joué par les experts et les praticiens devant la Cour de prévôté, notamment pour établir les comptes, constater les dommages ou liquider les successions. La transposition de cette solution déchargerait les juges d’une partie de leurs tâches. S’agissant du Conseil supérieur, Perrault souhaite que la lecture des décisions rendues par cette cour exerce une certaine influence à l’occasion d’une réorganisation de la Cour d’appel de la province. En somme, Perrault adopte une démarche de réforme des institutions judiciaires. Les initiateurs des deux autres recueils – le juge George Pyke104 et l’avocat George Okill Stuart – poursuivent une tout autre finalité. Ils ont pour but de faire connaître les décisions des tribunaux supérieurs ou d’appel de la province. Stuart déplore l’absence de recueils périodiques et estime qu’ils seraient d’autant plus pertinents que la province vit « under a system derived from such various sources as is the law of Lower Canada ».105 Les recueils parus permettent de prendre conscience de la naissance d’une jurisprudence coloniale. À cet égard, le recueil de Stuart est révélateur des problèmes causés par la dualité de traditions juridiques dans la province. L’impact de la jurisprudence est toutefois limité sans l’existence de recueils périodiques. De plus, la diffusion restreinte de la jurisprudence ne favore guère la critique des arrêts par les membres de la communauté juridique. Ceci a certainement ralenti l’apparition d’une pensée juridique autonome et peut-être aussi d’une opinion publique qui aurait pu réagir à certaines décisions des tribunaux qui présentaient un contenu politique affirmé. Les décisions parues sous forme de brochures, dont il a été question plus haut, ont probablement permis d’atténuer cet effet. Les recueils présentés sont, pour une bonne part, des compilations. Ils sont révélateurs de l’émergence de pouvoirs locaux dans la province. Ces publications mettent des textes à contenu législatif à la portée de personnes habilitées à faire respecter les règles qui y sont rassemblées.

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Les recueils de règles de pratique montrent l’étendue du pouvoir reconnu aux juges dans un système de tradition britannique. Il en va de même des très rares recueils d’arrêts qui attestent, par ailleurs, de la qualité des jugements retenus pour publication. Dans une société où l’État est encore relativement peu présent, ces recueils constituent une manifestation de son pouvoir dans un domaine où on ne s’étonne guère qu’il se manifeste, celui de l’administration de la justice. Conclusion La littérature juridique publiée de 1767 à 1840, même si elle demeure un artefact parmi d’autres, est révélatrice de certains traits de la pensée et de la culture juridiques québécoises. L’examen des premières décennies de publications juridiques témoigne de liens étroits entre la province et les métropoles que sont la France et l’Angleterre. Ceci ressort de l’influence exercée par les publications métropolitaines. La structure même des publications est marquée par le mimétisme de l’appareil paratextuel. En outre, plusieurs textes de la production provinciale sont fondés sur des emprunts à des textes métropolitains faisant dès lors une large place à l’hypertextualité. À ce constat, il serait facile de conclure à l’absence d’originalité de cette production éditoriale. Or, ces publications consacrées au droit, certes tributaires de modèles européens, montrent une capacité d’adapter les institutions et les thèmes traités en considérant les particularités de la colonie, il est le reflet d’une acculturation. Ce corpus révèle ainsi des traits originaux du droit provincial et de la manière d’envisager les questions juridiques. La production éditoriale fait prendre conscience de l’élaboration d’un droit provincial. Ce droit se définit par rapport à celui des métropoles. Quelques auteurs s’efforcent de rendre compte des singularités du droit canadien en jetant les bases d’une production doctrinale autochtone. Par ailleurs, l’introduction de l’imprimerie, la mise en place d’un système judiciaire de type britannique et l’instauration d’institutions parlementaires contribuent à susciter la discussion. Dans ce contexte, les questions juridiques ou les affaires judiciaires sont projetées dans l’espace public et contribuent à favoriser la constitution d’une opinion publique. Finalement, la publication de différents recueils, en plus de permettre de diffuser des sources juridiques provinciales, est une manifestation de l’apparition de pouvoirs locaux. L’ensemble de ce corpus de publications juridiques est un témoignage du processus de constitution du champ juridique québécois.

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NOTES * L’auteur remercie monsieur Matthieu Juneau qui, en tant qu’auxiliaire de recherche, a effectué une partie de la recherche documentaire à la base de cet article. La présente étude a pu être réalisée grâce au soutien financier du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada. 1 Jean Carbonnier utilise l’expression littérature du droit: Droit civil, t. 1, Introduction. Personnes. La famille, l’enfant, le couple (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 2004), 285. 2 Maurice Lemire et autres, La vie littéraire au Québec, t. 1, 1764–1805, La voix française des nouveaux sujets britanniques (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991), 289–95, et t. 2, 1806–1839, Le projet national des Canadiens (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992), 225–44. Déjà, au XIXe siècle, Edmond Lareau consacrait un chapitre à la littérature juridique dans son Histoire de la littérature canadienne (Montréal: Imprimé par J. Lovell, 1874), 381–443. 3 Gilles Gallichan, « Le Lex parliamentaria ou le Bas-Canada à l’école parlementaire », Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada 25 (1986): 52–4; et Sylvio Normand, « François-Joseph Cugnet et la reconstitution du droit de la Nouvelle-France », Cahiers aixois des droits de l’outre-mer français 1 (202): 127–45. Les historiens du droit rattachés à la tradition de common law manifestent un intérêt pour les publications juridiques, notamment en contexte colonial. Parmi les publications récentes, l’ouvrage suivant est particulièrement significatif: Angela Fernandez et Markus D. Dubber (dir.), Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise (Portland: Hart Publishing, 2012), 252 p. 4 Bernard Andrès, « La génération de la Conquête: un questionnement de l’archive », Voix et images 59 (hiver 1995): 274–93. 5 André Morel, « Collet, Mathieu-Benoît », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] www.biographi.ca/. Plus généralement sur cette question, voir David Gilles, « Les acteurs de la norme coloniale face au droit métropolitain: de l’adaptation à l’appropriation (Canada XVIIe–XVIIIe s.) », Clio@Thémis 4 (2011), [en ligne] http://www.cliothemis.com/. 6 Lettre de Louis-Guillaume Verrier au ministre, 19 septembre 1736 (Archives nationales de France, Fonds des colonies, série C11A, Correspondance à l’arrivée, Canada, vol. 66, fol. 114). 7 François Melançon, « Le livre en Nouvelle France » dans Patricia Fleming, Gilles Gallichan, et Yvan Lamonde (dir.), Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada, vol. 1, Des débuts à 1840 (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2004), 48, 51. 8 Le nombre des ouvrages peut varier sensiblement suivant les essais rete-

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12 13 14

15 16

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18

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nus. Dans la constitution du corpus étudié, je me suis limité aux essais qui présentaient un contenu juridique conséquent. John Hare et Jean-Pierre Wallot, Les imprimés dans le Bas-Canada, 1801–1840: bibliographie analytique, t. 1, 1801–1810 (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1967), 82, no 84. Ibid., 29, no 18. Claude Galarneau, « Livre et société à Québec (1760–1859): état des recherches », dans Yvan Lamonde (dir.), L’imprimé au Québec: aspects historiques (18e–20e siècles) (Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1983), 127–44. Yvan Lamonde et Daniel Olivier, Les bibliothèques personnelles au Québec (Montréal: Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1983), 131 p. Sur la notion de paratexte, voir: Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 7–19; et Philippe Lane, La périphérie du texte (Paris: Nathan, 1992), 13–15. Joseph-François Perrault, Dictionnaire portatif et abregé des loix et regles du Parlement provincial de Bas Canada: depuis son etablissement par l’acte de la 31me année du regne de Sa Très Gracieuse Majesté George III, Ch. XXXI. jusques et compris l’an de Notre Seigneur 1805 (Québec: John Neilson, 1806) [3] (Institut canadien de microreproductions historiques [ci-après ICMH] collection de microfiches; no 20886). Joseph-François Perrault, Manuel des huissiers de la Cour du banc du Roi, du district de Québec, dans la province de Québec (Québec: C. LeFrançois, 1813) [3]. Patricia Fleming, « Le livre de paie de William Brown, 1775–1790 », dans Fleming, Gallichan, et Lamonde (dir.), op. cit., note 7, 105–7; et Patricia Fleming et Sandra Alston, Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine’s A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1771–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 80. Pierre Tousignant et Madeleine Dionne-Tousignant, « Cugnet, FrançoisJoseph », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] www .biographi.ca/. George Petyt, Lex parliamentaria: ou, Traité de la loi et coutume des parlements, montrant leur antiquité, noms, espèces et qualités. Avec le rapport d’un cas en Parlement entre Sir Francis Goodwyn et Sir John Fortescue, chevaliers du comté de Bucks, 1. Jac. I; trad. en françois par Jos. F. Perrault (Québec: P.E. Desbarats, 1803), 421 p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 35197); et Gallichan, loc. cit., note 3, 45. Claude Galarneau, « McLane (McLean, M’Lane), David », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] www.biographi.ca/. Gallichan, loc. cit., note 3, 52–4. Jean-Marie Lebel, Ludger Duvernay et la Minerve: étude d’une entreprise de

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23

24 25

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27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

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37 38

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presse montréalaise de la première moitié du XIXe siècle (mémoire présenté à l’École des gradués de l’Université Laval, Québec, 1982), 155–6. Philip Girard, « Themes and Variations in Early Canadian Legal Culture: Beamish Murdoch and His Epitome of the Laws of Nova-Scotia », Law and History Review 11 (1993): 134. Sur le phénomène de la souscription, voir: Mary Lu Macdonald, « La publication par souscription », dans Fleming, Gallichan, et Lamonde (dir.), op. cit., note 7, 83–5. Marie Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 89. « Avertissements », Gazette de Québec / Quebec Gazette, 24 novembre 1774, p. 3. Voir également, le prospectus d’un ouvrage de Jean Mackay dans Le Canadien, 11 février 1809. « Prospectus d’un pamphlet qui sera intitulé, Les premiers rudimens de la constitution britannique; traduit de l’anglais de Mr. Brooke », 4 p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 32340). Hare et Wallot, op. cit., note 9, 194, no 205. Joseph-Edmond Roy, Histoire du notariat au Canada (Lévis: La Revue du Notariat, 1900), 2:364–6. Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique: contenant l’explication des termes de droit, d’ordonnance, de coutumes & de pratique; avec les jurisdictions de France (Paris: Saugrain, 1771), 2 v. Hare et Wallot, op. cit., note 9, 194, note 48. Tremaine, op. cit., note 24, 90. Hare et Wallot, op. cit., note 9, 107. Gallichan, loc. cit., note 3, 45. Sur cette question voir: Jean-Philippe Garneau, « Une culture de l’amalgame au prétoire: les avocats de Québec et l’élaboration d’un langage juridique commun au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles », Canadian Historical Review 88 (2007): 113–48. Lettre de Louis-Guillaume Verrier au ministre, 14 octobre 1739 (Archives nationales de France, Fonds des colonies, série C11A, Correspondance à l’arrivée, Canada, vol. 72, fols 228–9). Pierre Tousignant et Madeleine Dionne-Tousignant, « Cugnet, FrançoisJoseph », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] http://www .biographi.ca/. Coutumes et usages anciens de la province de Québec, 12 avril 1768 (Archives nationales du Canada, Fonds du Colonial Office, 42/28). Elizabeth Arthur, « Maseres, Francis », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] www.biographi.ca/.

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39 En collaboration avec Peter Marshall, « Hey, William », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] www.biographi.ca/. 40 Honorius Provost, « Joseph-André-Mathurin Jacrau » et Provost, « Colomban-Sébastien Pressart », dans Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, [en ligne] http://www.biographi.ca/. 41 An Abstract of Those Parts of the Custom of the Viscounty and Provostship of Paris, which were received and practised in the Province of Quebec, in the Time of the French Government (Londres: Charles Eyre et William Strahan, 1772), iv, 33 p.; An Abstract of the Loix de police; or, Public Regulations for the Establishment of Peace and good Order, that were of force in the Province of Quebec, in the Time of the French Government (Londres: Charles Eyre et William Strahan, 1772), 31 p.; The Sequel of the Abstract of those Parts of the Custom of the Viscounty and Provostship of Paris, which were received and practiced in the Province of Quebec in the Time of the French Government: containing the Thirteen latter Titles of the said Abstract (Londres: Charles Eyre et William Strahan, 1773), 1–154; suivi de: An Abstract of the Criminal Laws That were in Force in the Province of Quebec, in the Time of the French Government (Londres: Charles Eyre et William Strahan, 1773), 156–74. Ces ouvrages sont disponibles sur le site internet « Notre mémoire en ligne », à l’adresse suivante: http://www.canadiana.org/. 42 An Abstract of Those Parts of the Custom of the Viscounty and Provostship of Paris, which were received and practised in the Province of Quebec, in the Time of the French Government, ibid., i. 43 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 11–12. 44 An Abstract of Those Parts of the Custom of the Viscounty and Provostship of Paris, which were received and practised in the Province of Quebec, in the Time of the French Government, op. cit, note 41, i, ii, 14, 25, 26, et 27. 45 Voir aussi: Thomas Kennedy Ramsay, Notes sur la coutume de Paris indiquant les articles encore en force avec tout le texte de la coutume à l’exception des articles relatifs aux fiefs et censives, les titres du retrait lignager et de la garde noble et bourgeoise (Montréal: 1863), [i], [v] et passim (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 37180). 46 « Projet d’un rapport préparé par l’honorable gouverneur en chef et le conseil de la province de Québec […] au sujet des lois et de l’administration de la justice de cette province », dans Adam Shortt et Arthur G. Doughty, Documents constitutionnels du Canada, t. 1, 1759–1791 (Ottawa: Imprimeur du roi, 1911), 204–40. 47 Traité de la loi des fiefs: qui a toujours été suivie en Canada depuis son établissement, tirée de celle contenue en la Coûtume de la prevôté et vicomté de Paris, à laquelle les fiefs et seigneuries de cette province sont assujettis, en vertu de leurs

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titres primitifs de concession, et des édits, reglemens, ordonances et declarations de Sa Majesté très Chrétienne, rendus en consequence; et des diferens jugemens d’intendans rendus à cet égard, en vertu de la loi des fiefs, et des dits édits, reglemens, ordonances et declarations: traité utile à tous les seigneurs de cette province, tant nouveaux qu’anciens sujets, aux juges et au receveur-général des droits de Sa Majesté (Québec: Guillaume Brown, 1775), xii (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 33322). Sur Cugnet, voir David Gilles « Archéologie de l’herméneutique du drois québécois. En quête des discours juridiques avant la Conquête », Revue juridique Thémis 44, 3 (2010), 49, 104–18. Ibid., xi. François-Joseph Cugnet, Traité abregé des ancienes loix, coutumes et usages de la colonie du Canada aujourd’huy province de Québec, tiré de la coutume de la prévôté et vicomté de Paris, à laquelle la dite colonie était assujétie, en consequence de l’édit de l’établissement du Conseil souverain du mois d’avril 1663; avec l’explication de chaque titre et de chaque article, puisée dans les meilleurs autheurs qui ont écrit et comenté la dite coutume (Québec: G. Brown, 1775), 160 (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 33321). Émilien Petit, Droit public ou Gouvernement des colonies françoises: d’après les loix faites pour ces pays (Paris: Delalain, 1771), 2 v. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 47041); Dissertations sur le droit public, des colonies françoises, espagnoles, et angloises, d’après les loix des trois nations, comparées entr’elles: dans la première de ces dissertations, on traite entr’autres objets de l’origine, & des causes, de la guerre entre l’Angleterre, & ses colonies; & de l’etat civil, & religieux des Canadiens catholiques (Genève: Knapen & fils, 1778), xxviii, 507 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 57250); et Traité sur le gouvernement des esclaves, 2 vols. (Paris: Knapen, 1777) (ICMH collection de microfiches; nos 47098–100). Émilien Petit (1713–1780) est un juriste français qui a fait carrière dans l’administration des colonies. Ses publications, qui traitent de questions de droit public, se singularisent par leur approche comparative (Édouard Tillet, « Petit, Émilien », dans Patrick Arabeyre, Jean-Louis Halpérin et Jacques Krynen [dir.], Dictionnaire historique des juristes français [XIIe–XXe siècle] [Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 2007], 619–20). Henry Des Rivières Beaubien, Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada, 3 t. (Montréal: L. Duvernay, 1832) (ICMH collection de microfiches; nos 34787–34789). Le jeune Amédée Papineau à qui l’ouvrage avait été remis ne semble pas en avoir tiré une grande inspiration: « Je crois en effet avoir déposé au fond de ma valise, en m’y rendant [au collège de Saint-Hyacinthe], le Cours de droit civil du Bas-Canada par Desrivières Beaubien et l’avoir rapporté intact à Montréal, après mon cours de philosophie ». (Souvenirs de jeunesse [1822–1837], texte établi avec introduction et notes par Georges Aubin [Sillery: Septentrion, 1998], 119).

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52 Outre les titres présentés, il avait été envisagé de traduire les ouvrages suivants: Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons de John Hatsell et le vol. 4, consacré au droit pénal, des Commentaries on the Laws of England de William Blackstone (Gilles Gallichan, Livre et politique au Bas-Canada, 1791–1849 [Québec: Septentrion, 1991], 141). 53 Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History / University of Toronto Press, 2006), 123. 54 Richard Burn, Le juge à paix et officier de paroisse, pour la province de Québec: extrait de Richard Burn; traduit par Jos. F. Perrault (Montréal: Fleury Mesplet, 1789), 561 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 28214). Sur les ouvrages consacrés aux juges de paix, voir: Jim Phillips, « A Low Law Counter Treatise? « Absentees » to « Wreck » in British North America’s First Justice of Peace Manual », dans Fernandez et Dubber (dir.), op. cit., note 3, 202–19 et notamment 206. 55 Burn, ibid., v. 56 Ibid., 58. 57 Jonathan Sewell, An Abstract from precedents of proceeding in the British House of Commons / Extrait des exemples de procédés dans la Chambre des communes de la Grande Bretagne (Québec: Samuel Neilson, 1792), 143 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 50479). 58 Petyt, op cit., note 18. Voir aussi: Gallichan, op. cit., note 52, 127–43. Sur l’attribution de l’ouvrage à George Petyt: Gallichan, loc. cit., note 3, 43–4. L’ouvrage était apprécié tant en Angleterre que dans les colonies américaines, où il fut imprimé, à New York, en 1716 (ibid., 45). 59 Petyt, ibid., [iv]. 60 Gallichan, op. cit., note 52, 136–42. 61 Sur le rôle de la traduction, voir: Patricia Dumas, La naissance de la traduction officielle au Canada et son impact politique culturel sous le gouvernement militaire et civil du Général James Murray (mémoire de maîtrise, l’Université York, 2004), vii, 238 p. 62 Sylvio Normand, « Le droit civil canadien de Pierre-Basile Mignault ou la fabrication d’un palimpseste », dans Nicholas Kasirer (dir.), Le Faux en droit privé (Montréal: Les éditions Thémis, 2000), 133–54. 63 Pierre du Calvet, Appel à la justice de l’État, ou, Recueil de lettres au Roi, au Prince de Galles, et aux ministres: avec une lettre à messieurs les Canadiens, où sont fidèlement exposés les actes horribles de la violence arbitraire qui a régné dans la colonie, durant les derniers troubles, & les vrais sentimens du Canada sur le Bill de Québec, & sur la forme de gouvernement la plus propre à y faire renaître la paix & le bonheur public: une lettre au Général Haldimand lui-même: enfin une dernière lettre à Milord Sidney, où on lit un précis des nouvelles du 4 & 10 de mai

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67 68 69

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dernier, sur ce qui s’est passé en avril dans le Conseil législatif de Québec, avec les protêts de six conseillers, le Lieutenant Gouverneur Henri Hamilton à leur tête, contre la nouvelle inquisition d’Etat établie par le Gouverneur et son parti (Londres: s.n., 1784), xiv, 320 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 34621). Lemire et autres, op. cit., note 2, t. 1, 289–95. Ibid., 135. [Robert-Anne d’Estimauville], Esquisse de la constitution britannique par un vrai canadien (Québec: T. Cary, 1827), 2 (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 21215). Ibid., 5. Ibid., 20. Jacques Labrie, Les premiers rudimens [sic] de la Constitution britannique; traduits de l’Anglais de M. Brooke; précédés d’un précis historique, et suivis d’observations sur la constitution du Bas-Canada, pour en donner l’histoire et en indiquer les principaux vices, avec un aperçu de quelques des moyens probables d’y remédier ouvrage utile à toutes sortes de personnes et principalement destiné à l’instruction politique de la jeunesse canadienne (Montréal: Lane, 1827), vi (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 36480). Ibid., 40. Joseph-François Perrault, Moyens de conserver nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois (Québec: Impr. de Fréchette, 1832), 32 p. vi (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 21359). Ibid., 23–4. [Augustin-Norbert Morin], Lettre à l’honorable Edward Bowen, écuyer: un des juges de la Cour du banc du roi de Sa Majesté pour le district de Québec par un étudiant en droit (Montréal: Lane, 1825), 16 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 38242). Ibid., 5. Sur l’ensemble de ce corpus, voir: Sylvio Normand, « La publication de procès et la constitution d’un espace public au Québec / Bas-Canada », Ottawa Law Review 42 (2010–11): 1–27. Les brochures étudiées ont été repérées dans la collection de microfiches de l’Institut canadien de microreproductions historiques (ICMH). Procédures d’une cour d’enquête, sur plainte du Lieut. Colonel Bourdages, contre le Lieut. Joseph Cartier, ordonnée par Son Excellence le Lieut. général Drummond, et tenue à Chambly, le 1 juin, 1815: rapport fidel [sic] de ce qui y a donné lieu, et de ce qui s’en est suivi (Montréal: C.B. Pasteur, 1815), 20 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 21017); Réponse à l’auteur d’un pamphlet sur les procédures d’une cour d’enquête sur plainte du Lieutenant Colonel Bourdages, contre le Lieut. Joseph Cartier, Quart. Maît. ordonnée par Son Excellence le Lieutenant Général Drummond, et tenue à Chambly, le 1 juin, 1815. Fiat justitia ruat

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coelum (Montréal: Nahum Mower, 1815), 40 p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 21018); et Réponse à Testis, sur les procédures d’une cour d’enquête: sur plainte du lieut. colonel Bourdages, contre le lieut. Joseph Cartier, ordonnée par Son Excellence le lieut. général Drummond; et tenue à Chambly, le 1 juin, 1815 (Montréal: C.B. Pasteur, 1816), 23, [1] p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 57299). Case of Baptiste Cadien for murder: Tried at Three Rivers, in the March session 1838 (Trois-Rivières: G. Stobbs, 1838), 24 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 21685). Voir: Hamar Foster, « Sins against the Great Spirit: The Law, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Mackenzie River Murders, 1835– 1839 », Criminal Justice History: An International Annual 10 (1989): 23–76. Sur cette affaire, voir: Frank Murray Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1993), 139–70; Frank Murray Greenwood, « Judges and Treason Law in Lower Canada, England, and the United States during the French Revolution, 1794–1800 », dans Frank Murray Greenwood et Barry Wright (dir.), Canadian State Trials, vol. 1, Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608–1837 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1996), 241, 266–69; et Claude Galarneau, La France devant l’opinion canadienne (1760–1815) (Québec/Paris: Les Presses de l’Université Laval / Armand Colin, 1970), 252–9. Le proces de David M’Lane pour haute trahison: devant une cour spéciale d’oyer et terminer a Quebec, le 7me juillet, 1797 (Québec: J. Neilson, 1797), 22 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 20832); The trial of David M’Lane for high treason: Before a special court of oyer and terminer at Quebec, on the 7th July, 1797 (Québec: J. Neilson, 1797), 21 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 49964); et The trial of David McLane for high treason: At the city of Quebec, in the province of Lower-Canada, on Friday, the seventh day of July, A.D. 1797: Taken in short-hand at the trial (Québec: W. Vondenvelden, 1797), 127 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 36953). The trial, condemnation and horrid execution of David M’Lane, formerly of Pennsylvania, for high treason, against the British government, at the city of Quebec, on the 21st of July last […] (Windham, OH: [s.n.], 1797), 12 p. (Early American imprints, first series, microfiche no 48170). Procès de Joseph N. Cardinal, et autres: auquel on a joint la requête argumentative en faveur des prisonniers, et plusieurs autres documents précieux, &c., &c., &c. par un étudiant en droit (Montréal: John Lovell, 1839), 144, [2] p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 10783); et Trial of Joseph N. Cardinal, and others: To which are added, the argumentative petition in favour of the prisoners and several other precious documents, &c. &c. &c. / by a student at law (Montréal: J. Lovell, 1839), 141 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 10863).

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82 Procès politique, la reine vs Jalbert: accusé du meurtre du Lieutenant Weir, du 32e Régiment de Sa Majesté (Montréal: Imprimé par F. Cinq-Mars, 1839), 87 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 35729); et Procès de François Jalbert (Montréal: s.n., 1839[?]), 22 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 35342). 83 Steven Watt, « State Trial by Legislature: The Special Council of Lower Canada, 1838–41 », dans Frank Murray Greenwood et Barry Wright (dir.), Canadian State Trials, vol. 2: Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837–1839 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2002), 248, 258–61. 84 Judicial decisions on the Writ of Habeas Corpus ad subjiciendum: and on the provincial ordinance, 2d Victoria, chap. 4, whereby the Habeas Corpus ordinance of 1784 has been suspended: with notes (Trois-Rivières: 1839), 27 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 10802); et Report of the case of John Teed: On an application for a writ of Habeas Corpus, decided by the Court of King’s Bench at Quebec: Also, the opinions of Justices Panet and Bedard, delivered in vacation upon the same case (Québec: Thos Cary, 1839), [1], 11 p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 47697). 85 Fyson, op. cit., note 53, 27–8. 86 Le document suivant est probablement une affiche: Rules and Regulations made by his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, at a Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, holden at the New Sessions House, in the City of Montreal, for the District of Montreal […]. Règlements fait par les juges de paix de sa majesté, à une court de quartier des sessions de la paix, tenue à la nouvelle chambre des sessions dans la ville et pour le District de Montréal […] (s.l.: Brown, 1809[?]) (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 14274), [en ligne] http://www .canadiana.org/. 87 Police, Québec (Ville), Règles et règlements de police: avec les extraits des divers ordonnances et statuts qui y ont rapport (Québec: Imprimés par John Neilson, 1811), [1] (ICMH collection de microfiches, no 51250), [en ligne] http:// www.canadiana.org/. 88 Il est essentiel de rappeler que les lois sont diffusées par les journaux. La publication des ordonnances et des lois dans La Gazette de Québec / Quebec Gazette revêt d’ailleurs un caractère officiel (Gilles Gallichan, « Les imprimés et le pouvoir », dans Fleming, Gallichan, et Lamonde [dir.], op. cit., note 7, 327, 328–9). 89 Orders and rules of practice in the Court of King’s Bench, for the district of Quebec, Lower Canada (Québec: 1809), 397 p. (ICMH collection de microfiches; no 53438). Voir aussi: Hare et Wallot, op cit., note 9, 201–3. Pour consulter d’autres documents liés au dossier, voir: Arthur G. Doughty et Duncan A. McArthur (dir.), Documents constitutionnels du Canada, t. 2, 1791–1818 (Ottawa: Imprimeur du roi, 1915), 448–61 et 463–82.

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90 Bas-Canada, Chambre d’assemblée, Procédés dans l’Assemblée du Bas-Canada sur les règles de pratique des cours de justice et sur les accusations contre Jonathan Sewell et James Monk, écuyers (Québec: 1814), 68 p., [en ligne] http://www.canadiana.org/. Sur cette affaire voir: John McLaren, Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800–1900 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2011), 95–8; et Jean-Maurice Brisson, La formation d’un droit mixte: l’évolution de la procédure civile de 1774 à 1867 (Montréal: Les éditions Thémis, 1986), 58–65. 91 Bas-Canada, Chambre d’assemblée, ibid., 60–1; et Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: le débat du droit privé au Québec, 1760–1840 (LaSalle: Hurtubise HMH, 1994), 95. 92 Doughty et McArthur (dir.), op. cit., note 89, 475–6. 93 La présence de formules est attestée dans la colonie peu après la Conquête ainsi que le révèlent les archives de même que les livres de compte des imprimeurs Brown et Neilson de Québec chez qui s’approvisionnaient les officiers de justice et les notaires (Patricia Kennedy, « Les imprimés administratifs publics et privés », dans Fleming, Gallichan, et Lamonde [dir.], op. cit., note 7, 237–41). 94 Joseph-François Perrault, Formules des ordres que l’on delivre le plus communement pour les termes inférieurs de la Cour du banc du roi, en tournée (s.l.: s, éd., 1812[?] [4], 33, [1] p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 47084). 95 Ibid. 96 Perrault, op cit., note 15, 76. 97 Burn, op. cit., note 54, 533. 98 Fyson, op. cit., note 53, 249–53. 99 Kolish, op. cit., note 91, 121. 100 Lebel, op. cit., note 21, 96–7; et Gallichan, op. cit., note 50, 93. 101 Kolish, op. cit., note 91, 121. 102 Joseph-François Perrault, Extraits ou précédents, tirés des régistres de la prévosté de Québec (Québec: T. Cary, 1824), iv, 88 p. 103 Joseph-François Perrault, Extraits ou précédents, des arrests tirés des régistres du Conseil supérieur de Québec (Québec: T. Cary, 1824), vi, 78 p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 21184). 104 George Pyke (dir.), Pyke’s Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of King’s Bench for the District of Quebec in the Province of Lower Canada: In Hilary Term, in the Fiftieth Year of the Reign of George III (Montréal: s. éd., 1811), 77 p. (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 48363). 105 George Okill Stuart (dir.), Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Courts of King’s Bench and in the Provincial Court of Appeals of Lower Canada […] (Québec: Neilson & Cowan, 1834), iii (ICMH Collection de microfiches; no 10862).

2 Les revendications des nouveaux sujets, francophones et catholiques, de la Province de Québec, 1764–1774 m ic h e l m or in *

Are the Canadian inhabitants desirous of having assemblies in the province? – Certainly not. – Governor Guy Carleton, 1774†

En 1760, au moins 60 000 personnes d’origine française et de foi catholique vivent dans un vaste territoire appelé la « Nouvelle-France », même si elles sont très fortement concentrées dans la Vallée du SaintLaurent, qui constitue le Canada proprement dit. Elles sont entourées d’un grand nombre de peuples autochtones qui sont généralement considérés comme des alliés plutôt que comme des sujets du roi.1 Le 8 septembre, la capitulation des forces françaises à Montréal inaugure une ère de débats portant sur le régime juridique applicable aux habitants d’origine française. À cette occasion, plusieurs francophones expriment leurs opinions, qui sont loin d’être concordantes, tout comme celles des anglophones d’ailleurs. Initialement, l’intégration de ces « Canadiens » francophones et catholiques au sein de l’Empire britannique ne suscite pas une réflexion très poussée. En Grande-Bretagne et dans les colonies, bon nombre de personnes tiennent pour acquis que seuls les anglicans peuvent exercer des fonctions publiques, que les justiciables ont droit à un procès devant jury, que la légalité d’une détention peut être contrôlée au moyen de l’habeas corpus, que chacun peut s’exprimer librement et que des

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représentants élus doivent consentir aux impôts.2 Pour les colons américains, une constitution impériale fondée sur l’usage et la coutume impose certaines limites aux pouvoirs du Parlement, même si l’existence et l’ampleur de celles-ci demeurent très controversées.3 Les populations non chrétiennes (donc non européennes) ne sont pas jugées aptes à détenir les droits des sujets britanniques.4 Quant aux catholiques, s’il n’est plus question de réprimer l’exercice de leur religion, leur statut dans l’Empire est variable. En Irlande et en Acadie, ils sont soumis aux lois discriminatoires édictées en Grande-Bretagne; dans certaines colonies où les Britanniques sont très minoritaires, comme à Minorque ou à Gibraltar, ils peuvent cependant exercer des fonctions importantes et conserver leur propre système juridique, y inclus en droit pénal.5 En 1763, un acte du pouvoir exécutif britannique, la Proclamation royale, déclare que les habitants de la nouvelle province de Québec pourront bénéficier des « bienfaits des lois » du royaume d’Angleterre et que les tribunaux jugeront « suivant la loi et l’équité, conformément autant que possible aux lois anglaises ».6 En outre, une Chambre de députés doit être convoquée « dès que l’état et les conditions des colonies le permettront ». Toutefois, la commission du gouverneur exige que les fonctionnaires, les juges et les élus prêtent un serment qui constitue une abjuration de la foi catholique, ce qui a pour effet d’exclure de ces fonctions la quasi-totalité des francophones.7 C’est pourquoi aucune élection n’aura lieu au Québec avant 1792. Aux yeux de plusieurs historiens, en 1760, les habitants de la Nouvelle-France ont déjà leur identité propre; pourtant, des recherches récentes montrent qu’ils se considèrent avant tout comme des sujets Français, bien que Denys Delâge ait récemment contesté cette thèse.8 À la suite de la Conquête, ils doivent définir leur identité et se présentent comme des « Canadiens », dans un environnement où le statut de l’Empire et de ses colonies évolue constamment.9 En effet, à cette époque, le statut de sujet britannique est utilisé de manière dynamique par des populations souhaitant obtenir des réformes, tandis que les autorités s’assurent la coopération des élites, en attendant qu’il soit possible d’imposer les institutions britanniques à certaines populations conquises.10 L’objectif de la présente étude consiste à examiner dans quelle mesure les « Canadiens » ont fait appel aux droits reconnus aux sujets britanniques afin d’étayer leurs positions, en précisant les renseignements qui étaient connus du public à l’époque. Notre souhaitons éviter à cet égard une vision manichéiste de la Conquête, qui a longtemps été

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perçue comme l’élément déclencheur du retard socio-économique que l’on croyait pouvoir observer au Québec dans les années 1960. Selon les auteurs, cela était dû soit au fait que l’élite socio-économique francophone avait été décapitée après 1760, soit au fait que les structures d’Ancien Régime avaient subsisté au Québec beaucoup plus longtemps qu’ailleurs.11 En général, l’idée que les francophones sont peu intéressés par la création d’une assemblée élue est plausible, puisqu’aucune institution de ce genre n’existe en France ou en Nouvelle-France.12 Louise Dechêne rappelle aussi qu’il n’y a pas eu d’émeutes urbaines dans la colonie, contrairement à ce qui se produisait régulièrement en France.13 Après la Conquête, on peut penser que les « nouveaux » sujets britanniques feront peu de cas de leurs droits fondamentaux, alors que pour les « anciens » sujets, ceux-ci sont inestimables. Or, les règles pertinentes proviennent d’un système juridique qui demeure, dans une très large mesure, non-écrit et qui est difficilement accessible. Selon les administrateurs britanniques de l’époque, les « Canadiens » se désintéressent donc de ces nouveaux droits, une affirmation que l’historiographie a très rarement remise en question.14 En 1774, à Londres, le gouverneur Carleton, Francis Maseres (ancien procureur général de la province) et le juge en chef Hey tirent avantage du refus des Canadiens de revendiquer publiquement une Chambre de députés (appelée « Assemblée » à l’époque). En effet, ils affirment devant un comité de la Chambre des communes que les Canadiens (ou, pour Maseres, la grande majorité de la population) ne sont pas intéressés par une assemblée; à leur avis, ils sont également très satisfaits de l’introduction du droit pénal anglais.15 Peu après, l’Acte de Québec abroge la Proclamation royale.16 Il autorise les catholiques à exercer une fonction publique et il accorde aux prêtres le droit de percevoir la dîme de leurs paroissiens, comme sous le Régime français. Le droit privé de la Nouvelle-France est rétabli, sous réserve de la liberté de tester, tandis que le droit pénal anglais est préservé. Un conseil non élu peut édicter des ordonnances, sauf si elles ont pour effet d’imposer des taxes. Celles qui concernent les questions religieuses ou qui imposent une peine plus sévère qu’une amende ou qu’un emprisonnement de trois mois doivent être approuvées à Londres par le Conseil privé. Pourtant, avant cette réforme, une partie de l’élite francophone a réussi à se familiariser rapidement avec les règles fondamentales du droit anglais et elle a su utiliser celles-ci à son avantage. À cet égard, la situation dans l’Île de Grenade fournit un point de comparaison inté-

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ressant.17 Au Québec, il semble exister peu de manuscrits permettant de connaître l’opinion des francophones sur ces débats politiques; de toute manière, ces écrits représenteraient uniquement le point de vue de personnes bénéficiant d’une certaine éducation, qui demeure largement minoritaire.18 La Gazette de Québec fournit toutefois à ses lecteurs de nombreux renseignements sur les principes du droit constitutionnel britannique, en reproduisant et en traduisant des articles publiés à l’étranger, généralement à Londres et dans les colonies britanniques. Ainsi, les gens suffisamment éduqués peuvent obtenir des connaissances de base en ce domaine et en tirer avantage.19 Cependant, ce périodique fondé par un parent de Benjamin Franklin compte à peine 143 abonnés sur une population totale d’environ 70 000 habitants.20 Bien avant le début de la Révolution américaine, les lecteurs et les lectrices de la Gazette ont donc pu découvrir en français une liberté de presse très étendue et des débats parlementaires vigoureux. Contrairement à ce qu’on a parfois pu penser, ils n’ont pas été tenus dans l’ignorance des grands mouvements d’idées qui ont caractérisé les années en 1760 en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis. Ceux-ci ont pu être connus à la suite de séjours effectués à l’étranger par des membres de l’élite dans ces pays ou par la diffusion d’ouvrages et de périodiques étrangers.21 Ainsi, les gens instruits sont en mesure de comparer les régimes constitutionnels de la France, de la Grande-Bretagne et des colonies britanniques (I). Or, sous le régime de la Proclamation royale de 1763, les fondements constitutionnels de l’action gouvernementale sont contestés au Québec. Plusieurs francophones revendiquent l’égalité religieuse, le respect de leurs droits de propriété, ainsi que celui des régimes matrimoniaux et successoraux de la Nouvelle-France; ils sont beaucoup plus discrets à propos du droit des obligations, des contrats et du droit commercial. Ils sont également conscients des prérogatives reconnues aux sujets britanniques, notamment de l’importance d’une chambre de députés, mais ils devront renoncer à en réclamer une pour des raisons stratégiques (II). I. Le contraste entre les droits des sujets français et britanniques En Europe, l’autorité du souverain fait l’objet de contestations renouvelées dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle, notamment à l’occasion de causes célèbres. La Gazette de Québec reproduit de nombreux articles portant sur ces questions (A). Il en va de même des crises

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qui secouent les colonies américaines, même si celles-ci ont peu de résonnance au Québec (B). A. La contestation de l’autorité royale en France et en Angleterre Dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle, de nombreux auteurs français vont réclamer une réforme des institutions et des lois du royaume, en se fondant sur la raison et le droit naturel. Précédé par le célèbre traité de Montesquieu, l’Esprit des lois, paru en 1748, ce mouvement d’idées s’intensifie dans les années 1760, notamment avec la publication du Du contrat social de Rousseau.22 Durant cette décennie, les philosophes s’intéressent à la justice, alors que celle-ci avait peu retenu leur attention auparavant.23 Voltaire mène une véritable croisade pour réhabiliter un protestant (Calas) condamné injustement pour meurtre (1763–1765), tandis que le célèbre ouvrage de l’italien Beccaria critique le recours immodéré à la peine de mort (1766).24 En général, ces auteurs sont très peu présents dans les bibliothèques québécoises, sauf dans le cas d’administrateurs haut placé ou de juristes.25 De 1763 à 1774, des luttes épiques vont opposer le roi de France et ses parlements, qui sont chargés de rendre la justice sans détenir de pouvoir législatif, sauf à titre supplétif pour des questions administratives. Ceux-ci contestent plusieurs décisions royales en matière de taxation et d’administration de la justice. L’idée que le souverain français doive respecter la constitution et la loi constitue une attaque en règle contre l’orthodoxie traditionnelle. De 1771 à 1774, cependant, les parlements sont remplacés par de nouvelles cours et la crise suscitée par leur abolition se résorbe rapidement. Au bout du compte la doctrine du pouvoir absolu du roi sur les règles constitutionnelles et sur les institutions a triomphé.26 Les lecteurs de la Gazette de Québec peuvent suivre ces débats. Ils voient s’affronter une conception absolutiste de la monarchie et l’idéal d’un ordre constitutionnel supérieur au roi, dont certains aspects doivent demeurer immuables, afin de faire contrepoids à son autorité. Ils sont à même de constater que certaines publications sont détruites sous l’ordre des tribunaux. En outre, à cette époque les détenteurs de monnaie de carte qui circulait sous le Régime français ne récupèrent que 25 % de la valeur nominale de ce numéraire.27 Enfin, les militaires rentrés en France sont souvent laissés à eux-mêmes; plusieurs choisissent de revenir au Canada.28 Dans ces conditions, les privilèges inhérents au

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statut de sujet britannique ont pu sembler avantageux aux nouveaux sujets de Sa Majesté Britannique.29 À la même époque, plusieurs procès célèbres ayant eu lieu en Angleterre sont résumés dans la Gazette de Québec.30 Ces comptes rendus contiennent souvent une explication assez détaillée des grands principes du droit constitutionnel britanniques, tels que la liberté de la presse, le droit des électeurs de choisir librement leur député et la protection contre les emprisonnements injustifiés, les fouilles ou les perquisitions abusives. Ces controverses permettent aux lecteurs et aux lectrices de la Gazette de Québec de comprendre l’importance fondamentale de ces questions pour les Anglais. Elles mettent également en évidence le rôle primordial du jury, qui sanctionne la violation de ces règles par les détenteurs de fonctions publiques en octroyant de généreux dommagesintérêts à la victime. Dans l’ensemble, cette conception de la liberté est moderne ou libérale, plutôt que républicaine.31 B. Les revendications des colonies américaines Le même phénomène peut être observé pour ce qui concerne le conflit entre les colonies britanniques américaines et la métropole. En général, il a été très bien suivi par la Gazette de Québec.32 La revendication de privilèges parlementaires et d’une autonomie en matière de taxation, les protestations contre la suppression de certains types de procès devant jury et l’opposition persistante aux actions des collecteurs de taxes, souvent par le biais de verdicts condamnant au paiement de dommages, sont abondamment documentés. La position de la couronne est également très claire: elle réclame l’obéissance de ses sujets et la reconnaissance d’un pouvoir illimité du Parlement britannique, au moins en théorie. Les colonies américaines refusent toutefois d’admettre que celui-ci puisse imposer des taxes à l’intérieur de leurs frontières ou légiférer à leur place. De nombreux conflits opposant les représentants élus et le gouverneur sont également discutés dans la Gazette, y inclus la Rébellion ouverte qui se produit en Caroline du Nord. Les deux parties invoquent des principes constitutionnels et le droit naturel. Par ailleurs, des jurys réussissent à contrecarrer la volonté impériale; leurs décisions ont beaucoup d’écho dans les autres colonies britanniques. Le débat suscité par l’adoption de la célèbre Loi sur les timbres de 1765 est typique de ces controverses. Cette loi exige que le papier et de nombreux documents officiels (dont les procédures judiciaires) soient

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timbrés dans les colonies, moyennant le paiement de droits, sans quoi les actes juridiques qu’ils contiennent ne pourront être valides.33 Cette mesure déclenche un fort mouvement de protestation.34 Elle oblige les éditeurs de la Gazette de Québec à hausser considérablement le prix de leur abonnement, tout en maintenant leur décision de publier une édition entièrement bilingue; un mois plus tard, ils doivent toutefois cesser leurs activités.35 Dans les autres colonies, un boycottage des produits britanniques est organisé, des émeutes éclatent et les maisons de certains officiers des douanes sont vandalisées ou incendiées. Dans la province de New York, les avocats refusent de produire des actes de procédure timbrés et les tribunaux cessent de siéger pendant six mois.36 À Londres, les délégués des colonies protestent contre la Loi sur les timbres en invoquant le célèbre slogan « pas de taxation sans représentation », même si le cens électoral de leur législature est réservé aux propriétaires terriens, comme en Angleterre d’ailleurs. En 1766, à la suite d’un changement de gouvernement, cette loi est abrogée, mais une autre loi déclare solennellement qu’il n’existe aucune limite au pouvoir que le Parlement peut exercer sur ses colonies.37 William Pitt prononce à cette occasion un long discours où il affirme que le royaume de Grande-Bretagne « n’a aucun droit d’imposer une Taxe aux Colonies », car celle-ci doit être octroyée par des représentants élus; pour le reste, la souveraineté du royaume demeure entière.38 Benjamin Franklin est aussi longuement interrogé par les députés; il affirme que les colonies acceptent la réglementation du commerce et l’imposition de taxes sur les échanges extérieurs, par opposition aux taxes internes.39 Une minorité de lords proteste énergiquement contre une telle limitation.40 À Montréal, les droits sur les timbres sont payés ponctuellement. Toutefois, au cours de l’hiver de 1766, en raison des relations qu’ils entretiennent avec les autres colonies, les commerçants de cette ville savent tout des démarches entreprises par les Fils de la liberté afin de s’opposer à la Loi sur les timbres. Pour leur part, les francophones se plaignent de devoir payer une taxe dont les autres colonies ont fini par être exemptées à la suite de protestations publiques de leur population.41 Après l’abrogation de la loi, les commerçants britanniques qui ont soutenu les revendications des colonies reprochent à leurs homologues de New York les incidents violents qui ont eu lieu chez eux.42 Ils envoient une lettre identique aux commerçants de Québec.43 Selon un auteur anonyme, ces derniers sont indignés par une telle accusation, car la Province est demeurée calme; en effet, ses habitants ont gardé le

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silence parce qu’ils vivent sous un gouvernement « militaire ».44 Peu après, un lecteur anonyme fait remarquer que selon toute vraisemblance, l’auteur dont il vient tout juste d’être question a profité d’une erreur d’inattention des commerçants britanniques. Il s’est ensuite arrogé le droit de parler au nom des commerçants du Québec. Il ajoute que, même en l’absence d’un soi-disant gouvernement militaire, les habitants de la province ne se seraient pas comportés comme ceux des autres colonies.45 Il est vrai que, sans assemblée élue, aucune taxe locale ne peut être imposée au Québec; l’imposition de taxes par le Parlement britannique y suscite donc beaucoup moins d’opposition. Ainsi, aucune émeute n’éclate et les manifestations sont inconnues dans la colonie, contrairement à ce que l’on peut observer ailleurs. À cet égard, les autorités britanniques craignent que des évènements de ce genre aient un effet d’entraînement en Angleterre et en Irlande.46 Au mois de septembre 1766, le lieutenant-gouverneur Carleton arrive à Québec pour y remplacer le Gouverneur Murray. Des marchands et des habitants de cette ville (y inclus le procureur général, un juge des plaids communs et un greffier) lui présentent alors une adresse élogieuse. Ils déclarent éprouver un sentiment de loyauté sincère envers leur souverain et révérer profondément l’autorité législative du Parlement britannique, tel qu’en fait foi l’obéissance immédiate et universelle qui suivit l’entrée en vigueur de la Loi sur les timbres dans la Province.47 Sur les 68 signataires, 39 (soit 56 %) ont un nom à consonance anglophone, tandis que 30 (soit 44 %) ont un nom à consonance anglophone, si l’on inclut les protestants nés en Grande-Bretagne dont la famille est d’origine française, tel que le procureur général Francis Maseres ou le révérend Chabrand de Lisle. Simultanément, des marchands et des commerçants de la ville de Québec présentent une adresse dans laquelle ils se plaignent du ralentissement des affaires. Ils espèrent que sous la nouvelle administration, les entraves au commerce seront enlevées et qu’ils auront accès aux pêcheries et aux territoires où l’on peut se procurer des fourrures. Si une sage administration leur procure ces avantages, le mandat du lieutenant-gouverneur sera heureux et agréable.48 Sur les 46 signataires, 29 ou 63 % ont un nom à consonance anglophone, tandis que 17 ou 37 % semblent être francophones. Cet accueil tiède dénote une critique de l’administration du gouverneur Murray et, implicitement, de la Loi sur les timbres.49 Parmi les signataires, la proportion des francophones qui soutiennent cette position critique (37 %) ne diffère pas significativement de celle des francophones qui offrent un appui indéfectible au

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gouvernement (44 %).50 Ceux-ci participent donc rapidement aux débats publics qui font écho aux revendications des colonies américaines. Dès qu’ils en auront la possibilité, certains d’entre eux invoqueront les droits reconnus aux sujets britanniques. II. La familiarisation avec les principes constitutionnels britanniques au Québec Pour mieux situer le débat concernant les droits des nouveaux sujets britanniques de la Province de Québec, il importe de comprendre les particularités du régime constitutionnel et du système judiciaire de la colonie. Après la Conquête, un régime temporaire est dirigé par des militaires. Dans le district de Québec, un conseil d’officiers rend jugement en consultant des juristes de Nouvelle-France, tandis qu’à Montréal et à Trois-Rivières, de nombreux officiers de milice du Régime français sont rapidement habilités à rendre justice en première instance.51 Les règles suivies en Nouvelle-France continuent généralement de s’appliquer, sauf en matière pénale, où les accusés sont jugés par des cours martiales, conformément au droit militaire. Cette justice exacerbe les conflits entre les soldats et les marchands britanniques nouvellement installés dans la colonie, qui sont souvent contraint de loger des officiers. Après deux altercations relativement mineures survenues à Montréal, une cour militaire condamne même certains civils à une amende ou une peine d’emprisonnement, ainsi qu’à présenter des excuses publiques.52 La Proclamation royale entre en vigueur le 10 août 1764. Le 17 septembre, une ordonnance pourvoit à l’administration de la justice.53 En droit pénal, tant la Cour suprême que les juges de paix doivent appliquer les règles du droit anglais. En matière civile, ces derniers ont compétence pour les litiges de moindre importance; ils siègent seuls si l’enjeu est de moins de cinq livres, à deux s’il n’excède pas dix livres et à trois, lors des sessions trimestrielles de la paix, s’il est d’au moins dix livres, sans en excéder trente.54 Plusieurs d’entre eux ne sont pas à la hauteur de la tâche; à Montréal, sur les dix candidats choisis en 1764, sept sont remplacés dès 1765.55 Cette compétence est abolie en 1770, même si elle fonctionnait sans doute correctement à cette époque. Elle subsiste cependant en matière pénale. Après cette date, dans le district de Montréal, ce sont généralement trois protestants d’origine française, arrivés peu avant ou peu après la Conquête, qui entendent les affaires de ce genre, car leurs collègues anglophones se désintéressent de cette fonction.56

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Pour les causes dont la valeur est d’au moins dix livres, le demandeur a la possibilité de s’adresser à la Cour des plaids communs, qui doit juger suivant « l’équité en tenant compte cependant des lois d’Angleterre en autant que les circonstances et l’état actuel des choses le permettront, jusqu’à ce que le gouverneur et le Conseil puisse rendre des ordonnances conformes aux lois d’Angleterre pour renseigner la population ». Devant cette cour, chacune des parties peut exiger que sa cause soit entendue par un jury. Le demandeur peut également se tourner vers la Cour du Banc du roi, laquelle se fonde sur les règles du droit anglais. Des appels sont autorisés, si le montant en litige atteint divers seuils monétaires, d’abord devant la Cour du banc du roi, puis devant la Cour d’appel (constituée du gouverneur et de son Conseil) et, enfin, devant le Comité judiciaire du Conseil privé, à Londres. Initialement, les Canadiens sont autorisés à siéger comme jurés et à exercer la profession d’avocat devant la Cour des plaids communs. Une ordonnance de 1766 précise qu’ils pourront plaider ou être jurés devant toutes les cours. En outre, le jury devra être de la même origine que les parties; si celle-ci diverge, il sera composé de six Britanniques et de six Canadiens.57 Aucune autre qualification n’est imposée, tandis qu’en Angleterre et dans les autres colonies américaines, la possession de biens immobiliers est requise. Il est bien connu que la Cour des plaids communs a continué d’appliquer les règles de droit privé suivies en Nouvelle-France, même si la cause d’action avait pris naissance après le 10 août 1765; or, après cette date, aux termes des ordonnances pertinentes, ce droit aurait dû cesser de s’appliquer.58 Le boycottage des tribunaux que l’on avait cru pouvoir observer en matière familiale ne s’est pas produit et la décision de recourir à un tribunal plutôt qu’à un autre ne dépend pas systématiquement de l’origine du demandeur ou du droit applicable.59 Donald Fyson rappelle également que les francophones ont généralement accès à une justice bilingue et que les anglophones s’adaptent très bien aux règles et aux institutions qui n’ont pas d’équivalent dans leur tradition juridique.60 Par ailleurs, l’ordonnance de 1764 concernant l’administration de la justice prévoit que dans chaque paroisse, des baillis seront élus annuellement. Or, les Canadiens participent avec enthousiasme à cette nouvelle activité politique.61 Voilà, sommairement esquissés, les aspects du nouveau régime qui donneront lieu à des débats animés, qu’il s’agisse de l’imposition de taxes en l’absence de députés élus, du système juridique applicable, des coûts de la justice ou de ses dysfonctionnements. La petite commu-

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nauté anglophone, qui est composée principalement de commerçants et de militaires, sera particulièrement touchée. En effet, ces deux groupes ont des relations plutôt tendues, car le gouverneur et certains de ses collaborateurs font partie de l’armée. De 1764 à 1774, les civils britanniques récemment installés dans la Province critiquent les accommodements décrits ci-dessus et réclament la convocation d’une Chambre de députés.62 En outre, les nouvelles institutions judiciaires constituent un forum permettant d’exprimer des opinions sur le nouveau régime. Ainsi, dès 1764, les membres protestants du grand jury de la ville de Québec suscitent une controverse animée en réclamant le droit se vérifier les dépenses du gouvernement et en s’opposant à la présence de catholiques au sein des jurys de jugement. Les jurés prennent également des positions controversées dans des procès portant sur le rôle ou le pouvoir des militaires.63 De leur côté, au cours de cette même période, les membres de l’élite francophone – les seigneurs, les commerçants ou les professionnels – souhaitent la fin de la discrimination religieuse, afin de pouvoir accéder aux postes gouvernementaux ou militaires, par exemple au conseil du gouverneur ou à la magistrature. Ils demandent également la remise en vigueur des « lois françaises », se plaignent du coût élevé des procédures judiciaires et critiquent le recours fréquent à l’emprisonnement pour dettes.64 Le regretté Jean-Marie Fecteau et Douglas Hay ont souligné que les seigneurs d’origine française, qui ont fréquemment été officiers dans l’armée du roi de France, ont des affinités évidentes avec les militaires britanniques, notamment leur mépris des commerçants et des agriculteurs.65 Certains de ces derniers ont d’ailleurs fait l’acquisition de seigneuries. Nous avons vu que dans les années 1760, l’autorité du souverain français est contestée en France et que la mentalité d’Ancien Régime y demeure omniprésente. Le contraste avec les droits reconnus aux sujets britanniques, tant en métropole que dans les colonies, demeure frappant. Au Québec, un petit nombre de nouveaux sujets britanniques écrivent à la Gazette, parfois avec une liberté de ton inusitée. Les efforts qu’ils font pour comprendre la constitution britannique ne sont pas toujours couronnés de succès, même si certains lecteurs n’hésitent pas à leur faire des suggestions à cet égard (A). Par ailleurs, l’application dans les colonies des lois anglaises interdisant l’accès des catholiques aux fonctions publiques suscite des discussions passionnées, notamment parmi les juristes (B). Dans ce contexte volatile, les commerçants, les seigneurs et les juris-

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tes professionnels cherchent à se positionner dans le processus tortueux qui mènera à l’adoption de l’Acte de Québec. De 1766 à 1770, lorsque Guy Carleton est présent dans la colonie, les discussions concernant le Québec deviennent beaucoup plus rares dans la Gazette, tout comme les pétitions. Initialement, en 1766, les éditeurs de celle-ci affirment solennellement qu’ils ne soumettent pas les textes à paraître aux autorités et qu’ils ne le feront jamais; néanmoins, quatre ans plus tard, le gouvernement leur impose secrètement cette obligation.66 Contrairement à ce qui se passe dans les autres colonies, les pétitions rédigées au nom des nouveaux sujets britanniques sont débattues dans des cercles très restreints et ne bénéficient pas d’une large diffusion (C). Pour trouver d’autres exemples d’écrits où les droits des sujets britanniques sont invoqués par des francophones, il faut se tourner vers certains documents concernant la préservation du droit privé de la Nouvelle-France (D). Par ailleurs, en 1773, après plusieurs années de discussions, les nouveaux sujets sont prêts à demander le droit d’élire leurs propres représentants, mais ils se laissent convaincre de garder le silence afin d’obtenir l’égalité religieuse (E). A. La découverte des principes constitutionnels britanniques Initialement, un « citoyen canadien » se déclare surpris par les « plaintes amères » des britanniques à propos des « libertés anglicanes ». Il demande: « nouveau sujet de la Grande-Bretagne, que puis-je scavoir de la constitution des droits d’un chacun […] ces mêmes libertés, je devrois être jaloux de les connoître, et personne ne m’en instruit »? Il se dit qu’ « apparemment, C’est violer les libertés Anglicanes que d’exiger qu’on soutienne le militaire, qu’on mette des impôts, qu’on retrecisse le commerce, qu’on gene les Imprimeurs ». Pour lui, l’« état naturel » des « choses » sera subverti si, au lieu de laisser les gouvernants déterminer ce qui est dans l’intérêt général, il doit se former sa propre opinion sur chaque question « sous prétexte que je suis libre ». Il anticipe la riposte: on lui dira qu’il se ressent encore du « despotisme » qui l’a « formé »!67 Un lecteur lui répond sur un ton acerbe que « les loix naturelles nous permettent et même nous excitent, à faire le mal à quoi nous sommes fort enclins, les lois Anglicanes certainement nous les [sic] défendent […] », tandis que « les sages Ordonnances nouvellement rendues » nous incitent à « faire le bien »68… Confronté aux nombreuses opinions concernant le pouvoir de taxation dans les colonies, un « nouveau sujet » britannique ne sait trop que penser.69 Il tente de se familiariser

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avec la constitution britannique en lisant la Grande Charte de 1215 … sans grand succès.70 Il déclare candidement au correspondant qui lui a suggéré de lire Coke: « vous m’avez fait bailler pendant trois fois vingt quatre heures, en me faisant lire un in Quarto, écrit en trois langages presque inintelligibles ».71 À l’époque, l’ouvrage le plus accessible sur ces questions vient tout juste d’être publié. Il s’agit du premier volume des Commentaries on the Laws of England de William Blackstone.72 La première référence à cet auteur apparaît dans une opinion rédigée par trois avocats parisiens. Celle-ci concerne l’obligation d’indemniser les seigneurs lorsque la couronne utilise le bois de chêne situé sur leurs seigneuries. La formulation de l’acte de concession est alors déterminante, car il autorise parfois le roi à utiliser ces arbres sans verser d’indemnité. Examinant les conséquences du changement de souveraineté, les auteurs fondent leur démonstration sur « l’excellent ouvrage de Monsieur Blackstone sur les loix d’Angleterre ». Celui-ci distingue entre les colonies « nationales […] qui ont eu pour fondateurs des Anglois, et qui se sont établis [sic] par voie de défrichement et de première occupation, lesquelles ont été à l’instant de leur formation sujettes aux loix d’Angleterre » et « les païs conquis ou cédés qui ont leur propres loix ». Pour ces dernières, « le Roi peut à la vérité réformer et changer ces loix, mais jusqu’à ce qu’il l’ait fait, les anciennes loix de ces païs subsistent, à moins qu’elles ne soient contraires à la loî de Dieu, comme dans le cas d’un païs infidel ». A leur avis, il découle de ces principes que l’obligation du roi de France d’indemniser certains seigneurs a été transmise au nouveau souverain.73 En ce qui concerne Blackstone, la première édition française de ses ouvrages paraîtra de 1774 à 1776.74 Dans un essai écrit en français dans le but de défendre un projet de loi modifiant le droit des successions du Québec, Francis Maseres consacre aussi quelques pages intéressantes à l’histoire de l’habeas corpus et du Parlement anglais.75 En 1767, le compte rendu d’un procès célèbre publié en anglais discute de quelques questions de droit pénal, soit l’intention requise pour qu’il y ait cambriolage nocturne, l’applicabilité d’une loi du Parlement anglais dans une colonie et la question de savoir si le terme « membre » inclut une oreille.76 Dans l’ensemble, la documentation juridique locale demeure fort limitée.77 Pour démystifier le droit constitutionnel britannique, un lecteur suggère aux éditeurs de la Gazette de Québec de publier un article paru dans le North Briton, ce qui sera fait peu après. On peut y lire que la

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Chambre des Communes est la « tierce partie du pouvoir législatif »; elle constitue aussi l’un « des trois états du Roiaume […] ». Ceux-ci ont été « institués pour servir de frein et de contrepoids les uns aux autres, afin de mieux assurer notre liberté ». Or, les députés ont toujours considéré que l’imposition « de taxes sur le peuple, sous prétexte de prérogative » était incompatible avec la Constitution. Ce principe a été confirmé par la « déclaration des droits du peuple » à laquelle a consenti Guillaume III (il s’agit du Bill of Rights de 1689). Les sujets de la Grande-Bretagne ont donc la prérogative « de se taxer eux-mêmes », bien qu’ils la confient à leurs représentants. S’ils renonçaient à ce privilège, ils mettraient en péril leur liberté et la jouissance de leurs biens. Pourtant, le roi a imposé des taxes dans certaines colonies des Antilles conquises lors de dernière la guerre contre la France. Or, la Constitution britannique ne confère pas à la « partie exécutive du gouvernement » le pouvoir de lever une somme d’argent dans une telle colonie. En effet, dès son annexion, ses habitants ont le « droit de jouir des privilèges d’un gouvernement britannique ».78 La Cour du banc du roi annulera d’ailleurs cette mesure dans la célèbre affaire Campbell c. Hall, bien que pour des motifs différents.79 Ainsi, les lecteurs de la Gazette peuvent constater qu’en Angleterre, certains réclament la mise en place d’un système représentatif dans les colonies récemment conquises de la France. Un exemple du nouvel esprit qui se répand au Québec concerne la politique économique de la métropole. Un auteur anonyme réclame une augmentation des dépenses publiques par le biais de l’envoi de troupes additionnelles et la mise en œuvre de travaux publics.80 « Misopigros », qui écrit de Kamouraska, en conclut que cet auteur souhaite « voir l’Angleterre suivre les traces que suivoit la France avant la conquête du païs; c’est-à-dire, qu’elle épuisât ses anciens sujets en Europe, pour nourrir ici en Seigneurs une poignée de gens oisifs ».81 Pour lui, la Conquête a eu des conséquences facilement perceptibles pour la majorité des « Canadiens »: « il n’y a plus d’Intendant pour fabriquer de l’argent, ni tant d’emploiés pour le Roi pour le répandre partout, à pleine main et par caprice; et le Gouvernement Anglois est assez rigide pour vouloir que chaque particulier vive de son propre bien, ou du métier qu’il a embrassé, sans permettre qu’on pille une partie des sujets pour nourrir l’autre dans l’oisiveté et l’abondance ». Évidemment, cette opinion, qui concorde globalement avec ce que nous savons du Régime français, n’est pas forcément partagée par tous. On peut se demander si sa publication est due à une initiative

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des autorités coloniales, mais elle nous semble exprimer un point de vue répandu chez les Francophones eux-mêmes.82 Il n’est pas dit que la position opposée, c’est-à-dire une critique en règle du régime britannique, eût pu être publiée au Québec. Pourtant, dans les autres colonies, les critiques adressées aux gouverneurs et détenteurs de charges ont été nombreuses. Plusieurs ne se rendaient même pas sur place et déléguaient leurs fonctions à un subalterne qui devait lui remettre une partie des émoluments.83 Le coût élevé de la justice est également dénoncé au Québec dans plusieurs pétitions. Bref, les inconvénients du nouveau régime étaient visibles, mais il est significatif de constater que certains lui trouvaient aussi des avantages. Plus généralement, la Gazette a permis à ses lecteurs de se familiariser rapidement avec les grands principes du droit constitutionnel de l’Empire britannique. Il en va de même pour les questions religieuses. B. La controverse entourant l’application des lois anti-catholiques dans les colonies Certains catholiques du Québec n’hésitent pas à se prévaloir de leur liberté d’expression. Ainsi, un « Spectateur catholique » critique la décision de l’évêque d’exempter de la confession pascale les fidèles assistant à l’office dans la chapelle du Séminaire de Québec, qui est assez petite. Il s’exclame « Comment donc! Il n’y aura que les riches, qui auront le moyen de payer la rente d’un banc, qui obtiendront cette indulgence, et les autres s’en passeront […] cela ne paroît pas juste, à ce qu’il me semble », en concluant ainsi: « […] il est facile d’y remédier, si l’on veut ».84 Le « spectateur canadien » s’en prend aussi à un « parfait Dévôt en apparence » qui a décrié « sans ménagement » un « Officier public de cette ville » et qui passe pour être un « oracle » en raison de sa richesse supposée. Il rappelle que « Molière a bien caractérisé les faux Dévôts et Hypocrites dans sa comédie du Tartufe, comme dangereux et nuisibles à l’état et des espèces de perturbateurs du repos public, qui devroient être bannis de la société civile: Quiconque ne se laisse pas guider par la religion et la saine raison, ne peut être écouté des honnêtes gens, et foi ne doit être ajoutée à ses discours, même sous le masque de la dévotion ».85 C’est dire que les anciens sujets du roi de France n’obéissent pas servilement aux dictats de l’Église catholique. Mais l’hostilité à laquelle ils doivent faire face en raison de leur foi au sein de l’Empire britannique demeure considérable. En 1766, avant même de partir pour le Québec occuper ses nou-

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velles fonctions, le procureur général Maseres avait fait imprimer ses réflexions sur les problèmes juridiques qui se posaient dans cette colonie.86 Ce texte, destiné aux cercles officiels, n’est pas distribué dans le public et a peu retenu l’attention des historiens. Néanmoins, les idées qu’il contient finiront par être connues dans la province. Il discute du droit accordé aux Canadiens par le traité de Paris de 1763 de pratiquer la religion catholique « autant que les lois d’Angleterre le permettent », ce qui semble viser uniquement la liberté de culte. Pourtant, en 1765 et en 1768, le procureur général et le solliciteur général de la Grande-Bretagne concluent que les lois discriminatoires visant les catholiques ne s’appliquent pas outre-mer, car les lois du Parlement ne conviennent pas toutes aux colonies, compte tenu de la situation différente qui y prévaut, à moins que le texte ne prévoie expressément qu’il s’appliquera à cet endroit.87 Or, une loi de 1558 interdit à toute autre personne que le souverain d’exercer une autorité spirituelle quelconque dans les possessions anglaises actuelles ou futures, ce qui exclut que le pape nomme un évêque au Québec. Néanmoins, les autorités britanniques ont accepté officieusement la consécration de Monseigneur Briand en 1766.88 Maseres recommande donc l’adoption d’une loi britannique pour clarifier la situation. Selon lui, une intervention parlementaire est également requise pour modifier le droit d’un pays conquis ou pour y imposer des taxes. Pour autant, l’ensemble du droit anglais ne saurait convenir à cette province. Dans son esprit, il est inacceptable que la chambre de députés du Québec soit composée uniquement de protestants qui exerceront par le fait même une domination sur les catholiques. Mais ceux-ci ne peuvent davantage être élus, car ils seraient majoritaires et assureraient la perpétuation de leur religion et leur langue. Maseres rédige donc un projet de loi concernant la tolérance des catholiques, où il prévoit une augmentation graduelle et subtile des pressions pour se convertir au protestantisme. Ainsi, les séminaires continueront à former les prêtres, mais avec l’autorisation et sous la supervision du gouverneur et de son conseil. Celui-ci aura également le pouvoir de nommer l’évêque ou les prêtres desservant les paroisses et celui d’interdire ou de réglementer les processions religieuses. Tant l’évêque que les prêtres pourront se marier et l’obligation de payer la dîme sera rétablie. Au décès d’un curé, si au moins vingt paroissiens sont protestants, un ministre pourra être nommé en même temps que le nouveau curé catholique. Ils partageront alors l’Église et percevront la dîme de leurs

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fidèles seulement. Si les trois-quarts des paroissiens ou plus sont protestants, l’ancien curé ne sera pas remplacé. Les appels à la papauté et l’obtention de bulles seront également interdits. Dans ce même projet, le Conseil de la Province est autorisé à sélectionner les règles de la Nouvelle-France qui doivent demeurer en vigueur, à rendre applicable des règles du droit anglais et à édicter des ordonnances nouvelles. Enfin, les taxes du Régime français sont expressément remises en vigueur, afin de subvenir aux besoins du gouvernement provincial. En 1773 ou en 1774, Maseres rédige également un projet de loi prévoyant la constitution d’un conseil législatif non élu.89 En 1772, ce même auteur fait imprimer et distribue une version plus élaborée d’un projet de loi semblable à celui de 1766, mais qui concerne uniquement la tolérance de la religion catholique.90 Il propose de trancher certaines questions qui demeureront controversées au XIXe et au XXe siècle, tels la personnalité juridique du Séminaire de Montréal et les règles concernant la célébration et la validité des mariages.91 Michel Chartier de Lotbinière, qui a pris connaissance du premier de ces projets, en dévoile les éléments essentiels dans une lettre adressée à un correspondant de la province, où il ne cache pas son inquiétude.92 Ainsi, les catholiques du Québec n’ignorent pas que le sort devant être réservé à leur religion demeure très incertain. À cet égard, les évènements qui se déroulent à Grenade à la même époque, dont fait périodiquement état la Gazette, sont certainement inquiétants. Cette ancienne colonie française a été conquise pendant la Guerre de Sept Ans et est assujettie à la Proclamation royale de 1763, comme la Province de Québec. En 1766, une ordonnance grenadienne accorde le droit de vote aux Catholiques résidant dans l’île avant la Conquête, ce qui déclenche une avalanche de pétitions; celles-ci ont apparemment échappé à l’attention des éditeurs de la Gazette, à moins qu’elles n’aient pas été publiées à Londres.93 En 1768, des instructions royales confirment que les catholiques de Grenade peuvent voter et occuper un nombre limité de sièges au sein de l’Assemblée.94 En 1769, deux catholiques sont assermentés afin de pouvoir siéger au Conseil du gouverneur. Il en résulte une crise qui culmine avec la suspension de six membres protestants. La Gazette rapporte la protestation des autres membres contre cette décision, sans mentionner la cause de la confrontation initiale.95 En 1771, la commission du nouveau gouverneur de Grenade l’autorise à nommer des membres du conseil exécutif ou des juges catholiques, à condition qu’il s’agisse d’anciens sujets français; les députés

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peuvent également pratiquer cette religion.96 Toutefois, après avoir été sommés de procéder à l’assermentation de M. De Chanteloupe, les membres du conseil de la colonie protestent contre cette nouvelle politique. Ils soutiennent qu’il est « hors du pouvoir de la Couronne dans aucune partie des états Britanniques, de mettre en force un Acte de Parlement sur une partie des sujets et d’en exempter une autre partie ».97 À leur avis, les lois interdisant aux catholiques d’exercer des fonctions publiques s’appliquent dans les colonies. Même si ce n’était pas le cas, elles ont été mises en vigueur à Grenade par la commission du gouverneur Melville; par conséquent, seul le Parlement peut les abroger. En définitive, « se croyant obliges par leurs Sermens de soutenir la Constitution, et etans tous gens d’une fortune indépendante, [ils] arrêterent l’exécution d’une pareille mesure contraire à la Constitution, en se retirant ».98 Ce geste leur vaut l’admiration de nombreuses personnes, aussi bien dans les colonies qu’en Grande-Bretagne.99 Par la suite, en 1779, l’île de Grenade sera réoccupée par les Français, avec l’appui de la population francophone. Mais après sa rétrocession à la GrandeBretagne en 1783, suite à l’afflux de colons protestants, les Catholiques seront rapidement privés des droits dont ils bénéficiaient avant la guerre d’Indépendance.100 Ces évènements montrent clairement aux lecteurs de la Gazette à quel point l’admission de catholiques dans une Assemblée coloniale demeure une question controversée, du moins en l’absence d’une loi impériale sur le sujet. Les conséquences se font sentir rapidement au Québec. En 1773, les protestants sont bien au fait de ce qui s’est passé à Grenade, ce qui les porte à croire que le roi pourrait autoriser cette innovation et que dans l’attente de cette décision, ils doivent s’abstenir de prendre position sur cette question.101 En 1774, un francophone qui souhaite dissuader ses compatriotes de signer une pétition demandant l’abrogation de l’Acte de Québec leur rappelle également qu’à Grenade, les catholiques sont inéligibles et ont été exclus du Conseil.102 En toute hypothèse, à cette époque, l’atteinte de l’égalité religieuse au sein de l’Empire britannique représente un défi considérable. C. L’envoi de pétitions en Grande-Bretagne La présentation de pétitions est un droit bien établi dans la tradition britannique. Selon David Zaret, après la guerre civile de 1642, l’impression de ces documents ou de contre-pétitions permet un formidable brassage d’idées. Une partie importante de la population, y

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inclus des femmes, exprime à partir de cette époque des revendications précises au nom de l’opinion publique. Une sphère publique apparaît ainsi dans toutes les régions du royaume, beaucoup plus tôt qu’on ne le croit généralement; les discussions animées de l’époque permettent même aux illettrés de prendre position.103 Certaines pétitions comptent vingt mille signatures, mais le total varie habituellement de trois à sept mille; évidemment, des pressions plus ou moins fortes peuvent contraindre la volonté des signataires.104 Ces documents sont souvent présentés au terme d’une procession publique. Toutefois, depuis 1661, s’ils comportent plus de 20 signatures, leur contenu doit être préalablement approuvé soit par les juges de paix, soit par, les grands jurés, soit par le maire et le conseil de la ville de Londres; en outre, la délégation chargée de présenter le document au roi ou aux Chambres du Parlement ne peut compter plus de dix personnes.105 Un siècle plus tard, le roi peut recevoir une pétition lorsqu’il siège sur son trône, ce qui lui donne un caractère public, ou lors de son lever, ce qui la rend confidentielle.106 Sur les questions les plus controversées, les pétitions comportent entre 50 000 et 60 000 signatures (en 1769, en 1775 et en 1784).107 Cela représente très approximativement 1 % de la population totale de l’Angleterre.108 Au Québec, pour la période qui nous intéresse, les pétitions ne sont pas publiées dans la Gazette ou sous forme de fascicule, contrairement à ce qui se produira après 1784.109 La plupart de celles qui sont présentées au Conseil du Gouverneur ont pour objet l’obtention de privilèges ou d’autorisations, par exemple une concession de terres.110 D’autres portent sur des problèmes commerciaux et sont signées tant par des anglophones que des francophones.111 Si l’on se fie à la procédure suivie en 1773 par un groupe d’anglophones, dans le cas de revendications politiques ou d’intérêt public, des comités sont normalement constitués dans les villes de Québec et de Montréal. Ils se réunissent dans certains établissements pour établir le texte, puis ils chargent quelques-uns de leurs membres de recueillir des signatures. Après la transcription d’une pétition sur un parchemin, le gouverneur ou le lieutenant-gouverneur est consulté afin de savoir s’il accepte la présentation du document au conseil. Si sa réponse est positive, une délégation se rend solennellement devant celui-ci, afin qu’il soit transmis au roi.112 Nous sommes cependant loin de « l’âge d’or » des pétitions au Bas-Canada et dans le Haut-Canada, qui débute vers 1820, même si les questions soulevées à cette époque sont généralement de nature locale.113 Initialement, les francophones ont sollicité l’autorisation de s’assem-

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bler, conformément à la loi anglaise de 1661 mentionnée ci-dessus.114 Celle-ci leur est accordée, à condition que le Conseil en soit informé à l’avance, que deux de ses membres soient présents et qu’ils aient le pouvoir de dissoudre l’assemblée.115 Le 27 mars 1766, le Secrétaire d’État britannique demande toutefois au gouverneur d’expliquer aux nouveaux sujets qu’ils peuvent communiquer leurs griefs au roi, afin que celui-ci y apporte remède.116 Par la suite, selon William Hey, le remplaçant de Murray, Guy Carleton, s’est promis d’empêcher l’envoi de pétitions pendant son mandat, car il croit fermement que celles-ci ont donné lieu à des abus notoires.117 En réalité, compte tenu du fait que les pétitions ne sont pas imprimées et que la Gazette cesse rapidement de publier des commentaires concernant les questions locales controversées, il n’existe pas encore de véritable sphère publique.118 Néanmoins, les francophones éduqués n’hésitent pas à réagir aux prises de position des anciens sujets. Le 7 janvier 1765, quatre-vingt-treize personnes soumettent une pétition. La majorité des signataires est francophone; on y trouve des jurés, des négociants, un curé, un général des milices, etc. Au moins cinq noms semblent avoir une consonance anglophone ou du moins non-francophone: Coocherar, Thomas Lee, Hec. Keez, Schindler, Dennbefrire. S’il s’agit bien d’anglophones, on note une propension de certains d’entre eux à défendre les intérêts des francophones. Les auteurs déclarent avoir cru que le roi avait l’intention de laisser en place leurs « coutumes » « autant que cela ne seroit pas contraire aux Lois d’Angleterre et au bien général »; ils louangent la justice rendue antérieurement par le Conseil militaire de Québec. Un journal londonien mentionnera d’ailleurs la réception d’une « requête bien extraordinaire » par laquelle deux cent résidents d’une colonie nouvellement conquise réclament « la continuation de leurs anciennes loix, et leurs formes de judicature ».119 Les pétitionnaires dénoncent ensuite l’emprisonnement préalable des défendeurs en matière civile ainsi que les « fraix considérables, ruineux tant pour le débiteur que pour le Créancier ». Ils ajoutent: « nous avons vu toutes les Affaires de Famille, qui se décidoient cy-devant a peu de fraix, arrêtes par des Personnes qui veulent se les attribuer, et qui ne savent ny notre Langue ni nos Coutumes et à qui on ne peut parler qu’avec des Guinées à la Main ». Ils se réjouissent de la décision de créer « une justice inférieure, où toutes les Affaires de François à François » seront décidées. Ils font état de leur « amertume » devant les quinze grands jurés anglais qui, en 1764, ont fait souscrire aux sept grands jurés français des griefs dans une « langue qu’ils n’entendoient

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pas ». En outre, « soutenus par les Gens de Loy », ceux-ci veulent les « proscrire comme incapables d’aucunes fonctions […] par la différence de Religion; puisque jusqu’aux Chirurgiens et Apothicaires (fonctions libres en tout Pays), sont du nombre ».120 Tout en se déclarant disposés à obéir aux ordonnances du Conseil, ils reprochent à ces grands jurés « de faire discuter [leurs] Droits de familles en Langues étrangères et, par là, [les] priver des Personnes éclairées dans [leurs] Coutumes ». Dans les semaines qui suivent, après que les grands jurés ont déclaré par écrit qu’ils n’ont jamais eu l’intention d’empêcher systématiquement les catholiques d’être jurés ou d’exercer une profession, une annonce parue dans la Gazette révèle qu’une poignée de francophones soutiennent publiquement les critiques du nouveau régime. Par contre, un nombre plus considérable de nouveaux sujets se dissocie rapidement de cette position.121 Par ailleurs, les problèmes posés par les frais de justice et par l’emprisonnement en matière civile sont bien réels; ils ont été vivement dénoncés par Carleton et par Maseres.122 À l’époque, la charge de greffier est attribuée à un favori du gouvernement britannique qui délègue l’exécution de ses tâches et la perception des revenus moyennant un revenu fixe. Pour en revenir aux revendications exprimées par les francophones, le 27 mars 1766, vingt seigneurs du district de Montréal se réunissent après avoir obtenu l’autorisation du Conseil pour ce faire, sous la surveillance d’un de ses membres, Adam Mabane, ainsi que des juges de paix de la cité.123 Auparavant, les commandants militaires du district leur ont laissé entendre qu’il est interdit aux catholiques de s’assembler. Le jour dit, de nombreux sujets, anciens et nouveaux, s’invitent à la réunion et s’opposent à ce qu’elle ait lieu. C’est avec une extrême réticence qu’ils se dispersant, après avoir été menacé d’une expulsion manu militari.124 Au cours de l’assemblée, les seigneurs décident de rédiger une adresse au roi dans laquelle ils le remercient de ses bontés. Ils demandent également que le libre exercice de la religion catholique soit maintenu et que toute distinction entre les anciens et les nouveaux sujets soit abolie, de sorte que les sujets catholiques puissent être utiles à leur pays, comme les protestants. Ils sollicitent aussi la préservation des anciens usages ou coutumes de la Province, de la manière « la plus avantageuse possible ».125 Le lendemain, ceux qui ont tenté d’empêcher la tenue de l’assemblée adressent deux protestations formelles au Conseil. L’une d’elles, rédigée en anglais lors d’une réunion générale convoque à cette fin, est signée par 15 individus « nés sujet britannique ». Dans les trois pre-

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miers paragraphes, ils affirment que certains seigneurs ont été nommés mandataires des habitants de leurs seigneuries. Or, par le passé, ils ont prêté un serment de fidélité au roi lorsque la Croix Saint-Louis (une décoration militaire très prestigieuse) leur fut remise, ce qui faisait d’eux des membres à vie d’un ordre honorifique. Dans l’esprit des pétitionnaires, cela est incompatible avec le « statut de représentant d’une province régie par la Constitution britannique » ou celui de « gardien de la liberté d’un peuple libre ». Qui plus est, ils croient que certains seigneurs sont encore rémunérés par le roi de France et n’ont pas prêté le serment d’allégeance au souverain britannique. D’autres ont fait circuler une lettre et se sont assemblés sans avoir obtenu une autorisation des magistrats du district, du commandant en chef de la Province ou des habitants de la ville.126 Le reste de la protestation est approuvé tant par les anciens sujets britanniques que par trente-deux nouveaux sujets. Ces derniers signent une version traduite qui omet les trois paragraphes résumés ci-dessus. Les deux documents soulignent toutefois que les propriétaires de seigneuries du district de Montréal n’ont pas tous été convoqués à la réunion. Surtout, ils s’opposent violemment à l’idée que les seigneurs présents soient considérés comme des représentants du public, alors qu’ils ont agi d’une manière dissimulée et privée. Ils dénoncent leur prétention à parler au nom de l’ensemble de la population alors qu’ils ont tenu une réunion dont étaient exclus non seulement les anciens sujets britanniques, mais les nouveaux sujets engagés dans le commerce. Selon eux, cette attitude est de nature à encourager les distinctions entre les commerçants et « ceux qui s’intitulent la noblesse », ce qui pourrait susciter un sentiment de mécontentement qui est entièrement contraire aux douces intentions du roi. Certains auraient même tenté de faire croire aux nouveaux sujets que les Britanniques avaient l’intention d’interdire la pratique de leur religion; dans cette perspective, seul le Gouverneur pouvait les protéger de cette menace et leur garantir le droit de participer à l’administration de la justice. En terminant, les anciens sujets espèrent que si une assemblée est convoquée, ils seront autorisés à participer au choix de leurs représentants.127 En 1766, vingt commerçants de Québec envoient également une pétition au roi où ils affirment que, après avoir vécu sous un régime militaire « oppressif » et « intransigeant », ils s’attendaient à jouir « des libertés britanniques » sous un gouvernement civil, notamment d’une Chambre de députés, car la colonie compte selon eux suffisamment de sujets protestants susceptibles d’y être élus. Au lieu de cela, des ordon-

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nances « vexatoires, oppressives, inconstitutionnelles et attentatoires à la liberté civile et à la cause protestante » ont été adoptées. En outre, le gouverneur a été grossier à l’endroit de pétitionnaires et a fomenté la discorde, notamment en encourageant les nouveaux sujets britanniques à demander des juges qui parlent leur langue; il a également négligé de faire construire une église protestante. Il aurait même fait annuler l’accusation que le grand jury a portée contre Claude Panet « son agent dans la tentative de soulever la population contre les sujets britanniques ».128 Après que Murray a été convoqué à Londres, vingt-et-un seigneurs se portent à sa défense. Ils louangent son administration, notamment la justice rendue sans frais par le Conseil militaire. Sous le gouvernement civil, ils ont plutôt vu « naître […] la Cabale, le Trouble et la confusion » ainsi que, dans des « libels [sic] infâmes, dont les auteurs ont été impunis, la plus basse et la plus insigne Calomnie ». Pour leur part, ils sont « accoutumés à respecter [leurs] supérieurs, et à obéir aux ordres émanés de [leur] Souverain », ce à quoi ils sont portés par leur éducation et par leur religion. Les Canadiens qui ont appuyé les plaintes des anciens sujets britanniques sont des gens « sans naissance, sans Éducation, incapables de sentiments délicats, des soldats Congedies de la Troupe francoise, des Barbiers, des domestiques, des Enfans même, dont plusieurs pour être devenue [sic] Marchands, se sont rendu les Esclaves de leur créanciers, des juifs même […] ».129 Ils réclament donc le retour de Murray. En définitive, celui-ci sera exonéré de tout blâme à Londres, mais il ne reviendra pas dans la colonie.130 Dans ce document, les affinités entre les seigneurs et les militaires ressortent clairement, de même que leur mépris pour les commerçants et les classes laborieuses, pour ne rien dire de leur racisme et de leur élitisme. En 1767, les seigneurs de Montréal demandent plus simplement la suppression du registre des biens immeubles, « dont les frais epuisent la colonie » et l’admission de tous les sujets aux charges publiques, quelle que soit leur religion.131 Ils ne soufflent mot du système juridique. Le débat reprend en 1770. D’une part, trente-et-un anglophones réclament la mise en place d’une Chambre de députés, car il y aurait alors « un nombre suffisant de sujets protestants […] dans cette province qui y possèdent des biens-fonds et les autres qualités requises pour devenir membres d’une Assemblée générale », même si aucun député catholique ne pourrait alors y siéger.132 D’autre part, cinquanteneuf « Canadiens » rédigent une pétition où ils rappellent combien il est « désagréable & humiliant » d’être exclu des fonctions publiques en

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raison de sa religion. Ils ajoutent que les différences en matière de procédure et de frais de justice ont causé « La Ruine d’un nombre considérable de familles » et demandent à nouveau d’être jugés « Suivant les Loix et Coutumes & Ordonnances, Sous Lesquels ils sont nés, qui servent de Baze et de fondements à Leurs possessions et font La règle de Leurs familles ».133 Ces demandes seront réitérées en 1773, comme nous le verrons.134 Dans l’ensemble, il appert que les pétitions rédigées au nom des francophones n’ont pas fait l’objet de larges consultations. Au contraire, un petit nombre de seigneurs et de juristes ont formulé ces demandes en fonctions de leurs intérêts particuliers. Dès 1765, des anglophones et francophones ont contesté leur prétention de se poser en porte-parole de la population. Les nouveaux sujets s’approprient alors les droits inhérents à leur nouveau statut, ce qu’ils ne manqueront pas de faire dans d’autres forums. D. Les revendications concernant le droit privé de la Nouvelle-France En 1767, un litige montre que certains francophones sont conscients de leurs droits fondamentaux dans le cadre d’un procès. En effet, un justiciable soutient qu’en homologuant une sentence arbitrale, la cour le priverait du droit à un procès devant jury. Dans une pétition adressée au Conseil, il déplore que la Cour des plaids communs « arefusé aux instances du suppliant deluy accorder uncorp dejuré parluy reclamé malgrés la précision de l’ordonnance susmentionné [de 1764], Et qu’il a différente fois cité a cette dite Cour, Et malgrés en outre Ledroit qu’a unsujet deSaMajesté d’avoir dans sacause un corp de juré, rien de tout cela napüe operer enfaveur duSuppliant ».135 Les juges de la Cour expliquent que le litige avait été renvoyé devant des arbitres avant que la requête pour un procès devant jury ne soit présentée; le Conseil rejette la pétition en soulignant que la cause est encore pendante devant les tribunaux.136 Par ailleurs, il est bien connu qu’en général, les seigneurs méprisent l’institution du jury, tandis que les jurés y voient souvent un fardeau, plutôt qu’un instrument de protection de leur liberté.137 L’usage qu’a fait François-Joseph Cugnet des principes de la constitution britannique est également très instructif. Né dans une prestigieuse famille seigneuriale, il devient en 1766 le traducteur officiel du gouvernement. En outre, celui-ci lui demande de préparer un aperçu des règles de droit privé en vigueur sous le Régime français, ce qui donnera lieu par la suite à plusieurs publications.138 Cela explique sans doute pour-

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quoi en 1767, on peut lire dans la Gazette, à propos des Canadiens, que le roi « Entend qu’ils soient jugés suiyvant les Loix Françoises toujours utilisées en ce païs jusqu’à présent, de la même manière qu’en Normandie « pays conquis ». En outre, des Juges François, Gens de Loix […] rendront la Justice entre François […] suivant un Code qu’il plaira à son Excellence le Gouverneur de faire rédiger et imprimer; ce sera un bien pour toute la Colonie, lorsque par semaine il y aura des audiences, et que chaque particulier François sera jugé suivant les Loix Françoises, Us et Coutumes de ce païs; Alors il y aura moins de Retardement, de Chicanes, et de Frais ».139 Toutefois, ce projet avortera peu après.140 Vers 1771, après son retour en Angleterre, Maseres fait imprimer un projet de loi portant sur le droit successoral et les régimes matrimoniaux.141 Il y propose, de rendre les règles du droit anglais – avec d’importantes modifications – applicables aux couples qui se marieront après l’entrée en vigueur de la loi, ainsi qu’à leurs descendants, sauf s’ils choisissent d’opter pour le droit de la Nouvelle-France dans leur contrat de mariage ou dans leur testament. Ce texte suscite une réaction indignée de François-Joseph Cugnet, qui semble avoir disparu.142 Maseres fait alors imprimer une version plus élaborée de son projet.143 Il répond aussi à Cugnet en français, car il s’agit de sa langue maternelle (il est d’origine huguenote), dans un mémoire de 159 pages où il déplore notamment les injures, la violence, le « venin » ou « le langage emporté et indécent » de son contradicteur, tout en citant à l’occasion les objections formulées par celui-ci.144 Cela nous permet de saisir les points de désaccord entre les deux protagonistes. Cugnet refuse d’admettre que le droit anglais a été introduit au Québec par la Proclamation royale. Néanmoins, il accepte que les règles du droit criminel anglais et l’habeas corpus s’y appliquent. Il faut dire qu’en 1772, Maseres avait publié un ouvrage contenant divers documents officiels, ainsi qu’un compte rendu des difficultés rencontrées pour percevoir à nouveau les taxes imposées sous le Régime français, à la suite du rejet par des jurés des actions intentées devant la Cour du banc du roi. Allant beaucoup plus loin que Cugnet, il y affirmait que la Proclamation royale de 1763 et l’ordonnance de 1764 étaient invalides.145 Pour sa part, Cugnet croit que le projet de Maseres est « contraire aux désirs des Canadiens et ennemi de leur bonheur ». Les formalités testamentaires proposées lui semblent très critiquables; Maseres réplique qu’elles sont prescrites par une loi anglaise. Cugnet approuve expressément l’introduction de la liberté testamentaire illimitée, comme en droit anglais. Mais il considère que le projet sape aussi bien le fondement des lois

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françaises que celui des lois anglaises, en les modifiant considérablement toutes les deux. En effet, Maseres souhaite éviter le morcellement des terres en introduisant une forme modifiée de primogéniture, même pour les filles, ce qui fait dire à Cugnet que les puînées seront tellement désavantagées qu’elles seront contraintes de se prostituer!146 En faisant l’historique du système féodal, Maseres se lance dans une histoire constitutionnelle de l’Angleterre et, pour répondre à diverses objections, il tente de démontrer que les droits de succession ne découlent pas du droit naturel. Le dernier article de son projet prévoit le remplacement de la Coutume de Paris par un abrégé officiel préparé par des juristes du Québec, à l’exclusion des ouvrages de doctrine et de jurisprudence. En effet, ces règles s’appliqueront aux biens meubles et immeubles, seigneuriaux et roturiers, ainsi qu’à leur aliénation. Dans l’ensemble, Maseres manie avec une grande aisance aussi bien les concepts juridiques anglais et ceux de la Nouvelle-France. Les juristes du Québec désirant se familiariser avec le droit anglais ont pu trouver là une source précieuse de renseignements. Le principal enjeu socioéconomique de l’époque concerne la reconnaissance du régime seigneurial. Par l’article 37 de la Capitulation de Montréal, les Britanniques se sont engagés à respecter « L’Entiere paisible propriété et possession » des « biens, Seigneuriaux et Roturiers, Meubles et Immeubles, Marchandises, Pelleteries et Autres Effets ».147 Cela inclut l’ensemble des droits et obligations découlant du régime seigneurial, notamment le paiement par le censitaire de la redevance annuelle fixée dans le premier contrat de concession de la terre qu’il possède, l’utilisation obligatoire du moulin seigneurial en payant 1/14e de la mouture et le versement par l’acheteur d’un 1/12e du prix de vente au seigneur, chaque fois qu’il y a aliénation d’une terre située dans la seigneurie. Le seigneur détient également dans certains cas des droits exclusifs sur les pêcheries et les grèves, tout dépendant de son acte de concession.148 Le censitaire peut aliéner sa terre librement ou la transmettre à ses héritiers. Des principes semblables régissent les seigneuries, avec des différences notables (par exemple, en cas d’aliénation, l’acheteur doit payer 20 % au seigneur supérieur, qui est le plus souvent le roi en Nouvelle-France). D’un point de vue socio-économique, il faut attendre la fin du XVIIIe siècle pour que les seigneuries produisent un revenu permettant de vivre de manière très aisée. Avant la Conquête, pour se démarquer des paysans, les seigneurs doivent obtenir des commissions militaires, des postes dans l’administration ou encore bénéficier de re-

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venus commerciaux.149 En 1764, l’exclusion des catholiques de l’armée britannique est donc ressentie comme un affront, d’autant plus que plusieurs seigneurs et habitants se sont portés volontaires pour combattre le chef Autochtone Pontiac et ses guerriers (même si les hostilités ont pris fin afin qu’ils puissent livrer bataille). Les postes de conseillers du gouverneur ou de juges sont également convoitées. Nous avons déjà signalé les affinités entre les seigneurs et les officiers britanniques. On peut sans doute en dire autant du gouvernement britannique. En effet, en 1767, l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard est divisée en grands domaines qui sont vendus à des Britanniques; la plupart demeureront absents de cette colonie et vivront du travail des paysans, comme les seigneurs du Québec aspirent à le faire.150 Pour en revenir aux débats juridiques, la Coutume de Paris prévoit des règles différentes pour les seigneuries et pour les terres des censitaires, particulièrement pour les droits successoraux et les régimes matrimoniaux. C’est pourquoi la reconnaissance du régime seigneurial dans l’article 37 de la Capitulation de Montréal peut englober cette partie du système juridique de la Nouvelle-France. Dans sa réplique à Cugnet, Maseres affirme que le Parlement britannique peut modifier ces règles sans déroger à l’engagement pris dans l’article 37, puisque le général Amherst a rejeté la demande de maintenir en vigueur la Coutume de Paris dans son intégralité.151 Pour sa part, Cugnet soutient que « si le Gouvernement Britannique imposoit à ses nouveaux sujets, contre leur consentement, ces loix nouvelles, il seroit plus dur que le Gouvernement Turc »!152 Pour lui, affirmer que la Proclamation royale a remplacé les lois de la NouvelleFranc revient à attribuer « des couleurs noires aux droites intentions de Sa Majesté » afin de le voir « agir comme un dur et barbare conquérant ».153 En mettant ensemble les autres renseignements fournis par Maseres, il appert que selon Cugnet, la Proclamation a introduit le droit criminel anglais et l’Habeas Corpus, mais qu’elle a laissé intactes les lois françaises concernant les successions, les régimes matrimoniaux et les droits de propriété. Cugnet, qui est le traducteur du Conseil, a sans doute pris connaissance d’un rapport du procureur général et du solliciteur général d’Angleterre rédigé en 1766 qui soutient les mêmes idées. Selon eux, le roi n’avait pas l’intention d’agir « avec la main rude du conquérant » et d’abroger entièrement le droit de la Nouvelle-France.154 Il entendait plutôt accorder aux nouveaux sujets la protection des lois anglaises concernant « leurs vies, leurs libertés et leurs propriétés », plutôt que

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« des mesures nouvelles et arbitraires » applicables matière immobilière ou successorale. En effet, celle-ci « tendraient plutôt à confondre et à subvertir les droits qu’à les confirmer ».155 Pour ce qui concerne les contrats et la responsabilité extracontractuelle, à leur avis, « les principes essentiels de la justice sont partout les mêmes », même si les règles de procédure et de preuve peuvent varier. En se fondant sur ces « maximes essentielles », les juges ne pourront « commettre d’erreur contre les lois anglaises ou les anciennes coutumes du Canada ».156 En matière immobilière, les coutumes anciennes doivent demeurer en vigueur. Les anciens sujets britanniques qui achètent des terres dans la colonie « doivent se conformer aux règles locales », comme dans certaines parties du royaume et dans certaines autres possessions de la couronne.157 Dans ces conditions, la « fermeté et la douceur de l’administration de la justice anglaise » seront bien davantage ressentis lorsque « la vie, la liberté et la propriété du sujet » est en cause que si les sujets canadiens sont obligés d’adopter « les règles suivies en Angleterre à l’égard de propriétés mobilières et immobilières ».158 Ils concluent: « Cette fermeté et cette douceur sont les avantages que Sa Majesté se proposait d’octroyer par sa proclamation, en ce qui concerne la judicature. Ces bienfaits sont irrévocablement accordés, et la jouissance devrait en être assurée à ces sujets canadiens ».159 Le 24 juillet 1773, Cugnet adresse une lettre à nul autre que William Blackstone.160 Cugnet demande à Blackstone d’intervenir en faveur des Canadiens et il lui envoie certains documents qu’il a préparés. Il ajoute que ses « amis » sont effrayés par l’idée que l’ensemble des lois anglaises ait été introduite par la Proclamation royale, car ils seraient alors « privés de leur loix de propriété […] la supression de leur lois, bien loin de les Tranquilliser, mettraient le Comble à leurs malheurs ». Ils « souhaitent une Chambre d’Assemblée dans laquelle ils puissent représenter. Cette Chambre est le seul moïen qui puisse rendre, ainsi qu’il le faut nécessairement dans quelqu’années, les Canadiens vrais anglais, & les engager d’en adopter les loix ». Bien que cet argument puisse sembler peu sincère, dans le contexte de l’époque, l’adoption des lois anglaises n’était pas forcément une hypothèse à exclure à long terme, dans la mesure où des députés canadiens pourraient ménager une transition et faire des aménagements appropriés ou, à l’inverse, bloquer toute tentative de modifier les sources du droit. Cugnet s’oppose également à la création par le Parlement d’un Conseil législatif non élu:

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Le Ministère veut donc que le Gouverneur & Conseil, soit dans tout le Droit (sans consulter le peuple & ses véritables Intérêts) de changer, altérer, Réformer, & de même abolir leurs anciennes loix de propriété suivant ses caprices & ses volontés, & de leur imposer toutes & Telles Taxes qu’il jugerait à propos. Un tel pouvoir ne pourrait être accordé au Gouverneur & Conseil sans déroger Totalement aux prudentes & sages constitutions du Gouvernement britannique.

À ses yeux, seule une Chambre élue où pourront siéger des députés catholiques est acceptable.161 Cugnet joint également le manuscrit des traités qu’il a rédigés. Il s’oppose évidemment à l’utilisation de l’abrégé que d’autres ont préparé et dresse la liste des ouvrages de droit français que devraient lire les juges anglais pour pouvoir rendre justice au Québec.162 Les traités de Cugnet seront publiés en 1775, mais le manuscrit contient une réplique cinglante au mémoire de Maseres qui ne figure pas dans la version imprimée.163 Les propositions de celui-ci y sont qualifiées de « nouvelles loix absurdes de succession »; pour lui, les « Canadiens voient toujours avec peine que ce Monsr. qu’ils ont regardé et regarderont toujours comme leur Ennemy Juré est Incorrigible ».164 Dès la rédaction de son manuscrit, vers 1771, Cugnet soutient que l’interdiction de léguer plus du cinquième des biens propres du testateur ne doit plus avoir lieu « sous un gouvernement libre comme celui de la Province », au risque d’être traité de « mauvais citoyen » par ceux « qui se croient jurisconsultes, à cause de leur Bibliothèque ».165 Avant d’aborder les successions ab intestat, il rappelle que les nouveaux sujets peuvent « profiter des loix anglaises […] puisque testant les auteurs ont la liberté de renvoyer à la loy municipale ».166 En ce qui concerne la formation des juges du Québec, « les loix civiles », c’est-à-dire le droit romain, sont enseignées dans les universités anglaises; « si les personnes choisies […] les ont Etudiées, il ne leur sera point difficile avec de l’Etude et de l’Application de se rendre Maîtres des Loix françaises », car celles-ci sont fondées sur les mêmes principes. À cet égard, Michael Dorland et Maurice Charland on raison de souligner que l’enjeu du débat concerne la préservation de l’autorité de la doctrine française, car Maseres voudrait interdire le recours à celle-ci.167 Dans sa lettre à Blackstone, Cugnet discute de la promesse de la Proclamation royale d’appliquer le droit anglais au Québec. Or, à l’avenir, les sujets d’origine britannique pourront soustraire « leurs familles aux anciennes Loix » françaises en disposant « de leurs terres par testament ou acte de dernière volontés ». Pour Cugnet, cela constitue une

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« voie raisonnable et suffisante » pour leur assurer le bénéfice des lois anglaises. En outre, elle sera bien acceptée par les Canadiens. En effet, ceux-ci: […] ne peuvent s’opposer à ce que la même liberté leur soit accordée, la dérogations [sic] à cet égard à leurs anciennes loix ne peut que leur être agréable. On croit même pouvoir avancer qu’elles sont d’une très grande utilité pour le bien et avancement de la Province et les Canadiens parce que les cadets de famille, quelqu’elle soit, qui craindront que leurs pères qui pourront profiter de cette liberté, ne soient dans l’intention de disposer de leurs terres en faveur de leurs aînés, et s’ils en ont plusieurs, en faveur de quelques-uns de leurs Enfans, s’adonneront au travail, que les uns prendront de nouvelles terres & que les autres qui n’y voudront point se tenir à la culture, prendront party soit dans le commerce soit dans la marine, qui à la suite des tems deviendront une ressource pour les jeunes Canadiens.

Le 3 janvier 1774, Blackstone transmet ces documents au procureur général d’Angleterre. Nous pouvons donc présumer que les arguments de Cugnet tendant à montrer que la liberté de tester serait bien accueillie par les Canadiens, ont eu beaucoup de poids lors de la rédaction du projet qui allait devenir l’Acte de Québec. On sait que celui-ci a reconnue cette liberté, en dépit du rétablissement simultané des lois concernant la propriété et les droits civils appliquées avant la Conquête, lesquelles accordaient une protection aux descendants légitimes.168 Dans l’ensemble, les positions de Cugnet reprennent celles des pétitions antérieures rédigées par les francophones, en y ajoutant deux précisions capitales. D’une part, l’application du droit criminel anglais ne pose pas de difficultés particulières. D’autre part, en matière successorale, l’imposition de règles contraignantes serait inacceptable pour des Anglais, qui considèrent la liberté de tester comme un droit inhérent des sujets britanniques. Dans une lettre qui sera transmise au gouvernement britannique, il soutient que le maintien de la liberté de tester répondra aux attentes des anciens sujets britanniques et sera bien accueillie par les nouveaux, puisqu’elle encouragera les fils de familles à être plus industrieux. Dans ces écrits, il reprend la thèse formulée en 1766 par les principaux officiers de justice de la couronne britannique. Selon celle-ci, si le droit criminel et public a été introduit par la Proclamation royale, il n’en va pas de même du droit immobilier, des règles successorales ou des régimes matrimoniaux. Cette distinction, qui n’apparaît pas dans le texte, découle de l’engagement pris dans la

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Capitulation de Montréal de respecter les biens seigneuriaux et roturiers, meubles et immeubles. E. Les tentatives d’obtenir une assemblée élue L’interprétation donnée à la Proclamation royale par les officiers de la couronne est reprise presque mot pour mot par Cugnet dans un document qu’il destine initialement aux éditeurs de la Gazette. En avril 1773, une question posée à la Chambre des communes révèle que le gouvernement britannique dispose des rapports de Masères, de Carleton et du juge en chef Hey, ainsi que des conseillers juridiques de la couronne. Il ne lui reste plus qu’à faire un choix entre les divers scénarios que contiennent ces documents. Le 15 juillet, la Gazette publie un compte rendu de ces débats. Alarmé, Cugnet prépare une nouvelle traduction française de ceux-ci, auxquels il adjoint des commentaires.169 On peut y lire que Thomas Townshend, député de l’opposition, déplore le fait qu’une « bande d’Avocats ignorans & de mauvaise foy » incite les justiciables à présenter des demandes fondées sur le droit anglais « ce qui produit une confusion qui entraîne avec Elle le malheur et la ruine du Peuple. Il Résulte de tout cecy, Monsieur, que ce Peuple a raison de nous maudire & nos loix responsables, & même de détester ce gouvernement que l’Europe admire & auquel il porte Envie ». Cugnet répond que les « Canadiens raisonnables par la lecture des autheurs qui ont écrits [sic] sur la constitution Britannique ne peuve [sic] point maudire ni l’Angleterre ni ses loix; ils les connaissent Equitables ». S’il y a eu des avocats sans scrupule, le « Gouvernement y a, sans doute, remédié puisque cette Espèce n’y Existe plus ». À son avis, seule une Chambre élue peut modifier les anciennes lois de la colonie concernant les droits de propriété. En revanche, les « nouveaux sujets doivent Etre certainement Très Reconnaissans à leur nouveau Souverain d’avoir bien voulu qu’ils profitassent de la Douceur des loix anglaises quant au Criminel et à celles, quant à la Joüisance de leurs libertés personnelles ». Pour lui, la liberté testamentaire constitue le seul élément manquant pour assurer à la population le bénéfice des lois anglaises mentionné par la Proclamation. L’opinion contraire, selon laquelle tout le droit anglais a été introduit, est « absurde & Totalement contraire aux Justes & Droites intentions de Sa Majesté ». Il cite alors le tome 1er des Commentaires de William Blackstone. Cugnet rédige également un projet de pétition adressée aux deux Chambres du Parlement qu’il souhaite faire publier.170 À son avis, l’hé-

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sitation du gouvernement britannique s’explique par la mauvaise qualité de l’abrégé des lois de la Nouvelle-France qui lui a été transmis. Ce document a été préparé à la demande du gouverneur par un groupe de juristes, de préférence aux traités qu’il a rédigés (ce qu’il se garde bien de préciser).171 Dans son projet de pétition, il reprend les arguments exposés ci-dessus concernant la survie des anciennes lois de propriété, la nécessité de créer une Chambre de députés et l’accueil favorable réservé à la liberté testamentaire par les Canadiens. Selon lui, il « n’y a pas la moindre difficulté à ce que les loix d’Angleterre soient suivies en cette Province, quant à l’Amirauté & au Commerce, ces deux objets ne concernant point la propriété ». Si les catholiques ne peuvent siéger dans l’assemblée, un conseil non élu pourrait être acceptable, à condition qu’il ne puisse modifier les règles françaises concernant la propriété. Ses pouvoirs devraient être limités à l’adoption de règles locales ou de procédure.172 Cugnet tente cependant de démontrer que la raison d’être des lois anglaises interdisant aux catholiques de siéger comme député en Angleterre n’existe pas au Québec. Il croit que les Canadiens accepteront de bon gré d’être taxés par une assemblée élue car en son absence, c’est le Parlement britannique qui exercera ce pouvoir. Pour comprendre cet enthousiasme de Cugnet pour une assemblée élue, il convient de préciser que Maseres a fait imprimer à la même époque un document énonçant les questions qui doivent être réglées soit par un acte du Parlement, soit par une Proclamation. Il y joint le plan d’une Chambre de députés où chaque seigneurie serait représentée par son seigneur et par un député élu, les villes pouvant choisir leurs représentants librement.173 Une telle proposition ne pouvait que plaire aux seigneurs. Dans la lettre qu’il adresse à Blackstone, Cugnet explique qu’il a consulté le lieutenant-gouverneur Cramahé avant d’envoyer ses commentaires sur les débats parlementaires de 1773 concernant le Québec aux éditeurs de la Gazette.174 Cet officier lui répond qu’il n’est pas « nécessaire que les habitans de cette Province fussent instruits de ce qui se passait à Londres à leur sujet » et qu’ils doivent attendre « avec respect les arrangemens que la Cour ferait ». Tout en reconnaissant qu’il ne peut l’empêcher, il déconseille la publication du texte. Cugnet explique « qu’Elevé dans un Gouvernement despotique, J’ai pris le Conseil du lieutenant Gouverneur pour un ordre ». Ce faisant, il laisse la voie libre à Carleton, qui aura beau jeu d’affirmer par la suite que les Canadiens ne sont pas intéressés par une Chambre élue.

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Le projet de pétition de Cugnet est révisé par un groupe de marchands et de juristes francophones. Une nouvelle version est préparée, qui omet toute référence aux traités de Cugnet, à la possibilité d’écarter l’application du droit de la Nouvelle-France par contrat ou par testament, ainsi qu’au droit commercial ou maritime. Cependant, le texte soutien que la bonne conduite des Canadiens leur permet d’espérer qu’ils pourront:175 […] jouïr des constitutions Britanniques quant à la sûreté de leur liberté personnelle, de leurs droits et possessions, dont ils ne pourront jamais être pleinement assurés, tant qu’il leur manquera une chambre d’assemblée du peuple, composée de nouveaux et anciens sujets sans distinction; ce qui est une des parties les plus essentielles des dittes constitutions.

Ils ajoutent que: […] la police intérieure et l’arrangement à faire quant aux loix de la province, doivent être déférés à ses habitans. Ils doivent, sans aucun doute, ainsi que ceux des autres provinces, être les meilleurs juges, et les plus naturels, de leurs intérêts et de leurs besoins en tous les tems, leur bien-être dépendant entièrement d’un arrangement solide.

Si aucune assemblée n’est créée, ils demandent que leurs anciennes lois de propriété soient préservées. La suite des évènements est racontée par Masères. Cugnet tente d’obtenir l’appui des anglophones de la ville de Québec, en affirmant que, en Chambre, les anciens sujets emporteront certainement les voix des nouveaux, même s’ils y sont en minorité, car ils sont plus instruits qu’eux!176 Les discussions entre le comité anglophone et une poignée de francophones se continuent. En définitive, elles achoppent sur la question religieuse et la pétition de Cugnet n’est pas envoyée.177 À cet égard, il faut se rappeler qu’en 1772, dans une lettre envoyée de Londres, Michel-Chartier de Lotbinère avait demandé à ses compatriotes de se tenir tranquilles pendant ses démarches en vue d’obtenir une réforme.178 De leur côté, à Montréal et à Québec, des comités presque exclusivement anglophones approuvent une pétition en décembre 1773. Ils y réclament la création d’une Chambre élue, en laissant aux autorités londoniennes le soin de déterminer sa composition. S’ils s’abstiennent de l’approuver, ils admettent la possibilité que des catholiques puissent

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y siéger, bien qu’une telle éventualité ait peu de chances de se réaliser dans le contexte de l’époque.179 Auparavant, ils ont demandé à huit seigneurs et sept commerçants d’unir leurs forces avec eux. Seulement deux seigneurs ont accepté l’invitation, par opposition à cinq commerçants, ce qui préfigure l’opposition de cette catégorie sociale à une assemblée élue, qui se produira dans les années 1780.180 Au même moment, une pétition est signée par soixante-cinq personnes, généralement des seigneurs ou des juristes. Ceux-ci croient que l’introduction du droit anglais aurait pour effet de « renverser [leurs] fortunes et détruire entièrement [leurs] possessions ». Ils réclament le rétablissement de leurs « anciennes loix, priviléges et coûtumes », de même que l’octroi de tous les « droits et privilèges de Citoyens Anglois ».181 Dans un mémoire explicatif, ils réitèrent que les règles de l’ancien droit sont indispensables à la préservation de leurs titres et de leurs fortunes. Ils affirment que la colonie n’est pas en mesure de supporter ses propres dépenses et « par conséquent, de former une chambre d’assemblée ». Ils préfèrent un conseil non élu où les catholiques pourront siéger.182 Sans doute éprouvent-ils peu de sympathie pour une assemblée représentative. À cet égard, Michel Chartier de Lotbinière a demandé d’être autorisé à parler au nom des Canadiens, mais sa requête a été rejetée par ses correspondants. Si ceux-ci sont vraisemblablement préoccupés par son comportement imprévisible, ils espèrent également empêcher ou retarder l’imposition de taxes dans la colonie en s’opposant à la création d’une assemblée.183 En 1774, Chartier de Lotbinière comparaît devant le comité des Communes chargé d’étudier le projet de loi qui deviendra l’Acte de Québec.184 Il se déclare tout à fait opposé à l’idée d’un Conseil non élu. Dans la mesure où ils pourront y siéger, l’« inclination naturelle » des Canadiens est de bénéficier d’une législature similaire au Parlement britannique. S’il est vrai qu’ils n’ont pas exprimé ce désir, cela est dû au fait que, selon certains de leurs interlocuteurs, les catholiques en seraient exclus. En outre, l’assemblée devra générer des revenus suffisants pour couvrir les dépenses gouvernementales; or, la province n’est pas assez riche pour que cela soit possible. De Lotbinière évite toutefois de se poser en porte-parole de ses compatriotes. En effet, il déclare que la situation a pu évoluer depuis son départ de Québec. Peu après, dans une conversation privée avec Francis Maseres, il concède qu’une assemblée composée exclusivement de protestants est quelque peu préférable à un conseil. Pour lui, cette alternative revient à choisir entre se jeter dans une rivière ou se précipiter dans une maison

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en feu. L’assemblée de protestants est semblable à la rivière, puisque des représentants élus seront préoccupés par le bien de la communauté; un conseil non élu ressemble davantage au feu, puisqu’il s’agit d’un « instrument de gouvernement despotique et destructeur » dont les membres auront obtenu leur poste par flatterie et servilité. Ils seront probablement indifférents au bien-être et aux intérêts véritables de la province, préférant utiliser leur pouvoir pour s’enrichir ou céder aux caprices du gouverneur.185 Dans cette perspective, l’accès aux fonctions publiques apparaît réservée à une minorité de privilégiés qui soutiendront inconditionnellement le gouverneur. En définitive, bien qu’ils aient initialement été intrigués par la portée très large des droits reconnus ou réclamés par les sujets britanniques, les francophones éduqués semblent avoir assimilé ces concepts rapidement. Ils se sont sans aucun doute familiarisés avec certains d’entre eux par l’entremise de la Gazette, même si un François-Joseph Cugnet peut étayer ses arguments en citant Blackstone. En 1773, l’idée que des représentants élus dans la colonie doivent adopter des lois au nom des Canadiens ne parvient pas à rallier le soutien de ceux qui s’expriment en leur nom. Des projets de pétitions ou des lettres affirment qu’il s’agit là d’un droit inhérent au statut de sujet britannique, mais ils ne sont pas rendus publics. Pendant ce temps, un petit groupe de seigneurs et de juristes se contente de réclamer l’égalité religieuse et le rétablissement des lois suivies en Nouvelle-France, deux revendications qui semblaient faire très largement consensus à l’époque. Conclusion Avec le recul, si l’on considère l’expérience malheureuse de l’île de Grenade et l’hostilité générée par la reconnaissance de la religion catholique dans l’Acte de Québec, il semble que les promoteurs d’une réforme constitutionnelle avaient raison de supposer qu’une assemblée dominée par des députés catholiques n’était pas une option réaliste en 1773. Les sujets britanniques catholiques résidant au Québec étaient alors considérés comme plus déférents que les protestants et, par conséquent, comme ayant mois besoin d’une telle assemblée. Nous ignorons si cette vision était largement partagée, compte tenu du très petit nombre de personnes ayant signé des pétitions portant sur ces questions. Au minimum, nous savons que d’autres francophones appuyaient fortement la création d’institutions représentatives, mais qu’ils sont demeurés silencieux afin d’obtenir l’égalité religieuse en premier lieu.

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Certains commentaires publiés dans la Gazette montrent que, comme on pouvait s’y attendre, les controverses concernant le caractère limité des pouvoirs reconnus au gouvernement britannique ou colonial ont d’abord laissé les Canadiens perplexes. Toutefois, plusieurs comptes rendus publiés dans ce même périodique pouvaient leur fournir les outils nécessaires pour entreprendre des recherches doctrinales plus poussées. En 1773, certains d’entre eux, notamment François-Joseph Cugnet ou Michel Chartier de Lotbinière, ont maîtrisé des concepts tels que le droit d’élire les législateurs ou l’importance du procès devant jury en matière civile, de l’habeas corpus et du droit de propriété. Ils exigent de pouvoir jouir de tous les droits reconnus aux sujets britanniques, ce qui est rarement mentionné dans l’historiographie. Des recherches additionnelles seraient nécessaires pour déterminer dans quelle mesure ces idées ont circulé et ont été assimilées par d’autres personnes, en particulier les commerçants. Très rapidement, la Gazette doit se plier à un régime de censure et éviter de débattre des questions controversées concernant la province. En outre, les pétitions qui sont remises au gouverneur ou à son représentant ne sont pas publiées. Elles sont élaborées par un petit nombre de personne et leurs signataires représentent un infime pourcentage de la population. Dans ces conditions, il n’existe pas encore de véritable sphère publique permettant de débattre publiquement des questions politiques.186 En effet, à compter de 1766, lorsqu’il est présent dans la colonie, Carleton fait tout en son pouvoir pour empêcher la présentation de pétitions. Il parvient à dissuader la plupart des Canadiens de réclamer publiquement la création d’une assemblée, donnant ainsi faussement l’impression que presque personne n’est intéressé par celleci. En définitive, l’élite coloniale parvient à obtenir la reconnaissance du régime seigneurial et la possibilité d’accéder aux fonctions publiques les mieux rémunérées, en évitant la création d’une Chambre de députés qui serait susceptible de taxer ses propriétés. En outre, pour François-Joseph Cugnet, les droits fondamentaux des sujets britanniques incluent la liberté de tester. Dans plusieurs écrits qui ont été transmis à Londres, il se fait le promoteur de celle-ci, en assurant que les « Canadiens » sont du même avis. À cet égard, le rôle qu’il a joué est demeuré dans l’obscurité. Il est bien connu que les soldats américains qui envahissent le Québec en 1775 rencontrent bien peu de résistance et bénéficient même d’un soutien actif, même s’ils ne parviennent pas à s’emparer de la ville de Québec et doivent battre en retraite en 1776. On signale à l’époque

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des cas où les habitants refusent d’obéir à leur seigneur ou l’expulsent de leur village.187 À cet égard, les élites avaient fini par croire au mythe de la docilité et de l’apathie paysanne qu’elles avaient elles-mêmes forgé.188 Or, la neutralité ou l’appui dont bénéficient les envahisseurs peuvent être attribués aux lettres adressées par le Congrès américain aux habitants de la Province. Celles-ci ont été largement diffusées dans les campagnes par de vrais marchands ou par des individus passant pour exercer cette profession.189 La première de ces lettres expose les vertus d’un gouvernement « anglais » comprenant une Chambre de députés élus, le procès devant jury, l’habeas corpus, la possession de terres assujetties à « de legeres rentes foncieres » – une critique du régime seigneurial alors en vigueur au Québec – et, en dernier lieu, la liberté de presse. Au sujet de l’Acte de Québec, elle rappelle que le Conseil non élu peut modifier à sa guise les règles du droit pénal ou du droit civil: « la Couronne & ses Ministres seront aussi absolus dans toute l’étendue de votre vaste Province, que le sont actuellement les despotes de l’Asie et de l’Afrique ».190 En ce qui concerne la religion, le Congrès se dit convaincu qu’elle ne constituera pas un obstacle à l’obtention du soutien des habitants du Québec. Ces arguments seront rappelés dans divers documents imprimés par les Américains.191 En réalité, selon des commentaires transmis à Francis Maseres, après l’adoption de l’Acte de Québec, l’arrogance et l’insolence dont faisait preuve la noblesse ont été vivement ressenties par le reste de la population, mais aucune protestation formelle ne fut faite afin d’éviter de compromettre les droits accordés aux catholiques.192 Le 8 janvier 1776, Christophe Pélissier, qui soutient les envahisseurs et est également directeur des Forges de Saint-Maurice, écrit au Président du Congrès continental américain, afin de lui expliquer la situation qui prévaut dans la Province.193 Cette lettre méconnue analyse de manière particulièrement lucide les évènements de la dernière décennie. À son avis, le gouvernement britannique a tenté de convaincre les Canadiens que l’Acte de Québec fut adopté dans leur intérêt « et qu’ils devoient en avoir une eternelle reconnoissance ».194 Le premier gouverneur de la Province, le général James Murray, a été incapable de « rétablir le gouvernement sur le même pied qu’il étoit sous la domination Françoise ». Son successeur, le général Carleton:195 […] sonda le coeur des Canadiens, et ne negligea rien pour leur persuader que leurs anciennes lois, coutumes, et usages étoient ce qui pouvoient leur convenir le mieux; mais ayant trouvé l’ opposition chez ceux qui savent préférer la liberté

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au despotisme, il ne donna plus sa confiance qu’ aux officiers Canadiens et au clergé. Il trouva en eux tout ce qu’ il lui falloit; c’ est-à-dire, des courtesans [sic] qui, flattés de l’ esperance de voir renaître un jour les temps où ils pouvoient dominer sur le peuple, ils le suivirent suivant ses désirs, et en conséquence adressèrent au Roi une requête, au nom de tous les habitants de la Province de Quebeck, pour se soustraire à la sage constitution Britannique; c’ est-à-dire, pour demander fers [sic] pour leurs concitoyens. Il ne faut pas croire que les Canadiens en général se soient avilis jusqu’ à ce point; quelques adulateurs et quelques ignorans fanatiques des anciennes coutumes signerènt cette honteuse requête sans y avoir été autorisés que par euxmêmes, au nombre de 65. C’ est d’ après cette requête de commando que le Ministère qui avoit déjà ses vues, à saisi avec empressement l’ occasion d’ établir en ce pays le pouvoir arbitraire, au moyen du Bill de Quebeck.

L’accueil favorable dont ont bénéficié les lettres envoyées par les Américains peut certainement être expliqué, au moins en partie, par la dissémination des principes du droit constitutionnel britannique pendant la décennie précédente. L’échec de l’invasion, l’imposition de la loi martiale et la continuation de la guerre avec les États-Unis ont mis fin aux discussions constitutionnelles pendant près d’une décennie, jusqu’au commencement des débats qui culmineront avec l’adoption par le Parlement britannique, en 1791, de l’Acte constitutionnel.196 À ce moment François-Joseph Cugnet s’opposera farouchement à cette réforme, comme la plupart des seigneurs. Mais une toile de fond constitutionnelle est déjà en place depuis longtemps: l’élection de députés fait son apparition en 1792, tandis que l’habeas corpus et le procès devant jury en matière civile sont restaurés en 1784 et en 1785. Les idées semées de 1764 à 1775 produisent maintenant leurs fruits, inaugurant une ère de conflits politiques aigus qui avait été bien anticipée par les opposants à la mise en place d’un système parlementaire. À tout le moins, le droit de contester les décisions du gouvernement et de réclamer des réformes est tenu pour acquis, consommant ainsi la rupture avec la France consécutive à la Conquête de 1760. Même si la mentalité d’Ancien régime demeurera vivace au Québec, l’identité des élites francophones a été marquée de manière indélébile par l’idéal des institutions représentatives qui avaient rendu la Grande-Bretagne et ses colonies célèbres dans l’ensemble du monde occidental de l’époque.

