Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec: The Taschereaus and McCords 9780773596634

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Colour plates follow page
Tables
Acknowledgments
McCord and Taschereau Family Trees
Introduction
PART ONE French and Ulster Scots Establishment
1 Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)
2 John McCord (1711–1793)
PART TWO Local Authority in the Beauce and Montreal
3 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)
4 Thomas McCord (1750–1824)
PART THREE Patricians
5 Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)
6 John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)
PART FOUR Might and Just Memory
7 Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)
8 David Ross McCord (1844–1930)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

pat r ic i an fam i l i e s and the ma k i n g o f

qu e b ec

Studies on the History of Quebec/ Études d’histoire du Québec Magda Fahrni and Jarrett Rudy Series Editors/Directeurs de la collection

1 Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal Louise Dechêne 2 Crofters and Habitants Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1881 J.I. Little 3 The Christie Seigneuries Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760–1854 Françoise Noël 4 La Prairie en Nouvelle-France, 1647–1760 Louis Lavallée 5 The Politics of Codification The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 Brian Young 6 Arvida au Saguenay Naissance d’une ville industrielle José E. Igartua 7 State and Society in Transition The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 J.I. Little 8 Vingt ans après Habitants et marchands, Lectures de l’histoire des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles canadiens Habitants et marchands, Twenty Years Later Reading the History of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Canada Edited by Sylvie Dépatie, Catherine Desbarats, Danielle Gauvreau, Mario Lalancette, Thomas Wien

9 Les récoltes des forêts publiques au Québec et en Ontario, 1840–1900 Guy Gaudreau 10 Carabins ou activistes? L’idéalisme et la radicalisation de la pensée étudiante à l’Université de Montréal au temps du duplessisme Nicole Neatby 11 Families in Transition Industry and Population in NineteenthCentury Saint-Hyacinthe Peter Gossage 12 The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec Colin M. Coates 13 Amassing Power J.B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897–1927 David Massell 14 Making Public Pasts The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930 Alan Gordon 15 A Meeting of the People School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998 Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen 16 A History for the Future Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec Jocelyn Létourneau

17 C’était du spectacle ! L’histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal, 1955–1985 Viviane Namaste

22 Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques, 1776–1838 Michel Ducharme

18 The Freedom to Smoke Tobacco Consumption and Identity Jarrett Rudy

23 The Empire Within Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal Sean Mills

19 Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle-France Québec et Louisbourg au XVIIIe siècle Josette Brun 20 Fous, prodigues, et ivrognes Familles et déviance à Montréal au XIXe Siècle Thierry Nootens 21 Done with Slavery The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 Frank Mackey

24 Quebec Hydropolitics The Peribonka Concessions of the Second World War David Massell 25 Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec The Taschereaus and McCords Brian Young

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pat r ic i an fa m i l i e s and the making of

qu e b ec The Taschereaus and McCords b r i a n yo u n g

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isbn 978-0-7735-4435-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4436-9 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-9663-4 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9664-1 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Young, Brian, 1940–, author Patrician families and the making of Quebec : the Taschereaus and McCords / Brian Young. (Studies on the history of Quebec = Études d’histoire du Québec ; 25) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4435-2 (bound).–isbn 978-0-7735-4436-9 (pbk.).– isbn 978-0-7735-9663-4 (epdf).–isbn 978-0-7735-9664-1 (epub) 1. Elite (Social sciences)–Québec (Province)–History. 2. Property– Québec (Province)–History. 3. Families–Québec (Province)–History. 4. Patriarchy–Québec (Province)–History. 5. Taschereau family. 6. McCord family. 7. Québec (Province)–Social life and customs. 8. Québec (Province)–Economic conditions. 9. Québec (Province)– History. I. Title. II. Series: Studies on the history of Quebec ; 25 hn110.z9e4 2014

305.5’209714

c2014-903644-2 c2014-903645-0

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 10.5/14.5

To Béatrice Kowaliczko and members, past and present, of the Montreal History Group

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Contents

Colour plates follow page 140 Tables • xi Acknowledgments • xiii McCord and Taschereau Family Trees • xv Introduction • 3

part one French and Ulster Scots Establishment • 21 1 Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797) • 23 2 John McCord (1711–1793) • 55 part t wo Local Authority in the Beauce and Montreal • 67 3 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809) • 71 4 Thomas McCord (1750–1824) • 120 pa rt t h re e Patricians • 141 5 Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832) • 147 6 John Samuel McCord (1801–1865) • 190 part fo ur Might and Just Memory • 257 7 Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898) • 261 8 David Ross McCord (1844–1930) • 302 Conclusion • 325 Notes • 331 Bibliography • 391 Illustration Credits • 431 Index • 439

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Tables

1.1 Slave-holding in the families of Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière and Thomas-Jacques Taschereau • 34 1.2 Settlement and agriculture in the Beauce, 1762 • 37 1.3 Taschereaus who attended the Ursuline school before 1898 • 45 1.4 Witnesses to the marriage contract of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin • 51 2.1 Slave-owners in the McCord family • 61 3.1 Minutes of the Taschereaus as chief and deputy road commissioners, 1794–1825 • 82 3.2 Rang development on the Seigneury of Sainte-Marie • 88 3.3 Notarized concessions of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau by notaries Louis Miray [Lévis] (1780–1801) and John Walsh [Sainte-Marie] (1803–1809) • 92 3.4 Livestock on the Taschereau domain, 1742–1785 • 94 3.5 Parish development • 103 3.6 Known burial sites of Taschereau family members in the second branch, 1730–1907 • 113 3.7 Acts concerning settlement of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s estate, 1809–1811 • 117 5.1 Jean-Thomas Taschereau and other family members in the Legislative Assembly, 1792–1867 • 172 5.2 Taschereaus in the Legislative Council, 1798–1832 • 175 5.3 Concessions and obligations on Taschereau seigneuries drawn up by local notaries, 1810–1832 • 180 6.1 Burials in the McCord family lot, Mount Royal Cemetery • 253 6.2 Temple Grove guests at the marriage luncheon of Eleanor Elizabeth McCord and George M. Lewis as listed in J.S. McCord’s diary • 254

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Acknowledgments

First thanks go to archivists and curators in archives and museums, particularly in Quebec but also in unexpected sources in Ottawa and California. The essential archives that nourished this work – correspondence, notarial documents, judicial records, and museum objects – have not been digitalized. Awareness of many of these sources depended on face-to-face exchanges with archivists who peeled back the lids of treasures, were generous with their time, and were thoughtful in explaining their collections. At the McCord Museum, Pamela Miller, Conrad Graham, Nora Hague, and François Cartier were exemplary – knowledgable, resourceful, and open. Archivists across Quebec listened to my project and brought out gold. Particularly attentive were Rénald Lessard of the Archives nationales du Québec, Madeleine Faucher and Peter Gagné at the Centre de référence de l’Amérique française (Musée de la civilisation), Marie Pelletier at the Musée des Religions de Nicolet, and Yvan Carette and Daniel Carrier of the Centre d’archives de la Société du patrimoine des Beaucerons. Private collectors like Christian Paquin enthusiastically offered access to their collections. Judge Georges Taschereau took interest in my project and introduced me to family members. At the presbytery in SainteMarie-de-Beauce, Abbé Gilles Marcoux opened the door to the vault of his basement archives, turned on the photocopy machine, and disappeared on his parish duties. Across the street in the city hall of Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, Line Gagnon walked me through the rich Edmond Nolin collection held by the municipal archives. Marie-Ève Harbec, Darcy Ingram, Sarah Gibson, several researchers for the Montreal History Group, and particularly Maude-Émmanuelle Lambert contributed hugely in archival research. In helping me over the finish line, I was aided greatly by Jenn McIntyre in design and Carolynn McNally in editing. My generation of Canadian scholars has benefited hugely from research agencies, and I gratefully acknowledge the aid of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (of Canada), the Canada Council for a Killam Research fellowship, and the

xiv

Acknowledgments

Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. These public funds enrich knowledge in the humanities and social sciences in immeasurable ways. At McGill, I was helped by funds associated with my James McGill professorship. My research was also facilitated by a Mayers Fellowship from the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California. More than I intended, this work is perhaps a road map to a generation of historians and to friends and fellow travellers who shaped my thinking. Undergraduate and doctoral students at McGill will see their footprints across these pages. Colleagues like Richard Rice, Robert Sweeny, Blaine Baker, Gilles Lauzon, Fernand Harvey, Sherry Olson, John Dickinson, Bob Morris, Mary Anne Poutanen, Brian Lewis, Bettina Bradbury, Jarrett Rudy, Sue Morton, Bruce Curtis, Cecilia Morgan, Colin Coates, Phillip Buckner, Benoît Grenier, Sean Mills, Denyse Baillargeon, and Michael Gauvreau will recognize conversations, shared readings, and tentative runs. The regretted Jean-Marie Fecteau was a vibrant sounding board. Don Fyson and Pamela Miller were part of my project from the outset, encouraging me with ideas and generously sharing their sources. Sherry Olson, Maude-Émmanuelle Lambert, Blaine Baker, and Jack Little commented on earlier versions of the manuscript. Two anonymous readers contributed to major revisions. Series editors Jarrett Rudy and Magda Fahrni, editor Judith Turnbull, managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee, and editor-in-chief Jonathan Crago gracefully walked me through touchy editorial moments. Friends in the Montreal History Group, a research collective centred at McGill University, barked, prodded, inspired, and constantly reminded me that researching and writing history is in good part a collective métier greatly enriched by the sharing of resources and ideas. This work is dedicated to its members, past and present. Béatrice Kowaliczko, to whom this work is also dedicated, was with me through the whole process – supportive, innovative, and generous through thick and thin. One could say that this book represents a chapter in our own family life.

m c c o rd and

tasc h e reau fam i ly t re e s

the

m c c o rds John McCord

f i r s t g e n e r at i o n

John McCord (1711–1793)

Jane (1739–1767)

m.

John (1747–1822)

m. 1756

Margery Ellis

Margery (1749–1774)

Thomas (1750–1824)

Margaret Hanna Margaret (1766–1829)

m. 1768

Henrietta Maria Gilbert

s e c o n d g e n e r at i o n Thomas McCord

Thomas McCord m. 1778 Elizabeth Ellison (1750–1824) Mary McCord (1778–1845)

m. 1798

Sarah Solomons (c. 1769–1812)

John Samuel (1801–1865)

William King (1803–1858)

John Samuel McCord

t h i rd g e n e r at i o n

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Eleanor (1836–1863)

Jane Catherine (1838–1914)

John Davidson (1841–1866)

m. 1832

Anne Ross (1807–1870)

David Ross (1844–1930)

Robert Arthur (1846–1882)

f o u rt h g e n e r at i o n

David Ross McCord m. 1878 Letitia Caroline Chambers (1844–1930) (c. 1841–1928) David Ross McCord

Anne (1849–1929)

the

ta s c h e re au s f i r s t g e n e r at i o n

Thomas-Jacques Taschereau (1680–1749)

Marie Charlotte (1732–1820) (1736–1781)

m. 1728

CharlotteClaire (1737–1819)

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

CharlesLouisPierreGabrielSoeur Antoine Joseph François Elzéar Marie(1740–1755) (1741–1820) (1742–1773) Anne(1745–1809) Louise (1743–1825)

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau

m. 1789

s e c o n d g e n e r at i o n

Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay (1771–1841)

Antoine-Charles (1797–1862)

George-Louis (1805–1837)

t h i rd branch

f o u rt h branch

Marie-Louise- m. 1773 Gabriel-Elzéar Élisabeth Bazin Taschereau (1746–1783) (1745–1809) Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar (1773–1822)

ThomasPierre-Joseph (1775–1826)

Marie-Louise (1777–1827)

JeanThomas (1778–1832)

first branch

t h i rd g e n e r at i o n Jean-Thomas Sr

second branch m. 1806

Marie Panet (1789–1866)

f o u rt h g e n e r at i o n Marie-Louise (1811–1891)

Élizabeth-Susanne (1812–1888)

Jean-Thomas Jr (1814–1893)

Claire-Caroline (1816–1883)

m. 1840

Marie-Adèle Dionne (1820–1861)

m. 1862

Marie-Josephine Caron (1839–1915)

Premier Louis-Alexandre (1867–1952)

Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre (1820–1898)

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pat r ic i an fam i l i e s and the ma k i n g o f

qu e b ec

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Introduction Put briefly, the study of power in the old regime tends to lead to the family, but then the family itself can only be fully understood in the context of the wider community which it served. James Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain

In writing about Quebec elites, their composition, and their influence on institutions and national narratives, I’ve never been comfortable with the two major interpretations of Quebec history, one built around Laurentian entrepreneurship, epitomized by the Toronto school of Donald Creighton, the other Quebec-centred and driven by nationalist imperatives to connect the historical dots of a vulnerable and minority people.1 Writing in the 1970s, Louise Dechêne, office neighbour in the McGill Department of History, emphasized the rigour of feudalism and French custom in New France and their strengthening after the British Conquest. Her interpretation has found strong echo in the works of Allan Greer, in Benoît Grenier’s studies of seigneurialism, and in Donald Fyson’s and Jean-Philippe Garneau’s descriptions of the transition of ancien régime justice.2 Emphasis on the persistence in modern societies of the influences of landed wealth, patriarchy, medieval institutions, and customary law recurs forcefully in other historiographies. Noting structures in Britain that had lasted into his own lifetime, J.F.C. Harrison pointed to the links between land, inheritance, institutions, and authority: “[Landed property] was felt to be the most permanent of all forms of wealth; it was the foundation of the most basic of human activities, the production of food; and it was inherited from generation to generation. Landed property conferred a stability and continuity greater than any other material possessions, and provided institutions and forms of authority which have lasted from feudal times to the present day.”3 Amanda Vickery, writing of women’s lives in Georgian England, makes a similar argument, that genteel families “all shared an unassailable belief in the social consequence and intrinsic authority of the propertied.”4 Social historian Robert J. Morris describes permanence and continuity as “one of the defining features of

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Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

social structure,” and in writing of Paris, David Harvey uses the term “feudal residuals.”5 Harvey demonstrates the power of a provincially driven Catholicism in the construction of Montmartre’s mammoth Sacré-Coeur Basilica in juxtaposition with the modernism of the Paris Commune. Legal historian Christopher Tomlins, commenting on the American experience, underlines the durability in a supposedly liberal society of an “estates-based social order” and an “authoritarian tradition” traceable “to the revival of Aristotelian thought in the late thirteenth century.”6 In this comparative study of elite authority in Quebec, I focus on the heads of a French and of an English patrician family. Seigneurs, widows, lawyers, judges, and prelates – their authority would be anchored in landed and inherited wealth, hegemony in Catholic and Anglican institutions, place in the historical professions of the law and clergy, and, of course, patriarchal power within the household. Edward Thompson speaks to the son who is “clearly advantaged,” while Fustel de Coulanges, in his classic work on institutions, law, religion, and the family in Greece and Rome, pegged the head as “the privileged one for the worship, for the succession, and for the command.”7 Just as the Taschereau and McCord families would evolve over time, my own research has broadened from its 1980s base in feudal property relations, the capitalist transition, and legal institutions. In the 1990s, my struggle as a board member of a history museum sensitized me to the importance of what Asa Briggs calls “visual things.” And then, writing a history of Protestant burial in Montreal, I found my structural approach challenged with complex cultural questions around death, the gendering of life moments, and the political meaning of urban landscapes. In 1995, I helped organize the meetings in Montreal of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, a five-year experience that brought regular contact with provocative historians like François Bédarida and Natalie Zemon Davis; they were thinking about history and memory, cultural pluralism, gender, and the importance of individual stories. Joan Scott, David Harvey, Catherine Hall, Robert Darnton, Mary Ryan, John Demos, Robert J. Morris, Brian Lewis, Bettina Bradbury, Bruce Curtis, Ian McKay, and colleagues in the Montreal History Group kept poking at me with sharp methodological sticks around questions of gender, culture, modernity, and the family. William Sewell and Geoff Eley – both of them male social historians who came of age in the 1960s – pointed to the broadening of their historical inquiries to include cultural practices, forms of knowledge, gender, language, artefacts, landscapes, and literature.8 For his part, Christophe Charle has insisted that the historian’s “territory” and traditional studies of elites be broadened to encompass intellectuals, empires, and university institutions.9 This barrage of ideas, and my own convictions as to the cruciality of the elite family, led to a series of questions. How did Quebec’s patrician elite – apparently fractured by French and British identities, by the schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the

Introduction

differing urban cultures of Quebec City and Montreal – capture and maintain authority across the long political and economic haul from the British Conquest to the beginning of the twentieth century? What role – and this is a question raised by Anthony Giddens – did the family play in containing individualism, in providing “pattern,” and, through the biases of their gender and generational constructs, in “stretching” social relations over time and over both peasant and citadin populations?10 Latterly, I ask how influential families contributed to shaping landscapes, institutions, and the narratives of national history. Authority, in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense, is at the core of this work. Here, it ranges in form from patriarchal power within the family to feudalism; place in the colonial and then the state bureaucracy; slave-owning; position in the legal profession, on the bench, and in social institutions; moral and disciplinary command through the established churches; and controlling voice in information. Authority involves complex relations between officialdom and citizen, parent and child, husband and wife, master and slave, landlord and tenant, priest and parish ioner, and judge and judged. As slave-owners, the Taschereaus and McCords bought and sold and advertised for runaways. As mill proprietors, they were instrumental in the provision of bread. As militia officers, they signed execution orders for deserters in the War of 1812–14 and were in the front lines of those suppressing the Patriotes in the Rebellions of 1837–38. As rectors and chancellors of universities and as Catholic archbishops and leading Anglican lay officials, they exercised intellectual and disciplinary authority across parishioners, the clergy, students, female religious communities, and social institutions. As family heads, they could command obedience from their children, and as landed, they greatly influenced the inheritance of their heirs. Across four generations, I trace the lives of two patrician families for continuity through the disruptions of imperial conquest, of the American and French revolutions, of the challenges of seigneurial land reform and legal codification, and of the decline of Anglicanism, and through the rise of such institutions as the state, legislative democracy, the university, and the nuclear family. Historians use various terms to encompass an elite that combines economic and social authority with what Edward Said calls “the indispensable role of culture.”11 Amanda Vickery describes the “genteel” in British society; Richard Bushman uses “respectability” to capture the refined building and embellishment practices of his American elite; Kathleen Brown describes the “anxious patriarchs” of colonial Virginia; and Bonnie Smith writes of the bourgeoisie of Northern France as a “leisure class.”12 I’ve settled on the term “patrician.” Suggested by the work of Max Weber and Peter Laslett and given credence by Edward Thompson, it reaches beyond material wealth and is suggestive of birth, the landed, hegemonies, and the established churches.13 With its Greek roots in “father,” the term is suggestive of both domestic masculinity and civic identities associated with “fatherland.” In

5

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Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

seeking social permanence, the patrician family gravitated to the customary, legal, and religious rights of the father, brushing by the presence of female family heads and the evident contribution of wives, widows, and daughters. Culture, custom, and religion determined that it was through male flesh that flowed name, profession, and legal priority. This focus on gender and authority in family and society, as opposed to a focus on great wealth, tacks us away from historians like Sven Beckert and interpretations based on the “monied,” on “the model of social relations of competitive capitalism,” and on a New York elite that came to be through “the ownership of capital rather than heritage and birth.”14 A Protestant merchant from Ulster, John McCord arrived in the St Lawrence Valley in 1759 or 1760 through provisioning opportunities offered by the British occupation of Quebec. Although he shared a common language and a certain British political culture with the colony’s military and administrative elite, McCord’s Ulster Scots accent, his Presbyterianism, his sense of egalitarianism, and his entrepreneurship in the drink trade set him apart. His political differences with governors James Murray and Guy Carleton and his ill-fated support for Benedict Arnold and the Americans in their attack on Quebec in 1775 brought instability to his family in their first decades in the colony. Thomas McCord, head of the second generation in Canada, moved upstream to Montreal in the 1780s. Although his distillery venture burned and failed, Thomas, like many entrepreneurs in the St Lawrence River region, looked to land for stability and revenue. His most important acquisitions were ninety-nine-year leases of two convent properties on the river flats outside Montreal. To borrow Dror Wahrman’s term, the McCords remained just “middling sorts” until urbanization and rising property values after 1800 facilitated their accession to patrician rank in English Montreal.15 Thomas McCord lived until 1824, time enough to see the Lachine Canal built near his properties and the incorporation of his pastures and windmill into an industrial suburb. His revenues as a rentier and as one of the city’s principal magistrates assured for his two sons a classical college education, access to the legal profession, and marriage into the best families. By 1840, one McCord property, the Nazareth Fief, was valued at £27,616, with Thomas’s sons sharing land rents from 247 properties. John Samuel McCord, head of the third generation, disassociated himself entirely from the tavern-keeping, rum-trading, and distilling reputations of his father and grandfather. As a married man, he left behind all trace of their rough masculinity and their drinking and national clubs. Nor did he publicize the Jewishness he inherited from his mother, a member of the prominent Solomons family. His patrician tendencies were accentuated by the Anglican respectability of his wife. Anne Ross was the daughter of David Ross, former attorney general and Montreal’s seventh-largest property-holder in 1825.16 The Ross family also owned Saint-Gilles de Beaurivage, a seigneury listed as nineteenth in value in Quebec (1863) and which, coincidentally, adjoined a Taschereau seigneury.

Introduction

Thomas-Jacques Taschereau arrived in Canada in 1726 with a title in the French aristocracy and a senior position in the colonial administration. His marriage into the Fleury de la Gorgendière family brought entry into one of the colony’s principal merchant dynasties, kinship with Governor François-Pierre de Vaudreuil, and, thanks to his father-in-law, acquisition in 1736 of the first Taschereau seigneury. Taschereau’s death in 1749 meant the transfer of family authority to his widow. Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s headship, from 1749 to 1773, coincided with the Seven Years War, the British Conquest, the death of a son in war, and the exile to France of a daughter and son. During these years, the family made the transition from place in the colonial administration and French merchant elite to a role in strategies associated with landed wealth, loyalty to the new British administration, and seigneurial authority in the Beauce region. She masterminded her son Gabriel Elzéar’s accession to headship in 1773, his marriage alliance, and the collaboration of family members under his authority. By the time of his death in 1809, GabrielElzéar had assured his heirs substantial seigneurial revenues, senior positions in the colonial administration and judiciary, and a tradition of nepotism best seen in the passage from father to son of seats in the Legislative Council. Despite a flagrant nationalist moment and his imprisonment by Governor Craig in 1810, the career of third-generation head Jean-Thomas Taschereau, seen from the perspective of a lifetime, served to reinforce the family’s patrician standing at the governor’s court and in Quebec’s expanding urban institutions. His marriage into the Panet family assured blood links with the colony’s highest ecclesiastical and civil ranks, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, sons from this union would accede to the Supreme Court of Canada and the archbishopric of Quebec. While strengthening their national profile, the Taschereaus used the weight of generations, from great-grandmother to great-grandson and beyond, to forge local authority on their seigneuries in the Beauce. Devout and socially conservative, the Taschereaus, in defence of their seigneurial privilege, sought historical feudal rights, insisting in 1842, for example, on “immemorial prescription,” “public faith,” and “vested rights.”17 At the same time, they were models of progressive capitalist seigneurs such as those described by Bruce Curtis and Simon Schama.18 Into the nineteenth century, the Beauce expanded through capitalist agricultural and forest activities, improved transportation, and population growth through the addition of Irish Catholic and Protestant immigrants to a French-Canadian base drawn largely from Beauport and the Beaupré region. By Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s death from cholera in 1832, the family’s seigneuries were profitable mixed enterprises with manufactures and forest industries operating in conjunction with a peasant agricultural economy. From fathers to sons, the Taschereaus sat in both the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly, and across the Beauce, the Taschereau voice was usually decisive in transportation improvements, matters of legal

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Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

administration, scientific-farming projects of the Quebec Agricultural Society, and the extension of popular education. Over two centuries, the Taschereaus paid minute attention to local Catholic institutions. They had connections with the episcopacy, the seminary, and convents of the capital, and the family’s voice could be counted on in the determination of new parish boundaries, in the construction and furnishing of churches, and in the naming of priests. The Taschereaus’ growth into diverse family branches in the early nineteenth century gave them a diverse pool to draw on in exercising both nepotism and new forms of authority in the region’s emerging judicial, municipal, and militia institutions. Unlike merchants or entrepreneurs for whom mobility was often characteristic, landed elites emphasized embedment, power in the community, and the use of customary as opposed to commercial law. Although the early McCords were marked by migration from Scotland to Ireland and although the first generation in both families crossed the Atlantic, I accord major significance to fixed geographical place in the histories of the two families, both of them unfolding in three distinct sites in the St Lawrence and Chaudière River watersheds: Quebec (later Quebec City), Montreal, and the Beauce. It was in the latter, an isolated region along the Chaudière River some fifty kilometres from Quebec, that the Crown granted the Taschereaus their first seigneury. Their strength as a patrician family was based on the merging of their rank as principal seigneurs in the Beauce with their acquiring administrative and institutional power in the capital, where their urban influence dated from 1726. A thousand kilometres from the Atlantic, Quebec’s magnificent site dominated the narrowing of the St Lawrence River estuary. Tides facilitated port activities and shipbuilding on the river flats, while cliffs advantaged fortification of the upper town. From its founding in 1608 and then under both French and British regimes, Quebec combined these commercial and military advantages with growth as the colony’s administrative and religious capital. It was in these professional, judicial, educational, and religious functions, rather than commerce, that the Taschereaus found authoritative weight. The nomination of a Catholic bishop in 1658 had given Quebec diocesan power that remained undivided until the establishment of the Diocese of Montreal in 1836. Through marriage, social networks, and political collaboration, the Taschereau family merged almost seamlessly with this episcopal authority, climaxing with the accession of fourth-generation head Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau to the archbishopric in 1870. There were female dimensions to this religious hegemony. The first head in this study, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière, directed a promising daughter into a religious community. The Ursuline convent, with a Taschereau as Superior for fifteen years, was the senior female cultural and educational institution

0.1 Running vertically in the centre of Bouchette’s map (1831), the Chaudière River runs through the seigneuries of Saint-Joseph, Sainte-Marie, and Lauzon and then into the St Lawrence River upriver from Quebec. This map shows townships like Broughton on both sides of the Taschereau seigneuries as well as the Ross Beaurivage seigneury (Saint-Gilles).

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Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

in Quebec and the school and convent of choice for generations of Taschereau girls. The Seminary of Quebec, established in 1663 and the largest seigneurial proprietors in New France, served in parallel fashion for elite males from the Quebec region, particularly with the collapse of Jesuit influence after the Conquest. This classical college and theological seminary trained candidates for the professions and the clergy, and in 1852, it was instrumental in the founding of Laval University. Its buildings formed part of an ecclesiastical complex on Quebec’s main square that included Notre-Dame Basilica, the Bishop’s Palace, and, later, the university. While the Ursulines were cloistered, members of the Seminary of Quebec did not take vows of poverty, were not cloistered, and moved easily into orbits of administration and authority around the bishop. Taschereaus of every generation studied at its classical college, two trained there as priests, and Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau served as its principal, as rector of Laval University, and as archbishop of Quebec. French defeat in 1759–60 terminated the ethnic and cultural cohesion of the colony’s European population. The cession of New France in 1763 brought foreign rule and permanent presence in the city of a British military, administrative, and merchant population, including John McCord, who arrived with the British troops. While two Taschereaus with military connections were exiled to France, the rest had little choice but to remain in the colony of their birth. However, preservation of their seigneurial and aristocratic titles in a British colony would come with the cost of new public loyalties. Principal seigneurs in a strategic frontier zone between the capital and the Thirteen Colonies, the Taschereaus shone with exemplary military and administrative service to the British Crown. In the capital itself, they would be instrumental in the construction of a conservative political culture around a strong French and Catholic national identity, but one unthreatening to colonial authority. More than 300 kilometres up the St Lawrence from Quebec, at the base of the Lachine Rapids, Montreal was established in 1642 as a Catholic mission. In 1663, the French Crown conceded the Island of Montreal as a seigneury to the Seminary of Montreal, and it in turn granted fourteen fiefs, particularly to female religious communities engaged in educational and social missions. Well into the nineteenth century, some 20 per cent of Montreal’s space remained controlled by religious communities, a reality central to McCord history and the larger political culture of the city.19 As in Quebec, ancien régime property, religious, and legal institutions were foundational to Montreal’s morphology.20 At the same time, Montreal’s strategic commercial site positioned it to compete with both the Hudson’s Bay Company and Atlantic cities like New York, and its banks, canals, manufactures, and railways assured it economic dominance in nineteenth-century Canada. Following his father into the alcohol business, Thomas McCord migrated into this flourishing community and then, seeing opportunity in land, found respectability and wealth

Introduction

0.2 Map of Quebec, 1859 1 Ursuline convent 2 Basilica 3 Seminary

by leasing convent fief lands in the 1790s. Critical to the patrician future of his family would be his children’s and then his grandchildren’s enjoyment of the status and revenues generated by these convent lands. Quebec and Montreal had comparable populations of some 22,000 in 1825, and in 1851 Quebec’s population of 45,940 was still competitive with Montreal’s 57,715. It was later in the century, a period that coincided with peaking hegemony for the Taschereaus and decline for the McCords, that Montreal’s ethnic diversity and growing population began to mark that city’s difference from the capital. By 1901, Quebec City’s population of 68,840 was dwarfed by Montreal’s 267,730. In particular, Quebec City’s English population declined from 40 per cent of the city’s population in 1861 to 16 per cent in 1901. Montreal, which had an English-speaking majority in 1861, saw that population – but certainly not its economic power – decline to 33 per cent of the city’s total in 1901.21 Tied to the vested institutions of Anglican Montreal and with land leases expiring, the patrician authority of the McCords fell victim to the growing pluralism of English Montreal, to the multiplicity and increasing influence of the city’s Protestant sects, and to political alienation from the city’s increasingly populist French population. In the late nineteenth century, McCord

11

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Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

influence was easily eclipsed by the capitalist wealth of Hugh Allan, John Molson, or Louisa Frothingham. Even more fatal, the family paid the price of a dysfunctional head and a childless generation; the McCords disappeared as a family in Montreal with the death of David Ross McCord in 1930. This McCord vulnerability in both its civic and human dimensions reminds us of the dual function of family as both a publicly constituted regime and an intimate domestic site encompassing shelter, work, sexuality, child-bearing, education, and health care. James Casey emphasizes this duality, pointing out that the family is “no mere private refuge, but a powerful corporation at the heart of public life.”22 John Rawls also places the family as a basic structure of public reason integral to “political society”: “[O]ne of its main roles is to be the basis of the orderly production and reproduction of society and its culture from one generation to the next.”23 Insistence on the intimacies of the household as staging for the public realm is a central theme in the History of Private Life, a five-volume study of Western society from Rome to the American family.24 American historian Mary Ryan summarizes this merging as “[T]he personal is the political.”25 Successful dynasties like the McCords and the Taschereaus – presented here as families able to regenerate wealth, status, and authority over generations – are necessarily engaged in recurring processes of construction, transmission, preservation, and family mythmaking. These generational dimensions add essential factors of persistence and accumulation over time to the biographies and punctual histories of elite family power in Quebec.26 We will witness successive Taschereaus and McCords acceding to authority in war, on the bench, in the pulpit, in institutions, and over the peasantry and an industrial proletariat. But, whatever the place of family heads in these public responsibilities, pennies could drop uncontrollably at home: widowhood, failed health, drowned sons, and alcoholism mark the pages ahead. And, whatever titles and rank as a national hero a Taschereau head might have, it involved shame and the weight of patriarchy for him to convince his wife to accept his illegitimate son within their household. Indeed, one steps away from the family archives, the stories, the photos, and the headstones struck by the layered and complex lives of these families. Their histories give reason to Edward Said’s remark on the impurity and hybridity of “all peoples, all cultures.”27 Historians, William Sewell reminds us, are obsessive about “the unfolding of human action through time.”28 The construction of this work around successive generations points to the centrality given here to biological and cultural time. Raymond Williams has remarked how the popular mind uses generation “for the reckoning of historical time.”29 One of the historian’s tasks is to align this family and individual time with the geopolitical events that determined lives and, for later generations, their imagined moments. War and the cession of New France meant military service for all male Taschereaus; the death of one son in the Caribbean; the

0.3 Montreal, 1892

bombing of their home; exile of a daughter, a grandson, and the eldest son; and fragilization of their religious, seigneurial, and aristocratic privileges. Empire and the particular conjuncture of provisioning Irish troops on the St Lawrence front brought the McCords to Quebec. The Quebec Act of 1774 is presented as another determinant political moment for both families. The year 1774 legitimized Roman Catholicism and French private law and emphasized Westminster’s decision to share local authority with the French Catholic elite. The loyalty of second-generation head Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau during the American invasion of 1775 assured his family’s place as patricians. The same Quebec Act and the failure of the American invasion of Canada were sobering episodes for pro-American merchants like the McCords. They changed political tack after 1783 and found faith in British parlia mentarianism, and by the early nineteenth century, their passage to patrician status was evident: election of Thomas McCord to the provincial assembly, migration from Presbyterianism to Anglicanism, authority in the militia and magistrature, and landed wealth and rank. Thomas McCord gave witness to his loyalty by naming his second son “William King” in 1803; streets in his 1818 subdivision bore the names “King,” “Queen,” “Duke,” and “Prince.” The Taschereaus used similar symbols. In

14

Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

homage to both the British Crown and the regretted French monarchy, GabrielElzéar Taschereau named a son “George-Louis” in 1805.30 In 1819, and despite being imprisoned by Governor James Craig in 1810, third-generation head Jean-Thomas Taschereau petitioned to name the bridge facing his seigneury in honour of the Duke of Richmond. These interconnections of moral authority, national identity, and public culture draw our attention to the gendering of elite life. The force of patriarchy in Victorian society is well documented.31 Like the proverbial elephant in the room, this reality is described by Michael McKeon as “tacit” understandings in “the matrix of experience.” Men in particular, John Tosh has pointed out, saw little difference between male authority in the home and in the marketplace, treating both as a “linked system.”32 Jack Goody writes of a “bundled” patriarchy, while Gavatri Chakravorty Spivak insists that “the word ‘patria’ is not merely masculine in gender but names the father as the source of legitimate identity.”33 Cecilia Morgan emphasizes this process as central in “strategies whereby relations of power were produced, organized, and maintained.”34 Given French settlement of the St Lawrence Valley and its subsequent incorporation into a British colony separate from the American and French republican experience, it is not surprising that patriarchy in the colony took distinct cultural and legal forms. Obvious manifestations such as sexual hierarchies, legal incapacity, female exclusion from public office, and control of the female body must be examined in the particular context of Quebec’s institutions, its customary and statutory laws, and its Anglican and French Catholic discourses.35 Archbishop Taschereau’s promotion of the cult of the Immaculate Conception and McCord leadership in organizing Protestant burial are used to illustrate what Catherine Hall bluntly describes as “the means by which relations of domination and subordination are constructed.”36 Into the twentieth century and the trauma of the First World War, fourth-generation head David Ross McCord would place male violence and sacrifice as the driving themes of his Canadian history museum. Pushing the same gender perspective, Pierre-Georges Roy, biographer of the Taschereaus, located the family in a gender landscape in which women in situations of war or danger had only diminished instrumentality.37 This context facilitates our understanding of how McCord and Taschereau women conformed to expected “secondary” roles of respectability defined by historians like Bettina Bradbury, Barbara Hanawalt, and Bonnie Smith.38 Writing of elite women in Tuscany, Giovanna Benadusi argues that “women reinforced and supported the very system that in turn undermined their position. By ensuring the preservation and transmission of elite wealth, women guaranteed the perpetuation of the power of their husbands and sons in the community.”39

Introduction

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s place as family head in the mideighteenth century, her daughter Marie-Anne-Louise’s administration as Ursuline Superior, and her daughter Marie’s role in family life and in the development of popular religious culture in the Beauce demonstrate particularities of the exercise of female authority in Quebec. Alongside the evident masculine public cultures around seminary, mill, militia, and courthouse, McCord and Taschereau women exercised real civic influence through their Christian devotions, their prominence in ceremonies, and their leadership in voluntary associations, all part of what Mary Ryan calls participation in “a vigorous public culture.”40 The Ursuline convent and the Protestant Orphan Asylum illustrate the use of veil and female religious institutions to shape urban landscapes, childhood training, and social modalities of morality and deference. Taschereau women’s sponsorship of a chapel on the family domain dedicated to Sainte Anne and their presence in pilgrimages, religious rituals, and civic celebrations had political significance across the region as a force in deflating anticlericalism and resistance to seigneurial authority. McCord and Taschereau women also had a critical role in organizing history and memory through the ardent collecting, clipping, archiving, and keeping of commonplace books and diaries, through the painting of natural scenes and still lifes, and through the recording of institutional minutes. Anne Ross used Walter Scott and artist James Duncan in the education of her son David Ross McCord. With typhoid and cholera regularly raging through mid-nineteenth-century Montreal, McCord women saw the potential of William Notman’s photographic studio as a means to immortalize the images of family members. In choosing a new site for the Protestant Orphan Asylum and in working with its architect, Anne Ross McCord applied public-health concepts concerning children, nature, and fresh air. The intellectual work, sociability, international networking, and material culture of the McCord and Taschereau women represent strong evidence of their modernity and their comfortable coupling of feudal customs and religious practices with the latest in communications and technology.41 In both families, women safeguarded and bequeathed the material accoutrements of class and family: furnishings, paintings, silverware, and children’s mementos. Although these were subordinate to the official written family histories generated by males and centred on virile civil and military exploits, female family members were principal forces in the memorializing of the visual and in the oral passage of family and national history to their children. Diverse archival sources – diaries, paintings, photographs, letters, and notarial contracts – are witnesses to these complex female roles in structuring culture, education, and religiosity in the home, in ensuring family financial stability, and in bridging between the authority of father and son. Walter Scott’s novels, book

15

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Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec

borrowing from the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, institutional minutes, correspondence, and still-life paintings collected at the McCord Museum and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec permit insight into the thinking and culture of elite women. At the same time, these were not simply drawing-room lives; kitchens, bedrooms, and family crypts were witness to technicolour events. Several McCord and Taschereau women died giving birth, many suffered the loss of infants or children, one lost her husband to cholera, two raised the illegitimate children of their husbands, and others suffered lifetimes of estate isolation. Poverty and ruin struck widows in both families. Anne McCord and Marie Taschereau are used as examples of spinsters who spent lifetimes serving brothers, children, and the elderly as research assistants, household managers, surrogate mothers, and caregivers. Since both the Taschereau and McCord households had domestic slaves in the eighteenth century, the relationship of mistress to slave and then to black help was an important dimension of female authority. Besides having hands-on authority in the running of the household, mistresses had voice in slave marriages, baptisms, religious training, and the naming of godparents. The early death of a wife left knotty domestic and parenting issues. Patrician males, however, remarried easily, their brides, usually young, having to cope with age differences and the stepmothering dynamic in an elite household. On the other hand, death of a male head struck at the very quick of the credo and functioning of the patrician family. Taschereau widows, we shall see, regularly took their place in the batting order of authority, assuming major roles in the accumulation and protection of the family’s patrimony and becoming central players in the avoidance of the shoals of intergenerational and gender disputes over money, illegitimate children, place in the family pew, and living arrangements in the manor house. In the first three generations of Taschereaus under study, the wives of family heads had substantially longer tenures in widowhood than in marriage. The death of Thomas-Jacques Taschereau in 1749 gave Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière a critical family role in her forty-eight-year widowhood. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s second wife survived him by thirty-two years. Age thirty-seven when her husband died in 1809 and never assuming headship, Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay raised her own three children and would share life on the domain with three stepsons, a stepdaughter, and their spouses – all her contemporaries in age. Thirdgeneration head Jean-Thomas Taschereau died in the cholera epidemic of 1832; his wife, Marie Panet, survived him by thirty-four years. Raising six children, the youngest nine years of age, she saw sons into the episcopacy and Supreme Court.42 Not all of these widowhoods were comfortable and instrumental. By a strange quirk in the context of this comparative study, a McCord and a Taschereau widow, related by marriage through the Des Rivières family, pooled their resources and, in the first

Introduction

years of the twentieth century, spent their impoverished dotage together in the same Quebec City house. The Montreal McCords were spared these conundrums. Heads in the first two Canadian generations outlived their wives; between father and son, John and Thomas McCord buried five wives. In the third generation, John Samuel McCord assured the succession of son David Ross as head and, in any case, predeceased his wife, Anne Ross, by only five years. Head of the fourth generation, David Ross McCord, outlived his wife by two years. While this history concentrates on the exercise of authority in its family, community, regional, and national contexts, both the McCords and the Taschereaus had strong international networks. The men travelled and maintained kin, educational, business, and institutional connections around the North Atlantic. Flagrant examples include Thomas McCord’s service as a Dublin magistrate during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s study in Rome and his multiple trips across Europe. Women in the two families certainly travelled less, but they had broad access to international goings-on through reading, art, and family and institutional correspondence. At least until 1800 both families had links in the Caribbean. War, colonial service, travel as brides, widows, student grand tours, judges, and prelates, and leisure voyages brought postmarks and steamer trunks marked Albany, Louisiana, Ireland, Scotland, London, Oxford, Brussels, Paris, Rome, and India. Here, particular attention is given to the ability of both families to corner authority by influence in pre-industrial networks of information and communication. Before the telegraph or railway, the personal letter, Susan Cannon suggests, was “the chief agency of continual contact” in international networks.43 To hold a male or female position as “secretary” or “correspondent” in parish, national, and voluntary associations; to order books for the library of the Legislative Assembly; to receive at home an inspector of forts, a governor or bishop, international scientists, or playwrights; to organize agricultural fairs and the distribution of seeds and brochures; to preside over a university or the cosmopolitan flow of religious information; or to send one’s children to libraries in Rome, Cambridge, Paris, or Boston – and this over successive generations – represent gatekeeper positions in a colonial society’s construction of culture. Heads in both families were involved in the transfer of technological and scientific knowledge in natural history, horticulture and meteorology, rum production, road construction, and architecture. Of particular importance, it is argued here, were the mid-nineteenthcentury McCord and Taschereau communications, travel, and exchanges with the Hudson Valley and New England. Passage into the high culture of Montreal and Quebec via the newspapers, scientific journals, universities, and learned societies of Boston, New York, and Albany meant that European principles in science, law,

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education, and architecture were received through a strong, and often unrecognized, American filter. Religion, particularly the institutional church, was central across both the McCord and the Taschereau family cultures; their faith, spirituality, and sociability through religion, it is suggested, cannot be reduced to simple instruments of social control. At the same time, the two “established” or state churches – the Church of Rome and the Church of England – get rigorous attention in later chapters in support of Marcel Gaudet’s argument that, in societies with rudimentary state formation, they perhaps played “the central role.”44 Linda Colley’s assertion on the role of Protestantism in Britain can be tweaked in Quebec, where both Anglicanism and Catholicism were essential partners with the patrician elite in matters of identity, authority, and public morality.45 While the institutional relationship between the two established churches is not developed, interpretation here is largely in accord with Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau’s insistence on their “substantial resemblances” at least until the mid-nineteenth century.46 The McCords admired the intellectual qualities of French classical education and French law and were long envious of Catholic social traditions of respect and hierarchy. Over generations, the Taschereaus wore the British uniform with pride and regularly sent sons for training in legal culture by clerking with the colony’s senior Anglican judges. Both families drew abundantly on religious and honorific traditions. Catholic seigneurs like the Taschereaus had the right to front-row pews and to special place in prayers, in receiving communion, in processions, and in burial under the seigneurial pew. As archbishop and cardinal, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau was Canada’s ranking Catholic religious authority enjoying princely rights to dress, honours, and priority in rituals. Montreal’s leading Anglican layman, Judge John Samuel McCord, was influential in the construction of Christ Church Cathedral, drew up a disciplinary code for Anglican priests, travelled the Quebec countryside in the company of the Anglican bishop, and then, in death in the cemetery he had piloted, was buried in a lot adjoining that of the bishop. Like religious belief, the common and civil law mindsets of the McCords and Taschereaus were essential cultural determinants in establishing identity, channels of authority, and what has been described as a “sense of a world already there.”47 Over the nineteenth century, jurists and legislators from both families helped settle Quebec’s distinct legal culture into its polyjural saddle; a study of their comparative legal cultures would form an interesting study in itself, and I have treated some elements elsewhere.48 However, comparison has only awkward place in the construct of this book, since the most prominent jurists in both families do not figure among the eight family heads treated here. Thomas McCord (1828–1886), influential English-speaking secretary of the Civil Code Commission and later judge, was

Introduction

from a Quebec City branch of the family. For their part, the Taschereaus are a unique Canadian family in placing three members – none of them heads in this study – on the Supreme Court of Canada: Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr (1814–1893), Sir Henri-Elzéar Taschereau (1836–1911), and Robert Taschereau (1896–1970), the latter serving as the Court’s eleventh chief justice. The McCords and Taschereaus had a major influence on the organization of rural, suburban, and urban space in their respective communities. On seigneury and fief, both families acted as land developers, planning, surveying, conceding, and leasing, and exercised a strong hand in local infrastructures of roads, churches, mills, and markets. With the strength that came with generational experience and inherited position, they were central figures in the establishment of such institutions as parish and diocesan churches, seminaries, convents, orphanages, hospitals, schools, universities, and cemeteries. Alongside this instrumental and gut physicality, the McCords and Taschereaus accorded careful attention to “the pleasing prospects” of land, panorama, and nature as they saw it. In the Beauce, Montreal, and the Quebec suburbs, their neoclassical estates served as patrician skylines, what John Gillis calls “the imaginative landscape of the family.”49 Further, they used paintings, the photograph, memorial statues, boulevards, and parks to impose what Richard Dennis interprets as “a morality of landscape”; anthropologists Pamela Stuart and Andrew Strathern describe this as “embeddedness” and a “sense of community through emplacement.”50 Parallels can be drawn between this morphology and Robert Ross’s Cape Town, in which manners, status and respectability, and “the outward manifestation of a specific class ideology” became “hegemonic,” “part of the natural order of things,” and a factor in “defusing class-based conflict.”51 Final chapters treat the attempt of the third and fourth generations to capture what Bonnie Smith calls “control of the mirror of history.”52 By orchestrating the recording, collecting, narrating, illustrating, and museologizing of the very history their families had been part of, the McCords and the Taschereaus brought the history of family and nation into tandem. While the Taschereaus stretched their leadership back to the model of Bishop Laval, David Ross McCord preferred to associate his family with the Conquest, the decisive Atlantic moment of British imperial glory. The McCords used their grave monument and then their museum to link themselves by marriage to the Highland officers who took Quebec with James Wolfe in 1759. In flagrant exaggeration, their headstone described them as “founders of the Canadian Parliamentary System.” Before concentrating on developing his museum of Canadian history, David Ross McCord reconfigured the entrance to the Temple Grove estate, with each step commemorating a stage in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Members of the Taschereau family also drew unabashedly on lessons from history that confirmed the timelessness in French Canada of religion, hierarchy, and

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the noble family. By organizing the ceremonial reburial of the bones of Mgr François de Laval in 1878, Archbishop Taschereau linked his episcopal authority to that of Canada’s first bishop two centuries earlier. Premier of Quebec and the archbishop’s nephew, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau entitled his 1930 address to a Toronto audience “La noblesse canadienne-française.” Reminding English Canadians of the importance of family and tradition in Quebec, he emphasized the patrician elite’s “continual involvement in the front rank of events in national life up to our times and this despite the push from the nouveaux riches.”53 Like John Berger, David Harvey, and Simon Schama, I give central place to the “visual.”54 Besides being significant contributors to Quebec’s built landscape, the McCords and Taschereaus were major collectors, curators, and memoralizers of this material culture. Through the maps, surveys, plans, portraits, drawings, and photos that they commissioned and archived, we can penetrate patrician culture through their sense of fence design, panoramic sightlines, headstone inscriptions, ornamental trees, and classical urns. It is important to examine their artefacts firsthand: their three extant diaries, their Worcester dinner plates, sketches by John Samuel McCord and Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, and the still-life paintings of Anne Ross. These vestiges of the intimate in patrician life intersect with public culture associated with the 1828 memorial to Wolfe and Montcalm, the unveiling of a monument dedicated to Cardinal Taschereau in Quebec’s main square in 1923, the creation of a garden cemetery on Mont Royal in the 1850s, and the opening in 1921 of the McCord “National” Museum on the campus of McGill University. Family trees, maps, and colour plates are used to introduce the principals, their estates and cultural surroundings. The first generation disappeared in the 1790s without leaving likenesses. The second and third generations left trails of silhouettes, lockets, and portraits and proudly stored drawings and photographs of their estates. Fourth-generation heads, David Ross McCord and Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, can be shown reaching to other levels. They used top hats and mitres, symbolic backdrops of croquet pitches and seminary retreats, the technologies and marketing of professional photographers, and the repositories of museum and seminary to recalibrate history and their families’ visual presence therein. Their uses of material culture illustrate sharp divergence after 1850 in the face of London’s Crystal Palace exhibition, the opening of Montreal’s Victoria Bridge, and the democratization of public culture. With evident nostalgia and anti-modernism, David Ross McCord turned to artists, Notman’s photographic studio, collecting, and a museum to lock a visual past in place. Archbishop Taschereau turned to the future, tapping into new avenues of popular culture through the mix of a medieval church and a seigneurial family with new technologies and the cult of personality.

part one

French and Ulster Scots Establishment

Critical in the history of the first generation of Taschereaus was marriage into the Fleury de la Gorgendière family, passage across the shoals surrounding the collapse of New France, and the Taschereaus’ subsequent transition from their origins in the French colony’s bureaucratic and merchant elite to new forms of wealth and authority based on seigneurial land and British patronage. Despite French aristocratic title, notable military service, and direct family links with the vanquished administration, the Taschereaus managed to bridge the Conquest with those remaining in Canada uniting around development of their isolated seigneurial properties in the Beauce region. Loyal, representative of the colony’s principal Catholic institutions, and seigneurs in a strategic region adjoining the Thirteen Colonies, they found themselves well positioned to assume authority in a fragile British colony. Confirmation of customary family and feudal law under the Quebec Act of 1774, the expansion of seigneurialism as a vital institution on tributaries back from the St Lawrence River, and the appeal of republicanism to the Beauce’s peasantry, all served Taschereau ascension. To this political conjuncture, first-generation Taschereau added essential ingredients for the persistence of an elite family: strong headship from widow Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière, a capacity for collaboration among family members and kin, and the effective inter-generational transfer of authority, in this case from widow to son. Formed in the years after the British Conquest, Quebec’s neophyte Englishspeaking elite was amorphous in makeup. Flourishing in the shadow of wellpublicized military commanders like James Wolfe, colonial governors like Guy Carleton, and great staple merchants and seigneurs like William Grant were petty merchants and shopkeepers, artisans and small ship builders, creditors for peasants and soldiers, and, as in John McCord’s case, entrepreneurs in drink. This was a pluralist community from the outset, and besides English migrants, their

22

French and Ulster Scots Establishment

ranks included Scots, Germans, Jews, Americans, and Ulster Scots. From Ireland, John McCord might have tested the commercial waters elsewhere, shipping sugarcane in Kingston, Jamaica, distilling in Philadelphia, or following countrymen into the plantation economy of the Carolinas. While innkeeping and trade in drink were his principal activities, he could have gravitated to higher rank through his second marriage into a respectable Newry merchant family and entered their linen, saddle, or watchmaking businesses. With second suits in corn dealing, victualling, warehousing, and shipping, his arrival in Quebec was the result of the vagaries of war and the advantage accorded by Westminster to Irish provisioners in Canadian ports. Nor was McCord from a milieu likely to be intimidated by a French city or by work in a robust male environment of barracks and docks.

1 Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

The first generation of Taschereaus in Canada present us with a fundamental contradiction between conventional elite family history and the more complex gendered relations of authority suggested by archival sources. Notarial records and correspondence emphasize that the Taschereau establishment as a landed family and their survival across the Conquest period were hugely dependent on ThomasJacques Taschereau’s opportune marriage into the Fleury de la Gorgendière merchant dynasty and then, from 1749 to 1773, on the headship of widow Fleury de la Gorgendière. Deeply ingrained patriarchal ways of seeing family pasts through the prism of male lineage and national commitment to the construction of a collective Catholic memory have determined, however, that widow Fleury de la Gorgendière would slip off the radar of remembered history, invisible alongside her husband Thomas-Jacques, her son Gabriel-Elzéar, and the powerful marker of the Taschereau name. Although well documented in merchant histories of New France, the Fleury de la Gorgendières, for example, are accorded just two pages out of two hundred in Pierre-Georges Roy’s 1901 history of the Taschereau family.1 With aristocratic title but little real wealth, Thomas-Jacques Taschereau entered New France in 1726 via senior place in the colonial administration and, sixteen months later, married into one of the colony’s principal merchant families. MarieClaire Fleury de la Gorgendière bore fourteen children. Marriage also brought acquisition in 1736 of the first Taschereau seigneury and the later addition of others. The marriage ended in 1749 with the death of Thomas-Jacques and the transfer of family headship to his widow, a responsibility she bore until 1773 when she transferred headship to her youngest son. Seigneurial headship involved both public and private responsibilities. The head spoke for the family, was its principal representative on ceremonial occasions, administered family property, mediated disputes, and was responsible for ensuring a coherent intergenerational transition. Fleury de la Gorgendière’s headship in the mid-eighteenth century occurred in the context of conditions radically different

24

1.1 The Taschereau coat of arms, 1906

from those of her twenty-one-year marriage – namely, a collapse in income with her husband’s death and, with war in the 1750s, a crisis in the merchant income of her father. In the first decade of her headship, she coped with educating her children, their dispersal in war, the death and succession arrangements of her father, and, in 1759, the destruction of her home in Quebec by a British fireball. Under British rule, she purchased a new home, concentrated family resources on the development of its seigneury in the Beauce, and organized family alliances, her son’s marriage settlement, and the orderly passage of her headship. thom as - jacqu es taschereau (1680– 174 9 ) Born in Tours and orphaned at age fifteen, Thomas-Jacques Taschereau arrived in Quebec as private secretary to Intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy. His father, Christophe Taschereau, was the sieur de Sapaillé, King’s Council, and director of the mint and treasurer of Tours. In addition to several seigneuries, the Taschereaus held important royal posts across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, usually in the Touraine region: regional treasurer-general, grand master of royal forests and waterways, lieutenant-governor of police, and mayor of Tours. Two family histori-

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

ans of the Taschereaus differ over the significance of the family’s noble status. PierreGeorges Roy traces their ennoblement back to 1492 and their coat of arms to 1698 or 1699. Honorius Provost is more skeptical, describing them as nobility of the robe who had “lost a great deal of its prestige” by the early eighteenth century.2 In her study of the nobility in New France, Lorraine Gadoury situates Taschereau as one of only 170 French aristocrats who immigrated to New France. While noting its religious and military influence and its marriage alliances with the bourgeoisie, she points out that the Canadian aristocracy was a nebulous group “without any particular economic foothold, without any reserved functions, without well-defined privileges and that the colonial administration did not particularly bother with.”3 When Intendant Dupuy was recalled to France in 1728, Taschereau, recently married, remained in Canada for several months. His nineteen-year-old bride, MarieClaire Fleury de la Gorgendière, was the granddaughter of explorer and seigneur Louis Jolliet and the daughter of Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière, seigneur, prominent fur, munitions, seal, and wheat merchant, and Canadian agent for the Compagnie des Indes; he was the principal provisioner of textiles to the colonial administration. She was raised in one of Quebec’s finest merchant houses on Place Royale. At Taschereau’s death in 1755, Fleury de la Gorgendière held land in six seigneuries and his estate was valued at more than 100,000 livres tournois.4 Able to sponsor lengthy sojourns in France for his family, he saw his son Ignace placed as a senior French bureaucrat in Santo Domingo, while his daughters married into the highest social ranks including, in Canada, the Trottier Duffy Desaulniers, and in France, Marin de La Malque (Choiseul) and François-Pierre de Rigaud Vaudreuil, governor of Trois-Rivières and Montreal and brother of the colony’s last French govenor general, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial. Marriage into the Fleury de Gorgendières would give the Taschereaus connections around the French Atlantic from Versailles to the Caribbean and Louisiana: François-Pierre de Vaudreuil’s wife, Louise-Thérèse Fleury de la Gorgendière, died in Santo Domingo in 1775. Despite the ruptures of the Conquest and the French Revolution, this network was still operative a century after Taschereau arrived in Canada, and into the 1820s, Taschereaus in Canada were still hopeful of inheriting Fleury de la Gorgendière property in Santo Domingo. We cannot know the role of sentiment in the engagement of the nineteen-yearold bride and her forty-nine-year-old groom. Sources do, however, illuminate the public and material trappings of this first Taschereau marriage in Canada and emphasize the contribution of family, state, ceremony, and ritual in establishing traditions of hierarchy and authority. The signing of the marriage contract, the wellattended reception, and the church sacrament represented the legal, social, and religious components of marriage and, in recognition of status, were witnessed by the colony’s ranking officials, including Intendant Dupuy. In addition to regula-

25

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1.2 Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, marquis de Vaudreuil (1698–1778), last govenor general of New France, and brother-inlaw of Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendières

tions outlined in both canon and civil law, the economic relationships in an elite marriage were usually set out in a contract notarized in the days before the marriage. This was the material moment when the two families came together to arrange a property settlement and devices for eventualities of age, parenting, health, or remarriage. Claude de Ferrière, pre-eminent commentator on French customary law, identified the marriage contract as “the most important” contract made by man.5 On 13 January 1728, four days before their marriage, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière and Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, accompanied by family and friends, presented themselves before a notary. While Taschereau brought noble title and senior colonial office to the marriage, he was modest in material means, his properties in France were distant, and his seniority of twenty years over his teenaged bride was suggestive of a long widowhood. He did contract a dower for his wife, minimal in their social milieu, of either 500 livres tournois annually or the customary dower, fixed under articles 247 and 248 of the Custom of Paris at half of his estate.6 For the Fleury de la Gorgendières, the marriage contract was the occasion to temper the Custom’s awesome patriarchy and to protect their daughter’s inheritance. With a view to her property, present and prospective, and to her eventual widowhood, several clauses, some standard and some specific to her particular situation, were written into the contract. Fol-

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

lowing the norm of marriage contracts, certain movables were exempted from the community of property and hence from the husband’s control: the bride retained the right to her clothing, bedding, rings and other jewels, and bedroom furnishing, estimated in her case at 2,000 livres tournois, the equivalent of four years of pension offered by her husband.7 Most significantly, all property, movable or real, that she might receive by inheritance or gift was designated as “propre,” or under her exclusive control. Another clause established a preciput, or lien, of 2,000 livres tournois on the goods of the community for the surviving partner, a condition of potential importance for both partners. The first years of their marriage were productive. Thomas-Jacques Taschereau rose rapidly in state service, and the rapid succession of children born in Quebec, Paris, Louisbourg, and again in Quebec was witness to the fertility of Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière, the upward mobility of Taschereau’s career, and the couple’s metropolitan connections. A first child, who survived only long enough to be baptized, was born in Quebec thirteen months after the marriage. Taschereau had perhaps already left for France and was followed by his wife. The couple lived in Paris until 1732, when Thomas-Jacques Taschereau was named treasurer in New France for the Ministry of Marine. This ministry was in charge of the colony, and his appointment made him a senior official just below the governor and intendant. Among his responsibilities was the issuance of the card money used as currency in New France.8 Taschereau and his wife proceeded to Louisbourg in the summer of 1732 and then on to Quebec. In 1735, he was named as one of twelve members of the Superior Council, the colony’s ranking judicial body. In 1736, his administrative rank and merchant connections led to his participation as a 10 per cent shareholder in Les forges de Saint-Maurice, the colony’s first industrial enterprise.9 With its problems in raising capital and in obtaining skilled labour, the ironworks soon constituted a major financial burden for Taschereau. In 1740, writing in despair about the ironworks’ difficulties to the intendant, he wondered “what other hope there might be for my wife and children? In my sixty-first year, where I find myself today, I cannot count on my health to hold up much longer in my work … and it is well known that I have neither talent nor sense for business.”10 In 1741, Taschereau resigned from the company, apparently losing his investment of 4,906 livres tournois.11 We know little of Taschereau’s family life or of his career as a colonial administrator and superior councillor; he did describe his difficulties as treasurer as “immense.”12 In September 1749, the very month of his death, Taschereau was trying to curry favour with the marquis de Vaudreuil in Louisiana: “My wife understands, as do I, the merit of friendship with which you honour us. She assures you of her respect and not a day goes by when we do not pray together for your speedy return to us.”13 Describing himself as a “father without a fortune,” he complained of the difficulty of providing for his children, especially since four were girls; of the

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rheumatism that made it difficult for him to write; and of the high cost of firewood and rent in Quebec. Despite these complaints, the Taschereaus were among the colony’s principal families. Taschereau owned a substantial house on a strategic upper-town site where the Archbishop’s Palace would later be built and in which, as archbishop, his great-grandson would reside. His library, inventoried after his death, contained 184 titles; his household of three domestics and a slave (in 1744) placed him second in number of servants among the seventeen members of the Superior Council.14 The inspector of fortifications, Louis Franquet, described Taschereau’s sister-in-law Louise-Thérèse Fleury de la Gorgendière, wife of the governor of Trois-Rivières, as a hostess distinguished by looks, social graces, and intelligence. Franquet reported that she received up to twenty guests for dinner with the “abundance” and “delicacy” of the very best provincial tables in France.15 It was, however, as seigneurs that the Taschereaus would find comfortable saddle and an institution, a mode of production, and a way of life that would provide the family with comfort and authority over several generations. Yet establishing their position as a principal seigneurial family proceeded but slowly: it took three decades to put the first seigneurial structures of domain and tenant farmer, gristmill, access roads, and parish church in place. A sawmill and distillery, offices of justice of the peace, road commissioner, notary, and doctor, and infrastructures of lavish manor houses, schools, and a convent would await the second and even third generations. Only two seigneuries were granted by the French Crown in the period 1710 to 1731, with the colony developing essentially along its St Lawrence axis from the gulf below Quebec to the region west of Montreal. In the 1730s, however, new colonization corridors were opened on tributaries of the St Lawrence River, with twenty-one seigneuries granted along the Upper Richelieu, Yamaska, Ottawa, and Chaudière rivers.16 In 1736, adjoining seigneuries along the Chaudière were granted to Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière and two of his sons-in-law, François-Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil and Thomas-Jacques Taschereau.17 Regulated under the Custom of Paris, seigneurs were expected to establish residence (feu et lieu), to make a declaration of loyalty (foi et hommage) at the governor’s palace, and, over time, to bring settlement to their seigneuries.18 As seigneurs, they had the rights to high, middle, and low justice as well as to fishing, hunting, and trading with the Native peoples. Particularly challenging in these seigneurial grants in the Beauce were specific clauses obliging the three seigneurs to collaborate in the construction of a road along the Chaudière River that would connect to the communication axis of the St Lawrence. The Chaudière River flows into the St Lawrence 9 kilometres upstream and on the opposite shore from Quebec City. Stretching south some 200 kilometres to its source in lac Mégantic, the Chaudière is not navigable, a reality punctuated by the picturesque 37-metre Chaudière Falls situated just 3 kilometres inland from the St

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

Lawrence. However, roads and later railways along the Chaudière Valley would represent one of the colony’s major access routes between the St Lawrence Valley and New England.19 Isolated and undeveloped before 1760, the Taschereau seigneury at Sainte-Marie was some 30 kilometres inland from the St Lawrence. Located on a flood plain, fertile but subject to spring flooding, the seigneury was characterized by terraces rising sharply back on both sides of the Chaudière. Except for the Chaudière, the seigneury’s rivers are small and fast flowing: on the west side, the rivière de l’Ancien Moulin, the rivière du Bois, and the rivière St-Thomas; and on the east side, le ruisseau du Moulin and the Chassé and Bélair rivers. Principal roads along the Chaudière were hampered by flooding, while road-building in rangs, or ranges, back from the Chaudière faced the challenge of the sharply accented terraces. The road to Saint-Elzéar, for example, rises from 152.4 metres at the Chaudière to 274.3 metres in less than a kilometre.20 On one side, towards Quebec, the Sainte-Marie seigneury suffered in the competition for settlement with Lauzon, a seigneury bordering the St Lawrence and with parish church and grist- and sawmills in place. To the south of Sainte-Marie, the adjoining seigneury of Saint-Joseph, held by Fleury de la Gorgendière relatives, boasted a flour mill and chapel as early as 1739. Like many of his peers in New France, Thomas-Jacques Taschereau was an absentee seigneur.21 An administrator in the capital, he apparently rarely visited Sainte-Marie, naming surveyor Étienne Parent as his seigneurial agent. The seigneury was first surveyed in the winter of 1738, but over the next decade, only twenty-eight concession contracts were signed, mostly with settlers from the Côte de Beaupré region. With inadequate settlement to assure him of the seigneury’s financial viability, Taschereau postponed his banal, or feudal, obligation as seigneur to construct a gristmill for his censitaires. Still, he did initiate some improvements, developing the main road, deeding a church site, and installing a chapel in the domain house.22

mar ie-cl a ire fleury de l a gorgend ière Thomas-Jacques Taschereau’s death in September 1749 left his forty-one-year-old widow with seven children at home, five under ten years of age. Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière would survive her husband for forty-eight years, acting as family head until 1773 when she ceded headship to her youngest son, Gabriel-Elzéar. Archival sources show how she developed the infrastructure and the first institutions on the Sainte-Marie seigneury and effectively used a marriage settlement, customary law, and wills to ensure the effective distribution of family patrimony. She accomplished this over the Conquest period and in the first years of the British regime. Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s headship was characterized by her complicity in the prevailing customs of patriarchy, a stance with parallels among women

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on Virginian plantations and among the gentry in Georgian Lancashire.23 Although they have sometimes been placed in the category of femmes favorisées, particularly in comparison with widowed counterparts in the Thirteen Colonies and Victorian Quebec, seigneurial widows in both the French and British regimes found their status encumbered with understood cultural and sexual conventions. Like 80 per cent of widows of noble rank in New France, Fleury de la Gorgendière did not remarry.24 Unlike some women, she did not exercise her legal right to her maiden name; in notarial contracts, she also dropped her Christian names, signing invariably as simply “widow Taschereau.” All three of her daughters who stayed in Canada after the Conquest remained unmarried. This had the effect of facilitating the concentration of family wealth in the line of her principal male heir. Fleury de la Gorgendière saw one daughter into a religious profession and found places for the two others as female companions. Her widowed sister Marie-Thomas Fleury de la Gorgendière would be a major collaborator in concentrating seigneurial wealth in the hands of her Taschereau nephew. Fleury de la Gorgendière’s headship was profoundly marked by imperial war and the British Conquest. The 1750s were a dangerous decade for her sons. As teenagers, all four of her surviving sons served in French uniform. Louis-Joseph entered the navy in 1753 as a thirteen-year-old cadet; he was immediately posted to Santo Domingo and died there in 1755. Charles-Antoine fought in the campaign of 1758; in 1759, he served as an artillery ensign under Montcalm in the battle for Quebec; in 1760, at only nineteen, he was named commander of the artillery in Trois-Rivières; captured in Montreal in September 1760, he was sent to France in a prisoner exchange; and he spent the rest of his career in the French military, dying near Paris in 1820. Pierre-François enlisted in 1759 and survived the war. GabrielElzéar, fourteen in 1759, fought and survived the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Only one of Marie-Claire’s four daughters who survived to adulthood married. In 1752, at age sixteen, Charlotte was married to a French naval ensign, and with a son born in 1761, she followed her husband to France, where she remained until her death in the Vendômois in 1781.25 During the British siege of Quebec, the Taschereau home was ruined, probably by the fireball that destroyed 166 houses on 8 August 1759. It is unclear where the family lived during the years of occupation, but in 1764 Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière had the capital to buy a two-storey stone house on Sainte-Famille Street.With the development of a Taschereau dynasty so dependent on her skills and on recurring material support from her family, Fleury de la Gorgendière’s headship speaks strongly to the insistence of feminist historians on gender as an underestimated fulcrum.26 As a widowed mother with minor children, Fleury de la Gorgendière exercised much of the puissance paternelle and tutorship outlined in the Custom of Paris. She was to act as a “bon père,” status that gave her the authority to discipline her children physically and to approve a minor’s mar-

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

riage or entry into religious orders.27 While there was no apparent support from the Taschereau family in France, she was able to draw on Fleury de la Gorgendière family wealth and the family’s connections with the French colonial administration. The signators of her children’s tutorship give measure of these connections and included her brother-in-law François-Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, seigneur and governor of Trois-Rivières; Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, seigneur and chief royal engineer; and François Daine, seigneur and sub-delegate of the intendant.28 Without a state pension from her husband and with his major assets consisting of an undeveloped seigneury and minimal properties in France, it is not clear how she lived before her father died in 1755 and she received a substantial inheritance from his estate. The education and placing of her sons and daughters were major concerns. Aided by her sister in France, she asked her husband’s cousin in Paris for financial help and positions for her sons; despite affirmations from France of “liens de sang” and “la plus grande amitié,” these pleas apparently went unanswered.29 With her diminished capacity to finance the education of her children, two of the colony’s principal Catholic institutions, the Ursuline convent and the Seminary of Quebec,

1.3 Richard Short’s view of the ruins of the Jesuit College illustrates the destruction of Quebec.

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French and Ulster Scots Establishment

stepped in. The Ursulines were already a force in Taschereau life, with daughters Marie, Charlotte, and Claire studying there as students during their father’s lifetime. Within a month of her father’s death, five-year-old Marie-Anne-Louise was awarded a six-month bursary to board at the convent, and over the following years she boarded a total of five. In 1764, aged twenty, she entered the monastery as a novice.30 The education of Marie-Claire’s sons was equally precarious. Before Thomas-Jacques Taschereau’s death, eldest son Thomas-Victor had boarded at the Seminary of Quebec, dying as a student in 1747. In 1750, Fleury de la Gorgendière, unable to pay their board, enrolled sons Louis-Joseph and Charles-Antoine as day students at the seminary, their tuition of 133 livres tournois covered by bursaries provided by the duc d’Orléans. The duke’s death in 1751 terminated the scholarships and Taschereau attendance at the seminary. Until war took them into military service, the Taschereau boys may have attended the Jesuit College.31 In evaluating Fleury de la Gorgendière’s role in developing the Sainte-Marie seigneury, one finds that the model of “businesswoman,” common in Quebec historiography and usually associated with the widow of a merchant, is not a good fit. Her authority was based, not on the counting house or shop, but around a feudal institution, custom, land in the countryside, ritual, the notarial office, and inherited family resources. Her headship also represented much more than a conservative bridge, what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has called a “deputy husband,” squeezed between husband and son. Given seigneurialism’s particular cultural and economic dynamic, she best bears comparison with fellow seigneuresses like Marie-Catherine Peuvret and Marie-Geneviève-Sophie Raymond.32 Under the Custom of Paris, widow Fleury de la Gorgendière was seigneuress and proprietor of half of the seigneury of Sainte-Marie and responsible for administering her husband’s half of the estate in the interests of their children.33 She had the right to the seigneurial pew and to the rank of seigneur on both civic and religious ceremonial occasions. Sainte-Marie was a frontier seigneury, and it was through the offices of her seigneurial agent, her notary, the mission priest, and then her son that Fleury de la Gorgendière, as an absentee seigneur, would influence settlement of the seigneury and its early built landscape of mill, parish church, church bell, and domain chapel. Correspondence and wills show that she, and then her son, received critical help from a Fleury de la Gorgendière network, essentially female, that stretched across families and religious communities in Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Montreal, and France. These links facilitated the exchange of family assets in fishing and trading in the Gulf of St Lawrence for a Taschereau grouping in seigneurialism in the Beauce. They helped her accumulate the iron stove, silver, and luxury goods that would symbolize the introduction of aristocratic comfort and politeness on a rough domain. Family members and convents contributed church artefacts that gave visual and physical form to religious culture in the nascent parish of Sainte-Marie. When she ceded

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

headship in 1773, her function as widow became that of dowager. As the senior female Taschereau in church, chapel, and community, she continued to live in the manor house with her son’s family, her daughter, and their domestic slave and servants for another quarter century. In New France and early British North America, slaves, particularly blacks, were esteemed as domestic labour. We have evidence of their presence in Fleury de la Gorgendière and Taschereau households across the eighteenth century. While Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière would develop relations with her rural peasantry through the offices of a seigneurial agent, the management of blacks in elite households like hers was learned at home. As had been commonplace in her childhood, she and her husband, Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, had a slave in their household, and a slave was present in the home of her son, where she died. Women in her family were accustomed to organizing slave marriages, choice of godparents, and religious instruction. The prestige of black help continued after the abolition of slavery in the colony, with a black domestic or livery boy remaining a mark of social distinction in Quebec society.34 Owner of fifteen slaves over his lifetime, Fleury de la Gorgendière’s father was listed as one of the colony’s “great” slaveowners, and through family merchant connections in La Rochelle, he may have been involved in the Africa trade.35 In the 1740s, his household included an infant slave from Île Royale.36 Owner of sixteen slaves during his sojourn in New France, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial was a prominent defender of the institution. As governor of Louisiana after 1742, he had a plantation with thirty slaves, and on his appointment as governor general of New France in 1755, he brought at least one domestic slave, Canon, with him. The Conquest would mean transport again for Canon, this time in the company of his master’s family on their expatriation to France.37 Inheritance, particularly of real property, became the bearing wall of Taschereau patricianism. Wills, donations or gifts, exchanges, and other contracts associated with succession give us windows to observe generational and gender strategies. Besides Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière’s role in Taschereau acquisition in 1736 of their original seigneury, it was through Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s inheritance and that of her sisters that the Taschereaus expanded their seigneurial holdings in the Beauce beyond Sainte-Marie. Writing from Corsica in 1772, her eldest son described the seigneuries as “the only and unique source of wealth that we possess.”38 In 1740, while her husband was still alive, Fleury de la Gorgendière inherited silverware with a value of 1,000 livres tournois.39 Even though war greatly reduced her father’s worth, he left a substantial estate. As her one-seventh share, she received, in 1755, “Fleury,” the seigneury adjacent to the Taschereaus’ Sainte-Marie. In 1777, she received one-seventh of the proceeds from her family’s sale of the Gulf Island seigneuries of Anticosti and Mingan. She seems also to have raised cash by

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Table 1.1 Slave-holding in the families of Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière and Thomas-Jacques Taschereau 1st Louis Jolliet Generation (1 slave )1

Jacques-Alexis Fleury Deschambault (1)2

2nd Generation

Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière [Claire Jolliet] (16)3

3rd Thomas-Ignace Generation Trottier Duffy Desaulniers [Marie-Thomas Fleury de la Gorgendière] (5)4

Joseph Fleury Deschambault (5)5

William Grant [Marie-AnneCatherine Fleury Deschambault] (8)6

4th Generation

Hubert Couterot [Charlotte Taschereau] (3)11

Thomas-Jacques Taschereau and Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1)7

François-Pierre Rigaud de Vaudreuil [Louise Fleury de la Gorgendière] (4)8

Pierre Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial [Jeanne-Charlotte Fleury Deschambault (15)9

Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay (daughter marries Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau) (5)10

Gabriel-Elzéar Pierre-François Taschereau Taschereau (2)13 [Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay] (1)12

Sources: Marcel Trudel, Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec (Montreal: Hurtubise hmh 2004); Frank Mackey, L’esclavage et les noirs à Montréal (Montreal: Hurtubise 2013). 1

1 black child 1 Native boy 3 7 black females; 4 black males; 4 Native girls; 1 Native boy 2

41

black female; 2 Native females; 1 Native male; 1 “Native” 5 1 black female; 1 black male; 2 Native boys; 1 Native girl

6

3 black females; 5 black males 1 black 8 1 Native girl; 3 Native boys 9 5 black females; 9 black males; 1 Native girl 7

10

2 female mulatos;1 black male; 2 male mulattos 11 3 Native girls 12 1 black female 13 2 Native girls

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

selling property on two different domains and selling her share of the seigneury of Deschambault to her mother.40 She arranged to sell off her husband’s estate in France, a house in Tours in 1767 and, in 1773, an unproductive woodlot. Conditions in the Beauce in the mid-eighteenth century had little in common with those on developed seigneuries along the St Lawrence. Although the “Route des Seigneurs” along the Chaudière River had opened as a rough cart road, transportation between the Beauce and the St Lawrence remained tortuous. Construction in 1758 of the Justinian Road from Saint-Henri on the Etchemin River into the Chaudière seigneuries opened a more direct route to Pointe-Lévy (now known as “Lévis”), opposite Quebec, but the region’s bogs, forests, and uninhabited stretches did little to reduce its isolation.41 The continued strong presence along the Chaudière of the Abenaki spoke to the ongoing importance of Native forms of transportation and hunting and fishing and to a strong aboriginal culture that coexisted with European religious and property forms. In 1738, Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière, seigneur of Saint-Joseph, was named godfather of a Native child baptized by a Jesuit missionary; four decades later, an Abenaki village still existed adjacent to the seigneurial domain in Saint-Joseph, with the manor house, now in Taschereau hands, serving as a fur-trading site. In exercising their authority, missionaries, priests, and the seigneuress could not ignore this strong Abenaki presence: twenty-eight baptisms, fifteen burials, and eleven marriages of Natives were conducted in the parish of Sainte-Marie from 1767 to 1787. Not all of these acts concerned Abenaki, and the parish registry of Sainte-Marie demonstrates that the Chaudière remained an important Native transit route. In 1770, an Iroquois from Sault-Ste-Marie was found dead in the forest and was buried in the parish cemetery. Two years later, “Louis Sauvage,” the son of Iroquois parents from the Lake of Two Mountains, was baptised.42 As late as 1808 and although officially forbidden, the church continued to condone marriages in the Beauce between Natives and whites, particularly in cases where the European partner was living in a Native village.43 A banal mill in Sainte-Marie was only constructed some fifteen years after the concession of the seigneury, and it was not until 1753 that Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière signed a contract with miller Jean-Baptiste Dubord.44 This delay in opening the mill was evidence of the seigneury’s marginality; R. Cole Harris has estimated that a mill was only profitable for a seigneur as the number of established families approached fifty.45 Sainte-Marie attracted few settlers, and with the colony in prolonged war, even fewer made the difficult trip to notarial offices in Pointe-Lévy or Quebec to sign a concession contract in the presence of the seigneuress: a meagre two concession contracts were signed in the period 1753–58. It was reported to Governor Murray in 1762 that only 194 arpents had been cleared on the seigneury. To encourage settlement, the seigneuress apparently allowed a grace period of three

35

1.4 Native camp at Pointe-Lévy opposite Quebec. Thomas Davies (1788)

years before collecting the cens et rentes, a principal symbol of her seigneurial authority.46 Colonists on her father’s seigneury at Saint-Joseph were supplied from his stores in Quebec. While Beauport and the Beaupré remained the principal source of settlers, frontier seigneuries were characterized by diverse settlement. Étienne Voyer, a salt smuggler deported to the colony from Angers, was given permission, albeit without formal title, to settle in Sainte-Marie in 1744. He and many of his neighbours accomplished little more than the clearing of a house site in their first years. Only in 1764 did Fleury de la Gorgendière sign Voyer’s concession contract.47 The Beauce attracted Acadians: three Thibodeau family units held lots in SainteMarie by 1762. Born in Port Royal in 1708, Michel Thibodeau migrated into the Beauce, dying in Sainte-Marie; and his son, Pierre, born in Acadia in 1744, also took a lot in Sainte-Marie, had 150 square metres cleared by1762, and in 1769 married Marie-Josephte Proteau, herself an emigrant from Charlesbourg near Quebec.48 Fleury de la Gorgendière continued her husband’s employment of Étienne Parent as seigneurial agent. A stonemason and surveyor, Parent was authorized to collect rents. However, during the war years of the 1750s, Parent left the Beauce, leaving in limbo rent collection, mill receipts, and development of the seigneurial domain. In the absence of seigneurial authority or a resident notary, the intendant authorized

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

37

Table 1.2 Settlement and agriculture in the Beauce, 1762

Concessions*

Minots of Cereal Grains Seeded

Cattle and Oxen

Sheep

Horses

Pigs

145 129

674 997

188 342

155 181

47 84

103 175

Sainte-Marie Saint-Joseph

Source: France Bélanger et al., La Beauce et les Beaucerons: Portraits d’une région 1737–1987 (Saint-Josephde-Beauce: La société du patrimoine des Beaucerons 1990), 118. *1771

Récollet missionary Justinian Constantin to notarize concessions. After 1766, some notarial acts were apparently drawn up by the priest in the presbytery of SainteMarie.49 Table 1.2 illustrates Sainte-Marie’s slow growth and incapacity to support a parish infrastructure. In 1741, with a view to furnishing a parish church, Thomas-Jacques Taschereau ordered religious ornaments from Paris. The parish of Sainte-Marie was established in 1745, and a year later, the seigneur granted land for construction of a church, presbytery, and cemetery. Sainte-Marie’s population remained insufficient, however, to support a resident priest, and provision of the sacraments continued to depend on missionaries stopping en route along the Chaudière to Saint-Joseph. Occasionally, a missionary would stay overnight in the tenant’s house on the domain. Only in 1754 was a chapel, including a bedroom for the missionary, built and the parish register opened. A 1762 census showed only fifty-one households in SainteMarie and a population of 288, minimal to support a priest. It was not until 1766, three decades after the granting of the seigneury, that a resident priest was named and a small presbytery constructed.50 As late as 1768, it was recorded that the seigneuress was proprietor of the church’s ornaments. In 1769, still on Fleury de la Gorgendière’s watch, the Sainte-Marie’s cemetery was moved from the seigneurial domain to a site beside the parish church.

the conqu est Seigneurialism was only one element of Taschereau family survival in the larger geopolitical puzzle of the mid-eighteenth century. They faced unknowns that included the determination of British policy in its newly acquired colony, the fate of Catholic religious institutions, and the place of French law, particularly in relation

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to family and seigneurial custom. Given the memories of the Acadian deportation, the cession of New France might have signalled disaster, particularly for those dependent on feudal privileges granted by the Crown. With a presence of just three decades in the colony, the Taschereaus were French aristocrats, senior colonial administrators, and “johnny-come-lately” seigneurs. With roots through her mother into the Jolliet family and seventeenth-century exploration of the Mississippi and the Gulf of St Lawrence, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière had credentials in a stakeholder family. Her father had been a militia colonel and a major provisioner for the French state, and had served as Canadian agent-general for the French Compagnie des Indes. One of her sisters was married to François-Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, governor of Trois-Rivières and Montreal. Another was married to Thomas-Ignace Trottier Duffy Desaulniers, who saw distinguished French service throughout the Seven Years War as a captain of the Montreal militia. Years of military occupation culminated in the uncertainty of the Peace of Paris and the Proclamation of 1763. While the former assured the French their property and religion, the Proclamation stated that the colony would be organized so as to be “agreeable to the laws of England,” a phrase suggestive of the application of the Test Acts, which denied civil office to Roman Catholics.51 In fact, colonialism in British North America played out very differently. Families like the Taschereaus would benefit from a series of political decisions around what Peter Marshall has called “an enduring Imperial dilemma,” the absorption into empire, be it in Granada, Ireland, or Canada, of a European but non-British settlement population. This issue of a new form of imperial governance, as opposed to a simpler and historical anglocentrism, came up immediately with surrender at Montreal when Vaudreuil, married to Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s sister, asked the British to grant the free exercise of Catholicism and the continuation of the populace’s obligation to pay tithes to the Catholic Church.52 Significantly for his own slaves and domestic work in the homes of principal families like the Taschereaus, he also negotiated the continuation of slavery for blacks and Natives “in the possession of the French and Canadians to whom they belong.”53 Over the next three decades, a turbulent period that included the Quebec Act, the American and French revolutions, and the Constitutional Act of 1791, British officials and intellectuals from Edmund Burke to Chief Justice William Mansfield grappled with the harmonization of imperial authority and the citizenship of an essentially French and Catholic population in the St Lawrence Valley with the constitutional demands of the fractious colonies of New England. “Is it possible,” the chief justice asked in 1764, “that we have abolished their [French Canadian] laws and customs, and forms of judicature all at once? – a thing never to be attempted or wished.”54 On the ground in Quebec, British officials came to grips with demography and the evident authority of both the clergy and the resident aristocracy in a largely rural and Catholic colony described by Allan

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

Greer as one whose “social and economic structures were ‘feudal’ … and essentially similar to those of the mother country.”55 It would, we will see below, be quite possible to oppose this drift towards a form of British imperialism that included important concessions to the institutions and elites of New France. With a discourse of entitlement, Protestant identity, and right to historical constitutional freedoms, John McCord would be a prominent voice laying claim to the English jury system, to English common law, to the imperial trade system, and to taxation only with representation.56 However, James Murray, his administrators, and then Guy Carleton, his successor as governor, would reject these demands from the resident British community. Official British acquiescence in 1766 to Jean-Olivier Briand’s confirmation as bishop of Quebec was strong evidence of reconciliation with the Catholic Church. Moreover, before Murray left the colony in June 1766, he partially admitted customary Parisian laws, including inheritance practices.57 As well, the seigneuries of departing French officials were not necessarily seized. Despite his absence from Canada, Rigaud de Vaudreuil and his wife would retain seigneuries in the Beauce and at Rigaud for half a century.58 This persistence of New France’s colonial elite and its structures did not change after 1766 in the regime of Governor Murray’s replacement, Guy Carleton. A propertied aristocrat and career soldier, Carleton was separated by broad differences of social class and religion from Presbyterian entrepreneurs like John McCord, even though he and McCord shared the same Irish hometown of Newry. Carleton came to the conclusion that Quebec “must to the end of Time, be peopled by the Canadian Race.”59 Attorney General Alexander Wedderburn agreed, arguing that “more attention is due the native Canadian than the British emigrant.”60 Others in the Carleton administration gave grudging support to French institutions. Francis Maseres, for example, a Huguenot and confirmed anti-Catholic, accepted French civil law – “innocent, useful, and compendious” – as preferable to the “voluminous, intricate, unknown laws of England.”61 As the crisis deepened in the Thirteen Colonies, Carleton concentrated on security as the root issue of governance. With similar class credos and estate-owners themselves in England, Scotland, or Ireland, colonial officials like Carleton gravitated comfortably to seigneurial families like the Taschereaus, to traditional hierarchies, and to the civil authority that the Roman Catholic Church might deliver. French seigneurs were prominent voices in opposition to the British minority’s call for an assembly. The Taschereaus’ neighbour François-Joseph Cugnet, seigneur of Saint-Étienne and a legal authority, argued that representative government would simply subject the law “to the whim of an ignorant majority.”62 Governor Carleton agreed, reporting to London in 1768 that “the better Sort of Canadians fear nothing more than popular Assemblies which they conceive, tend only to render the People refractory and insolent.”63 With a view to establishing an appointed Legislative Council, he drew up a list of potential coun-

39

40

1.5 Sir Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec, 1768–78, 1785–95

cillors, including twelve seigneurs, most of whom had seen French military service. At the Colonial Office, Secretary of State for the Colonies the Earl of Hillsborough described this policy as part of “the King’s gracious intentions” towards the seigneurial community.64 In return for their titles, seigneurs would recognize the British monarch as “Sovereign Seigneur” through traditional oaths of “foi et hommage.”65 For their part, Catholic religious communities in the colony facilitated this rapprochement, moving rapidly to confirm what Christophe Horguelin calls their “canadianité” by cutting legal and financial ties with motherhouses in France.66 This settling into place under a British regime of what Pierre Tousignant describes as a “feudal plan” was based on collaboration among its major stakeholders in a manner parallel to the hegemony in Britain of gentlemen, Crown, and Church of England.67 While issues around an established church provoked fierce debate in the Thirteen Colonies, British officials in Canada moved to establish both the Church of Rome and the Church of England as institutional pillars. And, with a view to understanding French customary laws of property and family applicable in the colony, Governor Carleton in 1768 asked legal experts at the Seminary of Quebec to prepare a summary of the Custom of Paris. Representing the perspective

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

of Catholic authorities, this report would form part of the abstract of Canadian laws published in London in 1772–73.68 In 1765, and in apparent exception to the Test Acts’ exclusion of Catholics from public office, René-Ovide de Rouville was named chief road commissioner (grand voyer) for the Montreal district and FrançoisJoseph Cugnet for the Quebec district. Outside the judiciary, this position was the most important office in the local administration, one that, over two generations, Taschereau family members would later monopolize in the Quebec region.69

the ursulines We have seen how, early in her widowhood, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière reached to the Ursulines for support. Over subsequent generations, Taschereau authority would owe much to the family’s personal association with the Ursulines and the Seminary of Quebec, religious communities with profound roots in the institutional, seigneurial, and ideological history of New France. Through very different institutional cultures of convent and seminary, they had undertaken critical educational missions, while their monasteries, chapels, schools, retreats, seigneuries, mills, and gardens were among the most prominent features on the built landscape of New France. This presence did not change with the Conquest. With the exiling of the Jesuits, the Seminary of Quebec became the “go to” institution for British authorities seeking the wisdom of Catholic intellectuals and an understanding of the colony’s feudal and religious practices. The Ursulines were equally politically adept. After his death in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the marquis de Montcalm had been buried in a shell-hole in the Ursuline chapel. Use of the convent as a British military hospital, the knitting of winter stockings for kilted Highland soldiers, and Governor Murray’s restoration of the chapel contributed to a legend of mutual French-English succour. Murray also played a role in the remission of debts owed by the convent to the French government.70 The participation in convent activities of women in the governor’s family and court was another sign of approval. In 1786, Governor Carleton’s daughter attended the convent for lessons in French and embroidery and his wife’s sister, Lady Anne Howard, spent a year in retreat at the Ursulines.71 Founded as a teaching order in Italy in 1534, the Ursulines were cloistered, a practice they maintained over four centuries until Vatican II in the 1960s. From Italy, they had expanded to Switzerland, Germany, and particularly France, where, by 1715, they had more than 350 convents. They were introduced into New France in 1639 by Marie de l’Incarnation, who, like the Taschereaus, was a native of Tours. Although their required dowry of 3,000 livres tournois plus board and furniture was standard for all convents, the Ursulines attracted daughters of the elite from across

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1.6 View of the Ursuline convent, 1761, by Richard Short

the colony.72 Even among female orders, the Ursulines stood out as determined Marians emphasizing the Virgin’s union of maternity and chastity. In 1657, they participated in the founding of the Congrégation de la Sainte-Vierge en Amérique. About half of the aristocratic families in New France contributed family members to male and female religious vocations. Lorraine Gadoury emphasizes that the relatively young age (twenty-one) of aristocratic girls taking religious vows is suggestive of family pressure rather than of autonomous acts of women choosing religious life over marriage.73 Certainly, the Taschereaus would be prominent among the eighty-eight aristocratic families who produced priests and nuns. The Ursulines’ ability to combine strong French identity with collaboration with British authorities, the rigour of their Council of Trent Catholicism, their Marianism and model of selfless womanhood, their schools, and their monastic life profoundly influenced Taschereau religiosity, culture, and shared female memory. Into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, male Taschereaus recognized the convent’s place in family history. In 1881, Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau described his deep affection for the Ursulines, confiding to their Superior that he had “un faible pour la Communauté.”74 In 1930, as premier of Quebec and a fifth-generation Taschereau,

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

Louis-Alexandre Taschereau spoke to the qualities of an Ursuline education and its influence, through mothers-to-be, on the transmission of cultural traditions to sons from “the great families”: “Even before the Conquest, young Canadian girls received an education and instruction at the Ursulines’ convent that was in no way inferior to that given in French convents at the time … It is thanks to women that our sons from the great families have conserved the traditions of their ancestors.”75 Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thirty-one Taschereaus were educated in the Ursuline school and four took Ursuline vows, one becoming a Superior (see table 1.3). The only viable profession for elite women outside marriage, a convent career held promise of social status and authority in administration, schools, and hospitals. From the perspective of a family’s material resources, a female heir who took religious vows reduced the number of shares in an estate. Supportive of a Catholic landed aristocracy in Quebec, British officials played to this gender reality: “Convents … may be necessary for a certain period to accommodate and honour families. It may be expedient to preserve certain of them permanently as a place of respectable retreat for unmarried women.”76 This practical complicity in matters of gender, educational superiority, and social separateness characterized relations between convent and elite family. The first Taschereau attended the Ursuline school in the 1740s, and family members still appear among its student body. Successive generations of Taschereau girls boarded at the school and shared in its piety and culture: “At the age of six, Marie-Célanire [Taschereau] entered the boarding school of the Reverend Ursuline Sisters of Quebec, where she was welcomed by a maternal aunt. What impression did the ancient monastery with its austere grills have on this playful girl? At Sainte-Angèle, the girls’ school, she grew up wise in both piety and science.”77 Despite its “grim iron bars and the strict rules,” the Ursuline school engendered fierce loyalty in its students: “I ought to know something of the dear old Ursulines for from the age of nine years till a few months before my marriage, nine years after, I spent every day there, except summer holidays, from eight in the morning till five in the afternoon, taking dinner and lunch there, and so happy … I was passionately fond of my school, my lessons and teachers, in fact, it was my home, for I was motherless, and the kindest of fathers cannot supply the mother’s place.”78 The convent did provide surrogate parenting in moments of elite family crisis. Widow Taschereau turned to the convent to board daughters even younger than was usual, and an Ursuline scholarship for needy Taschereau girls was established. During the six-month American siege of Quebec in 1775, widow Taschereau, accompanied by her daughter Marie, used the good offices of her Ursuline daughter, Marie-Anne-Louise, to lodge several months in the Ursulines’ student residence.79 An exclusive religious site, the Ursulines’ chapel was accorded to the Taschereaus

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for exceptional ceremonies. In October 1796, for example, the bishop granted them the use of the chapel for the consecration of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Jr, the first male Taschereau to take holy orders. This permitted his Ursuline aunt, cloistered and forbidden normal family contact, to attend.80 Several lay female Taschereaus were granted permission to be buried in the chapel crypt. Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau took her Ursuline vows in 1766. She was one of the first nuns to take religious vows after the Conquest, her consecration in the presence of Bishop Briand symbolizing the renewal of female religious houses with the permission of the British.81 Her long administrative career as Sister SaintFrançois-Xavier, 1766–1825, included service as Superior. Cloistered, but with dispersed seigneurial holdings and hundreds of peasants, the Ursulines turned to the Taschereaus for professional services. From father to son and then to son-in-law, Taschereaus acted as advisers and lawyers to the community. The nuns, for example, needed reliable supervision of the banal mills on their seigneuries at Sainte-Croix and Portneuf. Gabriel-Élzéar Taschereau, younger brother of Sister Saint FrançoisXavier, visited the mill at Portneuf annually on the Ursulines’ behalf, inspecting, negotiating with their miller, and supervising repairs.

t r ans fer r ing hea d s hip Material survival of the Taschereaus after the Conquest depended on British renewal of their seigneurial titles and an economic and political climate that encouraged settlement and seigneurial development. We have seen that, in the 1760s and 1770s, seigneurs like Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière were aided greatly by governors Murray and Carleton, landlords themselves and familiar with issues of rural authority.82 In addition, in the court circles around the governors, Scottish officers like Robert Christie and Alexander and Malcolm Fraser were buying up seigneuries and lobbying for increased seigneurial rights. British officials understood the essentially rural conditions of Lower Canada and the fact that, outside urban centres with their garrisons and institutions, authority depended almost entirely on parish and seigneurial structures. Seigneuries along the Upper Richelieu and Chaudière rivers were particularly vulnerable. The latter was a strategic route to the Thirteen Colonies and a region where loyalty to Britain was fragile. The Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph seigneuries could be seen as representing the front lines of communications, colonization, and justice. Seigneurs in the Beauce necessarily acquired hands-on experience in a pluralist society that included a contentious peasantry, Natives, squatters, and American travellers. Both the Taschereaus and the Fleury de la Gorgendières positioned themselves as elite French families willing to collaborate with British colonial authorities. A

Table 1.3 Taschereaus who attended the Ursuline school before 1898 Entry Student

Years in Attendance

Boarder

1746 1746 1747 1786 1786 1820

Taschereau, Claire Taschereau, Charlotte Taschereau, Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau, Marie-Louise Taschereau Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, Marie-Louise

1746–50 1746–48 1747–57 1786–89 1786 1820–27

x x x x x

1821

Taschereau, Élizabeth-Suzanne

1821–28

x

1823 1826 1827 1829 1835 1845

Taschereau, Claire-Caroline Taschereau, Rachel Taschereau, Catherine-Zoé Taschereau, Agnès Taschereau, Adèle Taschereau, Adélaïde-Éléonore

x x x x x x

1851 1851 1854

Taschereau, Anne-Amédine Taschereau, Hélène-Adèle Taschereau, Marie-Eugénie

1823–33 1826–31 1827–33 1829–36 1835–36 1845–47 1847–52 1851–52 1851–54 1854–59

1855 1859 1868

Taschereau, Léda Taschereau, Célanire Taschereau, Elisa

1871

1875 1876

Taschereau, Marie-LouiseHémédine Taschereau, Marie-LouiseJoséphine-Henriette Taschereau, Marie-Adèle-Blanche Taschereau, Louise-Joséphine

1880

Taschereau, Marie-Claire-Caroline

1880

Taschereau, Hélène

1873

x

x x x

x

1855 1859–61 1868 1869–74

x

1871–76

x

1873 1874–77 1875–77 1876–78, 1880–82 1880 1881–88 1880–87

Day Student

x x x

Civil Status/ Husband Unmarried Hubert Couterot Ursuline Olivier Perrault Died as child Sir Randolph Isham Routh Henri-Elzéar Juchereau Duchesnay Unmarried Paul John Charlton Charles Pentland Unmarried François-Réal Angers Dr Hilarion Blanchet Unmarried Unmarried François-Guillaume Des Rivières Unmarried Ursuline Dr Marie-RichardAlphonse-Tancrède Fortier Louis-H. Taché

x

Joseph Pope

x x x

John Alexander Carling Eberhard-Emil Hecker Patrick Coote

x x

x x

William-Duval Baillargé

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French and Ulster Scots Establishment

Table 1.3 (continued) Entry Student

Years in Attendance

1880

1880–81 1882–90 1881–88

x x

1882–86

x

Taschereau, Adèle

1881

Taschereau, Marie-JoséphteLouise-Caroline

1882

Taschereau, Marie-JoséphineAmanda Taschereau, Marie-Anne-Zoé-Stella Taschereau, Alice Taschereau, Clara

1885 1895 1897

1885 1895–99 1897–1906

Boarder

x x

Day Student

Civil Status/ Husband

x

Ursuline

x

Nun (Mère Marie du Sacré-Coeur, Chicoutimi) Jérémie-Marcel Aubry Unknown Ursuline

Source: auq, file, “Anciennes élèves ayant étudié aux Ursulines de Québec”; Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau (Lévis: Mercantile 1901).

strategy of “protecting” family “interests” and allying them with those of “the Prince” was clearly outlined in a 1776 letter written by Charles-Antoine Taschereau, in exile in France, to his younger brother and recently appointed family head, GabrielElzéar: “Take care of your interests, those of peace and those of the Prince … And look after protecting yourself. This is useful for my mother, indeed for all of us, and even more so for your children. Ally yourself with the least dangerous party … Let yourself be guided by this policy and by our interests. Your safety is our safety.”83 In total agreement and assessing republicanism as “detestable,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau would take advantage of the American invasion into his seigneuries to establish the usefulness of his authority in the Beauce.84 The loyalty of the Fleury de la Gorgendières was also remarked upon early in the Conquest by British officials. In 1774, Governor Carleton wrote that Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s brother, Joseph Fleury Deschambault, “and his family have ever been remarkably civil to the English.”85 It was also noted favourably that several of Fleury Deschambault’s children, nephews of Marie-Claire, married into the British community.86 One of these marriages linked the Taschereaus to William Grant, son of the laird of Blairfindy, a leading Scottish merchant and probably the colony’s largest lay property-holder. These links bore fruits of both legitimacy and business. Grant, for

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

example, had never met his cousin Charles-Antoine Taschereau, who had been repatriated to France after the Conquest. Four decades later, in 1802, with the renewal of communications between Canada and Napoleonic France, the two began a correspondence, introducing themselves, sharing news of family members, and signing as “votre cousin.” Grant asked Charles-Antoine to act for him in “nos affaires en France,” enclosing a power of attorney that could be used in actions with either the French government or commercial interests.87 Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s leadership of the family ended with her concession of headship to coincide with her youngest son’s marriage in 1773. This elite marriage settlement and the passage of headship, a year before the passage of the Quebec Act, serve as a case study of the juncture of family and geopolitical realities in the post-Conquest period. Reliance on customary family and property traditions in the marriage contract and in the sale by Fleury de la Gorgendière of her half of the Sainte-Marie seigneury is suggestive of a more self-assured elite community than that suggested by Fernand Ouellet.88 Like the marriage contract Fleury de la Gorgendière had signed a generation earlier, her son’s marriage contract was a publicly observed settlement, negotiated in this case by female heads in both families and signed by civil and religious authorities. And although 1773 coincided with a major controversy between Attorney General Francis Maseres and jurist FrançoisJoseph Cugnet over the civil law to be applied in Quebec, particularly as it applied to succession, the Taschereau-Bazin marriage arrangements confirm A.L. Burt’s suggestion that the feudal and customary system inherited from France was taken as legitimate before the passage of the Quebec Act.89 With a language of usufruit, rente constituée, and juste moitié and following the pre-Conquest model, the acts of the marriage settlement replicated historical concepts of family, patriarchy, land, community, and mutuality.90 These acts also reiterated the partnership of state and religion in the governance of institutions like the family and marriage. Marriage as a sacrament, their notarized marriage contract stated, would be “celebrated and solemnized in the presence of our Holy Mother Church.”91 These acts serve as impressive reminders of the central place in civil society of women – mothers, aunts, sisters – in structuring the patriarchal family and, as Amanda Vickery points out, in assuring the ascendancy of their sons and brothers in marriage hierarchies.92 With the principal males, except for the groom, dead or absent in Montreal or France, the widowed mothers of brides and grooms were instrumental in the transfer of headship, the distribution of seigneurial property, and the exchanges of money, credits, and services to provide for gender and generational eventualities, particularly the bride’s widowhood and the dotage of the groom’s mother. Both the bride, aged twenty-seven, and the groom, aged twentyeight, had reached majority and, legally, did not need parental consent to marry.

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However, the property arrangements of the couple were in large part dependent on their mothers, Marie-Thérèse Fortier (widow Bazin) and Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (widow Taschereau), and on their perception of the political climate, their negotiation of a just exchange of merchant and landed forms of wealth, and their trust in the marriage partners. The marriage coincided with the transfer of Taschereau family headship in 1773 from mother to son. Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière was sixty-five and had led the family over a turbulent quarter century. Of two remaining sons in Canada, Pierre-François had moved to Montreal, where he worked as a merchant, dying there just three months after his brother’s marriage. In any case, the thirteenth child, Gabriel-Elzéar, had long been groomed with financial and seigneurial responsibilities that would culminate in his nomination as principal heir, seigneur, and family head. As early as 1765 he was signing mill and other seigneurial contracts “au nom de sa mère.” There are also suggestions that as early as 1766, with the first resident priest in Sainte-Marie, Fleury de la Gorgendière agreed to sit in the second seigneurial pew, leaving her son in the front row.93 But behind the ceremonial, she kept the headship long after Gabriel-Elzéar’s majority, officializing the transfer to coincide with his marriage. In a partage or division, she ensured that he would bear the honorific titles and the responsibility to develop the seigneury. For his part and before a notary, he accepted financial responsibility for his mother in old age as well as for Marie, his unmarried sister, caregiver for their mother, and an heir under the Custom. At the base of the marriage settlement was bride Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin’s acquisition of co-proprietorship of the Saint-Marie seigneury; in return, her dowry was used to purchase Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’s half of Sainte-Marie. The bride obtained security, and her children would be landed and would bear Taschereau title; the Taschereaus received a major influx of merchant capital that could be used to develop the seigneury. Coinciding with the marriage, the arrangements between mother and son – made with the explicit approval of the siblings, particularly eldest surviving son Charles-Antoine – would determine Taschereau family relations for the coming generation. Indeed, the voice of virtually every member of the Taschereau family can be heard in the settlement. Given the Custom’s patriarchal hierarchy, brothers had ranking voices in any division of family property: Charles-Antoine, childless, an ocean away with a military career in France, and, under seigneurial law, heir as eldest son of half of the seigneur’s property, including the manor house, was particularly pleased to see his brother assume responsibility.94 His letter, sent ten months before the wedding took place and apparently their first correspondence since 1766, spoke of “tenderness” and trust between the brothers. Leaving the seigneury and the economic fate of the family “in your hands,

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

dear Gabriel,” he forwarded a blank power of attorney to his brother, asking him to assure their mother “a comfortable and secure life.” Forty-four years later and with Gabriel-Elzéar several years in the grave, Charles-Antoine continued to describe his brother as “the soul of the family.”95 Daughters, particularly the unmarried, were critical elements in transfers of seigneurial property and in matters of lineage. Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière had four surviving daughters, three unmarried and living in Canada. MarieAnne-Louise, having taken profession in the Ursulines and “civilly dead,” was ineligible to inherit immovables. Cloistered just blocks away, she could not sign her brother’s marriage contract nor attend the church wedding ceremony. The two remaining sisters in Canada made settlements that facilitated their younger brother’s accession to family headship. A profession for Charlotte-Claire had been found in Montreal as a companion for her aunt, Marie-Thomas Fleury de la Gorgendière. In August, five months before her brother’s marriage, Charlotte-Claire forwarded her power of attorney.96 Marie, born in Louisbourg, Cape Breton, in 1732 and the oldest surviving sibling, had remained at home. Thirteen years Gabriel-Elzéar’s senior and lifelong companion to their mother, Marie acted as his collaborator, playing a major role in family life over seven decades. In 1773, when she was fortyone, her settlement with her brother included cession of her rights to Sainte-Marie and other family seigneuries in return for an annual pension of 420 livres tournois.97 As long as she and widow Taschereau were alive, the household, its chapel, and domain continued to follow the extended-family model as opposed to the nuclearfamily organization favoured by later generations. In elite families, the signing of a marriage contract normally took place as the centrepiece of a reception held in the bride’s house the day before the wedding. The 1733 marriage contract of Louise-Thérèse Fleury de la Gorgendière and PierreFrançois de Rigaud de Vaudreuil was signed by seventy-three witnesses.98 Diaries make clear that the reading of the contract, the witnessing, and the granting of the “consentment of family and friends” were critical junctures between public and private life, a social moment for family and community that was just as important as the religious sacrament celebrated later.99 The sociability of the event must not be underestimated. Unlike elite males who travelled for administrative, militia, political, or judicial business or leisure pursuits like hunting, marriages – more than funerals – were major occasions for female travel and reunions. For the TaschereauBazin signing, notary Panet arrived at the bride’s house at 16 Saint-Louis Street in Quebec with the seven-page handwritten contract already prepared and having left a three-quarter-page space in the preamble to name the witnesses. With some threedozen witnesses assembled in the bride’s home, he was hard pressed to enter their names in the preamble, settling instead with naming and describing sixteen of the

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most important. Forty-six individuals – including the bride, groom, and two notaries – signed the contract. Among family were the groom’s cousin, the Baroness of Longueuil, and her husband William Grant. Officials included Thomas Dunn, receiver-general of the colony and business partner of both the groom and Grant, and the colony’s two chief road commissioners, Hertel de Rouville and Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry. Despite the presence of British officials, notary Panet listed the latter’s French military honours as a “Chevalier de l’Ordre de Saint-Louis.”100 In what was almost a parody of the court society described by Norbert Elias, the elite standing of the marriage was officially recognized by the signature on the marriage contract of Hector Theophilus Cramahé, lieutenant-governor and, in Governor Carleton’s absence in Britain, the ranking colonial official.101 In New France, the governor and intendant commonly signed marriage contracts of the prominent. After the Conquest, the new Catholic bishop was recognized and the governor participated in Catholic ceremonies such as the distribution of prizes at the Seminary of Quebec.102 On the Taschereau-Bazin contract, Lieutenant-Governor Cramahé was listed in fifth place in the preamble, just after the bride and groom and their mothers, with the annotation that he had given his “agreement”; at the actual witnessing, he signed just after the groom and alongside the bride. The signing of the contract by two prominent clerics – Jesuit Superior Augustin-Louis Glapion and Seminary of Quebec bursar Colomban-Sébastien Pressart – signified complicity at the highest Catholic levels. This colonial and clerical recognition was a tradition in Taschereau marriages. Intendant Dupuy had witnessed the marriage of Gabriel-Elzéar’s parents in 1728, and in 1805, the bishop of Quebec would travel to Boucherville for the marriage of his son Thomas-Pierre-Joseph to the daughter of the seigneur of Saint-Denis. The bishop would make a similar trip to Sainte-Marie for the marriage of Gabriel-Elzéar’s daughter to Olivier Perrault. In their contract, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin brought into the marriage community her inheritance of 12,000 livres tournois, deposited by her mother in a letter of exchange drawn on France. The disposition of her inheritance became clear three weeks later in a sales contract in which widow Taschereau sold her son and his wife her “juste moitié” of the Sainte-Marie seigneury. This included half of the cens and other seigneurial rents, the banal mill, and the domain, including its manor house, barn, animals, and farm equipment.103 In payment, “Widow Taschereau” (no longer “Dame Seigneuresse”) received 4,000 shillings in cash and 8,000 shillings in the form of a rente constituée. She was also to benefit from lifelong usufruct of the lodging and other rights on the seigneury that she had enjoyed as seigneuress. In 1780, the Fleury de la Gorgendière family made another major contribution to Taschereau fortunes. Widow Taschereau’s sister further concentrated family power in Gabriel-Elzéar by selling

Table 1.4 Witnesses to the marriage contract of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin Order of Signing

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Hector Theophilus Cramahé Marie-LouiseElizabeth Bazin Veuve Taschereau Marie Taschereau Veuve Bazin William Grant

Position

Relation to Family

Military Service in American Revolution

Positions in British Administration post-1773

Groom

Militia

Multiple

Civil secretary and lieutenant-governor Bride

Mother of groom Sister of groom Mother of bride Merchant, rentier Married to cousin Militia and seigneur of groom Michel Fortier Merchant Bride’s uncle (fish and seal) David Alexander Grant Nephew of William Grant A. G. Bazin Bride’s sister P. Bazin Bride’s brother Marie-AnneBaronesse Cousin of groom and wife of W. Grant Catherine de Longueuil Deschambault Marie Bazin Paternal aunt Colamban-Sébastien Priest, professor Pressart of theology and assistant to the superior of the Séminaire de Québec (illegible) Joseph Gaspard Seigneur Chaussegros de Chief road Léry commissioner for Quebec region Jean-Baptiste Militia officer, Militia Melchior Hertel seigneur, road de Rouville commissioner

Legislative Council (1777)

Legislative Council (1775)

Commission on Jesuit Estates

Table 1.4 (continued) Order of Signing

Perrault J. Duchesnay (illegible) Thomas Dunn

Augustin-Louis de Glapion o.j. (illegible) P.L. Ouimet Louise Brouage Léry

Position

Relation to Family

Receiver-general business partner of William Grant and Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Superior general of Jesuits

Lessee of Anticosti and Mignan seigneuries of GabrielElzéar Taschereau

(illegible) (illegible) Angélique Chaussegros de Léry Lanougière Verchères (several illegible signatures) Marie-Anne Fortier Jolliette Boisjean Louise Fortier Angélique Fortier (illegible) Manon Perrault Perrault Perrault fils Barolet Panet Wife of notary A. Panet fils Louise Panet Jean-Antoine Saillant Notary Jean-Claude Panet Notary

Military Service Positions in in American British Revolution Administration post-1773

Judge, Court of Common Pleas

Wife of Joseph Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry

Judge, Court of Common Pleas (1777)

Source: banq-q, cn 301, s207, notary Jean-Claude Panet, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Bazin, “Contrat de mariage,” 24 January 1773.

Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière (1708–1797)

him the seigneury adjoining Sainte-Marie. Living in Montreal, Marie-Thomas Fleury de la Gorgendière (widow Trottier Duffy Desaulniers) had, with her brother, inherited the seigneury of Saint-Joseph. Acting on her own behalf and mandated by her brother Ignace, absent in Santo Domingo, she sold the Saint-Joseph seigneury (also known as Fleury) to her nephew Gabriel-Elzéar in 1780.104 Under conditions similar to those he had made with his mother, Gabriel-Elzéar assumed responsibility for his aunt’s care, including the arrangement of and payment for her funeral. In 1788, three additional acts furthered the transfer between generations. An inventory was drawn up of the remaining parts of Thomas-Jacques Taschereau’s estate, and in two agreements a division of this property was carried out among the co-heirs.105 In a third act, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière had the notary attend her bedside in Gabriel-Elzéar’s house in Quebec for the drawing up of her will. Having settled matters of family and seigneurial headship in 1773, she turned her attention, fifteen years later, to ensuring a roof and the division of her personal possessions among her three unmarried daughters. She left an annual rente or pension of 36 livres tournois. to Marie-Anne-Louise, a bequest that presumably took the form of a gift to the Ursuline community. Provision was made for CharlotteClaire, living in Montreal, and for Marie, her caregiver, through annual pensions of 701 livres tournois along with usufruit of her Sainte-Famille Street home in Quebec. In this 1788 will, she left actual ownership to son Charles-Antoine, absent in France. Two years later, in a revised will, she gave her daughters outright possession of the house. While Charlotte-Claire was to receive a silver setting, it was to Marie, “who has always remained with me,” that she left two other silver settings, her jewellery and hand mirror, bedding, a small bedroom table, and Marie’s own bed.106 Fleury de la Gorgendière’s long lifetime was instrumental in enriching her husband’s family, in holding his family together across war and the Conquest, and in positioning the Taschereaus for seigneurial hegemony in the Beauce region. She gave her name to the Sainte-Marie seigneury, initiated its mill, parish, and domain structures, and, through a sister, organized the addition of a second seigneury along the Chaudière River to the Taschereau fold. As family head in the decade after 1763 and the Treaty of Paris, she correctly anticipated that British authorities would give renewed legs to seigneurialism, French customary law, and Catholic institutions. Across the 1760s and 1770s, political collaboration in a strategic region, intermarriage, and ceremonial landmarks like marriage were used effectively to cement Fleury de la Gorgendière and Taschereau reputations of loyalty in the new British regime. Her arrangement of her son’s marriage settlement, her relinquishing of headship, and her wills testify to her enthusiastic participation in the construction of a landed family based on her husband’s lineage. As part of this understanding of

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complex cultural norms around gender, patriarchy, and social hierarchy, MarieClaire Fleury de la Gorgendière or “widow Taschereau,” as she preferred, protected her daughters financially, promoted the Taschereaus’ alliance with the Ursulines, saw her daughter into high responsibility as Ursuline Superior, and was a founder of the domain chapel dedicated to Sainte Anne. Even in her dotage, her health and spiritual needs were used to impose Taschereau authority over the local clergy: at the summons of her son, her successor as seigneur and family head, Sainte-Marie’s parish priest was obliged to attend at her manor house bedside.

2 John McCord (1711–1793)

Quebec represented a second colonization destination for John McCord’s family. Part of the seventeenth-century Scots diaspora, the McCord’s first emigration had been across the Irish Sea. Presbyterian Church registers in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, indicate the presence there of John McCord’s grandfather in 1677.1 David McCord, John’s father, was a merchant in Antrim, a market town on the main road from Belfast to Londonderry. Separated from Scotland by just twenty kilometres of sea, the Ulster Scots maintained strong traditions of Presbyterianism, literacy, and entrepreneurship: their attitude towards English political authority remained skeptical. To this, the linen-makers, petty landowners, small merchants, and innkeepers of McCord’s social class added deeply ingrained Ulster traits of hostility both to the dominant Anglo-Irish gentry and to the local disenfranchised Catholic community. Frustrated by decades of war and unrest in Ireland, Ulster Scots showed a strong penchant for emigration to America. Many had kin, correspondence, or work experience in the sugar islands and Thirteen Colonies, and there was longstanding sympathy in Ireland’s northern counties for American expressions of liberty and egalitarianism. In the eighteenth century, Ulster Scots, like Scots and Germans, tended to migrate as families rather than as the young and single male emigrants characteristic of England and Catholic Ireland.2 John McCord can easily be situated in a transatlantic Ulster Scots culture. Born in Antrim in 1711, he moved to the seaport of Newry in the 1750s and to the port of Quebec a decade later; he died in his son’s house on Montreal’s Nazareth Fief in 1793. Besides traditions of taking risks, being mobile, and finding English authority abrasive, the cultural baggage of John McCord and his son Thomas included expressions of social solidarity and networking through patriotic clubs and societies, such as the St Patrick’s Society and the Masons (but not the later and more sectarian Orange Order), and strong currents of enlightenment that ranged across classicism, literature, political economy, and technological innovation.

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In Quebec, the McCords, like their upper-town neighbours the Taschereaus, were able to maintain their transatlantic connections. News, money, and family members circulated around the Atlantic to Newry, Dublin, London, and the Caribbean. Decades after their arrival in Canada, the McCords used business and family links in Ireland and Britain to educate an errant son or provide for a widow’s return to her Ulster patrie. Fleeing bankruptcy proceedings a half-century after settling in Quebec, Thomas McCord would return to his brother-in-law’s home in Newry and then form a merchant partnership with him in Dublin; his two sons were born in the Irish capital. At the same time and albeit not without struggle, the McCords assimilated amenable colonial practices and institutions that included Crown land grants, slavery, and then British patronage and French land practices. Perhaps first as bottom-feeders in the English-speaking hierarchy, working as a docksider and living from small commerce, innkeeping, and the drink trade of soldiers, John McCord and then his son and grandson used marriage for social uplift. Marriage by the first three generations of McCords in Canada into the Hannas of Newry Ireland, the Highland Frasers of Quebec, and then the Jewish Solomons and Anglican Rosses of Montreal brought advantages of social rank, capital, and landed wealth. As late as 1750 John McCord and his family were still living in Antrim, an inland port and commercial centre on Lough Neagh. He is listed as a householder in 1740, while his children, including Thomas (b. 1748/50), gave Antrim as their birthplace.3 Antrim was a progressive parish town that boasted a dancing instructor and schoolmasters who advertised instruction in writing, arithmetic, bookkeeping, grammar, Greek, Latin, and mathematics.4 McCord’s first wife, Margery Ellis, died between 1753 and 1756, perhaps at the birth of her eleventh child, who died in 1753. By 1752, John McCord had moved from Antrim down the connecting canal to the expanding seaport of Newry.5 With at least four children and trading and innkeeping interests, McCord did not long remain a widower; he married Margaret Hanna in 1756. The following year, he had the first of five children with her. Benefiting from its position at the mouth of one of the first inland canals in the British Isles, Newry expanded rapidly after 1750 as a manufacturing and commercial city. Newry became the fourth-largest trading centre in Ireland, its bleaching mills and linen manufactures, distilleries, and agricultural hinterland making it a major exporter of linen cloth, butter, and whisky. Besides the production and export of white and brown linen, Newry’s developing industrial base included a tannery, sugar refinery, and iron foundry.6 Writing in 1776, Arthur Young noted the presence of ships weighing 150 tons in the harbour and described the canal from Newry to Lough Neagh as “noble.”7 Imports through Newry included lumber, staves, ashes, and flax. The city had a customs house and regular shipping links with Liverpool, Manchester, London, the East India trade, and North America.8 John McCord was a

John McCord (1711–1793)

2.1 John McCord

full participant in this rough and tumble prosperity. In his three-storey building on the docks at 4 Canal Street, McCord combined his own quarters with warehouse space, an inn, and a meeting room; he served meals and, in the oral history of Newry, is reputed to have sold corn from his front door.9 We certainly find “John McCord’s in Newry” listed as the staging station for the Belfast–Dublin coach. Active politically, he hosted political meetings. He also acquired property that he would leave to his children in Longfield, a quarrying and corn-growing area eight to twelve kilometres from Newry. While John McCord lived from the coarser trades around drink and canal transportation, his second wife’s family, the Hannas – respectable saddlers, agents, and wholesale merchants – were prominent in the militia and the Church of Ireland. While Margaret joined her husband in Quebec, her brother William Hanna would be listed among Newry’s most prosperous merchants and was able to marry his daughter with a dowry of £500. The Hanna family tombstone attests to their

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2.2 Belfast Newsletter, 22 November 1754

2.3 Below Merchant’s Quay on the canal at Newry

2.4 Opposite Northern Ireland and Scotland

social pretensions: “They have left to their surviving relations the profitable example of virtuous and well-spent lives and the enduring inheritance of an unspotted reputation.”10 Kirby Miller has detailed the diaspora of Ulster Scots to North America in the eighteenth century: just in the period 1730–60, some 70,000 Presbyterians left Northern Ireland for North America. Miller’s analysis suggests that an experienced docksider like McCord would be an ideal “entrepreneurial” emigrant.11 Certainly, through newspapers and their family and commercial correspondence, Newry merchants followed the war between France and Britain and quickly learned of the battles for Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal. In its North American dimensions, the war brought a particular window for Irish provisioners, who, despite their reputation for trafficking with the French, were permitted to export salt beef, pork, butter, cheese, candles, and other provisions for “use of his Majesty’s ships, land forces or foreign garrisons.” In 1750, an Irish regiment was sent to Nova Scotia, where it was to be “supported at the expense of that Kingdom [Ireland].” Other regiments of Irish Foot were raised in Ulster and sent to Quebec, Louisbourg, and Newfoundland. They too were to be provisioned from Ireland.12 Ships regularly left Newry for

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American ports: “The good ship Harvey, now lying in the port of Newry, James Blair Commander … an exceedingly fine ship, … well victualled and mann’d will sail on or before the first of June next [for Philadelphia]. Any persons who intend going either as passengers, or on redemption, or to indent themselves as servants may apply to Mr. Zachariah Maxwell, merchant of Newry.”13 The Belfast Newsletter of 21 October 1760 gave a full description of the fall of Montreal, while a later edition titillated Ulster readers with news that Quebec women were “handsome, extremely gay, and well-bred.”14 And, it was reported, French Canadians were “perfectly reconciled to the British Government.”15 We know that McCord left Newry for Quebec in the months after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 13 September 1759; his name did not appear, as it had in earlier years, among the Newry citizens who signed petitions in 1760 and 1761. In 1760, he took possession of the ruined house of a French official in Quebec.16 Provisioning the British garrison in Quebec quickly brought McCord prosperity, civil prominence, and the confidence to send for his family. One can speculate that his stake in provisioning in Quebec may have included capital from his wife’s family. Certainly, his brother-in-law watchmaker James Hanna had immigrated to Quebec by 1763 and was living in the McCord house.17 Within a year of arriving and even before the cession of New France to Britain, McCord petitioned the Crown for title to the house he had occupied. He soon duplicated his Newry experience by joining John Hay and René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville in petitioning for dock and warehouse facilities near the King’s dock.18 In 1767, with Felix O’Hara, a Gaspé merchant and his partner in a fishing enterprise, he was granted 1,300 acres in a Gaspé fishing port on the York River.19

fam ily Trade brought the McCords prosperity. Used to living among Irish Catholics, they replicated their Newry life in the small Protestant merchant community around Quebec’s port and garrison. Newry had schools and a theatre, and Voltaire and Rousseau had been printed by the city’s printers.20 By June 1764, Quebec had a newspaper, the Quebec Gazette, an English-speaking physician, and a developing Protestant infrastructure. A military chaplain was assigned to the Anglican community, while the Presbyterians were served first by one and, after 1783, by two ministers. The St Andrew’s Society, a national association of the Scots, had a chapter in Quebec, while St Patrick’s Day, then celebrated by Protestant as well as Catholic Irish, was marked in Quebec City by a banquet as early as 1765. Literacy and scripture reading were important in Protestant society, and English education was first assured by private teachers, including John Reid, who married McCord’s granddaughter.

John McCord (1711–1793)

Table 2.1 Slave-owners in the McCord family John McCord

Malcolm Fraser (husband of Margery McCord)

Lucius Levy Solomons (father of Sarah Solomons, Thomas McCord’s wife)

2 black males: Drummond (1765); Primus (1773)

Black male: Jean-Baptiste-Isaac (1788)

2 black males: Caesar (1784); William Becket (1793); 1 black female: Flora (1784)

Source: Marcel Trudel, Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec: Dictionnaire des esclaves et de leurs propriétaires au Canada français (Montréal: Hurtubise hmh 2004), 330, 377; Frank Mackey, L’esclavage et les noirs à Montréal (Montreal: Hurtubise 2013), 428, 526.

The Masons served as a fraternal network around the British world with particular strengths in Ireland, Scotland, the merchant marine, and military garrisons. Active in Ireland and an associational network that he would pass on to his son, grandson, and great-grandson, John McCord had ample choice for a lodge in Quebec City. The St Andrew’s Lodge and the St Patrick’s Lodge were established in 1760, regimental lodges were registered in 1761, and the Merchants’ Lodge was formed in the city in 1762. In 1769, all of the Quebec lodges became part of a Provincial Grand Lodge.21 John McCord’s household included a valet, maids, and domestic slaves. He advertised for reliable servants, preferably a “sober honest middle-aged couple” or “a discreet woman” and, in 1764, offered a four-dollar reward for the return of his runaway slave, a “Negro man, named Drummond, near six Feet high, walks heavily: Had on when he went away a dark coloured Cloth Coat and Leather breeches.”22 By 1773, the McCords’ household on Nicholas Street included his bachelor son John Jr, his daughter and granddaughter, a manservant and a ten-year-old apprentice, two maids, and “a negro man Primus,” aged fifty.23 Women in the first McCord generation in Canada suffered high mortality. We saw that with the death of his first wife, Margery Ellis, with whom he had two sons and two daughters, John McCord had remarried in 1756. Margaret Hanna came out to Quebec and died there in 1766, perhaps in giving birth to her namesake, Margaret. Nothing is known of McCord’s third wife, Henrietta Maria Gilbert, whom he married in 1768. The marriage of his daughters, Jane and Margery, to Alexander and Malcolm Fraser lifted the McCords into the colony’s Scots military and seigneurial elite. Margery McCord married Malcolm Fraser in 1772, gave birth to a daughter, and

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died in 1774. Seigneur of Murray Bay, half of the seigneury of Île d’Orléans, the seigneury of l’Islet-du-Portage, the seigneuries of Rivière-du-Loup and Madawaska, and the fief of Île-Rouge, Fraser had at least eight illegitimate children outside his marriage to Margery McCord.24 Jane McCord married Alexander Fraser in 1765, gave birth twice, and died in 1767. One of their daughters, Jane Fraser, married Arthur Davidson, a prosperous Scottish lawyer in Montreal, and another married John Reid, a Quebec schoolmaster. Among Alexander Fraser’s holdings was Beaurivage. This seigneury would assume importance in the third generation when John Samuel McCord married into the Ross family, heirs of the seigneury. Behind Lauzon and Tilly, which bordered the St Lawrence, Beaurivage was upland, more isolated, and less fertile. Sloping towards the Chaudière River, it overlooked the Taschereau seigneuries of Sainte-Marie and Saint-Étienne. In contrast to the Taschereau manor in SainteMarie, which was occupied by the family beginning in the late 1770s, Beaurivage, bought for £250 in 1782, was left to the management of agents, with Fraser and then his Davidson and Ross heirs remaining absentee seigneurs. Although its mill was constructed in 1791 and its communications were facilitated by construction of the Craig Road through the seigneury in 1805, Beaurivage did not have a manor house until 1818 or a parish priest until 1833. Well into the nineteenth century, the seigneury generated little revenue for its proprietors, with the Ross family using it primarily as a summer estate.25

t r a de With family and commercial connections around the Atlantic and with two sons joining him in business, John McCord expanded his entrepreneurial activities. A shipowner, he advertised the sixty-ton schooner Martha for sale. In 1765, he sought exclusive right to operate ferries between Quebec and Pointe-Lévy, petitioning that his boats would replace canoes and facilitate the transport of livestock, horses, and carriages.26 Unlike many of his peers, McCord did not concentrate on the fur trade or on forwarding freight up the St Lawrence to Montreal and beyond. Instead, he specialized in the alcohol business – importing, retailing, tavern-keeping, and, in the case of his son Thomas, distilling with a view to trade with Natives. Allan Greer describes the cheap Caribbean and American rum that entered Quebec after 1760 as the “battering ram” of commercial capitalism, a consumer product that contributed to the destruction of peasant self-sufficiency.27 British authorities were certainly concerned with the devastating effect of rum on Natives, fishermen, and the troops. In 1764, Governor Murray issued a flurry of alcohol ordinances. One was aimed at “the better discovering and suppressing [of] unlicensed Houses,” and another prohibited the sale of rum to Natives. A “Lords Day” ordinance decreed the

John McCord (1711–1793)

closing of taverns and rum shops during the hours of divine services.28 In 1768, concern over “drunkenness” and “riots and breaches of the peace” brought tightened licensing and the restriction of liquor sales by credit.29 Principal sites of male sociability, taverns and inns served as meeting halls for the St Andrew’s Society, the Masons, church groups, the Society to Prevent Fires in Quebec City, and the Amicable Society.30 Government and the courts used their meeting facilities: in February 1773, John McCord testified in a court hearing held at the “Sign of the Buck” concerning the lunacy of a fellow merchant.31 John McCord was a major importer and retailer of alcohol. Excise records for 1761–62 identify John McCord and the 8,655 gallons of rum he imported aboard five ships as the largest rum dealer in the colony; in 1770, he paid duty on 5,300 gallons.32 Much of Quebec’s rum was produced in or transited via New England, and McCord’s trading links along the Atlantic seaboard gave him familiarity with the crisis over the Sugar and Stamp acts. McCord was also a prominent retailer, advertising the availability in 1764 in his Côte du Palais store of “the best Jamaica Rum, fine shrub of Jamaica, French brandy, West India and New England rum, West India rum shrub, red and white wines.”33 McCord specialized in retailing around the docks and barracks. He had an “inn-keeping” licence for an alehouse and restaurant and in 1769 was granted another for portside Saint-Roch.34 He also promoted business by acting as financial guarantor and character witness for alcohol licence applicants, particularly those in the barracks trade. There were fifty-two tavern licences in Quebec City in 1766, thirteen of which were held by women, all Englishspeaking.35 In April 1772, McCord vouched that Margaret Bonner, the wife of a soldier absent with the 10th Regiment and the mother of six, was “sober in life and conversation,” “very honest and industrious,” and “well-deserving” of a tavernkeeper’s licence.36 McCord’s links with his compatriots remained evident. He signed as guarantor for John McGreary’s tavern, “The Two Jolly Irishmen,” as well as for Susanna Richardson’s tavern, both near the barracks.37 In 1774, we see him “representing” W. McCormick in the latter’s application for a Gaspé alehouse licence.38 And the alcohol business was passed from father to son. In 1771, Thomas obtained a licence in his own name to retail alcohol in Montreal.

p olit ics Success in commerce and tavern-keeping demanded a certain public notoriety, and McCord quickly assumed a voice on political issues. The existence of competing French, Spanish, and British currencies in the colony frustrated merchant exchange, and in 1764, McCord signed the “Memorial of the Merchants” in favour of Halifax currency. In 1769, he became the high bailiff of Quebec, a position with policing functions, and he served on juries in the Court of Common Pleas in 1768, 1770, and

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1773. In 1769, his name appears among petitioners for improved upkeep of the city’s fire engine.39 But Quebec’s Protestant community lacked political leverage, and whatever the similarities between McCord’s ideology and that of reformers in New England, circumstances in Quebec were quite different. Boston, with a population of some 60,000 in 1760, had a powerful merchant lobby. In 1764, Quebec’s Protestant community consisted of some 200 non-military households. Power in the colony was concentrated in Governor James Murray, a member of a lesser Scottish nobility that found careers in the British military and colonial administration from India to North America. Linda Colley has noted the solidarity of Scots and “Scottish tradition” across the British world.40 There were, however, wide differences of class and outlook between Scottish military and administrative officials and Ulster Scots entrepreneurs like McCord. And, within the broader Protestant community, there was also significant political and religious diversity. While the Church of England had French-speaking clergymen acquainted with French Catholic culture, McCord’s voice would retain its Presbyterian and ethnic edge. Nor did he join fellow merchants like Samuel Jacobs in sending his daughters to the Ursuline school.41 McCord saw his two daughters married into the colony’s Scottish military elite rather than join Protestants like Thomas Dunn and William Grant who adopted French customary norms: Grant, for example, was married in a Catholic ceremony. McCord had much more in common with fellow merchants Thomas Aylwin and James Johnston, the latter heading the first grand jury in Quebec in October 1764, a jury that denounced Murray’s decision to permit Catholics to act as jurors or lawyers in civil cases.42 In 1768, McCord married his third wife, Henrietta Maria Gilbert, apparently without the marriage contract common among elite families, and in 1775, he used a privately witnessed agreement to transfer property to his son.43 Governor Murray at first appeared sympathetic to the adoption of British institutions, laws, and an assembly as prescribed under the Proclamation of 1763. But on the central issue of governance – authority over a Catholic and peasant countryside – McCord and his friends lacked political muscle. By the mid-1760s, Governor Murray had opted to “shun” English-speaking merchants and instead “consult” landed and Catholic authorities capable of delivering social order. Murray’s politics, part of a larger colonial pattern, led to the preservation of the religious and legal institutions of the conquered.44 For his part, McCord found himself among those dismissed by the governor as “birds of passage,” “cruel, ignorant, rapacious Fanatics,” and “adventurers of mean Education.”45 Others in the governor’s court shared this antipathy. Francis Maseres, sent to Quebec as attorney general in 1766, described the local merchants as “violent gentlemen.”46 McCord reacted angrily. With a liberal discourse drawn from the Thirteen Colonies, he recited the English constitutional compact between king and people

John McCord (1711–1793)

and the necessary role of a local legislature in determining taxation and ensuring liberties.47 From the inventory of his library we know that McCord was well-read. Alongside religious tomes and classics like Homer’s epics, he owned a collection of American pamphlets, Hume’s On Civil Liberty, Cato’s letters condemning tyranny, and Voltaire’s Universal History.48 Throughout the 1760s, McCord lobbied for an assembly – elected by Protestants – in which only Protestants could sit, and in the language of the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, one that would be consistent with the “Principles and Spirit of the British Constitution.”49 Arriving in Quebec in September 1766 in the midst of the Stamp Act crisis, Governor Carleton was addressed by two groups of local merchants. While the first reiterated “loyalty to the sovereign,” “submissive reverence,” and “obedience to the Stamp Act,” the second was much more combative, with McCord’s signature second among forty-seven signators: “It grieves us that we have to inform your Excellency, that from many unfortunate casualties, our Trade … is of late become languid and declining: but we have now reason to hope that under your Majesty’s wise Administration, every measure will be taken that may tend towards removing the Clogs of Commerce, and the restoring of a free and open passage to the several branches of profitable Trade and advantageous Fisheries with which this country naturally abounds.”50 In 1767 and again in 1773–74, McCord led campaigns, as a December 1768 petition put it, to “promote the interest and trade of this province and to secure to us every inestimable privilege we are entitled to as British subjects.”51 Governor Carleton reacted in kind, dismissing McCord as a “Patriot” of “neither sense nor honest” and as responsible for the “drink sheds” near the barracks and for hiring “poor People to sell his Spirits to the Soldiers.”52 In publicly supporting the cause of the Thirteen Colonies, McCord joined merchants like Thomas Walker, who travelled to London in 1773 to present a petition in favour of an assembly; Robert Ellice, who took an oath of allegiance to New York State; and Lucius Levy Solomons, future father-in-law of Thomas McCord.53 John McCord would certainly have counted among those described by Carleton as the “many Enemies within.” On 27 July 1775, with American forces on Canadian territory, some 200 men from the English-speaking community assembled on the Quebec parade ground to form a militia company: “[A]fter hearing their Names taken down and giving three Hurrahs for the King, they marched off again, the Bagpipes playing Locbabar no more.”54 Having declined to enlist, McCord was given four days to leave Quebec, joining twenty-nine other Quebec merchants and their families who left the city. McCord offered active support to the Americans, selling them supplies worth $809 on 7 August. He may well have known Benedict Arnold, a fellow trader in West Indian rum and molasses. As a New England merchant, Arnold had visited Quebec several times. It is not clear where McCord resided during the American siege that saw his house on St Nicholas Street and his dockside

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warehouse burned by British troops. He was certainly back in Quebec and operating freely by December 1776 when “John McCord and Son” appeared among claimants for British compensation for damages inflicted during the invasion.55 And he apparently showed up at the Quebec courthouse, 4 January 1777, to show proof of damage. The McCords also proceeded with claims for payment of the supplies he furnished to American troops. In 1784, the names of John McCord and his son Thomas appeared in American Congressional records as individuals favourable to the republic. His bill for supplies was finally reimbursed by Congress in 1790, and he was granted a further $500 as a “Canadian sufferer.”56 In the post-revolution years, John McCord, now in his mid-sixties, retired. In 1776, his name was not among tavern-licence renewals; in 1779, he advertised to sell his store on the Côte du Palais; and in the 1780s, he joined his son Thomas in Montreal.57 He had achieved notoriety and a fragile prosperity around the port of Quebec, particularly in importing and selling drink. Operating in Catholic Quebec as he had with Catholics in Ireland and challenging British authority, McCord built a life apart, replicating the intense Ulster Scots culture he had known in Newry. Protestant institutions were founded, Presbyterian and fraternal networks expanded into the colony, and he saw both of his daughters married into the Scottish landed and military elite. We catch glimpses of his retirement in Thomas’s house on the Nazareth Fief, and just months before his death in 1793, he purchased a large pew in the Presbyterians’ new St-Gabriel Street Church.58 It was John Jr who carried on the business in Quebec, living above the store, now located on Fabrique Street. He staved off bankruptcy only by the intervention of his brother-in-law Malcolm Fraser in a sheriff ’s sale of McCord property. Rebuilding modestly, he abandoned his father’s unstable alcohol and import businesses and concentrated instead on retailing staples like coffee, tea, paint, soap, and flannel to institutional clients like the Seminary of Quebec.59 Unmarried and with his household managed by his niece Mary McCord, John Jr lived quietly, active in the Presbyterian Church and distant from the mercurial career of his brother Thomas in Montreal. On his death in 1822, his estate brought a substantial £13,000, including £6,000 found in a cashbox.60 It would be younger son Thomas who would assume the family headship, marrying twice, producing children in both marriages, and caring for their father in his dotage. Although bankrupted and forced to flee to Ireland, Thomas would achieve prominence as a magistrate, landed proprietor, and member of the Legislative Assembly. His ninety-nine-year leases of convent lands outside the fortifications of Montreal and their substantial rise in value would figure centrally in the McCords’ accession to patrician life.

part two

Local Authority in the Beauce and Montreal

Generational chronologies are an alternative to national chronologies in organizing historical time. The structuring of time through family, suggested by the works of James Casey and Norbert Elias, is of particular interest with respect to lives that extended across the British Conquest, the Quebec Act, the American and French revolutions, and into the early nineteenth century.1 We have seen Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s marriage in 1773, the passage of family headship from his mother, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière, and, thanks to her family, his acquisition of a second seigneury in the Beauce. Just a decade after the cession of New France, Fleury de la Gorgendière and Taschereau family members, although scattered from Montreal and Quebec to France and Santo Domingo and including mother and son, her sisters, and his siblings, united in a generational strategy that concentrated familial and seigneurial authority in his person, a position that French legal historian Anne Lefebvre-Teillard summarizes as that of “seigneur and master of the [family] community.”2 Perceiving the potential of seigneurialism under British governance, as Allan Greer put it, as “the basic framework” for rural development, the Taschereaus allocated their human and capital resources to a domain estate, mills, a chapel, and road construction. These investments, including the merchant capital the Taschereaus had acquired through Gabriel-Elzéar’s marriage, paid off handsomely as population growth and rising wheat and timber prices brought prosperity to seigneurs.3 From mother to son, the Taschereaus would emphatically continue to operate as an extended family or “corporation” and never as “closed individuals.”4 On an isolated seigneury far from the high tables and judicial reach of the capital and dependent on the labour of a resistant peasantry, domain tenants, and domestic servants, including a female slave, the Taschereaus paid meticulous attention to rank and the exercise of their ceremonial, institutional, and legal privileges. Influence in church construction and the nomination of a parish priest, efforts to intimidate the illiterate via the notary’s office, and the complicity of Taschereau

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females in the cult of Sainte Anne illustrate the exercise of Taschereau authority through the overlapping of gender, religion, and the professions. Besides the strong popular support in the Beauce for the American invasion, several examples are used to demonstrate the persistent, and sometimes violent, peasant opposition to Taschereau exactions: resistance to the unpaid feudal labour of the corvée, to Taschereau’s Road Act of 1796, and to the seigneur’s ambition to build a grand parish church and presbytery. It would be loyalty, respectability, and place in what Christopher Tomlins calls “an estate-based order” that brought honours and senior patronage positions in the militia, magistracy, and local administration to members of the second generation in both families.5 For both the Taschereaus and the McCords, the Quebec Act, with its endorsement of French civil law, seigneurialism, and civil rights for Catholics, was a defining political moment. The year 1774 rendered official what the Taschereaus had presumed and what the McCords had long resisted.6 Benedict Arnold’s 1775 invasion through his seigneury gave Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau the opportunity to prove his loyalty in a strategic and rebellious border region and to confirm publicly the transfer of his family’s support from Versailles to the Court of St James. The Americans’ auction of his goods to his social inferiors would be amply compensated by British patronage, and after 1775, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau would fill multiple senior functions in the colonial administration. In symbolic recognition of Taschereau royalism, he named a son born in 1805 “George-Louis.” As part of this integration of his family into the highest ranks of patrician culture, he arranged a law clerkship for his son JeanThomas with Chief Justice Jonathan Sewell, the colony’s most influential administrator and legal intellectual.7 Other sons found their profession in the clergy and military. By Gabriel-Elzéar’s death in 1809, Taschereau patricianism could be gauged by their manor house, seat in the Legislative Council, national honours, and the marriage of sons and daughters into ranking seigneurial, clerical, and legal families. Taken together, chapters 3 and 4 suggest a certain coherence between the two families in their effective marriage of landed property and the exercise of local authority. Albeit the son of a colonial administrator in one case and of a merchant in the other, both Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and Thomas McCord saw land as the key to stability and the future of the family. Both coupled land proprietorship with service as magistrates and militia officers. In the very different social contexts of the Beauce and Montreal, both were familiar with violence, close contact with angry inferiors, and an armed state. Through his tenure as chief road commissioner for the Quebec region, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau was able to exert powerful administrative authority. Thomas McCord leased convent lands on the

Local Authority in the Beauce and Montreal

outskirts of Montreal and became one of the city’s most influential magistrates. These positions of authority in the administration of transportation and the law were of major significance in the construction of the colony’s urban and rural structures and its communications apparatus.8 Their sons would amplify this participation in the construction of Lower Canada’s institutional frame. While prominent appointed authorities, both men perceived the democratic implications of Britain’s introduction of elected institutions under the Constitutional Act of 1791. Each became an influential legislator – Taschereau sitting for the Beauce and McCord for Montreal and then in a rural riding. Taschereau would also be named to the Legislative Council. Into the nineteenth century and the final years of their lives, both men were able to offer their families the trappings of Canadian gentility: estate life; the entry of sons into military, clerical, and legal professions; and cultural refinement in furniture, food, and sitting for portraits. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and Thomas McCord were able to indulge Enlightenment enthusiasms for technology, science, and progressive agriculture. Proudly “amateurs” and generalists, they turned their hands to distilling, surveying, and the writing and indexing of colonial law. Nor did the wars and revolutions of the late eighteenth century irrevocably interrupt their Atlantic communications, particularly with France and Ireland. We will see in chapter 4 that, for the McCords’ part, they digested 1774 only slowly. The Quebec Act tolled the knell of their Ulster Scots assumptions concerning the predominance of the common law or of Protestant ascendancy through application of Test Acts principles and the exclusion of the Catholic majority from public office. We saw a frustrated John McCord support the American invasion of Quebec. He and his son were compensated by the American Congress, and it was only later in the century that we see Thomas distancing himself from his father’s politics, business, and associational life. Thomas McCord’s distilling business, his leadership in a fire protection system based on corporate models of association, his urban development of a fief, and his energetic use of the police magistracy illustrate this transition in social attitudes, sense of identity, and family culture. It was in 1788 – more than a decade after the Taschereaus – that the McCords received British recognition as a respectable family with Thomas McCord’s appointments as justice of the peace and lieutenant in the Montreal militia. His long-term land leases in 1792 and 1793, his bankruptcy and removal to Ireland, and the subsequent meteoric rise in value of his convent lands were part of a complicated passage to patrician status. As a Dublin magistrate during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, he witnessed the dangers of sectarianism and Protestant triumphalism. He would return to Lower Canada as a moderate English-speaking

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voice and an experienced urban magistrate, increasingly conscious of the potential of the colony’s ancien régime land and judicial institutions. In 1803, with republicanism well behind him, Thomas named his second son “William King,” and back from Ireland, he enrolled his sons for classical studies at the Collège de Montréal under the French priests of the Seminary of Montreal. At his death in 1824, he left his sons landed, each with the profession of lawyer and with wealth to enjoy patrician life.

3 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

the que b e c ac t and the amer ican revolu t ion Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s assumption of family headship in 1773 coincided with a critical conjuncture in the political and constitutional history of Lower Canada. His family’s presumptions in the post-Conquest decade as to the legality of their notarial and religious acts were confirmed in the Quebec Act of 1774. Under it, devices like the Test Acts that might have kept Roman Catholics from public office were replaced by a simple oath of allegiance, tithing was recognized, and the rights of most religious communities, including the Ursulines and the Seminary of Quebec, were renewed. Seigneurialism was confirmed under the Act, a legitimation that coincided with Gabriel-Elzéar’s decision in 1774 to open a second concession (rang) back from the river in Sainte-Marie. The Quebec Act emphatically denied elected institutions, leaving legislative authority with the governor and his appointed Legislative Council, a body to which leading families like the Taschereaus could aspire. This confirmation of the colony’s traditional political hierarchies was enthusiastically approved by Gabriel-Elzéar’s peers in the French aristocratic and seigneurial community. In 1788 and 1789, he figured prominently in a group that described itself as “new citizen-subjects” and that petitioned against the English-speaking community’s demands for an assembly.1 Revolution in the Thirteen Colonies represented a major threat to British authorities in border regions like the Beauce where American agents circulated freely. The American Congress’s address to the “unhappy people” of Quebec in October 1774 promised “liberty,” “happiness,” and “representative government.”2 In June 1775, Governor Carleton, supported by Bishop Briand, called up the militia, and in a September review on the Quebec parade ground, eleven companies of FrenchCanadian militia (along with six companies of “British” militia) were armed and thanked for their resolve to “support the Crown.”3 Prominent among their officers were Taschereau family members like William Grant and his uncle Thomas-Ignace

3.1 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau

Trottier Duffy Desaulniers, holder of the Cross of the Order of Saint-Louis for distinguished French military service.4 Even before receiving his own commission in August 1775, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau was actively organizing the militia in the Beauce. Travelling out to Sainte-Marie in May, he delivered a commission naming his seigneurial agent, Étienne Parent, as militia captain. Resistance was immediate. A parish assembly, called to organize the militia, was “impertinent,” Taschereau reported, and not a single man enlisted.5 One speaker argued for delay in organizing the militia until neighbouring parishes had been consulted, well aware of the American sympathies in Lotbinière, Sainte-Croix, Saint-Henri, and Pointe-Lévy. For his part, militia captain Parent disobeyed orders to arrest three American agents operating in the region. Instead, Parent sent his neighbour’s English-speaking wife to warn them. In Sainte-Marie, it would be Parent who presented the American manifesto to local meetings. Continuing up the Chaudière to the family seigneuries of Saint-Joseph and Saint-François, Taschereau saw his authority collapse entirely. On

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

both seigneuries, militia officers refused their commissions. In the parish assembly in Saint-Joseph, the crowd cursed the priest and, when Taschereau rose to speak, deserted the hall to hear a reading outside of the American manifesto.6 As co-author a year later of a report on regional resistance, Taschereau identified women as instrumental in this treason. Parent, for example, had been “corrupted” by his wife, “whose spirit inevitably sowed confusion among the peasants of the parish, who expressed a thousand impertinences concerning priests and other honest people, and who, notably in the present affair, never ceased seditious language throughout both the parish and neighboring ones.”7 Taschereau also pointed at women in Saint-Vallier where “the widow Gadbourie, nicknamed the Queen of Hungary, was responsible for most of the harm in this parish: she often held and even presided over meetings in her home, raising passions against the government and encouraging rebel support. To aid her detestable cause, she served strong liquor.”8 This resistance intensified late in 1775 as Benedict Arnold’s army advanced down the Chaudière towards Quebec. In both Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph, authorities were openly disobeyed. Reading orders on the church steps in Sainte-Marie for corvées to clear the snow off parish roads, the bailiff was heckled. Inside, the verger ignored the priest’s signal to bring forward communion wafers for blessing and offering to the king. When Taschereau tried to imprison a peasant who refused mobilization, he was forced to relent in the face of a riot.9 On 1 November, with American advance men lodging in militia captain Parent’s house, the traditional Toussaint Masses for the dead in Saint-Marie and Saint-Joseph were surpassed by revolutionary meetings and the distribution of American pamphlets. While few took the American uniform, locals acted as guides and supplied Arnold with canoes, provisions, and lumber for boarding ladders. Before American troops bivouacked in Sainte-Marie, on 5–6 November, Taschereau had decamped for Quebec. At the manor, Arnold’s officers reputedly feasted on the seigneur’s turkey and Spanish wine.10 Three months later, as the Americans passed in retreat, Taschereau was publicly humiliated. In Sainte-Marie, 11 February 1776, the Americans ordered an auction of the household contents, tools, and animals of the manor house, mill, and domain. Taschereau reported that his own “censitaires” (tenants) participated and that militia captain Parent was among the purchasers of his property. In SaintJoseph, militia captain François Lessard and miller François Nadeau delivered the seigneur’s cash and mill receipts to the Americans. Whatever its immediate results in terms of personal humiliation and property damage, the American invasion of 1775 served to legitimize loyal French and Catholic seigneurs like Taschereau. Civil appointments quickly followed his militia commission of 1775. In 1776, Governor Carleton named him a justice of the peace and a commissioner on the politically delicate enquiry on treason, an enquiry that

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would examine French-Canadian loyalty, including that of the peasantry on Taschereau seigneuries. In 1794, he rose to the highest civil ranks with his appointment to road commissioner for the Quebec region. In 1792, he had been elected to the colony’s first Legislative Assembly, and in its first sessions he authored critical transportation and judicial legislation. These judicial, investigative, administrative, and political powers positioned him as a principal force in defending ancien régime interests, in enforcing feudal obligations, and in enacting favourable security, trans-

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

portation, and colonization measures. Although rebuffed by his constituents in the election of 1796, his appointment to the Legislative Council two years later represented British recognition of the Taschereaus’ place as a principal patrician family.

assum ing re g ional au t hor it y After the American retreat in 1776, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau was named by British authorities to a three-man commission to investigate disloyalty in the Trois-Rivières and Quebec districts. This was a sensitive political mission, with the disloyal parishes varying from well-established seigneuries along the St Lawrence to frontier areas where institutions were rudimentary; in Taschereau’s home parish of Sainte-Marie, for example, the stone church and presbytery had been completed just four years earlier. With revolution ongoing in the Thirteen Colonies and French-Canadian loyalty uncertain, British troops were kept in the Beauce until 1783, billeted in homes and patrolling the Chaudière.11 Through ongoing contact with New England, the Beaucerons would have been aware of the rural confrontations in western Massachusetts and Maine, unrest that culminated in attacks on landowners in Shay’s Rebellion of 1786–87. Describing conditions on his seigneury of Beauchamp, Alexander Fraser reported: “They have got into their heads, that their friends the New Englanders has [sic] joined the French, and they are to be a free people, and have no rent, nor nothing to pay, such was the opinion of the greatest part of the inhabitants … here.”12 For his part, Taschereau described himself as “insulted” by a “parish spirit” that had turned to rebellion and by a situation in which the peasantry had to be “kept under close watch.”13 For seven weeks, Taschereau, François Baby, adjutant-general of the militia, and Jenkin Williams, clerk of the Legislative Council, held parish hearings, questioning priests, seigneurs, and the militia about American sympathizers and those who had housed spies. In a process similar to that in the Thirteen Colonies and in other settler societies, Taschereau and his fellow commissioners sought expressions of public reconciliation, community displays of deference to traditional hierarchies of Crown, seigneur, and clergy, and restoration of what Anthony Giddens calls the “moral ties of fealty.”14 Representing British authority in communities openly sympathetic to American republicanism, the commission proceeded cautiously. In the upper Chaudière region, militia officers from Saint-François and Sartignan refused to appear at commission hearings. At Saint-Joseph, the commission reported its inability to discipline a parish that had “unanimously revolted and did not want to recognize the King’s authority.”15 On 26 June 1776, the inquiry sat in Sainte-Marie. Despite evident disloyalty, including its public auction of Taschereau’s property, the commission departed discreetly, ordering simply that the militia be reorganized and that six flagrant American sympathizers ask for public pardon.

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Taschereau’s service on the commission was just the first rung on the ladder he climbed as he established himself as a favourite choice for sensitive government commissions struck to investigate aliens, examine the conduct of liquor sellers, determine the legal status of the Jesuit Estates (1787), build and repair churches (1791), superintend the House of Correction in Quebec City (1799), construct a bridge over the Jacques Cartier River (1801), and examine relief for those in arrears to the state in lods et ventes payments (1801). In 1777, he was appointed judge of the Court of Common Pleas for the District of Montreal, a position he quickly relinquished to return to the Quebec region. In 1802, he was named superintendent of post houses. In 1776, Governor Carleton had restored the system of justices of the peace and courts established by Governor Murray in 1764 and suspended during the American invasion. Donald Fyson describes Quebec’s local justice organization as essentially an English transplant with the historical office of the justice of the peace originating in medieval duties as both magistrate and local governance.16 Commissioned from among the landed elite, the eighteenth-century English magistrate took his strength from identity with his community and in an exercise of authority both patriarchal and patrician. Taschereau was among Carleton’s justice of the peace appointments for the Quebec district, and one of the first Catholics. The Beauce formed part of the Quebec district, and this commission added greatly to his local influence; a generation later, Taschereau’s son Jean-Thomas would exercise major urban authority as police magistrate in Quebec. In the absence of evidence that the Taschereaus ever held seigneurial courts, it may be that the inhabitants of seigneuries in the Beauce came to assimilate their understanding of local judicial culture through a Taschereau face and Gabriel-Elzéar and his sons’ representation of the meaning and functioning of this English system. The office certainly put Taschereau in the front lines of keeping the peace and regulating local policing, hearing misdemeanours and levying fines, issuing warrants, and channelling criminal matters such as rape or murder to the courts in Quebec City.17 Although a magistrate was instructed not to hear cases in which he was personally involved, the Taschereaus certainly used their office to family ends, issuing warrants, for example, concerning the servants and apprentices of family members.18 As a rural magistrate, Taschereau had to mediate between official law and local mores, what John Beattie refers to as “social crimes” or offences officially criminal but in fact “carried out with the active approval of the local community.”19 In the Beauce, a magistrate might opt to be discreet in matters of disloyalty, such as those investigated by the commission in 1776, or in cases of smuggling, inciting a riot, militia desertion, refusal to perform roadwork, or insolence to the authority of seigneur or priest. Whatever the region’s political volatility, republican sympathies, or history of resistance to seigneurial and clerical authority, research on crime in the Beauce sug-

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

gests that assaults, murders, and other forms of criminal violence were only marginally higher than in other parts of the Quebec region.20 Certainly, as at McCord’s estate in Montreal, the magistrate’s manor house was perceived as a site of authority where the militia captain, the wronged, or the threatened might present themselves.21 Before the installation in 1805 of notary John Walsh as the first resident professional in Sainte-Marie, Taschereau’s hegemony was shared in only lesser ways with local priests and militia captains. Professionals such as lawyers, doctors, or teachers arrived only after his death, while formal institutions such as the schoolhouse and convent were only built in the 1820s. As notaries penetrated into the Beauce, the populace turned to their offices to record their challenges to seigneurial abuses. In 1807, for example, twenty-six of Taschereau’s concessionaires notarized a petition against the practices of his miller Barbeau.22 Throughout the American and French revolutionary periods and in keeping with fellow seigneurs like Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay and Jean-Baptiste-Melchior Hertel de Rouville, Taschereau sought opportune moments to display public solidarity with Britain. In 1794, and alongside John and Thomas McCord, he subscribed to the “Association to support the Laws, Constitution and Government of the Province of Lower Canada.” Members declared the “superior blessings they possess, to a generous and fostering Empire.”23 The Taschereau name figured prominently in the “Loyal League,” a voluntary subscription fund established in 1799 by Gabriel-Elzéar’s father-in-law and friend, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay, after Nelson’s victory on the Nile. Joining the Seminary of Quebec, Jonathan Sewell, Hugh Finlay, John McCord Jr (who subscribed £5), and others, Gabriel-Elzéar subscribed £10 per annum for the duration of the war; two of his sons, including his namesake Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar, subscribed £5: “[T]ruly sensible of the happiness and tranquility, we enjoy under the mild dominion of our most Gracious Sovereign and the protection of our Mother Country … [we] have come forward by private contributions to support the common cause of the human race.”24 Another of Gabriel-Elzéar’s sons, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph, took British colours, joining the Royal Canadian Volunteers and serving on Upper Canada’s American border. In 1805, the Taschereaus were given the high ceremonial honour of a gubernatorial visit to their seigneury, an occasion to impress the people of Sainte-Marie with pomp, bell ringing, prayers, processions, and banquets. On his death in 1809, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau was commemorated in the English press as “conspicuous for loyalty and zeal for the King’s service.”25 In 1789, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau joined the board of the Quebec Agricultural Society. Uniting Enlightenment enthusiasms for agronomy with the obvious selfinterest of landowners in improved peasant production, the board included the Superior of the Seminary of Quebec and sixteen English and French notables,

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including Taschereau, William Grant, seigneur Henry Caldwell, and Church of England clergyman Philip Toosey.26 Unlike most associations, which met in taverns or private halls, the Quebec Agricultural Society held its meetings in the governor’s palace. With an interest in statistics and the international literature, the society promoted scientific knowledge pertaining to crops, animal husbandry, and new technologies such as threshing machines. It sponsored lectures on the growth of hemp, published recipes for potato bread as an alternative to wheat, and, in a clear attempt to promote peasant production for market, offered prizes for the “habitant” raising the largest quantity of “merchantable wheat.” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau had a growing voice in the constitutional debates of the 1780s and 1790s. On one side, Protestants like the McCords challenged concessions made to French Catholics under the Quebec Act, insisting on the right of “National born subjects.”27 Using the same discourse of nation and citizenship, Taschereau began to speak with what he too called a “national” voice, joining other seigneurs in identifying legitimate citizenship with Roman Catholicism and a hierarchical feudal society. In January 1789, he, together with seigneur Pierre-Louis Panet, seigneur Jacques-François Cugnet, and Charles Voyer, presented Governor Carleton with a petition signed by 194 “Catholics.” Corporatist and Lockean in discourse, this mémoire, drawn up two decades before the supposed rise of a Quebec national movement around the tyranny of Governor Craig in 1810, presented the Catholic majority as “individuals and members of the Quebec nation,” as “the natural inhabitants of this country,” and as “peaceful cultivators, strangers to intrigues, and party spirit.” Against the backdrop of American independence, the petition described French Canadians as “happy under a moderate government” that protected their “ancient laws, customs and usages.” Secured by the balance between king and Parliament, these “rights” should only be modified “with the greatest caution.” Speaking to the potential for violence and intolerance from English-speaking hardliners, their petition identified the greatest danger as the implementation of an elected assembly that, under Protestant control, would have “unhappy” and “dangerous” consequences for “our religion, our laws of property, our personal safety.”28 With the introduction under the Constitutional Act of 1791 of an assembly in which Catholics could sit, the seigneurial elite changed their political colours. Reversing his well-known opposition to elected institutions, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau stood for election to the Legislative Assembly in 1792 in Dorchester, a two-seat riding that included Sainte-Marie. Elected by acclamation, he joined Dorchester’s other member, Ignace-Michel-Louis de Salaberry, a seigneur and relative by marriage.29 In the first sitting, Taschereau spoke forcefully in favour of French in the fractious debate over the bilingualism of the Speaker.30 His influence on justice and transportation policies was immediate. He chaired the committee on the administration of justice and, as chief road commissioner for the Quebec district, was the main

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

author of controversial transportation legislation. Locally, Taschereau authority was repeatedly contested in the militia, in parish councils, and on the seigneury itself. He was denied re-election by acclamation, and in the elections of 1796, with a populace resentful of his authorship of the Road Act, he was defeated in Dorchester. Two years later, colonial authorities appointed him to the Legislative Council.31

roa d com m is sioner In Montreal, Thomas McCord would exercise strong local authority through the office of police magistrate; in Quebec City in the 1820s, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s son Jean-Thomas would occupy the same position with similar effect. It was, however, through the office of district road commissioner that, over two generations, the Taschereaus would influence transportation across the Quebec region. Just as the office of police magistrate was about much more than petty crime, the district road commissioner was positioned at the very juncture of societal debates – usually unframed ideologically – over labour, taxation, the role of the state, and authority in a peasant society in transition from a feudal condition. From the perspective of a largely self-sufficient peasant society, inland transportation was essentially a community project about access to mill and parish church and, from back concessions and forests, to the services of an older, riverfront village. By the end of the eighteenth century, roads based on these needs and constructed by peasants begrudgingly fulfilling the seigneurial obligations of the corvée were being superseded by larger commercial and military needs for trunk roads, improved bridges, and communication links across uninhabited regions.32 As ambitious seigneurs, land developers, and then entrepreneurs in distilling and forest industries, the Taschereaus always had a strong interest in transportation issues in the Beauce. Roads and bridges attracted settlement, focused services, and, by providing access to markets, encouraged production. By connecting back rangs to the services of towns on the Chaudière River, improved roads led to Taschereau sawmills, banal flour mills, and the offices of kin engaged in law, notary practice, or medicine.33 Over two generations, they were able to ensure that the two major towns on their seigneuries, Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph, expanded as regional service nodes. Into the third generation, the family would be instrumental in the choice of Saint-Joseph for the region’s courthouse. Through the road commissionership, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and his sons laid out a regional road system that essentially remained in place until the 1960s. While the magistrature was an English legal institution, the office of chief road commissioner was a legacy of the French colonial administration. The commissioner was responsible for surveying and laying out major roads, for bridges and ferries, and for the assignment of corvée road labour. The use of French standards

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and sizes for roads, concessions, and mill roads persisted after the Conquest, and their confirmation in 1777 ensured that the office would continue to assimilate seigneurial measurements and procedures.34 There were no state subsidies for internal transportation, and until the Taschereau Road Act of 1796 and then military construction of the Craig Road in 1810 provided labour alternatives, the road system depended on ancien régime relationships of authority, on community collaboration in the provision of transportation facilities, and, at the same time, on the legal application of the labour corvée levy due in the concession contracts of all seigneurial landholders. Under British administration, the office of road commissioner for the Quebec region was always accorded to a seigneur, first François-Joseph Cugnet and then Joseph Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry. Appointed in 1794, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau held the office until 1808, months before his death, and his annual salary of £150 (1798) placed him just below judges in the colonial hierarchy.35 An unhesitant

3.3 Rivière du Loup. George Heriot’s view (1816) of a bridge in the Quebec district illustrates dimensions of the road commissioner’s responsibilities, including bridge-building, engineering, transportation of building materials, construction labour, and maintenance.

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

nepotist, he used his authority as commissioner to appoint his twenty-one-yearold son Jean-Thomas as his deputy in 1799. In 1823, another son, Thomas-PierreJoseph, was named chief road commissioner, serving until his death in 1826. Alone or accompanied by his son, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau made annual visits around the entire Quebec district, tramping, surveying, and presiding over often tumultuous meetings to sort out routes, bridges, fences, and the application of corvée labour. Aside from his physical stamina and his social rank as seigneur, Taschereau needed practical experience with the surveyor’s chains and rural métiers like milling, agronomy, construction, bridging, ditching, and fencing. As would be the case with the parish minutes that he drew up, he kept firm control over the official record by inscribing road commission minutes in his own hand. From 1794 to 1803, he drew up 177 instructions (minutes) for individual parishes. After 1803, he gave this responsibility to his son Jean-Thomas, who issued 72 minutes, 1803–08 (see table 3.1). Once approved by a justice of the peace, these instructions were delivered to local road commissioners (elected by the late 1790s), who were responsible for turning out the labour force, completing the work, and reporting on its completion.36 Besides dealing with a peasantry reluctant to perform forced roadwork, the road commissioner also had to deal with absentee or negligent seigneurs. Newly into his position, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau refused to visit the nearby seigneuries of SaintNicholas and Beaurivage to lay out their roads unless accompanied by their seigneurs. Despite considerable physical danger in crossing the St Lawrence, Alexander Fraser, seigneur of Beaurivage and widower of Jane McCord, hurried out from Quebec in July 1794: “I went with Capt Demers on board his canou [sic]. About one in the morning, and was till daybreak upon the water, a very disagreeable Voyage we had of it, and I have payed [sic] for it since, for it has added to my former ailments … Mr. Taschereau and I went up in Carts, where we settled I hope everything in regard to the Road, and with a deal to do, has got the Seven inhabitants of Grand Point to agree, to open the Road from the Mill up for fourteen arpents.”37 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and his sons paid particular attention to their Beauce bailiwick. Roads connecting the Taschereau seigneuries of Sainte-Marie and SaintJoseph had been completed on both sides of the Chaudière in 1771, and in the period from 1785 to 1818, these were continued upstream across the seigneuries of Saint-François and Aubin de l’île. Since settlement on his Sainte-Marie and SaintJoseph seigneuries extended back on both sides of the Chaudière River, Taschereau wore two hats of authority. As seigneur he enforced the corvée obligations of his censitaires, and as road commissioner he issued minutes that outlined construction norms and the range and connecting roads to be built. In 1801, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, aided by his son, laid out the road from his seigneury of Saint-Joseph

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Table 3.1 Minutes of the Taschereaus as chief and deputy road commissioners, 1794–1825

1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 ⬙ 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 ⬙ 1823 1824 1825

Number of Minutes Delivered

Commissioner

10 10 25 30 30 12 16 16 15 13 8 14 15 25 6 4 3 13 31 22

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ Jean-Thomas Taschereau ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau ⬙ ⬙

Source: Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des procès-verbaux des grands voyers conservés aux archives de la province de Québec, vol. 5 (Beauceville: Archives de Québec 1931).

to the Township of Broughton. Evident in Thomas McCord’s use of the magistrature in Montreal, this fine line between public good and a land proprietor’s interest continued into the next Taschereau generation. Jean-Thomas and ThomasPierre-Joseph Taschereau continued to develop access roads from Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph into upland seigneuries like Beaurivage and the new “townships” laid out behind Taschereau seigneuries on both sides of the Chaudière River. In 1817, the request for a road from Sainte-Marie to Saint-Gilles in the Beaurivage seigneury, where it would connect with the Craig Road and traffic into the townships, became part of a lobbying strategy for a bridge to replace the toll boat over the Chaudière at Sainte-Marie. In 1819, Jean-Thomas Taschereau was a major partner in the con-

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

sortium formed to build it.38 The Taschereaus were also able to use their legislative influence in promoting colonization and military strategies that would link the back rangs of their seigneuries with new state-funded trunk-road projects in the region: the Craig Road, the Etchemin Road, the Kennebec Road, and the planned colonization roads to the upper Saint-Jean River. Road-building by seigneurial corvées across unpopulated areas such as the forested zone between the Beauce and the St Lawrence was always problematic. Obliged under the terms of their seigneurial grant, the Taschereaus had been instrumental in building the first road, “la route des seigneurs.” Laid out in 1737 along the east side of the Chaudière River, this road remained marginal because of its thirtykilometre stretch of swamps and forests and its juncture with the St Lawrence well upstream from Quebec. A more attractive route was the nineteen-kilometre inland “Justinian Road” from the Chaudière River to the village of Saint-Henri. On the Etchemin River, Saint-Henri had decent road connections to Pointe-Lévy on the St Lawrence opposite Quebec. Opened in 1758 but almost impassable, the Justinian Road crossed a watershed and uninhabited wilderness on the seigneuries of Lauzon and Jolliet. In 1775, a captain in Arnold’s army described it as virtually impracticable: “Our troops … turned eastward, and left the river [Chaudière], had to pass thro a wood 15 miles where there is no inhabitants, and at this time of the year it is terrible travelling, by reason of its being low swampy land.”39 Immediately on his appointment as chief road commissioner in 1794, GabrielElzéar Taschereau ordered the parishes of Sainte-Marie, Saint-François, and SaintJoseph to name representatives to accompany him on a two-day site visit of the Justinian Road. Shortly afterwards, every censitaire, with the exception of priests and militia officers, was assigned roadwork to open this link with the exterior: 270 from the seigneury of Sainte-Marie, 155 from Saint-Joseph, 140 from Saint-François, and 15 from other seigneuries in the area.40 Construction of a bridge over the Bras, the major stream cutting the road, would remain an additional common responsibility of censitaires on the three seigneuries. Like taxation for the Montreal prison or McCord’s view of corporate versus collective responsibility for fire protection, corvée assignments on the Justinian Road raised profound issues, such as who was to pay for common services of security, fire, or transportation. Land concession contracts of New France and post-Conquest Quebec made censitaires responsible for opening and maintaining the roads in front of their properties (front roads) and for contributing to the construction of connecting roads (“bye” roads or routes de sortie) leading to back concessions. Based on historical feudal and local relationships, the corvée was inapt in the context of trunk roads planned with inter-regional trade or military objectives and that often crossed uninhabited areas.41 The censitaires’ corvée was involved in nearby clearing, bridging, ditching, and fencing, with a view to improvements that would serve the

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3.4 Early roads in the Chaudière Valley

immediate community. The resulting roads were rudimentary and subject to flooding, washouts, and the bumps of a corduroy road or winter ruts. While corvée labour was detested, roads in New France, R. Cole Harris suggests, were “a unifying element for the seigneury.”42 To supplement these local arrangements, monopolies were granted at major waterways, with private tolls funding ferries or bridges. Even before the cession of New France, new clauses concerning animal and human statute labour had been added to corvée regulations, making concession contracts longer, more explicit, and, as Louise Dechêne put it, more “invasive.”43 As early as 1716, peasants challenged their corvée obligations in protests to the intendant.

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

After 1760, British administrators did not weaken the corvée. This would have jeopardized local administration and weakened seigneurial authority. In 1763, Road Commissioner François-Joseph Cugnet, himself a major beneficiary as seigneur of nearby Saint-Étienne, assigned roadwork on the Justinian Road to each of the 160 inhabited concessions in the Beauce. Work brigades, consisting of ten landholders, were responsible for brushing, ditching, fencing, and road repair along an assigned frontage. Organized at the end of seeding, these corvées entailed an absence from home of at least five days. In addition, to feed and pay skilled bridge, forest, and survey workers on the site, inhabitants were levied 100 livres tournois and one bushel of wheat per home-site.44 In one of its first sittings, the Legislative Assembly established a roads and bridges committee to address the construction of public roads by means that varied from the existing corvée to tolls as in England or other forms of statute labour. In May 1796, the Assembly passed the Road Act, written and introduced by Taschereau as chief road commissioner for the Quebec district.45 At sixty-two pages longer than either the militia or judiciary acts (the latter also introduced by Taschereau), the Road Act transformed roadwork from a feudal-based form of labour into a broader statutory obligation applicable both in seigneuries and in townships established under the Constitutional Act of 1791. In a section highly relevant for the Beauce, construction and repair of the King’s Highway through uninhabited Crown or seigneurial lands (such as the Justinian Road) was to be assumed by those who “particularly benefited thereby” and this in proportion to their lands. The Act established new norms for road and bridge width, ditching, winter roads, and the control on public roads of galloping horses or stray farm animals. The responsibility for maintaining roads to mills was also reapportioned, and here the legislative weight of Taschereau and his fellow seigneurs was obvious. Once built, mill roads were to be divided into fourteen parts, one part being the responsibility of the seigneur and the other thirteen falling to concessionaires. Historically, it had been a responsibility of the militia captain to organize musters for the corvée. However, sympathetic with their fellow censitaires, many militia captains had failed to enforce the road commissioner’s orders. Taschereau’s Road Act changed the structure of parish authority and, co-opting democratic principles introduced in 1791, reassigned the muster to elected local officials.46 As chief road commissioner, Taschereau was to divide every parish, seigneury, and township into a maximum of nine divisions. In each division, householders were to elect commissioners to two-year terms.47 Reporting procedures for these officials were systematized by standardized printed forms, each with Taschereau’s name and title of Grand Voyer, and on which local road, bridge, and fence conditions were listed. Taschereau followed up with written rules and directions for commissioners.48

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In 1796, riots against Taschereau’s Road Act broke out in Montreal, and it fell to magistrate Thomas McCord to organize Volunteer defences. In Quebec City, officials faced what was described as “the menaces of 500 women,” and four local men were convicted of rioting against the Act and sentenced to prison terms and fines.49 Taschereau’s home region was also a flashpoint. Determined to improve the Justinian Road, Taschereau sent printed instructions that included the procedure to follow in ordering replacement labour at the expense of those who failed to turn out. Local opposition took several forms. In the election of 1796, held just two months after passage of the Act, Taschereau failed in his bid for re-election. On the Lauzon seigneury, which included part of the Justinian Road, protest escalated into armed rebellion and the kidnapping of officials. In January 1797, homes in Pointe-Lévy were invaded, and nine divisional road commissioners were bound and paraded in public to renounce the Act. Three officials who resisted were held for three days with just bread and water. Faced with the threat that they would have to confront 300 armed men, bailiffs sent from Quebec City retreated.50 It would take months, but ultimately twenty-seven men from the Lauzon seigneury were convicted of crimes, including rioting, the imprisonment of road officials, assault on a justice of the peace, and “seditious conversation and a Libel on the Honorable House of Assembly.” Sentences from six weeks to twelve months, fines up to 20s., and peace bonds for good behaviour of £50 were levied.51

the s eig neury In the period 1777 to 1780, the Taschereau family took up summer residence in Sainte-Marie, returning to their Quebec City home, the Basilica, and court society no later than the Saint-Martin’s Day collection of cens et rentes on 11 November.52 This residency put them among the minority third of seigneurs in the Quebec region who actually resided on their seigneuries. Rising agricultural and forest prices and settlement back from the St Lawrence enabled Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to abandon his interests in trading, sealing, and shipping in favour of a full commitment to the seigneurial economy.53 By 1799, the parish of Sainte-Marie had a population of 900, while Saint-Joseph counted 530.54 As well as the addition of the seigneuries of Saint-Joseph, Jolliet, and Fleury to the family fold in the 1770s and 1780s, Taschereau was a benefactor of Crown patronage in the distribution of freehold lands in the region: 200 acres in the Township of Mégantic (1804) and 400 acres in the Township of Frampton (1808).55 Roads and mills were a priority in attracting settlement. Within months of assuming family headship in 1773, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau was in Sainte-Marie supervising the construction of a new mill, and in 1806, he built another one. In the black fly season of June 1786, he spent a month in the bush with a dozen men

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

building an access road to the Jolliet seigneury.56 The Sainte-Marie seigneury extended along both sides of the Chaudière River, with concessions on the west side entailing a river crossing for village services. Front roads permitting the opening of second rangs on the east (Rang Saint-Gabriel) and west (Rang Saint-Thomas) sides of the river were constructed from 1785 to 1787, and before his death in 1809, Taschereau saw construction of front roads for third rangs on both sides of the river (see table 3.2). Attracting settlers in the context of the Loyalist arrival and the opening of the Eastern Townships after 1791 was a competitive business replete with advertisements, appeals to Irish, British, and American immigrants, and the construction of churches and showcase mills. Between the Taschereau seigneuries and the St Lawrence was the seigneury of Lauzon, for which seigneur Henry Caldwell borrowed £2,000 to build flour mills and sawmills, bridges, boats, and docks. A progressive agronomist and, with Taschereau, a Quebec Agricultural Society board member, Caldwell built a wharf in the Chaudière River basin capable of receiving twenty boats, signed contracts to supply flour to the British military and to the Newfoundland fisheries, and opened the back of his seigneury by surveying 320 new concessions from 1786 to 1800. Like Edward Ellice and other British or Irishborn seigneurs, Henry Caldwell was cavalier when it came to the legal niceties of seigneurialism, cancelling concession contracts when it suited him and exploiting Crown rights to oak stands to his own ends. In 1816, his grandson Henry John Caldwell petitioned, albeit unsuccessfully, to permit British immigrants to settle under freehold tenure on his seigneury.57 Beaurivage, another seigneury neighbouring the Taschereaus, was bought in 1781 by Alexander Fraser, widower of Jane McCord.58 While Beaurivage had a few French-Canadian settlers, Fraser had his eye on Loyalist immigrants. In 1783, he had his notary draw up concession contracts for fifteen German settlers demobilized after the American campaign and recently arrived in Lower Canada. A surveying sketch drawn up for Fraser in September 1792 shows his plans for a pluralist seigneury with specific sections along the Beaurivage River reserved for “Germans,” “English,” and “Canadians.” An eighteen-foot waterwheel was installed in the mill at Saint-Gilles.59 Fraser’s successor, Arthur Davidson, sought Irish settlers for his back rangs: “Should there be a vessel from Belfast to Quebec next spring, from what Mrs. Birnie mentions to me, I think I may expect at least eight or nine families.”60 Looking down onto the Taschereau rangs of Sainte-Anne, Saint-Olivier, and SaintJacques, Beaurivage hosted development of Irish Catholic villages such as SaintPatrice de Beaurivage and Saint-Sylvestre. The Taschereau seigneuries also faced competition from nearby township lands. In Frampton, a township backing onto the seigneuries of Sainte-Marie and SaintJoseph, Irish settlers were apparently recruited in Quebec City by local merchant

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Table 3.2 Rang development on the Seigneury of Sainte-Marie East Side of Chaudière River Rang Taschereau Rang Saint-Gabriel Rang Saint-Martin Rang Saint-Louis Third Rang Saint- Elzéar Fourth Rang Saint-Elzéar Rang Sainte-Claire

Front Road established 1771 First concession – 1789 Front Road established 1787 First concession – 1808 Front Road established – 1811 First concession – 1809 Front Road established – 1811 First concession 1806 Front Road established – c. 1808 Front Road established 1811 Front Road established 1817

West Side of Chaudière River Rang Saint-Linière Rang Saint-Thomas Rang Saint-Jacques Rang Saint-Olivier Rang Sainte-Anne Rang Saint-André Rang Saint-Alexandre

Front Road established 1771 First concession c.1785 Front Road established 1797 Front Road established 1806 Front Road established c 1828 Front Road established 1828 Front Road established 1821 Front Road established 1821

Source: John Hare and Honorius Provost, Voirie et peuplement au Canada français: La Nouvelle Beauce, no. 5 (Quebec City: Société historique de la Chaudière 1965), 23–5.

William Slevin.61 For land further up the Chaudière River, ads promised roads, millstreams, easy credit, and land in freehold tenure: Forty five thousand acres of land laid out in Lots of 200 Acres each in the Township of Dorset, situated sixty three miles south from Quebec, on the River Chaudiere and bonded easterly by the same, with a right to the water streams for erecting Mills and other purposes. This tract of land is well worth the attention of those who may wish to settle in Lower Canada, there is an excellent road from Quebec to within 10 or 12 miles of it, and a bridle

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

road runs from thence through the Township to the New Settlements on the Confines of the United States, the property is held of the Crown in free and common Soccage and the Titles are clear … The whole will be sold together or in different parcels as purchasers shall offer, and any person or Society of intended Settlers coming forward with a moderate proportion of the purchase money will meet with every reasonable accommodation in paying the remainder.62 This demographic conjuncture brought increasing entrepreneurial and multicultural pressures to a seigneurial institution grounded in feudal principles, French social relations, and the Custom of Paris. As they developed their seigneuries, the Taschereaus would be sticklers in enforcing their historical rights while turning legal loopholes to their advantage. The corvée, we have seen, was an ongoing means of extracting peasant labour, and the Taschereaus vigorously enforced the payment of lods et ventes on the transfer of seigneurial land. Besides levies on censitaires’ production through the cens and the milling banalité, the Taschereaus retained rights to waterpower, certain construction timber, and natural resources like slate, chalk, and stone quarries. Rivers and streams were reserved for seigneurial usage, as was the right to build gristmills as well as a house for the miller, a warehouse, and a stable. Each mill could encompass up to six arpents of surrounding land with their potentially valuable fields, pastures, forest, and river frontage.63 We have tracked Taschereau authority as it ranged from the New France traditions of the road commissionership to the authorship of transportation legislation in the modernizing state. Strict enforcement of regulations under the Custom of Paris was a principal means of establishing control on the seigneury. Taschereau, for example, began forcing peasants who, under his mother’s administration, had settled on properties with location tickets or unofficial oral arrangements to sign written contracts.64 Construction of a new parish church was approved in 1780, and in the same year, nineteen concession contracts for Sainte-Marie properties were passed before notary Louis Miray, who travelled out from Pointe-Lévy for signings in what he called the seigneurial “chateau.” After this exceptional year, only seventeen concessions were made in the period 1781–91, but in 1792, sixty-seven concessions were conveyed, and in 1797 another twenty. As with his use of printed forms to enforce the Road Act of 1796, Taschereau moved to standardize and tighten seigneurial conditions as settlement moved on to the second rang of Sainte-Marie. By 1793, notary Miray was using printed blanks for Taschereau concession contracts. The opening in Sainte-Marie in 1803 of the office of John Walsh, a notary born in Wexford, Ireland, further facilitated bureaucratic order. Two years later, Walsh introduced revised concession blanks, and the years 1806 (73) and 1808 (29) saw major

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3.5 Wood on the Taschereau domain. While agriculture flourished along the Chaudière, forest industries dominated in the back rangs of Taschereau seigneuries.

jumps in concessions. In the three decades from 1780 to 1809, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau made 279 concessions in Sainte-Marie, the last just three months before his death.65 Almost all censitaires coming before notary Walsh and seigneur Taschereau were illiterate, their concession contract marks witnessed by two literate signators, usually the militia captain, and later the doctor or a literate artisan. This penetration of professionalization via the notary was part of a larger transformation of social relations on the seigneury. We know that until 1803 Taschereau met with censitaires in an office located in an outbuilding attached to the manor house. Heated with its own stove, it contained rakes and a box of glass as well as the accoutrements of Gabriel-Elzéar’s seigneurial and public life: a weigh scale, surveying chains, concession contracts, receipt forms, calculation guides for lods et ventes, dictionaries relating to farming, geography, history, and French synonyms, books of mathematics, Journals of the Legislative Council, and a map of Lower Canada.66 Just beyond the office doorstep were the seigneurial family’s courtyard, a private chapel, and a domestic garden. When he took up residence in Sainte-Marie, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau had dispensed with employing an agent. For three decades, his tramping, recording in his own hand, personal involvement in mill, road, and church construction, use of the manor house to meet peasants and lodge artisans, and direct on-site interventions as a road commissioner and justice of the peace proved him a notable who exercised local authority on the basis of the personal, what Robert Young characterizes as “face to face conversations.”67

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

Walsh’s notarial office served to reduce business traffic to the domain along with its accompanying courtyard exchanges and mixed-gender relations between the peasantry and members of the seigneurial household. Situated in the village away from the seigneurial family and the domain’s tools, garden, and animals, the notarial office was a literate, professional, and masculine place dedicated to the writing of contracts, their reading, and their signing (see table 3.3). Letters and contracts from the seigneur were now wax-sealed with the Taschereau coat of arms and the letters gt.68 Adding to peasant offsetting in the formality of the office was the fact that the notary was Irish-born. Sainte-Marie itself was becoming multi-ethnic with Walsh joined by merchant William Slevin and at least three other Irish families. Taschereau benefited from three forms of seigneurial property: conceded land, the domain, and unconceded land. Parts of the latter might be divided into farm concessions or, despite the seigneur’s official obligation to promote settlement, be hoarded while their forest, mineral, and water resources were exploited. For his part, a censitaire was bound by his concession contract to establish residence (feu et lieu), which included construction of a house, barn, and stable. He was obliged to use the banal mill with its surcharge on production and to pay lods et ventes when he sold or transferred the property. A percentage of the property’s sale price, lods et ventes represented a seigneurial tax on a property-holder’s labour and investment. As seigneur, Taschereau retained rights on conceded lands to wood for the construction of the manor, mill, church, or presbytery, and to minerals and stone, as well as the right to expropriate land for a mill or quarry.69 The corvée, as applied by the Taschereaus, seems to have varied. Generally, the censitaire, as well as maintaining fences and roads along his property, was to provide an annual day of corvée or pay a penalty of 30 sols. Walsh’s printed concession blanks, however, made no mention of the corvée, leaving the specifics to handwritten conditions; other contracts, such as those for the rang of Saint-Linière (1811), imposed a mill corvée (sujet à la corvée du moulin), and we have seen Taschereau’s application of corvées for the Justinian Road.70 Walsh also vigorously applied the seigneurial retrait – the right to purchase a property at its recorded sale or transfer price. This was a legal device to curtail fraudulent or artificially low prices by which lods et ventes could be reduced.71 The domain at Sainte-Marie – the lands reserved for the seigneur’s use – was utilized as a kitchen garden, cultivated fields, pastures, woodlots, or a mill or quarry site. It was developed under different legal devices. The domain was worked first under a regime of farm leases and, after 1802, by hired help. As a finite arrangement, a lease enabled Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to introduce new techniques of grain growing, animal husbandry, barn building, and milling. Besides working the domain, the tenant had transportation responsibilities that included carting, delivering passengers in the family coach, and carrying messages by horseback. Seasonal and school transfers of family members to the St Lawrence crossing at Pointe-Lévy involved several

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Table 3.3 Notarized concessions of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau by notaries Louis Miray [Lévis] (1780–1801) and John Walsh [Sainte-Marie] (1803–1809) 1780 1781 1782 1783 1784 1785 1786 1787 1788 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793 1794 1795

19 0 0 3 2 3 1 1 0 3 0 4 0 67 2 2

1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 Total

4 20 12 5 16 1 0 0 2 6 73 1 29 3 279

horses, oxen, and extensive cart and coach facilities. Until the Taschereaus took up residence in the late 1770s, the tenant farmer occupied the house on the domain, providing occasional lodging for the seigneur, missionary, and artisans. In 1773, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau hired an entrepreneur to rebuild the mill, and the two men apparently lived with the domain farmer. In 1782–83, master carpenter François Vincent, a Huron from Ancienne-Lorette, was lodged by Taschereau for several months as he worked on the furnishings of the parish church.72 While most censitaires were married men with family and community links to Beauport or the Beaupré region, domain tenants were more diverse. Some were single men or headed families uninterested in an undeveloped lot. They may have used the lease or hired-labour arrangements as staging strategies for emigration into the townships or further west. Irish and British immigrants, arriving at Quebec City to seek work, were one important pool of tenant farmers. One ad for a 150-acre farm, mostly in meadow and just three miles from Quebec City, promised a “commodious house and a well-cultivated garden.” On the neighbouring seigneury of Lauzon, Henry Caldwell advertised for “a sober steady man that understands Farming and if he has a knowledge in gardening, it will be more agreeable.”73 Tapping into this labour market, the Taschereaus by 1802 had brought out Joshua Styles and his family from Quebec to work the Sainte-Marie domain.

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

The first tenant for whom we have notarial records is Antoine Chalifour. With Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau furnishing potato tubers and wheat, peas, oats, and barley seeds for spring seeding, he began work on the domain in March 1785 and, apparently as hired labour, worked through a season of clearing, planting, animal husbandry, and farm maintenance. In November, Taschereau’s notary drew up a short-term lease of ten and a half months. Signed in the “chateau de Ste Marie,” it set clear lines of authority: as landlord, Taschereau retained “the mastery and conduct of all matters.” Although it included cash payments for firewood, the lease was expressed mostly in kind. Chalifour was to sow four arpents in wheat and maintain the barn, stable, carts, plows, harnesses, and other equipment. He was also to feed and care for the seigneur’s livestock and poultry. He was to provide the manor house with ten pounds of butter from each of the seigneur’s six cows. At the end of the season, with seed grains set aside and fifteen minots (514 litres) of grain to be put in the barn as animal feed, Chalifour would have the right to half of the remaining grain, animal, and garden production. Clearing forest and cutting firewood were also part of his lease. Using what the lease specified as a pioche (pick), he was to clear land specified by Taschereau. This work would serve as payment for eight minots of wheat already received. Chalifour was also to cut the seigneur’s firewood for 20 sols a cord, transporting it free of charge to the manor house. He was obliged also to lodge two mill workers at his expense in the farmhouse during the winter months.74

the seig neur ial fam ily Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière’ s headship demonstrated the complex interplay of kin, gender, and widowhood in an elite French colonial family caught in the spiral of an Atlantic war and the British Conquest. On the other hand, GabrielElzéar Taschereau’s headship and authoritarianism in seigneurial, militia, judicial, political, and civil office have, to this point, been suggestive of actions that seem autonomous, virile, and apparently different from his mother’s focus on family survival. In both public and Taschereau family memory, it is the traits of individuality and masculinity that have been emphasized. Obituaries for Gabriel-Elzéar, for example, praised his qualities of “order,” “discernment,” “zeal,” “talent,” “industry,” “firmness,” “conscience,” and “wisdom.”75 Over subsequent generations, these virtues merged into broader metaphors for a benevolent patriarchy that served family and society. Into the twentieth century, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, GabrielElzéar’s great-grandson and premier of Quebec, reminded Quebecers of “the rights of the father of the family,” insisting that any weakening of this power would “sap the family which is the base of society.”76 But if we double back to the themes of his mother’s generation, what does her family and gender perspective bring to our understanding of Gabriel-Elzéar’s

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Table 3.4 Livestock on the Taschereau domain, 1742–1785

Bulls Cows Oxen Horses Pigs Sheep Chickens Geese

1742

1762

1773

1776 (auction)

1785 (inventory)

4 2 + calf 2 1 4 + 5 piglets 0 – –

2 3 2 1 3 4 – –

2 4 2 + calf ? 4 + 2 piglets 19 + 19 lambs 36 + 2 rooster 4

1 5 + calf 2 2 2 14 12 + rooster –

3 4 + calf 3 1 – 6 48 –

Source: Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile; 1785 from banq-q, cn301, s83, “Inventaire de la Communauté des biens entre Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Bazin,” 16, 17, 18, and 22 March 1785.

authority as seigneur, master, community leader, and head? In a decade-long marriage with Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, first wife Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin amply fulfilled her responsibility to produce Taschereau progeny. She gave birth eight times, her first child born just three days short of the nine-month anniversary of their marriage. Named in honour of his father, Gabriel-Elzéar Jr and two of his siblings were born in Quebec City. In the Sainte-Marie manor house, Bazin gave birth in 1778, 1780, 1781, and 1782. On 12 May 1783, she died in childbirth and was buried the next day in the crypt of the parish church. Her death left Gabriel-Elzéar a widower just as increasing civic responsibilities took him to travel, to engage in urban activities in Montreal and Quebec, and to be absent frequently from SainteMarie and his seven surviving children. As they had done when his father died in 1749, the Ursulines provided a safety net for an aristocratic family caught in a parenting crisis. Two daughters, Marie-Louise, aged nine, and Charlotte-Claire, aged seven, were sent in 1786 to board there, undoubtedly with supervision from their aunt, Sister Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau. The boys, Gabriel-Elzéar Jr, ThomasPierre-Joseph, and, later, Jean-Thomas, were also sent to Quebec, where they boarded at the seminary. At the manor in Sainte-Marie, it was Gabriel-Elzéar’s eldest sister, Marie (1732– 1820), unmarried, thirteen years his senior, and companion to their mother, who stepped into the breach. Marie had remained in the family home in Quebec, moving with her mother to the Ursuline convent during the American invasion of 1775 and then following in the family move to the Beauce. During their mother’s long dotage in the manor house, she sent family news to sisters in Montreal and

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

Quebec. In 1797, it was Marie who called the priest to her mother’s deathbed and who sent a coach for Gabriel-Elzéar, absent in Quebec.77 She arranged the burial of their mother near the altar of Sainte-Marie’s parish church. Aside from fulfilling a spinster’s expected role in caregiving and family networking, Marie Taschereau played a critical economic and social role in boosting the Taschereaus’ reputation as a humanitarian, principled, devout, and benevolent seigneurial family. As part of the family settlement of 1773, Marie, in return for a lifetime pension, had ceded her seigneurial inheritance to her brother. Since GabrielElzéar rarely paid his sister, or perhaps wasn’t even expected to, she had become his principal creditor and silent partner by the 1780s. Two decades later, on GabrielElzéar’s death in 1809, she stepped in again, giving her share of the estate by donation to her nephews and nieces. On her own death, half of her estate was bequeathed to the cult of Sainte Anne through maintenance of the domain chapel. Family letters, three wills, and other archival documents testify to her incarnation of Taschereau female virtues – qualities in sharp contrast to those of the impertinent and rebellious women denounced publicly by her brother in 1776 and 1796. Her mother remembered Marie in her will as the daughter who had “always remained with her.”78 In 1774, her younger brother Charles-Antoine described her as “a second mother.” Writing from France in 1785, he reiterated her importance as a surrogate mother, this time to his widowed brother’s children: “[T]he trouble, care, and fatigue with which, at her age, our dear sister raises them, is indicative not only of her virtues but also of the kindness and cooperation we have always loved in her.”79 In 1798, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau reported to their sister Charlotte-Claire on Marie’s health after the ordeal of their mother’s death and her life in Sainte-Marie, “where she was quite content to return to tranquility since she didn’t like the city.”80 Other letters described Marie as “changed and thinner.”81 In the will he revised shortly before his death, Gabriel-Elzéar put Marie on a similar footing with his wife, giving her usufruct of the manor house and domain and asking, across the grave, that she be respected by his wife and the younger generation: “Having always lived with Marie Taschereau, my eldest sister and a godmother, and having, along with my children, the greatest obligation to her in multiple ways, I want her to enjoy usufruct conjointly with Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay, my second wife, everything which belongs to me, movables and immovables without exception, and this until the death of my said sister, Marie Taschereau, and this to avoid any bickering or trouble in my house during her old age.”82 Other archival and church records confirm her honorific status within the family. At the Bazin-Taschereau marriage in 1773, she signed the contract as the third Taschereau signatory after the groom and mother of the groom. She was again a prominent witness and signatory at her brother’s remarriage in 1789. In family

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moments and ceremonies, festive or grim, Marie Taschereau was always present. She signed the burial certificate of a stillborn child born to Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin and Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau in February 1782 as well as the baptismal certificate of her niece Thérèse-Julie Taschereau (1784). In July 1807, she was named godmother of her niece and namesake, Marie-Louise, travelling to Quebec to witness the baptism.83 During the household inventory after Marie-Louise-Élisabeth’s death in 1783, Marie Taschereau acted as co-witness with her brother, taking the two notaries and a militia captain from room to room through the manor.84 Again in 1810, this time after Gabriel-Elzéar’s death, she accompanied the widow and notary in the required inventory of her brother’s household property; she was also present for the reading of his will. In addition to providing in her will for the family chapel, Marie Taschereau was meticulous in the distribution of her personal effects. She left a large iron stove, inherited from her mother and which sat outside the large bedroom in the original manor house, to nephew Thomas-Pierre-Joseph. Her sofa was bequeathed to Olivier Perrault, husband of her niece. Personal items – her “lit garni,” her “petit miroir de toilette,” her “grand miroir de toilette,” six small candlesticks, and her clothes – her animals, and her coaches were inventoried in her will and left individually, particularly to her nieces and her brother’s widow. She left cash and some of her clothes to servants and a former family slave.85

fam ily life Marie Taschereau’s centrality in the household emphasizes the second generation’s continuing sense of itself as an extended family and as a community. Based on mutuality among family members and the labour of peasant, tenant, servant, and, for a time, a slave, the manor in Sainte-Marie was organized to provide the Taschereaus with food, shelter, clothing, and health and old-age care. Officially under the authority of Gabriel-Elzéar, family space was determined by complex understandings of blood and gender, by legal devices like usufruct or “donation,” by the right to a key to the chapel or burial in its crypt, or by the patriarch’s legacy of a ceremonial sword.86 Taschereau family life, we have seen, was immensely complicated by the death in 1783 of the seigneur’s wife, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin. Remarriage in elite families was, however, always easier for men than for women. Among widowers in the aristocracy of New France, 54.4 per cent remarried, while only 20.3 per cent of aristocratic widows did so.87 Gabriel-Elzéar’s mother, widowed at age forty-one, had not remarried, but he, forty-four in 1789, ended his widowerhood by an apparently arranged marriage with seventeen-year-old Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay, the daughter of his close friend. One of the colony’s wealthiest seigneurs and

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

its fourth-largest producer of wheat, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay was proprietor of some 100,000 arpents in the seigneuries of Beauport, Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies, Gaudarville, Fossambault, and Saint-Denis, as well as in two fiefs. 88 He and Taschereau shared a patrician identity around land, manor, titles, senior militia commission, material possessions, and slave-owning. Both were progressive seigneurs in their approach to mills, roads, forest development, and agricultural improvements. Like Taschereau at Sainte-Marie, Juchereau Duchesnay saw his seigneury at Beauport sacked during the American invasion. Elected to Lower Canada’s first Legislative Assembly in 1792, both men acted as representatives of seigneurial interests. A widower with young children who himself chose a teenager as his second wife, Juchereau Duchesnay, in the marriage contract signed in the “Château de Beauport,” referred to “his friendship and attachment” for Taschereau.89 His friend would respond in kind, naming the first son born of the marriage “Antoine-Charles.”90 Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay grew up in one of the colony’s oldest and most luxurious seigneuries. Beauport was known for its splendour, its many servants and slaves, its indoor pond and ceramic fountain, and its majestic vistas up the St Lawrence to Quebec.91 Although Gabriel-Elzéar immediately began construction of a new manor house for his bride, Sainte-Marie was a far cry from Beauport. Travel to his seigneury implied forests, swamps, and isolation. At the manor itself, Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay took up life as seigneuress, wife to a widower twenty-seven years her senior and stepmother to five, the eldest just a year her junior. In the new manor house, fitted out by GabrielElzéar for his bride and his extended family, new space would be accorded to upstairs comfort and to Louise-Françoise’s role as a hostess. She would share domestic space, chambermaids, and household authority with her husband’s mother and sister. Archives give her little voice, and we cannot know if her household fit Amanda Vickery’s description of aristocrat households as “the accepted tale of progressive incarceration [of women] in a domestic private sphere.”92 Parish records do point to her fertility, for in the first eight years of her marriage, Louise-Françoise gave birth four times; none survived. Only her fifth child, Antoine-Charles (b. 1797); her sixth, George-Louis (b. 1805); and her seventh, Louise-Julie (b. 1808), survived to maturity. While a pale shadow of Beauport’s opulence, manor life in Sainte-Marie saw steady material improvement in the late eighteenth century. In the American auction of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s goods in 1776, the most valuable item had been his iron stove, followed by two beds (one of which was a featherbed), an iron pot, a mirror, two bunks, sheets, a mattress, and embroidered covers.93 An 1785 inventory, with the family now in residence, indicated increasing comfort and luxury. The family silver had been brought from Quebec; there was a parlour as well as two offices, one of which served for seigneurial business.94 Constructed in stages between 1789

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3.6 The seigneurial manor at Beauport

and 1803, the new manor house included a large living room, dining room, parlour, office, downstairs bedroom, and a back kitchen, while Gabriel-Elzéar’s seigneurial office, with its visitors, tools, and manuals, had been relocated to an attached outbuilding. The parlour and dining room were decorated with a view to refined and mixed entertaining. The two curtains of 1785 were replaced by two pairs of curtains that presumably permitted their being drawn to each side of the two windows. The room was less cluttered; a cherry-wood clothes dresser had disappeared, perhaps to an upstairs bedroom, as had three paintings on glass. The two large gilded mirrors that served as the major wall decorations suggested increasing attention to dress, beauty, and oneself, while a round mahogany table had been replaced by two folding mahogany tables, handy for tea service. A pendulum clock had given way to a more luxurious means of displaying time: a grandfather clock with a marble base. In 1785, the notary had recorded six easy chairs upholstered with a woollen fabric that he described as having holes. A quarter century later, these had been replaced by eighteen straight-backed caned chairs. Domestic servants were essential to manor life. As well as the upstairs nurse and chambermaid, servant manual labour was needed downstairs in the substantial kitchen and outside in the milk shed and vegetable garden. The increasing place

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

given to ceremony and finery in dress and at table necessitated having servants with sewing and serving skills. By 1809, seven servants, including one male, were employed, all apparently living in the house.95 Angélique Prévost, literate and described as a seamstress, seems to have acted as senior servant. She came into Taschereau employ about 1789 and for several decades served “upstairs” as chambermaid to Marie Taschereau as well as to Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay. GabrielElzéar Taschereau remembered Prévost in his will, granting her an annual pension of nine minots of wheat. Marie Taschereau left Prévost fifty Spanish dollars in her 1817 will, thanking her for her “long and loyal service” and then increasing her bequest to sixty-two Spanish dollars in a codicil three years later. In an 1840 will written just three months before her death, Louise-Françoise left Prévost an annual pension of £10.96 We have seen the continuous presence of domestic slaves in the Jolliet–Fleury de la Gorgendière–Taschereau households, and through his mother, Gabriel-Elzéar can be considered the fourth generation of a family of Canadian slave-holders. Writing wills in the early nineteenth century, both Gabriel-Elzéar and his sister Marie addressed the issue of a pension for their former slave. Not simply an urban phenomenon, slaves or freed slaves of African origin were sought for domestic service on prosperous seigneuries where they surely contributed to the seigneur’s local prestige. Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay had grown up with slaves at Beauport and found the same as mistress of Sainte-Marie. A black or mulatto slave, Marie Sylvie, was obtained from family member William Grant in Quebec and began working for the Taschereaus as early as 1773. It is difficult to fully understand Taschereau attitudes to race or to Marie Sylvie’s reception in the larger community. Freed by Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau when she became an adult but still without an apparent surname, Marie Sylvie continued in family service. In his 1809 will, Gabriel-Elzéar asked his heirs to provide for her “in old age” or “when her health broke down, and she became incapable of working.”97 The family honoured his bequest. In 1810, she married fellow servant Joseph Landry, and as a dowry, the Taschereaus gave her a plot of seigneurial land.98 She was also remembered by Marie Taschereau, who left her fifty Spanish dollars to pay off her seigneurial debts (to the Taschereau family). With Angélique Provost, she was also to share any of the dresses, skirts, coats, and cotton or wool stockings that were “trop vieilles” for the mistress of the house.99 Not all servants benefited from paternalism. In May 1809, just four months after apprenticing as a domestic to Gabriel-Elzéar, Jean Valière had a complaint of desertion sworn out against him. In 1815, ThomasPierre-Joseph Taschereau used the good offices of his brother, justice of the peace Jean-Thomas Taschereau, to lodge a deposition against Jean-Baptiste Simard, who had abandoned his work contract within a month of signing it.100

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catho licis m in s ain te- mar ie Thomas McCord would marry a Jew, his daughter Mary converted to Catholicism, and Thomas himself, with escalating social status, migrated from Presbyterianism to Anglicanism. In Quebec City, his grandson and namesake Thomas was raised as a Catholic. This religious pluralism contrasted sharply with Taschereau practice. While marriage with Protestants did occasionally and painfully occur, Catholicism to the Taschereaus was virtually universal, encompassing all children and seamless in its application to private and public lives. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s generation and that of his children and grandchildren each produced clerics: his younger sister entered a convent, his eldest son took religious orders, and his grandson became archbishop and cardinal. His mother and sister were principal promoters in the Beauce of the cult of Sainte Anne. The Taschereau family’s place in the front-row seigneurial pew, their presence in ceremonies and rituals of the Catholic calendar, their centrality in the construction and furnishing of the domain chapel and parish church, and their prominence in Christian charity were public benchmarks of community rank. The alliance between the seigneur’s authority and that of the parish priest, the latter distinguished by his monopoly of the sacraments, is mindful of Marc Bloch’s emphasis on the complicity of the medieval church and seigneurial family. Karen Orren, referring to what she calls “the missing link” in understanding American ideology, draws attention to the persistence in North America of a “medieval hierarchy of personal relations.”101 We observed Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau in his various commissions and positions as legislator, board member of the Agricultural Society, and superintendent of post houses, acting as an unofficial gatekeeper of the flow of secular information into the Beauce. At the same time, Taschereau coaches, letters, and visits linked the Episcopal Palace, seminary, convent, and their streams of knowledge, doctrine, and international news to the local community. Taschereau children boarded in Quebec religious institutions, and their laundry, textbooks, and reports on health and schoolwork flowed back accompanied by church vestments, decorations, music sheets, architectural plans, books, seed literature, and scientific instruments. The manor house in Sainte-Marie was a regional focus of religious traffic and an esteemed stop for missionaries, priests, and bishops. With court connections and regional authority, Gabriel-Elzéar had the bishop’s ear in clerical appointments, in the determination of parish locations, and in shaping episcopal directives aimed at the Beauce. Take, for example, Rev. Joseph-Octave Plessis’s visit to Sainte-Marie in August 1804 to officiate at the marriage of Taschereau’s daughter Marie-Louise. Taschereau used the occasion to take the soon-to-be-named-bishop aside to request that two mission chapels be built in the rear rangs of Sainte-Marie. These, he told Plessis, would attract settlement and later develop into parish churches. One chapel,

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1824)

located in forest along the Justinian Road, would, Taschereau told him, be “helpful in the clearing of his land.”102 The church was the major late eighteenth-century institution across the Beauce, and as such, its parish organization, symbols, rituals, and festivals were central to authority in the region. In Sainte-Marie, the first parish boundaries coincided with those of the original Taschereau seigneury; the mission and subsequent parish church became the principal focus of village religious and civil life; and public announcements were cried from its steps, citizen assemblies met there, circuit courts were held in the presbytery, and the community’s civil registers were kept by the priest. Tightening rules in the Quebec diocese concerning the number and observation of fast days as well as reiteration in 1774 of the interdiction of marriage between Europeans and Natives exemplified church influence on daily life in the Beauce. Purchase in 1772 of a safe for the church in Sainte-Marie suggested the increasing presence of a money economy alongside traditional practices of tithing in kind. Levies in 1780 for the construction of the new church were assessed in money terms of one sol per acre.

3.7 Minuets of the Canadians (1807)

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As donors in 1746 of the land on which the parish church was built, the Taschereaus had perpetual right to an annual honorific Mass. In addition, and as late as 1768, ownership of the chalice and silver plate imported from Paris remained with widow Taschereau.103 This collusion between the seigneurial family and the parish would be repeated over the next two centuries in gifts of church furnishings, bells, and land for presbytery, chapel, and cemetery. Gabriel-Elzéar’s son donated land to establish the convent in Sainte-Marie (1823), his son-in-law donated land for the school, while the domain chapel, still in existence, is a physical reminder of the union of Catholicism and seigneurial family. In the parish church, seigneur Taschereau had the right to special prayers from the pulpit, to priority in communion, to a place behind the priest in processions, and to intramural burial. As seigneur, Gabriel-Elzéar had the right to seating at the front right of the church. By law, this pew was to be of the same width as the rows in the rest of the church but could be double size in depth. Church records from 1766 record his pew and, just behind, that of his mother. The taking of communion was symbolic, fraternal through the congregation’s sharing of the body of Christ, but remindful of social hierarchy in the seigneur’s right to receive the host first. In the September Mass celebrating the patron saint of the parish, the head of the Taschereau family had the privilege of distributing the communion bread.104 With its isolation and small population, the parish of Sainte-Marie developed only slowly and its development occurred over a half century later than neighbouring parishes along the St Lawrence. In 1754, a wooden chapel was constructed for missionary visits; the missionary, who resided in Saint-Joseph, stayed in the domain house during overnight visits to Sainte-Marie. Only in 1766 was a resident priest appointed and a modest presbytery opened. During the long tenure of its first priest, Jean-Marie Verreau (1766–85), Taschereau was, as Sainte-Marie’s official historian put it, “the right arm of religious power.” He kept close watch on the fabrique (churchwardens), often acting as honorary president at their meetings. It was usual practice for the priest to keep the register of these meetings. However, throughout Verreau’s two-decade curatorship, it was seigneur Taschereau who maintained the register, recording parish accounts, pew holders, and minutes. A present-day skeptic with regard to seigneurial authority in the parish can still visit the basement vault of the presbytery of Sainte-Marie where Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s hand in the minute books is as strong today as when the ink dried two centuries ago. His minutes represent the official version of parish history: construction of the church, episcopal visits, votes on money and corvées, and detailed descriptions of the Taschereau family role in developing the Sainte-Marie parish. As parish recorder, he had a strategic role in creating local written memory, exercising a power strikingly similar to that exercised later by the McCords in institutions around Christ Church in Montreal.

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

Table 3.5 Parish development Establishment of Nearby Parishes on the St Lawrence River Pointe-Lévy Beaumont Saint-Nicholas Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly

1679 1692 1694 1702

Establishment of Parishes along the Chaudière River Saint-Joseph Sainte-Marie Saint-François (Beauceville)

1738 1745 1784

Establishment of Parishes along the Etchemin River and in rangs back from the Chaudière Saint-Henri Sainte-Claire Saint-Anselme Saint-Sylvestre Saint-Elzéar

1766 1824 1827 1828 1835

Development of the Parish of Sainte-Marie Opening of parish register Presbytery built and appointment of first resident priest Sacristy built Blessing of church bell Opening of Sainte-Anne Chapel New church completed

1754 1766 1772 1773 1778 1783

Diocesan regulations called for registration in January of the churchwardens’ annual accounts. Given Taschereau’s frequent absences and parish reluctance to act without the seigneur’s presence, these reports were routinely entered in the spring or summer and, in one instance, were delayed until October.105 The register records what Taschereau understood to be his virtual veto over churchwarden business. The account book entry for 31 May 1772, for example, reports on a meeting held in the

103

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presbytery to approve construction of the sacristy. Church assemblies such as this did not consist of all parishioners but rather of present and former churchwardens. In addition to the “majority of votes” of the assembly, Taschereau noted the specific “vote and consent of Monsieur Taschereau Écuyer, Seigneur.” Of the twentyfour parishioners who approved the minute, only three, besides Taschereau and Curé Verreau, signed; the rest gave their mark.106 A parish assembly on 15 October 1780 to approve construction of the new church functioned the same way. Held after Mass, it followed a private meeting in the presbytery of notables and a few lesser parishioners. The assembly, Taschereau recorded, authorized him, Curé Verreau, and three churchwardens “to enter into contracts, to regulate corvées, to determine and to order everything necessary to entirely and perfectly complete the building, and to ensure that each and every habitant or land proprietor in the said seigneuries, contribute one sol per arpent over three successive years.”107 It was Taschereau who deposited these minutes, signed or marked by the churchwardens, with notary Louis Miray. As construction proceeded, the seigneur noted his own donation of 60 livres tournois towards purchase of an enlarged site and the role of his mother in embroidering and gilding altar decorations. In July 1781, the bishop travelled to SainteMarie to bless the church cornerstone. Describing the ceremony, Taschereau noted that, after the bishop and three local priests, members of his own family, beginning with his mother, were next in rank: “dame Veuve Taschereau, dame du dit lieu; M. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, ecuyer seigneur de Sainte-Marie, Linière, Jolliet et autres lieux, Me Taschereau, son épouse, Mlle Taschereau, Mlle Bazin.”108 Signed by Taschereau, Curé Verreau, and three churchwardens, the construction contract of 3,450 livres tournois called for a stone church 120 feet by 48 feet that was to include two chapels and a heated sacristy.109 With completion of the church in September 1783, a campaign was mounted to build a new presbytery and church hall. This project revived conflicts between Taschereau and the peasantry already evident over the corvée, seigneurial dues, and loyalty in the American invasion.110 The Taschereau vision of a grand parish aroused strong resistance to its cost and to the prospect of forced labour on the building site. Reporting on the parish meeting, 15 October 1786, which unanimously approved construction of a stone presbytery, Taschereau noted his personal contribution of trente piastres as well as the required stone, sand, and two pine beams. For their part, each parishioner was to contribute une piastre annually for four years for each frontage of three arpents as well as three days of corvée a year for three years. This contradicted an earlier assembly decision that presbytery construction might entail further money contributions but not labour.111 Even as Taschereau was working to fulfil the terms of the construction contract, parishioners were complaining to the bishop that “a large majority” of the inhabitants opposed the project.112 Court challenges, a visit to the parish by the bishop’s envoy, and unsuccessful attempts to compromise on a less-expensive wood

105

3.8 Cornerstone of first SainteMarie parish church (1781). Taschereau influence included having the family name boldly inscribed as “soul” and “founder” on the church cornerstone

building delayed the project for four years. In 1790, the seigneur took matters into his own hands and, despite priest Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Marcheteau’s protests, had the roof of the old presbytery torn off. Shortly after, Taschereau had Marcheteau removed. Complaining on behalf of “the entire parish assembly,” militia captain François Verreau described a seigneurial “empire” that had been exercised “on us for too long.”113 The appointment of a new priest, Jean-Baptiste Dubord, in October 1790 did not resolve the crisis, and parishioners continued to balk at the seigneur’s insistence on a handsome building that would reflect Sainte-Marie’s grandeur. Relations between seigneur and the new priest quickly broke down, Taschereau accusing Dubord of refusing to travel to the manor to administer the sacraments to his ailing mother. Dubord responded that the doctor had not reported that Veuve Taschereau’s life had been endangered. In response to Taschereau’s refusing to attend the parish church and sending for the priest from neighbouring Saint-Henri to attend to his mother, Dubord transferred out of the parish.114 In 1795, another priest was named but he too survived less than a year. Taschereau offered the bishop a solution: he would complete the presbytery at his own cost but only in return for the nomination of his son, still a theology student, as parish priest. This proposal, which entailed building a fine presbytery in which his eldest son would live while serving as curé of Sainte-Marie – the union by blood of seigneury and parish – was not

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taken up. In 1796, Antoine Villade, a French émigré priest indelibly marked by the anticlericalism of the French Revolution, was named to the parish. His four-decade curacy was characterized by broad complicity with the seigneurial family. Parallel to the building of this parish infrastructure was the construction of a chapel on the domain. While chapels were not uncommon on seigneurial domains, they often took the form of missions that preceded the construction of a parish church and were then dismantled. Three successive chapels (1778, 1828, 1891) were constructed on the Taschereau domain. Situated beside the manor house and with a commanding panorama of river and village below, the chapel had symbolic place on the Sainte-Marie landscape. Unlike the more massive parish church, the chapel, to this day, with its scale, decoration, crypt, and reserved seigneurial prie-dieu, suggests an intimacy with the private religious life of the seigneurial family. Its association with devotion to Sainte Anne, miracles, protection against the flooding of the Chaudière, and celebration of Sainte Anne’s feast day made it a principal site for pilgrimages and commemorative Masses. Alongside its importance in popular religious culture, the chapel offered the seigneur private space for his devotions, family ceremonies, and crypt burials. Given the high infant mortality in the seigneurial family, the chapel also served in the provision of prompt church baptisms. ThérèseJulie Taschereau, for example, was born in the manor house at 9:00 am on 10 May 1783. Her mother died the same day, and the priest hurried up from the village to baptize Thérèse-Julie in the adjoining chapel.115 Among female saints, Sainte Anne is second only to Mary as a devotional figure. And, while the Virgin Mary’s purity came from freedom from original sin, Sainte Anne’s barrenness and then motherhood had broader popular meaning.116 The Ursulines, Jesuits, and other congregations brought her veneration to New France; a Confrérie de Sainte Anne was given canon approval by Bishop Laval in 1678; and her miracles in protecting sea travellers were popularized in a series of ex votos. Saved by a prayer to Sainte Anne from a shipwreck off Portugal in 1670, Intendant Jean Talon offered an ex voto to the Sainte-Anne chapel of the Quebec cathedral.117 Devotion to Sainte Anne was particularly strong in Beaupré, the native region of many Beaucerons and where, in 1658, the Jesuits erected a chapel in her honour. Bishop Laval was instrumental in obtaining for the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré chapel a fragment of Sainte Anne’s finger bone from his chapel house in Carcassonne. Some sixty parishes in New France were built under the aegis of Sainte Anne, and along the St Lawrence she gave her name to parishes like Sainte-Anne-de-laPocatière (1672), Sainte-Anne-de-Varennes (1693), Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade (1714), and Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue (1703). In Acadia, she was a central figure in Catholic missions to convert Mi’kmaq from their paganism.118 The veneration of Sainte Anne was particularly opportune in the Beauce. Recurrent victims of the seasonal flooding of the Chaudière, Beaucerons were encour-

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

3.9 Sketch of second Sainte-Anne chapel, 1828–90. Funded in part by the estate of Marie Taschereau and designed by Jérôme Demers of the Seminary of Quebec, the domain chapel rapidly became a focus of the cult of Sainte Anne in the Beauce.

aged to channel their devotions to Sainte Anne. Construction of a small wooden chapel in 1778 coincided with the Taschereaus’ move to their seigneury. Its major sponsors were widow Taschereau, her daughters Charlotte-Claire and Marie, and her daughter-in-law Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin, who, with Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, signed the request to the bishop. This was the beginning of a long tradition in which the public energies of Taschereau women were directed to shaping popular religiosity in the Beauce through the cult of Sainte Anne and the Virgin. In their request to build the chapel between the courtyard and kitchen garden, the family offered to cede its ownership to the parish. In return, they hoped to secure a veto on any change in usage of the chapel land, the right to a key to the chapel, and the privilege to have a seigneurial prie-dieu. They also rejected out of hand any suggestion that the chapel might include a burial ground for public use.119 In acceding to the Taschereau petition, Bishop Briand noted its exceptional nature, pointing out that ecclesiastical regulations normally restricted the construction of private chapels. His permission spoke to privileges of access, governance, and accoutrements. Only members of the seigneurial family in residence would have right to the key, and on leaving the seigneury, they were to return the key to the parish priest. Their tenant “farmer,” the bishop decreed, was not to have the key.120

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3.10 Statue of Sainte Anne in the Sainte-Anne chapel, surrounded by flowers in celebration of the festival of Sainte Anne

The seigneurial family was accorded two prie-dieu, which could be placed in similar position to that of the bishop’s prie-dieu in the chapel of the Seminary of Quebec. In contrast to the parish church where churchwardens were elected, the chapel’s single churchwarden was to be chosen by the seigneur in consultation with the priest. Collections at Masses – substantial given Sainte Anne’s popular favour for pilgrimages and special Masses – were to be shared equally between the chapel and the parish. The chapel meant an increased workload for the parish priest: holding special Masses, confessing pilgrims, administering to the special needs of the seigneurial family, travelling from presbytery to chapel, acquiring the necessary ornaments and vestments, and performing the sacraments in both locations. Unlike the parish church where authority remained a male constituency of episcopacy, fabrique, priest, and seigneur, the domain chapel can be seen as essentially a female enterprise. Land for the chapel was granted by four Taschereau women and the seigneur. Signed by Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, his mother, his wife, and his two sisters, Marie and Charlotte-Claire, who made the long trip from Montreal, the

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

donation of 2,560 square feet of domain land was made in the presbytery, 9 August 1778. Construction of the chapel and its enlargement in 1780 were paid for by the Taschereaus with supplementary revenues from Masses and indulgences. The women of the Beauce supported the chapel through annual collections of cash, eggs, butter, and linen.121 Widow Taschereau’s sister sent the processional rug; widow Bazin, mother of the seigneuress, offered the cloth for the communion table; and the Sisters of Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec contributed the communion table and four gold chandeliers. With Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau as a senior member, the Ursulines presented an ivory crucifix, communion cloths, and vestments, as well as gilding the statue of Sainte Anne in their monastery.122 Family control over the chapel was constant. Since the building opened directly onto the public road, churchgoers did not trespass onto the domain. In the chapel itself, the seigneurial family retained their reserved places and prie dieu, a practice retained well into the twentieth century. Given the distance to Sainte-Anne-deBeaupré, the chapel became the principal pilgrimage site in the Beauce, where up to a hundred Masses to Sainte Anne were celebrated annually. The feast day of Sainte Anne, 26 July, was a major celebration, with an extra priest sent out from Quebec for the special Masses and confessions. Nighttime events were popular, particularly torchlight parades or river processions from the parish church to the chapel. In 1810, following recurrent rowdiness and drunkenness in the celebration of Sainte Anne, the bishop discontinued feast-day Masses and pilgrimages to the domain. Perhaps as a result of the precipitous drop in chapel revenues, these prohibitions were removed in 1817. The first warden of the chapel and holder of the office for fifty-five years was Étienne Barbeau, miller at the banal mill of Sainte-Marie. Less than three years earlier, he had been one of the purchasers at the American auction of the seigneur’s goods. Of particular significance, religious authorities also permitted the nomination of Marie Taschereau, the seigneur’s sister, as treasurer of the chapel, a post she held until her death. With the bishop’s explicit permission, she was allowed to safeguard the chapel’s monies and receipts. Like the domain chapel, the bells of the parish church were what Alain Corbin describes as “a natural symbol of a community’s identity.” And again, and over two generations, we can see the influence of Taschereau women in their funding, naming, and benediction.123 The naming of bells after notables and the right of the seigneurial family to burial in the crypt served to symbolically encompass the congregation with a Taschereau presence. Going beyond the time-discipline role of the bells (emphasized by Edward Thompson), bells and belfry represented the dominant sights and sounds of Sainte-Marie’s Catholic landscape. They pealed three times a day for Angelus devotions as well as for Mass, for rites of passage such as marriages and funerals, for religious festivals, and for episcopal visits. In SainteMarie, they rang when the priest set out to give extreme unction. And bells, Corbin

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reminds us, had more than religious significance, their ringing bringing emotions of the “sensual” and “nostalgia.”124 They were signs of local pride and examples of the marvels of industrial production and transportation. Their arrival in a community and their hoisting, naming, and blessing were major ceremonial moments in which the local elite had principal place. In the Richelieu Valley at SaintAlexandre, for example, the wife of the region’s largest land proprietor was named godmother to the bells. Blessing bells shared similarities with christening – the naming, the use of water and oil, the washing, the presence of godparents, and the dressing in white. The benediction ceremony involved decorating the belfry and holding a ceremony that included prayers for the exorcism and purification of the parishioners.125 Widow Taschereau had been an important benefactor at the raising of Sainte-Marie’s first bells in 1773. In 1808, three new bells cast in London, the largest weighing 427 pounds, arrived in Sainte-Marie. At their benediction, the ranking female was seigneuress Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay. She and widow Louise-Marguerite Amelot, long-time housekeeper of parish priest Antoine Villade, donated thirty-six yards of fine cloth and ribbon, reminiscent of a christening, to decorate church and tower. Commemorating Marie-Antoinette, the most prominent female victim of the French Revolution, along with the seigneuress and the curé’s housekeeper, the first bell was named “Antoinette Louise,” and the second “Marguerite Françoise.” The third and smallest bell, “Marie,” was named by notary Walsh in honour of the saint, the seigneur’s sister, and the militia captain’s wife, Marie Clouthier.126 Before the establishment in 1823 of Sainte-Marie’s convent and its benevolent activities in the community, alms and most other services to the poor were shared between the parish church and the seigneur. While the place of the manor-house kitchen in the distribution of food and clothing is not clear, the seigneurial family’s attitude to Christian charity is evident in their wills.127 Taschereau family members regularly willed annual provisions for the parish poor, first in kind with wheat drawn from their banal mills and then in cash. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau left instructions that, in the three years after his death, the parish priest of Sainte-Marie was to distribute ten minots at seeding time to the needy. In Saint-Joseph, he singled out the poor on the northeast side of his seigneury to receive five minots of seed grain a year from the priest. Two decades later, his daughter Marie-Louise Taschereau left a hundred minots a year for ten years to the poor of Saint-Joseph and £12 10s. for the same period to the poor of Quebec. With the establishment of a convent in Sainte-Marie, female Taschereau directed their charity to its work. In her 1827 will, Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay, widow of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, left instructions that her hand-warmer muff and cloak be sold and that the receipts go towards supporting poor girls in their convent studies.128

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

succes s ion No moment for the elite family was more crucial than the death of its head: the funeral and burial with their ceremonies, rituals, and reshuffled hierarchies; the naming and settling in of a new head; the redistribution of family living space; the preparation of inventories and a generation’s balance sheets of debts and credits; and, most important, settlement of the estate’s property. Although arrangements like marriage contracts, dowers, donations, or sales could be used to settle property matters before death, the elite will was of central importance. In 1749, ThomasJacques Taschereau’s estate had been settled under the Custom of Paris. The persistence of the Custom for seigneurial, family, and other contractual matters into the British regime was, we have seen, pivotal in the headship strategies of widow MarieClaire Fleury de la Gorgendière and her son Gabriel-Elzéar. However, by permitting the English common-law practice of “freedom of willing” alongside the more restrictive civil-law directives of the Custom of Paris directives, the Quebec Act of 1774 had cracked one of the foundations of the civil law and rattled the gender and cultural assumptions of the elite French family. Michel Vovelle describes these “inherent” cultural traditions as “traits de civilisation.”129 Taschereau wills illustrate this liberalization. Gabriel-Elzéar’s children, for example, would use testamentary freedom to block the fragmentation of seigneuries, concentrating ownership in the hands of a single son. Other family members used wills to withdraw property settlements should a widower remarry.130 In chapter 4, we will see that Thomas McCord followed the norms of his legal culture in the distribution of his estate. A Protestant and born in Ireland, McCord exercised freedom of willing to favour his two sons equally, both born from his second marriage, and this while virtually ignoring the daughter born from his first marriage. Gabriel-Elzéar’s principal wealth lay in seigneurial land. In the tradition of his mother’s headship, would he organize the family’s seigneurial patrimony in a single bloc around a principal male heir? Or, like seigneurial families such as the Couillards and Lefebvres, would he divide his property so that each son became a co-seigneur?131 How, given the historical principles of equality in the Custom of Paris, were daughters or the unborn to be treated? Gabriel-Elzéar also faced delicate human issues around the lodging of his heirs; the distribution of his honours, his pew, and his ceremonial sword; and his ability to reach across the grave to ensure primacy of his sons and his successor as head while assuring just treatment of his widow, sister, and others of his generation. From this perspective, the Quebec Act can be seen as not just preserving seigneurialism but also as potentially serving as a wedge to open and modernize this landholding and social institution. We can certainly see evidence of these tensions in the wills of his peers in the community

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of aristocratic seigneurs. At his death in 1809, Gabriel-Elzéar’s best friend and the father of his wife, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay, left a controversial handwritten will whose authenticity and registration were aired in the courts, the Legislative Assembly, and the public press.132 Taschereau’s will reflected a very different legal culture from that of Thomas McCord, who would leave specific details entirely to his sons on the premise that he could not “say how it can be done.” No proponent of such laissez-faire arrangements, Gabriel-Elzéar addressed in minute detail matters of honours and social class, gender, and intergenerational relations. Replacing an earlier will, he prepared a thirteen-page handwritten will in the manor house, signing it on 2 June 1809; he added a codicil during a visit to Quebec on 17 July and a second codicil three days before his death. Three separate packages sealed by the family’s coat of arms and initialled “gt” were deposited with notary Walsh along with declarations of veracity from militia captain François Verreau, parish priest Antoine Villade, and AntoineLouis Juchereau Duchesnay. Included were his instructions to Walsh that the will, with the exception of his funeral wishes, not be read to the family until after his burial. Gabriel-Elzéar died in the manor house on 18 September 1809, and the same afternoon Walsh travelled out from Sainte-Marie to read Gabriel-Elzéar’s funeral instructions and to explain the restrictions on the rest. Gabriel-Elzéar stipulated a simple funeral and asked that his body be transported to Quebec. Unlike female Taschereaus, who opted for the crypts of the family chapel, the parish church, and, occasionally, the Ursuline chapel, he preferred burial alongside his father. In the first of many alterations in his testamentary wishes, Gabriel-Elzéar, after a large funeral in Sainte-Marie attended by dignitaries and censitaires, was buried on 20 September in the crypt of the parish church. Across the nineteenth century, the crypts of the parish church and the domain chapel would be the preferred burial sites of the Taschereaus. Later, on 20 September, notary Walsh, accompanied by Louis-René Chaussegros de Léry, Poulin de Coursal, the curé of Pointe-aux-Trembles, and militia captain François Verreau, journeyed back to the manor for a full reading of the will. With Gabriel-Elzéar barely cold in his grave, the reading must have brought added chill. In the first codicil, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau lashed out at second son ThomasPierre-Joseph, who, with his eldest brother in the clergy, might have expected the headship. But in the weeks just before his death, Gabriel-Elzéar had learned that Thomas-Pierre-Joseph was usurping his ceremonial prerogatives in the distribution of communion bread. Piqued, he had written to the priest, reminding him of his rights as seigneur: Mon cher Curé, Bélanger tells me that [Thomas-Pierre-Joseph] wanted to distribute the

Table 3.6 Known burial sites of Taschereau family members in the second branch, 1730–1907 Date Person

1730 1734 1734 1747 1749 1755

Crypt of Parish Church of SainteMarie

Cemetery Domain of Sainte- Chapel Marie

Ursuline Quebec Chapel City

Anonymous Thomas-Victor Taschereau Louise-Gilles Taschereau Eulalie-Joseph Taschereau Thomas-Jacques Taschereau Louis-Joseph

1773 Pierre-François Taschereau 1781 Charlotte Taschereau 1781 Jean-Baptiste-Xavier Taschereau 1782 Anonymous 1783 Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Bazin 1783 Thérèse-Julie Taschereau 1788 Charlotte-Claire Taschereau 1797 Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière 1807 Anonymous 1809 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau 1819 Charlotte-Claire Taschereau 1820 Charles-Antoine Taschereau 1821 Marie Taschereau 1822 Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau 1825 Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau (Sister Saint-François Xavier) 1826 Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau 1827 Marie-Louise Taschereau 1832 Jean-Thomas Taschereau 1837 George-Louis Taschereau 1839 Louise-Julie Taschereau

Other

Paris x x x x Santo Domingo Montreal France x x x x Montreal x x x Paris x x

x x x x x x

Table 3.6 (continued) Date Person

Crypt of Parish Church of SainteMarie

1844 Marie-Louise-Adèle Taschereau 1845 Louis-Alfred Taschereau 1847 Tancrède-Auguste Taschereau x 1861 Antoine-Charles Taschereau 1866 Marie Panet 1870 Catherine-Hémédine Dionne (widow of Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau) 1881 Agnes Taschereau 1883 Claire-Caroline Taschereau 1888 Élisabeth-Suzanne Taschereau

1891 Joseph-Edouard Taschereau 1891 Marie-Léda Taschereau 1893 Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr 1898 Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau 1891 Marie-Louise Taschereau 1907 Eugénie Taschereau

Cemetery Domain of Sainte- Chapel Marie

Ursuline Quebec Chapel City

Other

x x x x x x x Monastery of Hôpital général Belmont Cemetery Belmont Cemetery Belmont Cemetery Crypt of the basilica Montreal Belmont Cemetery

Source: Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau (Lévis: Mercantile 1901); Henri-Elzéar Taschereau, Branche aînée de la famille Taschereau en Canada, 1896.