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NOTES * Professeur titulaire, Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal; l’auteur a bénéficié d’une subvention du fonds Marcel-Faribault de l’Université de Montréal pour effectuer la recherche documentaire dans les périodiques de l’époque. Il tient à exprimer sa gratitude à M. Mathieu Vaugeois et Madame Stéphanie-Alexandra LoVasco pour leur excellent travail, ainsi qu’à son collègue Jean Leclair, pour ses précieux commentaires. † Henry Cavendish, Debates of the House of Commons in the year 1774 on the Bill for making a more effectual provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec (S.R. Publishers, Johnson Reprint, 1966 [1839]), p. 105 (Traduction: « Est-ce que les habitants désirent obtenir des assemblées dans la province? Certainement pas »). 1 Voir notamment Luc Huppé, « L’établissement de la souveraineté européenne au Canada », (2009) 50 Cahiers de droit, 153–206; Michel Morin, « Des nations libres sans territoire? Les Autochtones et la colonisation de l’Amérique française du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle », (2010) 12 Revue d’histoire du droit international public, 1–70. 2 Voir notamment Elizabeth Mancke, « Colonial and Imperial Contexts », dans Philip Girard, Jim Phillips et Barry Cahill (dir.), The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 30–50, à la p. 31; P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160. 3 Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), notamment p. 50–5; Jack P. Greene, « 1759: The Perils of Success », dans Phillip Buckner et John G. Reid (dir.), Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 95–114; sur les droits des sujets britanniques, voir aussi Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 4 P.J. Marshall, supra, note 2, p. 193–5 et 201–2. 5 Peter Marshall, « The Incorporation of Quebec in the British Empire », dans Virginia Bever Platt et David Curtis Skaggs, Of Mother Country and Plantations: Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Conference in Early American History (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1971), p. 43–63; Thomas Garden Barnes, « “ The Dayly Cry for Justice ” The Juridical Failure of the Annapolis Royal », dans Philip Girard et Jim Phillips (dir.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 3, Nova Scotia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press pour la Osgoode Society, 1990), p. 10–41;

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Jacques Vanderlinden, « À propos de l’introduction de la Common Law en Nouvelle-Écosse (1710–1749) », (2008) 10 R.C.L.F., 81–154; Hannah Weiss Muller, « An Empire of Subjects: Unities and Disunities in the British Empire, 1760–1790 » (PhD, Princeton University, 2010); Stephen Conway, « The Consequences of the Conquest: Quebec and British Politics, 1760–1774 », dans P. Buckner et J. Reid, supra, note 3, p. 141–65; Heather Welland, « Commercial Interests and Political Allegiance: The Origins of the Quebec Act », ibid., p. 166–89; Barry M. Moody, « Delivered from All Our Distresses: The Fall of Quebec and the Remaking of Nova Scotia », ibid., p. 218–40. Proclamation royale, 1763, dans L.R.C. (1985), App. II, no. 1 (ci-après « Proclamation royale ») dans Adam Shortt et Arthur Doughty (éd.), Documents relatifs à l’histoire constitutionnelle du Canada, 1759–1791 (ci-après « D.C. I »), Première partie, 2e éd. (Ottawa: Imprimeur de la Reine), p. 136. Pour des références et des informations complémentaires, voir Michel Morin, « Les changements de régimes juridiques consécutifs à la Conquête de 1760 », (1997) 57 (3) Revue du Barreau, 689–700. Christophe Horguelin, « Le XVIIIe siècle des Canadiens: discours public et identité », dans Philippe Joutard et Thomas Wien, Mémoires de NouvelleFrance, de France en Nouvelle-France (Rennes: PUR, 2005), p. 209–19; Louise Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le Régime français (Montréal: Boréal, 2008), p. 438–45; John A. Dickinson, « L’héritage laissé par la France au Canada en 1763 », dans Serge Joyal et Paul-André Linteau (dir.), France-Canada-Québec: 400 ans de relations d’exceptions (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2008), p. 39–56; Denys Delâge « Les Premières Nations et la Guerre de la Conquête (1754–1765) » (2009) 63 Les Cahiers des dix, 1–67; Denys Delâge, « La peur de “passer pour des Sauvages” », (2011) 65 Les Cahiers des dix, 1–45. Nancy Christie, « Introduction », dans Nancy Christie (dir.), Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions and Identities in Post-Revolutionary British North America (Montreal/Kingston: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 2008). Voir notamment P.J. Marshall, supra, note 2; H. Weiss Muller, supra, note 5; certaines catégories d’individus ou des personnes isolées peuvent adhèrer plus rapidement aux institutions de la nation conquérante ou en faire une utilisation sélective: Laura Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Voir généralement Charles-Philippe Courtois, (éd.), La Conquête, une anthologie (Montréal: Typo, 2009), et les contributions de Michel Bock, Brian Young, Nicole Neatby et Jocelyn Létourneau dans Phillip Buckner et John

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G. Reid (dir.), Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Sous le Régime français, des associations comptant fort peu de membres présentent le point de vue des marchands aux autorités: Christian Blais, « La représentation en Nouvelle-France », (2009) 18 (1) Bulletin d’histoire politique, 51–75; voir aussi Gustave Lanctôt, L’administration de la NouvelleFrance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1929). Supra, note 8, p. 268–9. Voir entre autres Henri Brun, La formation des institutions parlementaires québécoises, 1791–1838 (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1970), p. 10; Marcel Trudel, La Révolution américaine, Pourquoi la France refuse le Canada (Sillery: Boréal Express, 1976), p. 68; Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the American Revolution (Montréal/Kingston: McGill/ Queen’s University Press, 1989), p. 75–6 et 111; Karl David Milobar, « The Constitutional Development of Quebec from the Time of the French Regime to the Canada Act of 1791 » (PhD, University of London, 1990), p. 107 et 159; Karl David Milobar, « The Origins of British-Quebec Merchant Ideology: New France, the British Atlantic and the Constitutional Periphery, 1720–1770 », (1996) 24 (3) Journal of Imperial and Constitutional History, 264–390; Jacques-Yvan Morin et José Woehrling, Les constitutions du Canada et du Québec du Régime français à nos jours (Montréal: Thémis, 1992), p. 43 et 49; Denis Vaugeois, Québec 1792: les acteurs, les institutions et les frontières (Saint-Laurent: Fides, 1992), p. 32–8; Jean-Paul de Lagrave, L’époque de Voltaire au Canada (Montréal: L’Étincelle, 1993), p. 71–3; Yvan Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, 1760–1896 (Montréal: Fides, 2000), p. 70–1; Michael Dorland et Maurice Charland, Law, Rhetoric and Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 98 et 127–33; Michel Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838) (Montreal/Kingston: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 2010); H. Weiss Muller, supra, note 5, p. 107 et 118–19. Une exception notable doit être soulignée, celle de Pierre Tousignant, dont la thèse est malheureusement demeurée inédite: « La Genèse et l’Avènement de l’Acte constitutionnel de 1791 » (thèse de doctorat présentée à l’Université de Montréal, 1971), notamment p. 23–40; pour sa part, Hilda Neatby présente objectivement et systématiquement les démarches à caractère politique entreprises par les Francophones: Quebec, The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), notamment p. 127–33. H. Cavendish, supra, note †, p. 105–6 (Carleton), 124–5 (Maseres) et 160 (Hey). Même s’il y a eu très peu de critiques du droit pénal anglais, il

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n’existe pratiquement pas de preuves qu’il était universellement admiré dans la colonie, n’en déplaise aux administrateurs qui ont colporté cette idée: voir André Morel, « La réception du droit criminel anglais au Québec (1760–1892) », (1978) 13 R.J.T. 449–541. En pratique, les statistiques concernant les condamnations et les exécutions ne révèlent pas de différences majeures avant et après la Conquête. En outre, devant la Cour du banc du roi, le pourcentage disproportionné de plaignants anglophones et la présence de jurys mixtes lorsque l’accusé était francophone ne donnent pas une image positive de la justice britannique. Enfin, comme le souligne également André Morel, les seigneurs méprisent l’institution du jury: Douglas Hay, « The Meaning of the Criminal Law in Quebec, 1764–1774 », dans Louis A. Knafla (ed.), Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981), p. 77–111. Pour sa part, Donald Fyson, souligne que ces différences sont beaucoup moins prononcées devant les juges de paix, qui jugent les simples délits, par opposition aux crimes majeurs (Donald Fyson, Magistrats, police et société: la justice criminelle ordinaire au Québec et au Bas-Canada (1764–1837) (Montréal: Cahiers du Québec, Hurtubise, 2010). An Act for making more effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec in North America, (U.K.), 14 Geo. III, c. 83 (1774) (ci-après l’Acte de Québec; traduction D.C. I, p. 552); parmi un grand nombre de titres, mentionnons; P. Lawson, supra, note 14; Karen Stanbridge, « Quebec and the Irish Catholic Relief Act of 1778: An Institutional Approach », (2003) 16 (3), Journal of Historical Sociology, 375–404. Voir infra, texte correspondant à la note 93. On estime qu’environ 4 % de la population sait lire: Maurice Lemire (dir.), La vie littéraire au Québec, t. 1, La voix française des nouveaux sujets britanniques (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991), p. 82. Voir Michel Morin, « La découverte du droit constitutionnel britannique dans une colonie francophone: la Gazette de Québec, 1764–1774 », (2013) 47 (2) R.J.T. (à paraître). La partie I du présent texte reprend les principales conclusions de cet article. M. Lemire, supra, note 18, p. 212–15 et 227–31. Ibid., p. 90; Claude Galarneau, La France devant l’opinion publique canadienne (1760–1815) (Québec/Paris: Presses de l’Université Laval/Armand Colin, 1970), p. 81–5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1762). Élizabeth Badinter, Les passions intellectuelles, III. Volonté de pouvoir (1762– 1778), Références le Livre de Poche (Paris: Fayard, 2007), p. 128–41.

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24 Sur l’affaire Calas voir Élizabeth Badinter, Les passions intellectuelles, II. Exigences de dignité (1751–1762), Références le Livre de Poche (Paris: Fayard, 2002), p. 490–501; Cesare Beccaria, Traité des délits et des peines, s.é., Lausanne, 1766 ou s.é., Philadelphie, 1766 (disponible sur Google Book; cette traduction de Morellet est considérée très peu fidèle). L’exécution du chevalier de la Barre pour blasphème et le fait que le Dictionnaire philosophique de Voltaire a été brulé publiquement à cette occasion sont mentionnés au Québec: G. de Q., 27-10-1766; 16-02-1767; voir aussi une référence à Voltaire dans un commentaire acerbe adressé « Aux triumvirs », sans doute des éminences grises du pouvoir: 25-04-1765; « Epitre de Monsieur Voltaire à Monsieur le Cardinal Querini […] », 23-03-1767; 2911-1767; ainsi que quelques textes peu controversés: « Ode par M. De Voltaire, à un Marchand de Bretagne, qui avoit nommé un de ses vaisseaux de son nom », 09-02-1769; projet de faire une statue de Voltaire, 03-01-1771; « Lettre de Monsieur de Voltaire au Roi de Prusse », 04-07-1771; autorisation de rentrer en France, 28-11-1771; Marcel Trudel, L’influence de Voltaire au Canada, t. 1, de 1760 à 1850 (Montréal: Publications de l’Université Laval, 1945), notamment p. 30, 39 et 58–64. 25 Mario Robert, « Le livre et la lecture dans la noblesse canadienne, 1670– 1764 », (2002) 56 (1) R.H.A.F. 3–27, par. 30; Nathalie Battershill, « Les bibliothèques privées sur l’île de Montréal, 1765–1790 », mémoire de maîtrise, Faculté des études supérieures, Université de Montréal, 1993, p. 49–50; Gilles Proulx, Loisirs québécois: des livres et des cabarets, 1690–1760 (Ottawa: Service canadien des parcs, 1987), p. 92 (Montaigne), p. 95 (Voltaire), p. 120 (Locke et Montesquieu); M. Lemire, supra, note 18, p. 90 (Montesquieu, Bufon, Rousseau, Voltaire). 26 Voir M. Morin, supra, note 19; pour nos fins il n’est pas nécessaire de mentionner les rares limites imposées à l’autorité du roi. 27 Voir G. de Q., 18-10-1764; 01-11-1764; 22-11-1764; 29-11-1764; 30-05-1765; 24-10-1771; 30-01-1772; 04-06-1772; 13-08-1772. 28 Robert Larin et Yves Drolet, « Les listes de Carleton et de Haldimand. États de la noblesse canadienne en 1768 et en 1778 », (2008) 41 (82) Histoire sociale, 563–603. 29 La France n’éprouve d’ailleurs aucun intérêt à retrouver une colonie qui représentait pour elle une source de dépenses importantes: Françoise Le Jeune, « La France et le Canada au milieu du XVIIIe siècle au milieu du XIXe siècle: Cession ou Conquête? », dans S. Joyal et P.-A. Linteau, supra, note 8, p. 57–94; François-Joseph Ruggiu, « Falling into Oblivion? Canada and the French Monarchy », dans P. Buckner et J. Reid, supra, note 3, p. 69–94.

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M. Morin, supra, note 19. Voir M. Ducharme, supra, note 14. M. Morin, supra, note 19. Sur le contenu de la loi et sa sanction, voir G. de Q., 09-05-1765; 30-05-1765; voir aussi le discours enflammé du colonel Barré, qui se porte à la défense des colonies, 25-07-1765, de même qu’un autre député, 01-08-1765. Un Commerçant, « À l’imprimeur du Recueil Public », G. de Q., 15-08-1765. G. de Q., 10-10-1765. Jack P. Greene, « Law and the Origins of the American Revolution », dans Michael Grossberg et Christopher Tomlins (dir.), The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 447, à la page 469; D.J. Hulsebosch, supra, note 3, p. 139. Un Acte pour mieux assurer à la Couronne et au Parlement de la GrandeBretagne la Dépendance des Domaines de Sa Majesté en Amérique, 1766 (G.-B.), 6 Geo. III, c. 12, G. de Q., 05-06-1766. Les festivités entourant l’annonce de cette abrogation sont relatées par la Gazette de Québec: G. de Q., 26-051766; 14-07-1766, suppl.; 13-10-1766; voir aussi 04-08-1766. G. de Q., 29-05-1766; un débat s’ensuit: G. de Q., 05-06-1766. « Interrogatoire du Sieur Benjamin Franklin, Docteur en Droit, devant une Auguste Assemblée, touchant la Révocation, de l’Acte des Timbres », G. de Q., 01-12-1766; « Continuation de l’interrogatoire du Sieur Benjamin Franklin », G. de Q., 08-12-1766; 15-12-1766; 22-12-1766; 29-12-1766; 05-011767. « Protêt des Pairs contre le Bill pour révoquer l’Acte des Timbres à l’Amérique », G. de Q., suppl., 21-07-1766 et 28-07-1766. Register of the Legislative Council of the Province of Quebec, Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (ci-après BAC), RG1 E1 v. 2, fo. 123 v. Nous remercions M. Christian Blais, historien à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec, de nous avoir fourni une transcription de ces registres. G. de Q., 29-05-1766. G. de Q., 21-07-1766. « Copie d’une lettre écrite par les commerçans du Canada, en réponse à une Lettre qu’ils ont reçu d’un Committe de Commerçans de Londres », G. de Q., 28-07-1766. L’Anonyme, « Messieurs les Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 25-08-1766. P.J. Marshall, supra, note 2, p. 175. G. de Q., 29-09-1766. Ibid. Alfred Leroy Burt, The Old Province of Quebec (Toronto/Minneapolis: Ryerson Press / University of Minnesota Press, 1933), p. 136.

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50 Burt estime que la proportion est la même dans les deux cas (ibid.). 51 Voir notamment Douglas Hay, « Civilians Tried in Military Courts: Quebec, 1759–1764 », dans F.M. Greenwood et B. Wright, Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608–1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 114–28; M. Morin, supra, note 7; Donald Fyson, « Judicial Auxiliaries across Legal Regimes: From New France to Lower Canada », dans Claire Dolan (dir.), Entre justice et justiciables: les auxiliaires de la justice du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), p. 383–403; Arnaud Decroix, David Gilles et Michel Morin, Les tribunaux et l’arbitrage en Nouvelle-France et au Québec de 1740 à 1784 (Montréal: Éditions Thémis, 2012), p. 394–7. 52 D. Hay, supra, note 51, p. 122. 53 Ordonnance du 17 septembre 1764 établissant des cours civiles, D.C. I, p. 180. 54 Deux juges de paix doivent siéger chaque semaine dans les villes de Montréal et de Québec (ibid., p. 183). 55 D. Fyson, supra, note 15, p. 160 et 202–3. Une lettre datée du 15 octobre 1765 et envoyée de Montréal critique cette décision: voir Archives du Séminaire de Québec, Fonds George-Barthélémy Faribault (P29), pièce no 267. Le périodique où elle a été publiée n’apparaît pas sur la coupure recueillie par Faribault au XIXe siècle. 56 Ordonnance pour rendre plus efficace l’administration de la justice et réglementer les cours de justice dans la province [1770], D.C. I, p. 382; D. Fyson, supra, note 15, p. 202–3. Une compétence semblable survit toutefois pour les litiges d’une valeur de moins de deux livres. 57 Ordonnance pour modifier et amender une ordonnance de Son Excellence le gouverneur et du Conseil de Sa Majesté de cette province, rendue le dix septième jour de septembre 1764, 1er juillet 1766, D.C. I, p. 220. 58 Ordonnance du 17 septembre 1764 établissant des cours civiles, D.C. I, p. 180; Ordonnance du 6 novembre 1764, D.C. I, p. 199 (cette ordonnance prolonge l’application des règles de la Nouvelle-France en matière immobilière et successorale lorsque la cause d’action est antérieure au 10 août 1765; dans les autres cas, la date du 1er octobre 1764 fixée par l’ordonnance du 17 septembre demeure inchangée). 59 Voir John A. Dickinson, « L’administration “ chaotique ” de la justice après la Conquête: discours ou réalité? », dans Giovanni Dotoli (dir.), Canada. Le rotte della libertà. Atti del Convegno internazionale (Monopoli, 5–9 octobre 2005) (Fasano: Schena editore, 2006), p. 117–27; Donald Fyson, « The Conquered and the Conqueror: The Mutual Adaptation of the Canadiens and the British in Quebec, 1759–1775 », dans Phillip Buckner et John G. Reid (dir.), 1759 Revisited: The Conquest in Historical Perspective (Toronto: Uni-

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versity of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 190–217; A. Decroix et al., supra, note 51; nous renvoyons le lecteur à cet ouvrage pour une bibliographie détaillée sur le droit privé. D. Fyson, supra, note 59; Donald Fyson, « De la common law à la Coutume de Paris: les nouveaux habitants britanniques du Québec et le droit civil français, 1764–1775 », dans Florent Garnier et Jacqueline Vendrand-Voyer (dir), La coutume dans tous ses états (Paris: La Mémoire du Droit, 2013) (à paraître); Jean-Philippe Garneau, « Gérer la différence dans le Québec britannique: l’exemple de la langue (1760–1840) », dans Lorraine Derocher, Claude Gélinas, Sébastien Lebel-Grenier et Pierre-C. Noël (dir.), L’État canadien et la diversité culturelle et religieuse, 1800–1914 (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2009), p. 21–48. Donald Fyson, « Les dynamiques politiques locales et la justice au Québec entre la Conquête et les Rébellions », (2007) 16 (1) Bulletin d’histoire politique, 337–46; Donald Fyson, « The Canadiens and British Institutions of Local Governance in Quebec, from the Conquest to the Rebellions », dans N. Christie, supra, note 9, p. 45–82. Michel Morin « Les premières controverses concernant la justice au Québec sous le régime de la Proclamation royale de 1763 », dans Thierry Nootens (dir.), Actes du colloque Justices et Espaces Publics (à paraître); « Pétition pour l’établissement d’une Chambre d’Assemblée », D.C. I, p. 397; « Pétition au roi », D.C. I, p. 481. Voir D. Fyson, supra, note 59; M. Morin, supra, note 62. « Pétition des habitants français au roi au sujet de l’administration de la justice » (1765), D.C. I, p. 195; « Pétition des Seigneurs de Montréal » (1767), D.C. I, p. 24; « Pétition pour obtenir le rétablissement des lois et coutumes françaises » (1770), D.C. I, p. 399; « Pétition des sujets français » (1773), D.C. I, p. 491. Jean-Marie Fecteau et Douglas Hay, « “ Government by Will and Pleasure instead of Law ”: Military Justice and the Legal System of Quebec, 1775– 1783 », dans F. Murray Greenwood et Barry Wright (dir.), Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608–1837, vol. 1 (Toronto: Osgoode Society / University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 129–71, à la page 136. G. de Q., 29-05-1766; P. Tousignant, op. cit, note 14, p. 39. Le professeur Tousignant a analysé dans sa thèse plusieurs articles de la Gazette qui sont résumés dans la présente section. Civis Canadiensis, « Aux Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 29-09-1765. Civis Bonus Usque Ad Mortem, « Réponse à une Lettre Écrite par un Citoyen Canadien, à Messieurs les Imprimeurs de Québec: La dite Réponse à eux-mêmes adressée », G. de Q., 10-10-1765.

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69 « Extrait d’une lettre de Québec, du Sept Août, 1766, écrite à un Ami à Montréal », G. de Q., 18-08-1766. 70 « Extrait d’une Lettre de Québec, en date du 15 Août 1766, écrite à un Ami à Montréal », G. de Q., 25-08-1766. 71 « Extrait d’une Lettre de Québec du 20 Août 1766, écrite à un Ami à Montréal », G. de Q., 01-09-1766. 72 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1765–9). 73 Élie De Beaumont, Rouhette et Target, « Consultations rendues par trois des plus célèbres Avocats de Paris, au sujet des droits et propriétés des Seigneurs du Canada », G. de Q., 03-09-1767. 74 Auguste-Pierre Damiens De Gomicourt (trad.), Commentaires sur les loix angloises de M. Blackstone (Bruxelles: chez J. de L. Boubers, imprimeurlibraire, 1774–6). 75 Mémoire à la défense d’un Plan d’Acte de Parlement pour l’Établissement des Loix de la Province de Québec, dressé par Mr François Maseres, Avocat Anglois, cy-devant Procureur- général de sa Majesté le Roi de la Grande Bretagne en la ditte Province, contre les Objections de M. François Jospeh Cugnet, Gentilhomme Canadien, Secrétaire du Gouverneur et Conseil de la ditte Province pour la Langue Françoise (Londres: Edmund Allen, 1773), p. 24–6 [ci-après Mémoire], (habeas corpus) et p. 65–80 (Parlement). 76 Anonyme, The trial of Daniel Disney, Esq.: captain of a company in His Majesty’s 44th Regiment of Foot, and town major of the garrison of Montreal, at the session of the Supreme-Court of Judicature, holden at Montreal, on Saturday the 28th day of February, 1767, before the Honourable William Hey, Esq., chief-justice of the province of Quebec … in that case made and provided (Quebec: Brown and Gilmore, 1767), p. 15–16. 77 Un débat animé porte sur l’applicabilité dans les colonies des lois anglaises concernant la faillite (Un Marchang, « Abrégé du contenu des loix présentement en vigueur en Angleterre touchant les banqueroutes », G. de Q., 10-12-1767; Un Marchand, « Suite de l’Abrégé du contenu des loix présentement en vigueur en Angleterre touchant les banqueroutes », G. de Q., 17-12-1767; « Reponse convénable à l’“ Abrégé du contenu des loix présentement en vigueur en Angleterre touchant les banqueroutes ”, publié dans les Gazettes de Québec des dix et dis sept du present, sous le nom d’un marchand », G. de Q., 24-12-1767; « Suite de la Reponse convénable à l’“ Abrégé du contenu des loix présentement en vigueur en Angleterre touchant les banqueroutes ” », G. de Q., 31-12-1767; X.Z., « Aux Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 31-12-1767; Un Ami de la Liberté, « Aux Imprimeurs de la Gazette de Québec », G. de Q., 07-01-1768; Lettre de Z.Z., G. de Q.,

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07-01-1768; A.S., « Aux Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 14-01-1768). Par ailleurs, un article vraisemblablement repris d’un périodique anglais, porte sur le rôle des jurés dans l’appréciation des faits et de certaines questions juridiques (« Aux Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 01-11-1770). En droit pénal, le privilège du clergé, qui permet à tout individu d’échapper à la peine de mort dans le cas de certaines infractions, est aussi expliqué aux lecteurs (G. de Q., 28-031765). « Le North Briton, No 135 », G. de Q., 01-09-1765. Première mention dans G. de Q., 09-03-1775; bref résumé, mais exact, le 1603-1775; Campbell c. Hall, 1 Cowp. 204, 98 E.R. 1048 (B.R.); D.C. I, p. 506. X.P., « Aux Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 17-12-1767. « Aux Imprimeurs », G. de Q., 28-01-1767. Par exemple, selon le marquis de Montcalm, il est sans précédent qu’un intendant comme Hocquart ait séjourné vingt ans au Canada sans s’enrichir: Gilles Havard et Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, éd. revue (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), p. 159. Voir par exemple G. de Q., 03-03-1774 et 10-03-1774. G. de Q., 16-04-1767. Le Spectateur Canadien, « Sur les Hypocrites et Faux Devôts », G. de Q., 04-06-1767. « Considerations on the expediency of procuring an act of Parliament for the Settlement of the Province of Quebec », reproduit dans Occasional Essays on various subjects, chiefly political and historical (Londres: Robert Wilks, 1809), p. 327–64. « Rapport du procureur général et du solliciteur général au sujet de la condition des sujets catholiques romains, 10 juin 1765 », D.C. I, p. 236; H.W. Muller, supra, note 5, p. 67–8. F. Maseres, supra, note 86, p. 367–8. Draught of An Act of Parliament for investing the Governour and Council of the Province of Quebeck without an Assembly of the Freeholders of the same, with a Power of making Laws and Ordinances for the Peace, Welfare, and good Government of the said Province during the Space of Seven Years, s.d., dans Francis Maseres, An Account of the Proceedings of the British and other Protestant Inhabitants of the Province of Quebeck in North-America, in order to obtain An House of Assembly in that Province (Londres: B. White, 1775), p. 50. A Draught of An Act of Parliament for tolerating the Roman Catholick Religion in the Province of Quebeck, and for encouraging and introducing the Protestant Religion into the said Province, and for vesting the Lands belonging to certain Religious Houses in the Said Province in the Crown of this Kingdom, for the Support of the Civil Government; and for other purposes [1772], Bibliothèque

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94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

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McLennan de l’Université McGill; voir Francis Masères, Additional papers concerning the province of Quebeck: being an appendix to the book entitled, « An account of the proceedings of the British and other Protestant inhabitants of the province of Quebeck in North-America in order to obtain a house of assembly in that province » (Londres: B. White, 1776), p. 246. Brian Young, In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816–1876 (Montréal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006); Michel Morin, « De la reconnaissance officielle à la tolérance des religions: l’état civil et les empêchements de mariage de 1628 à nos jours », dans Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens (dir.), Le droit, la religion et le « raisonnable » (Montréal: Éditions Thémis, 2009), p. 53–91. « Lettre de M. Chartier de Lotbinière – datée de Londres, le 20e Sept. 1772. Au sujet des Affaires du Canada », Collection Faribault, no 201, Archives du Séminaire de Québec, disponible en ligne; voir aussi [Michel Chartier de Lotbinière], « Observations sur le Plan d’Acte de Parlement pour la Religion, & autres Objets qui y sont traits, au Sujet de Canada », n.p., n.d., British Library, Adams and Bonwick, British Pamphlets, 186. Une pétition des anciens sujets français de Grenade implore le roi de leur accorder tous les droits et privilèges des sujets britanniques; elle est publiée dans la Gazette (G. de Q., 17-10-1765). La protestation de l’Assemblée élue contre les instructions royales limitant le pouvoir du gouverneur de sanctionner des projets de loi l’est aussi (G. de Q., 29-09-1766). Une session parlementaire de l’ancienne colonie française de Saint-Vincent fait également l’objet d’un article où l’on mentionne l’adoption de projets de loi et le nombre de sièges à l’Assemblée (G. de Q., 10-09-1767). H.W. Muller, supra, note 5, p. 111–12. G. de Q., 04-01-1770. H.W. Muller, supra, note 5, p. 112–15. G. of Q., 23-04-1772. Ibid. P.J. Marshall, supra, note 2, p. 188. H.W. Muller, supra, note 5, p. 115–18. « Letter to the Printer of the Public Advertiser, publish’d June 7, 1775 », dans F. Maseres, supra, note 90, p. 61, aux pages 64–5. F. Maseres, supra, note 89, p. 267. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 14–19, 85–7, 91, 226, 248, 253 et 261. Ibid., p. 222–4, 235 et 269. An Act against Tumults and Disorders upon pretence of preparing or present-

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ing publick Peticions or other Addresses to His Majesty or the Parliament, 1661 (Angl.), 13 Car. II, sess. 1, c. 5. James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England, Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986), p. 5, 41 et 48. Ibid., p. 136–40. Celle-ci serait de 5 740 000 personnes en 1750 (Office of National Statistics, Focus on People and Migration 2005, chapter 1, p. 2, http:// www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_compendia/fom2005/01_ fopm_population.pdf). Voir Marie Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999 [1952]), p. 201, 305 et 337; Patricia Lockhart Fleming et Sandra Alston, Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine’s A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 161–2 et 222. Les pétitions de 1773 qui précèdent l’Acte de Québec seront publiées après l’adoption de cette loi: F. Maseres, supra, note 89. Les registres du Conseil contiennent un grand nombre de pétitions de ce genre (supra, note 41). Voir D. Fyson, supra, note 51, p. 204; voir par exemple BAC, RG4 A1, vol. 15, p. 5732 (MFILM C-2998), 30 mars 1766. « Délibération d’un groupe de onze marchands anglais – 6 décembre 1773 », Bibliothèques et archives nationales du Québec, P1000, S3, D1741 (disponible en ligne). Steven Watt, « Pétition et démocratie. Le cas du Bas-Canada et du Maine, 1820–1840 », (2006) 14 (2) Bulletin d’histoire politique, 51–62; Steven Watt, « “ Duty Bound and Ever Praying ”: Collective Petitioning to Governors and Legislatures in Selected Regions of Lower Canada and Maine, 1820–1838 » (thèse, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2006); Mathieu Fraser, « La “ pratique pétitionnaire ” à la Chambre d’assemblée du Bas-Canada, 1792–1795: origines et usages Patrick », 2008 (http://www .fondationbonenfant.qc.ca/stages/essais/2008Fraser.pdf); J. O’Connor, « Review Essay: Politics, Indoors and Out », (2002) 35 (69) Histoire sociale, 235–43. Voir supra, note 105. BAC, RG1, E1, vol. 1, fo 235 (25 avril 1765); RG1, E1, vol. 2, fo 112 (2 janvier 1766) et 120 (27 mars 1766, requête des seigneurs). BAC, RG1, E1, vol. 2, fo 120 (27 mars 1766). William Hey à Fowler Walker, 16 février 1767, Hardwicke Papers, BAC, MG21, transcription de British Library, Add. Mss. 3595, fo 102.

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118 Voir M. Dorland et M. Charland, supra, note 14, p. 98. 119 Gazette de Québec, 02-05-1765 (extrait d’un article paru à Londres en janvier). 120 « Pétition des habitants français au roi au sujet de l’administration de la justice » (1765), D.C. I, p. 195, aux pages 196–7; sur les représentations faites en 1764 par les grands jurés, voir M. Morin, supra, note 62. 121 Voir M. Morin, supra, note 62 et le texte correspondant à cette même note. 122 F. Maseres à Charles York, Archives nationales du Canada, Fonds Lambe, MG 53, *113; [F. Maseres], Brouillon d’un rapport préparé par l’honorable gouverneur en chef et le Conseil de la province de Québec, pour être prsenté à sa Très-Excellente Majesté le roi en son Conseil, au sujet des lois et de l’administration de la justice de cette province, D.C. I, p. 304, aux pages 331–3; H. Neatby, supra, note 14, p. 96–8; Paul David Nelson, General Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester (Madison/Teaneck/Londres: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / Associated University Press, 2000), p. 45–50; Francis Maseres, The Canadian Freeholder, vol. 1 (Londres: B. White, 1776), p. 350–78; Jacques L’Heureux, « L’organisation judiciaire de 1764 à 1774 », (1970) 2 (1) Revue générale de droit, 266–331, 324–8; mais voir Seaman Morley Scott, Chapters in the History of the Law of Quebec, 1764–1775 (thèse, Université du Michigan, 1933), Appendice 6, p. 444–9. 123 BAC, RG1, E1, vol. 2, fo 112 et 120 (2 janvier 1766, requête des seigneurs). 124 Ibid., fo 123v–125. 125 « Resolutions No. 9 in the Report », ibid., fos 128–9. 126 « Protest No. 10 in the Report », ibid., fos 129–32. En Angleterre, pour faire circuler une pétition comportant plus de vingt signatures, il faut obtenir l’autorisation des juges de paix, d’un grand jury ou du lord maire et des échevins de la ville de Londres (voir supra, note 105). 127 Ibid., fos 130–2. 128 « Pétition des commerçants de Québec », D.C. I, p. 202. La référence à une tentative de « soulever la population contre les sujets britanniques » vise vraisemblablement des démarches entreprises par Jean-Claude Panet (tel était son nom complet) pour convaincre les grands jurés francophones du district de Québec de déclarer publiquement qu’ils n’avaient pas compris la signification des représentations préparées par leurs collègues anglophones, même si lui-même ne faisait pas partie de ce grand jury (voir D.C. I, p. 192). Le grand jury des sessions de la paix approuva un acte d’accusation contre Panet. L’avocat de la défense demanda l’évocation par un bref de certiorari devant la Cour du Banc du roi, ce qui lui fût accordé, mais les juges de paix refusèrent d’obtempérer, malgré l’imposition de plusieurs amendes. En définitive, le procureur général

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139 140 141

142 143

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Suckling annula la poursuite en déposant un nolle prosequi (S.M. Scott, supra, note 122, p. 252). « Les Seigneurs de Québec au roi », non datée, dans Douglas Brymner (éd.), Report on Canadian Archives, 1888 (Ottawa: A. Sénécal, 1889), p. 14–15, 18–22. G. de Q., 04-06-1767 et 09-07-1767. « Pétition des Seigneurs de Montréal », D.C. I, p. 243–4. « Pétition pour l’établissement d’une Chambre d’Assemblée », D.C. I, p. 397. « Pétition pour obtenir le rétablissement des lois et coutumes françaises », D.C. I, p. 399. Infra, section II. E. Petition de Guillaume LeRoy au Conseil (sans titre), 1767, BAC, RG4, B17, vol. 2, dossier 1a. Register of the Legislative Council of the Province of Quebec, BAC, RG1, E1, v. 3, fos 234–5 (4 mai 1767). Voir A. Morel et D. Hay, supra, note 15. Sylvio Norman, « François-Joseph Cugnet et la reconstitution du droit de la Nouvelle-France », (2002) 1 Cahiers aixois d’histoire des droits de l’outremer français 127–45. Anonyme, « Reflexions sur les affaires du Temps au sujet de la Justice », G. de Q., 30-04-1767. Voir M. Morin, supra, note 7. A Draught of an act of Parliament for settling the laws of the Province of Quebec, 1771 (disponible uniquement à la British Library de Londres, Adams and Bonswick Pamphlets, 177). Marine Leland, « François-Joseph Cugnet 1720–1789 – X », (1963) 17 Revue de l’Université Laval, 820, 828. A Draught of an act of Parliament for settling the laws of the Province of Quebec, 1772 (disponible uniquement à la British Library de Londres, Adams and Bonswick Pamphlets, 188). Mémoire, supra, note 75. Francis Maseres, A Collection of Several Commissions, and Other Public Instruments, Proceeding from His Majesty’s Royal Authority, and Other Papers, Relating to the State of the Province of Quebec in North America, since the Conquest of it by the Bristish Arms in 1760 (Toronto: S.R. Publishers, 1966) [réimpression de l’ouvrage de 1772], p. 24–7; M. Morin, supra, note 51. Mémoire, supra, note 75, p. 94. D.C. I, p. 5.

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148 Voir notamment Jean-François Niort, « Aspects juridiques du régime seigneurial en Nouvelle-France », (2002) 32 R.G.D. 446–526. 149 Benoît Grenier, Seigneurs campagnards de la Nouvelle-France: présence seigneuriale et sociabilité rurale dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent à l’époque préindustrielle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007); L. Dechêne, supra, note 8, p. 145; J.A. Dickinson, supra, note 8, p. 43. 150 Voir Margaret E. McCallum, « The Sacred Rights of Property: Title, Entitlement, and the Land Question in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island », dans G. Blaine Baker and Jim Phillips (éd.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law in Honour of R.C.B. Risk, vol. 8 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 358–97. Le procureur général et le solliciteur général anglais ont déclaré que la couronne ne pouvait pas faire revivre les tenures militaires à l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard; les concessions ont donc été faites en franc et commun socage, une tenure très proche du droit de propriété actuel (Mémoire, supra, note 75, p. 26–7). 151 Mémoire, supra, note 75, p. 8; voir la réponse de Amherst à l’article 42 du projet de Capitulation soumis par Vaudreuil, D.C. I, p. 5. 152 Mémoire, supra, note 75, p. 9. 153 Ibid., p. 17. 154 « Rapport du procureur général et du solliciteur général au sujet du gouvernement civil de Québec », D.C. I, p. 222, à la page 223 (14 avril 1766). L’ouvrage que Maseres publie en 1772 contient un très bref résumé de ce document (supra, note 145, p. 17–18). 155 « Rapport du procureur général et du solliciteur général au sujet du gouvernement civil de Québec », D.C. I, p. 222, à la page 223. 156 Ibid., p. 226–7. 157 Ibid., p. 227. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Marine Leland, « François-Joseph Cugnet 1720–1789 – XI », (1963) 18 Revue de l’Université Laval, 339, Appendice H, p. 358–60. 161 Ibid., p. 347–9. 162 Ces deux documents, rédigés en français, ont été publiés plus tard avec un titre anglais, en deux volumes: Anonyme, An abstract of those parts of the Custom of the viscounty and provostship of Paris, which were received and practised in the Province of Quebec, in the time of the French Government / drawn up by a select committee of Canadian gentlemen, well skilled in the laws of France, and of that province, by the desire of the Honourable Guy Carleton, Esquire, governour in chief of the said province (London: Charles Eyre and

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William Strahan, 1772); Anonyme, The Sequel of the Abstract of those Parts of the Custom of the Viscounty and Provostship of Paris, which were received and practiced in the Province of Quebec in the Time of the French Government, containing the Thirteen Latest Titles of the said Abstract (Londres: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1773). François-Joseph Cugnet, Traité de la loi des fiefs (Québec: Guillaume Brown, 1775); François Joseph Cugnet, Traité des Ancienes Loix de Popriété en Canada, aujourd’huy Province de Québec (Québec: Guillaume Brown, 1775); François-Joseph Cugnet, Extrait des Regîtres du Conseil supérieur et des Regîtres d’Intendance (Québec: Guillaume Brown, 1775); François-Joseph Cugnet, Traité de la Police (Québec: Guillaume Brown, 1775); S. Normand, supra, note 138; David Gilles, « Les acteurs de la norme coloniale face au droit métropolitain: de l’adaptation à l’appropriation (Canada XVIIe-XVIIIe s.) », (2011) 4 Clio@Thémis, en ligne: www.cliothemis.com. M. Leland, supra, note 142, Appendice E, p. 838. François-Joseph Cugnet, « Loix municipales de Québec, divisées en trois traités », fos 256–7, Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec (http://www.bibliotheque.assnat.qc.ca/DepotNumerique_v2/ AffichageNotice.aspx?idn=36858); ce passage sera reproduit dans l’ouvrage imprimé en 1775, mais en s’appuyant cette fois sur la liberté testamentaire prévue par l’Acte de Québec (Traité des ancienes Loix […], supra, note 162, p. 160–4); voir à ce sujet David Gilles, « Aux sources de l’herméneutique du droit québécois: En quête d’un discours sur le droit avant la Conquête », (2010) 44-3 R.J.T. 49–120, p. 114–16; aussi André Morel, Les limites de la liberté testamentaire dans le droit civil de la province de Québec (Paris: L.G.D.J., 1960); Jean-Maurice Brisson, « Entre le devoir et le sentiment: la liberté testamentaire en droit québécois (1774–1990) », dans Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin, vol. 62, Actes à cause de mort — Acts of Last Will (Bruxelles: De Bœck, 1994), 277. F.J. Cugnet, Loix municipales […], supra, note 165, fo 260, en marge du début du titre douzième; ce passage n’est pas reproduit dans la version publiée (Traité des Ancienes Loix […], supra, note 163, p. 163). M. Dorland et M. Charland, supra, note 14, p. 94–7. M. Leland, supra, note 160, p. 339; voir les articles 8 et 10 de l’Acte de Québec. Marine Leland, « François-Joseph Cugnet 1720–1789 – XI », (1963) 18 Revue de l’Université Laval, 339, Appendice G, 350. « Très humbles représentations des habitans de la Province de Québec », Collection Baby, pièce L/3, non paginée, Archives de l’Université de Montréal.

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171 Voir supra, notes 160 et 162. 172 « Très humbles représentations des habitans de la Province de Québec », Collection Baby, pièce L/3, non paginée, Archives de l’Université de Montréal. 173 Things necessary to be settled in the Province of Quebec, either by the King’s Proclamation, or by Act of Parliament, s.éd., s.l., s.d. Même si ce document n’a pas été diffusé au Québec, son contenu a certainement été connu des francophones séjournant à Londres à l’époque. 174 M. Leland, supra, note 160. 175 F. Maseres, supra, note 90, p. 29–30. 176 Ibid., p. 20 et 28. 177 F. Maseres, supra, note 89, p. 1–40. 178 Voir supra, note 92. 179 « Pétition au roi », D.C. I, p. 481. 180 P. Tousignant, supra, note 14, p. 150 et 160–1. 181 « Pétition des sujets français », D.C. I, p. 491. 182 « Mémoire des pétitionnaires français ci-dessus pour appuyer leur pétition », ibid., p. 493. 183 Sylvette Nicolini-Maschino, « Michel Chartier de Lotbinière: l’action et la pensée d’un Canadien du 18e siècle » (thèse, Université de Montréal, 1978), p. 89–91 et note 39. 184 Examination of Chartier de Lotbinière before the House of Commons, dans H. Cavendish, supra, note †, p. 162. 185 F. Maseres, supra, note 89, p. 176–7. 186 À cet égard, le rôle joué par l’éditeur Fleury Mesplet après 1775 a peutêtre été surestimé: comparez J.P. Delagrave, supra, note 14; et César Rouben, « Propagande antiphilosophique dans les gazettes de Montréal et de Québec après la fin du régime français », (1986) 54 Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa, 79–98. 187 F. Maseres, supra, note 90, p. 105–6; H. Neatby, supra, note 14, p. 144– 6. 188 J.-M. Fecteau et D. Hay, supra, note 65, p. 131–5. 189 Pierre Monette, Rendez-vous manqué avec la révolution américaine (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2007), p. 94. 190 Ibid., « Lettre adressée aux habitans de la Province de Quebec, Ci-devant le Canada », ibid., p. 63–73 (la citation est tirée de la page 70); voir aussi « To the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec », dans Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 1, 1774 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), p. 105 (http://www.memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/ D?hlaw:11:./temp/~ammem_MlWg).

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191 Voir P. Monette, supra, note 190, passim. 192 F. Maseres, supra, note 90, p. 131–5, 138–40; F. Maseres, supra, note 89, p. 96–7, 105–6. 193 « Letter from M. Pelissier to the President of Congress, on the state of affairs in Canada », dans Peter Force (éd.), American archives: consisting of a collection of authentick records, state papers, debates, and letters and other notices of publick affairs, the whole forming a documentary history of the origin and progress of the North American colonies; of the causes and accomplishment of the American revolution; and of the Constitution of government for the United States, to the final ratification thereof, Washington, M. St. Clair Clarke and Peter Force, ser. 4, vol. 4, p. 596 (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/amarch). 194 Ibid., p. 597. 195 Ibid., p. 598. 196 Sur la loi martiale et les emprisonnements arbitraires, voir J.-M. Fecteau et D. Hay, supra, note 65; sur les revendications ayant conduit à l’adoption de l’Acte constitutionnel, voir supra, note 14.

3 “A just and obvious distinction”: The Meaning of Imprisonment for Debt and the Criminal Law in Upper Canada’s Age of Reform je f f r e y l . m c nair n

James T. Hall represents the problem of this paper.1 Imprisoned in the Midland District gaol at Kingston, Hall was one of ten debtors who petitioned Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland in January 1827 to protest their treatment and demand an enquiry. Privileges previously accorded them were being denied: two female criminals were confined in one of two small rooms allocated to debtors and they were no longer allowed to exercise during the day in the large room adjacent. The district provided them with nothing save firewood. They still had to pay to have it chopped and delivered to their room and to have water carried to them from the St Lawrence River. Not everyone could afford such necessities, and when the gaoler, Elias Dulmage, or his wife failed to leave the door to the debtors’ room open they could not receive visitors and whatever food, fuel, or water they brought. By contrast, male criminals were allowed to cut their own wood and to fetch water. The female convicts confined to the room once reserved for debtors were also at liberty during the day; they cooked for the gaoler and his family, were brought from his apartments late at night, and secured additional food and drink. Criminal sentences were “thus set at defiance … as the gaoler acts in the control and authority of himself.” When debtors asked district magistrates for the regulations governing the gaol, they were told that none existed. In the absence of rules, “the said gaoler imposed upon your Petitioners severely far exceeding that exercised by him to the Criminals.”2

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Sheriff John McLean concluded that their complaints were without merit: they could not exercise in the jury room or occupy the second small room because neither was sufficiently secure to prevent their escape; female convicts were confined to the latter because the cells were full; and they had to provide for themselves because the district made no allowance for debtors. McLean had nonetheless provided firewood, and a number of debtors, including Hall, depended on “the Gaolers bounty” for other essentials. Dulmage himself conceded that the “dilapidated” state of the old gaol was the source of many “inconveniences,” but denied their specific charges. Debtors had often complained during his time as gaoler, but he “allowed them all the liberty he could consistent with their safe custody.”3 According to Hall, soon after the petition (which he likely wrote), Dulmage assaulted him with a bludgeon. The gaoler was held to bail to appear at a future Court of Quarter Sessions. More than a month later and after the new gaol had opened, Dulmage brought Hall before a local magistrate, John Macaulay, at his Kingston store to accuse Hall of stealing from him in the old building. After being examined by Macaulay, Hall was returned to the debtors’ rooms and committed for trial at the same sessions scheduled to consider Dulmage’s alleged assault. A few days later, Hall, now an accused thief, was removed “from one of the said Debtors apartments into one of the Cells in the said Gaol appropriated for Criminals” where he was denied visitors and the food they brought. Although unacquainted with Hall, a local attorney, Marshall Spring Bidwell, volunteered to represent him at the April 1827 sessions, where he was acquitted of petty larceny. The sheriff prevented Hall from appearing before the grand jury investigating the alleged assault by ordering his immediate return to gaol – now to its debtors’ room, since he was an accused criminal no longer. Dulmage was nonetheless indicted on the evidence of another debtor who had complained against the gaoler the previous November for shackling him in a criminal cell following a failed escape attempt.4 The attempt by debtors to constrain Dulmage’s personal rule within the rule of law persisted. Another grand jury found a true bill against Dulmage at the September 1829 assizes for extorting money from a debtor as a “fee” for discharging him. This second indictment prompted John Macaulay, as chairman of the quarter sessions, to call on his fellow magistrates to devise “known published regulations” for the district’s gaol “not merely for the correction and prevention of abuses, on the part of the keeper and his deputies, but

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also the promotion of the comfort, health and morals” of the prisoners. Enumerating the subjects such rules ought to encompass, Macaulay reminded the grand jury that “a just and obvious distinction is to be made between persons confined for debt, and persons confined on account of felonies or misdemeanors.” The grand jury concurred. After its regular inspection of the gaol (when it heard further complaints from debtors), it called for rules that were as “liberal & extensive” as possible, especially as they pertained to debtors: “It is a misfortune, but not a crime to be confined in prison for debt, and consequently no reasonable indulgence should be denied those who happen to be deprived of their liberty.”5 Even this skeletal account suggests a number of research questions: what were debtors’ circumstances in the Midland gaol in the late 1820s (what happened); how did their conditions compare to those in other districts (how representative were they); and did the new gaol and regulations mark the transition to a more modern penal regime (what changed over time)?6 Others might ask who got the law “right” in these cases (what ought the outcome to have been) or what values and interests did it promote by confining Hall for debt (what explains those outcomes). Instead, this chapter asks questions more akin to intellectual and cultural history than social history or a legal history that re-litigates past disputes. What pattern of meaning was invested in imprisonment for debt? What “imaginative templates” or conceptual frames of reference structured how it was understood and experienced? How were competing claims deployed? How were tensions among possible meanings manifest and managed?7 What imprisonment for debt meant for individual debtors was likely conditioned by their specific circumstances: why they had not satisfied a particular demand against them; their financial or other relationship with the creditor who imprisoned them; why that creditor had turned to the courts and arrest as a debt-recovery strategy; in what season, for how long, and under what conditions they were imprisoned; and so on. Both John Coleman and William Sexon were imprisoned for debt in the Newcastle District in February 1834, but this common experience may have meant different things to the two men. Coleman, imprisoned on the 18th for an alleged debt of £2 10s. 4d., was discharged the same day. Sexon, imprisoned on the 27th for almost £30, remained nearly five months, subsisting on bread provided by the district for much of that time. Perhaps being brought to gaol was sufficient to convince Coleman or family and friends to pay this demand, come to other terms

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with the plaintiff, or post bail to contest the creditor’s claim at trial. Perhaps Sexon (or any family and friends nearby) lacked the means to settle with his creditor, who may have feared he would abscond or had hidden assets to defraud him.8 Yet such circumstances were filtered through broader assumptions, beliefs, and ideas about the norm (both moral and statistical) in debtor–creditor relations, the nature of insolvency and fraud, and the role of prisons and the law in disputes between private parties. These filters made sense of their experience – just as, in turn, experience informed or challenged those assumptions, beliefs, and ideas. Coleman and Sexon may have understood their different experiences in similar ways, just as common experiences might take on divergent meanings. The deceptively “raw” data of Newcastle’s gaol register could be mined to address important empirical questions9 but cannot tell us how the law was understood and evaluated or how alternatives might have been imagined. As an advocate for the history of meaning points out, to render countless experiences and sensations “intelligible …, manageable, communicable, and therefore socially useful,” they must be ordered into categories. Borders are drawn and redrawn, phenomena are compared and contrasted, and arguments proceed by metonymy and metaphor.10 For imprisonment for debt, the defining categories were civil and criminal. Its meaning thus reveals much about the meaning of the criminal law as well, and especially the blurred boundary between them. The Hall example demonstrates this chapter’s principal argument: how entangled conceptually and in practice this aspect of civil law was with criminal law. Hall was simultaneously involved in civil and criminal proceedings, and debtors and convicts were confined to the same district gaols administered by the same officials. Hall and the other debtors framed their grievances against Dulmage by comparing their treatment to that afforded criminals. They had clear expectations of what the contrast ought to be in order to reflect their distinct legal and moral standing, and that others would share their perspective. In this, they were not disappointed. Imprisoned debtors were not understood in contrast to more fortunate debtors who remained solvent or at least at liberty. Neither were they defined in relation to creditors, their contractual counterparts. Rather, the imprisoned debtor was configured against the convict, just as imprisonment for debt was understood in relation to the criminal law. The distinction between these defining categories was confirmed even as it buttressed competing claims:

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narrowed to suggest parallels or widened to emphasize contrast, but rarely transcended. The Hall example also suggests this chapter’s second argument that law’s meaning was constructed and contested across diverse terrains. Three are explored in turn: statutes and the use of the writs they authorized in specific disputes; the organization and regulation of gaols; and public debate about the abolition of imprisonment for debt. The law’s conceptual order operated in quotidian social practice and symbolic form as well as at the level of legal treatises and legislative deliberation. It was expressed in negotiations about prison visits and provisioning as well as in statutes, and even in the definition of custody. Hall later appeared before the Court of King’s Bench on a writ of habeas corpus. At issue was whether his removal by Dulmage from gaol to Macaulay’s store under guard but without a warrant constituted an escape. Or, as Attorney General John Beverley Robinson argued, was it merely an extension of his custody by the sheriff and gaoler beyond the gaol itself? For Robinson, the purpose of imprisonment pending a final ruling in a civil suit was to ensure the debtor remained in the jurisdiction, not imprisonment itself.11 Each of the three sections advances a third argument by charting how the contest of meaning intensified over time. As Douglas Hay has argued with respect to master and servant law, the “taint of criminalization” had long hung over imprisonment for debt but deepened in the first decades of the nineteenth century as a broader legal-reform movement re-imagined crime, punishment, and justice.12 John Macaulay, the magistrate who examined Hall, soon toured American prisons, charged with recommending plans for a proposed penitentiary, and served as president of its Board of Inspectors when it opened at Kingston in 1835. Similarly, Marshall Spring Bidwell, Hall’s criminal lawyer, was one of the most prominent and persistent voices in the legislature for reforming both criminal punishments and insolvency law. Prior to the union of the Canadas in 1841, the second culminated in An Act to mitigate the law in respect to imprisonment for debt, also in 1835. Hall thus stands near the beginning of a legal reform moment fuelled by shifting attitudes towards aggression, suffering, and effective sanctions. Yet more than two subjects reconsidered against a common humanitarian and legal-reform backdrop, imprisonment for debt and the criminal law intersected in tangible ways. Those intersections created tensions that, while not novel, became more complex and urgent by the 1830s. From those tensions emerged halting steps towards

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a more liberal state better positioned to claim a monopoly on the adjudication of disputes and the punishment of wrongdoing through the rule of law. Finally, this chapter contends that negotiating those tensions was not limited to legal figures like Robinson, Macaulay, or Bidwell. Jurors and imprisoned debtors struggled to make colonial laws and institutions conform more closely to their understanding of justice. Debtors like Hall, for instance, directed Macaulay’s attention to the importance of rules in administering gaols and promoting prisoners’ moral reformation, lessons he subsequently applied to the Kingston penitentiary.13 They, the creditors who imprisoned them and threatened to imprison others, and the family and friends who visited and provided for them in gaol all had to make sense of imprisonment for debt. More broadly still, “debtors comprise,” as one newspaper remarked, “nearly the whole community,” and, with its commercial economy reliant more on credit than cash, “he who is a creditor in one case is a debtor in another.” Certainly, debt collection, not crime, comprised most people’s direct engagement with the law.14 Struggles over the law’s meaning also extended to those who read Macaulay’s grand-jury charge or Bidwell’s speeches in the increasing number of colonial newspapers. At the request of those attending the annual Nelson township meeting in 1833, “the debates in Parliament on Mr Mount’s Bill [to abolish imprisonment for debt] were read aloud” and opinions canvassed. Soon after, “some person came twelve miles to borrow the papers containing the debates.” On Christmas Eve the same year, members of the Hallowell Lyceum gathered to debate “Ought the present system of imprisonment for debt be abolished?”15 In legislatures and courts, prisons, and the public sphere, the work of understanding the “just and obvious” but fraught distinction between imprisonment for debt and the criminal law proceeded along distinct but mutually constitutive lines. The Law and Its Historians Yet the basic division between civil and criminal seems clear enough. Crimes are generally thought of as intentional harms that society as a whole prosecutes; if found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the accused is punished. Civil actions, on the other hand, are disputes between private parties in which the plaintiff seeks a legal remedy, such as compensation. Because the objective is not to condemn or punish, it

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may be unnecessary to prove intent on the part of the defendant, and other procedural safeguards may be relaxed. The jurist William Blackstone provided the most influential classification of English law along these lines in the eighteenth century: “private wrongs, which, being an infringement merely of particular rights, concern individuals only, and … are called civil injuries,” were to be distinguished from “public wrongs, which, being a breach of general and public rights, affect the whole community, and are called crimes and misdemeanors.” The law set remedies for civil injuries but sought to prevent and punish crime. Perhaps in recognition of their more public nature, colonial newspapers routinely reported on criminal trials, but civil cases received only sporadic attention, even if more numerous at local assizes or “of an interesting nature” that “excited the public attention.” When both were reported, they were labelled civil or criminal, reproducing for readers the law’s seemingly obvious bifurcation.16 More than any organizing principle, however, it was the formal structure of common-law courts and the system of writs to plead in them that placed imprisonment for debt on the civil side.17 Default on a debt was not a crime, but thirteenth-century English statutes made arrest one of the remedies available to plaintiff-creditors to compel performance of a private obligation. The judicial writ of capias ordered the sheriff to take the debtor’s body into custody. Should a sheriff suffer an escape, he became liable to the creditor for the loss of the remedy in the amount of the suit. Thus judges might refer to debtors as “civil” rather than “criminal” prisoners, and gaol reports might refer to them as confined from the “litigation of private rights” rather than the Crown’s prosecution of public wrongs.18 Dulmage had spoken with precision when claiming to have allowed debtors “all the liberty he could consistent with their safe custody.” The law sought only to hold the debtor’s body on the plaintiff’s behalf. Speaking to this enduring sense of imprisonment for debt as purely custodial, the Canadian Freeman asserted that “when a man is confined before trial, or for debt, it is for his safe keeping, and no actual punishment is intended by the law.”19 Yet the Freeman’s statement, made in 1831, was less a description of the law than an attempt to change it. It served the editor’s demand for improved gaol conditions (which otherwise punished everyone confined) and to abolish imprisonment for debt (which he considered punitive). It also ignored statutory provisions dating from the colony’s first decade that framed arrest as a remedy for acts or apprehended acts in addition to default.

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Adhering to precedent set by the Province of Quebec from which Upper Canada was carved in 1791, bankruptcy and poor laws were explicitly excluded from the new colony’s reception of English civil and property law in 1792. Upper Canada never enacted its own general bankruptcy statute, whereby, in England, the assets of “traders” might be uncovered through examination of the bankrupt, seized, and apportioned among creditors in return for the bankrupt’s impunity from arrest and, from the early eighteenth century, a potential discharge from outstanding liabilities. While arrest for debt applied in Quebec (renamed Lower Canada in 1791) primarily to actions of ten pounds or more, at least from 1811 Upper Canadians could be arrested for as little as forty shillings (two pounds) on a writ of capias ad respondendum (ca. re.) anytime before the civil trial concluded (imprisonment on mesne process) or capias ad satisfaciendum (ca. sa.) after judgment (imprisonment on execution). If the debtor remained in default, a judgment creditor could seek a writ of fieri facias (fi. fa.) directing the sheriff to seize and sell at public auction sufficient goods, chattels, and, after 1809, land to recover the amount of the judgment. Alternatively, creditors could proceed against debtors’ bodies as satisfaction for the debt, leaving them their assets to provide for themselves in gaol (or to depend on family, friends, and charity). By a relief act of 1805, if an imprisoned judgment debtor swore to not being worth five pounds, the plaintiffcreditor was required to pay the prisoner or gaoler five shillings weekly for as long as he or she wished to keep the debtor’s body as satisfaction for the judgment. Failure to pay the maintenance allowance resulted in the debtor’s release from gaol (the loss of the remedy), not from the debt itself. Why would creditors elect body over property, especially if the choice turned costly? If the debtor was indeed insolvent, family or friends might pay instead to secure his or her release. Perhaps the debtor could pay, but the means to do so were held as or had been converted to intangible property, such as bank accounts, negotiable instruments, or annuities against which the law provided no remedy, or perhaps the creditor sought a particular settlement without a public auction of assets. Such means might be surrendered or terms agreed to in exchange for liberty. Finally, the debtor may have concealed or conveyed to family or other allies assets that might otherwise have gone to the judgment creditor. Such collusion was probably not uncommon. In one much litigated case, a debtor fled to the United States to avoid arrest and confessed a judgment of £700 in favour of someone he was

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not indebted to, “a mere pauper, gaining his livelihood by selling cakes in the street,” to prevent his wife from using his assets to settle with his bona fide creditors.20 Early colonial legislation was not, however, merely permissive in allowing creditors to use imprisonment to ferret out cases of deceit, evasion, or fraud. It created the fiction that arrest occurred only when such misconduct was alleged. To secure a ca. re., an English creditor had only to swear that a debt was due. From the establishment of the Court of King’s Bench in 1794, creditors in Upper Canada had to swear to being (to quote the 1822 act that altered the wording) “apprehensive that the Defendant will leave the Province without satisfying the said debt” and that they did not “sue out such process from any vexatious or malicious motive whatever.” Arrest on process issued formally on fear of evasion. From 1800, to secure a ca. sa., creditors had to swear to a fear that the debtor would abscond or that (again in words stipulated in 1822) “he hath reason to believe that the Defendant hath parted with his property or made some secret or fraudulent conveyance thereof in order to prevent its being taken in Execution.”21 Swearing to such beliefs positioned imprisonment for debt as imprisonment for alleged dishonesty. Similarly, a plaintiff who could prove that fraud had been committed was exempt from paying the weekly allowance. By imposing a mounting cost, the 1805 relief act encouraged creditors to abandon imprisonment when it seemed least likely to secure repayment, but would not relieve imprisonment for fraud. Thus, the court discharged a debtor who had been receiving the allowance for seventy weeks when the plaintiff ceased paying it, even though the debtor had come into possession of land after his arrest. The plaintiff-creditor could swear only to the debtor’s continued default and newfound solvency, not to any attempt to hide or transfer the land.22 Mindful of such provisions, an early emigration promoter told his English readers that “personal liberty is so highly respected by the laws of the province, that, in civil actions, the body is not subject to arrest or imprisonment,” except “where there has been an attempt, or is an apparent intention to avoid payment.”23 Yet so long as plaintiffs’ affidavits were accepted at face value, these statutory provisions did not restrict imprisonment for debt so much as reposition its meaning in a criminal context. What colonial creditors swore to in order to arrest a debtor resembled various acts that traders in England had to commit before creditors could subject them to bankruptcy commissioners, including departing the realm or making fraudulent conveyances. Since intent had to be proven, acts of bank-

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ruptcy were considered criminal offences. While the issue of intent proved troublesome in Upper Canada, its early statutes yoked arrest to actual or alleged acts that could be construed as deceitful, suggesting that arrest flowed from those acts, not default alone.24 The Freeman’s assertion that “no actual punishment is intended” or the Midland grand jury’s that it was a “misfortune, but not a crime to be confined in prison for debt” was a powerful but selective, civil-law reading of more ambivalent statutes. The preoccupation with fraud persisted in the age of reform, even as humanitarian sympathy for the plight of imprisoned debtors intensified calls for further relief measures, and the very legitimacy of arrest in civil cases was called into question. Privileges extended to imprisoned debtors in the 1820s and 1830s, whether altering the weekly allowance or establishing gaol limits, were typically paired with new measures to aid creditors in compelling payment. In short, relief was accompanied by further criminalization. For instance, statutory maintenance was amended in 1822 to require debtors who applied for the weekly allowance to answer “such interrogatives” as posed by the plaintiff to discover “any property or credits” the prisoner might have “secreted or fraudulently parted with,” applying to the poorest imprisoned debtors another element of English bankruptcy law for traders. In 1834 eligibility for the allowance was extended to debtors held on process, but they had to swear that they believed they did not truly owe the debt alleged by the plaintiff and had not settled solely so they could contest it at trial. Under certain circumstances, those held on process more than thirty days for a claim of less than ten pounds might also apply for the courts to discharge them upon answering the plaintiff’s interrogatories and swearing to being insolvent and to not have “directly or indirectly, sold, or otherwise disposed of any goods, debts, moneys, or other personal estates, in order to defraud his creditors.”25 A second form of relief, gaol limits, was instituted in 1822 as well, permitting debtors for whom sufficient security was posted to be bailed to an area not more than six acres surrounding the gaol. When the limits were expanded in 1830 to as much as sixteen acres, creditors could question under oath this class of imprisoned debtors as well. Failure to answer triggered a return to close confinement. Furthermore, those who applied for the privilege thereby subjected any property they might have to execution in satisfaction of the same judgment for which their body was being held. Finally, when the limits were enlarged again

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in 1834, plaintiffs who believed their judgment debtor could pay the debt or “a considerable portion thereof” could seek an investigation, after which the court might order the debtor’s return to “custody within the walls of the Gaol.”26 Judicial process, not creditors, might release petty debtors from custody on process or return suspect debtors to close confinement precisely because, by the mid-1830s, the rigour of imprisonment unrelieved by a weekly allowance, the limits, or the possibility of a discharge prior to trial was associated with fraud rather than innocent default. Despite these statutory experiments, no satisfactory balance was struck between relief of the honest insolvent and punishment of the wrongdoer. Prior to union, the 1835 Mitigation Act marked the culmination of the process of simultaneous amelioration and criminalization. According to the preface, the act made imprisonment for debt “less rigorous” and declared that it was “no[t] otherwise justifiable than as a means of compelling such persons to apply whatever monies or property they may be possessed of, or may have under their control, to the satisfaction of their Creditors.” Imprisonment for mere default or misfortune was now deemed illegitimate, but it remained a remedy to compel performance until “suitable Laws” had been enacted “to facilitate and ensure a resource against all the property of such Insolvent Debtors.” Imprisonment for debts of not more than £10 (excluding costs) was abolished. Debtors imprisoned on suits of less than £20 were eligible to apply to the courts for release after three months in gaol (or twelve on the limits). Debtors imprisoned for more than £20 but less than £100 could apply after six months, and if for more than £100, after twelve. Debtors seeking discharge had to swear to having observed the highest standards of contractual integrity laid out in a definition that stretched to more than 150 words, specifically to not having committed “fraud, deceit or dishonest practices” in contracting the debt or in arranging their affairs after a creditor had secured a judgment against them. On suits of more than £20, creditors could file counter-affidavits against their release. The courts were to discharge the debtor only if the creditor “shews no reasonable ground whatever, (and in such cases only) for expecting benefit from further detention.” A creditor’s discretion to persist in imprisonment after six months or a year was limited to reasonable efforts to detect fraud as determined by the courts. Finally, the act created a new criminal offence for assigning, concealing, or disposing of assets with the intent to defraud a creditor or to receive those assets with a similar intent.27

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The Mitigation Act thus reflected and failed to resolve the question of meaning. It was poised between criminal and civil understandings of imprisonment for debt; between creditors’ claims of suspected wrongdoing and imprisoned debtors’ protests of contractual honesty. For the Hamilton Express, the act “fixes the boundary of crime and liability to punishment at exactly ten pounds.” Larger sums were “criminal in amount” precisely because imprisonment remained a remedy.28 On such a reading, imprisonment for debt, far from purely custodial, punished crime. As the Courier already sensed, “the public mind is now fast coming to the conclusion that imprisonment is punishment, and that punishment is only due to crime.” It was a conclusion abetted by judges. According to the leading historian of imprisonment in Upper Canada, it became “the dominant form of punishment” for criminals after 1825, leading to the “virtually complete elimination of all other forms of punishment for serious criminal offences” in the 1830s. Moreover, whereas earlier statutes were largely the work of a handful of judges, senior officials, and legislators, in the age of reform debate concerning “the boundary of crime and liability” extended to what the Courier called the “public mind.” The Mitigation Act itself was reproduced in at least six newspapers, but the tension between civil and criminal meanings was not confined to colonial statutes.29 Just as the civil capias might be read through a criminal lens, the criminal law could resemble imprisonment for debt. Even once they had served their gaol sentence, convicts remained in prison if they did not pay the legal costs and any fine associated with their conviction – a not uncommon occurrence when cash was scarce and a combination of imprisonment and fine accounted for 18 per cent of all sentences imposed at assizes before 1830.30 In essence, such convicts were imprisoned as debtors of the Crown or its officers; their petitions for relief sounded the same notes as those of civil debtors and elicited similar sentiments from the sympathetic. Responding to a petition of seven criminals detained at least a month beyond their prison sentence, the chairman of the Gore Quarter Sessions was troubled that their continued confinement rendered “poverty if not a crime, at least a very serious inconvenience to them.”31 His logical chain – imprisonment was a criminal sanction but the inability to pay was not a crime – was here invoked in a criminal context, but anchored the case against imprisonment for debt. Civil and criminal also blurred in local disputes.32 In Brockville, for instance, James Gray’s criminal trial for burning Jonas Jones’s barn was but one skirmish in a bitter struggle that pitted more recent Irish im-

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migrants and Orangemen organized by Gray’s associate, Ogle Gowan, against the longer-established loyalist elite headed by the two Jones families. Before the alleged arson, Gray had attacked local magistrates in Gowan’s new paper, the Antidote, and at a public meeting. Jonas Jones had him jailed for twenty-three hours for abusing him in “ungentlemanly language” as president of the Board of Police and assisted in attempts to arrest Gray for £9,000 owed a London firm – an effort thwarted when Gray “absented himself from Brockville except on Sundays.” Indeed, Gray surrendered from the garret in the countryside in which he was hiding only when the sheriff, Adiel Sherwood, pledged that if freed by the magistrates “he should be put into as good a situation in relation to an arrest for debt as he then was”; that is, his return to Brockville to be examined on criminal charges would not be used to arrest him for debt. Gray, however, was held without bail on the criminal charges and, although acquitted after a spectacular seventeenhour trial, remained in the same gaol as a debtor for at least four years. At the assizes that Gray was acquitted of arson (King v. James Gray and John Stewart), Gowan sued the sheriff (Gowan v. Sherwood) for damages. Sherwood had seized the Antidote’s press and type in satisfaction of Gray’s debt in the mistaken belief that they were his property. Sherwood was ordered to compensate Gowan but had taken Gray’s body instead.33 Civil and criminal aspects of the law forged a single set of weapons. Yet scholars have, by and large, studied them in isolation.34 The best account of the reform of insolvency law in common-law British North America places it in the context of other private-law reforms.35 More surprisingly, despite extensive work on credit in Upper Canada, the laws framing it have escaped systematic study.36 Considerably more notice has been taken of criminal-law reform, especially the genesis of the Kingston penitentiary in the context of changing attitudes towards crime and punishment and the development of segregated institutions for distinct custodial populations. Yet the civil law that confined too has remained largely offstage. While imprisoned debtors figure more prominently in Peter Oliver’s study of prisons, they serve primarily to testify to the inadequacy of district goals, especially their mixed population, and thus to the penitentiary’s prehistory and distinctiveness borne of its exclusive connection to crime.37 The artificial cordoning off of criminal from civil has been easier but more costly because of the limited evidence extant on the penitentiary’s origins. The few select-committee reports, a handful of grand-jury

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charges, and a smattering of newspaper items available rarely, if ever, mention debtors. Whatever legislative debate the proposed facility occasioned, only one brief report from the Assembly on a supply motion was published.38 The relative paucity of evidence has obscured connections to imprisonment for debt and bolstered the argument, made most persuasively by Oliver, that prison reform and the penitentiary were projects of a rather insulated “Tory elite.”39 Yet why did highranking legal officials have a comparatively free hand on such matters when political opposition constrained them on most others? After all, their administration of justice served as a lightening rod for many of their critics.40 The much more extensive debate about imprisonment for debt reveals close ties with the criminal law but also the broader web of ideas and practices within which lay as well as official figures, both conservative and reform, operated. Those ties were particularly close because attempts to reform criminal sanctions and imprisonment for debt occurred in the same years and were often led by the same legislators. Brought initially before the Assembly in 1826, plans for a provincial penitentiary gained momentum in 1831 with the first report of several committees of investigation. After the passage of the Penitentiary Act in 1834, the provincial facility opened the following year with an elaborate architectural vision and rules intended to discipline and perhaps reform its inmates with solitary cells, hard labour in silence, and religious and other forms of supervision. This alternative punishment emerged with a growing sense of the inadequacy of such long-standing sanctions as death, banishment, fines, and shorter-term committal to district gaols, and such shaming penalties as the pillory and whip. The Capital Punishment Act (1833) had reduced the number of offences subject to the death penalty significantly, anticipating the penitentiary’s opening. The act originated in the Legislative Council and has been linked persuasively to its speaker and the chief justice, John Beverley Robinson.41 The first move in the Assembly to fundamentally alter imprisonment as a civil remedy dates from 1823. Rival bills with the declared intent to abolish imprisonment for debt in some respect arose in every parliamentary session from 1825 to 1840. The details of these measures were often unclear or poorly understood. Copies of many do not survive. Eleven of the thirteen introduced after 1825 failed to win a majority in the Assembly; the first to succeed (in 1828) was lost in the Council, which, in 1835, transformed the second from a measure “to abolish imprisonment for debt in certain cases” to the Act to mitigate

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the Law in respect to imprisonment for debt already discussed. The Assembly’s quasi-bankruptcy bill set out to abolish both capias writs, but also “to punish fraudulent debtors” and distribute debtors’ property among their creditors. If a creditor-plaintiff could prove an intentional attempt to defraud, the debtor would “remain in custody in the same manner as other prisoners on criminal process.” There is scant evidence concerning the bill’s progress through the Council, but Robinson, the dominant voice in the small upper chamber as well as chief justice, likely took a leading role, as he had in criminal-law reform two years before.42 Anxious to secure at least what the Council was offering, the Assembly rushed to concur with its amendments the day before the session closed. Legislators other than Robinson were also prominent in both causes. For instance, during the third session of the ninth Parliament (1826–7), H.C. Thomson (seconded by James Atkinson) moved to elect a select committee of seven to consider the idea of constructing a provincial penitentiary. Thomson sponsored a bill “for the relief of insolvent debtors” the same session. Marshall Spring Bidwell, Hall’s criminal lawyer and a vocal supporter of such relief, was elected to Thomson’s select committee after sponsoring a bill to abolish whipping as a criminal punishment (a measure also seconded by Atkinson). Bidwell hoped his bill would prompt a more general debate about punishment. No longer, he contended, ought the law aim merely to prevent crime as whipping did, but should strive to reform the criminal without debasing the mind. Two others elected to the penitentiary committee, John Rolph and John Mathews, sponsored a bill “to abolish imprisonment for debt” the same session. Earlier, Rolph had also tried to outlaw the lash. Finally, then-attorney general Robinson joined Thomson’s otherwise reform-dominated committee. While sympathetic to efforts to abolish whipping, Robinson opposed Bidwell’s bill on the ground that no effective alternative existed in the absence of a penitentiary by which solitary confinement and hard labour might substitute for both the lash and the pillory.43 While support for one measure did not entail assent to another, legislators tacked easily and repeatedly between civil and criminal. Porous Partitions As the Assembly’s 1835 abolition bill attested, without capias writs there would be no civil prisoners to keep distinct from criminal ones. Sepa-

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rate facilities were the other obvious, if impractical, way to maintain a clear division. By the mid-1830s, magistrates conceded that achieving new standards of penal discipline for criminals in the Home District gaol required “the separate confinement of debtors.” Although a number of segregated carceral institutions were authorized in Upper Canada’s age of reform – the penitentiary in 1834, houses of industry in 1836, and an insane asylum in 1839 – debtors’ prisons were never seriously considered. District gaols remained what a committee of judges described as “receptacles for crime and misfortune”: conjoined places that confirmed and confounded the fluid line between correction and custody.44 They were, like the statutes discussed in the previous section, key sites for giving meaning to imprisonment for debt. Such conceptual work was performed by those confined to them as well as those who administered them and by social practice as well as conscious statement. The work intensified in the age of reform. The role of spatial organization in shaping identities and power relations was evident as James Hall was relocated from debtor to criminal spaces and back again. Internal regulation of those spaces also reproduced the line between civil and criminal that debtors like Hall strove to police. Margot Finn has argued that the presence of debtors in English gaols stalled reformers’ efforts to impose greater penal discipline as debtors fought for their traditional and sometimes extensive privileges and retained much of their autonomous prison subculture.45 In Upper Canada too, debtors’ substantial presence complicated prison reform, they defended a primarily custodial understanding of imprisonment for debt, and examples of their collective protest and mutual aid abound. But as the Hall example also attests, debtors demanded more intensive regulation to protect them from neglect, privation, the petty tyranny of prison officials (and sometimes from each other), and physical or symbolic contamination by criminals. When officials took up their demands in ways that confused debt with crime, debtors sought again to underscore the distinction. Floor plans and rules, then, were crystallized expressions of meaning that shaped experience, even if the gap between reform objective and actual practice was occasionally wide. In 1801, magistrates in the newly created London District ordered a small, temporary gaol built twenty feet by fourteen, “to be divided into two Rooms, the one for Debtors & the other for Criminals[,] by a Plank partition.”46 Criminal cells and debtors’ rooms fronted onto a common hall divided only by a “wooden railing” in Niagara’s much-

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maligned gaol as well. After nearly a decade of prison reform efforts in the colony, the district grand jury condemned the lack of classification among criminal inmates, but the fact that they were “only separated by an open railing from the unfortunate Debtors” was “not only an outrage upon every proper feeling but has a most contaminating effect.”47 Even the modest Bathurst gaol was so organized that debtor and criminal spaces shared no wall, privy, or passageway. Entrance to the former was through the gaoler’s own rooms, spatializing debtors’ separate status as a privileged one. Two debtors’ wards formed separate, largely detached wings of the Johnstown District gaol, while debtors and criminals were typically assigned to different floors in multi-storey facilities. Indeed, the distinction was most substantial where new penal standards for criminals based on classification, individualization, and supervision were best realized. The first district gaol to adopt individual cells for criminals located the cellblock in the basement set back from all external walls; debtors were assigned more ample rooms on the ground floor with windows.48 Its designer was intimately aware of the “moral architecture” of colonial goals, having been imprisoned as a debtor by his workers.49 Spaces for criminals were labelled “cells” on most floor plans, while those for debtors were given less punitivesounding names: “rooms,” “wards,” or “apartments.” Yet referring to both as “cells,” the Talbot District plan suggested symbolically what Niagara’s wooden railing expressed physically – that the distinction could be porous. Interest in penal reform also led to more systematic attempts to count prisoners, efforts that revealed a similar fluidity in debtors’ relationship to criminals. “Jails and Prisons” was added as a subject on which colonies were to report in the imperial blue books, beginning with their 1828 submission.50 Annually thereafter, district officials confronted a table and questionnaire (printed on blue paper) informed by the latest metropolitan standards of prison discipline. Imperial officials asked whether “a classification has been observed” and, if not, “what measures have been taken to remedy this defect.” Upper Canada’s 1834 return summarized the response of most sheriffs: “Debtors & Criminals always kept asunder. In some cases convicts & untried Prisoners are also kept apart but from the smallness of the Gaols, a proper classification cannot always be observed.”51 Central information-gathering helped turn colonial practice into a “defect.” The accompanying table sought to disaggregate the confined further with columns for various classes of criminals and debtors. In some district returns, the figure re-

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ported under the heading “total number of prisoners” was the sum of the figures reported in each column; all those in custody were “prisoners.” In other returns, the total number of prisoners was the sum of the figures reported in the columns for accused and convicted criminals only. For those districts, imprisoned debtors were not prisoners.52 Such observational inconsistency, evident in other prison records as well, was not a matter of accuracy but reflected the absence of a consistent legal imaginary for imprisoned debtors. Statistics on imprisoned debtors – incomplete and interpretive as they are – suggest that the strain on district gaols increased in the early 1830s when new rules were being adopted, a penitentiary was being considered, and public debate led in 1835 to the mitigation of civil imprisonment. The number of debtors reported gaoled in the colony was 135 in 1828, 162 in 1829, and 183 in 1831, but rose to 261 in 1833, 435 in 1834, and 349 in 1835 before dropping to 192 in 1836.53 While the rate of imprisonment as a percentage of population appears relatively stable before 1835, the absolute increase in the number of debtors put enormous pressure on the ability of facilities to maintain a rigid separation of criminals and debtors.54 Debtors, however, were not imprisoned evenly across the colony, but were typically concentrated in the Home, Gore, and Midland gaols. The number committed annually between 1828 and 1832 to the Home District gaol at the colonial capital fluctuated from 19 to 186 and represented 42–68 per cent of yearly committals. (By contrast, from 1823 to 1840, debtors comprised only 8 per cent of prisoners at Quebec City, Lower Canada’s capital, in part, because Lower Canada already limited imprisonment mainly to actions of at least ten pounds. On execution, it was further restricted to suits between merchants or for debts due merchants and only after a sale of any real or personal property failed to satisfy the judgment.) While the number reported confined in gaols outside the Home, Gore, and Midland districts was often in the single digits, they remained a significant proportion of the local prison population. No more than ten debtors were in custody at Niagara in any quarter before 1832, but debtors still comprised 20–44 per cent of committals between 1824 and 1830, rising to roughly half in the early 1830s.55 Upper Canada lacked a debtors’ prison, but debtors might dominate the local gaol. Debtors brought conditions in these prisons to light. Charles Walsh, confined at Niagara, read in local newspapers that the colonial secretary had directed the lieutenant-governor to report on the state of the colony’s gaols. Walsh furnished Sir John Colborne with a detailed plan

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of the gaol and yard, showing how its poor physical state rendered proper classification and discipline impossible. Not accused or convicted of a crime, Walsh and other debtors were potentially credible witnesses to gaol conditions. Newspapers routinely published their letters and petitions, and debtors might be called to testify to what transpired within the gaol.56 They complained to officials about subordinates and called for greater oversight and transparency. Through the local press, some turned directly to the public as the ultimate arbiter of penal standards.57 Characterizing their “cruel” and “dreadful suffering” under “distressing,” “loathsome,” or “miserable” circumstances as “painful bondage” in a “dirty and unwholesome fabrick,”58 debtors intervened in the contest over the meaning of imprisonment in general and that of debtors in particular. Being deprived of liberty, especially under such circumstances, was often experienced as harsh punishment, not mere safekeeping. Attempts to escape further testified to its punitive nature.59 By naming what was now intolerable, debtors helped set new standards of “just” and “humane” practice. Conditions were especially galling when default was associated with criminality. One debtor reached for a notorious criminal sanction to convey to William Hamilton Merritt a sense of his confinement at Niagara as “a place not fit for[?] the vilest spirit that ever took its flight[?] from a public gibbet.” Merritt read such letters in the Assembly as evidence, not for improved gaol conditions, but for the abolition of imprisonment for debt.60 The distinction practically disappeared when debtors were confined to criminal cells, when criminals were held in spaces typically reserved for debtors, when the distinction seemed merely nominal, as when Lester H. Forward complained of “our rooms (Criminal Cells) … which they call the debtors cell,” or when, as Walsh claimed, “Debtors & Criminals Insane & Mad persons, are almost commingled.”61 When districts provisioned Crown but not civil prisoners, the distinction was maintained by punishing the unfortunate more than the felonious: “Our situation in some respects,” complained debtors imprisoned at York, “is more appalling than a Criminal imprisoned for murder.”62 Debtors insisted that the distinction be maintained not just by treating them better but also by subjecting criminals to greater restraint. Like other penal reformers, Walsh objected to the mix of the “murderer, insane, and prostitute” in the criminal hall where “conversation” was “neither controlled or under discipline.” Hall’s first petition noted that criminal sentences were “set at defiance,” while John Gray complained that an accused perjurer “has been suffered to go at

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large, without being brought to Justice, through the negligence of the proper authorities.”63 Rules were required, debtors insisted, to prevent authorities such as Elias Dulmage from acting “in the control and authority of himself.” Subject to approval by a judge, magistrates at Quarter Sessions had been empowered to frame prison rules since 1792,64 but only in the context of the prison reform movement and under pressure from debtors did printed, formal codes become the norm in the 1830s. Forward’s eighteen-page petition from the Johnstown goal in 1821 emphasized the “arbitrary measures” and “Gothic proceedings” he suffered at the hands of an unfit gaoler and sheriff whose “partiality” was unchecked by magistrates or prison “laws.”65 Leaving it to individuals to decide what safe custody or good order meant licensed arbitrary rule. Forward and Hall demanded that gaols be law-governed spaces to protect debtors and to keep criminals and the taint of criminality at bay. In support of his grievances, Forward provided the lieutenant-governor with what may be the colony’s earliest extant set of prison rules. While they instructed the gaoler to cook for felons and those unable to pay fines, he was instead to go “to any part of the village for the accommodation of the debtors” at 10:00 each morning. He could cook for debtors as well or return to the village at 2:00 in the afternoon if they paid additional fees. Debtors were to “arrange their matters in that way as to be prepared to send for what they want at those hours.” Leaving debtors to “arrange their matters,” the six rules evinced little concern for internal discipline or Forward’s primary grievances: the allocation of space, visitors’ limited and unpredictable access, the security of his correspondence, and the lack of oversight by magistrates.66 Debtors’ protests, the campaign against Dulmage, and the greater willingness of magistrates such as John Macaulay to intervene resulted in a more comprehensive disciplinary code for the Midland District. It served as a template for those adopted by other districts between 1831 and 1835, perhaps on the recommendation of judges arriving for local assizes. Responding to Dulmage’s indictment for extortion, the Midland code expressly prohibited gaolers from accepting fees “on any pretext whatever.” Gaolers were also to keep detailed records to be inspected at each quarter sessions, and their punishment of prisoners was subject to regulation and oversight. Reforming magistrates joined debtors in advocating rules intended to prevent abuses and improve conditions, but subjected debtors to others that went beyond their safe custody. Such regulations threatened debtors’ autonomy and redrew

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the boundary with criminals. Following a debtor’s death in custody at Kingston, one critic condemned the “absurdly rigorous and unprecedented, not to say unconstitutional and unlawful discipline, to which men confined for debt in the gaol of this town are subjected.”67 Imprisoned debtors became objects as well as agents of prison reform. Many rules, such as those relating to the cleanliness of the gaol, applied to “prisoners” or to “persons confined.” Rules prescribing particular behaviour or amusements also failed to differentiate among classes of prisoners, although they often concerned morality and internal order more than preventing escape. Prisoners faced solitary confinement and a restricted diet for breaking any rule and, as several codes phrased it, for “assaults in prison, profane cursing and swearing, [and] indecent or refractory behaviour.” Johnstown magistrates added the “disturbance of Gaoler or other prisoners” to the already broad category and added dice and cards to the common rule that “no gaming shall be allowed among the prisoners.” While their Gore counterparts were more permissive – “harmless amusements are not to be disallowed” – such rules gave no greater autonomy to debtors than other prisoners. Yet most codes began by allocating space to physically segregate debtors (and those confined for contempt in a civil process) from accused or convicted convicts (and those committed for want of sureties), which trumped other classifications. Segregation by sex was also stipulated, but fluctuating prison populations and the limitations of many district structures rendered the desire to classify criminals by the seriousness of their offence aspirational – “as far as the dimensions, plan and accommodations of the building may allow.” Other rules distinguished debtor from criminal by permitting debtors to receive visitors much of the day and to use light in the evenings. Visitors to criminals were typically restricted to fewer hours and were strictly supervised by prison officials; no provision was made for artificial light in criminal quarters. The complaint of two debtors in 1833 forced Niagara magistrates to alter recently adopted rules on visiting hours. When they attempted the next year to limit them to two hours of supervised visits in the morning and afternoon, debtors again protested, convinced the gaoler had not understood that “the order of the Court was to be applied only to criminals and the debtors to remain as they were.”68 Rules regarding provisioning performed particularly vexed boundary work. A number concerned rations to be provided criminals at the district’s expense and, except for those of the Home District, barred criminals from receiving any victuals or bedding beyond the pre-

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scribed allowance. As Crown prisoners, they were provisioned at public expense but in most gaols were denied freedom of choice or extras, regardless of their means. Confined by private litigation, debtors were responsible for their own maintenance, a responsibility facilitated by allowing them to receive necessities from those they hired or from family, friends, and the charitable during longer, unsupervised visiting hours. Not restricted to gaol rations, neither were they permitted unlimited freedom of choice. Rules for the Midland, Newcastle, Prince Edward, Johnstown, and Gore gaols allowed debtors to receive only “a reasonable quantity of plain wholesome food as well as bedding, clothing and other necessaries.” The first three added that they “shall neither conduce to extravagance, nor to luxury.” An upper limit was set on the possible spread in material conditions between criminals and debtors in colonial gaols that already offered none of the elaborate privileges available to well-heeled debtors in some English prisons. A desire to prevent debtors from depleting their assets may have ruled out “extravagance,” but the puritanical embargo on “luxury” suggests, much like concerns about gaming and other prescribed behaviour, that unnecessary comforts and freedoms were to be denied even non-criminals. In those districts, imprisonment for debt incorporated a penitential element.69 Paradoxically, adhering to the distinction between debtor and criminal disadvantaged destitute debtors, since all criminals received the gaol allowance, regardless of their means. As already noted, those imprisoned on execution could receive a court-ordered allowance from creditors, but the relief was not extended to those imprisoned on process until 1834. Several districts such as Midland made formal provisions for debtors unable to provide for themselves and without family or friends, or awaiting or ineligible for the allowance, so they were not abandoned to the generosity of fellow prisoners and officials or allowed to starve. Such humane arrangements erased the conceptual line between criminals and the poorest debtors unless, as in Gore, the rations for destitute debtors were reduced below those afforded criminals. Making no formal provision for destitute debtors, Newcastle and Home district magistrates cleaved even more faithfully to the distinction. Both argued that magistrates had no authority to spend district funds on maintaining civil prisoners. One hostile observer of Bathurst’s magistrates agreed, insisting that no ratepayers’ money be expended “for purposes not authorised by law; such as … supporting debtor prisoners.” Yet, according to the sheriff, Newcastle magistrates did provide

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a daily ration of bread in particularly hard cases “upon their own personal responsibility.” The distinction with convicts was maintained by feeding destitute debtors less, not at all, or only as objects worthy of charity.70 Even the geographies of their confinement differed. Secure prison yards were often non-existent for debtors and criminals alike, but if sheriffs feared an increased risk of escape due to the state of the yard or part of the gaol, they might deny access to some or all debtors while permitting criminals access because of their personal liability for the debt if they lost custody of a debtor. A court ruling in the early 1820s suggested that leaving “close confinement,” even for a secure prison yard, might constitute an escape. Thus, the Home District sheriff insisted that access to a prison yard, like expending public funds on their maintenance, was “very questionable” as “a right so far as respects the Debtors.” They were, however, allowed into an insecure yard when British soldiers were stationed there.71 Debtors (or those presumed particularly trustworthy) might be granted access to the yard in other districts, but those for whom sufficient bail was posted and who were not also confined for crime might be released to the gaol limits. Created, according to the 1822 act, to relieve debtors from poor prison conditions with fresh air and exercise, “the effect of these provisions is, to make the limits part of the gaol,” as Chief Justice Robinson put it.72 This conditional redefinition of custody for exclusively civil prisoners reinforced a primarily custodial view of imprisonment for debt. It kept them within the reach of creditor and court. Yet, as already discussed, subsequent extensions of the limits reinforced the counter-notion that they had been confined for alleged or actual misconduct by granting new powers to creditors to compel payment of the debt. Of course, floor plans and rules expressed intent more than carceral practice. Such practice varied by district and over time, depending on the state of particular gaols and the district’s funds, the fluctuating size and composition of the prison population, and the disposition and competence of gaolers, sheriffs, and magistrates. Rules were not always enforced, but printed and posted in most gaols, they expressed an evolving sense of what being imprisoned for debt meant in relation to crime and thereby authorized a standard by which to judge actual practice. One former debtor complained that “papers put up forbidding” disorder on the debtors’ side “has about as much effect as if it were stuck on the top of some neighboring maple tree.” Yet it was the rule to which he appealed and “Authority” responded that if witnesses

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came forward, his complaints would be investigated and offenders brought to account.73 Cumulatively, however, gaol plans and regulations spoke less of an internal logic being worked out to varying degrees in practice than of unresolved tensions in the civil and criminal meanings of imprisonment for debt. As civil prisoners, debtors were not to be physically or conceptually confused with criminals. Many became prison reformers to police the distinction, but they suffered what had become the defining criminal sanction, were arrested for alleged or actual acts that associated default with wrongdoing, and were objects as well as authors of penal reform. Such reforms and the information-gathering that underwrote them codified, reshaped, and threatened the distinction between debtor and criminal. The boundary, at once “obvious and just,” was amorphous. It grew increasingly equivocal under pressure from campaigns to reform prisons and the law. Equally Liable to Objection In 1836, the conservative Royal Standard linked the configuration of Upper Canada’s gaols to the principles that ought to guide its legislators. Just as the distinction “between misery and guilt” required that the debtor be kept “from the contamination of the criminal,” the newly elected constitutionalist majority ought to abolish imprisonment for debt for immuring “the sons of misfortune in the dungeons that ought to be reserved for the children of crime.”74 While public debate was structured around support for or opposition to the abolition of imprisonment for debt, at root the issue was how the law might distinguish fraud from default. The criminal-civil divide thus did significant work in discussions of legal principles, as it did in the organization of colonial gaols. Because critics like the Standard argued that imprisonment for debt confounded the line separating them, they could deploy principles associated with the criminal law to attack this element of the civil law, thereby sustaining the very tension they were responding to. In fact, the meaning of criminal justice found fullest expression in Upper Canada in debates about imprisonment for debt. Legal reformers sought to better police the border, both by further criminalizing certain behaviour by defaulters and by removing the taint of criminality from default when unaccompanied by such behaviour. Finally, and like its criminal counterpart, insolvency law was an ideological system to be judged less by its efficiency than the moral and political lessons it taught.75

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Those who advocated abolition urged that imprisonment was a criminal sanction but debt was not a crime. Thus, the strongest advocate of abolition in the assembly, John Rolph, insisted that debt was not “a crime against society” or a “public offense,” but “might more properly be considered a misfortune.” Likewise, Bidwell “did not think it could be called a crime to be in debt.” It was, then, wrong “to suffer the punishment which is due only to the foulest crime.” Fifteen debtors confined to the Johnstown gaol agreed: “We cannot be so contracted in our principles as to consider debt as a crime, where it is unattended with fraud.”76 More cautious legal reformers seeking only to ameliorate the practice as well as the status quo’s few supporters did not advance a systematic civil-law defence of imprisonment for debt as purely custodial. Rather, they accepted the association with the punishment of wrongdoing. Attorney General Robinson reminded Rolph that default arose for many morally questionable reasons besides misfortune. Others bluntly equated it with the “downright robbery” of creditors’ property.77 In his response to Bidwell, Solicitor General Christopher Hagerman conceded that only crime could justify a criminal sanction, but argued that “it is sometimes a crime for a person to get into debt … [T]here is no injustice imprisoning those who make no exertion to pay … I cannot help thinking that there is something dishonest in a person incurring debts which he does not expect to pay … [I]t is a question whether running into debt without prospect of payment is not in some degree a crime.”78 Claims that civil imprisonment punished crimes merely drew attention to the conceptual tension at the heart of the debate. Whereas in prisons, civil and criminal corresponded to the partition between debtor and convict, in discussions of legal principles it divided innocent from fraudulent defaulters. The conservative Allan MacNab pledged to support any bill that “would draw a line of distinction … and provide alike for the punishment of one, and the protection of the other.” Presenting his bill for the “Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt in Certain Cases,” Attorney General Henry John Boulton concurred that the law must “discriminate between crime and misfortune” to ensure that no honest debtor was “treated and punished as a criminal.”79 It is also more accurate to say that Rolph and Bidwell sought to reconfigure imprisonment for debt as imprisonment for fraud rather than abolish imprisonment for debt in its entirety. The bill Rolph sponsored in 1827 was entitled “an act to abolish imprisonment for debt and to punish fraudulent debtors.” While the abolition aspect was em-

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phasized almost exclusively in the Assembly and the press, Rolph did speak of default as a crime if the “undue obtaining” of credit or the concealment of property from creditors was proven. Likewise, according to one report, Bidwell would “punish a fraudulent debtor, or one who had squandered away his creditor’s property in wasteful extravagance, which he considered to be criminal and deserving punishment.” Even the Western Mercury, one of the most ardent abolitionist newspapers, thought the law ought to “chastise the fraudulent debtor with more severity than the common felon, because he is not only a robber but a betrayer of trust.”80 “Fraud” became the label for whatever lapse in contractual probity particular commentators wished to condemn. Legal scholar James Boyd White calls this the “intellectual process of law” whereby one of many “tolerable possibilities” for the meaning of key terms that “derive their substance and their shape from the whole world of legal culture” is singled out.81 As Robinson pointed out in opposing Rolph’s 1827 bill, “Fraud in a moral point of view, and what the law designates and treats as fraud were very different things.” He offered examples of acts by debtors he was confident would be widely condemned as dishonest, but which the existing criminal definition of fraud, left unaltered by Rolph’s bill, took no notice of.82 The range of what fraud might mean offered by Hagerman and Bidwell stretched from how credit was obtained (with dishonesty or without expectation of repayment, means to repay, or reasonable probability of having the means to repay), to how it was used (in an inappropriate or wasteful manner), to why it was not repaid (from insufficient efforts to repay or efforts to delay or defeat a creditor’s demands). In the event of default, the law ought to punish debtors’ behaviour according to a moral standard that might include a prohibition on “extravagance” just as gaol rules in several districts did once they were imprisoned. The Mitigation Act, 1835, reflected this process of definition, narrowing the official justification of imprisonment to cases of fraud but defining fraud in equally cumbersome terms. This “intellectual process of law” to define fraud in a such a way that moral culpability and legal guilt aligned went on in colonial courtrooms as well. The affidavits for a writ of capias had long required creditor-plaintiffs to swear they had reasons to seek the remedy of arrest beyond the outstanding debt itself. From their rewording in 1822, such affidavits appear to have been accepted at face value. In the early 1830s, however, as the legitimacy of civil imprisonment for debt was being undermined, debtors turned to the courts to test their veracity. If creditors had to

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prove that they did, in fact, fear a debtor would defraud or had defrauded them, the abolition of imprisonment except in cases of alleged wrongdoing would be achieved. In 1835–6, Dunn successfully sued McDougall for malicious arrest, claiming that McDougall could not have apprehended that he “would leave this province without paying his debts” as McDougall had sworn to arrest him on process. A sympathetic jury awarded Dunn damages, but a divided Court of King’s Bench ordered a new trial. Speaking for the majority, Chief Justice Robinson accepted that such actions could be allowed, although “the courts have always discountenanced” them for fear that creditors would be sued routinely, thereby, in effect, depriving them of their remedy. On the grounds of expediency, however, he discountenanced guilty verdicts in such actions by setting a remarkably high standard of proof for a jury to infer malicious intent. Justice J.B. Macaulay, who had served as trial judge, dissented, advocating a lower standard to allow juries to protect debtors from “undue harshness” or “wanton arrest.” Macaulay conceded, however, that the jury in Dunn v. McDougall may have been swayed more by a desire to hold creditors in general accountable for their decision to arrest than by the particulars of this case.83 Other debtors sought such accountability in the criminal law. In 1832, Macaulay had also presided over King v. Elias Boulton Smith at the Gore assizes. Smith was convicted and sentenced to one month in gaol and a fine of twenty-five pounds for perjury in the affidavit he swore to secure a capias against Lewis Burwell, a civil defendant turned witness in the criminal case against the plaintiff. Sympathetic editors publicized such cases as evidence that imprisonment for debt gave creditors indiscriminate power to punish. At least one debtor, convinced a local jury would believe he intended to meet his obligations, was reportedly emboldened by another perjury conviction to promise criminal prosecution when a creditor threatened to arrest him in order to secure the speedy settlement of a small sum.84 Such debtors and the jurors who sided with them joined reformist legislators in seeking to shore up the distinction between civil remedies for debt recovery and punishment for crime by limiting imprisonment to cases where the wrongdoing claimed in the creditor’s affidavit could be proven in court. The case against imprisonment for debt in the assembly and press for failing to respect the border between civil and criminal proceeded on two fronts: how the decision to arrest was made, and the penalty imposed. For abolitionists, imprisonment for debt epitomized the cruel absurdity they associated with pre-reform criminal law or with what

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Michel Foucault calls ancien régime “relations of sovereignty.”85 The link was drawn most systematically by John Rolph in a series of much publicized speeches in the late 1820s, for “this law is open to an objection, to which too much of our criminal code is equally liable.”86 It was, however, made by others of various political orientations and in support of rival measures to mitigate or abolish imprisonment for debt. Of course, arguments for reform cannot be taken for an accurate account of how imprisonment for debt worked, but widespread and sustained appeal to those principles undermined the legitimacy of imprisonment for debt. It also reinforced those principles as the yardsticks by which criminal and penal practice ought to be measured as well. Leading Anglo-American legal reformers and their foundational statements, such as Henry Brougham or Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments, concerned themselves with insolvency as well as crime, but in Upper Canada they were cited and their principles invoked primarily in a civil rather than criminal context.87 Concerning the decision to arrest, by not distinguishing between innocence and guilt, imprisonment for debt failed the first test of criminal justice. For Rolph, only primary causes and intentional acts of wrongdoing merited punishment. A failed bank or successful forgery might precipitate others’ insolvency, but they rather than the banker or forger faced punishment for the default. Of course, Rolph was well aware that creditors used the threat of arrest to pressure debtors (or their family and friends) to surrender property and make other efforts to pay. Just as Foucault points to the relationship between inflicting pain and producing truth, Rolph equated the use of imprisonment to detect fraud with “experimental torture upon the debtors body.”88 Reform would end “the domination of the creditor over the body and liberty of the debtor” but leave unimpaired civil remedies against a debtor’s property and labour. It limited the intrusion of criminality into civil matters, not debtors’ liability. Fraud, on the other hand, was a criminal matter and ought to be adjudicated and punished by the courts. The criminal law promised the accused procedural safeguards, such as carefully defined offences and trial by judge and jury, because of the stigma of conviction and the severity of possible sanctions. Such safeguards were central to popular notions of “British justice” invoked by imprisoned debtors.89 As it stood, decisions about whether fraud had been committed and whether imprisonment was appropriate were left to plaintiffs who thereby judged in their own case. Imprisonment for debt was the rule of men, not law.

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As drawn by abolitionists, the creditor who resorted to imprisonment ceased to be a potential victim of deception or theft and became a vindictive ancien régime sovereign. Able to determine the fate of others, creditors became, said “Julius,” “little tyrants and sway a sceptre, though not as large, yet more cruel than the autocrat of Russia.” Unchecked power tempted them to lash out from the wrong motives (anger, cruelty, or vengeance) or at the wrong target, unrestrained by the virtues of justice or mercy. The plaintiff, feared Bidwell, “may be exasperated against” the debtor who faced imprisonment, according to the conservative Courier, to “gratify the angry feelings of this disappointed creditor.” Criminal sanctions, insisted Attorney General Boulton, ought not to be imposed at “the arbitrary will of a vindictive creditor … as the law did not punish people from motives of vengeance.”90 Debtors reinforced the image. Always claiming they were willing but unable to pay and having committed no fraudulent act, they were nonetheless sentenced to gaol, thereby rendering them unable to work to repay their acknowledged debts. It followed that the decision to imprison could be only “to satisfy some malicious disposition, and to seek revenge, rather than recover a Just Debt,” contended John Woolstencroft. Twelve confined at York insisted that they were gaoled only “to gratify the base and unmanly disposition” of “our present tyrants.” They were “the only subjects in this Province … left wholly in the mercy of individuals” rather than public authority, just as Hall had been abandoned to the mercy of Midland’s gaoler. Imprisonment for debt licensed impulsive, personal, and physical confrontation, whereas the known rules of the criminal law and reformed gaols restrained such unruly passions and substituted for them the moderate, methodical, and continuous discipline of the public magistrate.91 The juxtaposition also challenged the notion that creditors could best discern their own self-interest in negotiations with other private parties and therefore resorted to or persisted in confining a debtor only when it could be expected to aid in debt recovery. After all, for a writ of capias ad respondendum, plaintiffs had to swear that they did not “sue out such process from any vexatious or malicious motive whatever.” Thus while Charles Richardson, a lawyer, thought his former client “rather wants the inclination than the means of liquidating the amount of my claim against him,” he assured the lieutenant-governor, “I certainly have no disposition to keep Mr Fenner in confinement & if upon further inquiry I find that there is no prospect of my realizing my demand, he shall be liberated.”92 Yet in the age of reform such unchecked

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power was associated with abuse. It was the very antithesis of the rule of law. The image of the capricious creditor was thus a welcome foil for the judge who insisted that he was impartial, committed to protecting the innocent, reluctant to punish except to secure justice, and ever merciful. Charles Duncombe’s 1836 report on prisons and penitentiaries positioned “the milder administration of the criminal laws” in a progressive history of refinement and state formation: “In the savage and barbarous state, vengeance is the ruling passion in the infliction of punishment,” which was often accompanied by “merciless torture,” but “as knowledge increases men learn to discriminate more clearly between actions and their motives.” Statutes made more “artificial” divisions, and courts made “more cautious inquiry” into the intentions behind an act and proceeded with “more humanity in the retributions of legal justice. But the most important step in the enactment and administration of penal laws, is the full admission of the principle, that it is not revenge which stimulates society to the infliction of punishment, … that neither in the prescriptions of the Legislature, nor in the progress of judicial investigation and decision, are the vindictive passions to be allowed to operate.” Duncombe’s report made no mention of imprisonment for debt, but its image of legal reform drew its strength in Upper Canada from debates about the civil remedy.93 By negative example, the private creditor defined the public magistrate. Similarly with the penalty itself, the second broad front along which the debate proceeded, legal reformers reinforced principles of criminal justice by associating imprisonment for debt with what they regarded as “unenlightened” criminal punishments. Like the ancien régime sovereign, the creditor meted out exemplary, disproportionate, and ultimately counterproductive terror as personal justice. References to debtors languishing in “dungeons,” “cells,” or “a loathsome and irongrated den” were not calls to improve gaol conditions so much as attempts to associate imprisonment for debt with a “barbarous” past. Abolition of imprisonment “for the simple non-fulfilment of a civil contract” and the establishment of a penitentiary to punish convicts reflected shared principles of a new age.94 Thus, the shift away from criminal sanctions that targeted the body found echoes in debates about insolvency regimes. Bidwell mocked the substitution of the body for credit implied by the writ of capias ad satisfaciendum: “When a man is taken for debt it is said to be taken in satisfaction; … if men were cannibals, and they might be roasted and eaten, it would be to some

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purpose. If we could sell his body, and get our debt by that means it would be some purpose.” Not infrequent references to Shakespeare’s Shylock appeared principally in discussions of the pathology of greed tinged with anti-Semitism, but spoke too of flesh mistaken for coin.95 A more common target, however, was the absence of proportionality and economy. In his speech to the Assembly in 1829, Rolph noted that the criminal law imposed a fixed term ideally correlated to the severity of the offence, but “in a neighbouring cell” a debtor suffered an indeterminate sentence. More generally, Rolph surveyed the history of punishments such as the scaffold and whip to explode the notion that “the severity of the present law is best calculated to deter men from improperly contracting debts or evading payment.” The success of Robert Peel’s recent reduction of the number of capital crimes in Britain inspired by the “humane and illustrious [Samuel] Romilly,” and the earlier replacement of hanging by solitary confinement in Pennsylvania demonstrated that penalties that came to be seen as excessive and cruel were demoralizing, ineffective, and unnecessary. “When a man contemplates a Law which inflicts indiscriminately the same punishment for small as for a great offence,” whether death for a range of crimes or imprisonment for a range of debts, he was tempted to commit a greater wrong. Deploying indiscriminate “terror” rather than calibrating the punishment to the offence was simply “ill suited to human nature.”96 Well before Upper Canada enacted its own capital punishment and penitentiary acts in 1833 and 1834, their underlying principles were best articulated in a civil-law context and by a political opponent of their principal architect, John Beverley Robinson. Disproportionate penalties such as the widespread threat of public execution taught the wrong moral lessons. They created perverse incentives and brutalized more than they edified. Debtors were driven to fraud in the form of conveying their property to family, contended Rolph, by despair at a creditor’s cruelty, not from dishonesty. Once arrested, the Royal Standard worried that being gaoled would “sour his sense of right and wrong … the debtor will set the cruelty against the debt, & consider himself morally acquitted of it” rather than obligated to strive to honour it. Conversely, meting out such punishment “hardens, if that is possible, the heart” of the creditor, rather than instilling an appreciation for mercy and justice, just as legal reformers worried that exemplary punishments coarsened rather than edified those who witnessed them. Deprived of the power to punish by the abolition of imprisonment for debt, Rolph hoped creditors would learn to exercise

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greater prudence in extending their trust to others in the form of credit and would no longer be tempted to commit perjury to secure a capias.97 The pre-reform relationship between crime and punishment was particularly irrational in the case of imprisonment for debt, because it prevented most debtors from working to support their families or to pay their debts, while depleting whatever they might possess to sustain themselves in gaol. As the belief gained wider currency that criminals should be put to hard labour to inculcate habits of industry, the legally enforced idleness of debtors seemed particularly demoralizing, as did their exposure to convicts. Unsuccessful in a suit for malicious arrest against his landlord, the ironically named confectioner Raymond Laliberté petitioned the lieutenant-governor for relief from the “stony-hearted oppressor” who held him for debt. If released to pursue his trade, “he may afterwards practise what he & his Colleagues are constantly bawling – reformation!”98 Labouring at his skilled trade to support his children and pay his debts offered the moral discipline criminals found only in the penitentiary. Legal reformers promised to bolster the distinction between civil and criminal, remedy and punishment, and misfortune and malfeasance and thus to teach clear and effective moral lessons. By associating imprisonment for debt with pre-reform criminal sanctions, critics diverted attention from a more civil-law reading of the practice and reinforced principles of criminal justice that resonated widely. In his charges to the Home District grand juries in 1832, Chief Justice Robinson welcomed the Assembly’s steps towards establishing a penitentiary. Only when alternatives were in place that punished truly “not nominally, at the same time that they tend to the reformation of the convict,” would “mitigating the apparent rigor of our criminal code” with its threat of the “impending terror of capital punishment” be possible. All agreed that “punishment should both be, and appear to be, commensurate with guilt.” Existing common gaols that imposed “profitless and unwholesome inactivity” and “the mere sense of suffering” were inadequate. A penitentiary “for the employment and correction of convicts” promised their “reformation” while “they receive no permanent injury,” unlike physical and shaming punishments.99 These were among the principles by which Rolph and others found imprisonment for debt wanting, but Robinson had long insisted that in disputes between debtors and creditors a creditor’s power to arrest remained the most effective legal tool to detect and respond to fraud. The purpose of imprisonment for debt was not to satisfy some secret passion of the creditor but to ensure that

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the debtor appeared at trial and to compel him “to disclose his effects and pay his honest debts.” Only when an alternative to the capias such as general bankruptcy legislation was enacted (which Robinson supported) would it be possible to mitigate further “the apparent rigor” of the civil code with its general threat of imprisonment. Only then would it be possible to resolve the tension between civil and criminal understandings of imprisonment for debt.100 “No very explicit line of distinction” English legal theorists such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin lamented the common law’s lack of clear definitions and consistent categories. Opaque technical terms, seemingly arbitrary classifications, and pleading by archaic writs obscured, they thought, any relationship between the common law and general principles of justice. Suggesting more methodical reordering of the law, Bentham and Austin nonetheless recognized that, to quote Bentham, there was “no very explicit line of distinction” between civil and criminal or private and public law. Particular laws likely contained elements of each.101 This was certainly true of imprisonment for debt. Indeed, imprisonment for debt in Upper Canada suggests the artificial and contingent nature of attempts to draw such lines. It rested formerly on the civil side. In disputes between private parties, the plaintiff brought the matter before the courts in search of a remedy for a loss arising from the disappointment of legitimate expectations of repayment, not a penalty. Yet there was a strong public interest in protecting private property and maintaining credit relations. Furthermore, if the law made the remedy available only when some moral offence was alleged, those offences resembled crimes all the more. This was especially true once the remedy itself came to dominate criminal sentencing as well. At times, the line virtually disappeared in practice: gaoled for failing to pay fines or court costs, convicts might appear as imprisoned debtors; suits for debt and prosecutions for crime might be used almost indiscriminately in the same dispute; creditors risked being gaoled for perjury in seeking to arrest others for debt; conversely, debtors might be charged with criminal offences such as resisting arrest or attempting to escape custody that arose from the civil suit against them; and debtors were arrested by the same officers and confined to the same “common” gaols as convicts. The legal reform movement of the 1820s and 1830s sought to fix the line by distinguishing fault more clearly from default. Yet by insisting

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that imprisonment for debt violated principles of criminal justice and conceding that certain acts by debtors to obtain, use, or fail to repay credit merited punishment, legal reformers contributed to a criminalized understanding of imprisonment for debt. Creditors were also to be held to greater account, especially for veracity and self-restraint. The indeterminacy of what constituted fraud in credit relations and how the law might recognize it maintained the uneasy coexistence of civil and criminal perspectives. In public debate, more thoroughly civil-law arguments, such as giving the injured party wide latitude to continue custody until its utility as a remedy was exhausted or the efficiency of custody in debt-recovery more generally, were sidelined. Yet this more civil reading of imprisonment for debt as purely custodial continued to justify the distinct confinement of debtors in the gaols they shared with criminals. As alternative criminal sanctions for all but the few remaining capital crimes were abolished or fell into disuse, imprisonment seemed increasingly coterminous with criminality. New penal standards strengthened the association by seeking to impose greater discipline and morally improve everyone confined. The age of reform rendered the long-standing tension between civil and criminal understandings of imprisonment for debt more acute, visible, and problematic. However inadequate in logic or practice, the distinction between civil and criminal mattered. It provided the conceptual frame by which both ideas and experiences of imprisonment for debt were organized, articulated, and given political salience. It structured how proposals for its amelioration or abolition were devised and evaluated. The distinction might be blurred to suggest similarities or urged to emphasize contrast, but it rarely faded from view. Nor were its implications always self-evident or without contradiction. The distinction mattered not only to the relative power of debtors and creditors in negotiating their relationship, but also to how they saw themselves and how they were seen by others. In turn, such portrayals had political purchase in debates about the law and prison reform. The distinction mattered to imprisoned debtors when they protested their conditions and when they and other prison reformers grappled with how to regulate space, diet, and behaviour. Such protests and regulations keyed to wider debates about the law, which, in turn, reverberated in the colony’s gaols. This creative tension was, then, manifest and managed in both explicit legal principles and social practices and across diverse terrains: in statutes and reported judicial decisions, legislatures, courts and jury rooms, debtors’

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wards, and newspapers, and in the floor plans, registers, and regulations of district gaols. Each site had its own internal logic and dynamic, but ideas, assumptions, and the meaning discerned from experiences in one shaped ideas, assumptions, and meaning found in others. Collectively, they created and sustained a pattern of meaning that conditioned how people made sense of the law and their relationship to it. Struggles over that meaning extended beyond a few legal specialists. Imprisoned debtors played an especially prominent role. Even the interests and values the law might serve were discerned and contested within this pattern of meaning. Thus, even as the civil law distributed power in private relations, it shaped the political and economic identities and interests of those involved. Rhetorically, Attorney General Boulton positioned his reform bill as promoting creditors’ “true interests,” presumably in contrast to some other, mistaken view of their interests. By confining them together in district gaols, the law also created the opportunity for debtors to develop a collective sense of their interests. District gaols were not only schools of crime, as legal reformers feared, but seminaries of political and legal principles. Only at the end of the period did commercial interests begin to find a similar voice as the Board of Trade in Toronto’s reading room.102 Interests and identities were not just reflected in the law but were, in part, created and refracted through it. Attention to meaning across various registers also suggests a deepseated desire for legality. Particular laws were evaded, twisted, or defied. Gaols were often insecure. Assets were concealed and debtors absconded. Specific legal officials and processes could not count on widespread acceptance. Extra-legal methods to resolve disputes were frequently preferred over legally mandated ones.103 Law reform was also hampered by the limited capacity of the early colonial state. Imposing uniform standards on local gaols or, in the absence of the numerous commissions and parliamentary inquiries that informed debate in England, collecting anything more than anecdotal information on how imprisonment for debt actually operated in the colony or what alternatives might be effective proved especially difficult. A motion in 1836 to hire a law clerk to assist members of the Assembly in drafting complex legislation would have addressed another challenge faced by insolvency-law reform, but was narrowly defeated.104 Yet however it might be evaded or decried in its particulars, law in general was not seen as an alien imposition on local, self-regulating communities. Numerous inhabitants in relatively isolated communi-

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ties petitioned for Courts of Requests to be established to try cases of small debts in their midst.105 Imprisoned debtors did not demand to be left alone to preside over the debtors’ ward, but to live in rule-governed institutions administered by responsible officials. Despite the necessary trade-offs, formally adopted and known codes promised the vulnerable better protection than dependence on the most powerful individual, group, or community norm. Creditors sought better means to manage the inability or unwillingness to pay. Debtors sought better protection from unreasonable creditors. The various relief measures of the 1820s and 1830s began to temper creditors’ coercive power with that of judicial processes, even as the initiative remained largely in private hands.106 Proposals to abolish imprisonment for debt promised to go further in that direction. In the spring of 1838, Charles Baker, a tailor threatened with arrest, was grabbed by James Perrin on a Toronto wharf to prevent him leaving for the United States. Baker sued Perrin, a wholesale merchant and one of Baker’s creditors, for assault and battery, winning a muchneeded £100 in damages. The problem was not that Perrin had tried to recover his debt or that leaving the colony could not be interpreted as an attempt to abscond (though Baker claimed he was going to collect debts owed to him there, and other creditors testified on his behalf), but that Perrin had physically confronted Baker, taking matters into his own hands. Imprisonment for debt had come to be seen as just such a personal assault perpetrated under the guise of law. “Why,” asked the British Colonial Argus in 1833, “should a hard-hearted and relentless creditor be invested with the power of life and death, and for the simple non-fulfilment of a civil contract be allowed to seize his unfortunate fellow-being, and by the King’s authority, drag an unoffending subject to a loathsome and iron-grated den and lock him in for life?”107 Over-heated rhetoric sharpened the contrast with a more liberal view of the state. The law’s authority ought to be impartial: to appear to stand above rather than take sides in private disputes, to mediate conflict through seemingly neutral state forms, to protect the unoffending, to punish the guilty humanely but efficiently, and to give greater effect to basic moral distinctions. Increased governance through law twinned with more intense governance of self. The law ought to be a rule-bound umpire in disputes otherwise deemed private, disputes that arose in the context of economic structures the law did not interrogate and rarely acknowledged helping to underwrite. Insisting that no one act “in the control and authority of himself,” James T. Hall de-

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serves a place among the progenitors of responsible, liberal government in Upper Canada.

NOTES 1 A SSHRC grant is gratefully acknowledged, as are the many valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper presented to the Osgoode Legal History Group and especially the support for this project of Blaine Baker and Jim Phillips. 2 Midland debtors to Maitland, n.d., Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG5-B3, Upper Canada, Civil Secretary, Petitions and Addresses, 1792– 1841, (Petitions and Addresses) v. 6, 00248–51. 3 John McLean to George Hillier, Dulmage affidavit enclosed, 1 Feb. 1827, LAC, RG5-A1, Civil Secretary’s Correspondence, Upper Canada and Canada West (Sundries), v. 82, 44451–68. 4 Hall to Maitland, 9 May 1827, Sundries, v. 84, 45622–35. 5 King v. Dulmage, 18 Sept. 1829, Court of Oyer and Terminer minute book, Archives of Ontario (AO), RG 22, 154; and grand jury presentment and chairman’s charge, Upper Canada Herald, 23 Sept. and 21 Oct. 1829. Dulmage was acquitted on evidence that the money may have been payment for provisions and for securing the debtor’s discharge after the sheriff’s office had closed, King v. Dulmage, Sept. 1830, J.B. Macaulay Benchbooks (Macaulay benchbooks), AO, RG22, 390, v. 1:9, 12–13. Humanity, Upper Canada Herald, 15 July 1829, publicized rumours of gaolers charging illegal fees. 6 Peter Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers”: Prisons and Punishment in NineteenthCentury Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 51–2, uses Hall to address the first two questions. 7 My approach is informed by Paul W. Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Philip Smith, Punishment and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), quotation at 20. More generally, see William J. Bouwsma, “From the History of Ideas to History of Meaning,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1981): 283, 287–8; and Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 6. 8 Cobourg Debtor Register, AO, RG20-65-1. 9 Evelyn Kolish, “Some Aspects of Civil Litigation in Lower Canada, 1785– 1825: Towards the Use of Court Records for Canadian Social History,” Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 3 (Sept. 1989): 337–65.

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10 Bouwsma, “From the History of Ideas to History of Meaning,” 289–90. 11 Robinson v. Hall, 8 Geo. IV, 1827 in Thomas Taylor, Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of King’s Bench, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1862) (hereafter Taylor), 482–6. Hall was imprisoned on mense process, not execution, on which see below. 12 Douglas Hay, “England, 1562–1875: The Law and Its Uses,” in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain & the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 106. 13 J. Jerald Bellomo, “Upper Canadian Attitudes towards Crime and Punishment,” Ontario History 66, no. 1 (Mar. 1972): 26. 14 Western Mercury, 24 Feb. 1831. The preponderance of debt and civil actions was also true in Lower Canada; Kolish, “Some Aspects,” 351–2; and Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 198, 245. 15 Courier, copied Western Mercury, 31 Jan.; and Hallowell Free Press, 23 Dec. 1833. On the development of the public sphere, see my The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), esp. 116–234; and for how it amplified the importance of meaning to understanding punishment, Smith, Punishment and Culture, 1, 12–15, 39, 46, 173. 16 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1893), 1, bk 1, chap. 1, 122; and Chronicle & Gazette, 6 and 13 Sept. 1834. More broadly, see J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 500–2. 17 Michael Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurisprudence, 1760–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Certainly the distinction was murkier than Blackstone’s formulation admitted. Bastardy and master-and-servant suits proceeded in the plaintiff’s name but were tried in the criminal courts and, at least in Lower Canada until the nineteenth century, lesser criminal matters like common assault might display similar degrees of private prosecutorial discretion as civil cases, implying conflict between private litigants rather than offences against the Crown. See Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 212, 238–40, 246, 286, 332–40. For a law-and-economics perspective, see Richard A. Epstein, “Crime and Tort: Old Wine in Old Bottles,” in Assessing the Criminal: Restitution, Retribution and the Legal Process, ed. Randy E. Bennett and John Hagel III (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1977), 231–57; and Epstein, “The Tort/Crime Distinction: A Generation Later,” Boston University Law Review 76, no. 1 (1996): 1–21. 18 Robinson charge to the Johnstown grand jury, Brockville Gazette, 11 Aug.

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1831; and Midland District Gaol Report in Appendix to the Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (AJHA), 1836, n. 44, 2. Canadian Freeman, 11 Aug. 1831. For the custodial view generally, see Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109–11. See Bergin v. Pindar, 4 & 5 William IV in J. Lukin Robinson, Upper Canada Reports, Old Series, in the King’s Bench …, (Reports) v. 3, 574–82. On the writs in England, see Baker, Introduction, 64–7; and more generally, Jay Cohen, “The History of Imprisonment for Debt and Its Relation to the Development of Discharge in Bankruptcy,” Journal of Legal History 3, no. 2 (Sept. 1982): 153–71. On these writs in the Canadas, see Evelyn Kolish, “Imprisonment for Debt in Lower Canada, 1791–1840,” McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 604–7; and William N.T. Wylie, “Instruments of Commerce and Authority: The Civil Courts in Upper Canada 1789–1812,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. David H. Flaherty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 2:20–8; and on the reception of bankruptcy, Russell C. Smandych, “William Osgoode, John Graves Simcoe, and the Exclusion of the English Poor Law from Upper Canada,” in Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History, ed. Louis A. Knafla and Susan W.S. Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 112–15. For extensive collusion to defeat creditors, see Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). An Act to repeal part of and amend the Laws now in force respecting the practice of His Majesty’s Court of King’s Bench in this Province, 2 Geo IV, 1822, c. 1. The latter was required only when the debtor had not been arrested on process already. An act for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors, 45 Geo. III, 1805, c. 7; and Williams v. Crosby, 1823, Taylor, 18–20. An Inhabitant, “Sketches of Upper Canada,” in Robert Gourlay, Statistical Account of Upper Canada Complied with a View to a Grand System of Emigration (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1822), 1:238. Michael Lobban, “Bankruptcy and Insolvency,” in The Oxford History of the Laws of England, ed. John Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12:782–5, which notes that “since acts of bankruptcy were seen as criminal in their nature, judges construed the law strictly” (783). Similarly, in Choate v. Stevens, 8 Geo. IV, 1827, Taylor, 449–50, Justice Sherwood ruled that plaintiffs had to use the precise words given by statute, setting aside an affidavit in which the creditor swore he “had reason to believe” rather than that he was “apprehensive.” An Act to make further regulation respecting the Weekly maintenance of Insol-

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vent Debtors, 2 Geo. IV, 1822, c. 8; and An Act to afford Relief to person confined on Mesne Process, 4 William IV, 1834, c. 3. An Act for assigning Limits to the respective Gaols within this Province, 2 Geo. IV, 1822, c. 6; An Act to Repeal and Amend, the Laws now in force respecting the Limits of the respective Gaols in this Province, 11 Geo. IV, 1830, c. 3; and An Act to extend the Limits … and to afford to Plaintiffs the means in some cases of more effectually compelling the payment of Debts due …, 4 William IV, 1834, c. 10. An Act to mitigate the Law in respect to Imprisonment for Debt, 5 William IV, 1835, c. 3. On English developments in this period, see Bruce Kercher, “The Transformation of Imprisonment for debt in England, 1828 to 1838,” Australian Journal of Law and Society 2, no. 1 (1984): 60–109. Hamilton Express, copied, Dundas Weekly Post, 13 Oct. 1835. See also Punctual, Kingston Spectator, 11 Nov.; and David Thorburn, Courier of Upper Canada, 24 Nov. 1836. Courier of Upper Canada, copied Upper Canada Herald, 20 Nov. 1831; and Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 16, xxi. On the small circle who determined early laws, see Wylie, “Instruments of Commerce.” Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 13, 17, 27–9. George Hamilton to Rowan, 24 Sept. 1835, Sundries, v. 157, 86318–25; and the petition, 22 Aug. 1835, Sundries, v. 156, 85721–3. Susan Lewthwaite, “Violence, Law and Community in Rural Upper Canada,” in Essays in Canadian Legal History, ed. Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 5:353–86. Jones and Adiel Sherwood, Brockville Recorder, 29 Aug. 1834; Ogle Gowan to John Colbourne, 10 Feb. 1834, Sundries, v. 138, 75362–5; and James Grey[?] to Sir George Arthur, 28 June 1838, Sundries, v. 197, 109615–18. The broader dispute can be traced in the Brockville Recorder; Elva M. Richards, “The Jones of Brockville and the Family Compact,” Ontario History 60, no. 4 (Dec. 1968): 179–81; and Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 169–85. Jones was a staunch defender of imprisonment for debt in the Assembly. For another case, see Correspondent & Advocate, 22 Oct.; and Cobourg Star, 28 Oct. 1835. Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Finn, Character of Credit, are important exceptions. Philip Girard, “Married Women’s Property, Chancery Abolition, and Insolvency Law: Law Reform in Nova Scotia, 1820–1867,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. Philip Girard and Jim Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 3:80–127.

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36 But on mortgages, see John C. Weaver, “While Equity Slumbered: Creditor Advantage, a Capitalist Land Market, and Upper Canada’s Missing Court,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 28 (1990): 871–914. For the early period, besides Wiley, “Instruments of Commerce,” see Karen Pearlston, “‘For the more easy recovery of debts in His Majesty’s plantations’: Credit and Conflict in Upper Canada, 1788–1809” (LLM thesis, University of British Columbia, 1999). Albert Schrauwers, “Union Is Strength”: W.L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace, and the Emergence of Joint Stock Democracy in Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), emphasizes its role in political oppression and unrest. Important economic studies include Douglas McCalla, “Rural Credit and Rural Development in Upper Canada, 1790– 1850,” in Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario’s History, ed. Roger Hall, William Westfall, and Laurel Sefton MacDowell (Toronto: Dundurn, 1988), 37–54. 37 Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” esp. 48–60. See also Bellomo, “Upper Canadian Attitudes towards Crime and Punishment”; Rainer Baehre, “Origins of the Penitentiary System in Upper Canada,” Ontario History 69, no. 3 (1977): 187–8, 194–5, 207; J.M. Beattie, Attitudes towards Crime and Punishment in Upper Canada, 1830–1850: A Documentary Study (Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 1977), 13–14; and Russell C. Smandych, “Beware of the ‘Evil American Monster’: Upper Canadian Views on the Need for a Penitentiary, 1830–1834,” Canadian Journal of Criminology (Apr. 1991): 130. John Weaver, “Crime, Public Order, and Repression: The Gore District in Upheaval, 1832–1851,” Ontario History 78, no. 3 (Sept. 1986): 175–207, is concerned solely with crime, but references to “jail committals” and the “jail population” elide civil prisoners whose presence is affirmed by the floor plan it reproduces. Richard B. Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, 1791–1893: A Study in Public Welfare Administration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 119, presents imprisonment for debt as part of “English criminal law” because he too equates imprisonment with criminal “penalties.” 38 Colonial Advocate, 18 Feb. 1830. 39 Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 92. Abetted by its scarcity, the same evidence led Rainer Baehre, “Imperial Authority and Colonial Officialdom of Upper Canada in the 1830s: The State, Crime, Lunacy, and Everyday Social Order,” in Law, Society and the State, 181–214, to argue for a Tory-reform consensus, while Russell C. Smandych, “Tory Paternalism and the Politics of Penal Reform in Upper Canada, 1830–34: A ‘Neo-Revisionist’ Account of the Kingston Penitentiary,” Criminal Justice History: An International Annual 12 (1991): 57–83, and Smandych, “Beware,” argue that the Tories faced considerable opposition.

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40 Paul Romney, Mr Attorney: The Attorney General for Ontario in Court, Cabinet, and Legislature, 1791–1899 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Oliver’s argument for the relative free rein of the so-called Tory elite risks the tautology that the colony’s most powerful men exercised the most power. 41 John D. Blackwell, “Crime in the London District, 1828–1837: A Case Study of the Effect of the 1833 Reform in Upper Canadian Penal Law,” Queen’s Law Journal 6 (1980–1): 539-41; and Smandych, “Beware,” 134–6. 42 For the Assembly’s bill, see Niagara Gleaner, 9 May 1835. The journals of the Council record Robinson present every day it was considered. The general conformity of the Council’s measure to the views he had expressed earlier as attorney general offers additional circumstantial evidence. For the subsequent statutory history, see R.C.B. Risk, “The Golden Age: The Law and the Market in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” University of Toronto Law Journal 29 (1976): 324–6. 43 Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada … Being the Third Session of the Ninth Provincial Parliament …, 14, 15, 23, 41, 63. Rolph, Bidwell, and Thomson also joined in support of a measure to extend gaol limits Robinson opposed. On Bidwell’s bill against whipping, see United Empire Loyalist, 23 Dec. 1826; and Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 23–4. 44 Grant Powell, chairman, Colonial Advocate, 11 Sept. 1834; and Committee No. 6, Appendix 8 to Second Report of the General Board of Inquiry into the Public Departments, 28 Dec. 1839, LAC, RG5 B30, v. 7, 30. 45 Finn, Character of Credit, chap. 3. 46 Proceedings of the Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace for the London District, 1800–1809, 15 Jan. 1801, LAC, MG9, D8, 20. Marion MacRae, with Anthony Adamson, Cornerstones of Order: Courthouses and Town Halls in Ontario, 1784–1914 (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1983), 20–1, provides a diagram; and Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 4–12, discusses early gaol construction. 47 L. Bell to George Arthur, 15 Mar. 1839, Sundries, v. 218, 120021–7. 48 Six district plans and five codes were submitted with the 1838 imperial blue book. Upper Canada Blue Books (Blue Books), 1838, LAC, CO 47, Canada, v. 156–94. Additional ones were located in the Sundries. On the role attributed to design, see C.J. Taylor, “The Kingston Ontario Penitentiary and Moral Architecture,” Histoire sociale / Social History 12 (1979): 385–408. 49 MacRae, with Adamson, Cornerstones of Order, 53–5. Archibald Fraser also designed the new Eastern District gaol, replacing the one to which he had been confined. 50 Bruce Curtis, “The Canada ‘Blue Books’ and the Administrative Capacity

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of the Canadian State, 1822–67,” Canadian Historical Review 74, no. 4 (1993): 540, 543. I draw more broadly from Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 3–5. Blue Books, 1834. Compare, for instance, the rows for Johnstown and Gore in Blue Books, 1829. The gaol return for the Ottawa District refers to “prisoners for debt,” while Midland’s speaks of “prisoners as well as the debtors” in AJHA, 1836, no. 44, 2–3. Did totals reported include debtors on the limits or only those in close confinement? Blue Book tables were left blank for 1830 and 1831, and only four districts reported for 1832. Local returns from six districts are located in Prison Returns, v. 1, Provincial Secretary, Board of Registration and Statistics, Upper Canada and Canada West, LAC, RG5-B27, and figures for a seventh were reconstructed from quarterly gaol returns to the Board. Three districts did not report in 1828, two in 1829, four in 1831, one in 1833, 1834, and 1835, and none in 1836. Non-reporting districts were among the least populated such that changes in total numbers cannot be attributed solely to missing data. Imprisoned debtors reported relative to 100,000 of population for 1828 was 102.36; 94.06 for 1829; 114.64 for 1831; 99.11 for 1833; 137.84 for 1834; and 105.94 for 1835. These figures are static compared to estimated committal rates for crimes against the person and public order offences. Committal rates for debt appear to be about twice those for crimes against property, to which they bear some resemblance. For crime rates based on four districts, see Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 93. On Lower Canada, see Kolish, “Imprisonment for Debt,” 606–7, 630. The Quebec City figures were calculated by Jean-Marie Fecteau. Home District gaol figures were calculated from the Blue Books and those for the Niagara District in the first two volumes of the prison returns cited in note 53. Chas. Walsh to J. Joseph, 2 Aug. 1836, Sundries, v. 169, 92334–42. Splane, Social Welfare, 119; and Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 48–9, 51, 53. Convicts almost never spoke through the press. One did only by paying for an advertisement, British Whig, 7, 18, and 21 Nov. 1834. In the politically charged dispute between Toronto mayor William Lyon Mackenzie and the gaoler concerning the presence of two prostitutes in the debtors’ rooms, Patriot, 12 Dec. 1834, printed the testimonial of “A Debtor,” and the gaoler insisted that “one or two very respectable debtors” would testify on his behalf. It is difficult to imagine officials seeking corroboration from criminals or deeming any of them respectable.

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57 For demands for greater oversight in the Johnstown district, see Ziba M. Phillips, Brockville Recorder, 18 Aug. 1831; Phillips, report of a meeting in the debtors’ ward, Brockville Recorder, 25 Aug. 1831; and James Breakenridge, Brockville Recorder, 20 Sept. 1832. 58 Captain Matthew Leech, petition, 1823, Sundries, v. 63, 33803–8 (cruel); Walsh to Joseph, 2 Aug. 1836, Sundries, v. 169, 92334–42 (dreadful suffering); William Young, petition, 28 Apr. 1829, Sundries, v. 93, 52081–8 (miserable); and Lester H. Forward to Maitland, petition, 30 Oct. 1821, Sundries, v. 54, 27175–87 (fabrick); petition from York debtors to Maitland, n.d., Petitions and Addresses, v. 7, 00410–13 (cruel / painful bondage); Ziba M. Phillips, Brockville Recorder, 18 Aug. 1831 (suffering); and John Woolstencroft and others, Colonial Advocate, 19 Dec. 1831 (loathsome). 59 Clifton Jackson and others, petition from York gaol to the Assembly, Kingston Chronicle, 13 June 1823; Ziba M. Phillips and report of meeting in the debtors’ ward, Brockville Recorder, 18 and 25 Aug. 1831; John Woolstencroft and others, petition from York gaol to Assembly, Colonial Advocate, 19 Dec. 1831; and Canadian Freeman, 11 Aug. 1831. See also Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” xxii. Reports of escaped debtors include Hallowell Free Press, 4 Jan. 1831; Niagara Reporter, 1 Aug. 1833; York Courier, copied Canadian Emigrant, 7 Dec. 1833; Cornwall Observer, copied Patriot, 30 Dec. 1834; and Bathurst Courier, 12 Aug. copied Christian Guardian, 24 Aug. 1836. 60 James Little to W.H. Merritt, 31 Aug. 1832, W. H. Merritt Papers, LAC, MG 24, E 1, v. 7 (Merritt Papers); and Merritt, Correspondent, 5 Jan. 1833. 61 Forward to Maitland, petition, 30 Oct. 1821, Sundries, v. 54, 27175–87; and Walsh to Joseph, 2 Aug. 1836, Sundries, v. 169, 92334–42. See also Matthew Leach to Hillier, 25 Mar. 1823, Sundries, second series, v. 60, 31403–6. 62 John Woolstencroft and others, Colonial Advocate, 19 Dec. 1831. See also resolutions of the meeting of Johnstown debtors, Brockville Recorder, 25 Aug. 1831. 63 Report of the Grand Jury, Johnstown District, AJHA, 1837, no. 11, 2. Gray may have been continuing inside the gaol the broader conflict with Sherwood and Jones described earlier; see Brockville Recorder, coped British Whig, 8 Sept. 1835. 64 An Act for building a Gaol and Court House in every District within the Province …, 32 Geo. III, 1792, c. 8. 65 Forward to Maitland, 30 Oct. 1821, Sundries, v. 54, 27175–87. 66 Ibid.; and General Quarter Session Minutes, Johnstown District, 20 Feb. 1821, AO, RG22-12, v. 2, 28–9. Forward was provided with a copy four days later. Five other rules adopted in May 1826, v. 4, 95, concerning visitors and alcohol did not distinguish between debtors and criminals. 67 T. and Ashley, Chronicle & Gazette, 1 and 4 Apr. 1835. Doubts about how

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extensive discipline imposed on debtors could be were also expressed at Niagara, Niagara Reporter, 1 Aug. 1833. The records of the Newcastle Sessions include a copy of Midland’s rules adopted in June 1831, which it followed closely in rules it adopted (Jan. 1832), as did Gore and Johnstown (Nov. 1831 and Nov. 1833, respectively). Midland’s somewhat revised code (Aug. 1833) was copied almost verbatim by Prince Edward (1 Sept. 1834), which was carved from Midland and by the Eastern District (Sept. 1835). Some of the same wording also appeared in undated, handwritten rules for the Home District as well. On the trade-off such codes posed for debtors, see Margaret DeLacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: A Study in Local Administration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), chap. 4. Niagara Reporter, 1 Aug. 1833; and David Thompson and K. Beach to W.H. Merritt, 13 July 1834, Merritt Papers. In 1831, Gore magistrates also mandated that “prisoners confined in the cells” wear “gaol livery” to further set them apart from debtors. The rule was later rescinded. Likewise, debtors and those awaiting trial were permitted quantities of wine, cider, and beer, unlike criminals. The Johnstown District, however, drew no distinction among those confined. On privileges in the largest English debtors’ prison, see Joanna Innes, “The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority and Order in a London Debtors’ Prison,” in An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. John Brewer and John Styles (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 250–98. On Newcastle, see Gaol Rules, 13 July 1832, AO, RG22-43; and W. Butler to Rowan, 28 Feb. 1835, Sundries, v. 150, 82473–80. Old Stile, Bathurst Courier, 10 Apr. 1835, emphasis in the original. Bread accounts for Newcastle, AO, RG22–34, boxes 4 and 5, envelopes 11 and 5, exist for 1832–3 and part of 1835, but a Grand Jury presentment, 12 July 1837, AO, RG22-33, suggests the practice may not have been continuous. The same arrangement appears to have been in place in the Western District: clerk of the peace to lieutenant-governor, 28 Apr. 1835, Sundries, v. 152, 83556–7. Like Midland, London extended the general gaol allowance to debtors despite knowing the legal questions it raised, AJHA, 1836, n. 44, 8. Home District debtors planned to petition the legislature for provisioning at the district’s expense, Colonial Advocate, 27 Nov. 1828. On charity in England, see Finn, Character of Credit, 124–8. In Lancashire, magistrates decided in 1737 and 1822 that allowances to debtors were illegal if charged to the county rates; DeLacy, Prison Reform, 48–9. Sheriff’s report regarding Home District gaol, 17 June 1834, Sundries, v. 142, 77637–48; and Grand Jury presentment, Courier of Upper Canada, 18 July 1832. On the judicial ruling, see Colonial Advocate, 1 June 1826.

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72 An Act for assigning Limits to the respective Gaols within this Province, and Leonard v. McBride and Lax, 1832, Reports, v. 3, 2. 73 Robinson Crusoe, “Prison Abuses”; and Authority, Reformer, 15 and 22 Dec. 1835. 74 Royal Standard, 18 Nov. 1836. 75 This view was put most influentially for historians in Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John C. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Calvin Winslow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 17–63; and applied to nineteenth-century legal reform in Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, esp. 11, 19–22, 26, 39, 46–57. 76 Rolph, United Empire Loyalist, 20 Jan. 1827; Bidwell, Cobourg Star, 21 Jan. 1833 and Chronicle & Gazette, 11 Apr. 1835; and report of meeting in the debtors’ ward, Brockville Recorder, 25 Aug. 1831. See also Peter Perry, Western Mercury, 26 Jan. 1832. 77 Robinson, United Empire Loyalist, 20 Jan. 1827; and John Lefferty, Colonial Advocate, 5 Jan. 1826 and 7 Feb. 1828. See also Christopher Hagerman, Kingston Chronicle, 27 June 1823; and William Jarvis, Western Mercury, 26 Jan. 1832. 78 Hagerman, Chronicle & Gazette, 11 Apr. 1835. 79 Boulton, Western Mercury, 26 Jan. 1832; and for his bill, Niagara Gleaner, 17 Dec. 1831. 80 Rolph, United Empire Loyalist, 20 Jan. 1827; Bidwell, Western Mercury, 26 Jan. 1832; and Western Mercury, 7 Nov. 1833. 81 James Boyd White, “The Invisible Discourse of the Law: Reflections on Legal Literacy and General Education,” in Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 66–7. 82 Robinson, United Empire Loyalist, 20 Jan. 1827. The question of meaning persisted, as Chief Justice Robinson discovered in having to determine what constituted “fraudulent preferences” among creditors under the bankruptcy statutes of 1843 and 1846; Risk, “Golden Age,” 345. 83 Dunn v. McDougall, 6 William IV, 1836, Reports, v. 5, 156–61. 84 King v. Elias Boulton Smith, 25 Sept. 1832, Macaulay Benchbook, v. 2:4, 26– 32; reported with commentary, Courier, 6 Oct. and copied, Hallowell Free Press, 23 Oct. 1832. For other perjury cases, see British Whig, 23 June and 25 July 1834, originally reported Canadian Emigrant; and An Eyewitness and Aliqeum Defendere, Patriot, 27 and 30 Oct. 1835. 85 The following paragraphs gesture loosely to Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), esp. 41–3, 47–53, 55, 202–3, 208, 217.

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86 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Rolph’s speeches are taken from among the fullest reports: United Empire Loyalist, 20 Jan. 1827; Colonial Advocate, 7 Feb. 1828; and Colonial Advocate, 1 and 15 Jan.; and Kingston Chronicle, 14 Mar. 1829. 87 The Upper Canada Herald, 9 Mar. 1824 and 30 June 1830, published a list of quotations from authorities it claimed undermined imprisonment for debt. Rolph and Bidwell repeated the list in the Assembly. A Farmer of Gore, Patriot, 16 Oct. 1835, invoked “Hale, Pitt, Romilly, Wilberforce, Peel, Brougham, the present Attorney-General, and above all, … the benevolent Howard.” 88 Rolph, Upper Canada Herald, 22 Apr. 1829. 89 Debtors, Home District gaol to Maitland, n.d., Sundries, v. 7, 00410–13 and to the Assembly, Chronicle, 13 June 1823; Forward to Maitland, petition, 30 Oct. 1821, Sundries, v. 54, 27175–87; and John Woolstencroft to lieutenantgovernor, 15 Aug. 1831, Sundries, v. 108, 61667–9. 90 Julius, British American Journal, 25 Feb. 1834 (emphasis in the original); Bidwell, Liberal, 24 Jan. 1833; Courier of Upper Canada, copied Chronicle & Gazette, 22 Nov. 1834; and Boulton, Western Mercury, 26 Jan. 1832. Nearly every attack on imprisonment for debt contributed to this image of creditors who, unlike debtors, rarely appeared as an actual person or in their own voice. For anonymous correspondents alone, see Z., Gore Balance, copied Canadian Freeman, 19 Aug. 1830; Jurisprudence, Upper Canada Herald, 21 Dec. 1831; True Benevolence, Correspondent, 26 Apr. 1834; and Benevolous, Patriot, 29 Apr. 1836. 91 John Woolstencroft to lieutenant-governor, 15 Aug. 1831, Sundries, v. 108, 61667–9; and York debtors to lieutenant-governor, 31 June 1832, Sundries, v. 117, 65934–7. See also York debtors to Maitland, n.d., Petitions and Addresses, v. 7, 00410–13; and Charles Walsh to J. Joseph, 2 Aug. 1836, Sundries, v. 169, 92334–42. 92 Charles Richardson to McMahon, 2 Nov. 1831, Sundries, v. 110, 62373–81. Perhaps Richardson should be given the benefit of the doubt, as he sponsored bills to abolish imprisonment for debt in 1835 and 1836. For claims that creditors imprisoned only when they could recover their debt, see Robinson, Colonial Advocate, 7 Feb. 1828; Lefferty, Colonial Advocate, 21 Jan. 1830; and Hagerman, Liberal, 24. Jan. 1833. 93 Duncombe, “Report of Commissioners on the Subject of Prisons, Penitentiaries, &c,” AJHA, 1836, no. 71, 1–5 (emphasis in the original). 94 Courier, copied Upper Canada Herald, 30 Nov. 1831; and British Colonial Argus, 6 Aug. 1833. 95 Bidwell, Chronicle & Gazette, 11 Apr. 1835. On Shylock and Jews in general, see Common Decency, Chronicle, 1 Dec. 1826; Rolph, Upper Canada Herald,

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99 100 101

102

103

104 105

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22 Apr. 1829; Reformer, copied Patriot, 18 Jan. 1833; and Royal Standard, 18 Nov. 1836. Rolph, Chronicle, 14 Mar. 1829. Rolph, United Empire Loyalist, 20 Jan. 1827; and Royal Standard, 18 Nov. 1836. Rolph, Colonial Advocate, 1 and 15 Jan. 1829; La Liberte v. Anderson, 28 Oct. 1835, Benchbooks of Justice John Beverley Robinson, AO, RG22-390-2, v. 22:1, 195–6; and Laliberté to Colborne, n.d., Petitions and Addresses, v. 7, 00642–5. Robinson, Courier, 14 Apr. and 24 Oct. 1832. Robinson, Colonial Advocate, 7 Feb. 1828; and for Rolph’s opposition to importing English bankruptcy law, see Colonial Advocate, 28 Dec. 1826. Lobban, Common Law, 126, 143, 154, 169, 173–4, 238. See also, Lobban, A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600–1900, vol. 8 of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, ed. Enrio Pattaro, Aleksander Pecsenik, Hubert Rotteuthner, Giovanni Sartor, and Roger A. Shiner (New York: Springer, 2005– ), chap. 6, quotation at 172. Boulton, Western Mercury, 26 Jan. 1832; and A Tradesman to Members of the Board of Trade, Patriot, 6 Jan. 1837. On debtors’ wards as incubators of political ideas, see Kecher, “Transformation of Imprisonment for Debt,” 63, 81. State weakness is emphasized in Michael S. Cross, “‘The Laws Are Like Cobwebs’: Popular Resistance to Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America,” Dalhousie Law Journal 8, no. 103 (1984): 103–23. Courier, 24 Nov. 1836. See, for example, Inhabitants of By-town to Maitland, n.d., Petitions and Addresses, v. 6, 90–2; and Inhabitants of Township of Albion and Inhabitants of Edwardsburgh to Colbourne, n.d., both Petitions and Addresses, v. 8, 724 and 863–6. English insolvency law is placed in a state-formation context by Kercher, “Transformation of Imprisonment for Debt,” 69, 103–4; and V. Markham Lester, Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment for Debt, and Company Winding-up in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Charles Baker v. James L. Perrin, 20 Oct. 1838, Macaulay benchbooks, v. 4:3, 252–9; and British Colonial Argus, 6 Aug. 1833.

4 The Law of Nations in the Borderlands: Sovereignty and Self-Defence in the Rebellion Period, 1837–1842 b r adl e y m il l e r

Introduction The Canadian rebellions remain famous in international law because of the December 1837 British attack on the American steamship Caroline, moored on the New York side of the Niagara River. The raid was prompted by the occupation of Navy Island, Upper Canada, by supporters of William Lyon Mackenzie, who fortified parts of the island’s shore and brought artillery and other weapons over from nearby New York State. After several weeks of this, British and colonial officials decided to strike back by attacking the Caroline, which was being used to ferry men and supplies to the island. On the night of 29 December, Royal Navy Captain Andrew Drew and a party of sailors crossed to the American shore, took over the ship by force, towed it into the current, and set it aflame. That action created a diplomatic firestorm, in part because sensationalized images of the burning ship plunging over Niagara Falls captivated and enraged an American public, which had become increasingly anti-British in the years before the rebellions. But the Caroline raid also sparked a profoundly heated legal debate because the U.S. government considered it an encroachment on American sovereignty and a violation of international law.1 The British government made legal arguments in reply, chiefly that the raid had been justified by the right of national self-defence and by American inability to prevent the Navy Island invasion or to stop the flow of supplies to the

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invaders. Finally, in 1841 Secretary of State Daniel Webster largely resolved the debate by laying out a test for when pre-emptive force in self-defence was lawful. He famously concluded that the necessity must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” and that the foreign forces must do “nothing unreasonable or excessive.”2 This has been known by generations of international lawyers as the Caroline doctrine, embodying the twin tests of necessity and proportionality.3 The Caroline controversy demonstrates the power of international law as an aspect of both global affairs and legal thought in the early nineteenth century. But the subsequent prominence of the Caroline doctrine around the world has also overshadowed other contemporary and rival understandings of territorial sovereignty and national self-defence, ideas that were used by British and Canadian policymakers and that offer very different visions of international legal order. In fact, the Caroline debate was only one in a long series of rebellion-era debates about self-defence, as cross-border attacks on Canada from colonial rebels and American Hunters’ Lodges dragged on for several years after the initial battles of 1837. As colonial and imperial officials grappled with each new threat, they increasingly questioned how sacrosanct the American border really was and engaged in far-reaching debates about the nature of territorial sovereignty. Not surprisingly, international law became a focal point of debate on all sides, and legal rhetoric in diplomatic correspondence, legislative debates, and community meetings was ubiquitous, as people invoked the notion of legal order among nations constantly. The key question, in other words, was not whether international law could or should guide the actions of Canadian, British, and American governments in what Albert Corey famously called the “crisis” atmosphere of the time – all sides agreed that it did and should.4 Rather, the issue was what that law required and how its rules could be determined. In this, the Caroline formula was only one interpretation. This chapter examines how British and Canadian officials understood and articulated the limits of sovereignty and the rights of national self-defence in the rebellion period. It argues that international law ideas handed down from legal writers and British and American statesmen, coupled with the ongoing menace emerging from the Canadian-American borderlands, developed a largely unified British and Canadian vision of a permeable American sovereignty in the border zone, a view that gave British forces some legal rights to cross into the

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United States without either supplanting American sovereignty or constituting an act of war. Simply put, according to those officials, if the threat was transnational, the response could be as well. This view drew ideological links between degrees of state power and varying rights of sovereignty and between natural and international law, demonstrating how deeply even the component parts of international law were contested in the early nineteenth century. These rebellion-era debates help shed light on the way colonial and imperial officials understood not simply international legal order, but also the meaning of sovereignty in a region where national borders often mattered little in the lives of ordinary people. While Canadian historians have paid little attention to international law, this chapter builds on the work of Kenneth Stevens, whose sweeping book on Anglo-American-Canadian relations in the post-rebellion period highlights how law structured statecraft in important ways.5 As Stevens has shown, understanding the different currents of legal thought at play in the rebellion period means delving into pre-rebellion British and American statecraft as well as exploring treatises on the law of nations, many of which were hugely influential in this period. But it is important to remember that, as scholars such as Lauren Benton have argued, territorial sovereignty – the conventional bedrock of international law – was often not a clear-cut or absolute concept. In fact, the orthodox model of sovereignty, namely a single law and legal order for all people within defined and inviolable borders, was just one of many operating in the imperial world.6 As Lisa Ford has argued recently, “perfect settler sovereignty rested on the conflation of sovereignty, territory, and jurisdiction” in a way that was still novel in the early nineteenth century.7 As a result, British and Canadian arguments for a permeable or imperfect American sovereignty along the border represent an alternate vision of sovereign rights with a long history in imperial expansion, as well as a legal recognition of the realities of the Canadian-American borderlands, a kind of reification through law of Peter Sahlins’s notion of a “zonal” border rather than a linear one.8 Understanding the rebellionera debates, then, means appreciating how law and legal ideas could be both fundamentally amorphous and enormously powerful. Borders and Borderlands in the Wake of 1837 The rebellion-era debates highlight the limited practical meaning of the border but also its enormous ideological and legal significance. After

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their initial defeats in 1837, many rebels fled to what Allan Greer has aptly called the “borderlands” of the northern states, where they found safe haven and broad public support.9 In many cases they fled only a few miles across the border, often living and operating within sight of Canadian territory. While the U.S. government had a neutrality statute in place, and reinforced it in 1838 to further prevent and punish the involvement of U.S. citizens or residents in foreign conflicts, the exiled rebels and their American supporters had little trouble planning and staging incursions across the border into Canada; indeed, thousands of Americans enlisted in Hunters’ Lodges to join the fight.10 These assaults began with the Navy Island occupation of 1837 and continued in 1838 with the attempted invasions and raids in Upper and Lower Canada. That year the steamship Sir Robert Peel was burned in American waters on the St Lawrence River, and Captain Edgeworth Ussher was murdered in Upper Canada, both at least partly out of revenge for the Caroline. Throughout 1839 there were raids and robberies along the border and targeted arsons in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, while in 1840 and 1841 respectively the Brock Monument and the Welland Canal in the Niagara Peninsula were bombed.11 That these attacks happened in defiance of U.S. law illustrates the limitations on the government’s power in the border regions. However much Washington proclaimed and, in most ways, exercised sovereignty over the areas in which the rebels and Hunters operated, they were unable to override the local realities of geography, public opinion, and limited resources. Indeed, the instruments of the state most crucial to enforcing American neutrality and to demonstrating its sovereignty seemed incapable of doing so. This section explores the attempts and failures of American officials to enforce the neutrality law and to crack down on rebel and Hunter activities. It focuses in particular on the idea, which was central to Canadian and British arguments, that U.S. state power exercised an insufficient sovereignty in the border zone. During this period, rebels and Hunters used the border strategically, keenly aware of its legal significance and the constructions of sovereignty that gave it meaning. As historians have long noted, one of the main objectives of many Americans involved in the Hunters’ Lodges was to bait British forces into crossing the border and so sparking an Anglo-American war that they hoped would end with an imperial defeat and the “liberation” of the North American colonies.12 Authorities on both sides of the border were well aware of those plans, which the secretary of state described as a “criminal purpose.”13 But aside from

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those using the boundary to spark a war, others involved in the rebellion and the ongoing attacks were savvy about its location and importance. In the Thousand Islands region at the east end of Lake Ontario, for example, where the border was often unclear to those on the ground, pirates who had burned the Sir Robert Peel in 1838 and robbed the Upper Canada mail in the spring of 1839 used it carefully. After the governor of New York offered a reward for his arrest on neutrality charges for having sunk the Peel, for example, the self-styled “commander-inchief of the naval forces and flotilla” of the rebels, Bill Johnston, claimed in a proclamation published in American newspapers that he had taken care not to break U.S. law because he had employed only British subjects in his attacks and had located his headquarters on an island inside Canadian territory.14 “I am well acquainted with the boundary line, and know which of the islands do, and which do not, belong to the United States,” he claimed.15 More often, the border offered a shield to those attacking Canada who could flee back across it. For example, the gang suspected of the Upper Canada mail robbery lived for a time during this period on Grindstone Island, directly adjacent to the international boundary in the St Lawrence, likely assuming that being inside American territory would protect their camp from British forces.16 As the Royal Navy commander on the river noted in May 1839, the pirates set up camp on American islands so close to the boundary “as to enable them to make incursions with facility and success,” while the rest of the time “their tact and cunning will keep them within the American line of demarcation.”17 One of the chief obstacles to keeping the peace and policing the American border region was the often intensely anti-British sentiment in the northern states. Imperial and colonial officials were acutely aware of this, and as a result many of them regarded the northern states as a distinct and threatening criminal borderland. Upper Canada Attorney General Christopher Hagerman decried “the Pirates and Bandits that infest the borders of the two Countries.”18 Likewise, the British minister in Washington bemoaned the “perverse and ill-bestowed sympathies of the Border population,” while Sir John Colborne observed that the American “borderers” would attack the moment British forces relaxed their vigilance in the colonies.19 But however “perverse and ill-bestowed” Americans’ views were in that respect, years of border disputes and other festering conflicts had poisoned much of U.S. public opinion against Britain. Two decades after what Alan Taylor has recently described as the “civil war” of 1812 – where loyalties, interests,

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and family connections transcended the colonial-American border – popular opinion was often clear-cut and straightforwardly anti-British in the rebellion period.20 As many scholars have noted, the northeastern boundary dispute and the fallout from the Caroline raid and other rebellion-related issues were intertwined conflicts, both in the minds of the colonial and American populations and in the diplomatic negotiations undertaken to resolve the conflicts.21 This was apparent in the almost-comical “Aroostook War” of early 1839, which threatened to envelop Maine and New Brunswick and by extension Britain and the United States in a war over the disputed Madawaska district. The conflict built on and exacerbated tensions stemming from the Caroline incident, and as Howard Jones has shown, fiercely anti-British rhetoric that invoked the Caroline, the American Revolution, and the memory of imperial tyranny was used to rouse the Maine populace.22 Elsewhere in New England, New York, Michigan, and Ohio, the same ideas were central in the formation of Hunters’ Lodges and in the mobilization of support for the Canadian rebels. In Vermont, public meetings in support of the rebellions occurred in towns across the state, in which participants likened the rebellions to the American Revolution, endorsed the Canadian rebels’ struggle for freedom, and invoked Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, and America’s history of confronting tyranny. “It ill becomes us,” declared one meeting in St Albans, “to witness, with indifference, the condition of such of the human family, as are struggling with patriotic zeal and in unequal circumstances to cast off the yoke of oppression.”23 Likewise, across the northern states many Americans enlisted to help liberate Canada from the British in large part because of this idea that the fight was for republicanism and the rights of man and against lingering British royalism.24 Canadian officials were concerned and outraged by that trend largely because it was difficult to separate local from official opinion in the legal and military institutions of the northern states. That is, these popular ideologies shaped the way the state functioned in the border regions, particularly the way it responded to the rebels and Hunters. Examples abound of local officials loudly supporting the rebel cause, and so undermining the enforcement of American neutrality. In May 1839, for example, U.S. citizens captured in the January 1838 attack on Amherstburg were released and taken to the New York border. There, after being harangued by two Canadian officials on the benevolence of the colonial state in not hanging them, the men were addressed by

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a local American magistrate. “The motives which led you into Canada were,” he told them, “in the estimation of a majority of your countrymen … pure, honorable, and exalted, as ever glowed in the breast of a patriot, or nerved his arm in defence of civil and religious liberty.”25 Even General Winfield Scott, appointed by President Martin Van Buren to keep the peace on the northern frontier, shared those opinions, if only in private. Scott wrote of the rebels in 1837, “God grant them success! My heart is with the oppressed of both Canadas.”26 But unlike many on the frontier, Scott also saw the rebels as a serious threat to American security and international order. As Samuel Watson has pointed out, the legally trained Scott believed passionately in the rule of law on national and international levels, and that belief was central to his antipathy towards the rebels and Hunters.27 On the frontier, Scott found the infrastructure of government that was most important to keeping the peace utterly ineffectual in doing so, because the federal government had few resources to commit to its effort: in December 1837 there were just over seven thousand uniformed troops, and over half of them were engaged in fighting the Seminoles in Florida or patrolling the western frontier.28 Meanwhile, the local branches of the state were often actively antagonistic to federal policies. Scott and his officers found that local marshals were unwilling to seize weapons or to arrest people likely guilty of neutrality offences. They also found local militias, which were crucial in maintaining order, just as unreliable, and rife with allegiance to the rebel cause.29 In Vermont, the federal commander even sent the militia home after their sergeant told him the volunteers were “radical to a man.”30 On the Detroit frontier, as well as in Vermont, commanders withdrew requests for more militia or disbanded units after weapons were handed over to the rebels and Hunters.31 By the end of 1838, army commander Colonel William Worth in northern New York was avoiding local officials entirely because of their unreliability unless collaboration was absolutely necessary.32 The application of the U.S. neutrality legislation in court seemed similarly hopeless, at least to many Canadians. In 1838 many chief rebels were arrested, but soon given bail. Convictions were rare, even when there was a trial, which was itself rare, given that many grand juries refused to indict (and occasionally expressed pro-rebel views in doing so), and since other prisoners were rescued or fled once given bail. One such case was that of James Grogan, who was arrested on neutrality charges in early 1839 in connection with the burning of several farms

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in the Eastern Townships during the winter of 1838–9. Grogan was rescued from jail, but the prosecutors nonetheless pursued the charges in May 1839 before a Vermont grand jury. There, the judge instructed them that if Grogan and his co-accused had plotted and armed themselves with the intent of attacking “military force” in Canada, they had violated the law, but if this had been done merely to take revenge on “private individuals,” they had not. The jury quickly declined to indict.33 Likewise, when there were convictions, they often resulted in little by way of prison time. William Lyon Mackenzie was convicted under the neutrality law, fined ten dollars, and sentenced to eighteen months, but he was pardoned by the president after thousands of people signed a petition for his release, further illustrating to Canadian officials the tenor of American public opinion.34 Other prisoners, such as Bill Johnston, were arrested repeatedly but were either discharged or escaped. In Johnston’s case, after escaping from jail he presented his own petition for pardon in Washington, which was granted by the president.35 Federal and state governments also refused to extradite rebels accused of crimes in Canada. Although there were suggestions that this too was based in political considerations, there were also powerful legal questions at play. In December 1837, for example, Sir Francis Bond Head requested the surrender of Mackenzie on charges of murder, robbery, and arson stemming from the York revolt. At that point, New York had its own extradition law in force, passed in the early 1820s to facilitate the return of fugitives to Upper and Lower Canada. But the state attorney general advised against using the act to surrender Mackenzie, citing the statute’s prohibition on surrendering those charged with treason.36 This clause stemmed from the emerging political offence exemption doctrine, which protected political dissidents from criminal extradition, and which had taken root in Europe after the French Revolution.37 Likewise, there were also constitutional questions surrounding the power of states to extradite foreign prisoners at all. As a result, in 1839, when Upper Canada requested the surrender of Benjamin Lett on murder charges stemming from the assassination of Edgeworth Ussher, Governor William Seward decided that he could not extradite without federal permission.38 The governor of Vermont gave a similar answer when asked for the surrender of James Grogan, who was charged with arson in Lower Canada.39 In the aftermath of a divided 1840 Supreme Court decision on the subject, a consensus emerged that only the federal government could surrender prisoners to

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foreign countries, which Washington claimed it could not do without a treaty or a statute in place empowering the president, neither of which existed at the time.40 Many Canadians interpreted these legal restrictions as simply another aspect of American unwillingness to take any action in aid of colonial security. There were minor exceptions. In fact, some American officials who acknowledged the frustrations of the normal systems of law enforcement were even prepared to allow the use of British force inside U.S. territory to forestall or combat rebel and Hunter threats. In the summer of 1838, the general commanding the northern frontier and the British Royal Navy commander on the St Lawrence came to an arrangement in the Thousand Islands area to hunt for pirates. British forces were allowed to attack the pirates on any of the islands, in British or American territory, as long as prisoners captured in the United States were turned over to American forces.41 As a result, two members of Bill Johnston’s gang were attacked on an American island and handed over to the Americans. However, here again public opinion shaped state action and the general quickly ended the arrangement out of fear of the potential public outcry.42 An even more unusual arrangement was offered after the robbery of the Upper Canada Mail in 1839. In Albany, New York Secretary of State John Spencer told a Canadian official that the state had no power to detain or extradite the robbers, but he also said privately that if a party from Canada came and arrested them, and presumably hauled them back to Canada by force, “the State authorities would not be disposed to consider it a breach of amity.”43 These episodes were, however, exceptions to the general American policy. In the main, the U.S. government expressed a view of international law and territorial sovereignty that was steadfastly protective of its exclusive territorial rights. The federal government readily admitted that it had what the secretary of state called in 1838 “its acknowledged obligation” to police and enforce its neutrality.44 According to the American minister in London, the United States “stood pledged to do so, not only by its public declarations and the acknowledged principles of International Law, but by its own high sense of honor, and love of peace.”45 Likewise, both men contended that this obligation had been satisfied with the passage of the 1838 federal neutrality act, the prosecution of several rebels and Hunters in American courts, and the deployment of U.S. forces to the border regions. Expecting more than that was unreasonable, they argued. According to Secretary of State John Forsyth, “The utter impracticability of placing a frontier, extending

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nearly one thousand miles, in a military attitude sufficiently imposing and effective to prevent such enterprises, is evident.”46 As a result, even while the government acknowledged its obligations under domestic and international law, and even though raids into Canada continued, it would not compromise American sovereignty by permitting British incursions into U.S. territory. Moreover, they expected that “under no pretext whatever” would British officers allow any such “violation of the territory of the United States.”47 In December 1841, the president summarized this stance, telling Congress that the government would “never concede to any foreign government the power … of invading its territory,” either to arrest fugitives or to attack rebels, except in what he called “the most urgent and extreme necessity.”48 Sacred Soil? Permeable Sovereignty and the Border Zone The American vision of exclusive and inviolable sovereignty deeply irritated many in Canada. By the end of his time as Upper Canada’s lieutenant-governor, for example, Sir George Arthur took to referring ironically to the United States as the “sacred soil” or the “sacred territory.”49 It is not that Arthur or anyone else disputed the basic tenets of territorial sovereignty that underlay the American position. Rather, for him, as for many colonial and imperial officials, the rights of sovereignty were linked to international duties, and one nation’s sovereignty should not be the cause of another’s insecurity. In this context, officials increasingly examined what could be done if the United States was unable or unwilling to control the rebels and Hunters, and they began asking far-reaching questions about the limits of self-defence in international law: Without a reliable government, how sacred was American territory? And if the border was irrelevant as a barrier for rebels and Hunters, should it mean much more for British troops battling with them? The result was the articulation, though not the wholesale creation, of a vision of permeable sovereignty, which allowed for the lawful use of British and Canadian force across the American border without eviscerating the legal meaning of the boundary or sparking an Anglo-American war. In other words, international law and legality was being adapted to the human geography of the border zone. At the core of these debates, of course, was the anxiety and expense occasioned by the ongoing threat of cross-border attacks. Throughout 1838 rumours of imminent attacks were widespread in the colonies, and such fears lingered on for several more years.50 In the summer of

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1839 an Eastern Townships magistrate noted that false reports of rebel plans were “industriously circulated, and generally believed,” and that as a result many English settlements were posting guards at night.51 Likewise, a Montreal police officer sent in 1842 to investigate the operations of the Hunters’ Lodges in the United States observed that while the power and prestige of the groups had diminished greatly, their members continued to exult in terrifying Canadians by spreading rumours of renewed raids and invasions.52 Indeed, word had spread that a large group would cross the Detroit River on 4 July that year, prompting a company of militia to march down from Malden, complete with several pieces of artillery, though no invasion came.53 As Sir John Colborne noted of such precautions, “A more expensive system could not be adopted than the one to which we have been compelled to resort, in consequence of the menaces of the American population on our frontier.” As he predicted, “The same game may be continued with little inconvenience to the Patriots for many years.”54 The actual invasions and attacks, the anxiety of rumours, the expense of precautions, and the inability of American officials to enforce neutrality and control their own territory fundamentally shaped Canadian and imperial attitudes towards the United States and to the meaning of the border generally. Policymakers were forced to confront three troubling questions with potentially dire implications: Did the United States want to help stifle the threat to Canada, or was it a covert enemy? Even if Washington was sincere, would they contravene public opinion and risk political disadvantage by taking on the rebels and Hunters in a meaningful way? Finally, even if Washington was willing to make such political sacrifices, could it make any difference on the ground? That is, they wondered if the government of the United States even had the clout to enforce its own law. Many Canadians doubted the Americans on all three fronts. Some Upper Canadian officials, for example, thought in late 1838 that the U.S. government was preparing to declare war and was readying the population by stoking anti-British sentiment.55 Sir George Arthur, meanwhile, complained about America’s ineffectual enforcement of the neutrality legislation and its policing of the border region, lamenting that the government had released prisoners and dropped prosecutions in cases where the evidence was solid.56 But for Arthur, this was not simply the result of legal bungling or the isolated flaws of local officials. Rather, he argued that American authorities had been actively and secretly encouraging the Hunters’ Lodges. “This I cannot prove,” he wrote, “but I sincerely believe it.”57

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Others who were less suspicious of American subterfuge warned of the extent to which public opinion and electoral politics limited governments’ sphere of action. In other words, there was perceived to be a tension between democratic self-government and international order. For example, the Canadian official sent to procure the extradition of Benjamin Lett from New York reported back that although there were constitutional questions about the state’s power to surrender Lett, he thought the principle barrier was the unpopularity of doing so, “and its consequent effect on the ballot-box.”58 Likewise, British minister to Washington H.S. Fox told Arthur in 1838 that even in the unlikely event that Van Buren would personally favour allowing British forces across the border to arrest or attack rebels and Hunters, the president “would not dare to encounter the clamour of his citizens.”59 He further reported in 1841 that although a joint Anglo-American declaration against crossborder raids might be desirable, the administration would likely not bring itself to denounce alongside a foreign government what he called the “treacherous designs” of so many Americans.60 America’s perceived unwillingness to stop the attacks raised troubling questions. So too did the widely held notion that the government was, instead, simply unable to do so. After all, with few federal troops, unreliable militias, and hostile civil officials, it seemed an open question whether Washington could effectively exercise its sovereignty in the border regions. Fox linked that inability to public opinion in the northern states, saying that although the administration’s desire to deal fairly with Britain was sincere, “their means of interference, in contradiction to the popular will, are almost null.”61 He targeted in particular “the Constitutional feebleness” of the federal executive and argued that the president’s power was inadequate to contain the threat to Canada or to prevent his citizens from continuing “a career of acknowledged and infamous publick crime.”62 Even Arthur, who certainly suspected American sincerity, was similarly dismissive about the federal government, calling the president’s proclamations of neutrality “mere exhortations.”63 As a result, throughout this period he was sceptical of Washington’s power to prevent the Anglo-American war, which he well knew the filibusterers hoped to spark. In 1839, he told Colborne that war was unavoidable because Washington would not be able to resist public clamour, while in 1841 he continued to believe that peace could be preserved only in the unlikely event that federal authorities were powerful enough to override widespread antiBritish fervour.64

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Clearly many colonial and imperial officials felt that Washington could not control its citizens or police its territory to ensure the security of the neighbouring colonies. Opinions varied on the implications of that inability for American sovereign rights on an international level. As frustration with the United States lingered, many in Britain and Canada understood this question as largely a legal one. Some, like Upper Canada Attorney General Hagerman, specifically bemoaned the American failure to compel its citizens to obey either domestic or international law. Hagerman also noted a surging desire among Canadians for what he called “summary retributive justice.”65 Likewise, in the immediate aftermath of the Caroline raid, key Canadian officials focused primarily on the violations of international law that had been committed by the Navy Island invaders. The raid was described by them as a reasonable reaction to that breach of law. A few days after the attack, Allan MacNab told the commissary-general of New York that the rebel and Hunter occupiers had broken international law by entering British territory and attempting to set up a separate provisional government.66 Likewise, Head stressed that the occupation had been a military invasion, which he said was an “outrage upon the law of nations.”67 That line of thinking also emerged in Nova Scotia, where the Legislative Council passed a unanimous resolution thanking Head and MacNab for putting down the rebellion and condemning those American citizens who “have been guilty of so unjustifiable a Violation of the existing Treaty and the Law of Nations” by supporting the defeated rebels and joining with them to attack Canada.68 Moreover, in the aftermath of the Caroline, many British and colonial officials linked the crimes of the rebels and Hunters to a broader national criminality tainting the United States and its government, in very specific and much more general ways. On questions of compensation for the damages done by rebel attacks, British legal advisors argued for American government responsibility. In 1841, for example, Britain’s international law adviser, Queen’s advocate Sir John Dodson, considered the attempt by owners of the Sir Robert Peel to sue for compensation in U.S. courts.69 Dodson advised that the burning of the Peel and other attacks by armed American citizens should not be considered as individual criminal acts – that they should be distinguished from such “ordinary Private Crimes” for which relief was obtainable through “the usual course of Law.”70 According to Dodson, given the context of continual cross-border aggressions, and because it was proving difficult for the owners of the Peel to sue in American courts, the British govern-

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ment would be justified in demanding redress for them directly from the government of the United States.71 For many officials, though, the question of America’s culpability went beyond the issue of specific compensation for property damage. Fox, for example, told the foreign secretary that the Caroline incident “will leave a fearful stain of crime and dishonour upon the American name.”72 Head even more clearly emphasized American guilt, arguing that the Navy Island invasion had been staged largely by American citizens, from American territory, using American artillery, and accomplished without any deterrence from the American government. He used the word openly several times in describing how the occupation had been planned, staged, and supplied in the United States, suggesting that in his opinion American ineptitude in policing the border region was more like criminal negligence towards a friendly power.73 Arthur later reiterated that point, summarizing both the argument about national culpability and the continuing question of America’s ability to fulfil the duties of a neutral state. “The Americans are without a Government unless they can control their population,” he wrote, “and, if they can control them, they are acting in violation of the law of nations, and should be compelled to keep faith with us.”74 That belief in America’s failure to live up to its international law responsibilities was widespread in Canada, as was the implication that this failure opened U.S. borders to the lawful use of British force. In April 1839 a committee of the Upper Canada Assembly submitted a long and impassioned report on the rebellions and their aftermath, which attacked American popular sympathy for the rebels but also singled out how that sentiment was reflected in what the committee saw as the either feckless or anti-British actions of federal, state, and local officials, who refused to extradite, punish, or even deter those who attacked Canada.75 According to the committee, American Hunters rightly lived “without fear or apprehension that the laws of their own country will reach or punish them, or that their magistrates and public officers have either the power or inclination to interfere with or restrain them.”76 In this context, they wrote, British forces had “an undoubted right” to destroy the Caroline inside U.S. territory, and they regarded with “alarm and apprehension” American arguments that sought to limit that legal right of self-defence and so bar British forces from following any future invaders back across the border.77 That line of thought provided the theoretical underpinning for British and Canadian arguments. British and colonial officials were, as a

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result, infuriated that the United States was emphasizing its own victimization and the inviolability of its borders after the Caroline raid. Fox seemed not even to believe that the American complaints were sincere, arguing instead that they were being deployed as a diplomatic tactic to offset the real injuries suffered by Canada on account of American inaction.78 Head likewise wrote that to call the raid a violation of American neutrality was patently absurd, since whatever injury was suffered by the United States was caused by the criminal acts of its own citizens.79 In such lawless circumstances, Head asked whether and by what authority Canada was obliged to refrain from what he called “necessary acts of self-defence against a people whom their own Government either could not or would not control.”80 Given the invasion of British territory and the danger to British subjects and their property, he wrote, Canadians should not have been obliged “to perplex themselves with researches into books upon the law of nations.” Instead, he said, they had followed “a more unerring guide in obeying the irresistible natural instinct of self-preservation.”81 It is important to appreciate that in this view the right of self-defence did not represent an absence of law or legal order. Rather, necessary acts of self-defence were remedies contemplated by the law of nature and the law of nations to address their violation. Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen made that clear to Britain’s special envoy in 1842. Aberdeen called self-defence “the first Law of our nature; and it must be recognized by every Code which professes to regulate the condition and relations of Man.”82 As we will see later, that link between the national rights of self-defence and self-preservation and the concept of natural law was a powerful aspect of British international law thought throughout the early nineteenth century. That perspective informed how the Caroline and subsequent controversies were handled at the imperial level. It was reflected in the imperial law officers’ understanding of the Caroline incident and prompted a provocative opinion from them on the legal nature not simply of the raid but also of the American territory in which it occurred. In the opinion of Sir John Dodson, Attorney General Sir John Campbell, and Solicitor General Sir R.M. Rolfe, it was regrettable that hostilities had taken place inside U.S. territory, though whether that regret acknowledged the infringement of American rights or merely its diplomatic consequences was not specified.83 Nonetheless, they still found the conduct of Drew and his men “perfectly justifiable by the Law of Nations.”84 Given that the invasion of Navy Island had been staged from U.S. terri-

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tory, and that the supplies to sustain it were coming from the American shore, ferried in part by the Caroline, the British forces were justified by the doctrine of self-preservation in attacking the ship as a belligerent vessel.85 More surprisingly, though, was that in their opinion the place where the ship was moored at the time of the attack was “not justly entitled to the privileges of a Neutral Territory.”86 That is, the actions of American citizens and, presumably, the inaction of the government over the course of the occupation, had changed the legal nature of that section of U.S. territory being used by the rebels, making it open ground for the lawful exercise of British force. What that opinion meant for the many areas inside the United States in which rebels were operating was never fully explored. There were suggestions that America should allow British forces across the border to combat rebels and Hunters but, as noted above, Fox soundly predicted that no such permission would be granted. Instead, he told Arthur that any infringement of American territory would have to be justified after the fact by the “absolute and paramount necessity of self-defence” and the provocation of rebel hostilities.87 But Fox also regarded such retaliatory incursions into the United States as more or less unavoidable in the event of further attacks, and particularly so on the lakes where, he said, it was especially impossible to think that the boundary would be respected, or even known in the heat of battle.88 The permeability of U.S. sovereignty became a hallmark of imperial and colonial arguments. Although a previously negotiated right of incursion into the United States was never likely, the British government emphasized the lawfulness of action inside American borders in response to rebel and Hunter hostilities. Indeed, this was something like an official British position, declared openly to the U.S. government. In November 1838 Fox told the acting secretary of state that if invaders coming from the United States succeeded in taking over any part of Canadian territory, the United States would be answerable to Britain for damages. On the other hand, if the invaders were defeated, “is it possible to suppose that the victorious party, exposed to such unheard of and enormous provocation, will always have the forbearance to respect the American boundary, from within which a lawless and unprincipled enemy will have been enabled to advance?” He then went further, invoking an idea of self-defence beyond what Webster would outline in the Caroline doctrine: “Is it possible to believe that a horde of ruffians and brigands shall be permitted, again and again, to issue forth from the territory of the United States, for the ruin of Her Majesty’s subjects,

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and still, when repulsed, to shelter themselves at pleasure beneath the same extorted and abused protection?”89 Similarly, in 1839 British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston served notice of this position to the U.S. minister in London. He wrote that “offenders of the worst description are still allowed to congregate in the American Territory” just across the border and allowed to continue their assaults on Canada, and that no “adequate steps” were being taken to prevent or punish the attacks.90 Since the British government had a duty to protect its subjects and their property, “at all risks and at whatever consequences,” Palmerston wrote, Britain would consider itself obliged to “have recourse to such measures as may appear to be called for by the occasion,” if “such proceedings shall not be prevented by the Authorities of the U. States.”91 The nature of Palmerston’s threat, then, was that Britain could consider itself justified in carrying out operations in U.S. territory without giving the government whose territory was being entered a lawful cause for war. American sovereignty, Fox and Palmerston implied, did not grant safe haven to those who would continually threaten Canada. Those threats were not made lightly. In the crisis atmosphere of the period, with the Caroline controversy and other international controversies simmering, not to mention the boundary dispute still inflaming relations, officials on all sides well knew the potential for war and understood the implications of British armed forces crossing into American territory. As a result, British officials usually took a cautious attitude towards the border, even in the face of immediate provocation. On the St Lawrence, as noted earlier, the Royal Navy was hunting pirate gangs who weaved easily in and out of American waters, often relying on the border as a shield from arrest or attack by the British, and so set up camps just inside the United States. The British commander on the St Lawrence complained of that practice to Colborne, noting that “in such cases … I feel most perplexed and at a loss how to act.”92 Colborne’s orders in reply were to attack the pirates anywhere on the river – even in American waters, he implied – but on no account to follow them into American ports or disembark on American soil without the permission of U.S. authorities.93 As a result, even when members of Bill Johnston’s gang opened fire on British seamen from an American island in June 1839 the officer in charge held his men back from following them into the United States, though with some degree of difficulty.94 Despite that keen understanding of the implications of crossing the border, as well as the intense diplomatic fallout from the Caroline inci-

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dent, that raid was far from the last violation of American sovereignty by British troops in the name of necessity. It is difficult to gauge how frequent such infractions were, but on at least three occasions during this period British or Canadian troops crossed the border and forcefully removed suspected rebels. In January 1838, Canadian volunteers, armed and wearing their uniforms, allegedly crossed into Clinton County, New York, and abducted a dozen or so suspected French-Canadian Patriotes.95 Likewise, in the summer of 1839 a small party of Royal Navy sailors raided a farmhouse near Goose Bay in the Thousand Islands area of New York. Inside, they found Martin Kelly, said to be a member of the pirate gang then raiding British vessels in the St Lawrence, and alleged to have been involved in the burning of the Sir Robert Peel. Lieutenant Robert McClure’s men subdued Kelly and brought him to Canada, where he was confined for several days.96 Finally, in September 1841 a party of British troops kidnapped James Grogan from Alburg, Vermont. This was the same man who had been charged under the neutrality act with arson committed in the Eastern Townships, and when the local British garrison heard he had returned to northern Vermont after some time in New York, they carefully stalked him, probably first attempting to get him drunk enough to come voluntarily over the border, and then breaking into his sister’s house in the middle of the night and hauling him off at gunpoint.97 As noted below, however, these tactics and the keen awareness generally among soldiers about the legal meaning of the border illustrate both the power of the concept of sovereignty and the belief among many that it was not absolute. That belief was symptomatic of a period in which jurists and policymakers in Britain and Canada grappled to make legal sense out of the border separating the British colonies and the American republic. As cross-border attacks on Canada continued after Navy Island, the imperial and colonial governments were forced to examine their options and to rethink the legal meaning of the boundary. In such strained diplomatic circumstances, Anglo-Canadian officials knew what could happen if British forces crossed the border to pursue or attack rebels and Hunters. But as the threat lingered, and as America seemed unable or unwilling to contain it, these officials explored the extent of the right of self-defence in international law. Although the U.S. government was arguably trying to restore order and enforce the federal neutrality laws, the question remained whether their mere effort was sufficient. If America tried but failed, and if raids on Canadian territory were still staged from within the United States, was the border still inviolable, or

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did Britain and Canada have a broader right of self-defence and selfpreservation? Increasingly, the imperial and colonial position was that international law empowered them to protect Canadian territory – perhaps not at all costs, but at almost all costs. Put simply, if the United States was not effectively sovereign in the border regions, it was not entitled to the full panoply of exclusive sovereign rights. Reaching towards Law: Territoriality and Self-Defence in International Law Literature The British and Canadian position was informed not simply by circumstances on the border, but by different principles circulating in international law thought. Sovereignty, self-defence, and the rights and duties of neutral states were legal concepts premised on the idea of rules operating within an international legal regime, and many scholars of the Caroline doctrine and of self-defence generally have looked to classical European law of nations writers to understand what that law then was.98 Certainly, these writers were central in shaping the rebellionera debates, since international law scholars long had a status beyond mere chroniclers of the law – they were often seen as sources of it by jurists and policymakers. But trying to identify an existing law that the Caroline doctrine entrenched or rejected is the wrong approach, in part because the opinions of eminent writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries did not coalesce into a single version of the law. In fact, although officials in North America and Britain considered these to be legal questions, there may not have been a single binding rule of international law on this point. This section explores this diversity of views among some of the most important law of nations writers, focusing on the scope of the self-defence right, the issue of anticipatory self-defence, and the question of whether it was permissible to violate neutral territory. The early publicists depicted a right to self-defence that was far larger and much murkier than that laid out by Daniel Webster in the Caroline doctrine, and one that was said to be rooted in the inherent law of nature. One of the most important of those writers – often described as the “Father of International Law” – was the Dutchman Hugo Grotius.99 In his 1625 treatise, Grotius argued that it was natural “to repel arms with arms.”100 He limited the scope of the right of self-defence among individuals by saying that the threat must be immediate and imminent – if one’s enemy was merely forming a plot or preparing an ambush or

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false charge, killing them was not lawful.101 Yet in war among nations the right was broader, since states had the right of self-defence but also the right to punish their enemies. According to Grotius, they had the right to forestall an attack that was not imminent “but which is seen to be threatening from a distance.”102 Although that doctrine of preemption centred on one state attacking another for wrongs inflicted by the latter, Grotius did deal briefly with the kind of circumstances that triggered the Caroline raid and other incursions during the rebellion period. He wrote that it was permissible for a belligerent in a just war to seize neutral territory to prevent its enemy from occupying that same territory and using it to wage war.103 There were limitations on that right, since the damage feared had to be “irreparable” and the danger had to be “not imaginary but … real.” He argued also that nothing must be taken from the neutral ground except what was necessary for the war and that the territory should be returned to its sovereign as soon as the necessity for occupation had ceased, since, in such circumstances, “legal jurisdiction” remained with that sovereign.104 Grotius, then, seemed to offer support for the idea that British force could lawfully be used in U.S. territory when circumstances necessitated without supplanting U.S. sovereignty. A slightly different but related message emerged from the 1737 treatise of the Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek.105 Bynkershoek devoted a short chapter to the issue of whether it was lawful to pursue or attack an enemy in a neutral port or territory.106 He began with the premise that the right to wage war operated only in belligerent territory or territory that belonged to no one, an idea that he claimed was universally endorsed by international law writers.107 According to Bynkershoek, “he who commits hostilities on the territory of a neutral, makes war upon the sovereign who governs there,” giving that sovereign a lawful right to repel the attack.108 But he also drew a key distinction between what he called the “right of aggression” and the “right of pursuit.”109 The latter meant that a belligerent could lawfully follow an enemy into neutral territory in the heat of battle or if the chase began on the high seas.110 While Bynkershoek was most famous as an admiralty and maritime lawyer, and so began with the instance of pursuit into a port, river, or bay, he was careful to specify that the right extended to pursuit on neutral lands and across land borders as well.111 That general doctrine has endured as the right of “hot pursuit.” However, most modern writers distinguish between the right to use force in neutral territory on land and that of doing so in territorial waters, or of seizing

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a vessel on the high seas as a result of a chase that began in territorial waters.112 Nonetheless, as some scholars of the doctrine have pointed out, Bynkershoek was influential on this point in the early nineteenth century, as evidenced by Sir John Colborne’s distinction between entering U.S. waters and landing on U.S. territory.113 Likewise, whether conscious of it or not, the initial explanations given by British and Canadian officials in the Caroline case and in the arrest of Martin Kelly by Robert McClure and his men from New York territory show traces of Bynkershoek’s influence in the way the commanders mitigated their invasion of foreign soil in the same way that Bynkershoek limited the right of pursuit by arguing that any use of force in foreign territory must absolutely avoid damaging or even endangering the neutrals or their property.114 In the Caroline case, Andrew Drew was careful to note that in the Caroline attack he and his men had specifically taken steps not to damage American property or hurt American citizens.115 Likewise, McClure’s statement after the 1839 raid across the St Lawrence claimed that no damage had been done to U.S. property or American blood shed, and that his men had gone without firearms to ensure that result. In their initial reports written just hours after each incident, both Drew and McClure attempted to mitigate their actions, contending that they had taken all possible steps to respect U.S. territory, even while violating it. Drew emphasized that his men had been fired on from the Caroline as they began to board the ship, and that they had taken the ship out into the current of the river as a precaution, because burning it close to shore might have led to damage to American property. He also declared that his men had put everyone ashore who did not resist, while those who fought “were of course dealt with according to the usages of war.”116 McClure, meanwhile, was quick to note that his men had captured Kelly without firing any shots or shedding any blood. Indeed, he claimed that his men had been armed only with cutlasses and that they had purposely left their pistols behind, clearly aware of the issues raised by foreign soldiers bearing arms in neutral territory.117 The Swiss jurist Emerich de Vattel took an approach somewhat similar to that of Grotius and Bynkershoek, and with a similar emphasis on the rights of belligerent states. Vattel was arguably the most significant international law writer of the eighteenth century and the most influential of the early nineteenth as well, and his 1758 treatise clearly expounded a right to security, which he defined as a state’s “right to preserve herself from all injury.”118 In discussing the lawfulness of waging

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war and employing force, Vattel specified that those actions were lawful only for self-defence and the maintenance of national rights. If one state attacked another or violated what he called that country’s “perfect rights” (those rights that were lawfully enforced by military action), the latter had a right to use force – but not until then.119 However, in explaining the right to security generally, Vattel took a broader approach, writing that a nation could resist “an injurious attempt” and use force against “whosoever is actually engaged in opposition to her, and even to anticipate his machinations, observing, however, not to attack him upon vague and uncertain suspicions.”120 That position was bolstered by what Vattel called the obligations of nations to preserve themselves and by their duty to “cultivate justice towards each other.”121 It followed that when one nation attempted to violate another’s rights, the latter was compelled by its duty of preservation and empowered by the requirements of international justice to invoke its right of defence using force.122 While Vattel had little to say about the role of non-state actors in triggering those rights and obligations, his discussion of the duties of neutrality appears to reinforce the British position. He wrote that while it was unlawful to attack or pursue an enemy in a neutral state, that state was itself under an obligation to ensure that refugees did not use its territory to regroup and plan new attacks.123 If it did not fulfil that duty, it gave the victorious country a right to enter its territory in pursuit of its enemies. “Such treatment,” he wrote, “is often experienced by nations that are unable to command respect. Their territories soon become the theatre of war; armies march, encamp, and fight in it, as in a country open to all comers.”124 In other words, there was recourse short of fullscale interstate war for countries whose enemies were operating from within neutral territory. Here again British and Canadian approaches to the border conflicts seemed at least redolent of the international law literature, given that policymakers in both governments emphasized often that the United States was unable to enforce its own law or fulfil this duty of preventing cross-border attacks. Even if the classical European writers could be understood to support the British claim of a right to enter American territory, it is not clear whether such a right was a part of international law in the early nineteenth century. Vattel remained hugely important in the period, but his argument on the point was not explicitly taken up by key early nineteenth-century Anglo-American writers. In his massively influential Commentaries on American Law, first published in the 1820s, New

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York scholar and judge James Kent sided with Vattel in contending that there were duties incumbent on neutral states, chief of which was that their territory must not be used to shelter belligerents engaged in planning further attacks.125 Like Vattel, he extolled the right of national self-defence, calling it “part of the law of our nature” and linking it to the duty of self-preservation.126 In fact, Kent referred to Vattel on the lawfulness of pre-emptive defensive war.127 Despite his views on selfdefence, though, Kent could have lent little support to the Canadian and British position, in part because he was silent on so many of the key questions and concepts. Moreover, his beliefs about the sacrosanct nature of neutral territory went strongly against what Britain and Canada would argue in the rebellion period. He declared, for example, that it was unlawful to commence hostile acts from neutral territory and to attack an enemy who was within neutral borders, and he made a point of disagreeing with Bynkershoek’s right of pursuit, writing that “there is no exception to the rule, that every voluntary entrance into neutral territory, with hostile purposes, is absolutely unlawful.”128 Similar perspectives emerged in the work of the American diplomat, lawyer, and treatise writer Henry Wheaton. In Wheaton’s important 1836 book on international law, he too extolled the rights of self-preservation and self-defence, but he was even warier than Kent about their invocation by governments.129 He warned against the invocation of a “supposed contingent danger” by states in justifying the use of force. “This preventive policy,” he wrote, “has been the pretext of the most bloody and destructive wars waged in modern times.”130 Like Kent, Wheaton was also silent on key issues being debated in the rebellion period. There was some acknowledgment in the book of the tension between one nation’s sovereignty and its neighbours’ security, but little by way of substantive exploration of the issue, and while he noted that the rights of neutrality necessitated impartiality between combatants, he did little to explore the troubling question of what a state’s obligations were vis-à-vis those fleeing into its territory who might use it as a base for attack, or what happened if those obligations were not met. But on neutrality generally, Wheaton sided with Kent, stressing that hostilities could not be conducted inside neutral borders and that states had an inherent right to remain at peace while other states engaged in war, and he too pointedly disagreed with Bynkershoek’s belief in a right of hot pursuit, calling it an “anomalous principle.”131 The British and Canadian view also had little support in the nascent English literature of international law of the period. William Oke Man-

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ning, author of the first nineteenth-century English international law treatise, took a similar approach. Manning believed strongly in the right of self-defence, noting that no “submission to violence” was required by international law.132 That right existed in the case of actual and threatened aggression, and so, for example, he endorsed the actions of France’s neighbours who mobilized in 1792 after the government declared itself an enemy of constituted authority generally and a haven for revolutionaries.133 He also resisted laying out concrete rules for when self-defence was lawful. “General rules for political action,” he wrote, “are too frequently either needless, because obvious, or useless, because they afford no additional light, but still leave each individual question to be determined by its own bearings.”134 Manning, too, sided with Vattel and Kent, in arguing strongly that neutral states were under a definite obligation to refrain from supporting either side in a war, calling this “the undisputed basis of the condition of Neutrality.”135 He also dealt in some detail with the question of whether belligerent nations could raise troops inside neutral territory, concluding that absent a pre-war treaty allowing such a levy would be a violation of the obligations of neutrality.136 But he contended that it was “one of the most obvious rules of the Law of Nations, that no hostile operations can be committed in a neutral territory.”137 In the end, it seems likely that he considered the misuse of neutral territory to be a cause for war but not the temporary diminution of territorial sovereignty. Manning and other nineteenth-, eighteenth-, and seventeenth-century publicists left the limits of sovereignty and self-defence unsettled. If the kinds of arguments Canadian and British officials made in the rebellion period would have been lawful according to Vattel, it was far from clear whether he and other classical writers represented real legality and, even if they had, whether international law had changed by 1837, by which time territorial sovereignty and neutral rights had become more entrenched and absolute concepts in international law literature. Making sense of this seeming transition may point towards the much larger purported shift from natural to positive law, which as Lauren Benton has noted recently, has long been the predominant theme in international law historiography.138 In this traditional narrative, naturalist conceptions of the law of nations that enveloped states and sovereigns in a divinely ordained transnational legal order gave way over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a positivist regime in which international law was constituted almost only by customs and pacts to which states had consented, and in which territorial sov-

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ereignty became a nearly absolute concept. But the divergence among treatise writers on questions of self-defence and the absence in several key works of the kinds of questions and circumstances at issue in the rebellion period probably points more to the amorphousness and incomplete nature of the international legal system in the absence of a global legislature or international courts. That is, many questions were understood as legal in nature on which there was yet no crystallized rule of law. “This great and sacred right of self-defence”: Permeable Sovereignty in Anglo-American Statecraft Treatise writers had a central role in laying out conceptual frameworks for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century international law. But treatises were not the sole creators, repositories, or benchmarks of international law. Statecraft mattered a great deal, and, as James Green has argued, many European states in the early nineteenth century applied doctrines of self-defence broader and vaguer than the Caroline formula of necessity and proportionality.139 This makes it that much more difficult to discern any crystallized or binding rules. While, as Kenneth Stevens has suggested, governments may often have used these doctrines simply as excuses to justify attacking weaker states, law still structured thinking about interstate relationships in important ways, and the widespread preoccupation with legality and the wider notion that state actions could and should be lawful on an international level were prominent elements of statecraft in the early nineteenth century.140 This section examines how pre-rebellion Anglo-American statecraft reflected unorthodox visions of sovereign rights and of the sanctity or lack thereof of national boundaries, and how those traditions and visions influenced Canadian and British perspectives during the rebellion period. It shows that in making arguments against an exclusive sovereignty on the American side of the border zone, Canadian and British officials were drawing not simply on past British doctrines but in fact on American ones as well. In the decades before the rebellions, U.S. governments invoked both notions of permeable or non-exclusive sovereignty and expansive doctrines of self-defence, which they argued were embedded in international law. As several scholars have pointed out, one of the chief examples of an expansive doctrine of self-defence emerged after General Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818.141 Jackson

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led an invasion force of more than 3,000 American troops and some 1,500 Aboriginal allies to attack the Seminoles, who had been staging raids across the border from Spanish territory. Spain was obliged by its 1795 treaty with the United States to control the Seminoles, but its power in the region was simply insufficient to attempt any such thing, which prompted Jackson’s incursion. However, in addition to burning and looting Seminole villages, and executing two British subjects said to have been supporting the Natives, Jackson conquered the Spanish towns of St Marks and Pensacola, taking a fort near the latter after a short siege in which the Americans and Spanish exchanged cannon fire.142 Spain protested the invasion strongly, and during the whole course of the debate U.S. officials relied heavily on the idea that Spain’s inability had created an American right of incursion justified by what President James Monroe called “the high obligations and privileges of this great and sacred right of self-defence.”143 This invasion is probably most noted in international law for the state papers about it drawn up by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. In those records, Adams leaned heavily on international law ideas, though the historian William Earl Weeks has dissected his version of the underlying facts of Jackson’s actions and concludes that Adams’s was in fact a “fraudulent legalism.”144 Adams told the Spanish minister to the United States that the invasion was Spain’s own fault because its failure to effectively control its own territory had led to years of violence against American citizens along the border.145 More famously, however, Adams laid out a doctrine in his letter to the American minister to Spain about the requirements of control that came with territorial sovereignty. He argued that in Florida, Spain had “nothing but the nominal possession, but which is, in fact, a derelict, open to the occupancy of every enemy … of the United States.”146 Since Spain could not control the region, it forfeited jurisdiction, and America was allowed to occupy it. As one diplomatic historian has noted, it was a simple and provocative ultimatum: control or cede.147 The concept of merely nominal and permeable sovereignty emerged again in U.S. statecraft. The government invoked it in justifying the December 1817 seizure of Amelia Island in East Florida, which had been overrun months earlier by a Scottish adventurer and his fifty-four followers, who then began preparations to turn the island into a depot for the sale of plunder taken from Spanish ships; others soon attempted to use it as a base to transport slaves illegally into the United States.148 The American position was that their seizure of the island was justified by

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Spain’s inability to hold or recover it, and that, as Adams wrote, it was only “nominally under the jurisdiction of Spain, Spain not exercising over it any control.”149 Monroe likewise told Congress that, because Spain had failed to maintain its authority and had allowed it to be used as a base for the “annoyance” of the U.S., “her jurisdiction for the time, necessarily ceases to exist,” an argument that distinguished between an act of war or conquest and an incursion justified by self-defence that did not extinguish or deny Spain’s sovereignty.150 As with the British claims in the wake of the Caroline raid, these arguments relied on a concept of permeable territorial sovereignty – that a government’s action or inaction could alter the legal nature of at least some of its territory, making the right to use force there non-exclusive. Indeed the United States used these arguments mere months before the Canadian rebellions. In 1836 the U.S. government served notice to Mexico that it might send troops to patrol the border with Texas and to attack hostile Aboriginals, because of the turmoil there during the Texas Revolution. According to Secretary of State John Forsyth, any operation inside Texas would rest “upon principles of the law of nations, entirely distinct from those on which war is justified – upon the immutable principles of self-defence – upon the principles which justify decisive measures of precaution to prevent irreparable evil to our own or to a neighboring people.”151 In endorsing the right, Forsyth was also careful to focus on the potential for cross-border attacks on Americans, and on the inability of the Mexican government to prevent such assaults in the first place or to redress them afterwards. The solution was for America to exercise a right of incursion that was far short of and very different from a war on Mexico. “To make war upon Mexico for this involuntary failure to comply with her obligations,” he argued, “would be equivalent to an attempt to convert her misfortunes into crimes – her inability into guilt.”152 Officials in Canada and Britain used these American doctrines as legal precedents in the rebellion period. In fact, the U.S. position on Jackson’s invasion of Florida influenced colonial and imperial policymakers in justifying specific incursions into American territory and in considering the wider question of a right to attack rebels and Hunters across the border. The 1839 Upper Canada Assembly committee used American examples in excoriating not simply American popular opinion towards Britain and Canada but what they saw as the American government’s hypocritical response to the Caroline raid.153 The committee dealt in detail with the invasions and attacks that had come from

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American territory and with the U.S. government’s apparently feeble attempts to suppress rebel plots. They also decried the American response to the Caroline burning, namely the idea that it was not justified by self-defence and that it had violated America’s neutral rights. The committee angrily dismissed that argument, and they argued in reply that if precedent were necessary to overturn Washington’s position, “there is no country whose history affords more striking examples in point than that of the United States.”154 They focused on the Florida invasion and quoted Monroe exalting the sacred right of self-defence. They also noted his claim that in pursuing the Seminoles “to an imaginary line in the woods, it would have been the height of folly to have suffered that line to protect them.”155 The committee linked the American rationale on the Florida invasion to the Caroline case. They contended that the Navy Island occupiers were an invading force that had been fitted out openly in U.S. territory, that this force had attempted the murder of British subjects and the overthrow of the colonial government, and that the Caroline had clearly been aiding that effort. As a result, the British forces had what the committee called an “undoubted right” not simply to follow the boat into the United States and to destroy it there, but to enter American territory to forestall preparations being made for attacks on Canada.156 The trigger for that right was the unwillingness or inability of American authorities to prevent the Navy Island invasion or even to hinder the flow of supplies to it, just as the Spanish had not been able to control the Seminoles prior to Jackson’s invasion. As with the Spanish in Florida, they wrote, the U.S. government “either wanted the power or the inclination, it matters not which, to restrain their citizens from making war upon The Queen of England, and attempting the destruction of Her subjects and the overthrow of Her government.”157 The imperial government also took notice of the Florida example and used it in framing diplomatic policy and in exploring the limitations of self-defence in international law. As noted above, in 1839 British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston issued a stern warning to the American minister in London, noting that “offenders of the worst description” were finding safe refuge beyond the border and so continuing to perpetrate “the most atrocious crimes” on Canada. Accordingly, he said, the British government would “have recourse to such measures as may appear to be called for by the occasion,” if the American government did not put an end to rebel activities.158 He drew authority for that position from the American justification of the Florida invasion, directing

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the minister’s attention to the declarations “upon such questions of International Right” laid out by the president in 1818.159 As the minister noted gravely in his reply, the meaning of that reference “is not to be misunderstood.”160 The British government also explored the applicability of the Florida doctrine to the kinds of comparatively minor incursions into American territory that had been taking place along the Canadian border. For example, shortly after the 1839 abduction of Martin Kelly from New York by a party of Royal Navy sailors, the Foreign Office asked the Queen’s advocate to consider the case. They specifically wanted to know if Kelly’s abduction could be justified by the “General Law of Nations” or the American government’s 1818 interpretation of self-defence.161 However, Sir John Dodson rejected the government’s idea of justification on both fronts. International law, he wrote, allowed states to enter the territory of other states in “immediate pursuit” of fleeing enemies, but not for the purpose of capturing a criminal. Dodson also brusquely rejected extending the Florida doctrine to justify the abduction of a criminal from foreign territory, writing that the circumstances of the Kelly abduction did not bring it within the scope of that principle, though he did not offer an explanation.162 Clearly, the American examples were influential. But in trying to understand the approach that Britain and Canada took to self-defence and international law in this period, it is also important to appreciate the role long-standing official British visions of neutrality played in the rebellion period. As Stephen Neff has shown so well, Britain often took a comparatively tough position on neutrality, favouring broad rights for belligerent countries engaged in maritime wars over those of neutral, trading nations.163 During the eighteenth century, Britain used its naval power to impose sweeping blockades of its enemies, arguing that general rules of international law, and not simply bilateral treaty relationships, circumscribed neutral rights during wartime.164 As historians have long noted, the British stance was so aggressive that it fed directly into the deterioration of the Anglo-American relationship and to the outbreak of war in 1812: in President James Madison’s June 1812 war message, two of America’s four grievances with Britain were on neutrality questions, areas in which Britain was said to be infringing unfairly on American rights.165 In large part, the British position stemmed from what Neff describes as the “conflict-of-rights” or necessity school of thought on neutrality, espoused by some important international law writers, including Grotius and Alberico Gentili. That

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version of neutrality favoured the rights of belligerents over neutrals in a just war because a belligerent had to do whatever was necessary to defeat its enemy.166 Since both neutral traders engaging in business and just belligerents seeking victory had rights, the question was whose would prevail, and proponents of this theory tended to assume that it should be the latter, because a neutral’s trade losses were quantifiable and so could be compensated, while the interests of a state at war were far more fundamental to national survival.167 The concept of overriding necessity in wartime was key and could have implications far beyond the issues of trading rights and shipping blockades. That was the case when the British invoked necessity over neutral rights in 1807. In August of that year the Cabinet decided to seize the Danish fleet when it seemed likely that Napoleon would overrun that neutral country and turn its navy against Britain. In doing so, the British bombarded Copenhagen, which led to thousands of casualties and the near-destruction of the city.168 It remains unclear what role the legal nuances of self-defence played in the British government’s deliberations beforehand, although according to one influential twentieth-century monograph on the use of force in international law, the British government was not concerned about legal justification before the attack, “and law was not a very prominent aspect of state relations at the time.”169 Likewise, in a recent and thorough book on the Copenhagen bombardment, international law plays little role before the incident and it seems entirely possible that evaluating the action’s legality beforehand may not have been a top priority.170 After the attack, Foreign Secretary George Canning even mocked the idea that international law or the opinion of jurists such as the German writer Samuel von Pufendorf should have circumscribed Britain’s right to defend itself: “Was it to be contended, that in a moment of imminent danger and impending necessity, we should have abstained from that course which prudence and policy dictated, in order to meet and avert those calamities that threatened our security and existence, because if we sunk under the pressure we should have had the consolation of having the authority of Puffendorf to plead?”171 The resemblance of this comment to Sir Francis Bond Head’s comment noted above about Canadians not being obliged to “perplex themselves” with research on international law is telling. But just as with Head’s arguments, Canning’s comments do not imply an absence of legal thought from the British position. After all, even while deriding the idea that the decrees of a legal writer should limit the actions of a

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state in a time of crisis, both Head and Canning were careful to stress the rights of necessity, in keeping with the conflict-of-rights approach outlined by Neff. In fact, throughout the statements of the government and the parliamentary discussion of the attack, a keen attention was paid to the law of nations and the law of neutrality. The government steadfastly used the inability of Denmark to enforce its own neutrality and the paramount necessity of self-defence to justify its action to a deeply sceptical parliament. The King’s declaration, issued a few weeks after the bombardment and seizure, emphasized its “cruel necessity” and stressed Denmark’s weakness and the imminence and certainty of the fleet being taken over by France, as well as the duty of self-preservation incumbent on the sovereign.172 Numerous members of the Commons and Lords agreed, with many of them laying out interconnections between natural law and the law of nations, and the centrality of selfpreservation and self-defence to both. Stephen Rumbold Lushington, for one, used terms strikingly similar to those invoked by Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen in the rebellion period in conceptualizing the natural law roots of international law. As had Aberdeen, Lushington contended that “the first law of nature, the foundation of the law of nations, is the preservation of man,” and argued on both grounds that the expedition against Copenhagen was moral and necessary.173 Likewise, Lord Wellesley, a former governor-general of India and future foreign secretary, maintained that “the great maxims of the law of nations were founded on the law of nature; and the law of security or self-preservation was, among these, the most important and sacred.”174 According to Wellesley, the government had only “put in exercise that law of self-preservation that needed no learned and intricate disquisition to justify.”175 Conversely, even some of the many vociferous opponents of the expedition in Parliament acknowledged the legal weight of necessity. For example, former secretary of war William Windham argued that the government had shown no regard for national honour and had violated international law.176 But he also admitted that the collusion of a neutral state with an aggressor or the inability of that state to defend its neutrality was sufficient justification for seizing that country’s military, though in his opinion such necessity was not present in this case.177 Similarly, while Samuel Whitbread argued that “the English had behaved like shabby thieves” and without justification, he too declared that if the attack had been motivated by necessity it would have been

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warranted by morality and “in the sight of God.”178 Thus the British discussion of the Copenhagen attack showcases the role of law in structuring ideas about foreign affairs and highlights the lineage of views on self-defence that would emerge again in the rebellion period debates. Copenhagen is the best known example of this British position.179 But during the decades before the Canadian rebellions, the British government’s international law advisors consistently emphasized the duty of self-preservation and the rights of self-defence, even sometimes to the detriment of British interests, which suggests that such doctrines were not entirely malleable according to national self-interest. In 1829, for example, King’s advocate Sir Herbert Jenner advised that the Mexican government could detain a British ship in port to prevent information reaching the Spanish fleet at a time when Mexico expected a Spanish attack. According to Jenner, “The first and paramount duty of every Nation is that of self-preservation, and the Law of Nations will sanction the adoption of any measure, which may be necessary to secure this great object, although it may in some degree infringe upon the rights of others.”180 Likewise, in 1836, Sir John Dodson told the foreign secretary that Spain could exercise a right of visitation on British ships in Spanish ports, and could require the surrender of Spanish subjects on board those vessels who were accused of crimes. Dodson reiterated that selfpreservation was a state’s first duty, and so long as the Spanish invoked this power only “in times of Danger and Difficulty” for the purposes of national security, and not to harass British commerce, the government would have no grounds of complaint.181 That strain of British international law thought also went beyond the question of neutral rights in wartime. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s the legal advisors dealt with cases that bore directly on issues raised during the rebellion period, relating to the threat one nation’s sovereignty might pose to another’s security. Specifically, they considered on several occasions the rights and duties of states in offering asylum to refugees fleeing political turmoil in their home countries. In 1827, for example, Sir Christopher Robinson considered the case of Portuguese citizens fleeing to Spain, and whether Spain was justified in receiving them. While not generally inconsistent with the duties of amity, Robinson argued that the propriety of Spain accepting the refugees would depend on its motivation: if Spain was inviting peasants to abandon their country and proclaiming an asylum for all who did so, it would seem to be deeply unfriendly, unless Spain promised that nothing would be allowed to happen that was disagreeable to Portugal. Robinson found

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that Spain’s assurances in this regard were unsatisfactorily vague, and he declared that Spain was probably not justified by the law of nations in providing the asylum.182 More relevant to the Canadian situation, in 1834 Jenner advised on the legality under international law of the German Diet’s demand that Switzerland either expel German and Polish refugees or remove them from the border regions to prevent crossborder attacks from Swiss territory. Jenner steered a middle course on the issue, declaring that the Diet had a right to call on the Swiss Confederacy to adopt “the most effectual measures” to prevent those attacks, and so to remove the refugees into the interior. But he also argued that the demand for their outright expulsion was a violation of Swiss sovereignty that could be justified only “by danger of the most pressing and imminent nature, and which there are no other means of averting.” Under such circumstances, he wrote, “the duty of self-preservation may excuse an encroachment upon the rights of others.”183 The history of Anglo-American statecraft in the few decades before the Canadian rebellions, then, afforded some support for the kind of view about the duties of neutral states and the rights of belligerent countries held by British and Canadian officials. While international law often took a seemingly subordinate role as states dealt with threats to their sovereignty and security, ideas and arguments about the scope of lawful self-defence were prominent in Britain and the United States in the decades before the Canadian rebellions, and structured thinking about state action in important ways. Indeed policymakers and politicians equated legality and necessity as bedrock notions of international order, and saw self-defence and self-preservation as inherent aspects of both natural and international law. Governments used this naturalist international law as a benchmark of conduct that supposedly carried great moral weight, even in wartime, and they sought legal advice in interpreting state responsibility and in making arguments about the legality of their own actions and those of other nations. In fact, in the decades before the Canadian rebellions, both Britain and the United States took aggressive approaches to security and in so doing used legal doctrines that often seemed to compromise neutral rights and the supposed impermeability of territorial sovereignty. Those approaches were key to the British and Canadian response to the ongoing threat from the northern states and form a transnational and transatlantic lineage and context to the rebellion-era policies. Only by looking to that context can we understand the imperial and colonial arguments after 1837.

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Conclusion Was America breaking international law by not stopping all attacks on Canada in the wake of the 1837 rebellions? Did the continuing threat to the colonies from the northern states mean that the United States effectively lacked a sovereign government in the border zone? That many British and Canadian officials in this period would have answered yes to both questions points to an intriguing viewpoint on neutrality and security specifically, and territorial sovereignty and international law in general. As they grappled with ongoing attacks, those officials questioned what legal meaning the border should have for British force if it had little for exiled rebels and American Hunters. Underlying that view, however, was a larger vision of the rule of law between nations. British and Canadian officials believed America was not merely compromising the Anglo-American diplomatic relationship, but undermining its own claims to exclusive sovereign rights along the border. In their view, sovereignty was not solely defined domestically – that is, it was not just a matter of exercising jurisdiction within the borders of the state. Sovereignty also had to be performed internationally, and a range of obligations on the international stage had to be fulfilled. As David Kennedy has argued, in the early nineteenth century it was taken for granted that sovereigns existed in a world of law that bestowed both rights and obligations, subjecting them to the constraints of international order.184 The debates about the situation in the border zone in the period after 1837, then, were not simply about whether those obligations were being met, but also about the more troubling question of what happened when they were not.

NOTES 1 See Kenneth R. Stevens, Border Diplomacy: The Caroline and McLeod Affairs in Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1837–1842 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 10–15. 2 Webster to H.S. Fox, 24 Apr. 1841, quoted in R.Y. Jennings, “The Caroline and McLeod Cases,” American Journal of International Law 32 (1938): 89. 3 Debate over the doctrine’s force as international law continues. See, especially, James A. Green, The International Court of Justice and Self-Defence in International Law (Oxford: Hart, 2009), 72–3; Green, “Docking the Caroline: Understanding the Relevance of the Formula in Contemporary Customary

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International Law Concerning Self-Defense,” Cardozo Journal of International & Comparative Law 14 (2006): 446–7; Maria Benvenuta Occelli, “‘Sinking’ the Caroline: Why the Caroline Doctrine’s Restrictions on Self-Defense Should Not Be Regarded as Customary International Law,” San Diego International Law Journal 4 (2003): 467–90. Examples of the doctrine’s application to contemporary international law questions are legion. For examples, see Skander Ahmen Shah, “War on Terrorism: Self-Defense, Operation Enduring Freedom, and the Legality of U.S. Drone Attacks in Pakistan,” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 9, no. 1 (2010): 92–3, 122; Tom Ruys, “Crossing the Thin Blue Line: An Inquiry into Israel’s recourse to Self-Defense against Hezbollah,” Stanford Journal of International Law 43, no. 2 (2007): 290–2; Ben N. Dunlap, “State Failure and the Use of Force in the Age of Global Terror,” Boston College International & Comparative Law Review 27, no. 2 (2004): 473–4. See Albert Corey, The Crisis of 1830–1842 in Canadian-American Relations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941). See Stevens, Border Diplomacy, esp. 24–6, 34–6, 103–4. For work on international law in Canadian history, see Bradley Miller, “Emptying the Den of Thieves: International Fugitives and the Law in British North America / Canada, 1819–1910” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012); Miller, “‘A Carnival of Crime on Our Border’: International Law, Imperial Power, and Extradition in Canada, 1865–1883,” Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 4 (2009): 639–69; Rainer Baehre, “Diplomacy, International Law, and Foreign Fishing in Newfoundland, 1814–30,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. Jim Phillips, R. Roy McMurtry, and John T. Saywell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2008), 10:353–87; F. Murray Greenwood, “The Prince Affair: ‘Gallant Colonel’ or ‘The Windsor Butcher’?,” in Canadian State Trials. Vol. 2, Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837–1839, ed. F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2002), 160–87. See Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Also Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For recent contributions to

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the literature of North American borderlands, see especially Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); David G. McCrady, Living with Strangers: The NineteenthCentury Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska University Press, 2005). See Allan Greer, “1837–38: Rebellion Reconsidered,” Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 1 (1995): 15. For the development of American neutrality legislation during this period, see Francis Deak and Philip C. Jessup, eds., A Collection of Neutrality Laws, Regulations and Treaties of Various Countries (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1939), 2:1079–86, 1140–2, 1177–80. The best work on the Hunters Lodges remains Oscar Kinchen, The Rise and Fall of the Patriot Hunters (New York: Bookman, 1956). See also Stevens, Border Diplomacy; Michael Mann, A Particular Duty: The Canadian Rebellions, 1837–1839 (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1986), 132–58; J. Mackay Hitsman, Safeguarding Canada, 1763–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 130–41; Corey, Crisis, 27–129. See, generally, J.I. Little, Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 96–100; Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 338–45; Kinchen, Rise and Fall of the Patriot Hunter, 91–123. See also Travis Childs, “In Liberating Strife: American Filibusters in the Texas Revolution, 1835– 1836 and the Canadian Rebellion, 1837–1839” (MA thesis, University of Texas, 2006). On filibustering and “Manifest Destiny,” see Frank Lawrence Owsley Jr and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). Forsyth to Fox, Washington, 15 Nov. 1838, The Arthur Papers: Being the Canadian Papers Mainly Confidential, Private, and Demi-Official of Sir George Arthur, K.C.H., Last Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, ed. Charles R. Sanderson (Toronto: Toronto Public Libraries and University of Toronto Press, 1957), 1:371. See J.K. Johnson, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, s.v. “William Johnston.” Quoted in G.F.G. Stanley, Guns and Gun Boats on the St Lawrence (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1976), 60–1.

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16 W.H. Griffin to R.A. Tucker, 6 May 1839, “Correspondence Relative to the Affairs of Canada, Part I,” Parliamentary Papers, XXI.1, 1840 (hereafter Canada Correspondence), 338–9. 17 Williams Sandom to Sir John Colborne, 31 May 1839, ibid., 98. 18 Hagerman to Samuel Bealy Harrison, 23 July 1839, Archives of Ontario (AO), CO 42, vol. 461, reel B-356, 270. 19 Fox to Lord Aberdeen, 26 Nov. 1841, AO, CO 42, vol. 499, reel B-379, 281; Colborne to Arthur, Montreal, 12 Feb. 1839, Arthur Papers, 2:43. 20 Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 21 See generally Corey, Crisis; Stevens, Border Diplomacy; Howard Jones and Donald A. Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-American Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington: S.R. Books, 1997). 22 Howard Jones, “Anglophobia and the Aroostook War,” New England Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1975): 519–39; John Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller, “The Great Wolf Hunt: The Popular Response in Vermont to the Patriote Uprising of 1837,” Journal of American Studies 8, no. 2 (1974): 161–9. 23 Quoted in Duffy and Muller, “Great Wolf Hunt,” 162. 24 Marc L. Harris, “The Meaning of Patriot: The Canadian Rebellion and American Republicanism, 1837–1839,” Michigan History 23, no. 1 (1997): 33–69; Stuart D. Scott, “The Patriot Game: New Yorkers and the Canadian Rebellion of 1837–1838,” New York History 68, no. 3 (1988): 281–95. 25 Extract from the Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, 18 May 1839, repr. in Canada Correspondence, 350. 26 Quoted in Samuel Watson, “United States Army Officers Fight the ‘Patriot War’: Responses to Filibustering on the Canadian Border, 1837–1839,” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 3 (1998): 496. On Scott, see also Scott Kaufman and John A. Soares, “‘Sagacious beyond Praise’? Winfield Scott and Anglo-American-Canadian Border Diplomacy, 1837–1860,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 1 (2006): 59. 27 See Watson, “United States Army Officers,” 490–99. 28 See Jones and Rakestraw, Prologue, 22. 29 Watson, “United States Army Officers,” 504–12. 30 Duffy and Muller, “Great Wolf Hunt,” 160–1. 31 Watson, “United States Army Officers,” 510. 32 Ibid., 512. 33 William Brown to P.E. Seclere, 25 May 1839, Canada Correspondence, 99; untitled news report, Vermont Patriot, 27 May 1839, 3; untitled news report, Milwaukee Sentinel, 28 May 1839, 3. 34 Corey, Crisis, 120–9.

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35 G.F.G. Stanley, “William Johnston: Pirate or Patriot,” Historic Kingston, 6 Dec. 1957, 27. 36 Samuel Beardsley to W.L. Marcy, 23 Dec. 1837, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 59, M-179, reel 84. 37 On the political offence exception in Canadian law, see Miller, “‘Carnival of Crime.’” 38 John Spencer to Forsyth, 10 June 1839, NARA, RG 59, M-179, roll 89. 39 Colborne to Arthur, Montreal, 12 Feb. 1839, Arthur Papers, 2:43. 40 On this question in particular and U.S. policy towards extradition in the period generally, see Miller, “Emptying the Den of Thieves,” 44–62. 41 Arthur to Normanby, 27 July 1839, CO 42, vol. 461, reel B-357, 372–3. Capt. William Sandom to Sir John Colborne, 31 May 1839, AO, Canada Correspondence, 98. 42 Arthur to Normanby, 27 July 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 461, reel B-357, 372–3. 43 W.H. Griffin to R.A. Tucker, 14 May 1839, Canada Correspondence, 367. 44 Forsyth to H.S. Fox, 15 Nov. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:370. 45 Andrew Stevenson to Foreign Office, 26 Sept. 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 465, reel B-360, 158. 46 Forsyth to Fox, 15 November 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:371. 47 Ibid. 48 Quoted in Occelli, “‘Sinking’ the Caroline,” 476. 49 Arthur to Sir R.D. Jackson, 20 June 1841, Arthur Papers, 3:253; Arthur to Lord Sydenham, 25 Jan. 1841, Arthur Papers, 3:272. 50 Little, Loyalties in Conflict, 89–96. 51 Report of Edward Bowen, 21 June 1839, Canada Correspondence, 1012. 52 Report of Alexandre Comeau, 15 July 1842, AO, CO 42, vol. 494, reel B-377, 284–6. 53 Ibid., 292. 54 Colborne to Arthur, 12 Feb. 1839, Arthur Papers, 2:43. 55 R.B. Sullivan to Arthur, 21 Nov. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:388. 56 Arthur to Lord Fitzroy J.H. Somerset, 30 Oct. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:335–6. 57 Ibid., 335. 58 W.H. Griffin to R.A. Tucker, 14 May 1839, Canada Correspondence, 367. 59 Fox to Arthur, 10 Nov. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:362. 60 Fox to Aberdeen, 5 Dec. 1841, AO, CO 42, vol. 499, reel B-379, 273. 61 Fox to Head, 4 Jan. 1838, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, pt I, ser. C, vol. 1, (hereafter BDFA), 11. 62 Fox to Palmerston, 4 Dec. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:414. 63 Arthur to James Stephen, 23 Dec. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:477. 64 Arthur to Colborne, 2 Apr. 1839, Arthur Papers, 2:109; Arthur to Jackson, 16 Feb. 1841, Arthur Papers, 3:324.

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Hagerman to Arthur, Dec. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:448. MacNab to Henry Arcularius, 4 Jan. 1838, BDFA, 8. Head to Fox, 8 January 1838, ibid., 14. Resolution of the Legislative Council, 29 Jan. 1838, “Copies or Extracts of Despatches from Sir F.B. Head, Bart, K.C.H., on the Subject of Canada,” Parliamentary Papers, vol. 33, 1839, 519. On the burning of the Peel, see Stevens, Border Diplomacy, 36–8. Dodson to Palmerston, 12 Feb. 1841, Law Officers Opinions to the Foreign Office, 1793–1860, ed. Clive Parry (hereafter Law Officers Opinions) (Westmead: Gregg International Publishers, 1970), 4:112–13. Ibid., 4:111–12. Fox to Palmerston, 21 Jan. 1838, BDFA, 20. Head to Fox, 8 Jan. 1838, BDFA, 13–14. Arthur to Somerset, 30 Oct. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:336. Report of Select Committee of House of Assembly, “Copies or Extracts of Correspondence Relative to the Affairs of Canada,” Parliamentary Papers, vol. 32, 1839, 8–31. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 17, 16. Fox to Palmerston, 21 Jan. 1838, BDFA, 20. Head to Fox, 30 Jan. 1838, ibid., 21. Head to Fox, 8 Jan. 1838, ibid., 15. Head to Fox, 30 Jan. 1838, ibid., 22. Aberdeen to Lord Ashburton, 8 Feb. 1842, in Lord McNair, International Law Opinions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2:222. Dodson, Campbell, and Rolfe to Palmerston, 21 Feb. 1838, in ibid., 225–6. Ibid., 226. Ibid. Ibid. Fox to Arthur, 10 Nov. 1838, Arthur Papers, 1:362–3. Ibid., 1:363. Fox to Aaron Vail, 3 Nov. 1838, ibid., 1:344. Palmerston quoted in Stevenson to Foreign Office, 26 Sept. 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 465, reel B-360, 155. Ibid. William Sandom to Colborne, 31 May 1839, Canada Correspondence, 98. Colborne to Sandom, 7 June 1839, ibid., 99. Sandom to Colborne, 25 June 1839, ibid., 367. Forsyth to Fox, 23 Feb. 1838, and affidavits of Paul Perra and William and James Farr, 9 Jan. 1838, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States:

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Canadian Relations, Vol. 3, 1836–1848, ed. William R. Manning (Washington: Carnegie Endowment, 1943) (hereafter Diplomatic Correspondence 3), 45–6. Arthur to Lord Normanby, 27 July 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 461, reel B-356, 368–77, and attachments. See Kenneth R. Stevens, “James Grogan and the Crisis in CanadianAmerican Relations, 1837–1842,” Vermont History 50, no. 4 (1982): 219–26. For example, Stanimir A. Alexandrov, Self-Defense against the Use of Force in International Law (The Hague: Kluwer Law, 1996), 5-10; Stevens, Border Diplomacy, 25, 35, 103–4; Ian Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 16–17. The literature on Grotius is large. See Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds., Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), bk 3, chap. 20, s. 32. Ibid., bk 2, chap. 1, s. 5. Ibid., bk 2, chap. 1, s. 16. Ibid., bk 2, chap. 2, s. 10. Ibid. On Bynkershoek, see Kinji Akashi, Cornelius van Bynkershoek: His Contribution to the Development of International Law (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1998). Cornelius van Bynkershoek, Quaestionum Juris Publici Libri Duo, trans. Tenney Frank (rpr.; New York: Oceana Publications, 1930), bk 1, chap. 8, 54–9. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 56–8. Ibid., 58. See generally Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 137; Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 246; L.C. Green, The Contemporary Law of Armed Conflict, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 270–1; Ingrid Detter, The Law of War, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84; D.W. Bowett, Self-Defence in International Law (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 38–41, 82–6. See generally Susan Maidment, “Historical Aspects of the Doctrine of Hot

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114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

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Pursuit,” British Yearbook of International Law 46 (1972–3): 366–7; Glanville L. Williams, “The Juridical Basis of Hot Pursuit,” British Yearbook of International Law 20 (1939): 87–9. Bynkershoek, Quaestionum, 57. Drew to Allan MacNab, 30 Dec. 1837, BDFA, 5. Ibid. Statement of Robert McClure, 4 July 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 461, reel B-356, 384–7. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, ed. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), bk 2, chap. 4, s. 49. Ibid., bk 3, chap. 3, s. 26. Ibid., bk 2, chap. 4, s. 50. Ibid., bk 1, chap. 2, s. 16; bk 2, chap. 5, s. 65. Ibid., bk 2, chap. 5, ss. 66–7. Ibid., bk 3, chap. 7, s. 132. Ibid., bk 3, chap. 8, s. 134. See James Kent, Commentaries on American Law (New York: O. Halsted, 1826), 1:112. Ibid., 1:46. Ibid., 1:23. Ibid., 1:109–12. Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1836), 81. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 283–5. William Oke Manning, Commentaries on the Law of Nations (London: S. Sweet, 1839), 96. See ibid., 97. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 167. See ibid., 175. Ibid., 385. Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 5–6. See Green, International Court of Justice, 70–1. See Stevens, Border Diplomacy, 25. See, for examples, Robert J. Delahunty and John Yoo, “The ‘Bush Doctrine’: Can Preventive War Be Justified?,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 32, no. 3 (2009): 851; Green, “Docking the Caroline,” 440; Occelli, “‘Sinking’ the Caroline,” 481; Detter, Law of War, 84; Stevens, Border Diplomacy, 25–6.

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142 On the Florida campaigns, see John Missall and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 32–51; Vanessa Bergman Peters, The Florida Wars (Hamden: Archon Books, 1979), 47–59. 143 Quoted in Peters, Florida Wars, 55. See also Jackson to John C. Calhoun, 25 Mar. 1818, in John Bassett Moore, A Digest of International Law (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906), 2:403; Monroe’s second annual message, 16 Nov. 1818, in Moore, Digest, 404. 144 William Earl Weeks, “John Quincy Adams’s ‘Great Gun’ and the Rhetoric of American Empire,” Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (1990): 39. 145 Adams to Don Luis de Onis, 30 Nov. 1818, in Moore, Digest, 405. 146 John Quincy Adams to George W. Erving, 28 Nov. 1818, Congressional Serial Set, 28 Dec. 1818, vol. 20, no. 65, 19. 147 See Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York: Crofts, 1940), 172; Stevens, Border Diplomacy, 25–7. 148 See Richard G. Lowe, “American Seizure of Amelia Island,” Florida Historical Society Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1966): 18–30; Charles H. Bowman Jr, “Vicente Pazos and the Amelia Island Affair, 1817,” Florida Historical Society Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1975): 273–95; Jennifer L. Heckard, “The Crossroads of Empire: The 1817 Liberation and Occupation of Amelia Island, East Florida” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2006). 149 Adams to Jean-Guillaume Hyde De Neuville, 27 Jan. 1818, in Moore, Digest, 408. 150 Message of Monroe, 13 Jan. 1818, Congressional Serial Set, vol. 4, no. 1, 139. 151 Forsyth to Powhatan Ellis, 10 Dec. 1836, Moore, Digest, 420. See also Forsyth to Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza, 26 Apr. 1836, Moore, Digest, 419. 152 Forsyth to Powhatan Ellis, 10 December 1836, Moore, Digest, 421. 153 Report of Select Committee of House of Assembly, 8–31. 154 Ibid., 16. 155 Ibid., 17. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid. 158 Palmerston to Stevenson, 19 Sept. 1839, quoted in Stevenson to Foreign Office, 26 Sept. 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 465, reel B-360, 155. 159 Ibid., 156. 160 Stevenson to Foreign Office, 26 Sept. 1839, AO, CO 42, vol. 465, reel B-360, 156. 161 Dodson to Palmerston, 31 May 1841, Law Officers’ Opinions, 4:121–2.

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162 Ibid., 123–6. On the “right of hot pursuit,” see Bowett, Self-Defence, 38–41. 163 Stephen C. Neff, The Rights and Duties of Neutrals: A General History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 63–6. 164 See ibid., 65–6. 165 Ibid., 84. See also Mlada Bukovansky, “American Identity and Neutral Rights from Independence to the War of 1812,” International Organization 51, no. 2 (1997): 209–43; Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison: Madison House, 1993), 211–18. 166 Ibid., 45. 167 Ibid., 46. 168 See Thomas Munch-Petersen, Defying Napoleon: How Britain Bombarded Copenhagen and Seized the Danish Fleet in 1807 (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2007). 169 Brownlie, International Law, 310. 170 See generally Munch-Petersen, Defying Napoleon. See also A.N. Ryan, “The Causes of the British Attack upon Copenhagen in 1807,” English Historical Review 68, no. 266 (1953): 37–55; Carl J. Kulsrud, “The Seizure of the Danish Fleet, 1807,” American Journal of International Law 32 (1938): 280–311. 171 George Canning, 3 Feb. 1808, The Parliamentary Debates from 1803 to the Present Time (London: T.C. Hansard, 1812), 10:283. 172 King George III, 26 Jan. 1808, Parliamentary Debates, 10:115–18. 173 Stephen Rumbold Lushington, 3 Feb. 1808, Parliamentary Debates, 10:308. 174 Lord Wellesley, 8 Feb. 1808, Parliamentary Debates, 10:348. 175 Ibid., 349. 176 William Windham, 3 Feb. 1808, Parliamentary Debates, 10:290–1. 177 Ibid., 289. 178 Ibid., 305. 179 See generally Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 240; Green, “Docking the Caroline,” 440; Alexandrov, Self-Defense, 20; Stevens, Border Diplomacy, 25; Brownlie, International Law, 310. 180 Report of Jenner, 31 Oct. 1829, McNair, International Law Opinions, 2:231. 181 Dodson to Palmerston, Sept. 1836, Law Officers Opinions, 82:156–7. 182 Robinson to Lord Dudley and Ward, 19 May 1827, Law Officers Opinions, 81:19–21. 183 Jenner to Palmerston, 9 Apr. 1834, Law Officers Opinions, 38:30–2. 184 David Kennedy, “International Law and the Nineteenth Century: History of an Illusion,” Quinnipiac Law Review 17 (1997): 124–5.

5 Minority Groups and the Law in Quebec, 1760–1867 donal d f y s on

Introduction1 Despite the considerable attention paid to the issue of minority rights in present-day Quebec, especially around language and, more recently, the reasonable accommodation of minority cultural practices,2 Quebec legal historiography has generally not been very attentive to minority groups. Focused as they so often have been on the national question, and thus on the rights and legal status of the francophone majority, scholars of legal history, at least until recently, paid less attention to other groups with “minority” status, whether these be racialized, ethnocultural, religious, gender, sexual, or other.3 While the same can, of course, be said about Canadian legal history as a whole, the historiography of the law in Quebec has until recently been particularly thin in this regard. Thus, Constance Backhouse’s Petticoats and Prejudice dealt less with Quebec precisely because of a relative absence of scholarly writing on women and the law at the time it was written;4 and there is still no equivalent for Quebec: the broadest overviews of the subject remain the passages in the general syntheses of Quebec women’s history.5 Or again, while two excellent recent overviews of Blacks and the law in Canada contain almost nothing regarding the Black legal experience in Quebec,6 it is not, I suspect, because of any lack of interest for Quebec, but because there is almost no one writing on the subject. Finally, while there has been a dramatic increase in

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writing on the legal history of Natives in Quebec over the last two decades, the work remains fragmented, without an overall synthesis of the sort Sidney Harring has produced based largely on Upper Canada and Ontario.7 The legal history of Quebec and Lower Canada in the crucial century following the British Conquest of 1759/1760 is a case in point. Traditional legal historiography, from Benjamin-Antoine Testard de Montigny and Edmond Lareau through André Morel and beyond, put the emphasis firmly on the “conflict of laws” and the grand narrative of the struggle for the establishment of a distinct Canadien / French-Canadian legal order in Quebec.8 More recent work has shifted towards exploring the bijurality or even polyjurality of the law – the mixed system that arose, especially in civil law, from the amalgam of French and English laws and legal traditions, studied less as a problem in itself than as a fertile ground for examining issues such as the interplay of legal cultures and practices or mutual adaptation among the colony’s ethnocultural groups.9 Since the 1980s, the socio-economic and social class aspects of legal regulation in Quebec and Lower Canada have also come in for a good deal of attention, both in terms of the civil and the criminal law, with a particular emphasis on the changes that accompanied the mid-century growth of liberalism (variously defined) and the expansion of the state.10 In many of these discussions of the legal history of pre-Confederation Quebec, as in the legal system itself, the emphasis (and indeed, often the exclusive focus) has been on the legal treatment and legal experiences of the white, adult males, both francophones and anglophones, who made up the bulk of those who came before the courts and virtually all of those who composed the legal system. But what of those whose interaction with the law was shaped by the particular (supposedly) shared characteristics, innate or other, of groups to which they belonged, and which distinguished them from the legal “majority” – non-whites, other ethnic or religious groups, women, youth? To varying degrees, Quebec legal historiography of the last two or three decades has become increasingly sensitive to the experiences of what might be called “minority” groups, not only in a purely demographic sense, but also in the broader sociological sense of groups discriminated against on the basis of perceived shared characteristics and who to a greater or lesser extent had an explicit or implicit awareness of their minority status.11 It has become increasingly accepted that there is no grand narrative of Quebec legal history, and that the experience of the law was

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often dramatically shaped by an individual’s assigned and/or claimed membership in a particular minority group or groups.12 This chapter in no way attempts to provide a definitive or even partial synthesis of the legal history of minority groups in pre-Confederation, post-Conquest Quebec. Rather, my intent is to explore some key issues relating to their legal experience, based largely on existing historiography, and with some suggestions about avenues for further research illustrated with a few examples drawn largely from my own work on criminal justice. Given the constraints of both space and existing historiographical production,13 the chapter focuses on two minority groups that fit the classic definition: Natives and Blacks. Both were in the demographic minority in Quebec (as defined below) during the period covered here; both were clearly disadvantaged within the structures of social power in the colony; both had at least some sense of their collective existence as a disadvantaged minority. Even more fundamentally, both shared the characteristic of being racialized minorities.14 At the same time, each presented a different relationship to the legal system and each is differently addressed in legal historiography. This is also the case for two other minority groups I address more briefly, for the purposes of comparison: women and people of British origin. In their case, conceptualizing them as “minorities” is far less evident, hence the lesser emphasis I put on them in this chapter (although they could easily be the subject of full essays in their own right). The ultimate intent of my chapter is to encourage the beginnings of a comparison between the experiences of minority groups on both a historical and historiographical level, which has yet to be undertaken in Quebec legal historiography. With few exceptions, when the legal experience of minority and/or disadvantaged groups has been addressed, the focus has been only on that group, in comparison with the corresponding majority, as in Natives in contrast to Europeans, Blacks in contrast to whites, women in contrast to men, and indeed, francophones in contrast to anglophones.15 A final word on the geographical bounds of the discussion. The boundaries of the colony usually known as the Province of Quebec and its successor entities (Lower Canada, Province of Canada / Canada East) shifted radically over the period, from the rough quadrangle limited to the lower Saint Lawrence valley as established in 1763, to the vast bounds of Quebec in 1774 covering the Great Lakes basin, to the south of present-day Quebec from 1791. Rather than following these administrative changes, I have chosen to concentrate on the area that from

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1791 would become Lower Canada and then Canada East, though for simplicity I use the term Quebec throughout. Essentially, this consisted of the Saint Lawrence valley and surrounding territory from the Montreal region east. This was an area largely dominated by a long-established, French-descended white settler society, but with a minority presence of Native groups – notably the so-called domiciliés living in their own villages within the European zone of settlement, such as Lorette (Wendake) or Sault-Saint-Louis (Kahnawake) – and an increasing presence of British-descended settlers. My discussion thus excludes the western areas that, after 1763, were first Indian Territory, then the western part of Quebec, and finally became part of Upper Canada / Canada West and of the United States.16 Natives Like Native history in general, legal history concerning Natives17 in Quebec has seen an explosion of production over the last couple of decades. In the early 1990s, virtually nothing had been written on the subject; now, in contrast, the legal historian is confronted with a plethora of studies. This historiographical outpouring is, however, unevenly distributed. Much, if not most, has been the product of research carried out in the context of contemporary legal confrontations over sovereignty, treaty rights, land claims, disputes over resource ownership, use, and management, and the like.18 Indeed, this observation applies to research into Quebec Native history of the period as a whole, which is often driven by such contemporary cases. The potential biases fostered by such an engagement with current litigation have been underlined by more than one Quebec scholar, though as they point out, this does not necessarily preclude the research from being valid.19 More generally, the result has also been that the aspects of Quebec Native legal history that have been most thoroughly researched are those that relate to current legal concerns, leaving other areas less well covered. Consider the key approaches to Indigenous legal history identified by Sidney Harring. He first suggests that it involves three distinct sets of inquiry: Native law itself, the interaction between Native and European legal orders (both Native reception of European law and European reception of Native law), and the imposition of European law on Native populations (which he describes as a “miserable legal history of oppression, violence, and domination”). He then identifies two major areas of modern concern where historical analysis is of particular

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relevance: Native sovereignty and Native land rights.20 If we consider this as something of a programmatic statement for Native legal history, how does the historiography of pre-Confederation Quebec stand up? With ongoing Native sovereignty and land claims litigation in Quebec, there has naturally been a great deal produced on subjects such as whether the British Crown regarded Natives in post-Conquest Quebec as subjects or as allies and whether it recognized their internal sovereignty and their title to land.21 Indeed, the aspects of the 1763 Royal Proclamation that relate to Aboriginal issues are currently far more studied than its impact on other populations, such as the Canadiens.22 Although tending to be addressed more from a political than a legal perspective, the issue of the early treaties signed by the British at the very beginning of their rule has also been explored in great detail and with great controversy, notably over whether these constituted treaties or not.23 There have also been a number of detailed studies of specific historical land claims and resource-use disputes in pre-Confederation Quebec, again often grounded in current disputes.24 As a result, the constitutional aspects of Native legal history in post-Conquest Quebec have been thoroughly and at times acrimoniously debated. Within these discussions are embedded elements of Harring’s second and third lines of inquiry, concerning the interaction between Native and European legal orders (although only from the perspective of Native reception of European law) and the progressive but imperfect imposition of European conceptions of sovereignty and land title. Most studies also show that Aboriginal communities were acutely aware of the dangers of this contact with the European legal order and took active steps to minimize them and protect their own legal culture. Finally, in broader terms, much of this literature situates the Aboriginal legal experience within a broad, imperial perspective, in which the boundaries of Quebec as such are of lesser import (and indeed, Quebec sometimes takes a secondary position).25 Given the frequent litigation over the extent to which Native peoples in Quebec are subject to federal and provincial penal and regulatory law, it is not surprising that much detailed research has concerned these same two intertwined themes of interaction and imposition as seen through the courts. Here again, the most thorough studies have been carried out in the context of current litigation. Hence, Denys Delâge and Étienne Gilbert’s detailed though flawed study of Native interactions with the European legal system between 1760 and 1820, which concentrates largely on criminal justice, is based essentially on

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a compilation of court documents involving Natives assembled for R. v. Antoine Gros-Louis.26 Similarly, Helen Stone’s published article on the same subject is a summary of a broader unpublished study carried out for the Huron-Wendat council of Wendake in the context of Gabriel Sioui v. Sous-Ministre du Revenu du Québec.27 Both studies came to conclusions that had already long been advanced for Upper Canada and for Canada more generally:28 initially, Natives were not usually seen as subject to European law; the British continued pre-Conquest French practice of legal pluralism through distinct legal treatment for European settlers and for Natives, even those established within the colony’s European zone of settlement; and Natives continued to be extremely reticent to have recourse to European courts, especially in matters between themselves.29 This began to change only from the late eighteenth century, and even then only very gradually: Delâge and Gilbert argue strongly for the persistence of legal pluralism throughout the period they study, though they do note the beginnings of the subjection of Natives to the British legal regime. However, both studies end in 1820, before the fundamental shifts in colonial Indian policy from the 1830s began to accelerate the changes in the relationship between Natives and the courts. For the crucial period 1820–67, during which the civilizing project came into full swing, while treaty rights and land claims have been relatively well-explored, there is only scattered information on the interaction between Natives and European law in Quebec. Mark Walters establishes a strong theoretical ground for the continuity of Aboriginal customary law throughout the British colonial period; the evident corollary is that Natives were not subject to European law, or at least not to the same extent as European settlers, a situation that persisted through to the 1820s and beyond.30 But Walters does not delve in any great detail into the actual relations between Natives and European law in Quebec. Similarly, Sidney Harring’s exploration of Natives and the law in mid-nineteenthcentury Quebec rests on a small number of well-known and generally reported or published cases and disputes, such as Connolly v. Woolrich (1867) or Commissioner of Indian Lands for Lower Canada v. Payant dit St Onge and Payant dit St Onge v. On8anoron (1856), as well as the conflicts at Kahnesatake, while Michel Morin’s analysis is equally brief.31 There are also more focused studies, such as Darcy Ingram’s examination of Native reactions to provincial game laws.32 But the sort of detailed analysis of the everyday interaction between Natives and the courts, that has been done for the period up to 1820, still awaits its historian.

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There is, of course, plenty of material to work with. In a very preliminary examination of the prison registers and some of the lower court records of Quebec City for 1820–70, I have been able to identify a little under a hundred prisoners who appear to be Natives and a little over a hundred cases apparently involving Natives.33 Interestingly, there appears to be no particular trend in the number of prisoners and cases over time, which one might expect if Aboriginal communities were progressively being brought under the control of European criminal justice. But confirmation of such an analysis awaits further study. Certainly, by the early 1850s at least, it was quite possible for one Native to be convicted for the murder of his son-in-law, in a case that turned on the testimony of the accused man’s daughter, wife of the victim.34 The law and the legal system, of course, stretched well beyond the courts; but until very recently there has been little on Native interaction with elements of the European legal system other than the courts, such as the notarial system. This may explain why an otherwise perceptive analyst of Aboriginal law such as Harring can affirm without qualification that “while French civil law was recognized under the British regime, it was not significant in matters of Indian law,”35 thus denying that the distinctiveness of Quebec’s legal system had any impact on relations between Natives and European law. Thomas Peace’s recent thesis comparing the Huron-Wendat of Wendake and the Mi’kmaq of Acadia / Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century shows what such an analysis can bring. In his work on the Huron-Wendat, Peace argues that it is necessary to go beyond Native dealings in the courts to examine how Natives interacted with European civil law more generally, especially on issues of land. He suggests that rather than separate and parallel legal systems for Aboriginal communities and for Europeans, the Huron-Wendat operated in a plural system that began under the French regime and continued after the Conquest and into the nineteenth century. For example, they used French notaries and surveyors for some of their land transactions, notably those concerning land outside of their village, where customary land law largely continued to apply; or again, they paid seigneurial dues on land they held outside the village, but not within it. In sum, “colonial law applied to land within seigneuries. A hybrid system operated within the village. And an Aboriginal system based on broader alliances and connections governed their hunting territory.” And at this level, both before and after the Conquest, the colonial law in question was French.36

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Similarly, Daniel Rueck’s recent thesis on the evolution of land-use conceptions and customary property law of the Mohawk of Kahnawake shows how these changed across the period through contact with European laws and practices and also across fundamental transformations in European law itself, such as the abolition of the seigneurial system (again a very distinctive element of Quebec civil law).37 Like other authors, Rueck emphasizes conflict over the issue of Aboriginal customary law and European justice, to a much greater extent than does Peace for Wendake. Rueck thus underscores the frequent struggles between traditionalists bent on preserving Mohawk customary law and modernizing assimilationists such as the Mohawk trader Thomas Arakwenté, involved in many of the early cases where Kahnawake residents came before the Montreal courts.38 More fundamentally, Rueck’s work opens new perspectives, since he is one of the very few Quebec scholars to have adopted the first type of approach to Indigenous legal history identified by Harring, that is, the study of Aboriginal customary law itself and more particularly its transformation by or resistance to European law. Certainly, in establishing that imperial law and imperial policy generally recognized the continuity of Aboriginal legal customs that were not explicitly abolished by colonial law, Mark Walters noted a number of instances in nineteenth-century Lower Canada where not only did Native groups assert their right to internal sovereignty over their customary law in matters such as land tenure, but this state of affairs was recognized by the Indian Affairs officials with whom they were dealing.39 However, he did not examine these customs themselves in detail. While there have been a number of attempts to reconstruct customary Aboriginal law and justice in Quebec, they have usually sought to peel back later influences in order to arrive at a “pure,” pre-contact, or at least timeless legal tradition, either from an auto-historical perspective, or in the context of current plans to set up alternative justice systems for First Nations communities.40 In part this may be a side effect of the judicial doctrine reflected in R. v. Van der Peet, where Aboriginal customary law can be acknowledged if it can be shown to have existed prior to initial contact with Europeans, a view that, as Walters has shown, adopts a very narrow view of what constitutes Aboriginal law.41 As Jeremy Webber suggests for an earlier period, it can be fruitful to conceptualize Aboriginal law and Aboriginal rights as the evolving product of inter-communal contacts, sometimes leading to the development of inter-communal norms based on pragmatic adaptation.42

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While the notion of true inter-communal normativity is perhaps more difficult to apply to Quebec in the period under discussion here, given the vast imbalances in power and demography between Natives and European settlers, Rueck’s work nevertheless illustrates how Native customary law can be addressed other than from the timeless, static perspective. Just as Walters did for the Credit River Mississauga,43 Rueck analyses a written code drawn up by Kahnawake chiefs in 1801, not simply as a political document destined to maintain Aboriginal sovereignty in the face of the activities of modernizers such as Arakwenté, but also as Aboriginal law in itself, to be understood both as reflecting traditional customs and as demonstrating an active adaptation to new realities, such as the increasing scarcity of land and the rise of individual acquisitiveness. Both he and Alain Beaulieu also analyse the manner in which Native customary conceptions of who should be defined as an “Indian” shifted in the face of developments such as intermarriages and European squatting on Native lands, notably with the expulsion from the community of Native women who married non-Natives; this in turn became enshrined in colonial and Canadian law.44 Overall, the Native legal history of pre-Confederation Quebec is alive and well, and perhaps even reaching a stage of maturity where it is no longer driven largely by current litigation, though this fruitful stream will no doubt continue. Paradoxically, though, one characteristic of much of this material is a relative lack of attention to the fact that Natives were a minority and an increasingly racialized one at that. As we have seen, much of the research effort has been directed at showing that Natives in the post-Conquest period maintained their sovereignty, their status as allies, and their juridical independence, and that the colonial administration and the colonial courts, at least until the 1820s, accepted this. However, this has meant that less attention has been paid to very real examples of the European desire to impose their judicial standards on Natives, and the early development of what can be termed racist attitudes of judicial personnel. In essence, Harring’s “miserable legal history of oppression, violence, and domination” is difficult to reconcile with a history of Aboriginal legal sovereignty and colonial legal pluralism, and so seems to have taken a back seat.45 While there is no longer any doubt that the legal history of Natives in post-Conquest Quebec cannot be read only from the perspective of European domination, it is also clear that such domination very clearly did exist, and not only from the 1830s onwards.