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

large sections of communion bread in the church. You know as well as I do that the large sections are rights of honour that not everyone has the right to have or to distribute and that we already stopped this a few years ago. I ask you to tell the beadle to refuse to do it. Votre serviteur. G. Taschereau133 To punish his son, Gabriel-Elzéar added a codicil to his will that changed the disposition of his ceremonial sword and shoulder stripes, the principal symbols of aristocratic title. Noting that his sword originated in the Duchesnay family of his second wife, Gabriel-Elzéar withdrew them from Thomas-Pierre-Joseph, leaving them instead to Antoine-Charles, eldest son of his second marriage. In the second codicil, he dramatically altered the disposition of family authority, removing Thomas-Pierre-Joseph as co-executor with Jean-Thomas Taschereau and sonin-law Olivier Perrault. Identifying Jean-Thomas as sole head, he instructed the family to “establish” Jean-Thomas as “agent for all business concerning family assets” and, as recompense, to accord him 10 per cent of the seigneurial revenues and 5 per cent of revenue from the mills. Jean-Thomas was to keep and administer all documents and land rolls and give a “clear and net” accounting to his fellow heirs.134 The will itself ranged across Gabriel-Elzéar’s concerns. We have seen his use of the will to provide for the old age of his former slave and for the living space of his sister; he also tried to protect his widow’s place in the seigneurial pew from encroachment by her stepsons. He outlined the usufruct rights of diverse family members to the manor house and to the domain’s barn, mill, and food resources. He recalled his brother’s “generosity with his family” and, despite CharlesAntoine’s absence in France for over half a century, confirmed his right to lodging in the manor and to a place for his carriage, horses, and cows. He made similar provisions for his eldest son, Gabriel-Elzéar Jr. A priest, Gabriel-Elzéar Jr did not receive property, but he was bequeathed the right, if sick or unable to take up a parish, to lodging in the manor house with specific access to kitchen, barn, coach house, and pastures.135 Although Gabriel-Elzéar left six properties in Sainte-Marie, 700 acres in Nelson Township, movables evaluated at £1,041, and other assets, particularly seigneurial debts owed to him, totalling £1,051, his seigneuries with their domains, flour mills, and sawmills formed the core of his estate. Giving consideration to the complicated and often contradictory cultural forces emerging from his experience of two marriages, parenting, masculinity, identity, fraternal and paternal concerns for his brother, wife, and sister, and evolving legal traditions, he based his bequests around three principles difficult to square: seigneurial authority for his sons, economic equality among his sons and daughters, and protection for his widow from her

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stepchildren. His first determination was to ensure that each of his four sons became a titled seigneur, what he described as “seigneurs en titre avec droit honorifique.” Possessing just three seigneuries, he achieved this by dividing the principal seigneury of Sainte-Marie into two seigneuries along the Chaudière River. He made ThomasPierre-Joseph titular seigneur of Taschereau seigneury, that part of Sainte-Marie on the east side of the Chaudière River and including the town of Sainte-Marie and the seigneurial domain. Jean-Thomas, second inheriting son from his first marriage, was made titular seigneur of Linière, the new seigneury west of the Chaudière. Antoine-Charles, eldest son of his second marriage, was granted the seigneury of Jolliet, and youngest son George-Louis, the seigneury of Saint-Joseph. Marie-Louise, married to Olivier Perrault, was given parts of the seigneuries of Taschereau, Linière, and Saint-Joseph, including shares of their mill production. Concerned with the possibility of the future birth of a son, he included complicated provisions for providing him with seigneurial title. This distribution was followed by a provision naming each of his six children, including daughters Marie-Louise and infant Julie-Louise, and declaring that they “share equally in all that I have right to assume as ‘bien noble’ in the above named seigneuries without prejudice to the rights by her marriage contract in my estate of Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay, my dear and tender wife.”136 In the conclusion of his will, he again implored the children of his first marriage to respect a stepmother who had always acted towards them with “so much goodness, friendship, and disinterest.”137 Resulting in a two-year notarial trail (see table 3.7), the will left the six heirs, three of them minors, with the complicated division of the ongoing revenues from four seigneuries, four flour mills, and three sawmills. Nor did the will, beyond Gabriel-Elzéar’s expressions of “goodness” and “respect,” square his bequests to his children with the legal rights of his widow. Under the Custom of Paris, their marriage contract, in which they had opted for community of property, assured LouiseFrançoise ongoing ownership of the property she had brought into the marriage, half of the community of property they had acquired since their marriage, and dower right to use the other half.138 This included rights to the domain and revenues from flour mills and sawmills constructed since 1789. The first major step in settlement of the estate occurred fifteen months after Gabriel-Elzéar’s death with the inventory and distribution of the community of property. While the thirty-nine–page minute of the distribution shows widow Louise-Françoise as the major recipient – of family silver, paintings, armoire, bed, mattress, rugs, eighteen cords of wood, wheat in the mill, and cowhides at the tanner – some items went to other family members and some were sold.139 Six months later and while taking advantage of clauses guaranteeing her rights to live in the manor house and to occupy the seigneurial pew, Louise-Françoise made the major

Table 3.7 Acts concerning settlement of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s estate, 1809–1811 1809 2 June 17 July 9 September 15 September 18 September 20 September 28 September

Notary Gabriel-Elzéar completes and signs handwritten will First codicil Second codicil Deposit of three sealed packages at notary Death of Gabriel-Elzéar and reading of funeral instructions Burial and reading of full will Donation by Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar to his two brothers and sister of rights to heritage of their mother

Walsh, no number1 Walsh no. 17132

1810 13 January

24 November

29 November

Procuration of widow Gabriel-Elzéar and her children to her brother Antoine-Louis Juchereau Duchesnay to sell house in Quebec Inventory of property in community of goods of Gabriel-Elzéar and Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay Minute of sale of movables of community of goods

Walsh no. 1753

Renunciation by widow Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay to community “Partage” of the goods of the succession of Gabriel-Elzéar

Plante no. 5606

Plante no. 55263

Plante no. 5527

1811 1 March 4 October

1

banq-q, cn306, a43, “Famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau,” 238. banq-q, cn306, s43. 3 banq-q, cn301, s230. 2

Plante no. 5800

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concession of renouncing her marriage-contract rights to the community of property.140 Whatever its larger meaning in terms of gender and Taschereau family identity, this removal of the widow facilitated the partage, or sharing, by the children of the seigneurial revenues, allowing the fulfilment of her husband’s wishes concerning male titularship and equality among the children and the assumption of family headship by Jean-Thomas, her stepson and junior by just three years.141 Parts of the estate would remain contested, and in the final settlement, Jean-Thomas emerged as titular head of Jolliet and Antoine-Charles of Linière.142 Across the second half of the eighteenth century, the Fleury de la Gorgendières and Taschereaus had united in a family strategy of grouping resources and seigneuries in the Beauce around male head Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau. Into the first decade of the nineteenth century and with his death imminent, Gabriel-Elzéar willed his view of family continuation, now in a context of several prospering seigneuries, a young widow, and four sons and two daughters from two marriages. Settlement of his estate would establish four male seigneury-endowed branches of the Taschereau family and Perrault and Fortier branches through his daughters. Jean-Thomas, who succeeded his father as family head, had a difficult mandate. Three of his brothers would be forceful seigneurs, public figures, and heads in their own right of distinctive Taschereau branches fanning out across the Beauce. His aunt Marie, the last link with his grandparents’ generation and New France, stayed close to him, active in advice, family matters, and the chapel, until 1820, which saw her burial in the parish church. His widowed stepmother, Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay, his contemporary in age, would outlive him, remaining on the domain until her death and burial in Sainte-Marie’s church in 1841. His eldest brother, Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar, rejoined the family domain and claimed his bequest. Disgraced as a priest, he lived on family resources until his death in 1822; he was buried with Taschereau honours under the sanctuary of the parish church. JeanThomas’s elder sister Marie-Louise (1777–1827) married Olivier Perrault, King’s Bench judge, legislative councillor, and his close colleague in Quebec. As a symbol of his rank in the family, Judge Perrault was buried in the parish church crypt close to the seigneur’s pew; Marie-Louise was buried under the first row of the nave on the epistle side. His youngest sister, Louise-Julie Taschereau (1808–1839), three decades his junior, married Richard-Achille Fortier, a doctor in Sainte-Marie and later registrar of the County of Leeds. Inheriting energy, intelligence, and social skills, Jean-Thomas would ride herd on these Taschereaus, manage his seigneury of Jolliet, raise five children, and act as magistrate, judge, politician, and legislative councillor. In his own way and even before the settlement of his father’s estate, he too would add deep stress to the Taschereau legacy. To the chagrin of conservative family members who insisted on strict collaboration with British authority, his political and journalistic activity on

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau (1745–1809)

Le Canadien led to his well-publicized imprisonment in 1810 by Governor Craig. In the same year, his affair with his wife’s aunt resulted in an illegitimate Taschereau. Louis-Épictière would be raised on the domain as a Taschereau, a source of distress in Jean-Thomas’s marriage and a public symbol of tarnished moral leadership. But Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s legacy ran deeper than the legacies of the competing brothers, deeper than the complicated divisions of material wealth or the soiling of the purity of family blood. It could be said that a page had turned for the Taschereaus. Whatever their sharp elbows and gaffes and despite the imprisonment of Jean-Thomas by British authorities, the family cruised successfully into the nineteenth century, assimilating European feudal traditions such as the cult of Sainte Anne, custom, the seigneury, and the English magistrature with immigrant settlement, newly devised notarial contracts, and modern mills. Gabriel-Elzéar made important political statements when he sent his favoured son to both the seminary and clerkship with Jonathan Sewell and named his youngest son GeorgeLouis. By picking up on his mother’s initiatives and positioning himself with land, administrative position, and privilege, Gabriel-Elzéar had directed the Taschereaus into nuanced ways of exercising authority both in the seigneurial countryside and in Quebec. Pierre Bourdieu would have called this a “habitus clivé,” a durable sweet spot of multiple hats where strong patrician families could thrive on Lower Canada’s profound contradictions and tensions.143

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4 Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

Five years the junior of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, Thomas McCord was born 7 February 1750 in Antrim, North Ireland, tenth among the eleven children of John McCord and Margery Ellis. Between three and six when his mother died, Thomas was raised by stepmother Margaret Hanna and was taken first to Newry and then, as a ten-year-old, to Quebec. Here, he grew up as “benjamin” in a family with two older sisters and a brother. In 1766, his stepsister Margaret was born. The emphasis in the Scottish community on education and his familiarity with the classics, science, and the law suggest that he was tutored in the colony. While not large, his father’s library included Protestant sermons, Greek and Roman classics, American pamphlet literature, and Edmund Burke’s Annual Register on the arts, economics, science, law, and religion.1 McCord was raised in the entrepreneurial surroundings of ocean trade, retailing, and tavern-keeping. An inherited capacity for risk, connections around the English-speaking Atlantic, scientific interests that included technology and the law, and an understanding of popular mores through the drink business led to a varied life of trade, distilling, landholding, the magistracy, election to the Legislative Assembly, and, in his later years, estate life in Montreal. His generation of English Montrealers maintained the male associational tradition of the late eighteenth century: the Masons, the militia, and voluntary clubs. He first joined the St Andrew’s Masonry Lodge No. 2 in Quebec (1778), was secretary (1780) and then master (1782) of St Peter’s Lodge (1780) in Montreal, and became provincial secretary of the Grand Lodge in 1788. While francophone members had been welcomed into the St Peter’s Lodge in the years after the Conquest, this lodge, like Canadian Freemasonry in general, became almost exclusively English-speaking in the ethnic climate of the 1790s.2 McCord in fact imitated his father’s insistent politics of Protestant superiority. In 1773, John McCord had been president of a committee that petitioned for the granting of an assembly limited to Protestants, and Thomas’s name appears among the signatories.3 With hopes of a Protestant

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

4.1 Emblem of Masonic Lodge (Montreal, nineteenth century)

assembly dashed by the Quebec Act, Thomas joined his father as an American supplier in their invasion of Quebec. In 1784, his name appeared with his father’s in reimbursements from the American Congress.4 Thomas McCord carried on family connections around the Atlantic. In the 1780s, he travelled to New England and New York, chartering ships with Irish, British, and American merchants. With Canadian partner George King, he participated in the triangular trade, shipping cod to Ireland, Irish beef and herring to the West Indies, and West Indian coffee, molasses, sugar, and rum to Canada. The commercial vitality of the St Lawrence attracted McCord upriver, and for a few years, he divided his life between Montreal and Quebec. Although he obtained a licence in 1771 to retail alcohol in Montreal, a 1773 census shows him still resident in Quebec, sharing a house on Poor Street with George King, two male servants, and a maid.5 Moving definitively to Montreal, he and King bought a two-storey stone building on Notre Dame Street in 1778 with a view to supplying alcohol for the fur trade.6 In 1783, they acted as bondsmen for Robert Macaulay, who shipped 1,238 gallons of rum and brandy and 658 gallons of wine to the West via Detroit.7 The potential of western markets drew McCord into industrial production. In August 1789, he and King leased a second building, a stone warehouse in the SaintLaurent suburb. Here, they first manufactured dip candles and “hard brown soap,” which they advertised “as equal to any imported.”8 Familiar with distilling in New England and the molasses trade, McCord was drawn to the production of rum and

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4.2 Signatures of Thomas McCord and Levy Solomons on the sales contract for part of the land of the Montreal Distillery, 1787. Eleven years later, McCord would marry his neighbour’s daughter, Sarah Solomons.

sent for distilling manuals and information about the recruitment of coopers to make rum barrels. “[A]s soon as possible,” he asked a trader leaving for the West Indies, “get me every information on the subject of the Distillery business – whether the rum trade in the W.I. is entirely of molasses or sugar cane or both – if mixed what proportion. Whether their rum new from the still is better than what is made here; if it is, try to learn the reason.”9 McCord became an important importer of molasses, the basic ingredient of rum, chartering entire ships for the trade. In 1785, he was the principal founder of the Montreal Distilling Company, the city’s only distillery and one of only four across Quebec. Among his associates were George King, Levy Solomons (his future father-in-law), Samuel Birnie (an Irish trading partner in the West Indies), and Jean-Baptiste Durocher.10 Selling from the distillery and from the McCord-King warehouse, the distillery advertised a local rum as good as the imported: “du bon vieux rum égal en goût à celui qu’on fait venir.”11 With strong West Indian and American competition, distilling was a relentless business requiring skilled work-

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

ers, capital, investment in new technologies, and sure supplies of molasses and fresh water. The Montreal distillery would have a troubled nine-year history, culminating in a fire and subsequent bankruptcy for McCord. The distillery was opened in 1786, and within a year, McCord was in court to force payment from his partners for unpaid shares. In 1788 and with a mortgage from his niece’s husband, Patrick Langan, he enlarged the distillery to include five copper stills, a retail store, a barrel-making workshop, and a manager’s house.12 Within months, the company’s assets were seized, and only after a sheriff ’s sale was the company refloated with capital of £3,050. In this refinancing, King and McCord attracted important capitalists, including Thomas Forsyth, John Richardson, James McGill, Isaac Todd, Jean-Baptiste Durocher, and Robert Lester.13 McCord and King retained a quarter interest and control over the distillery’s management. To bring American know-how to the enterprise, McCord hired Caesar Johonnot, former slave of a Boston distiller, as distillery manager in 1789, lodging him in the company’s house. In 1792, a horse-powered pump, shaft, and twenty-foot iron wheel to draw fresh well water to the distillery were installed.14 All of this came to naught in a disastrous fire, 24 April 1794, that destroyed the distillery. Dissolution of the company and auction of its site and undamaged equipment ruined McCord. The sale brought £1,166, less than 50 per cent of its value five years earlier, and McCord, bankrupted, left for Ireland in 1796.15 As a warehouse and distillery owner, McCord had been well aware of the danger of fire and had been a principal founder of a fire-protection society in the city. Before the establishment of municipal firefighting forces or fire insurance companies, the protection of businesses took the form of private associations or corporations with principles of mutuality similar to those of the St Andrew’s Society or the Masons. This corporatist perspective had been very much part of his father’s associational culture in Ireland and Quebec, and Thomas would have practised it as provincial secretary of the Masons. A half century later, his son John Samuel would promote similar models in structuring horticultural and natural-history societies, a Protestant orphanage, and a cemetery. While cities like Quebec had fire societies that offered help and relief funds to the devastated, the Montreal Fire Club, with its secret passwords and small fraternity of propertied members, seems to have been based on American examples.16 Fire clubs existed in Boston as early as 1717, spreading to cities like Philadelphia where six fire clubs were established.17 Montreal had experienced devastating fires in 1721 and 1734. As much as damage from flames, fire involved the breakdown of authority and trespass upon private property. In a 1765 fire in Montreal, goods pulled out of stores were quickly plundered.18 Into the 1780s, Montreal remained a walled town of 659 houses, including its suburbs. Its English-speaking entrepreneurial community was small

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and clannish, and in 1781, only forty-five home proprietors declared themselves of British or American origin.19 Within a year of establishing the distillery in 1786, Thomas McCord appeared with James McGill, Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, and others as founders of the Montreal Fire Club – its creation based on the fear of vandalism and on trust among a small group of proprietors. Club members visited each other’s properties and accepted joint responsibility to protect the valuables of fellow members. Limited to fourteen members, the club met at Sullivan’s Coffee House. Minutes were kept and stewards named to direct operations at the scene of a fire. As with the Masons, secret passwords were established for use at a fire “for the greater safety of the Effects of any Members that may be carried away from Fires.” Each member was provided with four “good leather buckets” and four large bags marked “Fire Club No. 1” to transport recovered valuables and documents. Reporting immediately to a fire in the premises of a club member, they were to station themselves “in different parts of the building so as to prevent Strangers from doing injury.”20 Thomas McCord’s position as an entrepreneur, distiller, provincial leader of the Masons, and police magistrate spoke to his rising status in English Montreal. Like his father’s, his politics were always up front. In 1785, he was a strong defender of Lieutenant-Governor Henry Hamilton’s attempt to offset the Quebec Act with the return of the right of habeas corpus and the strict application of English law across commercial matters.21 Two years later, he joined eleven prominent Montrealers in presenting a forty-seven–page report to the Committee of Council on Trade and Police. It addressed commercial issues such as western and foreign trade, fishing and timber, bankruptcy laws, coinage, weights and measures, public granaries, and police and fire concerns. McCord also had a lifelong interest in issues around the poor, their control, their confinement, and their training. The report pointed to Montreal’s “deserving poor,” who were to be confined in a poor house, while vagrants, criminals, and other “undeserving” would be incarcerated in a new House of Correction. Still chewing over the Quebec Act, McCord and his fellow petitioners called for an elected assembly subject to Protestant hegemony and for the restoration of what Attorney General James Monk called “National Laws” for “National born subjects.”22 The report resonated with frustration over the “great delay, procrastination and incertitude” owing to “the mixture of French and English laws” and to the “utter impossibility of promoting the welfare of this province as a British Colony under the present system of Government.”23 Reaching deep into differences between French and British legal cultures, the report soundly rejected family and community principles inherent in the Custom of Paris in favour of a registry system. By giving primacy to contracts registered publicly rather than in a notary’s study, a public registry office would end secret encumbrances or the possibility of there being several mort-

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

gages on the same property.24 The report addressed security issues, instability in the countryside, and the inefficiency of rural justice. It called for abolition of the circuit courts, a system that “carries no respect, impress[es] the inhabitants with no awe of justice, and proves of no relief whatever in distant parts of the district.” The report was unconditionally ethnocentric. Dismissing the qualifications of recently appointed French judges, it called for the nomination of an appeal court judge “bred to the Science of the Law.” It also insisted on a system of “free schools” financed with revenues from the confiscated Jesuit Estates. Such schooling would overcome illiteracy, “confusion and disorder,” “opening and enlarging the human mind [and] conciliating the affections of his Majesty’s subjects.” The Constitutional Act of 1791, with its division of the colony into Upper and Lower Canada, struck another body blow against the McCord vision of Quebec promoted from father to son since 1760.25 The Act confirmed the right of Catholics to sit in the Legislative Assembly and granted a liberal property franchise that gave the vote to most rural landholders and urban tenants. Gerrymandering, such as the attempt by McCord and twenty other merchants to reserve Montreal’s seats for their representatives, failed. In fact, it was French seigneurs like Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau who benefited from the Act and who were elected to half the seats in the first assembly. Fractious debates over the bilingualism of the assembly’s first speaker were further signs that the influence of the French-Canadian elite, or “Canadian gentlemen” as S.D. Clark called them, would persist under representative government.26 Seigneurs like Taschereau and Juchereau Duchesnay had shown their loyalty in the American invasion in 1776, and two decades later, the Napoleonic threat allowed them to reiterate allegiance. In 1794, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and other seigneurs placed their subscriptions alongside those of John and Thomas McCord in the “Association to support the Laws, Constitution and Government of the Province of Lower Canada.” Members attributed the “superior blessings they possess, to a generous and fostering Empire.”27 In the patriotic rush following Nelson’s victory on the Nile in 1799, Taschereau’s name again appeared alongside that of John McCord Jr.

l ande d McCord’s rising rank was accompanied by ambitions in land. His brothers-in-law, Alexander and Malcolm Fraser, were prominent among the British elite who acquired twenty-four seigneuries in the decade after the Conquest, and his father had land in Ireland and the Gaspé. Through the Taschereau example, we have seen how the Quebec Act encouraged investment in seigneuries, with Fernand Ouellet describing the establishment of “a class of anglo saxon seigneurs, mostly merchants” who owned eighty-four seigneuries by 1831.28 Thomas McCord, however, did not

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enter land proprietorship with social aspirations; rather he was motivated by a very Ulster and freehold perspective of land, forests, and other natural resources as simple commodities.29 The French blockade of the Baltic made Lower Canadian timber increasingly valuable in international markets, while the growth of Montreal stimulated local demand for firewood and construction materials. In 1791, Thomas McCord purchased land on the Ottawa River, and a year later, he bought 500 acres on Lake St Francis near the mouth of the Chateauguay River. From the latter he floated cribs of pine boards and planks down the St Lawrence to Montreal.30 In 1792, he took a ninety-nine-year lease on the Nazareth Fief from the Sisters of HôtelDieu, and a year later, he leased the adjoining Sainte-Anne from the Congregation of Notre Dame.31 One hundred and twenty-two arpents in size, these properties included a large barn, a bakehouse, and a windmill. In contrast to the uncertainties he faced as a merchant and distiller and in dealing in land as a commodity, these century land leases of convent lands took him into an entirely different social realm of “perpetual ground rents” and feudal forms of authority, hierarchies, and revenues.32 Making the sisters’ properties profitable would force him outside the box of English Montreal and into a larger understanding of seigneurial legal and social relations. Situated on the flatlands outside the southwest walls of Montreal, these convent lands were largely in pasture and were described by contemporaries as “water meadows” and “unhealthy.”33 This swampiness, however, gave it strategic place in transportation projects to circumvent the Lachine Rapids by canalizing the swamp and creek network between Montreal and Lachine. The properties also benefited from a reliable water supply, since, to the north, they fronted on the Saint-Pierre Creek. Before city expansion and its transformation into an open sewer, this waterway provided seasonal water power for mills and fresh water for a brewery. Into the nineteenth century and with its incorporation into an emerging industrial landscape, the creek would provide McCord’s properties with washing, cleaning, flushing, cooling, milling, and tanning capacities. Neighbouring McCord’s properties on two sides was the Seminary of Montreal, seigneur of the entire island of Montreal and an omnipresent force across Catholic life. Fencing, ditching, rights to passage and to water, canal routes, seigneurial dues, and changes in his leasing conditions brought McCord into regular contact with seminary and convent officials. Just across the Saint-Pierre Creek, the seminary, in 1806, built the Collège de Montréal, the classical college where Thomas, symbolically, would enroll his sons. Closer to the river, the seminary had two banal windmills. McCord himself had a mill, known as “Griffin’s,” and this would result in the area’s connotation as Griffintown. On the western side of McCord’s property was the seminary’s Saint-Gabriel domain, a major farm complex of pastures, cedar woodlots, stables, barns, and warehouses. As late as 1842, the domain farm had 120 cows. Between the McCord properties and the St Lawrence River was the Sainte-

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

Anne commons, lands provided obligatorily for public use by the seigneur and used as a public waterfront, grazing ground, Native campground, and trading site. To the east, the fief adjoined the Grey Nuns’ general hospital with its farm, bakery, and ice house.34 With the Nazareth and Sainte-Anne properties still largely in pasture in the 1790s, McCord’s function as land proprietor revolved around tenants, rents, milling rights, and the management of garden, dairy, meat, and firewood production for his household. As late as 1821, McCord’s farm, worked by a tenant, produced 2,550 bales of hay, 600 bushels of potatoes, 131 bushels of wheat, 240 bushels of barley, and 38 bushels of peas. In addition, the tenant provisioned the McCord household with milk, butter, cabbage, beef, and pork.35 The acquisition of a fief also enhanced McCord’s social rank, allowing him to take distance from the family’s reputation as rough tavern-keepers.36 He accepted directorships in the Agriculture Society (1790) and the Montreal Library and, later, was on the founding board of the Montreal General Hospital (1823). In 1792, he migrated from Presbyterianism to Anglicanism, another marker of social ambition. In the same period, he moved his household, including his black servant, out to the fief ’s large stone farmhouse. Though it was known under the nuns’ tenure as the “Grange des pauvres” (or Poor Barn), McCord shortened its name to “the Grange,” a nomenclature synonymous with gentlemen’s estates.37 At least £1,800 in debt owing to the distillery debacle, McCord sailed for Ireland in 1796, leaving Patrick Langan as his trustee. He officially declared bankruptcy in 1801 and only returned to Canada in 1805. His return to Ireland almost four decades after emigration owed much to ongoing family connections through his stepmother Margaret Hanna. Well-known merchants in Newry, the Hannas used McCord and his stepsister’s husband, Josiah Bleakley, as agents, exporting linen to Montreal and importing Canadian potash, skins, and wheat.38 McCord spent two years in Newry and then moved to Dublin, arriving for events in the city around the Irish Rebellion of 1798. He joined the Dublin yeomanry and was named a magistrate in Dublin, serving during the rebellion. Here, he sat on the side of British authority and martial law in the suppression of the United Irishmen and their American and French revolutionary ideals.39 Married in 1778 to Elisabeth Ellison, McCord had been quickly widowed and left with a daughter, Mary (1778–1845). Nineteen and unmarried when her father left for Ireland, Mary McCord survived her father’s bankruptcy and removal to Ireland by moving to Quebec City and serving as housekeeper for her bachelor uncle, John McCord Jr. After John Jr’s death in 1822, she converted to Catholicism, worked with Émilie Gamelin, founder of the Daughters of Charity, and left her inheritance to Catholic causes. Thomas McCord may have been introduced to his second wife, Sarah Solomons (c. 1769–1812), through Jacques Théroux, her half-brother and

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4.3 The Grange des Pauvres served as the McCord home until 1819. Taken in 1872, this photograph emphasizes the practicality of Thomas McCord’s home: rough fences, farm utensils, and a large vegetable garden with which he provisioned his household.

McCord’s agent in London. Sarah was the daughter of Louise Loubier and Levy Solomons. From Albany, a founding member of Montreal’s first synagogue, and a prosperous tobacconist, Levy Solomons was a partner in McCord’s distillery until his death in 1792.40 McCord, some twenty years senior to his bride, travelled from Dublin for the marriage, and on 27 November 1798, just months after the Irish Rebellion, the couple were married in an Anglican ceremony in Shoreditch outside London. They spent the first seven years of their marriage in Ireland, and their two sons, John (b. 1801) and Willliam King (b. 1803), were born there. McCord and his family returned to Canada in 1805, and in 1807, while his suit for the return of his convent properties was before the courts, he acted as resident agent for Edward Ellice, absentee seigneur of Beauharnois.41 During McCord’s absence from Canada and perhaps convinced that his exile was permanent, Patrick Langan began buying up McCord debts from assignees of the Montreal Distilling Company. In 1803, Langan sued for nonpayment of these debts, won judgment, and then, at the resulting sheriff ’s sale, himself purchased the Nazareth and Sainte-Anne properties. He quickly flipped these to Mary and Robert Griffin, already on site as mill tenants and owners of a soap factory, and with Langan’s apparent connivance, they in turn ordered a survey, laying out building lots in what would become Griffintown. In 1804, the Sisters of HôtelDieu approved the subdivision of one-third of their fief subject to one-sixth of the sale revenues, ongoing rights to lods et ventes, and payment of other seigneurial

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4.4 Mary McCord, c. 1805. Half-sister to John Samuel McCord, Mary McCord was a prominent convert to Catholicism.

rents.42 McCord returned to Montreal in 1805. With his house, the Grange des Pauvres, having been rented out by the Griffins, McCord lived first in Montreal as a merchant and then in Beauharnois as seigneurial agent for Edward Ellice. Only in 1808 did he have his day in court. In a case heard in that year, appealed in 1809, and finally determined in London before the Privy Council in 1812, he sued successfully for return of his properties and redemption from what he called “the wreck started by Mr. Langan’s deceit.”43 The population of Montreal and its suburbs grew from 9,020 in 1805 to 15,000 in 1815 and to over 22,000 by Thomas McCord’s death in 1824.44 His repossession of his lands coincided with development of the fief as an industrial suburb that would include popular housing, soap works, a brickyard, a distillery, and slaughterhouses. As with William Grant, William Pozer, Denis-Benjamin Viger, and other fief-holders or seigneurs in Montreal and Quebec, these new land uses enabled McCord to augment revenues through the sale of building lots. In 1816, he had a second subdivision plan drawn up, and two years later, he petitioned to have the city take ownership of the streets in his subdivision along with responsibility for water, lighting, market, and policing services.45 By 1824, about a hundred houses had been built, and Griffintown was served by five bakers, three taverns, and five grocers. Work on the Lachine Canal began in 1821, its route cutting across the commons just south of the fief. Industrial development and housing on the McCord properties would continue through the century as part of what Sherry Olson and David Hanna describe

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4.5 Mary Griffin’s plan for a Griffintown subdivision on Nazareth Fief as drawn by Louis Charland, 1804

as a “wall of high densities north of the Lachine Canal.”46 Annual gross revenues, largely from rents and sales, on McCord’s two properties rose from some £400 in 1814 to £600 in 1824, a sum more than double his magistrate’s stipend of £278.47 That master of words Stephen Leacock described Griffintown as a “wretched area, whose tumbled, shabby houses mock at the wealth of Montreal … the first of our industrial ‘slums,’ the gift of the machine age.”48

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

Industrialization did not preclude ongoing pre-capitalist relations across much of his land. Archives show McCord seeking rural tenants for his farm, bakehouse, and windmill, organizing a public meeting to establish a school on the fief, and advertising housing lots.49As late as 1824, more than a third of his rents (as opposed to land sales) were still paid in food or labour. His farm tenant continued to pay a large part of his rent in milk, butter, and pork, and in a five-month period, January– May 1815, his miller Joachim Deon delivered him forty-eight minots of wheat for his personal use or sale.50 These historical relationships in kind and services were, however, increasingly overtaken by money relations, municipal regulations, and the imposition of urban infrastructures. As police magistrate, McCord would have been well placed to intervene instrumentally in roads, markets, mills, and public security. He also turned to the courts, succeeding in having the lands of seventeen of his debtors seized by the sheriff between 1816 and 1821.51 John Fleming was one of these proletarian buyers unable to fulfil his sales contract. A freed slave, he bought two lots on Griffintown’s Prince Street in 1804 from Mary Griffin and the Sisters of HôtelDieu. He paid nothing down, promising the cens et rentes and £3 a year as ground rent. Twelve years later and £33 in arrears, he was sued by McCord and his property was advertised for sale.52 Administrators in the two convents kept a watchful eye on McCord’s application of their feudal rights. They too benefited from rising property values as reflected in lods et ventes and rent revenues. Of £400 collected in ground rents in 1814, McCord paid the nuns £80 or 20 per cent; his miller delivered 184 minots of wheat to the sisters’ barns, January–May 1815.53 For its part, the Sulpician priests, seigneurs of the Island of Montreal, felt vulnerable to challenges to their historical seigneurial rights, many of which originated from Protestant entrepreneurs. The banalité, or milling monopoly, was a major area of contestation. In 1816, the seminary was forced to sue miller William Fleming, whose new commercial mill at Lachine threatened their banal privileges.54 Thomas Cringan was another English Montreal voice that recognized the pious use of lands “to improve their fellow creatures”; such use, however, should be kept away from navigable channels and not obstruct “the erection of warehouses, the establishment of wharfs, and other facilities of commerce … at the water’s edge.”55 Aggressive in his use of fences, McCord, by then in Ireland, was told by his agent in 1799 that “the Priests have spoke to us again on the subject of the corner you enclosed.”56 The seminary protested again in 1816, this time over McCord’s infringements on their right-of-passage and haying rights along the road leading from their college and across the Nazareth Fief to their Saint-Gabriel farm property. They also accused McCord of hampering their seigneurial right to collect hay along the road to the commons. Construction of the Lachine Canal opened further questions of seigneurial jurisdiction. While an early version of the Lachine Canal bill had forbidden canal proprietors from entering fenced property of the

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seminary without permission, the Legislative Council, in striking out this clause, included the chilling phrase that “we have no evidence of the legal existence of a corporate body called the Seminary de St. Sulpice.” This comment was coupled with demands that the seigneury of Montreal be expropriated outright and returned to Crown ownership. In letters asking McCord not to infringe on their historical rights, the seminary reached to the solidarity expected between large landlords calling for the respect “that neighbours owe each other.”57 In 1818, the seminary reacted again to a McCord challenge, this time concerning the commons and their obligation as seigneurs to protect the public interest. Located along the river frontage separating McCord lands from the St Lawrence, the commons was in the direct path of road, dock, and waterfront development. McCord was not at all humbled by the seminary petitioning the Court of Special Sessions in 1818, a body that he chaired, to privatize the commons’ beach and part of its pastures with a view to their commercial usage.58 In its defence, the seminary was forced to produce its land register and to insist on its historical obligation to provide a commons.

m ag ist r ate Thomas McCord was well equipped to represent English Montreal in public office in both the judiciary and politics. His life had been marked by mobility from Antrim to Newry in Ireland, to Quebec, Montreal, Dublin, and back to Montreal. From the family’s tavern-keeping and retailing businesses, he had moved through shipping, soap-making, distilling, and the timber trade before bridging into the landed as a fief-holder. Tarred by the McCords’ reputation for contrarianism in the alcohol trade, their American sympathies, and their outspoken insistence on Protestant ascendancy, Thomas only slowly acquired the confidence of colonial officials. The 1789 petition of McCord’s friends had led nowhere, and although he was named a justice of the peace in 1788, his political influence remained limited. In 1794, Governor Carleton easily dismissed McCord’s lobbying to professionalize the police by establishing a salaried police office in Montreal. It was only after his return from Ireland, with a reputation for service as a loyal magistrate in the bloody circumstances of the Irish Rebellion and confirmation of his status as landed through the recuperation of his Nazareth and Sainte-Anne properties, that McCord joined the ranks of senior administrative, political, and judicial authority. McCord was absent from Canada in the early Napoleonic period, he missed the peak of English Montreal’s garrison mentality, and he did not participate in the assembly’s shrill debates until his election in 1809. The archives, in fact, contain evidence of his growing comprehension of French culture, law, and ancien régime institutions. He enrolled his sons in the French college, and as seigneurial agent in Beauharnois and fief lessee, he was necessarily imbibing seigneurialism and the

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

Custom of Paris. One family member decried that McCord’s brother-in-law Malcolm Fraser “knew so little of marriage contracts and French law.”59 Nor was it by chance that McCord hired André Jobin, the seminary’s experienced notary on seigneurial matters, to draw up and supervise sales on his subdivision. And, whatever McCord’s undoubted ethnic preference for dealing with what his family called “our countrymen,” he had to maintain amicable terms with the Grey Nun and Hôtel-Dieu sisters. Land proprietorship in the Montreal suburbs brought new bedfellows, and on issues of roads, markets, public squares, and gravel pits, he found himself in common cause with fellow developers Jacques Viger, Louis Guy, and Louis-Joseph Papineau. In August 1818, west-end proprietors McCord and Guy were named to examine widow Denis-Benjamin Viger and Louis-Joseph Papineau’s offer to the city of Viger Square as a site for a public market.60 In 1823, it was McCord’s turn to petition for a new “Sainte-Anne” market to serve his suburb. McCord proprietorship of convent lands, together with the political reality of the Quebec Act of 1774 (reinforced fifteen years later by the Constitutional Act), caused McCord’s vision of the state to evolve. We saw his role in the 1780s as a founder of the Montreal Fire Club, an elite association based on the defence of property interests through private collaboration. This model, while it would persist in the associational practices of English Montreal, was being lapped by new concepts of public good. An early practical sign of democratization was the decision in 1792 that water buckets be provided, not just for the use of members of the fire club, but for the use of the general public at rallying points such as Notre Dame Church. In making water buckets available to the public, McCord was a principal player in moving fire and police protection from the realm of the private and voluntary into larger concepts of civic responsibility. Habermas describes this as the “spheres of private peoples” coming together as “a public.”61 This was a landmark period in the history of Montreal, and city fathers like McCord oversaw decisions to dismantle the city’s fortifications and to lay out the Lachine Canal. As a land developer, McCord saw obvious benefit in merging his subdivision’s security and infrastructure needs into larger public discourses around taxation, policing, public health, and municipal assumption of the costs of transportation, markets, street lighting, water, and sewage. In 1817, he urged city officials to take advantage of the Montreal Waterworks Company’s opening of streets to install a system of public sewers, and in 1823, he chaired a public meeting on fire prevention and then accepted nomination to lobby for firefighting legislation.62 Besides his involvement in the planning of SainteAnne’s Market, he pushed for the installation of street lights to reduce prostitution in Griffintown.63 Alongside this strong participation in municipal administration, McCord was a major force in the enforcement of street-level criminal justice. It is telling that Donald Fyson, Quebec’s principal historian of criminal justice, chose two of the

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key figures in this study, Thomas McCord and Jean-Thomas Taschereau, to epitomize the role of urban police magistrates in rendering Lower Canada’s criminal justice system “commonplace, routinized, and bureaucratized.”64 In 1810, James McGill, McCord’s former business partner in the distillery and the most influential voice in English Montreal, recommended Thomas McCord as the person best equipped to deal with the sensitive issues of public order and the control of American aliens. Governor Craig subsequently appointed McCord and his French counterpart, JeanMarie Mondelet, as Montreal’s two stipendiary police magistrates, each with the imposing salary of £250. Before its incorporation in 1832, Montreal was governed by its magistrates, and McCord was systematically named to sensitive positions – for example, superintendent of the House of Correction (1811) and warden of the House of Industry – and given memberships on the commission to receive oaths of allegiance, the commission for internal communications in the District of Montreal (1815), the commission for repairs to the courthouse and prison (1818), and the commission for repairs to churches (1819).65 Service as police magistrate did not preclude elected office. McCord was elected to the Legislative Assembly for Montreal West (1809–10) and then for the rural riding of Bedford (1816–20). As chairs of the Courts of Quarter, Weekly and Special Sessions, police magistrates dealt with the daily flow of minor criminal matters. Montreal’s new courthouse was built in 1808, and by 1821, some 25 per cent of Lower Canada’s civil budget was devoted to justice and policing. Fyson estimates that, through the Quarter Sessions, McCord and Mondelet were responsible for 85 per cent of the committals to the Montreal jail.66 On just the issue of master-servants law and the disciplining of servants, McCord judged hundreds of cases.67 He was also influential in establishing new police regulations in 1810 that regulated night watchmen, lamplighters, constables, vagrancy, prostitution, nude bathing, and taverns. Traditionally, urban magistrates like McCord dealt with citizens at their own doorstep or in their home office. In June 1810, Mary Rusk, pursued by her husband, Joseph Pierson, ran to McCord’s house for protection: “[H]er said husband went into the sd [sic] House by force and there violently assaulted and Struck this deponent and tried to drag deponent out of the said house.”68 On their appointment as police magistrates in 1810, McCord and Mondelet established an office in the new courthouse, and it was here, rather than in their homes, that they met the public. Comparable to the transfer in the same period of Taschereau seigneurial business from their manor to the notary’s office, this bureaucratization was extended by the establishment of a regular accounting system and by the employment of a salaried clerk, a constable, and a messenger. Much of this justice, however, continued to be meted out face to face. It was McCord, for example, who dealt with Montreal’s black hangman Benjamin Field, giving him special long-term lodging in the House

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

of Correction and handling the charge that Field was operating a brothel in addition to his official duties.69 In 1818, McCord used his seat in the assembly to move that a regular and salaried police force be established in Montreal.70 Magistrates were in the front line in situations of civil disobedience. Montrealers rioted in opposition to Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s Road Act of 1796, and in Quebec in 1806, a mob ransacked the market and attacked a criminal awaiting execution, his hangman, and constables.71 The War of 1812–14 aroused fierce French resistance to militia service outside their home parishes, and it was magistrate McCord who was the senior civil authority in a confrontation that climaxed with the use of deadly force. On 10 August 1812, an armed crowd of 400 gathered in Lachine threatening to cross the St Lawrence to liberate their sons from the La Prairie military camp. Riding out, McCord faced the crowd, mostly French farmers from the Pointe-Claire area. Addressing them before the arrival of a regiment and artillery detachment, he dismissed their demands as “folie,” gave them thirty minutes to disband, and offered to receive a delegation at his home the next day. In the shooting that followed, one member of the crowd was killed and another wounded.72 These road and conscription riots underscored that Montreal and its larger judicial district remained profoundly divided in their cultures and legal traditions. Judicial authorities – including James Monk, chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench in Montreal – remarked on the inherent danger in confusing English and French law.73 McCord contributed to the professionalization of law by preparing Lower Canada’s first index to provincial ordinances and statutes.74 His son John Samuel would sit on law commissions, and his grandson and namesake, Thomas McCord, would serve as secretary of the Quebec Civil Code Commission and publish a treatise on its conclusions.75 While his son and grandson trained in the law, Thomas McCord’s lack of training in academic law was not unusual among magistrates. While statutes were printed and local officials could turn to standard English guides such as Richard Burn’s The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (reprinted in 1776), McCord’s ordering of applicable laws into a subject index (“bakers,” “barristers,” “bastards”) provided a much needed legal map. Entries such as “soccage,” “lods et ventes,” “testaments,” “burial,” “religious orders,” “records,” and “ancient French” took McCord through the Custom of Paris, French royal legislation, and local bylaws; entries such as “burning in the hand,” “whipping,” “transportation,” and “duties” spoke to British criminal and commercial law. General titles (“militia,” “roads,” “debtors”) were subdivided so that an official seeking specific regulations such as “licences” could check sub-index entries for auctioneers, billiard tables, public entertainment, and peddlers. The index to McCord’s guide reflects the importance he gave to security: “Houses of Correction,” “poor,” “tavern-keepers.” Stretching over eleven pages, his longest entry was devoted to “penalty.”76

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The development of institutions for the urban sick, poor, and mentally ill was complicated in a pluralist city with parallel traditions of Catholic parish aid and Protestant voluntary paternalism.77 McCord, we have seen, had a strong sense of Protestant mutuality that was expressed through his association with his church and the Masons. In 1789, for example, the Masons used the Saint-Jean Baptiste festivities to distribute 450 loaves of bread to the city’s poor.78 Seconded by DenisBenjamin Viger, McCord presented the bill that established the Montreal House of Industry and was warden on its opening in June 1819. McCord’s biographer in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has reiterated that McCord rejected the English poorhouse model. Instead of a penal approach, he looked to the “deserving poor” with the House of Industry organized to “serve the unfortunate objects coming out of the House of Correction,” particularly those “willing to endeavour at reform and be industrious.”79 McCord had certainly observed the Irish workhouse first-hand, particularly Dublin’s House of Industry, which in 1796 had 1,700 inmates and into which, as a magistrate, he would have committed lunatics and “strolling beggars.”80 While Jean-Marie Fecteau describes the House of Industry as having had the potential to be the “key” institution of social control, its promise to help the “industrial poor” and to clear the streets of beggars never attracted substantial voluntary contributions. After applying for a government subsidy of £500 in 1823 and receiving only £250, it closed its doors in May 1823, having aided some seventy families.81 Sarah Solomons’s death, Anglican funeral, and burial in the Protestant cemetery, June 1812, left Thomas McCord a widower with two sons. He raised them in increasing comfort. A black domestic slave that he had owned in the 1780s was replaced with a free black who crossed into Lower Canada from Vermont in 1793.82 He rebuilt his estate on the fief at a cost of £1,850, furnishing it with mahogany furniture and English china. He imported hundreds of volumes for his library and in 1816 commissioned a portrait of himself and a posthumous portrait of his wife, both by portraitist Louis Dulongpré.83 His annual food expenses of some £200 in the years 1810–24 were another indicator of wealth. Keenly interested in horticulture, McCord ordered flower seeds and raspberry, gooseberry, and currant roots from England and New York. He built a greenhouse, and his further interest in exact observation was evident in his collection of thermometers, barometers, and binoculars.84 Thomas McCord died on 5 December 1824, victim of a painful struggle with kidney stones. His lacquered coffin included an engraved brass plate and an outside liner, finished and upholstered in black.85 Exercising his right to freedom of willing under the Quebec Act, he disposed of his estate in a handwritten will that contrasted sharply with the long notarized testament of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau. In its brevity and simplicity, McCord’s will corresponded nicely to Frederick Pollock and

4.6 Portrait of Thomas McCord, 1816

4.7 Sarah Solomons (1816), second wife of Thomas McCord

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4.8 Register of Christ Church. Born in an Irish port and with an early career in the rough of the alcohol trade, Thomas McCord was buried as a “gentleman” in Montreal’s Protestant Burial Ground, 7 December 1824. Four decades later, his grandson, David Ross McCord, dug up his remains, reinterring them with family members in the newly established Mount Royal Cemetery.

Frederick William Maitland’s maxim that, in English wills, “elaborate clauses are rare.”86 Although undated, its writing can be situated after the death of his brother and therefore in the last months of his life. This end-of-life will, Pollock and Maitland remind us, was in keeping with English legal tradition: “[A] common form tells us that he is ‘sick in body’ though ‘whole in mind.’”87 It was his eldest son and executor, John Samuel, accompanied by his sister Mary and brother William King, who, after their father’s death, deposited the will with notary Thomas Bédouin, declaring it to be true and original. In just two pages, Thomas McCord outlined his wishes and disposed of his property. He asked to be buried alongside his “late dear beloved wife” and requested a funeral that was “decent” and conducted “with all reasonable economy.”88

Thomas McCord (1750–1824)

The will also conformed to the English practice of “preference for males over females in the inheritance of land.”89 He did ask his sons to honour his brother John’s legacy of £1,250 to daughter Mary McCord, a mandate that, as executor of his brother’s will, he himself had not carried out. Given his wealth, Thomas McCord was extremely parsimonious with his daughter, leaving her an annual pension of £45 as well as her bedroom furniture. He also remembered “my friend” Jessy Solomons. Probably his wife’s sister and a long-time member of his household, she was left £20 a year, her bedroom furniture, and the work table in the breakfast parlour. He made one non-family bequest, leaving £1,000 “that I honestly owe” to the estate of John Johnston of Friarstown, Ireland. The rest of his estate, including the Nazareth Fief, Sainte-Anne, and his home, was to be divided between his two sons: its specific disposition was left to them as “[b]rothers, as I cannot now say how it can be done.” Thomas McCord left no doubt as to the nomination of his eldest son as head. In return for his “trouble … in taking care of my property,” John Samuel was to receive “for his sole use and benefit” the household furniture (with the exception of heirlooms bequeathed to female family members) as well the estate’s horses and carriages. In a written statement held in the notary’s office, William King, then a divinity student, gave his brother power of attorney to administer the entire estate. Twenty-three, a lawyer, already administrator of the fief, soon to be master of his Masonic lodge, and enthusiastic importer of fruit trees for the Grange garden, John Samuel McCord would move almost naturally to assume his father’s patrician mantle.

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Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial (1698–1778). Portrait by Henri Beau, c. 1753–55. The Marquis de Vaudreuil exudes the authority of the Taschereaus’ aristocratic milieu.

Richard Short’s view of the ruins of the Jesuit College. Nearby, the Taschereau home was destroyed by British cannon.

Thomas Davies’s view of a Native encampment at Pointe-Lévy (1788) emphasizes the strong Native presence on seigneuries like Lauzon and Sainte-Marie.

Sir Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec, 1768–78, 1785–95

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau

Rivière du Loup. This fine watercolour by George Heriot (1816) suggests how expanding regional transportation facilities challenged traditional seigneurial concepts of road construction around local community and the corvée.

Minuets of the Canadians. Blacks were regularly depicted as participants at social events, such as in George Heriot’s drawing of a country ball in 1807.

Mary McCord, c. 1805

Portrait of Thomas McCord, 1816, in which he chose to be portrayed with a background of learned volumes and a rolled map

Posthumous portrait (1816) of Sarah Solomons, second wife of Thomas McCord

The Seminary, Quebec, 1886. Fascinated by Roman Catholic tradition and discipline, David Ross McCord commissioned this fine painting from Richard Bunnett.

Seminary students in uniform, 1842

Jonathan Sewell

Private chapel of the Ursuline convent, 1840

Le Bocage: Judge Panet’s three-storey estate in Italian villa design

George Heriot, Chaudière Falls near Quebec, 1792. A servant carrying goods on her head, a woman strolling in the woods, and a sports fisherman speak to the romanticization of seigneurial life along the Chaudière.

Governor Sir James Craig

The monument to Wolfe and Montcalm

View of Montreal, 1892. This bird’s-eye view helps one visualize the contrast between two McCord spaces: the Nazareth Fief and Mount Royal. The former represented landed income, popular institutions, and social conflict for the McCords, while the Mountain was a utopian, patrician space for family, leisure, and burial.

Opposite Projected canal basins. This fine map by John Samuel McCord of basins of the Lachine Canal that might serve Sainte-Anne’s ward shows architectural and drawing skills that he also demonstrated in church, courthouse, and garden plans.

Nelson’s Column, 1830

Anne Ross McCord, 1851

Anne Ross’s aquarelle A Moss Rose, 1848

View of Montreal painted from the future site of Temple Grove, c. 1836

Cavalry officer in the Montreal Dragoons, c. 1827

This full-length portrait (1862) of John Samuel McCord in his robes as chancellor of Bishop’s University still hangs in the reading room of the university’s library.

View of Bishop’s University, 1863

Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, with its Mount Royal backdrop prominently displayed

Anne Ross’s childhood home on Champ de Mars is visible next to the church (1830).

St James Street, 1830

View of Montreal from inside Temple Grove, c. 1848. Through paintings and then the photograph, the McCords captured the beauty, the classicism, and the romanticism of their estate. Although a genre, this watercoulor by Henry William Cotton, married to Anne Ross’s sister, is suggestive of the importance of panorama, nature, and a distant city. The presence of the straight chair and top hat is symbolic.

Taken in 2001, this photograph illustrates the elegance of the Taschereau manor’s interior.

The Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse, 1886

part thre e

Patricians

Third-generation heads Jean-Thomas Taschereau and John Samuel McCord were born to patrician status. Deep family and cultural grooves connected both men to vested landed, institutional, and bureaucratic interests, to profound French, Scots, and Ulster root systems, and to complex cultural identities. Rather than great family wealth, the essential markers of their rank were property, profession, official appointment, and high culture. Their substantial inheritances of land, their grounding in the culture and institutions of their respective communities, and their access to law, the elite profession of choice, gave both men a huge leg up in the assumption of institutional authority. The lives of Jean-Thomas Taschereau and John Samuel McCord would differ sharply from that of their parents’ generation. While international wars, the drama of conquest and cession, and the scramble to develop stable revenues had pocked their parents, this third generation in Canada coincided with postNapoleonic periods of peace and with the growth in demand for agricultural, forest, and industrial products. Communications changed fundamentally: this generation saw transatlantic steamers and railways, and John Samuel McCord and his wife, Anne Ross, sat for daguerreotype photographs, as did Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s wife, Marie Panet. On their respective lands in the Beauce and near Montreal, the Taschereaus and McCords benefited from the conjuncture of the persistence into the nineteenth century of ancien régime structures with the expansion of new forms of capitalist relations along the St Lawrence.1 In the Beauce, immigration, the development of potash, sawn lumber, and other forest industries, and improving transportation facilities brought increasing wealth to seigneurs. In Montreal, expansion outside the city’s western walls and then the construction of the Lachine Canal brought the bonanza of an industrial suburb onto land that Thomas McCord had leased as wetlands and prairie in the 1790s. Patrician status and catching a wave of growth gave no guarantee, however, of family stability in a period marked by changing rural and cash economies, by

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early industrialization and new dimensions of urban distress, by changing definitions of civil society and its institutions, by the transition to an increasingly liberal and democratic political regime, and by rising national feelings in both the French and the English community. Young Taschereau was raised in a family milieu of aristocratic angst over the French Revolution and in a parish presided over by an émigré priest vocal on the dangers of anticlericalism. Family archives included a fistful of letters announcing the death in 1793 of his stepmother’s uncle, Commander Marie-Eustache Juchereau, at the hands of French revolutionaries. Trained in the English-speaking law office of the attorney general, JeanThomas married into a notable Quebec City family, took his father’s seat in the Legislative Assembly, was named to senior militia rank, and, in 1828, culminated his patrician trajectory with a King’s Bench judgeship and appointment to the Legislative Council. Jean-Thomas had strong intellectual interests: as a founder of Le Canadien newspaper, he was instrumental in building the library of the Legislative Assembly, and as a legislator, he thought about the larger implications of popular education and poor relief. Like Thomas McCord, he was a dynamic police magistrate who understood the ramifications of this office in shaping social relations in Quebec City. Into its third generation, the structure and size of the Taschereau seigneurial family underwent significant change, and in his management of seigneurial business and larger matters in the Beauce, the frequently absent Jean-Thomas was able to rely on an enlarging and professionalizing raft of family members as well as agents and legal professionals. Born in Dublin in 1801, John Samuel McCord, like Jean-Thomas Taschereau, lost his mother as a boy. His father did not remarry, and under paternal tutorship, John Samuel and his brother William King lived in the comfort of the Nazareth Fief. The McCord brothers witnessed the effects of the Napoleonic bogeyman and grew up surrounded by the images of Nelson that graced the monuments, dinnerware, and children’s literature of English Montreal. Whatever the earlier prorepublican politics of the McCords, when they were perceived as thorns by British governors and traitors in the American Revolution, John Samuel’s father bequeathed canons of loyalty and service to the Crown. Thomas McCord groomed his sons for patrician leadership by a legacy of land, by his affiliation with the Church of England, and by soaking his heirs in the learned culture of the French Catholic majority as well as in that of the English world. He sent John Samuel for schooling in Quebec’s best Protestant school and in Montreal’s excellent Catholic classical college. Like Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, Thomas McCord ensured that his principal heir was trained cross-culturally in the law, sending John Samuel to clerk with Jean-Roch Rolland and then Samuel Gale. John Samuel learned about legal practicalities and the administration of land, tenants, and a suburban proletariat at his father’s knee, conceding lots, developing roads, and negotiating lease

Patricians

changes with the convent sisters. Over time, the Taschereaus cemented their authority by bridging smoothly between the Beauce countryside and leadership in the capital’s key institutions. In similar fashion, the McCords linked English Montreal to its Eastern Townships hinterland. Thomas McCord sat in the assembly for the rural riding of Bedford, and his son served in the townships as circuit and then Superior Court judge. As he presided at court hearings around the region, John Samuel used his office to network with the elites, advising on the establishment of Anglican parishes, fundraising for churches, and proudly sitting as vice-chancellor and then chancellor of Bishop’s, the region’s university. Marriage into the wealthy, landed, and connected family of former attorney general David Ross further facilitated John Samuel’s promotion to militia command, public commissions, Anglican lay leadership, and a judgeship. Builder with his wife, Anne Ross, of a classical estate overlooking Montreal and Nazareth Fief and cultivated in science, law, horticulture, and architectural landscapes, “Judge McCord” positioned himself in English Quebec as the very embodiment of a responsible patrician. Leaders in their respective communities, both McCord and Taschereau were caught up in the racial conflicts that swept Lower Canada in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s political culture had a supposed anchor in his father’s tropes of British loyalty, and when he was barely out of his teens, his law training and his road and militia commissionerships suggested a similar trajectory of patronage, privilege, and authority. However, the cultural and national sensitivities incubating in Taschereau’s intellectual circles came nose to nose with the English community’s garrison mentality and manifestations of Anglo ascendancy. Through Le Canadien and his assembly seat, JeanThomas fought against French exclusion and Governor James Craig’s attempt to upset the political balance. In the spring of 1810, Jean-Thomas was accused of “treasonable activities” and jailed.2 However, after a well-publicized confession, he was released and soon readmitted to the corridors of colonial authority. In February 1813, he was named deputy adjutant-general of the Lower Canadian militia with responsibility for local units and their 10,000 French-Canadian conscripts.3 Other markers of reintegration included sponsorship of a parting gift for Governor Prevost, appointment to the board of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and participation, as the only French-Canadian promoter, in the raising of a bon-ententisme monument to generals Wolfe and Montcalm. Increasingly overshadowed by the leadership of fellow seigneur Louis-Joseph Papineau and a nationalist agenda, Jean-Thomas died from cholera in 1832 and was thus spared of the hard choices in the Rebellions of 1837–38. Younger than Jean-Thomas, John Samuel McCord underwent his own crisis of national identity. With his assumption of family headship in the 1820s, he had

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inked out his Jewish, Dublin birth and Ulster “otherness” and, drawing on romantics like Walter Scott and William Wordsworth, had reinvented the McCords as “English.”4 However, his sense of a pluralist “Englishness” and his evident appreciation of French institutions and culture took a direct hit in the ethnic meltdown of the 1830s. In 1837, he played a bloody leadership role in the military suppression of the Patriotes. In contrast to the eulogization of Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s imprisonment as a symbol of national humiliation, McCord’s command resulted in his unshakable reputation as a violent Tory. Whatever the place they have taken in national memory, the technicolour events of 1810 and 1837 are interpreted here in their family contexts and as Sturm und Drang moments in long, layered public lives. This generation was able to fully indulge its tastes for the urban, for luxury consumption, and for rural estates. Into the 1830s, high culture in both the English and French communities was directly inspired by European movements. Learning and the arts came through French cartographers, English military artists, Dutch botanists, and Scottish novelists. Oxford-trained Anglican clergy and French émigré priests brought European religious narratives into the parlours and libraries of the two families. Garrisons in Quebec and Montreal ensured the passage of British military artists, surveyors, and scientists who could be drawn upon as tutors and role models for elite youth. In Montreal, British officers figured prominently in Anne Ross’s diary and later in her garden socials. Jean-Thomas’s eldest daughter married a senior colonial official and moved to England. His son’s voice and instrument teacher was the head of marching music in a Scottish regiment serving in Quebec; the same son, later archbishop of Quebec, took art lessons from Londoner Charles Woodley.5 J.G.A. Pocock describes this cultural movement as interaction across an “Atlantic archipelago.”6 By the Jacksonian period, however, American influence in the St Lawrence Valley was increasing sharply. John Samuel McCord’s travel, book and garden purchases, and associational network showed a broadening contact with the scientists, intellectuals, clergymen, and landscape architects of the Hudson Valley and Atlantic seaboard.7 Similarly, institutions like the Ursulines and the Seminary of Quebec developed close American links as they turned to New England and New York for educational and agricultural models, textbooks, and scientific supplies.8 In 1837, Jean-Thomas’s son, Elzéar-Alexandre, began his grand tour of the European continent and paid lengthy visits to schools, museums, galleries, and historic sites in New York and Boston. Still a teenager, Jean-Thomas was picked for headship by his father, who described him in a letter to France as the son who “promises much.”9 For his part, John Samuel was an early and easy choice as head. Domestic life changed significantly for this generation with the extended family ceding to the structure of

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the nuclear family. Jean-Thomas Taschereau and John Samuel McCord organized their estates to give primacy to the individual couple and to more personal conceptions of leisure, intimacy, and luxury. Siblings and parents were increasingly lodged elsewhere. Greek columns and panoramas made their appearance, while imported porcelain, mahogany tables, pianos, and magazines on gardening and rural architecture graced the interiors of both estates. Succession practice also evolved in the direction of the individual, particularly in the Taschereau family. In 1801, the Lower Canadian legislature had confirmed the English principle of freedom of willing established in the colony under the Quebec Act.10 By advantaging the eldest son, the third Taschereau generation stepped away from the willing conventions of the Custom of Paris and its principles of equality.

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5 Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

Jean-Thomas’s birth in November 1778 coincided with the family’s move to the seigneury, and he seems to have been the first Taschereau born in Sainte-Marie. With the death of his mother when he was five, motherhood was assumed by his grandmother and particularly his aunt Marie Taschereau. The construction of a new manor house to receive his stepmother, which began in 1789, was a material sign of the reconstitution of his family and its increasing comfort. The construction of the family chapel, the promotion of another aunt to Ursuline Superior, and the entry of his brother into the clergy pointed to his family’s increasingly rigorous religiosity.1 At the same time, his father’s civic responsibilities involved bridge building, the Jesuit Estates question, the administration of post offices, and the drafting of legislation to modernize transportation and the legal system. In his father’s office in the manor house, there were scientific and surveying instruments, maps, dictionaries, and volumes on mathematics, geometry, law, and surveying.

the sem inary of que b e c In 1789, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau installed his child bride as mistress of the seigneurial manor. Like the Ursulines four decades earlier at Thomas-Jacques Taschereau’s death, the Seminary of Quebec played a complicit role in the com plicated moments of favoured families. Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay’s arrival in Sainte-Marie coincided with eleven-year-old Jean-Thomas being sent to join his two older brothers, who were boarding at the seminary. The Seminary of Quebec had opened its classical college in 1765 to replace the Jesuit College that had been closed as a consequence of the British Conquest. Besides its focus on academics, the seminary had an essential role in shaping the world views of elite males or, as the Jesuits aptly put it, in “guiding consciences.”2 As with the Ursulines and female Taschereaus, the seminary – with its teaching order, classical and theological colleges, chapel, museum, library, estates, model farms, and, after 1852,

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dominant place in Laval University – had a strong influence on generations of Taschereau males. Its classical program, its institutional culture, and its old-boy mentoring network reinforced the Taschereau sense of hierarchy and contributed to a vision of society and history in which Taschereau leadership was taken for granted. In Jean-Thomas’s generation, all of his brothers and stepbrothers attended its classical college, the Petit Séminaire, with his eldest brother, Gabriel-Elzéar Jr, crossing the courtyard to study at the seminary’s theological school, the Grand Séminaire. Among Jean-Thomas’s sons, who in their turn studied at the Petit Séminaire, Elzéar-Alexandre would continue on to the Grand Séminaire, the priesthood, and the occupations of teacher, Superior, university professor, and archbishop. Aside from this urban importance, Taschereau emphasis on a Seminary of Quebec education had portent for local authority. Of the thirty-two students from Sainte-Marie who obtained a classical college education in the years from the 1780s to 1855, sixteen, exactly half, were from the Taschereau family. This contributed significantly to their regional dominance among the literate, the professionals, and the appointed.3 The seminary’s classical education included history, music, theatre, excursions, and field trips. In the teaching of the sciences – mathematics, geography, physics, and botany – exactitude in observing and measuring and familiarity with statistics and the use of technical instruments were emphasized.4 In addition to theology, aspirants who entered the Grand Séminaire were trained in church administration, record-keeping, agricultural methods, and architecture. Its graduates profoundly affected the built landscape of French Canada, serving as a network to dispense scientific information and to collect information and statistics on agriculture, demography, and rural poverty. These functions intersected in multiple ways with progressive seigneurs like the Taschereaus. One of the colony’s largest seigneurs, the seminary had practical interests in colonization, farm improvement, animal husbandry, and gardens and orchards as sources of food, income, and apothecary medicines. The seminary participated with elite families like the Taschereaus on the founding board of the Quebec Agricultural Society. The seminary’s farms and reserves served as leisure, spiritual, and scientific venues for seminarian sorties and fraternizing. In 1777, in a clear sign of its confidence after passage of the Quebec Act, the seminary built a rural estate, Chateau Bellevue, at Cap Tourmente. The estate’s views of the St Lawrence River, its walkways, and its burial ground were symbolic of a coherent seminary universe that integrated faith, instruction, masculine sociability, and a natural landscape.5 At the seminary itself, intellectuals like Abbé Jérôme Demers, himself a graduate of the Petit and Grand séminaires, had great influence. As early as 1806, Demers organized a physics museum to house the seminary’s collection of scientific instruments, and by 1842, he saw the college library grow to some 2,000 volumes. The

5.1 The Seminary, Quebec, 1886

5.2 Seminary students in uniform, 1842

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two-year program in philosophy – taught in Latin by Demers – was at the core of the classical college program. Besides logic, metaphysics, morals, and mathematics, it included rudiments of astronomy, magnetism, electricity, and principles of construction.6 This progressive teaching in science was paralleled by a profound social and political conservatism. Hostile to the French Revolution, republicanism, and popular democracy, Demers expanded his treatment of civil society from three pages in his written course in 1817, to eight in 1830, and to nineteen in 1835. Students learned of the dangers of Rousseau and the social contract and of the need for popular obedience to a political authority that included an aristocratic upper house and the “moderate” monarchy of Britain.7 The influence of intellectuals like Demers reached into female teaching communities: Ursuline Superior Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau, for example, invited Demers to the convent parlour to address the nuns on modern science. In 1828, Demers added an architectural component to his philosophy course, and the published version of this part of the course was soon in use in classical colleges across Lower Canada.8 Demers also consulted broadly on the construction of religious institutions, designing churches in Nicolet and Saint-Boniface, Manitoba. In 1827, he was an obvious choice as architect for the new domain chapel planned by the Taschereaus.9 In 1827, John Holmes, an American and a convert from Protestantism, joined the seminary community, playing a central role in the recruitment of Jean-Thomas’s son Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau. Holmes revitalized the classical college’s offerings in music and theatre, expanded the teaching of history and geography, introduced mathematics into every year of the school’s program, and organized botanical field trips.10 Holmes, adopting a strategy that would be imitated by Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, used learned societies to reach into Quebec’s English community. He chaired the arts committee of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, benefited from the society’s scientific connections on his European travels, and gave public lectures in English in the cathedral. Finally, and this was critical for the direction of church-state relations, seminary officials were able to exercise a strong voice in civil matters. With the collapse of the schools of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and their replacement with parochial schools, clerics like Demers and Holmes were instrumental in establishing normal schools to train teachers. Delegated by the Legislative Assembly to report on pedagogical methods and teacher education across the Atlantic world, Holmes mentored ElzéarAlexandre Taschereau, taking him and two other seminarians on his fifteen-month trip to the United States, France, Germany, and Britain. Completing the classical college program at the seminary in just six years and favoured for family headship, Jean-Thomas was the first Taschereau to enter the profession of law. He was sent to clerk with Attorney General Jonathan Sewell, the

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5.3 Jonathan Sewell

colony’s most influential jurist; Jean-Thomas’s father and Sewell shared class interests and a profound distaste for popular unrest. In 1796–97, Sewell had spearheaded the prosecuting and convicting of the rioters against Taschereau’s Road Act. We do not know how a sensitive nationalist like Jean-Thomas Taschereau tolerated Sewell’s anti-Catholic rages, but as a clerk and lodged at the master’s house over his fiveyear apprenticeship, young Taschereau did learn French and British legal and political culture at the knee of the colony’s best scholar. Also useful for public life in Lower Canada, Taschereau matured in an intercultural law office, surrounded by students drawn from the best French and English families: James Stuart, Edward Bowen, and Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé.11 Taschereau observed Sewell writing opinions on the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, on relations between the Roman Catholic bishop and the Crown, and on civil- and common-law testamentary dispositions. In Sewell’s home, where Sewell reputedly treated students “like his own children,” he and his wife, Henrietta Smith, herself the daughter of a former chief justice, introduced clerks to the violin, the theatre, and a library of 1,476 volumes.12 A family library, a father interested in the enlightenment, a classical college education, and clerking in the best law office bought Jean-Thomas entry into the world of young intellectuals in Quebec. Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, his fellow editor at Le Canadien and prison mate in the eventful spring of 1810, had a passion for algebra. François Blanchet, the third co-founder of Le Canadien, published Recherches sur la Médecine, ou l’application de la chimie à la médecine while studying medicine at Columbia University.13 Once elected to the Legislative Assembly, Jean-Thomas

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Taschereau became a strong promoter of the Legislative Library, founded in 1802 on the model of the libraries established by the Directory in Paris (1796) and the American Library of Congress (1800). The Legislative Library was a major book importer, and in 1825, it opened its doors to the general public.14 Prominent in the militia, Taschereau was a member of the Quebec Garrison Library, and with a view to collecting information on the demography and resources of seigneuries, he was among the sponsors of surveyor Joseph Bouchette’s map and topographical dictionary of Lower Canada.15 In 1824, Taschereau was the only French Canadian among the founders of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. Works on Humboldtian science and the Mémoires of the French Institute were available in its library, which, like the Garrison Library, was open to women. By 1835, the Literary and Historical Society had display cabinets for its mineralogical and natural history collections, a paid museum curator, and a catalogue that listed 1,310 specimens.16

e lder brothers Jean-Thomas Taschereau, the designated family head, was in fact the third son from his father’s first marriage, and aspirations for his two older brothers were high.17 His eldest brother and his father’s namesake, Gabriel-Elzéar Jr (1773–1822), studied at the Grand Séminaire and was the first male in the family to take holy orders. Celibacy, however, was a challenge for Gabriel-Elzéar, and his priesthood was punctuated with frequent crises, transfers, and family interventions with episcopal officials. His clerical career began in an atmosphere of privilege with an ordination specially arranged in the Ursuline chapel so that his cloistered aunt and convent Superior Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau could attend. His father tried unsuccessfully to have him named to their home parish of Sainte-Marie. Instead, and perhaps through the influence of his aunt, he was sent in 1797 to the parish of Sainte-Croix on the Ursulines’ seigneury in nearby Lotbinière. Three years later, he was dispatched out of his home region to the Montreal area, first at Chambly and then north to Blainville. Family correspondence reflects ongoing despair over his conduct. His father was forced to intervene with the bishop and then asked a sister living in Montreal to try to ensure that girls were not employed in his presbytery: “But dear sister, between us, try and ensure that there is no young girl in his house because if the Bishop hears of that, it will cost him all of his good disposition towards him. Since I can no longer talk to him, do it yourself.”18 A few months later it was the turn of his Ursuline aunt to write of the abbé’s “bad behaviour” and of the “deadly chagrin” he caused his father.19 In 1809, the bishop moved him to the other end of his diocese, posting him to the lower St Lawrence community of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli in a parish administered by his brother-in-law and coadjutor to the bishop, Bernard-Claude Panet.20

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

5.4 Private chapel of the Ursuline convent, 1840

Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s withdrawal from the active priesthood and his retirement to Sainte-Marie in 1813 underscored the different weight of gender among family members who took religious vows. Several Taschereau women took vows, received a dowry, and joined cloistered orders like the Ursulines. Their lives were entirely separate from family, civil life, and any significant dependence on family material resources. Males in the secular clergy, however, remained active family members, returning to the manor for holidays, family ceremonies, and retirement; they could, as we will see in the fourth generation, play full family roles as advisers, favourite uncles, and family heads. With his clerical reputation in tatters, Gabriel-Elzéar retired to Sainte-Marie accompanied by a housekeeper and rumours. As family head, Jean-Thomas took responsibility for paying him the pension provided under their father’s will. Reintegrating into the community he had left as a boy, Gabriel-Elzéar lived the last decade of his life in a separate house on the domain and, in 1822, was accorded a Taschereau burial under the altar of the parish church. Honours were accorded to his Ursuline aunt Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau in a manner separate from family or parish. In 1825, after her sixty-one years of cloistered life, her funeral Mass was led by Bishop Plessis and she was buried in the convent crypt.

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The inventory of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Jr’s belongings revealed modest possessions far inferior to those of his siblings. In addition to £14 1s. in cash found in his house, his movable goods, sold at auction, brought £59. These included a silver watch, five silver spoons, a silver tobacco can, a Christ in copper, a portrait, a desk, a violin, a cow, a mare and colt, a coach and carriage, and a few religious books. The most important non-religious work in his library was six volumes of Cicero. These assets were overshadowed by debts of £256 15s. Aside from his firewood, doctor, and funeral expenses, his debts represented board and cash advances from family members.21 Like his brothers, second son Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau (1775–1826) studied at the seminary’s classical college, but after eight years he left without graduating. Through the influence of his father, he had a brief career as a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Volunteers, serving on the American frontier at Niagara. Retiring as a half-pay officer, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph returned to Sainte-Marie where, until his marriage, he occupied a main-floor bedroom in the manor. ThomasPierre-Joseph never had his father’s favour, and as early as 1797, Gabriel-Elzéar reported to his brother in France that, among his children, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph “doesn’t bring me as much satisfaction as the others.”22 Relations surely became even more strained in 1799 when Thomas-Pierre-Joseph recognized a daughter born out of wedlock and brought her to live in the manor house. In 1805, he married Françoise Boucher Labruyère de Montarville, daughter of the seigneur of Saint-Denis. Passed over for headship, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph did inherit a seigneury and, as the eldest son outside the clergy, would have right to the manor house on the death of his stepmother and the end of her usufruct.23 However, with Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay just three years his junior, he opted to construct his own manor house, choosing a panoramic location between the river and the main estate. In 1814, his stepmother, while continuing to occupy the manor house, ceded him usage of the domain’s outbuildings, tenant farmhouse, barn, and garden.24 Although he operated a short-lived distillery on the seigneury with Jean-Thomas, ThomasPierre-Joseph’s principal interests were military. He served as lieutenant-colonel in the Sainte-Marie battalion and then, in the War of 1812–14, as lieutenant-colonel in the 1st Battalion.25 In 1818, his appointment to the Legislative Council brought the Taschereau name back to the colony’s senior legislative branch. While Jean-Thomas travelled constantly with national legislative, militia, judicial, and fisheries responsibilities, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph took up local judicial and administrative offices. In 1821, he was named judge of the small-claims court (or Commissioners Court) of Sainte-Marie, and in 1823, he was appointed road commissioner and road inspector for the Quebec district. The inventory of his library, taken on his death in 1826, contained only religious tracts and none of the literary, legal, and scientific works found in other Taschereau libraries or those of other local notables.26

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

Founders of what would be known as the “first branch,” Thomas-Pierre-Joseph and Françoise Boucher Labruyère de Montarville had five sons and two daughters who lived beyond infancy. The daughters married and lived in Quebec, while two sons became lawyers, another a notary, the fourth a doctor, and the fifth drowned as a student. Heir of the Sainte-Marie seigneury and headship of the first branch, eldest son Pierre-Elzéar (1805–1845) practised law, was a Superior Court judge, and briefly represented the county of Dorchester in the Legislative Assembly. His eldest surviving son and heir of the seigneury, Henri-Elzéar (1836–1911), sat on the Supreme Court of Canada. Alongside this bloodline, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph’s illegitimate daughter, Claire Taschereau, added a difficult family dimension. Although illegitimate children were not uncommon in Sainte-Marie, representing 4 per cent of births by one estimate, they were a challenge for the Taschereaus, pillars of Catholic morality and a seigneurial family for whom inherited land was a primary source of wealth. While the eighteenth-century La Gorgendière branch of their family had, in the oral tradition of the Beauce, offended sexual mores by exercising their droit de seigneur and “acting as barnyard roosters,” the Taschereaus had always claimed respectability.27 Whatever their private feelings, the Taschereaus were able to put aristocratic face on the presence on the domain of a disgraced priest and illegitimate children. Born six years before her father’s marriage, Claire Taschereau was recognized by her father, took the family name, and was raised in the family enclave.28 In 1817, Claire Taschereau married Joseph-Antoine Philippon, the first teacher in Saint-Marie’s village school. Her marriage ceremony and subsequent settlement demonstrated Taschereau capacity to temper Catholic respectability with family solidarity and affection. Signed in the manor house of Jean-Thomas Taschereau, the marriage contract was witnessed by seventeen friends and family members, including the bride’s stepmother, grandmother, aunt, and Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay, legislative councillor and seigneur of Beauport.29 Nine years later and dying, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph ensured a home site for his daughter. In his will signed 16 September 1826, he left his estate to be divided “suivant la coutume [of Paris].” However, to offset its exclusion of illegitimate children, he made special provision for his “fille légitime,” leaving her a riverfront property near the parish church.30

mater ial aspir at ions Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s marriage in 1806 to Marie Panet (1788–1866) was an excellent patrician match.31 Raised in an urban household with six servants, a nurse, and a tutor, she was the daughter of Jean-Antoine Panet, judge, first Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, and a lawyer whose clients included the Seminary of Quebec and leading British merchants. Like the Taschereaus, the Panets were known for piety: two of Marie Panet’s aunts were Ursulines and her uncle Bernard-Claude

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5.5 Jean-Thomas Taschereau

5.6 Marie Panet

Panet would become archbishop of Quebec.32 The Panets were a durable elite family, and a century later, like the Taschereaus, they would be the subject of a family history by Pierre-Georges Roy.33 On her marriage, Marie Panet moved to Sainte-Marie and entered her husband’s extended-family household. This included her husband’s father, his stepmother, his aunt, and his siblings. Artisans at work on the church or mill might be lodged in the manor house, and houseguests included a steady flow of priests and dignitaries. Despite the interior luxury of the manor house, the domain included a working farm and forest and rural industries. An 1832 inventory shows thirty chickens, two oxen, and four cows just beyond the kitchen door, while an 1826 map identifies a stable, barn, ice house, sheds, house for the tenant farmer, and, nearby on the domain, tanning, distilling, and potash manufactures.34

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

Early in her marriage, Marie Panet pressured her husband, away on service in the War of 1812–14, to purchase the home adjoining that of her parents in Quebec. With a Quebec residence, the couple rotated between city and seigneury, with JeanThomas travelling constantly. Marie Panet raised her children essentially in SainteMarie while dividing her charitable activities between city and seigneury. While there is more documentary evidence on the institution-building activities of the McCords and Protestant women in Montreal, Marie Panet’s leadership in charitable work underlines the social initiatives undertaken by Catholic patrician women.35 Parish records, for example, emphasize her close working relationship with parish priest Antoine Villade in organizing local charity. The 1820s saw the involvement of Taschereau women in the establishment of the convent in Sainte-Marie and in the construction of the new domain chapel. In Quebec, Marie Panet was the principal sponsor of the Société Charitable des Dames catholiques de Québec at its founding in 1831. Just three years into marriage, Jean-Thomas assumed the family headship on the death of Gabriel-Elzéar in 1809. With his stepmother and brother having customary rights to the manor house, Jean-Thomas constructed his own manor, the third on the domain. With river views and courtyard access to the family chapel, his manor included a parlour, a large porch, several safes, and four bedrooms on the second floor. The parlour contained a piano forte, a cherry-wood table, and three paintings, and its fifteen straight-backed chairs, its red and yellow armchairs, and its sofa suggested polite entertaining. The dining room was also refined, with a sideboard or buffet for serving meals, a table with three extensions, and two small children’s chairs. Jean-Thomas’s silver collection included a dinner setting with separate spoons for soup, dessert, tea, sugar, and salt. Among his personal goods were three canes, fourteen handkerchiefs, an otter hat, judge’s robes, and hats and the uniform of a militia officer. His library consisted of 137 volumes, including Cicero, Ovid, Plato, Nero, Virgil, Newton, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, John Young’s Lettres d’Agricola, manuals on learning Greek and Italian, three volumes of the Maison rustique, and six volumes on nature topics. The barn and stable contained a stagecoach, covered coach, and several wagons.36 With its expansive veranda and works on rustic homes in its library, this manor house demonstrated the influence of romanticism in the seigneurial countryside. With their manor house constructed, Jean-Thomas and Marie Panet turned to the embellishment of its grounds; landscape plans drawn up in 1826 show circular fences, three gardens, and ornamental trees.37 Similar scientific, intellectual, and romantic currents were evident in the Taschereau-Panet milieu in Quebec City and in the growing interest in libraries, natural history museums, and gardening exhibitions. However, immigration, popular unrest, and epidemics (cholera, for example, took Jean-Thomas as victim in 1832) pushed elite families to seek the privacy,

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5.7 Architectural plan of Taschereau estate

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

clean air, and security of the suburbs. Joseph-François Perrault built one of the first estates, “l’Asile champêtre,” in the Saint-Louis suburb. Using his estate as a model, Perrault reiterated in his book Traité d’Agriculture adapté au climat du Bas-Canada familiar themes of scientific agriculture and horticulture, adding a gardener’s calendar and advice on flowers, the French garden, and the English landscape.38 On an estate near Perrault, Vice-Admiralty judge James Kerr planted a vineyard and ninety fruit trees. A judge, joint premier, and prominent in the Catholic establishment, Augustin-Norbert Morin brought further weight to the movement to rural estates. Morin had a library with 505 titles in agronomy and was a founder, with John Samuel McCord, of both the Institut Vattemare (1841) and the Montreal Horticultural Society (1847). Two of Marie Panet’s brothers, Judge Philippe Panet and notary Louis Panet, built adjoining villas on eighty acres along the St Charles River, six kilometres from Quebec. After visiting Naples, Philippe Panet, built his three-storey “Le Bocage” in 1830, using an Italian villa design that included vaulted ceilings, terraces, and the construction of every room in an oval shape. Louis Panet’s neighbouring villa, “Coucy-le-Castel,” laid out in the 1830s, was renowned for its classical library and spectacular grounds, which featured snowball hedges, treed alleys, rustic seats, a gazebo, a fish pond, and a viewing bridge:39 “The neighborhood of running water; the warbling of the birds; the distant lowing of kine in the green meadows; the variety and beauty of the landscape, especially when the descending orb of day gilds the dark woods to the west, furnish a strikingly rural spectacle at Coucy-le-Castel, thus named from a French estate in Picardy, owned by the Badelarts, ancestors, on the maternal side, of the Panets.”40 In 1861, Jean-Thomas’s son Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr bought Coucy-le-Castel from his uncle, establishing it as a country seat in honour of his second wife, MarieJoséphine Caron. She had grown up at Clermont, a villa renowned for its spectacular river views, its veranda, coupole, classical columns, and prize-winning vegetable and flower gardens.41 This emphasis on the romantic and genteel in elite life had its counterpart in the Beauce through landscape painters like James Peachey, Thomas Davies, and George Heriot. Much as Montreal artist James Duncan had done in his work for his patron John Samuel McCord, these landscape artists travelled into the countryside painting bucolic panoramas to grace the parlours of rural estates. Very much in the vein of popular illustrations of the falls at Niagara or Montmorency, Davies sketched the Chaudière Falls, the region’s most spectacular landmark, completing the painting in England in 1792. Transforming the Chaudière from a reality of flooding, timber shoves, or isolation, they instead presented patrician life around the falls. Heriot’s view included a slave or black servant carrying the traditional jar on her

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5.8 Panorama of the town of Sainte-Marie and the river from the chapel doorstep. Painted by A. Russell between 1832 and 1843, this romanticization of rural life is reminiscent of McCord commissions to Duncan and Bunnett: chapel belfry, picket fences, trimmed gardens, poplars, idyllic river, and distant town and parish church.

5.9 Judge Panet’s estate: Le Bocage

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

5.10 George Heriot, Chaudière Falls near Quebec, 1792

head, a strolling gentlewoman, and aristocratic males with the braids and breeches of estates in southern England. Portrayals such as this helped to make the Chaudière Falls a sightseeing destination for day trips from Quebec City. After a military ball in 1846, for example, a steamer took visitors to the mouth of the Chaudière where country carts carried them to the falls for a picnic, “innocent mirth,” and “a distant view of the fields and forests of the rich banks of the St. Lawrence.”42 Portraits, miniatures, and the paintings of estates were other means of demonstrating gentility. In Montreal, Thomas McCord had sat for Louis Dulongpré and had commissioned a posthumous likeness of his wife. Quebec’s leading portraitist, Théophile Hamel, was known for his government commission to portray Lord Elgin. Various Taschereaus and their Panet, Caron, and Angers kin sat for him. In 1869, Hamel was chosen to portray Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, soon to be archbishop, in a painting that still hangs in the council room of the Seminary of Quebec.43 While Hamel’s portraits of men emphasized male intellectual and physical strength through the holding of a book or sword, those of women featured heavy curtains, tassels, flowers, jewellery, and elaborate dresses. Background was used to intensify mood. Hamel’s painting of Louise-Adèle Taschereau (c. 1846) is now part of the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

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5.11 Louise-Adèle Taschereau, c. 1849–53. Her off-theshoulder dress, the classical vase, and the bend of a tamed river, perhaps the Chaudière, are suggestive of a refined and feminized seigneurial society.

children and succes s ion Taschereau and Panet gave priority to their children’s careers and marriages, to organizing succession, and to provision for the unmarried. Among their six surviving children, Elzéar-Alexandre entered the clergy and two daughters remained unmarried. The latter, Claire-Caroline (1811–1891) and Agnes (1823–1881), represented lifelong charges on family resources; both are buried in the domain chapel. Lineage in this “second” branch of the Taschereaus should, but for his fragile health, have fallen to eldest son Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr (1814–1893), a lawyer, judge, and then member of the first Supreme Court of Canada.44 He first married Louise-Adèle Dionne, daughter of Amable Dionne, legislative councillor, seigneur of Sainte-Anne-de-laPocatière and Les Aulnaies, and reputedly the wealthiest merchant on the south shore of the St Lawrence.45 A year after Louise-Adèle’s death in 1861, Jean-Thomas, a widower with five children, married Marie-Louise-Josephine Caron, daughter of René-Édouard Caron, lieutenant-governor of Quebec. Second daughter Élisabeth-Suzanne Taschereau (1812–1888) also reinforced patrician alliances by marrying Henri-Elzéar Juchereau Duchesnay, widower of her

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

cousin Julie Perrault.46 Son of the seigneur of Beauport, his mother was a Fleury de la Gorgendière. It can be said, then, that the third generation of Taschereaus came full circle, marrying back into the Juchereau Duchesnay and Fleury de la Gorgendière families of their parents and grandparents. Élisabeth-Suzanne Taschereau and Henri-Elzéar Juchereau Duchesnay moved to Sainte-Marie where he practised law, sitting in the Legislative Council and then in the Senate of Canada. Mixed Protestant-Catholic marriages were not unusual among the elite for whom the union of merchant wealth with landed status was a common family strategy. The Taschereaus, undoubtedly with grinding teeth, accepted these marriages with the hope for the conversion of the Protestant and absolutely with the provision that children would be raised as Catholics.47 A generation earlier, merchant William Grant’s marriage into the extended Taschereau family had been fortuitous. For their part, the Panets had a prominent Protestant branch. In 1827, Marie-Louise Perrault, daughter and namesake of Jean-Thomas’s sister Marie-Louise Taschereau (1777– 1828), married Protestant notary Errol Boyd Lindsay in a ceremony celebrated in the domain chapel. This was the first of several marriages joining the Lindsays and Taschereaus.48 Imprisoned by British authorities two decades earlier, Jean-Thomas Taschereau saw his eldest daughter married into the highest colonial ranks. In 1830, Marie-Louise Taschereau (1811–1891) married Randolph-Isham Routh in the garrison church of Quebec City. An Eton graduate, son of the chief justice of Newfoundland, and a widower with four sons, Routh was almost thirty years his bride’s senior. After army service in Jamaica and Malta, Routh was appointed military commissar in Quebec. Louis-Joseph Papineau reported to his wife on the beauty of the teenaged bride and the groom’s rumoured wealth of £5,000: “I spoke at length with Madame Taschereau [Marie Panet] about the widower’s merits, his manners, his interest in uniting the two societies, English and French Canadian. The good mother spoke more favorably of his qualities than I and convinced me, inadvertently, that her opposition was designed to obtain better terms for her daughter.”49 For his part, Jean-Thomas confided that his daughter’s marriage “is a very advantageous match for her from the standpoint of wealth, but I have one thing that grieves me a great deal, and that is the difference in religion … This gentleman has all the necessary qualities … kind, friendly, well-educated, well-travelled, enjoys a fine reputation and has excellent manners; it has all the signs of a good marriage and that is what makes it even more regrettable that they are not of the same religion … During the year that this marriage has been under consideration, I’ve spent nights without sleeping … it is now a done deed and we have to make it work out happily.”50 Marie Panet’s leadership in charities in Quebec and the Beauce, her family connections with the bishop and the Ursulines, and her status as mother of a prominent priest made her a symbol of Taschereau womanhood. A widow for thirty-four years, she was buried in her beloved domain chapel in September 1866

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5.12 Sir Randolph-Isham Routh. Papineau and the groom himself remarked on this marriage alliance between the Taschereaus and a senior colonial official as a tactic of “uniting the two societies.” The couple had nine children, including Edward John Routh, distinguished mathematician at Cambridge.

and is remembered in family history as “a good and holy woman.”51 Throughout her married life, however, she had paid a major patriarchal tax. Like her brother-in-law, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph, her husband fathered a child outside marriage. The case of Louis-Épictière Taschereau was particularly flagrant. Born in 1810, four years after the marriage of Jean-Thomas and Marie Panet and a year before the birth of the couple’s first child, Louis-Épictière, recognized by his father and bearing his surname, was the result of a much-commented upon liaison between Jean-Thomas Taschereau and Louise-Rose Panet, his wife’s aunt and the youngest sister of Bishop Bernard-Claude Panet. She and her son continued to live in the Taschereau enclave. She remained in Sainte-Marie until her death in 1851 and had the status to be buried under the parish church.52 Louis-Épictière Taschereau had an ambivalent place in the patrician family: eldest son, a full-blooded Taschereau-Panet, illegitimate and ineligible as a principal heir, but recognized and living on the domain. It fell on Marie Panet to rectify the situation. Writing to his mother in 1837, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau asked to be remembered to “my aunt Rose.”53 And, in his handwritten will, Jean-Thomas implored his wife “to think of young Louis-Épictière; I rely entirely on her on this subject and no one must oppose in any way what she decides about him. She will take advice from friends and in the end I pray that she will take care to see him raised as an honest man.” Finally, he asked God to “bless my dear little family” and “to have a compassionate eye for the faults that I may have committed against his Holy Will.”54

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

By the early nineteenth century, seigneurs were increasingly aware of the dangers of the frequent subdivision of seigneuries. While obliging the principal male heir to compensate his siblings, many seigneurs effectively divided their families between landed and landless, the latter being obliged to seek livelihood in the professions or through an advantageous marriage. While Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s 1809 will had respected conventions of the equal division of his seigneuries, at least three of his heirs used freedom of willing in disposing of their seigneurial lands. Writing his will in 1819, Jean-Thomas left the usufruct of his seigneuries to his wife.55 On her death, however, his seigneurial property was to be inherited in its entirety by eldest son Jean-Thomas Jr. In return, Jean-Thomas Jr was obliged to give the interest on the value of half of his seigneuries to his siblings. The will of Thomas-Pierre-Joseph (1826) was similar; he left usufruct of his movables and immovables to his wife, with eldest son Pierre-Elzéar to inherit his seigneurial property on payment of half of its annual revenues to his siblings.56 The significance of this sea change was perhaps most striking in the will of their sister Marie-Louise. Her 1827 will, written in conjunction with that of her husband, Olivier Perrault, left her seigneurial land to their eldest son. Her gender preference was blunt: “[I]f there are males, they will inherit the said part to the exclusion of females.”57

the “ter ror” of jam es cr aig The years 1806–11 were an intense period in the private life of Jean-Thomas: marriage, headship of his branch, the birth of both his illegitimate son and his eldest daughter, and construction of his manor house. While this period might have allowed him to lead the conventional public life of a patrician, it also coincided with an exceptional moment: his imprisonment by Governor Craig. Emphasizing the personage of Louis-Joseph Papineau and the Rebellions of 1837– 38, the master narratives of Quebec history generally place Jean-Thomas’s twentyeight-year legislative career, including four years in the Legislative Council, in the shadow of Papineau, his colleague and fellow seigneur. However, Jean-Thomas’s jailing in March 1810, along with his fellow Le Canadien editors and its printer, has given him place at the centre stage of national memory. With Governor James Craig as the symbol of British racism, 1810 has been situated as an ethnocentric milestone halfway between the Conquest of 1759–60 and the chill of the Durham Report (1839).58 In 2010, the second centenary of these imprisonments was marked by a colloquium, a special edition of the Bulletin d’histoire politique, and a subscription for a statue of Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, Taschereau’s imprisoned colleague. Viewed from the historicism of a four-generational family narrative, however, Jean-Thomas’s protest and his three-month imprisonment in 1810 must be seen both as an episode and as ethnic exceptionalism. From the long perspective, the

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5.13 Commemorative bust of Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, sculpted by Pascale Archambault and installed in the Library of the National Assembly (2010)

weight of his life passage, in continuity with that of his father, was entirely in the direction of authoritarianism and of mediation between colonial authorities and French Canada – what Robert Young describes as the “creation of a collaborative climate of opinion.”59 Murray Greenwood, an astute observer of ethnicity, insists on the “fundamental loyalty” of Parti canadien members like Taschereau.60 Michel Ducharme, writing of the concept of liberty in Canada in the years 1776–1838, dismisses the importance of these Parti canadien challenges to Craig: “[T]hey did not put in question the colonial constitution, the composition of legislative power, nor the royal prerogative. Nor did they contest the principals of modern liberty on which the colonial state was founded.”61 Even before passing his bar exam, Jean-Thomas Taschereau had benefited from British patronage. In 1798, his father, exercising his right to name his subordinates, appointed his teenaged son as his assistant road commissioner in the Quebec district. Two years later, Jean-Thomas was elected in his father’s old riding of Dorchester, taking his seat at age twenty-two as the youngest member in the Legislative Assembly. Except for the years 1810–12, Jean-Thomas would serve in the assembly and then in the Legislative Council throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century. In his first sessions, 1801–04, his votes were almost evenly divided between the ministerial bloc (12) and the Parti canadien (10), a position described by John Hare as that of a “Canadien partagé.”62 As late as 1805, associational collaboration in elite social and intellectual activities in Quebec City was still the order

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

of the day. Jean-Thomas Taschereau, alongside the city’s Protestant elite – Jonathan Sewell, prominent lawyer James Stuart, shipbuilder Alexander Munn, teacher Alexander Skakel, and his seigneurial neighbour John Caldwell – subscribed to the charter of the Union Company, with its hotel, coffee house, and assembly room.63 In June 1805, Jean-Thomas saw his stepbrother christened “George-Louis” – not “Georges” – in homage to the British and French monarchies. In the same year, the Quebec Mercury began publishing, and in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, its racist taunts quickly poisoned public debate. This xenophobic press increased its calls for increased patronage and commercial advantages and for the forcing of English language and British educational, institutional, and legal models. Public discourse became peppered with language that was part of what Linda Colley, referring to British patrician life, describes as a “special kind of emotionalism and violence” – examples include “unfrenchify”; the charge that the Catholic Church “sinks and debases the human mind”; and the frequently voiced opinion that public affairs should be carried out “in English, by Englishmen, or men of English principles.”64 Racism took personal form. In 1806, the Mercury included the Taschereaus on a list of “distinguished” families who had served in New France and whose descendants should have the decency of a “nice sense of honour,” “loyalty of attachment,” and what Edmund Burke had called “proud submission.”65 Angered, and despite pleas for moderation from his father, his brother-in-law Olivier Perrault, and his mentor Jonathan Sewell, Jean-Thomas swung increasingly towards the Parti canadien, and his votes in 1805–08 were overwhelmingly (29/4) in its camp. Distancing himself from his family, he took a political position in line with that of his father-in-law, Jean-Antoine Panet, Speaker of the assembly, Parti canadien supporter, and seasoned lobbyist for equality between French and English citizens.66 From his assembly seat in 1806, JeanThomas was a leader in campaigns against the editors of the Gazette and the Mercury. And, with expanding demographic pressure in the freehold townships around the Taschereau seigneuries, he temporarily abandoned long-standing Taschereau anglophilism and the family’s attempts to attract English-speaking settlers. Instead, he expressed nationalist concern about immigration, particularly the presence in border regions of “Yankees” and “aliens.”67 He also spoke out strongly on language issues. In April 1806, he challenged an anti-French motion that this assembly “ought not to encourage the study of any language by translation of English books, in preference to the language of Empire.”68 Benefiting from the Canadien majority in the assembly, he signed a £700 government contract with his father-in-law as Speaker to translate John Hatsell’s four-volume Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons. Translated at public expense, the work was to be bound in leather and displayed alongside the English originals in the Legislative Library. In some respects, this gesture cut both ways with an ambivalence typical

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of the Taschereaus: it represented a cri de coeur for the French language and, perhaps just as significantly, respect and publicity for British constitutional practice. Rank and authority in the militia was another contentious issue as English hardliners questioned French-Canadian loyalty. Taschereau responded by arguing that militiamen should be subject to command and discipline in French, “their natural language.” These issues of ethnicity, language, and the right to civil and military office reached into the Colonial Office and British Parliament, forming part of larger imperial debates around tolerance, the Test Act, and the political rights of religious minorities. The rights of Jews to hold public office was another contentious issue. Merchant Ezekiel Hart’s election in the Catholic-majority riding of Trois-Rivières in 1807 presented a constitutional dilemma: Hart refused to sign election documents on the Jewish Sabbath or, in taking his oath of office, to use the phrase “in the year of our Lord.” In the ensuing campaign to exclude Hart from taking his seat in the assembly, Taschereau seems to have supported the Parti canadien position of rejecting Hart’s capacity to take a Christian oath.69 In 1806, Jean-Thomas Taschereau married into the nationalist Panets, and in the same year, his name appeared on the founding board of Le Canadien, the first exclusively French-language newspaper since 1779. Moreover, Pierre-Stanislas Bédard and François Blanchet were also on the board.70 The latter, trained in medicine at Columbia, had attended classical college with Jean-Thomas, and the two were related by marriage and seigneurial interest.71 The three, all graduates of the Seminary of Quebec, bonded as intellectuals, sharing interests in philosophy, mathematics, science, meteorology, and the law. In 1800, with Taschereau and Bédard among his subscribers, Blanchet published Recherches sur la médecine, ou l’application de la chimie à la médecine, a scientific work published in French in New York.72 Although Le Canadien, widely distributed and free, published articles on topics ranging from seed grains, climate, and science to Jean de La Bruyère, its punch was essentially political. Its argument centred on British constitutional rights, and in language similar to that of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and his fellow petitioners in 1789, the editors vigorously protested intolerance and the unjust dominance of British “placemen” in the colonial patronage system. Insisting on their rights as British citizens under the Constitutional Act of 1791 and suggesting the existence of a new “people,” they cited British intellectuals such as William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and, particularly, John Locke:73 “We hear often the use of ‘Canadien’ and ‘English’ party. Is there a civil war in this country? Aren’t all inhabitants of the province British subjects? The English here shouldn’t have the title ‘English’ any more than the Canadiens that of ‘French’: when will we be known as a people, as British Americans?”74 In this deepening crisis around identity, the appointment in 1807 of Sir James Craig as governor in charge of both military and civil matters was maladroit. Craig was Gibraltar-born, an army enlistee at age fifteen, and a veteran of wars with the

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5.14 Governor Sir James Craig

Thirteen Colonists and with the Dutch in South Africa, and his service as governor of the eastern districts of India had not increased his endearment to subject populations or his support for principles of plurality in British colonies. Frustrated with what he called Le Canadien’s language of “Revolution and Reform,” he moved in 1808 to strip the newspaper’s key supporters of their public offices.75 Jean-Thomas Taschereau lost two critical appointments: his militia captaincy and his post as deputy road commissioner. Reporting to London, Craig described him as “a hotheaded, petulant young man, extremely violent, very unprincipled but without talents to render him in any way dangerous. His father is a respectable man and a Member of the Legislative Council. He immediately waited upon me and expressed the utmost regret at the conduct of his son, but did not even ask me permission to restore him.”76 Re-elected in 1809 for Dorchester and Leinster, Jean-Thomas Taschereau and his fellow Le Canadien editors continued to attack Craig’s authoritarianism. In March 1810, Craig ordered the seizure of the presses of Le Canadien, and Taschereau, Bédard, Blanchet, and the printer were jailed for “treasonable practices.” Habeas corpus, that essential principal of English law that guaranteed appearance before a judge, had only fragile application in Lower Canada. Sewell, in particular, was instrumental in providing for its easy suspension in cases of suspected treason.77 While Bédard remained in prison for months insisting on a public trial, Blanchet and Taschereau made public confessions. Seven days after his imprisonment,

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Taschereau asked the governor for pardon, admitting his “errors” and attributing “my scandalous writing” to provocation. Renouncing his participation in Le Canadien and asking for release and trial, he cited his responsibilities as family head of the Taschereaus, his father’s long “services” to the Crown, “my poor health,” and “the continuous tears of my wife”: “Finally, I express to Your Excellency my sincere repentance, my desire and my firm resolution and determination to repair by an exemplary life the wrongs that I may have caused.”78 Taschereau was nonetheless left to languish in jail for months, and only in July was his petition heard by the Executive Council. It called for a medical report, and the examiners described Taschereau as having “suffered very materially from slow fever, accompanied with loss of appetite, strength, and sleep. He complained also of pain in the region of the liver, and had occasionally had the skin tinged with jaundice. We are of the opinion that his disease is at least very much aggravated from his confinement.”79 At the end of July and after posting bond of £500, Taschereau was released. In a meeting with Jonathan Sewell, he expressed his regrets and his willingness to make public contrition.80

re cover ing au t hor it y The arrival in October 1811 of Sir George Prevost as Craig’s replacement, together with imminent war between Britain and the United States, brought an immediate change in relations between British authorities and the French-Canadian political elite. Remarking to colonial authorities on the “professional abilities of these gentlemen,” Prevost appointed Bédard provincial judge in Trois-Rivières.81 François Blanchet, whom Craig had demoted in June 1808 as surgeon of the 1st Militia Battalion, was appointed superintendent of militia hospitals in Lower Canada during the War of 1812–14 and, in 1815, was named a justice of the peace. Taschereau’s fatherin-law, Jean-Antoine Panet, was reappointed lieutenant-colonel of the Beauport battalion.82 Within two years of his release from jail, Jean-Thomas Taschereau was named a justice of the peace, was re-elected to the Legislative Assembly, and was recommissioned in the militia. Running for office from jail in 1810 but defeated, Taschereau was re-elected to the Legislative Assembly in December 1812 to what some described as the “family seat” of Dorchester. Faced with the need for a strong Canadian militia and conscious of the strong French-Canadian resistance to militia service during the American invasion of 1775– 76, Prevost inevitably turned to seigneurial and religious authorities. Mandatory militia service for all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty had been established in 1777, and in 1803 a compulsory annual registration had been instituted. Although officially reorganized in 1807 into twelve battalions of 500 men each, the Lower Canadian militia, according to its principal historian, existed “only on paper” before 1811.83 One of the Quebec region’s four battalions was based in Sainte-Marie,

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

and despite the preference of British officers like James Brock for arming only “respectable inhabitants” (a pseudonym for men of British stock), this battalion in 1812 was placed under the lieutenant-colonelship of Jean-Thomas’s brother Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau.84 In September 1812, Jean-Thomas was promoted from his rank as major in the Sainte-Marie division to assume national responsibilities as deputy adjutant-general of the Lower Canadian militia; an annual salary of £135 gave him the second-highest pay in the militia.85 War and conscription for militia service brought immediate resistance from French parishes. With recruiting and administrative responsibilities across Lower Canada, Jean-Thomas, like his father in the American invasion of 1775, was a major French-Canadian figure of colonial authority. In Pointe-Lévy in August 1812, riots and French Canadians’ refusal to put on the military uniform forced him to dispatch two companies of British regulars. In May 1813, he announced colony-wide rewards for the capture of deserters. Defiance of his mustering orders in parishes along the Richelieu resulted in arrests and trials.86 Taschereau was headquartered in Laprairie in August 1812 when the most violent confrontation occurred. An angry mob, determined to cross the St Lawrence and free their sons from the Laprairie militia camp, was broken up by magistrate Thomas McCord and gunfire from the 49th Regiment.87 While the strongest disturbances occurred in the Montreal region, protest was also strong along the Chaudière, with one official describing “open violence” in the region.88 As Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau of the 4th Battalion reported, fifteen of the first fifty-nine conscripts in the Beauce, particularly from the Taschereau seigneuries of Saint-François and Saint-Joseph, had deserted before reporting. At Saint-François, nine militiamen refused to march because they had not been provided with food. Parallel with the integration of Bédard, Blanchet, and Taschereau into positions of militia, medical, and judicial authority was the increasing concentration of nationalist forces in Montreal around the leadership of Denis-Benjamin Viger and Papineau. In 1815, the latter was chosen leader of the French group in the assembly.89 In Quebec, Taschereau, Bédard, and Blanchet renounced any pretensions to responsible government and in a co-authored 1814 mémoire described the British constitution as “the one best fitted to create our happiness.”90 Distancing themselves from the stridency of their earlier positions in Le Canadien, they confirmed the power of the governor and the fact that “he would not be obliged to follow the advice of these councillors [leaders in the assembly] when he did not regard it as proper.” In 1816, it was Taschereau who moved that the assembly purchase a set of plates for the departing Governor Prevost “as a mark of respect for his character, and of gratitude for the services which he has rendered to this Province.”91 In 1819, Taschereau supported the movement to bring the recent editors of Le Canadien

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Table 5.1 Jean-Thomas Taschereau and other family members in the Legislative Assembly, 1792–1867 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau A. Juchereau Duchesnay

Dorchester Buckingham

1792–96 1792–96

Jean-Antoine Panet

Haute-Ville Québec

1792–1808

Jean-Thomas Taschereau ⬙ ⬙ ⬙ Antoine-Charles Taschereau ⬙ Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau ⬙ Joseph-André Taschereau ⬙ Henri-Elzéar Taschereau

Dorchester ⬙ ⬙ Gaspé Beauce Dorchester Beauce Dorchester Beauce Dorchester Beauce

1800–08 1809–10 1812–20 1820–27 1830–38 1841–44 1830–35 1844–45 1835–38 1844–45 1861–67

Brother-in-law of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Father-in-law of Jean-Thomas Taschereau

Source: Joseph Desjardins, Guide parlementaire de la Province de Québec, 1792–1867 (Quebec City, 1902).

before the assembly’s committee on privileges, arguing that “lies” by newspaper editors might lead to “the excesses of the French Revolution.”92 He was the principal petitioner in the request to the governor general, the Duke of Richmond, for permission to name the proposed bridge over the Chaudière River at Sainte-Marie in his honour.93 From 1821 to 1827, Taschereau served as chairman of the Quarter Sessions in Quebec, a salaried position that included supervision of Quebec’s police office. As with Thomas McCord in Montreal, this professionalization of the urban magistracy gave Taschereau important “on the ground” authority in the issuing of warrants, in attending the Courts of Weekly Sessions, and in dealing with the local magistracy.94 While he remained close socially to fellow seigneur Papineau and in 1823 voted against the proposed union of Upper and Lower Canada, Taschereau was a committed believer in “the wisdom of the Imperial Parliament.” Writing to Lord Dalhousie in 1826 and apparently drawing on Blackstone’s Commentaries, he emphasized the importance of the role of colonial nobility and the need for balance between the powers of the appointed and elected legislative houses.