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Take one example drawn from my own research: capital punishment. As in all ancien régime societies, this was the ultimate expression of the judicial power of the colonial state in Quebec. Executions were carried out in very public places to ensure high visibility and were very well-attended.46 In the eighteenth century, they were also among the few local judicial events reported by the colony’s fledgling press. Despite the frequent and unquestionable instances of Native immunity from European judicial proceedings, even in serious cases such as homicide, similar to the situation elsewhere in British North America,47 during the early years of British civil rule in Quebec, between 1764 and 1791, there were at least three executions of Natives for murdering Europeans. This has been presented as very few, but in fact, in the same period, there were some thirty-five non-military executions in all; given the small proportion of Natives among the population of the eastern part of the colony, it can hardly be said that they were particularly exempted from this most extreme aspect of European judicial vengeance.48 Indeed, the first such execution, of Valentine, a “Panis Indian” at Montreal in 1768, for the murder of soldiers Joseph Schlosser and Edward Jost near Lachine, quite significantly appears to have been only the second execution in the colony under civil government, and the first at Montreal. Here, the colonial state was very publicly asserting its ultimate jurisdiction over at least this Native and, as it would in other contexts of the imposition of its sovereignty, stating clearly its intent to protect its own.49 The case (like almost all capital cases in the colony) was prosecuted by the attorney general, Francis Maseres; and the sentence showed in a particularly gruesome way that no attention was paid to Aboriginal customs, since following the Murder Act 1752 Valentine was hanged and then anatomized.50 Valentine may have been a special case: since he was described as a Panis, he was perhaps a slave or at least a former slave. As Brett Rushforth shows, under the French regime, freed slaves were seen as a destabilizing influence and elicited little sympathy from other Native groups, who regarded them with disdain. Rushforth uses the execution of a Panis woman at Detroit in 1763 to illustrate how British officials alienated local Native groups, not by executing the woman but rather by failing to make the difference between free and enslaved Natives, and thereby helped set off Pontiac’s rebellion.51 Did the colonial officials who executed Valentine at Montreal make the same mistake, assuming they were setting an example for all Natives by executing a Panis? Or rather, were they sufficiently attuned to the difference be-

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tween Panis and free Natives that they felt they could make a more general example of Valentine without alienating their Native allies? Whatever the answer, the case underscores how historians also need to be attuned to the different relationships that different Aboriginal groups had with European law.52 But as well, it highlights another gap in the historiography: the legal history of Native slavery following the Conquest, in the same vein as what Rushforth has produced for the French regime.53 Can we reconcile the status of Native slaves with the view of Natives’ independence from European law and justice? What happened to Native slaves after the early nineteenth-century de facto emancipation of all slaves in Lower Canada? If slavery was accepted in Aboriginal custom, as it seems to have been, was this affected by the actions of the Montreal courts? All of these questions deserve answers. Executions and post-Conquest Native slavery underscore European oppression of Natives, and in the latter case, the frankly racist world views that allowed for the institution of slavery to continue in British Quebec. But visions of the inferiority of the Aboriginal legal order that run contrary to the overall notion of British respect for separate Aboriginal justice can also be seen in the Lower Canadian judiciary well before the 1820s. Thus, in 1801, John Lees, a Lachine justice of the peace, wrote to Montreal’s clerk of the peace enclosing depositions and recognizances in a case where Pierre Tehasitaere of Sault-Saint-Louis accused Thomas Awessassion of violent assault. In his letter, Lees declared, “I suppose it is the first instance of an Indian prosecuting another in a judicial manner for a beating; however I think it full time that the gentry should be brought under the civil law and encourage it as much as I can.”54 Lees was not just any country justice: he was also a lessor of the Domaine du Roi (which involved the fur trade), storekeeper general to the Indian Department at Lachine, an active member of the English party in the House of Assembly, and, from 1794, a member of the colony’s Executive Council.55 Whatever his views represent (for example, whether he meant “gentry” in an ironic or insulting fashion), they do not suggest much openness to legal pluralism. Another example concerns the views of Jonathan Sewell, long-time attorney general and then chief justice of Lower Canada. In a case discussed at length by Hamar Foster and Mark Walters,56 Sewell presided in 1818 over two trials, R. v. De Reinhard and R. v. M’Lellan, that concerned the murder of Hudson’s Bay Company trader Owen Keveney in the Indian Territories east of Winnipeg, during the company’s violent conflict with the North-Westers. After a lengthy judicial saga, the

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defendants were eventually tried in Quebec City, under the provisions of the 1803 Canada Jurisdiction Act, which extended the jurisdiction of the Lower Canadian criminal courts to the Indian Territories. During the first trial, defence counsel argued in arrest of judgment that British legislative authority did not apply in the Indian Territories, to which Sewell replied that the 1803 act affirmed that the territories in question were “Indian territory within British jurisdiction, and subject to British legislation, and assumes all persons there being, to be bound to that power, whether aliens or subjects.”57 There has been debate over whether Sewell meant by this that the act extended British law to Natives in the Indian Territories, and thus affirmed the supremacy of British law over Aboriginal groups, with Foster arguing that he did not. Regardless of the interpretation of Sewell’s ambiguous pronouncement (which was, at any rate, superseded by later court interpretations that more clearly imply that the act did not extend to Natives), it must also be placed within the context of the disdain Sewell expressed for Natives earlier in the proceedings. At one point, he declared in regard to the reported declarations of Natives who had found the body of the murdered man that “upon the vague testimony of a parcel of wandering Savages, it is hardly worth while to have an altercation about general repute, for what can it possibly amount to? what dependence can be placed upon testimony so extremely loose, that I consider it would really be a waste of time to us all to attempt to go into it?”58 Further, during the second trial, Sewell seems to have expressed no surprise at the indictment at a previous stage of the proceedings of a Sioux, Neganabines, as an accessory.59 Just like Lees, it is hard to see in Sewell’s positions much sympathy for the notion of Aboriginal sovereignty or the immunity of Natives to colonial criminal law. His views thus differed significantly from the later and much-cited decision of Samuel Cornwallis Monk in Connolly v. Woolrich, heralded as an (unfortunately unheeded) call to recognize Aboriginal legal custom.60 None of these examples in any way invalidate the more general arguments as to the continuity of Aboriginal sovereignty and Aboriginal customary law, as they have been more recently applied by Canadian courts. But they do underscore the need to look further at the extent to which the European legal system in Quebec adopted a racist stance towards Natives that came before it. Descriptions of Natives such as Sewell’s 1818 “parcel of wandering Savages,” while arguably not overtly racist, nevertheless had affinities with later incontestably racist descriptions of Native defendants in newspapers. Consider this extract

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from the Montreal Herald, describing a scene in the city’s Recorder’s Court in 1869: “The court made some allusion to ‘Lou the poor Indian’ when Louis Thom, a representative of the once powerful Iraquois, stepped into the dock proudly and defiantly. He said ‘him had taken some fire water given him by a paleface – had smoked the peace pipe with him and had gone to sleep, but woke in a box from which he could not get out.’ The Recorder expressed a fear that he might go and ‘take a hair of the dog that bit him,’ but eventually discharged him telling him to go to his wigwam to his squaw, and papoose.”61 The disdainful reference to Thom’s “squaw” also reminds us of the gendered aspects of Native legal history in Quebec, which have been very little examined, apart from in a few specific instances such as Connolly v. Woolrich or with regards to the redefinition of Native legal identities. Overall, by looking back at the progressive racialization of Natives by the justice system in pre-Confederation Quebec, it may be possible to address more explicitly the interplay between Aboriginal judicial sovereignty and European racialized domination. Blacks The history of the relationship between Blacks and the law in pre-Confederation Quebec provides a useful counterpoint to that of Natives. At first glance, the two historiographies are radically different. Perhaps most evidently, Black legal history in Quebec is currently much like that of Natives two or three decades ago: very sparse, and with few scholars actively engaged in it. Hence, the only significant recent published treatments are, on the one hand, the excellent work of Frank Mackey on Blacks in Montreal between 1760 and 1840, which is especially strong on the abolition of slavery and delves as well into the treatment of Blacks by Montreal’s criminal courts, and my own brief treatment of Blacks before the everyday criminal justice system, where I make the point that their presence was extremely marginal.62 Blacks are occasionally mentioned in other more focused studies of criminal justice, but as Mackey points out, the Black experience in Montreal (and even more so in Quebec as a whole) has been so ill-understood that even such an apparently momentous occasion as the 1800 decision in R. v. Robin alias Robert that purportedly declared that slavery did not apply in Lower Canada is often both misdated (as 1803) and attributed to the wrong chief justice (William Osgoode rather than James Monk).63

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One relatively evident explanation is the vast difference in the legal status of Blacks and Natives. Blacks had no legal claims on land or sovereignty, and as such there is no major wave of current litigation to drive research into their legal history. Further, unlike Natives, or women for that matter, there is no evidence that either in law or in colonial policy there was any formal recognition of difference between Blacks as Blacks and other British subjects, except if they were so unfortunate as to be slaves, which removes another fruitful line of legal inquiry. Still, given the significant work on Blacks and the law elsewhere in British North America, the lacunae in Quebec historiography are striking. Consider the issue of the abolition of slavery. Until 2010, the standard studies remained the account at the end of Marcel Trudel’s pioneering 1960 study of slavery in New France and the few pages in Robin Winks’s overview of Blacks in Canada, originally published in 1971. In terms of the legal context, neither went much beyond W.R. Riddell’s 1920 work on the same subject.64 Frank Mackey has now corrected and supplemented much of this, emphasizing (as did Riddell and Trudel) that while slavery may not have been abolished de jure in the British Empire until 1834, it was abolished de facto in Quebec from about 1800, despite there never being any positive law on the subject (unlike Upper Canada). Mackey is no doubt right, with suggestions that slavery as such continued into the nineteenth century being so far unproved.65 But from the perspective of legal history, much remains to be done. There is nothing at all comparable to, say, the recent pieces by Lyndsay Campbell and Bradley Miller on slavery and the law in Upper Canada,66 or the extensive work on England that nuances the extent to which the 1780 Mansfield decision in Somerset actually led to the abolition of slavery in England.67 It might be useful to adopt a similar comparative critical legal perspective on slavery in Quebec. Two brief examples drawn from the historical record may illustrate the possibilities of such an approach. First, consider the frequent affirmation that Monk’s 1800 decision in R. v. Robin alias Robert freed the slaves in Lower Canada on the basis of the 1797 English statute prohibiting the seizure of slaves for the debts of their masters.68 A close reading of the remaining contemporary evidence in the case (which was an application for habeas corpus for Robin, a slave who had escaped from his master, James Fraser, only to be recaptured and imprisoned) suggests that this affirmation is doubtful. Instead, what it reveals is the existence of a trans-colonial and even trans-national practice where judges refrained from pronouncing directly on the legality of slavery

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and instead sought to render slave-holding as difficult as possible via less direct judicial means. In the Monk case, the record itself, as was usual, gives no reason for the judgment. The only evidence of the reasoning behind the judgment (attributed to the court as a whole and not specifically to Monk) comes from the petition of slave-owners to the House of Assembly in April 1800, which addressed the judgment. In the passage most often quoted, the petitioners asserted that “it was stated in the course of the judgment of the Court that the Act of the 37th of His present Majesty, C. 199 had repealed all the laws respecting slavery.”69 But this was not the only legal grounding of the decision. In a previous passage in the same petition, it is stated that Robin was “discharged by the Court of King’s Bench, under an opinion that the property was not sufficiently proved by Mr Fraser. The petitioners tho’ they entertain a high opinion for the authority of that Honorable Court, cannot but remark that the evidence produced on that occasion was, in their apprehension, the best which it was possible in any case to produce, and that the Court in desiring more, have asked what it would be impossible almost ever to obtain, and in this manner have divested all the owners of slaves of any property in them.” This manner of proceeding to free slaves by requiring almost impossible proof of ownership at habeas corpus hearings was not Monk’s invention. Exactly this technique being used in Nova Scotia, where it had been employed since the 1790s. The idea was not to attack the institution of slavery directly,70 but rather to make the ownership of a slave virtually impossible to prove, in what has been called a “neo-Somerset precedent.”71 Monk had already employed a similarly roundabout approach in 1798, when he freed two slaves on the doubtful grounds that the common gaols of the province were not houses of correction, and he may have used the ownership issue in other cases.72 He also had strong ties to Nova Scotia and was in correspondence with his family there, and thus would very likely have been aware of the manner of proceeding in that colony’s courts.73 There was no need for him to go to the judicially radical extent of declaring all laws regarding slavery repealed by the 1797 act; instead, while this grounds may well have been mentioned during the judgment, it is more than likely that the slave-owners seized on it as if the court had ruled that slavery was in fact legally abolished, which it may not have, since it didn’t need to. This existence of a transcolonial approach to the legal issues surrounding slavery needs further exploration, especially since it seems to have spread beyond the British possessions in North America: in 1804, the Vermont Supreme Court ap-

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parently adopted precisely the same approach in a slave manumission case, with one judge, Theophilus Harrington, declaring (in a famously repeated anecdote) that the slave-owner would have to produce a chain of ownership going back to God himself.74 The second example also concerns a slave case with trans-colonial implications. In 1816 in Quebec City, James Drummond, a Jamaican slave-owner, complained against one Robert, a “man of colour,” for desertion of service and for carrying off clothes and bedding worth twenty-five pounds. In his deposition before John Fletcher, one of Quebec City’s salaried police magistrates, Drummond affirmed that Robert “is a servant of the Deponent’s engaged in Jamaica for the purpose of serving the Deponent during his absence from Jamaica and of returning with him thither as such and that when in Jamaica he is a slave the property of the Deponent, and has been such for about five years” (my emphasis).75 Unlike Monk, Fletcher was quite evidently willing to do whatever he could to assist Drummond in retaining Robert Doubridge (for such was his full name) in his service. Doubridge had already been arrested when Drummond made out his deposition, which was unusual at the time, though not illegal.76 The text in italics in the quotation above was inserted after the deposition had initially been written, and suggests that legal advice was tendered to Drummond that he should clearly state that Doubridge had agreed to return to Jamaica with him. Doubridge was never formally committed to gaol (as his name does not turn up in the gaol register), but he seems to have been kept in custody overnight: the next day, he entered into articles of agreement with Drummond, agreeing to serve as his body servant until Drummond left Lower Canada, or be subject to all the penalties “for breaking a former verbal agreement & other charges preferred ag. him” (in other words, both the desertion and the theft, the latter of which was potentially a capital offence). Unusually, the articles of agreement were witnessed by Fletcher and by the city’s other salaried police magistrate, Alexis Caron. The approach adopted by Fletcher, Caron, and Drummond is an excellent illustration of the legal complexities of dealing with an empire where slavery was legal in some colonies but not in others (whether de facto or de jure), and how even in parts of the empire where slaves had been “freed,” as in Lower Canada, slavery could still play a role in shaping the lives of Blacks. As Norma Landau has shown, it was common practice in England to force visiting slaves (technically free under the Mansfield ruling) to continue to serve their masters by signing ar-

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ticles of agreement. Furthermore, English doctrine was that a slave who was freed by arriving in England would become a slave again once returned to a colony where slavery was legal.77 This was precisely the tack taken in this case, more than likely on Fletcher’s advice: he had spent the early years of his career as a lawyer in London and was no doubt well aware of the English practice in this regard.78 Since Doubridge had to remain in Drummond’s service until they left Lower Canada for Jamaica, it in effect meant that although he was technically free, the justice system could be used to ensure that he did not escape. Here thus were two important actors in Quebec City’s penal justice system, both of whom later became higher court judges,79 very definitely coming down on the side of a slave-owner, and helping him maintain his Black slave in a state of bondage, using a well-known trans-colonial legal stratagem. Like Monk’s decision in Robin, the case suggests that, just as for Natives, the relationship between Blacks and the law could stretch beyond the judicial bounds of Quebec itself and cannot be understood without reference to the broader imperial context. The two cases do, however, raise another issue: that of Black agency. Blacks, like Natives, were very rarely before the justice system, but this was not, Mackey argues, because they rejected the legitimacy of white law.80 Instead, Mackey, and I as well, see Montreal Blacks actively seeking out the justice system in instances where they were wronged, not always receiving satisfaction, but trying nevertheless. Here the contrast with Natives is more striking: as Mackey puts it pithily (although with perhaps insufficient nuance with regards to Natives), “Indians wanted out: blacks wanted in. While aboriginals clung collectively to their deeply rooted identities as separate peoples or nations, the blacks, cut off from their roots, desired nothing more than to be seen as fullfledged British subjects, to blend in and to avail themselves of the opportunities, services and institutions, rights and privileges that integration seemed to promise.”81 At the same time, there are significant examples of Blacks acting collectively in defence of their own before white law, as in the Betsey Freeman case discussed by both Mackey and myself, where in 1836 Montreal Blacks came together to try to free Freeman, who was accompanying her American mistress on a trip to Montreal and who they believed was in fact a slave.82 Just like Natives, the engagement of Blacks with the law was as much active as passive, although their goals were quite different. A great deal can thus be gleaned about the relationship between racialized minorities and the law from the Black legal experience in Que-

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bec. Take once again the issue of racism. One fundamental debate that remains unresolved is the extent to which the pre-Confederation Canadian legal system embodied racism against Blacks, as it most evidently did in a later period,83 and also, it has been argued, under the French regime.84 In her recent work on Upper Canada, Lyndsay Campbell has suggested instead that the system was formally colour-blind, though at the same time evidently aware of the race of those who came or were brought before it. She also postulates a change in this that accompanied the rise of scientific racism in the mid-nineteenth century.85 Did Quebec follow the same trends? Mackey argues that Blacks faced no particular racial discrimination in the criminal courts in Montreal before 1840.86 Gary Collison has also suggested that the courts in mid-nineteenthcentury Montreal were sensitive to complaints of racism before them, in much the same fashion that Lyndsay Campbell has argued that in Upper Canada, courts tried to ensure that their proceedings were free of overt racism.87 It is also clear that race was not an overriding preoccupation of the justice system. As one example, consider the annual arrest and crime statistics that began being produced in Quebec City and Montreal from the mid-1840s. These analyses always included figures on women, and by the 1860s, also analysed arrestees by occupation. However, Blacks and Natives were indicated in only one or two years of the annual arrest reports of Montreal’s police, and this categorization was apparently soon dropped; and it was never included in the analyses of prisoners provided by the sheriffs from the 1860s onwards.88 But it is equally clear that the justice system was not race-blind. As Mackey notes, Blacks were apparently excluded from occupying any judicial function whatsoever, including serving on juries. This was in contrast to Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, where there were Black jurors in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.89 On another level, consider the deposition of a Montreal watchman, Antoine Charbonneau, in 1819, that “il aurait trouvé sous la halle du nouveau marché de cette ville, une femme de couleur, dont il ne connait pas le nom, qui s’est nommé Ann Taylor (au bureau de Police), couchée sur un banc après forniquer avec un soldat, que le déposant l’aurait arretée, fait prisonniere, et conduite au Guet comme étant une prostituée et une femme de mauvaise vie.”90 The emphasis in the original targeted Taylor’s perceived race, not her gender, though ultimately the latter was integrated into the charge against her; overall, both her race and her gender contributed to her marginalization. Advancing further into the nineteenth century, it is hard to avoid the impression of ambient racism when one reads the

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following descriptions of Police Court cases from the Quebec Mercury in 1851: [May 10] A KNIGHT “ERRANT” OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY … One of the prisoners was a black, who said he came from St Helena via the Rocky Mountains, and had walked to Quebec from Bytown! The name he gave was “The Knight of Knights otherwise the Black Knight,” by which it appears, his owner at some distant epoch, had qualified him. He had been, it seemed, a great traveller, but the adventures he sought were more in the way of broken victuals and the chance contributions of the charitable, than those deeds of “derring do” which so heroic a name might naturally be supposed to indicate. In fact, the Police knowing him for a sturdy beggar, he was committed for a month with hard labour. [June 10] ITERUM, ITERUMQUE – The Knight of Knights otherwise the Black Knight, a negro, formerly committed, and said to be acquainted with no less than 35 languages, savage and civilised, (though unable to read or write) was again brought up to-day, and having manifestly “sinned against” the Police Ordinance, was sentenced to 20s. fine, or 15 days imprisonment. Not paying he was locked up.91

The mocking of the fifty-four-year-old Black defendant’s former slave name (and the not-so-subtle evocation of his former status); the direct link made between him, savagery, and sin; the denigration of his transcultural abilities; along with the inclusion, in relation to another case reported in the same article, of a racist ditty: “A FROLIC. ‘I wish I were in Mobile Bay / ‘Screwing cotton all the day. / [Nigger Melody]’”; all underscore the racist bent of the reporter, who might well have been a lawyer or law student.92 Whether this sort of discourse influenced the views of the judges themselves is harder to determine (in Upper Canada, Campbell argues that it did not), but as in the case of Natives, it is hard to imagine that it did not shape public perceptions of the relationship between Blacks and the law. That the judicial system was not colour-blind even in an earlier period can also be illustrated by the role of Blacks as executioners. As we saw, the execution of criminals was the ultimate state sanction and up until the 1860s was a very public affair. The executioner embodied the judicial violence of the state, as practised on the bodies of those who had too greatly, or too often, infringed upon the social order and were thus excluded from the far more usual practice of according the royal mercy to those condemned for capital crimes.93 As Frank Mackey

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first observed, a number of Quebec’s executioners in this period were Black;94 indeed, from my initial examination of what evidence remains of the identity of executioners, it appears that in perhaps half of those executions carried out in Quebec between 1760 and 1869 where we can identify the executioner, he was Black; and among the four most active executioners, three were Black.95 As well as hangings, executioners were also responsible for public corporal punishment such as whipping and putting in the stocks, along with the branding in the hand that generally accompanied the granting of benefit of the clergy, all of which were common up until the mid-1830s.96 Almost all of those who were executed, flogged, or put in the pillory were white,97 so that the public could not help but associate Blacks with state violence against whites, the more so since executioners up to the 1830s at least were often well-known public figures.98 Unlike in the United States, where executioners were often local figures drafted temporarily into the role, or France, where the function of executioner was shunned but respected and passed down through the generations, or England, where they were drawn largely from the majority population (though certainly marginalized),99 the sheriffs who organized executions in Quebec chose men who were already on the margins of society, in part because of their race and their very small numbers. Indeed, the popular association between Blackness and capital punishment may have gone beyond the simple passive recognition of the fact. When hangings began again in Quebec in the early 1850s, after a fifteen-year hiatus following the hanging of the twelve Patriotes in Montreal in 1838–9, it seems to have become the practice for executioners (apparently now mainly whites) to blacken their faces and their hands when carrying out their duties. Was this simply an attempt to hide their identity (which they also accomplished by devices such as hooded cloaks), or rather, a harkening back to the Black executioners of earlier times? The journalist who, when describing the 1864 execution of John Meehan in Quebec City, declared that “these ‘finishers of the law,’ in their long black gowns, with cowls concealing their faces, and even their hands blackened so as not to spoil the sombre unity of the dark ensemble by any contrast of white, looked like some spectres of ill-omen waiting for the spoils of the dead,”100 may perhaps have been referring to darkness rather than to race. But not so Le Pays in its description of the 1858 double hanging of Marie-Anne Crispin (the first woman to be executed in Quebec since 1792) and Jean-Baptiste Desforges: the paper declared baldly, though perhaps without foundation, “Un nègre avait servi de bourreau,” and

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further affirmed that he had volunteered in order to get out of a twomonth jail term for vagrancy.101 As Campbell suggests for Upper Canada, it seems clear that racialization was central to the Black experience of law and justice in preConfederation Quebec, even if Mackey is right that, at least through the 1830s, they did not face overt racial discrimination when they came before the courts. And in this sense, the Black legal experience in Quebec can also usefully be linked to that of Natives, despite the many differences between the two. For instance, an analysis of the changing descriptions of both Black and Aboriginal defendants in Quebec’s criminal courts would cast further light on the shifting contours of judicial racism. “Lou the poor Indian” and the Black Knight both embodied potent racial stereotypes (the lazy Indian, the savage Negro) that could not but shape the way white judges, white lawyers, and white juries treated these minorities. Indeed, in the same article that described the case of Louis Thom, the writer described “Alexandre Najar, almost as black as a nigger,” along with “Louis Fortin, a fat Frenchman,” thus skilfully mixing racial and ethnic stereotypes in a way that made only white English-speakers the norm.102 Extending the “Minority” Approach? Women and the British Thus far I have concentrated on two minority groups that were, on the one hand, clearly minorities by any definition of the term and, on the other hand, linked by their being racialized. What might an explicit emphasis on the “minority” status of other social groups bring to the understanding of the relationship between society and the law in preConfederation Quebec? Two brief examples will serve to illustrate. The first group is women. A initial issue is whether it is useful to consider women as a minority at all. This has been the position of some feminist writers since the 1950s and continues to be suggested today. In this view, women, while not a statistical minority, nevertheless fit the classic sociological definition, since they are (or have been) socially disadvantaged and discriminated against on the basis of inherent characteristics (their sex) and to some extent have been conscious of this. This position has, however, been strongly criticized by other feminist writers, such as Gerda Lerner, who argued that “all efforts to treat women as a sub-group – minority, caste, class – are doomed to failure” and that “women are a category unto themselves.”103 In turn, other feminist scholarship has long emphasized the extent to which even the category

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of “women” is cut across by multiple identities and categories, including race, class, and marital status.104 Acknowledging all of these caveats, with regards to the judicial system in Quebec and Lower Canada, it is possible to argue that women were a minority both statistically and sociologically, just like Blacks and Natives. Statistically, women were essentially absent from the ranks of judicial personnel; they were a minority among those who appeared before the courts, whether as plaintiffs, as accused, or as witnesses; and within the system, they were very definitely discriminated against on the basis of their sex, both in the civil law and, to a lesser extent, the criminal.105 As the work of Bettina Bradbury, Brian Young, and others shows, legal relations involving Quebec women extended far beyond the justice system, into realms such as family and property relations, and in these, it is certainly harder to consider women as a “minority,” at least in the demographic sense. At the same time, I would argue that conceptualizing women as a minority in their relationship with the justice system can be a useful heuristic device. Just as the law in pre-Confederation Quebec made little room for Natives or Blacks within its ranks, it was also one of the colony’s most heavily gendered professional sectors. Medicine had its midwives; education its nuns and lay female schoolteachers; commerce, its female sole traders; the seigneurial system, its seigneuresses; even the political system, its woman voters. But there were no female judges, magistrates, lawyers, notaries, court clerks, or police; and women were excluded from lay positions with decisional powers, such as regular juries and even the family councils that decided on issues such as guardianship.106 When women came before the colony’s courts, whether as plaintiffs, defendants, or witnesses, they thus faced what Constance Backhouse has aptly termed the “irrefutably male legal system.” While the maledominated and patriarchal nature of this system is regularly evoked in the historiography and is used to explain the grave problems faced by women seeking justice in particular types of cases, there has been no concerted attempt to theorize what this meant to Quebec women overall, in the way that Backhouse has done for Canadian women as a whole.107 Did women’s view of the law differ from that of men, since they came before it only as outsiders and as a minority? Despite complete male domination of the system, was there any attempt to create distinctly female spaces within the law? One example from my own research that can illustrate the possibilities of such an approach concerns the one significant exception to

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the absence of women from the personnel of the justice system: the prison.108 Throughout the period under consideration here, women were regularly committed to Quebec’s gaols, and when they passed through the institutions’ doors, there was a good chance that among the prison staff who ensured their incarceration there would be at least one woman. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when prisons and prison populations were small, this was most likely the gaoler’s wife or daughter.109 With the expansion of imprisonment from the late 1820s, there was also a specially hired matron, at least in the two largest prisons, Quebec City and Montreal. Prisons were also increasingly gendered institutions. Even in the eighteenth century, when Quebec prisons were in recycled buildings, such as the former Jesuit convent in Montreal or the old Royal Redoubt and the Artillery Barracks in Quebec City, prison officials practised rudimentary segregation between men and women, keeping them in separate cells. In the new prisons opened in Quebec City and Montreal in the early 1810s, there were separate wards set aside for women. And in Quebec City at least, from 1829, female prisoners were kept in an entirely separate building within the gaol compound, physically separated from male prisoners and guarded by the matron and a male turnkey, most often her husband. Coupled with the rapid rise from the late 1820s in the imprisonment of women for summarily tried public order and morality-related offences such as prostitution and vagrancy,110 this created an increasingly separate sphere of carceral punishment for women. As such, when what is often erroneously termed the “first” female prison in Quebec opened in Montreal in 1876, under the guardianship of a female religious order,111 it was in fact more the continuation of a transformation that had its roots in an earlier period. Leaving aside the question of whether female prisoners were treated more or less harshly than their male counterparts, it is clear that prison authorities considered women to be a type of prisoner quite different from men, and saw them in many ways as more pliable and less dangerous. Thus, when the building in the Quebec City gaol compound was being considered as a female prison in the late 1820s, one of the arguments for its use exclusively as a female prison rather than as a house of correction housing both men and women was that its stone walls, which gave directly onto the street, were too weak to hold men, but were fine for women. Indeed, while many men attempted escape from the Quebec City gaol, and quite a few succeeded, women do not seem to have had the same impulse, with only one escaping. This is partly ex-

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plained by the fact that some of the women in the gaol were there semivoluntarily, since they used it as a place of refuge, especially during the harsh winter months; but among women sentenced for more serious crimes such as theft or assault, there were also virtually no escape attempts. Does this suggest a more passive attitude of female prisoners? Not necessarily. Some female prisoners did engage in the violent, individual resistance against prison officials that characterized the attitude of many male prisoners. But there are also many examples of non-violent resistance by female prisoners, often organized collectively. Thus, they mounted petitions and complaints against the matrons and their husbands, and they also regularly protested against matters such as the poor quality of the gruel served them, in one instance by collectively refusing to eat their soup, which prison officials characterized as the “soup movement.” This characterization hints at the development of a particular female culture of solidarity around imprisonment, which merits further exploration, as does the broader question of female legal culture in an environment of male domination of the legal system. A second group that can help illustrate the value of approaching the law from a minority perspective is the British, taken in the broad sense of those born in the British Isles or of British descent.112 Here, the use of the term minority may surprise, since up until recently, those of British descent, generally termed “anglophones,” were often viewed within Quebec as part of a pan-Canadian majority, and francophone Quebecers as part of a French-Canadian minority.113 Further, turning back to the definition of minority adopted in this chapter, while the British in post-Conquest Quebec were definitely a demographic minority and certainly had a sense of self-awareness of such (though also of their being split into multiple identities, both ethnic and religious), it is much harder to argue that as a group they were disadvantaged with regards to the law. For most of the period, British, Protestant officials occupied a dominant position in important facets of the legal system, such as among the higher court judges and the law officers of the Crown.114 Criminal and constitutional law in the colony, of English inspiration though with significant local adaptations, was evidently no more alien to the British than it was to the Canadien population. True, the Quebec Act had consecrated the primacy of French civil law, over the objections of an important part of the British community, but with the significant and progressive integration of important elements of English common law that has been so often pointed out by commentators: freedom of willing, common law rules of evidence, imprisonment for debt, land

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grants in free and common soccage, English commercial law, juries in civil cases, registry offices, and so on.115 The judicial system itself was based largely on English models, whether one considers the judiciary, the court structure, the bar, or the police;116 only the notarial system remained closer to French than to English models.117 This, of course, has been the basis of much traditional nationalist legal historiography in Quebec,118 and indeed, of all the other minority groups discussed thus far, none were treated in any way remotely similar to this “minority.” And yet, precisely because the British minority was so very fragmented along internal ethnic, religious, class, and gender lines, this dominating narrative of a dominant and privileged minority is far too simplistic. It is clear that a minority among the British benefited from a privileged relationship with the law and the justice system, and despite their often strident denunciations of French civil law and civil justice in particular, they adapted quite well to it, even in the immediate postConquest period.119 At the same time, a significant swath of the criminal justice system clearly targeted British far more than Canadiens – not, of course, the elite British who complained bitterly about the civil law, but instead, the mass of the British population who did not belong to that elite group. Hence, Jean-Marie Fecteau’s analysis of those accused of serious offences such as murder or theft in the district of Quebec in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries showed that the British were very disproportionately represented, generally making up 60 per cent or more of those accused in the 1770s and 1780s, and 50–60 per cent from the 1790s to the 1830s, when the British population was at best 20 per cent in the nineteenth century and less than 5 per cent in the eighteenth.120 The observation also holds true if we look at more serious forms of punishment. In the Quebec City common gaol from 1813 to 1870, and the Montreal common gaol from 1836 to 1870, 74 and 68 per cent of the prisoners respectively were apparently of British descent (based on their names); even if we take into account the fact that the Quebec City gaol served also to discipline a transient and transatlantic population of mainly British seamen, and remove these from the calculations, the proportion still remains at about two-thirds. At this time, Montreal’s population was between 50 and 60 per cent of British origin and Quebec City’s, never more than 40 per cent.121 The overrepresentation of those of British descent is also apparent if we examine that most extreme form of judicial repression, executions. Overall, from 1760 through to 1870, I have thus far identified about 130 people who were executed in Quebec for civilian offences. Of those, just under

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half were of British origin, when the British were very much a minority of the colony’s population.122 The disproportion was greatest in the eighteenth century, when the British population was much smaller, but even in the 1850s and 1860s, about 40 per cent of those executed were British when they made up at most a quarter of the population. What to make of this? Fecteau contented himself with noting that “tout se passe comme si la justice du roi s’abattait surtout sur ses anciens sujets, se réservant la faculté, par moments, de faire des exemples parmi les nouveaux sujets francophones.”123 In my own work on everyday criminal justice, my focus was on demonstrating that this disparity was less striking when it came to less serious offences.124 In both cases, however, the focus was really on the relation of francophones to the justice system, Fecteau arguing for its marginality, while I argued for their greater presence. But the equally important fact, which neither of us dwelt on, was that the harshest weight of the criminal justice system came down on the British. Not all of the British, of course: those before the bench of the higher criminal courts, in the prisons, and on the scaffold were disproportionately popular-class and male (though as we saw, women also had a significant presence in the gaols). Further, it appears that these “British” were also disproportionately Irish. While the link between criminal justice and the Irish remains to be explored in any great detail,125 it is significant that of all prisoners in the Quebec City and Montreal gaols in the 1850s and 1860s, half or more were either born in Ireland or apparently of Irish descent, of whom 80 per cent or so in both gaols were Irish Catholics. And there are hints at the sort of racialization of the Irish that others have postulated:126 when the Mercury’s court reporter in 1851 cited the “Nigger Melody” “I wish I were in Mobile Bay / Screwing cotton all the day,” he was making the transition from the story of yet another Black defendant (accused of using threats to solicit food), to the case of Irish-born Patrick Sullivan, who was said to have been loudly singing that ditty while drunk in the street. Still, the fact that British of descent other than Irish (mainly English and Scots) were also over-represented in the prison populations compared to Canadiens (though not at all to the same extent as the Irish) should guard us from considering only the Irish when examining the evident ethnic slant of the criminal justice system.127 Overall, had this over-representation concerned another minority group such as Blacks or Natives, or indeed for Canadiens, the charge of discrimination would have been readily and justifiably made. But instead, this fairly fundamentally discriminatory characteristic of the

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criminal justice system is rarely mentioned and remains to be explored and explained. In the eighteenth century, colonial authorities may have wanted to avoid alienating the Canadien population, since they did not have the means to rule by force. As well, poor British immigrants were less linked to broader networks of family and community support, and thus more likely to marginalized and criminalized.128 Further, targeting the Irish in particular was part of a broader pattern of discrimination against them in Britain and the empire.129 But instead, what has been most emphasized when considering the relationship between anglophones and the legal system in Quebec is the “majority” actions of the minority within the minority. Conclusion What then to retain from this brief and largely historiographical examination of the relationship between “minority” groups and the law in pre-Confederation, post-Conquest Quebec? While both the historiographical and historical treatment of the minority groups I focus on has varied widely, there are, nevertheless, some common threads that justify taking a more comparative perspective towards the legal history of minority groups in Quebec in this period. One is the existence of “minority” spaces within the law and the justice system, where minorities became majorities, for better or for worse: the separate or plural justice systems of Native groups; legal institutions such as slavery; particular legal professions such as executioners or matrons; or prisons, which were both Irish and female. Further exploring these spaces and their ramifications might allow us to deconstruct the image of a unified and unitary legal and judicial system, while at the same time recognizing the dominance of white, male legal culture and thus avoiding falling into what Mariana Valverde characterizes as the “intellectual dead end” of so over-playing the agency of oppressed groups that it leads history to a form of naive humanism.130 All four groups experienced significant shifts in their relationship with the law across the period: for example, the progressive loss of Native judicial sovereignty and their unequal integration into the European legal order (while at the same time their partial exclusion from it was being prepared, under the tutelage of the various Indian Acts); the decline and disappearance of Black slavery and (in person if not in memory) of the Black executioner; the rise of what Bettina Bradbury has called “a more liberal patriarchy” in regards to women’s property

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rights,131 along with the increasing penalization of female public order offences; and the initial contraction (after 1774) and then gradual extension of English norms within Quebec civil law, at the same time as the creation and expansion of a disproportionately criminalized group among the British minority (the urban Irish). In one conception, many of the basic transformations of Canadian society and Canadian institutions in the nineteenth century can be linked to the rise of the “liberal order,” as initially conceptualized by Ian Mckay and subsequently developed by a number of scholars.132 Changes in the legal experience of minorities in Quebec might thus be linked to the transition to a more liberal conception of law, property, and politics. However, while this undoubted transformation does have considerable explanatory value, it is insufficient to explain many of the processes I have discussed in this chapter. Linking the abolition of slavery in Montreal in 1800 to the later rise of liberal modernity in Canada is a bit of a stretch, unless one pushes that rise back by a half a century; and while mid-century modifications in the legal status of Natives can be more clearly linked to the broader Canadian liberal revolution, their roots also lay much deeper in the past. This was equally true of the rise of summary justice and of the prison as a disciplinary tool, both of which profoundly affected the legal experiences of popular-class women and British, and both of which, I have argued, were initially the products of the late stages of the ancien régime in Canada and the considerable capacity for adaptation of the ancien-régime state.133 Any explanations must thus be more multifaceted and linked to more specific changes in the social context. Indeed, another common thread that comes out of this examination is the issue of Quebec specificity. Many of the changes in the legal experience of minority groups in Quebec followed broader trends elsewhere in British North America, in North America as a whole, and in the Western world. But there were also local circumstances and contexts that played a fundamental role in shaping those relationships. The abolition of slavery, for example, followed a course in Quebec different from that in Upper Canada, being more judicially than legislatively driven. The specificities of the civil law system were also crucial, whether for Native landholding practices or for women and property. And in eastern British North America, by the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, the British were a majority everywhere except in Quebec (although the Irish were not). Minority legal history in Quebec cannot thus be written simply as a subset or exemplar of broader British North American or transatlantic trends.

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Perhaps the most evident specificity of Quebec was its majority Canadien, Catholic population. Although I have dealt extensively with Canadiens and the law elsewhere, including the question of anti-Catholic discriminatory measures,134 in this chapter I have deliberately avoided addressing the relationship between Canadiens and the law as shaped by minority status. Canadiens were never in the demographic minority within Quebec, and although they were definitely so within the British Empire, within British North America and at the end of the period, within the Province of Canada, the territorial bound of the legal system they dealt with was Quebec, Lower Canada, and Canada East. Further, despite their underrepresentation in some parts of the judicial system through to the mid-nineteenth century (notably among the higher court judges and the Crown law officers), unlike Natives, Blacks, and women, after the 1775 removal of Catholic disabilities they were in no way excluded from participating in the system and were indeed wellrepresented among magistrates, notaries, lawyers, jury members, court clerks, and so on.135 However, like women, Canadiens were arguably in a “minority” position insofar as they did not hold their fair share of economic, political, bureaucratic, or even judicial power, though this shifted considerably over the period. It might be interesting to explore more explicitly what could be seen as a shift from “minority” to “majority” status with regards to the law, a century before that same shift is usually thought to have happened more generally.136 One issue that I have evoked but explored less is differences within minority groups that shaped their relationship with the law. I have tried to show this with the British, but the same could be said for Natives, as the discussion of Valentine the Panis suggests. Thus, Alain Beaulieu and others have argued that there was a significant difference in the legal status and experience of the domiciliés living in settlements within the European zone of settlement and Native groups established further to the north and east.137 Similarly, the way Natives interacted with the civil law and with European property practices seems to have differed quite markedly between the Huron-Wendat of Wendake and the Iroquois of Kahnawake.138 As for women, Bettina Bradbury has pointed out that the impact of apparently momentous changes in the civil law, such as the progressive abolition of customary dower, varied enormously according to other distinctions such as social class: “For the propertyless, especially the emerging working classes, dower offered little. It was not the Registry Ordinance but migration, economic change, dispossession, and proletarianization that took away wid-

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ows’ dower rights.”139 Further, each minority group was evidently cut across by others, with, for example, Native men and Native women, or Black men and Black women, no doubt not having the same legal experience because of their gender. All of this is absolutely true. But I would still argue, and hope to have shown, that being Native, or Black, or a woman, or British (or Irish) was in itself a significant influence on how people related to the law in post-Conquest, pre-Confederation Quebec, and on how the law treated them.

NOTES 1 My thanks to Blaine Baker, Alain Beaulieu, Bettina Bradbury, Jim Phillips, Brian Gettler, Philip Girard, Jean-Philippe Jobin, Dan Rueck, and Brian Young for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Parts of the original research presented were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et culture. 2 Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building for the Future: A Time for Reconciliation – Report (Quebec: Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accomodement reliées aux différences culturelles, 2008). 3 For example, the early overview of Quebec legal historiography by Vincent Masciotra, “Quebec Legal Historiography, 1760–1900,” McGill Law Journal 32, no. 3 (1987): 712–32, does not deal with Natives or other racialized minorities (slavery is treated as a form of labour) and dedicates only a very brief final section to women and the law. Murray Greenwood’s “Lower Canada (Quebec): Transformation of Civil Law, from Higher Morality to Autonomous Will, 1774–1866,” Manitoba Law Journal 23, nos 1–2 (1996): 132–82, is similarly mute on Natives, though with a much greater emphasis on women. Blaine Baker’s “Quebec and the Canadas, 1760 to 1867: A Legal Historiography,” in this volume, provides an excellent overview of more recent production. 4 Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in NineteenthCentury Canada (Toronto: Osgoode Society and Women’s Press, 1991), 5. 5 The two relevant syntheses are Collectif Clio, L’histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles (Montreal: Le Jour, 1992); and more recently, Denyse Baillargeon, Brève histoire des femmes au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2012), in which law and state is one of six themes that structure the narrative (12). Their continuing importance can be illustrated by the fact that Bettina Bradbury’s discussion of dower rights in Wife to Widow: Lives,

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Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), is explicitly constructed in contrast to an interpretation advanced by the Collectif Clio (Wife to Widow, 121n4) which is in part repeated by Baillargeon (Brève histoire des femmes, 61–4). 6 Barrington Walker, ed., The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2012); Tony Freyer and Lyndsay Campbell, eds., Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands in the Age of Emancipation (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2011). In the former, the material on Quebec is limited to a few paragraphs in the introduction (13–14); in the latter, Quebec is essentially not discussed at all. 7 Sidney L. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 1998). The closest equivalent would be Michel Morin, L’usurpation de la souveraineté autochtone: le cas des peuples de la Nouvelle-France et des colonies anglaises de l’Amérique du Nord (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), whose focus is sovereignty rather than law. The French regime is better served, with Andrée Lajoie, Jean-Maurice Brisson, Sylvio Normand, and Alain Bissonnette, Le statut juridique des peuples autochtones au Québec et le pluralisme (Montreal: Éditions Yvon Blais, 1996). 8 Older nationalist legal history classics that followed this approach include B.A. Testard de Montigny, Histoire du droit canadien (Montreal: E. Senécal, 1869); Gonzalve Doutre and Edmond Lareau, Le droit civil canadien suivant l’ordre établi par les codes, précédé d’une histoire générale du droit canadien (Montreal: A. Doutre, 1872); Edmond Lareau, Histoire du droit canadien depuis les origines de la colonie jusqu’a nos jours (Montreal: A. Periard, 1888–9); and Rodolphe Lemieux, Les origines du droit franco-canadien (Montreal: C. Théoret, 1900). A similar emphasis, though not from a nationalist perspective, was evident in the two early major English-language studies of law in eighteenth-century Quebec: S. Morley Scott, “Chapters in the History of the Law of Quebec, 1764–1775” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1933); and Hilda M. Neatby, The Administration of Justice under the Quebec Act (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1933). The conflict of laws approach was even more evident in the more recent neo-nationalist work by André Morel, such as “La réaction des Canadiens devant l’administration de la justice de 1764 à 1774: une forme de résistance passive,” Revue du Barreau 20, no. 2 (1960): 55–63; Morel, “Un exemple de contact entre deux systèmes juridiques: le droit successoral du Québec,” Annales de l’Université de Poitiers, 2nd ser. 4–5 (1963–4): 19–32; or Morel, “La réception du droit criminel anglais au Québec (1760–1892),” Revue juridique Thémis

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10

11

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13, nos 2–3 (1978): 449–541. The same overall perspective is found in JeanMaurice Brisson, La formation d’un droit mixte: l’évolution de la procédure civile de 1774 à 1867 (Montreal: Thémis, 1986); Douglas Hay, “The Meanings of the Criminal Law in Quebec, 1764–1774,” in Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada, ed. Louis A. Knafla, 77–110 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981); and Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: le débat du droit privé au Québec, 1760–1840 (LaSalle: Hurtubise HMH, 1994). Examples include the work of John Brierley, David Howes, Blaine Baker, Brian Young, Jean-Philippe Garneau, Michel Morin, David Gilles, Arnaud Decroix, and myself, cited in Baker, “Quebec and the Canadas,” in this volume. For example, the work of Brian Young on seigneurialism, notably In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816– 76 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986); or of Jean-Marie Fecteau on criminal law and criminal justice, such as La liberté du pauvre: sur la régulation du crime et de la pauvreté au XIXe siècle québécois (Montreal: VLB, 2004). For an overview of the relevant literature on law and state formation, see Donald Fyson, “Between the Ancien Régime and Liberal Modernity: Law, Justice and State Formation in Colonial Quebec, 1760–1867,” History Compass (forthcoming). The definition of minority group adopted here is necessarily simplified. For an overview of the extensive debates on the definition of minorities in the sociological literature, see Anthony Gary Dworkin and Rosalind J. Dworkin, eds., The Minority Report: An Introduction to Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Relations, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Barce College Publishers, 1999). On changing legal definitions of “national” minorities, see Gaetano Pentassuglia, Minorities in International Law: An Introductory Study (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2002), 55–75; and Janne E. Nijman, “Minorities and Majorities,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For recent examples, see the articles by Michel Morin, “Le pluralisme religieux et juridique en matière d’état civil et de mariage, 1774–1921,” and Jean-Philippe Garneau, “Gérer la différence dans le Québec britannique: l’exemple de la langue (1760–1840),” in L’État canadien et la diversité culturelle et religieuse, 1800–1914, ed. Lorraine Derocher, Claude Gélinas, Sébastien Lebel-Grenier, and Pierre C. Noël, 3–20 and 21–48 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2009). It would have been interesting to address the relationship between other

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minority groups and the law, such as Jews or homosexuals, but on those, the literature is too sketchy. There is no satisfying treatment of homosexuality and the law in Quebec in the period considered here, as Patrice Corriveau’s path-breaking study, Judging Homosexuals: A History of Gay Persecution in Quebec and France (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), is unfortunately unreliable for the period. Nor has there been any significant analysis of the relationship between Jews and the justice system, despite considerable discussion of their political rights in works such as Sheldon J. Godfrey and Judith C. Godfrey, Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1995); and some scattered discussion of legal issues in works such as Denis Vaugeois, Les premiers Juifs d’Amérique, 1760–1860: l’extraordinaire histoire de la famille Hart (Quebec: Septentrion, 2011); or Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2006), 75 and 221. Similar considerations prevent much detailed discussion of the relationship of other religious minorities to the law. 14 I follow Constance Backhouse’s insistence that it is possible to talk about racism and racialization in regards to past legal systems, and I would argue even at a period before the rise of Victorian scientific racism, as long as one understands that it is used as a heuristic category rather than as an affirmation of the explicit existence of the concept: Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 5–8. 15 There are basic elements of a broader comparison in my own work: Magistrates, Police, and People, for example at 295–308. 16 A truly comparative study of minorities and the law covering both halves of the Canadas would be useful, and indeed the current collection seeks to foster such comparisons, but it has yet to be undertaken. Hence, apparently pan-Canadian studies such as Harring, White Man’s Law, or Mark D. Walters, “The Continuity of Aboriginal Customs and Government under British Imperial Constitutional Law as Applied in Colonial Canada, 1760– 1860” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1995), in fact concentrate explicitly on the area that became Upper Canada, even in the period when this was incorporated in the Province of Quebec. Harring’s explanation is that “Canadian Indian law was Ontarian, the product of Ontario judges” and that “Quebec law was not often cited in Ontario” (165–6), to which one might add his position that Quebec Native law was essentially no different from that in Ontario (166–76, 184).

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17 In this text, following much of the historiography, I use the terms Native and Aboriginal interchangeably. 18 For a discussion, see Jean-François Lozier, “History, Historiography, and the Courts: The St Lawrence Mission Villages and the Fall of New France,” in Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory, ed. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, 111–35 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 19 Alain Beaulieu, “Les pièges de la judiciarisation de l’histoire autochtone,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 53, no. 4 (2000): 541–51; Beaulieu, “Une histoire instrumentalisée: réflexions sur l’usage du passé dans les revendications autochtones,” Conférences des juristes de l’État, XVIIIe conférence: Vert, le droit? (Cowansville, QC: Éditions Yvon Blais, 2009), 349–71; Michel Morin, “Les insuffisances d’une analyse purement historique des droits des peuples autochtones,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 57, no. 2 (2003): 237–54. See also Arthur J. Ray, “Native History on Trial: Confessions of an Expert Witness,” Canadian Historical Review 84, no. 2 (2003): 253–73, and more generally, Ray, Telling It to the Judge: Taking Native History to Court (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). 20 Harring, White Man’s Law, 9–10. 21 The most notable studies relevant to pre-Confederation Quebec are Brian Slattery, “The Land Rights of Indigenous Canadian Peoples” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1979); Slattery, “Understanding Aboriginal Rights,” Canadian Bar Review 66, no. 4 (1987): 727–83; Walters, “Continuity of Aboriginal Customs”; the studies republished in Denis Vaugeois, ed., Les Hurons de Lorette (Sillery: Septentrion, 1996); Morin, L’usurpation de la souveraineté autochtone, 131–17; Alain Beaulieu, La question des terres autochtones au Québec 1760–1860: Rapport préparé pour le Ministère de la Justice et le Ministère des Ressources naturelles du Québec (Varennes, 2002); Beaulieu, “‘An equitable right to be compensated’: The Dispossession of the Aboriginal Peoples of Quebec and the Emergence of a New Legal Rationale (1760–1860),” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 1 (2013): 1–27; and Beaulieu, “The Acquisition of Aboriginal Land in Canada: The Genealogy of an Ambivalent System (1600–1867),” in Empire by Treaty: The History of Treaty-Making in the Appropriation of Indigenous Lands, ed. Saliha Belmessous (London: Oxford University Press) (forthcoming). My thanks to Alain Beaulieu for sharing the latter two pieces with me prior to their publication. 22 Along with the studies cited in the previous note (and notably Slattery, “Land Rights of Indigenous Canadian Peoples,” 191–349), examples include Jacqueline Beaulieu, Christiane Cantin, and Maurice Ratelle, “La

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Proclamation royale de 1763: le droit refait l’histoire,” Revue du Barreau 49, no. 3 (1989): 317–43; L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1993), 99–124; David Schulze, “The Privy Council Decision concerning George Allsopp’s Petition, 1767: An Imperial Precedent on the Application of the Royal Proclamation to the Old Province of Quebec,” Canadian Native Law Reporter 2 (1995): 1–46; Andrée Lajoie, “Synthèse introductive,” in Lajoie, Brisson, Normand, and Bissonnette, Le statut juridique des peuples autochtones, 43–57; John Borrows, “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government,” in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada, ed. Michael Asch, 155–72 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997); Matthias R.J. Leonardy, First Nations Criminal Jurisdiction in Canada: The Aboriginal Right to Peacemaking under Public International and Canadian Constitutional Law (Saskatoon: Native Law Centre, University of Saskatchewan, 1998), 7-9, 119–23, 156–7; Denys Delâge and Jean-Pierre Sawaya, Les traités des Sept-Feux avec les Britanniques: droits et pièges d’un héritage colonial au Québec (Sillery: Septentrion, 2001), 99–106; and J.R. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 66–75. Many of these deal more with the status of Aboriginal groups in the Indian Territories and in Upper Canada than in Quebec, as defined in this chapter. 23 Most notably, the long-standing controversy over whether or not the document signed by James Murray in 1760 in favour of the Huron-Wendat constituted a treaty or a simple pass: Denis Vaugeois, La fin des alliances franco-indiennes: enquête sur un sauf-conduit de 1760 devenu un traité en 1990 (Montreal: Boréal, 1995); Vaugeois, Les Hurons de Lorette; David Schulze, “Recension de Denis Vaugeois, La fin des alliances franco-indiennes: Enquête sur un sauf-conduit de 1760 devenu un traité en 1990,” McGill Law Journal 42, no. 4 (1997): 1045–53; Nelson-Martin Dawson and Éric Tremblay, “La preuve historique dans le cadre des procès relatifs au droit autochtone et aux crimes contre l’humanité,” Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke 30, no. 2 (2000): 390–7; Michel Morin, “Quelques réflexions sur le rôle de l’histoire dans la détermination des droits ancestraux et issus de traités,” Revue juridique Thémis 34, no. 2 (2000): 349–55; Alain Beaulieu, “Les Hurons et la Conquête: un nouvel éclairage sur le ‘Traité Murray,’” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 30, no. 3 (2000): 53–63; Delâge and Sawaya, Les traités des Sept-Feux, 55–61; Morin, “Les insuffisances,” 240–4; Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant, 74–5. Delâge and Sawaya also cover other less-studied early treaties, as does Alain Beaulieu, “Les garanties d’un traité disparu: le traité d’Oswegatchie, 30 août 1760,” Revue juridique Thémis 34, no. 2 (2000): 369–408.

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24 Examples include Claude Pariseau, “Les troubles de 1860–1880 à Oka: choc de deux cultures” (MA thesis, McGill University, 1974); Gilles Boileau, Le silence des Messieurs: Oka, terre indienne (Montreal: Éditions du Méridien, 1991); Arnaud Decroix, “Le conflit juridique entre les Jésuites et les Iroquois au sujet de la seigneurie du Sault Saint-Louis: analyse de la décision de Thomas Gage (1762),” Revue juridique Thémis 41, no. 1 (2007): 279–97; Karol Pepin, “Les Iroquois et les terres du Sault-Saint-Louis: étude d’une revendication territoriale (1760–1850)” (MA thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2007); Michel Lavoie, C’est ma seigneurie que je réclame: La lutte des Hurons de Lorette pour la seigneurie de Sillery, 1650-–1900 (Montreal: Boréal, 2010); and Lavoie, Le Domaine du roi, 1652–1859: souveraineté, contrôle, mainmise, propriété, possession, exploitation (Quebec: Septentrion, 2010), which began life as a research report prepared for the Quebec government in a case opposing it to Métis accused of illegally occupying Crown land, Quebec (Attorney General) v. Corneau. 25 This is most clearly the case in studies by anglophone authors, such as Slattery, Walters, or Harring. 26 Denys Delâge and Étienne Gilbert, “La justice coloniale britannique et les Amérindiens au Québec 1760–1820. I – En terres amérindiennes,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 22, no. 1 (2002): 63–82 ; “II – En territoire colonial,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 22, no. 2 (2002): 107–17. As Michel Morin has pointed out (“Les insuffisances,” 239), the authors’ lack of understanding of the historical legal context leads them into a number of errors, some more serious than others. Perhaps the most telling is their confusion over the use of the word police in witnesses’ descriptions of the functions of the village chiefs of St-Regis in 1819, which they take to mean “law enforcement,” when in the context of the witnesses’ statements (“veiller à la police du village”) it clearly bears the older sense of “local administration” (“En terres amérindiennes,” 76–7). Given that this example is a cornerstone of their broader argument as to the judicial autonomy of domiciled Natives in Quebec, the error is a significant one. At the same time, other sources more clearly demonstrate their point: only a year later, one of the same witnesses, the missionary Joseph Marcoux, affirmed in another context that the Sault-Saint-Louis village chiefs did not want a justice of the peace to be named for their village, since “ils pouvaient s’en passer ayant eux meme l’autorité de regler les petits differens”: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’archives de Montréal (henceforth BAnQ-M), P3999, 1971-00-000/13167, no. 66. 27 Helen Stone, “Les Indiens et le système judiciaire criminel de la Province de Québec: les politiques de l’administration sous le régime britannique,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 30, no. 3 (2000): 65–78. The full report

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prepared for the Huron-Wendat Nation of Wendake (December 1996) is reproduced in the factum of Sioui v. Sous-Ministre du Revenu du Québec, vol. 2, p. 281–324. In her article, Stone gives a different, later date for her final report, but there is no trace of it in the archives of the Huron-Wendat Nation at Wendake. My thanks to Stéphane Picard for his assistance in this matter. 28 Brendan O’Brien, Speedy Justice: The Tragic Last Voyage of His Majesty’s Vessel Speedy (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1992), 29–67; Mark D. Walters, “The Extension of Colonial Criminal Jurisdiction over the Aboriginal Peoples of Upper Canada: Reconsidering the Shawanakiskie Case (1822–26),” University of Toronto Law Journal 46, no. 2 (1996): 273–310; Walters, “Continuity of Aboriginal Customs”; Walters, “The ‘Golden Thread’ of Continuity: Aboriginal Customs at Common Law and under the Constitution Act, 1982,” McGill Law Journal 44, no. 3 (1999): 711–52; Russell C. Smandych and Rick Linden, “Co-existing Forms of Native and Private Justice: An Historical Study of the Canadian West,” in Legal Pluralism and the Colonial Legacy: Indigenous Experiences of Justice in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, ed. Kayleen M. Hazlehurst, 1–38 (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995); Harring, White Man’s Law; Leonardy, First Nations Criminal Jurisdiction. 29 On the French regime, see Jan Grabowski, “The Common Ground: Settled Natives and French in Montreal, 1667–1760,” (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 1994), 88–191; Grabowski, “French Criminal Justice and Indians in Montreal, 1670–1760,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 3 (1996): 405–29; John A. Dickinson, “Native Sovereignty and French Justice in Early Canada,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Vol. 5, Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Jim Phillips Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, 17–40 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 1994); Desmond H. Brown, “They Do Not Submit Themselves To The King’s Law: Amerindians and Criminal Justice During the French Regime,” Manitoba Law Journal 28, no. 3 (2002): 377–411; Jeremy Webber, “Relations of Force and Relations of Justice: The Emergence of Normative Community between Colonists and Aboriginal Peoples,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 33, no. 4 (1995): 638–51; and Denys Delâge and Étienne Gilbert, “Les Amérindiens face à la justice coloniale française dans le gouvernement de Québec, 1663– 1759. I – Les crimes capitaux et leurs châtiments,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 33, no. 3 (2003): 79–90, and “II – Eau de vie, traite des fourrures, endettement, affaires civiles,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 34, no. 1 (2004): 31–42. The argument for continuity between the French and British regimes runs contrary to that advanced in Harring, White Man’s Law, 166–67: “Just as pre-conquest Quebec Indian law was irrelevant in Canada,

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matters of French Indian policy mattered little … France had a different policy than Britain, recognizing some measure of Indian sovereignty and not generally attempting to bring Indians within the reach of French law.” Walters, “ Continuity of Aboriginal Customs.” Harring, White Man’s Law, 167–76; Morin, L’usurpation de la souveraineté autochtone, 207–18. Darcy Ingram, Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 83–6, 94–6. This is based both on parties explicitly identified as Native and on those whose names and place of residence suggest a Huron-Wendat origin (they being the most significant Aboriginal group close to Quebec City in this period). This research is evidently incomplete (apart from the problems of identification, it does not, for example, include the city’s Recorder’s Court established in 1858, nor summary overnight imprisonment in police station cells) and should be taken only as broadly indicative. Pierre Quatrepattes, convicted of manslaughter in 1851 in the Quebec City Court of Queen’s Bench for stabbing to death Jean-Baptiste Caplan, in 1849; the principal witness was Marie Quatrepattes. He was sentenced to eighteen months at hard labour, but later released on the order of the governor general. Quebec Gazette, 27 Jan. 1851; Quebec gaol register, BAnQ-Q E17, 1849-08-09. The case bears further investigation. Harring, White Man’s Law, 166. Thomas G.M. Peace, “Two Conquests: Aboriginal Experiences of the Fall of New France and Acadia” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 226–31, 268–77, 322, 346–7. Daniel Rueck, “Enclosing the Mohawk Commons: A History of UseRights, Landownership, and Boundary-Making in Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2012). My thanks to the author for allowing me to consult the manuscript of his thesis. Delâge and Gilbert, “La justice coloniale britannique et les Amérindiens I – En terres amérindiennes,” 64–5, and “II – En territoire colonial,” 116–17; Alexandre Lefrançois, “Thomas Arakwenté: promoteur de la modernité dans la communauté iroquoise du Sault Saint-Louis (1791–1820),” Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale, 228 (2004): 357–78; Denis Delâge, “Thomas Arakwenté: promoteur de la modernité dans la communauté iroquoise du Sault Saint-Louis (1791–1820),” in Gouvernance autochtone: aspects juridiques, économiques et sociaux, ed. Andrée Lajoie, 72–6 (Montreal: Éditions Thémis, 2007). Walters, “ Continuity of Aboriginal Customs,” 25–8. For example, Georges E. Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle

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(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 118–20 and 156–8; see also Elizabeth Jane Dickson-Gilmore, “La renaissance de la Grande Loi de la paix: conceptions traditionnelles de la justice au sein de la Nation mohawk de Kahnawake,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 21, nos 1–2 (1991): 29–43; and DicksonGilmore, “Resurrecting the Peace: Traditionalist Approaches to Separate Justice in the Kahnawake Mohawk Nation,” in Aboriginal Peoples and Canadian Criminal Justice, ed. Robert A. Silverman and Marianne O. Nielsen, 259–77 (Toronto: Butterworth, 1992). Mark D. Walters, “Aboriginal Rights, Magna Carta and Exclusive Rights to Fisheries in the Waters of Upper Canada,” Queen’s Law Journal 23, no. 2 (1998): 333–4; and Walters, “How to Read Aboriginal Legal Texts from Upper Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 14 (2003): 93–116. Webber, “Relations of Force and Relations of Justice.” Mark D. Walters, “‘According to the Old Customs of Our Nation’: Aboriginal Self-Government on the Credit River Mississauga Reserve, 1826–1847,” Ottawa Law Review 30, no. 1 (1999): 1–45. Alain Beaulieu, “Contestations identitaires et indianisation des autochtones de la vallée du Saint-Laurent (1820-1869),” in La indianización: Cautivos, renegados, hommes libres y misioneros en los confines americanos (s. XVI–XIX), ed. Salvador Bernabéu Albert, Christophe Giudicelli, and Gilles Havard, 335–62 (Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles, 2012). One exception is Alain Beaulieu’s work on the more political dimensions of issues such as land claims, where he sums up what he sees as the “new legal rationale” underlying the process of Native dispossession in Quebec as “a syncretic model that coated dispossession without treaties with the varnish of compensation”: “‘An equitable right to be compensated’”: 27. In the eighteenth century, executions in Quebec City were generally carried out on the heights of the Plains of Abraham, and in Montreal, outside the town walls, probably along one of the roads leading from the city’s gates. In the nineteenth century, they were carried out in front of the cities’ gaols. Large crowds regularly attended. The special treatment of homicides by Natives in Quebec is discussed notably by Stone, “Les Indiens et le système judiciaire”; and Delâge and Gilbert, “La justice coloniale britannique.” On other jurisdictions, see, for example, O’Brien, Speedy Justice, 29–67; Walters, “ Extension of Colonial Criminal Jurisdiction”; or Hamar Foster, “‘The Queen’s Law Is Better Than Yours’: International Homicide in Early British Columbia,” in Phillips, Loo, and Lewthwaite, Essays in the History of Canadian Law, 5:41–111. Valentine, a “Panis Indian” in 1768 (Quebec Gazette 1768-09-15); Charles Nishonoit or Nichau Noite, a Penobscot (Wabanaki) in 1784 (Quebec

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Gazette 11 Nov. 1784); and Paul Pauce alias Kakioukabawy or Kakioukabourg, an Algonquin, in 1788 (Montreal Gazette, 3 Apr. 1788). The information on executions as a whole is from a study I have underway on capital punishment in Quebec 1759–1870. The latter two cases are discussed by Stone (“Les Indiens et le système judiciaire”: 70–1) and by Delâge and Gilbert (“La justice coloniale britannique. II – En territoire colonial,” 107–8), though with conclusions different from mine on the relative impact of capital punishment on Natives, resulting partly from their not being able to situate these events within the phenomenon of capital crimes, executions, and the royal prerogative as a whole in Quebec in this period. On Aboriginal population numbers, see John Dickinson, “La population autochtone,” in Atlas historique du Québec: Population et territoire, ed. Serge Courville, 19–20 (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996). 49 As in British Columbia from the 1840s onwards: Foster, “‘The Queen’s Law Is Better Than Yours,’” 61–80. Interestingly, I have thus far identified only one instance of a Native defendant being executed in Quebec in the period 1810–70: Noël François at Trois-Rivières in 1825 (Montreal Herald, 26 Sept. 1825). 50 The case is not mentioned by Delâge and Gilbert and is dismissed by Stone on the odd grounds that “son identité en tant qu’Indien n’a pas été attestée” (“Les Indiens et le système judiciaire,” 75n4). Apart from the Quebec Gazette, 15 Sept. 1768, documentation regarding the trial and execution of Valentine is scattered through Library and Archives Canada (henceforth LAC), RG1, E15A (public accounts), and MG19, A2 (Ermatinger estate), though the two indictments prepared against him by Maseres have not been located; they would normally be in Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’archives de Québec (henceforth BAnQ-Q), TL18. In contrast to the treatment of Valentine, Nishonoit was shot rather than hanged, in a concession to Aboriginal sensibilities (Delâge and Gilbert, “La justice coloniale britannique. II – En territoire colonial,” 108). 51 Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press / Williamsburg: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture), 182, 371–6. Valentine is never described as a slave in any of the documents concerning him, and also does not turn up in Marcel Trudel, Dictionnaire des esclaves et de leurs propriétaires au Canada français (LaSalle: Hurtubise HMH, 1990), nor in the usual nominative sources covering birth, marriage, and death records (Programme de recherche en démographie historique, www.genealogie.umontreal.ca) and notarial deeds (the Parchemin database by Archiv-Histo).

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52 The relationship of Métis in Quebec to the state justice system is another such variation, which has yet to be explored in any significant detail, other than in the context of ongoing court cases over land rights and the use of resources. For a general discussion, see Geneviève Motard, “Les droits ancestraux des Métis et la mainmise effective des Européens sur le territoire québécois,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 37, nos 2–3 (2007): 89–95. 53 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance. Marcel Trudel’s L’esclavage au Canada français: histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Quebec: Presses universitaires Laval, 1960), 292–314, does mention Native slaves after the Conquest but says nothing about their legal status; David Gilles, “La norme esclavagiste, entre pratique coutumière et norme étatique: les esclaves panis et leur condition juridique au Canada (XVIIe–XVIIIe s.),” Ottawa Law Review 40, no. 1 (2009): 495–536, adds little on the post-Conquest period. 54 Lees to Reid, 1 Aug. 1801, in BAnQ-M, TL32, S1, SS1. 55 Yves Frenette, “John Lees,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5. 56 Hamar Foster, “Forgotten Arguments: Aboriginal Title and Sovereignty in Canada Jurisdiction Act Cases,” Manitoba Law Journal 21, no. 3 (1992): 370–5; Foster, “Long-Distance Justice: The Criminal Jurisdiction of Canadian Courts West of the Canadas, 1763–1859,” American Journal of Legal History 34, no. 1 (1990): 15–16, 47; Walters, “The Continuity of Aboriginal Customs”: 150–1. Detailed verbatim reports of the two trials are provided in Report of the Trials of Charles de Reinhard and Archibald M’Lellan for Murder at a Court of Oyer and Terminer, held at Quebec, May 1818 (Montreal: James Lane and Nahum Mower, 1818), and in more abbreviated form (summarizing the lengthy French testimony), William S. Simpson, Report at Large of the Trial of Charles de Reinhard … (Montreal: James Lane, 1819). 57 Report of the Trials, 631. 58 Ibid., 207. 59 Ibid., iii–iv, 121–2, 125–9; Simpson, Report at Large of the Trial of Charles de Reinhard, v. My interpretation differs from that of Foster, who argues that since the proceedings against Neganabines were dropped, this shows that European jurisdiction was not seen to apply to him, or that if it did, it was because of his connection to the North West Company. Instead, I would argue that the indictment of Neganabines (in Montreal, before the case was moved to Quebec City) shows that Attorney General Norman Fitzgerald Uniacke, who signed the indictment, felt that it was entirely possible to indict a Native defendant from the Indian Territories under the provisions of the 1803 act. The decision not to proceed against him may well have rested on the grounds that the evidence against him was weak (Papers

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Relating to the Red River Settlement ([London], 1819), 223–4), or again, may have resulted from the sort of political considerations that often led to Natives accused of serious crimes being removed from the regular justice system; in any case, the matter bears further investigation. For example, Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice, 9–20 (though she does point our that Monk equated Cree culture with barbarism, and underscores the gendered nature of the proceedings); or Harring, White Man’s Law, 169–73, 184–5. Montreal Herald, 23 Sept. 1869. Frank Mackey, Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004); Mackey, Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 302–8. As Mackey points out, Daniel Gay’s brief treatment of the subject is unreliable: Les Noirs du Québec, 1629–1900 (Sillery: Septentrion, 2004); Mackey, Done with Slavery, 14. Black prostitutes and vagrants are also discussed in Mary Anne Poutanen’s upcoming book Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal (in preparation). Mackey, Done with Slavery, 10. Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français, 292–314; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 99–102; William Renwick Riddell, “The Slave in Canada,” Journal of Negro History 5, no. 3 (1920): 305–15. As in Roland Viau, Ceux de Nigger Rock: enquête sur un cas d’esclavage des noirs dans le Québec ancien (Outremont: Libre Expression, 2003), which postulates the continuation of the enslavement of Blacks and possibly the importation of slaves from the United States; Mackey dismisses this as a myth (Done with Slavery, 78). Lyndsay Campbell, “Race and the Criminal Justice System in Canada West: Burglary and Murder in Hamilton, 1852–53,” Queen’s Law Journal 37, no. 2 (2012): 477–522; Campbell, “Governance in the Borderlands: Upper Canadian Legal Institutions,” and Campbell, “The Northern Borderlands: Canada West,” both in Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands in the Age of Emancipation, ed. Tony Freyer and Lyndsay Campbell, 109–39 and 195–225 (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011); Bradley Miller, “British Rights and Liberal Law in Canada’s Fugitive Slave Debate, 1833–1843,” in ibid., 141–69. Norma Landau, “After Somerset: Mansfield, Slavery and the Law in England, 1772–1830,” in Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830, ed. Landau, 165–84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); James Oldham,

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English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 305–23. Riddell, “The Slave in Canada,” 312; Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français, 306; Winks, Blacks in Canada, 101–2; Backhouse, Colour Coded, extended note 94 to chapter 7. Mackey is more careful on this score but still suggests that Monk declared slavery abolished: Done with Slavery, 56–60. Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada 8 (1800), 154. As may have been done by Montreal’s Quarter Sessions in 1794, when according to a newspaper report, the magistrates declared that “slavery was not known by the Laws of England and therefore discharged the negro man” (Mackey, Black Then, 203–6; Mackey, Done with Slavery, 53–4). However, the reasons for the judgment were reported only in a Quebec City newspaper, and hence only on the basis of indirect report from Montreal (and in an article that was clearly abolitionist and also appears to have gotten the names of defence counsel wrong); further, the case concerned a fugitive slave from New York, where the justices may have seen fit (perhaps in the political context of rising tensions with the United States) to apply a rule different from one they would apply to slaves already in Lower Canada. D.G. Bell, J. Barry Cahill, and Harvey Amani Whitfield, “Slavery and Slave Law in the Maritimes,” in The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays, ed. Barrington Walker, 385–7 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2012). Issues of proof of ownership were prominent in several cases involving slaves in Montreal in the 1790s (Mackey, Done with Slavery, 46–54), but no case was as clear in this regard as R. v. Robin alias Robert. Gaols in Quebec had already been explicitly used as houses of correction in the 1760s: see the calendars of the gaol and house of correction of Quebec in BAnQ-Q, TL18, S1, SS1, for example 1769, no. 88, “Return of Vagrants now in the house of Correction …” James H. Lambert, “Sir James Monk,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6. The exact details of the case, including Harrington’s precise role, remain murky, although John Lovejoy is working to clarify them. For different versions, see John Lovejoy, “Harrington, Theophilus,” in The Vermont Encyclopedia, ed. John J. Duffy, Samuel B. Hand, and Ralph H. Orth, 151 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2003); and Aviam Soifer, “De Facto Slavery and the Syren Songs of Liberty and Equality: Carol Weisbrod, Much Obliged,” Connecticut Law Review 40, no. 5 (2008): 1325. The legendary status of the case is noted in John M. Lovejoy, “Racism in Antebellum Vermont,” Vermont History 69, no. 1 (2001): 48–9. My thanks to

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Frank Mackey for bringing this case to my attention and for providing additional references. BAnQ-Q, TL31, S1, SS1 nos 49331 and 71406. Mackey mentions the case in Done with Slavery, 430–1n17, but only found the complaint. In a simple case of desertion of service, the arrest should normally have been made after a warrant had been granted, hence after the deposition: Rules and Regulations of Police: With Abstracts of Divers Ordinances and Statutes Relating Thereto (Quebec: John Neilson, 1811), 50. But given the charge of theft implied in the deposition, with a value amply within the scope of a felony, there was enough legal grounds for an arrest without a warrant: Joseph Chitty, A Practical Treatise on the Criminal Law … (London: A. J. Valpy, 1816), 1:12–15. Landau, “After Somerset,” 178–9. Christine Veilleux, “John Fletcher,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7. Landau illustrates the practice with a King’s Bench case of 1799, a year when Fletcher was still practising in London. Fletcher became the first provincial judge of the Saint Francis district, while Caron occupied the same position in the District of Gaspé. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 237. In reaction to my own work in Magistrates, Police, and People, Mackey also affirms that “there is no evidence that any blacks rejected the legitimacy of the courts,” which, as I point out elsewhere, is perhaps a little strong: Magistrats, police et société: la justice criminelle ordinaire au Québec et au Bas-Canada (1764–1837) (Montreal: Hurtubise, 2010), 470. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 236. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 260–5; Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 304–8. Backhouse, Colour Coded; Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2010). Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006); an opposing point of view is in Denyse Beaugrand-Champagne, Le procès de MarieJosèphe-Angélique (Outremont: Libre expression, 2004). Campbell, “Race and the Criminal Justice System.” Mackey, Done with Slavery, 236–65. Gary Collison, “’Loyal and Dutiful Subjects of Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’: Fugitive Slaves in Montreal, 1850–1866,” Québec Studies 19 (1994–5): 59–70; Campbell, “Race and the Criminal Justice System”; Campbell, “The Northern Borderlands.” Statistical analyses of arrests prior to the 1860s are scattered through a

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wide variety of fonds in various archival repositories, including BAnQ, Archives de la ville de Québec, and Archives de Montréal, and were also on occasion reported in newspapers. From 1864, these statistics were published in the Montreal chief of police’s annual report; the Quebec City police chief did the same for a few years, but then stopped for reasons that are still unclear: Donald Fyson, “Le ‘Gros Village’ et la Métropole: constructions réciproques du crime, du danger et du risque à Québec et à Montréal, du milieu du XIXe siècle aux années 1920,” in Les risques de l’histoire. Contributions à une historiographie du risque, ed. David Niget and Martin Petitclerc (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 254–5. From 1861, the provincial government also began publishing statistics on the annual activity of the judicial system, including criminal courts and prisons. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 237–38, R. Blake Brown, A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 2009), 77, 143–4. Since Mackey’s study ended in 1840, it would be necessary to see whether there were any Blacks on Montreal juries in particular from the 1840s onwards. Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 311. Quebec Mercury, 10 May 1851 and 10 June 1851. This was common practice at the time (Quebec Mercury, 6 Feb. 1855) and is suggested by the language used in describing other cases. Although the exercise of the royal prerogative in post-Conquest Quebec has yet to be examined in depth, a brief discussion can be found in Donald Fyson, “The Canadiens and the Bloody Code: Criminal Defence Strategies in Quebec after the British Conquest, 1760–1841,” Quaderni Storici 47, no. 3 (2012): 771–95. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 238–45. As in the case of Natives, the information on executions and hangmen is from my ongoing study on capital punishment in Quebec 1759–1870. My thanks to Frank Mackey, who has very kindly shared the considerable information he has on Black hangmen. Although often mentioned in analyses of pre-Confederation criminal justice in Quebec, corporal punishment has yet to be studied in any detail; in the Quebec gaol alone between 1813 and 1833 there were at least 130 prisoners whose sentences included some form of corporal punishment, though how many of these were actually subjected to it remains to be determined. Three Blacks appear to have been executed in the entire period: Thomas Bruce in Montreal in 1778, Warren Glossen in Montreal in 1823, and

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Robert Ellis or Ellice at Quebec City in 1827. See Mackey, Done with Slavery, 248, 250–1, 287–8 (though he did not find the evidence that Bruce was executed, which is in LAC, RG1, E15A, vol. 5, file “1778 – Judicial Establishment”). Of these three, Glossen was executed by another Black, Benjamin Field, and Bruce by John Whealon, who might have been Black; the identity of Ellice’s executioner is as yet unknown. As in the case of Benjamin Field of Montreal, discussed in Mackey, Done with Slavery, 243–5. Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 36–9; Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 42; Pascal Bastien, Histoire de la peine de mort: bourreaux et supplices, Paris, Londres, 1500–1800 (Paris: Seuil, 2011). Morning Chronicle, 23 Mar. 1864. Le Pays, 30 June 1858. Other sources affirm that the hangman was one Guire. For an argument on the racialization of the Canadien/British conflict, see Jarett Henderson, “Uncivil Subjects: Metropolitan Meddling, Conditional Loyalty, and Lord Durham’s 1838 Administration of Lower Canada” (PhD diss., York University, 2010). Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), xxxi, 31. Arguments for treating women as a minority include Helen Mayer Hacker, “Women as a Minority Group,” Social Forces 30, no. 1 (1951): 60–9; Mayer Hacker, “Women as a Minority Group: Twenty Years Later,” in Who Discriminates against Women?, ed. Florence Denmark, 124–34 (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1974); and Dana Dunn, “Women: The Fifty-One Percent Minority,” in Dworkin and Dworkin, Minority Report, 415–35. For arguments against this position, see also Joan Kelly-Gadol, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 813–14; and Margrit Eichler, The Double Standard: A Feminist Critique of Feminist Social Science (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 94–6. Some recent basic sociological texts still adopt the perspective that women can reasonably be considered a minority: see for example John J. Macionis and Linda M. Gerber, Sociology, 6th Canadian ed. (Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), 332–3. For example, bell hooks’s criticism of the racial blindness of white feminist scholarship, and specifically the work of Hacker, in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, 1981), 138. The more gen-

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eral debate on women as a category of analysis lies beyond the scope of this paper; for a basic overview, see, for example, Sue Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), especially part 2. 105 Apart from the chapters within this collection, on women and the civil law, see, for example, Brian J. Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montreal: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Jean-Philippe Garneau, “Le rituel de l’élection de tutelle et la représentation du pouvoir dans la société canadienne du XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 14, no. 1 (2005): 45–56; and Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 120–41. On the criminal law, see, for example, Mary Anne Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship, Kinship, and Community: Gender, Homelessness, and Mutual Aid in EarlyNineteenth-Century Montreal,” in Negotiating Identities in 19th and 20th Century Montreal, ed. Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, 25–48 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Poutanen, “Regulating Public Space in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal: Vagrancy Laws and Gender in a Colonial Context,” Histoire sociale / Social History 35, no. 69 (2002): 35–58; Poutanen, “The Homeless, the Whore, the Drunkard, and the Disorderly: Contours of Female Vagrancy in the Montreal Courts, 1810–1842,” in Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, ed. Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell, 29–47 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999); Poutanen, Beyond Brutal Passions; and Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 295–302 and passim. 106 The operation of juries of matrons has yet to be explored in Quebec in the same manner as it has elsewhere: James C. Oldham, “On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of Matrons,” Criminal Justice History 6 (1985): 1–64. There are certainly instances of such juries being called and even demonstrating a certain independence: for example, in R. v. Anaïs Toussaint, where they disregarded the evidence of a medical doctor (Morning Chronicle, 9 Feb. 1857). On family councils, see Jean-Philippe Garneau, “Le rituel de l’élection de tutelle et la représentation du pouvoir dans la société canadienne du XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 14, no. 1 (2005): 45–56; Bradbury suggests that mothers and surviving widows could participate, but their exact role remains unclear (Wife to Widow, 236). 107 Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: 293–4, 327–8; for explicit references to patriarchy in the justice system in pre-Confederation Quebec, see Marie-Aimée Cliche, “L’infanticide dans la région de Québec (1660–1969),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 44, no. 1 (1990): 31–59 ; or Sandy Ramos, “’A Most Detestable Crime’: Gender Identities and Sexual Violence in the District of Montreal, 1803–1843,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 12 (2001): 27–48.

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108 Unreferenced material in this section is from research underway on the history of the Quebec City common gaol 1760–1867; information is drawn from many sources, including the prison’s administrative archives in BAnQ-Q, E17; public accounts in LAC, RG1, E15A; correspondence between prison officials and colonial administrators, in LAC, RG4, A1, and RG4, C1; and a wide range of other sources. 109 The most striking example was Abigail Hill, who was the daughter, sister, and wife respectively of three Quebec City gaolers and lived in the gaol for most of the period from 1787 to 1817. 110 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People. 111 Jean-Marie Fecteau, Marie-Josée Tremblay, and Jean Trépanier, “La prison de Montréal de 1865 à 1913: évolution en longue période d’une population pénale,” Les Cahiers de droit 34, no. 1 (1993): 27–58. 112 This is, of course, a heuristic construct rather than a true reflection of the messy and fractured nature of British identity in Quebec and Lower Canada, but it does reflect the general views of the “majority” Canadien population and of many Quebec historians; see, for example, Paul-André Linteau, “Les minorités ethnoculturelles dans l’historiographie québécoise,” in Le Québec et ses minorités, ed. Beatrice Bagola, 144–5 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000). On the complexities of British and/or English-speaking identities in Quebec, see J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); and Gillian I. Leitch, “The Importance of Being English? Identity and Social Organisation in British Montreal, 1800–1850” (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2007). 113 Linteau, “Les minorités ethnoculturelles,” 144. 114 Donald Fyson, “Domination et adaptation: les élites européennes au Québec, 1760–1841,” in Au sommet de l’Empire. Les élites européennes dans les colonies (XVIe–XXe siècle), ed. Claire Laux, François-Joseph Ruggiu, and Pierre Singaravelou, 167–96 (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009). 115 Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits; Brisson, La formation d’un droit mixte; Young, Politics of Codification; Bradbury, Wife to Widow; Sylvio Normand and Alain Hudon, “Le contrôle des hypothèques secrètes au XIXe siècle: ou la difficile conciliation de deux cultures juridiques et de deux communautés ethniques,” Recueil de droit immobilier (1990): 171–201; Morel, “Un exemple de contact.” 116 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People; Donald Fyson, with the assistance of Evelyn Kolish and Virginia Schweitzer, The Court Structure of Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764 to 1860, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Montreal History Group, 1997–2012); Jean-Philippe Garneau, “Droit, pluralisme culturel et genèse du barreau québécois: analyse prosopographique de deux générations

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d’avocats (fin XVIIIe–début XIXe siècles),” in Les praticiens du droit du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine. Approches prosopographiques (Belgique, Canada, France, Italie, Prusse), ed. Vincent Bernaudeau, Jean-Pierre Nandrin, Bénédicte Rochet, Xavier Rousseaux, and Axel Tixhon, 209–23 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008). André Vachon, Histoire du notariat canadien, 1621–1960 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1962); David Gilles, “Le notariat canadien face à la Conquête anglaise de 1760: l’exemple des notaires Panet,” in Bernaudeau et al., Les praticiens du droit, 189–207. See the studies in note 7. Donald Fyson, “The Conquered and the Conqueror: The Mutual Adaptation of the Canadiens and the British in Quebec, 1759–1775,” in Buckner and Reid, 1759 Revisited, 190–217; Fyson, “De la common law à la Coutume de Paris: les nouveaux habitants britanniques du Québec et le droit civil français, 1764–1775,” in La coutume dans tous ses états, ed. Florent Garnier and Jacqueline Vendrand-Voyer (Paris: La Mémoire du Droit, 2013) (forthcoming); Jean-Philippe Garneau, “Une culture de l’amalgame au prétoire: les avocats de Québec et l’élaboration d’un langage juridique commun au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Canadian Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2007): 113–48; Garneau, “Civil Law, Legal Practitioners, and Everyday Justice in the Decades following the Quebec Act of 1774,” in The Promise and Perils of Law: Lawyers in Canadian History, ed. Constance Backhouse and W. Wesley Pue, 129–39 (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2009); Arnaud Decroix, “La controverse sur la nature du droit applicable après la Conquête,” McGill Law Journal 56, no. 3 (2011): 489–542; David Gilles, “L’arbitrage notarié, instrument idoine de conciliation des traditions juridiques après la conquête britannique? (1760–1784),” McGill Law Journal 57, no. 1 (2011): 135–85; Arnaud Decroix, David Gilles, and Michel Morin, Les tribunaux et l’arbitrage en Nouvelle-France et au Québec de 1740 à 1784 (Montréal: Éditions Thémis, 2012). This accommodation with French civil law carried on into the nineteenth century: G. Blaine Baker, “Law Practice and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal: The Torrance-Morris Firm, 1848 to 1868,” in Beyond the Law: Lawyers and Business in Canada, 1830 to 1930, ed. Carol Wilton, 45–91 (Toronto: Osgoode Society and Butterworths, 1990); Bettina Bradbury, Peter Gossage, Evelyn Kolish, and Alan Stewart, “Property and Marriage: The Law and the Practice in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” Histoire sociale / Social History 26, no. 51 (1993): 9–39; Young, Politics of Codification; Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 120– 41. Jean-Marie Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses: la pauvreté, le crime, l’État au

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Québec, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à 1840 (Montreal: VLB, 1989), 128–30, 235, 238; population figures from my own calculations. This is based on an analysis of databases created from the Quebec and Montreal prison registers, in BAnQ-Q, E17, and BAnQ-M, E17, the latter being the work of the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales at UQAM. Given that both gaols drew on judicial districts that went well beyond the two cities, including rural areas where francophones were far more predominant, the over-representation of anglophones is even more striking. Further, women of British origin were even more over-represented, making up 81 per cent of women in the Quebec gaol and 78 per cent of those in the Montreal gaol. Figures are preliminary and will probably be revised upwards. The total includes the twelve Patriotes executed on the orders of the Montreal general court martial following the Rebellions of 1837–8, but excludes soldiers executed for military offences. Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses, 128–9. Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 206–10. One more general study, based on the Montreal prison registers, is François Fenchel, “Disproportionately Drunk and Disorderly? Irish Catholics in the Montreal Gaol, 1853–1912,” chap. 4 of “Entre petite criminalité et grande misère: la prison des hommes à Montréal et sa population (1836–1912)” (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2008), 195–228. There are studies of specific instances of Irish criminality, often focused on collective violence, such as Ruth Elisabeth Bleasdale, “Unskilled Labourers on the Public Works of Canada, 1840–1880” (PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 1984); J. Matthew Barlow, “Fear and Loathing in SaintSylvestre: The Corrigan Murder Case, 1855–1858” (MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1998); or Roland Viau, La sueur des autres: les fils d’Érin et le canal Beauharnois (Salaberry-de-Valleyfield: Triskèle, 2010); and summary pieces such as Louis Turcotte, “Représentants de la loi et délinquants dangereux? Les Irlandais à Québec au XIXe siècle,” Cap-aux-Diamants 88 (2007): 25–8. On the Irish as police, see Michael McCulloch, “Most Assuredly Perpetual Motion: Police and Policing in Quebec City, 1838–58,” Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine 19, no. 1 (1990): 100–12. For example, Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). For an overview and critique of the literature, G.K. Peatling, “The Whiteness of Ireland under and after the Union,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 1 (2005): 115–33. The exact number of prisoners of English and Scots descent is not easy to determine, but overall, when in 1871 they made up 18 per cent of the

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population of Montreal and its immediate surrounding area, and 9 per cent of Quebec City and its immediate surrounding area, they probably accounted for 15–18 per cent of prisoners in the Montreal gaol (1853–70) and 9–12 per cent of those in the Quebec City gaol (1865–70). In contrast, francophones, who made up 60 and 70 per cent of the populations of the two cities and their surrounding areas respectively in 1871, accounted for only 28 and 34 per cent of prisoners respectively. These figures are entirely preliminary and subject to revision. For further analysis of the Irish in the Montreal prison, see Fenchel, “Disproportionately Drunk and Disorderly?” Fecteau, Liberté du pauvre, 137; Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 208–9. For instance, Roger Swift, Behaving Badly? Irish Migrants and Crime in the Victorian City (Chester: Chester Academic Press, 2006), Scott W. See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), Eric R. Teehan, “Conflict, Crime and Connexion: The Impact of the Irish Immigration on St John, N.B., 1845–1855” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1994), 122–65; or John C. Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City, 1816–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 53–8. Mariana Valverde, “Concluding Remarks,” in La régulation sociale entre l’acteur et l’institution: pour une problématique historique de l’interaction, ed. Jean-Marie Fecteau and Janice Harvey, 565–6 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2005). Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 393. Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2000): 617–45; Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). For a review of the literature, Fyson, “Between the Ancien Régime and Liberal Modernity.” Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 310–53. Donald Fyson, “Jurys, participation civique et représentation au Québec et au Bas-Canada: les grands jurys du district de Montréal (1764–1832),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 55, no. 1 (2001): 85–120; Fyson, “Judicial Auxiliaries across Legal Regimes: From New France to Lower Canada,” in Entre justice et justiciables: les auxiliaires de la justice du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle, ed. Claire Dolan, 383–403 (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005); Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People; Fyson, “The Canadiens and British Institutions of Local Governance in Quebec,

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from the Conquest to the Rebellions,” in Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America, ed. Nancy Christie, 45–82 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Fyson, “Conquered and the Conqueror”; Fyson, “Canadiens and the Bloody Code.” Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 53–183. Linteau, “Les minorités ethnoculturelles,” 144. For example, in Beaulieu, “’An equitable right to be compensated.’” Peace, “Two Conquests”; Rueck, “Enclosing the Mohawk Commons.” Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 140.

6 Être « demanderesse » en Justice: Permanences civilistes dans la Province de Québec, de la Juridiction royale de Montréal (1740–1760) à la Cour des plaids communs de Montréal (1760–1791)1 dav id g il l e s La femme et le procès sont deux choses semblables, L’une parle toujours, l’autre est sans propos L’une aime à tracasser, l’autre hait le repos Tous deux sont déguisés, tous deux impitoyables Tous deux par beaux présents se rendent favorables Tous deux ses suppliants rongent jusqu’aux os L’un est un profond gouffre, l’autre est un chaos Où s’embrouille l’esprit des hommes misérables Tous deux sans rien donner prennent à toutes mains Tous deux en peu de temps ruinent les humains L’une allume le feu, l’autre attise les flammes, L’un aime les esbats et l’autre les discord[e]s, Si Dieu doncques vouloit faire de beaux accords, Il faudroit qu’aux procès il maria les femmes2

L’opinion qui est portée sur les femmes canadiennes est historiquement le reflet de nombre de préjugés – comme cet amalgame entre féminité et procès du juriste du XVIIe siècle Louis Bouchel ô combien misogyne – le montre. Les propos portés sur les femmes canadiennes par le Chevalier de Baugy3 ou le Baron de Lahontan n’étaient guère plus flatteurs et en décalage certain avec la réalité de la condition féminine et de l’implication juridique des femmes en Nouvelle-France.4 Ces postures sont

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le reflet de leurs temps. Au XVIIIe siècle, les mœurs masculines n’ont guère évolué. Ainsi, Voltaire écrit qu’« [i]l n’est pas étonnant qu’en tout pays l’homme se soit rendu le maître de la femme, tout étant fondé sur la force. Il a d’ordinaire beaucoup de supériorité par celle du corps et même de l’esprit ».5 Les juristes ne se trouvent pas en reste pour justifier la prépondérance juridique de l’homme sur celle-ci.6 Lorsqu’on dépasse la lettre de la norme pour appréhender son application pragmatique, la condition juridique se veut défavorable mais protectrice, malgré une évolution réactionnaire au XVIe et XVIIe siècle dans la doctrine.7 Il n’en reste pas moins que pour la femme « la capacité demeure la règle ».8 L’exemple de la Coutume de Paris est caractéristique de cette réalité, puisque tout en entravant fortement l’exercice des prérogatives juridiques de la femme mariée – en la subordonnant à son mari – elle lui laisse pourtant un certain nombre de portes de sortie pour échapper à cette emprise masculine.9 Il en est de même en droit britannique. Si les mécanismes diffèrent, la logique reste la même et le contexte de la Province de Québec après la Conquête britannique est alors particulièrement intéressant au regard de ces flux normatifs. Il existe d’ailleurs, comme le relève Ruth Roach Pierson une tension entre l’histoire des femmes canadiennes à travers le prisme anglais et le prisme francophone.10 Sur le fond, dans la Province de Québec puis le Bas-Canada, le droit privé reste, – à quelques exceptions près, notamment patrimoniales et testamentaires – fondé sur les principes du droit français.11 Toutefois, l’influence de la pratique britannique ne peut que se faire sentir,12 tant par l’arrivée de colons que de praticiens ayant évolué dans une tradition juridique différente,13 et par l’établissement de juridictions fondées sur une procédure d’origine britannique.14 Comme le relevait Marie-Aimée Cliche: « Les textes de lois et les commentaires faits par des spécialistes en droit nous révèlent les normes de comportement dictées par l’élite sociale. Les jugements rendus lors des procès nous apprennent comment des lois d’apparence rigide étaient interprétées et adaptées au contexte de la société ».15 Les rapports entre les cultures juridiques françaises et anglaises16 se trouvent alors sous l’égide d’une même subordination juridique de la femme mariée, colorée de traditions culturelles différentes. Si l’impact du droit et de la pratique judiciaire sur les femmes est relativement bien connu pour le Régime français17 – et évalué de manière « favorable » par certains auteurs, comme Jan Noel au regard des femmes européennes – s’il figure comme une facette importante de l’histoire des femmes depuis les années 1960,18 les années séparant

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la Conquête des débuts du XIXe siècle sont restées peu explorées, du moins sous le prisme du droit privé et de l’implication des femmes dans le système judiciaire. Elles connaissent toutefois depuis quelques années des travaux d’importance sur la question, tant au regard de la réalité rurale19 qu’urbaine.20 Or, comme le souligne Veronica StrongBoag et Anita Clair Fellman « […] the propitious conjunction of influences described by Noel did not survive the nineteenth century intact. The Canadian colonies, under both British rule and independence, saw women’s authority increasingly, although never totally, constrained by a host of factors ».21 Une posture transsystémique semble alors obliger l’analyste à découvrir les points d’ancrage sociaux et juridiques des différentes cultures juridiques, dans un contexte où la norme « favorable subsiste », tel que c’est le cas dans la Province de Québec. Appréhendant alors la pratique juridique tant par son prisme normatif que juridictionnel, on peut tenter d’établir des évolutions – essentiellement quantitatives dans les limites de cette étude – entre l’accessibilité à la justice par les femmes en aval de la Conquête et leur activité en amont de celle-ci. Cette contribution ne vise pas à faire le tour de la question mais tente plutôt de présenter des pistes qui pourront inspirer d’autres recherches, en établissant notamment des lignes juridiques de comparaison et de fracture. Notre objectif est de mesurer l’étendue et la nature de l’activité juridique féminine dans un cadre spatio-temporel bien délimité, en faisant ressortir essentiellement les facteurs juridiques, familiaux et matrimoniaux qui permettent ou favorisent la participation des femmes dans le processus judiciaire. Afin de faire émerger les permanences mais aussi d’éventuelles différences, une étude du cadre juridique relatif à la capacité des femmes à ester en justice (I), précédera une analyse de cette activité devant la Juridiction royale de Montréal puis la Cour des plaidoyers communs jusqu’en 1791 (II). Le cadre de la capacité juridique de la femme et de l’épouse en droit colonial nord-américain Le choix de la Coutume de Paris, bien que posant un cadre peu favorable à l’exercice de la capacité juridique de la femme – notamment mariée – se trouve protecteur envers celle-ci, essentiellement par l’institution du douaire coutumier qui protège la femme après le décès de son époux. La capacité de la femme mariée se trouve également amplifiée par les particularités géographiques de la colonie, obligeant régulièrement l’époux à s’absenter longuement, et donc à confier la

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direction de la communauté à son épouse. Cette évolution,22 constante durant le Régime français (A), reste une réalité durant les premiers temps du Régime anglais, puisque la Coutume de Paris perdure en partie.23 L’impact des sources juridiques anglaises, la common law et l’equity, reste faible, et se concentre sur l’aspect patrimonial et procédural. De manière large, les cadres posés par la common law et ceux de la Coutume de Paris se rejoignent qui plus est dans une pratique peu ouverte à l’implication des femmes dans la sphère juridique (B). Néanmoins, le joug de ces deux traditions juridiques n’est pas absolu, la nature de la coutume et des sources de l’ancien droit privé français étant d’établir peu de normes coutumières et d’ordonnances formant le droit commun, en laissant beaucoup de place à la doctrine et aux pratiques conventionnelles. De plus, le statut de la veuve forme, à bien des égards une sphère d’activisme juridique pour les femmes dans les deux systèmes de droit. Aperçu de l’activité juridique de la femme en Nouvelle-France La capacité juridique reconnue à la femme sur le papier reste fortement limitée sociologiquement, par la prépondérance juridique du mari. En effet, le mariage en Nouvelle-France, plus encore peut-être que dans la métropole, s’avère être une nécessité, un passage obligé qui se doit d’être effectué le plus tôt possible, même si cela évolue du XVIIe au XVIIIe siècle.24 La pleine capacité juridique de la femme après 25 ans (ou 16 ans pour le consentement au mariage si on suit la pratique de la Nouvelle-France) est le statut normal d’une femme adulte. Néanmoins, les femmes canadiennes ne quittent bien souvent la sphère et l’emprise juridique familiale que pour se soumettre à l’autorité juridique du mari.25 La capacité de gestion des biens de la communauté est réservée au mari qui peut en user comme il l’entend pour peu que cela soit pour le bien de la communauté.26 Si, durant le régime français, le pouvoir affirme dans la majorité des cas l’application de la « Coutume de la ville, Prévôté et Vicomté de Paris » qui « s’observe inviolablement en Canada »,27 quelques adaptations apparaissent néanmoins en matière d’âge de consentement au mariage ou de procuration par exemple. L’usage de la procuration,28 rendu indispensable dans la colonie lorsque le mari est appelé à s’éloigner régulièrement (art. 223) se révèle un gage de sécurité juridique pour les tiers à la communauté.29 Si un formalisme rigoureux30 semble exister dans l’Ancienne France31 la pratique coloniale est plus souple, notamment quant à l’obligation

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d’établir une procuration expresse et spéciale.32 Une grande partie des irrégularités juridiques33 – ou adaptations sociales, comme l’usage du douaire34 – qui se retrouvent dans les actes passés dans les colonies, sont favorisées par les conditions de vie particulières de la population35 et couvertes par les pouvoirs locaux. Les désirs de modifications en profondeur de la Coutume36 au regard de la condition juridique de la femme resteront toutefois bien souvent à l’état de projet.37 Les futurs époux en Nouvelle-France ont fortement recours au contrat de mariage.38 Selon la Coutume de Paris, l’âge de majorité permettant de se marier est fixé à vingt-cinq ans. Si la Coutume de Paris prévoit un âge minimum pour pouvoir contracter un mariage valide, elle n’a pas semblé avoir été appliquée avec une grande rigueur en NouvelleFrance.39 Que ce soit au XVIIIème et plus encore au XVIIème siècle, les mariages en Nouvelle-France sont sensiblement plus précoces.40 Avant l’introduction de la liberté testamentaire,41 sous le Régime anglais, le contrat de mariage est le moment juridique privilégié afin de contrôler ses biens après sa mort. La Coutume de Paris limite les dons entre époux, sinon des aliments et des petits cadeaux (art. 296). Elle prohibe en principe toute donation entre époux une fois le mariage prononcé, à l’exception du don mutuel au dernier survivant, parfois prévu dans les contrats de mariage.42 Contraignante dans ce domaine, la Coutume de Paris se révèle toutefois protectrice des droits de la famille et en particulier de la femme.43 Dans leur contrat de mariage, les futurs mariés – selon le droit civil français – peuvent apporter des modifications au régime de la communauté des biens qui est la règle selon les dispositions de la Coutume de Paris.44 La plupart des époux, au cours de leur mariage, n’ont pas d’immeuble pour servir de base à un douaire coutumier. Aussi, ils lui substituent un douaire conventionnel payable à l’épouse après la mort du mari et tiré sur tous les biens du mari. Un couple peut aussi convenir que le survivant acquerra, avant le partage, certains biens meubles ou une somme fixe de la communauté, un préciput, ou que, s’il n’y a pas d’enfant, l’époux survivant gardera le tout. Lorsque les époux attendent des héritages, il en est fait mention et on détermine s’ils seront compris dans la communauté ou non. Dans tous les cas, la veuve peut renoncer à sa part de la communauté lorsqu’elle est déficitaire, privilège prévu pour compenser la mauvaise administration du mari. Le couple, lors de la rédaction du contrat de mariage, peut alors choisir entre la constitution d’un douaire conventionnel ou l’application du douaire coutumier, la communauté de meubles et d’acquêts étant de droit commun selon la Coutume de Paris.

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La primauté juridique de l’époux, chef de famille, est affirmée, que ce soit sur l’épouse ou sur le reste de la famille. Elle accompagne ainsi la position de la plupart normes européennes de l’époque et s’inscrit dans l’opinion communément admise chez les jurisconsultes qui est que « le mariage, en formant une société entre le mari et la femme, dont le mari est le chef, donne au mari, en la qualité qu’il a de chef de cette société, un droit de puissance sur la personne de la femme, qui s’étend aussi sur ses biens ».45 Tous les biens meubles et immeubles acquis durant l’union par les époux sont en communauté et administrés par le mari seul qui peut en disposer comme il l’entend,46 s’il a le bien de la communauté comme but. Celui-ci peut vendre, donner ou engager ses biens, pourvu qu’il le fasse pour le bien de la communauté. Les seuls biens qui demeurent légalement propriété de l’épouse sont les biens propres, les meubles reçus par succession ou par donation des parents, le mari ne pouvant vendre les biens immeubles comme tels. Toutefois, il peut disposer des fruits de ces biens47 : par exemple, percevoir des loyers ou vendre une récolte sans le consentement de sa femme.48 À la mort de l’un des époux, le survivant reçoit la moitié des biens de la communauté, l’autre moitié allant aux enfants en parts égales. La femme canadienne, lorsque son mari est absent, – bien que soumise juridiquement à son mari et privée de la gestion des biens de la communauté (art. 234)49 – se trouve alors en position favorable. En effet, elle se doit d’assumer la gestion, la responsabilité de la famille et du patrimoine. C’est pourquoi on retrouve un grand nombre de femmes agissant devant les tribunaux au nom de leur mari50 ou en leur nom propre51 si elles obtiennent l’autorisation de celui-ci ou l’autorisation judiciaire. Elles peuvent également conclure des contrats au nom de leur époux. Si l’épouse est incapable juridiquement lorsqu’elle est en puissance de mari, certaines exceptions subsistent – comme le statut de marchande publique52 – et on admet généralement que, dans le cadre des besoins courants du ménage, l’épouse contracte valablement, s’acquittant ainsi de son rôle de maîtresse de maison tout en ne s’engageant pas personnellement, car elle agit alors, selon Pothier,53 en vertu d’un mandat présumé que son mari lui aurait donné. Ces derniers54 peuvent toutefois révoquer les actes et les actions intentées en justice par leurs épouses.55 C’est donc à travers ces différentes implications juridiques que les épouses sont amenées à ester en justice. On peut considérer que les deux époux se trouvent donc soumis « à une réalité familiale qui les dépasse et dont ils sont tous deux victimes: la femme y perd un pouvoir

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d’administration et de disposition, l’homme y perd une grande partie de son droit de disposer des biens réservés à l’usage du lignage ».56 La convergence normative relativement à la capacité juridique de la femme: la conjonction de la Coutume de Paris et de la Common Law? Le cadre juridique offert aux femmes est, dans ses grandes lignes, relativement similaire en common law, soit une situation de dépendance et de sujétion. Si certains fondamentaux du système judiciaire britannique ont été implantés dans les colonies, c’est toujours de manière fortement simplifiée et adaptée au contexte local.57 La responsabilité du mari est similaire à ce qu’elle est en droit français.58 Le prisme lorsqu’on aborde le statut de la femme en common law est plein de facettes, et globalement, les outils permettant d’aménager la norme en défaveur des femmes sont nombreux, la diversité de la pratique normative dans le contexte colonial étant grande.59 En common law, le mariage repose sur les mêmes mécanismes juridiques que le mariage civiliste, un certain formalisme se renforçant au XVIIIe siècle, par le Marriage Act de 1753.60 L’equity – le recours au trust par exemple – joue également un rôle dans les rapports entre les femmes et le droit, notamment au regard de la propriété des épouses. La possibilité de posséder des biens en propre influe bien évidemment sur la perception de la capacité de la femme à réaliser ses droits. Comme le souligne Lori Chambers pour l’Ontario durant la période Victorienne: « Although it is unclear how many weatlthy wives actually made use of Chancery, the glaring contrast between law and equity was manifestly unfair to poorer wives. The Court of Chancery provided an accessible alternative model of family property relations upon which sensible and, it was believed, effective reform could be based; marriage settlements, expérience in Chancery had proved, worked ».61 Les rapports patrimoniaux peuvent être rapprochés bien qu’il existe des différences fondamentales, sous l’empire de la Coutume de Paris et la common law.62 Les points de rupture les plus marquants entre les deux mondes est l’absence de communauté de biens dans cette dernière, la femme n’ayant aucun droit aux biens accumulés pendant le mariage,63 la liberté testamentaire ou le statut de marchande publique. Cela est vrai même si la common law aux Amériques semble connaître le même phénomène d’assouplissement juridique à l’égard du statut des femmes64 que connaît la Coutume de Paris en Amérique du Nord. Des mécanismes similaires à la pratique de la procuration existent en

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common law, et trouvent à s’appliquer tant en Angleterre que dans le contexte colonial. Comme le souligne Holly Brewer, « women in early modern Anglo-America enjoyed relatively greater authorithy within marriage than they would in the nineteenth century, but were still at a significant legal disadvantage ».65 Dans la colonie anglaise du Massachusetts par exemple, durant la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle, les femmes font appel régulièrement à la justice afin d’obtenir des droits égaux, et cela avec un succès mitigé,66 Selon la common law, l’épouse est incapable de contracter sans l’aval de son mari, ne peut disposer ni gérer ses biens, et ne peut administrer les biens de son défunt mari si elle se remarie. La common law appliquée dans les jeunes États-Unis d’Amérique ne commencera véritablement à se libéraliser en faveur des femmes qu’à partir des années 1820, sous la pression de la société.67 Le même constat peut-être fait pour le Québec à la même période, les mêmes circonstances provoquant des effets similaires malgré un contexte normatif différent. Outre l’impact du contexte colonial, l’évolution législative joue toutefois un rôle. Au Canada, après l’Acte de Québec de 1774 hommes et femmes vont pouvoir disposer par testament de la totalité de leurs biens – capacité réaffirmée en 1801 –, et même de leur part dans la communauté, comme bon leur semble, même si « au début du XIXe siècle, très peu de femmes font [encore] des testaments ».68 Les travaux de Julian Gwyn ont largement éclairé la participation des femmes à l’activité judiciaire dans le contexte des colonies britanniques canadiennes, notamment en Nouvelle-Écosse et démontrent des lignes forces que l’on retrouve devant les Cours des plaids communs de la Province de Québec.69 Le portrait esquissé alors de la femme sous l’empire de la common law dans les autres provinces canadiennes est très proche de celui sous l’empire de la coutume de Paris: During marriage, for instance, a woman could own, but not control, property. Her personal property came under her husband’s exclusive control. He could spend her wages, appropriate her clothing and jewellery, and sell her wares and the produce of her garden or dairy. Her services belonged to him. He controlled rents and disposed of profits. Her husband gained the right, but not the responsibility, for prosecuting suits regarding her property; she could not compel him to do so. Yet he could not alienate her realty unless she consented. The feme covert could not contract alone, but only with her husband. She could operate her own business only if her husband gave his written consent. Alone she could not sue for payment, but only as her husband’s agent. Owing to a wife’s dower rights, purchasers wanted her consent before they

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would buy land from her husband. The widow enjoyed a one-third dower right to whatever freehold property her husband owned in his lifetime. […] As a widow she recovered all remaining land, which at the time of her husband’s death she had brought into the marriage, as well as all land they had jointly acquired during the marriage. A widow also had a one-third claim to her husband’s personal effects, if he died intestate. The effect of the law on a widow ensured that her standard of living would fall dramatically compared to the one she had enjoyed when married.70

Les différences entre les deux régimes juridiques, civiliste et de common law, semble en faveur de la Coutume de Paris en ce qui concerne le caractère favorable à la condition féminine. En effet, celle-ci protège les droits de la femme et de ses enfants par le régime de la communauté de biens de droit commun, en favorisant notamment les créances de la femme et de ses enfants par rapport à celles des autres créanciers. Comme le relêve Bettina Bradbury, le douaire peut apparaître aux colons britanniques du Québec – et aux hommes du XIXe siècle – comme a « barbarous law »71 et il constitue un objet de débat pour la colonie dans les années 1830.72 Les réformes qui interviendront au Québec après 184073 restreindront les droits des veuves au douaire et les droits des femmes mariées.74 De plus, dans le contexte de la colonie, une épouse mariée à un époux sans terre voit son douaire réduit à peu de chose. Comme le souligne Bettina Bradbury, le douaire coutumier constituait une hypothèque générale sur les biens de la communauté en l’absence de contrat, et les droits à ce douaire prenaient préséance sur les autres créanciers chirographaires. Pour échapper à cette entrave, la plupart des juridictions de common law adoptèrent des mesures « that made it easy for wives to relinquish their dower rights during the process of conveyancing. Not such provisions existed in Lower Canada ».75 Comme le montrent les travaux de Bettina Bradbury beaucoup de souplesse existe sous l’empire de la coutume pour restreindre le caractère a priori plus favorable de celle-ci. Ainsi, il est tout à fait possible pour les hommes qui le désirent de limiter les droits des femmes, notamment en les privant conventionnellement, dans le contrat de mariage, de leur droit au douaire et en levant de facto l’hypothèque sur des terres qu’ils souhaiteraient vendre par la suite.76 Ils peuvent également ne pas confier d’autorisation à ester en justice, contester des transactions ou tenter de priver certaines femmes du bénéfice du statut de marchande publique. D’ailleurs, les dispositions protectrices de la Coutume de Paris, notamment en matière de suc-

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cession, où la femme et les enfants se trouvent protégés par le douaire coutumier seront fortement critiquées par les auteurs précapitalistes anglo-américains et britanniques. Ceux-ci sont en faveur des solutions dégagées par la common law telle qu’appliquée en Angleterre à l’orée du XIXe siècle, permettant notamment d’amasser des capitaux plus rapidement dans les seules mains du mari: « British subjects coming to this country are liable to the operation of all these Canadian or French laws, in the same manner that the Canadians themselves are. They are not always aware of these circumstances; and it has created much disturbance in families. A man who has made a fortune here … conceives that he ought, as in England, to have the disposal of it as the thinks proper. No, says the Canadian Law, you have a right to one half only … Nothing can prevent this but an antinuptial contract of marriage, barring the communauté de bien ».77 Il faut toutefois souligner que la pratique protectrice, notamment du « dower » de common law, est maintenue dans le contexte colonial d’Amérique du nord plus tardivement et de manière plus générale que dans le contexte de la common law du Royaume-Uni.78 L’évolution des mœurs au XIXe siècle va conduire à l’usage progressif du testament, et à l’abandon des normes coutumières protectrices dans l’Amérique du Nord britannique. Le lien familial très fort – et la protection juridique qui en résulte – vont pourtant perdurer dans la société canadienne durant une grande partie du XIXe siècle et trouvent à s’exprimer devant les juridictions Montréalaises. « Être demanderesse » devant les juridictions montréalaises: De la juridiction royale de Montréal à la Cour des plaids communs Devant ces deux juridictions, l’enjeu pour ces femmes, épouses ou veuves est faire valoir leurs droits, à travers ou en appui du schéma normatif que nous venons de décrire. Elles agissent ainsi de manière relativement constante, malgré les changements de régime. Devant la Juridiction royale de Montréal Pour cette étude quantitative, nous avons arbitrairement choisi de limiter notre analyse à la juridiction royale de Montréal de 1740 à 1760 et aux causes qui font apparaître les femmes, épouses ou veuves, comme plaignantes ou défenderesses principales. Fort logiquement, les femmes demanderesses apparaissent alors essentiellement dans des affai-

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Graphique 1. Rapport entre les actes faisant intervenir des femmes comme parties principales et le nombre d’actes total devant la Juridiction royale de Montréal (1740–1760)

res de successions, de dettes, de demandes relatives à la protection de leur patrimoine ou celui de leurs enfants. Plus rarement, c’est le lien du mariage qui est discuté, soit en raison des conditions de celui-ci – mariages à la gaumine consécutifs aux folies de jeunesse79 ou aux aléas de la vie mature80 – soit en raison de ses conséquences.81 La nullité du mariage étant exceptionnelle, ce sont les demandes en séparation de bien – plus rarement de corps et de biens82 – qui sont ainsi proportionnellement assez nombreuses. De même, les actes passés devant la juridiction royale de Montréal afférant aux femmes ou filles non mariées sont généralement les déclarations de tutelle.83 Sur les 1778 actes ou dossiers qui forment la partie consultée du fonds de la Juridiction royale de Montréal,84 on trouve ainsi 275 actes qui font intervenir des femmes à titre de « demanderesse » ou « défenderesse » principale, soit 15,5 %. Pour leur part, Geneviève Postolec et France Parent, pour une période plus courte et pour la prévôté de Québec, relevaient « une participation régulière et significative aux audiences de la cour de justice […] dans une proportion d’une personne sur six ».85 Afin de voir apparaître un contentieux où les femmes sont les acteurs

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Graphique 2. Répartition des actes faisant intervenir des femmes comme parties principales devant la Juridiction royale de Montréal (1740–1760)

Sources: Fonds Juridiction royale de Montréal, BANQ-M, TL4, du 1 janvier 1740 à 1760

principaux, on peut isoler dans les fonds de cette juridiction les actes où au moins une femme est l’une des parties principales, ces actes donnant une idée de la capacité juridique effective des femmes en dehors de la volonté maritale ou familiale. Bien évidemment, un ensemble se trouve alors naturellement surreprésenté: celui des veuves dont on trouve 137 actes au sein le corpus total faisant intervenir des femmes à titre principal. Afin de faire apparaître un autre ensemble, le contentieux relatif aux séparations de biens est également intéressant, notamment à titre de comparatif dans le contexte d’une mixité de tradition juridique tel qu’il sera après la Conquête.86 Dans ce corpus, de 1740 à 1760, on trouve 24 demandes en séparation de biens dont deux de corps et de biens. Malgré les restrictions à son autonomie juridique,87 la Coutume de Paris permet à l’épouse séparée de biens de ne plus être soumise à l’obli-

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gation de la communauté de domicile conjugal, et ainsi d’échapper à d’éventuels mauvais traitements.88 L’implication d’un point de vue quantitatif constitue donc le reflet de la restriction juridique normative officielle. Outre les actes introduits par les veuves (50 %, des actes introduits principalement par des femmes) l’essentiel des autres causes est le fait d’épouses (48 %), et à de très rares exceptions de « filles mineures » représentées ou de « filles majeures »89 (5 actes soit 2 %), les émancipations étant relativement rares en Nouvelle-France au bénéfice des jeunes filles.90 On peut souligner qu’il ne se trouve pas dans cette période, contrairement à l’étude de Geneviève Postolec et France Parent, un grand nombre de causes où les épouses agissent au nom et comme procuratrice de leur mari.91 Ce rapide aperçu de l’activité féminine devant la Juridiction royale de Montréal, sans permettre une comparaison stricto sensu, laisse apparaître certaines lignes forces, notamment relativement à l’activité des veuves et de la faible représentation des femmes devant les juridictions. Devant la Cour des plaidoyers communs Pour appréhendé le contentieux devant la Cour des plaidoyers communs, nous avons arbitrairement choisi de limiter notre analyse à période allant de 1764 à 1791 et aux causes qui font apparaître les femmes, épouses ou veuves, comme plaignante ou défenderesse principale, excluant de facto les causes où elles agissent de manière liée avec leur mari. Si l’évolution subit bien évidemment les conséquences des conflits politiques et militaires, une croissance exponentielle des causes est à remarquer, le volume global dépassant largement les volumes de la Juridiction royale de Montréal antérieurement à la Conquête. Il faut donc se garder de calquer parfaitement les contentieux de la Juridiction royale de Montréal et celui de la Cour des Plaidoyers communs de Montréal, la territorialité de la juridiction ainsi que la compétence n’étant pas les mêmes en amont et en aval de la Conquête. La Cour des plaids communs, conformément à son statut dans le système judiciaire britannique, est l’une des juridictions de common law possédant une compétence théorique à toutes les affaires civiles. Le contexte de la colonie et la permanence – tout d’abord dans les faits puis dans la lettre de la loi – du droit français change considérablement l’impact de la Cour sur le droit. Une Cour des plaids communs pour la province a été créée au Québec par l’ordonnance de 1764.92 Compétence pour les litiges de plus de 10 livres sterling, les affaires

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devant celle-ci devaient être jugées conformément, autant que le permettaient les circonstances, aux lois d’Angleterre, et à l’équité (equity en anglais).93 Bien évidemment, les solutions normatives et pragmatiques adoptées au moment de la Conquête, conciliant certaines règles d’origine française à certaines règles d’origine anglaise, donnent une singularité juridique tant à l’ensemble normatif « affiché » durant la période allant de 1760 à 1791 que dans la réalité sociojuridique que l’on peut retrouver dans les fonds judiciaires.94 L’Ordonnance pour régler et établir les Cours de justice, publiée le 17 septembre 1764, édicte que les juges décideront selon l’équité (equity dans sa formule anglaise), eu égard aux lois d’Angleterre, et que la coutume « n’aurait » donc plus de force exécutoire en cette province jusqu’à l’Acte de Québec, ce qui entrainera un certain flou dans l’ordonnancement judiciaire, au dire même des administrateurs britanniques.95 On le sait, dans la pratique, les normes d’origine françaises continueront d’être appliquées devant la Cour des plaids communs jusqu’à l’Acte de Québec, de manière « officieuse » au regard de la lettre de la Proclamation royale puis officielle après l’Acte de Québec. Le doute quant à la norme à appliquer de 1763 à 1774 profite alors au meilleur plaideur, Hilda Neatby relève notamment que « there were cases in the common pleas where Canadians pleaded English law even against French suitors and the English pleaded French law, leaving the judges, no doubt, full scope for the practice of “ equity ” ».96 Malgré le caractère lapidaire des registres de la Cour des plaidoyers communs de Montréal, on dispose de la banque de données Thémis afin d’affiner la perspective soulignant l’activité quantitative des femmes devant cette cour. Au total, l’activité des épouses et des veuves est la plus importante, et elle recoupe en partie, bien évidemment, les termes défenderesse(s) ou demanderesse(s). Sans surprise, l’activité des parties présumées anglophones en fonction de la consonance des noms de famille est moins importante (defendresse, widow, wife). On trouve donc 1992 actes (lorsqu’on retire les doublons) qui démontrent l’intervention des femmes soit 37 %. Si on vise les situations où les femmes agissent à titre de demanderesse principale, on tombe à environ 14 % d’actes sur toute la période faisant intervenir principalement des femmes ce qui semble prouver une constance avec le régime français. L’importance de l’activité féminine reste donc largement minoritaire. Les variations annuelles sont toutefois très erratiques et il est difficile d’en tirer des enseignements. De plus, les interventions juridiques de femmes « en puissance de mari » dans ces derniers chiffres nous obli-

Tableau 1. Occurrence des termes renvoyant à des parties féminines dans les fonds de la Cour des Plaidoyers communs de Montréal (1764–1791)97 Nombre de années causes

Occurrence du terme épouse

Occurrence du terme demanderesse (s)

Occurrence du terme Occurrence du défenderesse (s) terme wife

Occurrence du terme widow

Occurrence du terme veuve(s)

1764 1765 1766 1767 1768 1769 1770 1771 1772 1773 1774 1775 1776 1777 1778 1779 1780 1781 1782 1783 1784 1785 1786 1787 1788 1789 1790 1791

14 2 4 110 74 86 58 77 74 87 91 20 12 95 124 144 213 152 148 176 257 359 206 280 206 647 887 679

0 0 0 5 8 8 9 7 5 9 7 3 1 9 16 12 12 7 8 9 15 19 17 11 8 21 38 35

1 1 1 6 5 4 7 2 7 4 9 2 0 6 12 9 13 11 6 5 7 11 12 13 10 30 39 35

1 0 0 2 8 2 2 3 5 2 3 2 0 2 5 3 1 2 1 2 5 6 2 7 3 17 24 20

0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 3 0 4 4 2 5 6 11 1 3 10 13 9 14 20

1 1 0 0 0 3 3 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 2 7 2 3 4 3 4 8 3 4 7 7 12

2 1 0 6 9 5 4 6 8 8 9 3 1 9 12 7 14 4 10 8 14 13 8 16 9 35 42 59

Total

5360

299

268

130

111

77

322

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gent à beaucoup de prudence. Le cadre de cette étude ne permet pas, bien évidemment, de confronter strictement l’activité antérieure et postérieure à la Conquête, dans un cadre démographique et politique, qui plus est, variable. Bien évidemment, ces réalités juridiques apparaissent tant devant la Cour des plaids communs de Montréal que de Québec. Devant cette dernière, on retrouve notamment une cause où est discuté le statut de la femme marchande publique et de la femme mariée en 1786. Comme le relève Arnaud Decroix,98 l’application de plusieurs articles de la coutume de Paris est alors débattue afin de rappeler que la « femme mariée ne se peut s’obliger sans le consentement de son mari »99 dans le cas d’une affaire entre une francophone et un anglophone. Dans sa Réplique, l’avocat Berthelot Dartigny, pour le demandeur, rejette l’application de la disposition française, le billet ayant été émis antérieurement à l’Acte de Québec, les normes françaises se trouvant inopérantes depuis 1764 pour les sujets britanniques et les questions relatives au commerce avec ces derniers.100 Certaines causes font intervenir uniquement des parties féminines. Devant la Cour des plaidoyers communs de Québec, s’opposent ainsi Catherine Boucher, veuve de Pierre Langlois et Nathalie Boudreau, veuve de Louis Fleury, seigneur de Deschambault concernant la succession et la donation de ce dernier.101 Dans ce conflit, ce sont encore les femmes appartenant à la petite noblesse et à la bourgeoisie qui usent des moyens judiciaires afin d’obtenir la réalisation de leurs droits.102 Si les veuves sont souvent amenées à faire valoir leurs droits suite à des successions,103 les activités de commerce permettent également aux femmes d’ester en justice. Ainsi, Louise, Charlotte et Katherine Chevery sont opposées à Georges Jenkins qui leur réclame le paiement de certaines marchandises de bouche que ces dernières refusent en raison d’un non-paiement de leurs salaires lorsqu’elles étaient à l’emploi de Mme Jenkins comme couturières.104 Les sœurs Chevery, « filles majeures », font valoir dans leur mémoire que l’action intentée par le boucher est le fait de son épouse, qui souhaite se venger des couturières qui ont quitté son emploi.105 Si les normes coloniales semblent déplacer le plateau de la balance davantage du côté du modèle théorique du compagnonnage que du modèle patriarcal,106 la séparation de corps – ainsi que le veuvage – cristallisent une réelle capacité juridique recouvrée.107 Réponse juridique apportée aux difficultés conjugales, la séparation de corps permet à la femme de redécouvrir une partie de son autonomie juridique,108 sans la libérer pour autant de toute contrainte.109 La preuve nécessaire

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à la séparation de biens posée par l’ordonnance de 1667 ne peut en principe être une preuve testimoniale.110 La Coutume de Paris, autorise la femme à demander la séparation de corps et de biens lorsqu’elle subit des sévices et mauvais traitements réitérés et considérables,111 si son mari a attenté à sa vie, s’il est débauché, s’il conçoit contre elle une « haine capitale… ».112 Il doit alors être fait un inventaire devant un officier public de « […] tous les biens, meubles immeubles et habitations provenant de la communauté stipulée par le contrat de mariage ». Les femmes mariées pouvaient entreprendre les procédures de séparation de biens in forma pauperis,113 c’est-à-dire sans avoir à débourser le coût de l’accès à la justice. Pour la période de 1764 à 1791, on trouve 32 séparations de biens. Rapporté en pourcentage, cela se rapproche assez largement de la proportion du recours à cette action durant le Régime français. Il faut remarquer que la procédure de séparation de biens n’est pas conjointe automatiquement avec une séparation de corps ou d’habitation que nous n’avons pas analysé ici,114 la séparation de biens étant parfois utilisée comme une protection patrimoniale contre la déconfiture – au sens juridique ancien – du mari. En vertu des articles 224 et 234 de la Coutume de Paris, « la séparation, de l’autorité de la Justice, dissout la communauté, formée par la loi ou par le contrat de mariage ».115 Confrontés à ces requêtes, généralement initiés par les épouses, les juges préservent toutefois l’autorité maritale, tout en concédant une certaine sécurité financière à ces dernières, ainsi que la garde des enfants généralement. Devant la Cour des plaids communs, la principale « demanderesse » est donc bien souvent une veuve. Bien évidemment, il faut noter que certains termes sont inclusifs et d’autres exclusifs. Ainsi, on ne peut être épouse et en même temps veuve ou widow, mais inversement, on peut être, au gré du greffier, veuve et demanderesse, ou veuve, ou demanderesse, sans que le statut juridique soit obligatoirement indiqué. Toutefois, la qualité de veuve est le plus souvent indiquée expressément. Devant la Cour des plaidoyers communs, de Québec ou de Montréal, le contentieux faisant agir des veuves est prépondérant, comme il l’était devant la Juridiction de Montréal. Le statut de la veuve116 dans la colonie au moment de la Conquête s’avère plus favorable sociologiquement que sur le continent européen.117 Sans constituer un véritable handicap juridique, le remariage éventuel de la veuve complique considérablement sa situation juridique, l’obligeant à recourir largement à l’institution judiciaire.118 Les droits patrimoniaux sont ainsi accordés

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Graphique 3. Répartition des occurrences des termes dans les actes de la Cour des Plaidoyers communs de Montréal (1764–1791)

aux veuves essentiellement afin de leur assurer une subsistance, à elles et à leurs enfants, afin qu’elles puissent subvenir aux besoins de leur famille et reprendre et gérer le patrimoine familial. La Coutume de Paris prévoit en effet une communauté de biens entre époux qui peut perdurer après la mort de l’un deux si le survivant le désire, notamment si des enfants sont nés de l’union. Le schéma de protection patrimonial s’exprime essentiellement à travers l’application du douaire coutumier, qui constitue une pension viagère. À la mort de son mari, la veuve à droit à celui-ci. C’est un droit qui porte sur la moitié des propres du mari c’est-à-dire les « fonds de terre, les édifices, rentes, offices […], consistant en l’usufruit, c’est-à-dire la jouissance, de certains des immeubles du mari, qui sont restés en dehors de la communauté ».119 Les veuves peuvent également poursuivre la communauté de biens avec leurs enfants jusqu’à la majorité de ces derniers ou jusqu’à un éventuel remariage. Elles peuvent procéder au partage de la communauté avec leurs enfants:120 elles bénéficient alors de la moitié des biens et sont responsables de la moitié des dettes de la société conjugale dissoute. Enfin, elles peuvent renoncer à la communauté de biens si celle-ci est grevée de dettes. Elles obtiennent alors le droit d’en retirer leurs effets personnels et reprendre les biens qu’elles y ont apportés si cela est stipulé dans le contrat de mariage.

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Le schéma est le même en common law, notamment dans son application dans les colonies américaines. Deux situations sont prévues afin de protéger la veuve, le « jointure » (contrat) et le « dower » (douaire). La première technique, contractuelle se pratique peu dans les colonies121 car elle nécessite un paiement en numéraire. Par contre, le dower fixe une division du patrimoine du mari en trois tiers. Les colons d’Amérique du Nord s’efforceront d’adapter cette pratique au contexte des colonies, notamment par une création de normes spécifiques ou une interprétation créatrice des normes de la métropole coloniale. Il en est ainsi du Dower Act du Massachusetts de 1647122 qui se rapproche davantage de la pratique de common law123 que de la lettre de celle-ci.124 Les colonies nord-américaines se caractérisent essentiellement par l’absence de jointure au profit du recours au dower. Plusieurs historiens soulignent d’ailleurs que le passage du dower au jointure, permettant de fixer définitivement la part de l’épouse, constitue l’une des étapes les plus importantes vers la perte d’autonomie financière qui caractérisera le XIXe siècle.125 Il faut souligner que, si le jointure – cristallisant la part de l’épouse lors du mariage – constitue un outil sécurisant pour le patrimoine, il remplace lentement (au XVIIe puis XVIIIe siècle) le « dower ».126 Celui-ci est principalement utilisé au sein des couples les moins favorisés, ces derniers n’ayant que peu de liquidité et ne faisant que rarement des testaments. La veuve retrouve donc, de par le décès de son époux, une capacité juridique relativement étendue, tant en common law127 qu’en droit civil. Le régime de la Coutume de Paris permet également à la veuve, grâce notamment au « bénéfice d’émolument » de renoncer à la communauté de biens si celle-ci est trop fortement grevée de dettes, ou tout du moins d’en limiter les conséquences. Durant la période étudiée, de 1764 à 1791, les veuves agissent à neuf reprises en tant que tutrices de leurs enfants, afin de protéger leurs droits patrimoniaux. Elles agissent dans des actions en dommage,128 dans des actions commerciales,129 elles s’opposent parfois à d’autres femmes ou veuves.130 Leur activité en matière d’obligations meubles est à souligner, les actions pour obtenir le paiement de certains billets ou l’apurement de compte de société sont nombreuses,131 à hauteur de 80 % du contentieux conformément à la réalité d’autres juridictions, comme en Nouvelle-Écosse.132 Ainsi, Julian Gwyn relève, ce qui ne peut étonner, une très forte représentation des veuves (51,8 % de son corpus)133 et la répartition des causes, similaires en proportion avec nos recherches, recoupent celles faites par Francis134 et par Kolish,135 pour la répartition du contentieux global.