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

In describing “the hour of danger,” he attributed Lower Canadian woes to the “popular branch.” There is not a republic in the world, he told the governor, “where one branch of power does not have a negative power which tends to destroy completely its Government.”95 With his strong anglophilism evident in his participation in the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, the Quebec Garrison Library, and the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, Jean-Thomas Taschereau appeared as the only French Canadian on the committee chaired by Jonathan Sewell in 1827 to supervise the design and building of a monument to Wolfe and Montcalm. H.V. Nelles, historian of Quebec City’s tercentenary in 1908, describes its sponsors as having participated in what he calls “spectacle” and “the art of nation-building.”96 Constructed with a personal contribution from Governor Dalhousie, the fourteen-foot obelisk was placed symbolically between the citadel and the governor’s residence, overlooking the St Lawrence. Its inscription imposed a joint ethnic hero-worship on the city landscape: Montcalm and Wolfe! Wolfe and Montcalm! Quebec, thy storied citadel Attest in burning song and psalm How here thy heroes fell!97 At the end of the inauguration ceremony, “[t]he Garrison presented Arms, the Band played the National Air. Three British cheers then rent the air, given by the Troops and spectators to the memory of British Valour, and French Gallantry.”98 This loyalty and bonne-entente of Jean-Thomas Taschereau, his seigneurial and administrative authority in a vulnerable region, and his service as a legislator, militia administrator, and chairman of the Quebec City police office brought repeated honours and patronage offices.99 He was named King’s Council in 1821 and a director of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. A measure of his standing in Quebec City’s English community was his appearance in 1824 as one of the rare French Canadians on the first board of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. In 1828, he was appointed judge of the King’s Bench and legislative councillor; his father (1798–1809) and brother (1818–26) had preceded him on the Legislative Council. The legislative expression of a local aristocracy and a body that might balance the popular tendencies of an elected assembly, legislative councillors held lifetime appointments and the title of “Honorable.” More than wealth, the Legislative Council signified family position, respectability, and high culture. Writing in 1824 of its Upper Canadian counterpart, Edward Allan Talbot described its members as “men of moderate property and respectable literary acquirements.”100 In recommending his appointment, Governor Dalhousie cited Taschereau’s “loyalty

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5.15 The monument to Wolfe and Montcalm

and unwearied exertion” and the need for “equal consideration” of French and English subjects.101 Crown, seigneury, and the aristocratic family came together symbolically in September 1828 when the Taschereaus received Dalhousie’s successor, Sir James Kempt, as a house guest in Sainte-Marie. Politics had come full circle: imprisoned by Governor Craig in 1810, Jean-Thomas Taschereau had the pleasure of welcoming the colony’s ranking British official à table in his manor house.

ear ly ninete ent h- centu ry s eig n eur ialism We saw in the career of Jean-Thomas’s father, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, that land and the seigneurial system were situated at the core of Taschereau wealth and authority. By the Napoleonic years, the frontier Beauce and formative seigneury that Jean-Thomas had known in his childhood in the 1780s was rapidly evolving. The region’s population continued to grow and diversify through immigration and expanding peasant households, while the seigneurial economy took new forms thanks to transportation improvements, the spike in the value of Canadian timber and agricultural products, and the penetration of new capitalist activities. By JeanThomas’s death in 1832, the village of Sainte-Marie, encompassed by the seigneury,

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

Table 5.2 Taschereaus in the Legislative Council, 1798–1832 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau Jean-Thomas Taschereau

1798–1809 1818–26 1828–32

had a population of 303 and industries that included a distillery and brickyard. In the larger parish of Sainte-Marie, mid-century censuses reported four flour mills, two carding mills, several sawmills, three tanneries, and a copper mine.102 Religious infrastructure on the Taschereau seigneuries – churches, presbyteries, cemeteries, and chapels – reflected this growth. Marriages in the parish of Sainte-Marie rose from six in 1794, nine in 1795, and ten in 1796 to thirty-five in 1820 and forty-four in 1821. Saint-Marie had 3,531 baptisms in 1794–1821, and Saint-Joseph 1,733 in the same period.103 By 1810, Saint-Marie had 1,200 parishioners, Saint-Joseph 775, and SaintFrançois 656.104 Seating in Sainte-Marie’s parish church was increased in 1801, and space around the church for horses and carriages was enlarged by an exchange of land between the fabrique and Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau. Besides the new bells in 1808, church ornaments reflected growing community prosperity. A framed altar piece from the Jesuit chapel and repaired by architect François Baillargé was purchased, as were three new altars, sculpted by Baillargé and gilded by sisters of the Hôpital général. Improvements were made to the church’s vaulted ceiling, baptistery, and cemetery, and in 1842, the church acquired an organ. Across the century, the Taschereau family remained conspicuous benefactors, but their gifts could include conditions. In 1880, for example, the Taschereaus planted a hundred poplars in the new parish cemetery in return for fabrique permission to enlarge the family burial vault in the domain chapel.105 Alongside this assiduously constructed Catholic landscape was the reality of an increasingly pluralist Beauce. Trunk roads, bridges, postal services, and, in 1811, the opening of through coach service from Quebec to Boston increased the region’s access to markets and outside cultures. As early as 1800, large proprietors of Crown lands were advertising “free and common soccage” lands on the Chaudière River, just miles upstream from Sainte-Marie. Attractions included “a bridle road” to the United States, rights to erect non-banal mills, and rights to titles that were “clear and compleat.”106 German loyalists, British, and Irish settled on these township lands and on the back rangs of the Taschereau seigneuries. English-speaking artisans, merchants, and professionals also established shops and offices in villages and towns along the Chaudière. By the 1830s, villages on the Taschereau seigneuries reported significant non-francophone populations: Sainte-Marie, 4.9 per cent; SaintJoseph, 8.2 per cent; and Saint-François, 14.3 per cent.107

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We have seen that even though strongly identified as Catholic, French, and aristocratic, the Taschereaus, from father to son, were assiduous anglophiles in their public and associational lives. The marriage of Jean-Thomas’s eldest daughter to an Eton graduate was symbolic. A similar pattern is evident on the seigneury and in manor life, and there is ample evidence of the adoption of British and American influences in the Taschereaus’ Sheffield cutlery, mahogany furniture, mill technology, and interest in the thinking of Locke and Blackstone. The family turned to professionals of Irish and British origin, notably John Walsh, Sainte-Marie’s first resident notary, and Alex Miller, Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s seigneurial agent. One of the first doctors in Sainte-Marie was Edward Pilkington. On the Taschereau seigneurial domains, tenant farmers like Joshua Styles and Leverett Davis, sometimes Protestant and recruited from away, introduced distinct legal, horticultural, and architectural traditions as well as English-language networks that shaped local practices.108 In 1827, Jean-Thomas’s illegitimate son, Louis-Épictière, married Mary Bingham in a Presbyterian ceremony in St Andrews Church, Quebec.109 The Taschereaus’ capacity to exert authority on their seigneuries remained fragile. Reputed as fractious, anti-authoritarian, and independent, Beaucerons had a long history of challenging parish and seigneurial authorities over political allegiance, church construction costs, and militia service.110 Disorder during Mass, insubordination to militia officers, riotous behaviour during the festival of Sainte Anne, and youthful street disorders were common manifestations of rebellious behaviour on Taschereau seigneuries. Fearing riots in Sainte-Marie on the marriage of militia captain François Bonneville and his much younger fiancée Thérèse Robitaille, Curé Antoine Villade of Sainte-Marie was given episcopal permission to hold a private service.111 Paradoxically, the Beauce was renowned for both its religiosity and its disobedience to clerical authority. Before 1793, there were, in addition to Sundays, thirtyfour obligatory church festivals. These processions and festivals, with their stopping at roadside crosses, were particularly disorderly in the Beauce and neighbouring Lauzon. Drunkenness was common, and the opening of trunk roads, forest shanties, and manufactures brought hotels, taverns, and single workers. In just the first five years of Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s family headship, 1809 to 1814, eight licences were granted for the sale of alcohol in Sainte-Marie.112 Disobedience reached into the parish church itself, with disturbances in 1830 leading to a four-year cancellation by the bishop of the midnight Christmas Mass in Sainte-Marie.113 Finally, natural catastrophes, such as the recurring flooding of the Chaudière and, particularly, summer frosts and the collapse of harvests in 1815, ushered in poverty, famine, and seedgrain shortages.

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

5.16 A “table bridge” in Sainte-Marie, 1903. Flooding of the Chaudière River was a spring ritual.

Raised on the seigneury, educated at the Seminary of Quebec, and part of the first Taschereau generation trained professionally in the law, Jean-Thomas Taschereau was well placed to develop a family strategy of raising seigneurial rents and applying other feudal rights while introducing capitalist measures to maximize family revenues. He was a seigneur who anticipated the potential of whisky, leather, and potash manufactures to add value to the Beauce’s expanding grain, livestock, and forest production. In 1808, he opened a distillery and alcohol-retailing business, first in partnership with his brother Thomas-Pierre-Joseph and then on his own account after 1814. He helped found a potash manufacture in 1813 and a year later participated in both a tannery and sawmill.114 His nephew Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau was partner in a carding mill opened on the domain in 1832, and in mid-century, his son Jean-Thomas Jr was partner in a wool factory on the Etchemin River.115

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The exploitation of changing forms of production and appointment to positions of influence in local administrative and judicial structures were only part of a larger dynamic of authority. Social relations in the Beauce were increasingly influenced by legislation from the capital, by the spreading of popular education, by the construction of a convent in Sainte-Marie, and by the introduction across the region of local courts.116 The Legislative Assembly and Council, with Jean-Thomas, his brother Thomas-Pierre-Joseph, and his brother-in-law Olivier Perrault as principal spokesmen for local concerns before 1832, were often the forums for the resolution of conflicts in the countryside between expanding capitalist relations and historical feudal-based relations. In 1805, for example, Jean-Thomas supported John Caldwell, seigneur of Lauzon, in a bill that, despite church strictures on usury, would have enabled seigneurs to apply compound interest to the debts of their censitaires.117 There were recurring complaints over the penury of land available for concession to the increasing numbers of peasant families. Seigneurs were accused of withholding property from settlement, speculating on the anticipation of rising land prices, and reserving timber lots for their own profit. In 1824, Olivier Perrault, Speaker of the Legislative Council and a seigneur through marriage to a Taschereau, took the lead in blocking legislation that would force seigneurs to grant unconceded lands.118 Jean-Thomas was adamant in his opposition to fundamental changes in the seigneurial system. Warning Governor Dalhousie in 1826 of the danger of alarming seigneurs, he told him to consider a voluntary system of commutation that would reduce feudal aspects while conserving the rights of “all parties”; an extension of the system of freehold tenure would, on the other hand, only diminish land values and hurt capitalists.119 This Taschereau discourse did not end with Jean-Thomas’s death in 1832, for the cause would be taken up by his son Jean-Thomas Jr. With the family’s omnipresence in public office, it happened that a Taschereau might appear before other members of the family. Appearing in 1843 before his cousin JosephAndré Taschereau, commissioner in a seigneurial tenure inquiry, Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr defended “we Seigniors” by appealing to history, “public faith,” “immemorial prescription,” and the “vested”: “Theirs are vested rights, of which they are in possession and for which they have given value … [W]e Seigniors, having our rights guaranteed to us by the public faith and by immemorial prescription, ought not to be deprived of them without a fair indemnity.”120 While championing feudal privilege in universal and theoretical terms as bearing principles of French-Canadian society, the Taschereaus were, at the same time, master plumbers in the mechanics of seigneurialism. Judicial and notarial archives show their capacity to use customary law and contemporary business law to enforce their rights at their mills, domains, and across the rangs of conceded lands. In conflicts with peasants who came armed with memory, oral tradition, and, hopefully, some family or notarial papers, the Taschereaus had the weight of literacy,

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

legal documents, historical records, and professional subordinates. Taschereau family libraries contained the classic French works on seigneurialism – Dictionnaire des Domaines, Traité des biens en roture, the multi-volume works of Pothier, and the Custom of Paris itself, as well as atlases, collections of legislation, and British texts on magistrates and court procedures. The vaults in the Taschereau manor houses and in the offices of their notaries necessarily included boxes of concession contracts, farm and mill leases, maps, surveys, and leather-bound inventories, as well as land and rent registers, account books, and indexes to help them maintain order in their own records.121 With Jean-Thomas as head in the years 1809–32, the family across their several seigneuries extended concessions into the forested hills back from the Chaudière along rang roads that bore the names of family members or favoured saints: Saint Louise and Saint-Elzéar in 1811, Saint-André in 1821, and Sainte-Anne and Saint-Olivier in 1828. To enforce their seigneurial rights, the Taschereaus made regular use of obligation contracts. These notarized documents, usually a recognition of peasant debt, were way stations on the road to the courts and land seizure. While some debtors, succumbing to failed harvests, illness, or age, asked for permission to abandon their properties and their overdue cens et rentes or lods et ventes, most signed a note or billet. Ongoing delinquency resulted in the transformation of this note into a formal obligation or debt contract. These were notarized by John Walsh or Jean-Baptiste Bonneville in Sainte-Marie, by Jean-Joseph Reny in Saint-Elzéar, or by François Verreau in Saint-Joseph. After 1832 when Jean-Thomas’s nephew Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, a seigneur in his own right, opened a notarial practice just steps away from the seigneurial domain, the Taschereaus could turn to a professional who was one of their own. Thomas-Jacques’s son Gustave-Olivier Taschereau, of the fourth generation, would in turn open a notarial practice in Saint-Joseph.122 This formalization of overdue seigneurial rents into notarized contracts formed part of a juridical process that might terminate in alienation through a sheriff ’s sale or repossession by the seigneur. In either sale or repossession, the censitaire lost much of the value of the improvements he had made to his property. The forcing of debtors into obligations occurred in waves, some clearly the result of economic hardship such as in 1816. Other debts, often on marginal lands, were allowed to accumulate over decades. In his 1854 debt contract, for example, Jean Kemneur, declaring himself “trop pauvre” to pay rents on his concession granted by Jean-Thomas Taschereau in 1826, asked the seigneur to repossess his land, the decades of labour presumably wiped out.123 It is difficult to get a precise sense of these outstanding debts across the several Taschereau seigneuries, but taken as a whole, they represented sizable sums. In 1827, censitaires owed £640 in unpaid and as yet unnotarized seigneurial rents to Marie-Louise Taschereau and her husband, Olivier Perreault. The inventory of Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau, drawn up on his death in 1845, included

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Table 5.3 Concessions and obligations on Taschereau seigneuries drawn up by local notaries, 1810–1832

1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832

Concessions 4 18 13 1 5 50 15 0 14 33 62 14 8 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Obligations

2 0 4 1 52 10 4 2 0 6 2 10 10 55 2 2 19 1 0 2 2

Source: banq-q, cn306, s43, Répertoire 301831, notary John Walsh; cn306, s9, Répertoire 301793/301794, notary Jean-Baptiste Bonneville; cn301, s42, Répertoire 301830, notary François Verreau; cn306, s34, Répertoire 301819/301820, notary Jean-Joseph Reny. Concessions on Taschereau seigneuries in this period were written almost entirely by notary John Walsh. Obligations were drawn up by Walsh, who worked in Sainte-Marie, and Jean-Baptiste Bonneville (Sainte-Marie), François Verreau (Saint-Joseph), and Jean-Joseph Reny (Saint-Elzéar). In 1832, Thomas-Jacques Taschereau was commissioned as a notary, and he and then his son, Gustave-Olivier, commissioned in 1860 and practising in Saint-Joseph, wrote many, but certainly not all, Taschereau contracts.

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

assets of $7,300 in notarized seigneurial-debt obligations and another $11,095 of cens et rentes and lods et ventes listed as outstanding.124 Seigneurialism and the seigneurial family were supportive institutions. The mills of Sainte-Marie serve as a case study of family seigneurial strategy over the long haul of economic, demographic, and legal transformation. The construction and operation of the banal flour mill, with its access roads, river sluices, outbuildings, and fences, were principal obligations of the seigneur to the Crown and, if serving a viable grain-producing seigneury, represented important revenues in money or kind. With several fast-flowing streams from uplands on both sides of the Chaudière River, the Sainte-Marie seigneury was well served with mill sites. The first Taschereau mill, built and leased under the French regime by widow Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière was operational by 1753. One of Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s first acts in taking over the seigneury in 1773 was to dismantle this mill and rebuild it on a nearby site. Alongside this reconstructed mill, he built a two-bladed sawmill. As the pattern of settlement in Sainte-Marie progressed, the location of these mills on the west side of the Chaudière became increasingly inconvenient: the domain, the village, and many concessions, all east of the river, were accessible only by boat or in winter by ice bridges. Before his death, Gabriel-Elzéar supervised construction of a second mill, this one on a Sainte-Marie site near the domain and boasting three grindstones.125 Since this mill served several Taschereau seigneuries, it was JeanThomas Taschereau’s responsibility as family head to supervise the leases, repairs, and organization in the granary for separate storage spaces for the banal shares of each of the six heirs. The Taschereau seigneuries were eventually served by additional flour mills at Saint-Joseph, Saint-François, and Jolliet. On behalf of his stepmother and siblings, Jean-Thomas contracted with Edward Ennis in 1826 to rebuild the dam and cisterns of the Jolliet mill as well as install new grindstones and machinery. Alongside the development of mills within this classic feudal relationship between seigneur and peasant, third-generation Taschereaus saw the potential of new approaches to agriculture and new technologies. In 1816, Jean-Thomas Taschereau chaired a legislative committee looking into whether agriculture in Lower Canada “has declined or made progress.” The committee drew up a list of twelve questions and heard testimony from leading seigneurs and landlords. Its report spoke to the backwardness of the peasantry, their use of ploughs and other tools predating the Conquest, their reluctance to adopt new “inventions,” and their failure to use manure or to fence in their animals.126 Jean-Thomas also chaired a committee that examined the funding of agricultural societies, the societies’ programs to import books and seeds, and their plans for an experimental farm.127 Not coincidentally, the Société d’agriculture de la Nouvelle Beauce was the most generously funded society in the Quebec district. J.-A. Philippon, husband of Jean-Thomas’s niece and his

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collaborator in regional projects, served as its secretary, lobbying for forest conservation, the production of hemp, restrictions on the importing of American cattle, and a local periodical to publicize “experiments and discoveries in Agriculture.”128 Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau had been chief road commissioner for the Quebec district and superintendent of provincial post houses. Son Jean-Thomas pursued this interest in transportation, serving as his father’s deputy road commissioner, and his brother Thomas-Pierre-Joseph became chief road commissioner for the Quebec district in 1823. Just weeks before being jailed in 1810, Jean-Thomas Taschereau had sat on a committee examining the prospect of ferry service between Quebec City and Pointe-Lévy and on another to which postmasters petitioned for the continuation of the automatic right of sons to the post-house positions of their fathers.129 In 1816, he chaired a committee on transportation. If internal communications were to improve in Lower Canada – and he had observed the riots resulting from his father’s Road Act of 1796 – roads would have to be prioritized and their construction and maintenance organized by other means than traditional peasant corvées. Jean-Thomas reorganized transportation into categories: roads to remote parts, trunk roads between provinces or from district to district, river communications, and bridges over major rivers.130 Beyond these colony-wide considerations, Taschereau regularly intervened in his own region: roads from Pointe-Lévy to Lotbinière, bridges over the Chaudière and Etchemin rivers, and ferry service between Quebec City and Pointe-Lévy. Transportation east from the Taschereau seigneuries along the Etchemin River, across St Lawrence–Atlantic headwaters, and down to New Brunswick’s Saint-Jean River came up regularly in discussions of trunk roads. The Taschereau seigneuries straddled the Chaudière River, their villages and infrastructures concentrated on the east side while significant expansion was occurring west of the river via the Craig Road into the Eastern Townships. The Taschereaus were strong supporters of a bridge. In 1818, Jean-Thomas, instrumental in the endeavour, held twenty-nine of eighty-six shares in the company chartered to construct a toll bridge over the Chaudière at Sainte-Marie.131 Near completion and with workers on a stage underneath, the bridge collapsed in February 1820, killing three. In 1829, the bridge project was replaced by a cable ferry.

lo cal au thor it y and k in Transformation on Taschereau seigneuries – in mills or manufactures, in forestclearing, in the clamour over school taxes, or in the releasing of lands to colonization – presented Jean-Thomas with issues of authority and issues relating to the

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

interaction between seigneur and community, now significantly different from those of his father’s generation. In the 1770s, with a view to adopting a hands-on approach in the direction of the family’s principal patrimony, his father had moved his extended family from Quebec to their Sainte-Marie seigneury. Gabriel-Elzéar’s exercise of authority had been intensely personal, with little institutional or professional interference. His direct hand, voice, and written instructions were evident in the seigneury’s roads and mills and in the construction of the parish church. As a magistrate, he dispensed justice from his manor office, and only in the last decade of his life did a member of the professions, a notary, take up residence in Sainte-Marie. These personal and customary forms of authority took new institutional shape in the early nineteenth century with the introduction of local courts, schools, a convent, new parishes, and the arrival in Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph of legal, medical, and teaching professionals. At the same time, national responsibilities took family head Jean-Thomas Taschereau to frequent sojourns in Quebec and to constant travel across Lower Canada: legislative sittings, military service in the Montreal region during the War of 1812–14, duties as road commissioner, duties with fisheries administration in the Gaspé, service as chief of police in Quebec City after 1826, and sittings of the Court of King’s Bench after 1828. Absent for long periods, JeanThomas turned to his brothers and other relatives, to the clergy, and to professionals to act for him in the Beauce. With an emerging sense of family identity and with shared classical college and professional training, a pool of brothers, sons, nephews, brothers-in-law, and sons-in-law spread into positions of local authority as militia officers, justices of the peace, notaries, lawyers, sheriffs, doctors, teachers, Crown lands agents, collectors of customs, and school inspectors. While family members did occasionally undertake professional military careers, Taschereau authority in a national sense was rooted in the civil rather than in the sustained military tradition of the de Salaberrys or the Juchereau Duchesnays, elite families to whom the Taschereaus were linked by marriage.132 However, with its hierarchies, annual muster, parades, uniforms, and cavalry unit, the militia was a visible institution of order and was essential to Taschereau standing in Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph. Across the first half of the nineteenth century, the Sainte-Marie battalion was commanded successively by three Taschereau brothers, Thomas-PierreJoseph, Jean-Thomas, and Antoine-Charles. In 1827, the Sainte-Marie battalion counted several Taschereau among its officers.133 Ubiquitous Taschereau presence in the administration of local justice was useful in a climate of fear of rural unrest and as seigneurs increasingly resorted to the use use of legal devices and formal debt-recovery mechanisms. In the assembly, Jean-Thomas spoke annually in favour of measures to establish order in the coun-

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tryside. He was particularly concerned about the peasantry’s willingness to use distant urban courts to contest “trivial and common matters” best decided in the parish. He brought in a bill to establish a village police force and another to establish courts that would hear claims “in country parishes.”134 In 1821, Jean-Thomas and his brother Thomas-Pierre-Joseph were named to the Commissioners Court established in Sainte-Marie to hear small cases. Three of Jean-Thomas’s brothers would serve as justices of the peace in Sainte-Marie, as did his nephew.135 By the early 1830s, a new generation of Taschereaus was moving into professional life in the Beauce as lawyers, doctors, and notaries.136 This blanketing of Taschereau-connected legal professionals ensured discretion in family business. When seigneur Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau died in 1845, his brother acting as notary and his cousin acting as lawyer took charge of drawing up the inventory of the estate and preparing for its administration by his young widow.137

5.17 Militia mustered on the square in front of Sainte-Marie’s parish church (n.d.)

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

Lesser professions were also critical sources of information for the seigneur. Joseph Martel acted as surveyor for Jean-Thomas Taschereau. As well as performing the chaining and measuring required of him in his official capacity, he tramped across peasant properties to report on clearings, burnt areas, and the condition of hardwood forests.138 One of Jean-Thomas’s nephews would train as a surveyor, and his sister Julie-Louise married Dr Richard-Achille Fortier (1803–1870). Trained in Philadelphia, Fortier was one of the first doctors in Sainte-Marie; when his health broke down, he took office as head of the land-registry office in Sainte-Marie. Other Taschereaus acted as Crown lands agents and school inspectors.139 Also prominent among local professionals linked by kin was Joseph-Antoine Philippon, husband of Jean-Thomas’s niece Claire Taschereau. He gave the family entry into the new and influential local milieu of educators and administrators. As well as being a schoolmaster, Philippon was named captain of the local militia (1818). In 1821, the Société d’agriculture de la Nouvelle Beauce was established, and with Philippon as its first secretary, it organized fairs and promoted agricultural improvement. Before drowning in the Chaudière River in June 1832, he travelled with Jean-Thomas in the latter’s function as road commissioner, acting as his secretary and writing reports. He appears as a creditor for firewood delivered to Abbé Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and, along with Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau (his father-in-law), Jean-Thomas Taschereau, and other notables, was a member of the consortium established to build a bridge over the Chaudière.140 Whatever their links to new professions, secular sciences, or institutions like the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, the Taschereaus never lost sight of the church’s centrality in the rural community. Always close to the episcopacy, they had seen to the transfer in the 1790s of out-of-favour priests. Parish priest Antoine Villade’s curacy in Sainte-Marie spanned three decades, 1796 to 1837, and represented a long period of collaboration between manor house and presbytery. Villade and Jean-Thomas discussed immigration, local debt, and the tannery. Excluded from professional and commercial life, women were pivotal in reinforcing the symbiosis between religious and seigneurial authority. Marie Panet, wife of the seigneur and niece of the archbishop, was an intimate of the curé, furnishing the church, exchanging notes, and, in her husband’s absence, turning to him for a loan.141 With four branches of the family in Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph by the 1820s, Taschereau wives, widows, daughters, granddaughters, aunts, and cousins cut a wide swath of devoutness and respectability in public rituals across the com munity.142 The husband of Marie-Louise Taschereau, for example, would quite typically speak of his wife’s “zealous observance” of Catholic principles.143 Besides their central participation in the reconstruction of the domain chapel in 1828, in

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part through the legacy of Marie Taschereau, Taschereau women were able to use the convent established in Sainte-Marie in 1823 as another channel to influence charity, education, and the encouragement of female religious vocations.

lo cal aid an d e ducat ion Even before Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s death in 1809, the role of the state in charity was increasing.144 With peasants in the Beauce starving and lacking seed grain, JeanThomas Taschereau and Villade collaborated in collecting statistics, reporting them to authorities, and petitioning for state aid. Chairing an 1807 assembly committee looking into relief for “the real poor” as opposed to for “those who have become necessitous from idle and drunken habits,” Taschereau stated his determination to force the latter “to work and become useful members of society in this country, where labourers are so much wanted.” Poor relief would be administered by three trustees elected in every parish; the trustees would grant relief only on the basis of reports from twelve parishioners who would “have a proper knowledge of such as may claim assistance, and will be interested in not granting with too great facility, relief to idlers and vagabonds.” Relief would be provided in kind, “in the form of articles of nourishment and not in money.”145 Jean-Thomas understood the importance of popular education – what Bruce Curtis describes as the process of “ruling by schooling” – and was a principal figure in initial attempts to implement universal literacy, both nationally and in the Beauce.146 The reliance of the peasantry on literate social superiors had been an essential form of rural authority evident in his father’s recording of church minutes, in his carefully written instructions as road commissioner, and in his role as communicator with outside literate worlds of politics, justice, and militia organization. Even before the arrival of resident notaries in the Beauce, the Taschereaus had emphasized written contracts of concession, debt, lease, and apprenticeship as means of bringing order and of registering official memory. At the seminary and at home, Jean-Thomas was raised with late eighteenth-century cultural traditions of the Enlightenment that brought to his social milieu an awareness of the potential of literacy and universal education in the Atlantic world. In Lower Canada, progressive seigneurs and promoters of agricultural societies agreed that only through schooling could the peasantry participate meaningfully in agricultural reform.147 Britain’s imposition of an assembly elected by broad franchise, together with the arrival in the Beauce of diverse ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, gave further urgency to debates around popular education. Leaders like Taschereau saw the links between universal literacy and teacher training, the appointment of school commissioners, and the school as a force in the institutional and intellectual life of the rural com-

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

munity. A well-managed schoolhouse could be regulated as a meeting place and might serve as a site for the circuit court. Popular education brought to the fore complex issues of church and state, national cultures, and evolving social relations around local governance and taxation. As a senior patrician, legislator, and seigneur, Jean-Thomas had a significant role in high politics. Marriage to Marie Panet placed him in the inner circle of her uncle Bernard-Claude Panet, coadjutor and then archbishop, 1825–33. For at least a decade, Panet and Taschereau would try to mediate as Catholic moderates amenable to state aid in education, to a certain place for secular schooling, and to a denominational model that might recognize parallel Protestant and Catholic schools. Jean-Thomas’s brother-in-law Olivier Perrault shared these interests and was a major ally as Speaker of the Legislative Council and Court of King’s Bench judge. Jean-Thomas had also collaborated with Jérôme Demers, principal of the Seminary of Quebec. And, distancing himself over the years from the Papineau nationalists, he positioned himself as a respected bridge into the colonial administrations of governors Dalhousie, Lord Bathurst, and Sir James Kempt, as well as a reliable conduit to Jonathan Sewell and authorities in the English community. Jean-Thomas had solid credentials as an intellectual; his friend and fellow editor at Le Canadien was principal advocate of monitorial schooling (or Lancaster schools), in which abler pupils taught others. Jean-Thomas supported the principles of the School Law of 1801 and its vision of a pluralist system of state education administered through the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. In 1822, he was appointed to the board of the institution, and as late as 1828, he was still trying to organize an acceptable denominational split for the board. Much of his heavy lifting was in the assembly and in negotiating an acceptable education act. Back from the War of 1812–14, Jean-Thomas in 1814 took leadership in writing a bill that called for parish schools to be established as the “first rudiments of education,” for the provision of schoolmasters in every parish, and for the funding of local education in the same manner as funding for churches.148 While the bill failed, it brought attention to elementary education, to Scottish and American models, and to the possible sharing of state and clerical authority in education. In 1822, he brought forward another education bill, one that would provide “free schools” and would separate the Royal Institution into Protestant and Roman Catholic denominational committees. While Lieutenant-Governor Lord Bathurst and other colonial officials hesitated when confronted with the principle of funding Catholic schools with public monies, the centrist position of Panet-Taschereau lost support from critical members in the Catholic hierarchy, particularly Bishop Jean-Jacques Lartigue and ultramontanists who advocated that education be solely a church responsibility.149 Education acts in 1824 and 1829 ended the viability of the

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Royal Institution with its model of a state-funded and centralized system of popular education. While Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s national influence ebbed in favour of a decentralized and increasingly sectarian system, he continued to promote popular education in the Beauce. He and Olivier Perrault spearheaded an 1814 petition for the establishment of a school in Sainte-Marie under the aegis of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. The petition was written in Taschereau’s hand, and Perrault offered land as a school site. Under the Royal Institution’s centralized, state-funded program, schoolmasters were named by the legislature. The petition proposed, as teacher, Joseph-Antoine Philippon, married to a Taschereau, and as school commissioners, parish priest Villade, militia major François Verrault, and notary John Walsh.150 All were appointed, with the governor adding Taschereau and Perrault as commissioners. In the assembly, Taschereau may have had a role in seeing that Philippon’s annual government salary in 1815 was £54, a salary more than double the amount paid most schoolmasters. The first school, apparently housed in a building owned by Villade, was replaced in 1822. The permanent school was built on land given by Perrault, the Taschereau family underwriting 75 per cent of its construction.151 In April 1823, the school was reported as “not quite finished but liveable.”152 During the 1820s, the school annually attracted eighteen to twenty-five students, although children were regularly drawn off for farm work. Because the school served both sides of the Chaudière, freeze-ups and thaws brought drops in attendance of up to 50 per cent. Although the Taschereau children had home tutors and then boarded in Quebec, they occasionally attended the local school. Aged seven in 1827, Jean-Thomas’s son Elzéar-Alexandre was sent to the village school to learn English.153 By the time of Jean-Thomas’s death in 1832, multiple schools had been established across the Taschereau seigneuries: four in Saint-François de Beauce, three in Saint-Joseph, and eleven in Sainte-Marie. This expansion only increased Taschereau influence on local education. Jean-Thomas’s nephew Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau succeeded his father as a seigneur and as a school commissioner, and he was later named inspector of schools for the counties of Beauce, Mégantic, and Dorchester. In 1832, Pierre-Elzéar’s brother Antoine-Charles replaced him in this function, presiding as well over the election of individual school boards and the writing of regional school reports. By 1834, Louis-Épictière Taschereau, JeanThomas’s illegitimate son, was teaching in the schoolhouse at L’Écuyer.154 Struck down in 1832, Jean-Thomas Taschereau left young children, a widow, and a complicated succession. Having overcome his misstep in challenging Governor Craig and British authority in 1810 and as family head for over two decades, he had greatly strengthened the Taschereaus’ place in colonial society. Taschereau status

Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr (1778–1832)

was officially recognized in Jean-Thomas’s appointment to high militia and judicial office as well as in his obtaining a seat in the Legislative Council. With support in the Beauce from his expanding kin network, Jean-Thomas was able to embed an organic Taschereau presence in cultural practices associated with community, work, religiosity, and education – what Michel Vovelle describes as “traits de civilisation.”155 Through two of his sons, fourth-generation Taschereaus of his lineage would build on this legacy and reach the pinnacle of Canada’s religious and judicial hierarchy.

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6 John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Head of his generation, John Samuel McCord shared the Taschereaus’ tastes for high culture and estate life. Also like them, he would turn to the state and to the established church, to the first for roads, markets, and policing and to the second for educational and social infrastructures. It will be suggested here that McCord’s corporate and sectarian view of institutions, evident in his leadership in the Masons, Christ Church Cathedral, and Bishop’s University, would compete unsuccessfully with the strong statist tendencies of Protestant society. His experience also insinuates that the retention of traditional forms of authority was more tenuous in Montreal. Younger than Jean-Thomas Taschereau and living into the 1860s, John Samuel McCord saw the rapid decline of his cultural and scientific influence. This loss of hegemony was partly associated with the accumulation of new forms of capital in industrial Montreal. The decline of McCord patricianism can also be linked to changes in institutions and in professional networks in the creation and transmission of knowledge in science, law, education, and philanthropy. Even before Darwin, McCord’s epistemological pins in natural science, in the established church, and in amateur culture in the arts, sciences, and law were eroding. Leadership in the construction of the rural cemetery on Mount Royal and of the new Anglican cathedral are presented here as indications of the marginalization of the McCords in the face of emerging nodes of intellectual and cultural authority in non-Anglican English Montreal. Certainly, the capitalist penetration observable on seigneuries in the Beauce was gradual compared to the dramatic changes that occurred on McCord lands. Thomas McCord’s decline and then death in 1824 coincided with the removal of the city fortifications, the introduction of steam power into local industries, and the opening of the Lachine Canal just beyond the southern edge of the Nazareth Fief. The opening of Sainte-Anne’s Market on the edge of the fief in 1832 was clear evidence of a changing urban economy and demography, as were the nearby immigrant sheds.

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

These changes led to the decline on the McCord fief of market gardening, pasturing, and banal milling in favour of accelerating urban and industrial activities: the construction of turning basins, warehouses, manufactures, and popular housing. The census of 1842 reported the presence of multiple industries, many steamdriven, in the Sainte-Anne suburb, or Griffintown as the fief came to be known: two soap manufactures, two nail manufactures, a foundry, two tanneries, two gristmills, a sawmill, and a ropewalk.1 These transformations in forms of energy and in Montreal’s industrial landscape signalled new challenges – dare one resuscitate the “transition” discourse of Maurice Dobbs, Pierre Vilar, and, in Montreal, the Montreal Business History Group? – to traditional forms of authority, to ancien régime institutions, and to historical attitudes towards education and poverty.2 Studies by Dan Horner, Sherry Olson, and Patricia Thornton have detailed accelerating civil unrest, violence, and rioting in the city. The aptly named McCord Street in Griffintown developed as a locus of Irish carters and their stables. Across urban Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, Irish Catholics emerged as a political and institutional force with a sense of identity and ethnic loyalties sharply distinct from the high culture of the Protestant McCords. While the McCords, far from the street they named after themselves, occupied their Mount Royal estate for some eight decades, 75 per cent of the inhabitants of Griffintown changed their dwelling place over a five-year period.3 Olson and Thornton report that, in the 1860s, thirteen children under age five from six different Ryan families died in sordid housing along a single stretch of lane between McCord and Murray streets.4 The fief, the Anglican Church, and the profession of law represented only the most visible channels of McCord authority in Montreal. John Samuel and his wife invested heavily in what has been described as “associational culture.”5 Raymond Williams, Robert Morris, and Jean-Marie Fecteau have tracked these associational impulses in Britain and Quebec, emphasizing how earlier forms of “natural charity” and religious paternalism were transformed into formal administrative structures.6 Male and female McCords of all ages were enthusiastic participants in a virtual flood of Victorian learned societies, clubs, philanthropies, and voluntary associations. McCord hands can be seen in prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools and universities, dozens of charities, natural history and agricultural societies, military installations, immigrant sheds, market sites, and water and sewage facilities. Through his energetic participation in the planning of public monuments, urban boulevards, cemeteries, and new Anglican parishes, John Samuel McCord was a major influence in the determination of Montreal’s suburban landscape. Their place in cathedral pews, militia parades, Masonic dinners, and community bazaars, as well as in major civic celebrations around the Victoria Bridge, royal visits, and the Crystal Palace, kept the McCords in prominent social view.

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6.1 Above Map of Nazareth Fief in southwest Montreal 6.2 Right Flooding in Griffintown. As it was along the St Lawrence River, spring flooding was part of life in Griffintown. John Samuel McCord did not settle his bride in the fief home of his childhood, preferring to live in the old city on St James Street while building his estate on Mount Royal.

6.3 Above Work in Griffintown at the Clendinneng foundry, 1891. William Clendinneng, an Irishborn Protestant like McCord, employed 180 workers at his foundry in 1872, most of whom lived in Griffintown. The foundry manufactured 5,000 stoves a month and, for the luxury trade, produced many of the wrought-iron fences that decorated Mount Royal Cemetery. 6.4 Left With its construction in the 1850s, Sainte-Anne’s Church – seen here from the Wellington Street bridge – became a major institution serving industrial Griffintown.

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One of the nimble characteristics of the patrician mind is its capacity to combine family narcissism with a sense of public service – a talent the McCords would express through their influence on civic architecture, art sponsorship, and leadership in social, benevolent, and educational institutions. The McCords, uniting civic virtues with a model Protestant family life, used a mountain property, classicism, and romanticism to construct an architectural symbol that overlooked the city and their fief. During the Rebellions of 1837–38 and despite his senior militia duties, John Samuel laid out his estate. Built on the very site depicted in a well-known landscape painting by James Duncan and located directly overlooking the estate of the city’s principal Catholic religious community, “Temple Grove” had powerful connotations of culture, rank, and empire.7 For John Samuel, this integration of private and civic architecture would climax in the cemetery he promoted on the mountain behind his estate. This astute merging of public and family life in McCord culture can be observed in other colonial elites. Emphasizing the need for gazettes, surveys, and statistics, Thomas Metcalf suggests that, in India, “effective imperial rule required not only troops and expressive symbols but knowledge.”8 In Spain, James Casey describes these connections between private and public as “mutually reinforcing aspects of moral authority.”9 How, Richard Bushman asks in his study of “respectable” 6.5 Bird’s–eye view of Montreal, 1892

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Americans, was “gentility able to cross national boundaries, to extend from class to class, to enter into hearts?”10 Péter Hanák describes a comparable process in Budapest: “[S]cience and art became public matters,” he writes, and “… beauty in art knowledge must be shared with people.”11 For his part, Clifford Geertz suggests a similar process linking culture with forms of communication – with what he calls the “traffic” in ideas.12 Commenting on John Samuel McCord’s death in 1865, a Montreal Gazette obituary linked his public influence to his refined culture and sociability: “Gifted with refined tastes, fond of pictures, statuary and books, as well as flowers, of a most happy and genial disposition, affable and courteous in his manners, he made himself beloved in private and social life, and leaves behind him almost numberless friends in different parts of the country, who will read of his departure hence with heartfelt and unqualified regret.”13 Care, however, as Mary Poovey wisely insists, must be taken in ascribing purely instrumental motives to this complex web of private and public culture. Anne Secord also warns against compacting culture into “models of disciplining,” positing instead the inclusiveness and social betterment resulting from an elite emphasis on visual beauty, leisure, and pleasure.14 Treating what he calls the evolution of the “modern self,” Dror Wahrman separates “interiority” from discussion of authority.15 This suggests that in unwrapping McCord culture, we discover that their croquet lawn, their granting of a garden key to the Anglican bishop, and their passionate study of ferns have, beyond their dimensions of social control, to be related to family culture, to Enlightenment traditions, to a certain transnational “Englishness,” and to a Christian commitment to the scientific and moral betterment of society.

lear ne d A widower after 1812 and with diminished Jewish cultural influences from his wife’s family, Thomas McCord gave full play to a Scottish educational tradition based on the classics, science, romanticism, and a general acquaintance with all branches of knowledge. French was encouraged as the principal language of continental scholarship, and with this in mind, McCord, like fellow widower Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, sent his son to board in Quebec City. John Samuel first attended Daniel Wilkie’s Classical and Mathematical Academy. A Presbyterian minister with a master’s degree earned in Scotland, Wilkie was well connected as a member of the Quebec Agricultural Society and later of the Natural History Society of Montreal, as founder of the Quebec Philosophical Society (1812) and the Quebec Emigrants’ Society (1819), and as president of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. Using Scottish textbooks for instruction in both Christian faith and Enlightenment principles, Wilkie drew students from both the Protestant and the Catholic elites. Art was important in his curriculum, and Wilkie

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himself was prominent in the establishment of Joseph Légaré’s art gallery (1833). John Samuel learned sketching in the classroom and in private lessons from wellknown artist Charlotte Berczy. The world of Scottish education in the colony was small, and Wilkie remained in close touch with his fellow alumni, who honoured him by sponsoring a portrait of him. In May 1836, John Samuel, then corresponding secretary of the Natural History Society, gave a public reading of Wilkie’s paper on “Lakes and Unexplored Seas.”16 After attending Wilkie’s academy, Thomas McCord’s sons returned to Montreal, their fief home, and enrolment in the classical college. Before the establishment of the High School of Montreal in 1843, many elite English Montrealers sent their sons to the Sulpicians’ Collège de Montréal. With excellent teachers from France, a wellendowed library and collection of scientific instruments, and strength in its French classical program as well as in astronomy, electricity, and physics, the Sulpician college advertised for non-resident Protestant students.17 As a student at the college from 1817 to 1819, John Samuel learned the history of New France and the scientific legacy of Jesuit and Récollet scholars in the colony. This solid education served him as a young lawyer; he showed, for example, familiarity with the culture of New France and the ordinances of 1716 and 1737 concerning the honours due to captains of militia in divine service.18 In the commonplace book he kept as an adult (where he filed and organized “useful” knowledge), he devoted three pages to Jesuit observations of the earthquake of 1663, and in his botanical notebook, he commented on Latin appellations made by Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier Charlevoix.19 In calculating long-term climate change, he noted that thermometers were introduced into Canada only after 1724; earlier calculations depended on travellers “and their records of the several periods of sowing time and harvest, the flowering of plants and trees, and the closing and opening of rivers – and the duration of frost and snow in winters.”20 This generation’s passion for exact measuring and observation has been effectively described by Bruce Curtis. Like keeping a diary or commonplace book, systematic weather-recording was a common practice among the elite across both English and French worlds, one that was directly linked to climatic theory and conceptions of civilization and race.21 In Quebec, Alexander Spark, a Presbyterian minister and uncle of John Samuel’s future wife, advocated systematic observation in botany and meteorology; he had a library of 450 volumes and kept a daily register of temperatures in Quebec City from 1798 until his death in 1819. The Quebec Literary and Historical Society (of which Jean-Thomas Taschereau was a founding member) reflected these scientific interests, publishing the meteorological journal kept by military surveyor Henry Bayfield on his visit to Lake Superior and a paper on climatic conditions (1832) in the St Lawrence Valley.22 John Samuel began his systematic weather-recording at age twelve, continuing his observations and twice-

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

daily notebook entries over three decades. At the Classical and Mathematical Academy, Daniel Wilkie gave him a copy of Spark’s observations, and before acquiring his own thermometers and barometers, he undoubtedly had access to his father’s instruments. It is probably Thomas McCord’s hand that can be seen alongside that of John Samuel in early recordings.23 It was only his appointment as a judge in 1842 and his absence on his circuit that prevented him from recording systematically in Montreal, “a subject I much regret particularly as the winter of 1842–3 has proved a most extraordinary one, and many Phenomena have of course escaped my observation.”24 Weather observations and statistics were a common preoccupation of newspapers, but John Samuel’s entries were especially complex, relying on the visual, on feeling, on what his favourite poet, Wordsworth, called “a simple produce of the common day.” Mary Poovey describes this as a particular knowledge system that combines order, beauty, and Christian faith.25 John Samuel’s notations went beyond twice-daily temperature and barometric readings and were instead careful observations on the effects of weather on outdoor sounds, vistas, and travel. Spring brought detailed descriptions of rainbows, thaws, and the arrival of the first crow and steamboat. Late autumn affected transport: “crossed on foot,” “ice finally taken,” and “snow fallen sufficient for sleighing.”26 While interested in the new technologies of self-recording meteorological instruments, he remained attached to measuring systems that combined good instruments with skilled human observation. His correspondence emphasized “accurate theory” and “accurate instruments,” and he warned against “superficial knowledge,” “a flimsy and specious kind of philosophy,” or a “careless and irregular manner of recording.”27 He explored Mount Royal on foot, instruments in hand, to verify the elevations he attributed to the fossil finds and ancient beaches on the Mountain.28 Using his influence with Governor Sir John Colborne, he trained weather and scientific observers drawn from the garrison. McCord felt that an understanding of climate would be “beneficial to navigation and agriculture.” Meteorology, his correspondence made clear, was part of a larger observational world that included geology, botany, surveying, public health, and art. Curious about everything in nature, he took an observational interest in the female body. Given his influence in the Montreal General Hospital, the Board of Health, the Natural History Society, and Christ Church Cathedral, he had easy access to the city’s medical elite. In 1837, he canvassed doctors on behalf of “a scientific friend in Quebec,” posing eight questions on what they had observed concerning women’s age at marriage and at their children’s conception and particularly the characteristics of menstruation among Quebec women, including its duration, their age at its commencement, and instances of “functional derangement at the commencement of menstruation.”29 In the 1830s, John Samuel’s reading included the Athenaeum, the Philosophical Magazine, the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Illustrations of Science by

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the Professors of King’s College, Illustrations of Mechanics, and Magnetical Investigations, all published in London. His records for 1836 show him buying the Edinburgh Journal of Science; from Paris, the Annales de chimie and Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet’s De l’influence des agents physiques sur la vie; and from Connecticut, the American Journal of Science and Arts.30 His commonplace book included subject titles like “Almanacs,” “Bible,” “Hogarth,” “History,” “Knowledge,” “Music,” “Phrenology,” “Voltaire,” and “Wisdom in Town and Country.” Three consecutive entries under “F” – “Flowers,” “Friendship,” and “Flag of England” – are also suggestive of the eclectic fashion in which he organized personal and public categories.31 At least into the 1840s, his approach to science and to the organization of knowledge – indeed his world view – was shaped by metropolitan connections. In the 1820s and 1830s, British science and state policy merged legislation concerning statistics and the standardization and quantification of weights and measures with legislation concerning factory inspections – this in reaction, in part, to French leadership in areas such as the metric system.32 In 1835, the Duke of Wellington as foreign secretary organized the simultaneous observation of tides on shores around the Atlantic. Poulett Thompson, later the governor of Canada, was prominent in establishing the statistical office of the Board of Trade.33 John Samuel integrated his weather observations into this imperial system, lobbying for a Montreal observatory that would be recognized by the British Meteorological Association.34 This broad scientific activity, along with his status as a landlord, lawyer, and wellconnected Anglican, facilitated John Samuel McCord’s entry into international networks. He received instructions for compiling meteorological reports from both the Meteorological Society of Great Britain, which boasted fifty-nine associates outside Britain, and the influential Albany Institute, to which he was named a corresponding member.35 He published his meteorological readings first in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and then in a Montreal pamphlet.36 He bought sophisticated meteorological instruments, entertained prominent scientists at Temple Grove, and discussed the importance of what he called “fixed,” “simple,” “permanent,” “comparable,” “standard,” and “verified instruments” with scientific correspondents in Albany, Oxford, and the Royal Society in London.37 In 1841–42, British geologist Charles Lyell included Canada in his North American scientific tour. Examining the distribution of shells in the St Lawrence Valley, he collaborated with John Samuel through the Natural History Society. Lyell visited a gravel patch discovered by McCord near Temple Grove in the hollow between Mount Royal and Westmount. The patch was of consideration interest because it contained seashells at a height carefully measured by McCord as 429 feet above sea level. Lyell published the discovery in his Travels in North America.38 Another sign of rank in the then-mixed world of academic and amateur scientists was John Samuel’s relationship with Charles Daubeny, Oxford professor of

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

botany, chemistry, and rural economy, a founder of the university’s botanical garden and, later, of its Museum of the History of Science. Trained in medicine, Daubeny was a founding member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831), and across the English world, he encouraged a network of observers who forwarded information on temperature, sea levels, volcanoes, and agricultural techniques. In 1837–38, Daubeny toured North America, visiting universities and learned societies, lecturing on subjects such as Roman husbandry, gathering information on mineral and thermal waters, and publishing his observations. He visited Montreal for two days during the rebellion period and, with John Samuel as his host, saw the city largely through McCord eyes and introductions. He brought his Oxford meteorological instruments to Temple Grove, where John Samuel was able to compare and confirm the accuracy of measurements on his actinometer, a device for measuring terrestrial and solar radiation. In his journal of his North American tour, Daubeny commented on McCord’s “addiction to science” and his “very exact meteorological register.”39 Despite these metropolitan ties, it seems that John Samuel never returned to Ireland or Britain after leaving as a child. He did, however, travel frequently to New England and the Atlantic seaboard. As with the Taschereaus, American influence both on McCord culture and on the shaping of Montreal’s landscape and institutions has been underestimated. John Samuel’s judgeship in a border region necessitated an understanding of Vermont’s legal culture, his rank as an Anglican layman took him to Episcopal synods in American cities, and as a leader in the Masons, he participated in an international network. He attended ceremonial occasions, such as the Boston Jubilee of 1851, as a tourist and as a way to meet with his American counterparts. John Samuel had a broad network of professional, associational, and institutional correspondents. Positions as corresponding secretary and then president of the Montreal Horticultural Society led to comments in the publications of horticultural societies in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and in 1836, he subscribed to the American Journal of Science and Arts, published at Yale University. In helping to organize the visit of British geologist Charles Lyell to Canada in 1841–42, he corresponded with Benjamin Silliman Jr, professor of chemistry at Yale.40 Thanks to Montreal’s water and then rail connections with Albany, links with the scientific community in the capital of New York State were particularly important. From 1836 to 1840, McCord was a corresponding member of the Albany Institute, coordinating weather observations in Montreal with those of New York State. In 1841, he hosted Theodoric Romeyn Beck at Temple Grove. A physician and amateur scientist, Beck was a founder of the Albany Lyceum of Natural History and then the Albany Institute, the latter renowned for its collection in history, natural history, and the fine arts. Beck and his brother John Broadhead Beck were actively involved in the management of the New York State Lunatic Asylum, in medical

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6.6 John Samuel McCord’s map of projected canal basins

education, and in regional publishing on botany and mineralogy. This gave them multiple scientific and associational links with John Samuel, who, among his civic hats, acted as inspector of the Montreal Lunatic Asylum. His contact with the Albany Institute was facilitated by his position as corresponding secretary of the Natural History Society of Montreal. During Beck’s visit to Temple Grove, McCord proposed that a meteorological society for North America be established that would coordinate “systems” of observation and comparative statistics between regions.41 Returning up the Hudson River Valley with his daughter Eleanor from an 1853 Episcopal meeting in New York, John Samuel stopped over in Albany and nearby Troy. He visited the latter’s rural cemetery and, already directing construction of its counterpart in Montreal at this time, commented in his diary that it was “a very gem of a cemetery, tho small, with a pretty brawling brook running through it.”42 He was also impressed with how horticultural societies had joined with burial societies to create cemeteries such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More than just a burial ground, this cemetery was planned as an educational site for training in botany, gardening, and landscaping.43 While the early nineteenth century witnessed increasing state intervention in Lower Canada’s social and educational institutions, John Samuel remained attached

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

to principles of the private corporation and of the common good as hierarchical, sectarian, and based on individual responsibility. In seeking funds for a drainage system at the Protestant Burial Ground (1833), the trustees, with McCord in the chair, expressed their preference for the sale of cemetery lots as a means of making the ground “pay for its own improvement.” This would be “more equitable” than a public subscription or subsidy, since the public are “so frequently called upon in this way, for other objects.”44 The Waverley Institute, with McCord as a leading board member, also took the form of a private corporation. Dedicated to the memory of Walter Scott, it sought public education “through the diffusion of useful knowledge, and the pursuit of liberal arts.” In its campaign to raise £20,000 in 1833, the board of the institute called on the citizenry to promote the building of a monument to “intellectual improvement,” “to the just estimate of everything enlightened and accomplished,” and to “the taste and high admiration of genius” of Montrealers.45 The Protestant Orphan Asylum, in which John Samuel’s wife, mother-in-law, and daughters were prominent, operated on similar principles, using bazaars, subscriptions, and only occasional government grants to finance its operations. In August 1831, for example, the Montreal Handel and Hayden Society presented a concert whose proceedings were donated to the Orphan Asylum and the Montreal Infant School Institution.46 In 1854, John Samuel was on the platform for a meeting held to plan a Protestant House of Refuge for Ladies, which would be attached to the House of Industry, an institution first promoted by his father, and located on Richmond Street, a site well placed to serve the disadvantaged from the Nazareth Fief. The institution was to be self-supporting through the work of its inmates, who would receive shelter in return for their work. The refuge’s sectarian links were evident in the Anglican bishop’s chairing of the meeting and the appointment of his wife as directress of its management committee.47 With McCord as its first president, Mount Royal Cemetery, a private and chartered corporation, emphasized the shared responsibility of elite female and national societies to bury the less fortunate. One of the cemetery’s missions, for example, was to bury the Protestant poor, usually in its “free ground.” This effort took the form of grants of burial lots to benevolent societies like the Protestant Orphan Asylum (1853), the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society (1853), and the St Andrew’s Society (1857), which in turn would provide burial for particular groups, such as orphans, aged women, and destitute Scots. Across the 1820s and 1830s, John Samuel was influential in reforming Lower Canadian law as a legal science. Husband of the daughter of a former attorney general, a founder of the Advocates’ Library (1828), member of the exclusive Brothers-in-Law Association, commissioner of public works (1839), bankruptcy commissioner (1840–41), and commissioner of the Seigneurial Commission of 1843

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6.7 Judge John Samuel McCord, c. 1855. Apparently never photographed with his wife or in a studio family photograph, McCord was invariably portrayed in his robes of office.

(an enquiry that met in his St James Street offices), he lobbied for a legal system that was coherent, organized, accessible, and written. Well before the codification movement of the 1850s, he was among those calling for the printing of case reports of decisions of the King’s Bench and appeal courts.48 His leadership in the Advocates’ Library positioned him to call for improved professional standards, an English version of the Custom of Paris, and an institutionalized legal education. In 1841, he seconded a Montreal Bar Association resolution proposed by LouisHippolyte LaFontaine complaining about the lack of systematization in Lower Canada’s judicial system, “its obscure, vague and unconnected” laws of procedure, and “the want of uniformity of judicial decisions,” which necessarily created “as many systems of jurisprudence as there are individuals.”49 These were, however, as Evelyn Kolish has convincingly shown, conflictual times in the modernization of Lower Canadian law.50 A Tory and influential in the court of Governor John Colborne, John Samuel McCord had little in common with Lord Durham, although he surely agreed with the latter’s dismissal of the Lower Canadian legal system as a “mass of incoherent and conflicting laws, part French, part English, and with the lines between them very confusedly drawn.” In any case, McCord’s influence as a legal intellectual declined sharply after the Rebellions of 1837–38. In 1842, he was named to the circuit court, a judgeship that took him out of Montreal for weeks at a time. More important, McCord was alienated from

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

6.8 Natural History Society of Montreal emblem

McGill University and its nascent law school. In 1857, the bar was instrumental in establishing the Lower Canadian Jurist, a monthly review of significant Montreal cases edited by four McGill law professors and the bâtonnier of the Montreal bar. Nor was his reputation as a violent militia commander in the suppression of the rebellions easily lived down among the Patriote lawyers who assumed political power in the 1840s. High Church and ethnocentric in sociability, he had no empathy with the pragmatic French-Canadian conservatives around George-Étienne Cartier. But Attorney General Cartier would be the most influential minister in the modernization that would lead to the Civil Code of 1866. John Samuel was not named to the seigneurial court of 1854, and ironically, it would be his devout Catholic nephew Thomas McCord who would act as the Codification Commission’s English-language secretary.51 John Samuel was, however, one of twenty-six founding members of the Natural History Society of Montreal, and it was perhaps in its early activities that he found his most comfortable public position. Established in 1827 and chartered in 1832, the society promised a museum and library “open to all ranks in the community.”52 It quickly became the focus for amateur science in Montreal, part of a regional network of learned associations that included Quebec’s Literary and Historical Society and the Albany Institute. The society’s building on St James Street housed the meeting rooms, library, and museum for its art, mineralogical, ornithological, and botanical collections. Weekly lectures during the winter were important social and pedagogical occasions. In its first years, John Samuel was prominent in the Natural History Society’s collecting, cataloguing, curating, and granting of awards. In 1831, he classified its

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medal and coin collections and sat as a judge on its essay committee. Both he and later his son David Ross gave public lectures on ferns; John Samuel’s study of fern habitat was published in the Canadian Naturalist.53 In 1836, he became corresponding secretary of both the Natural History Society and the Montreal General Hospital.54 He held the office of corresponding secretary in the Philosophical Society and also acted as corresponding member in Montreal for the Meteorological Society of Great Britain, the Albany Institute, and the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. These positions in the key learned and benevolent associations of English Montreal had greater significance than is implied by contemporary connotations of the terms “secretary” or “corresponding.” In scientific communities around the Atlantic world, the trustworthiness of information was often difficult to evaluate. Into the 1830s, Montreal did not have a functioning university or professions with internationally recognized standards and networks.55 This conferred remarkable authority on “amateur” associations and their “secretaries,” who acted as local hosts, dispensers of local cultural and scientific data, and funnels for outside information. Organizing the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831, an Anglican clergyman described this process as “approximating men of science to each other and promoting among them friendly feelings and an instructive interchange of ideas.”56 Reputation, trust, and the capacity for male “friendship” implied a combination of social class, literary and networking skills, and broad scientific and cultural knowledge. In offering John Samuel McCord membership, the Meteorological Society of Great Britain described the “friendly interchange of information” with those “desirous of pursuing the Science.”57 Correspondents were often members of the military, titled, or reputed as disinterested observers.58 Best known as “Judge,” McCord was also regularly addressed as “Colonel,” “Esquire,” or “President, Horticultural Society.” Different archives contain evidence of McCord’s role in dispensing a wide range of information that included neoclassical architecture, poetry, history, garden shrubs, military and scientific statistics of all sorts, and cemetery construction. “I have received a dozen copies of the enclosed for distribution to scientific friends,” one correspondent wrote, while another forwarded scientific results: “I remember that you expressed a wish to know the result of our trigonometrical measurements of the heights of hills in your neighborhood.” As corresponding secretary of the Natural History Society from 1836 to 1842, John Samuel maintained correspondence with both the Hudson’s Bay Company, concerning exploration and mapping in the West, and distinguished international scientists like geologist Charles Lyell and astronomer John Herschel. During his tenure, the society was instrumental in promoting the geological survey that would be undertaken by William Logan after 1842.59 News of the discovery in 1846 of Le Verrier’s Planet (Neptune) was forwarded

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

to McCord in the form of a pamphlet sent by an American correspondent. For their part, McCord women used Orphan Asylum business to correspond internationally on subjects like parenting, health, apprenticeship, and urban morality. McCord’s patricianism and learned culture served him well in these functions of trust, as communicator in diverse disciplines, and as intermediary in an international exchange of information. Judges, scientists, and other distinguished travellers often followed up their correspondence with visits during which the secretary provided entry into the local community. Visitors often came with handwritten notes of introduction from European or American intermediaries: “[T]he bearer, a professor in Williams College, is desirous of some information connected with an observatory.” Hosting these notables required a suitable estate and the social skills of parlour, library, and garden.

mas culinit y and nat ional ident it y Amateur science, high culture, cathedralism, and judgeship formed only part of John Samuel McCord’s complex character. Early McCords were reputed to be rough Irish, and John Samuel’s brother would remain mired in the family’s drinking tradition. Young, unmarried, and wealthy, John Samuel was himself an enthusiastic participant in the male pursuits of elite English Montrealers. McCord membership in the Masons reached back at least three generations to Ulster. John Samuel was a member of the St Paul’s Lodge of Freemasons, No. 34, for over forty years; he chaired his lodge in 1825 and, like his father, had national responsibilities for a period as deputy provincial grand master.60 Throughout his life, he attended feasts and lodge nights, such as the annual dinner held on 27 December, feast day of John the Evangelist. Of course, fraternity around drink, meat, and male solidarity continued to figure prominently in these festivities. His brother William King was a member of Quebec’s Albion Lodge, and in Montreal, he and his best friend George Moffatt travelled down from Mount Royal to attend Masonic dinners at Rasco’s Hotel. But behind the giblet soups and brandy fruits, the Masons – and this was particularly true of the McCords – represented a powerful and, above all, respectable organizational, associational, and intellectual force. From British origins among artisans and guilds, Freemasonry in the Montreal district was dominated by merchants, entrepreneurs, and professionals.61 McCord’s fellow members in 1846 included John Molson, Judge William Badgely, and the Reverend John Bethune, the rector of Christ Church who had presided at Thomas McCord’s burial. While other Lower Canadian elites looked to state intervention in the 1840s, civic fathers like McCord preferred the Masonic model of a private corporation and voluntary association through which to exercise authority and to encourage Christian morality, charity, social harmony, and intellectual improvement. From

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this perspective, and given that McCord was profoundly conservative, antidemocratic by instinct, and probably politically doomed, he must not be dismissed as part of a semi-feudal colonial regime determined to perpetuate what Bruce Curtis has called “ignorance and pastoral simplicity.”62 Studied and reflective, McCord would adopt similar institutional strategies in his tactics concerning natural history and horticultural societies, a university, a cemetery, and the construction of a cathedral. He incorporated the Masons into a nuanced cultural road map of Protestant Quebec that included social hierarchies, race, church, empire, and family. He carefully conserved substantial archives of his Masonic activities, and this collection of letters, circulars, and diplomas demonstrates his use of the Masons, their lore, their roots in Britain, and their particular history in Canada, to encourage order, education, and social unity. He wrote a “sketch” of Masonry in Montreal in 1845 as well as charting the organization of Canadian lodges from 1760.63 He based his overview on “the oldest documents,” noting that the warrants of constitution establishing the St Peter’s Lodge of Montreal in 1780 and the St John’s Lodge in 1796

6.9 Menu for Masonic dinner attended by John Samuel McCord and held at Rasco’s Hotel, 27 December 1841

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

were both signed by his father. Like the Taschereaus, he entwined his family with the sinews of Canadian history. His archives include a chart signed by his father that merged the St Andrew’s Lodge (1760), the St Patrick’s Lodge (1760), the Royal Artillery Lodge (Quebec, 1761), the Merchants’ Lodge (1762), and five others into a Provincial Grand Lodge, established in 1769. The chart showed the expansion of lodges into Upper Canada, Vermont, and New Brunswick.64 John Samuel applied his father’s charting of ethnic and class collaboration in the eighteenth century to his generation’s Freemasonry experience. His report of a colony-wide meeting of Masons in Montreal, 8 October 1823, wrapped together lodge unity, the established church, classicism, male decorum, and mutual support of the Protestant hospital and orphanage favoured by the McCord family: “[T]he Craft moved in procession to the Episcopal Parish Church where an eloquent and appropriate discourse was delivered by the Rev. B.B. Stevens, P.G. Chaplain, after which a collection was made and the sum of £59 received for which £51 was given to the charity of the Montreal General Hospital and £8 to the Orphan Asylum … [later] many of the brothers met in the new hall, most chastely and classically fitted up with double lines of columns of the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders.”65 John Samuel followed his father into militia command and, in 1827, became major in the District of Montreal Volunteer Cavalry with its fraternity around horse, British uniform, and drink. He belonged to the St Patrick’s Society when it was a national, as opposed to a Catholic, society, participating in its boisterous banquets and its mixing of Irish traditions, Catholic and Protestant – his St Patrick was Irish rather than sectarian and had none of the later sharp edges of populism and religious enmity. His role in the Brothers-in-Law Association, a lawyers’ drinking club established in 1828, was a professional expression of this elite masculine culture. Limited to fifteen members, the club met several times a year to celebrate the end of judicial terms and other significant dates in the legal calendar.66 As with the Fire Club, in which his father had been prominent in the 1780s, the Brothers-in-Law had a constitution, minutes, and a discourse of brotherhood that had more to do with male sociability than with professional interests in the law. Among the members was the solicitor general, the sheriff of Montreal, the judge for whom McCord had clerked, as well as his lifelong friend William Badgley. A legal club that used class, ethnicity, and exclusivity in numbers as filters, the Brothers-in-Law, Blaine Baker suggests, represented “second or third generation, socio-economic entrenchment” in Montreal’s English community.67 Its meetings and minutes were in English, and with the possible exception of Alexis Bourret, members were drawn entirely from the English-speaking legal elite. Club meetings rotated among Montreal’s best taverns: the Mile End Tavern, Orr’s Tavern, Mrs Hussens on Notre Dame Street, and particularly Cooley’s Tavern near the river at the foot of St Mary’s Current.

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Dinner menus featured steak, legs of lamb, cigars, and champagne. Meetings were punctuated with declarations of fraternity, toasts, and fines for lateness or absenteeism. On 20 October 1828, McCord, “having positively declared his inability to sing was permitted to escape on drinking two bumpers.” In January 1832, he transferred to the club the winnings of a bet he had made with William Walker. A prominent advocate of the union of Upper and Lower Canada and well known for a limp acquired in a duel over “an affair of honor,” Walker was to provide the club president with a hat in the style of the Spanish Cavaliers.68 By the 1830s, McCord’s marriage and parenthood, his increasing responsibilities in church affairs, and his involvement in the construction of his suburban estate were suggestive of a less boisterous masculinity. Alongside the Masonic dinners he attended and his duties as commanding officer of the Royal Montreal Cavalry (1834), McCord gravitated to more genteel, gender-mixed, learned, and benevolent pursuits in the Horticultural Society, the Natural History Society, Bishop’s University, and the Montreal General Hospital. He also acted as a special legal adviser to the Protestant Orphan Asylum. As a member of the finance committee of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society and the Gentlemen’s Finance Committee of the Protestant Orphan Asylum, he was a major voice on the issue of Protestant spending on asylums, orphanages, and old-age care.69 His diary reveals the importance to him of his domestic and parenting life at Temple Grove and his family’s increasing friendship with that of George Moffatt. Neighbours on the Mountain, the McCords were frequent dinner and garden guests at the Moffatts’ Weredale Lodge. Collaborating in Protestant charities, Anne Ross and Sophia Moffatt joined the bishop’s wife in organizing an organ concert, and Sophia Moffatt and Jane Davidson Ross, Anne Ross’s mother, were signatories for land for the new Protestant Orphan Asylum. George Moffatt was McCord’s closest friend. With wealth gained from the fur trade, importing, and land, a member of the Legislative Council and then the Special Council, and first president of the Board of Trade, George Moffatt was the colonel commanding the militia in the Montreal district and president of the Constitutional Association, which spearheaded the English community’s opposition to the Patriotes.70 Disgusted with the Rebellion Losses Bill of 1849, which compensated some Patriotes, Moffatt dropped out of politics, joining McCord in lay leadership at Christ Church and in establishing a new Protestant cemetery. As a circuit-court judge with sessions across southern Quebec communities like Beauharnois, Saint-Hyacinthe, and Sweetsburg, McCord had an extra-domestic life on the road, dining with local notables, attending church in diverse Anglican parishes, and tramping and specimen-collecting through the countryside: “drove with David [his son] to get a fern.”71 He was regularly accompanied by his children but rarely by his wife. When painful facial tics from Tourette’s syndrome made travel difficult for him after 1860, his medical student son John and his daughter

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Anne accompanied him on circuit and to mineral-bath cures at Caledonia Springs near Ottawa.72 One of John Samuel’s critical, long-term functions as family head was dealing with his younger brother, William King. By the 1830s, at the same time that John Samuel was being integrated into the respectability of the Ross family, the instability of his brother was becoming more evident. Back from study in Britain where his prodigal gambling and drinking had provoked major family crises and rendered problematic a career in the Anglican clergy, William King clerked in the law office of William Walker, prominent Montreal lawyer and member with John Samuel McCord of the Brothers-in-Law Association. He had difficulty establishing himself as a lawyer but finally set out on an itinerant career. In Sainte-Scholastique, he was well known during the rebellions as a repressive magistrate; then he was named sheriff of Sydenham (1841), circuit-court judge in the Quebec district (1844), police superintendent for the city of Quebec (1845), and resident Queen’s Bench judge in the Aylmer and Ottawa districts (1857). Locked in equal ownership of the Nazareth Fief and dependent on his brother as family head and their father’s executor, he was constantly in need of money.73 By the 1830s, William King was no longer speaking to his brother, preferring to communicate through friends or agents. Negotiations by which John Samuel might buy his brother’s share began in 1837, but in 1844, William King snubbed his brother, selling his share of the Nazareth Fief and Saint-Anne for £8,000.74 Financial divorce between the brothers did not stop William King’s wife from desperately asking for help in locating her alcoholic husband. In 1839, 1842, and 1845, William King fell in arrears for tuition payments for his son Thomas at the Seminary of Quebec. Refusing to pay school officials, William King pleaded that he was “in a period of financial difficulty.”75 Relations between the brothers was not improved by the adherence of William King’s family to Catholicism. When his daughter Louise Elizabeth died in 1845, she was buried in the Ursuline crypt and his granddaughter Gertrude McCord became an Ursuline. On William King’s death in 1858, it fell to his estranged brother to arrange for his burial. Whatever his embarrassment in life to family reputation, William King would be the first McCord to be buried in the family lot in the recently opened Mount Royal Cemetery (see table 6.1, page 253). The Napoleonic Wars had an important place in the childhood memories of this generation of English Montrealers. John Samuel’s puberty coincided with the Battle of Waterloo, and his world view would remain framed by Britain’s empire and constitution, its monarchy and established church. His 1836 list of “books to buy” fleshed out an exotic and universal empire, including Thomas Boteler’s bestseller Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia and Henry Salt’s travel classic A Voyage to Abyssinia and travels in the interior of that country.76 Much later in life and as Canada gravitated towards the autonomy of confederation and

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6.10 Portrait of William King McCord, c. 1850. “J.L. Gourlay, recalling Judge McCord to have been ‘very talented and full of humour,’ relates that when they encountered each other one wintery day at the Aylmer post office, McCord drew attention to the contrasting colour of their noses. He pointed out that his was so full of brandy that the snowflakes ‘fizzled off it like rain drops off a hot iron,’ while those on Rev. Gourlay’s nose ‘stuck till thawed off by natural heat.’”

6.11 Nelson’s Column, 1830

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

increasing Protestant sectarianism, he would remain a determined advocate of the authority of the established church and the Crown. In 1860, in preparation for the visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada, he helped draft the Anglican diocese’s declarations of loyalty to Queen Victoria as head of the Church of England and its “respect for the character, and devotion to the crown and authority of your Royal Mother, our beloved Sovereign.” During the royal visit, John Samuel proudly recorded that he met the prince twice, once in a private session in the Advocates’ Library with his fellow Superior Court judges.77 Influence from the British romantics was a critical factor in this construction of John Samuel’s identity. In particular, William Wordsworth and Walter Scott would act as powerful imaginative forces in reading families like the McCords and Rosses, shaping both male and female perceptions of classical history, architecture, nature, the nation, and gender comportment. John Samuel literally lived in a world of romantic images. In an 1832 love poem to Anne Ross, he rephrased Lord Byron, expressing pleasure at having “caged” his bride in his townhouse: A Change came over the vision of my dream He had ceased To live within himself, she was his life The ocean to the river of his thought Which terminated in a wish to see her Safely caged within St. James Street.78 A few years later and married, John Samuel and Ann Ross drew the name of their Mount Royal estate, “Temple Grove,” from a Wordsworth sonnet: Nor will I praise a Cloud, however bright, Disparaging Man’s gifts, and proper food. The Grove, the sky-built Temple, and the Dome, Though clad in colours beautiful and pure, Find in the heart of man no natural home: The immortal Mind craves objects that endure: These cleave to it; from these it cannot roam, Nor they from it: their fellowship is secure.79 Anne Ross’s diary reflects Walter Scott’s profound effect on the young in English Montreal. Fifteen in 1822, she devoured Scott’s novels as they were published, reading three in a single year.80 As a mother, she used Ivanhoe as a model for male behaviour, preserving one of her son’s childhood essays on the knight. We know, too, of Scott’s influence on John Samuel McCord’s antiquarianism, his conception of

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landscape, and his sense of honour and “Englishness.” Speaking at the meeting he chaired to memorialize Scott in Montreal, McCord twice used the term “usefulness” in describing “the great and good man.” In a virtual confession of his own merging of civic duty and personal sensuality, McCord noted that Scott’s life “showed the benefits of grafting practical usefulness upon pleasing recreation.”81 Scott’s readers enjoyed his mixing of the practical with medieval fantasy. In an 1828 article, “On Landscape Gardening,” he advised the gentleman horticulturalist to use shrubs, water, and colours to create “picturesque beauty” and “a beautiful and rational system.” He then invited “the feudal baron” to lead “his high dame” “down from her seat upon the castle walls so regularly assigned to her by ancient minstrels, and tread with stately pace the neighboring precincts which art had garnished for her reception.”82 Across the English-speaking world and in translation, epics like The Lady of the Lake influenced the creation of civic landscapes in which parks, fountains, and loch-like water bodies diverted views from urban squalor.83 Scott’s emphasis on the verdant, the panoramic, and “dame-friendly” settings would be reflected in McCord’s planning of both his estate and Mount Royal Cemetery. John Samuel increasingly merged his sense of self into a larger sense of “Englishness,” a generic understanding that would include his Ulster, Jewish, and New England roots.84 Scott helped in this process of making “Englishness” a world phenomenon. He had, for instance, an entirely different sense of the meaning of “national” than did Robert Burns, the bard of Scotland. Writing in Quebec City in 1885, Sir James McPherson Le Moine described Scott as a “genius of Great Britain” and “an entire way of learning.”85 And the Edinburgh Review, to which McCord subscribed, reminded its readers in 1832 that Scott “had the advantage of writing in a language used in different hemispheres by highly civilized communities.”86 Scott, like Wordsworth, was hugely influenced by Waterloo, visiting it and memorializing its meaning in The Field of Waterloo: A Poem (1816) and Paul’s Letters to his Kinfolk (1816).87 British angst over the French threat recurred often in Scott’s novels. In the Waverley series, he anchored The Antiquary (1816) in British fears during the 1790s of the French Revolution. Scott went beyond the literary, focusing on the collection of objects of war and their display in the lord’s home.88 Scott’s death in 1832 deeply affected the McCords, provoking emotions in English Montreal similar to those of the Battle of Trafalgar.89 Scott’s works were republished in 1834, and committees to memorialize the novelist were established throughout the English world. The Montreal committee, established in 1833 to collect money for Scott memorials in Scotland, turned to McCord as its corresponding secretary.90 Drawn from English Montreal’s most respectable medical, legal, and Anglican leaders, the committee included Chief Justice James Reid, Rev. J. Bethune of Christ Church, and Dr A.F. Holmes of the Natural History Society. Instead of just forwarding funds to Edinburgh and given their sense of English Montreal as a community,

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

they resolved to honour Scott by founding a new institution in their city. The Waverley Institute would group Montreal’s literary, scientific, and mercantile clubs into a shared site that would include a public library, reading room, museum, and lecture hall. At a meeting of the committee, McCord summarized their plans for a broad cultural institution, open to all citizens. He made no obvious invitation to French Montrealers, basing his vision rather on “Scott-like” values similar to those being pressed by fundraisers in New Zealand or the Hudson Valley: “[B]y endowing in the name of Sir Walter Scott, an institution for purposes connected with literary pursuits and instruction, we should carry his usefulness even beyond the period of his own life; we should raise a most appropriate memento of his name, and the particular application of his talents; we should ensure a constant regard to the renewal and preservation of the monument; and we should probably carry down to distant generations the name of Scott, associated with the expression of the liberal feelings of the citizens of Montreal.”91

hig h culture Art, particularly landscape and still-life painting, joined novels, poetry, and science as an ingredient of the McCords’ inner life that they could project onto Montreal’s public space. Both John Samuel and Anne Ross took painting lessons as children. Usually in chalk or pencil and as aide-mémoires, drafts, or models, John Samuel sketched in his diary, notebooks, and commonplace book. Art, for him, had two contrasting purposes: it was a way to capture exact observation and, at the same time, a means of imposing mythological and moral precepts onto local reality. In Britain, the wealthy had been buying landscape paintings to decorate their homes since the early seventeenth century, and artists like Constable and Turner had created romantic interest in the countryside ideal. In 1840, the English engraver W.H. Bartlett produced twenty-three illustrations of the Hudson River and its environs in Nathaniel Parker Willis’s American Scenery (1840); two years later, Bartlett’s 120 engravings in Canadian Scenery Illustrated gave further definition to the romantic ideal. McCord employed James Duncan to capture a certain reality of the city and its environs and accompanied the artist to sites around Montreal. While best known for his landscapes, Duncan painted street scenes and public institutions, including the interiors of Christ Church and the House of Assembly, burned in the riots of 1849. In 1860, and perhaps with a sense of Arcadian nostalgia, McCord bought two companion watercolours painted three decades earlier by Duncan: Montreal in 1832 and a river view, Montreal from St. Helen’s Island.92 This landscape movement had a particular attraction for elite women. Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, wife of Upper Canada’s lieutenant-governor, recorded careful observations of landscape in her diary, drew maps to illustrate her husband’s reports,

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and sent watercolours to her daughters in England.93 Colin Coates has shown the influence of Elizabeth Hale in transforming the workaday Hale seigneury at SainteAnne-de-la-Pérade into a “picturesque landscape.”94 Along with her drawing of the Chaudière Falls, two albums of the watercolours (1838–42) of Millicent Mary Caplin, wife of an officer of the Coldstream Guards, are held by the National Archives of Canada.95 Two women – Mrs Andrews (1831) and Mrs Fitzgerald (1831) – are listed among the twenty-six drawing masters giving private lessons in Quebec and Montreal from 1820 to 1850.96 This female interest in drawing and art collecting ensured that exhibitions were popular mixed events enthusiastically supported by artists. In 1828, for example, the Quebec Ladies’ Bazaar sponsored an exhibition of James Pattison Cockburn’s landscape painting, and in Montreal in 1847, the Montreal Gallery of Pictures, an exhibition of seven English-speaking artists, was organized by Miss Deming and Miss Dunkin.97 Like gardening or collecting botanical specimens, sketching sorties were suitable outdoor activities for women, the gendered counterparts of male snowshoeing outings on the Mountain. In Quebec, for example, Miss Dawson’s Quebec Studio Club travelled out to “charming spots” where they could draw in “mutual helpfulness” the “infinite variety of landscape.” After childhood lessons from Charlotte Berczy, Anne Ross was tutored by James Duncan, coincidentally her future husband’s preferred artist and a landscape painter reputed to have taught in all of Montreal’s convents. As a student, she was advised “to pay great attention to your music and art as [your] aunt is a most excellent judge of both.” Her diary and commonplace book contain multiple sketches and comments on art. She noted that one of her father’s friends had lent her “Mr. Joey Samson’s sketches of Lower Canada, in true Yankee style, the best of it are the penciled remarks.”98 Knowledge of painting found its way into the discourse of courting and aided John Samuel’s integration into Ross family culture. Writing to Anne’s sister, Eliza in 1832, John Samuel thanked her for her “kind attention in drawing my notice to the production of a young artist, in the department of Flower Painting.”99 Anne Ross enthusiastically supported her husband’s patronage of Duncan’s Montreal scenes, and a year after John Samuel’s death, in a symbolic gesture, she offered her son two Duncan landscapes on his twentieth birthday.100 A skilled watercolour painter, particularly of botanical subjects, Anne Ross adorned the walls of Temple Grove with her paintings; among those exhibited publicly, one can be found in the collection of Jacques Viger, first mayor of Montreal. Along with her virtues as a mother and patron of orphans, it was Anne Ross’s artistic creativity that remained in family memory. After her death in 1870, her paintbrushes and palette became part of a memorial display case at Temple Grove, while her paintings were archived by her son and incorporated into his McCord Museum collection.101 The McCords’ sense of city and countryside was profoundly affected by a style introduced principally by artists trained by the British military. While urban images

6.12 Anne Ross McCord, 1851

6.13 Below Anne Ross’s aquarelle A Moss Rose, 1848

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from the New France period were mostly cartographic, British military artists who arrived after 1760 moved from their first reliance on pencil drawings to watercolour painting and greater licence, to the picturesque, to scenery, and to the romantic given currency by landscape architects such as Humphry Repton, artists like Constable, and poets like Wordsworth. Military artists like Thomas Davies, James Pattison Cockburn, and George Heriot were all taught or influenced by the painter Paul Sandby.102 These works, such as Davies’s view of the village of Chateau Richer, included the primitive and the daily – ramshackle farms, animals, and the stumps of nearby forests. When these artists painted Montreal, they often did so from the vantage point of the military base facing the city on St Helen’s Island. Their works emphasized the river, soldiers, docks, people on the riverbanks, and other themes entirely familiar on the Nazareth Fief of McCord’s youth. From this perspective, the St Lawrence River was close, fast, dangerous, and the porter of immigrants and cholera. Countering these river views, Montreal could also be painted from the slopes of Mount Royal. From there, the city below could be rendered picturesque and the urban framed with trees, streams, and sloping fields reminiscent of an English countryside. In his last watercolour (1812), Thomas Davies, who also influenced Taschereau landscape perspectives in the Chaudière, painted Montreal from the Mountain, giving particular emphasis to flag and fort. These imperial representations, symbolic of war and imperialism and anachronistic given the dismantling of the city’s fortifications after 1818, could, in imitation of a common British technique, be replaced with urns and other vestiges suggestive of classical order, permanence, and Arcadian peace.103 These Mount Royal–oriented landscapes were part of a larger cultural reshaping of Montreal space in which height, panorama, groomed nature, and individual estates had increasing importance. Cloning British and American neoclassical architectural fashions, the McCords’ Temple Grove would be an early Mount Royal landmark in this tradition. Thomas Doige, author of Montreal’s first street directory (1819), transferred this visual perspective into discourse, using the Mountain to introduce the city: From various parts of this Mountain [he told his subscribers] a beautiful prospect opens to the view … there is a delightful view of Chambly Mountain – Beloeil Mountain … the St. John’s Mountain, and of the Blue Mountains, in the State of Vermont … On this spot, scarcely out of the buzz of business in the Town, which appears to lie immediately beneath it, you perceive the shipping in the harbor, the mechanic on his building, the agriculturist in his field and innumerable fine gardens and orchards, surrounding the various elegant seats, belonging to the gentlemen of

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Montreal. All kinds of fruit, found in European climes under similar latitudes, are produced in these gardens – the apples in particular, are of a very superior quality.104 As a judge, public-health official, and proprietor of an industrial suburb, John Samuel was intimate with stink, violence, fires, and faceless death: “had a most disagreeable day at Gaol,” “inspecting lunatics,” he told his diary in 1853. Landscapes inspired McCord, and the construction of his Mount Royal estate would be a means of encouraging respectable behaviour, what an American horticultural review described as “a model for less cultivated neighbors.” 105 “On a winter morning,” he recorded in his diary, “amidst the most beautiful and clear cloudless sky, tho high, I noticed that the outlines of the mountains from St. Hilaire to Vermont were most dramatically and sharply defined on the horizon, a certain sign of change to bad weather.”106

6.14 View of Montreal from the garden of Temple Grove before 1854. Commissioned by John Samuel McCord, this painting by James Duncan was a perfect response to McCord’s taste for panorama, an idealized bourgeois countryside, and the classical as represented by the urn.

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m ilitary repu tat ion John Samuel McCord joined the militia in a peacetime context of vestigial glamour from the War of 1812–14, with its romantic overtones of British military dress and cavalry balls. However, constitutional breakdown and Lower Canada’s descent into violence in the 1830s swept him into senior militia authority, leaving him with a reputation for ethnic violence that he would never live down. The British garrison was the primary imperial institution of physical authority in Montreal and, for the propertied, a force for security and a symbol of British identity. Troops served to put down election disturbances, strikes, or riots such as that suppressed by Thomas McCord in 1812. The McCord archives are witness to the fact that, with its officers, artists, chaplains, ceremonies, and parades, the garrison was a major cultural and social force in English Montreal. Officers were favoured garden-party and dinner guests at Temple Grove and valuable sources of scientific and cultural information from around the British world. At the military academy at West Point and en route for England, Colonel F. Farcourt wrote to John Samuel McCord reminding him to collect “seeds or roots of the pretty wild flowers of Canada” and to forward them to his wife.107 Growing up in a mansion overlooking Montreal’s Champ de Mars parade ground, Anne Ross recorded the importance of the British uniform in her imagination and social life. Her first entry (1821) was a poem to the memory of military chaplain Rev. George Jenkins, and a few pages further on she copied “Forget Me Not,” a floral tribute to the British dead in the Napoleonic Wars. She carefully entered troop reviews, coronation balls, military parades to the Anglican church, and descriptions of attractive officers.108 Still a teenager, John Samuel enrolled in 1819 as an ensign in the 1st Battalion of the Montreal militia. He quickly rose through the ranks from lieutenant to captain and, in 1827, to major. Other McCords shared this military tradition.109 The family of Anne Ross had an even stronger military tradition with six generations serving in the Canadian militia from 1759 to 1899.110 The cavalry, replete with horse, codes of honour, and association with aristocracy, was the elite corps. Members of the cavalry in Montreal were Volunteers, that is, armed units that did not have the obligatory and state-mandated connotations of the regular militia. Volunteer troops came to prominence in Britain in the 1790s where, faced with the Napoleonic threat and an acute manpower problem, “gentlemen” were permitted to establish Volunteer cavalry and infantry units. With a certain autonomy and no state funding, Volunteer commanders had the right to choose their uniforms, their officers, and their troops. In addition to being a defence force against invasion, Volunteers in Britain were prominent and violent in class confrontations such as the weavers’ strike in Manchester and the infamous Peterloo Massacre.111

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6.15 Cavalry officer in the Montreal Dragoons, c. 1827

This dual capacity for combating foreign invasion and domestic disorder was not lost on notables in Lower Canada. The Napoleonic Wars and the accompanying social and ethnic tensions, as well as concern over the reliability of the FrenchCanadian militia, led to the establishment of civil-defence associations such as the Loyal Association of Montreal (1794), which declared a readiness “to defend the Laws and Constitution of the Happy Government under which they live … at the risk of their lives and fortunes.”112 By the time of the War of 1812–14, Volunteer forces had been constituted in Upper and Lower Canada, and in the 1830s, with deepening civil unrest and renewed suspicions of the loyalty of French-Canadian militia men, the Volunteer corps were revitalized in Montreal and the English-speaking townships. Modelled on their British counterparts, they networked with rifle, constitutional, and loyalist associations. Unpaid, parallel, and semi-autonomous, these military units would have the arms and legal authority to punish on behalf of English Montreal. Copied from the Queen’s Light Dragoons, the uniform of a Montreal cavalry officer spoke of physical authority and British identity. While the dress of judges and priests symbolized the sobriety of power, the swords, epaulettes, and colour of the officer uniforms of a Champ de Mars parade, a ballroom, an Anglican cathedral, or a curling rink on the river placed class, nationality, and colonial power into highly

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visual, physical, and emotional contexts. Leaving for manoeuvres, a Montreal cavalry officer inventoried his belongings: “blue coat, white vest, best of gloves, saddle and bridle, brush, 2 pair corduroy trousers, leather button boots, 2 pair spurs, chemical soap.”113 Like the taser in contemporary police work, the cavalry sword gave authorities immense advantage in situations of popular challenge. Cavalry officers like McCord received printed instructions outlining action to be taken “against an Insurgent Mob in Street or elsewhere.” Officers dealing with a mob were reminded that in the case of “Discipline and Fire – especial care must therefore be taken not to lose these advantages by allowing the Troops to come into contact with the people, they must be held at arm’s length. The Bayonet is very good when opposed to a regular Enemy – but it would be sacrificing much to use it when Hundreds are opposed to Thousands.”114 McCord became a major in the Royal Montreal Cavalry in 1828, and by 1834, he was a commanding officer, using the term “private soldiers” to describe the Volunteers under his command. This term had increasing significance as the political situation deteriorated and as inter-ethnic connotations of militia command gave way to national solidarity. As early as 1830, and despite the distinguished military traditions of the Taschereau, Hertel de Rouville, and de Salaberry families, McCord was being warned of the dangers of having “all the Canadian gentlemen in the same Company.”115 During the rebellions, one of McCord’s officers wrote to him describing the Volunteer force as “a bond of union which unites all Britons – tories, whigs, and radicals. If the corps were dissolved, they would fall back into their former political dissensions.”116 Years later, Volunteer military service in 1837–38 under McCord command was recalled by English Montrealers as a moment of selfless loyalty to the Crown.117 The rebellions and the call-up of the Volunteers to active service swept McCord from his earlier patrician support for ethnic harmony to a stance of command and reprisals against the Patriotes. At the height of the crisis, November 1837, he was named lieutenant-colonel of the three Volunteer brigades of Montreal: cavalry, artillery, and rifles. He maintained this active commission over the following years. Through the dispatches, notes, and accounts of courts martial in his papers, a clear sense of the military culture of Volunteer officers emerges, their shared experience and male codes ranging across military music, drinking, and the use of martial force against civilians. With responsibility for disciplining the Volunteers, McCord was called upon to apply the Articles of War, the first of which read: “Obedience is the First Duty of a Soldier.” Nor was this authority limited to the barracks and military duty. “Under penalty of immediate discharge,” Volunteers agreed not to marry without express permission. As McCord put it – in terms similar to the courts martial enforced by Jean-Thomas Taschereau in 1812 – he wanted the men to be “of such a class as to be above all temptation of

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

desertion.”118 He was also called upon to mediate with French-Canadian communities in which the Volunteers were active. In February 1839, for example, he had to discipline a trooper in the Royal Montreal Cavalry who had raised “anger and ill will” in Saint-Hyacinthe. During a charivari in which young men had paraded in women’s clothing, “[the trooper] rode alongside one of the persons dressed in woman’s habiliment, his arm round the pretended lady’s neck and kissing her as it were.” Reacting quickly to what he called “insubordination” from a “private soldier,” McCord dismissed the trooper and promised prompt attention to other complaints.119 To ensure discipline, sergeants were appointed by 1838; their duties included writing reports on troopers guilty of misbehaviour. Courts martial were another powerful form of authority, and in instituting trials, McCord relied on rules laid out in the Articles of War.120 In keeping with his passion for exact observations, statistics, and recording, he seems to have appreciated military inventorying and accounting practices: his records include copies of his precise, monthly four-page returns that listed men fit for duty as well as those sick, on leave, or court-martialled. In October and November 1837, Volunteer units were called in by the magistrates to keep peace in Montreal, particularly at night, and to guard strategic sites like the courthouse. Indeed, soon after assuming command, McCord wrote the attorney general that his force could spare the regular troops the “harassing” work of night patrols.121 While his officers and men lived at home, they were ready to turn out on five minutes’ notice. McCord received written reports from each guard and patrol officer. With backup available from two mobile six-pounders mounted on gun sleighs, Volunteer patrols consisted of an officer and nine mounted men of the Montreal cavalry. At the courthouse, the nightly guard consisted of an officer and twelve men. To process arrests, magistrates were kept on the ready. “As there will doubtless be a great excitement this evening,” McCord informed the magistrates, “I have given orders to double the number of the mounted and foot patrols and therefore would suggest to the worshipful magistrates that a magistrate be requested to attend at our guard room in the old prison at eight o’clock tonight.”122 McCord’s highly visible command and the Volunteers’ violence, particularly in hunting down Patriotes in the countryside after their defeat at Saint-Eustache on 14 December 1837, destroyed his reputation among French Canadians, diminished the inclusiveness of his concept of “Englishness,” and handicapped his later efforts in ethnic bridging through leadership in construction of the cemetery, horticultural movements, or Alexandre Vattemare’s program for international exchange. DenisBenjamin Papineau, younger brother of Patriote leader Louis-Joseph, called the Volunteers the “butchers of Montreal,” while the Montreal Gazette described how, during the rebellions, the Crown had let “loose a McCord among the people, to run up and down the streets with a muster of bayonets at his tail.”123 McCord was not

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named to the Special Council that governed Lower Canada from 1838 to 1841, and he would never regain credibility among the French-Canadian professionals who assumed political power in the 1840s.

civ ic space Skilled in sketching and architectural drafting and prominent in the bar, in publichealth administration, and in the associational life of Protestant Montreal, John Samuel McCord was influential in the construction of Montreal’s built landscape. The major land proprietor in Sainte-Anne, he had voice in the development of the canal-side infrastructure of market, roads, schools, and churches. In 1847, he drew up detailed architectural plans, approved by judges and court officers, for the new courthouse in Montreal. These included the layout of basement vaults and cells and two floors to accommodate courtrooms, judges’ chambers, the Advocates’ Library, and police and sheriff ’s offices.124 The construction of McCord’s neoclassical and highly visible estate served as a symbol of the migration of the English elite to the flank of Mount Royal. From the 1830s to the 1860s, McCord had ubiquitous presence in the expansion of English Montreal’s institutions – its hospital, Anglican cathedral, learned and volunteer societies, orphanage, and burial ground. These institutions were understood to be part of the anglicizing of the Montreal landscape, but besides his use of British models, certain of his projects, such as a library and a cemetery, had important cultural connections with France and New England. The institutions he promoted were housed in dedicated institutional buildings reflective of elite architectural and social values; they welcomed, at least officially, both English and French members and encouraged the presence of children and women at their public lectures, reading rooms, museums, and lending libraries. Reminiscent of his leadership in the Waverley Institute in 1833, McCord was prominent in the 1839–41 movement to establish the Montreal Institute, which would unite under one umbrella the Mechanics’ Institute, the Mercantile Library, and the library of the Natural History Society. The Montreal Institute would be housed in the grandiose neoclassical setting of the projected Bonsecours Market building. Supported by Governor Sydenham and presented in a bill to the Special Council in February 1841, the concept of such a project grew out of an international movement led by Alexandre Vattemare. Born in France and influential in learned societies and state governments in the United States, Vattemare had been instrumental in the establishment of the Boston Public Library. In November 1840, while touring Canada, Vattemare visited Montreal and addressed the Natural History Society. One of Vattemare’s driving principles was that knowledge should be expanded and shared through the international collaboration of learned societies

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

6.16 John Samuel McCord’s floor plan for a new courthouse in Montreal (1847)

and their exchange of books, artefacts, and other scientific materials. McCord followed Vattemare on the platform, enthusiastically endorsing the establishment of an institute; he suggested that it be funded by a municipal loan of £50,000 and that it unite existing learned societies around a common library, reading room, meeting hall, museum, and exhibition space. He foresaw an institute that might also provide scholarships for law and medical students.125 Vattemare, however, returned to the United States, and Governor Sydenham’s death in September 1841 removed the institute’s principal imperial supporter. The idea of a learned institute was taken up again in 1844 by French-Canadian intellectuals who founded the Institut canadien de Montréal. Associated with the suppression of the Patriotes and inimical to the institute’s liberal, republican, and nationalist orientation, McCord would have no place in its activities.126 McCord did resurface as a founder of the Montreal Horticultural Society and then as its president (1849). Horticulture, with its gardens, its ornamentation, and its expression of both botany and beauty, was dear to McCord. The society’s genteel

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social objectives and its mixing of men and women in the context of park and garden corresponded to his social values, and he enthusiastically invested energy in reaching social harmony through nature and shared concepts of beauty. The Horticultural Society was deeply involved in civic beautification. At its annual meeting in 1861, members were congratulated for having ornamental shade trees planted in city streets and squares. This was of particularly importance because the planting, undertaken “solely due to private enterprise,” brought “additional attractiveness to the streets of our fair city and added greatly to the comfort and pleasure of its inhabitants … Buildings which are tame or even mean in appearance may be made interesting and often picturesque, by a proper disposition of trees and walks and roads which otherwise would be but simple ways of approach from one point to another are by the planting of a few trees made more interesting portions of a city.”127 Through prizes, exhibitions, and publications, the Horticultural Society provided the opportunity to show, classify, and reward gardening, flower arranging, and other genteel skills. McCord was a regular judge at flower shows and other horticultural events. Ceremonies organized by the society were congenial public occasions for women and girls to appear in parades and other polite public events. At the Montreal reception for the Prince of Wales in March 1861, gardeners’ daughters bearing flower and fruit baskets “formed one of the most pleasant features of the procession.”128 The interest of society members in gardening production and technology also served to bridge class divides between employers and artisans in trades like gardening and landscaping. Richard Sprigings, a respected gardener on several estates, sat with McCord on the society’s board, and McCord would see to his later nomination as chief gardener and then as superintendent of Mount Royal Cemetery.129 Whatever the reputation of violence he still bore from the rebellions, McCord assumed the presidency of the Montreal Horticultural Society in the midst of the ethnic confrontations of 1848–49. In 1856, the Reverend N. Villeneuve, a Sulpician priest, McCord’s Mount Royal neighbour, and his successor as president of the society, remarked that the society was “neutral ground.” Here and unlike within the domains of politics, nationalism, or religion, the two ethnic groups learned to “live in peace and work with one accord,” “admiring the particular genius of the other.”130 As he puzzled over plans for civic institutions, his own estate, and then his cemetery project on the Mountain, McCord turned to American initiatives. Andrew Jackson Downing would be a major influence. From his origins on his father’s Hudson Valley nursery, Downing developed into the principal American landscape architect before dying prematurely in 1852. His articles in the Horticulturalist and his best-selling books – The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845), Cottage Residences (1842), The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), and Treatise on the Theory and Practice of

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Landscape Gardening (1841) – had a profound effect on architecture and urban landscapes in Canada. The Horticulturalist had agents in Montreal, Quebec, and smaller centres.131 Downing advocated a genteel landscape with promenades, carriage drives, and gentle slopes; McCord’s emphasis on porches, seats, and gazebos were all echoes of Downing publications.132 With faith that “every laborer is a possible gentlemen” and the desire to stimulate the “higher social and artistic elements” lying “dormant” in every man, Downing by 1851 was emphasizing the point, often made by McCord in Montreal, that libraries and picture galleries should be “open wide.”133 In an 1842 advertisement for his family’s nursery, published in Hovey’s Magazine of Horticulture, Downing included the sketch of a gate lodge or gardener’s house.134 The latter, apparently an Americanization of Constable’s Cottage among the Trees (1789), was cloned in the superintendent’s lodge at Mount Hermon, Quebec City’s Protestant cemetery.135 Increasingly influenced by American publications and travels in New England and the Hudson Valley, McCord shared Downing’s view on the potential of vistas, walks, and fresh air to improve public health and morality. As chairman of the Board of Works (1839), McCord pointed to the benefits of avenues, promenades, and tree plantings. A generation before the Olmsted parks movement and never sharing its democratizing principles, McCord favoured opening Mount Royal to the public but only under conditions of decorum that would be determined by Mount Royal proprietors. He was on the steering committee of a project to build a coach boulevard that would start at Côte-des-Neiges behind Temple Grove and other estates and stretch around the Mountain to the new Mount Royal Cemetery. In 1856, he clipped a newspaper plea to make the boulevard from the bottom “to its top a public promenade.”136 His promotion of vistas, boulevards, classical symbols, grave statutory, benches, streams, paths, and greenhouses would serve as an inspirational counterpart to the canal, markets, and grid monotony of urban streets. The ladies of the Protestant Orphan Asylum showed the same feeling for the Mountain in choosing an orphanage site in 1823. “It is neat, comfortable and convenient,” McCord’s future mother-in-law reported in the asylum’s minutes, with “good yard room and fine pure air from the Mountain and surrounding Orchard, of which it commands a pleasant view in the rear.”137 A trustee, like his father-in-law, of the Protestant Burial Ground and then its long-time president, McCord was concerned with drainage and drinking-water issues, particularly after the cholera epidemic of 1832. The burial ground’s flatland site in the Saint-Laurent suburb was also known for hooliganism, gunfire, and nighttime dangers. In June 1833, the trustees reported a “disgusting scene” at their burial ground, where, despite the installation of barrel drains, the “remains of those whom they loved [could be observed] deposited in a pool of water, or covered with earth of the consistency of mud.”138

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For new concepts of burial that might combine sanitation with a romantic and healing vision of nature, McCord looked to the American rural cemetery movement. With direct connections to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and to the tradition of the English garden, the rural cemetery movement first took form in the 1831 charter of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cloned from there to attractive elevated sites on the outskirts of Philadelphia, New York, Albany, and ultimately Montreal, these rural cemeteries resolved the overcrowding, seepage, and rowdiness problems associated with centre-town burial grounds and churchyards. They also held romantic promise as “moral” landscapes and “natural” training sites for students of horticulture. Their distance from the city, their status as private and corporate as opposed to municipal space, and their rules, fences, and night closing times were suggestive of security and of a civic space suitable for genteel women and strolling families. Albeit from an Anglican perspective, McCord wanted to draw Catholics, Jews, and dissenting Protestants into an ecumenical institution with common civic goals. In its most picturesque and elevated sectors, the cemetery could sell large lots suitable for fenced family plots. In lower, less-desirable sections, cemetery fathers could provide unmarked or common graves for the destitute. McCord corresponded with officials and cemetery builders in Quebec City and New England, inquiring about construction techniques and experts who might be consulted. James Smillie, a Scottish engraver whose work was well known in Canada, moved from Quebec City to New York in 1830. In 1847, the year of the chartering of the cemetery in Montreal under McCord’s presidency, Smillie published illustrated bestsellers on Mount Auburn Cemetery and New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Andrew Jackson Downing was another keen observer of the rural cemetery movement. He visited Green-Wood Cemetery, which had been designed by engineer David B. Douglass, who also planned the Mount Hermon Cemetery in Quebec. Laid out in 1838 in Brooklyn overlooking the New York Harbor, Green-Wood, like its predecessor Mount Auburn, was more an exercise in landscape and panorama than an emporium of the dead. Downing helped lay out the Cemetery of the Evergreens, also in New York, designing its chapel and grounds.139 Cemeteries, Downing wrote, might serve as “great promenades,” a “magnificent drive,” and “a garden, full of the most varied instruction, amusement, and recreation”; public interest in cemeteries might stimulate the development of public parks as “preachers of temperance” and “refiners of national manners.”140 In 1852, the Mount Royal trustees under McCord’s presidency wrote Downing asking for his advice in laying out their cemetery. However, with Downing’s death in a Hudson River steamboat accident in July 1852, the trustees gave their design and construction contract to James Sidney of Philadelphia.141

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

church of en g l and From the Book of Common Prayer, to the family pew, to an inner social circle of rectors and bishops, Anglicanism was central in John Samuel’s life. He grew up attending Christ Church and inherited pew 117, for which his father had paid £35 in 1818. Like its Catholic counterpart, an Anglican proprietary pew reflected social rank, and his best friends and professional peers sat around him. Judge William Badgley sat in pew 106, and George Pyke, principal judge in sentencing the Patriotes, held 131. Colonel Bartholomew Conrad Augustus Gugy, who led the cavalry at SaintCharles in 1837, was in pew 111, while Samuel Gerrard, McCord’s mentor in commercial matters, sat in 119. John Samuel’s brother was able to socialize with his future wife in the pew adjoining the McCords’. Pew 116 was held by Dr Daniel Arnoldi, and in 1827, his daughter Aurelia Félicité married William King McCord. Also in pew 116 was Aurelia Félicité’s brother François-Cornelius-Thomas Arnoldi, medical officer in the rebellions under John Samuel’s command and, like Gugy, accused of cruelty in Volunteer mop-ups in the countryside around Montreal.142

6.17 The interior of Christ Church Cathedral. The McCords’ favourite painter, James Duncan, captured the majesty of Christ Church at the memorial service for the Duke of Wellington.