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Les veuves agissent également de manière à défendre leurs droits en tant qu’anciennes épouses, à travers des actions en réclamation de droits matrimoniaux face à des curateurs de succession.136 Devant la Cour des plaids communs de Québec, le même type de contentieux se retrouve. Si elles interviennent souvent en matière de succession,137 les veuves sont amenées à agir en justice afin de soutenir leur activité commerciale et notamment le paiement d’obligation.138 Les marchandes usent alors activement de leurs capacités juridiques.139 Sur un échantillon du fond de la Cour des Plaidoyers communs de Québec, sur 107 dossiers,140 on retrouve onze affaires faisant agir des femmes à titre principal, uniquement des veuves. Sur ces affaires, on trouve six affaires relatives à des successions, et cinq relatives à des obligations (des paiements de biens, de dettes ou de services). Les veuves agissent ainsi bien souvent afin de faire respecter des obligations de paiement.141 Les veuves de la noblesse et de la moyenne bourgeoisie sont au premier plan des actions en justice.142 Bien évidemment, elles disposent de plus de moyens pour ce faire et jouent un rôle majeur dans la représentation féminine, en amont et en aval de la Conquête.143 Les femmes parviennent parfois à faire valoir leur condition de mineure à leur profit, ou tente de le faire. Une affaire intervenue devant la Cour des plaids communs de Québec permet d’illustrer l’atmosphère – juridique et sociale – qui teinte cette question de la capacité de la femme. En l’espèce, Marie Françoise Gosselin, épouse Laroche fait valoir devant les juges de la Cour en 1772 une demande de restitution de terre qu’elle aurait vendue « par erreur de jeunesse » durant sa minorité mais après un veuvage précoce.144 Les moyens développés dans cette cause par la défenderesse éclairent la situation d’une femme face à des engagements juridiques non désirés et s’avèrent assez emblématique à la fois de la perception et de la réalité de la capacité juridique féminine, mais aussi des enjeux juridiques qui parcourent la province et agitent les praticiens du droit. La jeune veuve, encore mineure, a vendu une terre à un sieur Laverdière avant ses 25 ans. Son argumentaire souligne la situation fragile d’une femme mineure et sa quête de protection en justice. Ses avocats, qui écrivent le 16 novembre 1773, reflètent l’air du temps dans les prétoires et annoncent mezzo voce l’Acte de Québec en fondant un premier moyen sur la norme à appliquer dans la province. Le premier [moyen] est si naturel que personne ne peut ni [le] réfuter, ni le contester et nait, de l’opinion constante qu’une coutume est un droit particulier que les habitants d’un lieu ou d’une province, sous le bon plaisir et l’autorité

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de leur prince s’obligent et promettent volontairement d’observer les uns envers les autres, tellement que fort à propos un fameux jurisconsulte dit que le statut d’une province est une loi requise par le sujet, autorisée du prince, d’où il semble que l’un et l’autre a renoncé au pouvoir de la changer ou mitiger, parce qu’elle forme une espèce de contrat qui une fois parfait doit avoir un être immuable. La demanderesse et le défendeur sont nés et ont contracté dans un lieu, où un droit de cette espèce a depuis son établissement, fourni l’état personnel et fortuné de chaque particulier, qui n’a point encore été abrogé par aucun pouvoir, et qui par le droit des gens ne peut l’être tacitement, par aucune époque; celle de la Conquête de la province serait même mal à propos alléguée par le défendeur, parce qu’elle n’a changé que le droit public, et non le droit particulier, les divers témoignages de bonté de sa majesté régnante sur nous, sont l’évidence la plus parfaite de cette vérité; encore que la demanderesse est incontestablement fondée à s’appuyer du droit de l’usage et de la Coutume de Paris qui ont toujours fait le droit et que l’acte de vente qu’elle a fait dans sa minorité, et dont elle poursuit la cassation a été passé sous la protection de l’un et l’autre droit, usage et coutume.145

Malgré l’incertitude, la constance du droit d’origine française s’affirme ici, dans le même temps où la permanence d’une situation d’entrave juridique majeure pour les femmes mariées ou mineures s’affirme. S’il existe donc des failles juridiques permettant en droit français aux épouses d’agir en justice et de s’engager juridiquement, c’est toutefois le statut de veuve qui leur rend généralement une pleine capacité juridique et qui explique leur surreprésentation à titre de demanderesse principale devant la Cour des plaids communs. *** Comme l’atteste les recherches récentes146 – dans d’autres domaines sociaux et juridiques – l’application de la Coutume de Paris se fait sans véritable rupture juridique en amont et en aval de la Conquête lorsqu’on aborde la pratique. L’exemple de la condition juridique de la femme canadienne semble démontrer que la Coutume de Paris permet une certaine capacité juridique à la femme, qu’elle soit majeure, célibataire, veuve ou même mariée dans certaines conditions. Au regard du statut de la femme, il semble s’esquisser une réponse « coloniale » à la question initiée par J. Moutet, et reprise par Marie-Jo Bonnet et Christine Faure147 visant à établir un lien entre interventions régaliennes de l’état pour un plus fort contrôle de la norme et la restriction de la liberté juridique féminine. Plutôt qu’une intervention normative

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étatique, l’exemple de la capacité judiciaire des femmes devant la Cour des plaids communs laisse entrevoir plutôt une pression contextuelle et sociale sans faire apparaître ni de « stratégies féminines de résistance »148 ni une pratique coloniale particulièrement singulière. La permanence semble donc la règle. Que ce soit qualitativement, au regard des normes évoquées, que quantitativement, au regard de la part des femmes dans le contentieux en général ou dans la proportion d’acte de séparation de corps ou d’intervention de veuve, les lignes de base restent les mêmes. De même, malgré la disparité normative, la réalité de l’implication des femmes devant les cours de justice en matière de droit privé est relativement similaire à ce qu’elle est dans les autres provinces canadiennes à la même époque. La coutume de Paris, loin de s’opposer frontalement à des « stratégies féminines de résistance », accompagne celles-ci, voire même en recèle en sa pratique. La question de l’influence de la pratique coloniale américaine reste ouverte. Il semble bien que la souplesse normative et pragmatique que connaît la Province du Québec avant et après la Conquête se rapproche davantage de la dynamique coloniale nordaméricaine que de la réaffirmation du modèle patriarcal que connaît l’Angleterre à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. En étendant la recherche à d’autres paliers de juridiction, à la Cour des plaidoyers communs de Québec de manière systématique, et à certains domaines spécifiques, comme la dissolution de communauté de biens, les tentatives de recours au douaire ou l’exercice de la liberté testamentaire, un parallèle pourra être mené afin d’affiner l’influence sociale que peu jouer le contexte colonial nord-américain, sur l’application de cette norme exogène au système judiciaire britannique.

NOTES 1 L’auteur tient à remercier Donald Fyson, Blaine Baker, et Philip Girard, ainsi que ses deux évaluateurs anonymes pour leurs précieux conseils et remarques sur une version antérieure de ce texte, ainsi que Mlle Marie-Ève Demers-Morabito, étudiante à la maîtrise en sexologie (MA, UQÀM), et Steven Rousseau, étudiant au Barreau du Québec (LLB). 2 L. Bouchel, « procès », dans La Bibliothèque ou Thresor du droict françois, 2 vol., t. 2 (Paris: Chez la veuve Guillemot, 1615), 534. 3 Chevalier de Baugy, « Lettre confidentielle de M de Baugy à son frère, A Québec, ce 22 novembre 1682 », dans Journal d’une expédition contre les Iro-

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quois en 1687, 153, cité par Réal Ouellet, Oeuvres Complètes du Chevalier de Lahontant, édition critique, coll. Bibliothèque du Nouveau Monde, t. 1 (Montréal: Les Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 1990), 266n41. Ce dernier décrit en 1684, l’arrivée de « plusieurs vaisseaux chargés de filles de moyenne vertu, sous la direction de quelques vielles Beguines qui les divisèrent en trois Classes. Ces Vestales étoient pour ainsi dire entassées les unes sur les autres en trois différentes salles, où les époux choisissoient leurs épouses de la manière que le boucher va choisir les moutons au milieu d’un troupeau ». Baron de Lahontant, « Lettre de Lahontan A la cote de Beaupré, le 2 may 1684 », dans Ouellet, « Œuvres complètes, édition critique », 264–5. Contra: Y. Landry, Les filles du roi au XVIIe siècle (Montréal: Leméac, 1992), 19; Gustave Lanctot, Filles de joie ou Filles du roi, étude sur l’émigration féminine en Nouvelle-France (Montréal: Éditions Chantecler, 1952); S. Martel, Jeanne, fille du roi (Montréal: Éditions Fides, 1974); Nelson Dawson, « Les filles du roi: des pollueuses? La France du XVIIe siècle », Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 12, no. 1 (1985): 9–37; Dawson, « The Filles du Roy Sent to New France: Protestant, Prostitute or Both? », Historical Reflections 16, no. 1 (1989): 55–78; Dawson, « Protestantes à terre, catholiques en mer? ou les mutations religieuses des Filles du Roy embarquées pour la Nouvelle-France », dans Actes du 111e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes, Poitiers, t. 2 (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1986), 79–97; Y. Landry, « Les filles du roi émigrées au Canada au 17e siècle ou un exemple de choix du conjoint en situation de déséquilibre des sexes », Histoire, économie et société 2 (1992): 197–216. Le dialogue mené par Micheline Dumont et Jan Noel à travers diverses publications est particulièrement instructif sur la place des femmes en Nouvelle-France. Jan Noel, « New France: Les femmes favorisées », dans The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women’s History, ed. A. Prentice et S. Mann Trofimenkoff (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985), 18–40; et Noel, « Women in New France, Further Reflexions », Atlantis 8, no. 1 (1982): 125–30; Micheline Dumont, « Les femmes de la Nouvelle-France étaient-elles favorisées? », Atlantis 8, no. 1 (1982): 118–24; France Parent et Geneviève Postolec, « Quand Thémis rencontre Clio: les femmes et le droit en Nouvelle-France, » Les Cahiers de Droit 36, no. 1 (1995): 293–318. Voltaire, « Femmes, » dans Dictionnaire Philosophique, coll. Classiques, t. 3 (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1879), 96. Voir Cardin Le Bret, De la souveraineté du roy (Paris, 1632), livre 1, chap. 4, 123. Voir P. Ourliac, « L’évolution de la condition de la femme en Droit français », Annales de la Faculté de droit et des sciences économiques de Toulouse 14, no. 2 (1966): 62.

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8 Jean Portemer, « Le statut de la femme en France depuis la réformation des coutumes jusqu’à la rédaction du Code civil », dans Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’Histoire comparative des institutions, t. 12 (Bruxelles: Dessain et Tolra,1962), 453. 9 Eric F. Johnson, « Libertines and Liberty: State Justice and Changing Regimes in Eighteenth-Century France », Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (2007): 664–7. 10 Ruth Roach Pierson, « Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice », dans Writing of Canadian Women’s History, International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, et Jane Rendall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 88; Denyse Baillargeon, « L’histoire des femmes au Québec et au Canada anglais (1970–1995) », Sextant 4 (1995): 133–68; et, plus récemment Brève histoire des femmes au Québec (Montréal: Les éditions du Boréal, 2012). 11 Outre les travaux cités dans la présente contribution, voir André Morel, « La réaction des Canadiens devant l’administration de la justice de 1764 à 1774, une forme de résistance passive », Revue du Barreau 20 (1960): 53–63; Michel Brunet, « Les Canadiens après la Conquête, Les débuts de la résistance passive », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 12, no. 2 (1958): 170–207; Jean-Philippe Garneau, « Droit, famille et pratique successorale. Les usages du droit d’une communauté rurale au XVIIIe siècle canadien » (Thèse de doctorat, UQAM, 2003). 12 Sur cette question, voir Jean-Philippe Garneau, « Une culture de l’amalgame au prétoire: les avocats de Québec et l’élaboration d’un langage juridique commun (tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles) », Canadian Historical Review 88 (2007): 113–48. 13 Sur le contexte normatif, voir notamment les travaux de Seaman Morley Scott, Chapters in the History of the Law of Quebec, 1764–1775 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1933); Hilda Neatby, The Administration of Justice under the Quebec Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937); Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966): 49, 53; et Neatby, The Quebec Act: Protest and Policy (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1972); William Smith, « The Struggle over the Laws of Canada, 1763–1783 », Canadian Historial Review (1920): 171; Michel Brunet, « Premières réactions des vaincus de 1760 devant les vainqueurs », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 6, no. 4 (1953): 506–16; Brunet, Les Canadiens après la Conquête, 1759–1775 (Montréal: Fides, 1969), 99; plus récemment, ceux d’Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: le débat du droit privé au Québec, 1760–1840 (La Salle: Hurtubise, 1994); Michel Morin, « Les changements de régimes juridiques consécutifs à la Conquête de 1760 », Revue du Barreau 57, no. 3 (1997): 689; Jean-Philippe

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Garneau, « Droit et “ affaires de famille ” sur la Côte-de-Beaupré: histoire d’une rencontre en amont et en aval de la Conquête britannique », Revue juridique Thémis 34, no. 2 (2000): 515; Luc Huppé, Histoire des institutions judiciaires du Canada (Montréal: Wilson & Lafleur, 2007), 137. Voir Jean-Maurice Brisson, La formation d’un droit mixte: l’évolution de la procédure civile de 1774 à 1867 (Montréal: Éditions Thémis, 1986). Marie-Aimée Cliche, « Les procès en séparation de corps dans la région de Montréal, 1795–1879 », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 49, no. 1 (1995): 6. Sur cette confrontation des deux droits, voir notamment les deux travaux récents de Donald Fyson, « De la common law à la Coutume de Paris: les nouveaux habitants britanniques du Québec et le droit civil français, 1764–1775 », dans La coutume dans tous ses états, ed. Florent Garnier et Jacqueline Vendrand-Voyer (Paris: La Mémoire du Droit, 2011); Fyson, « The Conquered and the Conqueror: The Mutual Adaptation of the Canadiens and the British in Quebec, 1759–1775 », dans 1759 Revisited: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, ed. Phillip A. Buckner et John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Plus tardivement, certaines particularités du droit français, comme les hypothèques conventionnelles sans publicité, feront l’objet de débats et confrontations entre les deux communautés: voir Sylvio Normand et Alain Hudon, « Le contrôle des hypothèques secrètes au XIXe siècle: ou la difficile conciliation de deux cultures juridiques et de deux communautés ethniques », Recueil de droit immobilier (1990): 172. Grâce aux travaux de Josette Brun, Jan Noel, Micheline Dumont, Sylvie Savoie, Geneviève Postolec, et France Parent notamment dont les travaux sont cités dans ces pages. Sur la réalité pénale de l’implication féminine, voir André Lachance, « Women and Crime in Canada in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1712–1759 », dans Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada: Essays, ed. Louis A. Knafla (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1985), 157–77; Jean-François Leclerc, « Femmes et violence: quelques réflexions à partir des procès pour voie de fait dans la juridiction de Montréal, 1700–1760 », Cahiers d’histoire 6, no. 1 (1985): 83–103; Josianne Paul, « Sans différends, point d’harmonie, Les règlements de conflits à Montréal au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle » (Thèse de doctorat, Université Ottawa, 2011), 103 et suivant. Paula Bourne, « Women, Law and the Judicial System », dans Canadian Women’s Issues, Strong Voices, Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Activism in English Canada, vol. 1, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Paula Bourne, Philinda Masters (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1993), 320–48.

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Voir également le numéro spécial « Les femmes et la société canadienne », Revue Internationale d’Études canadiennes 11 (1995). Voir notamment les travaux d’Alan Greer, Jean-Philippe Garneau, et de Serge Gagnon: Alan Greer: Peasant, Lord, and Merchant – Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 52–60; Jean-Philippe Garneau, « Succession, pratiques d’écriture et individualisation de la famille au XVIIIe siècle: une approche culturelle du rapport droit et modernité », dans Temps, espace et modernités. Mélanges offerts à Serge Courville et Normand Séguin (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009), 57–69; Garneau, « De l’apparence de justice: le rituel de la protection des mineurs et la régulation sociale des familles rurales du XVIIIe siècle canadien », dans La régulation sociale entre l’acteur et l’institution. Pour une problématique historique de l’interaction / Agency and Institutions in Social Regulation: Towards an Historical Understanding of Their Interaction, ed. Jean-Marie Fecteau et Janice Harvey (Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2005), 57–68; Serge Gagnon, Mariage et Famille au temps de Papineau (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993); Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montréal et Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 137–46. Les travaux récents de Bettina Bradbury apportent un important éclairage: Bettina Bradbury et al., « Property and Marriage: The Law and the Practice in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal », Histoire sociale / Social History 26, no. 51 (1993): 9–39. Dans sa plus récente contribution, elle souligne notamment le caractère très formaliste des contrats de mariage dans les premières années du XIXe siècle, ainsi que les larges possibilités laissées par la Coutume de Paris dans la délimitation du devenir des biens apportés par chacun dans la communauté; Bettina Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 73, et plus largement 70–86 et 120–70. Veronica Strong-Boag et Anita Clair Fellman, « Editor’s Introduction » au texte de Jan Noel, « New France: Les Femmes Favorisées », dans Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, ed. Veronica Strong-Boag et Anita Clair Fellman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33. Ibid., 30. Evelyn Kolish, « Les Canadiens devant deux droits familiaux », Cap-auxDiamants 39 (1994): 14–17. Hubert Charbonneau et al., « The Population of the St Lawrence Valley, 1608–1760 », dans A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R.

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Haines et Richard H. Steckel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112–17. Jan Noel, « New France: Les femmes favorisées », 18–40. Postolec et Parent donne un large aperçu de la capacité des femmes à agir sous l’emprise de la coutume de Paris. Elles démontrent la souplesse de la coutume et évoque deux ensembles de normes positives ou négatives auxquelles il est possible ou impossible de déroger. Si nous sommes en accord avec le fait qu’il existe une « possibilité d’assouplissement qui fait partie intégrante de l’univers juridique », il faut éviter d’utiliser le terme de zone grise ou de dérogation à la loi dans le contexte de la coutume. Celle-ci est le droit commun, et comme le code civil de nos jours, ne contient pas toutes les dispositions ou ne fixe pas, par des normes d’ordre public (les normes prohibitives évoquées par Postolec et Parent), – auxquelles on ne peut déroger – l’ensemble du droit. Il ne s’agit pas d’une zone grise, mais bien d’un choix, fait par la pratique coutumière formalisée par le pouvoir royal, de laisser aux particuliers le droit d’organiser différemment ou selon leur volonté un régime juridique. Il faut rappeler que les sources du droit sont diverses dans l’ancien droit et les zones où la force créatrice conventionnelle existe sont vastes; Parent et Postolec, « Quand Thémis rencontre Clio », 302. 224 MIOM/2, Lettre de Colbert à Talon, 20 Février 1668, Archives d’OutreMer, Aix-en-Provence, C11A, vol. 2. Voir Parent et Postolec, « Quand Thémis rencontre Clio », 308. Voir Bourjon, Le droit commun de la France et la coutume de Paris réduits en principes, tirés des Ordonnances, des arrêts, des Loix civiles, & des auteurs, & mises dans l’ordre d’un commentaire complet et méthodique sur cette coutume, 2 vol. (Paris: Éditions Grangé Rouy, 1747), titre II, art. 1 et 2, 501. Ibid. Pierre Petot, Histoire du droit privé, La famille, t. 1 (Paris: Éditions Loysel, 1992), 461. Voir David Gilles, « La condition juridique de la femme en NouvelleFrance: essai sur l’application de la Coutume de Paris dans un contexte colonial », Cahiers aixois d’histoire des droits de l’outre-mer français 1 (2002): 77–125. Jean-Marie Augustin remarque que, dans la jeune colonie de Montréal, la publicité se trouve facilement assurée, et que les irrégularités sont couvertes par le gouverneur Chomedey de Maisonneuve. Jean-Marie Augustin, « Les premiers contrats de mariage à Montréal de 1648 à 1664, et la Coutume de Paris », Revue juridique Thémis 30, no. 1 (1996): 7. Sur les adaptations faites par les notaires, voir Louis Lavallée, « La vie et la pratique

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d’un notaire rural sous le régime français: le cas de Guillaume Barette, notaire à la Prairie entre 1709–1744 », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 47, no. 4 (1994): 499–519; André Vachon, Histoire du notariat canadien, 1621–1960 (Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1962). Bettina Bradbury, « Debating Dower: Patriarchy, Capitalism and Widows’ Rights in Lower Canada », dans Power, Place and Identity: Historical Studies of Social and Legal Regulation in Quebec (Montreal: The Group, 1998), 55–78. Voir par exemple Brian J. Young, « Getting around Legal Incapacity: The Legal Status of Married Women in Trade in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lower Canada », Canadian Papers in Business History, vol. 1, ed. Peter Baskerville (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1989), 1–16. Sur la Coutume de Paris en Nouvelle-France, voir notamment l’article de Yves F. Zoltvany, « Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 35, no. 3 (1971): 365–84; John Dickinson, « New France: Law, Courts, and the Coutume de Paris, 1608–1760 », Manitoba Law Journal 23, nos 1–2 (1996): 32–54. Geneviève Postolec, « Le mariage dans la Coutume de Paris: normes et pratiques à Neuville aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles », dans Vingt ans après Habitants et marchands. Lectures de l’histoire des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles canadiens, ed. Sylvie Dépatie (Montréal et Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 208–25; Postolec, « L’exclusion de la succession par exhérédation ou par substitution au Canada aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles », dans Les exclus de la terre en France et au Québec, XVIIe–XXe siècles, ed. Gérard Bouchard, John A. Dickinson, et Joseph Goy (Québec: Septentrion, 1998), 175–89. « … j’ay de nouveau examiné la matière des Dots des filles et après avoir fait réflexion que la coutume de la Ville, Prévoté et Vicomté de Paris s’observe inviolablement en Canada; et que tous les habitants l’ont receu d’un consentement universel dès le commencement de cette colonie ce qui depuis n’a souffert aucune interruption, j’ay jugé plus a propos de n’y rien innover »; 224MIOM/2, Instructions de Colbert à Talon, 20 février 1668, Centre des Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, C11A, vol. 2, fol. 11–22. Selon Geneviève Postolec, il s’agit d’environ 70 % des couples qui ont recours à un contrat de mariage de 1680–1780. M. Verette rapporte que la proportion de jeunes gens passant contrat de mariage à Montréal entre 1750 et 1770 dépasserait les 95 %. M. Verette, « L’alphabétisation de la population de la ville de Québec de 1750 à 1849 », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 39, no. 1 (1985): 54. Voir également Louise Dechêne, Habitants et marchands à Montréal au XVIIe siècle (Montréal: Éditions Plon, 1974), 418–22.

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39 Voir 224MIOM/2, Lettre de Talon au Ministre Colbert, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, C11A, Correspondance générale 1668–1672. Voir Bourjon, Le droit commun. Voir J. Boucher, « L’histoire de la condition juridique et sociale de la femme au Canada français », dans Le droit dans la vie familiale: Livre du Centenaire du Code civil, Textes présentés par J. Boucher et A. Morel (Montréal: Presses de l’université de Montréal, 1970), 157. Lettre de l’intendant Hocquart, Rapport de l’Archiviste de la Province de Québec, 1921–1922 (Québec): 62–6; Lettre de Vaudreuil et Raudot à Ponchartrain, 7 novembre 1711, RAPQ, 1946–1947, 439; Mémoire du roi à MM. De Vaudreuil et Raudot, 7 juillet 1711, cité dans Paul-André Leclerc, « Le mariage sous le régime français », 244. 40 Sur ce point, voir Charbonneau et al., « Population of the St Lawrence Valley », 99–142. 41 Sur cette question, voir les travaux fondateurs mais toujours d’actualité d’André Morel, Les limites de la liberté testamentaire dans le droit civil de la province de Québec (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1960). 42 Jean-Marie Augustin relève dans son étude 20 contrats prévoyant cette possibilité; Jean-Marie Augustin, « Les premiers contrats de mariage à Montréal de 1648 à 1664 », 17. Cette libéralité, réservée aux époux sans enfants, consiste en un acte notarié qui prévoit que l’époux survivant jouirait par usufruit sa vie durant, de la partie de la communauté appartenant au prédécédé. Zoltvany, « Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris », 369. 43 P.L. Gin, « De la Communauté », dans Analyse raisonnée du droit françois, par la comparaison des dispositions des Loix Romaines, & de celles de la Coutume de Paris, […], 1 vol. (Paris: Éditions Servière, 1782), titre XVII, 324. 44 Ibid., 328. 45 R.-J. Pothier, « Traité de la puissance du mari sur la personne et les biens de la femme », dans Œuvres (Paris: Éditions Bugnet, 1861), 1. 46 Bourjon, « Le droit commun de la France », t. 1, titre 1er, ch. II, art. 233, 2. 47 Gin, Analyse raisonnée du droit françois, 339. 48 Claude de Ferrière, Nouveau commentaire sur la Coutume de la Prévôté et Vicomté de Paris, Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée par Sauvan d’Aramon, t. 2 (Paris: Éditions Saugrain, 1741), titre X, art. 223, 22. 49 Article 225 de la Coutume de Paris: Claude de Ferrière, « Nouveau commentaire sur la Coutume de la Prévôté et Vicomté de Paris », 28; Bourjon, « Le Droit commun », vol. 1, titre I, ch. II, art. IV, 2. 50 Parent et Postolec, « Quand Thémis rencontre Clio », 304–8. 51 Argou, « Institution au Droit françois », t. II, livre III, ch. XIX, 203. 52 Sur ce point voir Petot, « Histoire du droit privé, La famille », 459; Ahmed

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Slimani, « La femme marchande publique dans les coutumiers des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle », dans La femme dans l’histoire du droit et des idées politiques, ed. P. Charlot et Éric Gasparini (Dijon: Presses Universitaires Dijon, 2008), 145–75; Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canada Civil Code of 1866 (Montréal et Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 130–46. Robert-Joseph Pothier, « Traité du contrat de mariage et de la puissance du mari », dans Œuvres de Pothier, t. 7 (Paris: Siffrein, 1822), no. 49. France Parent, Entre le juridique et le social: le pouvoir des femmes à Québec au XVIIe siècle, coll. « Les Cahiers de recherche du GREMF, no. 42 », Groupe de recherche multidisciplinaire féministe (Québec: Université Laval, 1991), 63. Bourjon, « Le Droit commun », vol. 1, ch. III, sec. I, 501. Parent, « Entre le juridique et le social », 63. Boucher, « L’histoire de la condition juridique et sociale de la femme au Canada français », 158. Voir Craig Evan Klafter, « The Americanization of Blackstone’s Commentaries,” dans Essays on English Law and the American Experience, ed. Elisabeth A. Cawthon et David E. Narrett (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), 42–66; Linda Briggs Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition from Dutch to English Law, 1643–1727 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983); sur la common law durant cette période, voir notamment N.E.H. Hull, Female Felons: Women and Serious Crime in Colonial Massachusetts (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987); H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3me éd. (London: Lexispublishing, 1990); Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America, 2me éd. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Kermit L. Hall, David S. Clark, James W. Ely, Joel B. Grossman, N.E.H. Hull, The Oxford Companion to American Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 364– 89; Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Deborah H. Rosen, « Courts and Commerce in Colonial New York », American Legal History 36 (1992): 139; Rosen, « The Supreme Court of Judicature of Colonial New York: Civil Practice in Transition 1691–1760 », Law and History Review 5 (1987): 213. Pour un aperçu des débats américains sur la genèse de la common law américaine et son rapport à l’héritage britannique, voir James A. Henretta, « Review », William & Mary Quarterly 53 (1988): 793–8. Ellen Holmes Pearson, Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,

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2011), 93–6, 105–11. Bruce H. Mann, dans son ouvrage Republic of Debtors, souligne à plusieurs reprises l’implication des femmes dans l’activité économique et juridique de la jeune République; Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009): 88–91, 118–26; Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, et Michel Dalhin, Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); A. Fernandez et M.D. Dubber, Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Treatise (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012). Mann, « Republic of Debtors », 443. Voir Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Studies in Legal History) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 14–23. An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage, 26 Geo. II. c. 33. Voir Leah Leneman, « The Scottish Case That Led to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act », Law and History Review 17, no. 1 (1999): 2; Rebecca Probert, « Control over Marriage in England and Wales, 1753–1823: The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in Context », Law and History Review 27, no. 2 (2009): 68; Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71 et suivant; sur l’application de la common law au mariage dans les colonies, voir M. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Rebecca Robert, « The Impact of the Marriage Act of 1753: Was It Really “A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex”? », Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2 (2005): 247–62. Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 72. Pour le contexte canadien, voir Constance Backhouse, « Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada », Law and History Review 6, no. 2 (1988): 211–58; Philip Girard, « Married Women’s Property, Chancery Abolition, and Insolvency Law: Law Reform in Nova Scotia, 1820–1867 », dans Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. Girard et Phillips, vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Philip Girard et Rebecca Veinott, « Married Women’s Property Law in Nova Scotia, 1850–1910 », Separate Spheres: Women’s Worlds in the 19th Century Maritimes, ed. Janet Guildford et Suzanne Morton (Fredericton: Acadiensis, 1994), 67–91; Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario, 14–28. Kolish, « Les canadiens devant deux droits familiaux », 17.

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64 Joan R. Gunderson et Gwen Victor Gampel, « Married Women’s Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia », William & Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 127. 65 Holly Brewer, « The Transformation of Domestic Law », dans The Cambridge History of Law in America, ed. Michael Grossberg, Christopher Tomlins, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 302. William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 134. 66 Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law, 103. 67 Brewer, « Transformation of Domestic Law », 298. 68 Collectif Clio, L’histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles (Montréal: Le Jour, 1992), 96. 69 Julian Gwyn, « Female Litigants before the Civil Courts of Nova Scotia, 1749–1801 », Histoire sociale / Social History 36, no. 72 (2003): 311–46; Gwyn, « Women as Litigants before the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754– 1830 », dans The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle, ed. Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, et Barry Cahill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 294–320. 70 Ibid., 315–16. 71 La phrase est de Robert Unwin Harwood, un marchand installé au Québec dans les années 1820, et qui, siégeant comme conseiller auprès de du Gouverneur Colborne, réfère en 1839 en ces termes au douaire; Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 120; voir également Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5. 72 Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 122–7. 73 The Registry Ordinance entre en vigueur en décembre 1841; Registry Ordinance, 5. 21, 1841, LCO. 74 Bradbury souligne trois profonds changements lors de la Registry Ordinance: premièrement, les douaires prévus par contrat de mariage n’auront plus préséance sur les autres créances portant sur les biens du mari avant qu’ils ne soient enregistrés. Deuxièmement, les épouses obtiennent une capacité limitée de contracter à travers la possibilité d’accepter l’aliénation de leur douaire désormais sans l’autorisation du mari et enfin, troisièmement le douaire est limité au patrimoine possédé par le mari au moment de sa mort; Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 135. 75 Ibid., 122 et 135. 76 Ibid., 120. 77 H. Gray, Letters from Canada Written during a Residence There in the Years

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1806, 1807 and 1808, Londres, 1809, cité dans Collectif Clio, L’histoire des femmes au Québec, 97. Sur l’évolution du dower en amérique du nord, et notamment l’impact de celui-ci sur l’évolution de la propriété terrienne, voir Philip Girard, « Land Law, Liberalism, and the Agrarian Ideal: British North America, 1750– 1920 », dans Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies, ed. John McLaren, A.R. Buck, Nancy E. Wright (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 123–7. Il s’agit alors de mariage fait devant l’Église, sans respecter les règles laïques ainsi que les formes du droit canonique, faisant alors de ces mariages des unions nulles vis-à-vis des juridictions laïques et valides devant les cours ecclésiastiques. Voir par exemple le procès de MarieAnne-Josèphe de L’Estringant de Saint-Martin âgée de 15 ans et de Louis de Montéléon, 30 ans, accusés de s’être mariés à la gaumine dans l’église de Beauport le 7 janvier 1711. C’est en l’espèce tant les autorités ecclésiastiques et politiques que le père de la mariée qui sont à l’origine du contentieux; TP1, S777, D87 ainsi que TP1, S28, P8918, P8922 et P89325 janvier 1711–12 février 1711, M3/2. Sauf mention contraire, l’ensemble des références concernant les tribunaux proviennent de la Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec. Pour la Juridiction royale de Montréal et la Cour des plaidoyers communs de Montréal, les références proviennent du site de Montréal de la Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec et celles de la Cour des plaidoyers communs de Québec proviennent du site de Québec. Il en est ainsi du réquisitoire du procureur du roi daté des 18 et 19 février 1751, qui vise à interroger le sieur Richard sur son mariage à la gaumine avec la veuve du sieur Divertissant, et dont les faits font ressortir que le prêtre, ne jouissant plus de toutes ses facultés auditives, déclare ne pas avoir entendu les futurs mari et femme se prendre pour époux lors de l’élévation … Ici, la veuve entend échapper au conseil de famille et non pas à son père contrairement à la plupart des mariages à la gaumine; P1000, S3, D1783. Ainsi, le Conseil Souverain dans une affaire d’appel comme d’abus consécutif à une dispense de bans, fait droit à la demande faite par la veuve Baudoin, et considère que la célébration du mariage a été « nul, nullement et abusivement procédé et célébré et, en conséquence, déclare ledit mariage non valablement contracté ». L’arrêt fait « défense au dit de Rouville et à ladite demoiselle André de prendre la qualité de mari et de femme et de se hanter et fréquenter sous les peines de droit »; TP1, S28, P19111, arrêt du Conseil Souverain, entre Marie-Anne Baudoin, veuve de Jean-Baptiste

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Hertel de Rouville, mère et tutrice de René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville, mineur, appelante comme d’abus du mariage contracté entre le dit de Rouville et la demoiselle André, fille majeure du sieur André de Leigne. Concernant les séparations de corps proprement dites, Sylvie Savoie en dénombre uniquement 28 durant le régime français; Sylvie Savoie, « La rupture du couple en Nouvelle-France: les demandes de séparation aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles », Canadian Woman Studies / Les cahiers de la femme 7, no. 4 (1986): 58–63. Nous avons écarté volontairement celles-ci de notre étude, les déclarations de tutelle faisant rarement apparaître un enjeu juridique. Il s’agit du contenu du fonds TL4, depuis 1 janvier 1740 à la fin de la juridiction recensé au moyen du moteur de recherche Pistard de la Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec. Elles « représentent 39,8 p. 100 des femmes mentionnées aux registres. Cette participation sur la scène judiciaire traduit un pouvoir juridique non négligeable puisque leur présence se compare à celle des hommes, évaluée à 52 p. 100. Parmi ces femmes, ce sont surtout des femmes liées par le mariage, pourtant frappées d’incapacité juridique, qui agissent plus souvent (64 p. 100 des présences féminines) que les veuves (28,8 p. 100) et les célibataires (0,5 p. 100) jouissant de droits juridiques plus étendus »; Parent et Postolec, « Quand Thémis rencontre Clio », 306. La possibilité d’être séparée de biens et de corps reste l’outil juridique le plus utilisé après la Conquête. Sur l’ordonnancement normatif conservé sur cette question après celle-ci, voir Joseph-François Perrault, Questions et réponses sur le droit civil du Bas-Canada dédiées aux étudiants en droit (Québec, se., 1814), 343–5. « La femme séparée de bien d’avec son mari ne peut point vendre ni disposer de ses biens; elle en a seulement l’administration sans qu’elle ait pour cela besoin de l’autorité de son mari, en sorte qu’elle peut faire baux à loyer de ses immeubles, bailler quittance, & s’obliger pour la nourriture & entretenement, mais elle ne peut pas ni aliéner, ni hypothéquer ses immeubles sans le consentement de son mari, ou l’autorité du juge à son refus »; Claude de Ferrière, « De la Communauté des Biens », dans Nouveau commentaire sur la Coutume de la Prévôté et Vicomté de Paris, Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée par Sauvan d’Aramon, t. 2 (Paris: Éditions Saugrain, 1741), titre X, 27. La Coutume de Paris, dans son article 224, permet également à la femme séparée « d’ester en jugement » avec l’autorisation de son mari ou par décision de justice, Claude de Ferrière, « De la Communauté des Biens », 25. Voir TP1, S28, P19111, Arrêt du Conseil Souverain, entre Marie-Anne Bau-

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doin, veuve de Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, mère et tutrice de RenéOvide Hertel de Rouville, mineur, appelante comme d’abus du mariage contracté entre le dit de Rouville et la demoiselle André, fille majeure du sieur André de Leigne. CC301, S1, D28825 janvier 1714, émancipation de Gabrielle-Angélique, fille mineure de feu Gabriel Duchesne et de feue Anne Demers. Cette différence est peut-être due à l’évolution sociologique de la colonie et à une plus grande implication dans le commerce au long cours des marchands de Québec. Parent et Postolec, « Quand Thémis rencontre Clio », 307–8. 4 George III, 17 Septembre 1764. 10 George III, 1 Février 1770. Voir Donald Fyson, avec la coll. Evelyn Kolish et Virginia Schweitzer, La structure des tribunaux du Québec et le Bas-Canada, 1764–1830 (Montréal: Groupe d’histoire de Montréal, 1994/1997), 13. Nicole Arnaud-Duc, « Les contradictions du droit », dans Histoire des femmes en Occident, 4: Le XIXe siècle, ed. Geneviève Fraisse et Michelle Perrot (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2002), 87–116. Francis Masères, Brouillon d’un rapport […] au sujet des lois et de l’administration de la justice de cette province, DC I, 325; James Marriott, Rapport de l’avocat général James Marriott sur un code de lois pour la province de Québec (Londres, 1774), 458; Guy Carleton et William Hey, Rapport sur les lois et les cours de judicature de la province de Québec (Québec: DC I, 15 septembre 1769), 68. Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto: McClelland, and Stewart, 1966), 53. Nos références sont tirées des Registres de la Juridiction: voir TL275, S3, Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 19 juin 1770–9 avril 1771; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 26 juillet–30 novembre 1771; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 6 décembre 1771–23 octobre 1772; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 30 octobre 1772–18 juin 1773; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 25 juin 1773–21 janvier 1774; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 28 janvier 1774–21 janvier 1775; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 1775, 27 janvier–7 avril, 9 août 1776–14 février 1777; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 9 août 1776–8 août 1777; TL275, S4; Registres des procèsverbaux d’audiences – 16 novembre 1770–28 juin 1771; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 3 novembre 1772–25 avril 1775; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 6 août 1776–18 mars 1778; Registres des procès-verbaux d’audiences – 27 août 1776–14 octobre 1779, TL275, S19; Registre des procès-verbaux d’audience – 10 juin 1770–19 juillet 1771;

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Registre des procès-verbaux d’audience – 18 février 1772–5 mai 1773; Registre des procès-verbaux d’audience – 22 février–5 mars 1775; 30 juin–25 juillet 1777 ainsi que la banque de données Thémis. Arnaud Decroix, « La controverse sur la nature du droit applicable après la Conquête », Revue de Droit McGill 56, no. 3 (2011): 533. Défenses, Québec, 17 juin 1786, Bouthiller, c. Mr Philippe Louis Badelar et Dame Charlotte Guillimin son épouse, TL 15, S 2, D 761, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.) Réplique, Québec, 1 juillet 1786, TL 15, S 2, D 761, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.) Catherine Boucher veuve Langlois, c. Nathalie Boudreau, veuve Gorgendière, 22 juin 1773, TL24, S1, D1319, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.) En l’espèce, les juges de la Cour des plaidoyers communs concluent à la condamnation de Nathalie Boudreau dite veuve de la Gorgendière, au paiement de la somme de 600 shillings relatifs à un propre aliéné par Marie-Anne Langlois, réversibles aux héritiers selon le contrat de mariage entre Langlois et La Gorgendière, 22 juin 1773, TL24, S1, D1319, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.). Alexis Pinet, c. Marie Anne Simon, Louis Boupu et Marie-Louise Gaffé, 13 mars 1772, TL24, S1, D1308, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.). George Jenkins, c. Louise Chevery, Charlotte Chevery, Katherine Chevery, 29 septembre 1772, TL24, S1, D1256, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.). Défenses de Mlles Chevery, TL24, S1, D1256, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Qc.). Sur ces deux modèles, voir Marie-Aimée Cliche, « Les procès en séparation de corps dans la région de Montréal, 1795–1879 », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 49, no. 1 (1995): 4. Joseph-Claude de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, vol. 2 (Paris: Bauche, 1774), 672. J.-L. Beaudoin, La dissolution du lien matrimonial en droit canonique et en droit civil canadien (Ottawa: 1949), 210. Argou, Institution au Droit françois, neuvième édition, revue corrigée & augmentée, conformément aux nouvelles ordonnances, par M. A.-G. Boucher d’Argis, Avocat au parlement, 2 vol. (Paris: Éditions Nyon, 1762), liv. III, ch. XIX, 201. Gin, Analyse raisonnée du droit françois, titre XVII, sec. IV, art. II, 348. M.-A. Cliché, « Les procès en séparation de corps dans la région de Montréal 1795–1879 », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 49, no. 1 (1995): 10–11.

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112 Claude de Ferrière, « Nouveau commentaire sur la Coutume de la Prévôté et Vicomté de Paris », 672. 113 M.-A. Cliché, « Les procès en séparation de corps dans la région de Montréal 1795–1879 », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 49, no. 1 (1995): 14. 114 Concernant les séparations de corps, elles relèveront de la juridiction de la section civile de la Cour du Banc du Roi de 1794 à 1850. Marie-Aimée Cliche, « Les procès en séparation de corps dans la région de Montréal 1795–1879 », 7. Environ 253 procès en séparation de corps ont eu lieu dans le district judiciaire de Montréal entre 1795 et 1879, essentiellement dans les dernières décennies du XIXe siècle, l’interprétation normative s’avérant selon Cliche de plus en plus favorable aux femmes; ibid. 3–33. Pour un exemple d’étude de la rupture du lien matrimonial dans les provinces strictement de common law voir Kimberley Smith Maynard, « Divorce in Nova Scotia, 1750–1890 », dans Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. Philip Girard et Jim Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 232–72. 115 Gin, Analyse raisonnée du droit françois, 325. 116 Pour une vision d’ensemble de la situation des veuves en NouvelleFrance, puis dans la Province de Québec voir Josette Brun, « Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle-France: Québec et Louisbourg au XVIIIe siècle », Études d’histoire du Québec 19 (2006); Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 120 et suivant. 117 Kate McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge, 1995), 24. 118 Voir les cas relevés par J.-P. Garneau, « Droit et “ affaires de famille ” sur la Côte-de-Beaupré: histoire d’une rencontre en amont et en aval de la Conquête britannique », Revue juridique Thémis 34, no. 2 (2000): 531. 119 J. Boucher, « L’histoire de la condition juridique et sociale de la femme au Canada français », 158. 120 Voir par exemple (Mtl), V601, S1, D104, 25 janvier 1724–30 décembre 1724, clôture de l’inventaire et partage des biens de la communauté de Marie Cuillerier et du défunt Michel Descarris. 121 Sur les singularités normatives coloniales, voir Calvin Woodard, « Is the United States a Common Law Country? », dans Essays on English Law and the American Experience, ed. Elisabeth A. Cawthon et David E. Narrett (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), 120–34. 122 George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (Lanham: University Press of America, 1960), 182–4. 123 James A. Henretta, « Magistrates, Common Law Lawyers, Legislators:

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125

126

127

128 129

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The Three Legal Systems of British America », dans The Cambridge History of Law in America, ed. Michael Grossberg et Christopher Tomlins, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 566. Amy Louise Erickson, « Common Law versus Common Practice: The Use of Marriage Settlements in Early Modern England », Economic History Review 43, no. 1 (1990): 21–39. Comme le souligne Sarah E. Jones, A Comparison of the Status of Widows in Eighteenth-Century England and Colonial America (MA diss., University of North Texas, 2004), 6. Le jointure, contrat créé à la conclusion du mariage, fixe une somme qui restera invariable et lui sera attribuée à la mort du mari, quel que soit l’évolution du patrimoine de ce dernier. Le dower, comme le douaire coutumier selon la Coutume de Paris, vise quant à lui à protéger aussi bien les enfants que l’épouse du mari en cas de décès de celui-ci. Le patrimoine immobilier aussi bien que mobilier est alors divisé, au décès en trois parties. La veuve obtient généralement un tiers du patrimoine immobilier, des troupeaux après que les dettes du mari soient payées si le mari n’a pas fait de testament. Dans la pratique britannique, 70 % de la population décédait sans faire de testament, ce qui aboutissait au partage du patrimoine selon le dower, prononcé par les cours de Chancellerie, deux tiers allant aux enfants et un tiers à la veuve; Amy Louise Erickson, Property and Widowhood in England (London: Routledge, 1993), 151–4. Voir pour la pratique en Angleterre: Susan Moller Okin, « Patriarchy and Married Women’s Separate Property in England: Questions on Some Current Views », Eighteenth-Centuries Studies 17 (1983–4): 125–6. Barbara Todd, « The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered », dans Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (New York: Methuen, 1985), 54–92; Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property, 95–115; le remplacement du « dower » par le « jointure » aura lieu seulement au XIXe siècle aux États-Unis. Pour les États-Unis, Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 127–35; Carol Shammas, « Re-assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts », Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 1 (1994): 9–30. Lee J. Alston et Owen Shapiro, « Inheritance Laws across Colonies: Causes and Consequences », Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 277–87. Veuve de Laurent Archambault c. J.-B. Venne, 9 février 1789, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Montréal). François Aubertin c. Veuve de Joseph Lamoureux, 7 oct. 1791, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Montréal).

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130 Veuve Baby c. Veuve Leduc, 27 mars 1792, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Montréal). 131 Par exemple Françoise Barbet c. Joseph Cerat, septembre 1778; Veuve Martial Bardy c. Gabriel Caisse, 20 mars 1794; Veuve Thérèse Baby c. J.-B. Primault, 10 décembre 1783, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Montréal). 132 Gwyn, « Female Litigants before the Civil Courts of Nova Scotia », 322– 43. 133 Ibid., 320. 134 Voir Clinton W. Francis, « Practice, Strategy and Institution: Debt Collection in the English Common-Law Courts, 1740–1840 », Northwestern University Law Review 80 (1980): 810. 135 Evelyn Kolish, « Some Aspects of Civil Litigation in Lower Canada, 1785– 1825: Towards the Use of Court Records for Canadian Social History », Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 3 (1989): 337–65. 136 Françoise Baron c. Antoine Foucher, 15 janv. 1783, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Montréal). 137 Veuve Louise Marie Drolet, c. Joseph Drolet et al. 3 nov. 1772, TL24, S1, D1353, Cour des plaidoyers communs (Québec). 138 Marie-Angélique Tanquerel veuve Lukeim et Georges Tanquerel, c. Joseph Hecker, 3 février 1768, TP5, S1, SS1, D502, Cours des plaidoyers communs (Québec). 139 Veuve Lamard (Lamarre), c. Jacques Sanson (Samson), 22 juillet 1769, TP5, S1, SS1, D747, Cour des plaidoyers communs (Québec). 140 Soit les dossiers 1671 à 1775 et 1845 à 1861, TL15, S2. 141 François Wolff c. Marie-Madeleine Dontail, veuve Lacroix, TP5, S1, SS1, D667, Cour des plaidoyers communs (Québec). 142 Julian Gwyn identifie quant à lui, pour la Nouvelle-Écosse, 55,2 % des causes relevant de ces catégories sociales; Gwyn, « Female Litigants before the Civil Courts of Nova Scotia », 321. 143 Ainsi, Geneviève Alliez, veuve de Jean-Baptiste Couillard, en tant que dame primitive de la seigneurie de la Rivière-du-Sud, est amenée à engager une action contre des coseigneurs de la seigneurie et les habitants et censitaire de cette seigneurie au sujet du paiement des droits de mouture depuis que ces derniers ne vont plus porter leur blé au moulin seigneurial et ses droits de banalité. En l’occurrence, c’est un conflit entre les différents coseigneurs, ces derniers ne reconnaissant le droit de banalité de la veuve que sur sa partie de seigneurie, et ont construit un moulin à vent sur leur partie de seigneurie. Les différents protagonistes de l’affaire s’appuient sur la doctrine féodale, Ferrière, la Coutume de Paris, ce qui aboutit à la décision de la Cour des plaidoyers communs portant un jugement

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147 148

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rendue le 30 août 1774 ordonnant que Michel Blais démolisse le moulin qu’il a fait construire « pour qu’il ne puisse plus moudre des grains ou faire de la farine ». De même, Ursule Godefroy de Tonnancour, veuve de défunt Louis Charly Saint-Ange, est également amenée à agir en justice, mais cette fois ci pour des questions de successions; William Grant, seigneur de Saint-Roch, c. Ursule Godefroy de Tonnancour, veuve de défunt Louis Charly Saint-Ange, TL24, S1, D1254. Marie Françoise Gosselin Laroche, c. Louis Laverdière, TL24, S1, D1355, Cour des Plaidoyers communs (Québec). Ibid. Outre les travaux à paraître de Donald Fyson, et ceux de Jean-Philippe Garneau, voir essentiellement Donald Fyson, Magistrats, police et société: la justice criminelle ordinaire au Québec et au Bas-Canada (1764–1837) (Montréal: Hurtubise, 2010); Fyson, « The Canadiens and the Conquest of Quebec: Interpretations, Realities, Ambiguities », dans Quebec Questions: Quebec Studies for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jarrett Rudy et al. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18–33; Fyson, « The Canadiens and British Institutions of Local Governance in Quebec, from the Conquest to the Rebellions », dans Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America, ed. Nancy Christie (Montréal et Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 45–82; Fyson, « Judicial Auxiliaries across Legal Regimes: From New France to Lower Canada », dans Entre justice et justiciables: les auxiliaires de la justice du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle, ed. Claire Dolan (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 383–403; Fyson, « Les dynamiques politiques locales et la justice au Québec entre la Conquête et les Rébellions », Bulletin d’histoire politique 16, no. 1 (2007): 337–46; Michel Morin, David Gilles, et Arnaud Decroix, L’arbitrage et l’administration de la justice au Québec de 1740 à 1784 (Montréal: Éditions Thémis, 2012). Marie-Jo Bonnet et Christine Faure, Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime, 536– 40. Ibid., 536.

7 “To shudder at the bare recital of those acts”: Child Abuse, Family, and Montreal Courts in the Early Nineteenth Century ian c . p il arc z y k *

The case of Emelie [sic] Granger was tried for cruelly beating and ill-treating a female child. The offence was clearly brought home to the defendant by one single witness, namely, the child upon whom the outrage was committed. The child, an orphan only nine years of age, gave her evidence in a clear and concise manner. The acts of violence to which she swore … are such as would cause the most hardened character to shudder at the bare recital of those acts. – Montreal Transcript, 14 November 1840

The trial of Emilie Granger, charged with abusing her nine-year-old niece, was witnessed by an overflow crowd in 1840. The spectacle of a young girl testifying against an abusive relative was rare enough to guarantee a rapt audience.1 Cordille Levesque was under the guardianship of her aunt and uncle, but her aunt’s violent and capricious temperament had taken a toll on the young girl. Her plight came to the attention of a neighbourhood physician called in to treat her while bedridden. Horrified at what he saw, he had Cordille removed to board with another relative and filed a complaint against Granger on a charge of “aggravated assault and battery on a child of ten years”: “Je trouvai la susnommé [Cordille] tellement meurtrie dans le bras gauche à l’articulation du coude qu’il étoit impossible de s’aperçevoir s’il était cassé et l’épaule droite est encore si enflé que je ne puis pas décider actuellement dans quel état il est. J’ai aussi aperçu plusieurs coups sur la tête et sur le corps, ceux de la tête pourait cause une abcès.”2

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After one beating left her covered in bruises, Granger allegedly told her niece, “Si tu ne dit pas á ton oncle que tu as tombé eu bas de l’escalier je te tuerai.”3 Granger’s threats ultimately did not dissuade Cordille from swearing out an affidavit before a local justice of the peace.4 Five months later, a grand jury of the Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery found a true bill against Granger for abusing her niece.5 At trial, Cordille was the principal prosecution witness, one newspaper observing that she delivered her testimony “in a clear and remarkably intelligent manner considering her youth.”6 Newspaper coverage summarized rather than transcribed her testimony, but it was clear that the evidence presented was considered shocking to period sensibilities. Her aunt, described as an otherwise respectable woman, had been “in the habit of practicing every description of cruelties on her person, such as beating her with sticks and other offensive weapons; locking her up in the cellar and in cupboards for hours together,” reported the Montreal Herald.7 The Montreal Gazette reported that Granger had been “in the habit of often cruelly and inhumanely beating her, and on some occasions, of inflicting such wounds upon her as to cause the blood to flow profusely.”8 Cordille’s treating physician was among the Crown witnesses, repeating the claims made in his original complaint that he had considered her life to have been “in the most imminent danger” as a result of her mistreatment.9 It is unknown what testimony Granger’s counsel presented, although it clearly proved unavailing. One account records that her attorney attempted to establish “certain palliative facts,” but since the events in question had “occurred at different periods from those laid in the indictment … [they] could have no relation to the injury done to the orphan child.”10 Whatever the nature of the evidence, the jury deliberated for only a few minutes before returning a guilty verdict.11 Granger’s status as a respectable woman did not insulate her from prison any more than it had from prosecution, as she was sentenced to three months’ incarceration.12 Indeed, in such cases judges may have been horrified by such unladylike conduct and hence even more prone to censure it.13 Granger’s prosecution was noteworthy for the time, certainly, and equally certainly child abuse prosecutions were far from common. Then, as now, the family sphere could be a dangerous place for infants, but Granger’s conviction reflected that when a family member’s treatment of a child posed a serious risk to health, Montreal courts of this

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period were prepared to intervene. The fact that she was Cordille’s aunt, rather than mother – or, more to the point, her father – may well have helped tip the scales in favour of intervention. This chapter discusses the phenomenon of child abuse prosecutions in the judicial district of Montreal during the period 1825–50, through examining all extant judicial records for courts having criminal jurisdiction, supplemented by review of all available period newspapers. Thirty-three cases against twenty-eight relatives and guardians were identified in which abuse was alleged by parents and guardians against the children in their care. Despite the law’s traditional deference to parents and guardians in how they chose to discipline their children, such cases indicate that society and the legal system did impose limits on parental treatment of the Crown’s youngest subjects, meting out sanctions in cases of the physical and sexual mistreatment of children. During a period that predated statutory protections and institutions devoted to promoting child welfare, stories such as that of Cordille Levesque contribute to an understanding of changing social patterns, reflecting the tension between deeply held paternalistic beliefs and the tentative steps by courts to delineate limits on parental authority. This study also augments a subject that has received comparatively less attention than other examples of domestic violence, such as spousal abuse, and moreover does so for a period under-examined compared to the second half of the nineteenth century.14 A brief history of child protection as well as the legal regime under which the courts operated will be offered, followed by an examination of prosecutions of family members and guardians for a variety of offences including assault and incest. Childhood in the Nineteenth Century Historically, the Western tradition viewed children rather more as chattel than as individual rights-holders. Historically, also, the most dangerous place for children frequently has been within the family.15 In England, the courts of Henry I intervened when a child was killed by anyone other than a parent, but under the common law, parents (notably, fathers) exercised largely unfettered authority over their children.16 Protection of children in Western jurisdictions before the late nineteenth century was not unknown, however. For example, in 1641 the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted The Body of Liberties; a very progressive legal code for its time in many ways, it proscribed parents from

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exercising “unnatural severity” towards their children, and accorded children legal redress in the event their parents did so.17 Still, parents made ready use of corporal punishment in correcting children, and the term unnatural severity was sufficiently ambiguous to allow for wide latitude in judicial interpretation. Changes in the nature of punishment in private eventually led to changes in modes of public punishment. By mid-century in the United States, corporal punishment was eliminated from many public schools.18 Reform movements advocated the abolition of slavery, capital and corporal punishment, and animal cruelty during the mid-Victorian era, all of which reflected a growing revulsion towards physical abuse directed against sentient beings in positions of subordination or helplessness.19 The 1830s onwards marked a period of institution-formation, designed to assist blind, deaf, mentally impaired, orphaned, or disadvantaged children.20 Philanthropists and social crusaders became increasingly involved with children’s issues, establishing schools and orphanages, facilitating emigration of neglected children to British North America and elsewhere, and forming societies to combat child abuse and neglect.21 Some historians have pointed to this period as marking a turning point, reflective of a change in the conception of childhood itself.22 Along with that greater concern for the sanctity of childhood was a growing concern about the family unit, particularly later in the century.23 Despite a growing concern with children’s developmental needs, they remained a prominent part of the workforce throughout the nineteenth century (and beyond) in Western jurisdictions, during which they were routinely exploited, maimed, and even killed by the cogs of industry. The New England states began to pass child labour laws in the 1840s.24 In all industrialized countries of that period, the perceived need to regulate child labour was evident. In 1835, 43 per cent of the workers employed in the English cotton industry were minors.25 It was not until the latter part of the century that legislation was passed that regulated working conditions for minors, serving to ameliorate the worst abuses of the Industrial Revolution.26 The rise of the anti–child labour movement contributed to the growing societal awareness of children’s issues. However, as has been suggested in the English context, it may also have contributed to anti–child cruelty crusades in another way: “Correspondingly, the need to shield the young from parental misuse became palpable because late Victorian

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children spent more time at home, in closer contact with their mothers and fathers, than did working children two generations earlier.”27 Scholars have offered contrasting views of whether Anglo-American society and law put meaningful limits on child abuse and neglect in the antebellum period, with perhaps the majority view being that parents were seldom constrained for any behaviour short of causing permanent injury or death, and that society expended little effort to define and standardize terms such as cruelty, immoderate correction, and neglect.28 Other scholars have concluded that there were limits on parents’ treatment of their children, regardless of the promulgation of statutory or other protections.29 The reality is that there were few concerted, systemic attempts to address child abuse in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, for example, public discussion of children’s issues became more noticeable in the 1830s, prompted by the anti-slavery crusade, even if other issues took primacy.30 As has been famously stated about nineteenth-century English society, it “diminished cruelty to animals, criminals, lunatics and children (in that order).”31 Indeed, the SPCA was founded in 1824, sixty years before a similar organization devoted to child welfare.32 In Montreal of this period, abusing an animal could lead to fines and incarceration.33 Despite the lack of concerted social movements in that direction, in most Anglo-American jurisdictions there were limited judicial constraints on child abuse and neglect. These may have been inconsistent, fitful, and sporadic, but courts as a general rule certainly did take cognizance of the worst excesses committed by parents and guardians. As has been noted about New England, parents were held to account for “overstep[ping] the community’s standards for abuse or neglect.” Newspapers reveal that parents who abused their offspring were considered “unnatural” and the cruelty as “horrific” or “barbaric,” echoing language used in Montreal of this period.34 It is perhaps most accurate to say that for most Western jurisdictions, child abuse and neglect was not yet a pressing societal concern and was addressed inconsistently at best – but at some times, and in some places, courts sanctioned parents for such acts. Prior to the 1830s, policies towards children were marked primarily by spiritual concerns, or reflected the state’s preoccupation with population growth, drains on the public purse, crime, or manpower needs. In later decades another concern was to surface: an awareness of the need to protect children as they matured to adulthood.35 In terms of statutes that could be more properly characterized as “child protection”

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legislation, apprentices were the first group to be accorded legislative protection in the nineteenth century. In 1851, the English Parliament provided for three years’ incarceration on conviction for wilful neglect or malicious assault on an indentured child.36 Two years later, Parliament enacted The Act for the Better Prevention of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children.37 However, not only was that act not intended to address abuse within the family, but prosecutions brought under it were almost exclusively for violence against women.38 A law allowing legal proceedings to be brought against parents for child neglect was not enacted until 1868.39 The first piece of Canadian legislation specifically addressing child abuse outside of the labour context mirrored the 1853 U.K. act and was adopted for the Province of Canada in 1858.40 With respect to the Quebec experience, the colony of New France (as Quebec was known before the Conquest) was established on rigid, legally reinforced family and hierarchal relationships. Children and wives were subject to the puissance paternelle of the male head-of-household, enshrined in the Coutume de Paris and reflective of the fact that to French society the “patriarchal family was the ideal social unit.”41 Courts in New France gave wide latitude to men who beat their wives and children, intervening only in cases deemed notorious or life-threatening. Private complaints, accessible to wives who sought séparation de corps from husbands on grounds such as brutality, profligacy, or mental aberration were of no use to children who were bereft of legal standing.42 The rigidity of French practice was seemingly little different in Quebec after the Conquest, and it has been noted that “severe treatment of children continued in early nineteenth-century Canada, which was largely composed of immigrants from traditional rural communities in the British Isles.”43 The civil law in Lower Canada enshrined parents’ rights to physically discipline their charges, deeming acts prosecutable only if they resulted in permanent injury or risk of death.44 The Civil Code of 1866, for example, codified the hegemony of patriarchal authority over children, including the right of physical correction.45 By this period, however, the historical record suggests that the reality was more nuanced. This period reflected the beginning of social reform in Quebec and Canada, with a growing awareness of the importance of institutions better adapted to serve children. Canadian lawmakers began discussing reformatories and corporal punishment of children by 1843.46 A decade earlier, social reform began in earnest in Quebec.47 Legislation obviously could be only part of the solution.48 However, Montreal courts of the period were already imposing limits on the ex-

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ploitation and mistreatment of the vulnerable. In the context of masterservant law, for example, employers clearly had legal recourse when employees violated the terms of their employment.49 But so, too, did servants: apprentices, domestics, and others sought redress in local courts against their employers for violations of the duties owed them. Servants, including minors, sought cancellation of indentures and recovered damages for such offences as unlawful withholding of wages, wrongful termination, physical mistreatment, and contractual breach – and moreover were frequently successful.50 Courts were also accessible forums for allegations of spousal violence. Montreal courts dealt with such complaints against both husbands and wives in significant numbers during this period.51 As Smith has noted, “Intimate violence was a phenomenon that, even if it was not coming under closer censure and control, was certainly being monitored and prosecuted within a larger cultural world in which other forms of violence were losing their former claims to legitimacy.”52 Spousal assault prosecutions were magnitudes more frequent in Montreal of this period; no doubt there were many pragmatic explanations for this, including that society had moved further along the spectrum of intolerance towards spousal violence than for child abuse.53 Indeed, one of the main social movements of this period – the temperance movement – effectively depicted the nexus between alcoholism and domestic violence, although wives remained the primary focus.54 Still, accounts of child abuse and neglect did appear in pre-Confederation temperance publications of the period, and Montreal was at the vanguard of the movement.55 And although only sporadically, parents were potentially liable for assault and battery, manslaughter, and related crimes for illtreating their children.56 The period 1825 to 1850, then, saw the genesis of movements that were antecedents to the anti–child cruelty crusades of later decades, years that contributed – at different paces, and with differing efficacy – to the reformulation of the authority of the paterfamilias. Child Abuse in Montreal The existence of child abuse and neglect in Montreal during this era is somewhat paradoxical, as the issues were heavily veiled from public scrutiny while the phenomenon was nonetheless quite widespread. As has been stated, that period was many years removed from the formation of child protection organizations in any Western jurisdiction,

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Quebec included, and there were no statutory provisions specifically designed to deal with child abuse or neglect. In view of a strong deference to family authority and privacy, a pervasive ethos of paternalism, a conservative family tradition, and the fact that children did not have ready access to the legal system, the relative paucity of child abuse prosecutions – hampered further by missing records – should not be surprising.57 Legal sources should therefore be seen as impressionistic rather than statistically reliable. While myriad factors militated against the legal system taking cognizance of such cases, one need not dig far below the surface to see that child abuse nevertheless did receive judicial attention, and also that many possible cases were never prosecuted. Accounts of infant bodies found in and around Montreal were a constant reminder of infanticide and the high infant mortality rates common to the period. At the same time, foundling hospitals struggled to keep up with a steady stream of abandoned infants while older children were left to fend for themselves. In the fall of 1829, for example, a ten-year-old child stricken with smallpox was found in the suburbs; his mother having died, his father and other remaining relatives deserted him. How could a person be “so lost to every feeling of humanity as to abandon a child in such a situation to death, by disease or hunger, in a city where a Hospital is open for the reception of such unfortunates?,” railed the Montreal Gazette.58 Sadly, child abandonment was not uncommon, and these accounts were reported with a frequency that is shocking to modern-day sensibilities. A pronounced disconnect is apparent, however, between the strong rhetoric of condemnation and the anaemic legal response. Abandonment, for all its moral turpitude and potential lethality, was not a prosecutable offence.59 Child neglect was an evident social problem, with older children found wandering in public areas; all too often their parents were habitual inebriates. With the formal establishment of the Montreal Police in 1838 and sporadic coverage of their activities and that of the Police Court, references to neglectful and drunken parents inevitably surfaced. L’Ami du Peuple, detailing news from the Montreal police station in 1839, including the following: “Bureau de Police, Station A. Dimanche Nov. 24: Une miserable femme fut ramasse dans la rue dans un état d’ivresse complete, avec un petit enfant dans ses bras. L’enfant fut envoyé a la maison de l’un de ses proches parens … Mardi 26, Station B: un jeune enfant fut trouvé a une heure du matin, nus pied, dans les rues, et l’on sut bientôt qu’il était celui de M. et Mad. Davidson, qui s’était sauvé au milieu des disputes ordinaires et désordonnees de ses

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parens. Le pauvre petit eut péri sans doute sans les prompts secours qui lui furent donnés par la police. Le père et la mère furent loges à la Station jusqu’au lendemain matin. Puisse cette légère correction leur inspirer plus de quiétude à l’avenir.”60 Flagrant instances of child abuse were occasionally publicized, such as the saga of a young girl beaten and whipped by her mother all over her body, including the soles of her feet.61 Accounts of children being neglected to the brink of starvation were also press fodder; one such account called for prosecution of the malefactors “to the utmost rigour of the law.”62 This call to action was not unusual, nor was the fact that none followed. It is also true that the limitations of the sources often make it difficult to determine what final disposition may have resulted. Many accounts in the press could not be tied to legal proceedings – although the case of the drunken Davidsons was an exception – and even when complaints were filed, the inability to trace those cases to a formal conclusion is an omnipresent frustration. For example, in 1844 a true bill was found against a parent “pour avoir cruellement battu son enfant âgé de 8 ans,” but no information could be adduced as to the circumstances or outcome.63 Child abuse generally came to the attention of the Crown in one of two ways: through the activities of the constabulary, who happened upon or responded to an incident of child abuse, or more commonly through the filing of a complaint before a local magistrate. Numerous obstacles would have hampered prosecutions for child abuse. Besides the disabilities of lack of statutory or common law protection, children faced a multitude of economic, social, psychological, legal, and other obstacles that militated against their seeking protection of the laws; foremost among them was the relative inviolability of family privacy.64 Jurists generally would have recognized the right of fathers to discipline their children physically, so in order to trigger a legal response the punishment would have had to be seen as excessive.65 In a period that predated child protection agencies by decades, there were also no social workers or child advocates combing back alleys and tenements.66 Many cases of violence against children were probably mis-categorized by coroners and physicians.67 Even should a complaint have been filed, evidentiary encumbrances further hindered prosecution. The youngest victims of assault were commonly disqualified from testifying, as they were presumed unable to understand the nature and consequences of the oath they were required to take.68 Spouses were

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legally incapacitated from testifying against each other as the result of marital privilege, even if one was a witness.69 In the absence of the investigative apparatus of the modern state, allegations of child abuse were likely to come before courts only after the instigation of third parties.70 Given that violence against children most frequently occurred in the home, and set against a backdrop of a strongly entrenched patriarchal ethos, it was only the rare instance of child abuse that surfaced. Moreover, it must be noted that, like for spousal violence in general, “many suits were initiated not with the intention of reaching a judicial decision based on a jury verdict, but rather with the much more limited desire to draw an external, authoritative voice into the dispute in the hopes of realizing some kind of immediate result.”71 As previously mentioned, the constabulary was responsible for uncovering or responding to a considerable number of the identified cases.72 In the summer of 1829, for example, a mother was repeatedly seen immersing her child in the river. A group of bystanders kept vigilant watch while the police were summoned, and she was committed to prison for breach of the peace.73 Similarly, a father was arrested in 1848 after taking his seven-year-old son to the waterfront, tying a rope to the boy’s waist and the other end to a nearby post, and then pushing the child into the water. A Good Samaritan dragged the child out of the water while another summoned the authorities. Following his arrest, the father maintained that he had intended to punish his son without intending any bodily harm.74 In both instances there was confusion as to whether the parents had truly attempted to drown their child, but unassailably both had put their child at risk. The outcome of proceedings depended on the circumstances, charges, and court before which the parent appeared. The usual outcome for summary proceedings held before the Police Court was for the magistrate to “admonish and discharge” the offender, as happened in April 1839 to Mary McShewen for assault and battery against her child.75 Later that same year, two parents were jointly charged for illusage, with the same result, as was a father arrested for drunkenness and “turning his child out of doors” in the dead of winter.76 In other situations, the presiding judge required that the defendants provide a surety to keep the peace.77 One such situation involved Elizabeth (Betsey) Kennedy, a spinster who had frequent altercations with the law. Kennedy had borne two illegitimate sons in the late 1830s with Henry Driscoll, a man of respectable social standing who served as a justice of the peace. While judicial archives have obvious limitations as sources

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of information for reconstructing personal relationships, their immortalization in the annals of the criminal courts began soon after the elder of their two sons was born. Driscoll and Kennedy maintained separate places of habitation, the children lodging with Kennedy. The first identified court appearance by one of the parties involved Driscoll’s arrest in April of 1840 on charge of having assaulted Kennedy.78 Two weeks later their roles were reversed, Driscoll having charged her with misdemeanour, and alleging that she harassed him with “persevering persecutions”: Betsey Kennedy … by violent language and abuse endeavours to extort money from him although he duly supplies her with lodging, clothes, and money for the comfortable support of the said two children, and molests and disturbs him so as that he cannot live peaceably, and quietly follow properly his business and avocation … [She] frequently brings the said children to his door, and pushes one of them in, and makes them cry, and after having pushed one of those children in as aforesaid, afterwards returns and abusingly demands from him the same child, and sometimes brings them to his door in bad weather and thinly clad (although he has supplied them with comfortable cloathing [sic]), and endeavours by making an outcry in the street and by pretending to cry, and by falsely stating that this Deponent lets the said children starve, occasions this deponent public scandal.

Driscoll continued that Kennedy made him “inexpressibly miserable” and “inspires him with an apprehension that, at length, goaded to desperation by her persevering persecutions, he may endeavour to repulse her by some bodily force.”79 As a result of his complaint she was arrested and lodged in the local prison.80 Kennedy’s subsequent court appearances were prompted by her mistreatment of their children. In July 1841, a neighbour witnessed her grabbing her son, pinning him between her knees and striking him in the face with such violence that she bloodied her own hand as well as the child’s apron. The neighbour’s wife prevailed upon her husband to seek out her landlord rather than to interpose himself directly; the landlord then sent his daughter-inlaw to retrieve the child, thus concluding a chain of “intervention by proxy.” The neighbour further alleged that Kennedy was frequently inebriated and “when in that state is of such a violent temper as to be unfit to have the charge of children.”81 Kennedy was summoned before a local justice of the peace in September of the same year. There is more than a hint of irony in that proceed-

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ing, as the justice in question was Henry Driscoll, the child’s father.82 Driscoll required Kennedy to provide a surety of twenty pounds for her future good conduct, but failed to specify the duration of time for which it applied.83 Sureties essentially interposed the coercive arm of the state between the parties, and while of limited efficacy were nonetheless often sought by complainants. Those cases illustrate the tensions inherent in the law’s response to parental violence towards children. No doubt jurists felt that they had authority to censure parents’ modes of discipline, but that expression had its limitations. Moreover, any rulings must be viewed contextually, as these judgments flouted traditional deference to family privacy and entrenched tenets of paternalism. Table 1 outlines all the instances of identified legal proceedings that involved child abuse at the hands of family members, including sexual offences, and their final dispositions. Only complaints where children were alleged to be the primary victims were included, which necessarily undercounts the phenomenon. Many acts of violence were directed at multiple relatives (including children) and, tellingly, in these situations children receded into the background: violence against a spouse and child, for example, was usually prosecuted as if only against a spouse.84 These cases – those in which violence against children were the gravamen of the legal complaint and those in which they are were not – necessarily can be only a fraction of the actual incidence rate. There was also significant attrition among cases, with nearly a quarter of identified cases lacking any evidence of a formal disposition. While all period juridical sources suffer from lacunae, that figure is itself suggestive. Penetrating the veil of family privacy was not easily done during this period, and it could only be a small minority of children whose sagas were heard by local courts. Another striking phenomenon is the near-absence of any trials for domestic child homicide, or filicide. In contrast, infanticide prosecutions were far from infrequent – thirty-one cases being identified for this period – and numerous instances of children being killed by nonrelations were found in the archives.85 As has been said about other Western jurisdictions, “the disappearance of children does not seem to have been of particular interest among the poor, whose rate of reproduction was perhaps greater than was felt necessary by the rest of society.”86 Deaths of children simply did not merit heightened attention in many jurisdictions, and no doubt many young victims went to their graves without further scrutiny. Child murder was not condoned, but

Table 1. Child Abuse Prosecutions, 1825–50

No Bill

Aquit

Admon. & . disc.

Surety

Convicted & jailed

N/I

n=2

–

–

–

1

1*

–

n=1 n=1 n=1 n=1

– – – –

1 – – –

– – – –

– 1 – –

– – – 1 (3 years)

– – 1 –

n=3 n=1 n=4 n=2

1 – – –

– – – –

– – – –

2 – – –

– – 3 –

n=7 n=6 n=1 n=1 n=1 n=1 n = 33

– – – – – – 1 3.0% 4.0%

– – – – – – 1 3.0% 4.0%

2 5 – – – 1 8 24.2% 32.0%

2 – – – – – 6 18.2% 24.0%

– 1 (9 months) 1 (3 months) 1 (9 days) 1 (5 days) 1** 1 (7 weeks) – 1*** – – 9 27.3% 36.0%

Charge Murder Carnally knowing and abusing female child under 10 years Incest Ravishment Abduction Attempted murder / assault with intent to murder Assault with intent to maim Aggravated assault Threats and menaces Assault and battery Ill-usage/ill-treatment Misdemeanour Dangerous lunatic Breach of the peace Misc. TOTAL % of total Adjusted total

* reprieved from sentence of death ** incarcerated for lack of bail *** institutionalized

2 – 1 1 – 8 24.2%

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neither was it aggressively condemned, investigated, and prosecuted, and a child who did not receive protection on the family premises was unlikely to find it elsewhere. As parents were assumed to be the arbiters of a child’s well-being, the public was loath to intercede vigorously if the antithesis proved true.87 Some scholars have claimed that causing the death of a child did not trigger the same societal response as a wife killing or husband killing.88 As children became more valued by society, there was more vociferous condemnation of such acts.89 The Montreal experience may have more closely mirrored that of nineteenth-century New England than other jurisdictions, as “New Englanders and their public officials acted decisively, especially in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whenever child murder was suspected.”90 Tightly knit communities, many united on the grounds of ethnicity, made Montreal an unlikely place for non-infant child homicides to go unnoticed. The filicide rate for Quebec appears from the historical record to be low; some 140 cases for the entire province over the span of two centuries.91 Within the period under examination, only two cases of domestic child murder, or attempted murder, were identified. One of these involved a washerwoman named Elizabeth Birch, who allegedly tried to murder her two children in 1830. The earliest identified reference to her case appeared in the Vindicator, which stated that she was committed to jail “for an attempt on the lives of two of her own children. One of them she was in the act of hanging when prevented; the other received some severe wounds on the head.”92 Following her arrest, several neighbours filed affidavits of support on her behalf.93 Her landlord offered alternative explanations for the children’s injuries, alleging the daughter had fallen down the stairs and hit her head on a rock. He described her eight-year-old son as a “turbulent boy inclined to give trouble,” but maintained he had never seen Birch discipline him. He further claimed that she and her neighbours were on bad terms, which he suspected was the impetus for the accusations against her.94 Another tenant also came to Birch’s defence, attesting that a fortnight earlier he had seen her son running around the yard with a cock under his arm that he had stolen. His mother removed a cord from a water bucket, with which he assumed she intended to whip him, and tied him by the neck to a post in the stable.95 Returning to the kitchen, Birch purportedly exclaimed that “sooner than he should take anything from any person to the value of a copper I would nail him by the ear to the

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floor.” Those affidavits evidently swayed the authorities, as Birch was admitted to bail.96 The 1829 case of Judith Couture, the starkest case of family violence, is an outlier in this study, as she slashed the throats of five of her children while allegedly being mentally deranged.97 Few of the records have survived, although it is known that she was arrested and charged on 19 January 1829, and ultimately convicted, sentenced to death, and reprieved.98 As instructive as Couture’s story might have been, missing records do not allow for further reclamation of her case, although it appears likely she was shown clemency as a result of being adjudged insane.99 One can expect the spotty nature of records to affect the ability to reclaim accounts of child violence that did not result in homicide. While details are often scarce, the archives disclosed over thirty such cases, including cases in which parents were convicted. The longest period of incarceration – three years – was imposed against a stepfather convicted of attempting to abduct his stepdaughter.100 More typically, cases resulting in incarceration involved crimes such as aggravated assault. A sentence of nine months was given to Betsey Kennedy, the mother who had borne two illegitimate sons with a local justice of the peace. In January 1844 a grand jury found a true bill against her for “stabbing with intent to maim” her five-year-old son.101 At her trial it was established she was an inebriate who often brutalized her children and had stabbed her child in the forehead with a knife.102 The nature of her barbarous conduct was underscored by the revelation that “when she inflicted the wound, she made use of most unbecoming language”!103 She was convicted, although the jury recommended leniency. According to the only surviving account of her trial, “The Court in passing sentence on the prisoner, condemning her to an imprisonment of 9 months in the House of Corrections, animadverted, at length, on the evil effects of intemperance, and reminded the prisoner of the consequences of the conviction had against her, which, according to the late criminal Statute laws granted in the Province, amounted to felony, subjecting her to imprisonment in the Provincial Penitentiary for life; a place to which she, in all probability, would have been consigned but for the humane recommendation of the respectable Jury.”104 Betsey Kennedy was clearly not of respectable background, unlike the jury that tried her, and also unlike Emilie Granger. The extent to which Kennedy’s relationship with Henry Driscoll, JP, had ramifications on the outcome of her case cannot be known. Granger’s status did

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not insulate her from prison for ill-treating her young niece, as demonstrated by her three-month prison sentence. Ultimately, Cordille’s saga ended the way it did because third parties championed her cause, and she was even more fortunate in that relatives provided for her after she was removed from her aunt’s custody. As shown in table 1, fully one-sixth of all cases of violence against children led to prison sentences, ranging from five days to three years. One aberrant case led to incarceration of a different type, wherein the mother was charged with being a dangerous lunatic; she had apparently “exposed her person in a state of nakedness, and placed her male child aged of about twelve months on her private parts, saying that she had been told to do so by a Black woman, for the good of her other children.” She was committed to the Montreal Lunatic Asylum.105 The threat of violence, rather than an overt act of violence, could also trigger a legal response. The common law had long held that a threat by itself, without apparent imminent bodily harm, was not actionable.106 However, two instances were identified in which parents were summarily convicted of making threats. In one, a mother was sentenced to nine days in prison for threatening to murder her child.107 In the other, a defendant was arrested for having “violemment et cruellement battu et maltraité sa fille,” aged seventeen, on the complaint of her neighbour. She further claimed the defendant had stood in the doorway of the complainant’s house, facing the street, and shouted invectives, thereby causing a public nuisance.108 She was summarily tried, convicted, and sentenced to five days in the House of Correction, ostensibly for “uttering threats and menaces.”109 These cases also reflect the fluidity between criminal charges common during this period. References to noise, disorder, and “disturbing the public peace and tranquility” appear starkly incongruous when coupled with much more serious allegations of physical violence embedded in these accounts. Yet these references were far from unusual, such as a police constable’s affidavit alleging a defendant was a “person of brutal and violent habits towards his children” and “in the habit of disturbing the peace and tranquillity … [by] continually annoying and incommoding persons residing under [the] same roof as himself.”110 John Miller’s wife asserted he did “disturb the public peace and tranquility and moreover violently assault, beat and strike the deponent’s son,” a curious juxtaposition as to the relative importance of the two acts.111 A similar phenomenon was noted in spousal violence complaints during this period, which likewise categorized many acts of violence as breaches of the peace.112

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This emphasis on “public” rather than “private” offences vividly reflects the role of magistrates who translated a prosecutor’s or witness account into the formulaic legal language common to these documents. Justices often shoehorned these accounts into recognizable, familiar, prosecutable legal categories. It also likely reflected a prosecutorial stratagem: the 1838 Police Ordinance authorized police to summarily arrest, and police magistrates to summarily commit, defendants charged with the broadly defined offence of being “loose, idle and disorderly.”113 Domestic violence inevitably resulted in noise and clamour, and crossing the threshold into the public arena ensured that defendants were subject to arrest under this ordinance and to a maximum of two months’ hard labour. In contrast, summary conviction by a justice of the peace for assault resulted in a maximum penalty of five pounds and imprisonment for up to two months (not at hard labour) if not paid. The indictment-driven route to a court such as Quarter Sessions had a much higher attrition rate due, in no small part, to its greater formality. These types of assaults – witnessed in alleyways and on sidewalks, glimpsed through open doors or through windows, heard from apartments and houses – were also more likely to come to the attention of police and others and hence more likely to be prosecuted. If this phenomenon happened to coincide with greater juridical comfort addressing public rather than private conduct during this period, which is also possible, that was likely a happy coincidence, as prosecutorial pragmatism was doubtlessly the main driver.114 To many magistrates, a violent family member being bound to the peace was probably the optimal outcome in terms of balancing public tranquillity with preserving the integrity of the family. Family members may have preferred an offending relative be bound to the peace rather than imprisoned, as was common with spousal abuse.115 The Dynamics of Domestic Child Abuse Despite the lack of detail in many of these cases, some general extrapolations may be made from them. To begin, the role of family members as instigators of violence against children is readily apparent. Parents and step-parents appeared as the most common victimizers of children during this period, with mothers and stepmothers appearing most frequently. Similarly to the crime of infanticide, scholars have commonly argued that nineteenth-century child assaults and homicides were crimes usually perpetrated by women, and children constituted the

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primary victims.116 In Montreal, women constituted a slim majority of defendants in child abuse prosecutions, at approximately 58 per cent, but that figure should not be taken as dispositive.117 Regardless of their actual numbers, mothers and mother figures featured prominently. Mary Burk was arrested in May 1830 for beating her child in an alley near Notre Dame Cathedral.118 Sixteen-year-old Jane Berry’s stepmother took advantage of her father’s absence to seize her and throw her down on the floor, and then “with both hands and feet, assaulted battered bruised and struck the deponent in such a manner as to make her fear for her life.” Had it not been for the intervention of their domestic servant, she believed she “would have been killed and murdered on the spot.”119 This was not the only such occurrence suffered at her stepmother’s hands; Jane had caused her to be arrested six months earlier for a similar offence. Her stepmother was charged with assault with intent to murder but not indicted.120 Similarly, Ann Farmer was charged with attempted murder for attacking her stepdaughter with a sharpened piece of iron. Farmer’s husband alleged she would have likely succeeded in killing her had he not intervened and requested, in period legal parlance, “justice in the premises.”121 Indeed, it is clear from these affidavits that these acts of aggression were often part of an ongoing pattern of violence, as Ann Farmer, Betsey Kennedy, and others like them repeatedly found themselves in the prisoner’s dock charged with having assaulted family members. Emilie Granger’s conviction for cruelty towards her niece illustrates that parents and step-parents were not the only offenders. Mary O’Brian was charged with having “continually taunted, abused and even beaten and maltreated” her daughter and four grandchildren, including grabbing them by the throat and slapping them as they slept. After O’Brian once again attacked her daughter and “threatened to have [her] blood,” the daughter sought her arrest so that she could be bound to keep the peace.122 Children who physically interposed themselves between an abusive parent and the object of their rage often bore the brunt of violence, as demonstrated by the saga of sixteen-year-old William Bagnell in 1832. In a poignant affidavit sworn from his hospital bed, William attested that he had been bedridden at his parents’ house when he was roused by the cries of his mother calling out “Murder!” as she attempted to fend off his father’s blows. William seized his father by the arm and asked “whether he intended to murder [his] mother,” to which his father replied “he would and me likewise” before throwing William

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down the stairs, kicking him several times between the shoulder blades, and ejecting him into the street. William was hospitalized after his injuries began to fester.123 It was seemingly more common for relatives to utilize the legal system rather than to physically resist violence, particularly so with female relatives, as reflected by the complaints filed by John Miller’s daughter and wife in 1843.124 Not surprisingly, non-related third parties (such as neighbours) were among the most common complainants.125 One defendant, described as “very severe,” was seen to have beaten his children with a large stick and “strike them in a brutal manner with his fists and feet.” As a consequence of habitual maltreatment, the three children had run away several times, with one witness recalling that he found them cowering in a stable, while another asserted that one of the boys was malnourished and that the daughter was at risk of “suffer[ing] materially in her health and condition.”126 A blacksmith likewise filed a complaint for aggravated assault and battery in August 1833 against parents for habitually beating and mistreating their ten-year-old “imbecile” daughter.127 Predictably, it was a rare occurrence to have a child as the main complainant; in those instances a non-custodial parent might assist. Catherine Clifford and her father filed depositions against Rosa Clifford; Catherine’s complaint, filed under the generic offence of “misdemeanour,” alleged the mother was in the habit of “beating striking illusing and illtreating” her, and that “she has reason to fear and doth verily believe that her said mother would again violently assault beat and illuse her as aforesaid.”128 With respect to the ethnicity of perpetrators, as far as can be determined, French Canadians constituted just over one-third of defendants, the remainder being of English or Irish ethnicity. This may have reflected demographics, given that this period saw Montreal having a non-French-Canadian majority.129 While some court records did not allow for identification of the gender of victims, a clear majority of the identified victims were female.130 Among the questions this raises, was violence against male children more acceptable and hence less likely to be reported, or were female children more likely to be hurt, and therefore more often came to the attention of authorities? These cases clearly illustrate the nexus between alcoholism, violence, and neglect.131 The editor of L’Ami du Peuple, in commenting on a case involving the arrest of two drunken mothers, noted, “Il est a regretter qu’il n’existe pas un asyle ou l’on puisse donner refuge aux enfans, qui ont le malheur d’être nés de semblables mères.”132 Newspapers and court records were replete with account of inebriated parents found

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carousing in the streets while their ragged children huddled in doorways in a futile bid for shelter.133 Mary Burk, a notorious prostitute and drunkard of “great violence of character,” was imprisoned for nearly two months for having beaten her young daughter in a public street, the complainant fearing the child might perish if not removed from her mother’s care.134 Ten-year-old Janet Sutherland likewise had a violent and alcoholic mother but was fortunate to have a father willing to take legal action on her behalf. In May 1838 her father filed a complaint against her mother for having been chronically abusive and having “committed a most violent assault and battery … thereby splitting her [daughter’s] head open so as to cause the blood to flow from the wound inflicted in profusion.” He added that his wife was a habitual drunkard and “commits such outrages when in a state of inebriety.”135 Similarly, John Miller’s wife attested that as a result of the “intemperate habits of her said husband she has reason to fear for her life, in addition to the violence he inflicted on their daughter.”136 Allegations of mental aberration were likewise quite common, even when not formally charged as such. Betsey Kennedy, the mother who had two illegitimate children with Justice of the Peace Henry Driscoll, is such an example; in March 1842, approximately six months after her previous involvement with the law, a Montreal physician attested that he was treating her for “aberration of intellect” but that he now deemed her irrefutably insane. Kennedy showed a desire to suicide, he claimed, and in all likelihood “if not put under sufficient constraint, will obey some suggestion of her own diseased imagination, in the injury of some description or other, to those about her.”137 Whether she was in fact deranged cannot be known, but clearly she escalated her acts of violence, as she was convicted two years later for stabbing her five-year-old son.138 Perhaps tellingly, there is no evidence that her mental competency was an issue at trial, nor was it referenced during sentencing. A finding of insanity would have been unsurprising to most jurors, given the common view that women were prone to hysteria, melancholy, and other mental/emotional lapses. Similarly, an armourer for His Majesty’s 15th Regiment had his wife arrested multiple times in 1831–2 for mental derangement and violence, aggravated by her alcoholism.139 Family violence was an endemic feature of everyday life, and the court dockets reflect this. Prosecution was often ill-suited to addressing pathological behaviour within the family, nowhere more so than in cases involving violence against children. Children remained the most vulnerable of all classes of victims. The cases that came to the attention

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of legal authorities were certainly just a fraction of the actual incidents of family violence directed at children, and the records that survive smaller still. Incest as Social Phenomenon Physical violence and neglect were not, of course, the only ways in which children suffered during this period. Emotional and psychological harm was not captured within the judicial archives, while one of the most pernicious forms of child abuse – sexual assault – also remained largely invisible within period sources. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, as Western societies had become increasingly sensitized to the plight of abused and neglected children, it was also recognized that incest (or “domestic sexual abuse”) was a form of family violence.140 While “violence” often implies lack of consent – and certainly the law reflected a distinction between incest and rape insofar as the latter constituted a non-consensual act of violence – even when the act fell short of rape in the legal sense it remained a crime perpetrated against children by adults in a position of authority, and consent could not meaningfully exist.141 The fact that sexual abuse of children within the family is a form of violence therefore appears incontrovertible.142 This is not to say that incest was seen as such during this period, as it surely was not.143 The lens through which one can view incest during this period is, at best, opaque. Judicial records are deeply flawed indicators for myriad reasons, including the fact that such acts occurred covertly, then as now. Furthermore, sexual offences were not openly discussed during this period, and the existence of incest was barely hinted at in the contemporary press.144 While the extent to which incest occurred is therefore conjectural, it surely did occur.145 Reanimating the history of behaviour that was cloistered within the darkest recesses of the family and considered unspeakably taboo is daunting.146 Any cases that surfaced during this era are therefore exceptional because of the multiple factors that would have militated against its discovery. Incest tended to become public only when another intervening event occurred, such as an act of overt violence, pregnancy, or diagnosis of venereal disease, or when it was disclosed by an adult child after leaving home.147 Publicly raising such claims was not to be done lightly, as social stigma and other repercussions frequently followed, particularly for members of the respectable classes.148 Victims not infrequently felt guilt and shame

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about the acts, in addition to familial pressure and a child’s desire to escape the abuse rather than bring it before a legal forum.149 There were also evidentiary impediments, not only related to child witnesses but also due to marital privilege.150 Most concretely, the judicial archives cannot be expected to contain much in the way of illumination for the overarching reason that, as will be discussed, incest was generally not prosecutable during this period. Many factors therefore militated against the surfacing of incest within official records.151 Like other forms of child victimization, incest has been a known phenomenon from antiquity to the present. The prohibition against incest in English legal history had its origins in the Old Testament admonitions found in Leviticus.152 Statutory prohibitions against incest were first promulgated during the reign of Henry VIII, mainly to govern incestuous marriage.153 In 1563, the Church of England formulated a table that set out prohibited relationships and provided the foundation for much of the legislation passed in common law jurisdictions in the seventeenth century onwards.154 Those jurisdictions, however, were not to include England. The Statute of Henry VIII was dispensed with during the reign of Mary I and never reinstated. From the time of Mary I onwards, the criminal law of England did not take cognizance of incest, leaving the matter solely to the ecclesiastical courts.155 In 1857, the Church of England was deprived of its jurisdiction over matrimonial cases by operation of the Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed for divorce on grounds of incestuous adultery.156 For the period under examination, it was the southern United States where legal prohibitions against incest were most pronounced and its application most instructive in providing background for the Montreal experience. In the absence of common law proscriptions, courts in the antebellum South generally refused to penalize defendants for incest until legislatures promulgated laws governing it.157 It was fatherdaughter incest that was considered most loathsome, as it flew in the face of the self-control necessary for a patriarch to fulfil his familial responsibilities.158 If force was used, the defendant could alternatively be charged with sexual assault – a nuance that, as we shall see, was also demonstrated in Montreal.159 The appellate decisions rendered by courts in the Southern United States evince a degree of contradiction, characterized by one scholar as a mixture of “rhetorical condemnation and reluctance to prosecute patriarchs.”160 The rulings and language of those courts left no doubt that incestuous behaviour was seen as destructive to family integrity.161

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In the same breath as those courts condemned incest, however, they treated it as aberrant and minimized its frequency. By so doing, jurists avoided drawing causal connections between the act itself and the power structure of contemporary families that led to this form of social pathology. Those courts were thus able to “preserve the patriarchal ideal” while minimizing intrusion into the family sphere.162 Unlike a variety of other Anglo-American jurisdictions during this period, England and British North America had no statutory prohibitions against incest.163 As Parliament had not seen fit to provide for its punishment, courts remained reluctant to criminalize it. That reluctance was compounded by the entrenched authoritarian-paternalistic family model, such that the law was loath to intercede itself more than was deemed absolutely necessary. In a statement that also rings true for British North America of the period, Anthony Wohl has written about Victorian England that “incest, far more hidden than prostitution, gambling, drunkenness or even the white slave trade, was unlikely to become the subject of a Victorian hue and cry. Its setting – the home – precluded it; those exploited by it, mainly young girls, had no one to champion their cause until the last decades of the century. That the state should be called in to protect girls from the lust of brothers and fathers was too unpalatable a notion for the mid-Victorian generation.”164 Legislatures and jurists alike evidenced a pronounced reluctance to grapple with the issue. Some scholars have concluded that the topic of incest was not only considered unseemly, it was simply too explosive an issue on both sides of the Atlantic. According to that theory, “emphasis placed on the cultivation of affection and sentiment,” coupled with the importance placed on sexual purity, resulted in an “intense and intricate emotional climate within the household that led, in many cases, to latent incestuous feelings.”165 Incest may also have proven to be too ambiguous and troubling: ambiguous insofar as it involved issues not present in other cases of sexual abuse;166 troubling insofar as it triggered deep-seated antipathy towards discussing sexual matters and intruding into the realm of the private.167 In Canada it was not to become a federal crime until 1890, although some colonies (not Quebec) had criminalized it prior to Confederation.168 Relatively little is known about the prosecution of incest in other nineteenth-century jurisdictions, and that typically for later periods. Leslie Erickson’s study of the prairies for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an outlier insofar as she uncovered seventy-one cases, indicating that courts there grappled with incest fairly regularly.169 Other Canadian

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jurisdictions, including British Columbia and Ontario, show far fewer for overlapping periods.170 In analysing the judicial response to incest in Montreal of this period, one is effectively attempting to reanimate a crime that did not exist. This is not to say that incestuous acts were not committed, a claim that would be patently untrue.171 Rather, it is to say that such acts were not indictable unless subsumed under other rubrics such as sexual assault.172 Even so, Crémazie’s Les lois criminelles anglaises, perhaps the leading Quebec treatise on criminal law for the period, neither contains an entry for incest nor references it in the section on sexual assault.173 However, like child rape, incest was viewed as more infamous than sexual assault itself, seen as a moral offence of the highest order, while sexual assault was deemed largely a crime against person and reputation. Incest was paradoxically both a greater and lesser offence than rape – lesser, because the law did not provide for its punishment, and greater, because it was seen as particularly heinous. Rape was governed by statute, which had different sanctions, depending on whether the child was below the age of ten or twelve, the former being a capital crime and the latter being a misdemeanour punishable by two years in prison and a fine.174 The legal requirements to sustain a rape charge would not have been satisfied in most instances, and even were this not the case, the many factors that traditionally militated against women’s success in prosecuting cases of sexual assault would have been fully operative.175 Predictably, few cases came to light, and all but a small minority were destined to fail, based on the rigidity and deeply gendered constructs of the common law.176 If a defendant was not charged with ravishment or a similar crime, it was unclear how a charge of incest could be sustained. Incest was nearly invisible in Lower Canada and Quebec, legally speaking, during the first half of the century. With no specific criminal provisions governing it – and with incest being viewed similarly to other “unmentionable” crimes such as buggery and bestiality – it could not have been otherwise.177 On those rare occasions when it was referenced, the infamy with which it was viewed was unequivocal. An 1846 account, occurring outside of the district of Montreal, referred to the crime as “almost unheard of in the annals of humanity,” and the perpetrator, sentenced to death after being convicted of raping his daughter, as possessing “character of unexampled demoralization.”178 The newspaper’s assertion that this was a rare crime was true insofar as few cases involving child rape by a relative came before courts.

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Despite the fact that incest inhabited a juridical no man’s land, however, references to incest occasionally surfaced within the archives, usually in the context of other domestic crimes, such as Elmire Legault dit Deslauriers and her uncle Louis, who were charged with having killed their two illegitimate children.179 Similarly, an 1832 affidavit by a spouse charging her husband for uttering threats and assault and battery referenced that he had abandoned their marital bed and slept with his seventeen-year-old stepdaughter in the “presence of her and four infants,” the stepdaughter becoming pregnant as a result.180 While in neither instance was the incestuous conduct subject to criminal sanction in its own right, accounts such as those provide what I term “shadow evidence” of incest.181 As mentioned earlier, charges of incest were doomed to fail unless subsumed under other legal categories such as rape, unlawful carnal knowledge of a female, or other related offences. In the same way as the victims of child abuse tended to recede into the background, so too did the incestuous acts that lay at the heart of many of these crimes. Only four prosecutions that implicated incest, explicitly or implicitly, were found in the judicial archives for this quarter-century span.182 The first of these occurred in August 1826, in which a brutal assault was alleged to have been perpetrated on a seven-year-old girl by Joseph Massé, her uncle. It was a “most atrocious crime,” hissed the Montreal Gazette, going on to explain that the “wretch” had given the young girl rum until she was intoxicated, after which he “violated her person with circumstances of aggravation too shocking to be detailed.”183 Massé was indicted and tried for carnally knowing and abusing a female child under the age of ten years.184 The trial disclosed that the niece had been spending the day at Massé’s house and was found lying on the cellar floor, intoxicated and bloodied. Even more damning was that the defendant had confessed to the crime after his apprehension. Under standard procedure of the period, however, confessions that might have been coerced were inadmissible, including those that may have been induced by the hope of escaping prosecution or leniency. His niece did not testify, and it is far from certain whether she would have been found competent to do so by virtue of her age.185 The presiding judge also did not allow Massé’s confession to enter into evidence and he was quickly acquitted.186 Ironically, it was the defendant’s family relationship that had provided him access. Standards of propriety during this era being what they were, there was considerable societal concern about commin-

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gling of the sexes. Family was the exception, and the “presumed moral safety of families afforded cousins, uncles and in-laws unsupervised access to female relatives.”187 Untold numbers of females were sexually victimized during the nineteenth century, and the family premises were a fertile hunting ground for predatory men.188 Fathers were certainly not above reproach in this regard, as Jean Baptiste Schnider was prosecuted for ravishing his eighteen-year-old daughter, Mérante, who claimed he had forced himself upon her from the age of eleven onwards. In her affidavit, she claimed that “qui cette fois, le dit Jean Baptiste Schnider malgré qu’il auroit essayé à connaître la dite deposante charnellement n’aurait pu reussir à cause de son jeune âge” but had continued his attempts until he was successful and had raped her repeatedly since then, his last act of violation having occurred three months earlier.189 Mérante’s claims were supported by her employer, Marie Muir. Muir attested that Mérante had been employed as a domestic for approximately fifteen days, but that after the eighth or ninth day of her service her father had returned for her.190 Mérante adamantly refused, prompting Muir to inquire why she reacted so strongly. When pressed, she confessed to Muir that her father had first raped her several years ago and was in the habit of doing so whenever he found her alone in the house. As she got older, she confided, she came to realize the consequences of the abuse she suffered.191 The indictment against Mérante’s father categorized this as a sexual assault, alleging that he had “illégalement, féloniesement et contre le gré de Mérante Schnider, sa fille, violé … et joui d’elle charnellement.”192 Disappointingly for the historian, the case did not proceed to trial, the docket simply noting “no proceedings had.” In addition to the evidentiary obstacles common to rape cases, the long period of abuse she suffered, lack of physical resistance, and her failure to seek legal intervention in a timely manner would likely have foreclosed a successful prosecution. Using a rape indictment to prosecute cases of incest was a well-known, albeit often unsuccessful, strategy.193 As such, it is no surprise that rape charges would sometimes have been brought, given that statutory provisions addressing incest were lacking, although the notoriety of the crime, the severity of the penalty, and the rigid application of the common law would have stymied prosecutions.194 The lack of witnesses also helped doom such proceedings.195 On the rare occasion when it appeared before the criminal justice system, incest could be subsumed under a miscellany of offences, as

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Michael Coleman discovered in 1850 after being convicted of abducting a woman under the age of sixteen, his stepdaughter, Ann.196 While none of the affidavits have survived, it is known that Coleman was committed to the Montreal Gaol on 18 July 1849 and was tried eight months later in a trial that was covered in the pages of the Montreal Gazette.197 Coleman was apprehended after luring his stepdaughter away from home, paying an acquaintance a half-dollar to assist in his subterfuge. In his opening remarks, the solicitor general argued, “All those who had daughters and sisters were interested in the punishment and prevention of crimes like this,” adding that the offence was “fortunately for us, almost unknown in Canada.”198 Coleman’s wife was not allowed to testify as a result of spousal privilege, but there were several other prosecution witnesses who bolstered the Crown’s case, including the two men who apprehended him. Upon his arrest, one of the men chided him, telling him he would go to hell if he died after committing such debauchery. Unfazed, Coleman responded, “I would sooner go there then go home again to live.” Coleman’s defence team pursued a vigorous, two-pronged strategy, arguing that his stepdaughter’s age had not been established, and that under the civil law the stepfather was vested with guardianship for Ann and therefore the charge could not be sustained. The Crown could not produce a birth certificate, as she had been born in the United States, but offered testimony to establish her age, which the Court accepted as sufficient. The defence’s second argument proved stickier; in rebuttal, the Crown argued that unless Coleman had formally become Ann’s legal guardian in lieu of her mother – which it posited could not be, as his criminal act negated this status – legal guardianship remained with the mother. The Court reserved judgment until after a verdict was reached, stipulating that this issue might be raised to arrest judgment, should he be convicted.199 Coleman was indeed found guilty, the jury deliberating for only a few minutes.200 Two weeks would elapse until the Court reconvened to hear a motion for a new trial. While in other cases the familial relationship receded into the background, here it remained central in that a fine point of law rested on whether the charge that the “girl abducted was taken from the possession and custody of her mother, while that mother was under the marital puissance of her husband, the abductor, was sufficient.” The Court ruled that “the law of nature” granted guardianship over children to the mother, a right that was not completely lost following marriage, but shared with the father:

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Previously to the marriage the law of nature gave the guardianship to the mother. The subsequent marriage did not take it altogether from her. There had been no regular appointment of the stepfather to that guardianship. If then, the father had a right to guardianship, the mother also held it conjointly with him. The right of protutor with which he was invested by his acquisition of the puissance maritale did not entirely destroy the right of the mother; it rather invested the stepfather with the duties and responsibilities, than with the rights and powers of the tutelle … In England, where the rights of the husband over the wife are much greater than under our law in Canada, and the legal existence of the wife merged in that of the husband, she was still held to possess this power and guardianship … The puissance of the husband, then, being greater than in Canada, who shall say that the mother, who is under that stricter system, even, left this power, has not with us this power of protection over the morals and safety of her child, in the absence of the father.201

In short, the mother was deemed to share guardianship over her minor children – a result that also would have been the case in England, despite the law being more restrictively applied than in Lower Canada. Those rights of authority and guardianship of the mother would be heightened in the instant case, reasoned the Court, as the stepfather was not only absent but was also “endeavouring to debauch” her daughter. Coleman was sentenced to three years in the provincial penitentiary.202 While acts of incest were therefore most likely to fall under the rubric of sexual assault cases such as rape, ravishment, and unlawful carnal knowledge, or related offences such as abduction, allegations of incest did occasionally surface more overtly. In April 1838, one defendant was committed to the Montreal jail, ostensibly on that charge, and was admitted to bail five months later. While that case could have proven instructive, no further information was found as the notation simply reads he was committed “for incest.”203 Similarly to the “loose, idle and disorderly” or “breach of the peace” prosecutions seen earlier, this charge reflected the discretionary ability of magistrates in deciding how to categorize offences, as well as the fluidity of criminal charges sometimes couched in terms more descriptive than legally accurate.204 Incest bridged the worlds of the public and private, and the overlapping areas of morality and crime. Its very ambiguity, reflected and fed by the failure of the law to categorize it as a discrete legal offence, doomed it to near-invisibility. In other jurisdictions, incest was seen

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more as a venal sin than a criminal offence.205 In Montreal of this period, rigid social mores precluded anything more than oblique references, if that, and certainly did not lead to public agitation on the issue of incest or the sexual exploitation of children.206 Indeed, the crime was unsavoury and unpalatable in many ways, but addressing it meant contesting the sanctity and primacy of the family.207 And while the conviction rate elsewhere has been shown to be higher than for sexual assault cases in general, and higher than those for child rape, the Montreal experience in contrast reflected a near-absence of convictions.208 The Dynamics of Incest Those cases, as limited as they are, allow for some circumspect extrapolation. In all instances, the malefactors were male.209 The perpetrators were usually fathers or father figures such as stepfathers or uncles.210 Conversely, all alleged victims were female.211 Incest tended to be a premeditated, sustained pattern of abuse, as reflected by the case of Mérante Schnider, where the cycle of abuse continued for years.212 Schnider’s claims surfaced after she moved away from home, perhaps a more common scenario than that of Joseph Massé, in which a relative exposed the incident.213 The victims typically experienced abuse in their pre-adolescent years, a pattern also reflected in the cases.214 All cases, of course, represent only those that fell within the purview of the judicial system, and one cannot say that they are necessarily representative. No statement about the frequency of incest or violence against children can be proffered, nor can any conclusions be drawn about the correlation between incest, child abuse, and larger rates of family violence.215 Disturbingly, it may well have been the case that families in which incest occurred were not otherwise unusual.216 It is also possible that informal mechanisms were used before legal recourse was taken as a final desperate step, showing a preference for informal modes of adjudication that would keep family matters outside of the purview of public scrutiny and criminalization.217 Incest also straddled two classes of victims – children and women – neither of which were seen during this period as full rights holders by a heavily gendered legal system. As Erickson noted for later in the century, “Canadians had only begun to deconstruct the foundation of patriarchy by acknowledging the rights of women; it had not yet completely acknowledged the rights of children.”218

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Conclusion It could only have been the rare case of abuse that would have prompted a complaint, let alone a full-fledged prosecution. Children were most often seen and not heard within families of this period – but before the law they tended to be neither. In those infrequent instances when allegations of abusive conduct came before nineteenth-century Montreal courts, they were heard by jurists who tended to accord deference to the traditional patriarchal and authoritarian model of the paterfamilias. There were limits, however, to parental correction of children. Cases during this period in Montreal were suggestive of flux. Replete with ambivalence and tension, rigidity and reprehension, they occurred against a backdrop in which parents were granted wide latitude, and children were not viewed as full rights-holders. Yet the existence of depositions, indictments, and accounts of trials for child abuse is evidence of some limitations to parental authority, however tentative. While legislatures had yet to promulgate laws designed to protect children from domestic violence, courts showed at least some inclination to apply the ordinary provisions of the criminal law to shield children. It is unlikely that Judith Couture, Betsey Kennedy, or Emilie Granger felt that they were constrained in their behaviour towards the children in their care until the coercive arm of the law interposed itself; it is equally unlikely that Isabel Belile ever contemplated the possibility of facing incarceration for threatening to kill her child. Yet these were not the only adults to face legal sanctions for harming children. Were children not faced with so many systemic disabilities, it is likely that other cases would have come before the courts. Allegations of incest are most illustrative. Despite the fact that lawmakers had yet to enact legislation governing that offence, allegations of incest still surfaced. Myriad obstacles prevented prosecution of those acts, yet some cases were still squeezed into existing legal categories. Michael Coleman’s intentions towards his stepdaughter left him vulnerable to prosecution for abduction; Joseph Massé was charged (however unsuccessfully) for unlawful carnal knowledge in a trial at which his young niece was not called to testify. These were halting steps, but steps they were. That those cases happened at all is perhaps the best evidence that Montreal jurists were beginning to grapple with these tensions inherent in the traditional sanctity of family authority over children. By so doing, they tacitly began to recognize that the family premises could

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be havens for child victimization as well as child protection. Such cases forced society to acknowledge issues its members would much rather have ignored: “Whereas reports of sexual misconduct may be occasions for a wide range of reactions – from humor to outrage – the details of the violence of one person to another evoke more immediate and visceral responses. There is no room for laughter in a courtroom when we hear verbatim the circumstances of a child being beaten to death, and the smile of the cynic is swallowed as grave after grave of murdered babies is, literally, or figuratively, opened. The fact that, as today, most violent crime occurred within families served to intensify this effect in an age which so vocally prided itself on its domestic solidarity.”219 There was, as of yet, no societal movement to expose and address the plight of abused children during this period, and indeed attention directed at such issues was seen as unwelcome. Courts, however, were forums where domestic criminality and pathology could be addressed, forcing some measure of acknowledgment of their existence as well as their gravity. Had children had readier access to the courts, had more third parties acted as guardians and stewards on their behalf, had the notions of patriarchy not been so firmly entrenched, early nineteenthcentury Montreal courts could well have grappled with those issues much more systematically. Attempts at reconciling parental authority and child protection during this period were often uneasy and disjointed. Those attempts nonetheless reflect the fact that courts were, on at least some occasions, willing to act out of lockstep with prevailing social and legal precepts. It would not be until the 1870s and 1880s that a battery of legislative enactments instituted formal limits on parental power, and representatives of “the Cruelty” investigated child abuse by combing the alleys and tenements of Anglo-American urban centres. The notion that the law should protect children from the excesses of their guardians had, however tentatively, already stirred in the minds of Montreal jurists decades earlier.

NOTES * I am greatly indebted to Blaine Baker and Donald Fyson for their constructive comments as well as those of the anonymous referees. 1 For discussion of the theatre-like atmosphere of local courts common to the period, see generally Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in Eng-

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land, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); King, “Law and Ideology: The Toronto Police Court, 1850–1880,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. David H. Flaherty (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1983), 2:248; for Quebec, see Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 310–53. “I found the above named [Cordille] so bruised in her left arm at the elbow joint that it was impossible to notice whether it was broken and the right shoulder is still so swollen that I cannot decide at present the condition it is in. I also noticed several blows to the head and the body, those to the head could cause an abscess” (author’s translation). Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’archives de Montréal (hereinafter BAnQ-M), Files of the Court of Quarter Sessions (hereinafter QS[F]), La Reine v. Emilie Granger (27 June 1840) (affidavit of Simon Fraser, MD). “If you do not tell your uncle that you fell down the stairs I will kill you” (author’s translation). Ibid. BAnQ-M, QS(F), La Reine v. Emilie Granger femme de Toussaint Trudelle (27 June 1840) (affidavit of Cordele Levesque dit Sansaucis) [sic] (detailing how her aunt had beaten her with a cane and broomstick, punched and kicked her, and broke her tooth with a spoon, among other violent acts). Such affidavits are valuable sources of victim’s accounts, albeit filtered through the jurists who transcribed them. For discussion of locating the true authorial voice in these documents, see, for example, Ian C. Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed’: Infanticide in Montreal, 1825–1850,” Law & History Review 30, no. 2 (May 2012): 577, and n5. Montreal Gazette, 14 Nov. 1840. For description of the court system, see Donald Fyson, Evelyn Kolish, and Virginia Schweitzer, The Court Structure of Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764 to 1860 (Montreal History Group: Montreal, 1997). Montreal Herald, 16 Nov. 1840. Ibid. Montreal Gazette, 14 Nov. 1840. Ibid. See also Montreal Herald, 16 Nov. 1840; BAnQ-M, QS(F), La Reine v. Emilie Granger (27 June 1840) (affidavit of Simon Fraser, MD). Montreal Transcript, 14 Nov. 1840. BAnQ-M, Register of the Court of King’s Bench (hereinafter KB[R]), 35–6, The Queen v. Emilie Granger (12 Nov. 1840); ibid. (14 Nov. 1840). See Montreal Gazette, 4 Dec. 1840; Montreal Transcript, 5 Dec. 1840. See, for example, Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 107.

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14 This observation is mirrored by Greg T. Smith, “Expanding the Compass of Domestic Violence in the Hanoverian Metropolis,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 1 (2007): 32. 15 This view of children as chattel was, of course, even more so for slave children. With respect to violence in the family, Doyle made a similar observation based on accounts culled from the archives of mid-Victorian English newspapers. Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead (New York: Viking Books, 1989), 27. For a discussion of family violence, including child abuse, see generally Ian C. Pilarczyk, “‘Justice in the premises’: Family Violence and the Law in Montreal, 1825–1850” (DCL thesis, McGill University, 2003). 16 See Samuel X. Radbill, “Children in a World of Violence: A History of Child Abuse,” in The Battered Child, ed. Ray E. Helfer and Ruth S. Kempe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17. 17 The Body of Liberties (1641), article 83, which stated (transliterated into modern English), “If any parents shall … exercise any unnatural severity towards them, such children shall have free liberty to complain to authority for redress.” Gleason L. Archer, History of the Law (Boston: Suffolk Law School Press, 1928), 427. See also Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 22. 18 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 48. 19 Ibid. Pleck also surveyed period childrearing literature, noting that AngloAmerican attitudes towards corporal punishment became milder as the century wore on; as she posited, this “gradually shifting stance towards childrearing practices constituted a kind of private reform movement against family violence” (34). 20 Radbill, “Children in a World of Violence,” 13; Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995), 147. 21 Cunningham, Children, 134. 22 Renée Joyal, Les enfants, la société et l’État au Québec, 1608–1989 (Montréal: Cahiers du Québec, HMH, 1999). 23 Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, Law and the Family in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 10. 24 Ibid., 144. France passed the Child Labour Law in 1841, the first concerted effort in that country to protect children from the carnage wrought by the industrial revolution. 25 Ibid., 141.

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26 Radbill, “Children in a World of Violence,” 7; George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 7–9; Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain, 1860–1918 (London: Routledge, 1991), 28; Linda A. Pollock, Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 62. For discussion of labour law related to servants during this period, including minors, see generally Ian C. Pilarczyk, “‘Too well used by his master’: Judicial Enforcement of Servants’ Rights in Montreal, 1830–1845,” McGill Law Journal 46 (2001): 491–529; Pilarczyk, “The Law of Servants and the Servants of Law: Enforcing Masters’ Rights in Montreal, 1830–1845,” McGill Law Journal 46 (2001): 779–836. 27 Behlmer, Child Abuse, 46–7. 28 See, for example, Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 48 (“Causing permanent injury to a child was always considered wrong, but before the Civil War there was no palpable interest in defining what cruelty to children was”); Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 233; Behlmer, Child Abuse, 6 (noting that in the United Kingdom, parents could “lawfully” or “reasonably” chastise a child, but these terms were not defined); Nancy Hathaway Steenburg, Children and the Criminal Law in Connecticut, 1635–1855: Changing Perceptions of Childhood (Routledge: New York, 2005), 159 (no unanimity on definition of “excessive” punishment). Roth, in the context of New England, noted, “Older children could be neglected, starved, imprisoned, tortured, raped and beaten with impunity, as long as parents and guardians were careful not to leave marks of violence on the face, neck, or hands and as long as potential informants … did not live in the same house.” Randolph Roth, “Child Murder in New England,” Social Science History 25, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 102. See also Smith, “Expanding the Compass,” 40 (stating it was rare to find prosecutions for child abuse). 29 See, for example, Pollock, Forgotten Children, 95 (parents “could not treat children exactly as they pleased, even if no specific law applied”). Pollock also noted that the manner of newspaper coverage and the fact the majority of defendants were convicted indicated that society condemned it before legislation was passed in the last decades of the century. 30 Cunningham, Childhood, 140. As one social critic wrote in 1833, “It is notorious that the health of the negro slave, of the adult felon, of the horse, of the ass, of the hare, of the rabbit, of the partridge, of the pheasant, of the cabbage, and of the strawberry, is protected by law; but at the same time, the Children of the Poor are unprotected by the law.” Ibid., citing Richard Oastler. 31 Conley, Unwritten Law, 105, quoting Harold Perkins.

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32 Monica Flegel, Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 39. 33 The law was intended primarily to protect work animals and usually resulted in a fine or incarceration if not paid. See, for example, BAnQ-M, Registers of the Montreal Police Court (hereinafter MP) p. 276, Domina Regina v. Edouard Nadeau (11 Aug. 1840) (fifteen days in House of Corrections for “illtreating a horse”); MP p.2 6, Domina Regina v. Augustin Perrault (19 July 1842) (one week imprisonment for “cruelty to a horse and overloading”). See also 2 Vict. c. 2 (1839) (L.C.) (statute prohibiting cruelty to animals). For an article referencing animal abuse, see Montreal Weekly Pilot, 15 Oct 1846: “Cruelty to animals is one of the distinguishing vices of the lowest and basest of the people. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness – an intrinsic mark, which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate.” 34 Pollock, Forgotten Children, 95. 35 Cunningham, Childhood, 134. 36 14 & 15 Vict. c. 11 (1851) (U.K.). See Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 42 and 234; Behlmer, Child Abuse, 305. 37 16 Vict. c. 30 (1853) (U.K.). It provided for a prison term of six months or a fine of up to £20 for attacks on females and on males under fourteen that resulted in bodily harm. 38 Behlmer, Child Abuse, 12. Rose likewise noted the lack of utility of the legislation in addressing child abuse by parents. Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 233. 39 That act, known as The Poor Law Amendment Act, allowed for Boards of Guardians to initiate legal proceedings against parents for neglect. Behlmer, Child Abuse, 80. It superseded the Poor Law Act of 1834 that required parents to support children as a way of preventing them from being public burdens, but by all accounts it was a failure. Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 234. 40 22 Vict. c. 27 (1858) (P.C.) 41 Peter N. Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages: The Children of Eighteenth-Century New France,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982), 21. For a contemporary history of New France, see Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France, 6 vols. (Paris: Nyon fils, 1744); for a more recent overview, see, for example, Yves-François Zoltvany, ed., The French Tradition in North America (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). 42 Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages,” 23. 43 Janet Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 92.

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44 Marie-Aimée Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir? La violence envers les enfants dans les familles québécoises, 1850–1969 (Montreal: Boreal, 2007), 51; Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages,” 22–3. Cliche notes this was similar to the English criminal law in this regard, 16n12. These concepts were also reflected in prominent legal treatises of the time. For a leading treatise, see, for example, Henry Des Rivières Beaubien, Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas Canada (Montreal: Duvernay, 1832). 45 Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages,” 22. Article 242 set out a child’s duty to honour and respect his parents; Article 243 stipulated he remained subject to parental (particularly paternal) authority until the age of majority or emancipation; and Article 245 allowed for the “right of reasonable and moderate correction.” 46 Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir?, 36. 47 Many of the early institutions were private or religious, such as the Grey Nuns (who took in foundlings) in the mid-eighteenth-century, or the Sisters of Miséricorde founded in 1848 (who took in orphans and assisted unwed mothers). By the 1860s Quebec established schools of industry, reform schools, and orphanages. See, for example, Reneé Joyal, Les enfants, la société et l’État au Québec, 1608–1989 (Montreal: Hurtubuse HMH, 1999), 48–52; Marta Danylewycz, Taking the Veil (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987), esp. 72–109. For a description of the demographic, economic, and other changes that Quebec underwent during this period, including the rise of institutions, see Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed,’” 581–7. Legislative action was focused mainly on the issue of delinquency, with two laws passed in 1857 establishing a separate prison for juveniles and providing for simplified judicial proceedings for youth charged with simple larceny. 20 Vict. c. 28 (1857) (L.C.) (reformatory for juvenile delinquents); 20 Vict. c. 29 (1857) (L.C.) (proceedings for juveniles charged with simple larceny). See also Joyal, Les enfants, 43. For discussion of the treatment of delinquency in Quebec, see generally Sylvie Ménard, Des enfants sous surveillance: la rééducation des jeunes délinquants au Québec (1840–1950) (Montreal: VLB, 2003). 48 See, for example, Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 233 (noting that conservative jurists in the United Kingdom were reluctant to punish parents for conduct that fell short of causing death). 49 See generally Pilarczyk, “Law of Servants.” 50 See generally Pilarczyk, “‘Too well used by his master’”; see also 524n103 for a local legislative provision that governed “misusage, defect of sufficient and wholesome provisions, or for cruelty or other ill-treatment.” Greg Smith likewise notes examples of suits filed against masters in eigh-

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teenth-century London. Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 43 (discussing suits against masters), and 42–6 (discussing violence against servants and apprentices). See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 214–361 (discussing 571 cases identified for the period 1825–50). Complaints against wives constituted approximately 15 per cent of the total. Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 48. See, for example, David Peterson del Mar, What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence against Wives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 57 (noting greater tolerance for violence directed at children than spouses in nineteenth-century Oregon). For the nexus between alcoholism and spousal violence in Montreal, see generally Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 214–361 (spousal battery), and 362–445 (spousal murder); Kathryn Harvey, “‘To love, honour, and obey’: WifeBattering in Working-Class Montreal, 1869–1879,” Urban History Review 19 (1990): 128. See, for example Noel, Canada Dry, 92: “Those cruel fathers (still accompanied in the 1830s and 1840s by a smaller phalanx of unfeeling mothers) who beat their children and sold their little girls’ clothes and shoes during the winter for whiskey were a staple of temperance literature of that day. They may be less exaggerated than modern readers would suppose.” Noel also notes that readers of temperance tracts were exposed to progressive ideals of “gentle child-rearing” (93). For specific discussion of the Montreal experience with temperance during this period, see 55–62. For a historical overview in Canada, see, for example, Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ed., Drink in Canada, Historical Essays (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1993). Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir?, 17. As Smith has noted for eighteenth-century London, “patriarchal authority in the household, combined with economic, social and legal barriers to prosecution conspired to foreclose on potentially successful prosecutions before they even came to light.” Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 32. For reference to the role of the Roman Catholic Church in reinforcing patriarchal relationships, see generally Marie-Aimée Cliche, “Un secret bien gardé: l’inceste dans la société traditionnelle québécoise, 1858–1938,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amerique française 50, no. 2 (1996). The Montreal court of this period was a highly localized, court-driven system, in which private prosecutors initiated a considerable amount of the business heard before the courts, particularly where assaults were concerned. See generally Fyson, Magistrates. For discussion of privately driven criminal justice, see, for ex-

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ample, Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice, Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1977); Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford: University Press, 2000). Montreal Gazette, 15 Oct. 1829. Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed,’” 583–8 and 629 (for abandonment); ibid. in general for infanticide. An early exception was Connecticut, which passed a law in 1838 regarding child abandonment and neglect. Steenburg, Children and the Criminal Law, 158–9. L’Ami du Peuple, 27 Nov. 1839: “Police Station, Station A. Sunday Nov. 24: A miserable woman was picked up in the street in a state of complete drunkenness, with a small child in her arms. The child was sent to the house of one of his close relatives … Tuesday the 26th, Station B: a young child was found at one in the morning, barefoot, in the street, and it was soon discovered to be that of Mr and Mrs Davidson, who had escaped during one of the regular and disorderly disputes of his parents. The poor child would have surely perished without the prompt help that was given by the police. The father and the mother were lodged at the Station until the following morning. May this slight correction inspire them to peace in the future” (author’s translation). When brought before the police magistrate on charge of “ill-treating their child,” these parents were “admonished and discharged.” BAnQ-M, MP, Domina Regina v. James Davidson (26 Nov. 1839); MP, Domina Regina v. Mary Davidson (26 Nov. 1839). Montreal Gazette, 31 Mar. 1835 (case of Pierre Gauvin v. Sophie Mailloux). The mother was sentenced to one year in prison and to provide a surety of £100, as recorded in Montreal Gazette, 4 Apr. 1835. This case was not counted, as it occurred in Quebec City. Vindicator, 13 Jan. 1829, citing the Christian Register. For similar accounts of the murder and starvation of children in mid-nineteenth-century England, compare Boyle, Black Swine, 27–34. La Minerve, 2 May 1844 (“for having cruelly battered her child aged eight years”; author’s translation); see also Montreal Gazette, 2 May 1844 (case of Clot/Clet Goulette). Many such cases were simply discontinued. Overlapping sources assist in capturing information that would otherwise be lost, but the absence of documentation on cases referred to in newspapers is a recurrent issue. See, for example, Jeffrey S. Adler, “‘My mother-in-law is to blame, but I’ll walk on her neck yet’: Homicide in Late NineteenthCentury Chicago,” Journal of Social History 31 (1997): 254 (referring to

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“maddening references” in newspapers to homicides that are absent from official records); Roger Lane, “Urban Homicide in the Nineteenth Century: Some Lessons for the Twentieth,” in History and Crime: Implications for Criminal Justice Policy, ed. Jane A. Inciardi and Charles E. Faupels (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980), 93. Conley, Unwritten Law, 100 (also noting that non-intervention reflected “the more practical concern that rate-payers not have to support the children of idle reprobates”). As George Behlmer has observed in his work on the public response to child abuse in later nineteenth-century England, “That few children appear to have been assaulted is natural; the young either could not or dared not prefer charges against adult males.” Behlmer, Child Abuse, 13. Conley, Unwritten Law, 104. There may have been some informal mechanics for intervention, including the role of parish priests, who may have uncovered instances of domestic violence. See n189 (noting Mérante Schnider disclosed incest to her priest in the confessional, although there is no evidence of his response). See, for example, A.H. Williams and N.K. Griffin, “100 Years of Lost Opportunity: Missed Descriptions of Child Abuse in the 19th Century and Beyond,” Child Abuse & Neglect 32, no. 10 (Oct. 2008): 920. Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 237. Ibid. This rule did not apply to acts of violence committed against one spouse by the other, at least in Montreal. See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 239. In the United Kingdom, this remained the law until the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act in 1889. Adam Kuper, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2009), 81. Conley, Unwritten Law, 105. It is likely that evidence of child abuse could be gleaned from the registers of Montreal charitable institutions, potentially a fruitful line of scholarly inquiry. Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 35. For discussion of policing in Quebec, see, for example, Fyson, Magistrates, 136–83. See Vindicator, 12 June 1829 (case of McCluskey). See Montreal Register, 8 June 1848 (citing Montreal Herald) (case of McLean). BAnQ-M, MP, Domina Regina v. Mary McShewen (22 Apr. 1839). BAnQ-M, MP, Domina Regina v. James Davidson, and Domina Regina v. Mary Ann Davidson (26 Nov. 1839) (charge of “illtreating their child”); Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Records of the Montreal Police, General Register of Prisoners, vol. 33 (hereinafter MP[GR]) (John Paylor arrested 19 Jan. 1841). These cases, and others like them, mirror spousal violence cases

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during the same period, as well as some cases brought by masters against recalcitrant servants. See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 310–11 (discussion of spousal abuse cases before the Police Court); Pilarczyk, “Law of Servants,” 793 (admonishment of servants in desertion suits). While reprimanding an abusive adult was obviously of limited efficacy, this response foreshadowed that of later decades following the advent of child protection agencies. In the 1870s and 1880s, as inspectors from “the Cruelty” investigated cases of child abuse and neglect, the usual response of inspectors was likewise to issue an admonition. See, for example, Behlmer, Child Abuse, 52 . A surety for good conduct, also referred to as being “bound to the peace,” required that a defendant keep the peace (either in general or towards specified individuals, or both) for a particular period of time or forfeit a specified sum of money to the Crown. Failure to post such a bond would result in imprisonment, as would failure to abide by its terms. Montreal sureties were typically for three months to two years, with six months or a year being the norm. Sureties were an ancient element of English criminal justice and were frequently employed in early colonial American spousal violence cases. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 27. Sureties could therefore be seen as a primitive form of restraining order and were a popular tool in family violence cases. A surety to attend court, usually referred to as a ”recognizance,” bound the defendant to keep the peace until her scheduled court date and also specified the sum to be forfeited in case of default; it was also used to guarantee the presence of private prosecutors and material witnesses. For discussion of recognizances, see, for example, David Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 99–100; Fyson, Magistrates, 239–40. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Domina Regina v. Henry Driscoll, Esquire (29 Apr. 1840) (arrest warrant). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Henry Driscoll, Esquire v. Betsey Kennedy (15 May 1840) (affidavit of Henry Driscoll). He also noted he “entertains a just apprehension that, unless … [she] be bound to refrain from so molesting him by bringing the said children to his house as aforesaid in bad weather and in slight cloathing [sic], the said children may receive injury to their health and possibly die.” BAnQ-M, QS(F), Domina Regina v. Betsey Kennedy (15 May 1840) (arrest warrant). According to the language of the warrant, she was arrested for “molesting Henry Driscoll ... by knocking violently at his door, and by abuse and violent language, endeavouring to extort money from him.” BAnQ-M, QS(F), Domina Regina v. Elizabeth Kennedy (8 July 1841) (affidavit of Joseph Guilbault).

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82 Justices of the peace and other jurists occasionally presided over matters in which they had an interest. For discussion of conflicts of interest related to justices of the peace, see Fyson, Magistrates, 97–9; for an example in the context of master-servant law, see Pilarczyk, “Law of Servants,” 824–5. 83 BAnQ-M, QS(F), Domina Regina v. Elizabeth Kennedy (16 Sept. 1841). It is, of course, possible that this was an oversight on Driscoll’s part, but given the dynamic between the two and Driscoll’s familiarity with the law, this may also have been an attempt to essentially keep the surety open-ended. 84 See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 285–8. Many complaints that included violence against children therefore were not examined in this study, such as the case of Mary Whitely prosecuted for assaulting her neighbour and aunt and resisting the police. The complaint also alleged she had assaulted her young son and breached the peace. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Domina Regina v. Mary Whitely (3 Apr. 1841). 85 Most Montreal cases involved children being accidentally run over by carriages in the streets or other instances of misadventure, although in a minority it was due to intentional violence. For examples of child murder in nineteenth-century England, see Patrick Wilson, Murderess: A Story of the Women Executed in Britain since 1843 (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), 150–4 and 186–9. For Montreal infanticide cases, see generally Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed.’” 86 Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 124. 87 See ibid., 144 (noting that murder of children was an extension of a culture that permitted infanticide). 88 As Knelman noted, “The truth was, however, that the reprieve of a child murderer sent a less threatening message than the reprieve of a husband murderer. Excuses could be accepted for the murder of a child, but the murder of a husband under any circumstances was not to be condoned.” Ibid., 142. 89 See also ibid., 144 (noting increasing press coverage of child murders as the century progressed). But see Adler, “‘My mother-in-law,’” 261 (noting that in nineteenth-century Chicago, child homicides “increased significantly as the nineteenth century drew to a close. During the late 1870s, police files included no cases in which parents killed their children. By the early 1880s, however, such homicides constituted nearly six percent of all homicides in the city”). 90 Roth, “Child Murder in New England,” 103. 91 Marie-Aimée Cliche, Fous, ivres ou méchants? Les parents meurtriers au Québec, 1775–1965 (Montreal: Boreal, 2011), 15.

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92 Vindicator, 15 June 1830. She was unnamed in this account. 93 See, for example, BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Elizabeth Birch (30 June 1830) (affidavit of James Ross) (stating he has “never seen her behave with rigour or harshness towards any one of her children” and “hath never perceived … any disposition to cruelty or violence in the smallest degree”). 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. (affidavit of David Martin). This did appear, on its face, to be a bizarre form of discipline, but Martin did not question it. He did, however, emphasize that her son “neither shrieked, nor struggled, nor, in any manner, seemed to suffer pain, nor to be suspended, nor to be bound too tight by the said cord.” 96 See, for example, Montreal Gazette, 15 July 1830; see also Montreal Gazette, 19 July 1830. Canadian Courant of 21 July 1831 stated, “We some time ago mentioned the committal to the Gaol of this city, of a woman named Elizabeth Birch, charged with attempting to strangle and wound her children, we have been since informed that the charge is unfounded, and originated in the fears of some of her neighbours who saw her correcting one of her children for some delinquency, and we have now the pleasure to state that such affidavits have been laid before the judges as have led to her being admitted to bail.” Montreal Gazette, 19 July 1830, asserted that Birch had never been charged with attempted murder of her children, but that her neighbour’s depositions “tended only to represent her as keeping a disorderly house, which was by them deemed a nuisance,” although this is in conflict with other surviving accounts and the judicial record. 97 The most complete account is found in two period newspapers. See Vindicator, 20 Jan. 1829: “Horrible Occurrence – A woman, named Judith Couture, wife of Pierre Guilot, of La Presentation, was committed to the jail of this city yesterday, for having cut the throats of five of her own children, one whom, only, has died, by the accounts given to us, the unfortunate woman labored under fits of insanity, in consequence of the death of her husband, during which she became depressed in mind and affected with the dreadful notion that it would be necessary to commit some horrible murders in order to ensure her salvation.” See also La Minerve, 22 Jan. 1829. 98 BAnQ-M., MG no. 466 (Judith Couture committed 19 Jan. 1829, bailed 27 Jan. 1829 by Judge Pyke – likely suggesting she was released on a recognizance pending trial). See also J. Douglas Borthwick, History of the Montreal Prison from A.D. 1784 to A.D. 1886 (Montreal: A. Feriard, 1886), 261; J. Douglas Borthwick, From Darkness to Light: History of the Eight Prisons

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Which Have Been, or Are Now, in Montreal, from A.D. 1760 to A.D. 1907 – Civil and Military (Montreal: Gazette Printing, 1907), 49; Frank W. Anderson, A Dance with Death: Canadian Women on the Gallows, 1754–1954 (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1996), 109–10; F. Murray Greenwood and Beverley Boissery, Uncertain Justice: Canadian Women and Capital Punishment, 1754–1953 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2001), 231 and n31; Cliche, Fous, 59 (misidentifying her as “Julie J.”). For a similar U.K. case from 1854, see Jill Newton Ainsley, “‘Some mysterious agency’: Women, Violent Crime, and the Insanity Acquittal in the Victorian Courtroom,” Canadian Journal of History 35, no. 25 (Apr. 2000): 38 (mother slashed throats of six children and was acquitted by reason of insanity). Compare Greenwood and Boissery, Uncertain Justice, 231 and n31. For discussion of the role of insanity in filicide trials, see generally Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 137–44; Ainsley, “‘Some mysterious agency,’” 39–40. Knelman further noted that courts and jurors baulked at extending leniency towards mothers accused of child murder based on insanity. Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 137. However, there is also an element of truth in Knelman’s observation that society could well afford to exercise mercy towards a child killer. In noting that the “two most notorious child murderesses of nineteenth-century England were not hanged,” Knelman further observed, “Child murder was not a crime that incited public vengeance. These crimes were bizarre but were peculiar to their own unhappy situations. They were not perceived as threats to the general public.” Ibid., 142. The further point has also been made by others that domestic homicides were rarely treated as murders. Conley, Unwritten Law, 59–60. She also noted, “Though not formally recognized in law, the relationship between the victim and the accused was crucial both in deciding whether to call a homicide a manslaughter or a murder, and in determining sentences.” Ibid., 59. These responses may have allowed the system to convict female murderers while also denying their agency, as Ainsley observes. Ainsley, “‘Some mysterious agency,’” 40. See the case of Michael Coleman, nn196–202. Times and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 15 Jan. 1844 (case of Betsey Kennedy). Ibid., 19 Jan. 1844. The wound was “about an inch in length and as deep as the bone.” Ibid. This appears to be an excellent example of conventions regarding female propriety. Ibid. The term was computed from the time of her sentencing on 15 Jan. 1844, not from the time at which she was first committed, which was 21

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Nov. of the previous year. BAnQ-M, MG (Elizabeth Kennedy committed for “maliciously stabbing a child” on 21 Nov. 1843). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Queen v. Elizabeth Eveley (4 Mar. 1842) (affidavit of Margaret Eveley); Queen v. Elizabeth Eveley (4 Mar. 1842) (affidavit of William Eveley). A threat of harm, coupled with intention and opportunity to commit it, was actionable as an assault; the threat itself was not considered actionable. See, for example, V. Francis Hilliard, The Law of Torts or Private Wrongs, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1861), 197–8; C.G. Addison, A Treatise on the Law of Torts (New York: James Cockcroft, 1876), esp. 6–8. BAnQ-M, MG, Domina Regina v. Isabel Belile (committed 1 Aug. 1846; discharged 10 Aug. 1846). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Queen v. Baptiste Poirier (5 Nov. 1841) (affidavit of Nicholas Metillier) (for having “violently and cruelly battered and mistreated her daughter”) (author’s translation). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Queen v. Baptiste Poirier (5 Nov. 1841) (trial notes). These charges were common in domestic violence cases; for the period 1825–50, fully 4 per cent of identified complaints against husbands, and 14 per cent of identified complaints against wives, were charged as threats. For discussion, see Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 265–6. For examples of similar cases in eighteenth-century London, see Greg Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 36. As one scholar has commented, the “distinction between various forms of assault is less clear-cut than the legal definition would suggest. Much depended upon the discretion of the individual prosecutor and/ or the police and magistrates involved in the case.” David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750–1914 (New York: St Martin’s, 1998), 43. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Queen v. Donald McCarthy (5 Apr. 1841) (affidavit of James O’Neil). He was committed later the same year for being “drunk and beating his wife.” LAC, Gaol Calendars of the Montreal Gaol, vol. 34 (hereinafter MG[GC]) (3 Oct. 1841) (committal of Donald McCarthy). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Queen v. John Miller (16 Mar. 1843) (affidavit of Agnes Miller); see also Queen v. John Miller (16 Mar. 1843) (affidavit of Mary Smith) (likewise noting he made a “great noise in the house” while assaulting his daughter). See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 261, fig. 6. 2 Victoria (1) c. 2 (1838) (L.C.). Section 9 included behaviour “causing a disturbance or noise in the streets or highways by screaming, swearing or singing.” Even in earlier periods not covered by the Police Ordinance, this held

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true. The 1829 case of the mother arrested for immersing her child in the river is reflective of this, as it is not obvious her actions met the standard definition of “breach of the peace.” While an argument could be made that she committed a nuisance, it is evident that breach of the peace was also a catch-all offence. See, for example, n73 and accompanying text. See, for example, Fyson, Magistrates, 281–2; Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 252–8; Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 35. Compare Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 123 (noting that in Victorian England infants and children were the most common murder victims at women’s hands); Conley, Unwritten Law, 107–8 (noting that women committed the majority of child assaults and homicides). Adler noted that in his study 69 per cent of child homicides were committed by women prior to 1890, but after the 1890s men accounted for 84 per cent of child homicides. Adler, “‘My mother-in-law,’” 262. Excluding cases involving incestuous acts or abduction, seventeen out of twenty-nine cases, or 58.6 per cent, were brought against female relatives. Compare Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile 2001 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2001), 1 (indicating 60 per cent of alleged perpetrators of child abuse were mothers). However, many affidavits by abused wives provide “shadow evidence” of violence by fathers against their children, attesting to violence against children that was never prosecuted. See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 285–8. In the context of marital violence, Hammerton claimed that “even the most drunken man chose his victims with care and calculation, rarely attacking his children, which would have brought more serious consequences.” A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992), 46. I find this claim dubious for the reason, among others, that violence against children was less likely to be prosecuted than wife battery. Allusion to child abuse in other legal proceedings was noted in the context of divorce filings where “evidence of child abuse might surface in those cases only as an incidental detail.” Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 40. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Mary Burk wife of William Freeman (29 May 1830) (affidavit of William Bingham). Mothers were also responsible for the majority of filicides during this period. Cliche, Fous, 15–16, and 18, table 3. For the role of stepparents in filicides, see Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir?, 48. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Margaret Cooper (9 Jan. 1834) (affidavit of Jane Berry). Berry further attested that on “divers[e] occasions before and … since, she has been put in danger of her life on the part of the said Margaret Cooper.” The domestic provided a corroborating affidavit.

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BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Margaret Cooper (9 Jan. 1834) (affidavit of Ann Cowan a.k.a. Morrison included with affidavit of Jane Berry). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Margaret Cooper (23 Jan. 1834) (recognizance); BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Margaret Cooper (30 June 1834) (indictment, returned ignoramus). This is all the more surprising as there was a witness, but perhaps this offence was “overcharged” as assault with intent to murder, rather than as aggravated or simple assault. No record of the previous arrest was found. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Ann Farmer (26 Nov. 1836) (affidavit of William Lilly). She had been charged on at least three occasions with assaulting her husband. See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 323–4. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Mary Groome v. Mary O’Brian (14 Feb. 1843) (affidavit of Mary Groome). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Abraham Bagnell (23 Oct. 1832) (affidavit of William Bagnell); QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Abraham Bagnell (14 Nov. 1832) (surety of £150 pounds to appear at court and keep the peace towards his son). This was an unusually large amount for the period. Queen v. John Miller, n111 (defendant “committed for want of bail”). For discussion of children who intervened, see, for example, Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir?, 47. Compare Conley, Unwritten Law, 106. BAnQ-M, KB(F), Dominus Rex v. Jean Baptiste Roy (27 Sept. 1836) (affidavit of Antoine Fleury); BAnQ-M, KB(F), Dominus Rex v. Jean Baptiste Roy (27 Sept. 1836) (affidavit of Matthew Sterns). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Dominus Rex v. Joseph Latour et Elmire Roy (8 Aug. 1833) (affidavit of Etienne Legrenade). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Queen v. Rosa Clifford (9 Sept. 1840) (affidavit of James Hameron); ibid. (affidavit of Catherine Hameron). As noted by Smith, misdemeanour could encompass a wide spectrum of offences. Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 35–6. For ethnicity in Quebec filicides, see Cliche, Fous, 17–18 (showing that for 1775–1965 perpetrators were mainly French Canadians). For ethnic divisions related to filicides in Chicago, see generally Adler, “‘My mother-inlaw.’” Compare Smith, “Hanoverian Metropolis,” 40 (out of ten sample cases of domestic child abuse, all involved female victims). In London in the 1880s the British National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that nearly 90 per cent of neglect cases implicated habitual inebriation of one or both parents, with the worst cases of child neglect involving mothers who were drunkards. Radbill, “Children

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in a World of Violence,” 8. In Liverpool SPCC cases in 1884–5, over 35 per cent were tied to alcohol abuse. Behlmer, Child Abuse, 72. For the conjunction of alcoholism and spousal violence during this period, see, for example, Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 317–24; Kathryn Harvey, “‘To love, honour, and obey’: Wife-Battering in Working-Class Montreal, 1869–1879,” Urban History Review 19 (1999): 129; Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir?, 47–8. L’Ami du Peuple (30 Nov. 1839) (“It is regrettable that no asylum exists where refuge could be given to children who are unfortunate enough to have been born to such mothers”) (author’s translation). See Pilot (18 Mar. 1851), containing the following account, not counted in the statistics, as it falls beyond the period covered in this article: “Drunkenness – March 7 –Bridget Fury, the second offence, was charged with being drunk and abusive towards her little girl – a child of two-and-a-half years old. Sentenced to pay a fine and costs of 1/2/6, which not being paid, Mrs F. was committed to gaol, and her interesting child sent to the House of Industry. This same lady had been previously taken up on the night of the 5th January, when she was discovered by the Police, near the Catholic Church, in a state of drunken insensibility, and her unfortunate child sitting by her side, nearly frozen to death.” BAnQ-M, MG no. 988 (29 May 1830) (Mary Freeman discharged on 19 July 1830); Dominus Rex v. Mary Burk wife of William Freeman (29 May 1830) (affidavit of William Bingham). BAnQ-M, QS(F), Alex Sutherland v. Janet Shaw (1 May 1838) (affidavit of Alexander Sutherland); ibid. (9 May 1838) (surety). Sutherland eventually removed his children to the country to sequester them away from their mother. BAnQ-M, QS(F), ibid. (20 July 1838) (affidavit of Alexander Sutherland). Queen v. John Miller (affidavit of Mary Smith), n111. Alcoholism was also amply documented in spousal abuse cases. See Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 316–23. Some of the earliest and most strident criticism was directed at drunken fathers who brutalized their children. Cliche, Maltraiter ou punir?, 26 and n9. BAnQ-M, QS(F), Domina Regina v. Elisabeth Kennedy (10 Mar. 1842) (affidavit of Stephen C. Sewell). See nn101–4. Pilarczyk, “‘Justice,’” 335–6 (case of Ellen Clarke), not counted here, as the acts were treated as being against him alone. In domestic violence cases, three times as many wives as husbands were accused of lunacy and were eighteen times more likely to be so accused if viewed as a percentage of all domestic violence charges. This might have reflected, inter alia,

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a popular face-saving strategy used by husbands. For discussion, see ibid., 267 and 333–8. The definition of incest used in this chapter is the standard legal definition of “sexual intercourse or cohabitation between a man and a woman who are related to each other within the degrees wherein marriage is prohibited by law.” Black’s Law Dictionary, 522. Incest therefore involves both blood relatives and relatives through marriage or cohabitation. See Linda Gordon and Paul O’Keefe, “Incest as a Form of Family Violence: Evidence from Historical Case Records,” Journal of Marriage and the Family (1984): 28 (“We considered sexual relations incestuous not only if the two people were kin but also if they occupied kinship roles – for example, stepfather and daughter”). As Kuper observed, the definition of what, or should have, constituted incest in England was historically quite uncertain. Kuper, Incest and Influence, 57. In the Canadian prairies, Erickson observed that “legal and political authorities adhered to a narrow definition of incest that limited it to cases of sexual violence that threatened to produce children of blood relationships.” Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 197. The issue of incestuous marriage falls outside the scope of this chapter. See generally Radbill, “Children in a World of Violence,” 11. The issue of consent did create legal and social complications, as noted in the context of colonial Connecticut. See, for example, Steenburg, Children, 177–8. See Gordon and O’Keefe, “Incest,” 28 (“Historical cases … suggest that such incest is usually coercive, thus appropriately considered a form of family violence”). Erickson made a similar point about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Erickson, Westward Bound,193. It generally began to be seen as such in the waning decades of the nineteenth century. Kuper, Incest and Influence, 80. See Anthony S. Wohl, “Sex and the Single Room: Incest among the Victorian Working Classes,” in The Victorian Family, Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 200. Compare Lynn Sacco, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 23 (noting “vast numbers of newspaper articles detailing father-daughter incest”). Compare Wohl, “Sex and the Single Room,” 212–13; Sacco, Unspeakable, 21 (the dearth of arrests and prosecutions for incest might lead to false conclusion that the crime occurred only rarely). That observation holds true for a variety of sexual activities, most nota-

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bly homosexual acts. As one scholar aptly put it, “Historians who study sexual behaviour and gender roles are all too familiar with the obstacles inherent in recovering from the past that which occurred in private.” See Lorna Hutchinson, “Buggery Trials in Saint John, 1806: The Case of John M. Smith,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 40 (1991): 130. Incest was among the most under-reported crimes. Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), 46; Cliche, “Un secret bien gardé,” 202. Compare Radbill, “Children in a World of Violence,” 12; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 43. But see Stephen Robertson, Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 43 (noting there was a late nineteenth-century tendency to see venereal disease in children as the result of “innocent infection” rather than having to grapple with the unpleasant issue of incest). For discussion of the myth of curing venereal disease by sleeping with a child virgin, see Roger Davidson, “‘This pernicious delusion’: Law, Medicine, and Child Sexual Abuse in Early-Twentieth-Century Scotland,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 62. Steenburg, Children, 178–9; Sacco, Unspeakable, 32. See, for example, Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 194. There could also be other ramifications for victims. See, for example, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’archives de Québec, Register of the Quebec Prison (Mary Anne Paterson committed 18 August 1821 on conviction of “contempt in refusing to disclose the truth and give full evidence according to her knowledge in a case of an alleged assault upon her by William Paterson with an intent to ravish her”; discharged 26 September 1821). I am indebted to Donald Fyson for this. See n69. No doubt these obstacles have also dissuaded scholars from examining the early nineteenth century. For a rare work that nearly intersects with this period, see Marie- Cliche, “Un secret bien gardé.” For discussion of other jurisdictions, see, for example, Dorothy E. Chunn, “Secrets and Lies: The Criminalization of Incest and the (Re)Formation of the ‘Private’ in British Columbia, 1890–1940,” in Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual and the Law, ed. John McLaren, Robert Menzies, and Dorothy E. Chunn (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 120; Linda Gordon, “Incest and Resistance: Patterns of Father-Daughter Incest, 1880– 1930,” Social Problems 33 (1986): 253–67; Patrizia Guarnieri, “‘Dangerous girls,’ Family Secrets, and Incest Law in Italy, 1861–1930,” International

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Journal of Law & Psychology 21 (1998): 369–83; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse; Robertson, Crimes against Children. Leviticus 18:6–18 (King James Version). 28 Henry VIII c. 27 (1536) (U.K.). Those laws were, in fact, less restrictive in scope than prohibitions enforced by the ecclesiastical courts. See generally Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 41. Ibid. The sanctions were not severe, and enforcement was left to the “feeble coercion of the spiritual courts, according to the rules of canon law.” Wohl, “Sex and the Single Room,” 208 and n47 (citing B. Gavit, ed., Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law [1892] 778); see also Kuper, Incest, 52. 20 & 21 Vict. c. 85 (1857) (U.K.). The Offences against the Person Act 1861 made it a crime to procure the defilement of a girl under twenty-one years of age, which was intended to address the parental practice of selling daughters to procurers, but did not govern incest itself. 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100 s. 42 (1861) (U.K.). See Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 234. Kuper, Incest and Influence, 57, points out that not only was there no crime of incest in the United Kingdom, but that the English were uncertain as to what properly did, or should have, constituted incest. It was not until the passage of the Incest Act of 1908, that incest was once again punishable in England as a criminal offence. 8 Edw. VII c. 45 (1908) (U.K.). That act encompassed the following familial relationships: parents and children; siblings; and grandfather and granddaughter. See generally Sybil Wolfram, “Eugenics and the Punishment of Incest Act 1908,” Criminal Law Review (1983): 308. Wohl emphasized the obvious discomfort and timidity exhibited by members of Parliament when discussing that act. See “Sex and the Single Room,” 201. The situation in England was in stark contrast to that in Scotland, where incest had been a capital offence for centuries and remained so until 1887. See generally Wohl, ibid., 208. In the American colonies, for instance, New Haven followed Levitical prohibitions and made incest a capital crime, while Massachusetts Bay mirrored English law and did not deem it a punishable offence. See generally Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 25. See generally Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 40. Penalties ranged from one year incarceration and $1,000 fine in Florida, to life in prison in Louisiana. Ibid., 39–40. Generally only the man was subject to sanction. Ibid., 45. Ibid.

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160 Ibid., 48. 161 Ibid., 39. 162 Ibid., 40. Linda Gordon’s samplings of case records from the 1880s in Boston show 10 per cent contained references to incestuous conduct. See generally Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics of Family Violence (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1988), 56. Child advocates knew that child sexual abuse was most prevalent within the family and that the father was the most common assailant, observations that continue to ring true today. See ibid., 61. According to 1995 statistics from the FBI, children under the age of twelve were nearly three times more likely to be victims of family rape than were all victims of rape. See “The Structure of Family Violence: An Analysis of Selected Incidents,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/nibrs/ nibrs_famvio95.pdf. 163 Conley, Unwritten Law, 23, described it as “legally permissible but socially abhorrent behaviour.” Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 44, stated that the “criminalization of incest took place in America long before England, perhaps due to separation of church and state.” Strictly speaking, that observation is inaccurate, as it overlooks the existence of incest as a statutory criminal offence in the time of Henry VIII. 164 Wohl, “Sex and the Single Room,” 211. 165 Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 39. For eroticism related to children, see generally J.R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 166 Linda Gordon noted, “One of the most complicated and painful aspects of incestuous sex is that it cannot be said to be motivated only by hostility or to be experienced simply as abuse.” Gordon, Heroes, 209. 167 Compare Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 62; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 43 (noting that incest was the sexual offence least likely to be resolved through courts); Steenburg, Children, 182. 168 Chunn, “Secrets and Lies,” 120. In Nova Scotia, it was a misdemeanour punishable by no more than two years’ imprisonment (141n2). 169 Erickson, Westward Bound, 193. 170 See, for example, Chunn, “Secrets and Lies,” 124 (thirty-two cases in BC, 1885–1940); Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, the Family and the Law in Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 26 (twenty-five cases in Peterborough County, ON, 1890–1929); Carolyn Strange, “Patriarchy Modified: The Criminal Prosecution of Rape in York County, Ontario, 1880–1930,” in Essays in the History of Canadian

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Law, vol. 5, Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and University of Toronto Press, 1995), 229–30 (eight cases for incestuous rape in York County, ON, 1880–1930). Dubinsky observed that “incest and infanticide cases brought to light massive evidence of sexual exploitation in families.” Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 61. See generally Rose, Erosion of Childhood, 234; see also Wohl, “Sex and the Single Room,” 210. For the early nineteenth-century Connecticut experience, see Steenburg, Children, esp. 179–82. For an example of a sexual assault provision, see 4 & 5 Vict. c. 27 s.17 (1841) (L.C.): “And be it enacted, That if any person shall unlawfully and carnally know and abuse any Girl under the age of ten years, every such offender shall be guilty of Felony; and being convicted thereof, shall suffer death as a Felon; and if any person shall unlawfully and carnally know and abuse any Girl, being above the age of ten years and under the age of twelve years, every such offender shall be guilty of a Misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable to be imprisoned for such term as the Court shall award.” Jacques Crémazie, Les lois criminelles anglaises (Quebec: Fréchette, 1842). For a brief discussion of incest, see Serge Gagnon, Plaisir d’amour et crainte de Dieu: sexualité et confession au Bas-Canada (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1990), esp. 102, 146. One of the few period references was in the instructions sent to governors, as Donald Fyson has brought to my attention, which includes incest in the list of crimes to be suppressed, although it likely referred to incestuous marriage. 4 & 5 Vict. c. 27 (1841) (L.C.). Crémazie, in his treatise, set out that under the age of ten, consent was not an issue; under twelve, the child could consent but the defendant could not depend on that fact in his defence. Crémazie, Les lois criminelles anglaises, 83–4. See Erickson, Westward Bound, 194–6, for such biases in the context of incest suits. The victim’s testimony could be introduced if she was deemed to understand the consequences of an oath, with her testimony weighed according to her intelligence and the circumstances of the case. Crémazie, Les lois criminelles anglaises. See also Sacco, Unspeakable, 36 (harsh penalties and a higher burden of proof discouraged prosecutions). See, for example the 1845 Kingston case in which a grand jury returned a “no bill” for rape in a case of incest because of the “absence of that violent resistance which the law requires as a constituent of that crime.” Ruth A. Olsen, “Rape: An ‘Un-Victorian’ Aspect of Life in Upper Canada,” Ontario History 68 (1976): 78 (citing the Kingston Chronicle of 12 Nov.

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1845). Connor references the same account, adding that the grand jury “lament[ed] the lack of any law applying to such circumstances.” Patrick J. Connor, “‘The law should be her protector’: The Criminal Prosecution of Rape in Upper Canada, 1791–1850,” in Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 130n29. There were also other obstacles; incest charges, like rape, often required witness corroboration. Cliche, Un secret, 206–7; Chunn, “Secrets and Lies,” 125. For discussion of the factors that militated against rape convictions in Montreal of the period, see Sandy Ramos, “‘A most detestable crime’: Gender Identities and Sexual Violence in the District of Montreal, 1803–1843,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 12, no.1 (2001): 27–48. Ramos identifies only three cases of rape by a family member for the period 1803–43 in Montreal but provides no details or identifying information on the cases found that would aid in comparison. Ramos, “‘Most detestable crime,’” 41; see also Cliche, Un secret, 205, and table 1 (one case each in Montreal for the periods 1850–9 and 1860–9). Compare Chunn, “Secrets and Lies,” n22 (thirty-two incest cases in British Columbia for 1890– 1940); Robertson, Crimes against Children, 239, table 3 (sampling of cases in New York City 1886–1911 show no incest cases prior to 1911); Pollock, Forgotten Children, 92 and n8 (nineteen incest cases for 1785–1860). Pilot (6 Nov. 1846) (death sentence passed on Joseph Roberts, citing Three Rivers Gazette). Given that rape charges were likewise notoriously difficult to prosecute, it is unknown to what extent the incestuous nature of the crime affected his sentence. The case was not included in analysis, as it fell outside the judicial District of Montreal. For discussion of newspaper reporting of American cases, see generally Sacco, Unspeakable. Rape cases during this period were seldom reported in newspapers, and then usually only obliquely. See, for example, Connor, “‘The law should be her protector,’” 105. See Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed,’” 627. Interestingly, the familial relationship between them was mentioned only in passing. For an Upper Canada case in 1840 in which a father and daughter were convicted of killing their newborn, see Anderson, Dance with Death, 186. BAnQ-M, KB(F), Dominus Rex v. René Lavoie (5 Mar. 1832) (affidavit of François Hinse); KB(F); ibid. (affidavit of Marie Hinse). Sacco similarly notes that newspapers sometimes mentioned incest only as it was a factor in another legal proceeding. Sacco, Unspeakable, 24. In talking about child sexual assault, “historical records have been passed down to us in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion … Furthermore, the

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questions we now ask of historical sources might not fit with legal or contemporary categories.” Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 18. Montreal Gazette, 21 Aug. 1826 (citing Montreal Herald). BAnQ-M, KB(R), King v. Joseph Massé (7 Sept. 1826); see also Montreal Gazette, 7 Sept. 1826; Canadian Courant, 9 Sept. 1826. The question of the reliability of child witnesses was to doom many cases in other jurisdictions. See, for example, Steenburg, Children, 180–2; Sacco, Unspeakable, 36. King v. Joseph Massé (7 Sept. 1826); see also Montreal Gazette, 7 Sept. 1826; and Canadian Courant, 9 Sept. 1826. This phenomenon recurred frequently as judges showed considerable distrust of confessions. In the context of infanticide prosecutions, see Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed,’” 615 and n173. Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 58. Ibid., 61. For the conjunction between incest and infanticide cases, see ibid., 60–2. BAnQ-M, KB(F), Domina Regina v. Jean Baptiste Schnider (15 Oct. 1842) (affidavit of Mérante Schnider): “That time the said Jean Baptiste Schnider tried to know [her] carnally but did not succeed as a result of her young age” (author’s translation). She alleged that prior to entering service she had confessed the abuse to her priest, but she did not specify in her affidavit what his response was to her allegations. She likely entered into domestic service at least partially to escape her situation. As has been noted, “neither marriage nor adulthood necessarily freed women from sexual obligations to their fathers.” Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 59. BAnQ-M, KB(F), Domina Regina v. Jean Baptiste Schnider (13 Oct. 1842) (affidavit of Marie Muir). As Muir’s affidavit was dated two days earlier, Muir might have initiated the proceedings. BAnQ-M, KB(F), La Reine v. Jean Baptiste Schnider (15 Oct. 1842) (voluntary examination of Jean Baptiste Schnider for having “illegally, feloniously and against the will of Mérante Schnider, his daughter, violated … and enjoyed her carnally”) (author’s translation). In late nineteenth-century Ontario, while there were statutes that proscribed incest, defendants were frequently charged with rape because that offence allowed for more severe penalties. See Strange, “Patriarchy Modified,” 230. More often than not, rape prosecutions failed. See generally Olsen, “Rape”; Dubinsky, Improper Advances; Strange, “Patriarchy Modified”; Constance Backhouse, “Nineteenth-Century Canadian Rape Law 1800–1892,” in Flaherty, Essays, 2:200. Some scholars have noted child rape was taken more seriously and had higher convictions rates.

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See, for example, Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 23; Connor, “‘The law should be her protector,’” 109 and 111. See generally Ramos, “Detestable Crime”; Erickson, Westward Bound, 194; Sacco, Unspeakable, 35. Myers, Caught, 201. Abduction, defined as the “unlawful taking or detention of any female for purposes of marriage, concubinage, or prostitution,” was an ancient common law crime. Black’s Law Dictionary, 3. This charge sometimes masked consensual acts, as noted in Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 81–4. BAnQ-M, MG (commitment of Michael Coleman on 18 July 1849, discharged 1 May 1850 “by being sent to Provincial Penitentiary”). Montreal Gazette, 20 Mar. 1850. Ibid. BAnQ-M, KB(R) (Mar. 1850–Oct. 1857) p.46, Queen v. Michael Coleman (18 Mar. 1850). See also Pilot, 19 Mar. 1850; La Minerve, 21 Mar. 1850. Montreal Gazette, 1 Apr. 1850. A.N.Q.M., KB(R) (Mar. 1850–Oct. 1856) p. 46, Queen v. Michael Coleman (26 Mar. 1850). Montreal Gazette, 1 Apr. 1850; La Minerve, 1 Apr. 1850 (“Michael Coleman, enlèvement d’une fille au-dessous de 16 ans, 3 ans au pénitentiare”); Pilot, 3 Apr. 1850; BAnQ-M., KB(R) (Mar. 1850–Oct. 1856) p.59, Queen v. Michael Coleman (31 Mar. 1850) (motion denied); p.66–7; ibid. (31 Mar. 1850) (sentence). BAnQ-M, MG (John Young committed 12 Apr. 1838 for incest; bailed 10 Sept. 1838 by Court of Queen’s Bench). For discussion of the fluidity inherent in charges related to infanticide, for example, see Pilarczyk, “‘So foul a deed,’” 629–30. Referencing Toronto, Carolyn Strange noted that “the language [juries, judges, and the press] used to describe incest was filled with the same terms of pollution and disgust reserved for portrayals of interracial rape, homosexual offences, bestiality, and child molestation.” Strange, Patriarchy, 229–30. Jackson likewise points to a “common vocabulary” used to describe sexual abusers; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 32. Broder emphasizes the veiled references used when discussing such taboo subjects in the late Victorian period and the “limited vocabulary” used to talk about rape or incest in an attempt to “articulate the unspeakable.” Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 119. Erickson makes a similar point; Erickson, Westward Bound, 196. Even in later decades, as Joan Sangster has noted, Children’s Aid Societies and

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social reformers focused on child neglect and physical abuse rather than incest. See generally Joan Sangster, “Masking and Unmasking the Sexual Abuse of Children: Perceptions of Violence against Children in the ‘Bad Lands’ of Ontario, 1916–1930,” Journal of Family History 25, no. 4 (Oct. 2000): 504–26. Myers, Caught, 202. “Incest was seen to be disrupting the social order, not because it was an expression of the power differential between daughters (who had little) and fathers (who were bestowed ultimate control in the family) but because it challenged the sanctity of the family as the fundamental social unit upon which society was built.” Compare Strange, Patriarchy, 230 (citing the figure that six out of eight men in Ontario charged with that offence during the period 1880 to 1929 were found guilty, although she also noted that the number of incest prosecutions was “miniscule”). Strange went on to state that offences “against fundamental taboos seemed to call for extraordinary responses from the criminal justice system.” Jackson, in contrast, found very low conviction rates. See generally Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 165. Compare Erickson, Westward Bound, 193 (forty-two out of seventy-one convicted). Donald Fyson identified one case during this period in the Quebec City gaol register in which a defendant was sent to the penitentiary for incest in 1844. As he notes, those records are not transparent, as they rarely mention the victims by name. I am indebted to him for this example. Gordon and O’Keefe likewise noted that the preponderance of perpetrators were male. See Gordon and O’Keefe, “Incest,” 28; see also Cliche, Un secret, 201 and table 4; Gordon, Incest and Resistance, 253 (98 per cent of incest cases committed by male relatives); Chunn, Secrets, 124. The case of John Young contains no information on the family relationship. See n203. Compare Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 58 (noting that one-third of sexual assaults against children committed by household members were perpetrated by uncles, stepbrothers and cousins, while the remainder were committed by fathers, stepfathers, and adoptive fathers); Cliche, Un secret, 210 and table 4 (more than two-thirds were fathers, but also included other male relatives); Gordon, Incest and Resistance, 253 (offenders were usually fathers were but also included stepfather, older brother and uncles). Almost all the children involved in Gordon and O’Keefe’s study were female. By way of comparison, Gordon and O’Keefe’s survey indicates that 38 per cent of the incestuous relationships continued for three or more years; 29 per cent for one to three years; 5 per cent for less than twelve months;

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17 per cent took place on several occasions; and 10 per cent occurred once. See Gordon and O’Keefe, “Incest,” 29. See also Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 59 (stating that father-daughter incest was typically sustained over a period of months or even years); Sacco, “Unspeakable, 37 (ditto). Compare Cliche, “Un secret,” 211 and table 5 (most two years’ or less but ranged up to thirteen years); Chunn, Secrets, 127 (noting they were virtually always premeditated and planned). Compare Gordon and O’Keefe, “Incest,” 29 (stating, “In our cases the incestuous relations were terminated either by the girl’s moving away from the household, by discovery by some outside authority or, least frequently, as a result of discovery by another family member”). Myers, Caught, 193. Compare Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 28 (“[Those cases] represent only those family violence cases that have come to the attention of socialcontrol forces. These cases bear an indeterminate relation to the actual incidence of family violence, and we can make no judgements about that problem in the population at large”). Jackson likewise noted the impossibility of drawing simple conclusions regarding causation, given the variety of people and processes involved in such prosecutions (21). See, for example, Dubinsky, Improper Advances, 62 (“One is struck by the sheer ordinariness of most families in which incest was reported. Sexual abuse does not, of course, characterize all Canadian families, but privacy and the ideology of the moral sanctity of the family do”). Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, 50, suggests that defendants who were prosecuted may have been too violent to be dealt with through more conventional means, pointing to the high correlation rates between incest cases that also referenced drunkenness, wife beating, and child abuse. Erickson also observed that for a “society and a justice system struggling to come to terms with feminist critiques of a patriarchal legal structure and culture it is revealing that few cases of child beating came before the courts in this period.” Erickson, Westward Bound, 199–200. Boyle, Black Swine, 27.

8 Married Women’s Property Law Reform, Couples, and Fraud in Canada West / Ontario, 1859–1900 l or i c h am b e r s

The symbolic importance of married women’s property law reforms of the nineteenth century has long been recognized.1 The ability to own property did not immediately transform women into fully participating public citizens,2 but in capitalist societies, the right to own property was an essential prerequisite to other aspects of citizenship. Early women’s rights activists, not surprisingly, focused on marital property law reform as the “first plank” of the women’s movement. There has been considerable scepticism, however, about the extent to which nineteenth-century reform provided women with practical relief. Without access to property accumulated jointly by spouses, most women did not have access to cash or the ability to achieve independence. Peter Baskerville’s recent book, A Silent Revolution, provides a provocative reassessment of this received wisdom. He makes a convincing argument that (some) women acquired a significant amount of property and provides a “detailed picture of women managing their own capital as investors, as inheritors and bequeathers of wealth, as landowners, as mortgagees and mortgagors on the basis of land, as borrowers and lenders on the basis of chattels, and as businesswomen on their own account.”3 He admits, however, that close attention to the interactions between men and women in the family is essential to understanding the empowerment of women through property ownership, but asserts that

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“such research [is] difficult to do.”4 Unreported fraud cases provide a point of entry for exploring interactions between husbands and wives, and this chapter takes up the challenge implicit in Baskerville’s argument: to what degree were wives empowered as the equals of their husbands?5 Using Canada West and Ontario as a case study, this chapter is based on evidence from all unreported and reported fraud cases between 1859 and 1900, going well beyond the strict temporal limitations of the period of the United Canadas. Hesitant and piecemeal reform continued in Ontario until 1884, and Confederation itself was not a salient moment in the history of marital property reform. Fraud litigation was frequent, and interactions between creditors, husbands, and wives provided evidence, to the bench and to society, that ideas about women’s innate honesty and lack of business acumen were erroneous – evidence that supports Baskerville’s assertion that reform created a “silent revolution.” A central finding from these fraud cases, however, is that despite transformation in attitudes on the bench towards women’s intelligence, and despite the fact that “women with wealth carved out new public territory for themselves,”6 women were not viewed as equal partners in the home or in the management of family, and family business and finances. While husband and wife were now to be seen as two individuals at law, the wife remained the lesser of the two. Judges were deeply concerned lest the more powerful husband abuse both his wife and her property, and embraced the protective potential of legislation to keep separate sufficient property for a wife to care for herself and her children when the husband was a wastrel.7 Nonetheless, and embracing a kind of cognitive dissonance, there was also fear on the bench that husbands and wives could act together to abuse new legislation for fraudulent purposes. Fraud cases illustrate these contradictions and limitations. The continuity of these themes from the time of first reform in 1859, beyond Confederation (and even into the present) illustrates that artificial temporal divides in historical analysis do not apply to many issues of relevance in the lives of women. Fraud is also inherently interesting as a subject and has been given surprisingly little attention in the otherwise well-developed literature on nineteenth-century married women’s property law reform throughout the common law world.8 Until comparative research is undertaken in other Canadian provinces, and elsewhere in the common law world, it is unclear to what degree the late nineteenth-century concern with fraud was unique to Canada West / Ontario.

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Nineteenth-Century Marriage and the Law of Property At least formally, Upper Canada (later Ontario) inherited the legal institutions of England;9 male control of property within marriage was unfettered. The common law before statutory reform treated the husband and wife as a single legal unit. As the eighteenth century jurist William Blackstone explained, “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing and cover she performs everything.”10 As Blackstone also made clear, the unity of the married couple was premised on the subordination of the wife: she was “so entirely under his power and control that she can do nothing of herself, but everything by his license and authority.”11 A married woman could not sign a contract or enter into a business on her own account. Her personal property, even wages earned outside the home, belonged to her husband. While the husband did not own land that a married woman brought to marriage, he had the right to manage such property for the duration of the marriage, and the wife could not claim the rents or profits from land (even when she needed such monies for survival).12 The wife performed essential tasks in the economy by acting as an agent for her husband, pledging his credit, for example, when she made purchases. She did so, however, on his authority, which could be revoked. Creditors knew to look only to the husband for payment. Even after the death of her husband, a woman remained vulnerable, as he could will his property to others, leaving her impoverished. Women were rendered financially dependent, obliging them to yield to masculine control.13 To prevent the dissipation of estates, the English legal system extended certain protections to wives and children. Wealthy families could place property in trust in the Court of Chancery, and, by the late eighteenth century, women were serving as trustees of their own equitable estates.14 Wives with property in trust could not sell their lands but could use the profits from such land for their survival. A Court of Chancery was established in Upper Canada in 1837,15 but, as in England, few families had adequate resources to create trust funds for wives and daughters. The majority of wives, therefore, were absolutely financially dependent on their husbands. Law reflected and reinforced popular ideas about women’s role and abilities. The ideal wife as portrayed in romantic and Victorian liter-

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ature and advice manuals was not an independent or assertive individual, and she showed little inclination to meddle in public affairs. Instead, she was a docile and giving helpmate who “revered her husband and minister[ed] unto him.”16 As economic production moved from the home to the marketplace, the middle-class companionate family came to be seen as a “haven in a heartless world,”17 and women’s place was increasingly circumscribed within the confines of the home.18 Although historians recognize that for many this “ideal” was unattainable, it was nonetheless a powerful social construct. It was presumed by society and in law that the husband, “by his education and manner of life, has acquired more experience, more aptitude for business, and a greater depth of judgment than the woman,” and was therefore better prepared than the wife to provide for the family and to ensure its financial viability.19 In Canada West, however, a frontier setting in which men could readily disappear, it became increasingly evident that not all men met the obligations inherent in marital unity or ensured the “financial viability” of their families. This problem created public support for limited reform of property law. If wives could protect some property for themselves, fewer poor families might require charitable relief. A volatile economic climate also encouraged reform. By shielding some family property from seizure by creditors, separate property protected families (and speculative husbands), not just wives.20 Fear was immediately expressed that men would use the new legislation to evade debt. What reformers, the courts, and legislators did not initially anticipate, however, was that women might act dishonestly on their own initiative in the market, working alone and in concert with husbands to manipulate the new laws to commit fraud.21 Surprisingly, neither public commentators in newspapers, nor judges in court, referred to British cases in which the problem of fraud had been extensively explored. Both newspaper articles and eventually fraud cases, both reported and unreported, detailed (and sometimes, in the case of popular commentary, exaggerated) the potential for fraud, and described the particulars of cases before judges. They did not, however, refer to legal debates in Britain or to concerns with fraud beyond Upper Canada / Ontario. Reform of 1859 Reform was first advocated in the legislature of the United Canadas in 1850. Billa Flint’s bill would have given dispositive powers to wives:

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“The law as he desired it would afford still greater security to the creditor, by placing property under the control of the women, where it would be much safer, and give greater security to him, than if the husband was left at liberty to squander it. He thought the gentlemen would be safer in the hands of the ladies, than the ladies with the gentlemen.”22 The bill as proposed did not pass and was decried as an inducement to fraud, not because women were suspected of unscrupulous economic potential but because it was feared that placing property in the hands of two separate members of a household would be confusing (and would undermine male authority within the household): “A man who, of course, has implicit confidence in the woman whom he intends to make a partner for life [will be able] to transfer to her on the eve of marriage all the real estate and personal property of which he may be possessed. This relieves him of all future contingencies, and any difficulties which may arise. The contract being private, of course, the public can know nothing about it; and the consequence would be that the man could contract what debts he chose, defraud his creditors as much as he pleased, and still enjoy the property which he had taken the precaution to place out of the reach of those to whom he was indebted.”23 Clearly, the risk that men might use legislation for fraudulent purposes was understood. However, legislators expressed much more concern that women might be coerced by husbands and forced to alienate property against their will, despite separate ownership, than fear that women might themselves treat creditors in a fraudulent manner. When reforms were later passed in 1859, the specifics of legislation reflected such fears. The act of 1859 gave all women a statutory separate estate, analogous to what could be achieved in equity through a marriage settlement, but with the husband serving as trustee (since without a settlement, there was no opportunity for the family to name an alternative trustee). A wife’s real property (land) would be held in trust and could not be alienated by her husband, but neither could the wife sell her estate to use it for her day-to-day maintenance. The husband also served as trustee over his wife’s goods, but the act did not make it clear to what degree he (or the wife herself) had dispositive powers over such property. An abused wife could apply for an order of protection for her wages earned outside the home.24 The act, like the provisions in equity that preceded it, was dependent on judicial discretion for its success. It attempted to minimize the problems faced by women married to abusive, irresponsible men, while simultaneously preserving family unity and the authority of the husband. By allowing ownership by the

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wife, but maintaining control in the hands of the husband, however, the act created confusion. Who owned property that was being used by a particular family? What questions did a creditor need to ask to be sure that property was attachable against a debt? Fraud and the Act of 1859 The problems and questions created by legislation are well illustrated in Wright v. Garden and wife. Elizabeth Garden owned a separate estate consisting of a large lot and a house. She had entered into an agreement with the plaintiff to make improvements to the house (worth over $1,000). The plaintiff completed the contract, but she refused to pay. The central question to be determined by the court was whether the act of 1859 had given married women the right to contract debts with regard to their separate property, whether “either expressly or by implication of law, [a wife could contract] a debt for the improvement of that property without the consent of her husband … though such improvements may enable her to enjoy the property in a more full and ample manner than she could have done had they not been made.”25 The court determined that the liability of the wife could not be upheld because her right over her property was a jus protegendi not a jus disponendi, a right of enjoyment, not of disposition. Chief Justice William Buell Richards also asserted that the husband could not be proceeded against because, as trustee over his wife’s property, he was denied dispositive powers over it, despite his rights of management and control. Clearly the act of 1859 had created a species of property that was not attachable by creditors. Whatever property a married woman might hold in her own name, a contract with respect to such property could not be enforced at law. Similar problems plagued relations with women who attempted to conduct businesses.26 The act of 1859 insulated the earnings of the wife only when her husband was abusive and, even then, only if she had obtained an order of protection.27 When a wife had obtained an order of protection, she was liable for all debts that she might contract in a separate business, and her earnings could be attached if she failed to pay for rent or common necessities. In all other circumstances, a woman’s wages and income from a business were still considered the property of her husband and were therefore attachable for his debts. This was confirmed in Foulds v. Courtlett. For several years the husband and wife had operated a shop. The husband managed a confectionary business

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while the wife ran a fancy-goods store (in the same building). She had always given orders for her own goods, but he had paid for them. In 1862 the husband gave up his business but the wife continued as before and the couple continued to cohabitate. In 1869 she purchased goods for which the husband subsequently refused to pay. Judgment was rendered for the plaintiff: I entertain a very strong opinion that where a husband knowingly permits his wife, who is cohabiting with him, to carry on a business of buying and selling in a shop in which he is frequently seen, that such business is to be considered to be his business, and that in the absence of notice to the contrary from him, all persons dealing in the shop, or supplying goods to it, are dealing not with a person under a known disability like a wife, but directly with him, and that his authority to her will be presumed. The fact of his coming forward and swearing that he did not buy the goods, or authorize her to pledge his credit, or that he did not interfere with the business, though cognizant from day to day of all that she was doing, cannot in my judgment free him from liability.28

The creditor could not obtain redress from a wife who did not have a protection order, and to deny him recourse against the husband as well would make it impossible for any married woman to carry on a business, as well as being unjust to the creditor. The court was careful to assert that this case did not involve a wife in need of protection: “It would no doubt invest this case with a very different character if the parties lived separately.”29 Despite her business acumen, the wife was held to remain under the care and control of her husband. The most common problem faced by creditors, however, was determining who owned property being managed by the husband. As trustee, the husband could fraudulently misrepresent himself to the community and to potential creditors as the outright owner of his wife’s property and thereby incur liabilities with respect to such property.30 If the wife could then prove that the property was her separate estate, the creditor would be denied redress, since the trustee had a right to manage, but not to alienate, his wife’s property. The case of Mercie Jane Mitchell provides an example of such misrepresentation by the husband. Mitchell had been married in 1859 and had inherited land from her father after her marriage, property that was rendered her separate estate by the act of 1859. Her husband had been employed as a commercial traveller but had been arrested on charges of embezzlement and forgery. He obtained a discharge by pledging his wife’s land

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as collateral. When the company realized that the pledged property belonged to the wife, they threatened to lay further charges against her husband if she did not pledge the land in her own right. She mortgaged her lands, as she put it, “solely in consequence of the duress and coercion brought to bear against me by the said plaintiffs.” The plaintiffs admitted that she had been “unfortunate in her choice of husband” and that they did not believe that she was party to the fraud.31 The husband did not have a right to pledge the land, but neither did the wife. Under legislation of 1859 separate lands were clearly not alienable. Mitchell’s inheritance had been intended to provide her with security, and her interests were preserved against the actions of an unscrupulous husband. The result, however, created a precedent with disastrous consequences for creditors when couples acted in collusion. It also clearly illustrates the ideas that motivated reform. Women were not considered equal citizens or partners in marriage. Instead, they were deemed weak and subordinate to husbands, whatever their behaviour in the public sphere. Reforms of 1872 and 1873 The act of 1872 improved on the practical relief afforded to wives under the reform of 1859. It removed the necessity of protection orders and gave all wives the right to hold and control their earnings obtained from work outside the home. It also granted wives dispositive powers over personal property – money and goods – that were essential to the use and enjoyment of that property.32 The Married Women’s Real Estate Act of 1873 provided a mechanism, analogous to orders of protection under the act of 1859, under which abused and deserted wives could apply for dispositive powers over their separate real estate, but made it clear that married women did not ordinarily have such powers.33 The two acts were based on the continuing belief that it was unwise and unnecessary, except in the most exceptional of circumstances, to separate the interests of husband and wife, “two parties who are in ordinary cases – to all intents and purposes – one.”34 These acts were clearly intended for women’s protection, not their emancipation. Nonetheless, by granting dispositive powers to wives, albeit in a halting and contradictory fashion, the acts allowed some women scope to participate actively (and sometimes dishonestly) in the burgeoning economy of the province. One observer of the law, Richard Walkem, warned that the incomplete dispositive powers of the wife gave women “peculiar facili-

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ties for the commission of frauds”35 and ensured that neither married women nor creditors could adequately protect themselves. As critics of the new laws observed, “Before the statutes to which we refer were enacted, the rights of husbands and wives … were pretty generally understood, not only by the legal profession whose business it was to comprehend them, but by the community at large.”36 Reform, however, created confusion. The husband acted as trustee over what was ostensibly his wife’s property. It was frequently unclear who owned property that was being used in common by a family and who had the right to alienate land, chattels, or money. Confusion dramatically transformed the way in which creditors needed to interact with married clients to protect their own interests. They had to treat married women as independent citizens and to acknowledge their ability and right to handle money and business dealings. Nonetheless, the husband, as evidence from fraud cases made clear, was assumed to be the head of the household with primary responsibility for, and authority within, the family. Fraud and the Acts of 1872 and 1873 While under the act of 1859 wives simply could not make binding contracts, except as agents for their husbands and with regard to their husbands’ property, after 1872 they could be held liable on contract with regard to their separate property, but only in certain types of property under limited conditions. The act of 1872 provided that “any married woman may be sued or proceeded against separately from her husband in respect of any of her separate debts, engagements, contracts or torts as if she were unmarried.”37 However, married women were denied dispositive powers over their real property under the Married Women’s Real Estate Act of 1873. A wife, therefore, could be held liable only to the extent of her separate personal property, her money and goods, and such property was notoriously easy to transfer. It was a simple matter for couples to avoid payment of their debts. The plaintiff had to prove that the wife possessed separate estate at the time at which the debt was contracted and that the wife herself had entered into a contract. He or she then had to prove that the wife was still in possession of the same separate property referred to in the contract at the time of judgment.38 Once a debt was contracted, a wife could dispose of the separate property to which reference was made in the contract and purchase land or goods that could not be vulnerable to suit. Creditors not well versed in the specifics of the law might fail to ensure that a contract contained

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sufficient reference to the separate estate to be enforceable. They might also make the mistake of entering into a contract on the basis of ownership of real estate; under the act of 1873 such property could not be sold in execution of a debt under any circumstances. This created an impossible situation for creditors: “This further proves how illusory the remedy at law would be, for the intelligent married woman would take care that the property with reference to which she might be supposed to have contracted, would not wait to be charged with a judgment, and in virtue of it she would probably be entitled to plead in bar of action that she had parted with it.”39 Ironically, but not surprisingly, it was often creditors, not married women, who argued for a broad interpretation of the statutes. Haunted by the possibility that an innocent wife might be defrauded by her husband or a scheming third party, few judges in the early years after reform seem to have seriously considered the possibility that a wife herself might be unscrupulous and economically astute; instead, they focused on the protective aspects of reform. The volume and variety of fraud litigation, however, ultimately convinced the public, and the judiciary, that presumptions regarding both women’s lack of business acumen and their innocence were erroneous.40 By the late 1870s it was widely argued on the bench and in the business community that “many frauds, not previously practicable, may be committed under colour of th[ese] statute[s].”41 The potential for fraud became apparent soon after the reforms of 1872 and 1873. Rosamund Stripp, who had been married in 1874 and who owned separate property, gave a promissory note, with her husband, in return for the forbearance from suit on her husband’s debts by his creditors. When the note came due, Rosamund refused to pay and her husband declared himself destitute. This was a clear case of attempted fraud, and the court was loath to allow the legislation to be used, and abused, in such a manner. It was held that the notes “were made by her respecting her said separate estate and while the same, and the rents, issues and profits thereof were held and enjoyed by the defendant.”42 It was a relatively simple matter in this case to hold Rosamund liable, as the income from her separate estate was sufficient to cover the debt. Separate personal property was attachable, and her land did not have to be sold for the debt to be made good. Sale of the land would have been precluded by the Married Women’s Real Estate Act of 1873, and had Rosamund’s income been insufficient to cover the debt her creditor would have been left without a remedy.

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The act of 1872 also created problems for women running businesses and their creditors. The necessity of a protection order was dispensed with, and all wages and other earnings from separate businesses belonged to the wife. The act did not, however, specify the conditions under which a woman would be deemed to be working in a separate business in which she, rather than her husband, would be entitled to profits and liable for debts. Moreover, since a wife could be held liable under a contract only when she owned separate estate, women without such property, who needed to work to support themselves and their children, faced considerable obstacles in obtaining credit, whether for a business or for necessities. Justice Wilson lamented this problem: If the woman have no capital or separate estate, as is the case with many who go into business, so that there is no fund or assets of any kind for her creditors to look to for payment, unless the goods then bought are to be considered as the fund upon which the faith of the sales were to be made to her, a fund diminishing day by day as her business goes on until it disappears and is represented by goods purchased from others, or it may be by only a number of bad or doubtful debts, or perhaps by nothing, and the creditors are debarred from establishing a personal claim against the woman which will be binding upon her subsequently acquired property – if, in fact, the business of the married woman can be carried on only under such disadvantages, and if her creditors are to be hand-bound in that manner – will it be possible for the married woman to carry on business as it must be carried on, and as it is carried on by those in trade or business? Or will anyone credit her with such risk against him of ever being paid?43

As Wilson also recognized, such unresolved problems created considerable scope for fraud: “She is successful – abundantly able to pay, only not willing. When he proceeds against her, her defence is that as she had nothing when she got the money he has nothing to resort to for payment, and it is therefore unreasonable for him to expect payment.”44 Judges were confronted with many disputes that illustrated manipulation of the statutes, collaboration between spouses, and dishonesty. For example, in one case the husband was insolvent, but suppliers, knowing of his insolvency, had nonetheless provided stock for his wife to launch a separate business. She gave a note for payment but did not own any separate estate. She allowed her husband to carry out the dayto-day operation of the business, allegedly paying him a salary, and the family continued to cohabit as before. Goods supplied to her had been

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seized by creditors of her husband, and she initiated suit to reclaim them and was clearly an active agent in the fraud. The court found for the creditors and concluded that the business “was substantially the same old business, both in character and management, as that carried on by the husband before the insolvency.”45 To deny the wife’s liability would be to impose a substantial injustice against creditors, and her goods were determined to “follow the rule of the common law and become the property of the husband”:46 “I think it must be really and truly her separate trade or business, not resting on the observance of a few empty forms, very transparently veiling the plain reality. I cannot believe that the Legislature intended to legalize an attempt like the present to evade the plain requirements of the law.”47 To rule otherwise would render the insolvency provisions irrelevant: “He can carry on a business precisely as before, enjoying the great advantage of having all the new stock exempt from his old creditors’ claims. He can thus have the actual benefit of a discharge in insolvency without having to conform to the legal conditions on which such discharge can lawfully be obtained, and possibly still enjoy the fruits of the evil conduct or the secreted assets which prevented the discharge.”48 The most common problem faced by creditors under these acts, however, was determining who owned property being managed by the husband. As trustee, the husband could fraudulently misrepresent himself to the community and to potential creditors as the outright owner of his wife’s property and thereby incur liabilities with respect to such property. If the wife could then prove that the property was her separate estate, the creditor would be denied redress, since the trustee had a right to manage, but not to alienate, his wife’s property. The ease with which couples could collude to avoid legitimate debts is made clear in Wagner v. Jefferson. The wife owned real estate that she had inherited from her family. Her husband employed the plaintiff to build on her land. When the debt came due, the husband claimed that he had no property out of which it could be made good, and the wife claimed that her husband had entered into the debt without her consent or knowledge, interfering with her right to enjoy her property by making it subject to contracts of which she did not approve. The court denied the creditor relief. While it was entirely possible, and in this case probable, that the wife was acting in collusion with her husband, the protective intent of the legislation, the court argued, could not be ignored. Chief Justice Harrison held that “the plaintiff on the facts proved in this case is without remedy, save as against the husband. If he be worth noth-

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ing, the remedy is valueless. But this is a matter which ought to have been ascertained by the plaintiff before he delivered the materials on his credit. Not having done so, the plaintiff must submit to the consequences of his own neglect.”49 The dangers such rulings created for creditors are obvious. Justice Wilson disagreed with the court’s restrictive insistence on ownership of a separate estate and a contract to bind it specifically, but concurred with the finding that the contract could not be enforced. The wife herself had not been a party to it, and the husband might be guilty of fraud against his wife, the very circumstance the statutes were intended to prevent: “If she has borrowed money or bought goods, and refuses to pay her creditor, why should he not have judgment against her and make it available as in any other case so soon as his debtor is in possession of property? And why, also, if she is going to abscond, should she not be arrested? If the defendant had personally contracted in this case or had contracted a separate debt in the language of statute, I should have held her liable, so far as I am concerned, whether she had a personal estate or not, or had contracted in respect of it or not. But the facts shew here that the wife did not contract a separate debt.”50 A wife who required such legislative protection was clearly not believed to be the equal of her husband. Not only could husbands fraudulently misrepresent themselves as the owners of their wives’ separate property, but they could also transfer their property to their wives to avoid their own legitimate debts. Because the wife could now hold separate property, a gift from husband to wife involved a legal transfer of title. Under the common law, gifts between husband and wife had been impossible (the wife having “gifted” all her property to her husband at the time of marriage). From 1859 onwards, the husband at any time, but particularly if he felt himself to be in financial difficulties, could transfer property to his wife and thereby place his land and goods beyond the reach of creditors. While land had to be transferred by a written instrument, a prudent husband could make such a transfer before falling into insolvency. Personal property could be legally transferred by simple oral agreement, agreements that were impossible to disprove when husbands and wives acted fraudulently in concert. The act of 1872 attempted to limit the potential for abuse inherent in right of gift and under section 7 it was enacted that “nothing herein contained in reference to monies deposited or investments by any married woman shall, as against the creditors of the husband, give validity to any deposit or investment

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of moneys of the husband made in fraud of such creditors and any moneys so deposited or invested may be followed as if this Act had not passed.”51 This provision, however, was vague and difficult to enforce. The plaintiff had to prove that the transaction had deliberately been made “in fraud of creditors.” A plaintiff seeking to set aside such a conveyance had to prove not only that the conveyance had denied the creditor redress, but also that this had been the purpose of the conveyance. Legal fraud could not be committed without intent. If a husband had been solvent at the time of the conveyance, whatever his financial fortunes thereafter, the settlement on his wife would be deemed valid. Moreover, it had to be proven that the wife herself was party to the fraud. In postnuptial cases in particular, wives might have considerable knowledge of their husbands’ business dealings, but the popular doctrine of separate spheres and general ideas about women’s lack of business acumen could be exploited by unscrupulous couples. For example, in 1870 Richard Dunbar sought to have a conveyance from George McKinnell to his wife, Julia, declared void. Dunbar had judgment against George McKinnell; the debt had been incurred on the understanding that he had land that could be seized. By the time at which the debt had been incurred, however, McKinnell had transferred the land in question to his wife, who claimed that the property had been purchased with her inheritance, but taken originally in her husband’s name because she was ignorant of the new married women’s property acts. When she learned that she could hold property in her own name, she claimed, she had insisted that the land be transferred to her. It is unclear whether they acted in collusion. George McKinnell fled the jurisdiction but his wife remained, and the case was dropped when Dunbar recognized that prosecution would be fruitless.52 But the protective intent of such decisions had potentially disastrous implications for other creditors. Protection proved difficult to reconcile with the needs of the business community. The legislation had created an anomalous form of property that caused particular problems for lenders who chose to deal with married women. Legislators had limited women’s contractual liability and retained husbands as trustees to place limitations on the ability of husbands to coerce their wives into squandering separate property for the benefit of husbands. But, as trustees, husbands could misrepresent themselves to the community and to potential creditors as owners of property that they only managed, and they could transfer their own property to their wives to evade creditors.

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In a suit filed in Toronto in 1883, John Dynan claimed that Thomas Walls had fraudulently conveyed property to his wife and co-defendant, Catherine. Dynan, a merchant, had a judgment against Walls, an auctioneer, for $13,926, but had been unable to make good on his claim. Subsequent to the judgment, Walls had sold his businesses in Montreal and Toronto with a net gain of over $20,000, an enormous sum of money for the period. He then transferred all cash, land, and chattels to his wife and fled to the United States, remaining out of the jurisdiction until Dynan dropped his suit. His wife remained in Montreal the entire time, living in a home purchased in her name with the proceeds from this sale. Ultimately Dynan’s business was unable to withstand the losses sustained in this transaction. Before the passage of the acts of 1859, 1872, and 1873, Thomas and Catherine would have been unable to flout the law so blatantly.53 The laws of 1859, 1872, and 1873 were problematic because the husband managed all family property but owned only some of it. When a wife brought property to a marriage, inherited during the marriage, or earned wages outside the home, her relationship with creditors was fraught with difficulties. She had limited powers of contract. Her separate business was not clearly defined by statute. And her husband, as trustee of her real property, could misrepresent himself as owner and thereby fraudulently obtain credit for which the property itself could not be held liable. While in most cases that came before the courts evidence would suggest that husbands were still managing property, they were nonetheless manipulating the wife’s right of ownership for her (fraudulent) benefit (and often for the benefit of the entire family). Moreover, it is difficult to know to what degree women were involved in financial decision-making in many of these cases. It served the purposes of the husband to assert that his wife had no knowledge of the business, that he had defrauded her as much as the creditor, and that she should not suffer for his sins. It served the interests of creditors to portray wives as wily partners in business and as deliberately hiding behind stereotypes of female passivity and lack of understanding of the business world. Questions of ownership were endemic, and the business and legal communities were convinced that reform was necessary. A return to the harsh conditions wives had faced under the common law would have been unacceptable, and members of the bench and the legal profession increasingly asserted that the only way to ensure creditors adequate remedy against married women was to grant all married women unequivocal dispositive powers over all separate

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property. One contributor to the Canadian Law Times complimented Justice Armour for his attempt, in a case in which a married woman had deliberately manipulated the statute of 1872 to avoid the payment of a legitimate debt, to “grapple fairly with the difficulty … of the question of liability of married women under the Act of 1872 … and to drag creditors out of the slough of despond into which they have strayed” and expressed hope that his comments might “have the effect of arousing the attention, not only of jurists, but of legislators, to the anomalies to which the decisions of the Courts have given rise.”54 In 1883, George Holmested, an advocate of reform, asserted that “the result of the present state of the law in Ontario is simply to enable married women to commit frauds with impunity, provided they can get anyone foolish enough to deal with them.”55 The central issue, in his opinion, was that “there is nothing to prevent a married woman from entering into a contract upon the faith of having a separate estate sufficient to answer it, and immediately afterwards disposing of the whole of it, with the satisfaction of knowing that both herself individually and any property that she may afterwards acquire will be free from liability on the debt so incurred.”56 The solution, in his opinion, was to give married women the same rights over their separate property as men enjoyed with respect to their property. Even the most radical proponents of reform, however, Holmested included, did not consider the wife an equal partner in marriage. He advocated clarification of the wife’s rights and obligations with regard to third parties, not a redefinition of marriage itself. While evidence in fraud cases helped to propel further reform and to transform ideas about women as passive and lacking knowledge about business, the husband continued to be perceived as rightfully the dominant party in marriage. This belief was evident when reformers responded to the concerns of creditors in 1884. Reform of 1884 Under the act of 1884, married women were made liable on contract, and every contract entered into by a married woman was deemed to bind her separate property, both that held at the time of the contract and any she might subsequently acquire.57 When a married woman reneged on a contract, her land, as well as money and chattels, could hereafter be liquidated to make good on the debt. However, despite its more liberal terms, the act of 1884 was not intended to place wives on an

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equal footing with their husbands. Wives and their separate property were not made liable for the support and maintenance of the family, which remained the exclusive responsibility of the husband, and the liability of the wife on her separate contract remained proprietary, not personal. Such limitations reveal the continuing assumption of marital unity, and of wifely subordination and obedience. As Holmested would later argue in his 1905 treatise on married women’s property law, the law “persistently regards the female as the weaker vessel and the subject for special protection by the law against both herself and her husband.” He believed that these “special contrivances” showed that the act of 1884 had failed to eliminate the problems faced by married women themselves and by creditors under earlier marital property legislation.58 The act of 1884 eliminated the most glaring injustices evident under the legislation of 1859, 1872, and 1873 by depriving the husband of his role as trustee over his wife’s estate. No longer could husbands simply misrepresent themselves as owners of their wives’ estates and commit fraud or abscond. However, couples working in concert could still avoid paying their debts by transferring property from a liable to a non-liable spouse. Fraud and the Act of 1884 The full proprietary liability of the wife with regard to her separate estate was confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in a case that involved extensive first-instance litigation and appeals. Edward Moore initially sued Jane Jackson for $4,262. She had given him promissory notes as security for her son and his business associate. At the time of signing the notes, she had promised not to encumber or sell her real estate. However, on learning from her son that his business was on the brink of failure, she conveyed the property to her daughter. She argued that as a married woman she had no authority to issue the original promise with regard to lands in which her husband had an interest. Yet she knew that this was a manipulation/distortion of the law, as she considered herself capable of conveying the property to her daughter. The daughter asserted that her mother was an old woman with a poor memory.59 Judgment was entered for the plaintiff and the decision was appealed by Jane Jackson.60 The ruling was overruled on a technicality and a new trial was granted. In the retrial it was held that lands owned before and after 1884 had to be treated differently. Mrs Jackson could not alienate the land that

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her husband held as trustee under the act of 1872, but the plaintiff could have a remedy against the lands owned subsequent to 1884.61 Unfortunately for Mr Moore, those lands were worth too little to cover the debts, and he entered a motion to have the decision varied and the Etobicoke lands declared vulnerable to the debt. It was held that section 22 of the act of 1884 had eliminated the role of the trustee on all property. Therefore the lands could be held liable under the judgment.62 The judgment was again reversed by the Court of Appeal, and the plaintiff appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1893. Speaking for the Court, Chief Justice Henry Strong held that not to consider Mrs Jackson liable on the notes would be to make a mockery of the obvious intention of the legislature in granting wives dispositive powers over their separate estates. Such a result would also seriously endanger the rights of creditors: Can any rational meaning be attributed to such a statute other than this, that a creditor was to be at liberty not only to sue and proceed against a married woman upon her separate contract, but also having so sued and proceeded against her and having obtained a judgment, he was to have the execution of that judgment out of her separate property? Surely it was not meant to mock at creditors by telling them that they might sue and recover judgment, but that such a judgment was to be barren and fruitless … If there is such a thing as necessary implication we must have recourse to it here and hold that this right thus conferred to sue and proceed against a married woman upon her separate contracts as if she was sole and unmarried implies that the judgment thus recovered was to be satisfied. Then if it was to be satisfied, satisfied out of what? What could be available to satisfy it except the judgment debtor’s separate property? It must follow that the intention was to confer upon creditors the right to sue and proceed against and enforce judgment out of the statutory separate estate of the debtor, or otherwise the clause would be wholly illusory.63

The decision in Moore v. Jackson established unequivocally the right of the wife to contract with regard to her separate estate, including land, without the consent of her husband, and the right of creditors to obtain judgment out of any and all separate estate that a debtor wife might possess. It confirmed that the special categories of property established in 1859, 1872, and 1873 had been retroactively abolished and that all wives had equal rights over their separate property. In most cases, the enlargement of the wife’s contractual capacity served creditors well. Problems remained, however, since the liability

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of the wife was proprietary, not personal. The ownership of property was essential to the right of a woman, but not a man, to make a contract. Disparity of rights created problems for creditors, as the Canadian Law Times put it, because it was “manifestly unfair to those who cannot ascertain the capacity of those with whom they are treating.”64 It was also, of course, manifestly unfair to women themselves, who were more likely than men to be denied credit, even when they needed such credit to provide for themselves and their children. Moreover, the question of agency plagued relations with creditors. A wife could still act as agent for her husband, purchasing necessities under his authority, and couples were sometimes deliberately ambiguous about who owned property with reference to which a contract was made. In the context of the traditional belief that husbands were responsible for family maintenance and support, the courts refused to hold women liable for household goods unless the creditor took the explicit step of entering into a contract with specific reference to the wife’s separate estate. Although the husband no longer served as trustee over his wife’s property, he could now act as her agent. If creditors did not search title adequately, they could find themselves without recourse. Husbands could lie to creditors and claim that they owned property that belonged to their wives and thereby obtain goods by deceit. Creditors could not execute a judgment against the husband, and the wife, if she did not enter into the contract herself, was not liable. For example, in 1892 the Hamilton Lumber Co. sued Jane and F.F. Appleton for the cost of lumber that had been used in the construction of buildings on land owned by Jane. The husband had not informed the plaintiffs that the property belonged to his wife. The wife asserted, “I never at any time authorized my husband or any other person to purchase lumber or other materials or goods from the plaintiffs.” She claimed not to have been aware of the work that was being done on her property, despite the fact that the construction site was very close to the matrimonial home. The husband confirmed, not surprisingly, that he had not told his wife about the transactions. The court found for the plaintiffs, asserting that it was the responsibility of the wife to make direct contact with the contractors and to deny her husband the right to act as her agent. The court also regarded the husband’s failure to disclose ownership information as evidence of the fraudulent intent of the couple.65 Husbands also conveyed property to their wives in the hope that they could thus avoid legitimate debts. For example, in 1892, Michael Piggott, a contractor, charged that Samuel Medley, a stonecutter, had

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fraudulently conveyed all his property to his wife in order to avoid his debts. Piggott had a judgment against Medley, but it remained unsatisfied as the defendant had no property. Four months after the judgment was made Medley had conveyed all his property to his wife. The case was decided against the couple, but by the time of the decision the lots had been sold and Samuel and wife had absconded.66 In cases such as Appleton and Medley it is unclear to what degree women themselves participated in fraud. They may simply have left their property to be managed by husbands who subsequently dealt with it dishonestly. More interesting are the cases in which women themselves were obviously active, astute, and dishonest agents in the marketplace. Ella Culverwell admitted that at the time of her marriage she did not own any separate estate. When her husband’s business was on the brink of collapse, he liquidated all his assets and purchased a home in the name of his wife. She was well aware of his impending insolvency and had announced to multiple creditors her intention to sell the lands. She claimed that her husband had borrowed money from her throughout the marriage and that she had finally insisted that property be purchased in her name to ensure the security of her children. Despite her manipulation of traditional assumptions about the role of women in the home, and the need for protection from speculative husbands, the court rejected her claim. She knew about litigation between her husband and his former business partner, litigation that had been a causal factor in her husband’s insolvency. Even if she had lent her husband money, the debt to the creditors had been incurred first, and to compensate her in advance of a declaration of insolvency was illegal. The conveyance to her was declared to be fraudulent as against creditors.67 Although the court in Culverwell was able to protect the interests of creditors, protection was not always possible. Liens could be placed on land to prevent its sale, although courts seem to have done this infrequently. Moveable property was more difficult to reclaim. Couples could easily abscond with money and chattels, leaving their creditors without redress. Three cases involving a particularly unscrupulous couple, Clemson and Lida VanWormer, suggest that some women – in concert with their husbands – made extensive use of the statutes, misrepresenting ownership to creditors and transferring property between spouses whenever necessary to avoid legitimate debts. Clemson VanWormer was financially successful and his wife owned extensive separate estate. In 1888 John Kay, a salesman, sued her for the costs of rugs and household materials. Because the goods were

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purchased directly by Lida, and because she had separate estate, Kay believed that he had protected his interests. The defendant, however, abused the concept of agency to deny responsibility for the debts: “The claim of the plaintiff herein is for goods sold and delivered by the plaintiff to my husband … the actual purchase of the said goods was made by me, but was made for my husband and upon my husband’s credit.” She claimed that because the items were household necessities, it was her husband’s legal responsibility to provide her with such goods, irrespective of her ownership of separate property. Although she was an astute businesswoman and had extensive knowledge of the law, she emphasized the traditional ideal of the wife as a dependent partner in marriage in the hope that she could thereby avoid responsibility for her debt. She claimed that at the time of the purchase she did not have any separate estate beyond her “personal effects” but failed to inform the court that such effects included jewellery valued at over $7,000. The plaintiff claimed that Clemson had explicitly told him to “look to his wife for terms and payment.” No decision has been located for this case, but further suits against the VanWormers suggest that the unwitting salesman was unlikely to have recovered his debt.68 Later in 1888 the VanWormers were again in court, this time because Clemson had given the plaintiff a promissory note with the representation that he had significant estate on which to make the note good. Lida owned separate estate listed in the proceedings that included a home on College Street in Toronto, furniture, chattels, and jewellery. She also owned a hotel, and shortly before the commencement of this action, Clemson had obtained over $50,000 on the pretence that this property was his own. When proceedings were commenced against her husband, Lida sold the hotel and absconded to the United States with the cash from the sale, the money obtained via the promissory note, her chattels, and jewellery. Her husband was detained on writs and she returned with only enough cash to pay the first instalment on his debts and thereby secure his bail. Further payments, however, were not forthcoming, and the plaintiff sought a speedy judgment before the VanWormers could again abscond: “I believe that the said Lida VanWormer has in her possession ample means to satisfy the amount of the note sued upon in this action but that if speedy judgment be not obtained here she will leave the city of Toronto, and the Province of Ontario, in order to prevent recovering the judgment and collecting the amount due by her to the plaintiff, and in order to defeat her creditors in the payment of their just claims against her.”

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Again, no further documents in the case could be found. The VanWormers may have absconded, they may have paid another instalment on the debt, judgment may have been rendered only against the husband, who had contrived not to own any property in his own name, or the plaintiff may have abandoned the suit. The ill-gotten gains may have been invested outside the province and beyond the reach of creditors, as the VanWormers admitted to having extensive business and family connections in New York.69 If they absconded, they returned at least intermittently to Toronto, as Lida again found herself in court in 1889, this time as the plaintiff in a claim for assault and damages. She was operating a large hotel. The defendant was a butcher who, she claimed, had “falsely, maliciously and without reasonable and probable cause assaulted and beaten” her. She had been forcibly removed from her hotel on charges of fraud. Her husband had posted bail. The defendant claimed that the altercation occurred because Lida had removed goods from the hotel to keep her creditors, including himself, from making good on their claims against her. Lida argued that she was innocent of all fraudulent intent and that she had suffered “pain, disgrace and annoyance and loss of time, credit and expenses.” Jacob Levin claimed in his own defence that he had supplied her with meat and provisions for the hotel but that she had refused to pay him. He had been informed that she was “secretly removing and disposing of her goods and chattels with intent to defraud her creditors and was about to leave the city of Toronto for the USA at once unless apprehended.” She had obviously established a reputation as a married woman with whom creditors dealt at their peril. This case did not go to trial. It is conceivable that Lida had absconded, or that she had cowed Levin into abandoning his claim. She was an astute, if unscrupulous, businesswoman. She also demonstrated considerable knowledge of the law and legal proceedings. It is clear that she did not simply allow her husband to use her property but actively engaged herself in the economy and deliberately defrauded her creditors.70 Emily Crittendon was similar in her tactics and dishonesty. In 1890 Charles Miller obtained judgment against Thomas Crittendon. He argued that Crittendon, while indebted, had purchased properties, registered in the name of his wife, on which he had made substantial improvements: “He has continually since his marriage with his codefendant placed in her name all properties he has acquired and as soon as acquired for the purpose and intent of placing them outside the reach of his creditors and he has thus denuded himself of all his prop-

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erty and made his codefendant ostensible owner of a large amount of property.” In their statement of defence the Crittendons denied any fraudulent intent. They claimed that at the time of the purchase Thomas had been solvent and that Emily had used money from her inheritance to purchase the property. She claimed that she had never put such money in the bank, but had always kept it in a bag in her room and “always let Mr Crittendon handle the money.” In an attempt to manipulate stereotypes about women’s lack of business knowledge, she claimed that she “knew nothing at all about my husband’s business affairs.” However, her husband was a contractor and had supervised construction on her property, but the materials had been purchased from her separate estate. She also tried to manipulate the protective impulse by claiming that her husband “was drinking at that time and wasting my money.” Ironically, while claiming that she had no knowledge of her husband’s business dealings, she asserted that she had dealt with her own money in a responsible and knowledgeable manner. Her proof of ownership of separate estate was weak, but her claim that her husband squandered their money might have evoked a chivalrous response. Judgment was rendered against the male defendant, but this was useless as he was insolvent. In July of 1892 the action against Emily was dismissed on consent of both parties, but the terms of the settlement are not available.71 In another case against the Crittendons heard in 1893, William and John Maguire, who had obtained judgment against Thomas Crittendon for the purchase of materials used in construction on Emily’s land, attempted to have the conveyance of land from Thomas to Emily declared fraudulent and therefore void. In their statement of defence, the Crittendons reiterated many of the claims advanced in the earlier suit. Emily Crittendon also asserted that “the defendant Thomas Crittendon has never claimed or exercised any ownership” over the property and that if the plaintiffs had provided goods based on a presumption of his ownership they were negligent. She had not entered into any contract with the plaintiffs and had not given her husband agency to obtain credit on her property. She asserted that “the said materials were furnished by the said plaintiffs solely upon the credit of the said Thomas Crittendon and upon his responsibility and the plaintiffs looked to him entirely for payment therefore.” In other words, she accused her husband indirectly of fraud, comfortable in the knowledge that as an insolvent any judgment against him was fruitless. She used the married women’s statutes to assert her own right to own and control the

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property but used the common law concept of agency to deny her debts. It is interesting to note that this is precisely the opposite claim, with regard to who controlled the property, from that put forward in the earlier suit. In that case, Emily had claimed that her ownership of the property was proven by the fact that all materials purchased for construction were bought on her account, not by or for her husband. In this case, instead, she claimed that her husband had purchased the goods without her consent. Although she attempted to use stereotypes regarding women’s lack of interest in and knowledge of business to her advantage, she was clearly aware of the particulars of these business transactions and of the loopholes and technicalities of the law. The case was also settled out of court in 1894.72 Women like Emily Crittendon and Lida VanWormer defied stereotypes of female passivity and economic disinterest. They evidenced considerable knowledge of both the market and the law. Judges were increasingly disgusted by the audacity with which couples such as the VanWormers and the Crittendons defied the law. Moreover, in light of the behaviour of women such as Lida VanWormer, judges and the general public gradually recognized that assumptions about women’s passivity, lack of business acumen, and higher morality were erroneous. The ability to transfer ownership of property within marriage was an inducement to fraud. As one woman argued in an open letter to the Week, an Ontario news and opinion journal with wide circulation, in 1891, “If the tendency of the new law is in the direction of lending aid or encouragement to fraudulent and dishonest practices, or of lowering the standard of commercial morality, it is the clear duty of the legislature by amendment to apply such checks and safe-guards as will counteract that tendency.”73 Such fears were neither misguided nor misogynist. The Canadian Law Times explicitly called for further legislative reform: “The law must be placed on such an intelligible basis that the lay mind can compass it. By slow gradations, with the help of Equity, married women have advanced from a stage at which they could by no possibility charge themselves or their property to a stage at which they can charge their separate estate, but by such devious, or rather uncertain methods, that the law is much more easily evaded or mistaken than fulfilled or understood.”74 Reform had been based on a widespread belief that women were in need of protection, both from unscrupulous creditors and from wastrel husbands. It had not been anticipated that wives themselves might be

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both economically astute and dishonest. Recognition that fraud was a problem, however, did not result in further reform after 1884. Without some concept of joint liability, certain types of fraud could not be eliminated. Only partners can be jointly liable, and the wife was still perceived to be dependent and subservient within marriage. The protective impulse, the belief that women were “weak and liable to be imposed upon” by husbands, precluded the possibility that wives might be considered equal partners in marriage.75 Conclusions An 1886 case reveals that judicial recognition of female potential for astute and at times fraudulent business dealings was not matched by any recognition of marriage as a partnership of equals. Robert Smith had obtained judgment against George Lewis, but the debt remained unsatisfied. Lewis’s wife, Eliza, owned considerable separate property and Smith claimed that such property had been transferred to Eliza to avoid legitimate debts. In their defence, George and Eliza argued that the property had been purchased with the proceeds from a business in which husband and wife had laboured together. They had owned a store and Eliza argued that “it was my work the same as his, and more so, because I spent more time in the store than himself, and took a deeper interest in it.” She hired a housekeeper to perform her household duties so that she could devote herself entirely to the store. The store had originally been purchased with the husband’s money, and the property in question had been purchased with proceeds from the sale of the store. George and Eliza argued that he had been solvent at the time of the purchase, but Smith’s solicitor asserted that a wife did not have a claim on a family business: Q: You don’t think that a wife should do any work for her husband? A: I did work for him. Q: But you think she should be paid. You do not think she is under any obligation to work for her husband. A: I do not think that is a proper question to put to me.

Eliza and George were able to produce books from the business that illustrated that George had not been indebted at the time of the purchase. George argued that he had always promised that his wife would have property in her own name, and that without such a promise she

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would not have married him. At the time of the conveyance he had been leaving on a trip to England and wanted his wife to have clear title in the case of a mishap: My intention was simply – I was in no ways liable to anybody, and I had a perfect right to do as I liked with my property … I was a free man … I was going away … the ship might have sunk and taken me down and my wife would have been left and would have had to run a certain amount of law business, which I wanted to avoid … I thought to myself “Now, George, you are going away. You have promised this thing to your wife for years. You are going to do this for her: she has worked solidly for you …” That is my sole and true intention in doing it. I did not know that I owed money that I could not pay, and my intentions were to pay every man every dollar that I owed. I never wanted to defraud a man out of a cent.

The case was dismissed on consent of both parties, although the settlement has not been located. However, George Lewis’s closing comment to the court is telling. Reflecting on his failure to set out his intention to fulfil his long-standing promise to convey property to his wife in any marriage settlement or other document, he asserted, “I just wish it had been.” Without the protection of a written marriage settlement or other statements of intent and ownership, questions regarding family property remained endemic. George and Eliza seem to have had a view of marriage as an economic partnership of equals, but the court did not share their view, even as Eliza’s success and intelligence in business were recognized. Her claim on the property, in the eyes of the law, arose not from the work that had helped the couple to accumulate wealth, but from her husband’s right to provide for her, a fact that illustrates the subordinate role women were still expected to play in marriage and the central limitation of property law reform. From that standpoint, Peter Baskerville’s “silent revolution” could never be complete. Even propertied women are not equal citizens if they are conceptualized as dependent on and subordinate to their husbands. Fraud cases reveal the artificiality of the public/private divide that pervades property law and social thinking, which was central to reform. Moreover, these are ideas that have had an enduring legacy. In a context in which domestic violence remains endemic, some women are clearly in need of protection via law, an objective that was foremost in the minds of nineteenth-century reformers and judges. But to posit that all women are the weaker party in marriage denies women autonomy and

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agency. Feminists continue to grapple with these contradictions in the context of family law,76 and courts continue to struggle with balancing protecting partners from fraud within a marriage and preventing couples from defrauding third parties.77 Finally, these cases illustrate the artificiality of examining many historical themes from the perspective of strict political periodization; reform may have begun before Confederation, but we are still grappling with the implications of the elimination of the doctrine of marital unity.

NOTES 1 Constance Backhouse, “Married Women’s Property Law in NineteenthCentury Canada,” Law and History Review 6 (Fall 1988), 211–57; Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage and Property in NineteenthCentury New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Norma Basch, “Invisible Women: The Fiction of Marital Unity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Feminist Studies 5 (Summer 1979), 346–66; Peter Baskerville, “‘She has already hinted at board’: Enterprising Urban Women in British Columbia 1863–1896,” Histoire sociale / Social History 26, no. 52 (Nov. 1993), 205–27; Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Legal History, 1997); Richard Chused, “Married Women’s Property Law: 1800– 1850,” Georgetown Law Journal 71 (June 1983): 1359–425; Chris Clarkson, Domestic Reforms: Political Visions and Family Regulation in British Columbia, 1862–1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); Philip Girard, “Married Women’s Property, Chancery Abolition and Insolvency Law: Law Reform in Nova Scotia, 1820–1867,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 3, Nova Scotia, ed. Philip Girard and Jim Phillips, 43–80 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Legal History, 1990); Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); George Holmested, The Married Women’s Property Act of Ontario (Toronto: Carswell, 1905); Marilynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Vivienne Ullrich, “The Reform of Matrimonial Property Law in England during the Nineteenth Century,” Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 9 (1977): 24–2; Rebecca Vienott and Philip Girard, “Married Women’s Property

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Law in Nova Scotia, 1850–1900,” in Separate Spheres: Women’s Worlds in the 19th Century Maritimes, ed. Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton, 67–91 (Fredericton: Acadiensis, 1995); and Richard Thomas Walkem, The Married Women’s Property Acts of Ontario (1874; repr., Toronto: Nabu, 2010). It was not until the twentieth century, after all, that women achieved suffrage. For further detail on suffrage in Canada, see Carol Lee Bacchi, Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). Peter Baskerville, A Silent Revolution: Gender and Wealth in English Canada, 1860–1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 10. Ibid., 114. In Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario I explored the issue of fraud. However, my focus was on the perception of fraud as an incentive for legislative reform, not on the actual relations between husbands and wives while engaging in fraudulent transactions. Baskerville’s assertions prompted me to review all of the reported and unreported case files involving fraud that I had collected (many of which had not been fully explored in the book), and to turn my attention to the relations between men and women as they acted together (or in opposition to one another) in cases of attempted fraud. In my review of all reported and unreported cases, I found 117 cases in which fraud involving married couples was alleged. In many of these cases, settlement was ultimately reached out of court, or it is not clear whether fraud actually took place. I have used the cases from this sample that provide the greatest detail about transactions to illustrate my arguments in this article. Baskerville, Silent Revolution, 245. For an extensive discussion of this issue, see Chambers, Married Women, chaps 7 and 10. See also Judith Fingard, “The Prevention of Cruelty, Marriage Breakdown and the Rights of Wives in Nova Scotia,” Acadiensis 22, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 84–101; and James Hammerton, “Victorian Marriage and the Law of Matrimonial Cruelty,” Victorian Studies 33 (Winter 1990): 269–92. It should be noted also that Quebec had an entirely different regime for the regulation of marital property. For an excellent exploration of the law in Quebec, see Bettina Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011). The only work thus far amongst the excellent works written on nineteenthcentury married women’s property law reform to address fraud is Chambers, Married Women, chaps 6 and 9. It should be noted that fraud had been

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recognized as a significant risk/problem in the United Kingdom in earlier periods with regard to equitable estates. For further details, see Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993); Karen Pearlston, “What a Feme Sole Trader Could Not Do: Lord Mansfield on the Law of Commercial Freedom,” in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd, ed. Kim Kippen and Lori Woods, 309–36 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010); Karen Pearlston, “Married Women Bankrupts in the Age of Coverture,” Law and Social Inquiry 34 (2009): 269–99; and Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Each North American British colony inherited English law as it existed at the date of the creation of the colony. Upper Canada confirmed that reception statutorily in 1792. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, in Four Books, ed. George Tucker (1803; repr., New York: Clarendon, 1969), 2:242. Although the Commentaries presented a simplified version of the law, Norma Basch has argued forcefully that this simplified form became the educational staple of a generation of American lawyers and informed basic interpretations of the common law: Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, chap. 2. Blackstone, Commentaries, 433. It should be noted that there were also limitations on the degree to which a husband could use his own land. In particular, he could not sell it because of his wife’s dower rights (her right to a portion of the land at the time of his death, a right of support and maintenance). For further details, see Backhouse, Commentaries; Bradbury, Wife to Widow; Chambers, Married Women; and Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property. For a full description of the status of the married woman, see Backhouse, Commentaries; and Chambers, Married Women. Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property. For information on the Court of Chancery in Upper Canada, see Elizabeth Brown, “Equitable Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery in Upper Canada,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 21 (1983): 275–314. William Alcott, The Young Wife, or Duties of Women in the Marriage Relationship (1837; repr., New York: Arno, 1972), 35. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977). It should be noted here that these distinctions were less evident in working-class families in which women also took in boarders, worked in factories, or performed other kinds of paid labour. However, the ideals as

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expressed in law and advice literature were consistently based on middleclass experience and expectations. Peregrin Bingham, The Law of Infancy and Coverture (London: G. Lamson, 1816), 162. It is worth noting that bankruptcy and insolvency laws were also reformed during this period, and connections have been drawn between marital property law reform and bankruptcy law. For a full discussion of the law of bankruptcy in the United States, see David Skeel, Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For a discussion of connections in the Canadian context, see Girard, “Married Women’s Property.” This is to some degree surprising, as British courts had grappled with the issue of fraud in the context of equity for decades. See Erickson, Women and Property; Pearlston, “What a Feme Sole Trader”; and Stretton, Women Waging Law. Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada 1841–1867, ed. Elizabeth Gibbs, vol. 9, pt 2, 1850, 1197–9. “Married Women’s Property Bill,” Hamilton Spectator, 15 June 1850, 3. An Act to secure for married women certain separate rights of property (1859) 22 Vict. c. 34, ss 1, 4, 5, and 6. Wright v. Garden and wife (1869), 28 UCQB 609, at 611. It is worth noting here that feme sole trader status, common in Quebec and recognized by custom in some cities in the United Kingdom, was not established in the British North American colonies, a fact that created particular problems for women in these regions. See Salmon, Women and the Law. Evidence suggests that magistrates and judges were liberal in their interpretation of the earnings clause and issued orders of protection when women presented evidence of abuse and/or desertion to facilitate women’s self-support and the support of their children. See Lori Chambers and John Weaver, “Alimony an Orders of Protection: Escaping Abuse in Hamilton-Wentworth, 1837–1900,” Ontario History (Fall 2003): 113–35. Foulds v. Courtlett (1871), 21 UCCP 368. Ibid., 372 and 374. It is entirely possible, of course, that any trustee could so misrepresent himself in order to abuse the trust for his own benefit. However, the fact of cohabitation and common use of property with a wife might make such connivance easier. Watts v. Mitchell, RG 22, Brant County, Chancery, 1879, Archives of Ontario (AO).

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32 An Act to extend the rights of property of Married Women (1872) 35 Vict., c. 16. 33 An Act to facilitate the conveyance of Real Estate by Married Women (1873) 36 Vict., c. 18. 34 “The Rights of Married Women,” Globe, 18 May 1869, 4. 35 Richard Thomas Walkem, The Married Women’s Property Acts of Ontario (1874; repr., Toronto: Nabu, 2010), 51. 36 George Holmested, “Married Women’s Rights of Property,” Canadian Law Times 3 (Feb. 1883): 64. 37 An Act to extend the rights of property of Married Women (1872) 35 Vict., c. 16, s. 9. 38 Lawson v. Laidlaw (1876), 3 OAR 92. 39 Clarke v. Creighton (1881), 45 UCQB 524, Armour J in dissent. 40 While only 20 cases are discussed in this chapter, many more – 117 – were found in a comprehensive search of all unreported and reported case files for the Province of Canada West / Ontario for the entire period, 1859– 1900. 41 Corrie v. Cleaver (1870), 21 UCCP 186, at 188–9. 42 Kerr v. Stripp (1876), 40 UCQB 125, at 126. 43 Berry v. Zeiss et al. (1881), 32 UCCP 231, at 239. 44 Ibid., at 239. 45 Meakin v. Samson et al. (1878), 28 UCCP 355 at 363. 46 Ibid., at 365. 47 Ibid., at 366. 48 Ibid., at 367. This was not the first time that the Meakins had behaved in such a fraudulent manner. Mr Meakin acknowledged in his separate examination that at the time of his insolvency proceedings he “had put about $4,500.00 into his wife’s name in the bank”: ibid., at 378. 49 Wagner v. Jefferson (1876), 37 UCQB 551, at 574. 50 Ibid., at 578. 51 An Act to extend the rights of property of Married Women (1872) 35 Vict., c. 16, s. 7. 52 Dunbar v. McKinnell, RG 22, Chancery 510/5/1/4-205/1870, AO. 53 Dynan v. Walls, RG 22, Chancery 515/19/3/4-629/1883, AO. 54 “Correspondence,” Canadian Law Times (May 1881): 318–19. 55 Holmested, “Married Women’s Rights of Property,” 76. 56 Ibid., 77. 57 An Act respecting the property of Married Women (1884), 47 Vict., c. 19. 58 George Holmested, The Married Women’s Property Act of Ontario (Toronto: Carswell, 1905), 7. 59 It is interesting to note that the daughter, Mary Jane Graydon, seems to

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have been consistently unscrupulous and fraudulent in manipulation of the statutes. In 1894 she attempted to reclaim property, seized by creditors of her husband, which she claimed to have purchased from him. Because she could not produce a bill of sale, however, it was determined that “there cannot be said to be an actual and continued change of possession open and reasonably sufficient to afford public notice thereof”: Hogaboom v. Graydon (1894), 26 OR 298 (Ch. D.). Moore v. Jackson, RG 22, Chancery 515/20/4/5-148/88, AO. Moore v. Jackson (1889), 16 OAR 433. Moore v. Jackson (1990), 20 OR 653. Moore v. Jackson (1893), 22 SCR 210, at 221. “Editorial Review: Married Women’s Property Law Acts,” Canadian Law Times (Feb. 1888): 41. Hamilton Lumber Co. v. Jane and F.F. Appleton, RG 22 Wentworth, 45/44/2/2, AO. Piggott v. Medley, RG 22 Wentworth HCJ-CPD 45/44/1/11, AO. Boustead v. Culverwell, RG 22 Chancery 510/9/1/16-359/74, AO. John Kay v. Lida VanWormer, RG 22 Chancery 515/20/4/15-190/88, AO. L. Berlowitz v. Clemson and Lida VanWormer, RG 22 Chancery 515/20/4/5287/88, AO. Lida VanWormer v. Jacob Levin, RG 22 Chancery 515/20/4/15-80/89, AO. It is noteworthy that the VanWormers appear to have returned to Ontario and are listed as residents of the St Andrew’s Ward of Toronto in the census of 1891. Lida appears as Sida, and Clemson as C.L. VanWormer. Both Sida/Lida and Clemson are listed as having been born in the United States, as are all but their youngest child. Clemson is identified as an electrician: Census of Canada, 1891: Ontario, 119 Toronto West, B St Andrews Ward, 12. Miller v. Crittendon, RG 22 Chancery 515/29/3/6-134/91, AO. Maguire v. Crittendon, RG 22 Chancery 515/29/3/6-464/93, AO. Anne Hamilton, “Operation of the Married Women’s Property Act,” Week, 11 Sept. 1891, 653. “Editorial Review: Married Women’s Property,” Canadian Law Times (Feb. 1880): 40. Mitchell v. Lizard, RG 22, Chancery, 515/19/3/11-462/1884, AO. For an interesting discussion of these ongoing debates on the current division of matrimonial property, see Robert Leckey, “Contracting Claims and Family Law Feuds,” University of Toronto Law Journal 57 (Winter 2007): 1–37. For a specific discussion of this issue on the division of farm property under Canadian matrimonial property law, see Lori Chambers,

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“Women’s Work, Relationship Breakdown and the Division of Farm Property,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 25, no. 10 (Spring 2010): 75–96. 77 Amanda Barker, “Note: The Application of Constructive Trust Fraud to Divorce Property Settlements: What’s Fraud Got to Do with It?,” Wayne Law Review 52 (Spring 2006): 221–53; J.L. Musselman, “Once upon a Time in Bankruptcy Court: Sorting Out Liability of Marital Property for Marital Debts Is No Fairy Tale,” Family Law Quarterly 41 (2007–8), 249–83.

9 From Shaved Horses to Aggressive Churchwardens: Social and Legal Aspects of Moral Injury in Lower Canada e r ic h . r e it e r 1

Introduction When does a perceived injury – a personally felt affront or slight or violation – become legally meaningful and subject to compensation by the courts? How is the gap between personal or social views of injury and legal views bridged by litigants seeking to turn their perceived wrongs into formally vindicated judgments and damages awards? The idea of injury – and in particular moral injury, that is one not involving direct material loss – has been a difficult problem in the history of civil law systems.2 Courts were long reluctant to allow compensation for intangible damage, and even once established, the basis for this compensation was understood in various ways. In what follows, I will explore this confrontation between legal and extra-legal understandings of moral injury by looking at several incidents arising in Lower Canada in the 1840s and 1850s, both as lived by the participants and as litigated in the courts.3 The stories of humiliation, family honour, physical affront, and grief behind these cases, and more particularly how those stories were presented by litigants and interpreted by judges, shed light on the reciprocal process through which social understandings of injury at once shaped and were shaped by legal ways of thinking.

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Four Cases Durocher v. Meunier (1857–1858) On 13 May 1857, Louis Durocher, a physician from Terrebonne, north of Montreal, arrived in the city in a carriage pulled by his red mare.4 At around eight o’clock in the morning he had his friend, Joseph Lambert, lodge the mare at the defendant Joseph Meunier’s inn on Notre-Dame Street,5 on Lambert’s recommendation. Around seven that evening, when Lambert went to check on the horse, he found that its mane and tail had been shaved off, rendering it almost unrecognizable and, Durocher claimed, almost worthless.6 Durocher threatened legal action, offering Meunier two alternatives. If Meunier paid forty-five pounds, representing the depreciation from the mare’s claimed unshorn market value of fifty pounds, Durocher would take the horse back. If Meunier refused to compensate, Durocher would pursue him in court for the mutilation of the mare and for damages resulting from the injure7 caused to Durocher himself.8 As Lambert explained in his testimony, the injure in question was the consequence of the horse having lost all its value as “a riding horse for a gentleman,” such as a physician might use for making his rounds in the countryside. Given the current condition of the horse, Durocher could no longer use it “without exposing himself to ridicule.”9 Another witness testified that after the mare was clipped, “no gentleman could have used her,” though she might still serve as a farm horse.10 Still another mentioned that the mare was in such a condition that everyone was pointing at her when he transported the mare back to Durocher from the inn; “She was in no state to be shown in public any more.”11 Meunier refused to compensate, and the suit went before the Superior Court in Montreal.12 As always, the reported judgments and the case file leave much unsaid, offering tantalizing hints at a deeper and more complex story. Meunier was originally from Terrebonne and maintained contact with people there.13 Numerous Terrebonne residents were in Montreal on the day in question, having arrived on the steamer Terrebonne docked a few blocks south of the inn, and witnesses reported that many of them were hanging around the inn during the day.14 Meunier argued in his defence that he never would have agreed to lodge the horse (or at least

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he would have charged more) had he known it belonged to Durocher, given the physician’s bad reputation.15 The sentiment among Terrebonne people, Meunier alleged, was that Durocher deserved to have his mare shaved.16 The shaving of Durocher’s mare was more than a random act of violence: it was a charivari, designed to humiliate the doctor publicly. The charivari, brought to Canada from Europe and already a feature of urban life in New France, had moved to rural Lower Canada before the Rebellions.17 Traditionally used to police “ill-assorted” marriages, during the Rebellions the charivari was used for political ends as well, and this usage continued through the pre-Confederation period.18 Besides the catcalls, “rough music,” and monetary payments of the traditional charivari, Lower Canadian examples sometimes included more violent practices: destruction of crops, breaking of windows, burning of barns, and occasionally shaving or even poisoning of horses.19 Both the charivaris aimed at marriages and those with political motivation used humiliation and veiled or open threats to assert and enforce norms of community. Where they differed was that the aspect of reconciliation (or at least compensation) for the purposes of reintegration into the community evident in some of the marriage charivaris was absent in the political ones, and the violence – more often carried out rather than just threatened – served as intimidation for which no reconciliation was sought or possible.20 The reasons for this conflict involving Durocher are obscure, but Terrebonne residents had threatened to shave Durocher’s horse for some time, to the point that he had taken to having his stable guarded at night, and had had it fortified with sheet metal and a padlock.21 Eventually he moved the horse to the more secure stone stable of the local seigneurial family, the Massons.22 Despite these precautions, the supporting posts on Durocher’s stable had been sawn through, and some witnesses suggested that there had been threats of poisoning the mare.23 The testimony suggests that the charivari directed at Durocher may have had different aspects, both political and social, but both involved Durocher’s relations with the Masson family. Several witnesses testified that another horse in the area had been shaved the year before in apparent connection with the election of Édouard Masson to the Legislative Council, and Durocher’s troubles seem to have been somehow related to that incident.24 This links the horse-shaving with other forms of popular self-help that manifested particularly around political issues.25 The incident extended also beyond politics, however, to some

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of the more traditional uses of a charivari. Durocher was at the time trying to marry into the Masson family, wooing the much older Sophie Masson, widow of Terrebonne’s last seigneur – and French Canada’s first millionaire – Joseph Masson.26 Durocher’s courtship seems to have been unsuccessful, perhaps as the result of opposition from Masson’s sons.27 Still, his unpopularity seems to have been limited to certain elements of the Terrebonne population, since he was acclaimed mayor of Terrebonne four years after this incident.28 Larocque v. Michon (1857–1858) In the Eastern Townships village of Roxton, at the unusual hour of nine in the evening of 12 October 1855, Adèle Berthelot and Amable Archambault were married before Jacques-Denis Michon, missionary priest for the area.29 The region was rustic, having opened for settlement just seven years before, but was thriving.30 Adèle had gone there that summer from her mother’s home in Rigaud, near Montreal, to visit her elder sister. Soon after arriving, she met Archambault, a young notary recently arrived himself from the United States, where he had been for a few years gaining commercial experience for his notarial practice.31 Beyond Amable’s professional promise, Adèle may also have been attracted by his physique, since he was a renowned amateur strongman known for showing off by performing feats of strength, such as lifting huge wooden beams that two other workers could not budge.32 Regardless of Archambault’s virtues, the marriage did not please Adèle’s mother, Julie Larocque, probably because Adèle was not yet fifteen years old, ten years younger than Archambault. Moreover, the wedding had been performed without the consent of either Larocque (Adèle’s father was dead) or Larocque’s brother (Adèle’s tutor), as required by law and social practice.33 The couple had arranged the wedding with Michon, who in turn put the matter to the local bishop of Saint-Hyacinthe. According to Michon, he performed the wedding upon the order and instruction of his superior.34 Adèle came from a relatively prominent family. Julie Larocque was the daughter of a former member of the Legislative Assembly for Lower Canada. Adèle’s father, the physician Isidore Berthelot, died young, and Larocque then married a second physician, Pierre-Théophile Leduc.35 We know nothing about Archambault’s family, but the judgments hint that a difference in social standing might also have contributed to resistance to the marriage. At trial, the plaintiffs, in a strategy apparently

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orchestrated by Leduc,36 brought a succession of witnesses to testify – each in virtually identical terms – that Archambault was a drunkard, was of generally bad reputation, and had few assets besides his professional qualification.37 The marriage went ahead, however, despite the evident disapproval of the bride’s family. Under Roman Catholic canon law the marriage was technically valid, both parties being above the age of consent and the dispensation of the bishop having been granted, but Larocque’s opposition points to a divergence between religious law and social attitudes about the marriage of young people. Secular law supported her in this. The marriage of a minor without parental consent was of questionable civil legality, since it was presumed to be the result of seduction and could be annulled upon an action undertaken by the parents.38 Still, despite this resistance, the union seems to have been a success, and censuses up to 1891 record Amable and Adèle as living together (apparently without children) in Montreal.39 At the time, however, the bride’s family explored ways to separate the couple. Larocque, joined by her brother as Adèle’s tutor, sued the priest Michon for having violated their authority over a minor child. That violation resulted, according to their argument, in “a serious injure” arising from Michon’s usurpation of paternal authority and his effecting the withdrawal of Adèle from that authority “by giving an immoral act the sanction of religion.”40 Beyond that violation of parental rights, Larocque cited the potential damage to the honour of her daughter and by implication to her family at large, both because of the fact of the underage marriage generally, and due to the union with Archambault particularly. Responding to Michon’s argument that no damages action could go forward until the marriage was first annulled, Larocque argued that such proceedings would “publicly display her daughter’s dishonour.”41 The dishonour in question was debatable, since by both secular and canon law the marriage was valid until annulled. Still, Larocque was speculating that popular opinion would hold the family to a stricter moral standard than the niceties of law might otherwise suggest, and would view Adèle and Amable’s cohabitation unfavourably. As a result, they forwent attacking the marriage and instead undertook an action in damages for £1000 against Michon. Michon raised two arguments in his defence: first that he was simply following the orders of his superior, and second, that Larocque had suffered no damage.42

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Delisle v. Himbault dit Mathias (1842–1843) On All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1842, in the parish church of SainteThérèse de Blainville, north of Montreal, an altercation took place during morning mass.43 According to the complainant John Delisle, at the moment of the elevation of the Eucharistic host, when the congregation was expected to kneel, one of the churchwardens, the defendant Marin Himbault, grabbed him by the tail [le pan] of his suit while he was standing in the pews and thereby forced him “in a rude and brutal manner” to his knees. Delisle alleged that this was done with a view to “injuring his sensibility” and to “mortifying and insulting” him before the assembled faithful in the church, and he sued Himbault for fifteen pounds in damages.44 Himbault, in his defence, stressed that his official responsibility was to ensure order and decorum in church, and that someone remaining standing during the elevation could “scandalize the faithful.” He claimed to have simply been doing his duty when he warned Delisle politely and decently to kneel, and he had no intent “to wound his sensibility or to cause him offence or injure.”45 By statute, churchwardens were required to keep good order in churches and were given the power to arrest anyone behaving “in any wise indecently or irreverently.”46 The interpretation of these last words had been subject to contestation, particularly since the late 1830s, when, under the episcopacy of Ignace Bourget, the Roman Catholic Church in the Montreal area had seen increasingly strict discipline for both clergy and laity.47 Moreover, the early 1840s were a period of heightened popular religious fervour and revival in Montreal and beyond, with some Roman Catholics adopting stricter norms of comportment in church.48 The official encouragement by the church hierarchy of practices such as Eucharistic devotions, their wide observance by parishioners, and their backing by legislative sanctions created strong social pressure of conformity, even if those practices were not technically mandatory in a liturgical or a canonical sense. This social pressure in turn led to contestation of the parameters of offence and what constituted reputational injury, with some individuals expecting to be left alone, despite the increased fervour of their co-parishioners. Delisle seems to have been among the former, while Himbault – who was himself evidently kneeling at the time, since he grabbed the tail of Delisle’s suit – was among the latter. Whatever the cause of the disagreement in mass that day, a

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religious conflict over proper behaviour in church gave rise to an alleged physical assault, whose public nature added to the moral injury Delisle felt he had suffered. Ravary v. Grand Trunk Railway (1856–1860) During the evening of 20 November 1856, Thomas Wilson was in his wagon crossing the recently completed Grand Trunk Railway tracks near his farm in Coteau du Lac, west of Montreal, when he was struck and killed by the outbound Montreal train on its way to Kingston.49 Details are sketchy in the newspaper reports of the incident,50 but Wilson was killed instantly, while another unnamed man travelling with him was seriously injured, despite jumping from the wagon just before impact. The horse was also killed, and the wagon and its contents destroyed. Wilson left his widow, Elizabeth Ravary-Francœur, and nine children, four of them minors. Listed in the 1851 census as a farmer, Wilson was from a prominent family. His father had been collector of customs at Coteau du Lac, and his younger brother, Charles Wilson, was a wealthy hardware merchant, mayor of Montreal from 1851 to 1854, and member of the Legislative Council of the United Canadas from 1852 until Confederation.51 Ravary brought suit against the railway in her own name and as tutrix to the four minors, and was joined by the five full-age children and the husbands of her two full-age daughters, making twelve plaintiffs in all.52 They claimed that Wilson’s death was due to the gross negligence of the defendant company, and sought £10,000 in damages, a huge sum representing the property damage of the lost horse, wagon and goods, as well as the moral injuries of Wilson’s loss of life and the suffering of his family as a result of his death.53 The railway, for its part, argued that Wilson’s own imprudence in crossing the tracks when a train was approaching with bells ringing was the cause of his death and the destruction of his property.54 Canada’s growing railroad network was a fertile source of accidentrelated litigation, leaving in its wake dead cattle that had strayed onto the rails, burnt homes and farms ignited by sparks from locomotives, injured or dead people who crossed or walked along the tracks, and the bereaved families of those killed or maimed.55 In suing the company, Ravary and the other plaintiffs were seeking to turn their emotional suffering into a more tangible form. Their litigation happened before

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widespread life insurance, and at a time when in Lower Canada there was still considerable doubt for moral reasons about whether spouses were permitted to be each other’s beneficiaries.56 An accident such as this one frequently meant destitution for the family that had lost its breadwinner, and the courts were not always receptive to private actions attempting to rectify that situation. *** These cases all centre on the meaning of injury. Outside the world of the courts and legal ideas, individuals understood their injuries in personal or social terms: Durocher’s jeopardized professional image, Larocque’s threatened family honour, Delisle’s humiliation in front of his fellow parishioners, Ravary’s grief over the loss of her husband. Taking such matters into court brought up the difficult issue of translating these social understandings of intangible values like honour and reputation and grief into legal terms a judge would recognize and compensate. Fact situations like these cases arose fairly frequently in the Lower Canadian courts because, even though most involved little or no monetary loss, they touched interests that were equally (or more) important to the individuals involved. Violations of perceived codes of honour, for example, appear in cases like Durocher or Larocque – or indeed in the huge number of defamation actions57 – precisely because one’s reputation was central to one’s identity and place in society. Though individuals had a clear sense of when aspects of their persona had been violated and had a vocabulary to describe these affronts, the courts had their own ways of describing and analysing these situations, which did not always mesh with the views of individuals. This chapter examines the confrontation in the Lower Canadian courts between legal and extra-legal characterizations of moral injuries at a time when the nature and scope of these intangibles was being redefined and clarified. We have already examined four cases involving situations that engage different interests involving individuals’ personality. In what follows, we will turn to look at how jurists in Lower Canada (and beyond) thought about these issues and the terminology they employed to describe the kinds of intangible interests or values litigants were bringing before the courts. We will then return to the four cases with which we began, to trace them through the courts, and bring together the social and legal understandings of personality those cases raised.