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6.18 The Anglican Parish Church of Montreal, 1822

Insistent on the presence in the McCord pew of the entire family, John Samuel attended Christ Church systematically, noting in his diary rare absences and notable sermons. On judicial circuit, he worshipped locally, lending his name in support of the establishment of the parish church next to his courthouse in Sweetsburgh. References to “Almighty God” were frequent in his commonplace books and diary. With his health deteriorating in 1860, he recorded thanks for being granted another birthday: “[I]n health, as good as my age 59 I have any reason to expect. I humbly thank Him for these mercies and pray that He will be pleased to spare me yet a few years that I may set both my spiritual and temporal houses in order for my own immortal benefit and the temporal advantage of my children when it shall please God to remove me hence. Amen.”143

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

McCord had participated enthusiastically in inter-denominational projects, including the Natural History Society, the Walter Scott memorial, Alexandre Vattemare’s Franco-American initiative, and the Montreal Horticultural Society. In 1846, he invited Catholic and Jewish authorities to join with Protestants in a common cemetery on Mount Royal. But, behind this very real ecumenism, John Samuel was a convinced High Churchman and his primary institutional pole remained the Church of England. He was firmly in what Richard Vaudry has described as a “literate culture that was at once English, Christian, and classical.”144 Whatever the increasing place of dissenters in Protestant Montreal, he firmly insisted on the Church of England’s rights as an established church. He strongly supported the principle of an episcopacy, socialized with the bishop, participated actively as a leader of church synods, and insisted on Anglican hegemony over Protestant sects for education, including universities, for poor and Native charities, and for hospitals, dispensaries, and even savings banks.145 This position, which would serve to marginalize him from critical Protestant institutions, was clear in his hostility to the growing secularism he observed at McGill University. In 1853, he dismissed McGill as a “Godless institution”; its new charter, he reported in his diary, made “melancholy” reading for Anglicans who had seen the university with official prayers and presided over by the bishop of Quebec.146 He was angered when McGill rejected Christ Church’s proposal to buy land from the university for a new cathedral opposite McGill and with an on-campus presbytery for the rector or bishop.147 While peers like Charles Dewey Day moved into positions of authority in McGill’s law or medical faculties, McCord turned instead to Bishop’s University. Established in 1843 in the town of Lennoxville in the Eastern Townships, it was principally a liberal arts college and Anglican divinity school. Universities were “Christian institutions,” its principal declared in 1860, and although open to students and faculty of other denominations, Bishop’s was run as an Anglican institution.148 In 1854, McCord was named vice-chancellor and then in 1858 chancellor, and as the university’s ranking layman, he was a platform dignitary in its religious ceremonies and convocations and a major player in the determination of university policies and teaching programs. Besides its official Anglicanism, he emphasized the university’s relationship with the Crown, an important principle in an educational institution just kilometres from the American border. He insisted that every student be obliged to take an oath of allegiance before graduation, and during the royal tour of the Eastern Townships in 1860, he proudly presented the university’s address to the Prince of Wales.149 In his frequent visits to the campus, McCord stayed at the home of the Reverend J.W. Williams, rector, professor of Belles-Lettres, and later bishop of Quebec. Even before his marriage, McCord assumed lay leadership in his parish. As president of the Montreal Sunday School Society (1830), he was brought by his

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6.19 John Samuel McCord in his robes as chancellor of Bishop’s University (1862). Painted by John A. Fraser from a Notman photograph, the portrait suggests McCord’s susceptibility to the traditionalism, realism, and colour that oils added to a studiomounted photograph.

6.20 Below View of Bishop’s University, 1863

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

involvement with Christian education into a larger Atlantic correspondence that included American Episcopalians.150 A perennial member of the vestry at Christ Church, he was also prominent in church finances, Sunday schools, pew regulations, and Anglican input into Protestant institutions, such as the Industrial House of Refuge and the Protestant Orphan Asylum. In the early 1850s, he was involved in Christ Church’s sponsorship of what its pamphlet called a “Course of Lectures,” a Monday-night educational series held over several winters in the cathedral’s National Schoolhouse.151 After fire destroyed Christ Church Cathedral, McCord, in recognition of his status, was chosen to head the building committee. The committee sold the Notre Dame site, arranged the move up to Ste-Catherine Street as part of English Montreal’s migration towards the Mountain, hired the architects, and supervised the construction of the new cathedral, which opened in December 1859.152 Strangely, McCord’s commitment of energy and time did not extend to generous financial contributions for church upkeep. Notoriously tight-fisted with paying bills, McCord embarrassed church officials with his tardiness. Pew arrears of £30 in 1841 placed him third among delinquents in the parish. By 1844, he owed £40, of which he paid £10, delaying until the following year to pay the rest. By 1848, he was in arrears for pew fees again, and in a highly unusual action, the churchwardens voted to sue him “in consequence of his refusal to pay.”153 Nor was he a significant donor in the campaign to rebuild Christ Church. In 1859, his small contribution of £20 appeared in church ledgers immediately after those of his mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and niece. In 1860, he subscribed £100, but his name is absent from the “paid-up” ledger for 1857–62. It is also absent in an 1861 list of fifty-two prominent contributors. He does not seem to have contributed to the organ, clock, and bell fund. This frugality can be compared to that of his admittedly wealthier neighbour George Moffatt, who gave $25,500. Among McCord’s peers, merchant tailor Benaiah Gibb gave £1,000, hardware merchant William Workman £800, and the bishop himself £4,000.154 McCord developed a close friendship with Francis Fulford, Montreal’s first bishop, hosting him at Temple Grove. He frequently accompanied the Oxfordeducated bishop on episcopal visits around the diocese, inspecting Anglican schools, attending parish meetings, and, with his judge’s knowledge of local conditions, advising in the establishment of parishes in places such as the industrial community of Saint-Hyacinthe. The management of the Diocese of Montreal in 1850, the elevation of Christ Church to cathedral status, and the institution of diocesan and provincial synods gave senior laymen like McCord national profiles as church dignitaries to add to their existing status in the courts, militia, university, and Masons. These roles also allowed McCord to have a direct influence on diocesan governance,

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6.21 Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal

on the division of powers between bishop, clergy, and laity in church finances, and on the establishment of diocesan codes of discipline. As a member of two critical synod committees, finance and parish organization, he was actively involved in the according of parishes and missions, in establishing rectories and the salaries of parish priests, and in forcing local parishes to raise at least half of their priests’ stipends. In one of the first meetings of the Church Society of the Diocese of Montreal, he argued for the creation of a body “with the power and authority to frame and enforce laws and regulations for the government, discipline, and internal management of the church.”155 In the provincial synod of 1864, he was instrumental in defining the responsibility of churchwardens as being “to maintain good order and quiet in and about the church and in the adjoining roads and public places during divine worship and to prosecute all offenses against that good order and quiet.”156 At the diocesan synod of 1863, McCord proposed that a mixed committee of five clerics and four laymen be formed to write a code of discipline for the diocese. Until his health broke down, he chaired this committee, which would establish regula-

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

6.22 Francis Fulford, Anglican bishop of Montreal. McCord showed his friendship and respect for the bishop by giving him a key to Temple Grove’s grounds and garden.

tions and ecclesiastical courts to deal with crime, immorality, and drunkenness among priests.157 McCord’s place in the structuring of Quebec’s second Anglican diocese allowed him to indulge his lifelong interest in collecting and organizing knowledge. As chair of the committee on the organization of rural parishes, he acted as convener for their reporting system. At the first diocesan synod in June 1859, McCord argued for a flow of information that was not simply from centre to periphery. Instead, with the careful choice of lay delegates from parishes and missions, “local information” could be forwarded to Anglican authorities in Montreal. At this same meeting, “Mr.

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Fulford thought one great object of the Synod was to bring delegates to town, in order that they might acquire information, and afterwards disseminate it in the country. Judge McCord considered that it was of great consequence that there should be persons who could afford local information to the Synod, and that, therefore, the delegates should come from the congregations they represented.”158 In 1858 and 1859, McCord organized, circulated, and tabulated a lengthy questionnaire on the diocese’s resources, including information on clergy stipends, glebes and clergy benefices, and attitudes to free versus rented pews.159

d om est ic s pace McCord involvement in the architecture and construction of the cathedral and mission churches, courthouses, market, cemetery, library, orphanage, and boulevards had a strong domestic counterpart. Construction of the family estate on Mount Royal in the very period of the Rebellions of 1837–38 resulted from a complex praxis that included cosmopolitan architectural, literary, and artistic currents, the angst of a city collapsing into ethnic violence, and the personal aspirations of a young patrician couple. John Samuel was the heir of mixed Ulster, American, and Jewish ancestry and of a McCord family reputation for tavern roughness. His mother was a Solomons and his father had suffered a nasty bankruptcy and several years’ exile in Ireland. Anne Ross’s family, on the other hand, represented the colonial incarnation of a patrician Scots family. Her father, David Ross, a former attorney general, was one of the city’s largest land proprietors, and the Rosses’ Champ de Mars residence was renowned for its classical beauty and gardens. The Ross estate was steps away from Montreal’s monument to Lord Nelson (1809), and one of Anne Ross’s first diary entries as a thirteen-year-old was a tribute to British dead in the Napoleonic Wars.160 Other properties in the Ross family included the Beaurivage seigneury, listed as nineteenth in value in Quebec ($100,412) in 1863.161 A diarist and accomplished artist, Anne Ross was raised with tutors, summers at the Beaurivage seigneury, and a garden gazebo. According to her father’s instructions, her substantial £1,000 dowry was to be invested in real estate by her brother Arthur Ross and then administered by her husband. It was used to purchase the couple’s first home, a property on St James Street bought for £1,250 on their marriage in 1832.162 A preferred address with space for a law office, the residence was close to the Ross home, but as with the third-generation Taschereaus, its separateness emphasized preference for a nuclear family structure.163 Christ Church, the law courts, the Natural History Society, the Protestant Orphan Asylum and the fief were just short walks away. The McCord-Ross marriage in 1832 coincided with a summer of cholera, urban unrest, and bloody election riots in Montreal. Proprietor of a popular subdivision

6.23 Top Anne Ross’s childhood home on Champ de Mars is visible next to the church (1830). 6.24 Bottom St James Street, 1830

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and active in public health, John Samuel dealt with immigrant sheds, flooding, and epidemic victims. As an administrator of the Protestant Orphan Asylum, Anne Ross, too, faced the flotsam of epidemics. Orphanage admissions rose rapidly in 1832, and in the same year, female destitution led to the founding of the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Faced with cholera in the city, the couple, like many of their peers, looked to the Mountain for a healthy residential site.164 In two 1832 land transactions totalling £500, McCord purchased a large Mountain lot fronting on Côtedes-Neiges Road. In addition to its woodlot, pasture, and panoramic views, the property had access to what was reputed to be Montreal’s purest water.165 The site overlooked the “Chateau,” the Sulpician estate, with its pond, belvedere, and apple orchard.166 The McCords spent four years planning their estate, and it was only in August 1836, the year their first child was born, that work began on the foundations of Temple Grove. At a cost of £859, the house itself was built in 1837, while its painting, fencing, and the gates were added in 1838.167

6.25 The Sulpician estate, 1847

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

John Samuel’s “house accounts” and archives show the architectural and landscape resources he drew upon in planning the estate; they also indicate the extent to which he relied on his own skills, taste, and international reading rather than on that of professionals. He did not, for example, hire John Ostell, the surveyor of his property and the architect of the neoclassical Arts Building built by McGill University in 1839. His detailed accounts show no expense for an architect, suggesting instead his own management of construction, including his purchase of A Treatise on Pocket and Office Instruments used by architects and engineers.168 In November 1836, McCord received from London a copy of J.C. Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture. Loudon recommended the Grecian villa style with its “expression of purpose” to “gentlemen of fortune.” “[P]orticos, colonnades, verandas, and balconies,” he continued, “are all expressive, more or less, of comfort and elegant enjoyment on the part of the occupant.”169 Whether McCord was in fact inspired by a villa pattern from Loudon or, as is more likely, by widely circulated plans by American architects like Alexander Jackson Davis, John Samuel’s choice of Greek revival was a familiar one in Jacksonian America. In 1835–36, Thomas Cole painted the first in his “Course of Empire” series. These treated the stages of classical culture, giving central place to the Greek temple that McCord would imitate.170 Visible from the city below, Temple Grove, with its classical grandeur, was an example of how domestic architecture could be used to make a powerful political statement in a city torn by ethnic enmity. When applied to British architecture in India, this classicism has been described as symptomatic “of a conquering militarism and a culture and a race which considered themselves superior.”171 Even estate gardens, Susan Stewart argues, are “linked to other means of ordering life: codifying and ritualizing social time and space, creating political orders and social hierarchies – including the organization of military order, or structures of force.”172 Studying the nineteenth-century elites of Cape Town, South Africa, Robert Ross notes that “the apogée of style entailed the building of a suburban villa with a large and ‘picturesque’ garden.”173 Neoclassicism was a familiar style in English manors and in numerous public buildings across Europe, including the Paris Stock Exchange, London’s Euston Railway Station, and the Edinburgh Royal Institution. Associated in the American imagination with the aristocratic South, the style, described as “an expression of the pre-industrial age,” was also imitated across the North.174 The New York Customs House (1833), the Connecticut State Capitol (1827–31), Boston’s Quincy Market (1825–30), and, in the Hudson Valley, the Dutch Reformed Church of Newburgh (1835) were well-known examples of Greek revival public buildings that McCord would have seen or known through publications or popular engravings. Greek

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6.26 Sainte-Anne’s Market. Painted by McCord’s favourite artist, James Duncan, in 1839, this classical columned market was built in 1833–34 as McCord was planning his Mount Royal estate. The market served the Griffintown area until the 1840s, when it became the Montreal site of the Canadian Parliament. It was burned down in the riots of 1849.

columns – in Christ Church, the Customs House, Sainte-Anne’s Market, and the Bank of Montreal – were prominent aspects of Montreal’s public landscape. In American domestic architecture, perhaps the most renowned building was the neoclassical mansion in Philadelphia of Nicholas Biddle, president of the Bank of the United States, although many others were constructed along the Hudson Valley. In neoclassical tradition, these estates were distinguished less by height or massiveness than by their landscape perspectives.175 Architects like Davis drew their plans directly from Greek temple models, adding sloping lawns around rural residences to recall the natural and garden surroundings suggested by the Waverley novels of Walter Scott and the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper.176 The neoclassical style was much less common in Lower Canadian domestic architecture.177 The McCord estate, an exaggerated model of temple style and one of the few built in Canada, was dominated by columns on three sides. Typical also of Greek revival was its wraparound portico, its central double door, and its floorlength front windows. Added touches of the Greek temple included broad steps along three sides and decorative outdoor urns strategically placed near the entrance. The Greek revival house style was essentially about exterior “look.” Indeed, given its portico and square construction, the provision of comfortable, well-lit interiors might have been difficult. As he constructed his house, McCord ordered Thomas Hope’s pattern book, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807). Hope, like

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

Walter Scott in his feudal castle at Abbotsford, was a strong advocate of neoclassical interiors built around antique furniture, stained glass, oak woodwork, and medieval armour, all of which would find echo at Temple Grove. Hope saw the elite home as a site in which the display of collections took precedence over comfort or privacy; he proposed statue and picture galleries that might include an Egyptian room, another containing Greek vases and urns, and a third for collections of ancient curiosities.178 It was, however, on the exterior – on landscaping, gardens, panorama, and outdoor leisure space – that McCord lavished most of his attention. In his Encyclopedia of Villa Architecture (1835), Loudon drew attention to an estate’s larger cultural function, its connection with literature, architecture, and natural beauty. Loudon recommended a “pleasure ground,” a bowling green, and “solitary grandeur.” Running water, he reminded “gentlemen of fortune,” was “the very life and soul of a garden.”179 Leonore Davidoff and others describe this view as part of the bourgeois need for “organic” community. Adam Smith makes the same point in the Wealth of Nations, remarking on the urban elite’s search for “tranquility of mind,” “independency,” and “beauty.”180 McCord’s diary repeatedly spoke to Temple Grove’s vistas and sounds: “The outlines of Vermont Mountains perfectly visible from our mountain and all this intermediate country – a perfectly cloudless sky … stars bright and twinkling – the rapids at Lachine were distinctly heard, even louder than usual.”181 When judicial reorganization threatened the family with transfer to the Eastern Townships, he noted that he had “[w]alked round the garden for an hour, resting at each seat, and thinking over our probable separation from our beautiful garden, on their putting into effect the new Judicature Act.”182 The relationship of a gentleman to his garden reached back to monastic practice and to La Fontaine’s fable “Le jardinier et son seigneur.”183 Following the English garden tradition, John Samuel energetically terraced and hedged, laying out walkways and meditative zones with views, rivulets, and lawns. He sketched plans for flowerbeds and landscaping around the gazebo and designed gates, garden bridges, and supports for climbing plants and flowerpots. In the evenings, he recorded his exact observations. “I yesterday nearly completed my top dressing of lawns,” he reported. “Leaves nearly cleared away … very little injury from winter … Gardening all day. Placed the greenhouse plants in the open beds … first cigalle … commenced cutting hay. A fine crop of good and heavy grass … A perfectly beautiful day.”184 While he placed his vegetable garden and orchard behind the house, he built the front and side gardens as complements to the panoramic view: [L]ong shrubberies and more conventional parterres perfumed the air, or displayed in scores of beds what our climate permitted to be grown of the perennials and annuals. A rustic bridge, covered with vines, spanned a

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ravine and terminated in an arbour, one of the many that suggested a book or thought … The place was a succession of gracefully broken surfaces, and the paths followed them. The theory of the garden was to be directed by nature rather than direct her, and the success of the result proved the correctness of the theory. There was hardly a straight walk, and there were acres of them. A system of curves predominated, even in the more useful domain of the fruit and vegetable garden, which in their productiveness demonstrated that the love of the beautiful had not weakened the knowledge of the useful.185 McCord’s passion for placing urns around his estate and later in Mount Royal Cemetery combined a romantic fascination with death with classical sculptural forms immortalized, for example, in John Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” (1819). In decorating a mansion, Thomas Hope suggested that two rooms be reserved for Greek vases while, outside, urns were to be displayed empty as declarations of beauty and melancholy in a natural landscape.186 Temple Grove’s outdoor spaces were also linked to Anne Ross’s interests in stilllife painting and flower collecting, what Lisa Stenaniak calls “women’s relationship to plants in particular and nature in general.”187 The influence of women, particularly widows, on the landscape and subdivision of the Mountain has been suggested by Rod Macleod.188 Peers of Anne Ross like Catharine Parr Traill (1802–1899) in Upper Canada and Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813–1894) in Cooperstown, New York, were well-published naturalists. The latter, in books such as Rural Hours (1850), combined Episcopalianism with influential essays on landscapes, Greek tradition, and the campaign to restore Mount Vernon. In Quebec City, “botanizing parties” were organized for “cultured ladies,” and this had parallels with collecting wild flowers, painting, and walking with children on the Mountain behind Temple Grove.189 In 1827, the Countess of Dalhousie, wife of the governor, presented the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec with a seven-page “Catalogue of Canadian Plants.”190 Anne Ross was raised in a family in which flower gardening and landscaping skills were passed from mother to daughter and Irish and Scottish horticultural practice remained strong; her father was a prize-winning producer of Montreal melons. The arrival in Montreal of a relative, Ann Birnie, as an Irish bride in 1820 was preceded by family correspondence describing her horticultural skills: “Ann is a very tolerable Botanist and delights in a garden and layout … I expect to see the cottage and garden … under her care. She has laid out the Garden at Dunminning in beautiful style, the others having given up entirely to her better taste.”191 With the displacement in the 1850s of the institutions of English Montreal into the Golden Square Mile around McGill University, life on the Mountain became more self-contained, particularly for women and children. Rather than parlour-

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

6.27 Omnipresent in romanticism, urns were a principal feature of the material landscape of both Temple Grove and Mount Royal Cemetery.

centred, McCord social gatherings were, by preference, held on the lawn with its brook and panorama. The best family moments were outdoors. A favourite winter pastime was sleighing around the mountain, and in summer heat, John Samuel and Anne Ross left their bedroom to sleep in a garden cabin. The first photos commissioned of the grounds show croquet, lawn chairs, and a gazebo. The McCords were known for their garden entertainment. “There was more leisure in the Judge’s time,” the Canadian Horticultural Magazine reported. “We did not live so rapidly, and, at Temple Grove, Bishops, Generals and staff officers and their wives, with the merchants and professional men, lingered over the flower beds as they discussed the topics of the day. Many a brilliant garden party those glades have witnessed.”192 Commenting on McCord’s death, the Lower Canada Law Journal drew attention to the beauty of his estate: “He was an ardent lover of Horticulture too, and alike in the choice of a site for his residence at Temple Grove, and in the laying out and culture of his grounds, showed his love for the beautiful in nature and the art which, by culture, so enhances her beauties.”193 Marie-Angélique Des Rivières, a visitor from the Eastern Townships, was in the McCord garden when, in the city below, fire struck the McCord’s own Nazareth Fief: “Our visit to my good friend Madame McCord of Temple Grove greatly pleased the children – what a magnificent site – what a beautiful panorama – the grounds are laid out with such decided good taste. While we were there, there was a terrible

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6.28 View of Montreal from inside Temple Grove, c. 1848

6.29 Temple Grove, 1872. The patrician home as columned “temple”; classicism as exemplified by the urn, veranda, and lawn seating for the contemplation of the panorama; and the framing of man-made beauty by a gentrified nature are all evident in this commissioned photo.

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

fire in Griffintown. We had a perfect view. What a beautiful but terrible spectacle. In just an instant, fire jumped to a steeple – oh, it was saddening to see such devastation – the big ‘Bourdon’ and all the bells of the city rang out with sadness summoning help for the unfortunate poor – over 200 houses burned.”194 McCord, understanding the social effect of the natural space and panorama of his estate, gave a garden key to the Anglican bishop and brought distinguished visitors up to Temple Grove: “Went into town to visit the Bishop of Indiana and invited him back to see view from Temple Grove: He came up at 5 pm and the view was magnificent.”195

e clips e An important distinction must be made between the Taschereaus, who gained strength into a fourth generation, and the McCords, whose family resources and public influence faltered in the mid-nineteenth century. The beginning of the eclipse of the McCord family can be dated symbolically to 1860, for if the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 represented “the Waterloo of the Wellington mind” in Britain, events in 1860 – the Crystal Palace Exhibition in Montreal and the opening of the Victoria Bridge over the St Lawrence River – may have signalled a similar watershed for the McCords, representing their distancing from English Montreal’s most visible manifestations of progress, cultural vibrancy, and national identity.196 Yes, some of the Grand Trunk Railway engineering shops were on McCord land, John Samuel was prominent on the committee of the Art Association of Montreal that prepared an exhibit for the visiting Prince of Wales, and he did serve as judge at the Crystal Palace for horticultural displays. And, impressed by their innovative colours and construction, John Samuel clipped into his diary samples of “marble paper” from exhibitions at the Crystal Palace. He was, as well, one of the most important patrons of James Duncan, among the first Montreal artists to adopt industrial techniques of engraving.197 But the new academic sciences (such as mechanical engineering), scientific blueprints, steel engraving, and the innovative use of glass and cast iron were foreign to John Samuel’s amateur mindset. He did not embrace photography, a technology already influencing his cherished domain of meteorology with correspondents like Sir John Herschel experimenting as early as 1838 with daguerreotypes and new methods of visually recording clouds and landscapes.198 And the marginalization of the Natural History Society and the Montreal Horticultural Society – associations that he had helped found – was a sign of the loss of intellectual traction to newer institutions linked to university or to French-Canadian intellectuals. McCord’s gravitation towards Bishop’s University in the town of Lennoxville rather than towards Montreal’s McGill separated him from the evolving and urban professional worlds of law and science. While he

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settled in comfortably with Bishop’s official Anglicanism, McGill was teaching civil engineering, agricultural chemistry, and political economy. By 1849, McGill had professors of botany, mathematics, and natural philosophy whose orientation towards laboratory science and the training of professionals in graduate schools distanced them from McCord, his friends, and the amateur scientific societies they frequented.199 Evolving forms of international academic trust, learned journals, and peer evaluation rendered anachronistic John Samuel’s preference for communication by letter and his legitimization of knowledge via the office of corresponding secretary or the direct sociability of a home visit or hand-borne letter. Although McGill’s principal Sir William Dawson and his wife were guests for a “conversational party” at Temple Grove in January 1860, McCord’s diary emphasizes that he was most at home with Anglican clergymen at the cathedral or at Bishop’s University.200 Nor did John Samuel, and even less his successor as head, David Ross McCord, fit into the newer banking, insurance, and industrial worlds. His friends, who were rooted in land, old money from the fur trade, or the Bank of Montreal, could be found at Christ Church, in the Natural History Society, on the first Board of Trade, and, through female family members, in activities at the Protestant Orphan Asylum and the Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Stiffer in bearing as he grew older and set apart as a judge and cemetery president, McCord no longer participated in the youthful raucousness of courthouse lawyers, fellow militiamen, and the brotherhood of Masons. His gendered world took new form on the judicial circuit, his diary recording pastimes such as reading, dining with local clergy and notables, and enduring ennui of hotel nights away. At home on his estate, he found pleasure with his wife and children, in gardening and scientific observations, and in visiting friends around the Mountain. This social aloofness and his concentration on his inner self and private life had a counterpart in his political trajectory. A strong believer in the hierarchies and forms of authority associated with the established church, the proprietorship of a fief, appointed office, and the judicial bench, John Samuel, as was said of John Keats, had neither “the slightest feel of humility towards the public” nor a connection with the turbulent party politics of the 1850s. Like the poet, his focus remained “the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of Great Men.”201 While McCord was deeply moved when he served as pallbearer at the burial of his patrician peers, his diary is silent on the dozens of Ryans who died on the street named after his family and who were buried further over the Mountain in the Catholic Notre-Damesdes-Neiges Cemetery. McCord’s connections to Britain and the United States had been determined by water transportation, correspondence, the universalism of the Book of Common Prayer, and personal links through church, Freemasonry, military, and scientific relations. He fit less easily into new axes of telegraph and rail. Many of

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

his international initiatives, such as Alexandre Vattemare’s Franco-American plan for a new library and cultural institution, had come to naught. There was ample sign that John Samuel was being increasingly marginalized from international networks of science and learning. In the 1830s, he had had lengthy correspondence with Henry Wolsey Bayfield, a naval officer, self-trained geologist, and one of the first to survey the regions of Canada. Their letters had ranged across meteorology, astronomy, and news of friends. By the mid-1840s, however, the field of geology in Canada was dominated by Sir William Edmond Logan, a Montrealer and McCord’s childhood contemporary at Alexander Skakel’s school. Logan had gone to Edinburgh as a youth, learned geological mapping as manager of a copper mine in Wales, and was elected to the Geological Survey of London in 1837. He developed a close scientific association with William Dawson, principal of McGill, and would later benefit from the university’s establishment of a chair of geology. Through his professionalization, laboratory, geological mapping, and publications, Logan succeeded in attracting state funding for his Geological Survey, and through election to the Royal Society in 1851 and knighthood in 1856, he gained international scientific recognition.202 McCord, in contrast, had remained in Montreal and been a founder of and corresponding secretary for the Montreal Horticultural Society and a principal member of the Natural History Society. By 1843, however, the latter had fallen into decline, meetings had slumped to a low of only six attendees, and McCord, now on the bench, had become inactive. Both societies faced competition from the Botanical Society established in Montreal in 1856 under the presidency of Principal Dawson. The Botanical Society’s plans for a herbarium, specimen collecting, and the reading of papers on botany were overtaking the activities of the older amateur societies.203 Faced with international, secular, disciplinary, and university-based projects, McCord could only tread water. Termination of his systematic meteorological observations had coincided with his nomination to the bench, and in the 1850s, his passion for exact observations was largely confined to compiling maps of the clergy reserves for the bishop of Montreal.204 Nor did he carry weight in the officialdom that represented Canadian science internationally; whatever his scientific network in the 1830s, his name was absent from the long list of prominent Montrealers who acted as judge, donor, or commissioner for the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1855.205 It was Sir William Edmond Logan who organized Canada’s mineral exhibition for the expositions of London (1851) and Paris (1855). It is also telling that McCord was not among the twenty leading citizens of Montreal chosen in October 1856 to organize celebrations to mark the Grand Trunk Railway’s linking Toronto and Montreal.206 Never active in elected politics and a judge since 1842, he had no place or even an indirect intellectual voice among the Montreal Conservative elite in attendance at the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences

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to plan a federation for Canada. His Anglican identity and sense of leadership within a mannered patrician elite had little in common with Attorney General GeorgeÉtienne Cartier’s pragmatism or push for “a political nationality with which neither the national origin, nor the religion of any individual would interfere.”207 Although a member, as a young lawyer, of the English legal establishment’s drinking club and one of the founders of the Advocates’ Library in 1828, McCord had no voice in the establishment of McGill University’s law faculty or in the professionalization of the bar in the late 1840s. As a circuit and then regional Superior Court judge, he did not participate in the publication of law journals such as the Lower Canada Jurist (1857); nor were his judgments often cited in the published law reports. Isolated from the Benthamite, positivist, and nationalist legal currents that would drive the codification movement, McCord failed to keep up with emerging legal systems that would give priority to the individual and freedom of contract. While he remained a sideline figure in law reform, his nephew was influential on the Codification Commission and through his subsequent published comments on the Civil Code. Thomas McCord, having been raised in Quebec City as a Catholic, had a legal and family culture that differed sharply from that of his uncle. His father’s drinking and problematic legal career, which culminated in a dispute over the sale of his share of the Nazareth Fief in 1844, led to the Quebec McCords’ estrangement from the stiffer patrician and Anglican milieu of the family in Montreal. Like many English-speaking Catholics, Thomas McCord integrated easily into French Quebec. He was educated at the Seminary of Quebec and articled with codifier RenéÉdouard Caron, whose daughter married Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr.208 In his third marriage and by then a Superior Court judge, Thomas McCord wed the sister-inlaw of Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr. As a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in 1862, Thomas McCord was named to the influential post of English-language secretary of the Codification Commission, his duties including his assuming major responsibility for the translation of French titles into their official English version. In 1867, he published an English synopsis of the Civil Code with the intention of making “our Laws more easily accessible to the public at large.” Thomas McCord noted his comfort with “the free exercise of man’s dominion over property” and with the “adaptation” of “ancient law” to “the new state of society.” A convinced “civilian,” he expressed “admiration and respect” for the civil law and touted Quebec’s new code as “a worthy model for legislation elsewhere”: “The English speaking residents of Lower Canada may now enjoy the satisfaction of at last possessing in their own language the laws by which they are governed, and the Province of Quebec will bring with her into the Confederation a system … founded on the steadfast, time-honored and equitable principles of the Civil Law.”209

6.30 Thomas McCord as English-language secretary of the Codification Commission. McCord’s rank in the Quebec bar is clear in this Livernois photo (c. 1865). Still in his thirties, he (far right) is seated alongside (from left to right) French-language secretary Joseph-Ubalde Beaudry and codifiers Charles Dewey Day, René-Édouard Caron, and Augustin-Norbert Morin.

Meanwhile, John Samuel McCord played out his career as a respected “country” judge in southwest Quebec; this was a pluralist jurisdiction with layered seigneurial and freehold zones and characterized by what John Brierley has called the “co-existence” of French, British, and American legal traditions.210 When hearing contract cases concerning disputes over kind in the county of Missisquoi, for example, McCord turned to his well-thumbed copy of Daniel Chipman’s Essay on the Law of Contracts for the Payment of Specifick Articles. Far from having the metropolitan intellectualism of Pothier or Blackstone, this handbook was used as a practical legal guide in neighbouring Vermont, where it was published in 1822. Chipman dealt with bread-and-butter issues of contract disputes in rural societies where agreements formalized officially in money terms often had their real meanings in understandings of kind.211 McCord’s interpretation of the validity of promissory notes whose value was expressed in kind rather than money was in fact overturned in a Montreal appeal court.212

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While contrasting sharply with that of his nephew, John Samuel McCord’s role as a distinctly regional, as opposed to national, legal authority also stands in sharp contrast with that of his Mount Royal neighbour Charles Dewey Day, principal and then chancellor of McGill University. In 1857, Attorney General Cartier named Day as one of the three Civil Code commissioners. While McCord drew up the obscure code of discipline for Anglican ministers and churchwardens, Day would be a principal author of the Quebec Civil Code (1866).213 As the Church of England declined as an institutional force in Quebec, women in the McCord family faced similar challenges to their authority. Prominent over three generations as successive corresponding secretaries of the Protestant Orphan Asylum since its founding in 1822, they were increasingly forced to share leadership in their benevolent activities with wealthy peers from the dissenting churches or with new medical and social-service professionals. Anglican charity in the orphanage and the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society had always been “hands-on” and closely connected to the church itself. In the 1820s, needy children were brought directly into Christ Church for aid and sermons on punctuality and selfimprovement. In 1823, the church’s management committee agreed to buy “coarse but warm grey cloth to make great-coats” for poor children who actively attended church.214 Into the 1850s, the church vestry itself dealt with individual cases of poverty, usually female, offering transportation, bread, rent, medical supplies, and clothing.215 In 1850, the vestry committee, apparently using the model of domestic service and with John Samuel McCord as a leading member, established the position of “pew-openers.” Dressed in identical black gowns, “neat” white caps, and slippers, five women, all described in the records as “Mrs” and chosen by the rector and churchwardens, were paid 2s. 6p. a week from the cathedral’s poor fund to act as ushers, opening pew doors for services and keeping “the Pews in their respective aisles perfectly and regularly cleaned.”216 While John Samuel McCord’s wife, Anne Ross, and daughter Anne McCord did retain the office of corresponding secretary through the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the Protestant Orphan Asylum saw its influence and social vision challenged by the Young Women’s Christian Association (ywca) and the Council of Women.217 Into the 1850s, Anglicans had retained centrality in running the asylum. Anne Ross held the position of secretary on a perennial basis; her mother, Jane Davidson Ross, had been first directress; her neighbour Mrs George Moffatt had been second directress; and her sister, Mary Jane Tylee, had served as treasurer. Their introduction in 1851 of a new constitution for the orphanage was challenged by Louisa Frothingham, a Unitarian, heir of the strong philanthropic interests of her father, John Frothingham, and later married to brewer John Henry Robinson Molson.218

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

This fading patrician authority in mid- and late Victorian Montreal – in law, politics, the established church, benevolence, and knowledge systems – crippled the McCords, pushing them into adopting a renewed romanticism around burial, collecting historical artefacts, and searching obsessively for imperialist definitions of identity in English Montreal.

bur ial and m em ory 219 History, art, and collecting were integral parts of John Samuel’s conception of the Montreal landscape. As a young man, he had commissioned James Duncan’s paintings of sites around the Island of Montreal, accompanying the artist and insisting on landscape art as a means of achieving accurate historical documentation. A half century later, in the years from 1885 to 1889, his son would repeat the process with artist Henry Bunnett. As negotiator for the sale of the old Christ Church site in 1857, John Samuel, concerned with the preservation of the original cornerstone laid in June 1805, was entrusted by the building committee with its safekeeping.220 This passion for historical objects would become an obsession with his son David Ross. The McCords represented the expanding interest throughout Western society in memorialization and burial sites. Across the first half of the nineteenth century, sites like London’s Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon in Paris became increasingly important urban foci as burial sites for the notable and as tourist shrines for the people. Death of the famous, their funerals, and burial parades became media events shared around the world in newspaper articles, drawings, photographs, and eventually in jug-ware and other consumer mementos. At the funeral in Montreal, in May 1849, of Sir Benjamin D’Urban, hero of the Napoleonic Wars and commander in chief of British forces in the British north, shops closed their doors and a crowd of 10,000 viewed the funeral cortège. The public outpouring of grief over the Duke of Wellington’s death in 1852 and Queen Victoria’s well-publicized mourning for Prince Albert after his death in 1861 were other powerful stimulants to national and private imaginations around death. In Britain and its colonies, those who read the new illustrated press, frequented museums, visited public squares, or ate off Wedgewood bone china were regularly treated to visual reminders of the glorious death of James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. Through his reading, travel, and Episcopal and Natural History Society connections to New York State and New England, John Samuel McCord, as long-time president of the Protestant Burial Ground of Montreal, learned of the American rural cemetery movement and its models, such as Mount Auburn Cemetery (1831) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Green-Wood Cemetery (1838) in Brooklyn, and Albany Rural Cemetery (1841). With its ponds, carriage paths, “garden” atmosphere, and

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“cottage” for the resident gardener, this emerging burial culture satisfied the longings of colonial imaginations nurtured on Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and romantic ideals around the English country landscape.221 In addition to creating a distinctly Anglo-American form of natural beauty and family commemoration, the rural cemetery offered practical considerations. As a burial institution based on innovative engineering, horticultural, and pedagogical techniques, it spoke to McCord concerns for public health and social utility: burial could be moved from ugly, unhygienic urban sites to elevated, well-drained, and park-like locations near the residences of the best families. A new cemetery would facilitate the rethinking of a burial ground’s social context, physical layout, and administrative organization; its distribution of gravesites, for example, could clone the society of the living to produce a clear hierarchy from fenced and private family lots to the common, unmarked graves of paupers. Rural cemeteries, like their host cities, could be constructed on a pluralist model. With Jewish as well as Presbyterian origins, John Samuel McCord gravitated easily towards a burial ground open to all confessions, including Catholics, but necessarily Protestant in its base culture and in its recognition of Anglican entitlement to consecrated ground. Rather than espousing municipal or church ownership, he reached back to his father’s corporate view of associations and put his weight behind the organization of a cemetery as a non-profit corporation on British models such as the Freemasons, the Royal Medical Society, and the Sons of the Church of Scotland.222 With the collapsing of his larger legal, religious, and social purchase in Montreal, McCord could use the cemetery corporation as a romantic and Christian “City on a Hill.” The Ross and McCord families had been associated with the direction of the Protestant Burial Ground of Montreal since its founding in 1799, and by the late 1830s, John Samuel was serving as its perennial president. Into the summer of 1846 and influenced by the American rural cemetery movement, he proposed the construction of a new ecumenical burial ground in Montreal in which Jews and Catholics would join Protestants in a “Public Cemetery for the use of all denominations.”223 Catholic authorities, however, quickly rebuffed McCord’s initiatives in favour of a confessional approach already enunciated for their schools, associations, and social institutions; Catholic cemeteries would remain separate institutions organized under parish authority.224 The Joseph Guibord Affair of the 1870s would demonstrate the determination of Catholic authorities to fight to the highest British courts to protect canon rights over burial in consecrated ground. Falling back on the non-Catholic population, McCord and his fellow trustees settled in January 1847 on the purchase of a cemetery site “for the use of the Protestant and Jewish congregations, combining ornament with celerity and safety.”225 With McCord as president, a cemetery company was incorporated and a secluded

6.31 Mount Auburn Cemetery, 1839. This engraving by William Bartlett illustrates the romanticism, classicism, and gentility of the American rural cemetery movement and its marketability to better classes. McCord was in contact with cemetery fathers through visits and his links to American meteorological, horticultural, and natural history associations.

Mount Royal site purchased. Laid out by a Philadelphia contractor with miles of winding roads and respect for what the trustees called the ground’s “great natural beauties,” the cemetery was organized as a memorial, leisure, and pedagogical space useful for instruction in morals, taste, and architecture.226 Family lots were sold with a “perpetual” clause, and their individual landscaping, fencing, and memorials spoke to varying classical, sentimental, or religious themes. One of McCord’s most influential American correspondents, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, envisaged the cemetery as an alternative to amusement parks, P.T. Barnum’s entertainment shows, and other crass appeals to popular taste. “[I]n the absence of great public gardens, such as we must surely one day have in America,” Downing wrote in 1849, “our rural cemeteries are doing a great deal to enlarge and educate the popular taste in rural embellishment.”227 As Mount Royal Cemetery president, McCord adopted aspects of Mount Auburn Cemetery: both cemeteries published pamphlets outlining visits, vistas, and scenic coach drives.228 Patriarchy was implicit across this cemetery culture, with McCord and his fellow trustees, all

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male, planning burial space they considered suitable for widows and other respectable women. While women, given their fragility, were not expected to endure long funeral cortèges or the reality of open graves, shovels, and ropes, the cemetery was constructed with an eye to security, coach paths, and panoramas pleasing to the genteel. With the opening of the cemetery in 1852, the choice of the adjoining McCord and Ross lots in the prestigious and isolated section a2, their fencing, landscaping, monuments, and epitaphs, as well as the status of the owners of neighbouring

6.32 Sketch of Mount Royal with cemetery, 1852–55. Kept in McCord’s archives at Temple Grove, this fine copy of a sketch by James Edward Alexander emphasizes Mount Royal and its cemetery as elite space. Clearly visible, for example, are the estates of McCord, John Redpath, and John Frothingham, as well of the governor’s residence, Monklands, the Sulpicians’ “Priests Farm,” and McGill College.

Table 6.1 Burials in the McCord family lot, Mount Royal Cemetery John McCord, died 14 October 1793* Thomas McCord, died 5 December 1824* Hon. John Samuel McCord, 28 June 1865 Anne Ross McCord, 30 April 1870 Jane Catherine McCord, 29 May 1914 Anne McCord, 11 February 1929

Sarah Solomons McCord, 13 June 1812* William King McCord, 20 October 1858 John Davidson McCord MD, 10 June 1866 Robert Arthur McCord, 3 November 1882 Letitia McCord née Chambers, 15 July 1928 David Ross McCord, 12 April 1930

Source: Archives, Mount Royal Cemetery, section A, 299A. * Removed from old Protestant cemetery and reinterred in McCord lot.

6.33 Eleanor McCord, 1861, a year before her marriage and two years before her death

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Table 6.2 Temple Grove guests at the marriage luncheon of Eleanor Elizabeth McCord and George M. Lewis as listed in J.S. McCord’s diary Hon. George Moffatt – Mrs (Sophia) Moffatt Lord Bishop Francis Fulford and Mrs Fulford Dean John Bethune and Eliza Judge William Badgley, Mrs and Misses B Grandma Ross1 Judge Monk and Mrs Monk Dr Campbell Dr Howard and Mrs Arthur, David, John, “my Annie McCord”2 General and Mrs Bell Mrs Reid, Taylor and wife Thomas McCord3 Edward Maitland and Mrs Maitland Mrs Davidson, R. Mackay, Mrs Holland, Miss Kirby O. Moffatt and Mrs G. Moffatt Tylee, Mrs and all their children4 Rev. and Mrs Ellrod Source: mm, mfp, 0411, J.S. McCord diary, 24 April 1862. 1 Jane Davidson Ross – mother of Anne Ross 2 McCord children 3 Nephew 4 Aunt of the bride, Mary Jane Ross

lots, represented important markers of patrician status in English Montreal. The McCords took painstaking effort to keep their family together in death. When Judge Arthur Davidson died in 1807, he was buried in the new Protestant Burial Ground of which he was a trustee. His first wife, Jane McCord, had, at age twenty-three, predeceased him in 1790, and as her headstone reads, her remains had been “interred within the walls” in one of the city’s first burial grounds. In 1811, she was moved to a grave alongside her husband in the new grounds, and a half century later, her remains were moved to a third site, this time to the McCord lot in Mount Royal Cemetery.229 The McCords’ strong belief in the value of written and visual historical records was reflected in succeeding generations’ careful attention to family headstones and epitaphs. John McCord Sr died in 1793, and almost two decades later his son Thomas paid to have 203 letters cut into his headstone in the Protestant Burial Ground.230 Symbolic of their lockage in time, the McCords were surrounded

John Samuel McCord (1801–1865)

in death in section a2 by the graves of Montreal’s university, clerical, and business patricians: Chancellor Charles Dewey Day of McGill University; Francis Fulford, first Anglican bishop of Montreal; and Bank of Montreal president Peter McGill. Perhaps the McCords’ finest patrician hour – recognition in home and cathedral of their place at the pinnacle of Anglican Montreal – was the marriage of John Samuel’s eldest daughter on 24 April 1862. It was Bishop Francis Fulford who celebrated the marriage of Eleanor to George M. Lewis of “Madeira and New York City.” John Samuel’s diary entry recorded the weather, the perfection of his daughter, and his pride in a ceremony witnessed by family and peers: “Snow covered the ground, but a prospect of fair, tho very cold weather for the season. This was the day fixed for the marriage of our dear Elly with … Lewis, and accordingly the wedding party met in the chapterhouse of the Cathedral, and hence to the altar where the Lord Bishop, the Dean present, united them in the Holy bands of marriage. The dear child looked as beautiful in person and bridal apparel as she is pure and perfect in mind and character. May God bless them both.”231 Within eighteen months, Eleanor was dead in childbirth and buried in her husband’s plot; three years later, in June 1865, her brother John Davidson McCord and her father, John Samuel McCord, were carried to the McCord family lot that the latter had laid out in Mount Royal Cemetery. In April 1870, Anne Ross McCord was borne to lie beside her husband. David Ross, son of John Samuel and Anne and now head of the family, would never really surmount this inheritance of family, memory, and death.

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Study of the fourth generation imposes a recontextualization of the forms of both authority and family structure. Since neither Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau nor David Ross McCord fathered children, with the former living in religious community, family relations were necessarily other than those of the traditional nuclear family. And, while assumptions of authority around land, feudal relations, and the profession of law slipped as Quebec edged into modernity, both men inherited generations of patrician assumptions about rank in Quebec society. The Taschereau family name and its association with the Seminary of Quebec, the Ursulines, the bench, the Beauce, and seigneurial estates made for Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s easy transition to the high table of religious and social authority and to status of “prince” of the church. Much less successfully and with atrophy of McCord muscle in Montreal already evident in his father’s generation, David Ross McCord was nonetheless able to use his influence at McGill University, the principal intellectual force in his community, imposing his museum, his objects, and the weight of his vision of Canadian history. It follows that fourth-generation Taschereau and McCord heads had radically differing public careers and took their families in very different directions. The decades following the death in 1898 of Archbishop Taschereau saw family members rise to positions of “might” – to the highest civil offices – as premier of Quebec and judge on the Supreme Court of Canada. For the Montreal McCords, the period spelt disaster. Childless like his siblings, a mediocre lawyer, and facing declining land revenues, David Ross McCord spent the last years of his life in an Ontario asylum. His death in 1930 signalled the end of the Montreal branch, the McCord name surviving only in its namesake history museum. It might be considered a historian’s sleight of hand to place a celibate as family head. In fact, the position of Taschereau family head became increasingly problematic in a family of multiple and often unharmonious branches. Into the third generation and dating from instructions in Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s

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will of 1809, the second branch, led by Jean-Thomas Sr, had pretensions to head the entire family. Yet Jean-Thomas’s widow, Marie Panet, and eldest son, JeanThomas Jr, would be able to exercise only problematic authority over other family branches, especially as the politics of nationalism intensified. In 1834, the presentation in the assembly of the Ninety-Two Resolutions by Jean-Thomas Jr’s uncle Antoine-Charles Taschereau had been one test of family solidarity. Family relations continued to deteriorate during the Rebellions of 1837–38, and in August 1840, Antoine-Charles, eldest son in the third branch, challenged his nephew Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau, eldest son in the first branch, to a duel. The duel was only avoided when Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr obtained a court order forcing Pierre-Elzéar and Antoine-Charles to post bonds to keep the peace.1 This acrimony continued into the elections of 1841, when Antoine-Charles defeated Pierre-Elzéar’s brother Joseph-André Taschereau for the Dorchester seat. Tracked by ill health that forced his resignation from the Supreme Court after only three years, Jean-Thomas Jr was succeeded as head and certainly as symbol of Taschereau pre-eminence by his younger brother Elzéar-Alexandre. Priest, seminary director, university rector, and then archbishop, the latter became Canada’s first cardinal in 1886. The funeral of Jean-Thomas Jr in 1893 was a notable national event; the death of his brother on 12 April 1898 was of international significance. The cardinal’s funeral, described as “the most impressive ever held in our country,” was led by Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore.2 From his ordination in 1842, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s career corresponded with the deepening penetration into Quebec of French Catholic theocratic principles (Gramsci described this process as “the conquest of civil society”) that took the form of a tightening grip over culture, identity, and social and moral discipline.3 As Catholic primate, Taschereau was instrumental in the construction of parish, educational, and social institutions and in Quebec’s reception of papal directives concerning virgin birth, papal infallibility, and class relations. In a secularizing continent leaning to individualism, Darwinism, and industrial capitalism, and despite strong liberal forces within Quebec society, he was able to reinforce Catholic religiosity and a conservative French-Canadian identity. Higher education can be used to illustrate this hegemony. Taschereau would succeed in finding place for a Catholic university that fit into an EnglishCanadian common-law model of sectarian, corporatist, and autonomous institutions. Then, as rector, he mediated in the halls of Laval University between those holding to strict Catholic doctrine and those favouring progressive teaching in disciplines like philosophy, medicine, botany, and law. Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s authority was based on cathedralism, influence in institutions, and his inherited sense of social hierarchies and culture.4 His clerical authority stemmed from the sacraments, priests in every parish, mission,

Might and Just Memory

and seminary, and his control of information from schools, publications, libraries, and meeting places. With an increasing number of women in paid domestic or manufacturing work, his position on their condition was strongly influenced by a lifelong Marianism: he led in the movement to tighten the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and in its different applications for women in marriage and for those living as celibates in religious communities.5 As archbishop in a period of intense internecine conflict between Montreal and Quebec over ultramontanism and episcopal jurisdiction, he was well served by his seminarianism and political networks in the Guibord Affair, the division of the parish of Montreal, and the affiliation of the faculty of medicine in Montreal with Laval University. In Quebec’s incorporation into the Canadian federal state, Taschereau, steeped in a family culture of ethnic entente, softened national feelings of alienation with what he called the politics of “patience et de prudence.”6 These instincts and his political conditioning in Quebec City as opposed to Montreal, assured a moderate discourse in race and religious crises like the New Brunswick Schools Question or the execution of Louis Riel.7 Conscious of Canada’s Protestant majority, he pushed to protect a French Canada whose identity he interpreted as inseparable from Catholicism and social conservatism. Empathy with parishioners in Irish Catholic national parishes or with peers in the Anglican episcopacy would never weaken his determination to wall French-Canadian institutions, his opposition to intermarriage with Protestants, and his fierce hostility to republicanism and egalitarianism. In dealing with hot political issues like trade unions or civil jurisdiction over marriage, he could count on an old-boy family and seminary network that included his brother-in-law, Lieutenant-Governor René-Édouard Caron, and his college classmate P.J.O. Chauveau, first premier of Quebec. The presence of his brother and nephew on the Supreme Court of Canada meant that he had well-placed kin to support him on sensitive churchstate matters like the Manitoba Schools Question or the influence of the Catholic clergy in Quebec elections. The archbishop’s seigneurial background, his vision of a conservative and Catholic nation, and his application of papal directives like the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and Rerum Novarum (1891) determined his course in the social struggle resulting from Quebec’s industrialization. He brooked no sharing of authority with popular organizers from the Irish Catholic working class, and in the 1870s and 1880s, he was one of the strongest North American voices to challenge the discourse of emancipation and class rights drawn from industrial and dockside experience in Ireland and the United States. If the Taschereaus entered the twentieth century with wind in their sails, the Montreal McCords were in a spiral that culminated in their disappearance in 1930. We saw John Samuel McCord’s steady loss of accord with the culture and institutions of industrializing Montreal. The Lachine Canal riots of 1842, the

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burning of the legislature in 1849, the Gavazzi riots of 1853, and, after John Samuel’s death, the 1885 riots against forced smallpox vaccination confirmed the persistence in Montreal of popular resistance and identity politics, and demonstrated that the patrician tactics of the McCords were increasingly vulnerable. The family’s authority had depended on fief, cavalry sword, judicial bench, and the privileges of the Anglican Church. In their Protestant way, the McCords could be said to have shared the cathedralism, the emphasis on an established church, and the social conservatism of Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau. The McCord network, both male and female, had exercised a personal, hands-on role in forming the learned, social, and associational institutions of Protestant Montreal. McCord strength had not been in railways, party politics, Irish Catholic associational networks, or a McGill University intellectual community influenced by secularism, professionalization, and Darwinism. The end of their century-long leases of convent lands in the 1890s, David Ross McCord’s retreat from public life and his law practice into memory and collecting, and his generation’s failure to produce children would signal an end to the McCords’ inherited wealth, to their public influence, and to 160 years of lineage in Montreal. Their collapse also had historical and societal context in the evolving forms of capitalist wealth, in the changing intellectual, cultural, and social institutions of urban society, in the shifting realities of ethnic power in Montreal, and in the diminishing authority of the Anglican Church. The McCords’ Montreal milieu was structurally different from the Quebec City milieu of Archbishop Taschereau. Rapidly industrializing, Montreal was markedly more populist, more pluralist, and much less accommodating of feudal vestiges and patrician privilege. Over 50 per cent of the province’s industrial production was in Montreal, and the city’s population rose from some 58,000 in 1852, to over 325,000 at the end of the century, and to some 818,000 in 1930, the year of David Ross McCord’s death. It was in Montreal that the two established or state churches, Catholic and Anglican, were in the greatest turmoil, the latter’s influence declining in the face of competing Protestant sects, a vibrant Irish Catholic community, and the arrival of new ethnic groups, such as the Jews. Montreal was host to McGill University, which was English-speaking, Protestant, and yet foreign to McCord because of its nonsectarianism and its professionalizing faculties in law, medicine, and the sciences. By the last decades of David Ross McCord’s life, Nonconformist churches, several railway stations, and factory smokestacks competed for the city skyline with the bell towers of the established churches of his youth. With no leverage in French Quebec, he steadily lost influence on his home turf of English Montreal.

7 Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

Raised with footing in the social relations of a Beauce estate and in its Catholic rituals and mysticism, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau easily accepted the transcendental and natural in rural culture: “Long ago, Divine Providence placed me here, a humble plant that might take root and benefit from its healing extracts. I am attached to this land by so many threads that if you tear me away I will die. I accept, because it is a duty, to become a large tree which will shade an entire province, provided that my dear little garden remains there, near me, protected by my branches, and nourishing me with its flowers and fruits.”1

7.1 Archbishop Taschereau’s birthplace, with family members (n.d.)

7.2 The Taschereau manor’s interior (2001) 7.3 Plans for the second parish church in SainteMarie-de-Beauce

Passage, however, from manor house to lifetime residence in a male community, to classical and theological studies in Quebec City, and to graduate work in Rome conditioned him to a “consciousness” or Bildung quite separate from the popular, secular, and rural.2 Never confined to a local or closed society, Taschereau had family in France and, over a lifetime, practised imperial politics in London and Rome. He knew the seminaries, universities, and cathedrals of American cities like New York and Baltimore. Next to the Vatican, his most important network was that of

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

American Catholicism with its strong Irish, democratic, and republican components, a religious culture that contrasted sharply with his social conservatism and French-Canadian identity. An anglophile like his father and many of his patrician peers, Taschereau spoke English fluently, witnessed his sister’s marriage to a senior British colonial official, saw his brother clerk in the law offices of Andrew Stuart and Henry Black, the deans of Quebec’s English legal community, and, as a boy in 1828, observed Governor Kempt as a house guest in the manor. As a young chaplain during the typhus epidemic of 1847, he put his own life on the line serving Irish immigrants at the quarantine station of Grosse Île. This inheritance, education, and patrician culture produced a complex figure of authority, an archbishop intellectually comfortable placing modern science alongside the Immaculate Conception. The progeny of a family conscious of history and himself author of institutional histories, he was able to create a bridge from his archbishopric to that of Mgr François de Laval, New France’s first bishop, thus setting the colony’s history between the religious bookends of strong episcopacies. At the same time, he moved beyond traditional communications based on the written, the pulpit, the parlour, or the costume and pageant. Progressive advisers from the Seminary of Quebec ensured that he and his office were marketed through the technologies of photography, steam travel, telegraphy, and new lithographic techniques for the mass printing of stamps and cards. Although his episcopacy coincided with a period of liberalization and individualism, Taschereau was able to incorporate all but the most radical French-Canadian liberals within a larger Catholic hegemony. He also succeeded in constructing a paternal identity around his own celibate personage that symbolized the union of French Canada and the sacred. By the mid-nineteenth century, Quebec City, suffering from the decline of the shipbuilding industry and square-timber trade, was slipping to secondary status as a commercial and industrial city. Tanning and shoemaking became the major industrial employments, while railways did not reach the city until 1879, more than two decades after the Grand Trunk Railway had linked Montreal to its Ontario hinterland and the Atlantic seaboard. Quebec City’s population rose only slowly from 57,375 in 1861 to 70,901 in 1891. “The general appearance of the city,” traveller Mary Davenport remarked in 1876, “is that of one that once was great, but whose grandeur and vitality are fading away.” Other observers described the city as “medieval,” “feudal,” and “mysterious.”3 Thoreau devoted a chapter to the antiquity of Quebec City’s fortifications and to the weight of “the memory and tradition of feudal days and customs.”4 Labelling the city’s criminal-justice system “anti-modern,” Donald Fyson notes the refusal of its courts and police to adopt a “culture of public information and statistics … characteristic of the modern state.”5 Compared to Montreal with its strong English population, Quebec City was overwhelmingly French. Its population was 67.6 per

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cent French in 1871, rising to 82.8 per cent in 1901. With its British Protestant population declining from 9.8 per cent of the population in 1871 to 7.1 per cent in 1901, Quebec City could legitimately lay claim to status as capital of a French Catholic nation.6 If Irish Catholics were included, Quebec City remained about 90 per cent Roman Catholic, allowing Archbishop Taschereau to proudly repeat the pope’s description of the city as “the North American metropolis of Catholicism.”7 The city’s docks, warehouses, artisanal shops, commercial district, and, later, railway were located in the lower city along the St Lawrence and St Charles rivers. Separated geographically and socially, the upper city, with its skyline of Basilica, seminary, and convents alongside the citadel, legislature, and governor’s palace, was suggestive of ecclesiastical permanence and church-state complicity. While Montreal had removed its fort, Quebec City retained its citadel and walls in a region that enjoyed international peace after 1814. The vestigial cannons and monuments to Wolfe, Montcalm, and Bishop Laval were suggestive of persistence, of an encompassing history, and of the normality in the old capital of patrician authority despite the larger continent’s passage into modernity and consumerism. Alongside his evident social conservatism, the archbishop, in an official effort to counter French-Canadian emigration, encouraged economic development and church investment in industrial enterprises like railways. This had its counterpart in his unremitting hostility to American-based labour unions and the cooperative movement. Capitalist entrepreneurs understood Taschereau and the potential of what Benedict Anderson calls the “collaboration of capitalism and gentility” and joined in the celebration of the city as French, Catholic, and conservative.8 The North Shore Railway chose the grounds of the venerable Hôpital général for its sodturning ceremony in July 1872. In his archbishop’s robes and speaking from a red dais, Taschereau blessed the railway and then turned the first sod with a special silver trowel. When citizens along the route expressed opposition to the railway, Taschereau issued a circular describing the enterprise as “a patriotic work” that his priests would fully support.9 This patricianism and Taschereau’s collaborative nationalism have not aged well in the early twentieth-first-century construction of Quebec historiography around themes of progress, autonomy, and the national struggle of a resistant people. In any case, histories celebrating the nation tend to sidestep stalled cities like Quebec City, focusing instead on entrepreneurial centres like Montreal and what Geoff Eley calls “the ethic of improvement.”10 With Archbishop Taschereau and Quebec City on the sidelines, it is the ultramontanist Catholicism of Bishop Ignace Bourget’s Montreal that draws fire as the principal force in the retardation of modernity in Quebec. Both historian Louis Rousseau and the multi-volume Histoire du catholicisme québécois, while emphasizing the growth of a rural-based, national church, give central weight to issues in Montreal after 1840.11

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

But there is another historiography. Influenced by Vatican II, Jesuit William F. Ryan separated nineteenth-century Quebec Catholicism from its simple equation with economic backwardness.12 Recent interpretations by Ollivier Hubert, Michael Gauvreau, and most insistently René Hardy and Jean-Marie Fecteau have resituated the authority of Archbishop Taschereau within the context of a powerful metropolitan church based in Quebec City.13 And, although he deals with the period before 1829, Luca Codignola effectively demonstrates the political savoir faire of the Holy See and Quebec bishops in dealing with North American issues of democratization and economic change.14 These perspectives facilitate an understanding of Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s fundamental influence on Quebec society: the legitimization of social differences in industrializing society; the long-term deconstruction of feudal institutions while the privileges of seigneurs and Catholic institutions were protected; the negotiation of church-state relations in the context of a new Canadian nation with a Protestant majority; and the tightening application across Catholic society of Council of Trent principles.

fa mily and t r aining Second-generation head Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau had established four patrilineal branches, and within a half century of his death in 1809, the Taschereaus had dozens of namesakes, each conscious of the significance of the family name. The two senior branches – the offspring of Thomas-Pierre-Joseph and Jean-Thomas Sr – were national in profile, profession, and marriage; their descendants included two Supreme Court judges, an archbishop, and a provincial premier. The third and fourth branches – offspring of Antoine-Charles Taschereau and George-Louis Taschereau, Gabriel-Elzéar’s sons from his second marriage – were more regionally focused, spreading across the Beauce as local patricians and seigneurial heirs; others in these branches found place as merchants, surveyors, sawmill operators, or doctors, or in local appointed posts such as postmaster, school inspector, customs collector or registrar. Other Taschereaus with legal, clerical, military, or business careers moved out of the Beauce, most often to Quebec City but also to Montreal, Ottawa, or Boston. Despite this dispersal, the schools of the Ursuline convent and Seminary of Quebec remained strong bonding forces. Just in the school year 1856– 57, four Taschereaus were studying at the seminary’s classical college, then directed by Abbé Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau.15 Maintenance of patrician status over generations was a continuing process of strategies around succession, marriage, headship, and family alliances. Confirmation in the Quebec Act of 1774 of freedom of willing had given great instrumentality to elite French, as well as English, families. While Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau had maintained the French customary tradition in his 1809 will, the abandonment in

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7.4 Jean-Thomas Taschereau, 1875. Eldest son, seigneur, and Supreme Court judge, Jean-Thomas Jr suffered from mediocre health. Never a media “star” like his brother the archbishop, Jean-Thomas was the father of Quebec premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau.

his children’s wills of equal division in favour of concentrating seigneurial wealth in a single male heir represented a fundamental change in succession practice.16 In his 1819 will, Jean-Thomas Taschereau Sr named his eldest (legitimate) son, JeanThomas Jr (b. 1814), as sole heir of his seigneury of Jolliet. The death in 1826 and 1832 of first and second branch heads, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau and JeanThomas Taschereau Sr, left direction of the senior branches in the hands of widows and young sons across the critical political period of the 1830s and 1840s. With Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s choice of a celibate life, the marriages of his siblings became even more vital to the family’s future. Females of the first generations had married into ranking families like the Duchesnays, Panets, and Perraults; in the nineteenth century, Taschereaus married into the Angers, Dionne, Caron, and Des Rivières families. One of the archbishop’s sisters married into the

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7.5 Marie-Eugénie Taschereau, c. 1860. To find marriage partners of standing, Taschereau women reached out to prestigious families across Quebec. Marie-Eugénie Taschereau, daughter of Jean-Thomas Jr and niece of the archbishop, married François-Guillaume Des Rivières, heir of James McGill’s estate in Stanbridge Township but a gambler and spendthrift. To stave off financial catastrophe for his daughter, Jean-Thomas Jr took a mortgage for $16,800 on their manor “Malmaison” and lent her husband $5,500. This support was to no avail: after a fall from his horse and a long paralysis, Des Rivières declared bankruptcy. With his death in 1893, Marie-Eugénie and her five Des Rivières children were forced to move in with family in Quebec City.

highest colonial ranks, her children distinguishing themselves at Oxford and in British military service. With the death of his first wife, Louise-Adèle Dionne, daughter of the seigneur of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière, the archbishop’s brother Jean-Thomas Jr married Marie-Joséphine, daughter of René-Édouard Caron, legislative councillor, judge of the seigneurial court, and lieutenant-governor of Quebec, 1873–76. Caron was also a lawyer for the Seminary of Quebec, and his legal opinion had weight in seigneurial tenure, education, Confederation, and minority rights outside Quebec. In his role as one of the three commissioners on the Civil Code Commission, his strict Catholicism and social conservatism were apparent in church-state negotiations concerning the status of marriage as both a civil ar rangement and a sacrament. Distinguished office was essential to the patrician, and the addition of episcopal and judicial seats greatly strengthened the place of fourth-generation Taschereaus at Canada’s high table of authority. Two Taschereaus, Jean-Thomas Jr and his nephew Sir Henri-Elzéar Taschereau, sat on the Supreme Court of Canada. From

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institutional bases in the Seminary of Quebec, Laval University, and the Archbishop’s Palace, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau was the pre-eminent late nineteenthcentury figure in establishing what Fernand Dumont described as a “religious society” – that is, a French Canada in which theological meaning had universality across its institutions and culture.17 Not all Taschereaus benefited from senior appointment, nepotism, or fast-tracking to legislative seats or road commissionerships. Patronage in this generation more often took local forms as schools, post offices, and courthouses spread into the Beauce. Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau, seigneur of Sainte-Marie and head of the first branch, was inspector of schools for the counties of the Beauce, Mégantic, and Dorchester. In 1831, he was replaced in this paid office by Antoine-Charles Taschereau, who was also named customs inspector for the Beauce. He would in turn be replaced in the inspectorship by his nephew notary Thomas-Jacques Taschereau. Named sheriff of the Beauce in 1858, ThomasJacques passed this office to his son Gustave-Olivier in 1883. Taschereau command in the militia, evident in the American Revolution and, a generation later, in the War of 1812–14, was another form of transmitting male authority. In 1827, JeanThomas Taschereau Sr ceded his lieutenant-colonelship in the 2nd Battalion, Dorchester, to his younger brother Antoine-Charles Taschereau. This promotion led in turn to the advancement of their nephew Lieutenant Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau to major. In the same announcement, Ensign George-Louis Taschereau, head of the fourth branch, was promoted to captain.18 Several Taschereaus of the second and third generations had taken religious orders, and unlike most elite families, the family continued to produce clerics into the fourth and fifth generations. Besides the archbishop, the Taschereaus produced a Trappist, several nuns, and a volunteer for the papal zouaves.19 Born in the manor house in 1820, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau was raised in Sainte-Marie.20 The 1820s saw rapid expansion of industries and population on the seigneury, the construction of its convent and school, and the rebuilding of the domain chapel. His father’s death in 1832 meant Elzéar-Alexandre’s eclipse into a pious world around his mother, parish priest Antoine Villade, and his seminary instructors. Strict piety was not, however, incompatible with patrician mores and a household in which his mother raised the illegitimate son of his father and aunt. His uncle’s illegitimate daughter lived and married in Sainte-Marie, while another uncle had retired to the domain as a disgraced priest. Elzéar-Alexandre was baptized by emigré priest Villade, whose live-in housekeeper was a source of gossip. The Beauce was always known for popular superstition, and religious authorities regularly contended with charlatans, faith healers, and quacks who organized communication with the dead.21 Charivaris, Sainte-Anne Day riots, and unpaid tithes and seigneurial dues spoke to a contested seigneurial and clerical authority, particularly among the Beauce’s young and its Irish.

7.6 Top Popular religiosity is evident in evening prayers at a wayside cross in Saint-Isidore de Lauzon, 1946. 7.7 Bottom Planting the seigneurial maypole (n.d.). In Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph, the planting of a May Day fir tree on the Chaudière facing the seigneurial domain remains rooted in popular culture.

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7.8 Nighttime aquatic parades, during which statues of the saint were carried down the river to the domain chapel, remain part of the Sainte Anne festival.

As a boy, Elzéar-Alexandre was tutored at home in Latin and French, attending the school in Sainte-Marie for English lessons taught by his cousin’s husband. At age eight, he joined his brother in Quebec City as a boarder in the Seminary of Quebec’s classical program. The seminary compound, with the adjacent Basilica and episcopal palace, would come to represent home, and fittingly he would have his portrait drawn with a seminary interior as background.22 His fellow seminarians, his chapel, and his library were all here, and in a rare personal remark, he confided, “I am above all a seminarian.”23 While Jean-Thomas Jr followed their father into law, Elzéar-Alexandre chose the clerical profession of three of his uncles, including Bishop Bernard-Claude Panet. Graduation from classical college was a critical career moment, and parish priests were instructed to recruit boys of “good character,” “piety,” and “Christian virtues.” Given his piety and family rank, Elzéar-Alexandre was carefully monitored by mentors in the seminary and in his home parish of Sainte-Marie. Age fifteen in January 1836 and months from graduation, he told his mother of his plans for the priesthood.24

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

This pronouncement in favour of a religious vocation determined the itinerary of his grand tour of American and European capitals, a normal student passage for Taschereau males. His brother Jean-Thomas Jr studied law for several months in Paris, and his cousin Charles-Philippe Taschereau, after spending two months with the Hart family in London, drowned in January 1841 in the crossing to France.25 Elzéar-Alexandre and two other seminarians were entrusted to Abbé John Holmes, the seminary’s most prominent intellectual, on his mission to colleges, museums, and libraries in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, London, Paris, the Netherlands, and Rome. Besides reporting on elementary and teacher education, Holmes was mandated to purchase textbooks, musical instruments, and scientific equipment for the seminary and the Ursulines. Taschereau was apprenticed into Holmes’s world of Enlightenment science, international pedagogy, new technologies, and historical and statistical research. He had studied Canadian history in Holmes’s class and in Paris was sent to the Bureau de la Marine to gather statistics on New France between 1730 and 1760.26 Yet, alongside this initiation into the intellectual citadels of Europe and the United States, Taschereau had a parallel world in which the mystical, religious icons, and monastic asceticism had powerful appeal. As a seminarian, he had stood out because of his Marianism and his membership in the Congrégation de la Bienheureuse-Vierge-Marie-Immaculée.27 Nearing the end of his year abroad and travelling to Rome without Holmes in May 1837, Taschereau met with Benedictine Dom Prosper-Louis-Pascal Guéranger, was tonsured, and announced his departure for the order’s monastery in Solesmes, France. Charismatic and a leading figure in the revival of monasticism, Guéranger championed meditation, liturgy, papal infallibility, and the Immaculate Conception. Taschereau explained his decision to his mother: “Hardly had I met him than I felt captured by a desire to enter his Order. Benedictine: that is something that suits me. One doesn’t become a Benedictine just to pray but to pray and work for God. What service is rendered to Religion by this admirable institution!”28 News of his tonsuring as a Benedictine was received with consternation by the family. Jean-Thomas Jr described Elzéar-Alexandre’s decision as virtually one of “your death, for you will be dead for us and everyone … Adieu, dear brother. Adieu, Adieu. Your affectionate brother.”29 Holmes hurried to Rome. Only after intense negotiations with Guéranger and his insistence that Taschereau was below the legal age for taking clerical vows was Holmes able to extract his charge from the Benedictines. Back in Quebec City, Taschereau crossed the seminary courtyard to the Grand Séminaire. His entry into theology coincided with reviving Catholic religiosity in Lower Canada and a wave of clerical vocations. In 1810, only ten students had been tonsured at the Grand Séminaire; forty-three candidates entered in 1839.30 In 1842, when he was still eighteen months below the official minimum age for taking

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canonical vows, he was ordained by the bishop in his parish church at Sainte-Marie. The first ordination held in the Beauce, the ceremony symbolized the union of patrician family, seigneury, and church.

pre l ate Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s family rank, scholasticism, and comfort in masculine community made him a good candidate for seminary life and a career in education or church administration – not for him the isolation of parish duties and a presbytery. Joining the community of the Seminary of Quebec, he began teaching philosophy and science in its classical college.31 Over the next years, he reworked courses in architecture, astronomy, theology, and Holmes’s course in Canadian history. He wrote a history of the seminary as well as an eighteen-page critique of Abbé Étienne-Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Histoire du Canada, de son église et de ses missions.32 As prefect (1849–54) and then director of the college (1856–59), Taschereau served on the seminary’s library committee. In 1852, students under his supervision established the Fondation Saint-Denys, a literary society modelled on that of the Petit-Séminaire de Paris. Taschereau signed its minutes, and with the Superior and school director, drew up its rules.33 In all of his college functions, he insisted on censorship: We have forbidden possession of any book without the express permission of the director with the exception of class textbooks and works of devotion and prizes … I have already sent back a mass of books, which without being bad are nonetheless useless … Despite all the rules, some prohibited books will still enter, but at least they will be obliged to hide them carefully and when they are seized, application of the letter of the law will be a means of silencing those who cry out against injustice, arbitrariness, and tyranny. As a canonist, I find nothing more beautiful or stronger than a good text. There is nothing which contributes as much to conserve unity and regularity in a house as this prescience of the law which regulates everything in advance and in as uniform a manner as humanly possible.34 Taschereau also kept tight reign on the seminary’s student newspaper, L’Abeille, sitting on its board and controlling its content and distribution. First published in 1848, the four-page weekly, as well as producing brochures on piety, music, and science, was distributed in several classical colleges across Quebec.35 By adopting official Catholic positions, it avoided the French anticlericals who had influenced students at the Collège de Montréal in the 1830s: “We are Catholics before citizens, and situated above what we owe to our patrie, is what we owe to religion.”36

7.9 Archbishop Taschereau with students from the seminary

With the chartering of Laval University in 1852, it was planned that the academic training of priests would be transferred from the seminary to a university theological faculty that might attract students from classical colleges across Quebec. With an eye to their nomination to the anticipated faculty, Taschereau and three other seminary priests were sent for graduate work in Rome. Taschereau returned in 1854 with a doctorate in canon law. With the opening of the theological faculty delayed until 1866, Taschereau taught theology in the Grand Séminaire and, in 1859, was named director. An inveterate letter writer as an administrator, Taschereau, like John Samuel McCord, was a diarist.37 From New Year’s Day 1849, Taschereau continued his diary, producing over two volumes, although he terminated the habit in October 1869 when he left on a visit to Rome. Officially a log of “the practices and customs of the Seminary of Quebec,” the diary shows Taschereau’s pleasure in the daily, the autobiographical, the social, and the ceremonial. Instead of recording his thoughts on ultramontanism or his attendance at meetings of, for example, the Council of Public Instruction, Taschereau used the log to detail events like the death of the seminary’s mascot: “‘Death of the dog.’ Thursday 24 October. At 10:00 am dead of illness, a beautiful Newfoundland terrier named ‘Milord.’ A great favourite of everyone because of his wisdom, his goodness, and his liveliness.”38

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7.10 Sketch of altar from Alexandre-Elzéar Taschereau’s diary, 1868. Taschereau, like McCord, occasionally turned his hand to drawing, architectural plans, or decorations for devotional occasions.

Lacking the obvious subjectivity of the traditional diarist, Taschereau clothed his authorship, increasingly referring to himself in the third person: “M. Taschereau with eleven ecclesiastics, left at 10:15 and arrived at the cross at 12:15. They ate around the fountain near the cross and then enjoyed themselves until 2:00 by visiting the diverse plateaux and admiring the magnificent panorama.”39 In March 1861, he described the obligatory attendance of all seminary and university students at his sister-in-law’s funeral: “Friday 15. Burial of Madame J.T. Taschereau. Le Grand and Petit Séminaire attended because she was the sister-in-law of a priest at the Seminary; students at the University attended in uniform because M. Taschereau [his brother Jean-Thomas] is an honorary professor and because his son is a student.”40 Weather, hiking, scientific visits, anniversaries, maple toffee, singing, dinners, male comradeship, and guest lists were staples in his bi-weekly entries. Particular attention was paid to graduations, governor’s levées, death-bed scenes, and fires and other catastrophes: “After dinner I went to Montmorency Falls with M. Hamel and the physicists for an on-site study of the geological theories applicable to the different terrains visible there. On our way back we went a quarter of a league north of the Beauport mill, where on the mill river, a layer of shells is to be found.”41 Ceremonies were carefully detailed: “At 3:45 the members of the faculties of law and medicine met in the salon of the University to present M. Casault [former rec-

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tor] with a portrait drawn by M. Théophile Hamel. Judge Morin, Dean of Law said a few words to which M. Casault replied. Also present was the Rector [Taschereau himself], the members of the Council, the professors of the arts faculty, and the four students who had not gone home for the holidays. As a body, they then proceeded to visit the Archbishop and then the Rector.”42 Alongside this quotidian record, the yearly retreat brought anxious entries on the Virgin Mary: “Meditation on the Virgin. Tomorrow we will meditate on the Holy Virgin. What she is for the Trinity, to all of us, as men, as priests, as Christians … the heart of Mary is sovereignly maternal and royal, tender and magnificent, merciful and liberal.”43 This mysticism was recorded alongside scientific observations: soil, landscape, geology, chaining techniques, and surveying tools. In August 1850, Taschereau assisted the seminary’s surveyor in comparing measurements taken from the tops of trees by use of a graph-meter tool with earlier observations from the base of trees.44

7.11 Taschereau in his robes as rector of Laval University

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This insistence in his diary on orderly collection and exact information would also characterize his episcopal administration. He ordered priests to observe civil laws in reporting statistics. Priests were to prepare precise parish inventories of sacred ornaments, relics, and furniture and to store the reports in fireproof containers in their private quarters.45 During an episcopal visit, the priest was to produce a “complete and exact” list of the material conditions in his parish. Following his annual visit to every home, the priest was to compile a “book of souls” on each household, including church and school attendance, conditions of morality and hygiene, presence in the home of books, newspapers, or “strangers,” and the names of participants in “dangerous activities.”46 The seminary’s sponsorship of Elzéar-Alexandre’s graduate studies in Rome was a sign that it was grooming him for senior responsibilities. Mentors like Superior Louis-Jacques Casault assured the young priest experience in communications, administration, and negotiations with civil authorities. In 1850 and still a junior, he was named to write the eulogy for Archbishop Joseph Signay.47 Taschereau’s persistence in the administration of the Institut canadien de Québec gave him public exposure in a sensitive association. While his father had figured in the founding of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, a learned society and library based on a British model and operating essentially in English, Elzéar-Alexandre was a leading figure in the Institut canadien de Québec from its founding in 1848 and its subsequent establishment of a library, reading room, museum, and public-lecture series. Unlike its provocatively liberal Montreal counterpart, the Quebec City institute, in its mission to impart “a taste for education, the arts, science, and useful knowledge,” remained firmly in the Catholic mainstream.48 Taschereau was the only cleric named to its board of governors in 1849; a year later he appeared as vice-president, and he remained a member as late as 1888.49 This assured him contact with prominent intellectuals like François-Xavier Garneau, Octave Crémazie, and Joseph-Charles Taché. Three Taschereaus, including the archbishop, were among the founding members of the Société de géographie de Québec.50 In 1859, Taschereau was named to the Council of Public Instruction, the central force in Catholic education; in 1860, he became Superior of the seminary, a position that included the rectorship of Laval University; and two years later, he was named vicar-general. Elzéar-Alexandre’s consecration as archbishop, 20 March 1871, brought leadership in the Catholic Church across Quebec. The archbishop of Toronto, aided by eight bishops (with the notable absence of Bishop Ignace Bourget), presided over the four-hour ceremony. The Basilica, steps from the seminary where he had spent his life, was jammed with 150 priests, the university professoriate, and political, diplomatic, and judicial signatories. An artist from the Illustrated News depicted the event for readers in Britain and across North America. The official party included his brother Judge Jean-Thomas Taschereau and Major Eugène-Arthur Taschereau, aide-

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7.12 Taschereau’s consecration as archbishop, 20 March 1871

de-camp to Quebec’s first lieutenant-governor, Sir Narcisse Belleau.51 After speeches, the bestowal of the ring, mitre, gloves, and pastoral baton of an archbishop, the kiss of peace from each of his episcopal colleagues, and a Te Deum, “Sa Grandeur” blessed the congregation: “A marked feeling of respect bowed all heads and a shiver of joy and religious enthusiasm moved the immense crowd. There was something infinitely solemn in this benediction, an august moment akin to a father blessing his children. It was profound veneration and respectful love, like all great affection stamped by the seal of religion.”52 Of major social and cultural import, Taschereau’s episcopacy must not be reduced to the internecine struggle with Bishop Bourget.53 By 1879, his archdiocese included eight dioceses and hundreds of priests. He oversaw the establishment of dozens of new parishes, thirty missions, and classical colleges in Chicoutimi (1877) and Lévis (1879). Through the improved theological training of priests, clerical

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retreats, regular summer visits around the archdiocese, and his insistence on exact reporting from all parishes, he ensured a more educated parish clergy and a more informed episcopacy.54 He encouraged the entry into Canada of teaching orders, including the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, the Clerics of Saint-Viateur, the Frères de Saint-Vincent de Paul, the Brothers of Charity, and the Marist Brothers. Though lacking the coadjutor traditionally present in a metropolitan diocese, he issued sixty-six mandements from 1871 to 1893, as well as hundreds of pastoral letters – written in his own hand – and circulars to his clergy.55 Holder of a doctorate in canon law, son and brother of prominent jurists, and brother-in-law of a codifier of Quebec civil law, Taschereau, like John Samuel McCord, was particularly interested in regimenting the clergy. Rooted in the principles of the Council of Trent, his Code of Clerical Discipline (1879) was part of what JeanMarie Fecteau describes as the church’s “immense power of braking or of blockage.”56 Shaped by the increasingly intransigent Catholic ideology of the Papal Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility (1869), Taschereau’s code emphasized the independence of church authority: “The church was founded by our Father as a perfect society unto itself, distinct and independent from civil society to which it is superior through its origins, its universalism, and by its mission which is the eternal happiness of souls.”57 One of Taschereau’s most important civil interventions concerned the organizing of workers along Quebec City’s waterfront of docks, shipyards, and timber coves. His sorties against the Knights of Labor in 1884 and 1886 earned him international title as one of the most aggressive opponents of unionism in North America. His position certainly reflected Rome’s growing international muscle and its concerns over radicalism as summarized in the Rerum Novarum (1891). But his hostility had deeper social and nativist roots reaching back to his origins in a seigneurial family, to his earlier confrontations with the Quebec Ship Labourers’ Benevolent Society, to his view of social relations between French and Irish Catholics, and to his determination to organize Quebec on a confessional basis. To general North American ecclesiastical concerns for order and the vested, he added the particular colonial context of French Canada with its specific history and vulnerability. This ethnocentricity served to distance Taschereau from his peers in the North American episcopacy, most of whom were of Irish origin. Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s familiarity with Irish Catholics in both Quebec City and the Beauce was well known, and as a bilingual priest posted to serve Irish immigrants at the Grosse Île quarantine station in 1847, he had almost perished from typhus. In the pluralist Beauce, French-Canadian parishes along the Chaudière like Sainte-Marie and Saint-Joseph backed onto upland Irish communities like Tring, Saint-Sylvestre, and Saint-Patrice. In Quebec City, however, he would have no

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

truck with the popular Irish culture of the longshoremen, their determined resistance to authority, their associational life, and their Chartist and American discourses on democracy and class solidarity. Insisting on a monopoly from “above” in determining what Edward Said describes as “fitting,” as “higher and lower,” and as “proper and improper,” Taschereau and his fellow bishops drew on the “moral and religious” differences between urban life and that of rural parishes.58 While the former represented “modern Babylons” and factory-inspired “impiety” and “perverted hearts,” the countryside “preserved simple values, the straight heart, traditions of saving, taste for work, the love of justice.”59 Repeating Rome’s position, he remained adamant on the dangers of popular democracy for Quebec society: “The capital error of our century, justly called the century of revolutions, is to confound notions of real power, so as to substitute the supreme authority of the people to that of divine authority, and thus to justify all revolutions, all disorders, all injustices … The Catholic Church … has its chef to whom were confided the keys of the heavenly kingdom … It is superior to the State in dignity and in authority … The authority of the Church must be respected in public life as in private life.”60 Nor, given his roots in the ecclesiastical life in Quebec City as opposed to Montreal, would he be more than a moderate supporter of French-Canadian minority rights outside Quebec or of a larger place for Quebec in the Canadian Confederation.61 Federal intervention in linguistic or educational issues in one jurisdiction, for example, might find a counterpart in efforts to protect Protestant minority rights in Quebec. The Quebec Ship Labourers’ Benevolent Society had been established in 1861 by Irish Catholics, some of whom had international experience in waterfront conflicts across North America.62 From its original base in Irish waterfront neighbourhoods, with concerns centred on workplace conditions, the society increasingly agitated for democratic rights and moral justice for workers, as well as mutual aid, temperance, and burial dignity. This made the Benevolent Society vulnerable to portrayal as a secular and foreign affront to a stable French-Canadian society. Irish unionists could be associated with republican Fenians who had invaded Canada in 1866 and 1870 and with Montreal’s Great Association of Workers, established in 1867 with socialist principles and demands for food cooperatives and Prudhomme-type councils to resolve labour conflicts. In Quebec’s St Patrick’s Society parade of 1867, labouring men mustered by the Benevolent Society represented the parade’s largest contingent.63 As late as 1878, the Benevolent Society’s annual procession was a symbol of popular solidarity across the city, with forays into the upper-town territory of the Catholic bourgeoisie, some 5,000 marchers, five bands (including the Emerald Independent Brass Band and the City Band of Montreal), a delegation of militia men from Battery B, and members of the St Patrick’s Total Abstinence Society. Banners in French proclaimed, “We help our sick. We bury our dead.”64

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Taschereau led the charge in linking the Quebec Ship Labourers’ Benevolent Society and then the Knights of Labor with Freemasonry, “secret societies,” “cosmopolitan” immigrant culture, and the “occult,” using his office to brandish excommunication as the penalty for social and political challenges.65 The society’s elected officials, usually Irish and English-speaking, were perceived as usurping the authority of chaplains and parish priests along with that of the capitalist employers. In 1879, a more conciliatory and primarily French-Canadian association, “l’Union canadienne,” was formed, but the militia was soon called into the streets to control violence and ethnic riots. The intervention of Archbishop Taschereau and priests, including those from St Patrick’s Church, played a critical role in neutralizing the parades, the public demonstrations, and the escalating violence. In a mandement damming the Benevolent Society, the archbishop insisted that “every man is master of his own work … and has the same authority over his work as a farmer on his land.” Any Catholic who interfered with a worker’s right to work “at a wage which suits him” would be subject to excommunication.66 In 1887, Taschereau, now a cardinal, responded to questions from the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital. “Strikes are one of the great dangers of society,” he wrote in his brief, “for they too often degenerate into deplorable disorders. It seems to me that it would be useful to establish a court of arbitration … to settle the difficulties which give rise to strikes.”67

l ava l u nivers it y As professor, Superior of the seminary, university rector for six years, 1860–66, and finally archbishop, Taschereau played an instrumental role in the history of Laval University, particularly in maintaining seminary dominance in the university. In contrast to McGill, which John Samuel McCord and his Anglican friends failed to transform into a confessional university, Laval was to be Catholic in teaching and principles, in theology, of course, but also in the faculties of arts, law, and medicine. Taschereau was a principal architect in the fight to retain Laval’s monopoly in Catholic university education in Quebec and to establish university training for Catholic professionals. He saw Laval as the pinnacle of a “totalizing” educational hierarchy “saturating downward” through the classical, teachers’, industrial, and agricultural colleges to the province’s developing system of elementary schools.68 Plans for a Catholic university had originated at the Seminary of Quebec with Jérôme Demers and John Holmes and were piloted after 1848 by Louis-Jacques Casault, professor of physics, Superior after 1851, and Taschereau’s mentor. As opposed to Bishop Bourget’s plan for a provincial university under the bishops of Quebec, Casault pushed for a diocesan university attached to the Seminary of Quebec and under the sole control of the archbishop. In the spring of 1849, Taschereau was

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

despatched to Montreal to analyse first-hand the charters and religious affiliations of Canada’s English-speaking universities. In his report, he pointedly urged avoidance of any emphasis on French Canada’s special condition or its need for separate religious and national rights. He instead urged seminary authorities to appeal to English Canada’s sense of “fair play,” to an inclusive sense of “English” identity, and to the tradition of Protestant confessional universities already existent in the colony.69 He argued that a Catholic university associated with the respected Seminary of Quebec might easily integrate into the pattern of denominational universities already existent in Protestant Canada. Royal charters, he noted, had been routinely granted to colleges with Protestant affiliations: the Anglican King’s in Toronto (1827), the Methodist Victoria College in Cobourg (1841), and the Presbyterian Queen’s College in Kingston (1842). Besides being host to the non-sectarian McGill University, Lower Canada was home to the confessional Anglican Bishop’s College (1843). Taschereau also perceived the importance of the abolition of the Corn Laws and the granting of responsible government as steps in London’s relinquishment of authority over local matters. To this end, he urged the abandonment of French-Canadian appeals over the heads of local legislators to Westminster. He counselled that the seminary, instead of requesting a royal charter, first seek incorporation for its university from the local legislature: “The Seminary of Quebec enjoys a quite good reputation and has a large number of friends at all levels. Since it would be asking nothing that is exclusive or excessive, nothing that is not already well known in this country, and nothing that would represent an expense for the government, why would it be refused?”70 As rector in 1862, Taschereau had reiterated what he called a “no noise” policy. Rejecting Bishop Bourget’s lobbying for a provincial university, he argued that the seminary, “acting alone and in its own name” did not “inspire the defiance from Protestants that would naturally be awakened by a request by all of the bishops.”71 Opposing a religious identification such as in the Catholic University of Leuven, he counselled against using the name “Séminaire de Québec” in the university’s title, since no other Canadian university identified itself by place or religious sect. He favoured “Collège Laval.” As part of his plan to centralize the emerging Quebec educational system around the new university in his diocese, Taschereau encouraged classical colleges across Lower Canada to affiliate with Laval. The five colleges in the Montreal region, particularly the Jesuit Collège Sainte-Marie and the Sulpicians’ Collège de Montréal, were the most resistant to what Philippe Sylvain describes as Taschereau’s plan “to drain to Quebec City the province’s best students, including those of Montreal.” Le Séminaire de Nicolet, known for its autonomy and its suspicion of a university too closely attached to the Séminaire de Québec, received a personal visit from Rector Taschereau and reassurances that it could later withdraw its affiliation.72

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Laval University’s 1852 charter established it as a French-speaking and Catholic institution under the authority of a board of directors chaired by the Superior of the seminary, who automatically held the office of rector. The charter named the archbishop as the only “visitor to the university” and, according to Catholic officials, created a Catholic university obedient to the principles of the Papal Syllabus of 1864, “completely under the control of ecclesiastical authority,” and “absolutely independent” of government control.73 Aside from presiding over board meetings and assemblies and ceremonies at the university, the rector supervised the university personnel, inquiring into “abuses” and “errors,” and had responsibility for approving student registrations.74 To the displeasure of other classical colleges, the seminary and university often operated as indistinguishable institutions sharing officials, physical space, and similar pedagogy and ideology.75 The vice-rector and university secretary-general were both drawn from among priests at the seminary, and into the mid-twentieth century, the twelve seminary directors, whatever their academic qualifications, still joined the deans of the four faculties as members of the university board. Taschereau, as a director at the seminary, was on the first board of Laval in 1853. The university statutes of those years left no doubt as to the allegiance of faculty members: “The behaviour of professors … must be exemplary and they must teach nothing that is contrary to Catholic morality or faith.”76 In a Mass at the beginning of term, the faculty, in a ceremony that lasted into the 1950s, joined in a procession to the Basilica, kneeling before the archbishop and swearing loyalty to Catholic doctrine.77 In Taschereau’s mind, a corporative experience, the university, was about belonging, paternalism, and the union of faith and collective identity: It was always so pleasant and agreeable to see reunited this large family of the Seminary of Quebec, Laval University, and of the Collège of Lévis, at the head of which Providence placed me as Superior and Rector. I know that in every heart my affection found faithful echo and I felt that together we were truly a unified heart and soul, with the common thought of serving the cause of religion and of the patrie – some exercising authority or teaching, others in preparing by obedience and by study to fulfil the destiny of Providence.78 While as clergy many of the professoriat lived in community at the seminary, secular faculty members, such as Taschereau’s brother Jean-Thomas, who taught commercial law, were drawn from reliable Catholic and family networks. There was a strong tradition of mentorship that continued from seminary to university. The archbishop himself and several of his peers had been drawn from the seminary for

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

study at the Gregorian University in Rome or at other European universities. As rector, Taschereau was able to perpetuate the practice, offering graduate study in Europe to promising clerical intellectuals like Louis-Nazaire Bégin. Laval’s faculty of theology opened in 1866, and by 1868, Bégin was teaching theology, scripture, and ecclesiastical history. Bégin, Taschereau’s junior colleague and confidant, was on Laval University’s board, acted as director of both the Petit and Grand Séminaire, and, through Taschereau’s influence, was named principal of the Laval Normal School of Quebec.79 Bégin wrote a textbook of Canadian history as well as a catechism that remained in use until 1951. While Rome was the obvious destination for canon law and theology, Paris, rather than Oxford, Cambridge, or Heidelberg, was preferred for the sciences. In 1862, Taschereau corresponded with the seminary’s teacher of botany, LouisOvide Brunet, in Europe to tour major botanical gardens and to study in Paris at the Jardin des plantes. Brunet reported to the rector on his mission and on the course material he was collecting for microscopic anatomy. In 1863, Taschereau saw to Brunet’s appointment as professor of natural history at Laval and to his research trip a year later to Boston, New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. The leading French-Canadian botanist of his generation, Brunet played a major role in the discipline – teaching, publishing, establishing the university’s herbarium to rival the Literary and Historical Society’s collection, and assigning popular names to Canadian plants.80 Within the confines of clerical censorship, Taschereau was known for his passion for books, libraries, and what he called “universal interests.” Priests travelling to the Holy Land or Egypt were encouraged to collect archaeological objects for the university’s museums.81 The seminary’s library of some 15,000 volumes doubled as a university library, and the faculty of arts used the seminary’s laboratories and museums of physics, mineralogy, geology, and botany. Laval’s faculties of law and medicine had prominent roles in encouraging national identity and in developing a more corporate Catholic professionalism than the more entrepreneurial and individualistic professional cultures promoted in most North American universities.82 Laval University, Taschereau pointed out, was designed to head a Catholic pedagogical envelope free from any affiliation with Protestant universities: “[O]ur Catholic students, aside from a few rare and deplorable exceptions, attend only Catholic institutions.”83 Protestant pamphleteers resented this intellectual closure, accusing authorities like Taschereau of “overt action”: “It will be seen that the course of teaching in the first Roman Catholic University in Quebec is of the most extreme description, and inculcates obedience to the Church of Rome in respect to every condemnation of civil rights and civil government contained in the Syllabus [of 1864].”84

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The university also encouraged a public culture of Catholic lectures, libraries, museums, and learned journals that would eclipse more secular or Protestant activities associated with the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, the Institut canadien de Montréal, or the projects of Alexandre Vattemare.85 Prominent clerics such as Joseph Aubry and Bégin gave public lectures in the evening on subjects ranging across universal history, comparative literature, science, and theology.86 As early as 1867, the faculty of arts considered publication of a literary, scientific, and historical review that might attract a broad public; Le Canada Français, a trimestrial literary and scientific review and the predecessor of the Revue de l’Université Laval, began publication in 1887. Strongly supported by Taschereau, the review received a special benediction from Pope Léon XIII.87 Honorary degrees and their accompanying celebrations were a means of meshing church and state through ritual moments. In September 1878, Governor General Lord Dufferin, in a ceremony witnessed by Archbishop Taschereau and Supreme Court judge JeanThomas Taschereau, was awarded an honorary doctorate of law.88 Catholic philanthropy towards universities was fitted into this structure. The university’s first lay benefactor was the brother of Abbé François-Xavier Baillargé, founder of the seminary’s library in classics. With a gift in 1885 of $10,000, lawyer Louis-deGonzague Baillargé established a chair of rhetoric to encourage “the patriotic, religious, and national work of Laval University.” Taschereau publicized this gift and, using his influence in Rome, ensured that Baillargé was named commander of the Ordre de St-Grégoire le Grand.89 As Superior and then rector through a period of ultramontanist revival, Taschereau needed sure political instincts to navigate through the ideological conflicts that divided seminary and university. Defender of a traditional classical college education with its emphasis on Greek and Roman authors and what a French bishop called “a solid base in science and virtue,” he clashed with followers of theologian Jean-Joseph Gaume, who attempted to ban pagan classical authors from the seminary curriculum. As Superior, Elzéar-Alexandre purged Gaumists from teaching positions at the seminary.90 He faced similar challenges at Laval in the faculties of medicine and law, and here he compromised his official insistence on a totalizing Catholic educational environment with civil realities. He refused, for example, to cede to demands that he dismiss three members of the medical faculty, all Protestants and Freemasons but highly competent. The teaching of family law was another morass, with courses necessarily treating separation, divorce, domicile, and marital authority from civil-law perspectives that contradicted canon law principles. Robert-Joseph Pothier’s Traité du contrat de marriage, for example, was essential for an understanding of the civil meaning of marriage. Taschereau permitted its teaching to law students despite Pothier’s presence on the index of prohibited works.

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

Public health was another area of shared political authority. During the smallpox crisis of 1885 and aware that victims of the disease were concentrated among an unvaccinated French-Canadian population, Taschereau chastised clerical opponents of inoculation, calling on Catholics in Montreal to report to public health clinics for vaccination.91 Clean water was another major public-health issue in cities, where the location and drainage of cemeteries were subject to provincial and municipal laws, but cemeteries also fell under canon administration and were treated in Taschereau’s code for priests.92 Other potential jurisdictional problems arose over the holding of Masses, church meetings, or public funerals during epidemics. Despite his insistence that the church was a “perfect society, complete unto itself,” Taschereau was a dedicated supporter of information collection by civil authorities. In 1891, he called on the clergy to collaborate in data collection and to defuse their parishioners’ suspicions of the census as a device for taxation and militia enrolment: “Our Province, especially its Catholics, gains a huge amount by reporting exact numbers because the larger these numbers, the larger our share in the distribution of public funds for education and local improvements: they must not hesitate to give an exact state of their production or revenues from their land or other property so that we can determine a just idea of the resources of this Province that our enemies are so determined to depreciate.”93

the public touch Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s academicism never displaced his sure feel for the popular religious culture of his childhood. Named a cardinal in 1886, he replied to a petition from 463 parishioners of Sainte-Marie, addressing them as “frères” and defining the parish as a more unifying institution than either province or nation. He reminisced about his Sainte-Marie childhood, when the convent had been built and the chapel blessed, and, later in his life, the inauguration of the Christian Brothers school and the enlargement of the parish church.94 Church bells, a traditional means of organizing time and communication around piety, have already been seen to illustrate Taschereau influence on the visual and oral landscape. As early as 1724, Louise-Élisabeth de Vaudreuil, linked to the Taschereaus by marriage, had been named godmother of the great bell of the Ursuline convent in Quebec. The archbishop’s grandparents and great-grandparents had been sponsors of church bells in Sainte-Marie. Taschereau himself attached great importance to the symbolism of bells. His disciplinary code, for example, emphasized the relationship between bell communication and piety; priests were to ensure that the blessing of bells was reserved for episcopal authorities, beginning with the archbishop, and that bells were not rung on profane occasions.95 Bells were of particular importance as reminders of the imminence of

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death. By the 1840s, it was part of the verger’s function to ring Sainte-Marie’s bells when the priest set out to administer extreme unction; daily at 20:00, he sounded the bells in a melancholy soupir to call families to pray for their dead.96 The archbishop himself criss-crossed the province for bell benediction ceremonies in Notre-Dame-du-Portage, Sainte-Famille de Cap-Santé, Saint-Patrice (Rivière-duLoup), and, for the new bells of his home parish, Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce. Other parishes – Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Saint-Lazare, and Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours – named their bells after the archbishop.97 Through his youthful monastic experience and his rise in clerical rank, Taschereau remained deeply attached to the Counter-Reformation traditions of daily devotion, ritual, and the sacrament.98 Repetition was fundamental in his religious practice: he rose at 5:00 am for prayers and Mass, said his breviary after lunch and his rosary in the evening, and took confession weekly at the same hour. At the seminary, he led in implementing the “Quarante Heures,” strict commemorative devotions celebrating Moses’s forty days on the mountain, the forty-day fast of Jesus, and the forty days between the Resurrection and Ascension.99 A tradition begun in Milan in the sixteenth century, the Quarante Heures coincided with the beginning of Lent and were celebrated with continuous rounds of prayers, Masses, confessions, and communions conducted in the presence of the holy sacrament, which was on display throughout the forty hours. Sainte Anne and the Virgin Mary, the central female figures of Catholicism, had central presence in Taschereau family faith. Rooted in France and then in the traditions of the Beaupré coast of the St Lawrence River, Sainte Anne, with her miraculous powers to stave off water catastrophes such as flooding, was, thanks in large part to Taschereau sponsorship, the dominant figure in the popular religious culture of Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce. The Sainte-Anne chapel, built on the Taschereau domain in 1778 and rebuilt after a fire in 1828, included a relic of Sainte Anne. In 1837, Pope Gregory XVI accorded a full indulgence to those who, during the festival of Sainte Anne, 26 July, took communion in the domain chapel before the silver crucifix blessed by him and brought from Rome by Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr and other family members.100 As a boy in the 1820s, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau had witnessed the rebuilding of the chapel, and in 1866 his mother was buried in its crypt. Throughout his life, Taschereau celebrated Mass in the family’s Sainte-Anne chapel during his annual holiday in Sainte-Marie. The presence of a prelate, born a Beauceron but now of court and mitre, bonded Taschereau identity with the local community, its lore, and female devotions. Speaking at the dedication of the third domain chapel on 25 October 1891, the archbishop recounted the legend of how his great-aunt Marie Taschereau had rushed to the chapel during a disastrous spring flood of the Chaudière. “Good Sainte Anne, please help,” she was reported as saying. “If you

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

7.13 Blessing the bells in Sainte-Marie

don’t stop the flood, it will quickly drown your chapel.” Tradition reported that at this precise moment, the floodwaters began to subside.101 While the chapel on the Taschereau domain was an important regional attraction, the church at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, a landmark for ships passing up the St Lawrence, had international prominence as a sailors’ shrine to Sainte Anne. With the site’s growing importance for pilgrimages and miracles, Taschereau, in one of his first acts as archbishop, recommended prayers for “La bonne Sainte Anne”; priests across his diocese were to organize processions with the bearing of relics of Sainte Anne and indulgences to participants. In 1872, he ordered a collection to be taken up for the reconstruction of the church in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, and in four years over $22,000 was raised. In 1873, the archbishop supported the publication of a new periodical, Annales de la bonne Sainte Anne de Beaupré, and with 30,000 subscribers by 1883, it had become instrumental in familiarizing new French-speaking reading publics with pilgrimages and miracles. Sainte Anne’s feast day gained civil significance and a place on the liturgical calendar when Taschereau organized an episcopal petition that resulted in Rome’s naming Sainte Anne the patron saint of Quebec in 1876. By 1877, with 40,000 pilgrims visiting what had become French Canada’s most popular religious attraction, the archbishop invited Belgian Redemptorists to establish a monastery in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré and to administer the local parish. And, with lobbying from the archbishop, Pope Leo XIII

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promoted the church at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré to the status of a minor basilica.102 In his mandement for subscriptions for the church altar in Sainte-Anne-deBeaupré, Taschereau focused on donations from children and the poor: “We are asking for two cents per soul, two cents spread over two years, one cent in 1885 and the other in 1886 … Who is so poor that they cannot offer this subscription to Our Lord and the good Sainte Anne? What young child would not want to contribute this small sum? What parent would not gladly give two cents in the name of a child still in the cradle so that the good Sainte Anne would conserve and protect him all his life?”103 To add an associational dimension to the cult, Taschereau was instrumental in founding the Confrérie de Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré (1886) and its expansion across Quebec.104 The Virgin Mary also figured centrally in Taschereau family piety.105 As a seminary student, Elzéar-Alexandre joined the devotional association, the Congrégation de la Bienheureuse-Vierge-Marie-Immaculée, and as Superior and then archbishop, he walked every Saturday, precisely at 17:00, to Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church to pray before its statue of the Virgin.106 The Immaculate Conception, at the core of Marianism, was fundamental in Taschereau’s religious culture and reflected a transnational Marianist movement that included Pius IX’s encyclical on the Immaculate Conception (1854), Mary’s apparition before Bernadette at Lourdes (1858), and the works of theologians like John Henry Newman and Henri-Dominique Lacordaire.107 In Quebec, the “Month of Mary” was introduced in the 1830s with a view to increasing female domestic rituals around home shrines. Mary remained central in religious art; in 1825, for example, the Ursulines commissioned an engraving of Virgin and Child by engraver James Smillie.108 This devotion took practical forms in the writing of codes and manuals according to the Marian model and in the establishment in Quebec of several sororities devoted to Mary: the Archiconfrérie du Très Saint et Immaculé Coeur de Marie (1840), the Sacré-Coeur de Marie (1841), the Association de l’Immaculée-Conception (1854), the Confrérie du Scapulaire de l’Immaculée Conception (1857), the Consolatrice de Marie (1861), and the Enfants de Marie Immaculée (1861).109 As archbishop, Taschereau gave strong support to this Marianism, to the development of female confraternities, and to female piety around rosary and sacraments.110 Female members of the newly founded Association de la Sainte famille (1891) were, Taschereau explained in a pastoral letter, “to take special care to imitate the Holy Virgin, keeping her always before their eyes as a model for their actions and considering her as their superior and their measure of perfection.”111 Women imitating Mary, he continued, would have qualities of “charity,” “humility,” “cleanliness,” “chastity,” “temperance,” and “simplicity.” A husband could expect a wife to show “simple and cordial love,” “care for everything that involved him,” “respect,” “obedience,” “gentleness,” and “patience to suffer his faults and bad humour.”