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Lower Canadian Jurists and Moral Injury How did jurists of mid-nineteenth-century Lower Canada understand situations involving intangible injuries in legal terms? This question is more difficult to answer than it might appear, since there were few home-grown works of legal commentary until the second half of the nineteenth century, and those that were published stayed for the most part close to French models from the ancien régime.58 Still, the comparatively meagre domestic doctrinal production was supplemented by a vigorous trade in imported French books, both old and new, and so the views of Lower Canadian jurists on the issue combined local ideas with imports to create a distinctive understanding of the basis of moral injury. The four cases introduced above raised issues that straddled various contemporary legal categories, and so authors discussed these issues in a variety of contexts. First, intangibles like honour, reputation, parental authority, and so on, as aspects of one’s “moral person,”59 touched concerns in the law of persons. This area of law, which dated back at least to the Roman jurist Gaius’s three-part division of the private law into persons, things, and actions, dealt with questions relating to the nature and status of the legal subject.60 Second, the interests for the violation of which the plaintiffs were seeking compensation were at the time viewed as biens – that is, as goods or assets that are objects of individual dominion61 – and so their analysis also touched the law of things. Discussion centred on the nature of the juridical relationship between the individual and these goods, and in particular on the nascent idea of the patrimony as the universality of one’s goods.62 Third, since these interests were considered to be integral to a person’s physical and moral being, their violation could also engage criminal sanctions. In old French law, the action d’injures that applied to violations of honour or reputation had aspects of both a public offence and a private delict,63 and in Lower Canada as well defamation and other honour violations continued to be linked to criminal law. At the time when Durocher, Larocque, Delisle, and Ravary were making their way through the courts, French jurists were beginning to articulate a sophisticated understanding of the various interests engaged in cases of this kind. At the practical level, authors working to develop the idea of civil liability sought to understand what sorts of injuries were compensible by the courts and why. This built on earlier works, such as François Dareau’s classic treatment of injure, or “what is said, written,

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done, or omitted with the design of offending someone in his honour, his person, or his things.”64 In one of the first treatises in France devoted specifically to civil liability, Alexandre Sourdat noted that when considered from the point of view of the interest that had been violated, delictual liability had two aspects. First were violations of the person or of the person’s civil, political, or personal rights, the last of which Sourdat defined as rights “to security, to liberty, to honour, and to the consideration of others.” Second were violations of property and other real rights.65 Though Sourdat distinguished between physical and intangible injuries, he treated them under the same legal rubric. This reflected what the French courts were doing: judges tended to treat these various kinds of injuries simply as factual situations, either giving rise to compensation or not, leaving analysis of why to the academics. Sourdat’s categorization thus represents a more practically oriented counterpart to broader discussions that were developing at the same time. More theoretically, and more famously, the Alsatian jurists Charles Aubry and Charles Rau adopted the Roman concept of patrimony to serve as a kind of interface between the person and the law. Their Cours de droit civil français was a translation and expansion of the commentary on the French civil code by the German Karl Salomo Zachariæ, and thus represents an important bridge between the sophisticated conceptual analysis of early nineteenth-century German jurists and the French legal world.66 In its earliest articulations, a person’s patrimony was a juridical universality of biens, a concept akin to the more abstract notion of “property” and defined as those “external objects over which the person has rights to exercise, insofar as they are considered to be biens.”67 This universality comprised all of a person’s biens, those with pecuniary value as well as certain intangibles “which blend with the existence of the person who has rights to exercise over them.”68 As examples of the latter, they listed the body, liberty, and honour, which, considered as biens, are called biens innés (or innate biens).69 In practical terms, as they pointed out, this meant that the patrimony was composed of the totality of one’s rights, since in legal terms objects became biens only by virtue of the rights exercised over them.70 Unlike the things of the exterior world, which are within the patrimony by their nature, the biens innés are in the patrimony only in a potential sense, which is actualized when they are injured by a wrong committed. Upon a successful court action, these biens innés effectively become rights over external objects. This early definition of the patrimony is interesting for our purposes. Aubry and Rau’s emphasis on the purely intellectual nature of the biens

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within the patrimony – something they clarified in their later editions71 – provided a means of conceptualizing the sorts of violations we have been examining. Moreover, it provided a definition in legal terms of the intangible interests at play behind these violations – aspects of the person (of the legal subject) that have legal meaning. What joins the external objects and the biens innés within the patrimony is the key concept of utility: the patrimony is the sum total of those things that bring some utility to the person. Utility here is broader than mere price or monetary value, however: it embraces any contribution to one’s material or moral well-being, whether or not this can be evaluated in monetary terms.72 By the middle of the nineteenth century, European jurists like Sourdat and Aubry and Rau had thus begun articulating a view of the person in law based in part on the abstraction of certain inherent qualities. They provided both a language with which to describe disparate intangible interests and a mechanism through which to conceptualize the complex relationships between these interests, the subject to whom they belonged, and the legal system that put them into play. Though these ideas – Aubry and Rau’s conceptualization of the patrimony in particular – were influential in France (and ultimately in twentieth-century Quebec), among Lower Canadian jurists such cutting-edge developments as these left no explicit traces. Still, though the latest French ideas were not in evidence in the pre-codification period (at least not in published works), Lower Canadian jurists were grappling with the conceptual difficulties posed by intangible injuries. Their discussions, however, tended to go back to earlier streams of thought – the same streams from which European writers were drawing, but used for different ends. In Lower Canada, before codification in 1866 imposed on private law a conceptual order drawn mainly from the French Code civil, the classic works of old French law – by Jean Domat, Robert-Joseph Pothier, JeanBaptiste Denisart, Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, François Dareau, and others – provided the doctrinal framework within which Lower Canadian jurists worked.73 This continuing reliance on older law greatly enriched the domestic book market, which flooded with volumes of old French law no longer useful in post-code France, but at the same time it stifled domestic publishing. The few home-grown doctrinal writings published in Lower Canada were narrowly focused on issues of legal practice and so devoted little attention to the conceptual foundations of legal ideas. That orientation is attributable partly to the state of legal

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education at the time: before the late 1840s, schools of law per se did not exist in the province, and even in the years following the establishment of formal law courses at McGill in 1848 and at the Collège Sainte-Marie in 1851, most legal training continued to take place as apprenticeship rather than formal classroom instruction.74 The earliest doctrinal writings published in Lower Canada were didactic works summarizing for students the essentials of the legal system, such as Joseph-François Perrault’s 1806 dictionary of Lower Canadian law and his question-and-answer works on civil (1810) and criminal law (1814). Unsurprisingly, given their purpose, these works spent little time on abstract questions and focused instead on issues more frequently encountered in practice.75 The only major doctrinal work published before the 1850s was Henry Des Rivières Beaubien’s three-volume Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada of 1832–3, whose purpose was to bring order to the legal disarray in Lower Canada by organizing under clear headings decisions relating to different aspects of the law.76 While Des Rivières Beaubien’s work contributed to the reorganization of Lower Canadian law,77 in substance it was firmly grounded in pre-codification French law, and in fact large portions were drawn virtually word-for-word from Robert-Joseph Pothier’s Traité des personnes et des choses and from other works on feudal customary law, with occasional additions to reflect local law.78 Those early writings on the law of Lower Canada – exemplified by Des Rivières Beaubien, but including other examples as well79 – reveal authors working to consolidate and organize Lower Canadian law, but doing little on the level of substance beyond explaining terms and institutions. Some authors raised the issue of intangible interests and their injury, though without developing the idea beyond noting that such are possible grounds for a court action. Jacques Crémazie, for example, in a survey of Lower Canadian law for school use, noted in his discussion of obligations that injury might be intangible, particularly when one’s honour is attacked by words, writings, or even images injurious to one’s reputation or credit.80 More interesting is the popular work on public law and politics by poet, journalist, and lawyer Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, published in 1851. In a discussion of the rights of the inhabitants of Canada, he invoked the tradition of natural rights, arguing that “there are certain rights that are inherent in every man and which he cannot alienate, such as the right to life, to seek happiness, to adore the Supreme Being, etc.”81 Moreover, certain of these rights extended beyond public matters to affect individual relations as well, notably the rights

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to liberty, security, and property. He explained, “We are protected in the legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of our life, our health and our reputation. We have the right to kill someone who seeks to take our life. We even have the right to secure ourselves against insults, threats, provocations, against any slanders or calumnies tending to sully our reputation.”82 Gérin-Lajoie’s invocation of rights recalled the long tradition of absolute, innate, or natural rights, which ultimately traced back to medieval theology and canon law,83 and which received significant development in the work of Immanuel Kant and those jurists influenced by his views, who proposed lawful freedom as an “innate” right inherent to the human personality.84 Other writers developed and expanded that idea, such as Heinrich Ahrens, a German working most of his career in Belgium, who set out in 1838 the droits primitifs (which he also called droits innés ou absolus) to life, liberty, dignity, and honour.85 The exception to the laconic nature of Lower Canadian doctrine is the work of Maximilien Bibaud. Bibaud’s writing shows a degree of self-conscious theoretical sophistication and engagement with jurisprudential issues not present in earlier works (or even in many later ones before Pierre-Basile Mignault and François Langelier at the turn of the century).86 Bibaud’s principal work was his two-volume Commentaires sur les lois du Bas-Canada, based on his law lectures at the Jesuit Collège Ste-Marie,87 and like much of his work, it mixed pedagogy and polemic. Bibaud’s purpose in writing – and in adopting a conceptual orientation – was in part to attract students to his school, which promised education in both the theory and practice of law.88 Whatever his reason, however, his work stands as the only significant theoretical discussion of Lower Canadian law from the pre-codification period. After a survey of Roman and old French civil law in the first volume, Bibaud devoted his second volume to a commentary on “pure” Lower Canadian law, a term he did not explain, but which comprised locally oriented customary law and English-influenced criminal law, in contrast to the more internationally oriented civil law of the first volume. In his discussion of customary law, in the context of an explanation of the distinction between movable and immovable property, Bibaud introduced his readers to the idea of biens, which as we saw was a term central to the conceptualization of personality in contemporary French doctrine. Bibaud looked to earlier models, however. He began with a definition, borrowed (without acknowledgment) from Ferrière’s eighteenth-century Dictionnaire de droit, of biens as “all sorts of

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possessions, and generally everything that makes up our resources.”89 Ferrière had continued the passage with a limitation: “From which it follows that things that are not in commerce cannot properly be called biens.”90 Bibaud, however, developed the definition differently: “Everything that brings us any utility or any pleasure is thus properly called bien.”91 In other words, whereas Ferrière had restricted the definition of biens to things in commerce – that is, things with monetary value – Bibaud’s definition was more expansive, potentially embracing things not in commerce as well as those in commerce. In this he paralleled Aubry and Rau, who as we saw developed an idea of the patrimony that encompassed both exterior and interior biens. That all-encompassing treatment was important for Bibaud’s further development of the idea of biens, which linked it more clearly with legal personality on the one hand, and with injury on the other. Bibaud came back to the idea of biens in his discussion of criminal law, which he began with a brief analysis of the general ideas of injury and reparation. Bibaud reminded his readers of the definition of biens already provided, and used that definition as the basis for an elaboration of human personality in terms of biens: “Man’s biens are of four kinds: biens of the soul, biens of the body, biens of the reputation, and biens of fortune.”92 He elaborated on each type of bien, noting in what it consists and the distinctive ways in which it is typically injured.93 The biens of the soul, the body, and fortune were typically injured in material ways. The soul, for example, with which Bibaud equated the intellect and the memory, could be injured through drugs or poisons. The biens of the reputation, on the other hand, were subject to intangible injury through detraction, calumny, and so on. Bibaud speculated (without clearly committing himself) about the basis of this intangible injury: “The public lawyers say that everyone has a strict right to the good esteem of others – which is necessary or useful for succeeding in the world – as long as one does not injure others. Once this principle (whether true or false) is accepted, anyone who reveals a shameful secret without sufficient reason violates this strict right of each citizen.”94 Any unjustified violation of these biens, whether material or immaterial, created an obligation of commutative justice for reparation of the injury caused, an obligation not strictly speaking natural, but rather of positive law.95 Bibaud’s discussion of biens was unique among Lower Canadian jurists and represented the only extended analysis of personality in Lower Canadian legal writing. Though Bibaud did not identify his sources,96

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his centring his analysis of the personality and injury on biens drew on a long doctrinal current on biens, which extended back to Aristotle’s distinction between internal and external goods, which had passed through the medieval Scholastic tradition, and which was prominent as well in eighteenth-century moral theology and natural law.97 This orientation towards earlier models led Bibaud to conceive the personality in more static terms than did Aubry and Rau, whose work represented the state of the art of French doctrine in the 1850s. Bibaud’s brief mention of public-law rights as the basis of the intangible injury to the reputation hints at a similar idea to Aubry and Rau’s patrimony as a universality of rights over biens, but without development. He provided a categorization of potential injuries (to the different biens), but not a mechanism by which to understand how those aspects of the personality might function in relation to other parts of the law (ownership, obligations, and so on). That is perhaps asking too much of a thinker who, while capable and sometimes creative, preferred adherence to the old law over any form of innovation.98 In grappling with the concept of human personality and the injuries it could suffer, these various Lower Canadian authors drew on streams of thought – the idea of interior biens and the concept of innate rights – that were already venerable by the 1850s. Bibaud and Gérin-Lajoie each invoked these ideas – Bibaud in a more thorough and interesting way – but neither pushed their development much within the Lower Canadian legal system. Whereas Aubry and Rau in France were exploring the relationship between rights and biens as parts of the human personality conceived juridically, in Lower Canada these constituent parts of a more dynamic understanding of moral injury remained largely separate and static. Still, the appearance of these discussions in Lower Canada reveals the same sort of thinking that went into developing the concept of the patrimony in France. It shows the state of home-grown doctrinal thought about the difficult conceptual question of the nature of intangible interests of personality and moral injury. Moral Injury in the Lower Canadian Courts These few traces of theoretical thinking about the interests of personality in the doctrinal literature of Lower Canada had little discernible influence on judges deciding cases whose factual contexts implicated these interests. Even after codification, when the similarities between the French code and the Civil Code of Lower Canada might have encour-

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aged the importation of French doctrine, judges’ reasons rarely acknowledged doctrinal debate.99 Still, it is revealing of the intersections between popular and legal understandings to reflect on how judges and litigants alike characterized moral injuries. The stories with which we began reveal – as much as possible, given the limitations of the available sources – the cases as lived conflicts at the human level. Already, of course, these narratives are inflected by the language and exigencies of the legal process – the principal sources are court documents, prepared by lawyers with a view to a particular audience, the judges hearing the cases.100 Even witness depositions, closer to the voices of the individuals within the cases, are responses to lawyers’ questions, and usually rewritten in the third person.101 Still, alongside the formulas and lawyers’ characterizations, it is possible as we have seen to discern the outlines of the personal and social concerns that defined the situations for the individuals concerned. In this part, I would like to focus on the confrontation between those subjective narratives of injuries and wrongs and the legal processes and categories within which the litigants had to work. In what follows, we will return to consider Durocher, Larocque, Delisle, and Ravary as examples of the legal treatment of reputation, family honour, bodily integrity, and grief in the 1840s and 1850s, bringing together the legal and extra-legal understandings of the injuries the cases raise. Honour and Reputation By far the most common sort of case involving moral injury was violations of honour and reputation. Situations like the shaving of Louis Durocher’s horse that would either not be actionable or would be limited to minor property claims changed their legal character when tinged with reputational injury. The action d’injures traditionally straddled civil and criminal law, each with separate procedures and different forms of reparation.102 The difficulty, as with any moral injury, lay in assessing appropriate recompense, and as a result damages were more often in the nature of a fine than compensation. The size of the damages, however, depended on a careful analysis by the judge of the circumstances of the case, and in particular on a reading of the social codes of honour and reputation behind the alleged violation. Though Durocher was an action in damages, a preliminary issue was whether the case could be characterized as involving a personal wrong, since if so there was a statutory right for either party to demand a jury

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trial.103 At the time, the meaning of the statute’s reference to “personal wrongs” (injures personnelles in the French version) was a matter of dispute, and that disagreement came out in the case.104 Meunier, seeking a jury trial, argued that if an injury had been committed it arose from a personal wrong,105 whereas Durocher moved to dismiss the motion requesting a jury, arguing for a real injury only.106 The question was whether the injury Durocher had suffered was an injury to himself personally or to his property only. Clearly his property had suffered – he claimed his horse had lost most of its value. Just as clearly, however, the damage to property was tied up in the cultural meaning of shaving the horse, and that cultural meaning was intimately connected to the personal wrong of injury to Durocher’s honour and reputation. Presumably Durocher’s mare was just as capable of pulling a cart without her hair as with it (and in any case, the hair would grow back, albeit slowly). For a respectable physician like Durocher to sit behind such a horse, however, would threaten his standing in the community and communicate to the world the message of the charivari. Though Durocher himself had brought up the personal side of his injury when he alleged that using a shaved horse would subject him to ridicule, his claim was for the value of the horse only, and nothing for the moral injury to his honour and reputation. Durocher’s contestation of the motion for a jury trial was presumably a strategic choice: Durocher (or his lawyer) was betting that a claim based on real damage would net a larger award (and have more chance of success) than one based on reputational injury. The reputational aspects of the case therefore played different roles for each side. For Durocher, the social meaning of a shaved horse – and the humiliation of the charivari behind it – was subsumed into the property damage he had suffered. The horse had lost its value because a professional gentleman could no longer respectably use it for the purpose for which he had acquired it. The role of the reputational injury to Durocher was thus strictly limited to its effect on the quantification of damages: it decreased the value of the horse, nothing more. Meunier, however, tried to promote a more expansive understanding of reputation: he argued that ridicule and breach of honour were themselves the injury, rather than simply a modulation of property damage, and that this characterization changed the nature of the case, making it about a personal wrong. Several of Meunier’s witnesses consequently emphasized that the horse was still usable, despite its missing hair.107

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The Superior Court sided with Durocher on this issue, dismissing Meunier’s motion and rejecting trial by jury.108 Precisely why they ruled in that way is unclear, especially given that a recent analogous decision had held that a breach of a promise to marry was a personal wrong, giving rise to a jury trial.109 The judges in Durocher acknowledged that the case involved more than simple property damage, given that Durocher himself had pleaded that the shaving of the horse exposed him to ridicule: “In the present case the wrong committed does not, it is true, bear physically on the person of the Plaintiff, but the Plaintiff himself brings the wrong back to his person morally by alleging that it is the ridicule to which he was exposed by using a mutilated mare that totally depreciated its value and gave rise to his action.”110 For the purposes of deciding the motion, however, the judges appear to have accepted Durocher’s argument that the reputational effect of the shaved horse was a factor in assessing the quantum of the loss only, rather than an injury in its own right. In the end, the case on the merits went ahead without a jury before Justice Charles Dewey Day, who held that Meunier had not proved the elements of his defence and so awarded Durocher twenty pounds for the damage to his horse.111 Neither party appealed, and the final judgment made no mention of the issue of ridicule. The charivari that mutilated Durocher’s horse represented a challenge to the doctor’s place in the community and his personal reputation. Though there was certainly some property damage at issue in the case, it was this attack on Durocher’s honour that gave rise to the court action and that provided the key to understanding the motivations of the parties in characterizing the litigation as they did. In the courts, however, the moral injury suffered was a more uncertain – and probably less valuable – interest upon which to base the case than the property loss. The moral aspect of the case did not disappear altogether – it was essential to the court’s evaluation of the injury – but it became simply a modulation of the property damage, rather than a focus of the inquiry. Family Honour Honour and reputation touch a complex of other issues, which come out especially in the family context of Larocque v. Michon. That case raised various issues that traced the boundaries between the inner

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world of the family and the public face that the family presented to society at large. The young bride’s defiance of her mother and her tutor – as well as the young priest’s apparent willingness to help the couple circumvent the socially and legally sanctioned channels of authority surrounding children and marriage – point to tensions surrounding the place of the law in regulating the private domain of the family. At the same time, the case illustrates some of the difficulties in articulating and proving injury in a case like this, since the situation depended on subtle private and social understandings of the family’s self-image of respectability, propriety, and standing within a vaguely-defined (but intensely felt) community. Julie Larocque’s formal complaint was that the failure to obtain her permission violated her legal authority over her minor daughter, in itself an affront to her honour. As Chief Justice Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine put it at the Court of Queen’s Bench, “for her [Larocque], the scorning of her maternal authority was a serious injure. The priest insulted her in her sentiments and affections; he deprived her of the custody she had of the person of her child, of the right she had to supervise her education and guide her conduct up to the age of majority.”112 As the chief justice suggested, Larocque’s case was in part based on rights: the priest’s actions interfered with rights she had over her child by virtue of her parental authority, rights she retained despite the death of her husband and the appointment of a tutor in Adèle’s interest. The violation of these rights, however, had broader social meaning: interfering with Larocque’s control over her daughter was a form of outrage or insult to the mother’s public persona. The plaintiffs explained the social dimension of the insult in their appellate factum: “There is no law more positive than that which requires the consent of the father and mother for the marriage of their minor children … The rigorous application of this law is in the highest interests of the family and society. Any priest who breaches it commits a grave injure against the parents: by assuming and claiming for himself parental authority, by disregarding it and urging a minor child to withdraw from it, all by giving the sanction of religion to an immoral act …”113 Beyond the personal injure represented by the usurpation of parental authority, however, Larocque also objected to the defence’s argument that she must first undertake annulment proceedings before seeking damages. She argued that doing so would expose her family to unwanted public scrutiny and so compound the public humiliation already suffered. Here emerges more explicitly the collective dimension

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of honour, and this was an argument whose social power clearly impressed the judges. As Justice René-Édouard Caron put it at the Court of Queen’s Bench, the effect of annulment proceedings would be to “expose and parade in the courts of justice her own shame and the dishonour of her daughter so as to be obliged thereafter to recover her from the arms of her seducer with whom she would have lived during the indeterminate length of a trial that would be the despair of any honest family. In such circumstances, the parents would always prefer, even in the interests of their daughter, to let a marriage that grieves them continue, rather than buy its annulment through judicial means, which are an insufficient remedy for the evil that has been done to them.”114 The worry here was not just the violation of honour, but also the unwanted publicity for the family that would multiply the dishonour. The “evil” to which Justice Caron alludes was more than this publicity, however, since allowing the marriage to stand would also be to introduce an outsider (Archambault) into the family unit against the wishes of some of its members. All of those concerns – the more personal one of usurpation of parental authority and the more collective ones of exposing the family’s shame and of sanctioning Archambault’s unwanted entry into the family – point to the subtle interplay between the public face of honour and the intimacy of family life. Though the term “privacy” was rare until much later,115 the idea of legal protection of things deemed private had a long history. Honour served in many ways as a stand-in for this concept, and litigants and judges invoked honour in cases dealing with a cluster of interests such as propriety, intimacy, and honour in its strict sense. In Larocque, both the parties and the judges read the injury in public terms rather than private, as involving family honour (via the dishonour represented by the situation of the wayward daughter). The social interests engaged in this case – propriety, intimacy, social standing, and so on – while clearly understood by those involved, did not have a clear legal meaning. Honour, however, and family honour more particularly, did have a clear legal meaning, forged in cases involving issues such as breach of promise to marry or duelling.116 Larocque’s litigation thus proceeded in terms of honour (and the related idea of shame) in order to protect a wider range of values felt to have been violated. The Superior Court took a strict and legalistic line, and dismissed the case for lack of evidence as to the amount of damages incurred.117 The plaintiffs had sought to prove their injury by asking witnesses their

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thoughts on the value of the injure of failing to require parental permission; unsurprisingly, the judges dismissed that evidence as worthless.118 Orally, Justice Jean Chabot expressed the opinion that to claim damages without first seeking annulment smacked of condoning the marriage, and so held that the action in damages was barred.119 On appeal, in arguing against the defendants’ position that no action in damages could go forward without first annulling the marriage, the plaintiffs pushed for a broad understanding of injury. Their factum stressed the various ways in which they had been wronged both individually and as a family, notably the affective injury of being “insulted in their most dear affections” by watching their daughter “given over to an individual of bad reputation, unworthy of entry into a respectable family.” Forcing them to undergo an action in annulment first, they argued, would be to add their daughter’s infamy of having lived with Archambault in such circumstances to the insult of a marriage performed without their consent.120 The judges agreed, and adopted a more subjective approach than had the Superior Court to find that the case was one of “an extremely serious insult” to Larocque’s parental authority.121 They devoted considerable energy to exploring how to conceptualize the intangible moral injury suffered. As Justice Jean-François Duval suggested, the publicity of the proceedings and the attendant embarrassment were themselves part of the injury: “To require the mother to take proceedings to have the marriage declared null would be to add to the injury she has already sustained and might cause the ruin of her child.”122 Chief Justice Lafontaine added the breach of the normal internal functioning of the family and the imposition of an unwanted outsider: “What! it is not enough for the parents to suffer in silence the pain and insult of seeing their daughter taken up and delivered into the hands of an individual to whom they perhaps never would have consented to join her, had they been consulted!”123 The court allowed the appeal and awarded Larocque one hundred pounds in damages, with some of the justices expressing regret that they could not award more, though they recognized that a missionary priest was unlikely to be able to pay even the amount awarded.124 Their reservations were justified: a month later, when Michon could not pay the damages, a bailiff tallied up his meagre property and seized eighteen pounds worth of livestock, furniture, and books, which after miscellaneous fees had been subtracted amounted to just ten pounds for the injured plaintiffs.125

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Physical Affronts Along with injury to reputation, physical affronts had traditionally been part of the law of injure in the civil law tradition. This included not only significant physical injuries of all kinds, but also more trivial physical contact. Ordinarily, the maxim de minimis non curat lex would have applied to the latter situations, but injure arose when the contact had a larger cultural meaning, bringing together ideas of physical violation and reputational injury.126 In eighteenth-century France, this broader meaning – and the potential for vengeance resulting from the violation of honour – was the reason behind allowing an action in cases of minor contact and even of gestures without contact.127 In Lower Canada too, the idea of injure was interpreted broadly. Maximilien Bibaud, for example, developed his discussion of biens within a wider consideration of injury and reparation, which grouped under the concept injure spiritual, physical, reputational and financial injuries.128 In Delisle, the simple physical assault by the aggressive churchwarden became actionable not because of any abstract notion of the inviolability of the human body but rather because the physical assault carried a broader cultural or social meaning as an affront to Delisle’s dignity or honour. In awarding Delisle damages of £12 10s, Justice Charles Mondelet concluded that Himbault’s actions constituted “an affront to the plaintiff, whose sensibility must have been grievously wounded by it.”129 The affront was not in the physical contact itself, minimal as it was, but rather in its having “brought the plaintiff to the attention and view of the people assembled in the said church, though he had caused no disorder.”130 In other words, whether by intention or not, Himbault’s physical contact with Delisle had the effect of exposing Delisle to the assembled congregation as a misbehaving worshipper, perhaps even as an unbeliever, and it was this exposure that constituted the injure of which Delisle complained. Justice Mondelet’s analysis – closely fact-driven, as was usual in this period – suggested little about the conceptual underpinnings of the decision. In a subtle way, however, he revealed some of his thinking. After affirming that the role of churchwardens was to ensure that the congregation conform to church practice, the judge noted that such officials “have no right to lay hands on whomever they want.”131 That introduction of the language of rights into the analysis is interesting, though the focus was on Himbault’s lack of right to do what he did, rather than any rights Delisle might have had. Alongside this lack of

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right on the part of Himbault, Justice Mondelet invoked the duties of Roman Catholics, noting that there existed no obligation for any worshipper – however fervent – to kneel.132 The reparation in this case was punitive rather than compensatory, and Justice Mondelet’s reasons – sermon-like at times – made it clear that his purpose in ruling in Delisle’s favour was to maintain social peace against affronts like this: “Everyone must love God, but it is equally important to love one’s neighbour. The law, the whole law, is contained in [these] two commandments. The second, which imposes a duty to love one’s fellow man, is only fulfilled if one wishes and does well by his brothers, does not injure them, does not clash with their prejudices, does not violate in any way their sensibility. One who sins in this way, without right and without cause, is reprehensible, and human laws, which in this matter are in harmony with divine precept, require that anyone who violates this precept must suffer the punishment.”133 The physical affront with its public implications thus required a public response – a sermon from the judge on the links between God’s law and human law, and a damages award meant to underscore that lesson. In keeping with the symbolic nature of the reparation – and the spiritual rather than secular tone of the judgment – Delisle assured the court that he planned to donate his damages to the poor.134 Loss of Life and Grief Finally, Ravary dealt with loss of life and its consequent effects on those left behind. Wrongful death in cases like this caused two kinds of injuries: financial, with the loss of the family’s main breadwinner, and emotional, with a spouse, children, and other relatives forced to endure the unexpected loss of a loved one. Both of these raised difficult legal questions, because the injuries in question were hard to conceptualize and consequently compensation was difficult to justify. The plaintiffs in Ravary explored various approaches to these questions in their action for £10,000 lump sum damages. On the financial level, as heirs of the deceased Thomas Wilson, the plaintiffs had a pecuniary claim for special damages for losses sustained by Wilson himself. Wilson’s instantaneous death prevented any action for moral injuries he himself might have suffered – loss of enjoyment of life, for example – and in the 1850s there was no possibility of compensation for the shortening of his life, as would be possible much later. An action did lie, however, for the destruction of the horse

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and wagon, a relatively uncontroversial claim that would eventually come to be theorized with the fiction that the heirs continued the legal personality of the deceased.135 Second, and more problematic, was the plaintiffs’ action for general moral damages for their own suffering occasioned by Wilson’s death – a claim for solatium doloris, compensation for the suffering caused by the loss of a loved one.136 In French law, which was traditionally receptive to moral injury claims, as we have seen, suffering occasioned by the wrongful death of a close relative was a recognized claim. The determinative factor was not the nature of the injury suffered, since both material and moral injury was compensible if proved, but rather the directness of the claimant’s interest: a spouse or child had a claim for the injury that he or she had suffered as a result of the death.137 The English courts, however, had long rejected such claims, principally because the intangible nature of the injury made it difficult to prove and quantify. In 1847, the Province of Canada enacted a statute virtually identical to an English statute of the previous year, which granted a limited right of action to certain family members of victims of fatal accidents to claim damages for “the injury resulting from such death.”138 Ravary was the first case under the statute, and at issue was whether the French or the English understanding of “injury” would apply in cases of wrongful death in Lower Canada. The case began with a sympathetic jury ignoring its instruction to consider property damage only. Instead, it awarded damages of £319, of which £300 was for the loss of Thomas Wilson, the remainder for the property losses (the horse and wagon).139 The company moved for a new trial, arguing that no specific proof had been put to the jury as to the value of Wilson’s life, and so the verdict was without evidence.140 The case thus revolved around the value of a human life, and framing it in this way implicitly posited that individuals had a legally recognized interest in their lives. The plaintiffs built on this – without expressing it in those terms, however – by asking the courts to determine whether and in what ways that interest was to be protected in a civil context. The conceptual difficulties of that argument, however, were reinforced by the general difficulty with moral injuries, namely that their intangible nature made them hard to evaluate in monetary terms. In hearing the motion for a new trial, the Superior Court split on the issue of proof of damages. The majority held that the amount awarded for Wilson’s loss of life had not been proved, and so ordered a new trial. Significantly, though, both the majority and the dissent agreed

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that only the pecuniary loss suffered (the lost horse and wagon, as well as the loss of Wilson’s future support if proved) and not the intangible aspects of the loss (the survivors’ grief) could be compensated. Justice Day was reported as saying, “So in the present case, if there had been any evidence at all the Court would not have interfered. It might have been established that Wilson was in the prime of life, and was managing a farm, superintending the education of a number of children, and so forth, and the Court would not then have touched the verdict.”141 To do otherwise, and allow purely “vindictive” or emotional damages, would mean, Justice Mondelet pointed out, that “there would be no safety for Railway Companies against the most monstrous fines.”142 Even Justice James Smith, who would have denied the new trial, sought a pecuniary basis for his reasoning: “Was there nothing else than mental suffering in the loss of a husband or a father? Was not the family left in such a case without a guardian or provider? … The representatives of a person killed by negligence had the right to the same action that he would have had himself, and it surely would not be necessary to prove that a man was injured other than mentally if his leg were broken.”143 The Court of Queen’s Bench, however, went in the opposite direction. The justices split on the applicability and interpretation of the 1847 statute, and particularly whether it barred non-pecuniary damage claims by relatives in wrongful death actions. The majority’s holding is interesting for evincing a willingness to move beyond a purely pecuniary reading of the injury and so to see a life like Thomas Wilson’s as more than a source of income. Though that line of reasoning was overturned thirty years later by the Supreme Court of Canada,144 the majority held that the right to damages was based not just on material factors, but on affective ones as well: “Seeing that the common law right is founded upon natural love and affection, and the ties of blood between the party killed and his widow, and next of kin respectively, and that the action to enforce such right is jure sanguinis and ex vindicta. Seeing that the damages which the party complaining is entitled to recover are not at common law confined to injuries of which a mere pecuniary estimate can be made, but comprehend a solatium to the widow and next of kin for their bereavement, qui s’accorde au deuil des parents, to be determined à l’arbitrage du juge.”145 The dissenting judges dismissed this as damages based on “mere feelings,”146 but the majority’s reference to “ties of blood” is telling. Compensation for solatium doloris involved an assessment of the affective relations within the family that structured the situation in the case. Even the dissenting judges, with their exclusive focus

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on the pecuniary aspects of the injury, necessarily had to consider the relational issue of Wilson’s role as provider (though the lack of proof spared them from having to do the calculation). The majority, however, by considering moral as well as material injury, undertook a fuller examination of the relational aspects of the question, grappling with the value of Thomas Wilson’s life in its various dimensions. As with the other kinds of moral injury in Durocher, Larocque, and Delisle, this social aspect of the case brought different considerations into the analysis, broadening the scope of the legal analysis undertaken by the judges. Conclusion Moral injuries presented difficult problems for nineteenth-century judges and doctrinal writers, since they brought to the fore the subjectivity of human experience. Their intimate association with the nature and interests of the human being as legal subject led to their eventually being theorized as involving violations of “personality rights,” a doctrinal construct for intangible aspects of the human personality.147 Lower Canadian judges, however, treated cases touching reputation, family honour, physical affronts, grief, and so on as individual legal situations that either gave rise to liability or not.148 For some judges and in some situations, the lack of tangible damage argued against compensation, despite the evidence of injury; for other judges and in other situations, the self-evident nature of the injury when considered in the context of social norms they shared with the plaintiffs led them to accept the evidence and uphold the claim. For litigants, this subjectivity was precisely what brought them into court in the first place. In their narratives in these cases of moral injury, their individual feelings of humiliation and grief as well as the broader social codes surrounding honour and propriety were clearly evident, even through the inevitable legalization of language in court filings and witness depositions. In bringing cases like these before the courts, however, individuals faced a legal system that demanded more than subjective feelings. The fluidity evident in these cases – some compensating the moral aspects of injury, others not – is testimony to the uncertainty regarding precisely what beyond subjectivity was required. Litigants had to tread carefully, negotiating on the one side a developing framework of legal categories and concepts within which judges and lawyers worked, and on the other side the social norms and values within which all concerned – judges, lawyers, and litigants alike – lived.

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1 For their help and comments I would like to thank Blaine Baker, Donald Fyson, Peter Gossage, Nicholas Kasirer, Evelyn Kolish, Shannon McSheffrey, Mary-Anne Poutanen, Ronald Rudin, and the various anonymous reviewers for the Osgoode Society. Versions of this chapter were presented at the University of Toronto and McGill University (I thank Jim Phillips and Helge Dedek for the invitations to speak), and those audiences provided many valuable insights and suggestions. Julie Perrone and Étienne Stockland provided excellent research assistance. This project was funded by a nouveaux chercheurs grant from the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture. Though what follows focuses on the period during which Quebec was officially “Canada East,” I have used “Lower Canada” throughout, since it continued to be the preferred designation among jurists before Confederation. Translations from French are my own, with the original given in the notes. 2 Olivier Descamps, Les origines de la responsabilité pour faute personnelle dans le Code civil de 1804 (Paris: LGDJ, 2005), 298–303; Manfred Herrmann, Der Schutz der Persönlichkeit in der Rechtslehre des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1968). 3 Models for this approach to legal history are the work of Brian Simpson and Constance Backhouse, the former emphasizing the doctrinal development of law, the latter its embeddedness in social and cultural structures. See, for example, A.W.B. Simpson, Leading Cases in the Common Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); and Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1999). 4 The details come from the case file, which contains various unnumbered and generally unpaginated documents, preserved at the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Montreal centre [BANQ Montreal], TP11, S2, SS2, SSS1, cont. 1987-05-007/4564 (no. 1061 of 1857) [Durocher, Case File]. Two brief judgments are reported: a preliminary motion in Durocher v. Meunier (19 Oct. 1857), 1 L.C.J. 290-91 (Sup. Ct., Montreal, Day, Mondelet, Badgley JJ.) [Durocher (motion)] and the final judgment in Durocher v. Meunier (29 May 1858), 9 L.C.R. 8-9 (Sup. Ct., Montreal, Day J.) [Durocher (merits)]. 5 Though the case file does not locate the inn, an 1856–7 city directory places Meunier’s tavern at 57 Notre Dame Street, today the site of the Quebec Court of Appeal. See Mackay’s Montreal Directory, New Edition, Corrected in May & June, 1856–7 (Montreal: Owler & Stevenson, [1856]), 195.

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6 Durocher case file, Inception et défense (filed 8 Oct. 1857), 1r–v. Court documents at this time were often foliated rather than paginated, that is numbered only on the front of each sheet. The abbreviations r and v used here and elsewhere refer to the front (recto) or rear (verso) of the foliated sheet. 7 This term is difficult to translate. It referred to particular kinds of injuries to persons or property that included elements of offence or outrage. See the discussion below. 8 Durocher case file, Inventaire de productions du Demandeur (filed 29 May 1857), 1v. 9 Durocher case file, deposition of Joseph Lambert (5 Feb. 1858), 1v (“un cheval de promenade pour un monsieur”) and 2r (“sans s’exposer au ridicule”). 10 Durocher case file, deposition of John Atkinson (5 Feb. 1858), 1r. 11 Durocher case file, deposition of Casimire Guérin (5 Feb. 1858), 1v (“Elle était dans un état à ne pouvoir plus être montrée en public”). 12 We will return to explore the legal issues in this and the other cases described here in the last part below. 13 Durocher case file, Inception et défense (filed 8 Oct. 1857). 14 Durocher case file, Réponses sur faits & articles du demandeur (filed 2 Mar. 1858); Interrogatoire sur faits et articles (dated 25 Feb. 1858); deposition of Joseph Lambert (5 Feb. 1858). 15 Durocher case file, Inception et défense (filed 8 Oct. 1857), 3r. 16 Ibid., 2v. 17 See generally Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 69–86; Bryan D. Palmer, “Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth-Century North America,” Labour / Le Travail 3 (1978): 5–62; René Hardy, “Le charivari dans la sociabilité rurale québécoise au XIXe siècle,” in De la sociabilité: spécificité et mutations, ed. Roger Levasseur (Montreal: Boréal, 1990), 59–72. 18 On political charivaris, see Greer, Patriots and the People, 239–56; Wendie Nelson, “‘Rage against the dying of light’: Interpreting the Guerre des Éteignoirs,” Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 551–81; Stephen Kenny, “‘Cahots’ and Catcalls: An Episode of Popular Resistance in Lower Canada at the Outset of the Union,” Canadian Historical Review 65 (1984): 184–208; J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 68–9. 19 Examples of violence on horses are discussed in Allan Greer, “From Folk-

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lore to Revolution: Charivaris and the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837,” Social History 15 (1990): 35; Kenny, “‘Cahots’ and Catcalls,” 203; Wendie Nelson, The “Guerre des éteignoirs”: School Reform and Popular Resistance in Lower Canada, 1841–1850 (MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1989), 152– 3, 158. Such attacks on horses as a means of ridiculing their owners were known in early modern England as well, though apparently not in a political context: see Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past & Present 105 (1984): 87. On charivari and reconciliation, see Greer, Patriots and the People, 80–1. René Hardy’s discussion of “cruel” charivaris is closer to the example here: see Hardy, “Le charivari,” 61, following E.P. Thompson, “‘Rough Music’ et charivari: quelques réflexions complémentaires,” in Le charivari: actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris (25–27 avril 1977), ed. Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris: Mouton, 1981), 276. Durocher case file, depositions of Pierre Auger (1 May 1858), Thomas McAnaulty (3 May 1858), and Louis Collard (3 May 1858). Auger had sued Durocher in the Circuit Court at Terrebonne in October 1857, claiming his fee for nocturnal guard duty had never been paid; the suit was discontinued on 15 March 1858. BANQ Montreal, TP10, S122, cont. 1986-11051/1064 (no. 773 of Nov. term 1857). Durocher case file, deposition of Louis Collard (3 May 1858). Durocher case file, depositions of Pierre Augé (3 May 1858) and Louis Collard (3 May 1858). George Clarke testified that at the time the other horse was shaved, Durocher had said that the shaving had been a mistake, and his own horse had been the target; Durocher case file, deposition of George Clarke (3 May 1858). See also Durocher case file, deposition of Thomas McAnaulty (3 May 1858) on the link to the election. The Legislative Council of the Province of Canada was made elective by An Act to change the Constitution of the Legislative Council by rendering the same Elective, S.P.C. 1856 (19–20 Vic.), c. 140 (assented 24 June 1856), and Masson’s election for Mille-Iles was held on 31 October 1856. See Gustave Turcotte, Le Conseil législatif de Québec 1774–1933 (Beauceville, QC: L’“Éclairceur,” 1933), 241–2. See generally Michael S. Cross, “‘The laws are like cobwebs’: Popular Resistance to Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America,” Dalhousie Law Journal 8 (1984): 103–23; as well as the critique in Greg Marquis, “Doing Justice to ‘British Justice’: Law, Ideology and Canadian Historiography,” in Canadian Perspectives on Law and Society: Issues in Legal History, ed. W. Wesley Pue and Barry Wright (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 49–50.

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26 See Andrée Désilets, Louis-Rodrigue Masson, un seigneur sans titres (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1985), 44; Robert Rumilly, Histoire de Montréal (Montreal: Fides, 1970), 2:382. 27 Désilets, ibid., 44. On the family dynamics, see also Thierry Nootens, “‘Je crains fort que mon pauvre Henri ne fasse pas grand chose …’: les héritiers ‘manqués’ et les querelles de la succession Masson, 1850–1930,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 59 (2006): 223–57. Sophie Masson was still listed as a widow in 1862 when she, Durocher, and others created the Terrebonne Turnpike Road Company to construct a macadamized toll road from Masson’s land to the Rivière des Prairies: An Act to incorporate the Terrebonne Turnpike Road Company, S.P.C. 1862 (25 Vic.), c. 76 (assented 9 June 1862). Later there were unconfirmed rumours of a secret marriage: Élie-J. Auclair, “Terrebonne, les Masson, leur château,” Mémoires de la Société Royale du Canada, 3d ser. 38 (1944), s. 1, p. 11. In the 1891 census, L.B. Durocher, “médecin et professeur,” is listed as living in Montreal with his wife Elizabeth. His age, given as sixty, would have made him twenty-six in 1857, much younger than Sophie Masson, who was then fifty-nine. 28 “Nouvelles et faits divers,” L’Écho du cabinet de lecture paroissial de Montréal 3 (1861): 48. 29 Larocque et vir v. Michon (30 Apr. 1857), (1857) 1 L.C.J. 187 (Sup. Ct.) [Larocque, Sup. Ct.], reversed (1 Mar. 1858), 8 L.C. Rep. 222 [Larocque, Q.B. (L.C. Rep.)], 2 L.C.J. 267 [Larocque, Q.B. (L.C.J.)] (Q.B.). The Superior Court file is BANQ Montreal, TP11, S2, SS2, SSS1, cont. 1987-05-007/4535 (no. 910 of 1857) [Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file]. The Queen’s Bench file, which includes only the two factums, is BANQ Montreal, TP9, S2, SS5, SSS1, cont. 2009-02-001/101 (no. 113 of 1858) [Larocque, Q.B. case file]. Thomas-JeanJacques Loranger, who represented the respondent in the appeal, later provided various details not printed elsewhere in his Commentaire sur le Code civil du Bas-Canada: livre premier—titre cinquième: du mariage, vol. 2 (Montreal: Eusèbe Senécal, 1879), 108n [Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM) no. 33494]. 30 See generally Stanislas Drapeau, Études sur les développements de la colonisation du Bas-Canada depuis dix ans: (1851 à 1861) (Quebec City: Léger Brousseau, 1863), 258-61 [CIHM no. 34775]; J.I. Little, “The Catholic Church and French-Canadian Colonization of the Eastern Townships, 1821–51,” University of Ottawa Quarterly 52 (1982): 142–65; J.I. Little, Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1881 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); Christine Hudon, Prêtres et fidèles dans le diocèse de Saint-Hyacinthe 1820–1875 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1996).

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31 See generally Édouard-Zotique Massicotte, Athlètes canadiens-français: recueils des exploits de force, d’endurance, d’agilité, des athlètes et des sportsmen de notre race, depuis le XVIIIe siècle: biographies, portraits et anecdotes, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1909), 139. Two witnesses in the case stated that Archambault had arrived from “Amérique du Sud,” but that is unlikely: Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, depositions of Joseph Séguin (2 June 1856) and Joseph Giguay (2 June 1856). Archambault had been admitted to practice as a notary in 1851 so must have been in Canada at that time: “Necrology,” Revue du Notariat 9 (1906): 128. 32 Archambault is profiled in Massicotte, Athlètes, 138–42. See also JeanJacques Lefebvre, “Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, Bar’t (†1864), ses ascendants et ses alliances dans les professions du droit,” Mémoires de la Société Royale du Canada, 4th ser. 2 (1964), s. 1, p. 88; Joan Finnigan, Giants of Canada’s Ottawa Valley (Renfrew, ON: General Store Publishing House, 2005), 8. 33 See Justin McCarthy, Dictionaire [sic] de l’ancien droit du Canada, ou Compilation des édits, déclarations royaux, et arrêts du Conseil d’État des Roix de France concernant le Canada &c. (Quebec City: John Neilson, 1809), 14–15 [CIHM no. 33003]; James Armstrong, A Treatise on the Law Relating to Marriages in Lower Canada (Montreal: John Lovell, 1857), 13 [CIHM no. 22631]. On the social aspects of parental consent, see Serge Gagnon, Mariage et famille au temps de Papineau (Sainte-Foy, QC: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993), 93–106. 34 Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, Défense (dated 11 Feb. 1856); Larocque, Q.B. case file, Factum de l’Intimé. I have not located the correspondence with the diocese or the bishop’s dispensation. 35 On Julie Larocque, see Francis-J. Audet, “Les députés de la vallée de l’Ottawa, 1792–1867: discours du président,” Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association 14 (1935): 21. 36 See the cross-examination of hapless witness Édouard Nadeau: Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, deposition of Édouard Nadeau (3 Mar. 1856). 37 Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, depositions of Pierre Luc Joy (4 Dec. 1856), Ciprien Martel (4 Dec. 1856), Joseph Séguin (2 June 1856), Joseph Giguay (2 June 1856), and Édouard Nadeau (3 Mar. 1856). 38 On the canonical standing of a marriage of a minor without parental consent, see Eusèbe Belleau, Des empêchements dirimants de mariage, chap. I, tit. V., C.C.B.C.: thèse pour le doctorat, Université Laval, Faculté de droit (Lévis: Mercier, 1889), 41–2 [CIHM no. 03564]. On the civil validity of such marriages, see Henry Des Rivières Beaubien, Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada (Montreal: Ludger Duvernay, 1832), 1:57 [CIHM no. 34786-89], whose discussion is drawn directly from the eighteenth-century French jurist Robert-Joseph Pothier’s Traité des personnes et des choses.

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39 Adèle died in 1899 at age fifty-eight, Amable in 1906 at seventy-six. Archambault had a successful notarial practice in Montreal, and warranted a brief notice in the Revue du Notariat when he died: Revue du Notariat 9 (1906): 128. His notarial register, begun in October 1851 and continued to his death, survives as BANQ-Montreal, CN601, S506. 40 Larocque, Q.B. case file, Factum des appelants, 1r (“une injure grave”; “en donnant à un acte immoral la sanction de la religion”). 41 Ibid., 1v (“afficher publiquement le déshonneur de sa fille”). 42 Larocque, Q.B. case file, Défense. There is no indication in the case file or the judgments that Larocque sought to call the bishop of St Hyacinthe as a defendant. 43 Delisle v. Himbault dit Mathias (21 Jan. 1843), reported (1897) 3 R.L. n.s. 64–71 (Dist. Ct. Ste-Thérèse, Mondelet J.) [Delisle]. The case file, containing various unnumbered documents, is BANQ Montreal, TL 91, cont. 198611-051/1059 (no. 27 of 1843) [Delisle, case file]. Though the case report identifies Himbault as L.M. Himbault dit Mathias, he appears as Marin Himbault dit Mathias or Matha (without another given name) in the case file and in the censuses of 1825, 1831, and 1842. 44 Quotations from Delisle case file, Summons (dated 17 Jan. 1843) (“d’une manière grossière et brutale”; “de blesser la sensibilité du Demandeur, de le mortifier et de lui faire affront”). 45 Quotations from Delisle case file, Exception péremptoire et défense (filed 21 Jan. 1843) (“scandaliser les fidèles”; “de blesser la sensibilité du Demandeur et de lui faire affront et injure”). 46 An Act more effectually to provide for the maintenance of good order in Churches, Chapels and other places of Public Worship, and for other purposes therein mentioned, R.S.L.C. 1845, c. 11 (originally 7 Geo. IV, c. 3, enacted 1826–27), quotation from section III. 47 Lucien Lemieux, Les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, tome 1: les années difficiles (1760– 1839). Vol. 2 of Histoire du catholicisme québécois, ed. Nive Voisine ([Montreal]: Boréal, 1989), 311–13; Philippe Sylvain and Nive Voisine, Les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, tome 2: Réveil et consolidation (1840–1898). Vol. 2 of Histoire du catholicisme québécois, ed. Nive Voisine ([Montreal]: Boréal, 1991), 356; René Hardy, Contrôle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec, 1830–1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1999), 9, 151–2. 48 See generally Louis Rousseau, “À l’origine d’une société maintenant perdue: le réveil religieux montréalais de 1840,” in Religion et culture au Québec: figures contemporaines du sacré, ed. Yvon Desrosiers (Montreal: Fides, 1986), 71–92. 49 Ravary v. Grand Trunk Railway (30 Sept. 1857), 1 L.C.J. 280-83 (Sup. Ct. Montreal, Day, Smith, Mondelet JJ.) [Ravary (Sup. Ct.)], reversed (7 Dec.

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1860), 6 L.C.J. 49–60 (Q.B. Montreal, Lafontaine C.J., Aylwin, Duval, Badgley, Bruneau JJ.) [Ravary (Q.B.)]. The Court of Queen’s Bench granted the defendant company permission to petition the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and security was posted for the appeal; Court of Queen’s Bench, Registre des Procès-Verbaux (31 May 1860 to 16 July 1862), 171, 188, BANQ Montreal, TP9, S2, SS5, SSS11, cont. 2009-06-001/327 [Q.B., Procès-Verbaux]. There is no record of a decision having been rendered, so the Privy Council likely refused permission to appeal, if indeed the case was ever formally presented to them. The court decisions incorrectly record the date of the accident as 29 November, but newspaper coverage confirms the correct date: Montreal Pilot, 22 Nov. 1856, 2; La Patrie, 24 Nov. 1856, 2; Montreal Transcript, 24 Nov. 1856, 2; La Minerve, 26 Nov. 1856, 2; Montreal Witness, 26 Nov. 1856, 1; Le Pays, 26 Nov. 1856, 3; Quebec Morning Chronicle, 26 Nov. 1856, 2. The story seems to have originated in the Pilot, from which the other papers took the story more or less verbatim (or translated). Unfortunately, the case files for neither the Superior Court decision (no. 2426 of 1857) nor the appeal to the Court of Queen’s Bench (no. 20 of 1860) have survived. On the family, see Thérèse Archambault-Lessard, “Alexandre et Thomas Wilson,” Bulletin des recherches historiques 42 (1936): 347–55; Philippe Sylvain, “Wilson, Charles,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography [DCB], 10:715; J. Douglas Borthwick, History and Biographical Gazeteer of Montreal to the Year 1892 (Montreal: John Lovell & Son, 1892), 320. The parties are listed in full in Q.B., Procès-Verbaux, 171. Ravary (Sup. Ct.), 280–1. Ravary (Q.B.), 53. See Harry Abbott, A Treatise on the Railway Law of Canada (Montreal: C. Théoret, 1896), 363–417 on negligence (esp. 371–8 on liability in Quebec) and 418–26 on damages (esp. 424–6 on injuries to persons) [CIHM no. 10500]. Little has been written on the early history of railroads and civil liability in Canada, but for elsewhere see R.W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), esp. 254–321; Robert S. Hunt, Law and Locomotives: The Impact of the Railroad on Wisconsin Law in the Nineteenth-Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958); Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). That point was clarified by An Act to secure to Wives and Children the benefit of Assurances on the lives of their Husbands and Parents, S.P.C. 1865 (29 Vic.), c. 17. See Brooke Claxton, “The Origins of the Quebec Law of Insurance

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and Its Relation to Civil Law,” in Le droit civil français: livre-souvenir des journées du droit civil français (Montréal – 31 août–2 septembre 1934) (Paris: Sirey: Barreau de Montréal, 1936), 548–50; Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press and Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1994), 146. On objections to early life insurance in the United States, see Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 41–6. I focus in this chapter on non-defamatory violations of honour, but cases of libel and slander bring up many of the same issues. Little has been written on legal aspects of reputation in Lower Canada. For an earlier period, see André Lachance, “Une étude de mentalité: les injures verbales au Canada au XVIIIe siècle (1712–1748),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 31 (1977): 229–38; and for later developments, see Joseph Kary, “The Constitutionalization of Quebec Libel Law, 1848–2004,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 42 (2004): 229–70. On the state of legal writing and publishing in Lower Canada, see Sylvio Normand, “Les débuts de la littérature juridique québécoise, 1767–1840,” in this volume; Normand, “L’histoire de l’imprimé juridique: un champ de recherche inexploré,” McGill Law Journal 38 (1993): 130–46; Sylvie Parent, La doctrine et l’interprétation du Code civil (Montreal: Thémis, 1997), 11–28; Christine Veilleux, “Le livre à Québec, 1760–1867: les gens de justice et leurs œuvres,” Cahiers de droit 34 (1993): 93–124; Nicola Mariani and Diana Lynn Perret, Legal Bibliography on the Québec Civil Law Published in English (1866–1997) (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1999). Alexandre Sourdat, Traité général de la responsabilité ou de l’action en dommages-intérêts en dehors des contrats (Paris: De Cosse & N. Delamotte, 1852), 1:37. The distinction between the physical and moral person and the various interests belonging to each – based on Kantian ideas of personality – entered French legal writing from Germany; see, for an early example, J.A. Brückner, Essai sur la nature et l’origine des droits, ou déduction des principes de la science philosophique du droit, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: C.H.F. Hartmann, 1818), 129–32. Anne Lefebvre-Teillard, Introduction historique au droit des personnes et de la famille (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). On Gaius’s influence, see Donald R. Kelley, “Gaius Noster: Substructures of Western Social Thought,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 619–48. For example, F.C. de Savigny, Traité de droit romain, 8 vols., trans. Charles Guenoux (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1840-51), 1:375: “Les biens, consi-

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dérés comme extension du pouvoir de l’individu, sont un attribut de sa personnalité.” Though the word might be translated as “property,” I have chosen to retain the French term to avoid linking the mid-nineteenth-century sense of biens (whose scope was in flux, as we will see) with modern ideas of property. For example, Charles Demolombe, Cours de Code civil, tome cinquième (Brussels: J. Stienon, 1854), 4–5. See generally David Deroussin, “Personnalité et ‘biens innés’ chez Aubry et Rau: entre nature et abstraction,” in Aubry et Rau: leurs œuvres, leurs enseignements, ed. Jean-Michel Poughon (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2006), 91–110. François Dareau, Traité des injures dans l’ordre judiciaire. Ouvrage qui renferme particulièrement la Jurisprudence du Petit-Criminel (Paris: Prault, père, 1777). Dareau, Traité des injures, 2 (“ce qui se dit, ce qui s’écrit, ce qui se fait, & même ce qui s’omet à dessein d’offenser quelqu’un dans son honneur, dans sa personne ou dans ses biens”). Sourdat, Traité général, 1:6 (“à la sûreté, à la liberté, à l’honneur et à la considération des personnes”). This idea has a long history: see Descamps, Les origines, 298–303. The debt to Zachariæ was clear in the title of the first edition: Cours de droit civil français, traduit de l’allemand de M. C.S. Zachariæ, 5 vols. (Strasbourg: F. Lagier, 1839–46) [Aubry and Rau, Cours (1st ed.)]. Through subsequent editions, the links to Zachariæ became more remote, and the work came to be styled “d’après l’ouvrage allemand de C.-S. Zachariæ” (3d ed., 1856) and “d’après la méthode de Zachariæ” (4th ed., 1869–79). On Aubry and Rau and their work, see Jean-Michel Poughon, ed., Aubry et Rau: leurs œuvres, leurs enseignements (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2006). Aubry and Rau, Cours (1st ed.), 1:99 (“l’universalité juridique de ses biens, c’est-à-dire, des objets extérieurs sur lesquels elle a des droits à exercer en tant qu’on les considère comme des biens”). On the patrimony in Aubry and Rau and issues of translating the terminology, see Nicholas Kasirer, “Translating Part of France’s Legal Heritage: Aubry and Rau on the Patrimoine,” Revue générale de droit 38 (2008): 453–93. Aubry and Rau, Cours (1st ed.), 1:331 (“qui se confondent avec l’existence de la personne qui a des droits à exercer sur eux”). Ibid. Ibid., 1:333: “L’ensemble des biens d’une personne constitue son patrimoine. Les élémens du patrimoine consistent donc dans les objets des droits civils considérés en leur qualité de biens; et comme ces objets ne revêtent cette qualité qu’à raison des droits auxquels ils sont soumis envers une

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personne, on peut aussi, en substituant en quelque sorte la cause à l’effet, définir le patrimoine, l’ensemble des droits civils d’une personne.” See their fourth edition (the last overseen by Aubry and Rau personally): Charles Aubry and Charles Rau, Cours de droit civil français d’après la méthode de Zachariae, 4th ed. (Paris: Marchal, Billard, 1873), 6:230. Aubry and Rau, Cours (1st ed.), 1:332n5: “De l’utilité. Ce terme est plus large que celui de prix ou de valeur vénale; il comprend tout ce qui peut contribuer au bien-être moral ou matériel de l’homme, et par conséquent, des avantages non appréciables en argent. Tels, par exemple, que les avantages ressortant des rapports personnels entre époux ou entre parens et enfans. Les personnes peuvent donc, aussi bien que les choses, constituer des biens.” Eric H. Reiter, “Imported Books, Imported Ideas: Reading European Jurisprudence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 445–92. David Howes, “The Origin and Demise of Legal Education in Quebec (or Hercules Bound),” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 38 (1989): 127–49; Roderick A. Macdonald, “The National Law Programme at McGill: Origins, Establishment, Prospects,” Dalhousie Law Journal 13 (1990): 216–25; R. St J. Macdonald, “Maximilien Bibaud, 1823–1887: The Pioneer Teacher of International Law in Canada,” Dalhousie Law Journal 11 (1987–8): 721–43; Sylvio Normand, Le droit comme discipline universitaire: une histoire de la Faculté de droit de l’Université Laval (Sainte-Foy, QC: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 1–12. Joseph-François Perrault, Dictionnaire portatif et abrégé des loix et règles du Parlement provincial de Bas Canada (Quebec City: John Neilson, 1806) [CIHM no. 20886] (itself in question-and-answer format); Joseph-François Perrault, Questions et réponses sur le droit civil du Bas-Canada, dédiées aux étudiants en droit (N.p., 1810) [CIHM no. 49359]; Joseph-François Perrault, Questions et réponses sur le droit criminel du Bas-Canada, dédiées aux étudiants en droit (Quebec City: C. Le François, 1814) [CIHM no. 49360]. See generally Normand, “Les origines.” Justin McCarthy’s Dictionaire [sic] de l’ancien droit du Canada, ou Compilation des édits, déclarations royaux, et arrêts du Conseil d’État des Roix de France concernant le Canada &c. (Quebec City: John Neilson, 1809) [CIHM no. 33003] is more a subject index to legislation than a dictionary proper. Earlier, in the period immediately following the transition to British rule, François-Joseph Cugnet had published several collections of legislation; see Sylvio Normand, “François-Joseph Cugnet et la reconstitution du droit de la Nouvelle-France,” Cahiers aixois d’histoire des droits de l’outre-mer français 1 (2002): 127–45.

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76 Henry Des Rivières Beaubien, Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada, 3 vols. (Montreal: Ludger Duvernay, 1832-33), 1:7 [CIHM no. 34786-89]. Des Rivières Beaubien was seigneur of Montarville, near Montreal, 1829–42, but little else is known about him. 77 The work is divided into three books: persons, things, and “Des différentes manières dont on acquiert la propriété.” The title of the third book suggests the inspiration of the French Code civil at the structural level at least. 78 Maximilien Bibaud recognized in the 1860s that Des Rivières Beaubien’s work was largely a pastiche of unacknowledged excerpts from other authors. In reviewing the work of the codification commission, Bibaud wrote, “Ils ont cité jusque à [sic] l’abréviateur qui a écrit sous le nom emprunté de M. Des Rivières Beaubien”; Bibaud, Exégèse de jurisprudence (N.p., [not before 1862]), 32 [CIHM no. 39211] [Bibaud, Exégèse]. The basis for Bibaud’s questioning of the authorship of the work is unclear. 79 For example, the first major work on Lower Canadian law written in English, Nicolas-Benjamin Doucet, Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada … Compiled with the View of Assisting Law Students, in Directing Them in the Course of Their Studies, 2 vols. (Montreal: John Lovell, 1841–2) [CIHM no. 92324-25]. Despite the assertion by Jacques Boucher (in “Doucet, Nicolas-Benjamin,” in DCB, 8:231–3) that Doucet’s work is a commentary on the Code Napoléon, the order of chapters and the content of the articles in Doucet’s proposed “Civil Code” in the second volume have little to do with the French code. 80 Jacques Crémazie, Manuel des notions utiles sur les Droits Politiques, le Droit Civil, la loi Criminelle, et Municipal, les Lois Rurales, etc., … à l’usage des écoles, des maisons d’éducation, etc. (Quebec City: J. & O. Crémazie, 1852), 61 [CIHM no. 37644] (“On peut encore causer du dommage à quelqu’un, en attaquant son honneur par des discours, des paroles, des écrits ou des peintures injurieux à sa réputation, ou à son crédit”). 81 Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, Catéchisme politique; ou élémens du droit public et constitutionnel du Canada … (Montreal: Louis Perrault, 1851), 11 [CIHM no. 10788] (“Il y a certains droits qui sont inhérens à tout homme et qu’il ne peut lui-même aliéner: tel est le droit de la vie, celui de chercher le bonheur, d’adorer l’Etre Supreme, etc.”). 82 Ibid., 12 (“Nous sommes protégés dans la jouissance légale et non-interrompue de notre vie, de notre santé et de notre réputation. Nous avons le droit de tuer celui qui cherche à nous ôter la vie. Nous avons même le droit de nous faire garantir contre les insultes, les menaces, les provocations, contre les médisances ou les calomnies qui tendent à flétrir notre réputation”).

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83 See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001); Brian Tierney, “Historical Roots of Modern Rights: Before Locke and After,” Ave Maria Law Review 3 (2005): 23–43. 84 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30, 174. See also J. Jacques Burlamaqui, Élémens du droit naturel (Lausanne: François Grasset, 1783), 81: “Cette liberté s’appelle un droit naturel, parce que c’est une prérogative inhérante à la nature de l’homme, & qui lui appartient par une suite nécessaire de sa constitution.” See also the distinction between droits innés (also called droits absolus or droits primitifs) and droits dérivés in Brückner, Essai, 225. 85 Heinrich Ahrens, Cours de droit naturel ou de philosophie du droit, fait après l’état actuel de cette science en Allemagne (Paris: Brockhaus et Avenarius, 1838), 96. See also William Belime, Philosophie du droit, ou Cours d’introduction à la science du droit, 2nd ed. (Paris: A. Durand, 1856), 2:13–14, who wrote of “des droits que l’on pourrait appeler humanitaires, droits primitifs qui appartiennent à tout homme, par cela seul qu’il fait partie du genre humain,” naming rights to existence, self-defence, liberty, and equality (ibid., 14–18). 86 To be fair, it should be noted that much of the energy going into debating more theoretical issues was being devoted to questions surrounding marriage and in particular to negotiating the intersections between secular private law, Roman Catholic canon law, and theology. See, for example, Édouard Lefebvre de Bellefeuille, Thèse sur les mariages clandestins, Soutenue le 28 Novembre 1859, dans les salles de l’École de Droit du Collège Ste. Marie (Montreal: Des Presses de l’Ordre, 1860) [CIHM no. 32406]. 87 F.-M. Bibaud, Commentaires sur les lois du Bas-Canada, ou Conférences de l’école de droit liée au collège des RR. PP. Jésuites, suivis d’une notice historique, 2 vols. (Montreal: Cérat et Bourguignon, 1859–61) [CIHM no. 46876–78] [Bibaud, Commentaires]. 88 See Bibaud’s early work Essai de logique judiciaire (Montreal: De Montigny, 1853) [CIHM no. 32739], which ends with a “Supplément” outlining his school’s program of studies. Some idea of Bibaud’s pedagogical style can be obtained from the lecture notes of John Jordan from Bibaud’s school, dated January to July 1853: BANQ Montreal, P1000, D625. 89 Bibaud, Commentaires, 2:306–7 (“Biens, en terme de jurisprudence, signifient toutes sortes de possessions, et généralement tout ce qui compose nos facultés”). Compare Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique, nouvelle édition by M. *** (Paris: Veuve Brunet, 1769), 1:185.

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90 Ferrière, Dictionnaire, 185. (“D’où il s’ensuit que les choses qui ne sont point dans le commerce, ne peuvent point proprement être appelées de ce nom”). 91 Bibaud, Commentaires, 2:307 (“Tout ce qui nous apporte quelque utilité ou quelque plaisir est donc à bon droit appelé bien”). 92 Ibid., 2:557 (“Les biens de l’homme sont de quatre sorte [sic], – biens de l’âme, biens du corps, biens de la réputation, et biens de la fortune”). 93 Ibid., 2:557–60. 94 Ibid., 2:559 (“Chacun a un droit strict, disent les publicistes, à la bonne estime qui lui est nécessaire ou utile pour réussir dans le monde, quand elle ne nuit à personne autre. Une fois ce principe vrai ou faux admis, celui qui, sans raison suffisante, dévoile une honte secrète, viole ce droit strict de chaque citoyen”). 95 “Si l’obligation de restituer n’est pas du droit naturel absolu, parce que la propriété n’appartiendrait pas elle-même à ce droit, elle est du moins du droit des gens positif”; ibid., 2:557, 560–4 (quotation at 560). 96 The catalogue of Bibaud’s relatively modest personal library includes no likely sources, but Bibaud read more widely than his collection indicates. See Maximilien Bibaud, “Ma bibliothèque” (undated manuscript), BANQ Montreal, P768, S6, SS1, D16, cont. 2006-12-001/8 (formerly at the FraserHickson Library, Montreal). 97 For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics, bk 1, chap. 8; Rhetoric, bk 1, chap. 5; Max Hamburger, Morals and Law: The Growth of Aristotle’s Legal Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 7. For later uses, see [François Genet], Théologie morale (Paris: André Pralard, 1703), 7:328. On the strong links between moral philosophy and theology in Lower Canada, see Yvan Lamonde, La philosophie et son enseignement au Québec (1665–1920) (Lasalle, Qc.: Hurtubise HMH, 1980), 117–76, esp. 161–4. 98 Bibaud’s conservatism and fidelity to the ancien droit are evident in most of his legal writings. See for example his “Observations sur le projet de code canadien” in Bibuad, Exégèse, 12. 99 There are exceptions, such as some of the decisions by Judges ThomasJean-Jacques Loranger, Louis-Amable Jetté, and Michel Mathieu in the later nineteenth century. 100 On some of the problems with court files as sources, and particularly the formulaic nature of witness depositions, see Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2006), 249–53. 101 See, for example, Durocher case file, deposition of Casimire Guérin (5 Feb.

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105 106 107 108 109

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1858), where first-person pronouns are at times crossed out and replaced with third-person pronouns. Dareau, Traité des injures, 304–10, 366–8. According to statute (25 Geo. III (1784–85), c. 2, s. 9), in civil matters jury trials were permitted, on the option of either party, in commercial affairs as well as in cases of “personal wrongs proper to be compensated in damages.” The debate continued after the expression was codified in article 2272 of the Civil Code of Lower Canada. See Edmond Lareau, “De l’emprisonnement en matières civiles,” in Mélanges historiques et littéraires (Montreal: Eusèbe Senécal, 1877), 273–4 [CIHM no. 06535]: “Ainsi, il ne peut-être question ici de dommages causés à la propriété; ce ne peuvent être que les torts, dommages ou injures faites à la personne.” Durocher case file, Inception et défense (filed 8 Oct. 1857). Durocher case file, Motion pour faire rejeter la demande du défendeur de remettre cette cause aux jurés (filed 17 Oct. 1857). Durocher case file, depositions (all 3 May 1858) of Édouard Mercier, Joseph Béliveau, and Joseph Rochon. Durocher (motion). Ferguson v. Patton (1853), (1854) 4 L.C.R. 383 (Sup. Ct.). The court in Durocher seems to have mistaken the basis for the holding in Ferguson. In the reported judgment in Durocher this holding was given as “il fut décidé que l’inexécution d’une promesse de mariage, qui n’est en définitive qu’un contrat civil, donnait droit à un procès par Jury.” In Ferguson, however, the reporter presented the holding as follows: “The Plaintiff contended that she was entitled to a trial by jury, because her action, besides the breach of contract, was brought for the recovery of damages resulting from a tort or personal wrong. The Defendant argued that the action was merely for a breach of contract, and consequently not one in which a trial by jury was permitted by the Statute.” In other words, the plaintiff in Ferguson was allowed a jury trial because the injury consisted of more than just a breach of contract. Durocher (motion), 291 (“Dans le cas actuel le tort commis ne porte pas, il est vrai, physiquement sur la personne du Demandeur; mais le Demandeur fait remonter lui-même moralement le tort à sa personne en alléguant que c’est le ridicule auquel il s’exposerait en se servant de la jument mutilée, qui la déprécie totalement et donne lieu à son action”). Durocher (merits). Larocque, Q.B. (L.C.J.), 269 (“il y a eu pour celle-ci une injure grave en méprisant son autorité maternelle, le curé l’a outragée dans ses sentiments et

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ses affections; il l’a privée de la garde qu’elle avait de la personne de son enfant, du droit qu’elle avait de veiller à son éducation et de diriger sa conduite jusqu’à son âge de majorité”). Larocque, Q.B. case file, Factum des appelants (filed 4 July 1857), 1r (“Il n’existe pas de loi plus positive que celle qui requiert le consentement des père et mère pour le mariage de leurs enfants mineurs … Cette loi et son application rigoureuse intéresse au plus haut degré la famille et la société. Le prêtre qui l’enfreint commet une injure grave envers les parents par le seul fait qu’il assume et s’arroge l’autorité paternelle, la méconnait et engage l’enfant mineur à s’y soustraire, en donnant à un acte immoral la sanction de la religion”). Ibid., 271 (“exposer et afficher dans les cours de justice sa propre honte et le déshonneur de sa fille pour ensuite être obligé de la reprendre des bras de son séducteur, avec lequel elle aurait vécu pendant les longueurs indéterminées d’un procès qui ferait le désespoir de toute famille honnête. Sous de semblables circonstances, les parents préfèreraient toujours, même dans l’intérêt de leur fille, laisser subsister un mariage qui les afflige, plutôt que d’en acheter la nullité par les voies judiciaires, insuffisantes pour apporter un remède au mal qui leur a été fait”). An early example appears in Ahrens, Cours de droit naturel, 159, who notes under the heading “Du respect de la vie privée” that “Le Droit doit donc assurer à toute personne une sphère dans le monde extérieur qui garantisse l’individualité” (emphasis in original). The heading appears only in the table of contents (p. 510), not in the corresponding point in the text itself (p. 159). On family honour, see, for example, André Lachance and Sylvie Savoie, “Violence, Marriage, and Family Honour: Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Marriage in New France,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Vol. 5, Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1994), 143–73. On duelling, see Ægidius Fauteux, Le duel au Canada (Montreal: Éditions du Zodiaque, 1934). For parallels outside Lower Canada, see Rosemary J. Coombe, “‘The most disgusting, disgraceful and inequitous proceeding in our law’: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” University of Toronto Law Journal 38 (1988): 64–108; Cecilia Morgan, “‘In search of the phantom misnamed honour’: Duelling in Upper Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 529–62. Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, Draft Judgment (30 Apr. 1857), Justices Day, Smith, Chabot. (The report in Larocque, Sup. Ct. gives a brief summary only.)

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118 The only witness to attempt an answer was Édouard Nadeau, but he had evidently been coached by Larocque’s husband: see Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, deposition of Édouard Nadeau (3 Mar. 1856). 119 Larocque, Q.B. (L.C. Rep.), 223; Larocque, Q.B. (L.C.J.), 268. 120 Larocque Q.B. case file, Factum des appelants (filed 4 July 1857), 1v (“outragés dans leurs affections les plus chères”; “livrée, à un individu mal famé, indigne d’entrer dans une famille respectable”). 121 Larocque Q.B. (L.C. Rep.), 224 (“une injure d’une gravité extrême”). 122 Larocque, Q.B. (L.C.J.), 270. 123 Ibid., 269 (“Quoi! ce ne sera donc pas assez pour des parents de subir en silence la douleur et l’outrage de se voir enlever leur fille, de la voir livrée aux mains d’un individu auquel ils n’auraient peut-être jamais consenti à l’unir, s’ils eûssent été consultés!”). 124 Larocque, Q.B. (L.C. Rep.), 224. Justices Duval (Larocque, Q.B. (L.C.J.), 270) and Caron (ibid., 271º2) would have awarded more, the latter as much as £500. 125 Larocque, Sup. Ct. case file, Warrant and related documents (30 June 1858). 126 Dareau, Traité des injures, 51-70. 127 Ibid., 56: “Au sujet des voies de fait qui se commettent sur la personne d’autrui, nous ajouterons qu’elles ne doivent jamais être indifférentes aux yeux des Juges, quels que soient ceux qui les éprouvent ou qui s’en rendent coupables; ils doivent particulièrement aux foibles toute la protection de la Justice. La loi défend aux opprimés de se venger; ils ne prennent donc patience que parce qu’ils espèrent que la loi les vengera elle-même. Ainsi ce seroit les trahir, & la loi tout ensemble, que de leur refuser les secours qu’ils ont droit d’en attendre.” 128 Bibaud, Commentaires, 2:557–60. 129 Delisle, 70 (“un affront offert au demandeur, dont la sensibilité a dû par là être gravement blessée”). 130 Ibid. (“signalé à l’attention et aux regards du peuple assemblé dans la dite église, le demandeur qui n’y commettait aucun désordre”). 131 Ibid., 68 (“n’ont droit de mettre la main sur qui que ce soit”). 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 67 (“Chaque homme doit aimer Dieu; il est également important qu’il aime son prochain: la loi, toute la loi, est renfermée dans deux commandements. Le second, qui fait à l’homme un devoir d’aimer ses semblables, n’est accompli d’autant que l’homme veut et fait du bien à ses frères, ne les blesse pas, ne heurte pas leurs préjugés, ne porte aucune atteinte à leur sensibilité. Celui donc qui, sans droit et sans cause, pêche en ceci, est répréhensible, et les lois humaines qui, en cela, sont en har-

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139 140 141 142 143 144

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monie avec le précepte divin, veulent que celui qui viole ce précepte, en subisse la peine”). Ibid., 69. See generally Albert Mayrand, “Les chefs d’indemnité en cas d’accident mortel,” Cahiers de droit 9 (1967–8): 642. Ravary was the first milestone in the long and circuitous history of compensation for solatium doloris in Quebec (and Canada). For an overview, see Michel Morin, “Une analyse historique et comparative de l’indemnisation du solatium doloris au Québec,” in Mélanges Claude Masse: en quête de justice et d’équité, ed. Pierre-Claude Lafond (Cowansville, QC: Yvon Blais, 2003), 347–86. Sourdat, Traité général, 1:22. An Act for Compensating the Families of Persons killed by Accident, and for other purposes therein mentioned, S.P.C. 1847 (10 & 11 Vic.), c. 6, quotation from s. II. The English model is An Act for compensating the Families of Persons killed by Accident, 9 & 10 Vic. (1846), c. 93 (U.K.), known as Lord Campbell’s Act. Though the Canadian act did not specify which kinds of damages were available, the argument was that since moral damages were barred in England, and the Canadian statute was modelled on the English statute, this same limitation had been imported into Canadian law with the statute. The initial trial decision is unreported, and the case file does not survive. See the summaries in Ravary (Sup. Ct.), 281, and Ravary (Q.B.), 53. Ravary (Sup. Ct.), 281. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 282. In Canadian Pacific Railway v. Robinson (1887), 14 S.C.R. 105, which, despite itself being overturned on appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ([1892] A.C. 481), remained the operative (though much criticized) statement of the law regarding solatium doloris in Quebec until Augustus v. Gosset, [1996] 3 S.C.R. 268. Ravary (Q.B.), 59. By “common law” the judges meant the droit commun of the province, not the English common law. Ibid., 57, Badgley J. E.H. Perreau, “Des droits de la personnalité,” Revue trimestrielle de droit civil 8 (1909): 501–36. Though judges in Lower Canada did not explicitly theorize this position, their treatment of moral injury accorded with Savigny, who in 1840 argued against viewing intangible interests as rights, since the objects of such claimed rights were indefinable. See Savigny, Traité, 1:330–1.

10 “Possession of arms among these men … might lead to serious consequences”: Regulating Firearms in the Canadas, 1760–1867 r . b l ak e b row n

Canadians have become accustomed to ferocious debates over gun control. However, unknown to most, the question of whether citizens should be able to freely purchase, possess, and use arms has a long history in this country. This chapter examines whether, how, and why authorities regulated firearms in the Canadas from the beginning of the British regime to Confederation. In undertaking an examination of pre-Confederation gun regulation, this chapter contributes to three areas of Canadian historiography. First, it adds to the slim literature on the extent to which Canadians owned and used firearms. A popular image of hardy pioneers leads to the assumption that many pre-Confederation Canadians owned weapons to hunt. Douglas McCalla, however, argues that gun ownership was far from universal in mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canada, a position this chapter supports.1 Second, historians have until recently given little attention to the history of firearm regulation in British North America, with the result that the framework of gun control laws is poorly understood, especially in the period before Confederation.2 Finally, while numerous historians have examined the constitutional history of British North America, they have focused most on broad issues such as the nation’s founding in 1867 and the development of federalism.3 They have spent less time considering how citizens viewed the individual liberties conferred by the British constitution, including whether Canadians believed that subjects had a right to bear arms.4

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Cultural attitudes, labour strife, civil unrest, firearm technology, constitutional thought, and foreign threat all shaped the extent to which Canadians used and regulated firearms. During settlement periods, European colonists possessed a substantial number of guns to hunt for food and to defend themselves. However, in the mid-nineteenth century firearms appear, in general, to have become less common in the more established areas of the Canadas. They became unnecessary as the bounty of farms increased, concern with foreign invasion subsided, and inhabitants became less fearful of Aboriginal peoples. Despite the fact that the Canadas do not appear to have been awash in firearms during much of the period between 1760 and 1867, the ownership or use of arms was at times regulated. Firearm laws fell into three categories. First, many local governments sought to prevent the discharge of guns in towns and cities. Second, the Province of Canada placed limits on the possession of weapons at public meetings and polling places. Third, colonial governments periodically passed laws that limited gun possession or use when fears rose of foreign invasion, or domestic ethnic, class, or political revolt. Firearms Technology and Gun Ownership Explaining the history of firearm regulation requires some sense of the extent to which inhabitants possessed guns. Unfortunately it is very difficult to determine with precision the level of gun ownership at almost any time in Canadian history. This is unsurprising, since quantifying firearm ownership has also bedevilled historians in Britain and the United States. A historian of gun regulation in England admits that “we have no way of knowing how many Englishmen actually owned firearms.”5 However, the available evidence suggests that firearm ownership was not universal in the Canadas in the century before Confederation. Europeans brought firearms to North America, but the number of weapons at any particular time or place depended on their perceived usefulness. The flintlock musket was the most common type of firearm in the Canadas from the eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth. Loading entailed pouring powder and ball down the barrel, then ramming the shot and powder into place with a ramrod. The flintlock used a piece of flint hitting a striking plate, or frizzen, to create sparks that ignited the primer, lighting the powder in the barrel and causing the gun to fire.6

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While flintlocks were relatively cheap and easy to repair, they had a number of weaknesses. Loading a musket took at least thirty seconds and usually required the owner to stand, thus exposing him to enemy fire. Compared to modern weapons, muskets also often misfired and required frequent cleaning to prevent barrels building up a powder residue. Finally, muskets lacked accuracy, with short effective ranges of approximately one hundred metres. This led to the practice of discouraging shooting accuracy amongst soldiers. Instead, massed musketeers devastated enemies at short range. Despite the limitations of such firearms, early French colonists often armed themselves in case of conflict with Aboriginal peoples or other Europeans. The Iroquois discovered this in 1609, when Samuel de Champlain famously used a firearm to kill two Iroquois chiefs.7 Many French colonials became adept at using firearms to hunt and to protect themselves from attacks by foreign powers or hostile Aboriginal peoples. Firearm ownership, however, though widespread, was not universal in New France. When an English privateer captured Quebec in 1629, his inventory of captured French possessions included just nineteen firearms. While the French population of Quebec was small – no more than one hundred, and mostly male – the small number of captured weapons suggests that not every male inhabitant possessed a firearm. The number of weapons in New France increased when the French Crown sent military forces to protect the fledgling colony. In addition, in 1669 France ordered the creation of colonial militia companies composed of all able-bodied men between the ages of fifteen and sixty. Many militiamen, however, could not afford a musket. Large families often possessed a gun only for the head of the household and perhaps for the eldest son, thus leaving younger sons unarmed. Militiamen often expected authorities to provide arms; otherwise, they brought only the “oldest and most useless firearms to a muster.”8 When war broke out between France and England in 1744, Canada had 11,285 militiamen but only 7,260 muskets, many unworkable.9 Like the residents of New France, not all British colonials possessed arms. After Britain took possession of New France in 1763, the British population initially remained small, limited mainly to soldiers and government officials. Substantial levels of British immigration into what became Upper Canada in 1791 began with the Loyalist migrations of the 1780s. Many of these early British settlers armed themselves to hunt, fend off animals, or defend themselves from feared attacks by Aboriginal peoples. Loyalist immigrants, for example, noted the impor-

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tant place of hunting in early Upper Canadian life. Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the first lieutenant-governor, reported that their family’s diet at York included several types of wild game, including duck, pigeon, deer, and raccoon. Thomas William McGrath reported as late as 1832 that many settlers in Upper Canada carried small arms when walking along roads so they could shoot any game that suddenly appeared.10 As agriculture became established in different parts of the Canadas, however, farmers had less need to participate in subsistence hunting. Crops and livestock supplanted hunting as the primary means of providing food, although farmers undoubtedly retained some firearms to kill pests and protect property. In addition, prevailing conceptions of ideal land use in the nineteenth century discouraged hunting by farmers. Hunting was “associated with idleness,” Jeffrey McNairn notes, for it drew settlers’ attention away from establishing successful farms, and was thus “incompatible with economic development.”11 While Catharine Parr Traill noted in 1855 that inhabitants of Upper Canada’s backwoods sold hunted meat in more settled areas, nineteenth-century gun sales at country stores suggest a gradual reduction in the use of firearms in rural areas.12 Douglas McCalla concludes that “there was a heritage of firearms in rural society from pioneer days, but it was not universal and it was markedly diminishing at mid-century.” He estimates that Upper Canada imported almost 125,000 pounds of gunpowder in 1861. Even if all of this went to civilian use, each household used only five ounces. The relatively small amount of gunpowder imported “scarcely suggests widespread and extensive shooting by most families.”13 Other factors contributed to a decline in firearm ownership. By the mid-nineteenth century, many British North Americans felt less threatened by Aboriginal peoples. During the early to mid-nineteenth century, many Native groups in the eastern colonies experienced a substantial decline in their strength vis-à-vis the growing European population. Both the English and French had developed strong ties with Aboriginal groups during their colonial competition for control of North America. Settlers often feared attacks by Aboriginals who either sided with an opposing European power or generally expressed hostility to foreign incursions into their territory. But by the mid-nineteenth century, the fear of potential attacks by Native peoples had subsided in what became eastern Canada. As a result, European inhabitants felt less compelled to have a weapon for protection.14 The creation of more effective law enforcement institutions also decreased British North Americans’ interest in gun ownership, espe-

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cially in urban areas. Various local governments developed effective law enforcement strategies, eventually drawing inspiration from police reforms in Britain and the United States to professionalize policing.15 The establishment of new police forces led citizens to rely less on themselves for the preservation of the public peace. As views changed about who should respond to crime, citizens likely felt less urgency to own firearms for protection. The end of duelling also contributed to modest levels of gun ownership by the mid-nineteenth century. Duels usually occurred because of a perceived slight that cast doubt on the honour of one of the participants. The practice allowed upper-class men to demonstrate their virtue and courage under the threat of death. Most countries officially banned duelling. For example, England outlawed duels in the seventeenth century. But courts and juries proved unwilling to convict men who murdered others in properly conducted duels, and, as a result, duelling continued.16 Duelling migrated across the Atlantic to the North American colonies. Early duellists in what became Canada fought with swords, but after the British conquest of New France, pistols replaced swords. Firing a pistol took considerably less skill than fencing, which broadened the appeal of duelling by making it easier to participate.17 Duelling was in vogue in British North America in the early nineteenth century among elite men, such as lawyers, and, to a lesser extent, military officers. These men sought to create a society that encouraged hierarchy and paternalism, and duelling became integral in how they defined their own class and masculinity. Duelling therefore, according to Cecilia Morgan, was “a public display of masculine courage for the eyes of all society to see and record, particularly those of the duellists’ own class.”18 Opponents of duelling called it a barbaric practice and suggested that men should avoid demonstrations of male honour through physical violence. The critique of duelling also stemmed from the colonial reform movement that opposed the hierarchy duelling represented. Such criticisms resulted in a decline in duelling, and few duels took place after the 1840s.19 Men thus had no need for a well-crafted set of duelling pistols. Militia laws of the pre-Confederation Canadas often required men to own and use weapons, but governments usually failed to enforce these regulations. The colonial militia laws of British North America differed in important ways from the British model. In Britain, the distaste for standing armies made the militia an important body. Britain, however, did not arm all men. In the seventeenth century, Parliament created

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different divisions of militia. All able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty could be required to appear for a “general muster.” Musters occurred infrequently and offered participants little military training. The muster, however, provided opportunities to select those deemed most loyal to the government because of their social status, political views, and religion to serve in the “trained band.” The responsibility of arming and drilling fell upon men of property, and the members of the trained band did not retain militia firearms. A new militia act in 1757 dictated the selection of thirty thousand men by lot to serve for three years. The British government also took over responsibility for supplying arms to the militia, although it kept these weapons out of the hands of the militiamen, except when needed to train or fight.20 The vulnerability of the British settlements in North America meant colonies passed laws requiring broader militia participation. In most of the Thirteen Colonies, all able-bodied free white men between sixteen and sixty had to possess a gun and could be called out for militia service. The militia systems of the pre-Confederation Canadas also required universal participation but demanded less in terms of gun ownership. The 1777 militia ordinance for Lower Canada required militia service of most able-bodied men and obliged militia officers to call out their companies to inspect arms and to fire at marks. The law, however, did not require men to own guns. The 1787 Lower Canada militia ordinance dictated that a militiaman’s failure to bring his firearm to muster could result in a fine, but again it did not dictate gun ownership. By 1803, Lower Canada still did not require men to have weapons, but it did stipulate that militia members provide an account of the number of firearms in their possession.21 Upper Canada passed a militia act in 1793 requiring most men between sixteen and fifty to enrol in the militia, but it did not force them to supply their own arms. This changed by 1808, by which time Upper Canada dictated that each militiaman had to provide himself a firearm and at least six rounds of ball and sufficient powder, unless his commanding officer excused him from the requirement because he could not procure a weapon.22 These militia laws, even the 1808 Upper Canada statute, did not result in all men either owning or using arms. The propagation of the “militia myth” in the late nineteenth century established an erroneous belief that the militia served as the backbone of the defence of early Upper Canada, especially during the War of 1812. In fact, regular forces largely took responsibility for defending British possessions in North America, in part because militia members often proved reluctant to

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serve. The militia was also ineffective because of a lack of firearms. After the British attack on the Chesapeake in 1807 led to fears of war with the United States, Isaac Brock chose not to call out the Upper Canada militia because of a paucity of available firearms. While the law required militia members to bring their own arms to train, many men lacked the means to procure a weapon. The government distributed several thousand muskets in Upper Canada between 1795 and 1812, but most were soon lost, broken, or sold. According to Alan Taylor, Upper Canadian militiamen at the beginning of the War of 1812 “lacked weapons, discipline, and professional officers.” In 1822, Robert Gourlay observed that Upper Canada militiamen were “imperfectly armed” although required by law to own weapons.23 Such statements support McCalla’s claim that firearms ownership, even in rural Upper Canada, was not universal. The Lower Canada militia also lacked enough firearms. In 1807, the colony’s 54,072 militiamen possessed only 10,044 muskets. By 1815, this decreased to just under 7,500 for the colony’s 53,929 militiamen. In 1827, the number of official militia members had increased to 79,542, but the number of muskets in their possession grew only to 10,403. The most careful historical study of the militia’s arms concludes that fewer than 20 per cent of Lower Canada’s militia had a weapon in the early nineteenth century.24 This lack of arms hampered efforts to defend the eastern townships of Quebec in the War of 1812. In April 1813, militia leader Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Cull pleaded for arms because of the lack of privately owned guns. Cull noted that “with the few old Firelocks, fowling pieces, Pitchforks, etc. that we could muster, it is not very probable that our defence would redound much to our Honor or the advantage of the Country.” Later, in October 1813, Cull again noted that the local militiamen required arms because “the very few rusty neglected fowling pieces that some few men (addicted to Hunting) have to snap three or four times probably at a Partridge are not worthy to be reckon’d.”25 In the late 1820s, Lower Canada militia officers took roll calls on muster days but organized little or no drilling or shooting.26 The amalgamation of Upper Canada (which became known as Canada West) and Lower Canada (Canada East) into the United Province of Canada in 1841 did not result in the creation of a well-armed militia. By the mid-nineteenth century the institution was in disrepair. According to Canada’s leading military historian, the colonial militias were “unarmed, untrained, and by the 1840s, unorganized.”27 The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 saw a brief burst of interest in the militia. For ex-

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ample, the Province of Canada’s 1855 Militia Act allowed for the creation of an active militia of five thousand to be armed, equipped, and paid five shillings per day for ten days of training. Interest soon waned, however, and the province did not renew the 1855 act in 1858.28 The weakness of the militia meant that most inhabitants did not become acquainted with weapons or purchase guns because of compulsory military service. The lack of firearms in the Canadas was evident in the extent to which men involved in the uprisings of 1837 and 1838 had guns. Many of the men who assembled to support William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebellion in 1837 came unarmed. Similarly, many of the participants in the Lower Canadian rebellion required guns, and the rebellion’s leaders constantly pursued additional weapons. According to Allan Greer, the rural patriots were “pathetically short of arms.” While there were “hunting fusils hanging in many an habitant cabin,” they tended to be “old and unreliable, and in any case there were only enough for a small proportion of the insurgents.”29 The limited use of firearms in violent crime further suggests a modest level of gun ownership in the Canadas in the first half of the nineteenth century. While people feared crime, few murderers killed with guns. In 1857, the Globe reported on an elderly man who had shot his stepson, but noted that it was “not often we are called upon to record man-shooting in Canada.”30 Even the most violent cities experienced relatively small numbers of homicides using guns. As Donald Fyson has shown, in Lower Canada, a relatively violent society in the first half of the nineteenth century, civilians rarely employed firearms in murders. Even most soldiers in Lower Canada preferred to use swords or bayonets when they became involved in interpersonal violence.31 The limited number of guns in the established areas of the Canadas meant that firearms posed few dangers in normal circumstances. There was thus usually little need for the regulation of firearms. A relatively unarmed citizenry was not, however, a permanent condition. Beginning around 1860, a growing number of people expressed interest in gun ownership. This was, in part, motivated by technological improvements to weapons. By the end of the American Civil War, the industrial production of firearms moved gun-making from the artisan’s workshop to the factory. Industrial gun manufacturing allowed for the mass production of weapons that incorporated several important technological improvements: rifled arms largely supplanted smooth-bore weapons; breech-loading guns replaced muzzle-loaders; cartridges

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became self-contained; and many arms could hold several rounds of ammunition and be fired in rapid succession.32 These changes made long guns more accurate, extended their range, and made them more reliable. They also made long guns more dangerous. Canada did not produce its own modern rifles in the 1860s, but foreign manufacturers made them widely available.33 These guns proved especially appealing to those wanting to defend the Canadas against a feared attack by the United States or the Fenians in the 1860s. The Globe suggested that “if every man in Canada, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, could put a bullet through a target at six hundred yards, a long step would be taken towards safety.”34 Writers in other newspapers agreed. For example, in 1866 the Grand River Sachem suggested that arming citizens with modern weapons would make Canada more secure, for “25,000 men armed with breechloading repeating rifles, would be equal to 100,000 men armed with the muzzle-loading Enfield, or any other similar arm.”35 Advocates of rifle shooting drew parallels between the breech-loading rifle and the historic English longbow, suggesting that Canadians trained in rifle shooting would defeat an opponent in the same way English longbowmen annihilated French forces in the Hundred Years War. “Time was when England had a national weapon,” suggested the Globe in 1860, and “she is now likely to have one again.” “The English bowmen decided the day at Crescy, at Poitiers, and at Agincourt,” and what in one day was done “with the bow can be more easily done in ours by the rifle.”36 Many members of the volunteer units created to supplement the militia thus sought modern weapons, and the Province of Canada armed a handful of the Queen’s Own Rifles with Spencer repeating rifles to repulse Fenian raiders.37 Canadians interested in defending against foreign invasion also joined the many new rifle associations formed in the Canadas during the 1860s. The British National Rifle Association, established in 1859, provided a model for the organizations that appeared in the Canadas in the 1860s.38 The Upper Canada Rifle Association existed by 1862, and Quebec had a provincial rifle association by 1869, although rifle shooting competitions occurred in Quebec earlier.39 The sudden popularity of rifle shooting led the Toronto Globe to declare in 1864 that rifle matches “have come greatly into vogue of late years.”40 Rifle associations held regular shooting matches, offering cash prizes and medals for winning shooters. The Upper Canada Rifle Association, for example, held its first shooting competition on the Garrison Common in Toronto in 1862,

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offering a range of prizes for various competitions. In 1864, more than $8,000 in prize money was awarded in shooting competitions throughout the Province of Canada, and in 1865 23,301 men participated in rifle shooting.41 This middle-class, urban interest in shooting sparked a revival in gun ownership in the Canadas that would be strengthened further by post-Confederation developments, including the availability of inexpensive revolvers and the growth of a recreational hunting culture amongst middle-class and elite men.42 Regulating Firearms While the number of firearms in circulation appears modest, authorities still regulated the possession or use of guns in three different situations. Some laws limited the discharge of firearms in urban areas. Legislators passed a second set of measures to prevent violence at polls and at public meetings. The third group of laws prevented the possession of firearms in places and at times that unrest, or potential unrest, threatened the state or its goals. Discharging weapons in urban areas posed several obvious problems. Noisy gunfire could constitute a nuisance, startling horses and causing injuries to their riders or to bystanders. Guns discharged in heavily populated areas could also accidentally strike people or property. As well, a desire to prevent fires long motivated the regulation of gunpowder and firearms in urban areas.43 In the eighteenth century, Montreal, Quebec City, and Trois-Rivières outlawed shooting guns within their boundaries. For example, by 1783 Montreal threatened a twenty shilling fine for anyone who fired a gun in the community.44 Other communities followed suit in the nineteenth century.45 By 1852, Hamilton included in its nuisance bylaws a provision that “no person shall fire any gun or other fire arms … within the City.”46 Toronto also had a measure against the discharge of guns among its nuisance and preservation of order bylaws. Quebec City created perhaps the strictest municipal gun law. In 1865, it forbade everyone from carrying a firearm on their person in public places.47 These bylaws were thus relatively common. While local governments did not limit the ownership of arms, they sought to regulate usage in areas of high population density.48 A second group of gun control measures sought to prevent the use of firearms at polling places and public meetings. The Canadas experienced frequent election-day violence in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Election legislation had long banned intimidation and violence, but in 1842 the Province of Canada passed legislation allowing an election returning officer or a deputy returning officer to demand offensive weapons, including firearms, from anyone possessing such arms. People who refused could be punished with a fine of up to twenty-five pounds and/or imprisonment of up to three months. Seized weapons could be returned following the election. To prevent arms from flowing into a polling area, the legislature also banned anyone who had not been resident in the polling district in the previous six months from coming within two miles of a polling place with a firearm. Doing so could lead to a hefty fine of up to fifty pounds and/or six months’ imprisonment.49 The Province of Canada created similar provisions to prevent men arming themselves while attending public meetings. Legislation enacted in 1843 allowed any justice of the peace within whose jurisdiction a public meeting had been called to demand offensive weapons. Failure to hand over a weapon could result in a smaller fine than on election days – up to forty shillings. If the owner peaceably and quietly delivered the weapon, he or she could apply to have the gun returned. As an added protection, no armed person could approach to within two miles of any public meeting. The fine for an infraction of this ban was again high, although lower than carrying weapons close to a polling place – up to a twenty-five pound fine and/or imprisonment for up to three months. Those exempted from these bans included the sheriff, justices of the peace, mayors or high bailiffs of a city or town, and constables or special constables.50 Perceived threats to the state or its goals resulted in the third group of firearm controls. These laws generally shared two common characteristics. First, legislators typically sought to limit the possession or use of guns by groups deemed dangerous, rather than to regulate all citizens. Second, legislators erected temporary measures that did not permanently disarm inhabitants. This reflected the sense that legislators had no need or right to permanently interfere with gun ownership. Between 1760 and 1867, four episodes resulted in this type of legislation: the British conquest of Canada, the 1837–8 rebellions, the Irish influx and canal riots of the 1840s, and tensions with the United States in the 1860s. After the fall of Canada, Britain seized, then regulated, arms. The British initially disarmed inhabitants and obliged the French to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown.51 Robert Monckton issued a

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proclamation following Britain’s victory at Quebec City in 1759 permitting the defeated French to return to their parishes, take possession of their lands, and practise their religion, provided that they “surrender their arms, take the oath of fidelity and remain peaceably in their homes.”52 In 1760, after the French surrender at Montreal, all inhabitants who had not turned in their arms were ordered to do so. This resulted in the delivery of many guns in some areas. For example, the almost 600 residents of Trois-Rivières and its suburbs delivered 212 firearms to authorities, while the roughly 331 inhabitants of Maskinongé handed in 128 guns.53 The British soon allowed some French Canadians to use tightly regulated weapons. To control the countryside, the British allowed Canadien militia leaders firearms. In 1761, the British also permitted a small number of arms for hunting in the Trois-Rivières district. Authorities distributed firearms and gun permits “for the relief of the inhabitants,” and intended that “guns and permits should be lent mutually and of good will from one to another among the inhabitants of the same parish.” Captains of the militia ensured that the arms remained longest in the possession of those “who are poorest” so that they could hunt. In addition to these shared guns, a firearm and permit to the seignior and an arm and permit to the curé were provided by the governor.54 The British, however, distributed only a small number of guns. For example, the residents of Maskinongé had surrendered 128 firearms to authorities. The British subsequently allowed one weapon for the curé and eight arms for the inhabitants to share. Similarly, the roughly 566 residents of Machiche had delivered 179 guns to the government but received just five weapons to share.55 Even when added to the small number of arms held by the officers and sergeants of the militia, it is clear that a much smaller proportion of French Canadians possessed arms immediately after the fall of New France. Officials sometimes complained that Canadians misused weapons provided for hunting or possessed guns illegally. The military governor of Quebec, James Murray, charged that many French Canadians hid their firearms and used them illegally. He thus banned workers and artisans from carrying arms in Quebec City in 1761. In 1762, the acting captain of militia at Yamaska received word that more guns than permits had been distributed, and thus he had to search for arms. Residents had to hand surplus weapons to authorities, and the British threatened severe punishment for people who possessed excess guns in the future.56 Two years later, in March 1764, the government ordered

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the inhabitants of Batiscan and Rivière Batiscan to surrender their arms to authorities in Trois-Rivières because they refused “so insolently to employ them for the welfare of the public.” They thus did not “deserve to have them for their personal interest.” Further, the British ordered the search for and seizure of firearms acquired illegally in the parish. Owners of houses in which authorities found guns faced a twelvedollar fine.57 These limitations on gun ownership ended when the civil government that replaced the military regime in August 1764 did not re-introduce the measures. The Lower Canada militia ordinance of 1777 required the calling out of militiamen for the inspection of their arms. Authorities designed the ordinance to encourage militia service during the period of the American Revolution, using a ban on gun ownership as a stick. Anyone who refused to serve faced several penalties, including being “rendered incapable” of keeping or bearing firearms.58 The militia law of 1787 lacked this particular penalty, likely because the crisis caused by the American Revolution had ended. The 1837–8 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada also led to the passage of legislation designed to disarm potential rebels. Upper Canada acted because men had “clandestinely and unlawfully assembled” and had “practiced Military Training and Exercising in Arms, to the great terror and alarm of Her Majesty’s loyal Subjects.” While many rebels in fact lacked arms, Upper Canada banned meetings for the purpose of drilling or practising in the use of arms, threatening violators with incarceration for up to two years. The government permitted magistrates to seize arms if one or more witnesses under oath provided evidence of possession for a purpose dangerous to the public peace. The legislation also enabled justices to issue warrants to conduct searches of homes or other buildings for firearms. If the occupant refused admission, the house or building could be entered by force. Further, the legislation allowed for authorities to arrest and detain any person found carrying arms “in such manner and at such times” as to afford “just grounds of suspicion that the same are for purposes dangerous to the public peace.”59 The legislation allowed for the eventual return of seized guns. Upper Canada made these measures temporary – they expired once the fear of further rebellion subsided. Beginning in 1838, the Special Council that administered Lower Canada after the outbreak of rebellion issued ordinances that imposed gun regulation. Although similar to Upper Canada’s law, the Lower Canada measure possessed slightly more draconian provisions, likely because

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of the more serious nature of the Lower Canada rebellion, which lasted longer and witnessed more violence. In addition, the Special Council, unhampered by the niceties of the normal legislative process, could easily issue a series of repressive measures. A justice of the peace or other authorized person could seize firearms from any person in the province, with the exception of guns in the hands of military forces or government officials. Unlike Upper Canada, Lower Canada did not require credible witnesses to provide evidence to take such action. The ordinance also permitted justices of the peace or other authorized persons to enter dwellings or other buildings to look for weapons, but, unlike in Upper Canada, did not require a warrant. All seized weapons went to one of several secure locations, including the police offices in Montreal, Quebec, or Trois-Rivières, the office of the clerk of the peace in Sherbrooke, or a military post. Resisting implementation of the act could result in three months in jail. Another difference from the Upper Canada legislation was that the Lower Canadian law did not include provisions for the return of seized weapons. A final difference was that the Lower Canada ordinance eventually became permanent; initially to expire 1 January 1840, it was continued until 1 June 1840, then made permanent.60 There was British precedent for these Canadian measures, although Lower Canada created a law in some ways more stringent than the British antecedents. Following the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the British Parliament passed legislation designed to prevent a feared revolution, including an act to prevent unlawful training in the use of arms or military drill. It differed from the measures in Upper Canada in the available punishments. Courts could sentence persons who trained others in the use of arms to seven years’ transportation or two years’ imprisonment. Persons who attended a meeting to receive training in arms faced a penalty of up to two years’ incarceration. Another response was the 1820 Seizure of Arms Act, which allowed justices of the peace in counties marked by disturbances to seize arms. The Upper Canada act was most similar to the British statute in that both, unlike the Lower Canadian ordinance, included some procedural safeguards, such as the requirement that authorities acquire a warrant to search homes.61 An 1845 act designed to disarm canal workers represented the third example of gun legislation meant to respond to threats to the state or its goals. In the early 1840s, the Province of Canada contracted out the construction of several canals. There were, however, never enough jobs for the large number of job-seekers. This created social tensions around

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canals, as did fluctuations in the demand for labour and traditions of animosity between Catholics and Protestants and between immigrants from different parts of Ireland. Workers complained of poor wages, and local residents expressed concern about large groups of rowdy, unhappy young men.62 When canal workers rioted or fought amongst themselves, they used a variety of weapons, including fists, clubs, swords, pikes, and pitchforks. Workers also sometimes procured guns, causing great concern for colonial officials. In 1843, for example, a number of workers on the Lachine Canal had firearms. Labour battles involving canal workers near Williamsburg, Upper Canada, in 1844 resulted in frequent complaints by officials and local residents that canal workers possessed guns. The tendency of canal men to acquire weapons by breaking into the homes of local residents proved an especially worrying practice.63 For example, in November 1844, five justices of the peace from the Cornwall area reported that labourers daily tried to steal firearms, often with success, and had even attempted to capture caches of militia weapons.64 Justices of the peace and other inhabitants from the County of Dundas claimed that labourers had “forcibly broken open houses and taken out fire-arms,” and were “furnishing themselves with arms and ammunition by various means, and from various sources.”65 By early 1845 reports indicated that Welland Canal construction workers had supplied themselves with weapons, possibly by bringing them in from Buffalo.66 Authorities had few means to disarm canal workers. An engineer convinced a number of armed labourers at the Beauharnois Canal to hand their weapons to officials, although they eventually returned these guns because they had no legal right to retain them.67 In November 1844, fear of armed construction workers at the Lachine Canal led Governor General Charles Metcalfe to order the disarmament of the labourers, using the 1838 Lower Canada measure for seizing weapons. The resulting sweep of canal workers’ residences resulted in the seizure of fifty-one firearms. A similar sweep of residences at the Beauharnois Canal resulted in the seizure of just two arms. The small number reflected the modest size of the workforce on the Beauharnois Canal, the limited availability of guns, or perhaps that news of the search spread quickly amongst the workers, who responded by hiding their arms.68 Authorities remained nervous, despite the seizures. In January 1845, a stipendiary magistrate of the Lachine Police said that his force could do little to control the canal workers because of the

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small size of the police force and because labourers possessed “large quantities of fire-arms.”69 The fear of armed canal workers led to legislation in 1845 allowing for limitations on gun possession at public works. Unlike the 1838 disarming statute, which applied only to Canada East, the 1845 act applied to the entire Province of Canada. The attorney general for Canada East, James Smith, deemed the existing tools of the criminal justice system insufficient to police the hordes of men building public works.70 Anti-Irish sentiments played a substantial role in the passage of the legislation. Assemblyman George Macdonell of Dundas encouraged legislative action because, he said, canal workers liked to pillage arms from local inhabitants, fight amongst themselves, and generally act like a “horde of savages.” Similarly, Edward Hale, an English-educated businessman representing Sherbrooke, supported the bill because it was “well known” that the Irish were “warm-blooded, and apt to quarrel.”71 The legislature created an act flexible enough to disarm canal workers when and where required. It allowed the governor-in-council to proclaim the act in force in areas in which public works, such as canals, were under construction. The state could employ two prongs of the legislation to keep order. First, the legislation permitted the formation of a mounted police force to assist magistrates. Second, the act could ban all public works construction employees from possessing a firearm. Unlike the 1838 Lower Canada measure, the 1845 law allowed for the return of weapons. When a weapon was delivered to a local magistrate, the owner would receive a receipt showing that the gun had been deposited. Once the act ceased to be in force, authorities would return the arm. Weapons kept illegally could be seized and ownership forfeited to the government, which could sell such confiscated arms. The government threatened hefty potential penalties of between ten and twenty-five pounds for concealing, or assisting in the concealment of, weapons. To encourage enforcement, informers received half of these fines. Moreover, the legislation allowed justices of the peace to authorize searches for and seizure of weapons from any person or household with sufficient evidence suggesting the presence of a weapon. Anyone found carrying a weapon could also be arrested. Like most such laws, the government made the act temporary – it was to remain in force for two years, although the legislature extended it a number of times before it finally expired in 1860.72 Despite the serious canal violence, aspects of the 1845 measure created controversy in the Assembly. The debates over the legislation shed

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light on attitudes to firearms in the Canadas, and, most importantly, on the perceived constitutional right of British subjects to possess arms for their own defence. While the bill ultimately passed by a wide margin, opponents of the proposed law issued several complaints. A major concern was that disarming citizens threatened to violate the British constitution. Attorney General James Smith suggested that the government could not, in normal circumstances, disarm inhabitants, but he deemed acceptable this targeted and temporary measure. He admitted that the powers applied for were “great, but when taken into consideration with the circumstances of the case, they were very limited.” To allay fears that the measure violated the rights of Englishmen, Smith suggested that many of the canal workers would eventually move to the United States upon the completion of the canal work. As a result, “nothing could arise from this bill which would be injurious to the rights of citizens of the country.” This hinted at the extent to which legislators would feel free to limit the application of this right. Smith also noted that he would consider a “general disarming measure” to be “an atrocious one,” but his bill targeted only dangerous inhabitants. When some legislators worried that the 1845 legislation might result in the disarming of citizens living near a canal, Smith assured them that this would not occur. Other legislators also suggested that the act risked trampling established liberties. Former attorney general for Upper Canada, Robert Baldwin, felt reluctant to grant “great and arbitrary powers” to the executive, and compared the proposal to the Irish coercion acts – the various laws passed to suppress dissent and impose order in Ireland. He nevertheless supported the legislation. While “it could never be pleasant” to “restrict the liberties of the subject” in the context of public works violence, “the restriction for a time might prevent its loss for ever.” Assemblyman Thomas Cushing Aylwin, a reformer, lawyer, and former solicitor general for Lower Canada voted against the bill. In attacking the legislation, he invoked the memory of the controversial Irish coercion acts, claiming that the proposed law was “one of those disarming Bills” which had “aroused the indignation of the people of Britain and Ireland, not once but a dozen times.” He called the plan an “unconstitutional exercise of power” that targeted the poor and left alone men of high standing who walked about armed. Reformer Joseph-Édouard Cauchon, a journalist who was called to the bar but did not practise, also believed the proposed act arbitrary and unjust, and thus voted against the bill.73

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It is somewhat unclear which constitutional principle critics of the act had in mind. They may have been concerned that the act would infringe the right to property by taking firearms, albeit briefly. The Toronto Globe had expressed this view after the 1844 attempts to disarm canal workers. It argued that the government had to limit such action to situations dangerous to the public. “As a general rule,” suggested the Globe, “every man has a right to the possession of his musket, or other weapons, as much as any other kind of property,” and it was “only when an unlawful use of those arms is about to be made, either collectively or individually, that the government has a right to deprive the owners of them.”74 It is more likely, however, that critics of the legislation felt unease with the potential infringement of the right to bear arms found in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Article VII of the Bill of Rights provides “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Armes for their defence suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.”75 William Blackstone repeated, and disseminated, this right. He called Article VII an “auxiliary right”: “The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject … is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law.”76 Like the American Second Amendment, Article VII has provoked scholarly debate about its meaning. A minority of scholars, most prominently Joyce Lee Malcolm, argue that the provision guaranteed a broad right to the mass of Englishmen to bear arms.77 The majority position is that the guarantee contained several important limitations. Lois Schwoerer offers this view, noting that only Protestants had the right to arms, which reflected the strong hostility to Catholics in English society. As well, the provision had a class limitation, for men could be armed only “suitable to their Condition.” This, says Schwoerer, “reflected the social and economic prejudices of upper-class English society.”78 After all, the upper class did not want all Protestants armed. The right to possess arms was associated with property ownership – men without property had little or no right to bear arms. Finally, the proviso “as allowed by Law” recognized Parliament’s long history of regulating gun ownership through militia and game laws, and the future ability of Parliament to control gun ownership and use, as needed. The 1845 debates over gun regulation demonstrated that some British North Americans held dear the right to bear arms, at least the right of men of property to bear arms as described by Schwoerer. The Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights held a privileged place

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in the conception of “British justice” espoused by many nineteenthcentury Canadian lawyers. As well, Blackstone was important in the education of nineteenth-century common law lawyers, many of whom had begun to espouse liberal views regarding rights and property by the 1840s. Legislators thus noted the existence of the English right, although they did not characterize it as a fundamental right based in natural law. Instead, they portrayed it as a right that could be tempered by social demands and necessities. This reflected a view of liberty that assumed that the provincial assembly was “the guarantor of the rights and liberties of its citizens.”79 It is thus unsurprising that some members of the bar expressed a belief in a limited right to possess arms. Lewis Drummond, a Catholic, Irish-born lawyer, provided the clearest evidence that a belief in the right to bear arms existed in the minds of some Canadian legislators. Drummond called the bill a “tyrannical and arbitrary measure,” expressly invoking the “constitutional right that all men possessed to keep and carry arms for the protection of their property.” Drummond generally supported the cause of Irish canal workers, but he refused to extend the right to bear arms to them because they lacked property. In his view, labourers had “no property to protect, they were too poor to acquire any, and therefore it was better that a little should be sacrificed to prevent the loss of a single life, or the commission of an act of violence.” The “possession of arms among these men, when driven by the arbitrary acts of the contractors, or want, to acts of violence, might tend to serious consequences, and therefore their being deprived of them [i.e., firearms] would contribute to the peace of the country and their own welfare.”80 When legislators deemed workers less than full citizens, because of their ethnicity and/or lack of property, they felt free to refuse full rights of British citizenship, including a right to a gun. Nevertheless, Drummond’s overt comments, and the more opaque statements of Baldwin, Aylwin, Cauchon, and Smith, suggest that a limited right to bear arms – to protect property – was a relatively common view in the mid-1840s, at least amongst men with some legal training. No member of the Assembly, it should be noted, spoke against such a right.81 The American Civil War and its aftermath spurred a final flurry of firearm regulations in the mid-1860s meant to protect the state. The first measure followed the 1864 St Albans Raid in which a small contingent of Confederate soldiers used Canada as a base to raid St Albans, Vermont. The event caused an international furore that risked drawing

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British North America into an armed conflict with the United States. One response of the Province of Canada meant to deflate tensions was 1865 legislation to prevent outrages on the frontier. The act allowed for the deportation of aliens and created stiff penalties for assisting an attack on a foreign state. The legislation also sought to control weapons that could be used in cross-border raids. It permitted the seizure of weapons of war held for the purpose of a military raid beyond the borders of the colony, or held for a purpose dangerous to the public peace within the Province of Canada.82 The Civil War also played a role in legislation meant to disarm the Fenians. Irish-American Civil War veterans launched two raids into the Canadas and a raid against New Brunswick. These attacks created substantial fears and led to restrictions on the use of firearms. The Province of Canada passed legislation that largely copied the measures passed in Upper Canada following the rebellion of 1837. The government sought to ban the unlawful training of people to use arms. The governor-in-council could declare the act in force across the province or just in specific areas. It prohibited all meetings for training or drilling, or being trained in the use of arms, without lawful authority. Because it was “expedient to prevent the collection and keeping of arms,” the legislature also permitted authorities to seize arms if the weapons were kept for a purpose dangerous to the public peace. Persons in possession of such weapons could be arrested. Moreover, authorities could get a warrant and demand entry to search homes for weapons. Failure to admit authorities could also result in detention. Seized weapons could be returned through an application in which the owner demonstrated that the weapons would be kept in safe custody. One difference from previous legislation was that the 1866 act was to remain on the statute book indefinitely, rather than expire.83 The 1866 Province of Canada legislation became the basis for a similar measure passed by the new Canadian Parliament in 1867. GeorgeÉtienne Cartier explained the government’s motivation for the bill in introducing the legislation into the House of Commons. The Fenian threat loomed large in Cartier’s thinking. “Within the last two or three months the Government had been informed that deposits of arms had been made along the frontier on the other side of the line,” he explained, “and that attempts had been made to introduce them in some instances into Canada.”84 Like the Province of Canada legislation, the Canadian act prohibited meetings for the purpose of training or drilling, or of being trained or drilled in the use of arms without lawful authority.

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Any person present at such meetings, or who trained others in the use of arms or in military exercises, would be liable to a two-year term of imprisonment. Justices of the peace could seize arms or ammunition kept for any unlawful purpose. Anyone carrying arms for an unlawful purpose could be arrested and tried for a misdemeanour. To make an arrest, a justice of the peace needed only to suspect that the weapons were for a purpose dangerous to the public peace.85 Conclusion Firearm regulation clearly predates Confederation. Bans on the discharge of weapons in towns and cities sought to prevent shootings, fires, or nuisances. Legislators also passed measures to decrease the dangers of violence at polling places and at public meetings. They further limited firearm possession or use during times of real or potential tumult, such as immediately after the fall of New France, during the rebellions of 1837–8, in response to the canal riots of the mid-1840s, and when fears rose of potential threats from the United States. The state, however, usually imposed modest levels of regulation and made most measures temporary. Legislators almost never advocated permanent limitations on when and where guns could be carried, nor, certainly, for the kinds of measures that became contentious in the late twentieth century, such as the licensing of gun-owners or the creation of a firearm registry. Several factors explain the modest nature of firearm regulation in the pre-Confederation period. Even when circumstances called for gun control, politicians questioned their constitutional authority to impose strict measures, especially laws that disarmed men of property. In addition, legislators knew that the limited power of the state prevented more aggressive measures. Gun-owners could easily hide their weapons. Even when the colonial state focused its resources to regulate guns for short periods, it rarely secured all arms. The failures to round up all weapons in post-Conquest New France or at violent canal sites demonstrates the perpetual challenge of enforcing firearm laws. Legislators also chose not to regulate firearms because many British North Americans did not keep arms in the pre-Confederation period. Country store records, low levels of firearm murders, and poorly armed militias and rebels provide evidence of the scarcity of firearms. Diminishing fear of Aboriginal peoples, a decline in the need to hunt for food, the falling number of duels, and the creation of professional police forces

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all combined to dissuade many people from keeping arms. The technological limitations that made firearms less dangerous than later guns also mitigated the desire for more regulation. Muzzle-loaded weapons could kill, but a slow rate of fire, poor accuracy, and unreliability meant that they caused relatively little concern in normal circumstances. In the 1860s, breech-loading rifles began to appear in British North America, but these arms created excitement, not fear. Modern rifles became associated with manliness and promised a means of defending the colonies from the American behemoth. Advocates of modernizing the militia, establishing volunteer units, and creating rifle associations all claimed that trustworthy British men should develop rifle-shooting skills. Governments thus encouraged the ownership of rifles for defensive purposes – a policy that continued after Confederation.

NOTES 1 Douglas McCalla, “Upper Canadians and Their Guns: An Exploration via Country Store Accounts (1808–61),” Ontario History 97, no. 2 (2005): 121–37. 2 Studies include R. Blake Brown, Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2012); Gérald Pelletier, “Le Code criminel canadien, 1892–1939: le contrôle des armes à feu,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés 6, no. 2 (2002): 51–79; R. Blake Brown, “‘Pistol Fever’: Regulating Revolvers in Late-NineteenthCentury Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association n.s. 20, no. 1 (2009): 107–38; Philip C. Stenning, “Guns & the Law,” Beaver 80, no. 6 (2000–1): 6–7; Samuel A. Bottomley, “Parliament, Politics and Policy: Gun Control in Canada, 1867–2003” (PhD diss., Carleton University, 2004); Susan W.S. Binnie, “The Blake Act of 1878: A Legislative Solution to Urban Violence in Post-Confederation Canada,” in Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History, ed. Louis A. Knafla and Susan W.S. Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Martin L. Friedland, “Gun Control: The Options,” Criminal Law Quarterly 18 (1975–6): 29–71. In comparison, there is an extensive literature on the history of gun laws in the United States, and a growing body of work on firearm regulation in Britain. For British studies, see Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Lois G. Schwoerer, “To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective,” in The Second Amendment in Law and History: Historians and Constitutional Scholars

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on the Right to Bear Arms, ed. Carl T. Bogus (New York: New Press, 2000); Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). The American literature is too extensive to cite here. For a discussion of the historiography concerning the second amendment, see Carl T. Bogus, “The History and Politics of Second Amendment Scholarship: A Primer,” in Bogus, The Second Amendment in Law and History, 1–15. For an overview of the legal debate over the second amendment, see Mark V. Tushnet, Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can’t End the Battle over Guns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See, for example, G. Blaine Baker and Jim Phillips, eds., R.C.B. Risk, A History of Canadian Legal Thought: Collected Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2006); W.P.M. Kennedy, The Constitution of Canada, 1534–1937: An Introduction to Its Development, Law, and Custom, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1938). Studies that have considered the constitutional liberties of subjects in British North America, although not the right to bear arms, include Michel Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838) (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009); Robert L. Fraser, “‘All the privileges which Englishmen possess’: Order, Rights, and Constitutionalism in Upper Canada,” in Provincial Justice: Upper Canadian Legal Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, ed. Robert L. Fraser (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 1992), xxi–xcii; Jeffrey L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 24–47; Paul Romney, “From Constitutionalism to Legalism: Trial by Jury, Responsible Government, and the Rule of Law in the Canadian Political Culture,” Law & History Review 7, no. 1 (1989): 120–74. Malcolm, Guns and Violence, 132. Lee Kennett and James LaVerne Anderson, The Gun in America: The Origins of a National Dilemma (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975), 36; Max Boot, War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 85; W.Y. Carman, A History of Firearms from Earliest Times to 1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 100–4; Robert Held, The Age of Firearms (London: Cassell, 1957), 20–59, 79–90. Carman, A History of Firearms, 100–4; Boot, War Made New, 86; David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 269, 616–19; Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada, 5th ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007), 1. The development of percussion caps in the

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first half of the nineteenth century enabled muzzle-loading muskets to fire more reliably. The percussion cap was a small cylinder with one closed end containing a small amount of explosive material. The percussion cap was placed over a hollow metal “nipple” at the rear of the gun barrel. When struck by the gun’s hammer, the explosive in the percussion cap ignited, sending flame through the nipple to the main powder charge. Morton, Military History of Canada, 19. Louise Dechêne, Le peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le Régime français (Montreal: Boréal, 2008), 100, 128–9, 310; Paul-Louis Martin, La chasse au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 1990), 21–49; Jay Cassel, “The Militia Legend: Canadians at War, 1665–1760,” in Canadian Military History since the 17th Century, ed. Yves Tremblay (Ottawa: Department of National Defence 2001), 59–67; Russell Bouchard, Les armes à feu en Nouvelle-France (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1999); Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 6; Brian J. Given, A Most Pernicious Thing: Gun Trading and Native Warfare in the Early Contact Period (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 37–8; W.J. Eccles, “The French Forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War,” in Reappraisals in Canadian History: Pre-Confederation, ed. C.M. Wallace and R.M. Bray (Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Allyn and Bacon Canada, 1999), 124; Morton, Military History of Canada, 9–10. David Calverley, “‘When the need for it no longer existed’: Declining Wildlife and Native Hunting Rights in Ontario, 1791–1898,” in The Culture of Hunting in Canada, ed. Jean Manore and Dale G. Miner (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 107; Thomas Radcliff, Authentic Letters from Upper Canada: Including an Account of Canadian Field Sports by Thomas William McGrath (Toronto: Macmillan, 1833), 106. On the propensity of pioneers to supplement their diet through hunting, also see Robert Leslie Jones, History of Agriculture in Ontario, 1613–1880 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 77–8. Jeffrey L. McNairn, “Meaning and Markets: Hunting, Economic Development and British Imperialism in Maritime Travel Narratives to 1870,” Acadiensis 34 (2004): 23. Catharine Parr Traill, The Canadian Settler’s Guide (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 155. McCalla, “Upper Canadians and Their Guns,” 123, 136. J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 103–24; Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kah-

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kewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2006), 136–83; Allan Greer, “The Birth of the Police in Canada,” in Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-NineteenthCentury Canada, ed. Allan Greer and Ian Radforth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 17–49; Greg Marquis, Policing Canada’s Century: A History of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 27–39; Michael McCulloch, “‘Most Assuredly Perpetual Motion’: Police and Policing in Quebec City, 1838–58,” Urban History Review 19, no. 2 (1990): 100–13; Nicholas Rogers, “Serving Toronto the Good: The Development of the City Police Force, 1834–1884,” in Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, ed. Victor L. Russell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 116–40; Greg Marquis, “‘A machine of oppression under the guise of the law’: The Saint John Police Establishment, 1860–1890,” Acadiensis 16 (1986): 58–77; Philip Girard, “The Rise and Fall or Urban Justice in Halifax, 1815–1886,” Nova Scotia Historical Review 8 (1988): 57–71; Greg Marquis, “State, Community, and Petty Justice in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1815–67,” in Violent Crime in North America, ed. Louis A. Knafla (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 1–29; Greg Marquis, “Enforcing the Law: The Charlottetown Police Force,” in Gaslights, Epidemics and Vagabond Cows: Charlottetown in the Victorian Era, ed. Douglas Baldwin and Thomas Spira (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed, 1988), 86–102. Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, trans. Anthony Williams (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Dick Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Donna Andrew, “The Code of Honour and Its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850,” Social History 5 (1980): 409–34; Antony E. Simpson, “Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Duelling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 99–155. Pistols, however, also increased the mortality rate from duelling. At least 15 per cent of participants in duels in England died in the 1785 to 1850 period. Richard Hopton, Pistols at Dawn: A History of Duelling (London: Portrait, 2007), 209–11; V.G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 144–5; Simpson, “Dandelions on the Field of Honor,” 106–7, 110–12. Cecilia Morgan, “‘In search of the phantom misnamed honour’: Duelling in Upper Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1995), 553.

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19 Ibid.; Hugh A. Halliday, Murder among Gentlemen: A History of Duelling in Canada (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 1999), 151–76; Joseph C. Chapman, “Gentlemen, Scoundrels, and Poltroons: Honour, Violence, and the Duel in Nineteenth-Century British North America” (MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 1994); Jean-François Mathieu, “Le duel au Canada, pratique et discours, 1646–1888” (MA thesis, Université de Montréal, 2005). 20 Lois Schwoerer, “No standing armies!”: The Antiarmy Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 14–15; Ian F.W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 7–89; Robert H. Churchill, “Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America: The Legal Context of the Second Amendment,” Law and History Review 25, no. 1 (2007), 144–5. 21 An Ordinance for regulating the militia of the province of Quebec … (1777), articles 1, 5 and An Ordinance for better regulating the Militia … (1787), articles 1, 4, in Arthur G. Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Years 1914 and 1915 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1916), 68, 70, 180–1; An Act for the better Regulation of the Militia …, S.L.C. 1803, c. 1, s. 7; Abstract of the Militia Act at present in force … (Quebec: P.E. Desbarats, 1821), 10, 14, 16; J.L. Little, Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 12; Fernand Ouellet, “Officiers de milice et structure sociale au Québec (1660–1815),” Histoire sociale / Social History 12 (1979), 51–2; Christian Dessureault and Roch Legault, “Évolution organisationnelle et sociale de la milice sédentaire canadienne: le cas du bataillon de Saint-Hyacinthe, 1808-1830,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association n.s. 8 (1997): 87–112. 22 An Act for the better Regulation of the Militia …, S.U.C. 1793, c. 1; An Act to explain, amend, and reduce … the several Laws … for the Raising and Training the Militia of this Province, S.U.C. 1808, c. 1, ss. 3, 14. 23 Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 150; Robert Gourlay, Statistical Account of Upper Canada with a View to a Grand System of Emigration (London: Simpkins & Marshall Stationers, 1822), 1:230; George Sheppard, Plunder, Profit, and Paroles: A Social History of the War of 1812 in Upper Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 40–99; J.L. Granatstein, Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 3–23; George Sheppard, “‘Deeds speak’: Militiamen, Medals, and the Invented Traditions of 1812,” Ontario History 82 (1990): 207–32; Morton, Military History of Canada, 54. 24 Lower Canada, House of Assembly, Report of the special committee, to whom

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was referred that part of His Excellency’s speech which referred to the organization of the militia (Quebec: Neilson and Cowan, 1829), appendices (Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions no. 63940). In 1833, one rough estimate of the number of Lower Canada militiamen who possessed hunting weapons was 25,000. Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 101; Luc Lépine, “La milice du district de Montréal, 1787– 1829: essai d’histoire socio-militaire” (PhD thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2005), 215–22. Quoted in Little, Loyalties in Conflict, 41, 46. Report of the special committee … referred to the organization of the militia, 10. Morton, Military History of Canada, 86. Ibid., 86; Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 18–19; Greer, The Patriots and the People, 101. Greer, The Patriots and the People, 307; Colin Read and Ronald J. Stagg, eds., The Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1985), xlii, 121; Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 15; Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada, 1837–8, 16; Elinor Kyte Senoir, Redcoats and Patriotes: The Rebellion in Lower Canada, 1837–38 (Stittsville, ON: Canada’s Wings, in collaboration with the Canadian War Museum, National Museum of Man, and National Museums of Canada, 1985), 69, 71, 82, 108, 122, 129, 189; John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec, 4th ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 166; Jean-Marie Fecteau, “‘This ultimate resource’: Martial Law and State Repression in Lower Canada, 1837–8,” in Canadian State Trials. Vol. 2, Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837–1839, ed. F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2002), 227–8. “Shooting a Man,” Globe, 24 July 1857, 3. Donald Fyson, “Blows and Scratches, Swords and Guns: Violence between Men as Material Reality and Lived Experience in Early Nineteenth-Century Lower Canada” (paper delivered at the 78th annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Sherbrooke, QC, June 1999). Jim Phillips comes to a similar conclusion in examining Halifax in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jim Phillips, “Women, Crime and Criminal Justice in Early Halifax, 1750–1800,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Vol. 5, Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 174–206. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800– 1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States

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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 46–50; Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms Industry, 1798–1870 (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1948); Kennett and Anderson, Gun in America, 83–93. Various American companies began producing such weapons for use in the Civil War. Christopher Spencer patented such a rifle in 1860 that held seven cartridges. Oliver Fisher Winchester purchased the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company in 1857. He reorganized it into the New Haven Arms Company, and then, in 1867, into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. On the Winchester company, see Harold F. Williamson, Winchester: The Gun That Won the West (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1952). S. James Gooding, The Canadian Gunsmiths, 1608–1900 (West Hill, ON: Museum Restoration Service, 1962), 128–9; “Rifles!,” Globe, 31 Mar. 1855, 1; “Armes a feu Volcaniques,” Le Courrier du Canada, 18 Apr. 1857, 4; “Arms & Ammunition of War,” Globe, 30 Mar. 1866, 3; “Spencer Repeating Rifles,” Globe, 5 Apr. 1866, 3. “The Great Rifle Match in Montreal,” Globe, 25 Sept. 1863, 2. Also see “The National Rifle Association,” Globe, 23 July 1860, 2; “Rifle Matches,” Globe, 11 July 1863, 3; “The Rifle Movement,” Globe, 23 Oct. 1863, 2. “Breech-Loading Rifles,” Grand River Sachem, 25 July 1866, 2. Also see “New Arms for the Volunteer Force,” Hamilton Evening Times, 23 Nov. 1866, 2. “The National Rifle Association,” Globe, 23 July 1860, 2. Also see “The Great Rifle Match in Montreal,” Globe, 25 Sept. 1863, 2; “The Rifle Movement,” Globe, 23 Oct. 1863, 2; “The Rifle Movement,” Kingston Daily News, 26 Oct. 1863, 2; “Rifle Shooting,” Kingston Daily News, 15 Aug. 1864, 1. Peter Vronsky, Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2011), 66, 109–10. The volunteer movement was largely an urban, middle-class phenomenon that became popular because of its social aspects. Canadian volunteers units acted as bastions of middle-class propriety, nativism, and masculinity. Members chose their own uniforms and elected their own officers. Units often offered a wide variety of activities for members, including curling competitions, dinners, and rifle shooting. Electing officers made volunteer units similar to the many fraternal associations that were popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Carman Miller, “The Montreal Militia as a Social Institution before World War I,” Urban History Review 19, no. 1 (1990), 86–7. The volunteer movement received a boost from the Prince of Wales’s visit to the colonies in 1860. Volunteer units formed for the opportunity to parade before Queen Victoria’s son. Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860

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Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 140–8. Malcolm, Guns and Violence, 154; Susie Cornfield, The Queen’s Prize: The Story of the National Rifle Association (London: Pelham, 1987), 13–25. “Rifle Match,” Globe, 17 Feb. 1862, 2; “Canadian Rifle Association,” Globe, 19 Apr. 1862, 3; “Upper Canadian Rifle Association,” Globe, 23 May 1862, 2; “Upper Canadian Rifle Association,” Globe, 4 June 1862, 2; “The Rifle Matches at Montreal,” Globe, 6 Aug. 1870, 4. “Grand Rifle Match at Hamilton,” Globe, 7 Sept. 1864, 2. For examples of various competitions, see “Upper Canada Rifle Association,” Globe, 23 May 1862, 2; “Upper Canada Rifle Association,” Globe, 24 May 1862; “Upper Canadian Rifle Association,” Globe, 4 June 1862, 2; “Upper Canada Rifle Association,” Globe, 6 June 1862, 2; “Grand Rifle Match,” Montreal Herald, 29 Aug. 1863, 3; “Montreal Rifle Tournament,” Globe, 24 Sept. 1863, 2; “The Rifle Tournament,” Kingston Daily News, 25 Sept. 1863, 2; “The Great Rifle Match in Montreal,” Globe, 25 Sept. 1863, 2; “The Rifle Movement,” Kingston Daily News, 26 Oct. 1863, 2; “The Great Rifle Match at Hamilton,” Hamilton Evening Times, 7 Sept. 1864, 2. K.B. Wamsley, “Cultural Signification and National Ideologies: RifleShooting in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Social History 20, no. 1 (1995): 66. Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2001): 296–319; Brown, “Pistol Fever,” 107–38. For example, in the early nineteenth century, New York banned the discharge of arms in the city as part of its fire code. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 57. For relevant Montreal by-laws, see Quebec Gazette, 12 June 1777; Quebec Gazette, 22 May 1783; Quebec Gazette, 25 Feb. 1790; Rules and Regulations of Police for the City and Suburbs of Montreal (Montreal: James Brown, 1810), article 15; Rules and Regulations of Police, for the City and Suburbs of Montreal (Montreal: James Lane, 1817), article 11; Collection des ordonnances et règlements de police en force dans la cité de Montréal … (Montreal: L. Perrault, 1843), 63; Charles Glackmeyer, The Charter and By-laws of the City of Montreal Together with Miscellaneous Acts of the Legislature Relating to the City (Montreal: John Lovell, 1865), 302; The By-Laws of the City of Montreal; with an Appendix (Montreal: John Lovell, 1865), 78. For Quebec City bylaws, see Quebec Gazette, 1 June 1802; Rules and Regulations of Police: With Abstracts of Divers Ordinances and Statutes Relating Thereto (Quebec: John

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Neilson, 1811); Laws and Regulations for the Government of the City of Quebec (Quebec: Bureau & Marcotte, 1850), 1:142; Mathias Chouinard, Règlements du Conseil de ville de la cité de Québec (Quebec: L.-J. Demers, 1901), 212. For Trois-Rivières, see Quebec Gazette, 29 Sept. 1791. Thanks to Donald Fyson for sharing these sources on the local regulation of firearms in Lower Canada. For similar measures in other colonies see An Act to prevent unnecessary firing off Guns …, S.N.S. 1758, c. 25; An Act in addition to … An Act to prevent unnecessary firing off Guns …, S.N.S. 1769, c. 3; An Act for extending … An Act to prevent unnecessary firing off Guns …, S.N.S. 1793, c. 12; An Act for extending … An Act to prevent unnecessary firing off Guns …, S.N.S. 1807, c. 21; An Act to prevent the unnecessary discharging of Guns …, S.N. 1835, c. 9; R.S.N.S. 1859, c. 100; An Act to prevent the unnecessary Firing off Guns …, S.P.E.I. 1790, c. 4. Legislators empowered local governments to place limits on the firing of guns. For examples, see An Act to establish a Board of Police in the Town of Belleville, S.U.C. 1834, c. 24, s. 19; An Act to define the Limits of the Town of London, in the District of London, and to establish a Board of Police therein, S.U.C. 1840, c. 31, s. 21. By-Laws and the Rules of Order of the City of Hamilton (Hamilton: Christian Advocate Office, 1854), 43. By-Laws of the City of Toronto, of Practical Utility and General Application … (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870), 46; Mathias Chouinard, Règlements du Conseil de ville de la cité de Québec (Quebec: L.-J. Demers, 1901), 60. Also see “By-Law,” Perth Courier, 18 Apr. 1851, 1. In 1862, Lévis stipulated a fine of four dollars for any person caught firing a gun in the community. “Corporation of the Town of Levis,” Quebec Mercury, 15 Mar. 1862, 1. In 1859, the Province of Canada prohibited the carrying of daggers, dirks, iron knuckles, skull crackers, slung shots, or “other offensive weapons of a like character.” An Act to prevent the carrying of Bowie-knives, Daggers, and other deadly weapons about the person, S.C. 1859, c. 26, s. 1; Donald Fyson, “The Trials and Tribulations of Riot Prosecutions: Collective Violence, State Authority, and Criminal Justice in Quebec, 1841–92,” in Canadian State Trials, Vol. 3, Political Trials and Security Measures, 1840–1914, ed. Barry Wright and Susan Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2009), 188. Lawyer John Prince introduced the measure in the Legislative Council, arguing that weapons made for assassination and murder should be less available. Weapons such as the bowie knife were “un-English” and were “used only by cowards.” This law, however, did not apply to firearms. When introduced in the legislature, the bill had placed limitations on the carrying of pistols and revolvers, but references

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to those weapons were removed in the final act. Journals of the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada, 1859, 184–5; “Provincial Parliament,” Globe, 1 Apr. 1859, 2. It is unclear why the reference to firearms was removed, although that decision may have been made by the leader of government, John A. Macdonald, who opposed firearm regulation throughout his career. Brown, “Pistol Fever,” 124–5. An Act to provide for the Freedom of Elections …, S.C. 1842, c. 1, ss. 27, 34, 37; W.C. Keele, The Provincial Justice, or Magistrate’s Manual …, 2nd ed. (Toronto: H. & W. Rowsell, 1843), 242. The penalties changed over time. See An Act … to amend, consolidate, and reduce into one Act, the several Statutory provisions … for the regulation of Elections, S.C. 1849, c. 27, s. 52; An Act respecting Elections of Members of the Legislature, C.S.C. 1859, c. 6, ss. 74, 77, 80. An Act to provide for the calling and orderly holding of Public Meetings …, S.C. 1843, c. 7, ss. 15–16, 18; W.C. Keele, The Provincial Justice, or Magistrate’s Manual …, 4th ed. (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1858), 684–5; W.C. Keele, The Provincial Justice, or Magistrate’s Manual …, 5th ed. (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1864), 685–6. W.J. Eccles, The French in North America, 1500–1783, rev. ed. (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 234; McCulloch, “Battle of Sillery,” 24. Proclamation by Robert Monkton (22 Sept. 1759), in Arthur G. Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1918 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1920), 33. Order to all captains of militia on the South Shore regarding the laying down their arms, and taking the oath of fidelity (21 Sept. 1760); Proclamation of General Jeffery Amherst (22 Sept. 1760); Order to inhabitants of Trois-Rivières to lay down arms, and take oath of Fidelity (22 Sept. 1760); Order to captains of militia to send to Government House, all guns in their charge (16 Oct. 1760), in Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1918, 73, 75, 199, 201, 217, 348, 350; Alfred Leroy Burt, The Old Province of Quebec, Vol. 1, 1760–1778 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 15–16, 24; Marcel Trudel, Le Régime militaire dans le Gouvernement des Trois-Rivières, 1760–1764 (Trois-Rivières: Éditions du bien public, 1952), 36–9. Letter to captains of militia, sending them hunting licences (4 July 1761), in Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1918, 245; Burt, Old Province of Quebec, 23, 37. Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1918, 350, 353–5; Trudel, Le Régime militaire, 39–40. Orders and proclamations of Murray for 6 July 1761, 28 July 1761, and 13 Mar. 1762, Les bibliothèques/UdeM, http://calypso.bib.umontreal.ca/

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58

59

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cdm4/index__murray.php?CISOROOT=/_murray; Letter to captain of militia at Yamaskam to return surplus guns (6 Mar. 1762), in Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1918, 267, 269. Order that the inhabitants of Batiscan and Rivière Batiscan be required to surrender their arms (28 Mar. 1764), in Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1918, 335. The confiscation of arms may explain the very small inventory of guns and firearm supplies at Samuel Jacobs’s store at St Denis, as detailed by Allan Greer. His business served a rural constituency, and Jacobs attempted to stock everything rural customers required. However, guns accounted for no more that 0.4 per cent of the store’s inventory in June 1775, and no more than 0.1 per cent in 1786. Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant, 155–6. An Ordinance for regulating the militia of the province of Quebec … (1777), article 1, in Doughty, Report of the Public Archives for the Years 1914 and 1915, 69; Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 1760–1791 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 163. Act to prevent the unlawful training of persons to the use of Arms …, S.U.C. 1838, c. 11, s. 6; Rainer Baehre, “Trying the Rebels: Emergency Legislation and the Colonial Executive’s Overall Legal Strategy in the Upper Canadian Rebellion,” in Greenwood and Wright, Canadian State Trials, 2:47. An Ordinance to authorize the Seizing and Detaining for a limited time of Gunpowder, Arms, Weapons, Lead, and Munitions of War, in Ordinances made and passed by the Administrator of the Government, and Special Council for the Affairs of the Province of Lower Canada, vol. 3, c. 2 (Quebec: John Charlton Fisher & William Kemble, 1838), 22; An Ordinance to continue … a certain Ordinance, relative to the seizing and detaining for a limited time of Gunpowder … and An Ordinance to render permanent certain Ordinances …, in Ordinances made and passed by his Excellency the Governor Genera, and Special Council for the affairs of the Province of Lower Canada, vol. 5, c. 2, 16 (Quebec: John Charlton Fisher & William Kemble, 1839), 10, 58. An 1845 volume of the revised acts and ordinances of Lower Canada incorporated the legislation. The Revised Acts and Ordinances of Lower-Canada (Montreal: S. Derbishire & G. Desbarats, 1845), 176. In 1860, a draft version of the consolidated statutes also had the 1838 ordinance, although the compilers questioned whether the act should be included, writing, “Query whether this ordinance can apply now.” An Act respecting Arms and Munitions of War, in The Consolidated Statutes for Lower Canada, draft report (Quebec: Stewart Derbishire and George Desbarats, 1860), 55. The answer was apparently in the affirmative, as the ordinance appeared in the final version of the consolidated statutes for Lower Canada published in 1861. An Act respecting Arms and Munitions of War, C.S.L.C. 1860, c. 8.