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

The use of Marianism as a saintly standard for social and moral comportment had another gender component: the Virgin was of great symbolic importance to celibate males like Taschereau. While on retreats, Taschereau devoted pages in his journal to meditations on Mary and on what she meant to “us, as men, as priests, and as Christians. Before going to bed, let those of us who need it most, say an Ave Maria … Danger of venal sin.”112 Women, including nuns, were an ever-present danger. In the multiple photos of holidays in Boston, retreats at Cap Tourmente, or scenes at the seminary, the archbishop was never photographed in their company. Even the traditional offering of flowers to the archbishop was presented by a junior priest.113 Taschereau’s code of discipline, published on 8 December 1879 to coincide with the festival of the Immaculate Conception, included strong warnings of the dangers of female sexuality to the probity of the priest. Besides the obvious dangers of socializing with his domestic servants or of being alone in the presbytery with a female, priests were forbidden to confess women except across the confessional grill; if a priest was obliged to confess a sick woman outside the church, it was to be done in as public a fashion as possible. Women were forbidden to enter church except at certain hours, and they had to follow strict instructions concerning female dress and the interdiction to show their throat or shoulders.114 Taschereau reserved his strongest language for female religious communities. Unshielded by the conventions of male behaviour that mediated his relations with parish priests, seminarians, and professors, nuns, and particularly the Ursulines, received the full brunt of his authority. He gave precise instructions on how the domestic life of the monastery should be conducted and asked that they collect detailed information concerning the monastery’s occupants and material conditions. His letters to the Mother Superior emphasized his view of the convent as cloister, with its grills, bars, and total isolation from male contact. He rejected the Ursulines’ plans for a school and convent in Malbaie, from which the nuns hoped to visit the nearby prison. Small and visible from all sides, the proposed site, he told them, was unsuitable for a monastery; instead, social services to male prisoners would continue to be provided by missionary nuns. He did give the Mother Superior permission to enter the school parlour, accompanied by another nun, on up to three occasions to discuss the repair of the parlour wall with male workers. In his convent inspections, he addressed the nuns across the grill of the choir stalls and then visited the monastery itself, examining in particular the altar, sacristy, garden, and servants’ quarters. In a note to the Mother Superior, he ordered the Ursulines to stop fattening the pigs in their garden with kitchen scraps, given their “odour and danger for health”; instead, these remains could be sold to local farmers.115

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the us e of history an d mem or ializat ion Post-colonialists have not spared the rod in diminishing history to “nothing but the systematic valorization of complex collectives” (Frantz Fanon), to reconstructed facts that fit into a “socially acceptable narrative” (Edward Said), or, with respect to narrative history, to having “to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority” (Hayden White).116 This insistence on the instrumentality of history is useful in examining how Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, with strong institutional support from the Seminary of Quebec as well as the backing of other Catholic intellectuals, contributed to the creation of an encompassing Whig narrative of a heroic Catholic and French-Canadian people. Given substance in texts, sermons, genealogies, popular histories, and public ceremonies, memorials, and exhibitions, this history assumed an evident universality that extended deep into the twentieth-century Quebec imagination. In this conservative and clerical history, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau did not give prominence to his own father’s nationalist journalism or imprisonment by Governor Craig in 1810. In the first decades of his career, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau actively taught and wrote about history. Beginning in 1853, he taught the seminary’s Canadian history course, reshaping it into a fifty-seven–page text covering the critical period from the Conquest to 1849. His course notes, available in the seminary’s archives, followed Michel Bibaud’s Histoire du Canada, with exact page references, until the War of 1812–14, relying then on François-Xavier Garneau’s more recent history. A principal theme of his course was the wise direction taken by the clergy through the potential disaster of the Conquest, with Catholic survival in British North America compared to the fate of the church in revolutionary France. The Quebec Act demonstrated the success of the church’s practical diplomacy, specifically its confirmation of “freedom of religion, property and privilege, and ancient laws and customs with the exception of criminal law.”117 Subsequent discrimination against Roman Catholics and the introduction of a Protestant model of education, exemplified by the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, of which Elzéar-Alexandre’s father had been a director, was due less to British constitutional practice than to incompetent governors Haldimand and Prescott and ultimately to Craig’s “Reign of Terror.” British constitutional largesse, Taschereau taught, stumbled again in the personage of Lord Durham and his program of anglicization.118 Taschereau took particular umbrage at Abbé Étienne-Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg’s belief that the clergy had shown “cowardly timidity” in the post-Conquest period. The abbé, a Belgian ethnographer attached briefly to the seminary before being appointed vicar-general in Boston, was the author of Histoire du Canada, de son Église et de ses Missions (1852), which prompted a twenty-page response from Taschereau. Reworking Ecclesiastes 3 and listing sixty-three factual errors in Brasseur

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

de Bourbourg’s work, Taschereau defended “les Canadiens” and the church: “There is a time to speak but also a time to keep silent. There is a time to reclaim rights but innocence itself must be guided by wisdom in how it is reclaimed. Who knows if, in following the path of Edmund Burke, they [British authorities] wouldn’t have succeeded in closing all the teaching and religious institutions of Canada, especially in the period immediately after the Conquest?”119 An administrator by the 1860s, Taschereau continued to lend a strong hand to the teaching of history, particularly after the Papal Syllabus of 1864 identified “error,” “impiety,” and “falsification” as potential dangers in the study of history. As Superior, he received a petition calling on the seminary to establish a chair of history. The holder would give public courses in “Histoire générale” with the understanding that “historical study, from a Catholic point of view, must occupy a pre-eminent place in teaching.”120 Speaking two decades later at a Russell Hotel banquet celebrating his elevation to cardinal, Taschereau framed a pocket history as to how Saint Jean-Baptiste might have explained Canadian events to François de Laval in the 178 years since the bishop’s death in 1708. In the mid-eighteenth century, Canada’s small French population would face the test of terrible wars between two imperial powers and, after “a heroic resistance,” would fall under British domination. Although “an agony,” this “painful separation” was in fact positive in that it protected the orphan French family in Canada from the “volcano” of the French Revolution. Thanks to British “religious and political liberty,” the cardinal explained, French Canada had expanded pacifically across Canada, enjoying “calm” and “profound peace” alongside peoples of diverse origins and beliefs.121 French Canada, he concluded, had the good fortune to be part of an empire on which the sun never set, with a just Queen Victoria who was as “dear as a mother to her children.”122 With their pageantry, oratory, and occupation of public spaces, lavish ceremonies were useful in priming historical imaginations.123 With standing as a patrician and as Quebec’s senior ecclesiastic, Taschereau achieved cult status as the icon of a threatened but proudly French and Catholic nation. His elevation to a cardinalship in 1886 prompted a series of ceremonies that would dwarf his father’s role in raising the Wolfe-Montcalm memorial (1827) or his own leadership in the reburial of Laval’s remains (1878). The principal organizer of the 1886 celebrations was ThomasÉtienne Hamel, vicar-general of the archdiocese and rector of the Seminary of Quebec and Laval University. Hamel, who had been a student of Taschereau’s, was a central collaborator in both the seminary and the archdiocese; he was also his mentor’s first biographer.124 Hamel had organized the public events in the 1878 ceremonies celebrating the reburial of Bishop Laval’s bones, describing the event as that of “an entire Christian people honouring the ashes of the father of their patrie.” He saw Taschereau’s accession as an even more momentous ceremonial occasion,

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7.14 Laval’s coffin, 1878

one that was witness to the historical continuity of the church from Laval to Taschereau to Quebec City – “a Catholic city” – with its role as bulwark against modernity: “Yes, the old city of Champlain, so often looked upon with a certain distrust by the captains of industry, finance, and modern progress, has in these blessed days, been the object of saintly desire and legitimate jealousy, on the part of generous hearts who understand true liberty, true grandeur, and true happiness.”125 The celebrations of 1886 were patterned on those of 1878: many of the same participants, similar emphasis on clerical and lay hierarchies in rounds of ceremonies and Masses, and the same street processions, decorations, music, and symbolic stops.126 On Tuesday 20 July 1886, the celebration began in the archbishop’s private chapel. Taschereau, before an audience of ecclesiastical dignitaries from across North America, swore to defend the church, letting blood if necessary. The public events began with a music festival at the skating rink and the cardinal’s arrival with an escort of Papal Zouaves. Wednesday was declared a civic holiday, and reminiscent of the procession in 1878, Taschereau followed a circuitous parade route through the city. It began at the archbishop’s residence, symbolically coming full circle to Mass in the Basilica. Preceded by a procession of sixty-two associations, clubs, societies, and professional orders, his coach passed by the Ursuline convent and under thirteen arches, including those of all three levels of government. Banners along the way proclaimed long life to Pope Léon XIII, Queen Victoria, and Taschereau as “Prince de l’église.” The Quebec government’s banner,

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

7.15 Cardinal Taschereau blessing the crowd, 21 July 1886

opposite the teachers’ college, praised the cardinal as the “distinguished promoter of public education.”127 High Mass was led by Alexandre-Antonin Taché, archbishop of Manitoba and dean of Canada’s Catholic bishops; the sermon was delivered by Elphège Gravel, bishop of Nicolet; and as a finale, papal delegate Mgr Ablegate O’Brien crowned the cardinal with the biretta, the cardinal’s symbolic red cap. Leaving the Basilica, the cardinal mounted a triumphal arch to bless the kneeling crowd of some 25,000. For the ceremonies of 1886 and throughout the last decade of Taschereau’s life, Quebec was papered with publications that included multiple biographical works, dictionaries of the Catholic clergy, and, finally, eulogies for the cardinal.128 Foremost was a 300-page Festschrift, Le Premier Cardinal Canadien, edited by Hamel. He gathered tributes from clerical authorities in Rome, Dublin, and London. Messages from Ottawa included those from Supreme Court Judge Henri-Elzéar Taschereau, Grey Nun Marie-L. Panet, and Charles-Eugène Panet, deputy minister of the militia.129 These official and family tributes had a popular counterpart in a flood of declarations, school poems, and congratulatory letters emanating from parishes, priests, and Catholic associations across the continent. Hamel himself wrote the twentynine–page biography of Taschereau, incorporating tributes into his historical narrative. The “providential” exodus of some 500,000 French Canadians to the

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United States was accompanied by a congratulatory letter from parishioners in Worcester, Massachusetts. Parishioners from this industrial community noted that emigrants were blessed in having Canada rather than France as their “patrie”: “they have become a people distinct from the people of France, and across North America, no one would confuse the French Canadians with the French.”130 Although declining in health, Taschereau was able in August 1892 to attend the golden jubilee of his entry into the priesthood, an event celebrated conjointly with the golden anniversary of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of Quebec. Leader of the Liberal Opposition in Ottawa, Wilfrid Laurier praised the Taschereaus as the incarnation of a disappearing French-Canadian culture. He expressed “sadness” at “the gradual extinction of the old families,” telling the crowd that the Taschereau name was “the most beautiful name of the French race in Canada,” the symbol of “virile virtues” and synonymous with “talent, character, honour, strength, and work.” Laurier spoke of his nostalgia for a seigneurial past associated with the Taschereaus and for what he called “Christian democracy”: I belong to the peasant community, but I can sincerely say that it is with sincere regret that I see the gradual extinction of these old families, once so illustrious. When I see a seigneurial domain in ruin, the forest and garden cut, the park turned into pasture … I am filled with an invincible sense of sadness. I still yearn to see the manor in the hands of those ancient masters with the state of ease and splendour that once characterized their way of life … above all else, we need pride in ourselves and pride in the great nation of which we are the descendants.131

7.16 Opposite top Thomas-Étienne Hamel. Mentored by the archbishop and organizer of his festschrift, Hamel succeeded Taschereau as rector of Laval. 7.17 Opposite left Pierre-Georges Roy. Author of the Taschereau family history, Roy, as provincial archivist and historian, collaborated closely with Premier L.A. Taschereau in organizing traditional memory in Quebec around sites like Île d’Orléans. 7.18 Opposite right Honorius Provost. Ordained in 1934, Provost taught at the Grand Séminaire and found vocation as seminary archivist and historian. One of the founders of the Société d’histoire de Québec in 1937, he wrote multiple works on the Beauce and the Taschereau, including four biographies of family members for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

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The Taschereaus were an obvious choice for inclusion in Pierre-Georges Roy’s series of monographs on elite families. Author of dozens of regional and institutional histories and the founder in 1895 of the Bulletin des recherches historiques, Roy was Quebec’s best-known genealogist and in 1920 was named as the first provincial archivist. Published three years after the archbishop’s death in 1898, La famille Taschereau was part of a thirty-two–volume series that included the Panets and Juchereau Duchesnays. Placing 137 Taschereau family members into his narrative, Roy was an assiduous historian, marshalling wills, contracts, correspondence, and illustrations. Using this evidence and a well-known genealogical model of biography, generation, and family branches, he harmonized the patrician family with themes of aristocracy, public service, Catholicism, and French-Canadian identity. Never stated but understood, male lineage and authority formed the implicit core of the patrician family; for their part, female members exemplified “goodness” and “piety.”132 Tracing Taschereau lineage from its noble origins in France, Roy concentrated on the second patrilineal branch, the most patrician and pious, climaxing with the archbishop. His nine-page éloge for Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau included illustrations of the family crest and of the cardinal in his robes. The message, however, was about more than simple elitism. The family’s link to popular religion was illustrated in an appendix that included a photograph and a three-page history of the domain chapel dedicated to Sainte Anne.133 Portraits and new photographic technology were also used to reinforce ElzéarAlexandre Taschereau’s image. Several portraits of the archbishop, notably those by Théophile Hamel, Ludger Ruelland (1893), and, in Rome, Vincenzo Pasqualoni, can still be seen in the seminary and in its summer residence, Bellevue. Seminary archives hold the cardinal’s ring, his biretta, the medal struck to celebrate his elevation to cardinal, and a lithograph by British artist Robert Wickenden. The archives possess Jean Bailleul’s maquette of a sculpture of the cardinal proposed for the façade of the legislature as well as André Vermare’s designs for the monument actually constructed. In 1886, the Livernois studio, Quebec City’s best-known photographers, took a series of six photos of Taschereau on his cardinal’s throne. In 1921, more than two decades after Taschereau’s death and a year after the cardinal’s nephew Louis-Alexandre Taschereau took office as provincial premier, the Quebec government announced plans to place the archbishop in its façade of “notables” on the exterior of the legislature. Although a maquette was commissioned, this project soon gave way to a more grandiose plan for a public monument. Rather than falling within the jurisdiction of civil and legislative authority, this memorial would form part of a series of public commemorations of Quebec’s episcopacy organized by the seminary. In 1908, the seminary had linked erection of a statue honouring the bicentenary of Bishop Laval’s death with celebrations for

7.19 Cardinal Taschereau. Ludger Ruelland’s 1895 portrait gives ample space to the seminary as background.

7.20 Medal struck by Gustave Seifert for the cardinal’s consecration. The reverse displays the archbishopric’s coat of arms, including the cross of Lorraine, the Virgin Mary, Saint Louis King of France, and the motto “I surround myself with such defenders.”

7.21 Mortuary card, 12 April 1898

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

7.22 Exhibition in the restaurant of the National Assembly of maquettes for the Taschereau monument, 1922

the tercentenary of Samuel de Champlain’s founding of Quebec.134 And, a half century later in 1986, the seminary continued to encourage Catholic institutional memory through its sponsorship of an exhibition commemorating Taschereau’s accession to the College of Cardinals a century earlier.135 In the post–First World War period, Catholic authorities in Quebec faced modern-age challenges that included a vocal English-Canadian nationalism, the growing voices of reformers and feminists, and the thrust of North American secularism and consumerism. A monument to Archbishop Taschereau would serve as visual reminder of the historical tenacity of a French and Catholic people. Fronting on three of French Canada’s most vital religious institutions – seminary, university, and Basilica – la Place de la Basilique was the city’s most prestigious square and the site almost three centuries earlier (1647) of Quebec’s first parish church. The international competition to design the Taschereau monument received thirteen submissions, including plans from Quebec artists Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Alfred Laliberté, and Henri Hébert. Models of the proposals were put on public display in the legislature, their exhibition space backed by British and

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7.23 In a festive and family ambiance of flags, flower girls, wreaths, and bunting, Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau spoke at the inauguration of the monument to his uncle, Cardinal Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, 17 June 1923.

Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898)

French flags. Taschereau was variously portrayed seated or standing and in Roman, Egyptian, or Greek garb as well as in the cardinal’s liturgical cape. The competition, adjudicated by a committee that included historian Thomas Chapais, Cyrille Delâge, and Taschereau biographer Pierre-Georges Roy, chose the project of French sculptor André Vermare and architect Maxime Roisin. Cast in Vermare’s foundry in Paris, the bronze statue was unveiled on 9 June 1923. Almost a century later, the statue still impresses the visitor to Quebec. Cast in his imposing cappa magna, Taschereau stands with his head tilted slightly towards the seminary, his right hand extending its protection over the people. The statue’s base of polished New Brunswick granite rests on a large terraced platform of blue granite from Rivière-à-Pierre.136 The platform is decorated with four angels, garlands, and a classical granite fence, while the front corner posts bear an urn, a tilted vase, the cardinal’s mitre, and a large book. Bas-reliefs around the monument’s four sides summarize his qualities: the first bas-relief represents his spirituality and religious rigour in enforcing the Quarante Heures of the beginning of Lent; the second recalls his selflessness and ethnic largesse in administering to typhoid-stricken Irish on Grosse Île; the third memorializes him as a Catholic intellectual and founder of Laval University; and the fourth illustrates his humanity as he chats with male students in the seminary garden.

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8 David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

Named after his maternal grandfather, David Ross was born at Temple Grove in 1844, benefited from the best English schools and university of Lower Canada, and attended Christ Church and its Sunday school. Classical education, fluency in French, and training in the natural sciences were implicit in a childhood at Temple Grove. An accomplished artist, his mother taught him sketching, enrolled him for tutoring from her own art teacher, James Duncan, and imparted her love of history and romantic literature to him. John Samuel, too, had a hands-on approach regarding his children’s education. He accompanied David Ross to his boarding school and took him along on his judicial circuit, which allowed educational opportunities that included botanical field trips, introduction into the regional courthouse milieu, and father-son moments hiking, collecting, and attending science meetings. As a teenager, David Ross learned the basics of land management by assisting the agent in collecting rents on Nazareth Fief and making bank deposits in his father’s absence. His father versed him in the amateur science tradition of accurate observation, precise note-taking, and specimen collection. John Samuel had been a classmate of Ottawa surgeon Edward Van Cortlandt, a collector of Native, geological, and archaeological artefacts. David Ross accompanied his father on an Ottawa River boat trip to visit Cortlandt and his private museum,1 and they attended meetings of the Natural History Society together. David Ross helped construct the herbarium at Temple Grove and, inheriting his father’s interest in ferns, traded specimens with Ovide Brunet, professor of botany at Laval University.2 Like his father, he presented a paper on ferns to the Natural History Society. In an expected trajectory for a judge’s son, David Ross took an arts program and then entered law. At McGill, he helped organize the Founder’s Day festivities held in 1861 to honour James McGill and to “commemorate the good deeds of public benefactors”; his brother John Davidson brought greetings from students in the medical faculty.3 After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1863, he followed the grandfather after whom he was named, as well as his father, uncle, and cousin, into

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

8.1 David Ross McCord, age nineteen and a student at McGill University, 1863

law, graduating in 1867 from McGill with both an ma and a bachelor of civil law. He articled with Leblanc, Cassidy and Leblanc, practised briefly with the well-known liberal Joseph Doutre, and then established his own downtown office. Young and connected, David Ross enlisted as an ensign and then lieutenant (1871) in the Reserve Militia of Montreal West. He joined the St Paul’s Masonic Lodge, travelled to England on Masonic business (1877), and, in the steps of his father and grandfather, became lodge master. This social and professional grooming was part of his preparation for family headship. John Samuel died in 1865, and in the interim until his mother’s death in 1870, David Ross assumed certain family responsibilities, such as tutoring his younger siblings, Robert and Anne.4 Following family succession practice, the estate was divided equally among the surviving children, but David Ross as head, through the exercise of understood patriarchal traditions and the complicity of his sisters, would be the principal benefactor. Division of the McCord estate was simplified by the deaths without issue of the two elder siblings. Eleanor (b. 1836) had gone to the grave giving birth to a stillborn child in 1863, and John Davidson (b. 1841) died in 1866, soon after his graduation in medicine. Having left Temple Grove on the death of their father, third son Robert (b. 1846) enlisted in the British army. A drinker, his

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career becalmed, he signed over his share of the estate to David Ross in 1873 in return for a settlement, and in 1882, he died at age thirty-six. Neither of David Ross’s two surviving sisters, Jane Catherine (1838–1914) and Anne (1848–1929), married, and both acquiesced to their brother’s management of family affairs. Anne served as assistant to her father and then to her brother, reading, observing, keeping notebooks, saving clippings for commonplace albums, and organizing the family collection. Both sisters stayed on in the family home after their mother’s death, leading the ordered lives of unmarried patrician Anglican women that were centred around Christ Church and benevolent activities in support of missions and the Protestant Orphan Asylum.5 Their brother’s unpopular marriage and the installation of his bride at Temple Grove prompted their move down the hill to the suburb of Westmount. Following his father and grandfather with their interests in public administration, David Ross won election as a Montreal alderman, serving from 1874 to 1883. He chaired the city’s health committee in 1874–77 and was particularly active in issues relating to market hygiene, sewage, and the purity of the city’s water and ice supplies. John Samuel had been an influential voice in public-health issues around cholera in the 1830s, and David Ross showed similar involvement with Montreal’s recurring smallpox epidemics and with the establishment in 1875 of the Civic Smallpox Hospital as an isolation unit on the slopes of Mount Royal. It was here that he met Letitia Caroline Chambers (c. 1841–1928), an Irish-born nurse and the hospital’s matron. David Ross’s marriage to Letitia Chambers in 1878 broke with the McCord tradition of using marriage strategically. Approaching forty, Chambers was in paid employment and from an undistinguished Irish family. To overcome her social lacunae, David Ross sent her to Toronto for training in music and dress and researched her genealogy to suggest membership in the Anglo-Irish gentry.6 Married and with paid work frowned upon, she participated in the volunteering expected of the genteel. She was invited to join the Committee of the Protestant Home for Friendless Women, was elected a manager of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, and met with “Mrs Molson” and “Mrs Redpath” to consider the establishment of an “Exchange for Women’s Work.” None of this won over David Ross’s sisters.7 By the mid-1880s, things were coming apart for David Ross. A few years into marriage and conscious that he was the first childless head in four generations of McCords in Canada, he lost interest in public life, municipal politics, and the practice of law. His thirteen-metre archive, part of the McCord Museum collection, is witness to his alienation and deepening instability. Influenced by Marshall Berman and T.J. Jackson Lears, historians describe him as “anti-modern” and link his “obsessive” collecting to the “insatiable demands of nostalgia.” Doctors called upon to assess his collapsing mental health were told of his daily consumption of a

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

8.2 Corporal Robert A. McCord, 3rd Victoria Volunteer Rifles, 1864

bottle of whisky and his bouts of domestic violence. For the last eight years of his life, McCord was confined to the Homewood Asylum in Guelph, Ontario.8 Certainly, his culture was increasingly out of step with a capitalist Montreal of transcontinental railways, consumer industries like tobacco, and international financial giants like Sun Life. McCord strength had been in land, judicial position, amateur associations, and the institutions of Anglican Montreal. The family’s land revenues were in decline, their century-long leases of convent lands due to expire in the 1890s. Cracks in the family’s wealth were evident as early as the 1860s. After the family’s loss of John Samuel McCord’s judicial income on his death in 1865,

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8.3 Letitia Chambers, 1876

David Ross, with responsibility for maintaining the estate, a widow, and his two spinster sisters, had placed a mortgage on Temple Grove. McCord entitlement to Mount Royal, its views, and its bourgeois privacy was challenged by new tram routes near the Mountain, a funicular railway that took picnickers and sightseers to the summit, and the encroachment of hospitals and other public institutions onto the Mountain’s flanks. Mount Royal Park opened in 1876, turning much of the Mountain into a public leisure space. In the face of a democratization that extended to his very backyard fence, David Ross complained that Mount Royal had been transformed into a “place of security for roughs and vagabonds.”9

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

Nor, despite two generations of McCord and Ross leadership in Protestant burial in Montreal, was David Ross able to maintain family influence at Mount Royal Cemetery. Its board, opting for modernity over his father’s romantic vision, introduced lawnmowers, sections dedicated to infants, and a professional business office. Fascinated by archaeology, bones, and the beauty of natural decay, David Ross could only stand by as new industrial technologies and antiseptic principles were applied in the construction of a crematorium on the cemetery grounds in 1903. He was even less in tune with McGill University’s increasing orientation towards the laboratory and its insistence on a necessary rupture between science and religion. It could be said that zoologist E.W. MacBride struck at the very quick of the McCord science tradition in telling the Natural History Society that it could no longer “justify its existence by the mere collecting and naming of species.”10 Cows still grazed on the McGill campus in David Ross’s student days, and William Dawson, as principal from 1855 to 1893, had promoted a university education that respected Christian and moral principles. David Ross’s vision of university, knowledge, and architecture probably climaxed in 1882 with the opening of McGill’s museum of natural history. The Redpath Museum, with majestic columns mindful of the classicism of Temple Grove, dominated the campus. Describing the medieval universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford as “lights of learning,” David Ross applied unsuccessfully in 1905 for Oxford University’s newly established Beit Chair in Colonial History. The Church of England, his parents’ institutional and social pole, also slipped away. John Samuel McCord had chaired the building committee that had built Christ Church Cathedral in the 1850s, and as head of the provincial synod and chancellor of Bishop’s University, he could be considered Lower Canada’s ranking Anglican layman. With this authority, he had been able to put an oar in for High Churchism by granting its practitioners space in the mortuary chapel of the old Protestant Burial Ground.11 David Ross never exercised religious influence and, as a frustrated High Churchman, raged unsuccessfully against the liberal theology of the deacons of Christ Church and their softening on the doctrines of the virgin birth and transubstantiation.12 Nor did he exercise great authority in the Masons. By 1900, he was signing as “Past Master” of the St Paul’s Lodge. Faced with imperialist attempts to make St Paul’s “an independent English lodge,” he argued for Canadian lodge autonomy, for continued collaboration with the Grand Lodge in Quebec, and for “peace and unity”: “I do not propose becoming a Quebec Mason alone. I will abide by the decision of the English masons; but I wish my humble voice to he heard … We are not less English in our views, because in my humble judgement we are more Masonic in our action.”13 No friend of modern technology, David Ross declined to buy an automobile, avoided installing a telephone, and only belatedly took up the typewriter, his

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preferred forms of communication remaining the notebook and handwritten letter. Abandoning politics and his downtown law office, he increasingly isolated himself at Temple Grove, retaining only a few family-based clients, such as the Protestant Orphan Asylum. His life became one of mostly solitary pleasures – drinking, collecting – although he valued an intense male comradeship with W.D. Lighthall, particularly through the pen.

m em ory David Ross McCord’s melancholy, obsessiveness, and tendency to “nurse calamity,” as Simon Schama put it, was manifested in a deepening imperialism, a fascination with death and history, and a fixation on James Wolfe and his heroism on the Plains of Abraham. His wife collaborated in his obsessions and wrote what Edward Said has described as “Blood Sacrifice Poetry.”14 David Ross’s fetish with physical remains and family memory was evident as early as the deaths of his father and brother in the mid-1860s. Under the cemetery rules drawn up by his father, individual families were responsible for the transfer of remains from the old Protestant Burial Ground to the new cemetery. In October 1866, David Ross organized the removal to Mount Royal Cemetery of three McCords – his great-grandfather John McCord (d. 1793), his grandmother Sarah Solomons (d. 1812), and his grandfather Thomas McCord (d. 1824). While this transfer was not unusual in itself, David Ross’s presence with his sisters and his memorandum of the removal were symptomatic: “The remains consisted of bones … Some were decayed and some were not. The thigh bones give evidence of a man of tall stature. The skull, without the lower jaw, was seen by Jane, Anne and me. I had it in my hand. I think all of the teeth in the upper jaw were present, and I know that all that were present were quite undecayed, and some show evidence of having been filled.”15 The physical reconstitution of his family in a common grave was one aspect of David Ross’s transformation of the romantic burial lot laid out by his father into an explicit historical site illustrating McCord achievements in the history of Canada. Not wishing to adopt the urn and obelisk style of headstones that graced most elite graves, David Ross hired sculptor Robert Reid, probably in 1915, to design the McCord family monument. They settled on the style of an altar tomb reminiscent of the above-ground crypt vaults of bishops and kings and much admired by AngloCatholics.16 The rectangular slabs of the altar tomb provided many flat surfaces for religious symbols, a coat of arms, and abundant text. David Ross illustrated the McCords’ High Church affiliation with a large cross placed at the top, around which “Resurgam” (I shall rise again) was sculpted. The epitaphs on the side panels differ sharply from the inscriptions in the adjoining Ross lot, where David Ross’s maternal

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

grandparents emphasized Christian, family, and female qualities. The McCord epitaphs link the family to James Wolfe’s campaign and to the family’s titles and landed seat. John McCord Sr is flagrantly, and erroneously, memorialized as “the founder of the Parliamentary System of Canada.” Despite a problematic judicial career and a bitter estrangement over inheritance, “the Hon. William King McCord” is eulogized as “one of her majesty’s justices in the Superior Court of Lower Canada.” For his part, John Samuel McCord is remembered as “the President of this Cemetery.” Military, judicial, and honorary titles are prominent around the headstone: “Captain,” “Colonel,” “Honorable,” “President,” “Founder,” and “her Majesty’s Justices.” By naming their estates as the location of the deaths of two McCord heads, David Ross reminded cemetery visitors of the family’s landed rank: John McCord Sr is recorded as having “died at the Grange Montreal 1793” and Thomas McCord “at his manor house of Fief Nazareth.”

8.4 The McCord family lot in Mount Royal Cemetery

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8.5 One side of the McCord tomb. This tablet shows David Ross McCord’s penchant for exaggerating the family’s role in Canadian history.

The place of females was problematic on a memorial dedicated to family service in war, public administration, and the professions. The name, for example, of Mary McCord, unmarried, Catholic, buried elsewhere, and half-sister of John Samuel and William King, does not appear on the tomb. On the other hand, politically useful female members, even if buried alongside their husbands elsewhere, are memorialized. Jane and Margery McCord, sisters of David Ross’s grandfather and buried in the Quebec region, are commemorated on the McCord memorial as married “to officers of General Wolfe.” David Ross’s great-grandmother, Sarah Solomons, was reinterred in the new cemetery beside her husband, Thomas McCord. Her portrait still hung in the gallery at Temple Grove two generations later, but she was accorded only diminished public place on the headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. Her epitaph identifies her only by name, death date, and as “his wife.”17 Nor was spinsterhood an acclaimed status. Unmarried, Anne McCord died in 1929, more than six decades after the death of her father and a half century after moving out of the family home. Her epitaph, however, identifies her entirely with her father and the estate: “daughter of Hon. J.S. McCord of Temple Grove.” Her sister was recognized simply by her name and dates: “Jane Catherine McCord, 1838–1914.”

8.6 Croquet lawn at Temple Grove. Just as his father chose to be photographed in official robes, David Ross, even on the croquet pitch, insisted on his top hat.

As he had done in structuring the family’s cemetery memorial, David Ross politicized Temple Grove’s visible landscape. From Côte-des-Neiges, the thoroughfare that ran below the estate, the brook, classical urns, and greenery had been central in views of the grounds as laid out by John Samuel. This English garden model, replete with croquet pitch, rustic footbridge, and gazebo, was immortalized in an album of forty-eight prints commissioned in 1871 by David Ross from photographer Alexander Henderson. Within a decade, David Ross – ever the imperialist – had modified this romantic landscape to illustrate the landmark moment in Canadian history, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Always precise and using the most visible part of the grounds, he laid out a terrace above Côte-des-Neiges that corresponded exactly to the forty-foot height advantage French troops had over Wolfe’s forces when they met on the Plains. The twelve steps leading up to the terrace commemorated regiments in Wolfe’s army.18 In constructing this model, he may have been influenced by the American outdoor museum movement. In 1864, for example, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association had been established to preserve that Civil War battlefield, and by the 1880s, the site’s marble urns, memorials, and battery monuments were attracting tourists.

8.7 Temple Grove’s grounds with its benches and the gazebo from the Ross garden on Champ de Mars

8.8 Interior view of Temple Grove, c. 1916. Taken during the First World War, this photo captures McCord’s growing obsessions with empire, war, and the medieval traditions promoted by Walter Scott.

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

At least publicly, David Ross never presented this reconstruction as representing French humiliation on the battlefield. Very much in the bonne-entente tradition of French-English relations – what he called “happy results” – and an admirer of French Canada as an antiquarian, Catholic, and aristocratic society, he commemorated the battle as a moment of joint national sacrifice: “[T]wo great heroes, Wolfe and Montcalm, who fell on the same day at Quebec … both dyed nobly in defense of the honor of their respective Kings and Countries.”19 In 1909, he mused whether his projected national museum might be opened to coincide with the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the battle: “Let us in the morning of the day open Canada’s monument – a select party – French and English. We need not talk ball cartridge but happy results etc. Borrow a fleur de lys … Mark the opening in this way.”20 David Ross’s commissioning of documentary photography and art represented yet other means to create visual records of historical place. In addition to its images of the estate grounds, Alexander Henderson’s album included photos of two former McCord residences. David Ross also turned to Montreal’s principal society photographer, William Notman. Besides having him photograph family members, he commissioned Notman to photograph hundreds of artefacts with a view to accuracy and preservation. David Ross also imitated his father’s practice of hiring artists to document threatened sites. In the 1830s, John Samuel had travelled the island of Montreal with artist James Duncan, choosing exact locations for the depiction of church, river, or Native village. In 1885, David Ross hired Henry Bunnett “to do some measure of justice pictorially to our History.” Rejecting any reliance on artistic “imagination,” he refused to let Bunnett draw from memory: such is “not historical or antiquarian work.” Instead, he accompanied Bunnett to historic or architectural sites around Quebec, positioning the artist, making some 500 sketches himself, and insisting that “artistic treatment” be subordinated “to those of truth – the soul of history”: “I spent a day in the ridge of a house on the St. Lawrence near Fort Levis, in a level country so as to get a fine picture to correspond with the military plan of Amherst’s campaign and the French defenses in the River.”21 Bunnett’s works represent Quebec without modern skyline, the Victoria Bridge, or the factories on the McCords’ Nazareth Fief. The artist was directed instead to paint themes of war (battlefield panoramas, forts, capitulation sites, the burial vault of a Loyalist military hero); religious institutions, particularly Catholic (the Seminary of Montreal, the Priests’ Farm, the Grey Nuns, the Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse); and architectural detail of the interiors of threatened homes (the chimney piece of James McGill’s house, the staircase of the Collège de Montréal, the pulpit of Saint Gabriel’s Presbyterian Church).22

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8.9 The Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse, 1886. Commissioned by McCord, Henry Bunnett painted the seminary’s farmhouse, adjacent to the Nazareth Fief, in a rustic and nostalgic setting. The painting gives no hint of the nearby Lachine Canal or Point-Saint-Charles rail yards.

col le c t ing Bunnett’s 200 oil paintings only added to the growing collection of books, paintings, and artefacts spread through Temple Grove. Anne Ross and John Samuel McCord’s material possessions had been patrician expressions of family, comfort, and Victorian art and science. Their accumulation can be linked to activities defined by Edward Said as motivated by “care and affection.”23 John Samuel McCord bought technical, scientific, and horticultural equipment as well as literature and law books that gave him intellectual pleasure. He preserved the cornerstone of his church and commissioned art that documented cherished landscapes. Anne Ross painted, and her still lifes, easel, and brushes were saved and displayed as icons of family culture. She furnished Temple Grove with objects of family meaning and archived children’s works like David Ross’s drawing, at age seven, of the heraldic emblem of Ivanhoe.24 Among their treasured possessions were mementos from preceding generations. Portraits, lockets, and military honours were exhibited throughout Temple Grove, and on formal occasions, heirloom tea and dessert sets were used. Decades after his parents’ deaths, David Ross remained cloistered among their belongings: his father’s notebooks and thermometers, his snuffbox, and the Wind-

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

8.10 Given to Anne Ross by her grandmother Eleanor Birnie in 1822, this Worcester tea set was prominently displayed in Temple Grove by David Ross McCord.

sor chair recuperated from his law office; his mother’s piano, the Davenport Longport porcelain service received on his parents’ marriage, and her watercolours. Outside was his grandfather’s garden house, brought up from the Ross home on Champ de Mars. To David Ross, these objects had an intensely personal and even mystical connection to the dead of his family, and he employed artists and photographers to document and immortalize their artefacts and estates. Significantly, he placed himself and occasionally his wife as the only human inhabitants in his visual essays. David Ross, under his father’s tutelage, learned collecting from field trips, notebook observation, and the organization of fern specimens. With his increasing withdrawal into Temple Grove, his breakdown, and his anxiety over the challenges to “Britishness” in the Boer and First World wars, collecting assumed new meaning. His changing sense of history and appreciation of artefacts can be traced in his five historical notebooks. Beginning the first one in the late 1880s and, symbolically, using the unused pages of one of his father’s notebooks, he replicated the form of the commonplace book, clipping, compiling, and commenting on newspaper articles and historical snippets. Jean Baudrillard relates this form of collecting to specific gender, time, and psychological states, noting the focus on men in their forties. He suggests that, facing sexual decline and “faltering religious and ideological [authority]” in their communities, men like David Ross used “activities of seeking out, categorizing, gathering and disposing” as means of expelling “anxieties about time and death.”25 Whatever the verities of this Freudian interpretation, David Ross’s collecting was certainly associated with a growing obsession with death, imperialism,

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8.11 David Ross McCord and Letitia Chambers at Temple Grove, c. 1910

and society’s disregard for the critical events of Canadian history. “The hand of time,” he wrote in his notebook, “is daily obliterating lines which I have endeavored to preserve to posterity. Already edifices which here appear have been demolished to make way for others required by an advancing civilization … While I have endeavored to attain as much artistic treatment as possible, I have subordinated all other considerations to those of truth – the soul of history.”26

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

8.12 W.D. Lighthall, 1913

In interpretations of Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s leadership, the archbishop’s seminarianism and what Philipp Sarasin calls masculine “communauté” have been emphasized. David Ross, although recognizing the role of his wife and sisters, was hugely influenced by male friendship. He and fellow lawyer and antiquarian W.D. Lighthall shared interests in Victorian science, municipal politics, imperialism, Canadian history, and the disappearance of Native peoples.27 Thirteen years his junior, Lighthall drew David Ross from the shadows of Temple Grove through letters, poems, sketches, nicknames, rituals, and complicity in reflecting about death and the decline of civilizations. Their comradeship was central in the shaping of David Ross’s collecting and then in establishing his museum of Canadian history. The two men were acquainted at least by 1887 when the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal, with Lighthall as secretary, sponsored a Canadian history exhibition. David Ross offered five artefacts, including the black mourning sword of his great-grandfather, the Honourable Arthur Davidson, and a portrait of his grandfather Thomas McCord.28 In 1894, Lighthall helped found the Château Ramezay Historical Museum with a mission of preserving and exhibiting artefacts

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of Canadian history. Mayor of Westmount, 1900–03, and founder of the Union of Canadian Municipalities, Lighthall shared McCord’s anguish over the fate of traditional Quebec, what Lighthall described as “that queer romantic Province, that ancient Province of Quebec – ancient in store of heroic and picturesque memories.”29 While McCord was tramping the St Lawrence Valley with artist Bunnett to document historic sites, Lighthall was comparing the habitants’ “white cottages” to Montreal’s “insane rush” and its blight of utility monopolies and telephone poles.30 Lighthall was involved in the Imperial Federation League, which had opened its Montreal chapter in 1884. Describing the British Conquest as “the greatest event in the History of the New World,” he credited it with saving French Canada from the radicalism of the American and French revolutions.31 Impressed by what he called the cleansing power of war and “its stimulus to bring out valuable qualities [that] may be lost by a perpetual peace,” David Ross, for his part, gave increasing emphasis to imperialist themes in his writing and collecting,32 while Lighthall, an adept marketer, published the work of imperialist John Reade. Literary editor of the Montreal Gazette, Reade in turn praised the poetry of McCord’s wife and her support of the Boer War. In contrast to the benevolent maternalism shown by McCord and Ross women of earlier generations, Letitia Chambers pointed to the losses mothers must endure as their sacrifice to the empire: Could we yield aught to our motherhood Offerings more dear than our children’s blood?33 Disappearing pasts were recurring themes in the undertakings of both Lighthall and McCord. In 1898, Lighthall associated a Native burial ground discovered on Mount Royal with modern man’s obliviousness to the fate of “vanishing races” and to the doomed Natives to whom he gave voice: “[W]e are dying, dwindling, dying.”34 As a suburban mayor, he saw an affinity between Native concepts of natural beauty and the threatened landscape of Mount Royal: “Undoubtedly the Hochelagans must have taken great pleasure in the magnificent woods, the immense trees, the mosses and dells and springs of Mount Royal, which are such happy memories also for many of us who have long lived in the neighbourhood.”35 This was perfect grist for David Ross, who agreed that the best in Canadian civilization was disappearing and that his collection might serve as a stopgap: “I’m getting old – getting old. My work is just beginning, but it is drawing to a close. Suppose I die, what would happen to this collection.” Reflecting this anxiety, his collecting became increasingly obsessive. He was able, for example, to unite death, monarchy, and empire in his acquisition of a deck plank from the royal yacht Alberta on which Queen Victoria’s coffin had rested on its journey from the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth.

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

Violent death in uniformed British service, particularly in the Seven Years War in Canada and the War of 1812–14, was also a central feature of David Ross’s collecting. He had a particular passion for objects connected to the death in battle of generals James Wolfe and Isaac Brock. Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe (1771) was arguably Britain’s most important historical painting and, through the widely distributed prints of William Woollett, profoundly affected the nineteenth-century male historical imagination.36 Wolfe’s battlefield death, as depicted by West, struck McCord family chords around aristocratic heroism, colonial nostalgia, masculine camaraderie, and a worthy death of patriotic sacrifice. For his Wolfe collection, purportedly the world’s largest, he acquired several portraits, including the only one apparently painted from life. He collected Wolfe’s letters, the general’s manuscript journal of the 1759 expedition, an eight-foot panorama of the Plains of Abraham, a number of photographs of the Wolfe monument in Quebec City, a painting of Wolfe’s armorial bearings, and a locket containing a lock of Wolfe’s hair.37 In 1887, David Ross accompanied Henry Bunnett to Quebec City to ensure an accurate oil rendition of Wolfe’s Cove, where British troops had landed and climbed the steep path to the Plains. He collected illustrations of the death scene in the form of paintings, drawings, prints, and a ceramic platter as well as photographs of the death site. Wolfe’s opponent on the Plains, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, also achieved greatness through mortal wounds and an honourable death that coincided with French defeat. McCord was particularly proud of his acquisition of the marquis’s silver cup replete with coat of arms. The War of 1812–14 was of great importance in McCord’s narrative of Canadian history. David Ross saw it as a turning point that aborted the spread of republicanism and confirmed the loyalty, through service in British uniform, of both Natives and French Canadians. His collection included Laura Secord’s bonnet, Sir George Prevost’s military field desk, paintings and prints of the naval battles, and an engraving of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles de Salaberry, French-Canadian seigneur and hero of the Battle of Chateauguay. Like Wolfe and Montcalm in 1759, Isaac Brock died gloriously, and objects connected to his death at the Battle of Queenston Heights, 13 October 1812, were prized acquisitions. Competing with the Public Archives of Canada and local historical societies in the Niagara region, David Ross maintained a two-decade–long correspondence, 1890–1909, with the general’s grandnieces in Guernsey. This correspondence included the exchange of watercolours, photographs, and reference to expert military opinions; it ultimately resulted in his acquisition of Brock’s sword and military dress jacket (but not the bullet-torn plain coatee worn by Brock at his death).38 In 1921, the McCord Museum was opened to coincide with the 109th anniversary of Brock’s death. War was not David Ross McCord’s only passionate collecting interest. To the family objects that he inherited, he added cut glass, printed ceramic ware, tea sets,

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oil and watercolour paintings, photographs, maps and engravings, and antiquated household equipment such as a plate warmer. Building on his mother’s cherished art tools, he acquired the engraving tools of William Satchwell Leney and the drawing equipment of Henri Julien in addition to the latter’s drawings and cartoons.39 To his parents’ gallery of portrait and documentary art, he added further works by James Duncan, Louis Dulongpré, and William von Mol Berczy; like them, he favoured military artists, obtaining works by Hervey Smyth and James Cockburn as well as by artists from the French regime. To complement his father’s science collection, David Ross acquired maps, journals, and instruments. He took particular interest in the Canadian West, adding hundreds of artefacts documenting discovery and the fur trade: canoe licences, maps, diaries, account books, minutes of the Beaver Club, fur-trading goods, and an engraving of Fort Michilimackinac. He had a special eye for the documentary talent of William G.R. Hind, acquiring thirtyone watercolours the artist had painted while accompanying gold seekers heading for British Columbia’s Cariboo goldfields in 1862.40 McCord and Lighthall were certainly familiar with the work of John Ruskin, sharing his “sudden blankness and chill” at “the pulling down” of historical vestiges in the modern city.41 Helpless to arrest what he saw as the ravages of the secular and urban, David Ross tried to preserve a visual memory of Montreal’s historic religious institutions. As well as documenting the threatened galleries of St Gabriel’s Church and the city’s Wesleyan and Congregational churches, he directed Henry Bunnett to paint the Catholic institutions that had marked McCord history: his father’s alma mater, the Collège de Montréal; the Grey Nuns Convent, proprietor of much of the family’s lands; and the Sulpicians’ Saint-Gabriel domain that bordered the McCords’ fief. Temple Grove overlooked the Sulpician estate, and the artist was dispatched to record the exact exterior and interior architectural details of the “Priests’ Farm.” Fascinated by the sacrifice of Catholic martyrs like the Jesuits, McCord enthusiastically collected religious artefacts. While some were Church of England relics and portraits, he especially sought Catholic objects – a cellar beam from the Jesuit House in Sillery or apostle spoons and iron balustrades from the church at Lachine. The Sulpicians’ Indian missions at Two Mountains was of particular interest. In 1885, Bunnett painted the mission’s Calvary chapels, and after years of negotiation, McCord obtained a confessional from one of the chapels.42 David Ross McCord’s collection of Native artefacts represents an important contribution to research in Canadian ethnography.43 He had participated in the Natural History Society’s frequent meetings on Native and archaeological topics and was also influenced by Principal Dawson’s studies of European contact. McCord’s notebooks provide evidence of his careful reading of Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and New Worlds and ethnographer Horatio Hale’s The Iroquois Book of Rites (1883). By the 1890s when he began

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

collecting seriously, American institutions like the Smithsonian and Harvard’s Peabody Museum were already building aboriginal collections. In their romantic association with aboriginal cultures, with what David Ross called the “original masters of the Forest and the Prairie,” he and Lighthall were much more than academic collectors.44 Both men were proud of the ceremonial honours accorded them by Native people. In 1890, apparently in return for legal work on their behalf, David Ross was given the Iroquois name “Rononshonni,” or builder, by the Six Nations Confederacy. Through correspondence, purchase, and occasional harassment, David Ross collected some 1,500 ethnographic objects and over 1,000 archaeological artefacts.45 With their provenance scrupulously documented, these included the Book of Common Prayer translated into Mohawk by Joseph Brant, Tecumseh’s war bonnet, cradleboards, carvings, Native dress, masks, brooches, battle clubs, and drums. Particularly symbolic for McCord were artefacts emanating from the Beothuks, extinct as a result of European contact.

from col le c t ion to mu seu m David Ross McCord first viewed his collection as personal and familial. In an 1878 will drawn up for his marriage, he left most of his possessions to his wife but also willed certain family portraits to his sisters. Over the next years as his collection expanded broadly into military and ethnographic themes, he began to envisage opening it to the public as “an historical museum … destined for Canada.”46 There were also practical considerations. By 1900, Temple Grove’s living area was becoming increasingly cramped because of the space taken up by the collection. Dominating the front entrance was a knight in armour, while Tecumseh’s war bonnet was featured in the library. The elegant staircase had been transformed by the display of Brock’s sword and thirty-nine scenes depicting the history of Canada. The drawing room was devoted to his mother’s art and the “West Room” to the Wolfe collection. Along with concerns about space and finances, David Ross began to feel guilty over his collecting fetish, commenting in his notebook that his epitaph might read: “Here lieth one who stole everything historical he could not buy and bought everything historical he could not steal and created more than any Canadian who preceded him.”47 His reading of John Ruskin encouraged this sense of culpability. Ruskin’s letters on the Oxford Museum, first published in 1859, urged abandonment of “acquisitive selfishness” in favour of associating collections with “local character and historical memory.” Using such McCord favourites as William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, Ruskin suggested that life could be extended through sharing: a museum was “not burial but immortality.”48 From its foundation in 1857, London’s South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert Museum, became a model of public education, offering free

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8.13 The drawing room. Encroaching increasingly on domestic space, McCord compartmentalized his history exhibitions throughout Temple Grove. Not far from his armour and Wolfe collections, the drawing room was more feminine, finer, and featured his mother’s works.

admission, public lectures, and travelling exhibitions. In the United States, during the Civil War, fairs and exhibitions were organized to instruct the public in hygiene and other elements of public health. This theme of public health – a focus of the public career of David Ross and his father – was reiterated in museum exhibitions in Amsterdam (1893), Milan (1894), and Munich (1900). The social value of museums was increasingly promoted across Canada. As early as 1853, Egerton Ryerson had planned a Canadian Library and Museum for Toronto. Ontario’s Provincial Museum was established in 1901 and the Royal Ontario Museum in 1912. McCord read and corresponded with Dominion Archivist Arthur G. Doughty, a strong proponent of the study of Canadian history through documents and artefacts.49 In Montreal, recognition of the relevance of collections to public education dated from 1827 and establishment of the Natural History Society with John Samuel McCord as a founder. John Samuel had also promoted Alexandre Vattemare’s plans for cultural exchanges through museums and libraries. Montreal’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1860 drew thousands to celebrate Britain’s industrial, artistic, and scientific achievements. McGill University frequently benefited from the largesse of philanthropists willing to fund museums as educational vehicles. William Molson’s

David Ross McCord (1844–1930)

gift in 1862 included provisions for a science museum, and Peter Redpath funded both the university’s museum of natural science (1882) and its new library (1893). These currents affected David Ross McCord. Musing over the disposition of his collection, he accepted that he had been “self-centred in his enjoyment of his treasures” and wrote of his collection’s “great teaching and inspiring power.” A museum, he told Lighthall, might enlighten public taste: “[W]e could furnish rooms for receptions … and the placing of mahogany and china would induce others to do likewise.”50 A museum might also serve to revive classicism. One of David Ross’s sketches for a possible museum featured columns, and he noted the “permanent educational effect” of having a “Greek Temple in Canada.” Seeking funding from American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, he emphasized the symbiosis between Greek symbols and a young nation: “I mentioned a Greek temple, because in a new country no form of building would be at the same time as fine a lesson in architecture and affords as much wall space.”51 There remained the issue of where the proposed museum of Canadian history should be located, and David Ross’s first choice, despite flirtations with authorities in Montreal, Westmount, and Ontario, remained McGill University. Whatever his doubts about the university’s secularism and disciplinary specialization, McGill was English Montreal’s intellectual flagship. It offered his collection academic and institutional permanence. In 1908 and 1909, David Ross put together a proposal to university authorities, offering to make the university “the true custodian” of his trust and “the historical centre of Canada … a site for pilgrimage and study.”52 His offer came with multiple conditions, including confirmation of his tenure as lifetime honorary director. He alone would supervise the collection “as I have done in the past” and would retain “entire control of the same without interference by any one.” McGill was to lodge the “McCord National Museum” in the prestigious Jesse Joseph House; the university would also be responsible for maintaining the building, insuring the collection, and providing clerical help.53 McGill responded with extreme reluctance. Principal William Peterson did not consider a Canadian history museum a university priority, telling David Ross that the collection might best remain in Temple Grove. With lobbying from Lighthall and university librarian Charles Henry Gould, the university finally, in December 1909, expressed willingness to accept the collection and to lodge it in Joseph House but on the condition that McCord raise $5,000 to operate it. David Ross’s museum proposal never incited support from McGill historians. Separated from collectors and amateur historians by new methodologies and the dictates of professionalism, historians in academe emphasized constitutional history over David Ross’s primary interests: ethnography, the military, and family history. Historians would have had little empathy with the

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passionate commemorative narrative history he wrote to accompany his collection.54 With David Ross unable to raise an operating budget and the university preoccupied with the First World War, negotiations dragged on for years. As McGill continued to balk, he complained that his “inestimable” collection was “not being treated with sufficient respect by the University.”55 In 1919, McGill finally accepted the collection, and on 13 October 1921 – coincidentally the same day the competition for the design of the memorial to Archbishop Taschereau was announced – the “McCord National Museum” was inaugurated. Spent and just months from being declared legally insane, McCord was unable to attend the opening. Fittingly, it fell to Lighthall to explain that David Ross’s legacy, in “properly illustrating Canadian history,” was “part of something larger.”56 Although David Ross willed his estate to McGill, his family wealth was exhausted, and in 1936, the museum was “temporarily” closed by the university. With Temple Grove sold and the last Montreal McCords having wound their way to Mount Royal Cemetery, the family’s patrician heritage was consigned to storage and the research of later scholars. It was only in the 1970s, with social scientists’ growing interest in ethnography and material history, that the McCord collection finally found place on the university’s research and teaching agenda. As a museum, a cultural institution, and heir of long-gone patricians, it remains enigmatic today, the vestige of a collapsed family, of authority in English Montreal, and of an obsession with Canadian history. 8.14 French regime exhibition room in McCord National Museum, c. 1927. Whether in the “Wolfe” or “French regime” room, McCord designed his glass exhibition cases meticulously. With no flair for the spectacular, his displays of Canadian history called for careful attention by visitors to artefacts and primary documents.

Conclusion We are not born, my dear daughter, to pursue our own small personal happiness, for we are not separate, independent, self-subsisting individuals, but links in a chain; and it is inconceivable that we would be what we are without those who have preceded us and shown us the path that they themselves have scrupulously trod, looking neither to the left nor to the right, but, rather, following a venerable and trustworthy tradition. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, 1900

Like religion, landed property, and the use of memory, modernity and its counterpart, anti-modernity, have been recurring themes in this work. Carl Shorske, David Harvey, and Jackson Lears, wise historians of the process, all agree on its complexity.1 It is true that Marian devotion, collecting weather statistics, or building a cemetery can appear to be effete and worlds away from the rhythms of industrializing North America. Even if, throughout this analysis, the McCords and Taschereaus have been disassociated from simple reactionarism, the Ursulines, feudalism, slaves, and croquet that figure in these family histories suggest social relations and values in sharp opposition to modernity’s pursuit of individual interests, secularism, entrepreneurial capitalism, and freedom. In their attitude to the state, to capital and technology, to the organization, inventorying, and structuring of knowledge, and to the place of professions, the Taschereaus were surprisingly progressive – modern, if you prefer. Archbishop Taschereau – Elzéar-Alexandre – played a critical role in the development of a Catholic university, and several members of the family were involved in the codification movement in law, Catholic discipline, and the military. The archbishop, like his father and grandfather, encouraged capitalist enterprise. A promoter of church investment in Quebec railways, he was a major regional force in blocking North American unionism. Deep into the twentieth century, the Taschereaus remained highly visible on the landscape of the Beauce and Quebec City, and their favoured institutions, the Seminary of Quebec and the Ursulines, remained vital. Constructed in 1808 and declared a heritage site in 1978, one of the Taschereaus’ ancestral manors – the archbishop’s birthplace – remained in family hands into the twenty-first century. Next door, in the family’s chapel, annual Masses to Sainte Anne are still held.

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9.1 The Taschereau manor and Sainte-Anne chapel in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce

The McCords stumbled in the modernizing world. Unlike the Taschereaus, who persistently held their position in the political, service, and legal elite of Quebec City, the McCords declined in the hierarchy of English Montreal. The institutions central to their patrician power – the Church of England, Bishop’s University, the Natural History Society, and the Protestant Orphan Asylum – lost traction. While his father, John Samuel, had been a long-time director of the Colonial Life Assurance Company, the last male McCord, David Ross, had little in common with the city’s three transcontinental railways or with the scale and ideology of new corporations like Sun Life. In 1930, the year of David Ross McCord’s death, Sun Life had 1,500 employees and a head office in Montreal described as the largest office building in the British Empire. The McCords also lost their physical place in Montreal: Temple Grove was eventually sold, and the Protestant cemetery on Mount Royal was overshadowed by a public park.

Conclusion

Patrician power, it has been argued, was less about wealth than about the exercise of seigneurial, civil, religious, professional, and familial authority. Both in the Beauce and in the suburbs of Montreal, successful landowning depended on sensitive social relations with peasant or factory populations, on the fine print of seigneurial contracts, on the long-term development of timber, water, and human resources, and on attention to infrastructure like roads, mills, and markets. More than through the blunt possession of land, patrician authority was determined, understood, negotiated, and manoeuvred through the sustained use of institutional, religious, and cultural levers, through the careful control of communication between the local and the outside world, through complex channels of mediation and arbitration, and through the relentless use of ceremony, rituals, processions, Masses, government commissions, and militia musters. Uncomfortable with world views around republicanism, egalitarianism, democracy, individualism, and secularism, both families achieved influence in permanent institutions – seigneurial, judicial, philanthropic, religious, associational, and educational. For both families, law was a key form of authority, a prized channel of male status, and a source of professional income. Third-generation McCords, trained by the best English tutors and Collège de Montréal instructors, served as legal and canon codifiers, judges, and, in one case, a university chancellor. Similarly, the Taschereaus understood the significance of a classical education and college connections, using seminary and convent schools as stepping stones to high office as Ursuline Superior, archbishop, Supreme Court judge, and provincial premier. Whatever their rootedness in community and local institutions, the histories of both families illustrate deliberate and persistent integration with Atlantic and European worlds. The very arrival of the two families in Canada was the direct result of powerful French and British imperial impulses, while Britain’s Quebec Act and the American and French revolutions had determinant effects on the second generation. The third generation has been interpreted in relation to Waterloo, Peterloo, Alexandre Vattemare, and Walter Scott. The fourth can only be understood in terms of Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, the daguerreotype, and Rome’s Syllabus of Errors. Study of four generations over some 150 years has permitted the long view of family strategies. Some of the land ceded to the Taschereaus in the 1730s remained unconceded a century later. Both the McCords and the Taschereaus took long-term perspectives in their estate construction; succession arrangements; administering, judging, legislating, and organizing parishes, churches, and militia; and collecting and preserving information through records, diaries, and weather reporting. Both families built up century-long experience in the micro-politics of suburb and countryside, encouraging social stability and exercising local authority over roads, justice, schools, and public rituals. They understood, too, the significance of status and

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title. When signing his concession contract in a notary’s office in 1806, a peasant must surely have felt the reality of class in facing a man described in the contract as “l’honorable Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, écrieur, membre de conseil legislative, Seigneur Haut justicier au fief et seigneurie Taschereau.” Two generations and threequarters of a century later, in a democratic period that saw the introduction of the automobile, the head of the fourth generation of Taschereaus, cardinal of Canada, and son, grandson, and great-grandson of seigneurs, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, was addressed as “Son Éminence” or “Prince.”2 Likewise, three generations of McCords benefited from the revenues and social prestige they gained from convent lands they held on a ninety-nine-year lease. Whatever their private fate, whether impotent, hermit, or alcoholic, the McCords carefully staged their public image via the high road of top hat, Anglican pew, judge’s robes, and classical urn. Wise in property management, they understood the strategy of letting land prices steep slowly. In 1832, as part of the marriage contract between Anne Ross and John Samuel McCord, Anne’s father, David Ross, settled £1,000 to be invested in “property or in good security” and to be realized on the maturity of his daughter’s children. The Saint-James property bought with the settlement in 1839 and managed by husband John Samuel McCord until his death, sold for $53,000 in 1893.3 Quebec’s two established churches presented ideal sites for patrician institutional and ideological authority. The relationship of the Anglican and Catholic churches with the Canadian state in the mid-nineteenth century – disestablishment in the case of the Church of England and, on the other hand, reinforcement of the institutional power of the Church of Rome – was not foreign to the differing destinies of the McCord and Taschereau families. Fourth-generation Taschereaus acceded to the Supreme Court and College of Cardinals and, in their fifth generation, to the highest elected office in Quebec, the premiership. This prominence made them, in a Gramscian sense, central intellectual figures in the construction of a coherent Catholic civil society and in its accommodation first to the British imperial and then to the Canadian state.4 The McCords, in contrast, suffered from disestablishment and the Church of England’s waning influence in a Protestant Montreal characterized by denominational splintering and state participation in the development of Protestant education and social institutions. In the 1860s, John Samuel McCord was increasingly marginalized from Montreal’s principal Protestant institutions, hunkering down instead in the closeted worlds of the Anglican synod, the Protestant cemetery, and Bishop’s University. Two of his sons reached their nadir in law and the military, and another died soon after graduating in medicine; none of the fourth-generation males had children. Of three daughters, only one married, and she and her child died in childbirth. For a family that for a century had been able to count on rents,

Conclusion

sales, and other land revenues, the expiration of their land leases in the 1890s symbolized their decline. Into the twentieth century, the public influence of the Montreal McCords was reduced to efforts to found a museum of Canadian history. In the late nineteenth century, both families turned to the use of history and public memory. To their traditional and private family portraits, lockets, chapel crypts, and classical estates, they added photo albums, genealogical studies, and printed family histories. They glorified family memory in street names, new cemeteries, public monuments, and their efforts to found a museum of Canadian history. I have connected both families to the construction of collective memory and the merging of family, institutional, and national history into what Tony Judt calls “master narratives.”5 John Gillis describes this as the process by which “imagined families and mythic homes … take on meaning.”6 As a boy in 1827, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau had witnessed his father’s role in raising the WolfeMontcalm monument as a symbol of bon-ententisme and Catholic accommodation. As a product of this tradition of loyalty and of his rich training in theology, history, and canon law, he constructed a history of Canada in which the Conquest represented Catholic survival and successful church diplomacy. British concessions on religion and custom, particularly in the Quebec Act of 1774, facilitated Taschereau’s contribution as Superior, university rector, and prelate to the ideological construct of a strong and loyal Catholic patrie. In the threatening late nineteenth-century climate of the Riel execution, of repetitive attempts to restrict Catholic education outside Quebec, and of the incursion into Quebec of secular and consumer tastes, the Taschereau family achieved cult status. Speaking at a 1892 dinner in the cardinal’s honour, Wilfrid Laurier caught the moment perfectly in his toast to “the glorious name of Taschereau … the name is symbolic of all the virile virtues which only great peoples and great nations can create.”7 The Seminary of Quebec was the principal institutional motor of this exaltation, sponsoring, collecting, displaying, printing, and archiving Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s career in multiple forms: it marketed the “Prince” of the church through paintings, photographs, commemorative tokens, mementos, publications, honorary arches, and winter-carnival statues that gave him both omnipresence and physical form in the popular imagination. Hagiographies by his fellow seminarian Thomas-Étienne Hamel and by Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society president A.B. Routhier ensured printed permanence to his words and career. In 1901, three years after the cardinal’s death, Pierre-Georges Roy published his family history of the Taschereaus. A genre, it was constructed around Catholicity, the aristocratic family, the strength of its male heads, and the fortitude of its females. After the First World War, the Taschereau legacy took the form of a monument to the cardinal in the square separating the Basilica and the city hall. Its unveiling, with Premier Louis-Alexandre

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Taschereau, the cardinal’s nephew, on the podium, gave physicality to the permanence, universality, and paternal authority of the patrician family and its identification with a conservative French Catholic nation. With their family’s public influence and the Anglican Church both in free-fall in Montreal, the McCords could expect no such public or institutional support for their claim to prominent place in the national memory of English Canadians. Their fourth generation stalled, their wealth and authority collapsed, and it fell on David Ross McCord as head to extend dwindling family resources throughout his life and that of his two spinster sisters. Alienated from the legal profession, married to a woman of indifferent social rank, and childless, he devoted himself to the development of a family historical narrative, to the conversion of the family’s private artefacts into a national collection, and finally, to the establishment of a museum of Canadian history on the campus of McGill University. The university may have been a reluctant host for his collection but it was his best hope for permanence, community prestige, and a publicly accessible museum. Like many creators of the narrative of Canadian history, he put the British Conquest at the centre of his museum plan. While he cherished French Canada’s loyalty in the War of 1812–14 and revelled in the vision of French and English in common battle, heroic death in war was his principal obsession. He assembled a world-class collection of artefacts around James Wolfe, constructing the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the general’s death into a moment of exquisite male violence and imperial glory. The McCords, albeit absent from the battle and then present in Quebec as tavern-keepers and merchants, could be linked to the heroic events of 1759 through the marriage of female McCords to officers of the legendary Highland Frasers. At Temple Grove, David Ross McCord used the landscape of Mount Royal, reconfiguring the front-lawn steps to represent the stages of the battle on the Plains of Abraham. All of this family, this struggle, this collecting – this memory – ultimately found place in the McCord Museum of Canadian History. It opened its doors on the McGill University campus in 1921, just two years before Quebec City’s unveiling of its monument to Cardinal Taschereau. All, it might seem, came to naught in 1936. Seeing no academic interest in McCord’s museum of Canadian history, McGill officials closed the museum and put its apparently effete collection of Canadiana in storage. In June of the same year, Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, heir of four generations of history, was put on ice by the Quebec populace. Moth-eaten by corruption and a tired legacy, he gave way to the Union nationale and its promising discourse of autonomy and national self-definition.

Notes

a bbrev iat ion s aaq asq assm auq banq-m banq-q cihm dcb lac mm

Archives de l’Archevêché de Québec Musée de la civilisation (Québec), Archives du Séminaire de Québec Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal Archives des Ursulines de Québec Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Quebec City Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions Dictionary of Canadian Biography Library and Archives Canada McCord Museum of Canadian History

in t ro duc t ion 1 Creighton, Empire of the St. Lawrence. For an example of the nationalist narrative of elites, see Yvan Lamonde’s analysis of Louis-Antoine Dessaulles as “allié de Papineau, voyageur, écrivain, libéral, démocrate, anticlérical. Je tenais enfin, un intellectuel acceptable, enviable, qui n’était ni Camus ni Sartre.” Lamonde, Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, 12. 2 Dechêne, “L’évolution du régime seigneurial au Canada,” 147; Grenier, Le régime seigneurial au Québec; and his Seigneurs campagnards de la Nouvelle France, 82, 98; Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 6–7; Garneau, “Une culture de l’amalgame au prétoire,” 113–48. 3 Harrison, The Early Victorians 1832–51, 114–15. Harrison called it “real property.” 4 Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 9, 11. I have omitted the end of Vickery’s quote with its reference to “unenthusiastic faith,” a description surely not applicable to the Taschereaus. 5 Morris, Class, Sect and Party, 4; David Harvey, Urban Experience, 91; and David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 312. 6 Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 43. 7 Thompson, “The Grid of Inheritance,” in his collection, Making History, 273; Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, 226. 8 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; Sewell, Logics of History, 22–80; Eley, A Crooked Line.

Notes to Pages 4–14

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Charle, Homo Historicus. Cassell, Giddens Reader, 7. Cited in Eley, A Crooked Line, 140. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 1; Richard Bushman, Refinement of America, xvii; Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches; Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class. Laslettt, The World We Have Lost; Thompson, Customs in Commons, 16–96. See also Sarasin, La ville des bourgeois, 91. Nancy Christie has been a leading proponent in describing Canadian elites as “patrician”; see her “‘The Plague of Servants,’” 83–132. Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 6, 321. Wahrman, “National Society, Communal Culture,” 45. Linteau and Robert, “Land Ownership and Society in Montreal.” Jean-Thomas Taschereau addressing seigneurial enquiry, Journals, Legislative Assembly of Canada, 1842, vol. 3, app. f . See, for example, the treatment of Joseph-Charles Taché in Curtis, The Politics of Population, 242, or the French example in Schama, Citizens, 185. Jean-Claude Robert, Atlas historique de Montréal, 52. Bernier and Salée, The Shaping of Quebec Politics and Society, 45; David Harvey, Urban Experience, 91. I give framework to this persistence in Young, “Revisiting Feudal Vestiges in Urban Quebec,” 133–58. Courville and Garon, Atlas historique du Québec, 177; Jean-Claude Robert, Atlas historique de Montréal, 177; Linteau, Histoire de Montréal, 160–2. For plurality in Montreal, see Olson and Thornton, “The Challenge of the Irish Catholic Community,” 331–62; and their Peopling the North American City. For Quebec City, one can begin with Vallières et al., Histoire de Québec et de sa région. Casey, History of the Family, 6. Rawls, Law of Peoples, 157. Ibid.; Ariès and Duby, History of Private Life. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public, 5. Besides the hugely useful but snapshot and individual organization of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (hereafter dcb), see the excellent studies of Elizabeth and John Hale in Colin Coates, Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec, chap. 8; Joseph-Charles Taché in Curtis, The Politics of Population, chap. 7; and Marie-Catherine Peuvret in Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret. For a multi-generational study of a seigneurial family, see Françoise Noël, Christie Seigneuries. Interview with the Independent on Sunday Review, 4 July 1993, cited in Davies, Cultural Studies and Beyond, 54. Sewell, Logics of History, 6. Williams, Keywords, 140. The naming of sons “George” in honour of George III and without the French “s” was not unusual in French-Canadian bourgeois families. See, for example, George-Étienne Cartier, born in 1814. Shammas, History of Household Government in America, 13; Caine and Sluga, Gendering European History, 97; Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class.

Notes to Pages 14–19

32 McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, xix; Tosh, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?,” 188. 33 Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, Family and Inheritance, 7; Spivak, In Other Worlds, 179. 34 Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women, 10; see also McPherson, Morgan, and Forestell, Gendered Pasts. 35 These gender dimensions are at the very core of Bettina Bradbury’s various works on legal culture. See her Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics, 120–70; also important are Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice, 7–39; and Denyse Baillargeon, Brève histoire des femmes au Québec, 39–64. 36 Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, 24; see also Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. 37 Coates and Morgan, Heroines & History, 97. 38 Bradbury, “Anne Molson”; Hanawalt, Wealth of Wives, 11, 114; Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class; Marguerite Van Die also shows this process in Religion, Family and Community in Victorian Canada, 85–6. 39 Benadusi, Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany, 187. 40 Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public, 13. 41 Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, 15. 42 Widowhood was an important factor in Taschereau branches outside this history. PierreElzéar Taschereau, head of the first family branch in the fourth generation, died of an aneurism in 1845. Thirty-nine, he left Catherine-Hémédine Dionne, herself the daughter of the wealthy seigneur of La Pocatière and Grande-Anse, with six children under nine and a widowhood that lasted twenty-five years. With her eight-year-old son Henri-Elzéar inheriting part of the seigneury of Sainte-Marie as well as the manor house, she administered the estate until his majority. He followed family tradition into the profession of law, and in 1878, eight years after his mother’s death and burial in the Ursuline chapel, HenriElzéar Taschereau was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. Gagnon, “Amable Dionne,” in dcb. 43 Cannon, Science in Culture, 3. 44 Gaudet, Disenchantment of the World, 12. 45 Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1837. 46 Christie and Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 7. 47 Supiot, Homo Juridicus, vii. 48 See Nelken, Comparing Legal Cultures, particularly Lawrence M. Friedman’s article, “The Concept of Legal Culture: A Reply,” 33–9. For legal culture, see my treatment of Thomas McCord in Young The Politics of Codification; and of Sir Henri-Elzéar Taschereau in Young “Overlapping Identities,” 259–84. 49 For discussion of “pleasing prospects,” see Williams, The Country and the City, 120–6; Gillis, A World of Their Own Making, 80. Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America also gives gentrification the perspective of material culture, homes, books, bodies, and gardens. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, also makes the link between the discourse of the middle-class home and new methods in architecture and gardening. 50 Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 82; Stuart and Strathern, eds, Landscape, Memory and History, 1, 3, 5.

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51 Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 5. 52 Bonnie G. Smith, Gender of History, 12. 53 “[C]ontinuellement mêlées aux événements marquants de notre vie nationale jusqu’en ces dernières années et toujours au premier rang en dépit de la poussée qu’ont faite les nouveaux riches.” L.-A. Taschereau, “La noblesse-canadienne française,” 9. 54 Berger, Ways of Seeing; David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity; Schama, Landscape and Memory.

cha p ter one 1 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 16–17. The absence of wives and widows from the remembered record does not surprise feminist historians. Placing women at the centre of her study of nineteenth-century public life in New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, Mary Ryan has described her “perverse attraction” in reversing “the customary order of historiography.” Catherine Hall has warned against missing what she calls the “relational” aspect of gender authority, while Amanda Vickery points to the “formal place” of elite women and their prominent share in exercising the “intrinsic authority of the propertied.” Among feminist historians of Quebec, Bettina Bradbury vigorously insists on the place of women in “ongoing negotiations in families, society, and politics that had their roots in the Conquest and colonial rule.” Joy Parr makes a similar point in “Gender and Historical Practice,” 366. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public, x; Hall, Macaulay and Son, 141; Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 7, 11; Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Class, Culture, Family, 3. 2 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 13; Provost, “Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau,” in dcb. 3 Gadoury, La noblesse de Nouvelle France, 18, 21, 165 (“ce groupe sans assises économiques particulières, sans fonctions réservées, sans privilèges bien délimités, et que les dirigeants coloniaux eux-mêmes semblaient n’oser troubler”). 4 Rodger, “Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière,” in dcb; Nish, Les bourgeois-gentilshommes, 72. 5 Ferrière, Nouveau commentaire, 1:253, cited in Bradbury, Gossage, Kolish, and Stewart, “Property and Marriage,” 17. 6 Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal, 421, notes that douaires of 300 livres tournois were common among peasant grooms, while merchant douaires ranged from 1,000 to 2,000 livres and those of officers might reach 4,000 to 6,000 livres. 7 A copy of the contract appears in ba nq-q, cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, #1790, “Compte et Partage” Héritiers du Sieur Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, 16 August 1788; for a similar example of strategy in the bride’s family, see Nish, “François-Étienne Cugnet,” in dcb. 8 ba nq -q , “Extrait du livre P.G. Roy. Notes et documents sur la famille Taschereau, Branche de l’Hon. L-A Taschereau (Quebec, 1925), “Lettre du Ministre A.M. Hocquart au sujet de Thomas-Jacques Taschereau (17 mai 1729).” On her transatlantic voyage to join her husband in 1729, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière had royal permission to ship furniture on board l’Éléphant and to eat at the captain’s table. Nish, François-Étienne Cugnet 1719–1751, 46. 9 Nish, François-Étienne Cugnet 1719–1751, 63, 85.

Notes to Pages 27–31

10 Ibid., 75 (“quel autre espoir pour ma femme et mes enfants? Dans ma soixante et unième année, où je suis aujourd’huy, je ne puis faire fond sur assez de santé pour remplir encore longtems mon employ … et l’on sçait que je n’ai aucuns talens ni facultez pour le commerce”). 11 Ibid., 85. The project was a major factor in partner François-Étienne Cugnet’s bankruptcy. 12 Huntington Library, Loudoun Papers, Vaudreuil mss , Thomas-Jacques Taschereau to the marquis de Vaudreuil, 16 September 1749. 13 Ibid. (“Mon épouse connaît, comme moi, Monsieur, tout le mérite de l’amitié dont vous nous honorez. Elle vous assure de son respect. Il n’y a pas de jour que nous ne prions ensemble le Seigneur de vous renvoyer vers nous”; “un père sans fortune”). 14 Merchant and seigneur Eustache Chartier de Lotbinière had five domestic servants. Nish, Les bourgeois-gentilshommes, 134–5. 15 “Y arrivé, je fus présenté à madame son épouse, qui par parenthèse est une personne des plus accomplies tant par la figure que par l’esprit. Elle est d’ailleurs pleine de grâces et de politesse … la profusion et la délicatesse des mets des meilleures provinces de France.” Franquet, Voyages et mémoires sur le Canada, 16. 16 Other bumper years for seigneurial grants were 1647 (10), 1672 (40), and 1683 (11). 17 Provost, “Thomas-Jacques Taschereau”; Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 37. 18 Pierre-Georges Roy, “Concession de la seigneurie de Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce à Thomas-Jacques Taschereau.” 19 The Beauce, more correctly “la Nouvelle Beauce” in deference to its French namesake, is essentially the region drained by the Chaudière upstream from the seigneury of Lauzon. Lauzon is part of the Côte Sud region. 20 Drouin, Le Passé présent toujours, 9. 21 Pierre-Georges Roy, Famille Taschereau, 16; Courville, Poulin, et al., Histoire de BeauceEtchemin-Amiante, 117. For absentee seigneurs, for the insistence that seigneurs were essentially “passive” in development, and for the argument that seigneurialism was “not a way of life in the French regime,” see Harris, Seigneurial System in Early Canada, 116, 169, 196. 22 This partial fulfilment of his obligations as seigneur may have helped him avoid repossession by the Crown for failure to promote settlement. Several seigneuries granted on Missisquoi Bay and Lake Champlain in 1733 and 1734 were, for example, repossessed in 1741 owing to failure to develop them as stipulated under the Edict of Marly. Anon., Frelighsburg, 14. 23 For a general description of widowhood in New France and family strategies, see Brun, “Le veuvage en Nouvelle France,” particularly chap. 5. Suzanne Lebsock suggests that women in Virginia were “kinder” to their slaves, freed them in their wills more often, and may have been “a subversive influence on chattel slavery.” Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg, 138; for Lancashire, see Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 8. 24 Nöel, “New France,” 29; Gadoury, La noblesse de Nouvelle France familles et alliances, 81. 25 This son, Pierre-Hubert-François-Xavier Couterot, became an artillery officer in the Amercian forces. 26 Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics, 7. 27 A widow’s puissance paternelle does not seem to have included the “respect” and

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33 34

35 36 37

38 39 40

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42

“reconnaissance” children owed to their father. Nor could a widow apparently replace the father in the bénédiction du père, a historical tradition in which the eldest son was blessed by the father. See Beaubien, Traité sur les lois civiles du Bas-Canada, 56–7. ba nq-q, cc 301, s 1, d 2363 (Fonds Cour supérieure. District judiciaire de Québec. Tutelles et curatelles), “Tutelle aux mineurs de feu Thomas Taschereau, conseiller au Conseil supérieur de Québec, et de Marie-Claire de la Gorgendière (Fleury),” 3 October 1750. lac, mg 18-h 17, Taschereau Family, pp. 001–004, De Beaufort to Marie-Claire Fleury de La Gorgendière, 11 May 1850; pp. 005–009, Mme Boutin de Nantouillet to La Gorgendière, 3–4 June 1753. For similar examples by seigneurial families like the Salaberry, Baby, and Chaussegros de Léry, see Paquet and Wallot, Patronage et pouvoir, 38–41. auq , “Fichier des anciennes élèves du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec”; lac, mg 18 h 17 (3) (famille Taschereau), 406, “Extrait du Livre des professions religieuses des Ursulines de Québec, du 12 Août 1766.” Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 45; for the bursaries offered by the Ursulines and the Seminary of Quebec, see Frégault, Le XVIIIe siècle, 145. For a businesswoman model of widowhood, see Plamondon, “A Businesswoman in New France,” 45–58; see also the description of artisanal women in Romero-Martin, “Artisan Women and Management in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona,” 81–95; Ulrich, Good Wives, 35; Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret. For Raymond, see Desjardins, “Les Masson.” For discussion of the separate spheres argument for the late eighteenth century, see Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women, particularly the introduction. Fleury de la Gorgendière’s seigneurial leadership can also be compared with Hélène Paré’s analysis of Louise de Ramezay in dcb. Petot, Histoire du droit privé français, 398; Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, 104. “Do you know me, Madame Falardeau?” “Yes; I am sure you are the little girl who always came out with your father, with a black boy in livery, a little black servant they brought to wait at table.” MacPherson, Reminiscences of Old Quebec, 43. Trudel, Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec, 141. Cooper, “The Secret of Slavery in Canada,” 257. Eccles, “Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial,” in dcb; Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime, 178; Mackey, L’esclavage et les noirs à Montréal, 533. As a colonial administrator, Vaudreuil was able to evade French legislation and take domestic slaves back to France. Canon declared that he had been freed but continued to work in Vaudreuil’s household. Charles-Antoine Taschereau, “la seulle [sic] et unique bien que nous possédions,” cited in Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 48. ba nq-q, cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, no. 1790, “Compte et Partage” Héritiers du Sieur Thomas Jacques Taschereau, 16 August 1788. Ibid. The seigneury of Mingan, based on the seal fishery, had in fact come into the estate through an inheritance of Claire Jolliet, wife of Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière. Rodger, “Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière,” in dcb . Because of the black mud from the Justinian Road, travellers from the Beauce, even into the nineteenth century, were known in Lévis as “les Jarrets-Noirs” or “the Black Thighs.” Cited in Doyon, “Folk Dances in Beauce County,” 173. Courville, Histoire de Beauce-Ethchemin-Amiante, 133.

Notes to Pages 35–41

43 Provost, “Mariages entre Canadiens et sauvages,” 53–4; Provost, Les Abénaquis sur la Chaudière, 13, 23; Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 26. 44 Courville, Histoire de Beauce-Ethchemin-Amiante, 129. 45 Harris, Seigneurial System in Early Canada, 78. 46 Courville, Histoire de Beauce-Ethchemin-Amiante, 133; Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 60. 47 Voyer, “The Boyer Family from Étienne to Bernard,” http://www.bernard.voyer.com; Bélanger et al., La Beauce et les Beaucerons, 25. 48 http://www.nosorigines.qc.ca/GenealogieQuebec.aspx?pid=79802&partID=79801. 49 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 61. See the donation of François Chapais, 15 February 1768, in Barnard, Mémoires Chapais, 1:28. 50 Courville, Histoire de Beauce-Ethchemin-Amiante, 123; Provost, Histoire religieuse, 17, 23, 29; Harris, Seigneurial System in Early Canada, 78–87. 51 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War, 565, 568; Lambert, “David-François de Montmollin,” in dcb. 52 Marshall, “British North America, 1760–1815,” 374; Read, The Rebellions of 1837, 3. 53 http://archive.org/stream/documentsrelatin01publuoft/documentsrelatin01publuoft _djvu.txt, Shortt and Doughty, Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, “Capitulation of 1760,” Article slvii . 54 Cited in Marshall, “British North America, 1760–1815,” 375; see also James Oldham’s biography of Mansfield (William Murray) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 39:992–9. 55 Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 4. 56 For the evolution of this sense of entitlement, see Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 17. 57 Browne, “James Murray,” in dcb . British policy is outlined in Ouellet, “Le nationalisme canadien-français,” 5. 58 Rare Books Collections, McGill University, De Léry Macdonald Papers, box 11, no. 7, “Procuration,” Pierre François de Rigaud et Louise-Thérèse Fleury de la Gorgendière à Joseph Fleury Deschambault, 31 March 1769; box 1, no. 5, “Vente” Seigneur Pierre François de Rigaud to Michel Chartier, 30 March 1808. 59 Tousignant, “The Integration of the Province of Quebec into the British Empire, 1763–91,” 4:xli. 60 Burt, The Old Province of Quebec, 183; Oury, Les Ursulines de Québec, 172. 61 Ged Martin, “Francis Maseres,” 37:144. 62 Cugnet, cited in Tousignant and Dionne-Tousignant, “François-Joseph Cugnet,” in dcb . 63 lac, mg 11, C.O.42, vol. 28ff., 147–51, Carleton to Shelburne, 20 January 1768. 64 Cited in Tousignant and Dionne-Tousignant, “Hector Theophilus Cramahé,” in dcb. 65 Tousignant, “The Integration of the Province of Quebec into the British Empire, 1763–91,” 4:xlvi. 66 Horguelin, “Le XVIIIe siècle des Canadiens,” 216. 67 Tousignant, “The Integration of the Province of Quebec into the British Empire, 1763–91,” 4:xli. 68 Provost, “Colomban-Sébastien Pressart,” in dcb. 69 Tousignant and Dionne-Tousignant, “René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville,” in dcb . 70 Browne, “James Murray,” in dcb.

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71 Aubert de Gaspé, A Man of Sentiment, 411, 417. 72 For Marie de l’Incarnation, see Davis, Women on the Margins, 72; and Chabot, “Marie Guyart,” in dcb . For dowries, see Lapointe, “Marie-Anne Migeon de Branssat,” in dcb; and for conditions in other convents, see D’Allaire, “Marie-Joseph Juchereau Duchesnay,” in dcb , and her “Conditions matérielles requises pour devenir religieuse au XVIIIe siècle,” 183–99. The Ursulines in Quebec attracted 20.7 per cent of aristocrats entering female religious orders in New France; the hospital sisters of the Hôpital général de Québec drew 22.4 per cent. Gadoury, La noblesse de Nouvelle France familles et alliances, 68. 73 Gadoury, La noblesse de Nouvelle France familles et alliances, 70–1. 74 auq , Séries, relations avec les autorités ou organismes ecclésiatiques, 1/b 2,4 Archidiocèse de Québec, vol. 6, Mgr Taschereau to la Mère Ste-Catherine, supérieure des Ursulines de Québec, 1 September 1881. 75 L.-A. Taschereau, “La noblesse-canadienne française,” 9. 76 “Les couvents … peuvent être nécessaires pendant un certain temps pour l’accommodation et l’honneur des familles. Il peut être expédient de conserver en permanence dans cette colonie quelques-unes des communautés pour servir de retraite honorable aux femmes célibataires.” Attorney General Alexander Wedderburn, cited in Oury, Les Ursulines de Québec, 172; see also Burt, The Old Province of Quebec, 183; and Gadoury, La noblesse de Nouvelle France familles et alliances, 67. 77 “À six ans, Marie-Célanire [Taschereau] entrait au pensionnat des Révérendes Mère Ursulines de Québec, où l’accueillit une autre tante maternelle. Le monastère antique avec ses grilles austères fit-il impression sur la bruyante espiègle? À l’école des filles de SainteAngèle, elle grandit en sagesse, en piété, en science aussi.” auq , Sœur Ste-MargueriteMarie, “Nécrologie,” Marie-Célanire Taschereau, n.d. 78 MacPherson, Reminiscences of Old Quebec, 54–5. 79 Saint-Thomas, Les Ursulines de Québec, de leur établissement jusqu’à nos jours, 216. 80 Ibid., 329. 81 “Au nom de notre seigneur Jésus Christ, et en l’honneur de sa très Sainte Mère, de notre bienheureux Père Saint Augustin, et la bienheureuse Sainte Ursule, moi Sœur Marie, Anne, Louise, Taschereau, dite de Saint François-Xavier, voue et promets à Dieu Pauvreté, Chasteté, Obédience, et de m’employer à l’instruction des petites filles selon la Règle de notre bienheureux Père St. Augustin, et selon les Constitutions de ce Monastère de Sainte Ursule, conformément aux Bulles de nos Saints Pères les Papes, Paul V et Urbain VIII. Sous l’autorité de Monseigneur l’illustrissime et Révérendissime Jean Olivier Briand, Évêque de Québec, en présence de vous Monseigneur; et de Révérende Mère Sœur Marie, Joseph Esther Whedright dite de l’enfant Jésus supérieure de ce Monastère de Sainte Ursule. L’an de notre Salut 1766, le 12 août. Sœur Saint François-Xavier.” lac, mg 18 h 17 (3) (famille Taschereau), “Extrait du Livre des Professions Religieuses des Ursulines de Québec, du 12 Août 1766.” On the taking of her vows and by an arrêt of 1732 applicable to all religious communities in New France, her dowry of 3,000 livres had to be paid in full. D’Allaire, “Conditions matérielles requises pour devenir religieuse au XVIIIe siècle,” 191. 82 Clark, Three Centuries and the Island, 264–5; for one example, see Françoise Noël, Christie Seigneuries, 20–7; a later example of the strict application of seigneurial rights in a frontier region can be seen in the tactics that Louis-Joseph Papineau used on his Ottawa Valley seigneury at Petite Nation. Baribeau, La seigneurie de la Petite-Nation 1801–1854.

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83 “Ménage tes intérêts, ceux du pais [sic], et les droits du prince … Veille à ta conservation; elle est utile à ma mère et pour nous, et encor [sic] plus à tes enfants. Range-toi vers le parti le moins dangereux … Laisse-toi guider par la politique encore plus par nos intérêts, ta sûreté est la nôtre.” Cited in Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 50. 84 Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams dans la tournée qu’ils ont fait …, 1776,” 480. 85 Rodger, “Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière,” in dcb . 86 Browne, “Guy Carleton,” in dcb. One of Fleury Deschambault’s daughters, MarieAnne-Catherine, became the Baroness of Longueuil in marrying Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil. 87 McGill University, Rare Books Collections, De Léry Macdonald Papers, box 7, no. 10, William Grant to Charles-Antoine Taschereau, 25 March 1802; see David Robert’s biography in dcb . 88 Ouellet, Lower Canada 1791–1840, 14. 89 Tousignant and Dionne-Tousignant, “François-Joseph Cugnet,” 4:182; Burt, The Old Province of Quebec, 186. 90 Comparisons can be made, for example, with the 1737 marriage of Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay and Marie-Françoise Chartier de Lotbinière. Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, 174. 91 “[C]élebrer et solemniser en face de Notre Mère la Sainte Église Catholique, apostolique et romaine,” ba nq-q, cn 301, s 207, notary Jean-Claude Panet (no. number), GabrielElzéar Taschereau and Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Bazin, “Contrat de mariage,” 24 January 1773. 92 Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 59–60. 93 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 47. 94 The complexity of seigneurial inheritance was pointed out by the manuscript’s external reader. See also Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 71. 95 lac, mg 18-h 17, Taschereau Family, pp. 013-016, Antoine-Charles Taschereau to GabrielElzéar Taschereau, 25 March 1772; ba nq-q , p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Charles-Antoine Taschereau to Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 23 May 1816; for discussion of sibling relations in elite families, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 351 (“une vie douce et assurée”; “entre tes mains cher Gabriel”; “l’âme de toute la famille”). 96 Marie-Thomas Fleury de la Gorgendière was married to Thomas-Ignace Trottier Dufy Desaulniers; after his death in 1777, Charlotte-Claire stayed on, caring for her aunt and dying in Montreal in 1819. 97 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, “Inventaire de la communauté des biens entre Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau et Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Bazin,” 16, 17, 18, and 22 March 1785. In fact, this pension was not paid, at least in the form promised, for at least eleven years; owing £183, 6s. 8d. in 1788 for unpaid pension, Marie-Louise Taschereau was Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s largest creditor. 98 http://www.ville.vaudreuil-dorion.qc.ca. 99 In April 1737, seventy people travelled to the manor at Beauport to witness the signing of the marriage contract of Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay and Marie-Françoise Chartier de Lotbinière, a marriage that produced Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s second wife, Louise-

Notes to Pages 50–7

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100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Françoise. Grenier, Marie-Catherine Peuvret, 174. Marie-Angélique Des Rivières, motherin-law of Thomas McCord and Eugénie Taschereau, recorded in her diary the marriage of her nephew Frobisher Mackenzie in Terrebonne in 1857: “We arrived at 6 o’clock p.m. Our sister was much affected on seeing us – the Fiancée looked lovely. The contract was read, in the presence of all the family and friends, who, also, all signed.” McGill University, Rare Books Collection, Diary of Marie-Angélique Des Rivières, chi 537, 22 June 1857 (“consentement de leurs parents et amis”). ba nq-q, cn 301, s 207, notary Jean-Claude Panet, no., Gabriel Elzéar Taschereau et Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Bazin, “Contrat de mariage,” 24 January 1773. Elias, The Court Society. Quebec Gazette, 3 August 1775; for a prominent New France marriage, see Miquelon, “Marie-Anne Barbel,” in dcb, 4:44–5. ba nq-q, cn 301, s 207, notary Jean-Claude Panet (no number), “Vente par la Dame Veuve Taschereau à M. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau et son épouse,’” 16 February 1773. Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des concessions en fief et seigneurie; “Acte de vente de dame Marie-Thomas Fleury de la Gorgendière … à Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau,” 4 February 1780. ba nq -q, cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, “Compte et partage, héritiers Taschereau (du Sieur Thomas-Jacques Taschereau),” 16 August 1788. ba nq-q, cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, no. 1842, “Testament de Dame Marie Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière,” 27 October 1788; no. 2391, “Testament de Dame Marie Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière,” 10 July 1790. In 1790, as in 1788, she received the notary in her bedroom. In the second will, she asked for the intervention of her “patron saints,” Sainte Vierge Marie, and Sainte Claire (“qui a toujours resté auprès d’elle”).

cha p ter t wo 1 Public Record Office, Belfast, Mic 1p /3/1, Marriages 1676–1736, Antrim Presbyterian Church; Register of First Antrim Presbyterian Church, Baptisms 1766–1733; Marriages 1675–1730, “August last 1677 were married James McCord and Elizabeth Munnell both of Connor parish”; 16 October 1703, marriage of “David McCoard with Mary Swan of Killead,” 13 April 1712; “David McCoard [sic] merchant had a child baptized John.” We know from the “Index of Connor Wills,1636–1857,” that David McCord died in Antrim in 1718. Public Record Office, Dublin, “Index Connor Wills 1636–1857 M-Y”: Connor is the diocese of the Church of Ireland in which Antrim lies. The will itself was destroyed in 1922 during the Irish rebellions. 2 Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 52. 3 Public Record Office, Dublin, G.O. 539, Tenison Groves, Names of Protestant Housekeepers 1740, pt 3, Toome Walk, County Antrim, Drumaul Parish, Toome Barone, County Antrim. 4 Belfast Newsletter, 30 January 1769, 30 September 1766. 5 “Announcement of Meeting of Free and Independent Club of Armagh,” Belfast Newsletter, 22 November 1754. 6 Canavan, Frontier Town, 93. 7 Ibid., 92. 8 McCutcheon, “The Newry Navigation,” 464–80. 9 Belfast Newsletter, 22 November 1754; interview with Mrs — Flynn, proprietor of Oisin House, 4a Canal Street. She told me that John McCord’s name appears on her building

Notes to Pages 59–63

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28

deed and that he sold corn from his doorstep. See also leases (1753, 1755) from the Earl of Hillsborough (National Library of Ireland, mss 2212, F.C. Crossle, “Newry Jottings,” 12, 3, 33). National Library of Ireland, F.C. Crossle Collection, vol. 2214, “Newry Jottings,” p. 193; see p. 519 for clipping of Hanna marriage 6 November 1776. Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 133, 149, 153. Public Record Office, Belfast, t 1060, bundle 412, State Papers, Ireland, 29 March 1750; bundle 415, 3 January 1758; bundle 416, 20 February 1759; t 1080, vol. 423, 21 March 1765. Belfast Newsletter, 27 May 1760 Ibid., 27 May 1760, 30 January 1761. Ibid., 27 May 1760. Armagh County Museum, Francis Crossle Collection, ms 2206, p. 82; lac , rg l 3l , “Lower Canada Land Petitions”: John McCord to James Murray, 5 April 1764. Sylvio Normand, “James G. Hanna,” in dcb ; Quebec Gazette, 26 November 1767. lac, rg 1 l 3l, “Lower Canada Land Petitions”: John McCord to James Murray, 5 April 1764; rg 1 l 3l , “Lower Canada Land Petitions”; John Hay, John McCord, and Hertel de Rouville to Murray, 5 December 1765. mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 1935, D.R. McCord to Lomer Gouin, __ March 1919; Day, “Felix O’Hara,” in dcb . From 1779 to 1791, O’Hara was a judge in the court of common pleas. McCord and his heirs were never able to take possession of their Gaspé land, and it was eventually appropriated by squatters. Canavan, Frontier Town, 92. mm , McCord Family Papers, box 0862, Thomas McCord, “List of lodges for which warrants have been granted in Canada from the Conquest to the year 5792,” 2 March 1792. Quebec Gazette, 22 November 1764, 6 December 1764, 27 June 1765, 29 September 1766. For other instances of the involvement of Thomas and John McCord in the capture of runaways in Quebec and Montreal, see Quebec Gazette, 8 September 1774, cited in Mackey, Done with Slavery, 314, 318. Provost, Les premiers anglo-canadiens à Québec, n.p. Pelletier, La seigneurie de Mount Murray 1761–1860, 35. lac, mg 23 g 111.11, St Gilles seigneury, Alexander Fraser 1791–1810, “Report of the Solicitor General and Clerk of the Terroirs of the King’s Domain on the Memorial of Arthur Davidson Esq, 1 July 1792,” “Donation entre Alexander Fraser and Walter Davidson,” 25 June 1791; Arthur Davidson to David Ross, 16 December 1802, cited in Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 48; mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1441, Arthur Davidson to Alexander Fraser, 31 January 1793; Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1928–1929, “Inventaire de la correspondance de Mgr Joseph-Octave Plessis,” 167; Bishop Plessis to Michel Dufresne, curé at SaintNicholas, 6 March 1823. ba nq-q , notary Roger Lelièvre, cn 301, s 178, no. 10338, “Marché,” Samuel Lawrence and Walter Davidson, for construction of a manor house, 10 June 1818; no. 9998, Marché, Antoine Couture et Walter Davidson, 7 October 1817; no. 10384, “Marché,” Antoine Couture and Walter Davidson, 6 July 1818. lac, rg 4 a 1, vol. 14, pp. 5365–7 (c 2999), Civil and Provincial Secretary Lower Canada “s ” series, 1760–1840. There is no evidence of McCord actually operating the ferry business. Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 157. Quebec Gazette, 3 November, 20 December, 6 November 1764.

341

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Notes to Pages 63–6

29 Ibid., 25 February 1768, 8 June 1769. 30 Ibid., 2 March 1769, 3 December 1767, 23 March 1769. 31 lac, rg 4 a 1, vol. 20 (c 2999), Civil and Provincial Secretary Lower Canada, “s ” series, 1760–1840, pp. 6953–4, 17 February 1773. 32 lac, rg 4 a 1, vol. 19 (c 2999), s series, pp. 6701, 6705, Civil and Provincial Secretary Lower Canada, 1760–1840. 33 Quebec Gazette, 6 December 1764. 34 Ibid., 24 August 1769; lac, rg b 28, vol. 120, Shop Licences, 1765–69, 1771–72. 35 Quebec Gazette, 22 September 1766. 36 lac, rg 4 b 28, vol. 67, Tavern Licences, 25 April 1772, 23 March 1773. 37 lac, rg 4 b 28, vol. 57, Tavern Licences, 1766–68, 26 March 1768, 21 March 1768. 38 lac, rg 4 b 28, vol. 68, Tavern Licences, 1774. 39 lac, rg 4 a 1, vol. 19 (c 2999), Civil and Provincial Secretary Lower Canada, “s ” series, 1760–1840, pp. 6483, 6408; Quebec Gazette, 7 September 1769; Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 152. 40 Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 129. 41 Lambert, “David-François de Montmollin,” 5:600–2; Vaugeois, “Samuel Jacobs,” in dcb, 4:385. In an irony of sorts, John McCord’s great-granddaughter would join the Ursulines. 42 Lafleur, “Thomas Aylwin,” in dcb, 4:37–8; Bérubé, “James Johnston,” in dcb, 4:399–400. 43 mm , John McCord Sr Papers, no. 0100, “Transfer,” John McCord Senior to John McCord Junior, lot St Nicholas Street, 31 March 1775. 44 Browne, “James Murray,” in dcb ; for the larger context, see Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 2. 45 Browne, “James Murray,” in dcb. 46 Ged Martin, “Francis Maseres,” 37:144. 47 See Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada, 25–6. 48 ba nq-m, notary J.G. Delisle, no. 938, “Inventaire des mobiliers du feu M. John McCord,” 5 January 1795. 49 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War, 678. 50 Quebec Gazette, 29 September 1766. 51 Creighton, Empire of the St. Lawrence, 52; Quebec Gazette, 13 December 1768. 52 lac, mg 11, C.O.42, vol. 28, 147–51ff, Carleton to Shelburne, 20 January 1768. 53 Fahey, “Benedict Arnold,” 5:28, 30. 54 Quebec Gazette, 27 July 1775. 55 Ibid., 12 December 1776. 56 lac, mg 23 b 3, Papers of the Continental Congress, 1776–1785, p. 25, Isaac Melcher to Thomas Mifflin, 20 June 1784; An American Time Capsule, http://memory.loc.gov/ loc.rbc/rbpe.2140160a. 57 Quebec Gazette, 13 May 1779. 58 Campbell, A History of the Scotch Presbyterian Church St Gabriel Street, 149. 59 asq , Journal de la dépense du Séminaire, c 35, pp. 310, 312, 318, 332; Séminaire 16, no. 30c (1779); Séminaire 125, no. 509 (1817). 60 Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (1880–81), 42 (“Petition for land to build a Presbyterian Church,” 1802); Miller et al., The McCord Family, 33.

Notes to Pages 67–73

pa rt t wo: int ro du c t ion 1 Casey, History of the Family, 6; Elias, The Court Society, 33–6. 2 Lefebvre-Teillard, Introduction historique, 179. 3 Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 12; for rising seigneurial revenues in the Richelieu Valley seigneury of St Ours, see ibid., 111. 4 Casey, History of the Family, 6; Elias, The Court Society, 33. 5 Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 43; see also Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 186. For the example of Rouen France, see Chaline, Les Bourgeois de Rouen, 371–81. 6 For loyalty and the implications of the Quebec Act, see Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 74, 83–8, 117. 7 Elias, The Court Society. 8 The municipal basis of law and order in the colony is emphasized in Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts, 14; Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” 62. Legal historians Norma Landau and Morton Horwitz have described the significance of this process in England and the United States. Landau uses the term “gentry justice” to explain what she calls patriarchy of neighbourhood, while Horwitz insists that this transformation of legal regulation “was a major instrument in the hands of these newly powerful groups.” Landau, The Justices of the People, 1679-1760, 15; Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860, xvi.

cha p ter thre e 1 Quebec Gazette, 11 December 1788, 15 January 1789; see also Young, “Everyman’s Trope,” 13–16 (“nouveaux sujets citoïens”). 2 Wade, The French Canadians, 1:66. 3 Quebec Gazette, 21 September 1775. 4 Jacqueline Roy, “Thomas-Ignace Trottier Dufy Desauniers” in dcb ; Igartua, “The Merchants of Montreal,” 3:284–5. 5 Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams dans la tournée qu’ils ont fait …,” 1776, 470. 6 Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 82–3; the seigneury of Saint-Joseph was owned by his aunt, Marie Fleury de la Gorgendière, and Saint-François by his sister-in-law. 7 “[C]orrompu,” “… dont l’esprit a de tout temps semé la zizanie dans la paroisse parmi les habitants, dit mille impertinences des curés et de tous les honnêtes gens & qui notamment dans l’affaire présente n’a cessé de tenir des discours séditieux partout [dans] la paroisse & dans les paroisses voisines.” Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams dans la tournée qu’ils ont fait,” 1776, 470. 8 “La veuve Gadbourie surnommée la reine d’Hongrie a fait plus de mal dans cette paroisse qu’aucun autre: elle tenait souvent chez elle des assemblées où elle présidait, tandant [sic] à soulever les esprits contre le gouvernement et à les animer en faveur des rebelles. Pour mieux parvenir à son but détestable elle leur faisait boire des liqueurs fortes.” SaintElizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231) was a symbol of female exaggeration, fanaticism, and political insensitivity. Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams dans la tournée qu’ils ont fait …, 1776,” 480; for a description of another female conspirator, see ibid., 447.

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Notes to Pages 73–7

9 Edmond J. Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 3:67, 49; Courville et al. Histoire de Beauce-Etchemin-Amiante, 173–4. 10 Edmond J. Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 3:63; Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams dans la tournée qu’ils ont fait …, 1776,” 472–3. 11 Provost, Chaudière-Kennebec, 130. 12 Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 97. 13 Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams dans la tournée qu’ils ont fait … ,” 1776, 1927–28: 63, 64, 65. 14 Cassell, Giddens Reader, 250; for comparable colonial situations, see Foster, Berger, and Buck, The Grand Experiment, 9, 271; and Appleby, Jacob, and Jacob, The Origins of AngloAmerican Radicalism, 47. 15 Courville et al., Histoire de Beauce-Etchemin-Amiante, 176, citing Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–28, “Journal par Frans Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, et Jenkin Williams.” 16 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 33; see also Landau, The Justices of the People, 1679–1760, 3–5. 17 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 90. 18 For the duties of a magistrate, see Burn and Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, 3:27; for cases involving Taschereau employees, see below and ba nq-q, tl 31,s 1, ss 1, “Fonds Cour des sessions générales de la paix du district de Québec,” tp 12 s 999, 196001357/73, no. 807, “Plainte de Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” 6 May 1803; 196001-357/80, no. 9475, “Déposition de T.-P.-J. Taschereau vs. Jean-Baptiste Simard,” 6 May 1815. Taschereau women didn’t hesitate to turn to justice. In 1834, two years after the death of her husband, Jean-Thomas Taschereau, widow Marie Panet swore out a statement against Dame Elias Reich for having used insulting language. tl 31, s 1, ss 1, “Fonds Cour des sessions générales de la paix du district de Québec,” 196001-357/137, 114449, Veuve Taschereau, “Déposition – Assaut,” 13 February 1834. 19 Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800, 7. 20 Donald Fyson email to author, 18 July 2013, citing from his database on historical violence in Quebec. For the assault of a justice of the peace in Lauzon, a neighbouring seigneury, see the Quebec Gazette, 6 April 1797. The neighbouring Ross seigneury, in which the McCords had an interest, would become a particularly fractious settlement: “This day I have been surrounded with people … the same stereotyped story of bad crops your Honor and money hard to get. The widows whom I used to see and let off till their sons were grown big enough to work the farms, are replaced by a new set of widows, some, of a few months and weeks standing, poor things … [And twelve years later] This unfortunate parish has again been brought before the public by the murder of Hugh Donaghue. He was a bailiff of the Queen’s Bench … a man of sinister aspect, somebody having bitten off a part of his nose years ago, and was universally detested, always in some row or devilment … Two years ago he … received a load of small shot in the shoulder … There should be a Stipendiary Magistrate resident at the Church at St. Sylvestre, for at present the people are grievously oppressed … of law & justice, which makes the name of the Queen to have an ill savor in the nostrils of the lieges.”Arthur Ross to his wife, 6 November 1858, and Arthur Ross to David Ross McCord, 25 July 1870, both cited in Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 116.

Notes to Pages 77–80

21 An intriguing example of the manor house as a site of authority occurred in 1812, three years after Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau’s death. His son Jean-Thomas succeeded him on the domain, serving as justice of the peace and also as co-seigneur and member of the Legislative Assembly. When a person was found murdered in the forest behind Sainte-Marie in August 1812, the militia captain notified Taschereau, asking him what he should do. The presumed murderer, Pierre Cormier(?), soon presented himself at the manor, confessing that he had taken his gun and killed Hyacinthe Morrisette in a dispute over a tub of maple syrup. At the coroner’s inquest, held in the presbytery, Jean-Thomas Taschereau testified that when he told Cormier that it “was my duty to take him prisoner, he answered ‘I came here for that purpose.’ I put him into the custody of a sergeant of the militia for the night and the next morning sent him prisoner to Quebec.” ba nq-q, tl 31, s 1, ss 1, “Fonds Cour des sessions générales de la paix du district de Québec,” 1960-01-357/81, 10017, “Statement [in English] of Jean-Thomas Taschereau to Coroner Henry Blackstone,” 30 May 1812. Other examples of mediation occurred on the neighbouring seigneury of Beaurivage where seigneur and justice of the peace Arthur Ross wrote of his role between “furious disputants R.C.s and O.P [Roman Catholics and Orange Protestants] neighbors in two concessions, who have been burning barns, cattle, destroying crops etc. for years, owing to crossing a disputed line, both agreed to abide by a proposition I made them … That is to be done with all convenient speed, before they get up another quarrel about something.” Arthur Ross to his wife, 6 November 1858, cited in Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 116. 22 Musée de l’Amérique française, file drawer J. Walsh N.P., “Affaire du meunier,” 2 July 1807. 23 Quebec Gazette, 3 and 17 July 1794. 24 Ibid., 1 August 1799. 25 Ibid., 21 September 1809. 26 Clerical members of the society in 1791 included priest Bernard-Claude Panet, later bishop of Quebec. His sister Marie married Gabriel-Elzéar’s son Jean-Thomas. Voisine, “BernardClaude Panet,” in dcb . See also Millman, “Philip Toosey,” in dcb ; and Greer, “George Davison,” in dcb ; for similar agricultural societies in Nova Scotia, see Samson, “Visions du libéralisme,” 35–50. 27 Kolish and Lambert, “Attempted Impeachment,” 458. 28 Published in English in the Quebec Herald, 19 January 1789; the mémoire bears interesting comparison with the discourses in J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832, 13. 29 De Salaberry was a Juchereau Duchesnay on his mother’s side and inherited a quarter of the Beauport seigneury. 30 Journals of House of Assembly, 22 January 1793. 31 Journals of House of Assembly, 16 November 1793, 5 January 1795, 8 January 1795; Edmond J. Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 3:186; Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 51. 32 This discord between seigneurial means and national needs is effectively analysed by Grenier, Seigneurs campagnards de la Nouvelle France, 325–30, and is the subject of an excellent thesis by Léon Robichaud, “Le pouvoir, les paysans et la voirie au Bas-Canada à la fin du XVIIIe siècle.” 33 See, for example, the crisis on the Rivière du Sud seigneury described in Wien, “Les conflits sociaux dans une seigneurie canadienne au XIIIe siècle,” 225–35. 34 Fyson, “La paroisse et l’administration étatique,” 33; “Commission de Lord Dorchester à

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Notes to Pages 80–7

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60

Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau,” 18 March 1794, in Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des procèsverbaux des grand voyers, vol. 5; Hare and Provost, Voirie et peuplement au Canada français, 4–5. Journals of House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1799, “Payments of the Civil Expenditure of the Province of Lower Canada for the year 1798,” 82. Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des procès-verbaux des grand voyers; Quebec Gazette, 26 July 1798, 18 December 1794; Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Panet, 198. Alexander Fraser to Arthur Davidson, 30 July 1794, in Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 10. Courville et al., Histoire de Beauce-Etchemin-Amiante, 201; Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des Procès-verbaux des Grands Voyers, 79. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 199. Provost, Chaudière-Kennebec, 195. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 186. Harris, Seigneurial System in Early Canada, 189. Ibid., 69; Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal, 257. Hare and Provost, Voirie et peuplement au Canada français, 17, 13. “An Act for making, repairing and altering the Highways and Bridges within this Province and for other purposes,” Statutes of Lower Canada, 34 Geo III, cap. IX, 7 May 1796. See, for example, lac, mg 23 g IV 5, Grand Voyer de Boucherville to Rev. John Doy, 25 October 1786. Statutes of Lower Canada, cap. IX, 7 May 1796, “An Act for making, repairing and altering the Highways and Bridges within this Province and for other purposes”; for an example of the old system, see nac, mg 23 g IV 5, Grand Voyer de Boucherville to Rev. John Doy, 25 October 1786. asq , polygraphie 21, no. 68, “Blanc pour sous-voyers,” 1797; Archives du Séminaire de Québec, 719.3 a -54, G. Taschereau, “Quelques règles et directions aux inspecteurs des chemins …,” 24 April 1807. Cited in Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 106, 89; Quebec Gazette, 6 October 1796. Provost, Chaudière-Kennebec, 176; Edmond J. Roy, Histoire de la seigneurie de Lauzon, 3:276. Quebec Gazette, 6 April 1797. Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 72. Grenier, “‘Gentilshommes campagnards,’” 421; for the sharp rise in grain prices after 1775, see Harris, “The Agricultural Economy,” 7. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 95. List of Lands Granted by the Crown in the Province of Quebec from 1763–1890, 1874: 378. ba nq-q, p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 22 June 1786. Caya, “Henry Caldwell,” in dcb ; Heroux, “Sir John Caldwell,” in dcb . Quebec Gazette, 6 September 1781. ba nq-q, p 233 famille Ross, 5b 03-1600b , “Sketch of proposed manner of laying out the lands of the seigniory of St. Giles” and accompanying anonymous note to Captain Fraser, September 1792; ba nq-q, Cartes, “Mr. Ross’s Mill,” n.d. Arthur Davidson to David Ross, __ December 1802, cited in Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 50.

Notes to Pages 88–95

61 McLane, “The Frampton Irish,” http://www.framptonirish.com. 62 Quebec Gazette, 18 September 1800. 63 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 43, notary John Walsh, unnumbered, “Concession,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to Jean-Baptiste Chabotte, 22 September 1806. 64 Upton, “William Smith,” in dcb ; for contracts, see those in the ba nq-q of notary Louis Miray such as the unnumbered concession, G.E. Taschereau to Louis Boivin, 8 October 1780. 65 ba nq-q , notary Louis Miray, cn 301, s 200, Répertoires 300408, 303021; notary John Walsh, cn 306, s 43, Répertoire 301831. 66 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 230, no. 5526, “Inventaire des biens de la communauté de feu l’honorable Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau avec Louise Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay son épouse,” 24 November 1810. 67 Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 46. 68 ba nq-q , p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, p. 238, notary John Walsh, cn 306, s 43, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 9 September 1809. 69 ba nq-q , notary Louis Miray, no notarial number, “Concession,” G.-E. Taschereau to Louis Boivin, 8 October 1780; Oak was subject to expropriation for use in the king’s ships. 70 ba nq-q , notary J. Walsh, no. 338, “Concession,” G.-E. Taschereau to Louis Thibodeau, 22 April 1805. 71 In 1791, for example, Claude Patris and his wife Marie Dupont transferred their farm in donation to the curé of Saint-Antoine in return for a rente viagère or life rent. With Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau threatening court action against this form of property exchange and the loss of his right of retrait, the couple went back before a notary to withdraw their donation. In a new contract, signed in the seigneurial manor and “freely” entered into, the couple sold their farm to Taschereau for 100 livres tournois. ba nq-q , notary Louis Miray, “Vente,” Claude Patros and Marie Dupont to Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 7 January 1791, “besoin de formalité de justice,” “leur plein gré, franche et libre volonté”; for another example, see Miray, “Vente,” Augustin Gagnon and Gertrude Morriset to Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 10 January 1792. 72 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 63, 49. 73 Quebec Gazette, 14 April, 31 March 1796. 74 ba nq-q , notary Louis Miray, “Bail à ferme,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to CharlesAntoine Chalifour, 15 November 1785 (“la maîtrise et conduite de toutes choses”). In a clause added at the end of the lease, perhaps after its reading to the illiterate tenant, he was permitted to sow one and a half minots of flax seed on land designated by Taschereau. 75 Quebec Gazette, 21 September 1809. 76 Louis-Alexandre Taschereau vous parle, 223. 77 ba nq-q , p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Sœur Saint-François to Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 10 February 1797. 78 ba nq-q , cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, no. 2391, “Testament de Dame Marie Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière,” 10 July 1790 (“qui a toujours resté auprès d’elle”). 79 lac, mg 18 h 17, Famille Taschereau 013-016, Antoine-Charles Taschereau to GabrielElzéar Taschereau, 17 March 1774 (“une seconde mère”); ba nq-q , cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Duchenaux, no. 2391, “Testament de Dame Marie Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière,” 10 July 1790 (“toujours resté auprès d’elle”); ba nq-q , p 238, Fonds famille

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80

81 82

83 84

85 86 87

88 89

90 91 92

93 94

Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Charles-Antoine Taschereau to Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 22 February 1785 (“les peines, les soins, les fatigues que cette chère sœur à son âge emploie pour les Elever [sic], est digne non seulement de ses vertus, mais aussi de cette amitié, de cette complaisance qui nous la fie [firent] toujours aimer”). ba nq-q , p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 17 January 1798 (“bien contente de retourner dans sa tranquillité car elle n’aime pas la ville”). ba nq-q, p 238, Fonds famille Thomas Jacques Taschereau, Sœur Saint-François à Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 10 February 1797 (“me fait pitié tant elle est changée et maigrie”). ba nq-q, cn 306, s 43, notary John Walsh, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 15 September 1809 (“Cinquièmement – ayant toujours vécu avec Marie Taschereau ma sœur aînée et ma marraine et lui ayant ainsi que mes enfants la plus grande obligation à biens des égards, ma reconnaissance exige qu’elle jouisse conjointement avec Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay ma seconde épouse généralement de tout ce qui m’appartienne en bien meubles et immeubles sans aucune exception par usufruit jusqu’au décès de ma dite soeur Marie Taschereau affin [sic] de lui épargner tout tracasserie ou trouble en ma maison sur ses vieux jours”). asq, p 18/z /no.68, “Copie, Registre des Baptêmes, Mariages et Sépultures de la Paroisse de Notre-Dame de Québec,” 3 July 1807. ba nq-q, cn 301, s 83, notary Pierre-Louis Duchenaux, no. 554, “Inventaire de la communauté des biens entre Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau et Marie-Louise Elizabeth Bazin,” 16, 17, 18, and 22 March 1785. Explaining the absence of Bazin’s blouses and handkerchiefs, Marie Taschereau declared that she had given them to the children. ba nq-q, notary François Verreau, cn 301, s 42, “Testament,” Marie Taschereau, 20 November 1817. See, for example, Lefebvre-Teillard, Introduction historique, 323. Gadoury, La noblesse de Nouvelle France familles et alliances, 81. Examining Montreal in the nineteenth century, Bettina Bradbury collaborates the high remarriage rate of widowers and the importance of “youth” in the remarriage prospects of widows in Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, 193–5. Réal Brisson, “Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay,” in dcb. ba nq-q, cn 301, s 83, no. 2169, notary Pierre-Louis Duchenaux, “Contrat de mariage entre Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau et Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay,” 3 November 1789 (“son amitié et attachement”). In the choice of name, Gabriel-Elzéar was also able to honour his brother CharlesAntoine. Réal Brisson, “Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay,” in dcb. Vickery is referring to English aristocratic households in her The Gentleman’s Daughter, 288. Interesting comparisons can also be made with plantation wives in Virginia. Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, 250. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 73–4. Papineau’s manor house at Montebello had three libraries, the one on the main floor serving as an office to meet with censitaires. Baribeau, La seigneurie de la Petite-Nation 1801–1854, 139–41.

Notes to Pages 99–104

95 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 230, no. 5526, “Inventaire des biens de la communauté de feu l’honorable Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau avec Louise Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay son épouse,” 24 November 1810. The seven servants were Jean Landry, Louis Binet, Angélique Prévost, Joseph Landry, Marie Sylvie, Madeleine Roussin, and Angélique Foucher. 96 ba nq-q , Jean-Joseph Reny, cn 306, s 34, “Codicile,” Marie Taschereau, 18 August 1820 (“bons et longs services”); Errol Boyd Lindsay, cn 301, s 188, no. 3337, “Testament,” LouiseFrançoise Juchereau Duchesnay, 4 October 1840. 97 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 43, John Walsh notary, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 15 September 1809 (“vieillesse, ou que sa santé lui manquera et deviendra incapable de travailler”). 98 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 53. 99 ba nq-q , notary François Verreau, cn 301, s 42, “Testament,” Marie Taschereau, 20 November 1817 (“trop vieilles”). 100 ba nq-q, tl 31, s 1, ss 1, “Fonds Cour des sessions générales de la paix du district de Québec,” tp 12 s 999, 196001-357/73, no. 807, “Plainte de Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” 6 May 1803; 196001-357/80, no. 9475, “Déposition de T.-P.-J. Taschereau vs. Jean-Baptiste Simard,” 6 May 1815. For a McCord example, see the sentencing of William King McCord’s servant Patrick Sherden to two months in the House of Correction; 357/136, no. 112676, “Complaint of W.K. McCord,” 29 January 1835. See also Pilarczyk, “The Law of Servants and the Servants of Law,” 779–836. 101 Bloch, Feudal Society, 1:xv, xii; Orren, Belated Feudalism, 3, 2. 102 Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1927–1928, 236, “Inventaire de la correspondance de Mgr JosephOctave Plessis,” Plessis to Mgr P. Denaut, 27 September 1804. The other chapel was suggested for Sainte-Claire (“avantageuse au défrichement de ses terres”). Examples of Taschereau appeals to ecclesiastical authorities abound; see Jean-Thomas Taschereau Jr’s letter of December 1848 to Charles-Félix Cazeau, first secretary of the archbishop, complaining that the fabrique was interfering with his right to a seigneurial pew. Cited in Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 131. For these relations in general, see Gagnon, Quand le Québec manquait de prêtres, 64; for an example of a conflictual episcopal-seigneurial relationship, see Bishop Plessis’s sharp statement that the right of pew and other church honours were not applicable to non-Catholic seigneurs. Rapport de l’Archiviste, 1928–1929, “Inventaire de la correspondance de Mgr Joseph-Octave Plessis, evêque de Québec, 1816 à 1825,” 140, Plessis to Jean Raimbault, curé at Nicolet, 1 December 1821. 103 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 32; lac, mg 30 d 38, vol. 1, file 1, Marius Barbeau, “Arts and Trades under the French regime,” Évêché de Québec (Cartable de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce). 104 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 47; Provost, “Fragments d’histoire paroissiale,” 276. 105 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 36. 106 Livre de comptes et de délibérations de la Fabrique de Sainte-Marie de la NouvelleBeauce, 1766–1832, 31 May 1772 (“pluralité des voix”; “voix et consentement du Monsieur Taschereau Ecuyer, Seigneur”). 107 ba nq-q , notary Louis Miray (no number), “Acte d’assemblée générale de la paroisse Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce pour la bâtisse de l’église de la dite paroisse,”

349

Notes to Pages 104–7

350

108 109

110

111 112 113

114 115

116

117 118 119

15 October 1780; Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce. Histoire religieuse, 45 (“le pouvoir de passer tous marchés, régler les corvées et enfin déterminer et ordonner tout ce qui sera nécessaire pour parvenir à la bâtisse entière et parfaite de la dite église, que tous et chacun habitant ou possesseur de terre dans les susdites seigneuries, donneront pour contribution pendant trois années consécutives un sol par arpent en superficie”). Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 44–50. ba nq-q, notary Louis Miray (no. number), “Marché de la bâtisse de l’église Sainte-Marie,” 12 October 1780. The church was built by François Bergevin, an entrepreneur and master stonemason from Beauport. In neighbouring Lotbinière, for example, the seigneurial pew of Protestant seigneur Joly was, with the connivance of the parish priest, removed from the church and broken up on the beach. The pew’s blue lining was dyed and converted into trousers for the thief ’s son. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 16 Vic, 1852–53, app. pp , “Inquiry at Lotbinière relating to the loss of furniture belonging to the parish church …” (cihm 00955). ba nq-q , notary Louis Miray, no number, “Acte d’assemblée générale de la paroisse SainteMarie de la Nouvelle-Beauce pour la bâtisse de l’église de la dite paroisse,” 15 October 1780. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 59. Ibid., 64. It is not clear whether there was a family connection between militia captain Verreau and curé Jean-Marie Verreau (“toute la paroisse assemblée”; “sur nous depuis trop longtemps”). Ibid., 65. lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 1, file 4, “Pièces généalogiques (Famille Taschereau).” Thérèse-Julie survived fourteen months, dying 26 July 1784. She was buried in the vault of the parish church. For the first twenty years of her marriage to Joachim, Sainte Anne had been sterile. Unlike Mary’s immaculate conception of Jesus, her pregnancy, while the result of a miracle granted by Providence, did not deny the reality of sexual conception. The protector of women in childbirth, Sainte Anne had a character of “admirable strength,” “constant patience,” “softness,” and “charity.” Her sterility, her challenge by the dragon Lucifer, and her husband Joachim’s desperate flight into the forest were captured in images that can be traced to the seventh century: flowering trees, the sparrow’s nest, and loving parenthood reinforce her place in the popular imagination. The celebration of Sainte Anne’s feast day on 26 July in England was pronounced by Pope Urbain VI in 1378 and made universal in a papal bull of 1622. Pilgrimages, Masses, indulgences, and the cult of Sainte Anne were encouraged by relics, including her head in Cologne and her right hand in Vienna. At Sainte-Anne d’Auray in Brittany, her cult can be traced to the fifth century. Ghyelde, La bonne Sainte Anne, 66 (“force admirable”; “patience constante”; “douceur”; “charité”); Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 31. Charland, Le culte de Sainte Anne en Occident, 403. Lamontagne, Le culte à Sainte Anne en Acadie, 143. “Requête en forme d’acte présentée par les seigneurs de cette paroisse à Monseigneur l’Évêque,” 4 July 1778, cited in Provost, La Bonne Sainte Anne de Beauce, 9–11.

Notes to Pages 107–16

351

120 “Mandement concernant la chapelle de Ste Anne,” cited in Provost, La Bonne Sainte Anne de Beauce, 14–15 (“on ne laissera point aux fermiers”). 121 Provost, La Bonne Sainte Anne de Beauce, 17–18. 122 lac, mg 30 d 38, vol. 1, file 1, Marius Barbeau, “Arts and Trades under the French régime,” Évêché de Québec (Cartable de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce). Many of the chapel ornaments, including its chalice and communion accessories, were produced in Paris. 123 Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, 70. 124 Provost, “Fragments d’histoire paroissiale,” 285; see also Bouchard, Le Québec et ses cloches; Corbin, Village Bells. Sound and Meaning, 4. 125 lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 1, file 4, “Pièces Généalogiques (Famille Taschereau),” 514; Bouchard, Le Québec et ses cloches, 115. 126 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 95. 127 See, for example, the role of Marie-Rosalie Papineau and the Dessaulles manor house in Saint-Hyacinthe. Béique, Quatre-vingts ans de souvenirs, 103. 128 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 43, notary John Walsh, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 15 September 1809; ba nq-q, cn 301, s 16, notary Jean Bélanger, no. 9895, “Testament de Dame Marie Louise Taschereau,” 16 March 1827; notary Errol Boyd Lindsay, cn 301, s 188, no. 3337, “Testament,” Louise Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay, 4 October 1840 (“au choix et option”). 129 For the relationship of these “inhérentes” qualities, see Sohn, Sois un homme, 137, which describes masculine domination as “naturalisée et considérée comme inhérent”; Vovelle, “Une histoire sociale ‘totale,’” 26. Alfred Weber and Thomas Mann saw important differences between culture and civilization and would have objected to Vovelle’s analysis. Elias, Norbert Elias par lui-même, 129. 130 ba nq-q, ct 301, s 2, Greffe de la Cour Supérieure du District de Québec, Registre des testaments olographes, 1855–65, “Testament olographe de Dame Louise-Adèle Dionne, épouse de Jean-Thomas Taschereau, jr, déposé le 1er juin 1861 et écrit le 23 novembre 1845.” 131 Grenier, Seigneurs campagnards de la Nouvelle France, 87–8. 132 Réal Brisson, “Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay,” in dcb. 133 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 56 (“Mon cher Curé, Bélanger m’a dit que [Thomas-Pierre-Joseph] voulait faire distribuer des gros morceaux de pain bénit dans l’église. Vous savez comme moi que les gros morceaux sont les droits d’honneur que tout le monde n’a pas le droit d’avoir ni de faire distribuer et que nous avons déjà arrêté, il y a quelques années. Je vous prie de défendre au bedeau de le faire. Votre serviteur. G. Taschereau”). 134 ba nq-q, p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, p. 238, notary John Walsh, cn 306, s 43, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, codicil 9 September 1809 (“établir”; “agent de toutes les affaires des biens de la famille”; “clair et net”). 135 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 43, notary John Walsh, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 15 September 1809. 136 “[P]artagent également dans tous ce que j’ai droit de prétendre comme bien noble dans les sus-dites seigneuries sans préjudice aux droits que doit prétendre en ma succession Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay ma chère et tendre épouse par son contrat de mariage.”

352

Notes to Pages 116–20

137 “[U]ne belle mère qui a agi avec tant de bonté, d’amitié et de désintéressement envers eux.” 138 ba nq-q, cn 301,s 83, Pierre-Louis Deschenaux, no. 2169, “Contrat de mariage entre Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau et Demoiselle Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay,” 3 November 1789. For an explanation in English of marrriage contracts and community of property, see Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Class, Culture, Family, 8–13. For a larger discussion of willing and the Custom of Paris, see Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics, 151–63. 139 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 230, Joseph-B. Plante, no. 5527, “Procès-verbal de la vente du mobilier de la communauté de feu Taschereau et Dame Louise-Françoise Juchereau Duchesnay son épouse,” 29 November 1810; see also the inventory, Plante, no. 5526, 24 November 1810. 140 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 230, Joseph-B. Plante, no. 5606, “Renonciation par Madame Veuve Taschereau à la communauté,” 1 March 1811. In the later “partage,” her children and stepchildren ceded her a large property adjoining the domain. Part of the explanation for her renunciation may be found in her own family experience. Her stepmother, Catherine Dupré, had left the Juchereau-Duchesnay family home accused of adultery and party to a sensational separation trial. In any case, Louise-Françoise was wealthy in her own right. On his death, Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay arranged to leave his five seigneuries to his sons, but Louise-Françoise Taschereau received her share of his movables, which included 42,000 French livres in cash and 165,000 French livres in chattels. Réal Brisson, “Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay,” in dcb. For a discussion of willing options around freedom of willing and the Custom of Paris, see Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics, 151–63. 141 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 230, Joseph-B. Plante, no. 5800, “Partage des biens de la succession de feu l’honorable Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau,” 4 October 1811. 142 ba nq-q, p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, p. 238, notary John Walsh, cn 306, s 43, “Testament,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau, 2 June 1809; Provost, “Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau,” in dcb . For the share of Marie-Louise Taschereau, see ba nq-q , notary Errol Boyd Lindsay, on 301, s 188, no. 773, “Inventaire des biens et effets dépendant de la succession et communauté de feu l’hon. J. Olivier Perrault et de feue Dame Marie-Louise Taschereau son épouse,” 18 August 1827. Draws were an accepted seigneurial practice for the division of property. In the oral tradition of the Beauce, the original disposition of the three seigneuries among Fleury de la Gorgendière and his sons-in-law Taschereau and Vaudreuil in 1736 may have been done by a roll of the dice in the Chien d’Or Tavern where the three new seigneurs were celebrating. Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 58. On the death of Olivier Perrault and Marie-Louise Taschereau, both in 1827, their immovable property was also divided by a draw. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 90. 143 Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité, 214.

cha p ter fo ur 1 ba nq-m, notary J.G. Delisle, no. 938, “Inventaire des mobiliers du feu M. John McCord,” 5 January 1795. 2 Lauzon, L’édifice Masonic Memorial Temple, 18 3 Senior, “Thomas McCord,” in dcb ; lac, mg 19 a 2, series III (Ermatinger Estate), vol. 54, “Receipt from Thomas McCord to Edward William Gray,” 15 January 1781.

Notes to Pages 121–4

4 lac, mg 23 b 3, Papers of the Continental Congress, 1776–1785, p. 25, Isaac Melcher to Thomas Mifflin, 20 June 1784. 5 Provost, Les premiers anglo-canadiens à Québec. 6 lac, rg 4 b 28, vol.120, “Shop Licenses 1765–1769; 1771–1772,” 21 May 1771; ba nq-m , notary P. Parret, no. 4843, “Vente” Jean Stenhouse to George King and Thomas McCord, 7 April 1778. 7 nac, rg 4 b 28, vol. 115, h 1098, p. 2321, “Trade License no. 30,” Robert Macaulay, 5 May 1783. 8 ba nq-m , notary Papineau, no. 1345, “Bail,” Pierre Fortier and Ignace Bourassa to Thomas McCord, 29 August 1789; Quebec Herald, 12 March 1790. 9 lac, mg 23, GIII 8, Samuel Birnie et al., 1785–1794, Thomas McCord to Samuel Birnie, 29 June 1785. 10 ba nq-m , Not. P. Mezière, no. 2934, “Vente,” Ignace Bourassa and Pierre Fortier to the Compagnie de la Distillerie, 16 April 1785; Not. J.G. Beek, no. 302, 31 July 1787, “Sale of part of Distillery Ground”; other partners included George McGeath, Norman MacLeod, George Winter, Mathew Lessey, John MacNamara, and Alexander Hay. The Birnies reappear in McCord history. Eleanor Birnie, perhaps Samuel Birnie’s daughter, was the grandmother of John Samuel McCord’s wife, Anne Ross. For the precarity of distilling in Quebec City, see Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 148. 11 Quebec Gazette, 17 January 1791. By the barrel their rum sold for four French livres a gallon. 12 Ibid., 26 June 1794, “À vendre par encan”; ba nq-m , not. J.G. Beek, 7 November 1787, “Deed of Mortgage,” Patrick Langan to George King and Thomas McCord; not. J.G. Beek, no. 265, 27 April 1787, “Deed of Mortgage,” Jacob Jordan to Thomas McCord. 13 Quebec Gazette, 4 September 1788; ba nq-m , not. J.G. Beek, no. 65, “Agreement,” Todd and McGill, Forsyth and Richardson, King and McCord, Robert Lester and Jean-Baptiste Durocher, 26 February 1789. 14 Mackey, Done with Slavery, 145; ba nq-m , not. P. Lukin, “Agreement,” no number, wheelwright W.A. Gibbard and Thomas McCord, 15 August 1792. 15 Quebec Gazette, 18 December 1794; ba nq-m, notary E.W. Grey, “Sale,” James McGill et al. to Nicholas Montour, 16 October 1794; for examples of McCord’s debts, see ba nq-m , notary J.-G. Delisle, no. 966, “Obligation,” Thomas McCord to Executors of John Kay, 11 February 1795 (£100 3s.), and J.-G. Delisle, no. 911, “Obligation,” Thomas McCord to Jean-Baptiste Durocher, 7 October 1794 (£323). 16 Quebec Gazette, 4 May 1801, 10 November 1796. Both Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau and John McCord Jr were members of the Quebec Fire Society. In 1796, Quebec City was struck by a major fire, and both men joined the Catholic and Anglican bishops in subscribing to a relief fund. McCord’s contribution of 10s paled in comparison with Taschereau’s £1 subscription. 17 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 87, 390, 393, 418. 18 Hay, “The Meaning of the Criminal Law,” n44. 19 Dechêne, “The Growth of Montreal in the 18th Century,” 160. 20 Rare Books Collection, McGill University, ms 435, Minute Book, Montreal Fire Club, 1786–1814; see also Sweeny, “Risky Spaces,” 9–23. Other examples of this associational life included the Select Society, established in Montreal in 1774, “for the purpose of debating

353

Notes to Pages 124–7

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21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

freely on chosen subjects,” and the Amicable Society in Quebec, as well as the “Club of those who defended the Garrison in 1775–6.” Quebec Gazette, 20 April 1775, 13 February 1777, 17 December 1795. Arthur, “Henry Hamilton.” Kolish and Lambert, “Attempted Impeachment, ” 458. asq , p 29/283, Document Faribault 283, “Report of the Merchants of Montreal to a Committee of the Council on Trade and Police,” 23 January 1787. Besides McCord, the signators were Richald Dolici, J. Derinault, John McFindlay, James Walker, Jacob Jordan, James McGill, Louis Guy, Benjamin Frobisher, M. Blondeau, A. Auldjo, and (_) Bouthillier. This would become a major point of contestation after the Rebellions of 1837. See Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits. For these attitudes, see Greenwood, Legacies of Fear. Cited in Marshall, “The Political Persistence of British North America, 1763–1815,” 6; for debates over bilingualism, see Journals of the House of Assembly, 22 January 1793. Quebec Gazette, 3, 17 July 1794. Ouellet, Éléments d’histoire sociale du Bas-Canada, 100; for a strong argument on the attractiveness of seigneuries as capitalist enterprises, see Bernier and Salée, The Shaping of Québec Politics and Society (“une classe de seigneurs anglo-saxons, commerçants pour la plupart”). For Irish land as a commodity, see Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 402. ba nq-m, notary J.G. Delisle, no. 657, “Vente,” Dlle Lisette Desmuseaux to Thomas McCord, 7 April 1793; notary L. Chaboillez, “Vente de bois,” Thomas McCord and John Kay and Devoreux to A. and R. Pattinson, 2 July 1794 ; ba nq-m , Beek, 4 March 1791, 1 February 1792; Delisle, 9 April 1793. Cited in Miller et al., The McCord Family, 51. For merchant activities and the role of firewood, see Sweeny, Hogg, and Rice, Les relations ville/campagne. mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 0229, Gauthier, 3 May 1793, “Bail à rente foncière par les Dames de la Congrégation à Thomas McCord”; mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 1964, notary Chaboillez, 10 April 1804, “Agreement,” l’Hôtel-Dieu and Mary Griffin. mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 1964, notary Chaboillez, “Agreement,” l’Hôtel-Dieu and Mary Griffin, 10 April 1804. Fyson and Young, “Origins, Wealth, and Work,” 35; for early maps, see Jean-Claude Robert, Atlas historique de Montréal, 60, 69, 76, 86, 89. Masciotra, “An Analysis of the 1825 and 1842 Census Data,” 450, 454. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 273, “Bills and receipts,” Mark Elvidge’s Account settled 11 May 1821. See, for example, Ouellet, Éléments d’histoire sociale du Bas-Canada, 100. “The Grange” was the name of a neoclassical estate built in 1804 in Northington, Hampshire, England, as well as of Alexander Hamilton’s mansion in New York City. For his debts, see ba nq -m , notary Deslisle, 7 October 1794, and notary Beek, 24 December 1794; for family connections with the Hannas and his trading, see mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 208.1, “Patrick Langan to T. McCord, 15 October 1799”; and Senior, “Thomas McCord,” in dcb. Driedger, An Irish Heart, 67.

Notes to Pages 128–34

40 Dunn, “Lucius Levy Solomons.” 41 For Ellice, see Colthart, “Edward Ellice.” 42 mm , no. 1964, notary Chaboillez, “Agreement,” l’Hôtel-Dieu and Mary Griffin, 10 April 1804. 43 Driedger, An Irish Heart, 73. 44 Fyson and Young, “Origins, Wealth, and Work,” 39–41;Bernard, Linteau, and Robert, “Les tablettes statistiques de Jacques Viger (1825).” 45 asq , Fonds Viger-Verreau, p 320 087, no. 50, Court of Special Sessions, 20 September 1817. 46 Olson and Hanna, “Social Change in Montréal, 1842–1901,” plate 49. 47 Fyson and Young, “Origins, Wealth, and Work,” 41. 48 Leacock, Montreal: Seaport and City, 172. 49 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 297, “Rent and Board,” William Gray for advertising, 1816–1818. 50 See mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 0495, “Statement of account current …”; and Miller et al., The McCord Family, 39; for farm leases, see Fyson, “Eating in the City,” 109; mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 273, “Joachim Deon’s mill account,” January–May 1815. 51 Senior, “Thomas McCord,” in dcb ; Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, especially chap. 6, which shows the implications of this use of contract law in the United States. 52 Mackey, Done with Slavery, 150, 343. 53 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 273, “Joachim Deon’s mill account,” January–May 1815. 54 Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal (hereafter assm) , tiroirs 63–4, cited in Young, In Its Corporate Capacity, 41–3. 55 Great Britain, Report of the Committee on Grievances in Lower Canada, 1838. Cited in Young, In Its Corporate Capacity, 43. 56 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 208.1, “Patrick Langan to T. McCord,” 15 October 1799. 57 assm , tiroir 63, no. 214, “Jugement du Conseil Législatif ne reconnaissant pas au Séminaire de Montréal ses droits à une existence légale,” 16 April 1819; mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0232, Supérieur to Thomas McCord, 16 August 1816; for the seminary’s road rights, see assm , Terrier du faubourg St Joseph, no. 46, “Ce terrain et cului des nos. suivants 46 A.B.C. …”; the Fleming case is described in Young, In Its Corporate Capacity, 41–3. 58 asq , Fonds Viger-Verreau, p 320 087, nos 67, 69, Court of Special Sessions, 25 April 1818. 59 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 208.1, “Patrick Langan to T. McCord,” 15 October 1799. 60 asq , Fonds Viger-Verreau, p 320 088, no. 96, Court of Special Sessions, 8 August 1818; no. 80, Court of Special Sessions, 13 October 1821. 61 Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 11; Christopher Tomlins and Bruce Mann describe this as “attempts to colonize the landscape – to give it system, regularity, purpose, familiarity. Claiming, using, granting, and owning the land all invoked a legal culture that gave land distinct transactional identities for specific mundane outcomes.” Tomlins and Mann, The Many Legalities of Early America, 14–15. 62 Rare Books Collection, McGill University, ms 435, Minute Book, Montreal Fire Club, 1786–1814; see also Fougères, L’approvisionnement en eau à Montréal, 127, 305. 63 Poutanen, “The Geography of Prostitution,” 118. 64 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 41–4, 356; see also Senior, “Thomas McCord,” in dcb.

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65 Senior, “Thomas McCord,” in dcb. 66 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 110; for the jurisdiction of courts, see Fyson, The Court Structure of Quebec and Lower Canada, 12, 41–51. 67 Pilarczyk, “The law of servants and the servants of law,” 789; Mary Anne 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; Mackey, Done with Slavery. 68 Cited in Mackey, Done with Slavery, 259; Joseph Pierson, a black restaurant owner, was murdered with a bayonet in 1815. 69 Ibid., 243. 70 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 39–45; Senior, “Thomas McCord,” in dcb. 71 Mackey, Done with Slavery, 242; for riots fomented by the elite, see Romney, “From the Types Riot to the Rebellion,” 113–43. 72 lac, mg 24 l 3, vol. 43, Baby Collection Legal Documents Court Cases 1788–1841, 10 August 1812, “Émeute pour empêcher l’enrôlement des miliciens à Lachine,” 27810 testimony of McCord; Mills, “French Canadians and the Beginnings of the War of 1812,” 37–58. 73 Kolish and Lambert, “Attempted Impeachment,” 456. 74 cihm 54822, George Pyke and Thomas McCord, A Complete index to the ordinances and statutes of Lower Canada to the 57th year of George the Third inclusive (Quebec, 1817). While Judge George Pyke, author of Lower Canada’s first collection of judicial decisions (1811), is listed as co-author, the work was apparently entirely that of McCord. For the context of McCord’s index, see Garneau, “Civil Law, Legal Practitioners, and Everyday Justice,” 139. For manuals used by American magistrates, see Appendix, “Legal Treatises used by Americans before the Nineteenth Century,” in Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent. 75 Thomas McCord, The Civil Code of Lower Canada. 76 In another long entry of almost two pages, McCord employed the term “police,” not in the sense of street security, but in the broader rights of magistrates to make rules for towns, for the publication of laws, and for fines. For this concept of “police,” see chapter 2 of Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology. 77 Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses, 27–38. 78 Quebec Gazette, 25 June 1789. 79 Senior, “Thomas McCord.” 80 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Industry_(Dublin); http://eppi.dippam.ac.uk/documents/10159/eppi_pages/224685. 81 Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses, 189–94. 82 Mackey, Done with Slavery, 202, 431. 83 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0254. 84 Miller et al., The McCord Family, 41; Fyson, “Eating in the City.” 85 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 257, “Clarke and Appleton carpenters,” bill to the estate of Thomas McCord, December 1824. 86 Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, 2, 340. 87 Ibid. 88 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 202.3, “Act of Deposit of the last Will and Testament of the late Thomas McCord,” 7 December 1844. 89 Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, 2, 260–1.

Notes to Pages 141–50

pa rt ii: in t ro duc t ion 1 An example of this conjuncture can be neatly seen in Robert Sweeny et al.’s study of the provision of firewood for the Montreal market. Sweeny, Hogg, and Rice, Les relations ville/campagne. 2 Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 215. 3 Lépine, Les officiers de milice du Bas-Canada 1812–1815, 5. 4 For “Englishness” and the role of Scott, see Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 38. 5 The music teacher was Adam Schott. Provost, Le Séminaire de Québec, 315 (directeur de fanfare). 6 Cited in Bailyn, “How England Became Modern,” 44. 7 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 825, “Scientific Subjects,” Notations, November 1836, at end of volume. 8 In 1837, for example, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s Grand Tour to the continent began with lengthy academic visits to schools, museums, galleries, and historic sites in New York and Boston. In 1848, the seminary sent a promising young priest, Edward John Horan, later bishop of Kingston, to study natural history at Harvard and Yale. With a passion for scientific agriculture, Horan toured agricultural schools in New England and, on returning to the seminary, used his American experience to transform their Côteaux estate into a model farm. From Saint-Hyacinthe, seigneurial heir Louis-Antoine Dessaulles visited the United States and Europe three times in the period 1838–45. On his first trip and travelling with his mother, he attended graduation exercises at the University of Pennsylvania and also visited Philadelphia’s Fine Arts Museum and the city’s botanical garden. In 1842, he travelled from Montreal to Kingston with ornithologist James Audubon. Paul-Louis Martin, Les fruits du Québec, 66. Lamonde, Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, 33, 43. 9 lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 4, file 4, “Papiers Taschereau,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to Charles-Antoine Taschereau, 5 October 1797 (“promet beaucoup”). 10 Zoltvany, “Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris,” 382.

cha p ter five 1 The family library, at least in 1750, had a lower percentage of theological works (13 per cent) than the libraries of Taschereau’s aristocratic peers. It contained 184 titles: literature and history composing 58 per cent of the library; law 12 per cent; and arts and science 16 per cent, including two volumes on physics. Mario Robert, “Le livre et la lecture,” 18, 20, 27. 2 Cited in Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain, 214. 3 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 544. 4 For the history of the Seminary of Quebec, see Noël Baillargeon’s three-volume Le Séminaire de Québec de 1685 à 1760; 1760–1800; 1800–1850. Among Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s classmates was Joseph-Charles Taché, later deputy minister of agriculture and statistics and a major force in the Canadian census of 1871. See Curtis, The Politics of Population. 5 Martin and Morisset, Promenades dans les jardins anciens, 88, 93, 106; Lebel, Savard, and Vézina, Aspects de l’enseignement au Petit Séminaire, 55–8; asq , “Notes sur Brasseur de Bourbourg” (c. 1847), polygraphie 36, no. 3a, 13, 14. 6 Lebel et al., Aspects de l’enseignement au Petit Séminaire, 31–60; see also Galarneau, “Jérôme Demers,” in dcb . 7 Lebel et al., Aspects de l’enseignement au Petit Séminaire, 54–8.

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8 asq , “Précis d’architecture pour servir de suite au Traité élémentaire de physique à l’usage du Séminaire de Québec,” n.d. 9 Provost, La Bonne Sainte Anne de Beauce, 23; for examples of church architecture in rural France, see Rey-Bogey, L’architecture et l’élan religieux, 112. 10 Galarneau, “John Holmes,” in dcb . 11 Jean-Philippe Garneau, “Une culture de l’amalgame au prétoire,”147, shows how the law office acted as an intercultural setting. 12 Greenwood and Lambert, “Jonathan Sewell,” in dcb ; for boarding, Lower Canadian rules concerning legal training, and French-Canadian attempts to establish schools of civil law, see Baker, “The Juvenile Advocate Society,” 88, and his “Legal Education in Upper Canada 1785–1889,” 60. 13 Fernand Ouellet, “Pierre-Stanislas Bédard,” in dcb . 14 Jean-Paul Baillargeon, “Les bibliothèques publiques,” 6; Gallichan, Livre et politique au Bas-Canada, 248–9; for Taschereau’s influence on the Legislative Library and its purchases, see Le Canadien, 10 January, 28 March 1807. 15 For Bouchette, see Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 11 April 1807; Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 19 February 1814; Regulations and Catalogue of the Quebec Garrison Library (Quebec: T. Cary 1824), 30. The Garrison Library welcomed “Ladies in the families of Subscribers.” 16 “Catalogue of the Mineralogical Collections belonging to the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec,” in Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, vol. 1 (Quebec, 1829); Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 6 William IV, 1835, app. OO, Robert Gardiner testimony, 20 November 1835. The Literary and Historical Society was open to women. 17 His older sister Marie-Louise Taschereau (1777–1827) inherited a full seigneurial share and married Jean-Baptiste-Olivier Perrault. 18 ba nq-q, p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 1 January 1809 (“Mais chère petite soeur entre nous sache qu’il n’est point de jeune fille chez lui car si cela venait aux oreilles de l’Évêque cela lui coûterait toute la bonne disposition qu’il a pour lui et comme je ne veux plus lui parler de cela fait le toi-même”). 19 ba nq-q, p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, Soeur Saint-François-Xavier [Marie-Anne-Louise Taschereau] to her sister Charlotte-Claire Taschereau, 7 October 1809 (“mauvaise conduite”; “chagrin mortel”). 20 Tanguay, Répertoire général du clergé canadien, 163. 21 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 34, notary Jean Joseph Reny, no. 216, 2 August 1822, “Inventaire des biens … de la succession de feu messire Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau”; no. 234, 26 August 1822, ‘Procès verbal de vente des biens … de Gabriel-Elzéar Tascherau”; Provost, SainteMarie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 117. 22 lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 4, “Papiers Taschereau,” Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau to CharlesAntoine Taschereau, 5 October 1797 (“ne me donne pas autant de satisfaction que les autres”). 23 See the droit d’aînesse in Zoltvany, “Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris,” 378. 24 The main manor house burned in 1827. 25 Provost, “Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau,” in dcb .

Notes to Pages 154–7

26 ba nq-q, notary Jean-Baptiste Bonneville, cn 306.89, no. 2358, “Inventaire: Biens de la succession de Feue Dame Françoise Boucer Labruyère de Montarville, veuve de T-P-J Taschereau,” 17 January 1835. This can be compared to the inventory of another notable, Saint-Joseph lawyer Jean Vézina, published in Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 143. 27 Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 130 (“faire le coq”). 28 Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay was the bride’s step-grandfather. For another example of the problems of illegitimacy and succession among the wealthy, see Derome, “Dominique Rousseau,” in dcb . The statistics for illegitimacy in Sainte-Marie are given in Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis, 140–1. “Claire” was a common Taschereau name given to daughters in both the first and second generation. 29 ba nq-q, notary Edward Glackmeyer, cn 301, s 116, no. 92, 18 August 1817, “Contrat de mariage de Joseph-Antoine Philippon et Claire Taschereau.” 30 T.-P.-J. Taschereau apparently insisted on the term “fille légitime,” since an illegitimate child could not inherit under the Custom. Zoltvany, “Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris,” 381; ba nq-q, notary Louis Panet, cn 301, s 208, no. 2022, “Testament de Thomas-PierreJoseph Taschereau,” 16 September 1826. 31 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Panet. 32 Wallot and Tousignant, “Jean-Antoine Panet,” in dcb. There is another Taschereau-Panet marriage, that in 1897 of Supreme Court Judge Henri-Elzéar Taschereau and Marie-Louise Panet. 33 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Panet. 34 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 34, notary Jean-Joseph Reny, no. 396, “Inventaire des biens meubles et immeubles qui ont formé la communauté entre feu l’honorable Jean-Thomas Taschereau et Dame Marie Panet,” 2 August 1832; Société du patrimoine des Beaucerons, Collection des cartes, J.P. Proulx, “Plan topographique du domaine, manoir et autres dépendances de Jean-Thomas Taschereau, Ecuier, Seigneur de Linière …,” 3 May 1826. 35 This point is strongly made in Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Life, Laws, and Politics, 320. 36 ba nq-q, cn 306, s 34, notary Jean-Joseph Reny, no. 396, “Inventaire des biens meubles et immeubles qui ont formé la communauté entre feu l’honorable Jean-Thomas Taschereau et Dame Marie Panet,” 2 August 1832. A comparison of the furnishings held by JeanThomas’s sister and her husband in their Sainte-Marie home with those in their Quebec house suggests that the most luxurious family furnishings were kept in town. MarieLouise Taschereau and Olivier Perrault had a piano evaluated at £10 in Sainte-Marie and a second pianoforte evaluated at £55 in their second-floor music room in Quebec. Their Quebec home included walnut and mahogany card tables, ten chandeliers, two featherbeds, four bear rugs, a silver horse harness, two globes, a silver plate, porcelain tea and dessert sets, five engravings (including one of Bishop Plessis), and twenty-two family portraits. The town house included a “guest room” furnished entirely in mahogany, with two mirrors, three pairs of Indian cotton curtains, a fireplace, a Brussels rug, and a card table. Their wine cellar included fourteen dozen bottles of Madeira as well as sherry, champagne, Bordeaux, Portuguese, Spanish wine, and fourteen gallons of table wine. ba nq-q, cn 301,s 188, notary Errol Boyd Lindsay, no. 773, n.d., “Inventaire des Biens et effets dépendant de la succession et communauté de feu l’hon. J. Olivier Perrault et de feu Dame Marie-Louise Taschereau son épouse.” 37 Courville et al., Histoire de Beauce-Etchemin-Amiante, 112, 132.

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38 Perrault, Traité d’Agriculture adapté au climat du Bas-Canada, 3, 57; for Taschereau interest, see their presence at Sir James McPherson Le Moine’s “Spencer Grange” in Le Moine, Un Québécois bien tranquille, 123–4. 39 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Panet, 124. 40 Le Moine, Picturesque Quebec, 427. 41 Gagnon-Pratte, L’architecture et la nature à Québec, 76–7, 82, 93–6. 42 Montreal Gazette, 1 September 1846. 43 Vezina, Théophile Hamel, 99. 44 Four branches resulted from Gabriel-Elzéar’s division: Thomas-Pierre-Joseph (first branch), Jean-Thomas (second), Antoine-Charles (third), and George-Louis (fourth). 45 The Dionnes were already linked to the Taschereaus. In 1834, Jean-Thomas Jr’s cousin Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau, head of the first branch of the Taschereau family, had married Catherine-Hénédine Dionne, sister of Louise-Adèle. 46 Marie-Louise Perrault died in 1838, and like her sister Julie Perrault, who died in 1837, she was buried in the Ursuline chapel. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 35, 39. 47 In Ottawa, later in the century, the Taschereaus made headlines with the elopement of a Protestant and Amélie Taschereau, daughter of Supreme Court judge and seigneur HenriElzéar Taschereau and niece of the cardinal: “Miss Taschereau Makes a Runaway Match with One Alien in Race and Faith.” lac, mg 30 e 405 (Frank Beard), clipping from the World, 22 June 1889. 48 Not all Lindsays converted to Catholicism. Writing to authorities at the Seminary of Montreal in 1811, William Lindsay gave permission for his children to be raised as Catholics “when at home [my son] professes that of the Church of England. It is mine, but dare I say our clergy are so few in number, that they have little or no time to attend to the instruction of children in their faith. From which you will find my boy deficient in a matter that much concerns his present and future happiness: pains have been taken notwithstanding, as far as circumstances would admit of, to impress him with a proper idea of what he owes to God and Man. Mrs Lindsay appertains to your Church, and is a zealous observer of its precepts, and as she will experience the greatest satisfaction at having one of her sons of the same communion, I have no objection to indulge her wishes.” asq, p 18/z /no. 20, William Lindsay to Rev. Roque, 6 October 1811. 49 Senior, “Randolph Isham Routh,” in dcb ; “Lettres de L-J Papineau à sa femme,” 7 February 1829, 266. 50 lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 2, “Papiers Taschereau,” Jean-Thomas Taschereau to Curé JosephPhilippe Lefrançois, 21 January 1830 (“C’est un parti bien avantageux pour elle du côté de la fortune, mais j’y ai à regretter une chose qui me peine bien, c’est la différence de religion, quoiqu’elle ne sera aucunement gênée de ce côté là cependant, pour nous catholiques, c’est un grand sujet de ___. Vous voudrez bien vous joindre à nos prières de la famille pour que le Seigneur veuille bien jeter un regard de miséricordieux sur ceux qui sont dans l’erreur et les ___ [ceci est entre nous]. Ce Monsieur a toutes les qualités possibles, doux, aimable, bien instruit, a beaucoup voyagé, jouit d’une haute réputation et a une excellente conduite et donne toutes les marques possibles d’un bon ménage, c’est ce qui fait d’autant plus regretté qu’il ne soit pas de la même religion que son épouse – mais je mets toute ma confiance que Dieu exaucera les prières de quelques ___ Depuis une année que ce mariage est en contemplation, j’ai passé bien des nuits sans dormir – il est

Notes to Pages 164–5

51 52

53 54

55

56 57

58

maintenant fait, il faut travailler à le rendre heureux dans ses suites. Je vous prie de ne pas communiquer ceci à personne”). Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 113 (“une bonne et sainte femme”). Rose Panet has presented difficulties for chroniclers of the Taschereaus-Panets. Although depicted in official accounts of the Ursulines as having had a “pious and beautiful old age,” family historians were less gracious, categorizing her as a “single woman” known for her “freedom of behaviour” and “serious distractions when not saying her rosary.” Burke, Les Ursulines depuis leur établissement jusqu’à nos jours, 3:196; Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 123 (“pieuse et belle vieillesse”; “célibataire”; “liberté de conduite”; “sérieuses distractions entre ses chapelets”). For the treatment of illegitimacy in patrician families, see Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain, 143–4. Têtu, Notice biographique S.E. le Cardinal Taschereau, 115 (Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau to Marie Panet, 8 May 1837); Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Panet, 42 (“ma tante Rose”). ba nq-q, ct 301, s 2, Registre des testaments olographes – 1824–1844, “Testament olographe de Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” déposé le 20 septembre 1832 et fait le 11 juin 1819 (“Je prie mon épouse de penser au jeune Louis-Épictière; Je m’en rapporte entièrement à elle à ce sujet sans que personne puisse opposer en aucune manière ce qu’elle aura décidé à son égard. Elle prendra des conseils d’amis à cette fin. Je la prie aussi de veiller à ce qu’il soit élevé comme un honnête homme”; “bénir ma chère petite famille”; “Je prie Dieu de jeter un œil de compassion sur moi, pour les fautes que j’ai pu commettre contre sa sainte volonté”). ba nq-q, ct 301, s 2, Registre des testaments olographes – 1824–1844, “Testament olographe de Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” déposé le 20 septembre 1832 et fait le 11 juin 1819; Jean Dessaulles of Saint-Hyacinthe provides a similiar example of primogeniture and of grouping seigneurial property in this generation. On his death in 1835, he left all rights and honorifics of his seigneury to his eldest son, Louis-Antoine. He, however, was obliged to have the seigneury evaluated, giving one-third of its value to his brother and one-third to his sister. Lamonde, Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, 27–8. ba nq-q, notary Louis Panet, cn 301, s 208, no. 2022, “Testament de Thomas-PierreJoseph Taschereau,” 16 September 1826. For the division of seigneuries, see Zoltvany, “Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris,” 379; ba nq-q notary Errol Boyd Lindsay, on 301.s 188, no. 773, “Inventaire des biens et effets dépendant de la succession et communauté de feu l’hon. J. Olivier Perrault et de feue Dame Marie-Louise Taschereau son épouse,” 18 August 1827, “Codicile, 30 juin 1827, au Testament de Marie-Louise Taschereau,” 16 March 1827. See the several works of Maurice Séguin and his popularization in the works of Denis Vaugeois, particularly Vaugeois’s Union des deux Canadas: Nouvelle conquête? The first decade of the nineteenth century is the central subject of the doctoral dissertation of Séguin’s student Jean-Pierre Wallot. Wallot’s account of Jean-Thomas’s imprisonment represents virtually the only time that Taschereaus of the first three generations enter into our historiography. In recent nationalist discourse, the Taschereaus are associated with collaborators. Presenting the Charter of the French Language in the National Assembly in July 1977, Camille Laurin, for example, referred to “notables qui ont perdu contact avec [la majorité francophone] dans leur trop longue fréquentation du pouvoir anglophone.” Cited in Picard, Camille Laurin: L’homme debout, 306. For his part, Donald Creighton

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75

76

characterized the period as a battle between “the new commercialism and the stiffened feudalism,” the latter the result of a French society filled with “an apathy which deepened into hatred” and turning “inward upon itself … sullen, suspicious, and unresponsive.” Creighton, Empire of the St. Lawrence, 160, 154. Young, White Mythologies, ix. Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 207; also useful is Manning, The Revolt of French Canada 1800–1835, especially chap. 5. Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada, 71 (“… ne remet donc en cause ni la constitution coloniale, ni la composition du pouvoir législatif, ni la prérogative royale. Il ne conteste pas non plus les principes de la liberté moderne sur lesquels l’État colonial est fondé”). Hare, “L’assemblée législative du Bas-Canada, 1792–1814,” 376. Provincial Statutes of Lower Canada, vol. 5, 1805, Geo. III, 45, cap. XVI, “An Act for erecting an Hotel, Coffee House, and Assembly Room in the City of Quebec.” Mercury, 27 October, 22 November 1806, cited in Wade, The French Canadians, 105. For civil secretary Herman Ryland’s comments on the church, see Lambert, “Herman Witsius Ryland,” in dcb. The “garrison mentality” is the central theme in Murray Greenwood’s Legacies of Fear; Colley, Britons Forging the Nation, 151. Christie, A History of the Late Province of Lower Canada, 1:261–2. Jean-Pierre Wallot et Pierre Toussignant, “Jean-Antoine Panet,” in dcb . Jean-Pierre Wallot, “Sir James Henry Craig,” in dcb . Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1 April 1806. Hare, “L’assemblée législative du Bas-Canada, 1792–1814,” 376, 380. For concern over the failure of Jews to integrate, see Le Canadien, 18 April 1807; Ezekiel Hart’s career is described by Denis Vaugeois in dcb . For discussion of the place of Jews in mid-eighteenthcentury society, see Vaugeois, Les juifs et la Nouvelle France. Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 205. Blanchet married Catherine-Henriette Juchereau Duchesnay, the sister of Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s stepmother. Castonguay et Limoges, François Blanchet, vol. 1: L’étudiant et le savant, 286. See, for example, Le Canadien, 7 March 1807; and Ajzenstat, “Canada’s First Constitution,” 40; Gilles Gallichan also points to the importance of Locke in “Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, le parlementaire et le chef de parti,” 13; see also Lawrence A.H. Smith, “Le Canadien and the British Constitution, 1806–1810,” 93–108. Le Canadien, 22 November 1806 (“Nous entendons trop souvent les expressions de parti canadien et de parti anglais. Y-a-t-il une guerre civile dans le pays? Tous les habitants de la province ne sont-ils pas sujets britanniques? Les anglais ici ne doivent pas plus avoir le titre d’Anglais que les Canadiens celui de Français: ne serons-nous jamais connus comme un peuple, comme Américains britanniques?”). James Craig to Lord Castlereagh, 5 August 1808, in ba nq-q , “Extrait du livre de P.G. Roy. Notes et documents sur la famille Taschereau, Branche de l’hon. Louis-Alexandre Taschereau” (Quebec City, 1925). Ibid. Jean-Antoine Panet, who had strongly supported Le Canadien, was also dismissed from his militia commission.

Notes to Pages 169–73

77 Kolish, “Le contexte juridique de l’emprisonnement de Pierre-Stanislas Bédard,” 34–42; Christie, A History of the Late Province of Lower Canada, 101 (James Craig to Earl of Liverpool, 24 March 1810). 78 Séminaire de Québec, Requête de Jean-Thomas Taschereau au Governeur James Craig, 26 March 1810 (“fautes”; “scandalisés de mes écrits”; “mon peu de santé”; “les larmes continuelles de mon Épouse”; “J’expose enfin à Votre Excellence mon repentir sincère, mon désir et ma ferme résolution et détermination de réparer par une vie exemplaire les torts que je puis avoir causés”). 79 lac, rg 1, Lower Canada, State Book g , reel c-92, p. 251, Report of the Committee of the Executive Council, 28 July 1810. 80 Christie, A History of the Late Province of Lower Canada, 128–9 (James Craig to H.W. Ryland, 6 August 1810). 81 Cited in Donald Fyson, “Pierre-Stanislas Bédard et le système judiciaire du Bas-Canada, 1812–1829,” in Monière “Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, la crise de 1810,” 44. 82 Bernier, “François Blanchet,” in dcb ; Lépine, Les officiers de milice du Bas-Canada 1812– 1815, 193. 83 Lépine, Les officiers de milice du Bas-Canada 1812–1815, 27. 84 lac, rg 1, Lower Canada, State Book g , reel c-92, p. 380, Executive Council, Report on Militia and Confidential Letters of Colonels, various dates July and 16 October 1807. 85 Provost, “Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” in dcb, ; Provost, “Thomas-Pierre-Joseph Taschereau,” in dcb ; Journals of House of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1823, app. f . 86 Lépine, “La participation des Canadiens-Français à la guerre de 1812,” 111, 112, 129, 136, 148; asq , a -7, “Cours d’enquête,” Chambly, 1 June 1815. 87 See chapter 2 and lac, mg 24 l 3, vol. 43, Baby Collection Legal Documents Court Cases 1788–1841, 10 August 1812, “Emeute pour empêcher l’enrôlement des miliciens à Lachine,” no. 27810 testimony of McCord; Mills, “French Canadians and the Beginnings of the War of 1812,” 37–58. 88 See Stephen Sewell, brother of the chief justice, in the Montreal Herald, in Mills, “French Canadians and the Beginnings of the War of 1812,” 37–58. 89 For the marginalization of Quebec City nationalists, see Fyson, “Pierre-Stanislas Bédard et le système judiciaire du Bas-Canada, 1812–1829,” 45. 90 Ouellet, “Pierre-Stanislas Bédard,” in dcb ; Manning, The Revolt of French Canada 1800– 1835, 71. 91 Ouellet, “L’enseignement primaire,” 182; Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 23 January 1823, 9 February 1816. Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada, 79; and Ajzenstat, “Canada’s First Constitution,” 40–1, confirm this interpretation. 92 Le Canadien, 3 February 1819 (“mensonges”; “les excès de la Révolution française”). 93 Secretary of the Duke of Richmond to Jean-Thomas Taschereau, 26 June 1819, “Extrait du livre de P.G. Roy. Notes et documents sur la famille Taschereau, Branche de l’hon. LouisAlexandre Taschereau” (Quebec City, 1925); Jean-Thomas Taschereau’s brother-in-law Olivier Perrault was a pallbearer at the duke’s funeral in Quebec, 2 September 1819. 94 Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 42–3. 95 lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 2, “Papiers Taschereau,” Jean-Thomas Taschereau to Governor

363

Notes to Pages 173–8

364

96 97 98

99 100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114

115

116 117

Dalhousie, 11 April 1826 (“la sagesse du parlement impérial”; “l’heure du danger”; “branche populaire”; “ou une branche du pouvoir ait un pouvoir négatif qui tendit à détruire si complètement son Gouvernement”). Nelles, The Art of Nation Building. See Catharine Parr Traill’s description in The Backwoods of Canada, 27; for the inscription, see Charles G.D. Roberts, The Canadian Guide-book, 132. Anon., “Ceremony of Laying First Stone, Wolfe and Montcalm Monument,” 176. In 1834, the first municipal seal of Quebec City, designed by Joseph Légaré, also used classical forms to express similar themes of river and ethnic harmony between beaver and the British lion. For his activity as chairman of the police office and comparisons with Thomas McCord in a similar office in Montreal, see Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People, 195. Edward Allan Talbot, Five Years’ Residence in the Canadas (London, 1824), cited in Earl, The Family Compact, 54. Dalhousie to Viscount Goderich, 23 October 1827, “Extrait du livre de P.G. Roy. Notes et documents sur la famille Taschereau, Branche de l’hon. Louis-Alexandre Taschereau” (Quebec City, 1925). Census of Canada, 1861, reel 1265. Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, vol. 33, 1823–24, app. r , District of Quebec, “Statement of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials,” 1794–1821. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 94. The trees were offered by Henri-Jules Juchereau-Duchesnay. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 255. “For Sale by Private Bargain,” Quebec Gazette, 18 September 1800. Courville et al., Histoire de Beauce-Etchemin-Amiante, 223. Many of the skilled workers brought to the seigneury by the Taschereaus were British or American. Gabriel-Elzéar Taschereau hired Styles as domain farmer in 1802, and JeanThomas Taschereau employed Davis. Provost, “Des Taschereau aux Irlandais,” asq , Collection Honorius Provost, box 102; Provost, “Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” in dcb . http://www.nosorigines.qc.ca/GenealogieQuebec.aspx?genealogie=Taschereau_ Louis&pid=363554&lng=fr. Examples of this independence and insubordination abound in Ferron, Les Beaucerons ces insoumis. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 244. Ibid., 301. Provost, “Fragments d’histoire paroissiale,” 279, 281, 282; the number of obligatory festival days was reduced to nine in 1793. The role of seigneurial initiatives such as those of the Taschereaus have been noted across Lower Canada by both Serge Courville and Jean-Claude Robert. Courville, Entre ville et campagne, 43, 287; Jean-Claude Robert, “Un seigneur entrepreneur,” 375–96. ba nq-q, cn 301, s 208, notary Louis Panet, no. 1951, “Agreement,” Edward Ennis and Jean-Thomas Taschereau, 2 August 1826; Ferron, “Siméon Gautron dit Larochelle,” in dcb; Veilleux, “Jean-Thomas Taschereau,” in dcb . For an overview of this situation, see Greer, The Patriots and the People, especially chap. 4. Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1805, 236.

Notes to Pages 178–84

118 Jacques L’Heureux, “Olivier Perrault,” in dcb . 119 lac, mg 18 h 17, vol. 2, “Papiers Taschereau, Jean-Thomas Taschereau to Lord Dalhousie,” 11 April 1826 (“toutes les parties”). 120 Montreal Transcript, 14 July 1842; Journals of the Legislative Assembly, app. f , “Commission of Inquiry on the Seigniorial Tenure,” 15 September 1843. 121 For examples of the detailed contents of these volumes, see the summaries in ba nq-q, notary Errol Boyd Lindsay, on 301.s 188, no. 773, “Inventaire des biens et effets dépendant de la succession et communauté de feu l’hon. J. Olivier Perrault et de feue Dame MarieLouise Taschereau son épouse,” 18 August 1827. 122 In 1885, three decades after the official abolition of seigneurialism, Gustave-Oliver Taschereau succeeded his father as proprietor of the seigneury of Fleury or Saint-Joseph Sud-Ouest. Two years earlier, he had replaced his father as sheriff of the Beauce. 123 ba nq-q, b 253, Fonds George Siméon Théberge, 1960–01-167/3, “Seigneurie Ste-Marie Nord-est, Divers, 1822–1889”; “Déguerpissement par Jean-Baptiste Le Houllier et son épouse à Antoine-Charles Taschereau,” 27 May 1827; “Acte de réunion au domaine, Jean Kemneur dit Laflamme à Elzéar Henri Duchesnay,” 13 February 1854; for an example of Taschereau account books, see “Livre de compte du notaire Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, 1849–66.” 124 ba nq-q , notary Errol Boyd Lindsay, on 301.s 188, no. 773, “Inventaire des biens et effets dépendant de la succession et communauté de feu l’hon. J. Olivier Perrault et de feue Dame Marie-Louise Taschereau son épouse,” 18 August 1827; Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 119. 125 Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 80–2. 126 Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1816, app. e . 127 Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, vol. 32, 1823; vol. 31, 1821–22, app. n . 128 Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, vol. 31, 1821–22, app. f , 1822. 129 Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 7 and 10 February 1810. 130 Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1816, app. f , “Committee to enquire into what internal communications are the most essential,” 1 February 1816; see also Robichaud, “Le pouvoir, les paysans et la voirie au Bas-Canada.” 131 Courville et al., Histoire de Beauce-Ethchemin-Amiante, 204; Statutes of Lower Canada, Geo. III, 50 (April 1818), cap. 23, “Acte pour autoriser un pont de péage”; http://www.slavens.net/news/bridge_collapse.htm. Boston Daily Advertiser and Repertory, 14 March 1820. 132 Legault, Une élite en déroute, 11. 133 Besides commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Antoine-Charles Taschereau and retired Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Thomas Taschereau, the battalion included Major Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau and Aide-Major Joseph-André Taschereau. Jean-Thomas’s son-in-law J.-A. Philippon was listed as a captain, and his illegitimate son, Louis-Épictière, as an enseigne. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 276–7. 134 Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, vol. 31, 1821–22, 23 January 1822, 11 December 1821. 135 Thomas-Pierre-Joseph, Antoine-Charles, and George-Louis were justices of the peace, as was his nephew Pierre-Elzéar. 136 Pierre-Elzéar, eldest son of Thomas-Pierre-Joseph and seigneur, practised law in Sainte-

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137 138 139

140

141 142

143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150

151

Marie, sitting in the Legislative Assembly in 1830–35. A third son of Thomas-PierreJoseph, Henry-Victor-Antoine, was the first Taschereau to join the medical profession, beginning his practice in Sainte-Marie in October 1831, only to die in the epidemic a year later. Jean-Thomas’s nephew Thomas-Jacques Taschereau (1811–1885) opened a notarial office in Sainte-Marie in 1832 and later served as sheriff of the Beauce (1858). Pierre-Elzéar’s brother, Thomas-Jacques, acted as notary, and his cousin, Jean-Thomas Jr, served as lawyer for the estate. ba nq-q, Fonds Joseph Martel, ca 301, s 36, Procès-verbal, no. 165, “Plan de ligne au bord de la rivière Chaudière près de l’église Saint-Joseph, Nouvelle-Beauce,” 10 January 1815. Louis-Achille Taschereau became a surveyor. Antoine-Charles Taschereau was returning officer for Dorchester before winning one of the Beauce seats in 1830 to sit alongside Pierre-Elzéar Taschereau, who held the other Beauce seat. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire civile, 302, 191. For Taschereau as “first school visitor” in Mégantic, see Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 6 William IV, app. OO, 1835, Testimony of John G. Clapham, 28 December 1835. For the significance of these changes in local authority, see Curtis, Building the Educational State, 149. Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, vol. 31, 1821–22, app. f , app. c ; PierreGeorges Roy, Inventaire des procès-verbaux des grands voyers, vol. 5; Provost, “JosephAntoine Philippon,” in dcb . Archives, Fabrique de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, Curés de Ste Marie, Antoine Villade, Correspondence, no. 3.114, Taschereau letters, Jean-Thomas Taschereau to Villade, 9 April 1818. For the significance of this “sexual symbolism,” see Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, particularly page 29. For the relationship of religious ritual and authority, see Girard and Vattimo, Christianisme et modernité, 91. Ritual practice is examined in Hubert, Sur la terre comme au ciel. asq , p 18/z /no.20, William Lindsay to Rev. Roque, 6 October 1811. To situate the Beauce within larger discourses around poverty, see the several works of Jean-Marie Fecteau, beginning with Un nouvel ordre des choses. Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 9 February 1807. Curtis, Ruling by Schooling Quebec. Fernand Ouellet uses Edward Ellice, for whom Thomas McCord was seigneurial agent, as an example of a seigneur who supported popular education. Ouellet, Éléments d’histoire sociale du Bas-Canada, 261. Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 15 January 1814, 20 February 1816; Curtis, Ruling by Schooling, 81. Curtis, Ruling by Schooling, 104; Ouellet, Éléments d’histoire sociale du Bas-Canada, 271; Audet and Gauthier, Le Système scolaire du Québec, 10–12. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 296; Curtis, Building the Educational State, 42, mentions the nomination of schoolmasters by Parliament. Boulianne, “The Correspondence of the Royal Institution 1820–29,” 5:1203–4. On the neighbouring Lauzon seigneury, Royal Institution schools were opened in Pointe-Lévy in 1806 and in Saint Nicholas in 1816. Perrault contributed 25 louis in addition to the land, Jean-Thomas Taschereau and his brother Thomas-Pierre-Joseph 10 louis each, and widow Taschereau 5 louis. The school

Notes to Pages 188–96

152 153 154

155

was completed with contributions of 10 louis from Curé Villade and 5 louis from militia captain Bonneville. Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 298. Boulianne, “The Correspondence of the Royal Institution 1820–29,” vol. 5, 1206. Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb . Provost, Sainte-Marie de la Nouvelle-Beauce: Histoire religieuse, 311. Louis-Épictière was apparently living in Saint-Sylvestre between 1842 and 1845; http://genealogie. planete.qc.ca/forums/display_topic/id_14186/Cherche-naissance-de-Louis-Épictière/. Vovelle, “Une histoire sociale ‘totale,’” 26.

cha p ter six 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

Masciotra, “An Analysis of the 1825 and 1842 Census,” 35, 38–40. See, for example, Cohen, Congost, and Luna, Pierre Vilar. Horner, “Taking to the Streets,” 78–9, 54, 329. Olson and Thornton, Peopling the North American City, 120; see also Olson and Thornton, “The Challenge of the Irish Catholic Community,” 331–62. Morris, “Civil Society and the Nature of Urbanism,” 292. “Natural charity” is drawn from Williams, The Country and the City, 83; Morris, “Clubs, Societies and Associations,” 395–443. For Fecteau, see in particular Un nouvel ordre des choses. For a similar Arcadian vision using the Swiss Alps and Scottish Highlands, see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 524. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” 40. Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain, 1. Bushman, The Refinement of America, 403. Hanak, The Garden and the Workshop, 67, 74. Similarities can also be drawn with the enlightened but religiously observant communities of European Jews, Catholics, and Protestants described by Sorkin in The Religious Enlightenment. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 362. Montreal Gazette, n.d., in mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 400, “Birth, Marriage, School, Death.” Poovey, Making a Social Body, 18; Curtis, Ruling by Schooling; Secord, “Botany on a Plate,” 56. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, xvii. Lambert, “Daniel Wilkie,” in dcb ; Montreal Gazette, 5 May 1836; for the portrait, see Béland, Painting in Quebec, 1820–50, 396. Maurault, Le Collège de Montréal 1767–1967, 66. J.S. McCord to Gabriel Marchand, 20 April 1829, letter provided by Alex Tremblay with permission from the private collection of Yves Beauregard. For his interest in purchasing the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes, see mm , 825, “Scientific Subjects,” notations at end of volume; mm , 871 “Commonplace Book” (J.S.M.), n.d., n.p., 832, “Botanical Notebook,” n.d, n.p. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 665, handwritten draft of letter (n.d.) inserted into “Legal Memoranda and Agenda.” Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, 83–126.

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Notes to Pages 196–8

22 Lieut. Bayfield, “Abstract of the Meteorological Journal kept on Lake Superior in 1824”; and William Kelly, md , “On the Temperature, Fogs and Mirages of the River St. Lawrence” (1832), both in Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, vol. 3 (Quebec, 1837). 23 For the influence of Spark and Wilkie, see mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0834, “Meteorological Reports.” The quality of the instruments held by Thomas McCord were evident in the bankruptcy sale, 24 July 1798. His set of mathematical instruments sold for £11.5. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 235, “Auction of Property of Thomas McCord.” 24 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0828, entry Philipsburg 4 February 1843, n.p. Four notebooks of his tables and observations are held in the McCord Museum archives, 0827–0830. 25 Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 325. Katharine Anderson describes “weather wisdom” as between a “science of elite observatories [and] a science of seamen and shepherds.” Katharine Anderson, “Looking at the Sky,” 305, 303. 26 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 825, “Scientific Subjects,” various dates, 1821–23. For another example of weather keeping, see Robert Christie’s records in ba nq-q , p 1000, s 3, d 399, “Coupures de journaux concernant les années 1855 et 1856 et notes sur Taschereau conservées par Robert Christie, 1843–1866,” 67–8. 27 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 665, handwritten draft of letter (n.d.) inserted into “Legal Memoranda and Agenda.” 28 mm , McCord Family Papers, 1001-d 12/ 36 820, Document 9, John Herschel to McCord, 14 December 1840; Document 11, Charles Lyell to McCord, 1 October 1842. For the development of meteorological science and the inclusion of local observations in an imperial project, see Naylor, “Nationalizing Provincial Weather,” 407–33. 29 mm , vol. 825, “Scientific Subjects,” responses of Doctors Arnoldi and W. Robertson, January 1837. He received detailed answers from William Robertson, a founder of the Montreal General Hospital and part of the circle that had established the Montreal Medical Institution, later the McGill Medical School. Daniel Arnoldi, chair of the Medical Board of Examiners and the father-in-law of John Samuel’s brother, also replied. For similar interests, see Smith. The Gender of History, 134. McCord’s interests were in fact quite in keeping with those of his peers. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, an association of mostly amateur scientists, had a medical science section. Bodleian Library, Archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, box 146, “Annual Meetings,” First Report, 1832. 30 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 825, “Books to be Purchased,” November 1836. 31 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 871, Commonplace Book, “Index.” 32 Science as state policy is developed in Gascoigne, “The Royal Society and the Emergence of Science,” 171–84. 33 Cannon, Science in Culture, 242. 34 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1001-d 12/3, Charles Daubeny to McCord, __ 1839. 35 mm , vol. 826, “Miscellaneous,” pamphlets, Meteorological Society of Great Britain, January 1843, and Albany Institute, n.d. 36 Hamilton, “Early Canadian Weather Observers” and “The Year without a Summer,” 524– 32; McCord, Report of meteorological observations made in Island [sic] of St. Helen in the river St. Lawrence opposite the City of Montreal … (Montreal: John Lovell 1842), 18 pages.

Notes to Pages 198–204

37 For his use of these terms, see mm , vol. 657, “Legal Notebooks,” John Samuel McCord to Dr Beck, Albany, _ February 1842. 38 Lyell, Travels in North, 2:142. 39 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0827, “Note-book on Climate of Montreal and Lower Canada during the period 1824–1838,” 90; Daubeny, Journal of a Tour, 28; Bodleian Library, Archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, “Geological Pamphlets 4-370 Obituary Notice of Charles Giles Bridle Daubeny.” 40 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 0825, “Books to be purchased,” November 1836, n.p.; vol. 0820, B. Silliman Jr to J.S. McCord, 11 July 1842; American Journal of Science and Arts 28, no. 1 (April 1835): 6, 175. 41 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 826, “Miscellaneous,” Instructions for Meteorological Reports, Albany Institute to J.S. McCord, n.d.; vol. 657, “Legal Notebooks, McCord to Theodoric Romeyn Beck,” __ February 1842. 42 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0411, J.S. McCord diary, 26 September 1853. 43 Anon., Canadian Guide Book, 39. 44 Montreal Gazette, 2 July 1833. 45 Ibid., 12 March, 8 April 1833. 46 Ibid., 11 August 1833. 47 McCord was also a speaker at the opening of the refuge. Montreal Gazette, 15 March, 18 May 1854. 48 Galllichan, Livre et politique au Bas-Canada, 93. 49 Cited in Young, The Politics of Codification, 47. For the seigneurial commission and civil code, see Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 1843, app. f .; JeanMaurice Brisson, “L’apport du premier Code de procédure civile”; Johnson, “In a Manner of Speaking,” 636–72. 50 Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits. 51 Thomas McCord’s second wife, Julie-Catherine Lindsay, was buried in the Ursuline crypt in 1875. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 37. 52 Lower Canada, 9 Geo. IV, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 2 December 1828, 59–60. 53 John Samuel McCord, “Notes on the habitats and varieties of some Canadian ferns,” Canadian Naturalist 1, no. 5 (October 1864): 354–6. 54 Major R. Lachlan, Retrospective Glance at the Progressive State of the Natural History Society of Montreal (1852), in mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 833. The founding members of the Natural History Society, all prominent English Montrealers, included many of McCord’s neighbours and associates in the bar and clergy, including Rev. Dr Mathieson, Rev. Dr Bethune, judges Day and Badgley, James McGill, and George Moffatt. See Anon., Canadian Guide Book, 40; and for the Montreal General Hospital, see Montreal Gazette, 28 April 1836. 55 See, for example, the importance given to trust by Anthony Giddens in Cassell, Giddens Reader, 292. 56 Bodleian Library, Archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, box 146, “Annual Meetings,” Rev. William Vernon Harcourt, Yorkshire Philosophical Society, First Report, 1832. 57 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 826, “Miscellaneous,” J.W.G. Gutch, Meteorological Society of Great Britain, January 1843.

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Notes to Pages 204–12

58 Secord, “Corresponding interests,” 383–3. 59 Lachan, A Retrospective glance, 10; see also the collection of the Natural History Society, Rare Books Room, McGill University. 60 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0426, no. 11, St Paul’s Lodge statement, 14 November 1865. 61 mm , box 0962, “Provincial Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of England,” Minutes of Meeting, Montreal, 14 September 1846. For British roots, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 309–49. 62 Curtis, Ruling by Schooling, 3. 63 mm , box 0860, “Sketch of Masonry in Montreal.” 64 mm, box 0862, Thomas McCord, “List of lodges for which warrants have been granted in Canada from the Conquest to the year 1792,” 2 March 1792. 65 mm , box 0860, “Sketch of Masonry in Montreal.” 66 See the Minute Book of the Brothers-in-Law Association, mm , c 194. 67 Baker, “Public Frivolity and Patrician Confidence,” 43–73. 68 Carman Miller, “William Walker,” in dcb . 69 Harvey, “The Protestant Orphan Asylum and the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society,” 274 and apps 20, 21. 70 Gerald Tulchinsky, “George Moffatt,” in dcb . 71 mm , Diary, visit to la Malmaison, 28 May 1860; clipping on “Williams” in back of vol. 120, “1863”; vol. 418, 17 September 1861. 72 mm , Diary, 18 February 1860. 73 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 428, various letters. 74 Miller et al., The McCord Family, 41. 75 asq , Recettes, c 41 (1839–42), 286, 330 ; c 43 (1845) 25; Séminaire 74, no. 72a, W.K. McCord to the Seminary, 6 December 1852 (“une époque de difficulté financière”). 76 Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia Performed in his Majesty’s Ships Leven and Barracouta (1835); A Voyage to Abyssinia and travels in the interior of that country, executed the orders of the British government in the years 1809 and 1810 (1816). As British consul in Cairo, Salt conducted archaeological research at the pyramids and collected antiquities for the British Museum, including the head of Ramses II. 77 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 417, diary entry, 30 August 1860. 78 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 424, Correspondence, 1821–42, J.S. McCord to Eliza (younger sister of Anne Ross), 14 October 1832. 79 John Leighton, ed., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London: Routledge 1858), 193. 80 mm, McCord Family Papers, Anne Ross diary, 9 March, 21 May 1822. 81 Montreal Gazette, 2 February 1833. 82 Published originally in the Quarterly Review, the article is reprinted in Scott, Prose Works, 21:80, 151. Images from the gardens and glens of Abbotsford were used to illustrate Scott’s collected works. 83 Maver, “Glasgow’s Public Parks,” 323. 84 For treatment of the self and its relationship to identity, modernity, and individualism, see Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, xii–xv, 265–311; for “Englishness,” see Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity. 85 Le Moine, Un Québécois bien tranquille, 62.

Notes to Pages 212–18

86 Anon., “The Waverley Novels,” 61–79; Loudon, Architectural Magazine and Journal, 2:320. 87 For Wordsworth, see “After Visiting the Field of Waterloo,” in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 7 (London, 1888), 137; and the discussion in Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past,” 9–37. 88 Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, 204. Wainwright devotes two chapters to the decoration of Scott’s feudal castle, Abbotsford. Prints of Abbotsford show relics ranging from Rob Roy’s gun to pieces retrieved from the battlefield of Waterloo. Among his more vivid war memorials was his mantle display of the skull of “Shaw,” the famous Lifeguardsman who killed ten Frenchmen before falling himself. 89 Scott also enjoyed great success with the francophone bourgeoise. With the Papineau family in hiding in the Dessaulles’ manor house in November 1837 during the rebellions, Louis-Antoine Dessaulles borrowed Walter Scott’s Rob Roy from the seminary library in Saint-Hyacinthe to distract his cousin Amédée Papineau. Lamonde, Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, 29. 90 Montreal Gazette, 2 February 1833. 91 Montreal Gazette, 2 February, 12 March 1833. 92 Graham, Mont Royal-Ville Marie, 85–6. 93 Crowley, “‘Taken on the Spot,’” 25. 94 Colin Coates, Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec. 95 lac , r 5653- 0- 8-e ; see also Burant, Drawing on the Land. 96 Beland, Painting in Quebec 1820–1850, 72. 97 Ibid., 17. 98 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1002, Anne Ross diary, 7 March 1821, cited in Miller et al., The McCord Family, 77. 99 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 424, J.S. McCord to Eliza Ross, 14 October 1832. 100 Graham, Mont Royal-Ville Marie, 86. 101 Miller et al., The McCord Family, 77. 102 Hubbard, Canadian Landscape Painting, 1670–1930, 7–9; Hubbard, Thomas Davies in Early Canada, 60. 103 See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination; Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology. For the embourgeoisement of the countryside around Rio de Janeiro, see J.J. Steinneman’s “Faubourg de Catète,” 49. 104 Doige, An Alphabetical List of the Merchants, Traders, and Housekeepers, or Montreal Directory, 1819, 9. 105 Horticulturist 19 (1864): 299. 106 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 415, diary, 7 December 1858. 107 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 424, Letterbook, 1821–42, Col. F. Farcourt to J.S. McCord, 19 May 1840. For the role of the British garrison, see Senior, British Regulars in Montreal. 108 Anne Ross diary entries, 12 May, 2 November 1821, cited in Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 123, 128. 109 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 710, “Military Commissions, 1819–38”; much of this section is drawn from my article “The Volunteer Militia in Lower Canada, 1837–50,” 37–54. John Samuel’s brother William King was a militia lieutenant in the 4th Battalion of the County of York, and John Samuel’s third son, Robert Arthur, served in the Victoria Rifles, a Volunteer force, before enlisting as a regular in the 30th Regiment of Foot.

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Notes to Pages 218–24

110 Bourke, Ten Canadian Generations, 145–7. During the War of 1812–14, Anne Ross’s father joined the Montreal Artillery. During the Rebellions of 1837, her four brothers were active: David Alexander and Arthur in the Montreal Artillery and Thomas and John in the Montreal Rifles. Arthur Ross’s grandson, Captain Arthur Cecil Ross, grew up on the Beaurivage seigneury, was killed in France, and in 1919 was awarded the Military Cross. 111 Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 288; Lewis, The Middlemost and the Milltowns, 21–7; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 276, 454, 685. 112 Greenwood, Legacies of Fear, 205. 113 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 764, “Deployment, manoeuvres, Queen’s Light Dragoons, 1838–48,” Manoeuvres, n.d. 114 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 797, “Standing Orders, Instructions, Queen’s Light Dragoons 1848.” 115 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 767, “Captain William Forsyth, 1829–38,” Forsyth to McCord, 15 November 1830. 116 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 735, Major H. Driscoll to McCord, 24 April 1838. 117 “When the Rebellion broke out in 1837 and our services were required,” cavalry officers recalled in 1852, “we thought of no conditions, we made no conditions, we were not animated with the hope of remuneration, but for our duty to our Sovereign alone.” mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 816, Walter Jones, C.O. Ermatinger, Campbell Sweeny, David Ross, George Johnston to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 October 1852. 118 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 711, “Sir John Colborne,” McCord to Colborne, n.d. (1838). 119 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 722, “Correspondence general,” Willam Gass to Capt. Thomas Colman, 9 February 1839; McCord to Colman, 27 February 1839. 120 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 724, “Memos, General Orders, 1835–39,” Articles of War, n.d. 121 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 721, “McCord to Charles Richard Ogden,” 11 November 1837. 122 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 722, “McCord to clerks of the peace,” 17 November 1837. 123 For British examples of the Volunteers, see Cunningham, The Volunteer Force, 5–17; Montreal Gazette, 22 September 1842. 124 lac, rg 11, vol. 86, file 13, December 1847, no. 6, Schedule of Accommodation required for Courthouse (Judge McCord’s Plan) [Document provided by Donald Fyson]. F.P. Rubridge, Public Works engineer and architect, apparently incorporated McCord’s plan in the Montreal courthouse, which was finally built in 1855–57. 125 Montreal Gazette, 14 November 1840; Galarneau, “Alexandre Vattemare,” in dcb . For Vattemare’s plan for international exchanges, see his International Exchanges. 126 Galarneau, “Alexandre Vattemare,” in dcb ; Buckner, “Charles Edward Poulett Thomson” (Sydenham), in dcb ; Revai, Alexandre Vattemare, 61, 70. For the Institut canadien, see Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, 1760–1896, 1:314; and Lamonde, Les bibliothèques de collectivités à Montréal, 53. 127 Montreal Gazette, 14 March 1861. 128 Ibid., 17 July 1856; 14 March 1861. 129 Young, Respectable Burial, 34 130 Montreal Gazette, 17 July 1856.

Notes to Pages 225–31

131 In Montebello, the Horticulturalist was represented by Denis-Benjamin Papineau, seigneurial agent for his exiled cousin Louis-Joseph Papineau. Two of Downing’s works, A Treatise on Landscaping (1844) and Cottage Residences (1844), were in Papineau’s library at Montebello. Anon., “Jardiner par l’imprimé,” 5. 132 A home without a porch, Downing wrote, “was as incomplete, to the correct eye, as a well-printed book without a title page.” Cited in Schuyler, The Apostle of Taste, 45. Downing gave particular attention to female taste and the potential of women to civilize the popular classes. “In all countries,” he wrote, “it is the taste of the mother, the wife, the daughter, which educates and approves, and fixes, the tastes and habits of the people… [In decoration] all that is, he concluded in 1849, “owes its existence to female hands.” Downing also emphasized the importance of the domestic, insisting as his biographer put it, that it was in the house that “morality began its outward march”: “an unbroken axis of aesthetic and moral assessments extended from the center of the house outward to the town boundary.” Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books, 102. 133 Cited in Bushman, The Refinement of America, 422. 134 Schuyler, The Apostle of Taste, 75. 135 This North American lodge can be contrasted with British gravediggers’ huts and gate lodges. See Long, Victorian Houses and Their Details, 31, 38. 136 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 416, diary, undated clipping at 28 July 1859; for the blocking of the boulevard by opposing proprietors, see MacLeod, “Salubrious Settings and Fortunate Families,” 178–9. 137 lac , Summerhill Homes, mg 28 i 388, vol. 6, file 18, Protestant Orphan Asylum Minute Book, 1823–33, 7 July 1823. 138 Montreal Gazette 2 July 1833. 139 Schuyler, The Apostle of Taste, 190–1. 140 Ibid., 190, 192. 141 Young, Respectable Burial, 26. 142 Janson, “Daniel Arnoldi,” in dcb ; Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Pewholders (1841–55), various dates. 143 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 417, diary, 18 June 1860. 144 Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, 15. 145 John Irwin Cooper, The Blessed Communion, 25. 146 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0411, J.S. McCord diary, 2 November 1853. 147 MacLeod, Salubrious Settings and Fortunate Families, 186. 148 Masters, “Jasper Hume Nicolls,” in dcb ; see also Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, 15. 149 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Papers of Bishop Francis Fulford, Journal, vol. 1, 13 September 1856; mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 417, diary entry, 30 August 1860. 150 mm , McCord, Papers, vol. 0424.5, John Hopkins to J.S. McCord, 21 September 1830. 151 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, file 36, “Course of Lecture”; file 37, “Circular Letters,” 1851–1922. 152 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Finance and Building Committee, Minutes, various dates. For construction of the church, see Epstein, Montreal, City of Spires. 153 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Pewholders, 1841–48, Meetings of Wardens of Chirst Church, 1848–53, 13 December 1848.

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154 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Ledger, Building Committee of Christ Church Cathedral, 1857–62. For McCord’s subscription, see mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 852, “subscription receipt,” 9 July 11860. For other contributions, see lists in the back of the Minutes of the Finance and Building Committee, 1857. 155 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Bishop F. Fulford, Journal no. 1, clipping from Montreal Gazette, 22 January 1852. 156 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Proceedings of the Annual Synod of the Diocese of Montreal (Montreal: Lovell, 1863),17; Proceedings of the Provincial Synod of the United Church of England and Ireland (Montreal: Lovell 1863). 157 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Proceeedings of the Sixth Synod of the Diocese of Montreal, 21, 22, 23 June 1864 (Montreal: Lovell 1864), 40. 158 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Proceedings of the First Meeting of the Synod of the Diocese of Montreal, 7–8 June 1859 (Montreal: Lovell 1859). 159 John Irwin Cooper, The Blessed Communion, 68. 160 Colley, Britains Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 253; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 48; mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1007, Anne Ross McCord, Book of Collected Poems; for full inscription of the monument, see Bosworth, Hochelaga Depicta or the Early History of Montreal, 155–7. In 1819, Thomas Doige, in An Alphabetical List of the Merchants, Traders, and Housekeepers residing in Montreal to which is prefixed a descriptive sketch of the Town, 13, described Nelson’s Column for the visitor to Montreal: “The pillar, or column, which is about six feet in diameter, stands on a base or pedestal, which is about twenty feet wide at the bottom, and about 10 feet high to the foot of the pillar. The whole appears to be about 75 feet high from the ground. On the summit is a statue of Lord Nelson, standing bare headed, with a spy-glass in his hand, supported by the stump of a mast. The pedestal is square, and on three sides of it, are represented the actions, or circumstances attending them, in which he obtained his most splendid victories – the Nile – Copenhagen, and Trafalgar – with an appropriate inscription on each subject. On the fourth side is an inscription, stating by whom, (the inhabitants of Montreal) and the object for which, this monument was erected. The base of the pillar is encircled with a cable, and over the monumental inscription is an alligator; the corners of the pedestal are supported by cannon, and the whole is enclosed with iron railing, outside of which four cannon are sunk in the ground as posts, to which is affixed a chain as a barrier to carriages.” 161 Linteau and Robert, “Land Ownership and Society in Montreal,” 29; Canada, Cadastres abrégés des seigneuries du district de Québec (Desbarats & Derbyshire 1863), cited in Benoît, “La Question seigneuriale au Bas-Canada, 1850–1867,” 206. 162 Miller et al., The McCord Family, 41. 163 Writing of French Canadians later in the century, Peter Gossage makes this point in Families in Transition. 164 The relationship between housing and health concerns of “privileged mothers” later in the century are treated in Adams and Gossage, “Health Matters,” 45. 165 The property was part of the estate of John Gray, who had used a nearby spring-fed pond as a water supply for the Montreal Water Works. In 1836, McCord bought an eight-arpent addition to his property. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 434, “Report of Land Survey by John Ostell of land owned by estate of John Gray,” 10 March 1836; Carman Miller, “John Gray,” in dcb .

Notes to Pages 236–40

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166 Paul-Louis Martin, Les fruits du Québec, 42. 167 mm , McCord Family Papers, m 9911, “Expenses of Building Temple Grove.” 168 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 825, “Books to be Purchased,” November 1836. Clarence Epstein, in Montreal, City of Spires, 152, suggests that Temple Grove was designed by architect William Footner, while Conrad Graham, in Mont Royal-Ville Marie, 127, posits Paul Adams. 169 Loudon, Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa, 821, 1113. 170 Foshay and Novak, Intimate Friends, 22. 171 Sten Nilsson, cited in Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” 39. 172 Stewart, “Garden Agon,” 111. For the development of the Royal Gardens at Kew in the context of protecting post-Napoleonic British interests, see Gascoigne, “The Royal Society and the Emergence of Science,” 174. 173 Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750–1870, 81. 174 Kennedy, Architecture, Men, Women and Money, 224; Massey and Maxwell, House Styles in America, 67–71. 175 Loir, Bruxelles néoclassique, 106. 176 Donoghue, “Alexander Jackson Davis,” chap. 6; for examples of the influence of Walter Scott on North American architecture, see Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books, 50, 176; for Scott’s influence on visions of the garden, see Simo, Loudon and the Landscape, 175; for the influence of James Fenimore Cooper’s daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, see Johnson and Patterson, Susan Fenimore Cooper. 177 Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 63; for influences, and particularly the role of J.C. Loudon when McCord was planning his home, see the discussion in the Architectural Magazine and Journal 2 (1835): 319–20, 528; Gagnon-Pratte, L’architecture et la nature à Québec, 57. Exceptions in Lower Canada include the Bois-de-Coulonge in Quebec City and Caldwell’s manor in Lauzon. Louis-Joseph Papineau added neoclassical decorations to his Montebello estate in the 1830s. Kalman, A Concise History of Canadian Architecture. 178 Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration; Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, 204. Wainwright devotes two chapters to the decoration of Scott’s Abbotsford. 179 Loudon, Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa, 994, 823, 821, 987. 180 Davidoff, L’Esperance, and Newby, “Landscape with Figures,” 144; Smith, cited in Schorske, Thinking with History, 54; Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 14. 181 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 414, J.S. McCord diary, 11 September 1847. 182 mm , McCord Family Papers, 4 October 1857. 183 Quellier, Histoire du jardin potager, 83. 184 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 414, J.S. McCord diary, 6 September 1851; 21 April, 29 May, 10, 17, 18 July 1858. 185 Richard G. Starke, “Notes on Old and Modern Gardens of Montreal,” Canadian Horticultural Magazine 1, no. 12 (March 1898), cited in Miller et al., The McCord Family, 71. 186 Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, plates 4 and 5. For the ode, see Garrod, The Poetical Works of John Keats, 260–2. 187 Stefaniak, “Botanical Gleanings,” 234. 188 MacLeod, “Salubrious Settings and Fortunate Families,” 116. 189 Le Moine, Maple Leaves, 270–1. 190 Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec: Session of 1871–2 (Quebec

Notes to Pages 240–6

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200 201 202 203 204 205

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City: Middleton and Dawson 1829), 1:255. See also Sarah Stone’s work as a professional natural-history artist for the Leverian Museum: Sarah Stone, Album of 31 original watercolours of Australian fauna, c. 1789 (State Library of New South Wales), and Catalogue of the Leverian Museum, pt 1 (London 1806). In Sydney, Australia, Harriet and Helena Scott worked with their father, Alexander Walker Scott, in collecting, preparing, and illustrating their father’s Australian Lepidoptera and their Transformations. See their sketchbooks in the State Library of New South Wales or at http://www.sl,nsw.gov.au/heritage/. mm , Ross Family, vol. 1617, Walter Davidson (Dublin) to David Ross (Montreal), 8 May 1820. Starke, “Notes on Old and Modern Gardens of Montreal,” Canadian Horticultural Magazine 1, no. 12 (March 1898), cited in Miller et al., The McCord Family, 71. “Obituary, the Hon. J.S. McCord,” Law Journal (Lower Canada, July 1865). Rare Books Room, McGill University, chi 537, Diary of Marie-Angélique Des Rivières, 15 June 1850 (“[U]ne visite qui a beaucoup plue aux enfants, est celle que nous avons faite chez ma bonne amie Madame McCord à Temple Grove – quel magnifique site – quel beau point de vue – the grounds are laid out with such decided good taste [sic] – pendant que nous étions là – il y eu un feu terrible dans Griffintown. Nous en avions une vue parfaite. Quel beau, mais terrible spectacle! Le feu courut dans un instant, tout le long d’un clocher, ah! que c’était désolant de voir une dévastation pareille – le gros Bourdon et toutes les cloches de la ville retentissaient de leurs sons lugubres, qui appelaient au secours de ces pauvres malheureux – il y a eu au-delà de deux cent maisons de brûlées”). mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0411, J.S. McCord diary, 13 August 1855. Dugan, The Great Iron Ship, 31. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 417, J.S. McCord diary, 7 September 1860. In 1849, Duncan utilized a form of industrial engraving in publishing a panoramic view of Montreal. Katharine Anderson, “Looking at the Sky,” 319. Alberti, “Placing Nature,” 309. McGill’s disruption of McCord’s world of amateur learned and scientific societies had parallels. In 1847, schools of applied science were established at Harvard and Yale. In Albany, the development of new institutions of higher learning – the Rensselaer Institute, Union College, and the Albany Medical School – relegated the Albany Institute to the sidelines of amateurism. mm , McCord Family Papers, J.S. McCord diary, vol. 417, 20 January 1860; vol. 420, 3 January 1863 and clipping in back of vol. 420. Keats (1818), cited in Thompson, William Morris, 17. McKenzie, “Henry Wolsey Bayfield,” in dcb ; Winder, “Sir William Edmond Logan,” in dcb . Montreal Gazette, 15 and 24 December 1856. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0872; Miller et al., The McCord Family, 57. Zeller, Inventing Canada; Canadian Executive Committee for the Paris Exhibition, Canada at the Universal Exhibition of 1855. For a similar pattern in the Great Exhibition of 1851, see Anon., A Few words upon Canada and her productions in the Great Exhibition. Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Bishop Fulford Correspondence, file 35, “Memorabilia, 1847–61,” 20 October 1856. For similar examples of the eclipsing of a traditional urban elite, see Warner, Jr, The Private City, 82–3. Cited in Young, George-Étienne Cartier, 81.

Notes to Pages 246–50

208 His father’s failure to pay his tuition is mentioned in the correspondence of the seminary, while his mother was prominent in Catholic bazaars (Le Journal de Québec, 9 January 1847). 209 Thomas McCord, The Civil Code of Lower Canada, iii, x. For his translation duties, see page ix. 210 John E.C. Brierley, “The Co-existence of Legal Systems in Quebec,” 277–87; see also Baker, “Law Practice and Statecraft,” 61. 211 For the significance of Chipman, see Simpson, Legal Theory and Legal History, 265. 212 “Gillin appellant vs. Cutler respondent,” Lower Canadian Jurist 1 (27 June 1857). 213 Before going to the bench in 1842, the same year as McCord, Day had acted for timber barons and was well known for his support of the British American Land Company, expanded British immigration, and the abolition of seigneurialism. Marriage to his second wife gave him family connections with the Grand Trunk Railway and the Bank of Montreal, and in 1850, he gave the principal address at the Provincial Industrial Exhibition. Day built an estate on Mount Royal, succeeded his neighbour McCord on the executive of the Montreal Horticultural Society. Both men sat on the board of the Anglican Church Society, and both had been prominent in crushing the Rebellions of 1837–38, Day serving as prosecutor of the Patriotes and signatory of several death warrants. But whereas McCord promoted education on a sectarian basis, Day was instrumental in founding the colony’s common school system, introducing the education bill (1841) that ensured centralization, uniformity, and strict controls over texts, teachers, and curriculum. As leader at McGill, he played a major role in organizing the law faculty and in shaping the university as “an undenominational college of a broadly Protestant character.” Carman Miller, “Charles Dewey Day,” in dcb ; Young, The Politics of Codification, 84–98. For Day’s role in common schools, see Curtis, Building the Educational State, 52–4; Frost, McGill University for the Advancement of Learning, vol. 1: 1801–1895, 174, 157, 155. 214 lac, mg 28 i 388, Summerhill Home, vols 6–7, microfilm #1716–17, Protestant Orphan Asylum Minute Book, 1823–59, 3 November 1823. 215 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Ledger, 1853–58, 5 August 1854 (“paid for shoes for J. Gall”). 216 Archives, Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Minute Book, Select Vestry, 1849–57, 18 April 1850. 217 Harvey, “The Protestant Orphan Asylum,” 21. 218 Frothingham had long participated in the Ladies’ Benevolent Society and the Protestant Orphan Asylum, joining the latter’s management committee at age eighteen. From decorating the orphanage’s Christmas tree and providing Christmas gifts for orphans, she advanced to the office of manager and in 1851 challenged a provision of the constitution by which Unitarians, as non-believers in the Holy Trinity, could not adopt orphans. lac, mg 28, Summerhill Homes, no. 1-388, vol. 6, file 18, Protestant Orphan Asylum Minute Book, 26 December 1851. 219 Much of this section is drawn from Young, Respectable Burial. 220 Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Minute Book, Finance and Building Committee, 1 August 1857. 221 Boston Athenaeum, “Mount Auburn Cemetery Circular” (Boston, 1832). 222 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 97. 223 Archives, Mount Royal Cemetery, “Circular of 24 October 1846.”

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224 In 1854, parish authorities in Montreal opened their own rural cemetery, Notre-Dame-desNeiges, separated from its Protestant counterpart by a long, impenetrable fence. In 1872, Archbishop Taschereau made a rare exception to this denial of shared facilities, granting the parishioners of Sainte-Catherine permission to buy a hearse in common with local Protestants. Dupuis, “Mgr Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” 121. 225 Archives, Mount Royal Cemetery, clipping from Montreal Transcript, 11 January 1847. 226 Annual Report, Mount Royal Cemetery, 1852. 227 Schuyler, The Apostle of Taste, 190–1. 228 Young, Respectable Burial, 67. 229 mm , McCord Family Papers, 6. 230 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 268, bill from Robert Smith to Thomas McCord, 6 December 1822. 231 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0411, J.S. McCord diary, 24 April 1862.

pa rt iv : mig ht an d just memory 1 ba nq-q, tl 31, s 1, ss 1, “Fonds Cour des sessions générales de la paix du district de Québec,” tp 12 s 999, 196001-357/111, no. 69156, “Recognizance of Pierre Elzéar Taschereau for the Peace,” 6 August 1840; no. 69157, “Recognizance of Antoine-Charles Taschereau for the Peace,” 6 August 1840. 2 Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb ; Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 137 (“les plus imposantes qui aient jamais été faites dans notre pays”). 3 Gramsci, cited in Said, Reflections on Exile, 245; see also Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch. This interpretation of the central place of Catholicism supports Ronald Rudin’s thesis in Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec. For an alternative view that emphasizes the strength of the liberal tradition in Quebec, see Lamonde, The Social History of Ideas in Quebec. This interpretation can also be compared to Bruce Curtis’s argument, in “Public Education and the Manufacture of Solidarity,” 447–68, for the centrality given to the state by Quebec intellectuals like Christopher Dunkin. 4 See Hannah Arendt’s “What Is Authority,” in her Between Past and Future, 91–141. 5 Rudin, Founding Fathers. 6 Dupuis, “Mgr Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau et le catholicisme libéral,” 149. 7 Perin, Rome in Canada, 35.

cha p ter seven 1 Taschereau is cited in Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 134 (“Et j’ai dit: Fiat voluntas! Mais mon cher petit jardin sera toujours à moi, comme je serai toujours à lui. C’est là que la divine Providence me plaça jadis, humble plante, pour m’y faire prendre racine et m’abreuver de sucs bienfaisants; je tiens à cette terre par trop de fibres pour qu’on m’en arrache sans me faire mourir. Je consens, puisqu’il le faut, à deviner un grand arbre, qui ombragera toute une province, pourvu que mon cher petit jardin soit encore là, près de moi, protégé par mes branches, et me réjouissant toujours par ses fleurs et par ses fruits”). 2 For Bildung, see Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 173–207. It is Georges Bernanos who uses the term “consciousness” to describe a certain Catholic and seminarian elite. Bernanos, L’imposture (Paris: Plon 1927), 162–3. 3 Courville and Garon, Atlas historique du Québec, 172, 244. Observations of the city by

Notes to Pages 263–70

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14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

Henry David Thoreau and James McPherson Le Moine are cited in Jack Little, “‘Like a Fragment of the Old World.’” Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada, 75. Fyson, “Criminal Justice in a Provincial Town,” 48–9. Vallières et al., Histoire de Québec et de sa région, 2:1385. Ibid., 2:1281 (“la métropole du Catholicisme dans l’Amérique Septentrionale”); cihm 44355, no. 58, “Mandement de … Taschereau … promulguant la bulle … qui érige canoniquement l’Université Laval,” 13 September 1873, 436–7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 409; see also Charle, Les élites de la République 1880–1900, 28, and his “modèle des notables” for the place of continuity and family staying-power in determining elite power. cihm , 44355, “Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des évêques de Québec (Nouvelle Série). Son éminence le Cardinal Taschereau, vol. 1, 1889,” Circulaire à messieurs les curés du comté de Portneuf, 21 September 1871. Eley, A Crooked Line, 189. My own conciliation of church and capitalism can be seen in Young, In Its Corporate Capacity. Louis Rousseau, “La conduite pascale dans la région montréalaise,” 270–84. The index of volume 2 of the Histoire du catholicisme québécois lists 150 entries for Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal and 61 for Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau. Sylvain and Voisine, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, 492, 501. William F. Ryan, The Clergy and Economic Growth in Quebec, v. René Hardy emphasizes long-term institutional change and the dynamics of clerical collaboration with lay elites, and chooses the urban parish of Notre-Dame de Québec, rather than a Montreal case study, to illustrate religious revival. Hardy, Contrôle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec, 66 and chap. 2. Jean-Marie Fecteau also insists on incorporating Montreal’s ultramontanist ruptures after 1840 into the “continuum” and “longue durée” of the Catholic Church in Quebec and construction of “an authentic civil Catholic society.” Fecteau, “La construction d’un espace social,” 63, 65, 80 (“durée stable”; “une véritable société civile catholique”). See also Gauvreau and Hubert, “Beyond Church History,” 21–3, 30–1. Codignola, “Roman Catholic Conservatism,” 717–56. Annuaire de l’Université Laval pour l’année académique 1856–57 (Quebec: Coté 1858), 51–4. Morel, Les limites de la liberté testamentaire dans le droit civil. Fernand Dumont’s use of the term is cited in Sylvain and Voisine, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, Tome 2 (1840–1898), 442. Journals of Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, 1829, app. 2, Report of Special Committee. Gagnon and Lebel-Gagnon, “Le milieu d’origine du clergé québécois,” 380; Hardy, “Regards sur la construction de la culture catholique québécoise,” 21. For the rise in the clerical population, see Deslandres, Dickinson, and Hubert, Les Sulpiciens de Montréal, 137. The family also had a Quebec City townhouse on Sainte-Ursule Street. Provost, “Fragments d’histoire paroissiale,” 285–8. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, 1824, app. Y, “Education Report”; Galarneau, “John Holmes,” in dcb . Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb ; for masculine community, see Sarasin, La ville des bourgeois, 271.

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24 Discipline diocésaine: La discipline du diocèse de Québec (Quebec City: L’Action Catholique [1879] 1937), “Vocations,” 611; Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb . 25 Once in the priesthood, Elzéar-Alexandre, along with his official visits to Rome, enjoyed family vacations with his sister in England and France. asq, Université 38, no. 55, ElzéarAlexandre Taschereau to … Hamel, 8 July 1855. 26 asq , polygraphie 44, no. 11a , “Autorisation” of J. Holmes, __ January 1837. 27 Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb . 28 Oury, “Dom Guéranger et le Cardinal Taschereau,” 13 (“A peine l’eus-je aperçu, écrit-il que je me sentis entraîné par le désir d’entrer dans son Ordre. Bénédictin, voilà quelque chose qui me va. On ne se fait point bénédictin seulement pour prier, mais pour prier et travailler pour Dieu. Que de services rendus à la religion par cette institution admirable!”) 29 Oury, “Dom Guéranger et le Cardinal Taschereau,” 18 (“… ta mort, car tu seras mort pour nous et pour le monde … Adieu, cher frère, je ne puis croire à tes projets. Adieu, adieu. Ton frère affectionné”). 30 Plante, L’Église catholique au Canada, 291, 373. 31 Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexander Taschereau,” in dcb . 32 asq , “Notes sur Brasseur de Bourbourg” (c. 1852), polygraphie 36, no. 3a . 33 Provost, Le Séminaire de Québec, 343–4 (“Fondation de l’Académie Saint-Denys,” 9 December 1852). 34 asq , Fonds du Séminaire de Québec, sme 9/38/68, Abbé E.-A. Taschereau to l’Abbé T-E Hamel, 16 May 1857 (“[O]n a défendu d’avoir aucun livre sans permission expresse du directeur, excepté les livres propres de la classe, ceux de dévotion et de prix … J’ai déjà fait renvoyer une foule de livres qui sans être mauvais ont l’inconvénient d’être pour le moins inutiles … Malgré tous les règlements il restera bien encore quelques livres proscrits, mais au moins seront-ils obligés de les cacher soigneusement et quand on les saisira, la lettre de la loi sera un moyen de faire taire ceux qui voudraient crier à l’injustice, à l’arbitraire, à la tyrannie. En ma qualité de canoniste, je ne trouve rien de plus beau ni de plus fort qu’un bon texte. Il n’y a rien aussi qui contribue autant à conserver l’unité et la régularité dans la direction d’une maison, que cette prévoyance de la loi qui règle tout d’avance et d’une manière uniforme autant qu’il est permis à l’homme de le faire”). 35 L’Abeille gave particular attention to events in the Taschereau family. See elections of Taschereau to the bar association, in L’Abeille, 12 February 1852, or the death of Marie Fleury de la Gorgendière, wife of Thomas-Jacques Taschereau, 22 April 1852. Printed on a special press imported from Boston, L’Abeille was run by La société typographique du Petit Séminaire, a non-profit corporation with a board of six students and Taschereau. The newspaper can be consulted in the Archives du Séminaire de Québec. 36 L’Abeille, 31 January 1850, cited in Debien, “Les journaux de collège au XIXe siècle,” 369 (“Mais nous sommes catholiques avant d’être citoyens, et au-dessus de ce que nous devons à notre patrie, se place ce que nous devons à la religion”). 37 For a well-known diary by a Catholic cleric, see Abbé Arthur Mugnier’s Journal de l’abbé Mugnier: 1879–1939. 38 asq , ms 34, vol. 2, E.-A. Taschereau, “Journal des usages et coutumes du Séminaire de Québec avec quelques événements remarquables,” 24 October 1867, 100 (“‘Mort de chien.’ Jeudi, 24 octobre. À 10h du matin, meurt de maladie un beau chien de Terreneuve,

Notes to Pages 274–6

39

40

41

42

43

44 45

46

47

48

49

381

nommé Milord grand favori de tout le monde à cause de sa sagacité, de sa bonté, et de son enjouement”). asq, ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 2, 5 June 1867, 83 (“M. Taschereau avec onze ecclésiastiques, partit vers 10¼ et arriva à la croix à midi et quart; ils dinèrent près de la fontaine voisine de la croix et s’amusèrent ensuite jusqu’à deux heures à visiter les divers plateaux et à admirer le magnifique panorama qui se découvre ainsi.” For an example of clerical autobiography, see Chaumont, Soixante années de sacerdoce. asq, ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 1, 15 March 1861, 285 (“Vendredi 15. Sépulture de Mme J.T. Taschereau. Le Grand et Petit Séminaire y assistent parce qu’elle est belle-sœur d’un prêtre du Séminaire; les élèves de l’Université assistent en costume parce que M. Taschereau est un professeur honoraire et parce que son fils est un des élèves”). asq, ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 2, 11 June 1866 (“Après diner j’allai au Sault Montmorency avec M. Hamel et les physiciens pour y étudier sur place les théories des géologues sur les divers terrains qu’on y voit. En revenant nous allâmes voir à un quart de lieue au nord du moulin de Beauport, sur la rivière de ce moulin, une couche de coquillages qui s’y trouve”). asq , ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 1, 25 December 1861 (“À 3¾ h. les membres des facultés du Droit et de médecine se réunissent dans le salon de l’Université pour présenter à M. Casault son portrait qu’ils ont fait peindre par M. Théophile Hamel. Le juge Morin, doyen du Droit dit quelques paroles auxquelles M. Casault répondit. Là se trouvaient aussi le Recteur, les membres du Conseil, les professeurs des arts et les quatre élèves qui ne sont pas allés chez leurs parents durant la vacance. On alla ensuite en corps faire visite à Mgr puis au Recteur”). asq , ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol; 1, __ September 1850, 71 (“Méditation sur la vierge. Demain nous méditerons sur la Sainte Vierge. Ce qu’elle est à la Trinité, à nous comme hommes, comme prêtres et comme chrétiens … donc le coeur de Marie est souverainement maternel et royal, tendre et magnifique, miséricordieux et libéral”). asq , ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 1, 19 August 1850. Archives de l’Archevêché de Québec, fiches concernant “Taschereau E.A.,” 17 June 1893; Mgr E.-A. Taschereau, Discipline du diocèse de Québec (Quebec City: Léger Brousseau [1879] 1895), “Visite épiscopale” (2540); “Archives” (19). Cardinal Villeneuve, Discipline diocésaine, 3rd ed. (Quebec City: L’Action Catholique 1937), 606–10; for the importance of home visits, see Provost, “Fragments d’histoire paroissiale,” 284. asq , 375.2–375.5 “Oraison funèbre et notice biographique et … Joseph Signay,” 1850, 4 (“L’obéissance et le respect ne m’ont point permis de laisser à un autre la douloureuse tâche de vous parler en ce jour de deuil”). Charter reproduced in cihm , 09721, Catalogue de la bibliothèque de l’Institut canadien (Quebec City: Coté 1881), 127; for the very different situation of the Institut canadien in Montreal, see Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, 1760–1896, 1:339–44. L’Abeille, 5 February 1849, 7 February, 1850; Annuaires (1874–88), Institut canadien de Québec. Other Taschereau were prominent: Henri-Thomas was secretary (1861–63) and then president (1866–67) and the institute’s Annuaire lists Jean-Thomas Jr (1874–88), Linière (1874–88), Édouard (1888), and Lieutenant-Colonel É. Taschereau (1883–85) as members.

382

Notes to Pages 276–80

50 Bergeron, François-Xavier Garneau 1808–1866, 97; Jean-Thomas Jr and Henri-Thomas Taschereau were founding members of the Société de géographie. 51 Le Nouveau Monde, 21 March 1871. 52 Ibid. (“Un sentiment de respect le plus marqué inclina toutes les têtes et l’on sentit comme un frémissement de joie et d’enthousiasme religieux agir sur l’immense assemblée. Il y avait là quelque chose d’infiniment plus solennel encore que cette bénédiction, pourtant si auguste du père de famille bénissant ses enfants. C’était une vénération plus profonde, un amour plus respectueux, comme toutes les grandes affections empreintes du sceau de la religion”). 53 Dupuis, “Mgr Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau et le catholicisme libéral”; for a survey of Catholicism, see Ferretti, Brève histoire de l’Église catholique au Québec. Ideology, particularly from a Montreal perspective, is treated in Fernande Roy, Histoire des idéologies au Québec. The Manitoba and New Brunswick Schools questions are best treated in Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation. For ultramontanism in Montreal, see FahmyEid, Le clergé et le pouvoir politique au Québec. Papal zouaves are treated in Hardy, Les Zouaves. Relations with Rome are covered in Perin, Rome in Canada. 54 Vallières et al., Histoire de Québec et de sa région, 2:1281. 55 Only in December 1891, with increasing mental and physical incapacity, did Taschereau accept the naming of Louis-Nazaire Bégin as coadjutor. 56 Fecteau, La liberté du pauvre, 344 (“immense pouvoir de freinage ou de blocage”). 57 Taschereau, E.-A. Discipline du diocèse de Québec, 151 (“L’église a été fondée par Notre Seigneur comme une société parfaite en elle-même, distincte et indépendante de la société civile à laquelle elle est supérieure par son origine, par son étendue et par sa fin qui est le bonheur éternel des âmes”). 58 Bayoumi and Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, 228. 59 cihm, 44358, “Lettre pastorale de nos seigneurs les archevêques et évêques …,” no. 220, l’Épiphanie, 1894 (“les Babylones modernes; l’impiété; des cœurs pervertis; conservant des mœurs simples, un cœur droit, des habitudes d’économie, le goût de travail, l’amour de la justice”). 60 cihm, 62861, “Mandement de Monseigneur E.-A. Taschereau … promulguant l’encyclique Immortale Dei miserentis opus sur la constitution chrétienne des états,” 25 December 1885 (“L’erreur capitale de notre siècle, si justement appelé le siècle des révolutions, est de confondre toutes les notions du véritable pouvoir, afin de substituer à l’autorité divine, ce qu’on appelle l’autorité suprême du peuple, et ainsi justifier toutes les révolutions, tous les désordres, toutes les injustices … l’Église catholique est une société parfaite et complète en elle-même, distincte de l’État civil. Elle a son chef, à qui ont été confiées les clefs du royaume des cieux … Elle est supérieure à l’État en dignité et en autorité … L’autorité de l’Église doit être respectée dans la vie publique comme dans la vie privée”). 61 Perin, Rome in Canada, 35. 62 Palmer, Working Class Experience, 91. 63 Bischoff, Les débardeurs au port de Québec, 247. 64 Ibid., 249 (“Nous secourons nos infirmes. Nous enterrons nos morts”). 65 Palmer, Working Class Experience, 130; for “secret society,” see Olson and Thornton, “The Challenge of the Irish Catholic Community,” 357; for Knights of Labor challenges to church officials in Ontario, see Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be, 311. 66 Bischoff, Les débardeurs au port de Québec, 303. This hostility should be compared to that

Notes to Pages 280–3

67 68 69 70

71

72

73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80

81 82

83

84

of liberal Catholic authorities like Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and John Joseph Lynch, archbishop of Toronto. Stortz, “Archbishop Lynch and the Knights of Labor,” 2. Kealey, Canada Investigates Industrialism, 301. Edward Said, cited in Bayoumi and Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, 234, 227. This sense of “Englishness” is developed in Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 232. asq , Université 100, no. n , 1849, Rev. E.A. Taschereau, “Idées sur les précautions à prendre pour une université catholique,” no. 11; “Notes de M.E.A. Taschereau rédigées à la suite d’un voyage à Montréal en mars 1849” (“Le Séminaire de Québec jouit d’une assez bonne réputation, il y a un grand nombre d’amis dans tous les rangs, il ne demanderait rien d’exclusif ni d’excessif, rien d’inconnu dans le pays, rien qui pût être à charge au gouvernement, pourquoi le refuserait-on?”). Université Laval Archives, 506-33, dossier 5, 1856–1872, “notes manuscrites, photocopies de documents,” “Mémoire sur l’Université Laval commencé en mars et avril 1862 par M.E.A. Taschereau avant son départ pour Rome et non terminé”; “sans bruit” (“Le Séminaire, agissant seul en son propre nom” did not inspire “aux hommes protestant la défiance que réveillerait naturellement une demande faite par tous les évêques”). Founded in 1801 and granted a royal charter in 1821, le Séminaire de Nicolet negotiated its affiliation over three years, 1859–62. Rector Taschereau’s personal visit to Nicolet was important, as were his written assurances. Claude Lessard, Le Séminaire de Nicolet, 194–5. Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien, 12, 14 (“absolument indépendant”; “complètement sous le contrôle de l’autorité ecclésiastique”). See discussions in Fecteau, “Ruse de la raison libérale?” Annuaire de l’Université Laval pour l’année académique 1856–57 (Quebec City: Coté, 1856), 19–20 (“abus”; “fautes”). Voisine, “À l’ombre du Séminaire de Québec et de l’église catholique,” 16; Lambert, “Évolution et transformation d’une institution,” 11. Annuaire de l’Université Laval pour l’année académique 1856–57 (Quebec City: Coté, 1856) (“La conduite des Professeurs, tant ordinaires qu’extraordinaires, doit être exemplaire, et ils ne doivent rien enseigner de contraire à la morale ou à la foi catholique”). Trudel, Memoirs of a Less Travelled Road, 142, 145. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 132. Perin, “Louis-Nazaire Bégin,” in dcb . Later, as archbishop, Bégin was instrumental in the establishment of Catholic unionism. Musée de l’Amérique française, Séminaire 113, no. 58, Ovide Brunet to E.-A. Taschereau, 1 August 1862; Quebec Morning Chronicle, 13 June 1870; Jacques Rousseau, “Louis-Ovide Brunet,” in dcb. Provost, Historique de la Faculté des Arts de l’Université Laval, 2; Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb . Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, 80–128; for an example of this professionalism and French-Canadian doctors using medicine around gender and the national question, see Denyse Baillargeon, Babies for the Nation. cihm , 62944, “Mandement de Mgr E-A Taschereau, promulguant un décret du souverain pontife relatif à l’Université Laval, 29 mars, 1883” (“Il n’y a pas ici d’école catholique affiliée à une université protestante … Nos élèves catholiques, à part quelques rares et déplorables exceptions, ne fréquentent que des institutions catholiques”). Galt, Church and State, 27.

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85 For examples of this monopolization, see Hubert, “Écoles privées et domination sociale au Québec.” 86 Perin, “Louis-Nazaire Bégin,” in dcb . 87 Provost, Historique de la Faculté des Arts de l’Université Laval, 39. 88 L’Abeille, 19 September 1878. 89 Provost, Historique de la Faculté des Arts de l’Université Laval, 35 (“l’oeuvre patriotique, religieuse et nationale de l’Université Laval”). 90 L’évêque de Bourges, 1660, cited in Gallat-Morin, Jean Girard, 89; Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb ; and “La Querelle Gaumiste,” in Dupuis, “Mgr Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau et le catholicisme libéral,” 132–41. 91 cihm , 44355, “Mandements, lettres pastorales, et circulaires des évêques de Québec (Nouvelle Série) Son éminence le Cardinal Taschereau,” vol. 1 (Quebec 1889), no. 144, “Circulaire au clergé,” 14 May 1886. 92 Mgr E-A. Taschereau, Discipline du diocèse de Québec, 46. 93 cihm , 44356, “Mandements, lettres pastorales, et circulaires des évêques de Québec (Nouvelle Série) Son éminence le Cardinal Taschereau,” vol. 2 (Quebec, 1893), no. 144, “Circulaire au clergé,” 14 May 1886; no. 187, “Circulaire au clergé,” 10 February, 1891 (“il importe beaucoup à notre province, surtout aux catholiques, de faire constater exactement leur nombre, parce que plus ce nombre sera considérable, plus ils auront de part dans la distribution des deniers publics, pour l’encouragement de l’éducation et pour les améliorations locales; qu’ils ne doivent pas non plus hésiter à donner un état fidèle des produits ou revenus de leurs terres, ou autre propriétés, afin que l’on puisse se former une juste idée des ressources générales de cette Province, que des hommes ennemis s’attachent à déprécier”). 94 Cited in Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien, 277. 95 Mgr E.-A. Taschereau, Discipline du diocèse de Québec, 55. 96 Provost, “Fragments d’histoire paroissiale,” 285. 97 Bouchard, Le Québec et ses cloches, 273, 373, 382, 384, 409, 411. 98 Delumeau, Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire, 291, 34. 99 His leadership in the Quarante Heures is commemorated in a bas-relief on the archbishop’s monument in front of the Basilica. 100 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 191; also on the seigneury and visible from the archbishop’s childhood bedroom was the rang “Bas Sainte-Anne.” 101 Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 192. 102 Gagnon, “Nazaire Leclerc,” in dcb ; Mgr E.-A. Taschereau, Discipline du diocèse de Québec, 16; in 1908, Sainte Anne was replaced by Saint Jean Baptiste as the patron saint of Quebec. Dupuis, “Mgr Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau et le catholicisme libéral,” 117. For the sums raised, see cihm , 62857, #17, “Mandement … ordonnant une quête en faveur de l’église de Sainte-Anne de Beaupré, 10 avril 1876.” 103 cihm 62853, #135, “Mandement … concernant une souscription pour le maître-autel de l’église de Sainte-Anne de Beaupré,” 26 June 1885 (“Nous demandons deux centimes par âme; deux centimes repartis sur deux années, un centime en 1885, et l’autre en 1886 … Quelle est la personne si pauvre qu’elle ne puisse pas offrir à Notre Seigneur et à la bonne Sainte-Anne cette faible souscription? Quel est l’enfant si jeune qui ne veuille contribuer cette petite somme? Quels sont les parents qui ne donneront pas volontiers ces deux

Notes to Pages 288–91

104 105

106 107 108 109

110

111

112

113 114 115 116 117 118 119

centimes au nom de leur enfant encore au berceau, afin que la bonne Sainte-Anne le leur conserve et le protège toute sa vie?”). See Asselin, “Jean Tielen,” in dcb . Quite in keeping with nomenclature in Catholic Quebec, fifty of the seventy-three women listed in the Taschereau family biography bore “Marie” as their first Christian name. Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau, 196–9. Voisine, “Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau,” in dcb . Régamey, Les plus beaux textes sur la Vierge Marie, 381–413. Villeneuve, Lord Dalhousie, 84. Anon., Manuel de la Congrégation des enfants de Marie; see also Caulier, “À Marie et au Christ!,” 281–2; Rousseau and Remiggi, Atlas historique des pratiques religieuses, 176. The Enfants de Marie Immaculée, organized for unmarried girls and under the direct jurisdiction of the parish priest, had two functions. First, the members’ manual cautioned girls about “the dangers which surrounded them,” urging them to avoid compromising social situations, games, and luxury and vanity in dress. Those who remained “virtuous” until marriage had the right to take their marriage vows in the side chapel and before the altar devoted to Mary. The second function of the Enfants de Marie Immaculée was to serve as a burial society. In addition to assuming the funeral costs of members, the sorority obliged members to gather at the deathbed of a sister-member and to designate four to carry the drape that would later cover her coffin. Anon., Manuel de la Congrégation des enfants de Marie, 19, 5, 17. This Marian piety and increased emphasis on the rosary, Brian Clarke argues, made devotion a much more private female experience and one that did not require the intervention of a priest. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 64–5; Régamey, Les plus beaux textes sur la Vierge Marie, 356–7. cihm , 44357, “Lettre pastorale” no. 210, “L’Association de la Sainte Famille,” 1891, 333–4 (“Les femmes auront un soin particulier d’imiter la sainte Vierge, qu’elles auront toujours devant les yeux, comme le modèle de leurs actions, et la considèreront comme leur supérieure et la règle de leur perfection,” “la charité,” “l’humilité,” “la propreté,” “la chasteté,” “la tempérance,” “la simplicité,” “un amour sincère et cordial,” “un grand soin de tout ce qui le regarde,” “le respect,” “l’obéissance,” “la douceur,” “la patience de souffrir ses défauts et ses mauvaises humeurs”). asq , ms 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 1, 7 September 1859 (“nous, comme hommes, comme prêtres et comme chrétiens. Disons avant de nous coucher un Ave pour celui de nous qui en avait le plus besoin … Danger du péché véniel”). asq , Collection of Photos, ph 2000-9602, “Présentation d’un bouquet,” Petit Cap, 1895. Mgr E.-A. Taschereau, Discipline du diocèse de Québec, 209, 188, 135. asq, 1/b 2, 4, vol. 4, Taschereau to Mother Superior, Ursulines de Québec, vol. 3, 7 October 1872; vol. 4, 2 June 1875, 19 November 1979. Fanon, cited in Renault, Frantz Fanon, 21; for White and Said, see Bayoumi and Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, 252. asq , ms m 94, tablette 3, “Histoire abrégée,” 4 (“La liberté de religion, les propriétés et privilèges, les anciennes lois et coutumes, à l’exception des lois criminelles”). Ibid., 49 (“Règne de terreur”). Brasseur de Bourbourg, Histoire du Canada de son Église et de ses Missions; asq ,

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122 123 124 125

126 127 128

129 130

131

polygraphie 36, no. 3a , 5, 7, 16, “Notes sur Brasseur de Bourbourg” (c. 1847), (“lâche timidité”; “Il y a un temps de parler, mais aussi il y a un temps de se taire; il y a un temps de réclamer ses droits, mais aussi l’innocence elle-même doit être guidée par la prudence dans la manière de les réclamer … Qui sait si, en suivant les traces de M. Edmund Burke, on n’aurait pas réussi à faire fermer de même toutes les maisons religieuses et d’éducation du Canada, surtout dans les premiers temps après la conquête?”). Musée de la civilisation, Fonds du Séminaire de Québec, sme 9/103/38 (ancienne cote: Université 103, no. 38), “Requête de quelques citoyens,” 12 January 1864. For the syllabus, see Boudon, Caron, and Yon, Religion et culture, 139 (“l’erreur”; “l’impiété”; “la falsification”; “les études historiques, au point de vue du catholicisme, doivent occuper une place prééminente dans l’enseignement”). Cited in Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien, 161 (“une résistance héroïque”; “une agonie”; “douloureuse séparation”; “volcan”; “liberté religieuse et politique”; “calme”; “profonde paix.” Cited in ibid., 162 (“chère comme une mère à ses enfants”). For Quebec ceremonies, see Rudin, Founding Fathers; and Nelles, The Art of Nation Building. Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien. Ibid., 111 (“Tout un peuple chrétien, honorant les cendres du père de sa patrie”; “une ville catholique”; “Oui, la vieille cité de Champlain, regardée avec un certain mépris par les hommes de l’industrie, de la finance et du progrès moderne, a été, en ces jours bénis, l’objet d’une sainte envie et d’une légitime jalousie, de la part de cœurs généreux comprenant la vraie liberté, la vraie grandeur et le vrai bonheur”). Rudin, Founding Fathers, 11–52. Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien, 124–5 (“promoteur distingué de l’instruction publique”). See, for example, Têtu, Les évêques de Québec: Notices biographiques; Têtu, Notice biographique S.E. le Cardinal Taschereau; Allaire, Dictionnaire biographique du clergé canadien-français; and Anon. 1842–1892: Jubilé sacerdotal de S.E. le Cardinal E.A. Taschereau. See the 46-page eulogy by l’Abbé O.-E. Mathieu published in the Annuaire de l’Université Laval 1898–99 and deposited by P.-G. Roy in the “Notes et documents sur la famille Taschereau, branche de l’Honorable Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, Québec 1925,” Bibliothèque, ba nq -q . Taschereau was a Panet on his mother’s side and may have taken his name from ElzéarAlexandre Panet. Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien (“ils sont devenus un peuple distinct du peuple français, et, dans toute l’Amérique Septentrionale, personne ne confondra les Canadiens avec les Français”). Cited in Hamel, Le premier cardinal Canadien, 7–8 (“le plus beau nom de la race française en Canada”); Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau (“la démocratie chrétienne”; “J’appartiens à la roture, mais je l’affirme avec la plus grande sincérité, c’est avec un regret toujours renaissant que je vois l’extinction graduelle de ces vieilles familles, autrefois si illustres. Quand je vais dans mon pays natal, et que je vois le domaine seigneurial en ruine, les bois coupés, les jardins rasés, le parc devenu pâturage, … je me sens pris d’un invincible sentiment de tristesse, je voudrais encore voir le manoir aux mains de ses anciens

Notes to Pages 296–307

132 133

134

135 136

maîtres, dans l’état d’aisance et de splendeur qui caractérisait jadis leur train de maison … avant toutes choses, il faut avoir la fierté de soi-même, et la fierté de la grande nation dont nous sommes des descendants”). Pierre-Georges Roy, La famille Taschereau (Marie Panet is described as “bonne et sainte”). Other Taschereaus wrote family histories. See Supreme Court Judge Henri-Elzéar Taschereau’s chronicle of the first branch, Branche aînée de la famille Taschereau en Canada (1896). See Rudin, Founding Fathers. In his “Contested Terrain: Commemorative Celebrations and National Identity in Ireland and Quebec” in La nation dans tous ses états: Le Québec en comparaison, edited by Gérard Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde (Montreal and Paris: Harmattan, 1997), 194, Rudin shows the clergy’s adeptness in putting forward its interpretation of “nation” in both Ireland and Quebec. Magella Paradis, “Le Cardinal Taschereau et ses successeurs 1886–1986: Cabinet des œuvres sur papier,” Exposition Cardinal Taschereau et ses successeurs, 1986. Marquis, Les Monuments commémoratifs de Québec, 97–7. A maquette was prepared by French sculptor Jean Bailleul. Paradis, “Le Cardinal Taschereau et ses successeurs 1886–1986,” 9.

cha p ter eig ht 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13

Miller et al., The McCord Family, 119; Bond, “Edward Van Cortlandt,” in dcb . asq , Sém. 114, no. 9, D.R. McCord to Ovide Brunet, 19 September 1864. Montreal Gazette, 26 October 1861. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 0440, 7 April 1866, “Appointment of D.R. McCord and Arthur Ross, tutor and sub-tutor.” Pamela Miller, “David Ross McCord,” in dcb . The substantial archives of Anne McCord are held at the McCord Museum. See the correspondence of David Ross McCord with Chambers in Toronto. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1854, letters 22 July 1878 to 15 August 1878. mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1860, various letters 15 August 1878–26 April 1879; Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum, 31; Pamela Miller, “David Ross McCord,” in dcb. Kathryn Harvey states that David Ross asked his sisters to leave. Kathryn Harvey, “David Ross McCord (1844–1930),” 110. Donald A. Wright, “Remembering War in Imperial Canada,” 97; Kathryn Harvey describes his nostalgia and drinking in “Location, Location, Location,” 60, 76; Pamela Miller, “David Ross McCord,” in dcb . For broader discussions of modernity, see Lears, No Place of Grace; Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air; David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity. D.R. McCord to Commission des parcs et traverses, Archives de la Ville de Montréal, 29 November 1900, cited in Schmidt, “‘Private’ Acts in ‘Public’ Spaces,” 133. Cited in Brian Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum, 53. Kathryn Harvey, David Ross McCord, 85. Donald Wright, “The Handmaid’s Tale: David Ross McCord on the Discourse of Imperialism,” 18–19, unpublished research paper, mm , McCord Family Papers, isoo-p 14, 1992.01/14, La famille McCord: recherche. mm , McCord Family Papers, 2006, David Ross McCord, Past Master, St Paul’s Lodge to Anon., 5 April 1900.

387

388

Notes to Pages 308–18

14 Schama, Landscape and Memory, 450; Said, Reflections on, 306. For ten of Letitia McCord’s poems celebrating the Boer War, see Rev. J. Douglas Borthwick, Poems and Songs of the South African War (Montreal Gazette, 1901). 15 Brian Young, “Death, Burial, and Protestant Identity,” 112; see also mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 200.3, handwritten note concerning burial of Sarah Solomons. 16 Kathryn Harvey, David Ross McCord, 90. Reid headed the Montreal Sculpture and General Marble and Granite Works and had an international reputation for his public and funerary monuments. He designed Toronto’s memorial to Canadian volunteers who died fighting the Fenians and the monument in Savannah Georgia to its Civil War heroes. 17 mm, McCord Family Papers, no. 200.3, handwritten note concerning burial of Sarah Solomons. 18 Kathryn Harvey, “Location, Location, Location,” 70. For a mildly different explanation of the battlefield layout, see mm , photo description mp 0000. 2135. 3n . 19 “Early Room Guides, List of Contents, 1924,” cited in Wright, “Remembering War in Imperial Canada,” 101. 20 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2949, “Correspondence re: Donation of Museum: McCord to and from W.D. Lighthall, 1908–1920, McCord to Lighthall,” 17 July 1909. 21 mm , McCord Family Papers, “Catalogue of Original Paintings in Oil and Water Colour illustrative of the History of Canada,” vol. 1, cited in Miller et al., The McCord Family, 131. 22 Some 125 paintings in the McCord Museum’s Bunnett Collection can be viewed online. http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/scripts/search_results.php?keywords=bunnett &Lang=1. 23 Said, Representation of the Intellectual, 82. 24 Wright, “David Ross McCord’s Crusade,” 89. 25 Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 17, 10; Kathryn Harvey also puts collecting in a Freudian context, David Ross McCord, 119. 26 Cited in Miller et al., The McCord Family, 131. 27 Sarasin, La ville des bourgeois, 271; for Lighthall, see Wright, “W.D. Lighthall.” 28 Descriptive Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Canadian Historical Portraits … held in the Natural History Society’s Building, 15 December 1887 (Montreal Gazette, 1887). See the society’s publication, The Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal, http://archive.org/details/canadianantiqua00unkngoog. 29 The Young Seigneur or, Nation Making (1888), cap. 1, n.p. For Lighthall, see Wright, “W.D. Lighthall”; and Virr, “Son of the Great Dominion,” 103–9. 30 The Young Seigneur, cap.1, n.p.; Wright, “W.D. Lighthall,” 86. 31 Cited in Wright, “W.D. Lighthall,” 20. 32 mm , McCord Family Papers, Historical Notebook, vol. 3, 44; cited in Wright, “David Ross McCord’s Crusade,” 101. 33 Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum, 31; for the ideology of sacrifice, see Wright, “Myth, Memory, Meaning,” 97–104. 34 Lighthall’s ideology is drawn from his anthology of Canadian poetry, Songs of the Great Dominion (1889) and the Wright thesis. 35 Lighthall, “Hochelaga and the ‘Hill of Hochelaga,’” 372.

Notes to Pages 319–24

36 For the impact of Wolfe’s death, see Brumwell, The Life and Death of General James Wolfe, 322–3. 37 All of these artefacts form part of the McCord Museum collection. http://www.mccordmuseum.qc.ca/scripts/search_results.php?Lang=1&keywords=wolfe; for McCord’s substantial correspondence on collecting around Wolfe, see mm , McCord Family Papers, nos 5484–8. 38 Kosche, “Relics of Brock: An Investigation,” 35, 56; Wright, “David Ross McCord’s Crusade,” 97; for the collection of Brock correspondence, see mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 5520. Among other military acquisitions were Wolfred Nelson’s rifle from the Rebellions of 1837, a print of the Nova Scotian Crimean war hero Sir William Fenwick Williams, and lithographs from the Riel Rebellion of 1885. Among memorabilia of the First World War, McCord obtained strands of barbed wire from the Battle of Vimy Ridge. 39 Miller et al., The McCord Family, 135. 40 mm website, http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/scripts/explore.php?Lang=1&tableid =1&tablename=artist&elementid=00472__true. 41 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 163, 180, 181. 42 See his collecting in mm , McCord Family Papers, #5459-5470; Miller et al., The McCord Family, 125–7. 43 McCord’s ethnographic collection is described in McCaffrey, “Rononshonni – the Builder,” 102–15. 44 Ibid., 105. 45 Ibid., 111. 46 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 3013, Final Will and Testament, 21 April 1878; no. 1001m 7, “McCord Newspaper Clippings to 1920,” Montreal Gazette, 12 January 1914. 47 Inscription in Historical Notebook, vol. 5, c. 1910, cited in Wright, “Remembering War in Imperial Canada,” 99. 48 Acland and Ruskin, The Oxford Museum, 49, 50, 81; see also Lears, No Place of Grace, 4–5. For McCord’s reading of Ruskin, see his Notebooks, vol. 2, 286. 49 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 5128. 50 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2049, “Correspondence re: Donation of Museum: D.R. McCord to and from W.D. Lighthall, 1908–20,” McCord to Lighthall, 12 June 1909. 51 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2048, “Correspondence re: Donation of Museum to institutions other than McGill University,” McCord to Carnegie, 11 October 1906. 52 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1001-m 7, “McCord Newspaper Clippings to 1920,” Montreal Gazette, 12 January 1914. 53 McGill University Archives, rg 4 f 10696, c 0096, “Correspondence, McCord Estate and Donation – McCord Museum, 1908–35.” In discussing possible locations for his museum in the municipality of Westmount, he told officials that he might “live in part of the museum.” mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2048, “Correspondence re: Donation of Museum to institutions other than McGill University,” draft suggestion to Westmount, 1908. 54 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2065, “McCord Room,” Memorandum by McCord, n.d. (1921). 55 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2052, McCord to Charles Gordon, 16 March 1920. 56 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 2052a, Opening 1921, Lighthall address, 13 October 1921.

389

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Notes to Pages 325–9

con clus ion 1 Schorske, Thinking with History; David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity; Lears, No Place of Grace. 2 Anon., 1842–1892: Jubilé sacerdotal de S.E. le Cardinal E.A. Taschereau. 3 mm , McCord Family Papers, no. 1938, notaries Marler and Fry, no. 19711, “Sale,” Miss Jane Catherine McCord et al. to Hugh Graham, 18 October 1893. 4 Railing against this takeover, Jean-Marie Fecteau emphasizes the “longévité” of this Catholic control in Quebec society. La liberté du pauvre, 344; for the larger implications of secularisation see Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape, Secularisation in the Christian World. Essays in honour of Hugh McLeod (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), particularly from page 4. 5 New York Review of Books, 9 October 2008, 35. 6 Gillis, A World of Their Own Making, xvi. 7 Cited in Vigod, Taschereau, 13 (“Au glorieux nom de Taschereau … le nom est symbole de toutes ces vertus viriles qui créent à elles seules les grands peuples et les grandes nations”).

Bibliography

pr ima ry s ou rces Study of the McCord family begins at the McCord Museum of Canadian History – see McCord Family Papers, 1766–1945, 2 volumes (Montreal: McCord Museum, 1986). To this can be added the important archival holdings of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Library and Archives Canada, and the Mount Royal Cemetery. Archival sources for the Taschereaus are more scattered. Among the most important are holdings at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (banq), the Archives de la Société du patrimoine des Beaucerons (aspb), the Centre de référence de l’Amérique française (Musée de la civilisation), and Library and Archives Canada (lac ) . archival sources Anglican Diocese of Montreal Ledger, Building Committee of Christ Church Cathedral, 1857 Ledger, 1853–58 Meetings of Wardens of Christ Church, 1848–53 Minute Book, Finance and Building Committee, 1857–59 Minute Book, Select Vestry, 1849–57 Papers of Bishop Francis Fulford Journal, vol. 1 Correspondence files Pewholders, 1814, 1841–55 Proceedings of the Provincial Synod of the United Church of England and Ireland, 1861–74. Montreal: Lovell Proceedings of the Annual Synod of the Diocese of Montreal, 1859-1864. Montreal: Lovell Archives, fabrique de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce Livres de comptes et de délibérations de la Fabrique de Sainte-Marie de la NouvelleBeauce, 1766–1832, 1832–65

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Curés de Ste Marie, Antoine Villade, Correspondance, no. 3.114, lettres des Taschereau; 3.113, lettres de Olivier Perrault; no. 3.112, Duchesnay Sainte-Marie de Beauce en 1928. Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce: Paroisse de Sainte-Marie 1928 Archives, Société du patrimoine des Beaucerons (aspb) Collection (nos) des cartes Fonds R.G. Taschereau Various dossiers including photo collection of Honorius Provost Archives de l’Archevêché de Québec (aaq) Correspondance et divers matériaux relatifs à Mgr Taschereau Archives des Ursulines de Québec (auq) 1/b 2, 4, vols. 2, 3, 4 Correspondance de Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau Various obituaries Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal (assm) No. 5, “Terrier du faubourg Saint-Joseph” Belfast, Public Record Office Mic 1p /3/1, Marriages 1676–1736, Antrim Presbyterian Church; Register of First Antrim Presbyterian Church, Baptisms 1666–1733; Marriages 1675–1730 Sundry dossiers Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montréal (banq-m) Notaries J.G. Beek, 1787–89 L. Chaboillez, 1794 J.G. Delisle, 1793 P. Lukin, 1792 P. Mezière, 1785 J. Papineau, 1789 P. Parret, 1778 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Québec (banq-q) ca 301, s 36, Fonds Joseph Martel p 233, p 7, Fonds famille Ross Cartes, “Mr. Ross’s Mill,” n.d. p 238, Fonds famille Thomas-Jacques Taschereau p 253, Fonds Georges Siméon Théberge p 283, Fonds famille Angers p 1000, s 3, d 399, “Coupures de journaux concernant les années 1855 et 1856 et notes sur Taschereau conservées par Robert Christie, 1843–1866” tl 31, s 1, ss 1, “Fonds Cour des sessions générales de la paix du district de Québec” (criminal dossiers); sundry dossiers,1803–63

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Wallot, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Tousignant. “Jean-Antoine Panet.” In dcb, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/panet_jean_ antoine_5E.html Ward, Peter. Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1990 Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf 1976 Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Growth. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press 1968 Weaver, John. Crimes, Constables and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City, 1816–1970. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995 Wien, Tom. “Les conflits sociaux dans une seigneurie canadienne au XVIIIe siècle: Les moulins des Couillard.” In Famille, économie et activité rurale en contexte d’urbanisation (17e–20e siècles), edited by G. Bouchard and Joseph Goy, 225–35. Chicoutimi and Paris: sorep/ehess 1990 Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press 1973 – Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana 1976 Williamson, Tom. Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995 Winder, C. Gordon. “Sir William Edmond Logan.” In dcb, vol. 10, University of Toronto/ Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/logan_william_edmond _10E.html Winock, Michel. L’effet de génération: Une brève histoire des intellectuels français. Vincennes, fr : Thierry Marchaisse 2011 Winterer, Caroline. The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900. Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press, 2007. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage 1993 Wood, Kirsten. “Broken Reeds and Competent Farmers: Slaveholding Widows in the Southeastern United States, 1783–1861.” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 34–57 Wright, Donald. “David Ross McCord’s Crusade.” In The McCord Family: A Passionate Vision/La famille McCord: Une vision passionnée, edited by Pamela Miller et al., 89–101. Montreal: McCord Museum of Canadian History 1992 – “The Handmaid’s Tale: David Ross McCord on the discourse of imperialism.” Unpublished research paper, 1992, mm , isoo-p 14, 1992.01/14, La famille McCord: recherche – “Myth, Memory, Meaning.” Literary Review of Canada 7, no. 4 (December 1998): 27–9 – “Remembering War in Imperial Canada: David Ross McCord and the McCord National Museum.” Fontanus 9 (1996): 97–104 – “W.D. Lighthall: Sometime Confederation Poet, Sometime Urban Reformer.” ma thesis, McGill University, 1991 – “W.D. Lighthall and David Ross McCord: Antimodernism and English- Canadian Imperialism, 1880s–1918.” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 134–53 Young, Brian. “Bourgeois Visions of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Quebec.” In Shifting Boundaries: Place and Space in the Francophone Cultures of Canada, edited by Jaap Lintvelt and François Paré, 61–72. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2001

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– “Cross-generational Biography as a Vehicle for Understanding Historical Process.” In La Création biographique/Biographical Creation, edited by Marta Dvorak, 247–52. Rennes, fr : Presses Universitaires de Rennes 1997 – “Death, Burial, and Protestant Identity in an Elite Family: The Montreal McCords.” In Negotiating Identities in 19th and 20th-Century Montreal, edited by Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, 101–19. Vancouver: ubc Press 2005 – “Dimensions of a Law Practice: Brokerage and Ideology in the Career of George-Étienne Cartier.” In Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Vol. 4: Beyond the Law: Lawyers and Business in Canada 1830–1930, edited by Carol Wilton, 92–111. Toronto: Osgoode Society/Butterworths 1990 – “Everyman’s Trope: The Quebec Act of 1774.” Cahiers du Programme d’études sur le Québec, December 2001, 13–16 – George-Étienne Cartier: Montreal Bourgeois. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1981 – In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816–1876. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1986 – The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921–1996. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000 – “Overlapping Identities: the Quebec Civil Code of 1866, its Reception and Interpretation.” In Le Code Napoléon, un ancêtre vénéré? Mélanges offerts à Jacques Vanderlinden, edited by Régine Beauthier and Isabelle Rorive, 259–84. Brussels: Bruylant 2004 – “Patrician Elites and Power in Nineteenth-Century Montreal and Quebec City.” In Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750–1940, edited by Ralf Roth and Robert Beachy, 229–46. Aldershot, uk, and Burlington, vt : Ashgate Publishing 2007 – The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866. Montreal & Kingston: Osgoode Society for Legal History/McGill-Queen’s University Press 1994 – Promoters and Politicians: The North Shore Railways in the History of Quebec 1854–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1978 – Respectable Burial: Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery. Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 2003 – “Revisiting Feudal Vestiges in Urban Quebec.” In Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America, edited by Nancy Christie, 133–58. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 – “The Volunteer Militia in Lower Canada, 1837–50.” In Power, Place and Identity: Historical Studies of Social and Legal Regulation in Quebec, edited by Tamara Myers et al., 37–54. Montreal: Montreal History Group 1998 Young, Robert J.C. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2008 – White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge 2004 Zeller, Suzanne. Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1987 Zoltvany, Yves. “Esquisse de la Coutume de Paris.” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 25, no. 3 (1971): 365–84

Illustration Credits

Maps created by Jenn McIntyre unless otherwise noted 0.0.1 McCord Family Tree 0.0.2 Taschereau Family Tree 0.1 Detail from Joseph Bouchette, topographical map of the districts of Quebec, TroisRivières, Saint-Francis, and Gaspé, Lower Canada (1831). McGill University, Rare Books/Special Collections, folder g3452-s6-1831-b6 0.2 “A plan of the City of Quebec, the capital of Canada …, 1759.” Archives nationales du Québec, T. Jefferys, p1000, s5, b-942-Québec-1759 0.3 Montreal, 1892. Anonymous, coloured ink on paper, 65.6 × 114.3 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of M. Luc d’Iberville-Moreau, m984.210. @ McCord Museum 1.1 The Taschereau coat of arms. Reproduced from Album universel 22, no. 1148 (24 April 1906): 1580. banq-q, per m-176, mic a117, Cote, rs 4576, no. 0002746395 1.2 Henri Beau, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, marquis de Vaudreuil, c. 1753– 55. Oil on canvas, Library and Archives Canada, c-147538 1.3 Richard Short, View of the Treasury and Jesuits College, 1761. Library and Archives Canada, accession no. 1989-283-5, l-00356 1.4 Thomas Davies, A View near Point Levy opposite Quebec with an Indian Encampment, Taken in 1788, 1788. Watercolour over graphite on laid paper, 35.1 × 52.5 cm. Collection of National Gallery of Canada, 6280. Photo © ngc. 1.5 General Sir Guy Carleton. Artist unknown, copy made by Mabel B. Messer, 1923, oil on canvas. Library and Archives Canada, accession no. 1997-8-1, c-002833 1.6 Richard Short, A View of the Orphan’s or Ursuline Nunnery, taken from the Ramparts, 1761. Print, 32 × 50.6 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr R.W. Humphrey, m970.67.3. © McCord Museum 2.1 J.L. Jones, John McCord, miniature painting, about 1865, c. 1865. Silver salts on paper mounted on card – albumen process, 9.2 × 5.6 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-0000.593.1. © McCord Museum

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2.2 Belfast Newsletter, 22 November 1754 2.3 Merchants Quay, canal in foreground, carts on quay, two ships tied up, Newry, Down. National Library of Ireland, stp_1179 2.4 Map of Northern Ireland and Scotland 3.1 Judge Gabriel Elzéar Taschereau, Library and Archives Canada, 1780–90, no. 1977-45-2 3.2 Benedict Arnold. Artist unknown, drawing, 1776. Published by Thomas Hart. Library and Archives Canada, accession no. r9266-3027, e002140052 3.3 George Heriot, River du Loup, Canada, 1816. Watercolour and graphite on paper, 11.4 × 19.3 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mrs J.C.A. Heriot, m928.92.1.88. © McCord Museum 3.4 Early roads in the Chaudière Valley. Drawn from map in Honorius Provost, Chaudière-Kennebec: Grand chemin séculaire, 410. Quebec City: Éditions Garneau 1974 3.5 Rear view of seigneurial domain. Ville de Sainte-Marie, sdaf 174 3.6 The seigneurial manor at Beauport with Quebec in the background, c. 1850. banq-q, collection Fred C. Wurtele, p546 d3 p 11 3.7 Minuets of the Canadians, 1807. Engraved by Joseph Constantine Stadler from a drawing by George Heriot. Published by Richard Phillips in Travels through the Canadas, London, 1807. Stipple engraving, David M. Stewart Museum. Photo by Daniel Roussel, Centre de documentation Yvan Boulerice. Reproduced from Montreal, Quebec, and the French Revolution, National Archives of Canada, 1989, c-00052 3.8 Cornerstone of the first church. Fonds de la Société d’initiative et de développement d’artères commerciales (sidac), Ville de Sainte-Marie 3.9 Sketch of the second Sainte-Anne chapel, Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, n.d. Fonds Edmond Nolin, Ville de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce 3.10 Statue of Sainte Anne in the Sainte-Anne chapel in present-day Sainte-Marie-deBeauce. Photo by Rolland Bouffard, 2009 4.1 Emblem of Masonic Lodge, John Henry Walker, c. 1850–85. Wood engraving, ink on paper, 3.2 × 3.2 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m930.50.1.726. © McCord Museum 4.2 “Deed of Sale of a piece of the Ground of the Montreal Distillery,” between Thomas McCord and Levy Solomons, 31 July 1787, written by notary John Beek. banq-m, m620.125 4.3 Alexander Henderson, La Grange des Pauvres, Montreal, qc, 1872, 1872. Silver salts on glass – wet collodion process, 12.7 × 20.3 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, mp-0000.33.7. © McCord Museum 4.4 Mary McCord, attributed to William Berczy, c. 1805. Watercolour on paper, 6.6 × 6.1 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of the estate of Miss Anne McCord, m9554. © McCord Museum 4.5 Louis Charland, “A Plan of the Fief Nazareth Laid Out into Lots under the Name of Griffin Town Drawn by Order of Mrs. Mary Griffin, about 1803.” Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m18463. © McCord Museum 4.6 Louis Dulongpré, Portrait of Thomas McCord, 1816. Oil on canvas, 77 × 65 cm.

Illustration Credits

Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m8354. © McCord Museum 4.7 Louis Dulongpré, Portrait of Sarah Solomons, 1816. Oil on canvas, 92 × 78 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m8355. © McCord Museum 4.8 “McCord Buried.” banq-m, m336.2, Register of Christ Church, Montreal 18009-28 5.1 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Seminary, Quebec, 1886. Oil on canvas, 25.8 × 36.1 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m662. © McCord Museum 5.2 Les élèves du Séminaire de Québec, 1842? by James Grant. Reproduced from Album Viger de Montréal, Archives de la Ville de Montréal bm99, 299 5.3 Anonymous, Portrait of Chief Justice Jonathan Sewell (1766–1839), c. 1825–30. 8 × 6.4 × 1.6 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Donald Sewell Campbell and Family, m2006.30.1. © McCord Museum 5.4 John Richard Coke Smyth, The private chapel of the Ursuline Convent, Quebec, 1840. Print, 45.9 × 56.1 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr G.W. MacKimmie, m16701.1. © McCord Museum 5.5 Jean-Thomas Taschereau. J.E. Livernois Ltée/vers 1820. banq, p560 s2 d1 p1312 5.6 Marie Panet, Mme Jean-Thomas Taschereau, J.E. Livernois Ltée, Quebec, c. 1860. banq, p560 s2 d1 p1313 5.7 “Plan Topographique du Domaine, Manoir et autres dépendances, de Jean Thomas Taschereau” by J.P. Proulx, 3 May 1826. Centre d’archives régional de la Société du patrimoine des Beaucerons 5.8 Vue de Sainte-Marie depuis les ruines de la maison seigneuriale, 1832–43. Copy from a wash drawing by A. Russell. Fonds de la Société d’initiative et de développement d’artères commerciales (sidac), Ville de Sainte-Marie 5.9 George Russell Dartnell, Judge Panet’s house near Quebec, 1838. Watercolour over graphite, scratching out on wove paper, 20.3 × 27.9 cm. Royal Ontario Museum, 2006-7485_1 5.10 George Heriot, Chaudière Falls near Quebec, 1792. Watercolour and gouache over pencil on laid paper, 52.5 × 37.9 cm. Library and Archives Canada, online mikan no. 2834128 5.11 Théophile Hamel, Louise-Adèle Taschereau, c. 1849–53. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, inv. 2008.171 5.12 Sir Randolph-Isham Routh. Montreal City Archives, bm1, s5, p1857 5.13 Bust of Pierre-Stanislas Bédard. Collection Assemblée nationale. Photo by Christiane Chevalier 5.14 Gerritt Schipper, Sir James Henry Craig, c. 1808–10. Drawing, pastel on paper, 16 × 13 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m389. © McCord Museum 5.15 Thomas W. O. McNiven, Wolfe and Montcalm Monument on Des Carrières Street, Quebec City, c. 1828. Watercolour over graphite, 41.5 × 27.2 cm. Library and Archives Canada, accession no. r9266-320, c-150279

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Illustration Credits

5.16 “Un pont de tables, à Sainte-Marie, en 1903,” Ville de Sainte-Marie, sid af 104 5.17 Militia mustered on the square in front of Sainte-Marie’s parish church, n.d. Fonds de la Société historique Nouvelle-Beauce, Ville de Sainte-Marie, sh a 31. 6. 1 Detail from Cane topographical map of Montreal, 1846. Map Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, g3454 m65 1846 c3 6.2 Edward Jump, Montreal – The Spring Floods – The Rising Water, a Sketch in Griffintown, 1873. Ink on paper, 27.5 × 40.5 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr Colin McMichael, m985.230.5356. © McCord Museum 6.3 Anonymous, Messrs Clendinneng’s Foundry – Moulding Shop, 1872. Print, 27 × 39 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr. Charles deVolpi, m979.87.5024. © McCord Museum 6.4 Detail from William Notman, Arch at Wellington Bridge, for the Prince of Wales’ Visit, Montreal, 1860, 1860. Silver salts on paper mounted on card – albumen process, 10 × 8 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Capt. John P.T. Dawson, n-1984.107.136. © McCord Museum 6.5 Anonymous, Montreal, 1892, 1892. Coloured ink on paper, 65.6 × 114.3 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of M. Luc d’Iberville-Moreau, m984.210. © McCord Museum 6.6 John Samuel McCord, Projected Basins, St. Anne’s Ward, Lachine Canal, qc, 1837, drawing, 57.3 × 39.4 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr. David Ross McCord, m2293. © McCord Museum 6.7 Judge John Samuel McCord, about 1855, c. 1855. Daguerreotype, 17.8 x × 12.7 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Miss Anne McCord, m9771. © McCord Museum 6.8 John Henry Walker, Emblem of Natural History Society of Montreal, 1850–85. Ink on paper, 5.3 × 5.2 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m930.50.1.582. © McCord Museum 6.9 “Bill of Fare of the Masonic Dinner at Rasco’s Hotel on Saint John’s Day, December 27, 1841.” Collection of the McCord Museum, m12236. © McCord Museum. Reproduced from an image in Pamela Miller et al., The McCord Family, 59 6.10 Judge William King McCord, about 1850, c. 1850. Daguerreotype, 8.3 × 7 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Miss Anne McCord, mp-0000.489.2. © McCord Museum 6.11 Robert Auchmuty Sproule, Nelson’s Monument, Montreal, Notre-Dame Street Looking West, 1830. Watercolour, graphite and arabic gum on paper, 22.4 × 34.7 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m302. © McCord Museum 6.12 Frederick William Lock, Portrait of Mrs. John Samuel McCord, 1851, pastel and crayon on toned paper, 31 × 23.4 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m8413. © McCord Museum 6.13 Anne Ross McCord, A Moss Rose, 1848. Coloured ink and graphite on paper mounted on board, 20.8 × 14.9 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m1117. © McCord Museum 6.14 James Duncan, City of Montreal from the Mountain, before 1854. Watercolour, graphite, and gouache on paper, 45.1 × 63.5 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m315. © McCord Museum

Illustration Credits

6.15 Anonymous, Cavalry Officer in the Montreal Dragoons, c. 1827, c. 1827. Watercolour on paper, 31.7 × 29.1 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m812. © McCord Museum 6.16 John Samuel McCord’s floor plan for a new Montreal courthouse. lac, rg 11, vol. 86, file 13, December 1847, no. 6, Schedule of Accommodation Required for Courthouse (Judge McCord’s Plan) 6.17 James Duncan, Interior View of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, 1852. Watercolour, gouache and graphite on paper mounted on board, 38 × 52 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr S.H. Bethune, m6015. © McCord Museum 6.18 Anonymous, The Protestant Episcopal Parish Church of Montreal. Completed 1821, 1822. Ink on paper – etching, 41 × 22 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m1242. © McCord Museum 6.19 John Samuel McCord, third chancellor of the university, 1862. Full-scale painted photograph, 122 × 91.3 cm. Bishop’s University Art Collection, 1993018. Bishop’s Old Library, Notman photograph: John A. Fraser, artist 6.20 Bishop’s University in 1863. Drawing by W.S. Hatton. Bishop’s University Archives, Sherbrooke, qc 6.21 Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, 1856. Architects: Frank Wills and Thomas Seaton Scott. Print of the project by William Henry Bartlett. Library and Archives Canada, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, accession no. r9266-580, e002291757 6.22 William Notman & Son, Bishop Fulford, painting by William Sawyer, 1853, photographed 1925, 1925. Silver salts on glass – gelatin dry plate process, 25 × 20 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, purchase from Associated Screen News Ltd, view-23430. © McCord Museum 6.23 Robert Auchmuty Sproule, View of the Champ de Mars, Montreal, 1830. Ink and watercolour on paper, 22.8 × 35 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m327. © McCord Museum 6.24 Robert Auchmuty Sproule, Saint-James Street, Montreal, 1830. Watercolour, graphite, and ink on paper mounted on board, 24.1 × 35.3 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m300. © McCord Museum 6.25 Charles Dawson Shanly, Priests Farm, 1847. Graphite on paper, 23.5 × 30.2 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Miss Mary Shanly, m971.171. © McCord Museum 6.26 James Duncan, St. Anns Market, Montreal, 1839, 1839. 10.5 × 17.8 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Capt. P. Godenrath, m15949.18. © McCord Museum 6.27 Gravestone with ornamental urn in Mount Royal Cemetery. Photo by Brian Young, 2013 6.28 Henry William Cotton, Old Montreal, c. 1848. Watercolour and graphite on paper, 26 × 38.4 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m1859. © McCord Museum 6.29 Alexander Henderson, David Ross McCord’s house “Temple Grove,” Côte des Neiges, Montreal, qc, 1872, 1872. Silver salts on paper – albumen process, 11.5 × 19.2 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, mp-0000.139.3. © McCord Museum 6.30 Livernois, Commission to codify the laws of Lower Canada in civil matters, Quebec

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Illustration Credits

City, qc, about 1865, c. 1865. Silver salts, paint (retouching) on paper, 22 × 33 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, mp-0000.1815.2. © McCord Museum 6.31 W.H. Bartlett, Forest Pond, Mount Auburn Cemetery, 1839. Courtesy of Mount Auburn Cemetery 6.32 Sketch of Mount Royal with Cemetery, 1852–55. Collection of the McCord Museum, m9944 6.33 William Notman, Miss Eleanor Elizabeth McCord, Montreal, qc, 1861. Silver salts, Watercolour on paper mounted on card – albumen process, painted photograph, 20 × 15 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of the Estate of Miss Anne McCord, n-0000.3.1. © McCord Museum 7.1 Manoir de Tourville à Ste. Marie de Beauce – Maison natale du Cardinal Taschereau, premier cardinal canadien (Tourville manor in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce – birthplace of Cardinal Taschereau, first Canadian cardinal), c. 1870. Ville de Sainte-Marie, bhp a 022 7.2 Interior of the Taschereau manor in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, 2001. Photo by Yves Laframboise 7.3 Plans for new parish church of Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce (1853) by architect Charles Baillargé. http://www.ville.sainte-marie.qc.ca/patrimoine-religieux/église/plans/ index.htm 7.4 Jean-Thomas Taschereau (1814–1893), J.E. Livernois Ltée, Quebec, c. 1880. banq, p600 s2 d1 p1314 7.5 Eugénie Taschereau, c. 1860. Photo by Livernois et Bienvenu. banq, Fonds J.E. Livernois Ltée, p560 s2 d1 p260 7.6 Jos. W. Michaud, Evening Prayers at a wayside cross in Saint-Isidore de Lauzon/La prière du soir à la croix du chemin à Saint-Isidore, comté de Dorchester, 1946. banq-q, Fonds Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine, Série Office du film du Québec, e6 s7 ss1 p29804 7.7 Planting of the seigneurial maypole. Fonds de la Société historique, Ville de SainteMarie-de-Beauce, sh d011 7.8 Rowboats on the Chaudière River during the nocturnal parade for the Sainte Anne celebrations, Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, 26 July 1947. Fonds Edmond Nolin, Ville de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce 7.9 Taschereau with students from the seminary. Musée de la civilisation, Fonds d’archives du Séminaire de Québec, ph1985-0333 7.10 Detail of page from Alexandre-Elzéar Taschereau’s diary. Musée de l’Amérique française, Alexandre-Elzéar Taschereau, manuscript 34, “Journal des usages,” vol. 2, 10 March 1868 7.11 “Monseigneur Taschereau, le nouvel archevêque de Québec, dans son costume de recteur de l’Université Laval,” L’Opinion publique 2, no. 10 (9 March 1871): 114. banq, per 0-104-mic a209; cote rs 3013, no. de séquence 0002744081 7.12 “Consécration de Monseigneur l’Archevêque de Québec,” L’Opinion publique 2, no. 15 (13 April 1871): 173. banq, cote rs 3024, no. de séquence 0002744070 7.13 Blessing the bells in Sainte-Marie. Ville de Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, sh d010

Illustration Credits

7.14 Laval’s coffin, 1878, photograph by J.E. Livernois, Quebec. banq, Fonds J.E. Livernois, Ltée, p560 s2 p300370-663 7.15 From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “Cardinal Taschereau bestowing the papal benediction upon the people of Quebec, in the square fronting the basilica after receiving the biretta, July 21st,” drawing from a photo by Gilbert Stanley, 7 August 1886. banq p600 s5 pimn29 7.16 “Mrg Thomas-Étienne Hamel, dans sa chambre au séminaire de Québec.” Musée de la civilisation, ph1998-3470 7.17 Pierre-Georges Roy, 1925. banq, p1000 s4 d83 pr62-3 7.18 Honorius Provost of the Seminary of Quebec, genealogist of the Taschereau family and historian of Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce. Fonds de la Bibliothèque Honorius Provost, Ville de Sainte-Marie, c. 1986 7.19 Ludger Ruelland (of Jules-Ernest Livernois), Le Cardinal Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, 1895. Oil on canvas, 54.8 × 40 cm. Permanent collection, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1976-161 7.20 Taschereau commemorative medal. Musée de la civilisation, 1991.2654 7.21 Mortuary card, 12 April 1898. Musée de la civilisation, ph2000-4498 7.22 Exhibition of maquettes for Taschereau monument in the restaurant of the National Assembly, 1922. Musée de la civilisation, ph1987-0848 7.23 Inauguration of the Taschereau statue in the presence of his nephew, Premier LouisAlexandre Taschereau, 17 June 1923. Musée de la civilisation, fonds d’archives du Séminaire de Québec. Photograph: Jessy Bernier – Perspective Photo, ph1987-535 8.1 William Notman, David Ross McCord, Montreal, qc, 1863, 20 June 1863. Silver salts on paper mounted on paper – albumen process, 8.5 × 5.6 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, purchase from Associated Screen News Ltd, i-7532.1. © McCord Museum 8.2 William Notman, Corporal Robert A. McCord, 3rd Victoria Volunteer Rifles, Montreal, qc, 1864, 1864. Silver salts on paper mounted on paper – albumen process, 8.5 × 5.6 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, purchase from Associated Screen News Ltd, i-10734.1. © McCord Museum 8.3 William Notman, Miss Letitia Chambers, Montreal, qc, 1876, 1876. Silver salts on paper mounted on paper – albumen process, 17.8 × 12.7 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, purchase from Associated Screen News Ltd, ii-41897.1. © McCord Museum 8.4 William Notman & Son, McCord family cemetery Lot, Montreal, qc, 1918. Silver salts on paper – gelatin silver process, 20 × 25 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, n-0000.130.1. © McCord Museum 8.5 Detail from McCord tomb. Photo by Brian Young 8.6 Croquet lawn at “Temple Grove,” Côte des Neiges Road, Montreal, qc, 1872. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-0000.33.3. © McCord Museum 8.7 Summer house at “Temple Grove,” Côte des Neiges Road, Montreal, qc, 1872. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-000033.5. © McCord Museum 8.8 Armour and Flags, interior “Temple Grove, D.R. McCord’s house, Montreal, qc, about 1916. Silver salts on glass – gelatin dry plate process, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-0000.2135.2n. © McCord Museum

437

438

Illustration Credits

8.9 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse, 1886. Oil on canvas, 31 × 41 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of Mr David Ross McCord, m733. © McCord Museum 8.10 Teapot, Spode, c. 1822. Collection of the McCord Museum, gift of the Estate of Miss Anne McCord, m9736.1.1-2. ©McCord Museum 8.11 D.R. McCord and wife at “Temple Grove,” Montreal, qc, about 1910. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-0000.2135.7. © McCord Museum 8.12 Wm. Notman & Son, William D. Lighthall, Montreal, qc, 1913, 1913. Silver salts on glass – gelatin dry plate process, 25 x 20 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, purchase from Associated Screen News Ltd, ii-199145. © McCord Museum 8.13 Artifacts and artwork inside D. R. McCord’s house “Temple Grove,” Montreal, qc, about 1916, c. 1916, silver salts on glass – gelatin dry plate process, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-0000.2135.4. © McCord Museum 8.14 Sydney Jack Hayward, French Regime room, McCord National Museum, Joseph House, Montreal, qc, about 1927, 1927. Silver salts on paper (glossy finish) – gelatin silver process, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Collection of the McCord Museum, mp-0000.181.1.2. © McCord Museum 9.1 Taschereau mansion in Sainte-Marie, 2011. Photo by Harfang. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Sainte-Marie3.jpg

Index

absentee seigneurs, 29, 86 Acadians, 36, 38 Advocates Library, 201 agriculture. See seigneurialism Albany, 17, 128, 198, 200, 376n199 Albany Institute, 198, 199, 203, 204 Albany Medical School, 376n199 Albany Rural Cemetery, 249 alcohol, 6, 12, 57, 62–3, 65, 121–3, 132, 137, 176, 209, 305, 308. See also distilling Allan, Hugh, 12 Amelot, Louise-Marguerite, 110 American Revolution, 65, 71, 73 Amicable Society, 62 ancien régime, 3, 80 Anderson, Katharine, 368n25 Angers, François-Réal, 45 Anglicanism. See Church of England Annales de la bonne Sainte Anne de Beaupré, 287 Anticosti, 33 Antrim (Ireland), 55, 120 Archiconfrérie du Très Saint et Immaculé Coeur de Marie, 288 Arnold, Benedict, 65, 68, 73, 74, 264 Arnoldi, Aurelia Félicité, 227 Arnoldi, Daniel, 227, 368n29 Arnoldi, François-Cornelius-Thomas, 227 art, 159–61, 213–14, 242. See also culture; photography Art Association of Montreal, 243 associational life, 123, 127, 133, 191, 204 207, 353n20 Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe-Joseph, 151 Aubry, Jérémie-Marcel, 46 Aubry, Joseph, 284 authority, 4, 5, 69, 119; in the Beauce, 46; from

Conquest, 37–41; through information and communication, 17, 198; forms of, 325–30; in military, 268; as patricians, 260; through Ursulines and churches, 41–4, 227–34, 261– 301. See also law; militia; patricianism; politics; road commissioner Aylwin, Thomas, 64 Baby, François, 75 Badgley, William, 205, 207, 254, 369n54 Baillargé, Abbé François-Xavier, 284 Baillargé, François, 175 Baillargé, Louis-de-Gonzague, 284 Baillargé, William-Duval, 46 Bailleul, Jean, 296 Baker, Blaine, 207 Bank of Montreal, 238 Barbeau, Étienne, 109 Baroness of Longueuil (Marie-AnneCatherine Deschambault), 50 Bartlett, W.H., 213, 251 Baudrillard, Jean, 315 Bayfield, Henry, 196 Bazin, A.G., 51 Bazin, Maire-Louise-Élisabeth, xix, 48, 51, 94, 107, 113 Bazin, Marie, 51 Bazin, P., 51 Bazin, widow, 109 Beattie, John, 76 Beauce, xi, 7, 8, 15, 19, 32, 68, 75, 79, 114, 176, 177, 257, 261, 325; capitalist penetration, 190; pluralism, 175; riding of 172, 366n139; transportation, 81; and worship of Sainte Anne, 106–9. See also Chaudière River; SainteMarie-de-Beauce Beaudry, Joseph-Ubalde, 247

440

Index

Beauharnois, 129, 208 Beaumont, 103 Beauport, 7, 36, 92, 97, 98, 99 Beaupré, 7, 36, 92 Beaurivage (seigneury), 6, 62, 81, 82, 84, 87, 344, 345 Beck, John Broadhead, 199 Beck, Theodoric Romeyn, 199 Bédard, Pierre-Stanislas, 151, 165, 166, 168, 169 Bédarida, François, 4 Bedford (riding), 134, 143 Bédouin, Thomas, 138 Bégin, Louis-Nazaire, 283, 284 Belleau, Narcisse, 277 bells, 109–10, 285–6 Belmont Cemetery, 114 Berczy, Charlotte, 196, 214 Berczy, William von Mol, 320 Berger, John, 20 Bergevin, François, 350 Bethune, John, 205, 212, 254, 369n54 Bibaud, Michel, 290 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, 16 Bingham, Mary, 176 Birnie, Eleanor, 315, 353n10 Birnie, Samuel, 122, 353n10 Bishop’s University, 143, 190, 208, 229–30, 243, 244, 307, 326, 328 Black, Henry, 263 blacks, 101. See also slavery Blackstone, William, 168, 172, 247, 345 Blanchet, Dr Hilarion, 45 Blanchet, François, 151, 168, 170, 171 Bleakley, Josiah, 127 Bloch, Marc, 100 Boer War, 315 Bonneville, François, 176, 366n151 Boston Jubilee of 1851, 199 Boston, 17, 64, 123, 357n1 Botanical Society, 245 Boucher Labruyère de Montarville, Françoise, 154, 155 Bouchette, Joseph, 9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 119 Bourget, Bishop Ignace, 264, 277, 280, 281 Bourret, Alexis, 207 Bowen, Edward, 151 Bradbury, Bettina, 4, 14, 333n35, 348n47 Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles-Étienne, 272, 290 Briand, Bishop Jean-Olivier, 44, 71, 107 Brierley, John, 247 Briggs, Asa, 4

British Association for the Advancement of Science, 199, 204, 368n29 Brock, Isaac, 319, 321 Brothers-in-Law Association, 201, 207, 209 Brothers of Charity, 278 Brothers of the Sacred Heart, 278 Broughton, 9 Brown, Kathleen, 5 Brunet, Louis-Ovide, 283, 302 Bulletin de recherches historiques, 296 Bulletin d’histoire politique, 165 Bunnett, Richard, 149, 160, 249, 314, 318, 320 burial, xi, 4, 14, 18, 95; and memory, 249–55. See also cemeteries Burns, Robert, 135, 212 Bushman, Richard, 194, 333 Byron, Lord, 211 Caldwell, Henry, 78, 87 Caldwell, John, 167 Cambridge University, 17 Canadian history, 271, 272, 283, 316, 317, 321, 323, 324, 329–30. See also historiography; Provost, Honorius; Roy, Pierre-Georges Canadian Scenery Illustrated, 213 Caplin, Millicent Mary, 214 Cap Tourmente, 148 Caribbean, 25, 55, 62, 63 Carleton, Sir Guy, 6, 21, 30, 39, 44, 46, 65, 71, 73, 76, 132 Carling, John Alexander, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 323 Caron, Marie-Joséphine, 159, 162, 267 Caron, René-Édouard, 162, 246, 259, 267 Cartier, George-Étienne, 203, 246, 332 Casault, Louis-Jacques, 276, 280 Casey, James, 3, 12, 68, 194 Catholicism, 4, 18, 38, 40, 42, 43, 49, 100–9, 125, 175, 176, 278, 328; and national identity, 64; parish of Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, 102–5, 370. See also Sainte-Anne chapel; Seminary of Quebec; Taschereau, Elzéar-Alexandre; Ursulines cemeteries, 200, 201, 249–55, 285, 308, 327. See also Mount Royal Cemetery; Protestant Burial Ground Chalifour, Antoine, 93 Chambers, Letitia Caroline, xvii, 253, 304, 305, 316, 318 Chapais, Thomas, 301 charity, 157, 201; and alms, 110; and Arch bishop Taschereau, 288. See also Protestant Orphan Asylum Charle, Christophe, 4

Index

Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier, 196 Charlton, Paul John, 45 Chateau Bellevue, 148 Chaudière River, 8, 9, 28–9, 44, 79, 81, 88, 159, 161, 177, 182, 185 Chaussegros de Léry, Angélique, 51 Chaussegros de Léry, Joseph Gaspard, 31, 50, 51, 80 Chaussegros de Léry, Louis-René, 112 Chauveau, P.J.O., 259 Chipman, Daniel, 247 cholera, 7, 15, 143, 157 Christ Church (Montreal), 13, 18, 102, 190, 197, 227, 231, 238, 244, 249, 302, 304, 307 Christie, Nancy, 18 Christie, Robert, 44 Church of England, 11, 13, 18, 40, 127, 142, 191, 211, 227–34, 260, 326, 328. See also established church Church Society of the Diocese of Montreal, 232 Civic Smallpox Hospital, 304 Civil Code Commission, 18, 135, 203, 246–7, 248, 267 Clark, S.D., 125 Clendinneng, William, 192 Clerics of Saint-Viateur, 278 Clermont (villa), 159 Coates, Colin, 214 Cockburn, James Pattison, 216, 320 Code of Clerical Discipline, 278 Codignola, Luca, 265 Cole, Thomas, 237 collecting, 214, 239, 314–15, 318–20 Collège de Montréal, 70, 126, 196, 272, 320. See also Seminary of Montreal Collège Sainte-Marie, 281 Colley, Linda, 18, 64, 167 Colonial Life Assurance Company, 326 Colonial Office, 40 Committee of Council on Trade and Police, 124 commonplace book, 196, 198 communication, 17, 100, 141 Compagnie des Indes, 38 concession contracts, 90–2. See also law; seigneurialism Confrérie de Sainte-Anne, 106 Confrérie du Scapulaire de l’Immaculée Conception, 288 Congrégation de la Bienheureuse-ViergeMarie-Immaculée, 271, 288 Congregation of Notre Dame, 126 Conquest, 3, 5, 7, 19, 21, 23, 30, 33, 37–41, 80, 93, 147, 165, 181, 291

Consolatrice de Marie, 288 Constantin, Justinian, 37 Constitutional Act of 1791, 78, 125 convent (Sainte-Marie), 102, 157 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 240 Coote, Patrick, 45 Corbin, Alain, 109 corporatism, 123, 200–1, 205, 250, 282 Cortlandt, Edward Van, 302 corvée, 80, 81, 83, 84, 89, 91. See also seigneurialism Côte de Beaupré, 29 Cotton, Henry William, 242 Coucy-le-Castel, 159 Council of Public Instruction, 273, 276 Council of Trent, 42, 265 Couterot, Hubert, 34, 45 Craig Road, 62, 80, 82, 83, 182 Craig, Governor James, 7, 14, 119, 134, 143, 165, 168, 169, 170, 174, 290 Cramahé, Hector Theophilus, 50, 51 Creighton, Donald, 3, 361n58 Crémazie, Octave, 276 Cringan, Thomas, 131 Cross of the Order of Saint-Louis, 72 Crystal Palace, 20, 191, 243 Cugnet, François-Joseph, 39, 41, 80, 85 culture, 16, 17, 18, 123, 136, 151, 157, 161, 195, 213–17, 359n36; material culture, 15, 20, 176, 234–43. See also art; Catholicism; education; English Montreal; legal culture; Protestantism; romanticism Curtis, Bruce, 4, 7, 186, 196, 378n3 Custom of Paris, 26, 28, 30, 40, 89, 111, 116, 124, 135, 145, 202, 359n30 Daine, François, 31 Dalhousie, Countess of (Christian Broun), 240 Dalhousie, Lord. See George Ramsay Darnton, Robert, 4 Darwinism, 190, 260, 327 Daubeny, Charles, 198–9 Davidson, Arthur, 62, 87, 254 Davies, Thomas, 216 Davis, Alexander Jackson, 237 Davis, Leverett, 176 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 4 Dawson, Sir William, 244, 245, 307, 320 Day, Charles Dewey, 229, 247, 248, 255, 369n54, 376n213 Dechêne, Louise, 3, 84 Delâge, Cyrille, 301 Demers, Jérôme, 148, 150, 187, 280

441

442

Index

Demos, John, 4 Dennis, Richard, 19 Deschambault, Joseph Fleury, 46 Deschambault, Marie-Anne-Catherine, 51 Deschambault seigneury, 35 Des Rivières, François-Guillaume, 45 Des Rivières, Marie-Angélique, 241 Des Rivières family, 16, 266, 267 Dessaulles, Jean, 361n55 Dessaulles, Louis-Antoine, 331, 357n1, 361n55, 371n89 diaries, 211, 234, 239, 243, 273–4 Dionne, Amable,162 Dionne, Catherine-Hémédine, 114, 333n42, 360n45 Dionne, Louise-Adèle, 162, 267 distilling, 6, 122–3, 154, 176, 353n10 Dobbs, Maurice, 191 Doctrine of Papal Infallibility (1869), 278 Doige, Thomas, 216 domain, 91–4. See also seigneurialism Dorchester (riding), 78, 166, 169, 170, 172, 258, 366n139 Douglass, David B., 226 Doutre, Joseph, 303 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 224–6, 251 Dublin, 17, 55, 127, 136, 142 Dubord, Jean-Baptiste, 105 Ducharme, Michel, 166 Dulongpré, Louis, 136, 161, 320 Dumont, Fernand, 268 Duncan, James, 194, 213, 214, 217, 243, 302, 320 Duncan, Joseph, 159, 160 Duncan, William, 227 Dunkin, Christopher, 378n3 Dunn, Thomas, 50, 51, 64 Dupré, Catherine, 352 Dupuy, Claude-Thomas, 24, 25, 50 D’Urban, Sir Benjamin, 249 Durham Report, 165, 290 Durocher, Jean-Baptiste, 122, 123 Eastern Townships, 87, 143, 182, 229 education, 32, 102, 105, 150, 327, 366n150; in Sainte-Marie, 186–8. See also Laval University; Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning; Seminary of Quebec; Ursulines Eley, Geoff, 4, 264 Elias, Norbert, 67 elites, 4, 5, 12. See also patricians Ellice, Edward, 87, 129, 366n147 Ellis, Margery, xvi, 56, 61, 120 Ellison, Elizabeth, xvi, 127

Enfants de Marie Immaculée, 288, 385n109 English Montreal, 123, 124, 132, 142–4, 190, 196, 205–13, 218–20, 240, 243, 246, 249, 260, 323, 324. See also associational life; Masons; Mount Royal Cemetery; Protestantism Enlightenment, 69, 77, 195, 271 Ennis, Edward, 181 established church, 5, 40, 327. See also Catholicism; Church of England estates, 19, 77, 97–8, 157–60, 236–43, 262, 294, 309, 325. See also Temple Grove Etchemin River, 35, 83 ethnicity, 143, 165–70, 358n11. See also English Montreal family: naming of children, 70; nepotism, 81. See also culture; headship; marriage; succession Fanon, Frantz, 290 Fecteau, Jean-Marie, 136, 191, 265, 278, 379n13, 390n4 Ferrière, Claude de, 26 feudalism, 3, 7, 40, 178, 362n58. See also seigneurialism Field, Benjamin, 134 Finlay, Hugh, 77 fire, 62, 123–4, 133 Fleming, William, 131 Fleury (seigneury), 33, 86, 365n122 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Ignace, 25, 53 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Joseph de, 25, 33, 34, 35, 352 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Louise, 34 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Louise-Thérèse, 25, 28, 49 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Marie, 343n6, 380n35 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Marie-Claire, ix, xi, xviii, 7, 8, 15, 16, 21, 23–4, 67, 93; authority, 47, 53–4; burial, 113; and Church, 37, 102, 104, 105, 107–9, 340n106; headship, 93, 111; marriage, 25–7; raising children, 30–2; seigneurial leadership, 32, 35–7, 51, 53, 181; slave-holding, 34; succession, 33–5; Ursulines, 32, 41–4, 53; war and Conquest, 30–2, 37–41; widowhood, 29 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Marie-Thomas, 30, 49, 53 Fleury de la Gorgendière family, 23, 26, 33, 155, 163 Fleury Deschambault, Jacques-Alexis, 34 Fleury Deschambault, Jeanne-Charlotte, 34 Fleury d’Eschambault, Joseph, 34

Index

Fleury d’Eschambault, Marie-Anne, 34 Fondation Saint-Denys, 272 forges de Saint-Maurice, 27 Fortier, Dr Marie-Richard-AlphonseTancrède, 45 Fortier, Louise, 51 Fortier, Marie-Anne, 51 Fortier, Marie-Thérèse (widow Bazin), 51 Fortier, Michael, 51 Fortier, Richard-Achille, 118, 185 Frampton (Township), 86, 87 Franquet, Louis, 28 Fraser, Alexander, 44, 62, 75, 81, 87, 125 Fraser, John A., 230 Fraser, Malcolm, 44, 61–2, 125, 133 French Revolution, 142, 172 Frères de Saint-Vincent de Paul, 278 Frobisher, Benjamin, 124, 354n23 Frobisher, Joseph, 124 Frothingham, John, 252 Frothingham, Louisa, 12, 248 Fulford, Francis, 231, 233, 234, 254, 255 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 4 Fyson, Donald, 3, 76, 133, 263 Gadoury, Lorraine, 25, 42 Gale, Samuel, 142 Gallichan, Gilles, 362n73 Gamelin, Émilie, 127 Garneau, François-Xavier, 276, 290 Garneau, Jean-Philippe, 3 Garrison Library, 152 Gaspé, 60, 63, 125, 341 Gaume, Jean-Joseph, 284 Gauvreau, Michael, 18, 265 Gavazzi Riots (1853), 260 Geertz, Clifford, 195 gender, 7, 14, 32, 42–3, 47, 197, 296; and religion, 8–9; and willing, 138–9; and writing history, 15, 23, 334. See also masculinity; women generation, 12, 20, 21, 48, 67, 141, 327 Gerard, Samuel, 227 Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, 311 Gibb, Benaiah, 231 Gibbons, James, 383n66 Giddens, Anthony, 5, 75 Gilbert, Henrietta Maria, xvi, 61, 64 Gillis, John, 19 Glapion, Augustin-Louis, 50, 51 Goody, Jack, 14 Gould, Charles Henry, 323 Gramsci, Antonio, 258

Grand Séminaire, 147, 152, 271. See also Seminary of Quebec Grand Trunk Railway, 263 grand voyer. See road commissioner Grant, David Alexander, 51 Grant, William, 21, 34, 46, 47, 50, 51, 64, 71, 78, 99, 129 Gravel, Elphège, 293 Gray, John, 374n165 Great Association of Workers, 279 Greenwood, Murray, 166 Green-Wood Cemetery, 226, 249 Greer, Allan, 3, 39, 62, 67 Grenier, Benoît, 3 Grey Nuns, 127, 320 Griffin, Mary, 128, 130, 131 Griffin, Robert, 128 Griffintown, 13, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 191, 192, 193. See also Nazareth Fief Grosse Île, 263, 278, 301 Guéranger, Dom Prosper-Louis-Pascal, 271 Gugy, Bartholomew Conrad Augustus, 227 Guibord Affair, 250, 259 Guy, Louis, 133, 354n23 Guyart, Marie, dite Marie de l’Incarnation, 41 Habermas, Jürgen, 133 Hale, Elizabeth, 214 Hale, Horatio, 320 Hall, Catherine, 4 Hamel, Théophile, 161, 296 Hamel, Thomas-Étienne, 291, 294, 295, 329 Hamilton, Henry, 124 Hanák, Péter, 195 Hanawalt, Barbara, 14 Hanna, David, 129 Hanna, Margaret, xvi, 56, 61, 120, 127 Hanna, William, 57 Hardy, René, 265, 379n13 Hare, John, 166 Harris, R. Cole, 35, 84 Harrison, J.F.C., 3 Hart, Ezekiel, 168, 362n69 Harvard University, 376n199 Harvey, David, 4, 20 Hay, John, 60 headship, 23, 44–7, 71, 111, 209 Hébert, Henri, 299 Hecker, Eberhard-Emil, 45 Heriot, George, 80, 159, 161, 216 Herschel, John, 204, 243 Hertel de Rouville, Jean-Baptiste-Melchior, 50, 51

443

444

Index

Hertel de Rouville, René-Ovide, 41, 60 Hertel de Rouville family, 220 Hillsborough, Earl of (Wills Hill, 1st Marquess of Downshire), 40 Hind, William G.R., 320 historiography 4, 133, 165–6, 191, 194–5, 165–6, 237, 240, 264–5, 290, 325, 331n1, 355n61, 361n58, 378n3. See also Canadian history; memory Holmes, A.F., 212 Holmes, John, 150, 271, 280 honours and ceremonies, 18, 67, 95, 111, 284, 291–4, 309 Hope, Thomas, 238, 239, 240 Horan, Edward John, 357n1 Horguelin, Christophe, 40 Horner, Dan, 191 Horowitz, Morton, 343 House of Correction, 134, 136 House of Industry, 136, 201 Howard, Lady Anne, 41 Hubert, Ollivier, 265 Hudson Valley, 17, 223, 225, 237 Hudson’s Bay Company, 10, 204 identity, 18, 78, 97, 118–19, 143, 167–70; as British, 205–13. See also Catholicism; English Montreal; ethnicity; Protestantism illegitimacy, 119, 155, 268, 359n28, 359n30, 361n52 Immaculate Conception, 14, 259, 271, 288. See also Marianism industrialization, 129–31, 177, 191, 290–1 Institut canadien de Montréal, 223, 284 Institut canadien de Québec, 276 institutions, 4, 136, 183, 191, 205–9, 326, 327; of Protestants, 66. See also Catholicism; Church of England; Laval University; Mount Royal Cemetery; Protestant Orphan Asylum; seigneurialism; Seminary of Quebec; Ursulines Institut Vattemare, 159 intermarriage, 64, 100 International Committee of Historical Sciences, 4 internationalism, 17, 26, 121, 262, 327. See also Albany; Caribbean; Hudson Valley; Oxford; Rome Ireland, 17, 69, 125, 136 Irish Catholic, 7, 60, 87, 92, 191, 259, 263, 278– 80 Irish Rebellion of 1798, 69, 132

Jenkins, George, 218 Jesuit College, 147 Jesuit Estates question, 76, 147 Jesuits, 10, 31, 41, 106, 196, 320 Jews, 6, 100, 144, 168 Jobin, André, 133 Jolliet: family, 38; seigneury, 86, 104, 116, 118, 181, 266 Jolliet, Claire, 34, 336 Jolliet, Louis, 34 Juchereau Duchesnay, Antoine, 34, 77, 97, 111, 125, 339n99, 352n140 Juchereau Duchesnay, Antoine-Louis, 112, 117 Juchereau Duchesnay, Catherine-Henriette, 362n71 Juchereau Duchesnay, Henri-Elzéar, 45, 162 Juchereau Duchesnay, Louise-Françoise, xix, 16, 34, 95, 96, 99, 110, 116–18, 147, 154, 352n140, 366n151 Justinian Road, 35, 76, 83, 86, 336 Keats, John, 240, 244 Kemneur, Jean, 179 Kempt, Sir James, 174, 263 Kennebec Road, 83 Kerr, James, 159 King, George, 121, 122, 123 Knights of Labor, 278–80 L’Abeille, 272, 380n35 Lachine Canal, 6, 13, 130, 131, 133, 141, 190 Lachine Riots of 1842, 259 Lacordaire, Henri-Dominique, 288 Ladies’ Benevolent Society, 201, 208, 244, 304, 376n218 Lafontaine, Louis-Hippolyte, 202 Lamonde, Yvan, 331n1, 378n3 Landau, Norma, 343 landed property, 3, 68, 327, 328. See also seigneurialism; estates Landry, Joseph, 99 landscape 19, 148, 214, 224–6 Langan, Patrick, 123, 127, 128 La Prairie, 135 Lartigue, Jean-Jacques, 187 Laslett, Peter, 5 Laurier, Wilfrid, 294, 329 Laurin, Camille, 361n58 Lauzon, 9, 86, 87, 176, 366n150 Laval, Mgr François, 19, 20, 263, 264, 291, 296 Laval Normal School of Quebec, 283 Laval University, 10, 147, 258, 259, 273, 291, 294, 301, 302

Index

law, 3, 13, 18, 38, 39, 40–1, 63, 76, 132–5, 201–3, 207–8, 284, 327, 343, 347; and censitaires and local justice, 125, 179, 183–4; and McCords, 246–7. See also Custom of Paris; legal culture; magistrature; notaries; succession; Supreme Court of Canada Leacock, Stephen, 130 Leblanc, Cassidy and Leblanc, 303 Le Canadien, 119, 142, 143, 151, 165, 168–70, 171 Lefebvre-Teillard, Anne, 67 legal culture, 124–5, 126, 138–9 Légaré, Joseph, 196 Legislative Assembly, 7, 134, 142, 166, 170 Legislative Council, xi, 7, 68, 75, 132, 142, 154, 166, 173 Legislative Library, 151 Leney, William Satchwell, 320 Lessard, François, 73 Lester, Robert, 123 Lewis, Brian, 4 Lewis, George M., xi, 254, 255 libraries, 28, 65, 136, 148, 152, 154, 157, 159, 167, 283, 348n94, 357n1 Lighthall, W.D., 308, 317–18, 320, 323 Lindsay, Errol Boyd, 163 Lindsay, William, 360n48 Linière (seigneury), 104, 116, 118 Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, 16, 150, 152, 173, 196, 203, 204, 240, 276, 284 Livernois studio, 296 Locke, John, 362n73 lods et ventes, 91. See also seigneurialism Logan, William Edmond, 245 Lotbinière, 72, 350 Loudon, J.C., 237, 239 Louisbourg, 27, 59 Lyell, Charles, 198, 204 Lynch, John Joseph, 383n66 Macaulay, Robert, 121 McCord, Anne, xvii, 16, 253, 303, 304, 310 McCord, David Ross, ix, xvii, 12, 14, 15, 17, 208, 253, 254, 257, 304, 320; collecting, 314–15, 318–20, 321; death and burial, 138, 303, 307, 308; decline, 304–5; education and law practice, 303; fetish with Wolfe and war, 308, 311, 318; headship, 303–4; history and memory, 19, 308–13, 315; McCord Museum, 321–4; marriage, 304; modernism, 307–8, 318; photography and art, 20, 149, 312–13; religion, 307; succession, 303, 321; with W.D. Lighthall, 317–18. See also masculinity; Mount Royal Cemetery; English Montreal

McCord, Eleanor, xi, xvii, 253, 254–5 McCord, Gertrude, 209 McCord, Jane, xvi, 62, 81, 87, 254 McCord, Jane Catherine, xvii, 253, 304, 310 McCord, John (1711–1793), ix, xvi, 6, 10, 17, 21, 77, 253, 254; in American Revolution, 65–6; burial, 309; family, 60–2; Ireland, 55–60; land, 341; library, 65; as merchant, 62–3; in politics, 39, 63–5, 125; and Protestantism, 120 McCord, John Davidson, xvii, 253, 302, 303 McCord, John Jr (1747–1822), xvi, 66, 77, 353n16 McCord, John Samuel, ix, xvi, 6, 17, 18, 20, 128, 202, 230, 253, 310; amateur science, 197, 198, 203–5, 243–5; art and romanticism, 159, 160, 211–13; burial and memory, 249–55, 309; charity, 201; in Church of England, 227–34; civic space, 222–34; education, 195–6, 302; estate, 234–43, 311; and family decline, 190, 243–9, 259–60, 328; headship, 139, 144, 209; and health of, 208–9, 228; high culture, 213– 17, 195; identity and English Montreal, 209– 13, 123; and institutions, 205–9; and law, 201–3, 207–8; marriage, 234, 236; masculinity and Masons, 205–8, 218–22; Masons, 205–7; material life, 234–8, 314, 328; militia, 218–21. See also Bishop’s University; Mount Royal Cemetery; Nazareth Fief; Ross, Anne; Scott, Walter; Temple Grove McCord, Louise Elizabeth, 209 McCord, Margaret, xvi McCord, Margery, xvi, 61, 310 McCord, Mary, xvi, 100, 127, 129, 139, 310 McCord, Robert A., xvii, 253, 303–4, 305, 371n109 McCord, Thomas (1750–1824), ix, xvi, 6, 10–11, 13, 17, 18, 79, 120, 137, 161, 253, 254; alcohol businesses, 62, 121–3; culture, 136, 368n23; death and burial, 136, 308, 309; education of children, 142, 195, 197; fire protection, 123–5, 133; international connections and Ireland, 55, 56, 121, 127–9; landed, 66, 68, 125–32, 141, 366n147; legal culture and magistrature, 69, 82, 86, 126, 127, 132–5, 171, 172, 218, 356n74; marriages, 127–9; and Masons, 120, 121; politics, 66, 77, 132, 134; Protestantism, 100, 120; with urban poor, 136; wills, 111, 112, 136–9. See also English Montreal; Nazareth Fief McCord, Thomas (1828–1886), 135, 246, 247, 254, 340 McCord, William King, xvi, 128, 138, 139, 209, 210, 227, 253, 309, 349, 371n109 McCord family: and Anglican Church, 66,

445

446

Index

102, 127, 209, 227–34; authority, 69, 191, 232– 4; belief in corporatism, 200–1, 205–6; and Canadian history, 309, 315, 330; charity, 201; compared to Taschereaus, 257–60; death and burial, 14, 136, 309; eclipsed in authority, 243–9, 259–60, 304–5, 330; education, 70, 327; estate, 234–43; high culture, 213–17, 312– 13; and institutions, 133; as landed, 125–32; and law, 132–5, 201–3, 243–9, 349; and libraries, 120, 136; in memory, 206–7, 249–53, 329; as merchants and Masons, 120, 205–7, 303; and militia, 218–21, 303; willing and succession, 138–9, 303, 321. See also alcohol; collecting; English Montreal; McCord Museum; Protestant Orphan Asylum; Temple Grove; women McCord Museum, 16, 20, 214, 304, 319, 330 McGill, James, 55, 123, 124, 267, 354n23, 369n54 McGill, Peter, 255 McGill Department of History, 3 McGill University, 13, 20, 229, 237, 240, 243, 244, 255, 257, 281, 302, 307, 323–4, 330 McKay, Ian, 4 McKeon, Michael, 14 McPherson Le Moine, James, 212 magistrature, 76, 132–5. See also law Maitland, Edward, 254 Maitland, Frederick William, 138 Mann, Bruce, 355n61 Mann, Thomas, 325 manor houses. See estates Mansfield, Chief Justice William, 38 Marcheteau, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 105 Marianism, 42, 259, 275, 288–9, 385n105, 385n109, 385n110 Marie de l’Incarnation. See Guyart, Marie Marin de La Malque (Choiseul), 25 Marist Brothers, 278 marriage, xi, 7, 25–7, 47–54, 56, 64, 100; mixed marriages, 163, 360n48 marriage contracts, 47, 49, 64, 97, 339n99, 352n138. See also law; notaries Marshall, Peter, 38 Martel, Joseph, 185 masculinity, 42–3, 93, 205–13, 218–21, 268, 289, 308, 315, 317–18, 330, 351; and collecting, 314– 15, 318–20, 321, 351n129. See also Brothers-inLaw Association; gender; militia Masons, 55, 61, 63, 120, 121, 123, 139, 190, 205–7, 307 Mechanics’ Institute, 222 Mégantic (Township), 86 memory, 23, 206–7, 214, 249, 290–1, 308–13

Mercantile Library, 222 Merchants Lodge, 207 Metcalf, Thomas, 194 Meteorological Society of Great Britain, 198, 204 militia, 5, 72, 168, 170–1, 183–4, 218–22, 268, 303, 365n133, 371n109, 371n110 Miller, Alex, 176 mills, 35, 38, 86, 126, 175, 181. See also seigneurialism Mingan, 33, 336 Miray, Louis, 89, 104 modernity, 20, 307–8, 325–6 Moffatt, George, 205, 208, 231, 254, 369n54 Moffatt, Sophia, 208 Molson, John, 12, 205 Molson, John Henry Robinson, 248 Mondelet, Jean-Marie, 134 Monk, James, 124 Monk, Judge Samuel, 254 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de, 41, 143, 173, 264, 319 Montreal, 19; as capitalist, 305; demography, 11, 123–4, 260; fires, 123; industrialization, 129–31; justice, 132–5; poverty, 135; site of, 10, 13 Montreal Bar Association, 202 Montreal Business History Group, 191 Montreal Distilling Company, 122, 128 Montreal Dragoons, 219 Montreal Fire Club, 123, 133, 207 Montreal General Hospital, 127, 197, 208 Montreal History Group, 4 Montreal Horticultural Society, 159, 208, 222, 223–4, 229, 243, 245 Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society, 236, 248 Montreal Library, 127 Montreal Sculpture and General Marble and Granite Works, 388n16 Montreal Volunteer Cavalry, 207 monument to Wolfe and Montcalm, 173–4 Morgan, Cecilia, xiv, 14 Morin, Augustin-Norbert, 159 Morris, Robert J., 3, 4, 191 Mount Auburn Cemetery, 200, 226, 249, 251 Mount Hermon Cemetery, 225, 226 Mount Royal, 194, 198, 216, 225, 252, 318 Mount Royal Cemetery, xi, 13, 20, 192, 201, 209, 210, 226–7, 240, 250–5, 306, 307, 308, 324 Munn, Alexander, 167 Murray, James Governor, 6, 35, 39, 41, 44, 62, 64, 65, 76 museums, 152. See also McCord Museum

Index

Nadeau, François, 73 Napoleonic Wars, 203 Natives, 35, 36, 38, 92, 101, 106, 317, 318 Natural History Society of Montreal, 195, 196, 200, 203, 204, 208, 212, 222, 229, 243, 244, 245, 302, 307, 326, 369n54 Nazareth Fief, 6, 126–32, 139, 190–1, 192, 194, 201, 209, 216, 241, 302 Nelles, H.V., 173 Nelson, Wolfred, 389n38 Nelson’s Column, 210, 374n160 Nelson Township, 115 New Brunswick Schools Question, 259 New England, 17, 29, 64 New France, 3, 17, 27, 29, 33, 38, 64, 216 Newman, John Henry, 288 Newry (Ireland), 55, 60 New York State Lunatic Asylum, 199 Ninety-Two Resolutions, 258 North Shore Railway, 264 notaries, 49–50, 77, 89–91, 93, 96, 112, 124, 134, 138, 179, 340. See also Walsh, John Notman, William, 15 Notre-Dame Basilica, 10, 11 Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, 244, 378n224 Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal, 317 O’Brien, Mgr Ablegate, 293 O’Hara, Felix, 60, 341 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 225 Olson, Sherry, 129, 191 Orange Order, 55 Ordre de Saint-Louis, 50, 72 Orren, Karen, 100 Ostell, John, 237 Ouellet, Fernand, 47, 125, 366n147 Ouimet, P.L., 51 Oxford, 17, 199, 283, 307 Oxford Museum, 321 Panet, Barolet, 51 Panet, Bernard-Claude, 155, 164, 187, 345 Panet, Jean-Antoine, 155, 170, 362n76 Panet, Jean-Claude, 49, 51 Panet, Louis, 155 Panet, Louise-Rose, 164, 361n52 Panet, Marie, xix, 16, 114, 141, 155–7, 164, 187, 258, 345n26, 387n132 Panet, Marie-Louise, 359n32 Panet, Philippe, 155, 161 Papal Syllabus of 1864, 282

Papineau, Denis-Benjamin, 221 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 163, 165, 221, 338n82, 371n89, 375n177 Parent, Étienne, 29, 36, 72 Parti canadien, 166, 168 patriarchy, 12, 14, 26. See also masculinity patricianism, 4, 5, 20, 29, 68, 69, 97, 141–5, 194–5, 260, 330, 361n52 Patriotes, 223 patronage, 68, 73, 86, 166, 167 Peabody Museum, 321 Peachey, James, 159 Père Lachaise Cemetery, 226 Perrault, Joseph-François, 159 Perrault, Julie, 163, 360n46 Perrault, Marie-Louise, 163, 360n46 Perrault, Olivier, 45, 50, 116, 118, 167, 178, 187, 188, 218, 352n142, 359n36, 363n93 Peterloo, 327 Peterson, William, 323 Petit Séminaire, 147. See also Seminary of Quebec Peuvret, Marie-Catherine, 32 Philippon, Joseph-Antoine, 155, 181, 185, 188, 365n133 photography, 141, 263, 296 Pierson, Joseph, 134, 356n68 Pilkington, Edward, 176 Plains of Abraham, 19, 30, 41, 60, 308, 311, 319 Plessis, Joseph-Octave, 100, 153, 349 Pointe-Claire, 135 Pointe-Lévy (Lévis), 35, 72, 83, 84, 91, 103, 182 politics, 40, 63–6, 133, 143, 165–70 Pollock, Frederick, 136 Poovey, Mary, 195, 197 Pope, Joseph, 45 popular resistance, 72, 73, 75, 135, 151, 176, 184, 260, 278–80, 286; in the Beauce, 268; to church construction, 104; to corvées, 84–6; to militia conscription, 171; in Quebec City, 278–80 Pothier, Robert-Joseph, 247, 284 Pozer, William, 129 Presbyterianism, 6, 13, 55, 66, 127 Pressar, Colomban-Sébastien, 50, 51 Prevost, Sir George, 143, 170, 171 Proclamation of 1763, 38 professionalization, 90. See also law Proteau, Marie-Josephte, 36 Protestant Burial Ground, 13, 136, 137, 201, 225, 249, 250, 254 Protestant Home for Friendless Women, 304 Protestantism, 64, 65, 120, 191, 281. See also

447

448

Index

Church of England; English Montreal; Masons; Mount Royal Cemetery; Presbyterianism; Protestant Orphan Asylum Protestant Orphan Asylum, 15, 201, 205, 208, 225, 231, 236, 248, 304, 326, 376n218 Provincial Grand Lodge, 207 provisioning, 21, 59, 60 Provost, Angélique, 99 Provost, Honorius, 25, 294, 295 Public Archives of Canada, 319 public health, 250, 285, 304, 322 Pyke, George, 227, 356n74 Quarante Heures, 286, 301 Quebec Act, 13, 21, 38, 47, 68, 71, 111, 124, 136, 327, 329 Quebec Agricultural Society, 77, 78, 87, 100, 148, 195 Quebec City, 19, 64, 325; demography, 8, 11, 263; economy, 263; and fire, 353n16; institutions, 60–1; and law, 142; monuments, 173; politics, 259; taverns, 63 Quebec Emigrants’ Society, 195 Quebec Fire Society, 353n16 Quebec Garrison Library, 173 Quebec Ladies’ Bazaar, 214 Quebec Mercury, 167 Quebec Ship Labourers’ Benevolent Society, 278–80 Quebec Studio Club, 214 Queen’s College (Kingston), 281 Ramsay, George, 172, 174 Rasco’s Hotel, 206 Rawls, John, 12 Raymond, Marie-Geneviève, 32 Reade, John, 318 Rebellion Losses Bill of 1849, 208 Rebellions of 1837–38, 5, 203, 221, 227 Recherche sur la médecine, ou l’application de la chimie à la médecine, 168 Redpath, John, 252 Redpath Museum, 307 Reid, James, 212 Reid, John, 60, 62 Reid, Robert, 308 Reny, Jean-Joseph, 179 Repton, Humphry, 216 Rerum Novarum (1891), 259, 278 Richmond, Duke of (Charles Lennox), 14, 172, 363n93 Riel, Louis, 259

Road Act (1796), 80, 85, 89, 135, 182 road commissioner (grand voyer), xi, 41, 68, 79–86, 154 Robertson, William, 368n29 Robitaille, Thérèse, 176 Roisin, Maxime, 301 Rolland, Jean-Roch, 142 romanticism, 159–60, 211–12, 240–2 Rome, 17, 262, 271, 273, 283 Ross, Anne, xvii, 6, 15, 17, 20, 141, 143, 208, 211, 213–15, 218, 234, 235, 236, 240, 248, 253, 314, 328, 353n10 Ross, Arthur Cecil, 371n110 Ross, David, 6, 143, 204, 234, 371n110 Ross, David Alexander, 372n110 Ross, Eliza, 214 Ross, Jane Davidson, 208, 248 Ross, John, 371n110 Ross, Robert (historian), 19, 237 Ross, Thomas, 371n110 Ross family, 62 Rousseau, Louis, 264 Routh, Sir Randolph Isham, 45, 163, 164 Roy, Pierre-Georges, 14, 23, 25, 156, 294, 295, 296, 301, 329 Royal Canadian Volunteers, 77, 154 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 280 Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, 143, 150, 173, 185, 187, 188, 290, 366n150 Royal Montreal Cavalry, 220 Royal Society, 245 Rudin, Ronald, 378n3, 387n134 Ruelland, Ludger, 296 Rusk, Mary, 134 Ruskin, John, 321, 327 Ryan, Mary, 4, 12, 15 Ryan, William F., 265 Ryland, Herman, 362n64 Said, Edward, 5, 12, 279, 290, 314 Saint-Anselme, 103 Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly, 103 Saint-Croix (Lotbinière), 152 Sainte Anne, 15, 68, 286, 287, 350n116 Sainte-Anne (chapel), 100, 106–9, 150, 286, 296 Sainte-Anne Church (Montreal), 13, 192 Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, 106, 287 Sainte-Anne-de-la Pocatière, 162 Sainte-Anne festival, 270 Sainte-Anne’s Market, 133, 190, 238

Index

Sainte-Anne suburb, 191, 222. See also Griffintown Sainte-Claire (parish), 103 Saint-Elzéar (Beauce), 29, 103, 179 Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, 9, 29, 32, 33, 99, 103, 148, 161, 278, 286, 287; in American Revolution, 73, 75; demography, 86, 91, 174–5; illegitimacy, 359n28; militia, 171; religious life, 37, 100, 102–5, 106–9, 175, 262, 286, 287; seigneury, 44, 71, 79; and Taschereaus, 185, 285; transportation, 79, 81–3, 87. See also Beauce; Chaudière River; education Saint-François (Beauceville), 72, 83, 84, 103, 171, 175, 181, 343 Saint-Gabriel domain, 126, 131, 320 Saint-Gilles. See Beaurivage Saint-Henri (Bellechasse), 35, 72, 83, 84, 103 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of Quebec, 294 Saint-Joseph (seigneury), 9, 29, 36, 37, 44, 53, 72, 73, 75, 79, 81, 83, 86, 103, 116, 171, 175, 181, 185, 278, 343n6 Saint-Nicholas (seigneury), 81, 103 Saint-Patrice de Beaurivage, 87, 278 Saint-Sylvestre (Beauce), 87, 103, 278 Salaberry, Charles de, 319 Salaberry family, 220 Santo Domingo, 25, 30 Sarasin, Philipp, 317 Schama, Simon, 7, 20, 308 School Law of 1801, 187 science, 203–5, 275, 276 Scott, Alexander Walker, 376n190 Scott, Harriet, 376n190 Scott, Helena, 376n190 Scott, Joan, 4 Scott, Walter, 15, 144, 211–13, 229, 239, 250, 312, 321, 327 Secord, Anne, 195 Secord, Laura, 319 Seifert, Gustave, 298 Seigneurial Commission of 1843, 201 seigneurialism, 3, 5, 7, 8, 28–9, 32, 35, 37, 40, 86–93, 128, 131–2, 165, 176, 338n82; in the Beauce, 174–82; as capitalist enterprises, 354n28; and English merchants, 125–6; in succession, 111–18. See also Nazareth Fief Séminaire de Nicolet, 281, 383n72 Seminary of Montreal, 10, 126, 131–2 Seminary of Quebec, 10, 11, 31, 32, 50, 71, 77, 94, 107, 209, 257, 263, 265, 270, 290, 325; with British authorities, 40, 41; classical education, 148–52; and history of Quebec, 299; in-

ternationalism, 357n1; with Laval University, 273, 280, 285; marketing of archbishop, 291, 299, 329; seigneuries, 148; in training of Taschereaus, 272 Seminary of St Sulpice. See Seminary of Montreal servants, 98–9, 136. See also slavery Sewell, Jonathan, 68, 77, 119, 150, 151, 167, 169, 170 Sewell, William (historian), 4, 12 Shay’s Rebellion, 1786–87, 75 Silliman, Benjamin Jr, 199 Simard, Jean-Baptiste, 99 Simcoe, Elizabeth Posthuma, 213 Sisters of Hôtel-Dieu, 126, 128, 131 Skakel, Alexander, 167, 245 slavery, xi, 5, 16, 28, 33, 34, 38, 61, 99, 136, 159 Slevin, William, 88, 91 Smillie, James, 226 Smith, Adam, 157, 168, 239 Smith, Bonnie, 5, 14 Smith, Henrietta, 151 Smithsonian, 321 Smyth, Hervey, 320 Société Charitable des Dames catholiques de Québec, 157 Société d’Agriculture de la Nouvelle Beauce, 181 Société d’histoire de Québec, 294 Society to Prevent Fires, 62 Solomons, Jesse, 139 Solomons, Lucius Levy, 61, 65, 122 Solomons, Sarah, xvi, 61, 122, 127, 136, 137, 253, 308, 310 Solomons family, 6 South Kensington Museum, 321 Spark, Alexander, 196 Special Council, 221 spinsterhood, 16. See also women Spivak, Gavatri Chakravorty, 14 Sprigings, Richard, 224 St Andrew’s Society, 60, 61, 63, 123, 201 Stewart, Susan, 237 St Gabriel’s Church, 320 Stone, Sarah, 376n190 St Patrick’s Masonic Lodge, 207 St Patrick’s Society, 55, 60, 62, 207, 279 St Paul’s Masonic Lodge, 303, 307 St Peter’s Masonic Lodge, 206 Stuart, James, 151, 167 Stuart, Pamela, 19 Styles, Joshua, 92, 176

449

450

Index

succession, xi, 33–4, 39, 50, 51, 53, 111–18, 144, 266 Sullivan’s Coffee House, 124 Sulpicians, 236, 320. See also Seminary of Montreal Sun Life, 326 Supreme Court of Canada, 16, 19, 162, 257, 265, 267, 328, 333 surveyors, 185 Suzor-Coté, Marc-Aurèle de Foy, 299 Sweeny, Robert, 357n1 Sweetsburg, 208, 227 Sydenham, Governor. See Thomson, Charles Edward Poulett Syllabus of Errors (1864), 259, 327 Sylvain, Philippe, 281 Sylvie, Marie (slave), 99 Taché, Alexandre-Antonin, 293 Taché, Joseph-Charles, 276, 357n4 Taché, Louis-H., 45 Talbot, Edward Allan, 173 Talon, Jean, 106 Taschereau, Adéläide-Éléonore, 45 Taschereau, Adèle, 45, 46 Taschereau, Agnes, 45, 114, 162 Taschereau, Alice, 46 Taschereau, Amélie, 360n47 Taschereau, Anne-Amédine, 45 Taschereau, Antoine-Charles, xix, 114, 115, 116, 118,172, 183, 258, 268, 360n44, 365n133, 365n135, 366n139 Taschereau, Catherine-Zoé, 45 Taschereau, Célanire, 45 Taschereau, Charles-Antoine, xviii, 30, 32, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 95, 97, 113, 265, 348n90 Taschereau, Charles-Philippe, 271 Taschereau, Charlotte, xviii, 24, 30, 34, 45, 113 Taschereau, Charlotte-Claire (1737–1819), xviii, 45, 49, 53, 94, 95, 113 Taschereau, Charlotte-Claire (d. 1788), 113 Taschereau, Christophe, 24 Taschereau, Claire, 45, 46, 155, 185 Taschereau, Claire-Caroline, xix, 45, 114, 162 Taschereau, Elisa, 45 Taschereau, Élisabeth-Suzanne, xix, 45, 114, 162 Taschereau, Elzéar-Alexandre, ix, xix, 8, 10, 17, 20, 28, 114, 162, 257, 258–60, 279, 285, 291; authority in seminary, 272, 273, 275, 278; burial, 378n224; Catholic identity, 259, 275, 288– 9; charity, 288; childhood and education, 148, 188, 270–1, 285, 329, 357n1; as communicator, 263, 278, 293, 295–6; as diarist, 273–4;

and family, 164; history of Canada, 263, 272, 290–1; honours and ceremony, 18, 291–4, 328; international network, 262, 380n25; at Laval University, 275, 280–5; modernity, 264, 325; monument to, 296, 297, 300, 301, 324, 330; ordination of, 272; politics and anglophilism, 259, 263; popular culture, Irish, and labour movement, 278–80, 285, 286; portrait of, 161; and women, 14, 42, 259, 288–9. See also Marianism; Seminary of Quebec; Ursulines Taschereau, Eugène-Arthur, 276 Taschereau, Eugénie, 114, 340 Taschereau, Eulalie-Joseph, 113 Taschereau, Gabriel-Elzéar (1745–1809), ix, xi, xviii, xix, 7, 16, 29, 34, 67, 113, 142; Catholicism, 44, 100–10; death of, 112, 113; family, 14, 49, 53, 81, 93–100, 154, 195, 360n44; landed, 68, 86–94, 174, 181, 328, 347n71, 364n108; marriage and headship, 48–53, 147; politics, 30, 46, 68, 71–5, 78, 97, 125, 167, 169, 172, 175; regional authority and road commissioner, 46, 68, 75–86, 135, 182, 183; willing and succession, 95, 111–18, 136, 154, 165, 257, 265–6. See also Quebec Act; seigneurialism Taschereau, Gabriel-Elzéar, Abbé (1773–1822), xix, 44, 77, 94, 105, 113, 115, 117, 118, 152–3, 185 Taschereau, George-Louis, xix, 97, 113, 116, 167, 265, 268, 360n44, 365n135 Taschereau, Gustave-Olivier, 179, 268, 365n122 Taschereau, Hélène, 45 Taschereau, Hélène-Adèle, 45 Taschereau, Henri-Elzéar, 19, 172, 267, 333n42, 359n32 Taschereau, Henri-Thomas, 382n50 Taschereau, Henry-Victor-Antoine, 366n136 Taschereau, Jean-Baptiste-Xavier, 113 Taschereau, Jean-Thomas Jr (1814–1893), xix, 19, 114, 159, 162, 266, 267, 271, 274, 282, 284, 360n45, 366n137, 382n50 Taschereau, Jean-Thomas, Sr (1778–1832), ix, xi, xix, 7, 14, 16, 116, 177, 196, 265; burial, 113; culture and identity, 143, 151–2; education, 186–8; family and illegitimacy, 163, 164, 360n44; headship, 115–19, 144, 258; institutions, 183–4; landed and local authority, 81, 174–86; law and magistrature, 76, 99, 150–1, 173, 345; marriage and material life, 155–8, 176; militia, 168; politics and Governor Craig, 119, 142, 152, 165–74, 290; Seminary of Quebec, 94, 148–50; willing and succession, 165, 266 Taschereau, Joseph-André, 172, 178, 258

Index

Taschereau, Joseph-Edouard, 114 Taschereau, Julie-Louise, 116, 185 Taschereau, Léda, 45 Taschereau, Louis-Achille, 366n139 Taschereau, Louis-Alexandre, xix, 20, 43, 93 294, 296, 300, 330 Taschereau, Louis-Alfred, 114 Taschereau, Louise-Adèle, 161, 162 Taschereau, Louise-Gilles, 113 Taschereau, Louise-Joséphine, 45 Taschereau, Louise-Julie, 97, 113 Taschereau, Louis-Épictière, 119, 164, 176, 188, 365n133, 367n154 Taschereau, Louis-Joseph, xviii, 32, 113 Taschereau, Marie, xviii, 15, 16, 43, 49, 51, 53, 94–6, 99, 104, 107–9, 113, 118 Taschereau, Marie-Adèle-Blanche, 45 Taschereau, Marie-Anne-Louise (Soeur Marie-Anne-Louise de Saint-François-Xavier), xviii, 15, 32, 43–4, 45, 49, 53, 109, 113, 150, 152, 153, 338 Taschereau, Marie-Anne-Zoé-Stella, 46 Taschereau, Marie-Célanire, 43 Taschereau, Marie-Claire-Caroline, 45 Taschereau, Marie-Eugénie, 45, 267 Taschereau, Marie-Joséphine-Amanda, 46 Taschereau, Marie-Joséphte-Louise-Caroline, 46 Taschereau, Marie-Louise (1777–1827), xix, 45, 94, 100, 113, 116, 118, 163, 165, 179, 185, 352n142, 359n36 Taschereau, Marie-Louise (1811–1891), xix, 114, 163 Taschereau, Marie-Louise (d. 1888), 114 Taschereau, Marie-Louise-Adèle, 114 Taschereau, Marie-Louise-Hémédine, 45 Taschereau, Marie-Louise-JoséphineHenriette, 45 Taschereau, Pierre-Elzéar, 114, 155, 258 Taschereau, Pierre-François, xviii, 30, 34, 48, 113 Taschereau, Rachel, 45 Taschereau, Robert, 19 Taschereau, Thérèse-Julie, 96, 106, 113 Taschereau, Thomas-Jacques (1680–1749), xviii, 7, 16, 23, 24–9, 32, 33, 34, 53, 111, 113, 352, 366n151 Taschereau, Thomas-Jacques (1811–1885), 179, 268, 380n35 Taschereau, Thomas-Pierre-Joseph, xix, 50, 77, 82, 94, 96, 99, 112, 113, 115, 116, 154–5, 164, 165, 175, 177, 178, 183, 184, 185, 265, 365n133, 365n135, 365n136, 366n151

Taschereau, Thomas-Victor, 113 Taschereau family: American Revolution, 72– 4; authority of, 325–30; in the Beauce, 35, 37, 41, 75–86, 174–82; Catholicism, 8, 43–4, 100– 10, 152, 153, 175, 187, 261–301; compared to McCords, 257–60; and Conquest, Quebec Act, and British authority, 21, 37–41, 44, 46, 68, 86, 71–2, 77, 167; death and burial of, and family memory, 20, 95, 296, 329, 330; education, 186–8; estates and material life, 19, 97– 8, 176, 154, 155–8, 325, 359n36, 365n136; family strategies and marriage, 32, 47–53, 67, 93– 100, 118, 157, 163, 234, 265, 344, 385n105; headship, 44–7, 48–53; high culture, 144, 151, 154, 157–61, 357n1; in history, 290–301, 329, 330; international network, 25, 144, 327, 357n1; landed, 28–9, 35–7, 86–93, 327–8; law and magistrature, 77, 178–9, 183–4, 327, 347; militia, 168, 170–1, 183, 184, 268, 365n133; and modernity, 325; politics, 165–74; slavery, 99; succession, 95, 111–18, 145, 154–5, 165, 266, 352n140. See also Canadian history; estates; law; masculinity; notaries; seigneurialism; Seminary of Quebec; widowhood; women Temple Grove, 13, 19, 196, 198, 199, 208, 211, 214, 215, 216, 234–43, 302, 306, 307, 311, 312, 314, 315, 320, 321, 323, 330 tenant farmers, 127, 131, 176 Test Act, 38, 41, 69, 71 Théroux, Jacques, 127 Thibodeau, Michel, 36 Thibodeau, Pierre, 36 Thirteen Colonies, 10, 44, 64–6, 71 Thompson, Edward, 4, 5, 109 Thomson, Charles Edward Poulett, 222, 223 Thornton, Patricia, 191 Todd, Isaac, 123 Tomlins, Christopher, 4, 355n61 Toosey, Philip, 78 Tosh, John, 14 Tours (France), 24, 41 Tousignant, Pierre, 40 Township of Broughton, 82 Trafalgar, 374n160 Traill, Catharine Parr, 240 transportation, 7, 17, 35, 79–86, 182. See also road commissioner Trottier Duffy Desaulniers, Thomas-Ignace, 25, 34, 38, 72 Tylee, Mary Jane, 248 Ulster Scots, 6, 55–60, 64 Union Company, 167

451

452

Index Union of Canadian Municipalities, 318 urban space, 19 urns, 241, 242 Ursulines, xi, 8, 10, 11, 15, 31, 32, 41–6, 53, 71, 106, 113–14, 147, 152, 153, 155, 209, 257, 265, 271, 325, 333, 338, 361n52; burial in chapel, 112, 360n46; cult of Sainte Anne, 109; safety net for aristocratic families, 94 Vatican II, 265 Vattemare, Alexandre, 222–3, 229, 245, 327, 372n125 Vaudreuil, François-Pierre de Rigaud de, 7, 25, 28, 31, 34, 49 Vaudreuil, Louise-Élisabeth de, 285 Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, Pierre de Rigaud de, 25, 26, 27, 33, 34 Vaudry, Richard, 229 Vaugeois, Denis, 361n58 Vermare, André, 296, 301 Verreau, François, 105, 112, 179, 188 Verreau, Jean-Marie, 102, 104, 350 Vézina, Jean, 359n26 Vickery, Amanda, 3, 5, 47, 97 Victoria and Albert Museum, 321 Victoria Bridge, 20, 243 Victoria College, 281 Viger, Denis-Benjamin, 129, 171, 133 Viger, Jacques, 133, 214 Vilar, Pierre, 191 Villade, Antoine, 106, 110, 112, 157, 176, 185, 186, 188, 210, 268, 366n151, 374n160 Villeneuve, N., 223 Vincent, François, 92 violence, 68, 135, 344, 345. See also militia Virgin Mary. See Marianism voluntary associations, 17 Volunteer militia, 219–21 Vovelle, Michel, 111, 189 Voyer, Étienne, 36 Wahrman, Dror, 6, 195 Wales, Prince of, 229, 243 Walker, James, 354n23 Walker, Thomas, 65 Walker, William, 208 Wallot, Jean-Pierre, 361n58 Walsh, John, 89, 90, 91, 112, 176, 179, 188 War of 1812–14, 5, 218 Waverley Institute, 201, 222 Wealth of Nations, 157 weather observation, 196–7 Weber, Max, 5 Wedderburn, Alexander, 39

Wellington, Duke of, 227, 249 West, Benjamin, 319 White, Hayden, 290 Wickenden, Robert, 296 widowhood, 12, 30–1, 33, 163, 333; authority of, 16, 47 Wilkie, Daniel, 195 Williams, J.W., 229 Williams, Jenkins, 75 Williams, Raymond, 12, 191 Williams College, 205 willing, 138–9 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 213 wills, 95, 111, 136–9, 145, 155, 165. See also succession Wilson, Daniel, 320 Wolfe, James, 19, 21, 143, 173, 249, 264, 308, 309, 310, 319 women, 68, 93–6, 97, 112, 240, 314; art and elite culture, 16, 213–14, 376n190; charity, 147, 157, 201, 205, 248, 304, 376n218; marriage, 96, 266, 304; memory and collecting, 214, 266, 310, 314; mortality and burial, 61, 252; religiosity, 107, 153, 185, 259, 288–9, 385n109, 385n110; revolution and war, 73, 318; slavery, 33; use of law and notaries, 96, 344n20. See also Fleury de la Gorgendière, Marie-Claire; Taschereau, Marie-Louise; Taschereau, Marie; Protestant Orphan Asylum; Ross, Anne; Ursulines; widowhood Woodley, Charles, 144 Woollett, William, 319 Wordsworth, William, 107, 144, 250, 321 Workman, William, 231 Yale University, 199, 376n199 Young, John, 157 Young, Robert, 90, 166 Young Women’s Christian Association, 248