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61 An Act to prevent the Training of Persons to the Use of Arms …, 60 Geo. III, c. 1 (1819) (U.K.); An Act to authorise Justices of the Peace, in certain disturbed Counties, to seize and detain Arms collected or kept for purposes to the Public Peace …, 1 Geo. IV, c. 2 (1819) (U.K.); Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 14–17; Malcolm, Guns and Violence, 95–9. 62 Bryan D. Palmer, “Labour Protest and Organization in Nineteenth-Century Canada, 1820–1890,” Labour / Le Travail 20 (1987): 61–83; Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780– 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 205–6, 231–53; Bryan D. Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992), 60–3. 63 Dan Horner, “Solemn Processions and Terrifying Violence: Spectacle, Authority, and Citizenship during the Lachine Canal Strike of 1843,” Urban History Review 38, no. 2 (2010): 36–47; H.C. Pentland, “The Lachine Strike of 1843,” Canadian Historical Review 29 (1948): 263–4. For numerous examples of labourers stealing weapons to arm themselves in 1844, see Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1844–1845, Appendix Y. Also see E. Gibbs, ed., Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, 1841–1867, vol. 6, pt 2 (Montreal: Centre d’Étude du Québec, 1978), 1512. Taking guns from locals during times of upheaval was not uncommon. In Bytown in 1849, rioters procured guns from merchants, nearby houses, and even from government armouries in Hull. Michael S. Cross, “Stony Monday, 1849: The Rebellion Losses Riots in Bytown,” Ontario History 63 (1971), 186–9. 64 Letters from G.S. Jarvis, Esquire, and four other Justices of the Peace, 25 Nov. 1844, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1844– 1845, Appendix Y. 65 Petition of the Justices of the Peace and other Inhabitants of the County of Dundas, in the vicinity of the Public Works now in progress, 2 Nov. 1844, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1844–1845, Appendix Y. 66 The Quebec Mercury took solace in its belief that the arms were of a “very inferior description, and may not be of much service if an attempt is made to use them.” Quebec Mercury, 8 Feb. 1845, 2. 67 H. Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650–1860 (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1981), 191–3; Pentland, “Lachine Strike of 1843,” 264; Ruth Bleasdale, “Class Conflict on the Canals of Upper Canada in the 1840s,” Labour / Le Travailleur 7 (1981): 33. 68 Provincial secretary to C. Wetherall, 15 Nov. 1844; C. Wetherall to provincial secretary, 20 Nov. 1844; L.G. Brown to Captain Wetherall, 21 Nov.

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73

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1844, L.G. Brown to provincial secretary, 21 Nov. 1844, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1844–1845, Appendix Y. C. Wetherall to the provincial secretary, 21 Jan. 1845, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1844–1845, Appendix Y. Gibbs, Debates, vol. 6, pt 2, 1442–3. Gibbs, Debates, vol. 6, pt 2, 1448, 1513; Louis-Philippe Audet, “Edward Hale,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) online. An Act for the better preservation of the Peace …, S.C. 1845, c. 6; Quebec Mercury, 8 Feb. 1845, 1; An Act to continue for a limited time the several Acts and Ordinances therein mentioned, S.C. 1847, c. 8; An Act to continue … several Acts, S.C. 1848, c. 3; An Act to continue … several Act, S.C. 1849, c. 17; An Act to continue … several Acts, S.C. 1850, c. 10; An Act to continue … An Act for the better preservation of the Peace, S.C. 1851, c. 76; An Act to continue … several Acts, S.C. 1856, c. 85; An Act to continue … several Acts, S.C. 1857, c. 16; An Act to continue … several Acts, S.C. 1858, c. 81; An Act to continue … several Acts, S.C. 1859, c. 28. Gibbs, Debates, vol. 6, pt 2, 1445, 1446, 1450, 1455, 1477, 1505, 1506, 1511, 1517; Andrée Désilets, “Joseph-Édouard Cauchon,” DCB online; Michael S. Cross and Robert Lochiel Fraser, “Robert Baldwin,” DCB online; Quebec Mercury, 22 Feb. 1845, 1. “Riots and Assassination in Montreal,” Globe, 10 Dec. 1844, 2. Quoted in Lois G. Schwoerer, “To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective,” in Bogus, The Second Amendment in Law and History, 215. William Blackstone as quoted in Schwoerer, “To Hold and Bear Arms,” 224. Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms; Malcolm, Guns and Violence, 58–61. Schwoerer, “To Hold and Bear Arms,” 216. Philip Girard, “Liberty, Order, and Pluralism: The Canadian Experience,” in Exclusionary Empire: English Liberties Overseas, ed. Jack P. Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181; Greg Marquis, “In Defence of Liberty: 17th-Century England and 19th-Century Maritime Political Culture,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 42 (1993): 69–94; G. Blaine Baker, “Legal Education in Upper Canada, 1785–1889: The Law Society as Educator,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. David H. Flaherty (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1983), 2:94; Ian McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution: On Writing the History of Actually Existing Canadian Liberalisms,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, ed. Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 347–452; McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,”

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82 83

84 85

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Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 616–45. Philip Girard suggests that Blackstone had a smaller role in legal education in British North America than in the United States but still notes that he was usually recommended reading. Philip Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2011), 39–41. Gibbs, Debates, vol. 6, pt 2, 1453, 1517. And see Gibbs, Debates, vol. 6, pt 2, 1459. In 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie prepared a draft constitution that could be debated by a provisional government in Upper Canada. Among its provisions was a right to bear arms: “The people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State.” Charles Lindsey, The Life and Times of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie (Toronto: P.R. Randall, 1862), 2:347. It is unclear whether Mackenzie simply paraphrased the American Second Amendment or was aware of the older British right in framing his proposal. The willingness of Canadian legislators to limit the reach of the English right mirrored similar legal contortions in nineteenth-century America to prevent free blacks from claiming a right to bear arms, despite the existence of the Second Amendment as well as, in some jurisdictions, state constitutional guarantees. Clayton E. Cramer, “The Racist Roots of Gun Control,” Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy 42, no. 2 (1995): 17–25. An Act for the prevention and repression of outrages in violation of the Peace on the frontier …, S.C. 1865, c. 1. An Act to prevent the unlawful training of persons to the use of arms ..., S.C. 1866, c. 5, s. 3. The Fenian threat led to the passage of similar legislation in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. An Act to provide for the seizure of Arms and Munitions of War, S.N.S. 1866, c. 37; An Act to prevent the concealment of Arms or munitions of war …, S.P.E.I. 1866, c. 3; An Act to prevent the clandestine training of persons to the use of Arms …, S.P.E.I. 1866, c .8. On the raids, see Hereward Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866–1870 (Toronto: Dundurn, 1991). Debates, House of Commons (18 Dec. 1867), 309. An Act to prevent the unlawful training of persons to the use of arms, and the practice of Military evolutions …, S.C. 1867, c. 15.

11 Grand Juries and “Proper Authorities”: Low Law, Soft Law, and Local Governance in Canada West / Ontario, 1850–1880 m ar y s t ok e s

“Low law” is a self-consciously heuristic concept, designed to reclaim as well as distinguish an aspect of socio-legal experience that has tended to escape the scrutiny of legal historians, whose tendency to see only the “high” forms of legal ritual and culture when describing and explaining legal norms or expressions has skewed our understanding of what is and was “law” in a particular time and place.1 Although the terms are generic, rather than specific to the legal system, they do exhibit a telling parallel with common-law terminology, as “high” law has generally been taken to describe the activities of “superior,” especially appellate, courts, while “low” law emphasizes those of “inferior” courts and tribunals.2 “High” and “low” are to be preferred for purposes of analysis, perhaps, as carrying less connotative baggage, thus minimizing the sense of relative merit and competence that inhere in “superior” and “inferior.” Nevertheless, the historiographic and legal terms have much in common: both focus on the judicial, and both convey a restrictive vision of binary hierarchy. While the conceit of portraying law as “high” or “low,” then, does have incontrovertible value in drawing attention to the submerged nine-tenths of the judicial iceberg, it should not be allowed to obscure the fact that whether low or high, law is never reducible to a simple model. Pioneering efforts by Willard Hurst and Harry Arthurs drew the attention of legal historians to the importance of legislative/executive and administrative/ regulatory institutions. Their insistence on the centrality of non-judicial

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aspects of law in the nineteenth-century common law world, though honoured more in acknowledgment than practice, is equally applicable to the sphere of low law.3 Another analytic dichotomy, that of “hard” and “soft law,” is similarly relevant to the study of low law institutions. Simply put, hard law is the law that is instantly recognizable to Western eyes as legal: positivist, monist, hierarchical, and coercive. Soft law is non-coercive, communicative, and cultural, law in a broader sense as understood by law-and-society scholars of the legal pluralist school. As Anna di Robilant has put it, “Soft law … labels those regulatory instruments and mechanisms of governance, that while implicating some kind of normative commitment, do not rely on binding rules or on a regime of formal sanctions.”4 For some time much in vogue in the field of international law, these terms have had little impact on the thinking of legal historians outside the history of the lex mercatoria, the European international private law of trade, from which it has been claimed the soft law of the European Union and other non-state “transnational” regulation descends. Yet as I will argue, the phenomenon is also discernible intra-nationally, in such otherwise legally difficult to classify institutions as the mid-Victorian Ontario grand jury in its non-criminal, supervisory mode.5 Introduction In eighteenth-century England, institutions of low law – the justice of the peace, quarter sessions of the peace, and grand juries – were gentrycomprised “rulers of the county” and combined legislative and administrative roles with their judicial duties.6 In early nineteenth-century Upper Canada there was less social distance between governed and governors at the local level and arguably even less functional separation of law, administration, and government than in England. Upper Canadian Courts of General Quarter Sessions (hereafter Quarter Sessions), composed of justices of the peace, also set rates, passed by-laws, and directed township officers: James Anderson has estimated that the non-judicial aspects of Quarter Sessions work took up more than half its time.7 The bench of JPs, led by a chairman elected by his fellow justices, was assisted by petit juries, who were the ultimate finders of guilt in criminal proceedings, and by grand juries, or as sometimes styled, the “grand inquest.” The grand jury was one of the received conventions of the common law, a fixture of criminal justice at the infe-

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rior courts of general quarter sessions and in superior circuit courts of Oyer, Terminer, and General Gaol Delivery (commonly known as the Assize, or Assizes).8 In the criminal law sphere, grand juries reviewed proposed prosecutions to determine which of them should proceed to trial. In addition, grand jurors commented on political issues and lobbied for reforms by means of a general report called a “presentment.”9 They also regularly presented on matters of local governance, such as the condition and administration of facilities such as the courthouse, local roads and bridges, and particularly the district gaols.10 Peter Oliver has written on the proclivity of Upper Canadian grand jurors in the early part of the nineteenth century to chastise the justices of the Courts of Quarter Sessions by presentments on the state of district goals that fell below what the jurors felt was an acceptable standard.11 Much of this, the “old regime” of law and local government, changed significantly at mid-century.12 The advent of responsible government transformed the “high” Legislative Assembly, allowing a more direct means of exerting (limited) popular influence over the executive. At the local level, first the District Courts Act of 1841 and ultimately the Municipal (Baldwin) Act of 1849 removed the legislative functions from the Courts of Quarter Sessions and created a comprehensive set of “low” legislatures in the form of municipal corporations.13 While the Courts of Quarter Sessions continued, professionally trained county judges took over their leadership from the amateur justices of the peace, and even their criminal jurisdiction became narrowed and diminished.14 In effect, “low law” in Upper Canada became fragmented.15 Blake Brown has argued that the importance of the jury in British legal ideology seems to have helped preserve the grand jury from attacks by those who considered its role in the criminal justice system to be an offence to principles of modernization, professionalization, and cost-efficiency.16 It might be expected that the presentment function of the grand jury would have been unprotected by this powerful ideological aura and have been repealed, or atrophied, especially given the power of concurrent ideologies of rationalist democracy and Benthamite bureaucracy. However, that transformation did not occur: the old and new instruments of supervision existed in tandem, ensuring that the administrations of the new low legislatures – the municipal corporations – would be well scrutinized, at least in theory. In this chapter I inquire into the survival of the general presentment function of the grand jury as an old regime aspect of judicial/administrative low law in the new regime, and into its interrelationship with

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new low law formations, namely the political/administrative municipal corporation and the bureaucratic/administrative provincial prison inspectorate. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of grand juries in the post–Municipal Act period, examining such issues as composition, scope, attitudes, and use of the general presentments by judges and the jurors themselves, based on an examination of surviving presentments in the records of the province, newspapers, and local governments.17 The second part of the chapter considers the grand jury as an institution of soft law. I speculate briefly on the impact of presentments on the higher echelons of government (the provincial and later federal levels), then examine in greater detail the relative effectiveness of grand juries as compared to that of the new regime “hard law” bureaucrats of the prison inspectorate in their respective quests to influence one “low” authority, the counties council of the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville.18 Grand Juries In their obituary for Robert Baldwin, the editors of the Upper Canada Law Journal waxed eloquently on the “glory of the country,” the Municipal Act, for which legislation he was most famous, but insisted that his Jury Act of 1850 was a close rival as his greatest achievement.19 Baldwin’s Jury Act is surprisingly succinct (especially when compared to the sixty-odd pages of the Municipal Act) and dealt only with the composition and selection of juries. Nonetheless, as Blake Brown has pointed out, it was both creative and innovative, substituting a sliding scale for the absolute property qualifications employed previously, used in other jurisdictions, and maintained in Canada West for voting and office holding eligibility at every level of government.20 To provide a sufficient pool of jurors, the act required that the top three-quarters of ratepayers by assessed value in any county would be eligible (with some exceptions), and that the panels would be selected by ballot. Later the pool became more even rarefied by the reduction of the eligible to the top half.21 Municipal government, by contrast, was designed to be more democratic, especially in rural areas. While there were absolute property qualifications for elected officials at every level, (male) voters in townships and villages merely had to be on the assessment rolls, that is, own some amount of rateable property.22 The Jury Act, as Brown points out, created an unwieldy, time-consuming system with copious amounts of paperwork, the cost of which

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was expected to be borne by the localities, but had the virtues of eliminating much of the potential for corruption for which the system was, justly or not, notorious, and spreading the burden of jury service evenly throughout the jurisdictions.23 Although the act set out the proportions of the pool to be allocated to each of the four juries – grand and petit juries for the two levels of courts – and specified who should be exempt from service on each, it was silent on which ratepayers should serve on what jury, provided they were appropriately discreet, competent, and sound of judgment and character in the opinion of the elected officials who formed the board of selectors.24 The minute books of the Leeds and Grenville Quarter Sessions show that in that jurisdiction at least, the grand jurors for superior courts were chosen first, followed by grand jurors for inferior courts, then petit jurors in the same order. The minutes do not indicate the specific assessed value for the names given, but it seems that ratepayers with property of the greatest assessed value were directed to the grand juries, with the Assize grand jury receiving the most propertied. This impression is supported by the accompanying occupational descriptions: for example, the Leeds and Grenville grand jury list for 1869 for the superior courts includes fourteen “esquires” (a term used at this time to signify justices of the peace, who were eligible for grand, but not petit jury service), eleven “yeomen,” six merchants, and a single blacksmith, cabinetmaker, tanner, joiner, tinsmith, manufacturer, hotel-keeper, gas manager, innkeeper, and miller. The grand jury list for the inferior courts included twenty farmers, seven merchants, three “gentlemen,” three butchers, two joiners, and a baker, civil engineer, bank clerk, waggon (sic) maker, insurance agent, hotel-keeper, mechanic, marblecutter, and tinsmith. The petit jury list for the superior courts was still heavier with yeomen (thirty-two) and farmers (twenty-nine), though it also included six each of “gentlemen” and merchants, and a variety of business- and tradesmen. The petit jury for the inferior courts consisted mostly of farmers and included no “gentlemen” and fewer merchants.25 It seems likely that other jurisdictions followed this pattern: one speech in the Legislative Assembly in favour of abolishing the grand jury argued that “the allocation of grand jurors greatly limit[s] the panel of petit jurors.”26 Grand juries were likely to include at least a few experienced members. Once having served, jurors were exempt for the next three years, but could then be re-pressed into service. Several charges to the grand jury indicate that it was usual to see repeat members. One charge to the

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Wentworth grand jury acknowledged this, presumably in apology for a lengthy and detailed address: “Perhaps some of you were never on a grand jury before and may not be again for years to come.”27 Many grand juries seem to have been aware of the presentments of their predecessors and referred to these explicitly in their own presentments. It can be assumed that grand jurors also had second-hand knowledge of previous presentments through press reports, or because they had been read in aloud in court, as seems to have been the practice, and had become part of general community knowledge.28 Some grand jurors were probably also well-versed in municipal affairs. While municipal councillors and officers were exempt from grand jury duty, this was only during their tenure of elected service. I have not systematically investigated the identities of grand jurors, but one foreman mentioned in the Daily Globe in 1875 was “W.H. Howland,” presumably the same of that name to become a notable Toronto mayor.29 In an address to the Simcoe County council, Judge James R. Gowan remarked that “there are many gentlemen in [the council] who have frequently served as grand jurors.”30 Whatever their level of formal experience, there is little doubt that grand jurors were, as one newspaper noted, “very respectable gentlemen.”31 This respectability – code for middle class – is evident in the attitudes of grand jurors to the varied matters on which they made presentments. Observations on the state of gaols and other institutions of social control and public welfare, such as hospitals, asylums, and Houses of Refuge (where the jurisdiction boasted such facilities,) with which I deal in the latter part of this essay, were the mainstay of presentments during this period. However, the presentments also indicate considerable interest in non-institutional facets of criminal justice, as might be expected, given the grand juries” primary task, the confirmation of indictments. The plight of young offenders exposed to hardened criminals prompted many expressions of concern, although the suggestion that they be flogged in preference to “unclassified” imprisonment might not have been considered a kindness by the juveniles in question. Adult male vagrants, on the other hand, attracted juror distaste and gave rise to several proposals for deterrence with hard labour. Still, grand jurors were not shy about advocating for those, even the prima facie “undeserving,” whom they felt were inappropriately incarcerated, either because, in their opinion, the prisoner had been confined too long for a “trifling” offence or an inability to produce sureties, and, most frequently, for the mentally ill, especially

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females, for whom they seem to have had a sincere, if paternalistic, concern.32 The “insane” had a special importance for the grand juries of the quarter sessions. About half of the presentments of the sessions grand juries that were recorded by the clerk of the peace of the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville dealt exclusively with the right (and duty) of the grand jury to determine entitlement and quantum of support for the “Insane Destitute” of the counties.33 This, the only “hard” grand jury power (other than the right to accept or refuse indictments), had been given to the grand jury of the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Home District by statute in 1830, then to the quarter sessions juries in all districts in 1832, and was held to extend to the successor sessions of the counties, an extension made explicit in 1858.34 Often overlooked by historians, the law regarding the destitute insane was an exception to the well-known lack of mandatory poor relief in Ontario. A finding by the grand jury that a person was both destitute and insane resulted in a peremptory order by the chairman of sessions to the treasurer of the county council to provide for the resident “lunatic” by payments to a third party for his or her benefit.35 Thus, for instance, Sally Hubble routinely received court-mandated payments from the Leeds and Grenville counties fund on account of her two “lunatic” sons, as well as discretionary support from the township on her own account.36 In the “final” presentments, the issues canvassed by grand juries at both levels went beyond the specific problems of insanity and criminality to less legalistic issues. These included such disparate – and multijurisdictional – matters as extradition treaties, snow removal, gun control, furious driving, free public education, the bravery of the volunteer militia defenders against the Fenian threat (for whose dependants a Leeds and Grenville grand jury urged support from public funds), and the reprehensible conduct of young people. One popular topic was court facilities for participants, including spectators and witnesses as well as jurors, and on this issue one can see the consequences of a rising standard of living and concomitant expectations: the provision of cushions for juries and waiting rooms for witnesses interested juries in the 1870s, but not in the 1850s, although the facilities can hardly have been more comfortable or commodious in the earlier decade. Grand jury service was evidently not a particularly attractive duty, especially for those who did not live in or near the county seat.37 One presentment of the Leeds and Grenville grand jury made suggestions concerning the time for calling them to jury service, noting that travel

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time made morning sittings a hardship for many.38 A Perth grand jury went still further, stating that as reforms of the criminal law resulted in the grand jury being called a considerable distance for a “mere form,” the institution should be done away with at the sessions level.39 A partial boycott of jury duty by Leeds and Grenville quarter sessions grand jurors occurred in January 1854, when only eight of the summonsed individuals appeared, forcing the sheriff to make up the numbers on the spot and moving the chairman to order fines for the absentees, which response seems to have deterred further recalcitrance.40 Strangely, given the grand jurors’ stated dislike of having to travel to the courts, the condition of roads and highways does not appear as a subject of concern in any of the presentments canvassed. Roads had been a traditional concern of grand juries in England and Nova Scotia, as well as in earlier Upper Canada, and remained a preoccupation for the county councils, especially in the earlier part of the period.41 Perhaps the fact that failure to keep in repair, as well as giving rise to nuisance claims against the municipalities, was a statutory misdemeanour, and thus potentially the subject of an indictment before them, excluded it as a fit subject for presentment, or perhaps jurors were aware of the fact that the new municipal councils were devoting a considerable part of their time and resources to transportation infrastructure and declined to press a matter that was already clearly a priority.42 The “crying evil” of intemperance also made fewer appearances in the general presentments than might have been expected.43 Possibly that absence was due to conflict on this issue, as is indicated in one presentment from the county of Peterborough, wherein the foreman indicated that the grand jury forbore from presenting on the issue “owing to the various and confused opinions which have arisen” on the point.44 Consensus seems to have been de rigueur for grand as for petit juries, although majority rather than unanimity seems to have been the technical requirement.45 Minority reports seem to have been rare or non-existent. That was also true of non-feasance of the duty to make a presentment: though the minutes do not always record that a presentment was made, it seems likely that in those cases either the clerk neglected to record it, or the judge or chairman decided it to be unnecessary, as the grand jurors could not leave their post until formally discharged, and the presentments were customarily the last thing the grand jury undertook before being excused.46 Any conflict between judge and jurors on this issue would likely have attracted a notation to that effect.

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It might be wondered why, if the Peterborough grand jury “concluded not to dictate on the question” of drink, the foreman chose to mention it at all. The answer seems to be that an agenda for presentment deliberations was set by the presiding judge. The charge to the jury was a standard element of criminal court proceedings and it was assumed that the judge or magistrate need not confine himself to the cases on the docket. According to the 1816 edition of Joseph Chitty’s Treatise on the Criminal Law, “The chairman of the sessions usually delivers his charge to [the grand jury], relative to the bills about to be submitted to their consideration, the state of the county, and the duties he has to fulfil … [T]he judicious magistrate will take care not only that his remarks are, in general, suited to the offices which a grand jury have to discharge, but have a plain reference to local objects, events, discussions, and concerns as far as they properly fall within the limits of his jurisdiction, and seem entitled to his notice. He will strive to allay animosities, to destroy the spirit of party, to discountenance every receptacle of idleness and vice as well as every vestige of popular barbarity and grossness.”47 “Animosities … [and] the spirit of party” seem not to have much interested mid-Victorian judges and magistrates in Canada West / Ontario, but many other political issues did attract their attention. Writing on the predilection of superior court judges, especially the reformminded ones, to use the opportunity of addressing the grand jury as a sort of bully pulpit for the expression of views for which any other outlet could be considered inappropriate at best and unconstitutional at worst, in the new era of political responsibility that saw judges deprived of their former elected or appointed political positions and, at least for the most superior, considerable clout, Patrick Brode has noted that judges “were not shy about rendering their opinions,” especially regarding the condition of prisons.48 Nor were they reticent in eliciting opinions from the grand juries to supplement their own. The presentments bristle with evidence of judicial direction on what to do (visit the hospital “in accordance with your Lordship’s wish”), to consider (“attention drawn by your Lordship”) and, more insidiously, to think (“your Lordship’s suggestive charge”).49 Simcoe County Judge James Gowan seems to have been defensive about a potential allegation that he had overly influenced grand juries, stating, “I have not spoken to Grand Juries to draw out any opinion from the particular body of Grand Jurors addressed. I am only anxious to avail myself of these occasions to reach the thinking public.”50 That position was ironic in view of the

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fact that Gowan was a great advocate of grand jury abolition; however, it seems likely that Gowan and his colleagues were well aware that if the newspapers did not report their charges they might still report the presentments that followed.51 The press found the presentments to be good copy and printed a variety from jurisdictions across the colony, the country, and even the continent. While not binding, jury presentments may have had a greater perceived legitimacy than a judge’s charge, especially on issues that were not clearly legal. Still, a grand jury was a transient, ephemeral group with no corporate identity once released from service, and no recognized right to initiate direct communication with governments. The Leeds and Grenville Assize and Quarter Sessions minute books indicate that it was in the judge’s discretion whether a presentment was forwarded to the provincial secretary or county council, or both, or merely “filed.” Cover letters by the clerks who copied the presentments attest to the fact that the presentments were being sent pursuant to the judge’s direction. Often the judge took a more personal interest: Peter Oliver noted that after mid-century the judges of common pleas, and Justice James Buchanan Macaulay in particular, maintained an ongoing campaign with a series of letters accompanying presentments on gaols.52 Mr Justice Adam Wilson wrote to the Toronto Council and highlighted the points of the presentment he wished to draw to the councillors’ attention, as did Justice Richards on several occasions to the Leeds and Grenville counties council.53 One entry in the Leeds and Grenville Assize minute books relates that the judge took the presentment with him back to Toronto.54 While grand juries could and sometimes did ask that the presentment be forwarded to one or other of the “proper authorities,” once they were functus officio they had no means of ensuring or even knowing whether that had been done. In the United States, grand juries may have been more disposed to communicate with the government on their own, but in Canada West / Ontario the presentment process was a joint effort.55 Patrick Brode has suggested a certain condescension by the judges “as they looked down on the yeoman of the county.”56 There is no question that the grand jurors tended to be deferential, often to the point of obsequiousness, as they congratulated the judges on their elevation to the bench, wisdom, and/or health; however, grand jurors also displayed signs of independence and a pronounced sense of their own importance. Occasionally grand juries chose not to follow the script set out for them by the judges. The refusal of the Peterborough grand jury

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to “dictate” on temperance was mentioned earlier. One jury insouciantly remarked that because they heartily concurred with the judge there was no need for a written presentment.57 Several Toronto grand juries observed in their presentments that they declined to visit certain institutions as directed because these places had just been inspected or because they did not think it necessary.58 There are hints that some grand jurors saw their duty as arising from “time honoured tradition” or “accustomed usage” rather than mere judicial fiat. On occasion a grand jury might itself seem somewhat patronizing, as when one “express[ed] sympathy with [the judge’s] humane tone.”59 The Globe reports also reveal considerable judicial respect for grand jurors, both in the charge and in the reply: frequently judges were quoted thanking jurors fulsomely and assuring them that the presentments would be forwarded to the proper authorities who would “no doubt” give them due consideration. While some charges tended to heavy-handedness in assigning inspectoral duties to the grand jurors, others show more ambivalence: one such charge declared a duty to visit the gaol and asylum, and thereafter such institutions as the grand jury themselves might choose.60 Grand Juries and Proper Authorities Grand jurors’ consciousness of their own worth is also revealed by their frequent expressions of frustration and resentment at the fact that previous presentments had not been followed the by the “proper authorities.” While many grand jurors may have felt that their efforts were in vain, the records of the provincial secretaries before and after Confederation show that they were not ignored at the higher government level. When received, the secretary or his clerk furnished the presentment with a standard printed wrapper, on which he filled in information about the source, and acknowledged receipt in a letter to the court clerk. Then he would forward the presentment to the appropriate government department or departments. Presentments tended to be undifferentiated, and “the proper authorities” to whom they might be relevant could be multiple, especially after Confederation. The first person to review a presentment after the provincial secretary or his clerk was usually the attorney general, who would acknowledge it, often with a recommendation or his comments, and return it. Others who might see the same copy of the presentment included the premier, the prison inspector, and the director of the asylum. Each would minute

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the wrapper with his initials and the date of review. Turnaround time was usually no more than a few days. When there was action to be taken – as, for instance, in the case of “lunatics” who the grand jury felt were wrongly incarcerated – if the asylum agreed to accept them, the provincial secretary would be deputized to inform the clerk and advise the sheriff of the necessary arrangements. Whether the more amorphous items such as presentments on the death of the prince consort or free public education made much impact on the executive is hard to say, but like the petitions that were regularly sent on such matters, it is possible that they were used as an opinion poll might be today, to gauge the mood of the electorate.61 How much value they would attribute to the opinions, however, would doubtless depend on how representative of the electorate the presentments were considered to be. Even allowing for the exclusion of voters who were not among the top half of the assessment roll, it is not at all clear that the presentments were necessarily even geographically comprehensive, as the government would have been aware. At the beginning of the period under review, only a handful of presentments were ordered to be sent to the provincial government. That ratio began to change in the latter half of the 1850s, and in 1880 some twenty-five presentments were recorded by the provincial secretary.62 Yet that is still only a fraction of all the presentments generated by grand juries during the year, as these juries met three (later two) times a year in each jurisdiction at sessions and at assizes. Some counties were more frequently represented in the registers, while some rarely appear; that variation can be attributed to the idiosyncrasies of the judge and jury and perhaps the relative condition of the gaols as the sine qua non of the general presentment agenda. Though the excerpt from Joseph Chitty quoted earlier in this chapter refers to charges by magistrates, and while county judges of Canada West / Ontario, sitting as chairmen of quarter sessions, often did as he stipulated, the practice of using the charge for purposes not strictly connected to the trial of offences seems to have been more popular with judges at the assize.63 About three-quarters of the presentments sent to the provincial government were from superior courts, a pattern that seems to hold true of publication in the press as well. The preponderance of charges and presentments from the assizes reported in the Globe could be attributed to elitism on the part of the editors and their readers, or on the part of the judges and grand juries themselves. In Leeds and Grenville, court minute books indicate that the sessions

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grand juries generated between twenty one and twenty-four presentments (excluding those dealing solely with the destitute insane) over thirty years, whereas the assize minutes show sixteen over nineteen years, a comparable ratio. However, the respective minutes of the sessions and assizes show that more of the presentments from the latter were noted as having been sent to the council or government, and more of the assize presentments made their way to the counties’ papers currently in the Ontario archives.64 Quarter sessions charges and presentments may have tended more to the perfunctory: the clerk of this court in Leeds and Grenville often records that the chairman made “his usual remarks” to the grand jury and that they made theirs in return. It may have been the case that the judges of Quarter Sessions were less convinced of their own mission in this respect, or that there was too much social, professional, and geographical distance between the county bench and the government and, paradoxically, too little distance from the other “proper authorities,” the county councils. The provincial government paid the county judge’s salary, but the Leeds and Grenville counties council papers show a close relationship between the two branches of low law. Indeed, the clerk of the peace and the clerk of the counties were the same person until 1857.65 The counties council was in effect the landlord for the courts and their personnel, and once sent a message to the county judge that the division court would have to be held in the grand jury room because the council would be using the courtroom for municipal business.66 Property committee reports include myriad instances of requests by the judge and other court officials for space, matting, furniture, stoves, and even curtains.67 Hence it is possible that the county court judge was less than assertive with the council, or that familiarity bred if not contempt, at least lack of deference by the latter. On one occasion, the apparently legally dubious generosity of a Leeds and Grenville grand jury finding regarding the eligibility for support of a woman as destitute and insane was raised after the fact (and presumably without notice to the jurors) by the chairman of the sessions in a letter to the counties council, to no avail – it does not appear that the letter was even referred to a committee.68 Or it may be that on this issue the council simply considered the grand jury to be the legitimate decision-maker. Though the Leeds and Grenville quarter sessions records are scanty, and it is impossible to tell what proportion of, or to what extent, applications were successful, it does not appear that applications for support for the destitute insane

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were ever challenged in court by a representative of the council. Nor is there any indication of viva voce evidence from an alleged lunatic or his or her sponsors. Probably the grand jury found on the basis of a petition with supporting signatures or affidavits, similar to those presented to township councils for ordinary (discretionary) poor relief, or to the county council for relief for (similarly discretionary) relief for other disabilities, such as blindness, deafness, or “idiocy.”69 Perhaps there was no perceived need to challenge claims: grand juries seem to have been fiscally responsible for the amounts they voted for the maintenance of the insane, which appear to have been commensurate with the discretionary amounts granted by townships for poor relief. To return to Sally Hubble, on 11 March 1863, the grand jury of Leeds and Grenville “presented to the Court … [that] Sally Hubble of Augusta in the County of Grenville be allowed the sum of fifty cents per week for each of her two lunatic sons for the present year.” In 1872, the Prescott Telegraph reported that Mrs Hubble had been granted twenty-five dollars for the year on her own account out of the “poor funds” of the Township of Augusta.70 While the county judge might not have been able to trump the grand jury in such a case, on other issues he may have been more influential, an influence that may have been more social than legal and exercised informally. One letter to the chair of the Leeds and Grenville Property Committee in 1878 from the county judge requested a personal meeting on the matter of procuring a table for the judge’s chambers.71 That county judges were considered to be appropriate authorities on the matter of gaols is attested to by a letter from Leeds and Grenville Warden William Garvey to E.A. Meredith, the prison inspector. In a rage at what he saw as the inspector’s meddling in county business, Garvey fumed that gaol matters could safely be left to the superintendence of the county judge, the sheriff, and the warden.72 Whether Garvey understood that judges would be assisted by grand juries in his preferred state of affairs is unclear, but there is no other evidence in the Leeds and Grenville papers of a county judge exercising influence over gaols other than indirectly through a grand jury report. Despite Garvey’s assertion that the gaols were well supervised, with or without the participation of the grand jury, the inspectorial assault on local autonomy continued apace. After the issue of goal conditions had been raised for many years by grand juries, judges, and rudimentary government inspection, the province took steps to provide administrative infrastructure – a new form of low law for the province, in the

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form of prison inspectorates. The first of these was introduced in 1859, the second reconfigured for the new province of Ontario in 1868.73 Peter Oliver has written extensively on the extreme frustration of the few itinerants – led by E.A. Meredith in the pre-Confederation, and J.W. Langmuir of the post-Confederation Ontario inspectorates – with what they saw as the obstruction of their mandate by county councils. Although Oliver did show some sympathy with the budgetary concerns of the justices of quarter sessions when gaols were their bugbear prior to local government reform, he accepted that the municipally administered county gaols post-reform were badly in need of amelioration and that councils were bent on resistance. Perhaps because he relied on the Inspectors’ own professionally biased reports and the presentments filed with the government, which were skewed to the critical by the very fact that they were forwarded, Oliver implied that the grand juries, which he credited “in the absence of appointed inspectors [as having] served to prevent some of the worst abuses” in the early years, were rendered irrelevant by the advent of correct and crusading bureaucrats.74 The Leeds and Grenville council papers provide ample evidence for these arguments, but also show that the situation was more complicated than Oliver described. There is nothing in the presentments to suggest that there was any crisis in the condition of the Leeds and Grenville counties facilities as the 1850s began. The first presentment from that decade to be filed with the council papers, in 1852, includes a complaint – which later presentments would repeat – that the court and public are disturbed by excessive noise during proceedings, and “suggests … having the court Room and pasages [sic] connected there with covered with strong matting or Carpeting which would greatly lessen if not wholley [sic] prevent the annoyances.”75 The gaol, however, was “clean and secure,” with no complaints from the prisoners, who are said to be “satisfied and greatful [sic] for the humane attention of the Jailor.”76 That wording is similar to that of many presentments in Leeds and Grenville and other jurisdictions of the time that seemed to follow the same template on the gaol report, focusing especially on the performance of the gaoler. The gaoler was generally commended, but the inclusion was not entirely formulaic. Chief Justice Draper, in a charge reported in the Brockville Recorder, reminded one grand jury of the importance of this part of their duty, citing an incident in England “where two or three youth committed suicide to escape the torture of the keeper of the prison and his myrmidons.”77

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Doubtless it is unsafe to draw too much from the alleged satisfaction of the prisoners with their treatment. Oliver cited instances in which prisoners were vehement about terrible conditions in the colonial period, so they were presumably not without voice, but they were naturally in a somewhat vulnerable position when it came to the gaoler. The grand jurors’ tendency to approbation of gaolers may also have been partially due to a structural bias, albeit a less direct one. Grand jurors exhibited a similar appreciation of officials on whose assistance they relied in the performance of their duties, including the director of the other institutions visited, the county Crown attorney, and the judge himself. Yet just as in the case of the judges, it is clear that this was often a two-way street: the officials in question also sought to make use of the grand jury to add authority to their own concerns and complaints.78 Nor is there any reason to suspect that the gaol staff were less than exemplary, as even the prison inspectors, although they tended to be sparing rather than fulsome in their praise, had only one negative comment concerning the Leeds and Grenville goal employees, and that for a turnkey who was dismissed for negligence following an escape, rather than for ill-treatment.79 Indeed, during this entire period the prison inspectors had no qualms about the cleanliness or upkeep of the prison, and it is clear from the records that the council had the gaol painted and repaired on an ongoing basis. Neglect and negligence were not problems, it would seem. Rather, the core of the conflict between the council and the inspectorate seems to have derived from differing missions and administrative structures and from a related divergence in expectations and assumptions. It is instructive that the first criticism of the gaol during the period under review came neither from the grand jury nor the inspectorate, but from the gaol surgeon, and that his complaints were related to his own professional priorities. In October 1856 Dr Thomas Reynolds wrote to the assize judge, emphasizing that “though it was not strictly his duty” to report, he had concerns that the gaol walls were insufficient, resulting in a restriction on outside exercise, and that there were no facilities for sick inmates.80 The next month he repeated his concerns in a letter to the court of quarter sessions, adding a request for further remuneration for himself.81 In response, the assize grand jury agreed on the question of security, but was silent on the erection of a small building to serve as a hospital, whereas the quarter sessions jury agreed with all the suggestions and recommended the salary increase.82 Success was similarly mixed when both presentments with the accompanying letters were

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forwarded to the council, which in turn referred them to the newly established standing committee on counties property.83 The committee recommended repairs to the wall and the increase in salary, but baulked at the hospital “in the present state of finances.”84 A letter from the sheriff sounding alarms about a water supply problem, a broken stone floor, consequent rat problem, and severe leaks in the roof was referred to a special committee to make the necessary repairs.85 The rats were never mentioned again, so presumably they were either exaggerated or eradicated, the roof received a temporary repair, and the sheriff was authorized to have the prisoners dig a new well and call on the treasurer for payment for water in the meantime.86 Without detailed investigation of the counties’ finances, it is difficult to tell whether the reason given for the decision not to proceed with the gaol hospital was disingenuous. The late 1850s were a time of province-wide depression, although the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville escaped the unwise railroad speculation and threatened bankruptcies of many other Ontario counties. Municipal councils were elected yearly, and taxes were raised by townships (which with villages and unseparated towns comprised the county, a federated body) each year based on annual estimates of current needs, with a portion of the receipts payable to the county treasurer. There is thus no reason to think that the counties were not as hard up for funds, at least in capital, as they alleged, and that the grand juries were aware of this fact. In 1858 a grand jury of the quarter sessions, reconsidering Dr Reynolds’s request, advised once again in favour of improvements to the walls, but decided “it was prudent to forbear” on the question of the hospital.87 That the council was not expecting an extreme condemnation of their gaol by the provincial bureaucracy is shown by the warden’s 1857 address to council in which he announced the proclamation of the new prisons inspection act, commenting that he expected the council “cheerfully [to] cooperate with the Government in placing the Gaol of these counties upon such a footing as will make it such an institution as the Legislature contemplated.”88 The next year he recommended that Dr Reynolds be appointed to the inspectorate.89 Change was clearly in the offing, though, and council set up a special committee to meet with the inspectors as required by the statute. The inspectors, however, were dilatory about meeting, which may ironically have resulted in deterioration of the gaol in the meantime. Perhaps under the influence of interest in the press and instigation from a reformist judge, the gaoler and

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two grand juries found the gaol to be in need of repair and renovation. One of these reports was particularly pointed, recommending: 1st That the different cells for the Prisoners need to be enlarged and further ventilated 2nd That the Building should be enlarged in order to accomplish the object above referred to as well as those alluded to hereafter 3rd That great necessity exists for separate apartment for Male & for Female Juvenile offenders to avoid the serious evil of contamination by those more hardened in crime 4th That all the cells of the Jail should be prepared with a view to the comfort and cheerfulness of the Prisoners so far as may be consistent with perfect safety 5th That separate apartments for the sick should be prepared say for the Males & for Females 6th That Baths for the general cleansing & health of the prisoners are desirable 7th That either a good well or cistern should be provided to ensure a sufficient of good water 8th That the Walls enclosing the Yards of the Jail are insufficient as a watch is found necessary to prevent escape.90

The council’s property committee, while urging renewed temporary protection for the roof, declined to recommend the “significant outlay” implied by the presentments. Though they did vote money for a gaol library at the behest of the gaol surgeon and sheriff, and expressly concurred with the criticisms set out in the presentments, committee members cited their fear that whatever improvements were undertaken might not be in accord with the inspector’s requirements. While that determination may have been a disingenuous procrastination, given later developments it also showed a degree of perspicacity. Once the inspectors finally did arrange to meet, they sent a four-page illustrated pamphlet in advance, setting out plans for a model gaol. The ideal building would be of specific proportions, close to the court, with at least an acre of yard space, waxed hardwood floors, and wide corridors.91 To comply with that plan where a gaol was already in existence would doubtless require an even more significant capital expenditure than the grand juries’ suggested improvements. Unlike the grand juries, the inspectors made no acknowledgment that there was an operating gaol in existence that had already been erected with local taxes. As might be expected, the council and committee took umbrage at their

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criticism, denying that the gaol was as “wretched as represented” by the inspector and railing against the necessity of the significant alterations requisitioned.92 But resistance was not a monolithic response. The question of the appropriate degree of cooperation seems to have been a seriously contested one, as is demonstrated by deletions and amendments to the committee reports, and conflicting reports by successive committees. The special committee eventually recommended that the inspectors’ instructions be followed, only to be overruled by the finance and assessment committee. The negotiations took several years and were hindered by the council’s voting an insufficient amount to begin the alterations, to the consternation of the commissioners, who were hesitant to begin work without secure funding and warned that the inspectors had threatened government action, in the form of suspension of their corporate status, in the face of municipal “contumacy.” 93 Eventually the truculent warden, William Garvey, was replaced by the more tractable James Keeler, and the committee proffered an appropriate plan that was approved by the inspectors and provincial executive. Work was finally completed in 1863, at a cost of $3,921.20, of which the government paid half.94 The inspectors’ perspective excluded extraneous considerations, including the fact that counties did not have immediate access to unlimited or uncontested resources. In 1871 the Leeds and Grenville statement of assets and liabilities declared the number of ratepayers to be only 9,862, many of whom seem to have been regularly clamouring for economic infrastructure in the form of roads and bridges, which latter seemed to have the unfortunate habit of being destroyed by floods almost as fast as the council could build them.95 Although they were not entirely adverse to discretionary spending – they voted for improvements to the town square, at a cost of $400, and paid their staff relatively generous salaries – for large outlays the council were forced to borrow: to finance the new gaol and registry office, they had to incur bank debt of $4,000 to make up the anticipated expenditure of $7,500 over two years.96 Notwithstanding the council’s capitulation, there was to be little peace on the gaol front. No sooner had the council agreed to the renovations than Inspector Meredith began to press them on the subject of proper diet for prisoners, and the addition of a small multipurpose building to serve as a kitchen, both of which proposals gained the approval of a grand jury. Once again, William Garvey, who was property

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committee chairman as well as warden, initially refused point-blank, but his successors, perhaps persuaded by Meredith’s assertion that his proposal for feeding the prisoners a regulated diet provided by someone other than the gaoler would save money, took a more conciliatory stance, although they still baulked at the additional building. Meredith had less success with a requirement for prison clothing, which continued to be a point of disagreement. The property committees ignored all the strictures of Meredith and those of his successor, J.W. Langmuir, on the matter of prison clothes. It is significant that they did not acquiesce on this issue until the mid-1870s, after several grand juries added their exhortations to that of the inspectors. However, no sooner did they do so than the inspectors once again upped the standard in a circular of 1878, which advised that standard prison clothing would henceforth be purchased through the central prison, albeit at county expense.97 Nor did the money spent on the gaol building result in equilibrium on that issue. After Confederation a new provincial inspectorate replaced the old board. The newly renovated gaol, which had received the imprimatur of the provincial executive only a few years before, incurred the contempt of Meredith’s successor, who announced in 1869 that, among other things, the “internal arrangements” of the gaol were “seriously defective.”98 Langmuir was particularly appalled by the dayrooms, which had not been included in previous discussions, but which he felt were much too crowded. One might assume from this review that that the prison population had increased, but in fact it was relatively stable, with eleven confined in 1869, one fewer than there had been in 1856.99 Again, the property committee and council were unconvinced by Langmuir’s opinion, which seems to have been rooted in his professional principles that privileged the “classification” of prisoners. The council did follow Langmuir’s suggestions on baths and padlocks but, again, only after those improvements had been endorsed by grand juries. Similarly, after the grand juries took up the mantra of classification and stressed the necessity for more commodious dayrooms, the committee and council finally accepted the new standard and agreed to invest in a significant revamping and extension of the building, along with a construction of a new registry office (pursuant to the demands of yet another provincial inspector). Thereafter, the inspectors ceased much of their criticism and the grand juries moved on to related causes, inveighing on the problem of “incurables” and the desirability of a House of Refuge for the counties.100

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During all this time the property committees continued to recommend payment for minor repairs, as well as stoves and furnishings for the courthouse, registry office, and municipal and judicial offices. Most of those requests seem to have been accepted without much difficulty by the finance committee and the committee of the whole. As with the grand jury recommendations, it often took several reports before a property committee’s more expensive recommendations would be accepted. It is arguable, then, that it was an aversion to capital expenditure and a structure of decision-making that required a proposal to pass several levels of scrutiny, in each case vulnerable to competing priorities, and not a lack of interest or innate miserliness that was the cause of the divergence between councils the inspectors. The grand jury seemed to occupy a middle ground, representing community standards that, though they rose continually during this period, were mitigated by their local knowledge and could never match the inflationary ideals espoused by the professionals. Conclusion The grand jury in mid-Victorian Canada West / Ontario was a collateral legal institution that defies easy categorization or placement in a hierarchy, interacting with judicial, administrative, and executive branches of government at both high and low levels. At the higher end of the governance spectrum, grand jury presentments may have had indirect ramifications for the policies, or at least the politicking, of the “proper authorities” of the provincial and federal executives. There is no question that the grand jury of the quarter sessions had an important ongoing quasi-judicial role in the determination of eligibility and quantum of support for the “destitute insane,” a group that they appear to have defined generously, and may have had influence on the institutional fates of particular individuals they identified as insane. As far as matters of local governance are concerned, the imprint of those instruments of the old regime and new – the grand jury and the inspectors – cannot be easily disentangled. The councils were assailed by both agencies, not in concert, but often simultaneously and often in counterpoint with gaolers, sheriffs, doctors, the press, and even their own members sitting as property committees. Indeed the most direct repercussions of the grand jury presentments may have been on the agendas and reports of those committees, which mimicked grand jury presentments on the issue of the gaol, including the physical visit of the

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committee members to the premises, the commendation of the gaoler, the enumeration of the prisoners (which made sense for the grand jury in the context of general gaol delivery but was of doubtful relevance to municipal administration), and the eliciting of prisoners’ opinions on their treatment. The effects of even the “hardest” of laws and legal institutions are notoriously resistant to measurement. With the possible exception of maintenance orders for the destitute insane, the non-criminal presentments of the grand juries in mid-Victorian Canada West / Ontario lacked an enforcement mechanism. This does not mean that they were necessarily ineffective, or at least any more ineffective than the new professional, centralizing, and bureaucratic organs of administration. The experience of the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville may not have been representative, but there is no reason to think that it was exceptional. In these counties, as we have seen, the record is unclear but suggests that the municipal council was just as, or more, likely to be influenced by the opinions of grand jurors on gaol-related issues. In that case grand jury presentments can be seen as a nineteenth-century variety of soft law, where the norms expressed were imprecise yet consequential, those of the most prosperous, “respectable” male members of the local community on whatever subject was raised by the judge, institutional convention, or circumstances. While other forms of low law underwent drastic transformation and innovation, the presentment function of the grand jury was merely adapted to the context of a new regime as the press, judges, and grand jurors themselves continued to find purpose in a soft law institution.

NOTES 1 This chapter is a revised draft of a paper written for Professor Paul Craven’s graduate “Low Law and Petty Justice” course at York University in the spring of 2007. It was also informed by Professor Harry Arthurs’s reading group at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2006–7, “Law … and Not Law,” in which I was introduced to the concept of soft law. I thank Professors Craven and Arthurs for their help and support. 2 Doug Hay pioneered the use of the concept of “high law / low law” in a number of publications. See Douglas Hay, “Legislation, Magistrates and Judges: High Law and Low Law in England and the Empire,” in The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings, 59–79

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(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2005). See also Tony Freyer and Lyndsay Campbell, “Introduction,” 6; and Lyndsay Campbell, “Governance in the Borderlands: Upper Canadian Legal Institutions,” 125–33, in Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, ed. Tony Freyer and Lyndsay Campbell (Durham: North Carolina: University Press, 2011). For a discussion of the relationship between legal pluralism and “low law,” see Jim Phillips, “Why Legal History Matters,” Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 41, no. 4 (2010): 293–316. See, for example, James Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964); James Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965); H.W. Arthurs, “Without the Law”: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). See Anna Di Robilant, “Genealogies of Soft Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law 54 (2006): 499–544. See also T. Gruchalla-Wesierski, “A Framework for Understanding Soft Law,” McGill Law Journal 30 (1984): 37–88; and W. Witteveen and B. van Klink, “Why Is Soft Law Really Law? A Communicative Approach to Legislation,” RegelMaat 14, no. 3 (1999): 126-40. And in present-day Canada, such offices as that of the auditor general, ombudsman, privacy and freedom of information commissioners. See generally Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter Webb, The Development of English Local Government, 1689–1835 (1906; London: Oxford University Press, 1963); Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); David Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government, 1780–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870 (New York: St Martin’s, 1997). See James K. Anderson, “The Court of General Sessions of the Peace: Local Administration in Pre-Municipal Upper Canada” (MA thesis, McMaster University, 1991), 78. Anderson does not deal expressly with the role of grand juries. Nor does David Murray, whose monograph on the pre–Baldwin Act Niagara Court of Quarter Sessions looks at the social welfare and social control aspects of local government by justices: David Robert Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791– 1849 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, 2002). For a chronology of the courts, see Margaret A. Banks, “The Evolution of Ontario Courts, 1788–1981,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, ed. David H. Flaherty (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1983), 2:492–572.

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9 For the political use of the grand jury in pre-revolution America, see Marvin E. Frankel and Gary P. Naftalis, The Grand Jury: An Institution on Trial (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 10. 10 R.I. Ferguson attributed the gaol investigation function to the grand jury’s role in general gaol delivery, but grand juries also pronounced on other public buildings such as court houses and registry offices: R.I. Ferguson, “The Grand Jury,” Criminal Law Quarterly 5 (1862–3): 210–19. See also George John Edwards, The Grand Jury: Considered from an Historical, Political and Legal Standpoint, and the Law and Practice Relating Thereto (Philadelphia: G.T. Bisel, 1906); J. Van Voorhis, Note on the History in New York State of the Powers of Grand Juries (Albany, NY: Albany Law School, 1962), 13, on the conduct of local supervision of accounts and infrastructure in the United States. See also W.A. Clarke, ed., The Grand Jury Recommend: A Selection of Entries in the Restigouche Grand Jury Book, 1858–1877 (Dalhousie, NB: Restigouche Regional Museum, 1995), for a collection of presentments by grand juries in nineteenth century New Brunswick. Other works on grand juries include Greg Taylor, The Grand Jury of South Australia (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University School of Law, 2001), 468; Max Bolstad, The Grand Jury: Eight Centuries of Myth and Reality (Boston: Warren Gorham Lamont, 2000); Mark Kadish, Behind the Locked Door of an American Grand Jury: Its History, Its Secrecy, and Its Process (Tallahassee: Florida State University, College of Law, 1996), R. Perry Sentell Jr, Georgia Local Government Officials and the Grand Jury (Atlanta: State Bar of Georgia, 1989); Elise Histed, The Introduction and Use of the Grand Jury in Victoria (London: F. Cass, 1987); Richard H. Helmholz, The Early History of the Grand Jury and the Canon Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 1983); Marvin E. Frankel and Gary P. Naftalis, The Grand Jury: An Institution on Trial (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Richard D. Younger, The People’s Panel: The Grand Jury in the United States, 1634–1941 (Providence: American History Research Center, Brown University Press, 1963); Sidney N. Lederman and Ontario Law Reform Commission, Study of the Civil Jury and Grand Jury in Ontario: Prepared for Ontario Law Reform Commission (Toronto: Ontario Law Reform Commission, 1971); Richard D. Younger, “A History of the Grand Jury in the United States” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1954); E.A. Hackett, The Irish Grand Jury System with a Note on the Irish Poor Law System (London: P.S. King and Son, 1898); Donald Fyson, Grand Juries, Political Power and Citizenship in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1830 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1998); and Donald Fyson, “Jurys, participation civique et représentation au Québec et au Bas-Canada: les grands jurys du District de Montréal (1764–1832),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 55, no. 1 (2001): 85–120.

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11 See Peter Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers”: Prisons and Punishments in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 60. 12 Margaret Banks declared 1849 to have been the annus mirabilis of institutional legal reform in Canada West: Banks, “Evolution of Ontario Courts,” 511. The terminology of old and new regimes has been used effectively to explore nineteenth-century Canadian institutional legal change. See Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, 2006); John C. Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City, 1816–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). 13 See G.P. de T. Glazebrook, “The Origins of Local Government,” in Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Ontario: Essays Presented to James J. Talman, ed. Frederick Henry Armstrong (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the University of Western Ontario, 1974), 36–47; Engin F. Isin, “The Origins of Canadian Municipal Government,” in Canadian Metropolitics: Governing Our Cities, ed. James Lightbody (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1995), 51–91; C.F.J. Whebell, “Robert Baldwin and Decentralization, 1841– 9,” in Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Ontario, ed. F.H. Armstrong (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 36–47; J.W. Aitchison, “The Development of Local Government in Upper Canada” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1953); J.I. Little, “Colonization and Municipal Reform in Canada East,” Histoire sociale / Social History 14 (1981): 93; Michele Dagenais, “The Municipal Territory: A Product of the Liberal Order?,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, ed. J.-F. Constant and Michel Ducharme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 201. 14 See generally Banks, “Evolution of Ontario Courts,” 494. 15 Upper Canada became Canada West in 1841, though it was still referred to by its former name by contemporaries. At Confederation in 1867 it became legally Ontario but was referred to as Upper Canada for some years. 16 See R. Blake Brown, The Jury, Politics, and the State in British North America: Reforms to Jury Systems in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, 1825–1867 (PhD diss., Dalhousie University, 2005), 282. He states this less pointedly in the book derived from his dissertation: R. Blake Brown, A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2009). See also John Alexander Kains, How Say You?: A Review of the Movement for Abolishing the Grand Jury (St Thomas, ON: Journal, 1893); Lederman, Study of the Civil Jury; Paul Romney, Mr Attorney: The Attorney General for Ontario in Court,

Grand Juries and “Proper Authorities”

17

18

19

20 21

563

Cabinet, and Legislature, 1791–1899 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1986), 298– 310. Brown, Jury, Politics, and the State, 282. As well as the sources relating to the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville cited in note 19, primary sources used in this part of the study include the Daily Globe, http://heritage.theglobeandmail.com.ezproxy.library .yorku.ca/default.asp?sessionID=1951973317; Brockville Recorder, Archives of Ontario (hereafter AO), MS N 144 (1851–4); Prescott Telegraph, AO, N131, R 10, (1861, 1864, 1871); Peterborough County Court of General Sessions of the Peace Grand Jury Presentments, AO, RG 22-81, box 1 (hereafter Peterborough Presentments); index registers to general correspondence of the provincial secretary, Ontario, AO, RG 8, series I-1-F, 1867–1909, MS 581, reel 1 (hereafter provincial secretary’s register, Ontario); General Correspondence of the Provincial Secretary (Ontario) AO, RG 8, series I1-D (hereafter provincial secretary’s correspondence, Ontario); provincial secretary (Canada) numbered correspondence file, Library and Archives Canada, RG 5, C1, indices and registers volumes 896 to 930, reel C-10804–9 (hereafter provincial secretary’s register, Canada). “Proper” as used in nineteenth-century presentments means “appropriate.” Municipal corporations under the Baldwin Act could be villages, towns, townships, counties, or cities. Cities and counties had responsibility for local gaols and other public facilities, the primary subjects of grand jury presentments. The United Counties of Leeds and Grenville were chosen as the basis of this study for their particularly comprehensive records, which include Leeds and Grenville United Counties Court of General Sessions of the Peace Minute Books, AO, RG 22-12-0-9, 1845–69, MS 699, reels 2 and 3 (hereafter Leeds and Grenville sessions minutes), and the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville council papers, AO, F-1740-8, 1850–80, boxes 12–28 (hereafter Leeds and Grenville papers). The Leeds and Grenville Criminal Assize (Oyer, Terminer and Gaol Delivery) Minute Book (AO, RG 22, 2906-0-2) (hereafter Leeds and Grenville assize minutes) was also consulted, though it unfortunately does not cover the entire period, beginning only in 1861, and is frequently illegible. “The Late Robert Baldwin,” Upper Canada Law Journal 5 (Jan. 1859); An act for the consolidation and amendment of the Laws relative to Jurors, Juries and Inquests in that part of this Province called Upper Canada, SO 1850, c. 55 (hereafter Jury Act 1850). The editors gave fewer kudos to the project for which later generations would venerate Baldwin, the realization of the reform movement for responsible government. See generally Brown, Trying Question, chap. 6. See ibid., 143.

564 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31

32

33

34

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See Municipal Act 1849, ss 23, 53. See Brown, Trying Question, chap. 6. See also Romney, Mr Attorney, 294–6. See Jury Act 1850, ss 5 and 6. The selectors were also paid for their trouble. Leeds and Grenville sessions minutes, 18 Dec. 1868. Daily Globe, 27 January 1876, 4. For a much more detailed breakdown of class and occupation in juries during an earlier period, and a different system of selection in Halifax, see Jim Phillips, “Halifax Juries in the Eighteenth Century,” in Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New: Essays in Honour of J.M. Beattie, ed. Greg T. Smith, Allyson May, and Simon Deveraux, 135–82 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Daily Globe, 1 Apr. 1859, 3. The Globe, as a daily, had more space for court reporting than did the Brockville Recorder or Prescott Telegraph, which as weeklies had to fit international, national, provincial, and local affairs, not to mention advertising and notices, in a scant four pages a week. Daily Globe, 1 Feb. 1875, 2. Kains, How Say You?, 12. Daily Globe, 1 Apr. 1859. For a discussion of the interrelationship of the political and cultural aspects of the mid-Victorian Ontario middle class, see Andrew Carl Holman, A Sense of Their Duty: Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). See also Stacy Pratt McDermott, “Gentlemen of the Jury: The Status of Jurors and the Reputation of the Jury in the Midwest, 1830–1860” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007). There may have been a degree of prurience in this interest. See generally Janet Miron, “‘Open to the public’: Touring Ontario Asylums in the Nineteenth Century,” in Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives, ed. David Wright and James E. Moran (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 19–48. The subject matter of the presentments was usually, but not always, recorded by the clerk. The grand juries of the superior courts had no such jurisdiction. See An Act respecting the support of destitute insane persons, 11 Geo IV c. 20; 3 Will. IV c. 45, 22 Vic c. 122. Whether these powers really qualify as hard law is arguable. In theory these decisions would have been reviewable by certiorari or mandamus, but there is no record of any such proceeding. See below on the doubts of the county judge transmitted to the Leeds and Grenville Counties’ Council. In “A Janus-Like Asylum: The City and the Institutional Confinement of the Mentally Ill in Victorian Ontario,” Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine 36, no. 2 (2008): 43–52, authors

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35

36 37 38 39 40

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David Wright, Shawn Day, Jessica Smith, and Nathan Flis express their surprise at the high numbers of rural patients who were treated at the Toronto asylum. See also Joseph Dunlop, “Politics, Patronage and Scandal at the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1848–1857,” Ontario History 98, no. 2 (2006): 183–208. David Murray made note of this legislation in passing: David Robert Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791– 1849 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by University of Toronto Press, 2002), 119. On the lack of a poor law in Upper Canada, see J.C. Levy, “The Poor Laws in Early Upper Canada,” in Law and Society in Canada in Historical Perspective, ed. D.J. Bercuson and L.A. Knafla (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1979), 23–44; Russell C. Smandych, “William Osgoode, John Graves Simcoe and the Exclusion of the English Poor Law from Upper Canada,” in Law, Society and the State: Law and Legal Pluralism in the Making of Modern Societies, ed. Louis A. Knafla and Susan W.S. Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 99. The genesis of this act is beyond the scope of this study, but the rationale may have been that the mentally ill were seen as more of a challenge to the families and neighbours who might be expected to assist. Paupers could help out in some way – the mentally ill were a burden by definition, and their presence in a family devastating to the marginal, especially where the afflicted person was a supporting member. See Thierry Nootens, “‘For years we have never had a happy home’: Madness and Families in NineteenthCentury Montreal,” in Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives, ed. James E. Moran and David Wright (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 49–68; Miron, “‘Open to the public,’” 19–48. Wright and Moran point out that “just as not all institutionalized were mad, not all mad were institutionalized” (9). AO, Township of Augusta council minutes, F 1523-1, MS 337, reel 1. See Brown, Trying Question. Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1876 (3d). Correspondence of provincial secretary (Ontario), 1878, #1553. Some of this may have been the result of errors by named parties leaving the jurisdiction and errors in nomenclature. The chairman tended to be forgiving, remitting fines when the no-shows appeared, and the problem did not recur in the period under review. See also R. Blake Brown, “Research Note: Storms, Roads and Harvest Time – Criticisms of Jury Service in Pre-Confederation Nova Scotia,” Acadiensis 36, no. 1 (2006): 93–111. The Upper Canadian resistance to travelling for jury service seems to have been much less than Brown finds for Nova Scotia, perhaps as the result of

566

41 42

43

44 45

46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

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better infrastructure in Upper Canada, and/or the greater accountability afforded by more democratic local government. Compare Eastwood, Governing Rural England, 33; Brown, “Research Note.” On Friday, 21 October 1870 W.H. Boulton applied to the grand jury in Toronto to indict the city for misdemeanour in leaving certain streets in a bad condition: Daily Globe, 21 Oct. 1870, 2. See generally Brian Paul Trainor, “Towards a Genealogy of Temperance: Identity, Belief and Drink in Victorian Ontario” (MA thesis, Queen’s University, 1993). Peterborough presentments, 5 June 1878. Petit juries were made up of twelve jurors. Grand juries were to be at least twelve and fewer than twenty-four, and a vote of twelve was considered binding. The Leeds and Grenville sessions grand jurors tended to number at least seventeen. With the exception of presentments on the destitute insane, which in Leeds and Grenville were usually – though not always – the first item on the grand jury’s agenda. Joseph Chitty, A Practical Treatise on the Criminal Law (London: A.J. Valpy, 1816), The Making of Modern Law, 2007, Thomson Gale, http://galenet .galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/servlet/MOML?locID=yorku_ law, 312. Patrick Brode, “Grand Jury Addresses of the Early Canadian Judges in an Age of Reform,” Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette 23 (June 1989): 139. Daily Globe, 18 Nov. 1865; Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1866(5); provincial secretary’s register (Ontario), 1867, #91. Charge to the Grand Jury of Simcoe County, 1881, quoted in Kains, How Say You?, 13. See Brown, Trying Question, 189. See Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” 330. Daily Globe, 21 Nov. 1865. It is possible that Justice Richards took a particular interest in Leeds and Grenville, since he had once been the MPP for the counties. Leeds and Grenville assize minutes, 26 Sept. 1871. On 10 December 1875, the Globe reported that a Missouri grand jury had sent a letter to President Ulysses S. Grant in words that suggested the lack of a judicial intermediary, 1. Brode, Grand Jury Addresses, 139. Daily Globe, 3 Feb. 1876. It should be noted that institutions in Toronto could be visited by grand juries of the Recorders’ Courts and Assizes of the city and Quarter Sessions and assizes of the County of York several times a year.

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59 Daily Globe, 31 Jan. 1857, 2. 60 Daily Globe, 15 Dec. 1874, 4. 61 See generally Mary Stokes, “Petitions to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from Local Governments, 1867–1877: A Case Study in Legislative Participation,” Law and History Review 11, no. 1 (1993) 145–80; and Jeffrey L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 62 The zenith was 1878, when twenty-seven presentments were recorded in the register. 63 The county judge was ex officio chairman of Quarter Sessions. The Leeds and Grenville minutes refer to him as chairman and esquire, until a reform that allowed him to sit alone, that is, without at least one justice of the peace, after which time he is referred to as the honourable judge of the County Court. 64 Three of the presentments mentioned in the sessions minutes are not identifiable as being about the destitute insane or not. Of course, it is possible that the clerk of the peace did not record all the presentments. That is also true of the assize, as the Leeds and Grenville council papers show presentments from the assizes for which there is no notation in the assize court minute book. 65 When the position of Crown attorney was created, this individual, who was required to be a lawyer, took over the clerk of peace duties from the long-time lay incumbent. 66 Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1856 (3). 67 A letter to the warden from William Chewett and Sons, publishers, claimed that several councils subscribed to court reports for their county judges. (Leeds and Grenville does not appear to have followed suit.) Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1865 (5). 68 James Jessup, clerk of the peace, to warden of the Counties Council of Leeds and Grenville, 16 June 1968, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1868 (5). 69 The county councils of Leeds and Grenville were not antagonistic to the idea of providing such relief. Though careful not to trench on the jurisdiction of the townships (and presumably not wanting to be accused of playing favourites among its constituent units), the council regularly granted money to worthy causes such as hospitals for the deaf and dumb, as well as fire victims of a neighbouring county, and provided matching funds where a township wished to send a disabled resident out of the jurisdiction to a residential facility. 70 Leeds and Grenville sessions minutes, 11 Mar. 1863; Prescott Telegraph, 3 Aug. 1871, 2. What mid-Victorian Ontario lacked in privacy, it made up for in civic transparency.

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71 Judge H.S. Macdonald to Mr Stafford, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1878 (3a). Most requests seem to have been made in writing. (The judge was granted the table.) 72 William Garvey to E.A. Meredith, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1862 (5). 73 An Act respecting Inspectors of Public Asylums, Hospitals, the Provincial Penitentiary of Canada and of all common Goals and other Prisons, Canada, Statutes, c. 110 (1859); Act to Provide for the Inspection of Asylums, Hospitals, Common Gaols and Reformatories in the Province, Ontario Statutes, c. 21 (1868); Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers,” chaps 9 and 10. 74 Oliver, “Terror to Evil-Doers.” 75 Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1852 (8) (n.d.). 76 Ibid. The spellings gaol and jail were both used during this period, although the former tended to appear more often. I have therefore used gaol in this chapter, except in quoting primary sources that used jail. The courtroom was carpeted. Later presentments and judges’ letters requested (and received) carpeting in the halls and galleries, on account of noise and distraction. 77 Brockville Recorder, 27 Oct. 1853, 2. 78 James Moran has written that in 1844 a conflict between the asylum superintendent and the Board of Commissioners was initiated by the publication of a grand jury report that took the position espoused by the superintendent who had guided the grand jury in their inspection: James E. Moran, Committed to the State Asylum: Insanity and Society in NineteenthCentury Quebec and Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 53. 79 Duplicate of letter of inspector of prisons and asylums, 1 June 1872, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1872 (4). 80 Dr Thomas Reynolds to Justice Hagarty, 20 Oct. 1856, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1856 (1). 81 Dr Thomas Reynolds to Chairman George Malloch, 18 Nov. 1856, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1856 (1). At this time the court was responsible for appointing and paying the gaol surgeon, a part-time contract position. Later the council took over these responsibilities. 82 Presentment to Assize, 24 Oct. 1856, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1856 (6); presentment of to Quarter Sessions, 8 November Nov. 1856, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1856 (6). 83 In the early 1850s gaol matters were referred to the omnibus Finance and Assessment Committee. 84 First report of the Standing Committee on Property, 28 May 1857, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1857 (3).

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85 Letter of Adiel Sherwood, 7 Apr. 1857, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1857 (2). 86 First report of Standing Committee on Property, 14 Oct. 1857, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1857 (2). 87 Presentment of 20 Apr. 1858, Leeds and Grenville Council papers 1856 (6). (Some of the presentments have been filed together in an earlier year, suggesting that someone culled them from several years and subsequently filed them all according to the earliest date.) 88 Warden’s address, 12 Oct. 1857, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1857 (2). 89 Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1858 (2). 90 Presentment dated Nov. 1858, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1856 (6). See n78 regarding the filing of later presentments in an earlier year. The grand jury also included an item commending the gaoler, and another expressing indignation that the gaoler was using his own money to buy food for an indigent debtor, which it argued should have been the responsibility of the sessions or the province. 91 Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1860 (5). 92 Report of Standing Committee on Property, 7 Nov. 1860, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1860 (3). 93 Report of commissioners, 13 Oct. 1862, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1862 (5). This was the only sanction the inspectorate possessed, a somewhat blunt instrument with which to secure compliance. 94 Report of commissioners, 29 Dec. 1863, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1863 (5). 95 Statement of Assets and Liabilities for 1871, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1871 (1). This does not include the towns of Brockville and Prescott, which had separated from the counties, but which paid a proportionate amount for shared services according to contracts they entered into on separation. The council papers are full of requests for roads and bridges, and in the early part of the period the council’s time and money was almost entirely committed to providing these facilities and schools. In 1862, the year the first addition to the gaol was paid for, at least eight bridges were destroyed or badly damaged by spring freshets. 96 A schedule based on returns to a circular of 8 Sept. 1869 to the wardens shows that Leeds and Grenville’s assessed property of $5,386,413 was close to the median. Lowest was Renfrew with $1,700,000, and the highest was York with $14,125,027. However, the chart shows that Leeds and Grenville salaries were on the high side; Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1869 (5); letter of treasurer regarding plan to borrow funds, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1871 (4). The gaol ended up costing closer

570

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98 99

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to $6,000. The government subsidy was half the total, but was not paid in advance. (To aid in prison discipline and deter escapes). Circular from the prison inspector to sheriffs, 7 Jan. 1878, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1878 (3a). Report of Inspector J.W. Langmuir, 19 June 1869, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1869 (5). Report of Prison Inspector J.W. Langmuir, 19 June 1869, Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1869 (5); letter of gaol physician, 20 Oct. 1856, Leeds and Grenville Papers, 1856 (6). The numbers increased towards the end of the period, after the gaol had been rebuilt, with the committee on property reporting twenty-nine in 1875 and twenty-one in 1878; Leeds and Grenville council papers, 1875 (2), 1878 (8). No such project was begun until after the period under review.

Contributors

G. Blaine Baker is professor of law emeritus at McGill University. He is the co-editor of three collections of Osgoode Society essays, and a contributor to six of them. He has also published widely elsewhere on a variety of topics in modern Canadian, American, and English legal history. R. Blake Brown is associate professor of history at Saint Mary’s University and adjunct associate professor at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. He is the author of two Osgoode Society books: Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada (2012) and A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada (2009). Lori Chambers is professor of women’s studies at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario. She is the author of two Osgoode Society books: Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (1997) and Misconceptions: Unmarried Motherhood and the Ontario Children of Unmarried Parents Act, 1921 to 1969 (2007), both of which won the Alison Prentice Award for Women’s History. She is also the author of numerous articles published in legal and historical journals. Donald Fyson is professor in the Département des sciences historiques of Université Laval. His book Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 was published in

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Contributors

2006 by the Osgoode Society and garnered several prizes. He is a specialist in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Quebec history, with a particular interest in the relationships between state, law, and society as seen through the criminal and civil justice system, the police, and local administration. David Gilles est professeur de droit à la Faculté de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke. Docteur en droit, il a publié plusieurs ouvrages en histoire du droit et de la pensée juridique, dont Thémis et Dikè. Introduction aux Fondements du droit (2012) et, avec Arnaud Decroix et Michel Morin, Les Tribunaux et l’arbitrage en Nouvelle-France et au Québec de 1740 à 1784 (2012). Il est l’auteur de plusieurs articles et publications en histoire du droit dans différentes revues nord-américaines et européennes. Ses recherches présentement portent sur le régime seigneurial et les revendications particulières des autochtones. Jeffrey L. McNairn is associate professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University, Kingston. He is the author of The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada (2000) and a number of studies of British travellers to the Maritime colonies and nineteenth-century intellectual history. In addition to the legal regulation of economic failure, his current projects include “Contribution, Coordination, Consent” on the mixed economy of public goods, especially roads, in Upper Canada, and how debates about taxation reconfigured the fiscal state and civil society. Bradley Miller is assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, where he holds the Keenleyside Chair in Canada and the World. His research has appeared in the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, and (with Jim Phillips) in the Law and History Review. He is revising his dissertation for publication. Michel Morin est professeur titulaire à la Faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal. Ses activités d’enseignement et de recherche portent sur l’histoire comparative du droit public ou du droit privé, l’évolution des droits des peuples autochtones et le droit comparé. En 1998, la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines et sociales lui a décerné le prix Jean-Charles Falardeau pour son ouvrage L’usurpation de la souveraineté autochtone (1997). En 2012, il a dirigé et coécrit, avec Arnaud

Contributors

573

Decroix et David Gilles, Les tribunaux et l’arbitrage en Nouvelle-France et au Québec de 1740 à 1784. Sylvio Normand est professeur titulaire à la Faculté de droit de l’Université Laval où il enseigne en histoire du droit et en droit civil. Ses recherches portent principalement sur l’histoire de la culture juridique québécoise. Il a publié Le droit comme discipline universitaire: une histoire de la Faculté de droit de l’Université Laval (2005) de même que plusieurs autres études sur la pensée juridique, sur l’enseignement du droit et sur la place occupée par l’imprimé dans la pratique du droit. Ian C. Pilarczyk is director of the Executive LL.M. Program at Boston University School of Law. His primary research interests are in comparative legal history, particularly at the intersection of family and criminal law. He holds a JD from Boston University, and an LLM and DCL from McGill University. Eric H. Reiter is associate professor in the Department of History, Concordia University, and a member of the Barreau du Québec. His recent publications include studies of Quebec nuisance law, the development of extra-patrimonial rights in Quebec, and the uses of history by judges in Aboriginal rights litigation. He is working on a book on social and legal ideas of honour and other intangible interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Quebec. Mary Stokes is a practising lawyer and a doctoral candidate in law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. Her research focuses on law and municipal corporations in Canada West / Ontario from the proclamation of the Municipal (Baldwin) Act of 1849 to the beginnings of the urban reform movement. She has published on institutional petitioning as a form of advocacy for law reform in mid-Victorian Ontario.

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Index

abduction, 382, 397, 399 Aberdeen, Lord, 249, 265 Aboriginal. See Natives Acadia, 132, 284 Act for the Better Prevention of Aggravated Assaults (1853), 375 Adams, John Quincy, 260–1 Admiralty, 28–30, 162 Ahrens, Heinrich, 472 alcoholism and drunkenness, 17, 376–9, 388–9, 392, 464, 545, 548 Algonquin, 287n48 aliens, 289, 522 Amelia Island, 260 American Revolution, 110, 240, 515 Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 157 Amherstburg, attack on, 240 Anderson, James, 539 annulment, 478–80 Appleton, Jane and F.F., 445–6 apprenticeship, 375–6 Arakwenté, Thomas, 285–6 Archambault, Amable, 463–4, 479–80

archives, judicial, 119, 379–80, 390–1 Argou, Gabriel, 105 Aristotle, 474 Armour, John Douglas, 442 Aroostook War, 240 arrest, 244, 246, 251, 255, 295, 386, 465, 515, 523; for debt, 189, 193–6, 199, 212–13, 218–19, 222; malicious, 213, 218; resisting, 219 arson, 199, 238, 242, 252 Arthur, Sir George, 244–6, 248, 250 Arthurs, Harry, 7 assault, 188, 193n17, 207, 222, 288, 301, 385n109, 386, 394, 448; sexual, 390–1, 393, 395; see also child abuse; incest Assizes, 188, 193, 198–9, 206, 540, 542, 545–7, 549–50, 553 asylums, 9, 202, 543, 548–9 Atkinson, James, 201 attorney general, 146, 157, 160, 242, 287, 548; see also specific individuals Aubry, Charles, 469–70, 473–4

576 Austin, John, 219 Awessassion, Thomas, 288 Aylwin, Thomas Cushing, 519, 521 Backhouse, Constance, 25, 278, 299 Bagnell, William, 387–8 Baker, Charles, 222 Baldwin, Robert, 521, 541 bankruptcy and insolvency, 10, 13– 15, 190–1, 194–201, 210, 214, 216, 219, 430n20, 437–9, 446 Banks, Margaret, 14 Baskerville, Peter, 427–8, 452 bastardy, 193n17 Bathurst, 203, 208 Batiscan, 515 Baudoin, Marie-Anne, 340n81 Baugy, Chevalier de, 330 Beauharnois Canal, 517 Beaulieu, Alain, 286, 306 Beccaria, Cesare, 135, 214 Bédard, Pierre, 118 Belile, Isabel, 399 Bentham, Jeremy, 16, 219, 540 Benton, Lauren, 237, 258 Berry, Jane, 387 Berthelot, Adèle, 463–4, 478 Berthelot, Isidore, 463 Berthelot Dartigny, Michel-Amable, 345 bestiality, 393, 398n205 Bibaud, Maximilien, 472–4, 481 Bidwell, Marshall Spring, 188, 191–2, 201, 211–12, 215–16 Bill of Rights (1689), 144, 520 Binnie, Susan, 27 Birch, Elizabeth, 383–4 Black Knight (former slave), 290, 296–8

Index Blacks, 278, 280, 290–9, 303–4, 306–7, 385, 521n81, 537 Blackstone, William, 35, 103, 143, 158–62, 165, 193, 429, 520–1 Body of Liberties (1641), 372 Bonnet, Marie-Jo, 350 borders and borderlands, 29, 235–68, 522; see also international law; sovereignty; statecraft; territoriality Bouchel, Louis, 330 Boucher, Catherine, 345 Boudreau, Nathalie (widow de la Gorgendière), 345 Boulton, Henry John, 211, 215, 221 Bourdages, Louis, 114 Bourget, Ignace, 465 Bowen, Edward, 113 Bradbury, Bettina, 299, 304, 306, 338 breach of the peace, 386n114, 397 Brewer, Holly, 337 Briand, Jean-Olivier, 146 Brierley, John, 12 Brisson, Jean-Maurice, 14 British Columbia, 393 British North America Act (1867), 5, 10, 16, 19n114 Brock, Isaac, 238, 509 Brockville, 198–9, 556n95 Brode, Patrick, 546–7 Brooke, Henry, 112 Brougham, Henry, 214 Brown, R. Blake, 15, 540–1 Brown, William, 102 Bruce, Thomas, 297n97 Buchanan, Alexander Carlisle, 101 Buckner, Phillip, 5 buggery, 393 Burk, Mary, 387, 389 Burn, Richard, 101, 108, 117–18 Burwell, Lewis, 213

Index Bytown, 296, 517n63 Cadien, Baptiste, 114 Calas, Jean, 135 Campbell, Lyndsay, 291, 295–6, 298 Campbell, Sir John, 249 Canning, George, 264–5 canon law, 21, 340n79, 391n153, 464, 472 capias, writs of, 193–4, 198, 201, 212, 215–16, 218–19 Caplan, Jean-Baptiste, 284n34 Cardinal, Joseph-Narcisse, 115 Carleton, Sir Guy, 105, 131, 133, 138, 142, 150–1, 161–2, 166–7 Caroline (steamship), 235–6, 238, 240, 247–51, 253–5, 259, 261–2 Caron, Alexis, 293 Caron, René-Édouard, 479 Cartier, George-Étienne, 522 Cartier, Joseph, 114 Castles, Alex, 3 Cauchon, Joseph-Édouard, 519, 521 Chabot, Jean, 480 Chabrand de Lisle, David, 138 Chambers, Lori, 336 Champlain, Samuel de, 505 Chancery, court of, 14, 336, 348n125, 429 Charbonneau, Antoine, 295 charivaris, 4, 462–3, 476–7 Charland, Maurice, 159 Chartier de Lotbinière, Michel, 147, 163–4, 166 Chevery, Louise, Charlotte, and Katherine, 345 child abuse, 27, 38, 370–400; see also incest Chisholme, David, 118

577 Chitty, Joseph, 546, 549 Civil Code of Lower Canada, 12–13, 22, 106, 375, 470, 474 civil law, 5, 10, 12–13, 16, 18–19, 21, 24–5, 28–30, 39, 108, 139, 150–1, 159, 166, 168, 192–3, 195, 211, 217, 220, 284, 342, 468, 470, 472; droit canadien, 98–100, 104–10, 120, 133, 140–3, 150, 154, 156, 159–64, 167, 472; French, 98, 104–5, 108, 112, 141, 157, 159, 284, 301–2, 331, 333–4, 336, 339, 342, 350, 468–72, 474–5, 483; reception of English, 108–9, 133, 139–40, 146–7, 155–6, 159, 161, 164; Roman law, 12, 107, 159, 468–9, 472; see also Custom of Paris civil law systems, 112, 117–18, 305, 338, 460, 481 clergy, benefit of the, 297 Cliche, Marie-Aimée, 25, 331 Clifford, Catherine, 388 Clifford, Rosa, 388 codification, 10, 12–13, 36, 98 Coke, Sir Edward, 143 Colborne, Sir John, 204, 239, 245–6, 251, 255 Coleman, Ann, 396 Coleman, John, 189–90 Coleman, Michael, 396–7, 399 Collectif Clio, 278n5 Collège Sainte-Marie, 29, 471 Collet, Mathieu-Benoît, 98 Collison, Gary, 295 commercial law, 29, 37, 134, 163, 302, 539 Commissioner of Indian Lands for Lower Canada, 283 common law, 219, 301, 333, 336–9, 342, 348, 372, 378, 385, 391, 393,

578 395, 428–9, 438–9, 441, 450, 484, 538–9 Common Pleas, courts of, 20, 138, 140, 154, 330–51, 547 Compagnie des Cent-Associés, 19, 34 Connolly, Susanne, 283 Conquest (of Canada), 20, 98, 104–5, 107, 112–13, 132–3, 139, 144, 157, 168, 279, 331–2, 341–3, 350, 507, 513 Conseil supérieur, 98, 119 Constitutional Act, 34, 113, 168 constitutional law, 100–1, 108, 242, 246, 301; British, 134, 136, 143, 145, 168 constitutions, 4–5, 17, 24, 28, 38, 97, 100, 110–13, 134–5, 148, 165; British, 103, 111–12, 132, 134, 139–45, 152, 154, 156, 159, 161, 163, 168, 503, 519 contracts, marriage, 17, 155, 334, 336, 338, 346–8, 350, 431, 452 conveyancing, 22, 338, 440, 446, 449, 452 Cooper, Margaret, 387n119, 387n120 Copenhagen, bombardment of, 264–6 Corey, Albert, 236 County Courts, 550 Courtlett, Jean-Louis, 432 Court of Appeal, 119, 140, 444 Couture, Judith, 384, 399 Cramahé, Hector Theophilus, 162 Cree, 289n60 Crémazie, Jacques, 393, 471 crime, 27, 193, 242, 247, 263, 266, 295, 507; see also criminal law; misdemeanour; specific crimes Crimean War, 509 criminal law, 6, 13, 15, 20, 26–7, 100, 106, 108, 132, 139, 143, 167, 187–

Index 223, 279, 289, 299, 301, 385, 393, 397, 399, 468, 471, 473, 475, 545; English, 112, 155, 157, 160, 199n37, 391, 472; reception of, 108–9, 133, 160 Crispin, Marie-Anne, 297 Crittendon, Emily, 448–50 Crittendon, Thomas, 448–50 Cugnet, François-Joseph, 99, 101–8, 110–11, 154–63, 165–6, 168 Cull, Henry, 509 Culverwell, Ella, 446 custody, child, 25, 346, 385, 396, 478 Custom of Normandy, 19 Custom of Paris, 17, 19–20, 26, 105–8, 156–7, 331–4, 336–8, 341, 343, 345– 8, 350–1, 375, 471–2 Custom of Vexin, 19 Dareau, François, 468, 470 Davidson, James and Mary, 377–8 Dawson, McGregor, 5 Day, Charles Dewey, 477, 484 death, wrongful, 482–5 debt, 13–15, 187–223, 291, 427–53; see also arrest; fraud; imprisonment Dechêne, Louise, 133 Decroix, Arnaud, 345 Delâge, Denys, 282–3 Delisle, John, 465–8, 475, 481–2, 485 Denisart, Jean-Baptiste, 470 Denmark, 264–5 Derrida, Jacques, 34 Desforges, Jean-Baptiste, 297 Des Rivières Beaubien, Henry, 101–2, 108, 471 d’Estimauville, Robert-Anne, 101, 111–12 Detroit, 241, 245, 287

Index di Robilant, Anna, 539 District Courts Act (1841), 540 Division Courts, 550 Dodson, Sir John, 247, 249, 263, 266 Domat, Jean, 35, 470 Dorland, Michael, 159 Doubridge, Robert, 293–4 Dower Act (1647), 348 dower (douaire), 278n5, 306, 332–4, 337–9, 347–8, 351 Draper, William Henry, 552 Drew, Andrew, 235, 255 Driscoll, Henry, 379–81, 384, 389 Drummond, James, 293–4 Drummond, Lewis, 521 Du Calvet, Pierre, 110–11 duelling, 479, 507, 523 Dulmage, Elias, 187–8, 190–1, 193, 206 Dunbar, Julia, 440 Dunbar, Richard, 440 Duncombe, Charles, 216 Dundas (county), 517–18 Dunn (plaintiff), 213 Durocher, Louis, 461–3, 467–8, 475–7, 485 Duval, Jean-François, 480 Duvernay, Ludger, 102 Dynan, John, 441 Eastern District, 207n67, 228 Eastern Townships, 11, 238, 242, 245, 252, 463, 509, 567 East Florida, 260 Ellice, Robert, 297n97 equity, 14, 132, 140, 333, 336, 343, 430–1, 450 Erickson, Leslie, 392, 398 extradition, 28, 242–3, 246, 248, 544

579 family councils, 17, 299 Farmer, Ann, 387 Faure, Christine, 350 Fecteau, Jean-Marie, 141, 302–3 Fellman, Anita Clair, 332 feme sole trader (marchande publique), 299, 336, 338, 345, 432n26 Fenians, 511, 522, 544 Ferrière, Claude-Joseph de, 103, 105–6, 349n143, 470, 472–3 Field, Benjamin, 297n97, 297n98 Field, David Dudley, 14 Finn, Margot, 202 firearms and other weapons, 9, 241, 255, 503–24 Flaherty, David, 21 Fletcher, John, 293–4 Fleury, Louis, 345 Flint, Billa, 430 Florida, 241, 260, 262, 391n157 Florida doctrine, 262–3 Ford, Lisa, 237 Forsyth, John, 243, 261 Fortin, Louis, 298 Forward, Lester H., 205 Foster, Hamar, 288 Foucault, Michel, 34, 214 Foulds (plaintiff), 432 Fox, H.S., 246, 248–51 Francis, Clinton W., 348 François, Noël, 287n49 Franklin, Benjamin, 134, 137 Fraser, James, 291–2 fraud, 15, 190, 195–7, 201, 210–15, 217–18, 427–53; see also debt Freeman, Betsey, 294 French Revolution, 20, 242 Friedman, Lawrence, 3 Fury, Bridget, 389n133 Fyson, Donald, 14, 140, 510

580 Gaius, 468 game laws, 283 Garden, Elizabeth, 432 Garvey, William, 551, 556 Genette, Gérard, 106 Gentili, Alberico, 263 Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine, 471–2, 474 Gidney, Robert, 30 Gilbert, Étienne, 282, 283n26 Glossen, Warren, 297n97 Goose Bay, 252 Gore (district), 198, 204, 207–8, 213 Gosselin, Marie Françoise, 349 Gourlay, Robert, 509 government: local (municipal), 8–10, 13, 16, 27, 116, 283n26, 504, 507, 512, 538–59; responsible, 10, 16, 540 Gowan, Ogle, 199 Grand River, 511 Grand Trunk Railway, 466 Granger, Emilie, 370–1, 384, 387, 399 Grant, Ulysses S., 547n55 Gray, James, 198–9 Gray, John, 205 Green, James, 259 Greenwood, Murray, 27 Greer, Allan, 40, 238, 510 Grenada, 133, 147–8, 165 Grey Nuns, 375n47 Grindstone Island, 239 Grogan, James, 241–2, 252 Gros-Louis, Antoine, 283 Grotius, Hugo, 253–5, 263 guardianship, 299, 370, 372, 374, 396–7, 400 Gwyn, Julian, 337, 348 habeas corpus, 111, 115, 131, 143, 155, 157, 166–8, 191, 291–2

Index Hagerman, Christopher, 211–12, 239, 247 Haldimand, Sir Frederick, 110–11 Hale, Edward, 518 Hall, James T., 187–92, 201–2, 222–3 Hamilton, 512 Hammerton, A. James, 387n117 Hammond, Bray, 8 Harring, Sidney, 279, 281–6 Harrington, Theophilus, 293 Harrison, Robert Alexander, 438 Harwood, Robert Unwin, 338n71 Hay, Douglas, 141, 191 Head, Sir Francis Bond, 242, 264 Hertel de Rouville, René-Ovide, 340n81 Hey, William, 105, 150 Hill, Abigail, 300n109 Himbault dit Mathias, Marin, 465, 481–2 Holmested, George, 442–3 Home District, 202, 204, 207–9, 218, 544 homicide, 114–15, 135, 205, 242, 262, 284, 287–8, 302, 376, 384n99, 510; child, 381–7, 394; spousal, 383; see also infanticide homosexuality, 280n13, 390n146, 398n205 honour, 460, 464, 467–9, 471–2, 475–9, 481, 485, 507 hooks, bell, 299n104 Horwitz, Morton, 3 House of Correction, 292, 384–5 House of Industry, 202, 389n133 House of Refuge, 9, 543, 557 Howland, W.H., 543 Hubble, Sally, 544, 551 Hudson’s Bay Company, 34, 288

Index Hunters’ Lodges, 236, 238, 240–1, 243–8, 250, 252, 261, 268 Huron-Wendat, 282–4, 306 Hurst, Willard, 538 imprisonment, 27, 300–3, 379n77, 386, 513, 516, 523, 543; for debt, 13, 141, 150–1, 187–223, 301, 555n90; reform of, 200, 202–3, 206–7, 210, 220; see also prisons incest, 382, 390–9 Incest Act (1908), 391n156 Indian Acts, 304 Indian Territories, 281, 288–9 infanticide, 25, 27, 377, 386 Ingram, Darcy, 283 injury, moral, 38, 460–85 insanity, 384n99, 389, 544, 551 international law, 16, 27–9, 235–68, 539; see also sovereignty; statecraft; territoriality Ireland, 132, 138, 303, 517, 519 Irish, 198, 303, 388, 513, 518, 521–2 Iroquois, 290, 306, 505 Jackson, Andrew, 259–62 Jackson, Jane, 443–4 Jacrau, Joseph-André-Mathurin, 105 Jalbert, François, 115 Jamaica, 293–4 Jefferson, Mary Louisa, 438 Jefferson, Thomas, 240 Jenkins, George, and wife, 345 Jenner, Sir Herbert, 266–7 Jetté, Louis-Amable, 475n99 Jews and Judaism, 21, 153, 217, 280n13, 287n48 Johnson, Tom, 38 Johnston, Bill, 239, 242–3, 251

581 Johnstown (district), 203, 206–8, 211 Jones, Howard, 240 Jones, Jonas, 198–9 Jost, Edward, 287 Juridiction royale, 330, 332, 339–42, 346 juries, 15, 295, 299n106, 306; grand, 9, 13, 141, 149–51, 188–9, 196, 203, 241–2, 538–59; of matrons, 299n106; trial, 131, 136, 141, 167, 299, 302; trial, civil, 140, 154, 166, 168, 213, 302, 475–7, 483; trial, criminal, 214, 298, 379, 384, 539, 542, 545 Jury Act (1850), 541 justice, juvenile, 27 justices of the peace. See magistrates Kahnawake, 281, 285–6 Kahnesatake, 283 Kakioukabawy (Kakioukabourg). See Pauce Kant, Immanuel, 472 Kay, John, 446–7 Keeler, James, 556 Kelly, Martin, 252, 255, 263 Kennedy, David, 268 Kennedy, Elizabeth (Betsey), 379–81, 384, 387, 389, 399 Kent, James, 257–8 Keveney, Owen, 288 King’s Bench, 116–17, 133n15, 139–40, 144, 153n128, 155, 191, 195, 213, 292, 346n114; see also Queen’s Bench Kingston, 187–8, 191, 207, 466 Knight of Knights (former slave), 296 Kolish, Evelyn, 13, 20, 348 Kostal, Rande, 24

582 labour, 18, 23, 218, 345, 375–6, 395; hard, 200–1, 218, 296, 386, 543 Labrie, Eugene, 8 Labrie, Jacques, 99, 103, 112 Lachine, 287–8, 517 Lafontaine, Louis-Hippolyte, 478, 480 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de, Baron de, 330 Laliberté, Raymond, 218 Lambert, Joseph, 461 Lancashire, 209n70 Landau, Norma, 293 Langelier, François, 472 Langlois, Pierre, 345 Langmuir, J.W., 552, 557 Lareau, Edmond, 279 Larocque, Julie, 463–4, 467–8, 475, 477–80, 485 Laverdière, sieur, 349 law: architectural symbolism of, 14, 27, 200, 202–4, 540, 551–8; cultural meanings of, 33–4, 189, 221–3, 375–6, 429–30; informal, 4, 7, 40, 450–85, 507, 539; public opinion and, 38–9, 110–20, 142–65; reception of, 5–6, 35–7, 96–104, 196, 429– 30, 468–74; see also canon law; civil law; commercial law; common law; constitutional law; criminal law; international law; low law; maritime law; Natives; obligations; public law; soft law law reform, 9–13, 15–16, 19, 26–7, 38, 111, 119, 132, 135, 163, 187–223, 427–53, 540, 545; see also statutory experimentation Law Society of Upper Canada, 29, 31 lawyers, 9–10, 19, 22, 30–2, 34, 36,

Index 39, 98, 114, 137, 140, 143, 161, 296, 298–9, 306, 473, 475, 485, 507, 521 Leduc, Pierre-Théophile, 463 Lee, Thomas, 150 Leeds and Grenville (counties), 541– 2, 544–5, 547, 549–54, 556, 559 Lees, John, 288–9 legal culture, 30–2, 96–120, 237–8, 253, 279, 386, 468–74, 528–9 legal education, 19–20, 29–31, 105, 470–2, 521 legal imagery, 204, 212, 214, 217, 427–51, 540–1 legal literature, 12, 19–20, 22, 24, 28, 30, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 96–120, 134, 143, 156, 159, 191, 237, 253–9, 393, 469, 474 legal pluralism, 4, 7, 19–21, 96–110, 116–20, 279, 281, 283–6, 288, 304, 336–50, 539 Legault dit Deslauriers, Elmire, 394 Leigne, André de, 340n81 Lerner, Gerda, 298 L’Estringant de Saint-Martin, MarieAnne-Josèphe de, 340n79 Lett, Benjamin, 242, 246 Levesque, Cordille, 370–2, 385 Levin, Jacob, 448 Lévis, 512n47 Lewis, Eliza, 451–2 Lewis, George, 451–2 libel, 467n57 libraries, law, 33–4, 100, 135, 159, 473n96 litigation, social context of, 24, 370–2, 460–7, 474–85 Lolme, Jean-Louis de, 112 London (district), 202 London (England), 105, 134, 147, 149, 294, 376n50, 377n57, 388n131

Index London (Upper Canada), 199 Loranger, Thomas-Jean-Jacques, 475n99 Lord Campbell’s Act (Act for compensating the Families of Persons killed by Accident) (1846), 483n138 Lorette, 281 Louisiana, 391n157 low law, 4, 41, 370–400, 538–59 Loyalists, 18, 199, 505 Lushington, Stephen Rumbold, 265 Mabane, Adam, 151 Macaulay, James Buchanan, 547 Macaulay, John, 188–9, 191–2, 206, 213 Macdonald, Sir John A., 512n48 Macdonell, George, 518 Machiche, 514 Mackay, Jean, 103 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 205n56, 235, 242, 510, 521n81 Mackey, Frank, 290–1, 294–6, 298 MacNab, Sir Allan Napier, 211, 247 Madawaska, 240 Madison, James, 263 magistrates, 9, 108, 116, 139, 149, 151, 187, 215–16, 283n26, 378, 386, 513, 516, 518, 523, 539–40, 542, 546; police, 379, 386 Magna Carta, 143 Maguire, John and William, 449 Maine, 240 Maitland, Sir Peregrine, 187 Malcolm, Joyce Lee, 520 Malden, 245 Manchester, Anthony, 3 Manning, William Oke, 257–8 Marcoux, Joseph, 283n26 marital unity, 430, 443, 453

583 maritime law, 28–30, 163, 254–5 Marquis, Greg, 38 marriage, 15, 147, 286, 333–7, 427, 429, 462–4, 478–80; see also contracts; women Marriage Act (1753), 336 Married Women’s Real Estate Act (1873), 434–6 Maseres, Francis, 105, 133, 138, 143, 146–7, 151, 155–7, 159, 161–4, 167, 287 Maskinongé, 514 Massachusetts, 12, 19, 21, 337, 348, 372, 391n156 Massé, Joseph, 394, 398–9 Masson, Édouard, 462 Masson, Joseph, 462–3 Masson, Sophie, 463 master and servant law, 23, 191, 193n17, 293, 376, 379n76 Mathews, John, 201 Mathieu, Michel, 475n99 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), 391 McCalla, Douglas, 503, 506, 509 McCarthy, Justin, 99, 101, 103 McClure, Robert, 252, 255 McDougall (defendant), 213 McGrath, Thomas William, 506 Mckay, Ian, 305 McKinnell, George, 440 McLane, David, 102, 104, 114–15 McLean, John, 188 McNairn, Jeffrey, 38, 506 McShewen, Mary, 379 Medley, Samuel, 445–6 Meehan, John, 297 Melville, Robert, 148 Merritt, William Hamilton, 205 Mesplet, Fleury, 166n186 Metcalfe, Charles, 517

584 Métis, 288n52 Meunier, Joseph, 461, 476–7 Mexico, 261, 266 Michigan, 240 Michon, Jacques-Denis, 463–4, 477, 480 Midland (district), 187, 189, 196, 204, 206, 208, 215 Mignault, Pierre-Basile, 110, 472 Mi’kmaq, 284 militia, 241, 245–6, 505, 507–11, 514– 15, 517, 520, 524, 544 Militia Act (1855), 510 Millar, Wynne, 30 Miller, Bradley, 291 Miller, Charles, 448 Miller, James, 6 Miller, John, 385, 388–9 Minorca, 132 minorities, 6, 278–307; see also specific groups misdemeanour, 380, 382, 388, 393, 523, 545; see also crime; specific offences Mississauga, 286 Missouri, 547n55 Mitchell, Mercie Jane, 433–4 Mitigation Act (1835), 197–8, 212 M’Lellan, Archibald, 288 Mohawk, 285 Monckton, Robert, 513 Mondelet, Charles, 481–2, 484 Monk, Samuel Cornwallis, 289 Monk, Sir James, 116–17, 290–4 Monroe, James, 260–2 Montéléon, Louis de, 340n79 Montesquieu, 135 Montreal, 3, 18, 27, 29–30, 116, 137, 139, 149, 163, 285, 287–8, 290, 294–5, 297, 300, 302–3, 305, 330–51,

Index 370–400, 441, 461, 465–6, 512, 516; capitulation of, 113, 131, 156–7, 161, 514 Moore, Edward, 443–4 Morel, André, 279 Morgan, Cecilia, 507 Morin, Augustin-Norbert, 99, 101, 113 Morin, Jacques-Yvon, 5 Morin, Michel, 283 Moutet, Josiane, 350 Muir, Marie, 395 Municipal Act (Baldwin Act) (1849), 541 murder. See homicide Murder Act (1752), 287 Murray, James, 108, 138, 150, 153, 167, 282n23, 514 Najar, Alexandre, 298 Napoleonic Code, 20, 37, 469–70, 474 Natives, 6–7, 260, 279–91, 294–6, 298–9, 303–7, 506; customary law of, 281, 283–6, 289; see also sovereignty; specific groups Navy Island, 235, 238, 247–9, 252, 262 Neatby, Hilda, 343 Neff, Stephen, 263, 265 Neganabines, 289 Neilson, John, 102 Nelles, Vivien, 21 Nelson (township), 192 New Brunswick, 12, 14, 118, 240, 522 Newcastle (district), 189–90, 208 New England, 28, 240, 373–4, 383 Newfoundland, 118 New France, 19–20, 40, 98, 104–5, 107, 113, 119, 131–5, 139, 144, 156–

Index 7, 283–4, 287–8, 291, 295, 330–1, 333–4, 342, 346, 375, 462, 505, 507, 514, 523; see also civil law New York, 12, 14, 137, 235, 239–41, 243, 246–7, 252, 255, 263, 292n70, 512n43 New York Code of Procedure, 14 Niagara (district), 202–5, 235 Niagara Peninsula, 238 Niagara River, 235 Nishonoit, Charles, 287n48, 287n50 Noel, Jan, 331–2 Normandy, 155 North West Company, 288–9 notarial system and notaries, 17, 20, 30, 32, 117n93, 284, 299, 302, 306 Nova Scotia, 12, 14, 35, 247, 284, 292, 392n168, 522n83; juries in, 295, 545; women and the law in, 337, 348 obligations, law of, 4, 13, 16, 23–4, 106, 134, 348–9, 471, 474 O’Brian, Mary, 387 Offences against the Person Act (1861), 391n156 Oliver, Peter, 5, 199–200, 540, 547, 552–3 On8anoron, 283 Ormsby, William, 5 Osgoode, William, 290 Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery, 371, 540; see also Assizes Palmerston, Lord, 251, 262 Panet, Jean-Antoine, 101 Panet, Jean-Claude, 153 Panis, 287–8, 306 Papineau, Amédée, 108n51 Parent, France, 340, 342

585 parental authority, 372, 376, 399–400, 464, 468, 478–9 Paris, treaty of (1763), 146 patrimony, 335, 340, 348, 468–70, 473–4 Pauce, Paul (Kakioukabawy or Kakioukabourg), 287n48 Payant dit St Onge, Louis, 283 Peace, Thomas, 284 Peel, Sir Robert, 217 Pélissier, Christophe, 167 Penitentiary Act (1834), 200, 217 Pennsylvania, 217 perjury, 205, 213, 218–19 Perrault, Joseph-François, 99, 101–2, 104, 108–10, 112–13, 117–19, 471 Perrin, James, 222 Perth, 545 Peterborough, 545–7 Peterloo Massacre, 516 Petit, Émilien, 107 petitions, 142, 145, 147–50, 152–4, 162–6, 188, 198, 205, 242, 292, 549, 551 Petyt, George, 109 Pierson, Ruth Roach, 331 Piggott, Michael, 445–6 Pilarczyk, Ian, 25, 38 pillory. See punishment piracy, 29, 239, 243, 251 Pitt, William, 137 Plymouth, 19 police, 26–7, 283n26, 299, 302, 377–9, 386, 507, 513, 518, 523 Police Court, 296, 377, 379 Police Ordinance (1838), 386 Pontiac, 157, 287 Poor Law Act (1834), 375n39 Poor Law Amendment Act (1868), 375n39

586 Portugal, 266 Postolec, Geneviève, 340, 342 Pothier, Robert-Joseph, 17, 335, 470–1 Prescott, 556n95 Pressart, Colomban-Sébastien, 105 Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act (1889), 379n69 Prévôté de Québec, 119, 340 Prince, John, 512n48 Prince Edward (district), 208 Prince Edward Island, 522n83 prisons, 15, 26–7, 187–9, 199, 202–5, 209, 300–1, 540, 543, 546–9, 551–9; penitentiaries, 191–2, 199–202, 204, 216, 218; prison inspectors, 541, 548, 551–4; prison officers, 187–8, 191, 194, 202–3, 206–7, 209, 215, 229, 300–1, 325, 552–4, 557–9, 569; see also imprisonment private law. See civil law Privy Council, 117, 133, 140 prostitution, 25, 205, 300, 392, 396n196 Protestants, 135, 138–9, 141, 146–8, 151–3, 164–5, 517, 520 public law, 219, 471, 474; see also constitutional law; criminal law Pufendorf, Samuel von, 264 punishment: capital, 15, 114, 135, 200, 217–18, 220, 287–8, 293, 296–7, 302, 304, 317, 373, 384, 391n156, 393; corporal, 200–1, 217–18, 297, 373, 375, 543; fines, 133, 198, 200, 206, 219, 374, 393, 475, 508, 512–13, 515, 518; see also imprisonment Pyke, George, 119, 384n98 Quarter / General Sessions of the Peace, 139, 188, 198, 206, 386, 539– 40, 542, 544–7, 549–50, 552–4, 558

Index Quatrepattes, Marie, 284n34 Quatrepattes, Pierre, 284n34 Quebec Act (1774), 20, 34, 106–9, 111, 113, 142, 148, 160, 164–5, 167, 301, 337, 343, 345, 349 Quebec City, 27, 29, 116, 138, 141, 149–50, 152, 163, 166, 204, 284, 289, 293–5, 297, 300, 302, 512, 514, 516 Queen’s Bench, 284n34, 478–9, 484; see also King’s Bench rape, 25, 390, 393–5, 397, 420n162 Rau, Charles, 469–70, 473–4 Ravary-Francoeur, Elizabeth, 466–8, 475, 482–3 Recorder’s Court, 284n33, 290 registry offices, 10, 22, 153, 302, 556–8 Registry Ordinance (1841), 306, 338n74 Reinhard, Charles de, 288 Reiter, Eric, 38 religion and churches, 24, 278–9, 280n13, 378n66; see also canon law; specific religions Renfrew (county), 556n96 reputation, 393, 448, 465, 467–8, 471–7, 480–1, 485 Reynolds, Thomas, 553–4 Richards, William Buell, 432, 547 Richardson, Charles, 215 Richelieu River, 114 Riddell, W.R., 291 Rigaud, 463 riot, 133, 137–8, 513, 517, 523 Risk, R.C.B., 8, 18, 37–8 robbery, 238–9, 242–3 Robert (slave), 293 Robin alias Robert (slave), 290–2, 294

Index Robinson, Sir Christopher, 266 Robinson, Sir John Beverley, 191, 200, 209, 211, 213, 217–18 Rolfe, Sir R.M., 249 Rolph, John, 201, 211–12, 214, 217–18 Roman Catholics, 109, 131–3, 141, 145–8, 151–3, 157, 162–5, 167, 464– 6, 481–2, 520 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 135 Roxton, 463 Royal Navy, 239, 243, 251–2, 263 Royal proclamation (1763), 132–4, 139, 147, 155, 157–62, 282, 343 Rueck, Daniel, 285–6 rule of law. See legal imagery Rushforth, Brett, 287–8 Sahlins, Peter, 237 Sainte-Thérèse-de-Blainville, 465 Saint-Hyacinthe, 463 Saint-Vincent, 147n93 Sault-Saint-Louis, 281, 288, 283n26 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 29, 485n148 Schlosser, Joseph, 287 Schnider, Jean Baptiste, 395 Schnider, Mérante, 395, 398 Schwoerer, Lois, 520 Scots, 260, 303 Scott, Winfield, 241 Seigneurial Court, 38 seigneurialism, 10–11, 16–17, 22, 38, 106–7, 117, 143, 156–7, 161, 166–7, 284–5, 299, 349n143 Seizure of Arms Act (1820), 516 Seminary: of Montreal, 147; of Quebec, 105, 145 Seminole, 241, 260, 262 Seward, William, 242

587 Sewell, Jonathan, 99, 101, 109, 116– 17, 288–9 Sexon, William, 189–90 sexual offences, 378n167, 381, 390; see also incest; rape Sherbrooke, 516, 518 sheriffs, 191, 193–4, 199, 203, 206, 209, 295, 297, 513, 545, 549, 551, 554–5, 558 Sherwood, Adiel, 199 Sherwood, Levius Peters, 196n24 Simcoe (county), 543 Simcoe, Elizabeth, 506 Simpson, Brian, 24 Sioui, Gabriel, 283 Sioux, 289 Sir Robert Peel (steamship), 239, 247, 252 Sisters of Miséricorde, 375n47 slander, 467n57, 472 slavery, 25, 28, 260, 287–8, 290–4, 296–8, 304–5, 372–4 Smith, Elias Boulton, 213 Smith, Gregory, 376 Smith, James, 484, 518–19, 521 Smith, Robert, 451 social hierarchies, 6–7, 24–6, 279–81, 326–50, 370–400, 427–51, 460–85 soft law, 538–9, 541, 559 Sourdat, Alexandre, 469–70 sovereignty, 29, 137, 143, 235–68; Native, 281–2, 286–7, 290, 304; see also international law; statecraft; territoriality Spain, 260–1, 266–7 Special Council, 10, 515–16 Spencer, Christopher, 511 Spencer, John, 243 spousal abuse. See homicide; violence

588 St Albans Raid, 240, 521 statecraft: domestic, 104–10, 161–5, 226, 240, 512–23, 538–58; international, 6, 28–30, 226–7, 259–67, 507–12; see also government; international law; sovereignty; territoriality statutory experimentation, 7–16, 23– 4, 197–8, 202, 216, 430–43, 541–58; see also law reform Stevens, Kenneth, 237, 259 Stewart, John, 199 St Lawrence River, 3, 10, 187, 238–9, 243, 251–2 Stone, Helen, 283 St-Regis, 283n26 Stripp, Rosamund, 436 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 332 Stuart, George Okill, 119 succession and inheritance, 26, 107, 119, 143, 155–63, 301, 331, 334–40, 345, 348–9, 351, 433–4, 438, 440–1, 449, 482–3 Suckling, George, 153n128 Sullivan, Patrick, 303 Superior Court, 4, 11, 461, 477, 479– 80, 483, 546 Supreme Court (Canada), 443–4, 484 Supreme Court (United States), 242 surety (peace bond), 207, 379, 381–2, 543 Sutherland, Janet, 389 Switzerland, 267 Talbot (district), 203 taxation, 133, 135–8, 140, 142, 144, 146–7, 155, 159, 164, 541, 549, 554–6 Taylor, Alan, 239, 509 Taylor, Ann, 295 Tehasitaere, Pierre, 288

Index tenure: freehold, 11, 285, 301–2, 338; see also seigneurialism Terrebonne, 461–3 territoriality, 6–7, 27, 237–51, 279–80, 281–2, 507–12; see also international law; sovereignty; statecraft Testard, Benjamin-Antoine, 279 Texas, 261 theft, 215, 293, 301–2 Thom, Louis, 290, 298 Thompson, E.P., 14 Thomson, H.C., 201 Thousand Islands, 239, 243, 252 tithe (dîme), 133, 146 Toronto (York), 27, 29, 205, 215, 221– 2, 441, 447–8, 506, 512, 547–8 Townshend, Thomas, 161 Traill, Catharine Parr, 506 Trois-Rivières, 118, 139, 287n49, 512, 514–16 Trudel, Marcel, 291 Tucker, Eric, 24 Uniacke, Norman Fitzgerald, 289n59 United States, relations with, 167–8, 235–68, 292n70, 509, 511, 513, 522–4 Upper Canada Rifle Association, 511 Ussher, Edgeworth, 238, 242 vagrancy, 300, 386, 397, 543 Valentine, 287 Valverde, Mariana, 304 Van Buren, Martin, 241, 246 van Bynkershoek, Cornelius, 254–5, 257 Van der Peet, Dorothy, 285 VanWormer, Clemson, 446–8, 450 VanWormer, Lida, 446–8, 450 Vattel, Emerich de, 255–8

Index Vermont, 240–2, 252, 292, 521 Verrier, Louis-Guillaume, 98, 105 Viger, Denis-Benjamin, 103, 113 Viner, Charles, 35 violence (interpersonal), 260, 288, 301, 462, 510, 512–13, 516, 518–19, 521, 523; spousal, 25, 372, 376, 379, 385–7, 428, 431–2, 452; see also assault, child abuse; duelling; homicide; riot Voltaire, 135, 331 Wagner (plaintiff), 438 Waite, Peter, 5 Walkem, Richard, 434 Walls, Catherine, 441 Walls, Thomas, 441 Walsh, Charles, 204–5 Walters, Mark, 283, 285–6, 288 Watson, Samuel, 241 Webber, Jeremy, 285 Weber, Max, 11 Webster, Daniel, 236, 250, 253 Weeks, William Earl, 260 Wegenast, Frederick, 8 Welland Canal, 238, 517 Wellesley, Lord, 265 Wendake, 281, 285 Wentworth, 543 Western District, 209n70 West Indies, 107, 144 Whealon, John, 323 Wheaton, Henry, 257

589 whipping. See punishment Whitbread, Samuel, 265 White, James Boyd, 212 Williamsburg, 517 Wilson, Adam, 547 Wilson, Charles, 466 Wilson, Sir Adam, 437, 439 Wilson, Thomas, 466, 482–5 Wilton, Carol, 31 Winchester, Oliver Fisher, 511n32 Windham, William, 265 Winks, Robin, 291 Wohl, Anthony, 392 women, 7, 15, 21, 25, 27, 148, 278–80, 291, 295, 298–301, 303, 305–6, 375, 386–7, 389, 398; legal capacity and status of married women, 10, 13, 15, 25, 330–51, 375, 396–7, 427–53; widows, 306, 333–4, 338–9, 341–51, 463, 466, 484 Woolrich, Julia, 283, 289–90 Woolstencroft, John, 215 Worth, William, 241 Wright, Barry, 27 Wright (plaintiff), 432 Yamaska, 514 York. See Toronto York (county), 548n58, 556n96 Young, Brian, 12, 299 Zachariæ, Karl Salomo, 469 Zaret, David, 148

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publications of the osgoode society for canadian legal history 2013 Roy McMurtry, Memoirs and Reflections Charlotte Gray, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial that Shocked a Nation C. Ian Kyer, Lawyers, Families, and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, 1863ಥ1963 G. Blaine Baker and Donald Fyson, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume XI: Quebec and the Canadas 2012 R. Blake Brown, Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada Eric Tucker, James Muir, and Bruce Ziff, eds., Property on Trial: Canadian Cases in Context Shelley Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870–1905 Barrington Walker, ed., The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays 2011 Robert J. Sharpe, The Lazier Murder: Prince Edward County, 1884 Philip Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax John McLaren, Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800–1900 Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society 2010 Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker, eds., Work on Trial: Canadian Labour Law Struggles Christopher Moore, The British Columbia Court of Appeal: The First Hundred Years Frederick Vaughan, Viscount Haldane: ‘The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution’ Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 2009 William Kaplan, Canadian Maverick: The Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand R. Blake Brown, A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada Barry Wright and Susan Binnie, eds., Canadian State Trials, Volume III: Political Trials and Security Measures, 1840–1914 Robert J. Sharpe, The Last Day, the Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial (paperback edition with a new preface)

2008 Constance Backhouse, Carnal Crimes: Sexual Assault Law in Canada, 1900–1975 Jim Phillips, R. Roy McMurtry, and John T. Saywell, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume X: A Tribute to Peter N. Oliver Greg Taylor, The Law of the Land: The Advent of the Torrens System in Canada Hamar Foster, Benjamin Berger, and A.R. Buck, eds., The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies 2007 Robert Sharpe and Patricia McMahon, The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood Lori Chambers, Misconceptions: Unmarried Motherhood and the Ontario Children of Unmarried Parents Act, 1921–1969 Jonathan Swainger, ed., A History of the Supreme Court of Alberta Martin Friedland, My Life in Crime and Other Academic Adventures 2006 Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 Dale Brawn, The Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba, 1870–1950: A Biographical History R.C.B. Risk, A History of Canadian Legal Thought: Collected Essays, edited and introduced by G. Blaine Baker and Jim Phillips 2005 Philip Girard, Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life Christopher English, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume IX – Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island Fred Kaufman, Searching for Justice: An Autobiography 2004 Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, and Barry Cahill, eds., The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754–2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle Frederick Vaughan, Aggressive in Pursuit: The Life of Justice Emmett Hall John D. Honsberger, Osgoode Hall: An Illustrated History Constance Backhouse and Nancy Backhouse, The Heiress versus the Establishment: Mrs Campbell’s Campaign for Legal Justice 2003 Robert Sharpe and Kent Roach, Brian Dickson: A Judge’s Journey Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699–1832 George Finlayson, John J. Robinette, Peerless Mentor: An Appreciation Peter Oliver, The Conventional Man: The Diaries of Ontario Chief Justice Robert A. Harrison, 1856–1878 2002 John T. Saywell, The Lawmakers: Judicial Power and the Shaping of Canadian Federalism Patrick Brode, Courted and Abandoned: Seduction in Canadian Law

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David Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791–1849 F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, eds., Canadian State Trials, Volume II: Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837–1839 Ellen Anderson, Judging Bertha Wilson: Law as Large as Life Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker, Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action in Canada, 1900–1948 Laurel Sefton MacDowell, Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J.L. Cohen Barry Cahill, ‘The Thousandth Man’: A Biography of James McGregor Stewart A.B. McKillop, The Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H.G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past Beverley Boissery and F. Murray Greenwood, Uncertain Justice: Canadian Women and Capital Punishment Bruce Ziff, Unforeseen Legacies: Reuben Wells Leonard and the Leonard Foundation Trust Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 G. Blaine Baker and Jim Phillips, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume VIII – In Honour of R.C.B. Risk Richard W. Pound, Chief Justice W.R. Jackett: By the Law of the Land David Vanek, Fulfilment: Memoirs of a Criminal Court Judge Sidney Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence Peter Oliver, ‘Terror to Evil-Doers’: Prisons and Punishments in Nineteenth-Century Ontario James W.St.G. Walker, ‘Race,’ Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada: Historical Case Studies Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario Patrick Brode, Casual Slaughters and Accidental Judgments: Canadian War Crimes and Prosecutions, 1944–1948 Ian Bushnell, The Federal Court of Canada: A History, 1875–1992 Carol Wilton, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume VII – Inside the Law: Canadian Law Firms in Historical Perspective William Kaplan, Bad Judgment: The Case of Mr Justice Leo A. Landreville Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, eds., Canadian State Trials: Volume I – Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608–1837 David Williams, Just Lawyers: Seven Portraits Hamar Foster and John McLaren, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume VI – British Columbia and the Yukon

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W.H. Morrow, ed., Northern Justice: The Memoirs of Mr Justice William G. Morrow Beverley Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong: The Treason, Trials, and Transportation to New South Wales of Lower Canadian Rebels after the 1838 Rebellion Patrick Boyer, A Passion for Justice: The Legacy of James Chalmers McRuer Charles Pullen, The Life and Times of Arthur Maloney: The Last of the Tribunes Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume V – Crime and Criminal Justice Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 Greg Marquis, Policing Canada’s Century: A History of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Murray Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution Brendan O’Brien, Speedy Justice: The Tragic Last Voyage of His Majesty’s Vessel Speedy Robert Fraser, ed., Provincial Justice: Upper Canadian Legal Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada Philip Girard and Jim Phillips, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume III – Nova Scotia Carol Wilton, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume IV – Beyond the Law: Lawyers and Business in Canada, 1830–1930 Desmond Brown, The Genesis of the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892 Patrick Brode, The Odyssey of John Anderson Robert Sharpe, The Last Day, the Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial John D. Arnup, Middleton: The Beloved Judge C. Ian Kyer and Jerome Bickenbach, The Fiercest Debate: Cecil A. Wright, the Benchers, and Legal Education in Ontario, 1923–1957 Paul Romney, Mr Attorney: The Attorney General for Ontario in Court, Cabinet, and Legislature, 1791–1899 Martin Friedland, The Case of Valentine Shortis: A True Story of Crime and Politics in Canada James Snell and Frederick Vaughan, The Supreme Court of Canada: History of the Institution Patrick Brode, Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact David Williams, Duff: A Life in the Law

1983 David H. Flaherty, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume II 1982 Marion MacRae and Anthony Adamson, Cornerstones of Order: Courthouses and Town Halls of Ontario, 1784–1914 1981 David H. Flaherty, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume I