Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882 9781487515423

Table of contents :
Contents
Maps, Illustrations, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Contracting on Public Works, 1841 to 1882
2. The Labour Force
3. The Work
4. The Living
5. The Boundaries of Belonging: Navvy Communities of the 1840s and 1850s
6. Degrees of Separation: Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging through the 1870s
7. Defining a Community of Interests: The 1840s and 1850s
8. Labour Unity and Militance on Public Works through the 1870s
Conclusion
Appendix: Location of Contracts (Sections) on the Intercolonial Railway and Third Welland Canal
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Rough Work

Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882

The labourers at the heart of this study built the canals and railways undertaken as public works projects by the colonial government of British North America and the federal government of Canada between 1841 and 1882. Ruth Bleasdale’s fascinating journey into the little-known lives of these labourers and their families reveals how capital, labour, and the state apparatus came together to build the transportation infrastructure that linked colonies and united an emerging nation. Combining census and community records, government documents, and newspaper archives, Bleasdale elucidates the ways in which successive governments and state branches intervened between the operative forces of labour and capital and in labourers’ lives. Case studies capture the remarkable diversity across regions and time periods in a work force drawn from both local and international labour markets. The stories here illuminate the ways in which men and women experienced the emergence of industrial capitalism and the complex ties which bound them to local and transnational communities. Rough Work is an accessibly written yet rigorous study of the galvanization of a major segment of Canada’s labour force over four decades of social and economic transformation. (Canadian Social History Series) ruth bleasdale is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University.

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Rough Work Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882

Ruth E. Bleasdale

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0248-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2199-8 (paper)

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

Bleasdale, Ruth E., 1948–, author Rough work : labourers on the public works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882 / Ruth E. Bleasdale. (Canadian social history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0248-5 (cloth). – ISBN 978-1-4875-2199-8 (paper) 1. Labor – Canada – History – 19th century.  2.  Public works – Canada – History – 19th century.  3.  Canada – Economic conditions – 19th century.  4.  Canada – Social conditions – 19th century.  I.  Title.  II.  Series: Canadian social history series HD8106.B64 2018  331.0971’09034  C2017-906989-6 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publication Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

For Aaron

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Contents List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables  /  ix Acknowledgments / xi Introduction / 3 1 Contracting on Public Works, 1841 to 1882  /  26 2 The Labour Force / 56 3 The Work / 86 4 The Living / 121 5 The Boundaries of Belonging: Navvy Communities of the 1840s and 1850s  /  155 6 Degrees of Separation: Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging through the 1870s  /  186 7 Defining a Community of Interests: The 1840s and 1850s  /  216 8 Labour Unity and Militance on Public Works through the 1870s / 248 Conclusion / 283 Appendix: Location of Contracts (Sections) on the Intercolonial Railway and Third Welland Canal  /  293 Notes / 297 Select Bibliography / 357 Index / 393

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Maps, Illustrations, and Tables Maps 1 System map of Intercolonial, 1877, Halifax to Rivière du Loup / 21 2 St Lawrence, Ottawa, Rideau, and Richelieu Canals, from Annual Report of the Department of Railways and Canals, 1894–1895  /  22 3 Détail de la carte de Montréal de 1859 faisant ressortir Pointe Saint-Charles, 1859, F.N. Boxer  /  23 4 Showing Line of Welland Canal between Lakes Erie and Ontario, from Annual Report of the Department of Railways and Canals, Annual Report 1894–1895  /  24 5 Counties of Cape Breton and Richmond, Nova Scotia  /  25

Illustrations 3.1 Intercolonial Railway. Section 7, Embankment over 100 feet high  /  89 3.2 Work at St Gabriel Locks, Lachine Canal, 1877  /  90 3.3 Construction of the Miramichi Bridges on the Intercolonial Railway / 91 4.1 Labourers’ shanty at Tartigou River, Quebec, on the Intercolonial Railway / 125 8.1 Lachine Canal Strike of January 1878: “La grève des ouvriers du canal Lachine,” Henri Julien  /  261

Tables 3.1 Partial Listing of Deaths and Serious Injuries on Public Works in the 1850s and 1870s  /  104 4.1 Wage Rates for Categories of Work on the Junction Canal, July 1854–July 1856 / 132

x  Maps , I l lust rat ions, and Tabl es

4.2 Wage Rates for Labourers on the Chats Canal, January 1855– June 1856 / 133 4.3 Wage Rates on the Grenville, Lachine, and Welland Canals, 1871–1881 / 137 7.1 Partial Listing of Labourers’ Work Stoppages on Canals, 1840s and 1850s / 227 8.1 Partial Listing of Strikes on the Grenville, Lachine, and Welland Canals, 1872–1881 / 252 8.2 Partial Listing of Strikes of Stonecutters on the Welland Canal, 1873–1881 / 274

Acknowledgments

Over the many years of researching this book I have incurred countless debts to archivists and librarians who helped me track down potential source material. I am especially grateful to archivists and librarians at the National Archives of Canada, the provincial archives and legislative libraries of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec, and the Dalhousie Killam and Dunn Libraries. Special thanks is due to Meryl Lister for her diligence in identifying and accessing research material. Two anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press and the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program provided invaluable perspective and suggestions for improvement. I gratefully acknowledge their support, the support of the press, and a grant from the publications program. I am still accumulating debts to my editor, Len Husband, for extraordinary patience and for helping me see the book the way a reader would, to Leah Connor and Christine Robertson for thorough production editing, and to Greg Kealey for generously agreeing to include my book in the Canadian Social History Series. I also thank Labour/Le Travail for permission to reprint modified portions of a previously published article. Colleagues, friends, and family kept this project alive over many years. For their encouragement and moral support at key junctures I am particularly indebted to Don Avery, Jerry Bannister, Fraser Bleasdale, Michael Cross, Cecilia Danysk, Vittorio Frigerio, Tina Jones, Krista Kesselring, Oriel MacLennan, Douglas McCalla, Todd McCallum, Don McNally, Jane Parpart, Jim Phillips, Gillian Thompson, my brother John Bell, and my sister Dereth Teasdale, who came to live with this project in its final stages. I do not know how to thank Gail Campbell for her constancy, her insistent pressure to stop researching xi

xi i   Ack now le dg ment s

and write, her help in refining arguments, and her willingness to drop her own work to read and polish mine. My greatest debt is to my son, Aaron. It is his love, encouragement, and moral support for which I am most grateful. Rough Work is dedicated to him.

Rough Work

Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882

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Introduction

These men – the men of whom the prisoner is one – came here invited to carry on a great public work; we are told that Railways are necessary for the well-being and progress of the country – but you may vote your monies  – you may devise your schemes, all must prove futile, useless, and ineffectual, without the sinews and muscles of men to aid you in carrying them out. To obtain this you invite men accustomed to and familiar with these works to come into your country and lend you their aid, and you must take the inconveniences with the convenience – and should be prepared to overlook some error and irregularities which might other wise be censurable. Nova Scotian, 15 December 1856 In closing arguments in the trial of James O’Brien for riotous and unlawful assembly on the Nova Scotia Railway, James Johnston captured the fundamental duality of the image of public works labourers in mid-nineteenth-century British North America.1 A gifted attorney and astute politician caught up in the enthusiasm and acrimony surrounding Nova Scotia’s major public work, Johnston presented a defence which would resonate with his audience: jurors might not like railway navvies, but they needed them. In doing so, Johnston emphasized the crucial role of men such as O’Brien in the transportation revolution which would expand local, imperial, and trans-imperial commercial networks and usher in industrial capitalism. As human machines they were inseparable from the dramatic achievements which conquered time and space and promised a new age of human progress. But as flesh-and-blood labourers in the shape they assumed along construction sites, they were inconvenient and problematic. 3

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The duality embedded in such contemporary representations of canal and railway labourers reflected broader ambivalence and tensions surrounding processes transforming British North America, processes which, with all their bright promise, both created and destroyed: urban and rural industrialization, with its implications for relations between town and country and within regional economies; shifting relations between colonies and mother country, as Britain worked towards a new form of imperialism and colonists to find and define their place within the empire and the larger world; and increasing arrivals of not always desirable immigrants at the same time that outmigration pointed to problems in accommodating the existing population, or at least in matching their sense of prospects south of the border. The accompanying reconfiguration of political power and social classes, both dynamic and destabilizing, was cause for unease even among those who most welcomed change in the name of progress. For a number of reasons labourers on transportation projects became a focus for that unease. The projects on which they worked were on such a large scale and of such significance to the regions in which they were undertaken that their progress and any disruptions attracted ongoing attention and those who built them unusual scrutiny. The massive public expenditures necessary to cover costs also positioned public works at the centre of testy political and partisan debates on the hustings, within legislative bodies, and in the press. The sheer numbers of labourers necessary to construction magnified their impact in the immediate area, offering some locals the opportunity for labouring jobs and to profit by providing the necessities of food and housing, but also stretching local resources for ministering to the labourers’ material and spiritual needs and maintaining public order. The numbers coming to the works from a distance also changed local demographics along construction sites and underlined perceptions that the labour force was a group apart, comprised of strangers difficult to hold to community standards of conduct. Anxiety generated by the labourers’ presence fed on established perceptions and rhetoric concerning the type of men attracted to construction sites. Labourers on major public works such as canals and railways shared a reputation for lawless and disreputable behaviour with others involved in rough occupations – seafarers, soldiers, longshoremen, lumbermen – but by the 1840s and 1850s they had earned a special place in the trans-Atlantic hierarchy of vice and disorder. At the height of the railway mania in England, mothers cowed children into obedience with threats they would give them to the railway navvies;2 throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, canal and railway

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labourers were characterized as a “despicable race of men” or worse; in continental Europe, construction labourers imported from Britain engaged in pitched battles with members of the host societies,3 and stories of similar conflicts circulated from as far away as New South Wales.4 Closer to home, on projects in the United States, labourers built a similar reputation, and where they congregated within British North America, too, they quickly gained notoriety as men who lived outside the laws of God and man.5 Thus, Johnston knew his appeal to the jury would ring true with jurors familiar with images of men such as O’Brien. O’Brien was just another Patrick Keniff, who had made headlines in the local press the previous month, a stereotypical itinerant bruiser, only just arrived from Portland, Maine, to work on the Nova Scotia Railway in November 1856 when he was arrested for drunkenness: “He had no money, a bruised nose, a scratched and begrimed countenance, and many of the marks peculiar to the navvy.”6 And he would move along when his work was done. Even as Johnston invoked the rhetoric of unruly foreign navvies, conditions on the ground were calling it into question. A key feature of socio-economic change at mid-century, the shuffling and reshuffling in local and international labour markets brought to major colonial public works men from a variety of backgrounds. Itinerant labourers who made their living following construction jobs still appeared in their numbers, and relatively high immigration in some years continued to bring new arrivals to the work. However, they were joined increasingly by men from rural and urban communities in the immediate area and by those with established ties to communities at a modest remove. Migration paths within and across the colonies brought farmers and rural and urban day labourers to compete for the opportunity to supplement their livelihood or to make their living through construction. The result was a diverse labour force on many projects which was difficult to dismiss wholesale as rootless itinerant outsiders and foreigners. Many were part of the communities in and near which they worked, and they were what the communities were becoming. Men with ties in the area of construction or a little farther afield were even more in evidence when massive numbers again assembled on public works in the late 1860s and through the 1870s into the early 1880s. In subsequent decades, both public and private construction would again depend heavily, as it had in the 1840s, on newly arrived immigrants and migrants, on the “dangerous foreigners” most spectacularly in evidence on publicly funded but privately built transcontinental railways, though also on more modest undertakings from tramways to sewer systems.7 In the 1870s, however,

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despite a continuing and overriding rhetoric concerning untamed intruders, a large proportion of labourers on construction sites could not be readily disowned as outsiders. They were men from families, communities, farms, and other types of work in the surrounding area, and some were even skilled workers who picked up shovels during hard depression years. Some had also travelled a longer distance from other communities within the new Dominion, and some were recently arrived immigrants from Europe and migrants from the United States. As in previous decades, their individual choices fitted into broad patterns now well established in studies of labour migration and the process of class formation: internationalization of labour which accompanied socio-economic dislocation and readjustment in the Old World and the new;8 movement from and within rural economies, locally and internationally, as the rural periphery increasingly supplied labour necessary to industrial capitalist development;9 and the build-up and movement across regions and nations of urban and rural labour as the search for work became a necessary condition of industrial capitalism.10 As the labour force became more diverse, that diversity was obscured in part by terminology which defined the labourers by their work and in the process frequently reduced them to that work and the lifestyle it was perceived to impose. Men who arrived to build canal-navigation networks became canallers or navigators, the latter term shortened to navvies in Britain and then expanded on both sides of the Atlantic to include the men who built the railways.11 This artificial and rhetorical homogenization of the workforce was useful in a variety of contexts: in tributes to “[t]he men who built the Railway – the Navvies – their wives and children”; in indulgent censure of “navvy nights” of drinking and fighting; and in denunciations of the “saucy navvies,” the day labourers of Saint John on strike for higher wages.12 But what it offered in the way of easy romanticization and denunciation, it lost in clarity and definition. Like canallers, navvies failed to capture the rich diversity of the construction workforce and the temporary communities of which labourers became a part, and it obscured the complex ties which the workforce maintained with local and international communities. By recreating that diversity and complexity, this study opens up to analysis the identities and the breadth of experience labourers brought to worksites which became part of the broader processes shaping a major segment of the emerging working class. It reveals that in their relationships with each other and with others in the vicinity of construction, in the social disruption and the conflict in the workplace, far from being apart, they were very much part of the processes

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and tensions developing in communities, regions, and the country, in the political, social, and economic order under construction. Those processes and tensions were multiple. In all the colonies at mid-century, interwoven contests for political, economic, and socio-cultural power cut across class lines and involved members of every strata of society. The pursuit of responsible government through the 1840s and the continuing redefinition and redistribution of power in the 1850s focused frequently violent attention on questions of governance and authority, perhaps most acutely in the Canadas in the wake of the Rebellions but passionately, nonetheless, in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia with their own histories of division and dissent. As groups coalesced and split apart around a range of issues, they welcomed among their numbers – or aggressively excluded – labourers on public works. Even newly arrived immigrants and migrants from the United States found reason to join enthusiastically in causes which replicated their own decades-old conflicts with and within the British Empire, and in which the local and transnational merged. The Irish Famine and Irish nationalist struggle, trans-Atlantic ethnic, racial, and religious tensions, the revolutions in Europe, the Crimean War, and antebellum movements in the United States  – these all reverberated through Britain’s remaining North American colonies and on their public works. Conflicts more directly associated with the financial and commercial developments of mid-century also involved unskilled construction workers, who were particularly vulnerable to business cycles and fluctuations in wage rates and prices: to depression in the late 1830s and continuing into the 1840s, easing up, taking hold again, giving way to the economic stabilization of the early to mid-1850s, and then re-emerging with the international crisis of the closing years of the decade. Responding to these developments, public works labourers were among the first large groups of workers to mount a persistent opposition to the demands of capital and industrialization. In this capacity they represented a readily identifiable segment of society which appeared to threaten the values and even existence of respectable society. As such they were central in struggles for both labour control and moral reform. The new Dominion’s public works again offered the construction labour force multiple opportunities to participate in tensions at the local level which frequently intersected with broader processes of national and international dislocation and conflict. Relative prosperity early in the 1870s followed by the depression years and the partial recovery as the decade drew to a close pulled the labourers into the spotlight in the unemployment protests, aggressive workplace action,

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and drive for legislative reforms which characterized the labour turmoil of these years. In the face of rising fears of socialism, anarchism, and labour radicalism in various forms, labourers on public works attracted suspicion and hostility. In this they were not alone. Indeed, significantly more than in previous decades, their activism dovetailed with the wider unrest in the areas in which they laboured and found homes. They were less visibly active and identifiable as canal and railway labourers in sectarian and ethno-racial violence, though they were integrated into broader patterns of sectarianism, racialization, urban and rural violence, intemperance, and perceived moral laxity to such an extent that legislation crafted to control public works labourers became a template for wider policing of the nation’s morals, in the same manner that legislation originally designed to control labour unrest on public projects was subsequently broadened to include workers in other settings. In all these respects labourers on public works provided compelling representations of multiple processes of dislocation and adjustment which formed part of the creation and definition of a broad segment of the working class. That is how this study approaches them. Perceived as agents of social decay no less than agents of economic progress and prepared to fight for their own interests as they defined them, public works labourers vividly reflected both the spectacular human and technological advances of their age and the economic dislocation, social ruptures, class conflict, and human cost of the transition to industrial capitalism. Few images represented the age of progress as powerfully as steam navigation, and more powerfully still, the railway, “perilous and marvellous,” la bête humaine.13 So intertwined were canals and railways with visions of prosperity and the advance of civilization that within British North America and then Canada, the state followed the model already established in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, assuming a central role in improving transportation infrastructure. The state poured resources into building canal and railway networks judged necessary to security, economic development, and shifting political and national aspirations. The insufficiency of domestic sources of capital to fund a transportation revolution and the reluctance of international private capital to assume the risk of construction in a still largely agricultural and rural economy encouraged governments to assume a critical developmental role, providing both direct public funding and security for private investment. This costly public commitment to canal and railway construction was promoted by powerful groups whose direct and indirect representation in government circles encouraged identification of their interests with those of

Int ro du c t i on  9

the broader public.14 Indeed, so closely identified was the public good with the aspirations of private capitalists promoting transportation infrastructure that increasingly in this period the term public works might be used to refer to major private undertakings represented as unusually beneficial to the public, such as private railways or mining ventures. This broad, partly rhetorical usage was in keeping with the belief that what profited private enterprise profited the community as a whole. This study employs what was the strict definition of public works: projects not just funded but initiated and prosecuted by the state; however, it is cognisant of the importance of the loose usage of the term in the state’s intervention on both public and private works.15 In the improvement of inland navigation, the state assumed not only enormous financial obligations but also responsibility for construction. Earlier attempts at canal building by private companies having met with limited success, the newly created government of the Canadas opted for public construction. With the backing of a guaranteed imperial loan of £1.5 million, it prosecuted a canal program which by Confederation had cost well over ten times the original amount of the loan. The state also poured funds into railway development. By the end of the 1850s, governments in the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia had invested in close to two thousand miles of trunk and feeder lines designed to pull together previously isolated communities and facilitate expansion of communication, trade, and industry. After the inauspicious railway construction at the hands of private companies in the 1840s, men in government and business circles debated the feasibility and desirability of public construction. On most lines advocates of private construction carried the day, and the state’s role was restricted primarily to assuming the financial risks associated with railway ventures. In the form of subsidies, grants, and guarantees on loans, public funds poured into the hands of private entrepreneurs anxious to participate in ventures they believed promised more immediate and certain returns on their investment than canals.16 But important exceptions found the state assuming much more than financial responsibilities related to construction. By 1854 Joseph Howe, the strong colonial advocate of government construction and ownership of railways, had successfully secured agreement to the building of the Nova Scotia Railway as a public venture, after private enterprise bowed out of what appeared to be a losing proposition.17 In New Brunswick the European and North American Railway also became a public work when the original contractors reneged on their agreement with the colony after a brief period of indifferent construction had produced a few paltry miles of track, much of which had to be rebuilt.18

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The railway boom came to an abrupt end in the late 1850s, leaving in its wake enormous public and private debts, and the decade that followed saw comparatively little canal or railway building within British North America. But following Confederation the new Dominion, already staggering under the debt for colonial infrastructure, threw its expanded credit behind further improvements to transportation, commencing a massive canal-construction program which expanded the projects of earlier decades and reached out into new areas.19 The federal government also adopted a direct role in construction of railways presented as necessary to the new nation’s political and economic survival. With private enterprise reluctant to build the Intercolonial along the route favoured by the British and Canadian governments, the Dominion undertook the railway as a public enterprise. Early sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway were also constructed directly by the state before private interests could be locked into what initially appeared to be a financially satisfactory arrangement. While the necessity, and even the desirability, of government promotion of enterprise was widely accepted by politicians and businessmen, also widespread was the belief that governments should tread carefully in the realm of commercial enterprise and not usurp the role of private entrepreneurs. Businessmen shared a view of politicians and government officials as too corrupt and inefficient to engage in commercial endeavours and too ready to preside over the pork barrel, favour special interests, and yield to popular pressure rather than wise counsel. In keeping with these assumptions, governments turned to the private sector for assistance in the building of canals and railways, contracting out the smallest of jobs. Thus, a peculiar combination of public and private enterprise defined public works construction: contractors were responsible for assembling the initial capital and labour and any machinery and plant necessary to begin operations, but the state retained intimate and ultimate control over the work. This was the fundamental difference between public works and private projects in receipt of public funds. Scholars have cautioned against overestimating the differences in levels of state funding directed to private and public ventures and against exaggerating the extent to which the British North American colonies and then Canada provided state funding for transportation infrastructure, in comparison with other jurisdictions.20 In the area of supervision of construction, however, the difference between public and private projects must be emphasized because that difference defined the nature and extent of state power over both contractors and the labourers they employed.

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On a broader level, state supervision of construction contributed to the build-up of a massive bureaucracy which, though dedicated primarily to physical infrastructure, through its sheer size and the vast sums it expended came to exercise extraordinary power throughout British North America and Canada. That power extended beyond agencies and branches of the state directly related to public infrastructure, and, most importantly for this study, helped to determine policies and priorities in the area of capital and labour relations. In the oversight of contractors and the workforce they employed, the diverse powers of the state came to bear on questions concerning the conduct and powers of employers and workers. Administrations were forced to confront directly issues to which they might have preferred to turn a blind eye, and in the process they crafted policies and laws which would ultimately have even broader application. Acting or choosing not to act in the public interest on public works, as they perceived it, branches and members of a disaggregated state – the judiciary, police, military, members of various segments of bureaucracy, and elected and appointed members of successive administrations at different levels of government – explored and defined the role of the state in relations between capital and labour. Bodies in charge of construction depended on individuals able to mobilize and follow up on the deployment of money, materials, and men. At their core were engineers with the expertise to set out the work, oversee day-to-day operations, ensure the workforce was adequate and effectively deployed, monitor the quality of materials and construction, and then recommend expenditure of funds commensurate with progress. The configuration and the precise roles of civil servants staffing oversight bodies varied. Canal construction in the Canadas proceeded initially under the authority of the Board of Works, operating from 1841 to 1846, and then under its successor, the Department of Public Works, a body more dependent on political influence and thus exercising a different and more diffuse type of power. In its turn, the department responsible for prosecuting the canal program of the new Dominion also attempted to juggle the authority of engineering expertise with even closer political scrutiny and accountability. What made all these bodies similar was their mode of operation. For each, a permanent engineering staff provided continuity from project to project and administration to administration. In contrast, the various commissions established to oversee construction of railways as public works were ad hoc, appointed for the duration of construction. Yet even they conformed to broadly similar procedures,

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policies, and principles which allowed for tenable generalizations concerning oversight from project to project.21 As suggested by the transition from the Board of Works to the Department of Public Works for the Canadas, elected officials’ influence on decision-making expanded as British North America moved from representative to responsible government and then as Canada reached towards an expanded franchise bolstering another level of public accountability. This juggling over time of relative power between appointed officials and elected politicians, the latter more attuned to public opinion but also to the potential impact of powerful financial interests on their political fortunes, was evident in key areas of decision-making and constitutes an important thread in public works construction. Cutting across it was the increasing expertise required for membership in the expanding bureaucracy, expertise which politicians learned to respect or ignored with costly consequences. Processes integral to public works were international: capital, technology, and labour moved back and forth across borders, and, in particular, across the borders shared with Britain and the United States. In this respect this study is by necessity transnational in approach, attentive to the international flow of money, entrepreneurs, engineers, and workers and the ideas, attachments, and commitments which came and went with them. All these push analysis beyond the confines of British North America and Canada and call for a transnational approach which carries the international across geopolitical boundaries in the form in which it was carried at the time, in the transfers of capital, expertise, and the men and women who moved to find work, bringing their beliefs and loyalties with them.22 At the same time, this study respects the analytical value of colonial and national boundaries and is attuned to the subtleties of place and space. Analysis of the state’s multiple roles in construction entails capture of transnational processes within what were in some respects artificial but in others determinative jurisdictions within which power was exercised and policies and laws crafted and enforced. Here the transnational and the local overlap. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Canadas shared much as colonial entities within the British Empire. But variations in regional economies, differences in linguistic, ethno-racial, and socio-cultural configurations, and distinct political and economic histories and trajectories shaped for each colony unique goals and challenges in the pursuit of public works. Similarly, after Confederation as Canada moved carefully in establishing a nation and in adopting federal governance and oversight of public works, variations based on local geography, demographics, politics, and economic constraints

Int ro du c t i on  1 3

emerged within the larger federal framework. To capture differences and similarities across colonies and nation, this study focuses on key projects within each of the colonial jurisdictions of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Canadas and then turns to comparable projects across the Dominion. From the many public works researched, those chosen for close analysis reflect, and to the extent possible represent, changes and continuities over time and space, including projects in and at the edges of early industrial communities and those moving through less densely populated stretches of countryside and wilderness. Projects envisioned as funnelling trade through the St Lawrence provide the focus for the construction program of the 1840s: the Lachine, built through Montreal on the north side of the river, one of the most densely populated areas of British North America; the Beauharnois, fifteen miles upriver from the head of the Lachine; the Cornwall, a further thirty-two miles upriver at the Long Sault Rapids; further still, the Williamsburg Canals, comprising the Farran’s Point, Rapid Plat, and Galop Canals; and the Welland, designed to carry ships over the Niagara Escarpment and into Lake Erie. Two canals follow the less intensive program of the 1850s: the Junction, part of the continuation of improvements to the St Lawrence navigation, constructed between 1851 and 1857 to connect the Point Iroquois and Galop Canals; and the Chats, west of Ottawa in the heart of the Ottawa Valley lumbering industry, undertaken between 1854 and 1856 as part of an abortive plan to bypass three miles of rapids and the falls and improve navigation of the Ottawa River. For the 1870s, the study targets the two largest projects in the Dominion’s plans for expansion of inland navigation, the Lachine and Welland Canals from their commencement in the early 1870s until the completion of all but a small portion of the work by 1881. A much smaller undertaking, the Grenville Canal, returns to the attempt to improve navigation of the Ottawa River sixty-four miles upriver from Montreal. The St Peter’s Canal takes the public works program to the east coast and attempts to facilitate trade between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island by linking the Bras D’Or Lakes of Cape Breton to the ocean. Two competing visions of rail and trade networks in the Atlantic colonies represent railway construction during the 1850s. Nova Scotia’s construction of the Nova Scotia Railway connecting Halifax to Truro and Windsor between 1854 and 1858 promoted a vision of Halifax as a linchpin of imperial expansion, the eastern port for colonial trade and commerce. In the same years, New Brunswick sought that status for Saint John through backing of the European and North

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American Railway and completion of construction of the line between Saint John and Shediac. The Dominion followed through on revived plans for railway connections between the Atlantic Provinces and central Canada, constructing the Intercolonial between 1868 and 1876. A defensive, commercial, and nation-building project, it linked and expanded the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways and pushed the line through the Miramichi, the Ristigouche, and the rugged and sparsely populated Matapédia Valley and down along the Saint Lawrence to join the Grand Trunk at Rivière du Loup.23 (See the appendix for location of contracts.) Study of labourers on these projects is structured both chronologically and thematically. The opening chapters provide the context in which capital, labour, and the state came together on public works. Chapter 1 analyses the imperatives of the contracting system, the public tendering which pushed down contract prices well below actual costs, and the public oversight which attempted to hold contractors to those prices. The resulting double dependency of contractors on frequently inadequate monthly payments from government and on their own unstable sources of capital guaranteed cash flow problems which continued into the 1870s even as a massive state bureaucracy grew up to oversee the program of public works. The expertise incorporated into that bureaucracy could smooth the way between contractor and elected politician, but close analysis demonstrates that it could not go far in eliminating the essentially political nature of public works contracting. Through the period, better-capitalized contractors increased their fixed capital investment in technological innovations and achieved greater flexibility in dealing with both the state and labour. Among these were men who called the Colonies and Canada home and enjoyed not only rising stature within their communities but increasing political influence. At the same time, the inexperienced and undercapitalized hung on to a place within public works both as principal contractors and as subcontractors. Their presence compounded problems within an industry which challenged even the emerging giants. In chapter 2 workers respond to the demand for labour. Individual paths to construction are rarely clear; however, analysis of labourers’ diverse origins places them within international and local patterns of labour migration and class formation. Variations in these patterns across regions underline the nonlinear, irregular intersection and overlapping of sectors of the economy and the multifaceted processes which created the workforce. To immigrants with limited or meagre resources, the work offered an immediate means of subsistence

Int ro du c t i on  1 5

and a possible avenue to establishment in rural or urban centres; to men from the rural economies, it offered funds for maintenance or expansion of their holdings, another source of work as journaliers, or a stepping stone off the land; and to labourers from the United States and throughout Canada, the work offered a way station in their cycles of unemployment and underemployment, perhaps a stopgap during a seasonal hiatus in their primary occupation. All these and more found a place on the public works. But over the decades and from region to region, their relative contributions to construction varied. Immigrants made this an international workforce, dominated by Irish Catholics in the 1840s, becoming more heterogeneous through the 1850s as English, Scots, Irish Protestants, and Germans arrived at construction sites in increasing numbers, and then more heterogeneous again by the 1870s with men from Italy and Scandinavia representing new immigrant groups on the public works. The workforce was also North American, marked by movement back and forth across borders with the United States in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1870s. However, the 1850s witnessed a striking increase in the numbers of men drawn from within British North America, and this pattern continued into the 1870s, when revived public works relied heavily on labourers from rural and urban communities within Canada. The importance of this source of labour to one sector of the economy reflects the broader socio-economic changes within Canada, the economic displacement and changing labour markets which contributed to the creation of a workforce for the range of unskilled jobs in an industrializing society. Of the many who came looking for work, some were experienced at construction. However, chapter 3’s analysis of the work and the workplace demonstrates that contractors’ primary demand was for men who, whatever their previous experience, were willing to take up unskilled heavy labour. That is why men from diverse backgrounds found a place on public works: no experience, apprenticeship, or training was necessary. Technological innovations did change the workplace on many construction sites, particularly on canals and dramatically in the 1870s, and did expand areas of the work in which steam dredges, excavators and derricks, and a relatively small number of operatives could significantly reduce dependence on labourers. But on every construction site studied here, the major component of the work, frequently the overwhelming preponderance, fell to labourers expending sweat and muscle with picks and shovels in the time-honoured way. Their stamina was tested by the regimentation crucial to labouring at close quarters in heavy materials with potentially dangerous implements. Their health was challenged by working outdoors

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in all weather and terrain. Their lives and limbs were threatened by the standard methods of prosecuting the work. By the 1870s routine injury and death on the public works fed into the broader campaign to regulate conditions across industries and to challenge the assumption that free labour freely chose dangerous work. These labourers would be among the last to benefit from protective legislation. Yet for any who were deterred by the challenge and danger of the work, many others stepped up to take it, which brings the study to chapter 4 and questions concerning what the work could offer. Analysis of living conditions demonstrates why the work frequently did not deliver what it appeared to promise. The temporary nature of worksites forced many labourers into makeshift and unhealthy accommodation, adequate perhaps for a short stint on the work. On the surface, advertised wage rates could be appealing, hovering at the top of the range for unskilled labour, competitive with lumbering, and in most years above the rate paid to farm labourers and those finding a place in other heavy industries and manufactories, though consistently well below the wages offered to skilled workers on the same construction sites, a measure of the status attached to the work. Chapter 4’s analysis produces no easy generalizations concerning the standard of living those wages could afford. Wage rates fluctuated across time and place, and those fluctuating wages were experienced differently depending on individual labourers’ life circumstances: the number and age of family members, those members’ ability to contribute to the domestic economy, and the nature of labourers’ attachments to other sectors of the economy. Added into the analysis are the recurring problems in the payment of wages which ate into their value: payment in credit or goods when cash had been promised; long waits between paydays when contractors’ cash flow problems became the problems of workers; and bankrupt and absconding contractors who made wage rates irrelevant. By the 1870s payment in credit or goods and the outright loss of wages placed public works labourers at the centre of political debates galvanizing both skilled and unskilled in a number of industries. They also became a source of embarrassment for governments confronting labour campaigns for wage protection on the one hand and, on the other, sensational instances of lost wages on their own public works. The second half of the book focuses on labourers’ interactions among themselves, with other groups in society, and in the labour market and workplace. Central to the analysis is the division into two chronological periods, the 1840s and 1850s and then the 1870s, a division which, while in some respects arbitrary like all temporal divisions,

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best highlights change and continuity over the decades. Chapter 5 builds on the changing nature of the workforce and on the material conditions of the labourers to explore how labourers and those with whom they came into contact defined and redefined the boundaries of belonging during the 1840s and 1850s. Here focus is on the shift to the more ethnically heterogeneous workforce of the 1850s which brought together men and families with differing attachments to other sectors of the economy. The chapter asks what labourers shared among themselves and with those in the area of the works and to what extent they were communities apart or extensions of other communities defined by class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and mores. Important to this analysis is the process of cohesion and fragmentation which has been central to historians’ study of class formation.24 Factional, religious, political, and ethno-racial conflict reveals the fissures within this segment of the developing working class and the process of racialization, captured in whiteness studies, which defined some as less desirable than others. Much of the analysis depends on observations framed in the language of contemporary moral panics which included, along with racial stereotyping, anxiety over Catholicism, Sabbath desecration, and alcohol. These critiques reveal more about what the labourers were perceived to represent than about who they were. They also help explain the state’s willingness to intervene to regulate their lives to an extent not considered acceptable for other segments of society and to create special laws and mechanisms to police these labourers. The following chapter pursues these themes into the 1870s. The even greater proportion of labourers who were already resident in the area – and if not resident, boarding with those who were – increases the difficulty of separating them out from others living near construction sites. But that raises a key question addressed in the chapter: To what extent can or should they be separated out for analysis, and to what extent are they best understood as integrated into established activities, institutions, neighbourhoods, and networks? Like the previous chapter, chapter 6 relies heavily on critiques generated by those other than the labourers, those critiques once again revealing the anxieties labourers generated and the identities others projected onto them. Perhaps most significantly in this regard, critiques focused less on ethnicity and race even as new groups such as the Italians were targeted for a brutal process of racialization. Race and ethnicity were absorbed into concerns over the threat to respectable manhood the concentrations of labourers appeared to pose: the drinking, dissipation, and violence at the heart of their rough, all-male sociability. Analysis of the state’s intervention to control the workers focuses on

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federal legislation which, like that of earlier decades, restricted access to alcohol and weapons among public works labourers; only this time, it went further and provided for broad application of the law to workers employed in a range of endeavours considered important to the economic health of the country. The final chapters focus on relations in the workplace and the direct intervention of the state in conflict between capital and labour. Chapter 7’s analysis of workplace action in the 1840s and 1850s returns to the boundaries, bonds, and divisions explored in chapter 5 and asks what impact they had on labourers’ conflict with contractors on a range of issues: hours of work, supervision, machinery, methods of payment, late and lost wages, and above all, wage rates. Labourers enjoyed at times remarkable success, particularly in the first half of the 1850s, when the relatively tight supply of labour gave workers an advantage in driving up wages. This establishes for them an important place among the better documented strike action of other workers in the 1850s. But success was threatened by boundaries and divisions as their evolution over time pitted labourer against labourer. The changing basis for division and unity in collective action also bears the mark of the significant shifts in the composition of the workforce. History, traditions, and vehicles for collective organization bound the Irish workers together on construction sites in the 1840s. Worksites of the 1850s required something more, and on some sites, both in the Canadas and on the Atlantic railways, labourers found it, as men from diverse ethnic backgrounds and sectors of the economy joined to demonstrate the redefining of ethnic bonds and identities and the identification of shared interests. Moving into the 1870s, chapter 8 highlights important respects in which labourers’ initiatives changed over those of previous decades and analyses how those initiatives intersected with broader labour unrest. The strike pattern is not surprising. Aggressive and successful strikes in the early 1870s, followed by more modest demands and fewer victories, and then the escalation of demands going into the 1880s reflected the impact of business cycles on the bargaining power of workers across the spectrum of industries. What stands out in this pattern is the labourers’ creation of what they considered to be unions on two major projects, and on at least one project their joint strike action with teamsters and in at least one instance, with stonecutters. Their action also intersected with that of other workers in other ways. In a decade in which workers faced widespread unemployment and threats to the security of their wages, labourers on public works became part of the protests for work or food, and their

Int ro du c t i on  1 9

high-profile struggles to secure lost wages resonated with skilled and unskilled alike. Observers pointed to other, more frightening connections formed by the labourers, those with agitators and radicals who fuelled exaggerated fears that strikes and demonstrations represented a dangerous challenge to the social and economic order. Analysis of demonstrations and strikes suggests that the labourers were likely most influenced by representatives of the two established political parties and the labour activists pushing for change through their connections in those parties. When all these expanding connections and intersections are viewed within the context of the labour turbulence of the 1870s, they raise important questions about the place of militant unorganized labourers in the build-up to the upheaval of the following decade and the movement to bring the previously unorganized within formal associations.25 Exploration of such questions confronts the intractable anonymity of the labourers. A few appear briefly as individuals, identified as navvies, canallers, or canal or railway labourers in census tracts, court and community records, government reports, or newspapers; of those few, a fragment can be tracked beyond their engagement at one point in time on one construction site. But they are lost to the type of tracing across records with which historians have reconstructed important details of workers’ individual and private lives.26 Without the individuation such analyses can provide, their story depends on representations which emphasize their position as members of a group or groups, attracting attention primarily for their collective identity and actions, and their lives, as presented, are lived in public. Details of individual and private lives are rare, unremarked, or unrecorded. No help in recreating them is available from collections or fragments of personal descriptive papers attributable to labourers on these projects. Lost are private letters such as those boarding-house keepers James and Mary Leary stored in the basket on the old beef barrel at the head of their bed.27 What they might have contributed is overshadowed by what others found it expedient or believed it important to record and preserve, details primarily focusing on groups working, fighting, and drinking together, engaging in collective demonstrations, protests, and work stoppages. This rendering of labourers’ lives tilts towards disjuncture and disruption, their collective actions usually subject to public censure or to rebuke from politicians and officials worried about interruptions to the work. Acknowledging the limitations of the available records, this study considers the labourers as individuals and in their diversity where possible, while also focusing on what they represented. It integrates the labourers into the broader processes of

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social and class formation and at the same time suggests how they experienced those processes. That experience speaks to important dualities in the transition to industrial capitalism: the faith in economic development and the reality of economic hardship; the belief in social advancement and the fear of moral decay; the ideal of harmony and reciprocity among the classes and the manifestations of class tension and conflict; the promise of the transportation revolution and the human cost.

Map 1  System map of Intercolonial, 1877, Halifax to Rivière du Loup.

Map 2  St Lawrence, Ottawa, Rideau, and Richelieu Canals, Canada, Department of Railways and Canals, Annual Report, 1894–1895.

Map 3  Détail de la carte de Montréal de 1859 faisant ressortir Pointe Saint-Charles, 1859, F.N. Boxer, Ville de Montréal, Section des archives.

Map 4  Showing Line of Welland Canal between Lakes Erie and Ontario, Canada, Department of Railways and Canals, Annual Report 1894–1895.

Map 5  Counties of Cape Breton and Richmond, Nova Scotia. From Roe and Roe, Atlas of the Maritime Provinces of the Dominion of Canada, plate 77. Beaton Institute Archives, MAP 712

1

Contracting on Public Works, 1841 to 1882

I was resident engineer when Crawford and Milner commenced operations. Crawford was acting contractor. [H]e told me more than once that although he had been an extensive contractor on buildings he was unacquainted with work of excavation and he was then simply serving an apprenticeship to such work. I replied that I was afraid he would have to pay a heavy apprentice fee.1 James Crawford paid a heavy “fee” when he was forced to give up his contract on the Junction Canal in April 1854, though he received payment for much of the work he had completed, and he retained the respect of engineers with whom he had worked, to a large extent because of his honesty.2 James Jack also deserves credit for his honesty. In 1854 his contract for the Beauharnois forced him into bankruptcy. In a petition to the governor general requesting compensation for his expenditures, Jack admitted that he should never have considered taking a contract; he had been persuaded to do so on the understanding that his partners were familiar with canal construction, “he himself knowing nothing about the same.” After one partner had drowned and another had absconded with money owing for wages and supplies, he had been left to face his creditors, with no funds and little idea how to proceed.3 Crawford and Jack were one type of contractor. John Brown was another. As Crawford and Jack were struggling through the 1850s to recover from their attempts to make it as public works contractors, Brown was steadily acquiring expertise and assets within the industry. He had come to Canada from the United States for his first big contracts on the Welland in the 1840s and had stayed 26

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to build an international reputation, in the process acquiring quarries, limekilns, plaster beds, and cement and plaster mills to control the supply of materials for his empire. Brown held contracts worth close to $2 million on the Welland improvements in the 1870s, when a fall from his carriage during a routine inspection of the works ended his life. Out of respect for Brown, his workmen put down their tools and refused to work until his body had been laid to rest. His funeral procession stretched over two miles and included hundreds from his workforce, some of whom had been with him for forty years. Brown left an estate worth over $500,000.4 James Crawford, James Jack, and John Brown counsel caution in generalizing concerning public works contractors; at the same time they represent significant trends emerging during the period studied here. By the 1870s the consolidation of capital in the hands of experienced contractors such as Brown was relegating men such as Crawford and Jack to a minor role on public projects. Central to this process was fixed capital investment in technological developments which encouraged specialization and provided greater control over scheduling and methods of construction. Simultaneously, a core of contractors from within British North America and Canada rose to prominence, competing successfully with their international rivals. Yet within these broad trends small and inexperienced entrepreneurs clung to positions as principal contractors and subcontractors. In part, they were able to do so because of problems within the industry which bedevilled contractors on public and private projects alike. The nature of public works construction in particular – its procedures and policies and political imperatives – also encouraged them to persist; public works stood out as a place where the inexperienced could have an edge, and expertise might frequently go unrewarded. Histories of private railway construction have created a compelling, almost mythic image of the contractor as a callous, hard-driving, profit-grasping individual who mastered the art of manipulating companies and governments alike. Detailed studies of individual projects and contractors have helped to modify this image.5 The experience of contractors on public works modifies the image further, providing in the place of robber barons and confidence tricksters nineteenth-century businessmen with varying degrees of talent, expertise, and capital, struggling to establish themselves in exceedingly risky endeavours. Here, large and small, corrupt and honest, were caught and squeezed by the vagaries and exigencies of the construction industry, by the state’s role in overseeing construction, and by the public interest as defined by government officials, politicians, and private citizens. Understanding

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these processes is crucial to understanding the relationship between capital and labour on the public works. This chapter begins with analysis of the system of contract tendering, a system which underlined the uncertainties and risks inherent in the construction industry and in public works construction in particular. From government engineers’ preparation of rough projections of costs, through would-be contractors’ submissions of woefully inadequate bids, to the awarding of contracts to those most successful in underestimating material and labour costs but not estimating actual costs, the process opened the door to the inexperienced and incompetent who either did not know the cost of the work or hoped to secure additional government money as their expenditures mounted. Attempts by public works officials to pass over the lowest bidders and others considered incompetent did, at times, help secure what engineers judged to be more reliable contractors, but not without accusations of patronage and collusion between contractors and politicians. The chapter explores what were by the 1870s the fiercely partisan and, in a number of instances, well-documented charges of corruption involving contractors and their political friends. The second part of the chapter analyses the experience and capital contractors brought to the work and the growing prominence of local entrepreneurs among their number – their predominance on the railways of the Atlantic colonies and the canals of the Canadas in the 1850s and their even more dominant role on the Intercolonial and the Dominion’s canals. This rise of a core of Canadian contractors paralleled and overlapped with the growth of better-capitalized businessmen whose financial resources and reputation enabled them to more successfully, though not always, ride out the endemic cash flow problems resulting from disputes with government officials over prices and measurement of the work. The third part of the chapter analyses the fixed capital investment in technology which enabled such contractors to pull ahead of their competitors by specializing in key areas of construction and achieving greater control over the scheduling of work. Most importantly for this study, analysis focuses on the extent to which investment in technology could limit but not eliminate dependence on the unpredictable supply and cost of unskilled labourers. Contractors entered the public works through public tendering, a system attractive to governments concerned about keeping down costs and avoiding at least the appearance of patronage and corruption, charges of which so frequently accompanied the expenditure of public funds. By publishing the call for tenders widely and then choosing contractors on the merits of their bids, governments hoped

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to secure quality workmanship at suitably low rates. Good in theory, in practice the system was open to serious problems and abuses. It was based on the assumptions that contractors would build their tenders on reasonable cost projections and that governments would then hold the winning bidders to agreed prices. Government officials, however, were frequently at a loss in providing potential contractors with information from which reliable estimates could be projected. This was not a reflection on the quality of government engineers. British North America benefited from knowledge accumulating on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing experienced engineers from Britain, Europe, and the United States6, and by mid-century Britain’s North American colonies were increasingly tapping into the growing number of those who had cut their teeth on construction sites within colonial boundaries. Thus it was competent and frequently highly talented engineers who prepared the plans and specifications for public works.7 Unfortunately, their expertise could only go so far. At the height of the transportation revolution in Britain, the projections of even the most gifted engineers frequently ran as much as 50 per cent under actual cost.8 Within British North America difficulties in projecting costs were heightened by the fact that large sections of railways, in particular, ran through sparsely settled, undeveloped territory for which geological surveys were incomplete. Such territory called for particular care in the preparation of plans and specifications. But too frequently, material furnished to prospective bidders was sketchy and randomly accurate, delayed by political debate over the merits of proposed routes and then snatched up from the drafting table over the protests of supervising engineers whose calls for greater care went unheeded. On the Nova Scotia Railway, contractors required to work with such plans complained that the depths of embankments and cuttings had been “accidentally” misrepresented, and the 1858 report of consulting engineer James Laurie argued that greater care with the original surveys could have saved much of what bogs and lakes swallowed up. In New Brunswick, government commissioners let contracts for the European and North American before finalizing the eastern portion of Section 6, then several months later handed the contractor a route which included work at Groom’s Cove near Hampton, the heaviest embankment on the line.9 The following decade, in its rush to commence the Intercolonial, the federal government advertised for tenders before completing the location surveys for the line. Distinguished Chief Engineer Sandford Fleming described as “mere guesses” his estimates of the work required on Sections 1 to 7. He was not being modest. His hurriedly prepared profiles and specifications

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for these sections meant would-be contractors “could not possibly do more than guess at the quantities of work to be done” and the financial investment necessary. Other sections offered their own surprises. Contractors discovered, for example, that the crossing over the Miramichi River had to be footed on a shifting foundation of gravel and sand, not rock, as they had been led to expect.10 Even the most detailed surveys and specifications could only reduce, not eliminate, risks inherent in this aspect of the industry. Embankments that subsided at an alarming rate and rock that would not be moved confounded the most experienced. One contractor who ran into bottomless bogs on the Nova Scotia Railway was philosophical about his problems, explaining to a government inquiry into cost overruns that this was an expected part of the industry, just “one of the risks contractors had to take.”11 If contracts were let according to a schedule of prices, with the cost for each type of work specified in advance but the quantities determined as construction progressed, contractors were spared some nail-biting. This was the system used for the second round of contracts on the European and North American. But it still left considerable room for guesswork and controversy over the amount and type of work completed. Projecting fluctuating costs of materials and supplies over the lifetime of a contract was difficult enough. More challenging, according to government officials and contractors, was estimating labour costs: How many workers would be needed for how long? Would they be available at the right time and place? How much would their labour cost? How dramatically would that cost fluctuate? To consider just one decade on one project, contractors on the Welland improvements who had signed their agreements early in the 1870s before the 1873–4 drop in wage rates were considered to have an edge in staying within contract prices; however, at decade’s end other contractors were hit hard by the general rise in wages and found the cost of labour rapidly climbing well above earlier estimates.12 Such risks were not peculiar to canal and railway construction; they were an integral part of nineteenth-century enterprise. Given the number of unknowns, however, contracting for public works was among the most hazardous entrepreneurial ventures and not for the faint-hearted.13 It might be argued that contractors took even bigger gambles on private ventures, where awarding of contracts was frequently tied to their financing as well as construction, and the work was often let to men who undertook to supply necessary capital or attract investment on the strength of their financial connections. Such arrangements raised the stakes considerably, though they also gave

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contractors more control over decisions involving their money. Initially the firm of Peto, Brassey, Betts, and Jackson, among the biggest in the world, was to have fulfilled this function for the European and North American, raising capital and constructing the railway virtually on their own terms. The firm also considered constructing and financing the Nova Scotia Railway under similar terms.14 Beside such ventures, the gambles of public works contractors can appear insignificant. To those who took them, they were not. Contractors on public works in British North America and Canada rank high among the risk-takers in the age of progress. Difficulty in estimating contract prices should have encouraged cautious tendering. Little suggests it did. Without sufficient appreciation of costs, contractors offered miserably low bids, hoping to undercut their rivals and encouraged in this practice by governments which adopted the lowest tender policy as part of their attempt to limit expenditures and charges of patronage. The policy was inordinately successful in keeping down prices, and in the process prepared the ground for financial difficulties and conflicts between governments and contractors and between contractors and those to whom they became indebted for materials, supplies, and labour. The Board of Works for the Canadas acknowledged that it had erred on the side of frugality in adopting the lowest-bidder policy. It had hoped the policy would push down contract prices, but by some undefined but inevitable process “the works would ultimately fall into the hands of men practically acquainted with their true value, and capable of properly executing them.” After a succession of contracts let at rates far below costs, the board recommended new guidelines for assessing tenders,15 but both it and its successor, the Department of Public Works, clung to the lowest-bidder policy, even as evidence of its repercussions mounted. Inadequate prices remained “the experience of every season,” according to a report on the Beauharnois in the early 1850s,16 and on the Junction the board acknowledged that the price at which the first contract had been let in 1851 had been far too low and was directly responsible for the failure of the contractor. Yet it relet the contract to the next-lowest bidders at prices only slightly higher, and when, predictably, they, too, failed, the work was let to the next lowest and then ultimately finished by one member of that firm.17 New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were rigid enough in adopting the lowest tenders to precipitate serious difficulties with contract prices on their railways.18 In its turn the federal government tried to contract with the lowest bidders for work under its superintendence. The “folly” of this policy became brutally clear on the Intercolonial, when

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four of the first five contracts let were thrown up within one year, a “self-evident proposition,” according to prominent engineer and contractor Walter Shanly.19 In all, ten of the fifteen major contracts for grading and masonry through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were let to the lowest or second-lowest bidder. Some had to be relet at double the original price.20 Somewhat dramatically, the Ottawa Citizen argued that the experience of other countries should have warned the federal government concerning “the penny-wise and pound foolish policy of allowing men to cut one another’s throat, in the race to get in the lowest tender.”21 Yet chief engineer Fleming defended the policy on the grounds that if the skill, experience, and resources of the lowest bidders appeared to be adequate, any other method of choosing contractors “would render the System of public tenders useless, and in future, prevent that proper competition which is calculated to get large public works constructed at the smallest possible cost.”22 On the canals of the 1870s the federal government also fulfilled what John Page disapprovingly described as its “obligation” to the public and let contracts at what government officials and the press characterized as “hazardously” and “ridiculously” low rates.23 Of the twelve major contracts for the Lachine enlargement between Sections 1 and 11, eight went to the lowest and two to the second-lowest bidders. The pattern was less dramatic on the Welland, where superintendent Page intervened to prevent acceptance of the lowest tenders for sections he considered both crucial and extraordinarily difficult. Still, of the forty-three major contracts let for the Welland between 1868 and 1878, twenty-one went to the lowest and seven to the second-lowest bidder.24 At the beginning of the decade, the Grenville was let to the third-lowest bidder, but Page could confidently and correctly predict that the contractor would not realize any profit from the work. At the end of the decade, when the department considered tenders for reletting work at the Carillon Rapids in 1878, Page warned that rates in the tenders were “much too low,” but implicit in public tendering was the obligation of the government to accept the lowest tender in the absence of a valid reason not to do so.25 Government engineers suggested the problem went beyond the prices on contracts to include the type of entrepreneurs the process encouraged. Men who did not understand the real cost of the work were most likely to submit the low bids, while the more competent and experienced tendered more cautiously. On the basis of his experience supervising the European and North American, Alexander Light denounced the whole contracting system on public works in British North America as a “promiscuous way of letting works to men of

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all classes ... without any special regard being had to their qualifications.”26 In the Canadas, the Board of Works suggested that the lowest-bidder policy be replaced by the practice of choosing “competent contractors” in the first place.27 From his experience on the canals of the 1850s, John Page concurred, echoing the assessment of staff under him that by bidding low a novice such as James Crawford on the Junction could find in public works an excellent opportunity for “serving an apprenticeship” in canal and railway construction.28 Twenty years later, as chief superintendent and engineer for the Department of Public Works, the same Page was still struggling this time to convince the federal government to choose contractors on the basis of their competence and the feasibility of their tenders and to let the work at fair prices. As the canal program of the 1870s got under way, he warned, concerning the first nine contracts for the Welland: “[T]here are some fair Tenders from good Contractors, but these are for the most part so far on in the list, that they cannot be reached; unless by passing over numerous others which would no doubt be viewed as invidious by those who submitted them.” To give “honest contractors” who understood the work a chance, Page recommended the lot be scrapped and a call for new tenders issued.29 He could have asked for an Order in Council passing over the lowest tenders for clearly specified reasons: if prices were far below department estimates, if the bidder was already engaged on a public work, if the securities were insufficient, or if the contractor appeared to lack the necessary skill and experience. Under the federal administrations of the 1870s as under the colonial, these were legitimate reasons for rejecting the lowest tender, and both Conservatives under Macdonald and Liberals under Mackenzie did use Orders in Council, citing such reasons for awarding contracts. But this was not an attractive option, engineer and contractor Walter Shanly, Conservative MP for Grenville South, explained during Commons debate over mounting costs for the Intercolonial. Accepting the lowest bidder might be generally unsatisfactory and ultimately uneconomical, but governments which did not do so found it “difficult to satisfy the people, and … the representatives of the people here, that favouritism ha[d] not been exercised.”30 Speaking as minister of railways and canals in a Conservative government over a decade later, Charles Tupper echoed Shanly: “[O]ur system of letting contracts is such that if parties come forward, however unable to do the work, however little confidence we may have in them, the hon. gentleman knows the difficulty of refusing the lowest tender, provided the party is prepared to make the deposit.” The only fixed tests for a bidder were whether he could put up the initial fee and 5 per cent of

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the contract price as security.31 Consideration of other criteria opened governments to charges of patronage and corruption. Both Shanly and Tupper found it politically expedient to overstate the degree to which public policy fettered administrations. But Page, the engineer civil servant, proved willing to force the issue when in 1879 he sought out contractors capable of completing the complex Welland aqueduct and rectifying the false starts and blunders of two previous contracting companies. He went against the core principle of the Public Works Act and circulated private invitations for bids to only ten companies and then recommended the successful bid on the basis of its feasibility and the contractor’s reputation. Ensuing debate in the Commons raised two important points. Tupper’s first line of defence, that the government could hardly go against the recommendation of an engineer of Page’s stature and experience, was, in part, an attempt to dodge responsibility by hiding behind his civil servant. As prime minister, Mackenzie had also called on Page in vindication of his government’s irregular actions in awarding contracts, “sheltering himself behind this officer,” in the words of Conservative MP McCallum. But this was more than political posturing. As government bureaucracy expanded so, too, did politicians’ reliance on civil servants. This was abundantly clear in the operation of the Departments of Public Works and Railways and Canals. Given the rising status of engineers, only a foolhardy politician did not consider carefully the advice of men like Page, whose job it was to know what they were doing and, at times, rise above partisan interests.32 That said, Tupper’s second line of defence shifted the focus to the extent to which partisan interests and patronage dictated government decisions. Tupper asked the House why, if any other course of action had been possible, the government would have risked alienating the contracting community by asking only a few firms to bid on a $760,000 contract and why it would risk the disaffection of Canadian contractors by including Americans among the select. He explained that the government had found Page’s proposal “most unpalatable”: “The Canadian contractors embrace a numerous and important section of the community. They possess great influence in their localities, and no step the Government could take was so likely to involve them in unpopularity with this large class, as to shut them out from public competition.” Yet the government had been willing to jeopardize its popularity among contractors in the interests of fulfilling its responsibility to complete the public works expeditiously.33 It was a nice argument, but at its core was the assumption that in the normal course of events, politician and contractor enjoyed a harmony of interests, the contractor hoping for a share in the government’s

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largesse and the politician looking to capitalize on the “great influence” contractors enjoyed in their communities. The government’s behaviour in risking “unpopularity” with the contracting community was the exception that proved the rule. Throughout the period, each successive colonial and federal government struggled with the issue of patronage and corruption on public works. In the decades which saw the move to responsible government, the broadening of the franchise, the rise of liberal democracy, and the consolidation of political parties which would become the vehicles of that democracy, emerging groups and classes wrestled with questions concerning the representation of their interests and the appropriate ethical relations between government and governed. But the dominant discourse did not seriously challenge the close ties between political parties and the governments they formed on the one hand, and those who enjoyed social and economic power on the other. The ties were natural, to be expected in a developing liberal democracy based on the principle that the best men could and would rise to the top in all spheres of life, though public works tempted ambitious men to the trough in excessive numbers and with unseemly demands to such an extent that they challenged both the integrity of public construction projects and evolving ideas concerning access to government. In the wake of the Pacific Scandal and the Conservative defeat, the Liberals under Alexander Mackenzie promised new standards of government accountability. But in the Liberal interlude between 1874 and 1878, was there enough time or inclination to clean up patronage in the public works and at the same time satisfy the party faithful who came looking for their reward? Mackenzie initiated at least two changes in the vetting of tenders.34 Yet it is difficult to trace a significant shift in the process of awarding contracts: partly because some of those approved by his government had already started to make their way through the selection process; partly because influential civil servants who had served under the Conservatives remained in place in the Department of Public Works, enjoying Mackenzie’s confidence; and partly because the Liberals did not avoid irregularities in awarding contracts. In opposition, the Conservatives were quick to make political capital out of those irregularities, and when they returned to power in 1878, they continued to gnaw at Liberal skeletons, largely in defence of their own record of patronage, one on which they continued to build. The sum total was a decade of public debates and more private communications, exposing the networks pulling business and politics together and linking contractors to party finances and party fortunes back to public works. Among those who won contracts on the

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Intercolonial and the post-Confederation canal projects, a few stand out for the scale of corruption in which they would become involved. Leading Toronto Liberal politician John Carroll won major contracts on the Welland in 1875 and 1876. Less than a decade later the same Carroll and his partner offered to swing the Toronto Tribune and its influence among Irish Catholic voters behind Macdonald in exchange for contracts on the Kawarthas, which they were willing to take “under assumed names.”35 Alexander Manning’s experience and reputation in the construction industry were probably sufficient to win him major contracts on canals in the 1870s. But his reputation as a shrewd and successful politician with considerable influence in the Conservative Party, combined with the irregularities in the tendering process for the CPR, in particular, raised suspicions of influence-peddling which would follow him long after he had given up government contracting.36 Thomas McGreevey was already at the centre of the 1863 Royal Commission investigating the process which had won him a contract for the Parliament Buildings, when he and his brother Robert secured the $650,000 contract for Section 18 of the Intercolonial. Willing to help friends as well as himself, McGreevey used his influence with Hector Langevin, Conservative minister of public works, to further the fortunes of other contractors, most notably John Connolly and Patrick Larkin, whose involvement with him in the 1885 Quebec Harbour Commission scandal would earn them time in Her Majesty’s custody for defrauding the public. Both Connolly and Larkin were contractors on the Welland in the 1870s.37 Most patronage did not leave such clear paper trails, nor did it touch off major scandals, and much of it would have been difficult to characterize as fraud. There were so many ways to nudge contracts into the hands of personal or political friends without bribing officials or politicians, leaking information about other contractors’ prices, or engaging in overt corruption. To many, patronage would even have been perceived as a positive sign that elected representatives were looking after their constituents, since the larger community could hope to reap some benefit when a local citizen won a contract. Equally, when hometown entrepreneurs lost out to contractors at a distance, the loyalties and vigilance of local politicians could be called into question.38 Seen in this light, patronage on the public works was not difficult to absorb into evolving democratic beliefs and institutions. Rather than challenging those beliefs and institutions, it helped to define them. As the interests of capital and elected governments and other branches of the state came together on the public works, they clarified the nature and meaning of the liberal democracy developing within the new

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Dominion and helped shape who would have access to government and whose interests the state would protect. The transportation revolution within British North America drew heavily on the resources of international contracting companies. Britain and the United States provided entrepreneurs with experience building the transportation infrastructure of Britain, Europe, and North America; however, in the 1840s those from the United States formed the preponderance of international contractors on public works, a continuation of the pattern established during the 1820s and 1830s, when both principal contractors and subcontractors on the Welland, Rideau, and Lachine had come largely from the United States and some directly from the Erie Canal as their sections of that project were completed. As transportation projects south of the border ground to a halt in the late 1830s and early 1840s, experienced American contractors again headed north to take up contracts on the public works. John Black came to the Beauharnois with fifteen years’ experience on projects such as the Pennsylvania Canal, the Philadelphia Railway, and the Columbia Dam on the Susquehanna; Samuel Zimmerman moved north from Pennsylvania to take work on the Welland in 1842 and stayed to dominate railway and political circles in the Canadas into the following decade; Carmichael brought to the Welland his expertise and the latest in earth-moving machinery manufactured by his New York company.39 These were among the most prominent of the American entrepreneurs central to canal construction in the 1840s, though less important in the 1850s. On the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways, British and American contractors were prominent at the bidding stage but secured work primarily as subcontractors. Local men and men from the Canadas stand out as principal contractors. On the main trunk line of the Nova Scotia Railway, at least four of the ten contracts went to men from Nova Scotia, the others to men from the Canadas. Of the five sections on the Windsor branch of the railway, Sections 2 and 5 went to a partnership involving a contractor from Canada and one from Britain, but two Pictou businessmen ventured into railway construction and secured the remaining work: John McDonald took Section 1, and Duncan Cameron, Sections 3 and 4.40 On the European and North American, local businessmen were marginally less important. John Brookfield, one of the most important contractors on the line, had come out from Sheffield, England, in the early 1850s as part of James Sykes and Company to build the abortive St Andrews and Quebec Railway. As that project limped to a halt, he found new opportunities in his adoptive country, securing five of the twenty-one major

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contracts on the European and North American, one in association with two local businessmen and four on his own.41 Businessmen from within New Brunswick such as Dillon Myers, who rapidly rose in the construction industry, appear to have split the remaining contracts with men from the Canadas and Nova Scotia. One pattern stands out among successful bidders on the European and North American. The three men whose contracts taken together represented the bulk of the work on this public project had established reputations locally for satisfactory performance on private railways: Brookfield’s five contracts were initially worth $51,000; Dillon Myers’s three, more than $75,000; and Walker, Rankin, and Walker’s five, approximately $124,000. By the 1870s the role of Canadian entrepreneurs had expanded dramatically. Despite the scores of American companies which tendered for a place on the public works, Canadians took the lion’s share of the contracts.42 Of the twenty-five companies which won the major contracts on the Welland between 1868 and 1880, nineteen can be defined as Canadian, headed by men who had been born within Canada or who had relocated their operations to Canada and had resided within the Dominion for at least ten years.43 Only three American firms took contracts on the Welland; Canadian-American partnerships secured another three. Those contracts that had to be relet all went to Canadian entrepreneurs. Of the major Lachine contracts let between 1873 and 1878, thirteen went to Canadian companies and two to American, one of which was headed by J.C. Rodgers, who came with extensive railway experience in the eastern United States. One contract went to Canadian F.B. McNamee of Montreal, who went into partnership with American contractors Dennis, Gaherty, and Frechette to reinforce his capital backing. On the Lachine, Canadians also won those contracts which had to be relet.44 On the Intercolonial the pattern was even more dramatic. Here, American companies appear to have been all but excluded, winning only one contract through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But here the cry went up against Ontario and Quebec contractors  – “Canadian,” “foreign” contractors, as newspapers described them  – who would bring in goods and labour from outside the area and squeeze members of the local labour market out of construction jobs. To critics continuing their opposition to Confederation and to those newly disenchanted with the union, these contractors became symbols of Central Canadian domination. No doubt these local critics watched with some satisfaction as contractors from Ontario and Quebec floundered, as first a Quebec and then an Ontario contracting company ran into trouble on Section 4 out of Amherst, and the contract was won and completed by local Amherst men; they

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also watched as Section 7 along Folly Lake was taken out of the hands of a Paris, Ontario, contractor and given to a local businessman.45 Focusing on public works risks overestimating Canadian firms’ ability to compete with internationals. By the 1870s the stipulation in major public works contracts that security be provided by two residents of Canada gave an indeterminate edge to men able to win the confidence and capital backing of Canadians. This did not exclude international competitors and certainly not American and British competitors whose established ties to Canadian enterprise facilitated their hunt for appropriate capital guarantors within Canada.46 But it may have deterred some. A bigger impediment was growing sentiment against awarding contracts to Americans on the grounds that they would use them to benefit American rather than Canadian businesses and citizens by bringing in plant, machinery, and supplies made in the United States and by employing American labour, depriving Canadians not only of jobs but of the opportunity to profit from providing the necessities for construction. The member of Parliament for Lachine expressed this sentiment forcefully when he urged the federal government to protect his constituents by adopting the “National Policy in its broadest sense” and excluding Americans altogether from any part in contracting. His argument reflected debate along the Welland, where the press lobbied against contracting with Americans. Two big American companies did win major contracts on the Welland. Denison and Beldon of Syracuse, each worth between $1.5 million, took contracts on the canal but were forced to withdraw from the work in 1874 in the face of charges, subsequently not proven, that they had embezzled $400,000 from the State of New York. That left only one American firm, that of Charles Dunbar, with a major contract on the canal, but that was still one too many for advocates of a Canadians-only policy.47 Dovetailing and overlapping with such sentiments, patronage and corruption also played their role in the choice of some Canadian firms, though patronage did not necessarily respect national borders, as the Pacific Scandal effectively demonstrated. Care is needed in assessing the level of involvement of foreign companies, in particular American, on Canadian public works. At the time officials had trouble determining whose interests a bid represented. In 1873 superintendent Page modified the tender forms to include full disclosure of all company members, in an only partially successful attempt to catch paper companies fronting for unknown interests and company ring bids in which members of a company submitted separate tenders without declaring their association with each other. But even these attempts to more effectively identify company

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members and prevent collusion in the bidding process left considerable room for American interests to pass themselves off as Canadian, if they so chose. Even when a company openly presented itself as a Canadian-American partnership, identifying whether Canadians or Americans held the controlling interest posed problems for government officials and later for historians attempting to determine the importance of American capital and enterprise to public works.48 What was and is clear is that Canadians were able to use the public works to establish their presence and enlarge their capacity to carry out heavy contracts and thus assume a position beside their American counterparts in the construction industry. A core of these men grew dramatically in stature. F.B. McNamee of Montreal, who by 1878 held contracts simultaneously on the Welland, Lachine, and Carillon; Hunter and Murray of St Catharines, who had begun on a modest scale and by the late 1870s had two million dollars’ worth of contracts on the Welland, major dredging contracts on the Lachine, and the task of dredging Toronto harbour; John Sullivan of Montreal, whose record of accomplishments took him from the Lachine to extensive contracts in Mexico; and Hugh Ryan, an Irish immigrant who rose from a humble position on the St Lawrence and Atlantic Railway in the early 1850s to the top tier among railway and canal builders in North America – such men were among the new Canadian giants in the field.49 Their rise to prominence both facilitated and signalled the arrival of an indigenous canal and railway construction industry. The paths men followed into contracting emerge from a sample of those on the public works of the 1870s, though the ability to trace the careers of only one quarter of those on the projects studied here means patterns are only suggestive. Some, like John Brown, built experience and capital within British North America and expanded their operations into the 1870s construction boom. Robert Gibson, contractor for masonry on Section 5 of the Intercolonial, had experience dating back to the construction of important bridges on the Great Western Railway in the 1850s; Sumner of Sumner and Somers, on Section 12, was a veteran contractor from the European and North American; Duncan MacDonald of Montreal was “an old railway man” with years of experience, entrusted with Section 10 when the original contractor defaulted; and Thomas McGreevy, trained as a carpenter, had worked his way up as a building contractor, winning minor contracts on public works in the 1850s before taking his major contract on the Intercolonial in partnership with brother Robert.50 Others used public works to move up from supervision under others to contracting in their own right. Local resident J.D. Silcox managed excavation

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of the hard pan on Section 26 of the Welland for American subcontractor Van Dusen. His success on this extremely difficult work gave him the edge in competing for extensive work on Collingwood Harbour.51 Following a similar path in a more spectacular rise, Horace Beemer came to the Welland in the early 1870s as foreman for the New York company of Ripley and Smith, enjoyed modest successes as an independent contractor, in 1878 entered a brief partnership with Montreal contractor John Sullivan, and by 1880 had achieved sufficient stature within the industry that he was among the select few asked to bid for the Welland Aqueduct. He won the contract and with it the respect of financiers who would back his expansion into railway construction and natural-resource development throughout North America, in particular in Quebec.52 Better known are stories of engineers who enjoyed successful careers in contracting – men like Walter Buck, who worked as engineer for the New Brunswick Department of Public Works, a private railway venture and the Intercolonial Railway in turn, and then as contractor on a private railway, before returning to the federal public works. Among the most successful were Sandford Fleming, Walter Shanly, and Collingwood Schreiber, who advanced as engineers through mid-century. The Shanly Brothers’ reputation won them some of the most difficult contracts in the United States, among them the $5 million contract for the Hoosac Tunnel in northwestern Massachusetts which had already broken three major American companies.53 Some contractors used skills acquired in related fields to facilitate a lateral move into construction. Already a well-respected Quebec architect, Francois-Xavier Berlinguet tried his hand at railway construction on the Intercolonial. His attempt at two contracts brought him close to financial ruin but did not deter him from taking on other major civil engineering projects such as the Trois-Rivières water system.54 Also on the Intercolonial was Ephrum A. Jones, manager of the Londonderry Iron Mines, when he turned his hand to railway construction near his home in Nova Scotia. Then there were those who transferred their capital and business acumen into contracting, men such as Amherst merchants Robert Smith and James Pitblado, wise enough to join their capital with “persons with practical railway building experience” for work on Section 4 of the Intercolonial. Among men who brought decidedly more capital to the table was Patrick Larkin of St Catharines, who went to sea at thirteen, rose to command a prosperous shipping enterprise, and then moved capital into a partnership which won a major contract on the Welland, a first step into an even more prosperous construction business.55 But the

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most frequently recommended path to advancement was to learn the industry from within, through subcontracting. Lacking the resources to win a major contract, an individual could offer his services to principal contractors, often eager to share their risks and responsibilities and increase their profits by subletting. British railway magnates Sir George Banks and George Stephenson – among the most spectacular success stories of their generation – entered railway construction as minor subcontractors and helped create the image of an industry in which humble men could rise to prominence. Closer to home, Samuel Zimmerman, an American who adopted Canada as his home, demonstrated that through subcontracting even the unskilled labourer could rise to wealth and power beyond his dreams.56 Alexander Manning demonstrated the same possibilities. Trained as a carpenter, Manning took a subcontract on the Welland in the 1840s, built his reputation on railways throughout the eastern United States and British North America, and won contracts on the Cornwall and Welland in the 1870s and later on the CPR west of Lake Superior and on the TrentSevern Waterway.57 Attracted in part by the image of such men, in an age that appeared to hold out such promise, men clamoured for a share in subcontracting, and the system became endemic to canal and railway construction. Government bodies officially discouraged subcontracting, refusing on paper to recognize its existence and in practice to accept responsibility for problems arising from it, yet not going so far as to wipe it out.58 This tendency to turn a blind eye to subcontracting makes it one of the more obscure aspects of public works construction. Throughout the 1840s, 1850s, and 1870s contractors sublet extensively in a variety of ways: they let out work requiring special machinery, such as dredges; hived off work of a particular category, such as masonry; or simply divided their contracts geographically. On Section 21 of the Intercolonial, for example, contractor MacDonald divided his grading between Newcastle and Bathurst into eight subcontracts ranging in length from less than a mile for a heavy cutting to four miles over lighter terrain.59 But subcontracting did not necessarily hand the work to less-experienced or shoestring entrepreneurs. To secure a larger portion of the work than those vetting tenders considered wise, an experienced principal contractor on one project might act as subcontractor on another section of the same project. Or, to the delight of government officials, an unproductive and inexperienced contractor might subcontract much of his work to more capable individuals. Given the high quality of some subcontractors, it is not surprising the federal government chose at times to enter into direct, though

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informal, working relationships with them, ignoring its own strictures against subletting and maintaining only a paper relationship with the principal.60 Whatever the nature of a subcontract or subcontractor, the practice compounded problems with inadequate prices and capital flow. Allowing himself a wide margin for profit, the head contractor left the subcontractor to operate with prices which at the extreme might be as little as 50 per cent of those on the original contract.61 Still, many subcontractors got a toehold in the industry, just enough to climb to the status of principal contractor. Similarities between canal and railway construction meant that, for all practical purposes, this was a canal and railway construction industry. The nature and organization of the work, the labour force required, and the demands for machinery, plant, and technology enabled an entrepreneur to take his experience from canals to railways and back again, providing him an ideal avenue along which to expand his operations. Following a pattern which characterized the industry, twelve of the principal contractors on the Welland and Lachine in the 1870s had experience as railway contractors.62 Adjustments might be necessary in moving from a canal to a railway contract, and men not prepared to modify machinery and construction schedules could find the transition hard, as was the case for prominent contractor R.P. Cooke of Brockville, who ran into difficulties when he attempted to save time by not adequately adapting his railway construction machinery to the work on the Grenville. But the pattern of combining these branches of construction criss-crossed the industry, pulling together major contractors from the two areas, expanding their opportunities for work, and increasing their experience and stature in the process.63 The capital necessary to commence operations depended on the size, nature, and location of a contract. Having won the confidence of men who would act as sureties, at a minimum a contractor required sufficient cash and credit to acquire and move necessary materials, machinery, and men onto the site and carry on for the first six to eight weeks, when he could hope to receive payment of his first monthly “estimate,” based on the engineer’s calculation of work completed. He could satisfy his creditors and cover costs from month to month as long as estimates approximated expenditures. The prices at which many had taken their contracts, however, combined with unanticipated problems, guaranteed that payments would frequently fall below actual costs, as contractor and engineer differed over the value and quantity of work completed. Laying out the work, measuring and inspecting materials, and overseeing construction to the extent of monitoring the workforce and scrutinizing its deployment,

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government engineers had the knowledge and authority to recommend payments well below contractors’ expectations and needs. Problems with estimates also centred on the fact that they were frequently late, more so during the 1840s and 1850s, when governments’ own political and financial problems were more likely to disrupt the flow of capital than in the 1870s, when dealings with contractors appear to have become more routinized.64 Whatever the reason, late or insufficient estimates were a headache for those contractors possessing a capital cushion and were a source of real hardship for those operating on a shoestring. They dramatized the tense relationship between contractor and government, the latter struggling to keep within specified prices, the former fighting to cover actual costs. A contractor with resources over and above monthly government payments might dip into his assets or use his credit to ride out difficult periods. He could also schedule the work in the order which would cut costs in the long term, not necessarily the order which produced payment quickly. In contrast, the contractor dependent on monthly payments was tempted or driven to adopt injudicious strategies, trying to maximize his short-term gain but jeopardizing any long-term profit. Surveying progress on the European and North American in 1858, engineer Light appealed for contractors with sufficient capital to carry out work “prospectively that [did] not immediately pay for itself.”65 It was an unambiguous plea for contractors with capital at a time when public works attracted too many without. Engineers at the centre of disputes over costs made compelling arguments against yielding to contractors’ appeals for additional payment. Page cautioned that increasing prices for Macdonald on the Chats would be an “extremely questionable” policy that would set a bad example and increase contractors’ power.66 Light warned the New Brunswick government that tampering with contracts on the European and North American would be unfair to those who had submitted responsible bids in the first place, would perpetuate the practice of unreasonably low tendering, and would only encourage “the designing men” who secured contracts by offering low bids, “thereby obtain[ing] a living in the meantime trusting to chance, a raise of prices, highly paid extras, fortuitous circumstances, lawsuits.”67 In his turn Fleming maintained that paying “extras” on Sections 4 and 7 of the Intercolonial would be “a general invitation to all other contractors on the line … would without doubt whatever keep alive the idea, that no matter what the Contract may be, a Contractor’s losses, or expected profits, will be made up to him in an irregular way in the end.”68 The recurring theme was fairness to those who submitted reasonable tenders and

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deterrence of the reckless and dishonest. But few knew better than men in the position of Page, Light, and Fleming that inadequate prices posed difficulties for honest and dishonest, efficient and inefficient; and whatever their assessments of the worth of individual contractors, they attempted to help them through those difficulties, an approach driven to a large extent by the desire to minimize disruptions while ensuring the integrity of the work. To this end, rather than cancel a contract, engineers might recommend nursing along the incompetent under stricter government control, informally increasing prices for a section of the work, or propping up a financially embarrassed contractor by inflating monthly estimates in the short term or advancing part of the money held as insurance against his failure. As superintendent Gallwey recommended when the contractors on the Chats ran into problems in 1856, “better to carry them along than go through the delays and injuries which come with a switch in contractors.”69 When Goodwin ran into potentially ruinous financial difficulties on the Grenville in March 1872, his letter to the Department of Public Works struck just the right note: “Do not embarrass me … Help me along.”70 Those who politicians and government officials could not or would not “help along” could submit claims for extra work or take their claims to arbitration. These processes differed from administration to administration throughout the period but were seldom straightforward, were usually time consuming, and always put the contractor at the mercy of government officials and politicians, back where he did not want to be – unless an intervening change in government had increased his chances for a favourable decision.71 Even for those who received a sympathetic response, compensation came too late to resolve their immediate problems and those of any creditors. On some issues, contractors could go to court, but this was an even more lengthy procedure with prohibitive costs and little prospect of success. The McGreevy brothers, who claimed to have lost $240,000 on their contract for Section 18 of the Intercolonial through the Matapédia Valley, were among the few successful in their appeal to the courts, but that only won them $65,000, fourteen years after the government had taken over their contract.72 The struggle for funding above original prices is dramatized by the experience of Bertrand and Berlinguet, major Quebec contractors originally welcomed on the Intercolonial as men with experience, solid assets, and good reputations. Before being forced to abandon their work, both men engaged in heated controversy with the commissioners. Positioned in the middle of the controversy, Fleming professed to being “at a loss” as to what to do. Certificates were falling

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far short of actual expenditures through no fault of the contractors, and prices would have to be increased at least 20 per cent to cover costs. While the commissioners agreed to a temporary increase in the schedule of prices, they added the crippling proviso that the total cost of construction was not to exceed the total price in the original contracts. Confronted with repeated assurances that the government was only trying to be fair, Bertrand and Berlinguet vented their frustration: “We are perfectly aware there is every disposition to see justice done us from the powers that be. All we ask is, let us have an outward and visible sign of it.” Another letter expressed their disbelief that the government would “allow any part of the cost of such a great national work to be sustained by private individuals.”73 From his perspective, perhaps bolstered by his own experience of long waits for his pay, Fleming warned about the unacceptable direction in which the public works system appeared headed: “[A] system by which Public Works were built to any considerable extent with private means must be a bad one.”74 Over the decades, how many contractors, confronting governments apparently more interested in cutting costs than in the cost of construction, had reason to wonder whether the public works were being constructed at the expense of private individuals? Politicians faced fallout from their treatment of cash-strapped and bankrupt contractors, and once again questions of patronage entered centre stage. Charges and countercharges of favouritism and corruption reveal concerns over patronage in colonial politics but no clearcut patterns in dealing with defaulters.75 More detailed records for federal public works suggest successive governments adopted a lenient attitude towards defaulters, most of whom eventually received payment for the value of any work completed satisfactorily, though not for losses incurred in the process. Under the Macdonald administrations, Liberals denounced this practice as special treatment for special friends, and it may well have been. The Liberal leader and advocate of greater checks on public spending Edward Blake questioned the motives of Conservatives in paying defaulting contractors for work on the Grenville as if they had fulfilled their contracts. But Tupper was able to respond truthfully that this was the usual manner of handling defaulters. As an example, he cited the Liberals’ payment of $334,000 to Cooke and Company before they were relieved of their contract for the Carillon.76 Similarly, neither party pressured sureties to make good on their undertaking to complete the work if contractors failed, unless that was their wish. Indeed, whether they could be forced to do so was open to debate. Engineer Shanly told the House during an 1870 debate over the Intercolonial contracts that he knew of no instance

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in his lengthy experience “where work taken below its acknowledged value had been completed by sureties.” In debating the same contracts the following year, Senator Tessier argued that it was “generally understood that it was better to leave those sureties alone.” When previous governments had tried to make sureties pay, they had failed and ended up covering the cost of the proceedings.77 A decade later, in defending the Conservatives’ treatment of defaulting contractors, Tupper could argue that they were only following the policy of Mackenzie’s government which had “settled a score of large contracts in which they took the work out of the hands of the parties and paid a large sum of public money over and above the amount of the contract, and yet they were not able to obtain a single dollar of the securities.”78 Lenient treatment of defaulting contractors and their sureties may have been justified, given the problems faced by even experienced contractors and the governments’ part in exacerbating those problems. But after-the-fact settlements did not address immediate problems of men attempting to maintain their credit and pay for materials and wages. Contractors with resources to fund capital shortfalls increased their independence in dealing both with governments and with the vagaries inherent in the industry. By mid-century, the better capitalized were further expanding their flexibility and options by funnelling their capital into technological innovations which provided new ways to tackle difficulties with terrain, weather, and the supply and cost of labour. Writing in the 1850s, engineer Light on the European and North American argued that it was becoming increasingly necessary for those with railway contracts to make the investment in heavy machinery. For major works in particular he considered it “absolutely necessary to have sufficient plant Such as Steam Engines, Pumps, Cranes, Pile Drivers, Waggons and other very expensive tools which are nearly valueless, to any person save a Railway Contractor, and which no one can afford to buy merely to complete one job at any ordinary prices.” The result was that as technological changes cut into traditional methods of construction, they also speeded the formation of what Light described approvingly as “a class of men who devote themselves almost exclusively to works of this nature and who are alone fitted to execute them with the necessary dispatch” and still make a profit.79 Most visible were innovations which cut deeply into the demand for human and animal power and promoted specialization by opening up areas in which contractors could work almost exclusively with machinery and operatives. Dredges provide the best example. Common in the first half of the century, horse-powered dredges, with the

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horse pulling from the towpath along the canal, were unwieldy, their power limited by the number of animals able to be harnessed to the task in the space available. Hydraulic dredges, such as the one in use on the Junction in the early 1850s, met the need for increased power, but their dependence on a fixed power source restricted their portability,80 and it was steam that increasingly replaced horses. In the early 1840s, to maintain inland waterways, the Board of Works invested in steam dredges comparable to those used by major contractors in the United States. By loaning them out, the board helped those unable to invest in steam to remain competitive in bidding for contracts involving dredging.81 Within a decade, however, government engineers were complaining about deterioration of equipment and frequent costly repairs and were pushing for state-of-the-art replacements in the face of increasing traffic on inland waterways which put a premium on machinery able to work during the navigation season,82 such as the compact steam hopper dredges which combined dredge with scow for removing material. But their cost was prohibitive; those procured from England in the 1870s cost $100,000 each. As in previous decades, government officials rented them out at their discretion. When S. Parker Tuck abandoned his contract on the St Peter’s Canal in 1879, the department helped his assignee finish the dredging by renting him the George McKenzie, its crew, supplies, and all necessary repairs for $1,100 per month, provided George McKenzie put in ten hours’ work per day, “weather and break-downs permitting.”83 The same year, when McNamee’s dredge floundered in fierce currents at the Beauharnois, the department provided a more powerful dredge which helped control costs in the long run.84 But engineers were becoming less confident of the government’s ability to meet the increasingly challenging work, even in this, the area in which it was most concerned to keep abreast of technological developments. When Charlebois asked to use a government dredge on the Lachine, Sippell explained that neither of the available dredges was up to the task. Charlebois worked with what he had.85 By the end of the 1870s major contractors were pulling significantly ahead of the government in investing in dredging machinery. On the Welland, Ferguson, Mitchell, and Symmes used an unusually large dredge able to scoop up a load of roughly three and a half tons and averaging forty loads per hour.86 Fighting currents on the St Lawrence required even more elaborate innovation and pushed investment in some of the most advanced machinery on the continent. For deepening the Galops Rapids Channel, Davis and Sons invested $80,000 in a custom-built combination drill, dredge, and excavator said to be

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among the most sophisticated technology of its kind in North America, able to operate in currents of more than eight miles per hour, held in place by a massive iron chain. An impressive innovation initially up to the job, it was perhaps too ingenious. Location of the drilling and excavating machinery on one dredge slowed operations sufficiently that the contractors had to alter their method of attack.87 Inevitably circumstances arose in which the machinery could not be adequately customized. Despite investment in modifying dredges for Sections 6 and 7 of the Lachine, Davis and Sons could excavate only a small quantity below the level of the old canal bottom, and resorted to manual labour for much of their work during 1877 and 1878.88 Even when the available dredges were powerful and flexible enough, they might not be a contractor’s first choice. Operating costs alone could exceed those for drawing off the water and hiring labour, so that contractors with the latest technology might still find reason to choose labourers over machine. On other occasions cost considerations cut in the opposite direction. When Whitney and Boyd decided to continue excavating on the Lachine by manual labour through the winter of 1877, they assumed any additional costs would be offset by wage rates low enough to protect profits. Labourers’ demands for a wage increase led them to reconsider, and they threatened to suspend work and continue in the summer with dredges.89 Perhaps Whitney and Boyd were bluffing, but their position illustrated a major attraction of technological innovation – flexibility in dealing with the demands of labour. Technological innovations also expanded options for creating and maintaining dry construction beds and manageable water levels. Steam pumps at mid-century proved quicker and more agile than horse- and human-powered pumps;90 by the 1870s advances in pumping technology had dramatically widened the gap between those who could afford steam and those who could not. On the Grenville in the early 1870s, superintendent Page calculated that a hand pump raised water over a small dam, a steam pump over the bank.91 The widening gap was evident on the Welland, where one contractor, McNa­ mee, employed a “monster” pump “capable of lifting as much water as all the pumps in the vicinity put together.”92 His pumping capacity got men into cuttings much more rapidly than on other sections, a source of frustration on interdependent sections where the slowest pumps set the pace for unwatering, and such interdependence became a chief force in marginalizing contractors who could not upgrade their pumping power. Newly developed pumps offered their own frustrations, however, and the frequency with which they broke down was just one of them. On Section 11 of the Lachine in December 1879,

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for example, hopes for winter work for hundreds of labourers faded as frost created leaks in the coffer dams, and the relatively sophisticated steam pumps repeatedly failed, bringing work to a standstill. Davis and Sons suspended excavation and ordered a massive steam pump from Baldwin of New York, a state-of-the-art Heald and Sisco, considered the largest of its kind in North America, driven by two seventy-five-horsepower engines and able to pump thirty-five thousand gallons a minute. The pump worked splendidly, and by mid-July Davis was employing three hundred men in excavating the bottom. As pumping continued, the machine preparing the way for the men, the Star announced: “GOOD NEWS FOR THE LABOURERS”: Davis was advertising for one thousand men. Mother Nature intervened again. By mid-November heavy rains had contributed to a two-foot rise in the water level at Lachine; the pump could not keep up with water forcing its way into the basin, and the work season ended prematurely, the pump off to the foundry for repairs and the labourers forced from the pits for two months.93 What for Davis was a disappointing season, on a broader level was a dramatic demonstration of the impact of fixed capital investment on the struggle with the St Lawrence. It also underlined the symbiotic relationship between man and machine, new technology replacing labourers in one area of the work but preparing the way for them in another. Hoisting and haulage required a considerable outlay of capital, but at mid-century most contractors spread that cost over the life of the contract by renting horses and oxen as the need arose for powering wagons, scows, and scrapers, pulling men and wheelbarrows up out of cuttings, and working winches, derricks, and other mechanical devices. Dependence on hired animals created problems. Farmers were reluctant to part with teams during planting and harvesting, the very points at which contractors endeavoured to accelerate the pace, after the spring thaw and before the fall freeze, and in winter horses might be off to the lumbering camps, unless contractors offered enough to keep them. No amount of money could secure adequate horsepower in the face of the widespread epizootic epidemic which struck particularly hard along the Welland from spring into fall of 1875.94 To get around such difficulties, some large contractors purchased their own horses and to a lesser extent oxen, and over the second half of the century, increasing numbers of contractors made the fixed capital investment in steam which decreased sharply their dependence on seasonal and regional fluctuations in the availability of animal power. For haulage over long distances, an area of railway construction in which steam quickly became indispensable, contracts usually bound

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governments to supply engines and flat cars. As with government help in dredging, these arrangements removed what for many would have been a major barrier to contracting.95 But they did not ensure work would proceed expeditiously. Difficulties in securing government-promised steam engines on the Nova Scotia and the European and North American reveal the extent to which colonial governments were themselves hauled unprepared into the railway age. When the government fell six months behind in delivering the engine and forty ballast cars necessary to remove surface earth from the heavy rock cutting on Section 5 of the European and North American, contractor Walker was forced to excavate frozen, not soft earth, setting back rock removal by at least two seasons and ultimately costing him his contract. On the Nova Scotia Railway also, dependence on government kept “men and everything idle for want of Engine power” and jeopardized schedules and increased costs.96 By the 1870s the larger firms on the Intercolonial, such as Brown, Brooks, and Ryan, engaged in the heavy work at the Bay of Fundy and crossing the Miramichi, were investing in their own steam engines, tugs, and barges to better control their operations.97 For hoisting and haulage over short distances and on the site, contractors innovated in a variety of ways; during the 1840s and 1850s they modified horse-powered derricks and experimented with steam, until by the 1870s major contractors showcased impressive steam derricks. On the Welland, Ferguson, Mitchell, and Symmes used a derrick with “the longest boom ever tried” in North America, while other contractors mounted multiple large derricks on a movable platform to extend their reach and mobility. Similar experimentation for heavy work down the St Lawrence and along the Intercolonial accelerated the movement of earth, rock, and plant on and off the site and shifted some of the burden in this area from man and animal to machine.98 For excavation, steam-powered machinery was available as early as the 1840s, though in Britain it was not until the tapering off of railway construction in the 1880s that it had a significant impact on the demand for unskilled labourers.99 In contrast, in the United States, where at key points and places the supply of cheap labour proved less dependable, technological developments in construction more rapidly took hold. Steam excavators and shovels able to do the work of up to a hundred men were making inroads on construction sites at mid-century and by the 1890s had become so common that navvy was applied to these machines as readily as to labourers.100 Major contractors operating in British North America also relied on steam excavators and shovels relatively early in the century. Carmichael, a New

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York manufacturer whose earth-moving machines were in demand internationally, brought his latest model to the Welland Deep Cut in the 1840s. According to his testimony before the 1846 British inquiry into railway labourers, he used and promoted steam excavators primarily for protection against strikes in periods of labour shortage.101 Even when the labour supply was adequate, steam machines could speed up the work in the right conditions. Two contractors on the European and North American chose them for that reason. In a race against time, Walker took the advice of the consulting engineer and acquired from Boston a steam shovel able to do the work of fifty men in the deep cutting back of Otty’s farm outside Saint John. The machine accelerated progress through the summer and fall of 1858, though it could not save Walker’s contract. That was relet to Alexander McBean, working Section 4 to the east, who had already learned the value of steam when forced to modify the grade on his section. Faced with a significant increase in earth work, McBean and his partner had made a hefty investment in steam excavators.102 In the cramped confines of many cuttings and over rough terrain, early models were a questionable investment, their bulk, lack of manoeuvrability, and inefficiency in heavy and hard soils giving pause to those contractors not deterred by their cost. By the 1870s, however, more compact and mobile machines fitted more comfortably into tight spaces and provided the versatility needed on a range of sites. Contractors experimented with models such as Slusser’s Excavator, a self-loading and self-dumping combination shovel and wagon. Customized for work in the blue clay pockets along the Welland, it was hailed as a great labour-saving machine capable of scooping up and running earth along a band into its wagon in one continuous motion.103 Despite modifications steam excavators remained inefficient in many circumstances. Through necessity but also as a cost consideration, John Brown set aside his impressive array of earth-moving machinery and excavated much of his sections on the Welland with pick and shovel. On the Lachine contractors also found steam excavators poorly adapted to some work, and on the Intercolonial newer machinery was far from replacing traditional man- and horse-powered excavation.104 On Section 10 of the Intercolonial, Brown, Brooks, and Ryan employed some of their most sophisticated steam excavators, but sturdy old excavators similar to those in use in the 1850s were also in evidence in the ballast pits at Little Fork and Battery, for example.105 Contractors unable to afford the initial capital outlay pooled their resources to rent or buy steam excavators jointly, a practice more common in the 1850s, when government engineers helped

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to locate machines where they could be best employed, but still in use in the 1870s.106 At the same time, others professed their willingness to use steam excavators should they prove convenient but decided to rely on men and horses instead, and, like Bertrand, faced frustrating delays. In March 1871 Bertrand complained that he could not hire extra teams for as much as $3.50 per day, a rate well above the $1.50 the government initially had estimated for the hire of one horse along the coast of Baie des Chaleurs, New Brunswick.107 The hard rock through which much of the canal and railway beds were driven begged for constant improvements in drilling. Steam drills also presented a solution to difficulties in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labour in some years. The experience on the Chats is instructive. In the early stage of construction in 1855, churn drills, which derived their power from lifting and dropping and were effective in limestone, proved “useless” in the irrefragable rock of the Laurentian Shield, and sledgehammers and cast-steel jumpers proved “indispensable” though irritating, given the speed with which even they wore out.108 Engineer Gallwey looked forward to moving from manual boring to horse-powered drills, once the terrain was sufficiently smooth and the space sufficiently large, and he was even more anxious to get steam machinery operating. A four-horsepower steam drill was on site by August but could do little more than sit and watch; the ground remained too rough and its movement too awkward for a rapid escape from the blasting.109 But its time came. Men continued to smooth the ground, the machine was modified, and by January 1856 it was drilling. It still lumbered along and lost too much time to repairs, but together with the horse-powered drill, it addressed the problem of maintaining an adequate workforce. By August Gallwey happily reported on the “very apparent” advantages of steam and horsepower over manual labour in drilling.110 Not incidentally, these included the ability to work steam machines night and day at less cost than an extra shift of labourers. By the 1870s, more mobile and compact drilling machinery required less advance preparation of the surface and worked at dramatically increased speeds. Steam drills able to move through at least sixty feet of solid rock a day became common on canals in particular, and for their work at Welland and Port Colborne, Murray, Hunter, and Cleveland employed a drill capable of driving through at least 130 feet of rock in nine hours, the Ingersoll Rock Drill patented in 1871, winner of prestigious engineering awards and quickly to become a fixture in mining and construction.111 A costly investment, the machine was advertised as paying for itself in the long run because fewer and more sturdy moving

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parts meant less downtime for repairs. An added advantage was its ease of use. Less skill and training was required before a man could be put at the controls, rendering the contractor less dependent on a supply of trained operatives and the wages they could demand.112 Advances in blasting materials complemented the new drills. Contractors on Canadian public works were in the forefront of testing gunpowder substitutes. Goodwin on the Grenville was one of the first contractors in North America to successfully employ nitroglycerine, by February 1872 reporting favourably on the speed with which it attacked the Precambrian Shield. Those who could afford to experiment tried new forms of nitroglycerine such as trinitroglycerine. For much of the excavation of the high bluffs along the deep ravine of Section 15 on the Welland, Brown invested in dualin, a highly effective glycerine combination. The results were spectacular but the cost prohibitive, over $1.00 per foot, significantly more than he had calculated for that portion of the work.113 Along the Intercolonial a wide range of blasting material was in use. Some contractors used nitroglycerine, others continued to rely on hand-driven borers and gunpowder, and one major firm excavated hard rock by hand at an increase in cost of $0.30 a yard. When Berlinguet ran out of gunpowder his labourers proceeded to hack through solid rock with picks, dramatic testimony to the persistence of traditional construction techniques, even when they were much more expensive.114 On the contracts studied here, impressive technological advances could limit but did not eliminate heavy dependence on labour. On the Welland, for example, to begin contracts worth $2 million in the 1870s, Hunter, Murray, and Cleveland assembled plant and machinery worth at least $100,000 second hand and increased their fixed capital investment as their work progressed. They still hired between five and six hundred men at a monthly cost in wages which fluctuated between $6,500 and $8,000 in the spring of 1878 but might have been double that, weather permitting. At Thorold, Brown combined a greater investment in machinery with monthly payments of approximately $7,500 for a workforce of similar size in the spring of 1876.115 As entrepreneurs built up their investment in machinery, they continued to face significant outlays on labour even in seasons in which working days were restricted. Those not investing in technological innovations found a steady and affordable supply of labourers even more essential to the work. Consequently, for large and small, principal and subcontractors, a primary component of monthly expenses was the bill for wages. When the cost of the work exceeded contract prices and the monthly estimates paid by governments, when the estimates were only temporarily late or in dispute, or in the face of any number of reversals

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of fortune, it was the wage bill to which contractors looked for help in cutting costs. Having exhausted other possibilities for staying afloat, they might hope to pare down the cost of wages or hold off on paying workers in the hope that the next month, or the next, would bring improvement in their circumstances. Their fortunes were inextricably tied to the cost of labour and the uncertainties of the labour markets as they fluctuated from season to season, year to year, and region to region. Their operations depended on a malleable and affordable supply of labourers. The following chapter looks at the changing sources from which contractors drew men for the rough work.

2

The Labour Force

WANTED. 200 Labourers, 20 Stonecutters To work on Nos. 2 and 5 Contract Windsor Branch of the Nova Scotia Railway. April 26  DUNCAN MACDONALD Halifax Evening Express, 7 May 1858 WANTED. 300 Labourers, 50 Stonecutters Immediately for Section 16, Intercolonial Railway June 7  WHITEHEAD & SONS Apply Murphy’s Grocery, Bathurst

Truro Sun, 11 June 1870

Labourers came to public works from a variety of backgrounds and sectors of the economy, their individual choices shaping and reflecting patterns in local and international labour markets. These shifting patterns across time and place suggest the regional variations and the overlap and intersection of sectors of local and transnational economies which combined to bring labour to the public works. In the 1840s and 1850s government publications and private colonization initiatives promoted labour on public works as a beginning point for immigrants lacking the resources to establish themselves on the land; in keeping with this vision, but also in the absence of other opportunities in some years, the recently arrived homed in on canals and railways, joining throngs of 56

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the hopeful waiting for work and finding work in years when the labour market was tight. In the same years the United States provided a source of labourers who were desperate for work of any type and flocked to canals in the Canadas when American public works closed down. Like the new immigrants, those successful in finding jobs were overwhelmingly Irish Catholics in the 1840s. In the following decade a broader spectrum of immigrants, primarily English, Irish and Scots Protestants, and Germans, secured work on canals and railways. In the early years of the decade, many immigrants moved on to the expanded job opportunities in the United States, and the flow of migrant labourers from south of the border lightened up, though it would pick up again in the second half of the 1850s as jobs once again dried up throughout eastern and central North America. The major change in the workforce from that of the 1840s, however, was the dramatic increase in the participation of men drawn from sectors of the economy within British North America, from the immediate vicinity of construction sites, and from greater distances. This source of labourers would become even more important to the revived public works program of the new Dominion. Their participation stands out early in the decade, when the labour market was tight and men were attracted to construction projects close to home and farther removed, on the Intercolonial in particular, working their way along the advancing line of rail through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, into Quebec, and down along the St Lawrence. With the deepening depression of the middle years of the decade, those thrown out of work in commercial and developing industrial centres joined in the hunt for jobs, and migrants from the United States returned again in numbers to compete for employment. Also gravitating to public works were the relatively modest numbers of immigrants in these years, among them the beginnings of the build-up of Scandinavians and Italians. The result over the 1840s, 1850s, and 1870s was a shifting combination of public works labourers drawn from recent immigrants, migrants from the United States, and men from within the British colonies and the new Dominion, who together represented significant changes in local demographic and migration patterns and in broader, international trends in the movement of labour. Beginning with a discussion of the range of workers contractors required, the chapter then turns to analysis of the sources from which they drew the major segment of their workforce, the men who undertook the heavy manual labour. Proceeding decade by decade, it considers the build-up of immigrants and migrants who comprised the backbone of the labour force in the 1840s and the rhetoric which tied even the poorest to the vision of colonization through public works.

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For the 1850s, the broadening of the sources from which labourers were drawn focuses on modest changes to recruitment strategies, the diversity within the immigrant component of the workforce, the migrants from the United States who again appeared on public works, and the shift to labourers drawn from sectors of the British North American economies. The chapter analyses why this last group was attracted to public works and why contractors found them at times convenient and at others problematic. The final section of the chapter examines the expanded use of local labour in the late 1860s and early 1870s along the Intercolonial and on the canals of central Canada and the St Peter’s Canal in Cape Breton. Once again, contractors found these workers demanding and problematic, but as their numbers increased around construction sites in the second half of the 1870s, they became a valuable pool of cheap labour, and even more valuable as their numbers were swollen by migrants fleeing depression in the United States. The modest immigration of the 1870s was significant in adding to the workforce new immigrant groups with already established patterns of migration throughout North America and back and forth across the Atlantic. Italian labourers, in particular, represented the expansion and refinement of a recruitment strategy for the industry which in later decades became what contractors considered a good, mobile fit with construction projects which were themselves constantly on the move. The chapter concludes with the suggestive reconstruction of small segments of the 1870s workforce using rare pay lists, labourers’ petitions, and fragments of census records. Contractors sought men with varying skills, depending on the specifics of their contract. Skilled stonecutters, stonemasons, carpenters, and blacksmiths were necessary to prepare materials and build bridges, locks, tunnels, and the more humble drains, culverts, and temporary structures needed to advance the work. Increasing investment in machinery also brought a corresponding rise in demand over the decades for men to tend, operate, and repair and service that machinery. In addition, specific aspects of the work called for men whose specialization set them apart. Platelayers in charge of packing railway ties, navvy miners experienced in tunnelling, and blasters practised in the deployment of explosives were worth the investment, though contractors might choose to rely on cheaper, untrained labour, and indeed might have to, if experienced specialists were unavailable at the wages they were willing to pay. The primary demand, however, was for men capable of heavy manual labour. Some of these men worked in quarries and as ancillary to the skilled. They also cut sod and cleared trees and brush to prepare the right of way. But on both

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canals and railways, despite impressive technological innovations over the decades, the labourers’ primary task remained shifting “muck,” the navvies’ term for all types of earth and rock.1 A man acquired practical knowledge through experience, even in the work of shifting muck. He gained expertise in assessing soils and rock formations and judging the degree of stress they could withstand, determining the safe limits of an overhang in different materials and recognizing the early signs of faults and slides. He acquired practical know-how in matters such as when embankments could be extended and how much additional material would close a gap or fill a marsh. In addition, he developed agility in the use of pick, shovel, and axe. Such expertise was a valuable addition to any construction site, and during the canal and railway booms in Europe and North America, major contractors attempted to maintain a contingent of seasoned labourers at the core of their workforce. Yet the work was unskilled in that it required no formal preparation or apprenticeship. Like employers in other heavy industries such as mining and lumbering, contractors on canals and railways could choose to hire the inexperienced and unseasoned at rates they hoped would compensate for delays and setbacks resulting from their lack of experience and stamina. Consequently, from the contractors’ perspective, many aspects of the work were open to any man with the ability to swing a pick and wield a shovel and with sufficient stamina to begin the process of toughening up. During the canal-building boom of the 1840s the demand for men willing to take up construction jobs expanded enormously over previous decades. Staggered canal construction in the 1820s and 1830s had maintained a steady demand for such labour in the Canadas. In the 1840s, the simultaneous prosecution of projects along British North America’s major waterways necessitated a workforce of unprecedented size. In any one of the peak construction years between 1842 and 1846, over fifteen thousand labourers were required for canal construction alone. The Lachine and Welland Canals absorbed the major portion of these, in some seasons employing over four thousand each. Smaller projects demanded anywhere between a few hundred and a thousand workers. With canal construction on a more modest scale in the following decade, labourers were employed in the hundreds rather than the thousands on projects such as the Junction and Chats Canals.2 But the reduced demand for canal labourers was more than offset by the railway boom of the 1850s. The number of labourers employed per mile of track varied from railway to railway and from section to section on the same railway; however, taken together, the close to

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two thousand miles of rail constructed throughout Canada and the Maritimes required tens of thousands of labourers each year from 1852 to 1859, the boom years of mid-century railway construction. The standard estimate used by railway promoters and governments seeking immigrants was that each mile of track would require one year’s labour of sixty men. On the Nova Scotia Railway the total construction force peaked each year between roughly twelve and eighteen hundred men. The European and North American Railway fuelled a comparable demand for labour.3 Immigrants flooding into North America during the 1840s proved vital to stocking the pool of unskilled labour from which construction workers could be drawn. In a pattern well documented in numerous studies of international labour migration, wave after wave of small holders and rural labourers, displaced by the restructuring of rural economies and impoverished by cyclical depressions, supplied the human power for British North America’s transportation revolution.4 Government officials and private pamphlets addressing questions of economic progress in British North America pointed to what appeared to be the natural connection between immigration and public works. During his brief time as first governor of the United Canadas, Lord Sydenham tied canal construction to emigration in his vision for expanding the population, economy, and transportation infrastructure in the area over which he took charge.5 Immigrants arriving in the New World without the means to become farmers immediately could provide the cheap canal and railway labourers necessary to social and economic development. Colonial Secretary Lord Grey defined this connection in similar terms, though with an emphasis on railways, during consideration of the most effective means of colonization: “[M]ore would really be accomplished towards encouraging emigration by applying it to the construction of great public works; such, for instance as railways, by which employment would be provided for a large number of emigrants in the first instance, and a great extent of land would be rendered far more accessible, and therefore available for settlement, than it now is.” In turn, the development of public works would touch off an even greater demand for labour to build bridges, roads, houses, mills, and factories, all necessary to progress. Grey estimated that “for every labourer employed on the line, at least four would be employed in the formation of settlements growing up on either side.”6 For his part, in correspondence with Grey, Governor Lord Elgin fleshed out his ambitious scheme for an intercolonial railway which could employ thousands of destitute Irish immigrants at construction labour and defence of the colonies and ultimately settle them in purpose-built

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communities along that railway. On a broader level the railway would promote commerce and prosperity within the colonies.7 In the short term canal and railway construction would offer immediate relief from destitution and maintain within the colony those who would otherwise travel on to the United States. In the long term, public works would give labourers the means for social advancement. After working for two or three years at construction, the poorest of immigrants could save enough capital to begin farming their own land. In a country possessing “no monopolies, exclusive privileges, or great and impassable gulfs between grades of society,” immigrants who at home had been parasites and a drain on the economy could become respected and productive members of society. Thus, employment of immigrants at railway and public works construction was presented as the path both to individual advancement and to the social and economic development of the colonies.8 The compelling symmetry of such plans captured the imagination of men such as William Fitzgibbon, Irish landlord and member of the House of Lords, whose firsthand knowledge of the suffering building in 1840s Ireland spurred him to become both a general advocate for railway colonization and the architect of a bold attempt to relocate families from his estate lands to construction projects in the New World. The obvious dovetailing of their own immediate self-interest with the desperate need of their tenants has made balanced portrayals of such men difficult, and the spectacular failure of a number of their projects has left them the appearance of an ugly predictability. But at the time, rhetoric which twinned individual improvement with colonial development promised to ease the artificial pressure on land in the Old World, extend the opportunity for land in the new, and provide productive labour to groups unable or unwilling to help themselves.9 Irish immigrants proved particularly important to canal construction, the timing of their arrival ideal for infrastructure projects. From the mid-1820s through to 1837, the Irish influx provided primarily Protestant, and to a lesser extent Catholic, smallholders and the better-off class of labourers willing to take jobs in canal construction at least temporarily.10 The cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1834 led to brief dips in immigration, and the commercial crisis of 1837 prompted a temporary labour shortage. This shortage, combined with the continual drain of immigrants south across the American border, was a particular concern to the newly created Board of Works when the Canadas launched their massive inland navigation program in 1841. The board’s report of the same year noted that cheap labour was so scarce that contractors on the Chambly Canal were finding it

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necessary to offer exorbitant wages and even then could not maintain a sufficient workforce. But within less than twelve months the board was pressing the Legislature to commence other construction projects immediately to take advantage of the resurgence of Irish immigration and the consequent surplus of labour and low wages.11 The majority of Irish immigrants were now Catholics from the south and west of Ireland, and it was the Catholic Irish who would predominate among the pool of newly arrived from which construction workers would be drawn. This shift from a Protestant to a Catholic preponderance coincided with a shift to poorer smallholders, cottiers, and labourers. Up to 1843–4 many in this stream arrived with sufficient resources to see them through their first days in the New World. But by 1845 and through the famine immigration into the 1850s, increasing numbers of the absolutely destitute disembarked at British North American ports. Many of their number, perhaps the major fraction of those who remained within British North America, would eventually find a place on the land. Studies of occupational stratification and ethnicity have challenged the old stereotype of the Catholic immigrant, predisposed to remain waged labourers. Studies emphasizing the Irish Catholics’ rejection of the land, and more recent, subtler presentations of this argument, have been effectively challenged by work demonstrating the importance of Irish Catholics to the rural economies.12 Analyses of Irish immigration patterns in British North America and the United States have further undermined attempts to superimpose cultural predispositions on Irish settlement patterns in the New World, though these studies have also argued that settlement on the land was, for many immigrants, part of a multistaged process. Depending on the timing of their arrival and their economic circumstances in the country of origin, members of a particular immigrant group clustered, if only temporarily, in sectors of the economy and pockets of the workforce.13 Immigration officials cooperated with the Board of Works in directing the newly arrived to the canals and in advancing passage money to the most needy.14 Contractors also joined in recruitment, advertising in newspapers and shipping offices and sending agents to port cities to entice labour. Independent of or in combination with such inducements, immigrants were likely also drawn to canal construction by kinship networks reaching across the Atlantic.15 The same process of chain migration which created identifiable ethnic and kinship clusters in rural and urban centres throughout North America likely also created migration corridors to the public works. In addition, the search for employment which carried labourers throughout the States of the

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Union also propelled them north into the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies. During the 1830s the movement of labourers across the border had usually been in the opposite direction, a large proportion of immigrants at Quebec proceeding to the United States in search of employment or land. But the economic panic of 1837 had put a stop to most public works in that country, and further stoppages in 1842 sent thousands of Irish labourers into British North America looking for work. They came alone and with wives and families, establishing temporary homes where they saw the prospect of work.16 Within this pool individuals remain anonymous, but together they represented a spillover from the build-up of transient unskilled at the base of American society, the large floating population of American cities, constantly “on the wing” in their search for work.17 They were recent arrivals from the British Isles, established American residents, and former residents of British North America who had crossed into the United States, only to return when public works held out the prospect of employment. Those who had moved from one construction job to another within the United States, pursuing navvying as an occupation, were the largest identifiable block. Within the United States these migrating seasoned labourers were predominantly Irish and Catholic but included representatives from a range of groups, from German immigrants following employment opportunities to slaves whose bondage dictated their movements. Those from this pool who came north across the border to work the canals of the 1840s were portrayed, however, as overwhelmingly Irish Catholic with a much smaller contingent from other ethnic groups. Although an important source of labour for the canals, to government and public works officials they were not desirable as future citizens and settlers. As the chairman of the Board of Works expressed it, their years at construction work, “wandering from one work to another,” had turned them into a class of migrating labourers, men who had already demonstrated their inability or unwillingness to take advantage of the opportunities offered in the New World. The “refuse of the works in the United States,” when they were no longer useful it was hoped they would disappear back across the border.18 In this respect they fell woefully short of the type of immigrant imagined in railway and public works colonization schemes. Migrants from south of the border combined with recently arrived Irish to comprise the bulk of labourers for whom information is available along the St Lawrence Canal system. Of the two to three thousand men on the Beauharnois in 1843, the great majority were natives of Ireland, twelve hundred of them recent immigrants of whom over six

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hundred had arrived in 1842. Indeed, the employment of these immigrants had been a primary reason given for early commencement of the canal. The remainder were described by their fellow workmen as Irish labourers who had been working for some years on canals in the United States, two hundred coming directly from the Erie Canal. From the total workforce, over twenty-five hundred were Irish Catholics, according to government officials and contractors.19 Only a relatively small number of Canadiens secured work. Contractors and government officials suggested a similar breakdown on the Lachine.20 Irish Catholics also overwhelmed every other group in the Welland unskilled workforce, and here again many were from the United States and maintained close contact with friends across the border in Buffalo. The General Sessions of the Peace for St Catharines provide a rare close-up of a segment of this labour force which ran afoul of the law in the years 1842 to 1845. Of the sixty-eight convicted and imprisoned who could be positively identified as canal labourers, all were Catholics born in Ireland.21 Protestant Irish working along the Welland were identified as lock labourers and tenders, though they may also have made up a small segment of the unskilled force. Here and on other projects, Protestant Irish labourers may have been obscured by or confused with their Catholic countrymen, or their contribution may simply have gone unremarked. The same might be argued for other groups whose participation may have occasioned little comment. Even allowing for under-reporting of such individuals and groups, Irish Catholics dominated the unskilled workforce on the canals in the 1840s, as they did the free labour on canal construction sites in the United States.22 The build-up of would-be labourers along the public works generated consternation among government officials who, as early as the first seasons of construction, realized work could be provided for only a fraction of those flocking to the canals. Even contractors expressed concerns that the surplus of labourers would disrupt rather than advance the work. In response to the Board of Works’ frustration that the unnecessary men were not being made to move along, Welland superintendent Samuel Power explained, “[T]he majority are so destitute that they are unable to go. The remainder are unwilling as there is not elsewhere any hope of employment.” By 1847 the situation had improved little. The Emigration Committee for the Niagara District Council lamented that construction sites were still operating “as beacon lights to the whole redundant and transient population of not only British America, but of the United States.” It concluded that even if there had been somewhere for the unemployed to go, they were too

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indigent to travel.23 Reports from around the Lachine told the same story, and here, too, contractors came to see the labour surplus as too much of a good thing.24 Canadiens in Lower Canada offered a further potential source of labour. Important to canal building in the 1820s and 1830s, they once again sought work on the Beauharnois, Chambly, and Lachine Canals, as part of a broader pattern of combining seasonal waged labour with their continuing roles in the agricultural sector. For some, work on the canals might have represented the beginning of a complete break with the land, and for many, an alternate means of livelihood as depression in the timber trade diminished opportunities for employment.25 Despite their availability and willingness to take on a wide range of heavy labouring jobs, their contribution to canal and railway construction was dwarfed by that of the Irish. Why? The argument that they were reluctant to assume this type of unskilled labouring job, that their attachment to agriculture and their peasant attitudes in general held them back from construction projects in Lower Canada, has been effectively challenged;26 and their migration patterns challenge it, too. Many travelled to seek work on canals and railways much farther afield in the United States, where they became important in construction of projects such as the Illinois and Michigan Canals in the 1840s and expanded into railways and other infrastructure projects in subsequent decades.27 They themselves argued that they wished to take such jobs closer to home. Initially the government of the Canadas had appeared committed to honouring their wishes. Louis Isaac Laroque, son of the contractor for Sections 3, 4, and 5 of the Beauharnois, admitted that his father had obtained his contract from the government on condition that he employ the “Canadian farmers residing on the spot,” and a petition of seventy-three cultivators and others from the parishes of St Clement and St-Timothée de Beauharnois argued that they had only agreed to construction of the canal on the understanding that they would be given “a preference of employment on the works.” But the government had reneged on its commitment. Indeed, at the very time it was promising the Canadiens jobs on the canals, it was making plans to ease the introduction of the English and Irish, whom it expected would predominate in the workforce, in the process fuelling the criticism of contemporaries that Britain and the government of the Canadas would attempt to swamp the Canadien population as an important part of plans to create the society envisioned by colonial administrators such as Durham. Laroque was allowed to proceed with only nineteen Canadiens in a workforce of 750. According to the petitioners, they found

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themselves “partially excluded, and their places filled by strangers.”28 Martin Fortier from the parish of St-Timothée complained that the few Canadiens employed on the canal came from a distance, and it was difficult for those from the immediate area to secure work. Joseph Bergevin, who cultivated land divided by the canal, gave his opinion of contractors’ hiring preferences and practices: “I know that the Contractors very often refused to employ the inhabitants of the place. I myself was refused – contractors make money from provisioning and renting to those who come from a distance.” Others along the Beauharnois agreed.29 In contrast to the surfeit of labour along the canals of the 1840s, contractors confronted recurring labour shortages in the early 1850s. Government superintendents on canals in the Canadas reported that the many public works throughout North America were gobbling up labourers, creating stiff competition for any surplus which became available. Contractors on private railways joined the lament. Immigrant agents and government officials in the Canadas concurred that labour shortages peaking in the spring and summer of 1854 were retarding public works.30 The pattern was similar in the Atlantic colonies. Recent immigrants remained one important source of labour for infrastructure projects of the late 1840s and early 1850s, as two private railway projects reveal. Of the 828 labourers on the St Lawrence and Atlantic Railway at Sherbrooke in 1851–2, the majority had arrived in British North America during the immigration of 1847–9. Eighty-one per cent were Irish, and 75 per cent Irish Catholic.31 Of the 143 labourers on the St Andrews Railway who were living in St Andrews, New Brunswick, in 1851–2, 124 were Irish immigrants who had entered the colony between 1841 and 1850. Though their religion was not specified, newspapers reported that the unskilled were primarily Catholic.32 Such immigrants continuing to stream into British North America in the 1850s were still encouraged to find a place on public works. Government officials fed hungry contractors suitable recruits from among Irish and increasingly English and Scottish newcomers. From outside the British Isles, Germans and Swedes represented an important shift in the composition of the unskilled workforce to inclusion of more men from continental Europe. In 1854 Chief Emigration Agent Alexander Buchanan reported that “fully” four-fifths of the “foreign arrivals” at Quebec had found work on public works and railways in Western Canada. Many of their number lacked sufficient resources to establish themselves on the land immediately; some, like the half-naked immigrants from the Duchy of Baden, were in desperate

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circumstances, only half alive, and many of those who made it to the Junction Canal would not survive long.33 Intensified competition for the unskilled throughout North America encouraged more aggressive and targeted recruitment strategies. Contractors stepped up advertising and hired agents to solicit workers among new arrivals34 and to recruit men who came out from Europe under formal contracts. In part a response to the shortage of cheap labour, this also reflected the shift in the type of contractors on transportation projects in the 1850s. Formal recruitment from across the Atlantic was a costly expedient, favoured by very large companies on private projects in particular. Giants like Peto and Brassey, for example, could bring in an estimated three thousand skilled and unskilled men and their families, guaranteeing five years’ employment at good wages on the Grand Trunk Railway. Other employers recruited by the hundreds, not thousands. These attempts to import a workforce coincided with a sudden glut of experienced railway labourers throughout Britain, where completion of the major British railways in the late 1840s threw an estimated 150,000 navvies and skilled railway workers out of jobs. These were highly prized, considered a cut above common labourers. They were Irish, English, and Scottish workers drawn from throughout the British Isles, and most had experience working as a group of mobile, seasoned labour, attached to the often larger mix of inexperienced locals and unskilled labourers on construction sites in Britain and in continental Europe.35 An elite corps with international experience, some among their number laboured as far afield as New South Wales and its successor colonies, jump-starting their transportation infrastructure. But in the early 1850s many were reported absolutely destitute and desperate for any type of work. A contingent stranded in France appears to have been in the worst shape, and communications between London and British North America encouraged their rapid relocation to the Canadas. To contractors in North America they appeared an ideal source of labour. Immigration agents also professed to considering them desirable as future settlers, enticing them to emigrate by the promise not only of good wages but also of cheap land at the end of their labour. But could contractors on public works afford what could be an expensive and not always satisfactory arrangement? Those recruited for the early months of construction of the European and North American as a private project under Peto and Brassey proved to be more trouble than they were worth, abandoning the railway and crossing into the United States. From his own experience, a bitter subcontractor complained that to the navvy recruits,

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engagements were “only regarded as chains that ought to be snapped asunder, and soon the navvies took themselves off.”36 The tight labour supply eased in the second half of the 1850s as the slide into depression pushed the unskilled from their tenuous positions in the labour force. Bad news for the labourers was good news for contractors, and in 1856 projects throughout the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies reported vast numbers of men descending on construction sites,37 though contractors still faced some problem in keeping their forces up to strength in the early fall and in reassembling labourers during the spring.38 Depression brought a revival of migration north across the border, as distress in American cities propelled the unemployed into British North America, where once again they congregated along public works. To hurry along this migration contractors in the Atlantic colonies recruited among the Irish unskilled who were out-of-work in the large cities and who would otherwise be reduced to “sweeping the streets and living in soup kitchens.” They advertised in American papers and sent agents throughout the United States arranging for shipment of fifty, one hundred, or two hundred men.39 These shipments included French labourers from eastern port cities and New Orleans, some perhaps returning to their place of birth to find work. They also included German labourers from southern and northeastern states whose contributions to canal and railway construction there likely made them attractive targets for recruiters.40 Among these migrants and recruits were individuals known only by nicknames. To officials an irritatingly anonymous form of address but to other labourers a badge of belonging, the nickname marked the individual as part of a far-flung community of labourers, able to maintain the type of group identity generated within less mobile communities of workers. It also gave its bearer a special place in the collective mythology of construction communities: it kept alive a story in which the everyday event became larger than life, or the unusual became an act of heroism or tragedy. It preserved the deeds of a navvy such as Bloody Hammer, whose exploits had already earned him an unsavoury reputation before his 1857 arrival on the European and North American Railway.41 Among labourers from the United States, how many had migrated into the Canadas in the previous decades from across the Atlantic or across the American border, had returned to the United States as the St Lawrence projects drew to a close, and had continued to move from project to project throughout North America during the 1850s? Observers in the United States concurred with the Board of Works that the great majority of those employed on public works for any

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length of time were lost to a settled agricultural life, “neither valuable as settlers, nor disposed to fix themselves as such.”42 Yet studies of settlement patterns in the United States suggest that Irish Catholic labourers broke with construction work during the first half of the nineteenth century and secured land along the canal and railway projects they had built. Indeed, it was not uncommon for financially troubled public and private enterprises to pay their debts to labourers in the form of land grants, creating pockets of Irish settlers along transportation projects.43 These studies have been unable to break through the anonymity of the labour force, and rather than tracing the movement of individuals from construction to the land, they have identified bulges in the population which appear to indicate settlements of former construction workers. This level of analysis leaves considerable scope for confusion between construction worker-settlers and settlers attracted to potentially valuable land along new transportation links. Yet it has provided an important avenue for challenging two stereotypes: that immigrant groups such as Irish Catholics were landless by choice or that they were unable to find a place on the land.44 During the 1850s labourers drawn from within British North America played an important role in the construction workforce, as they had in the 1820s and 1830s before the influx of labour from outside the colonies had dwarfed their contribution.45 As contractors struggled to build a workforce in the early 1850s, they turned to those resident both in the immediate area and farther afield within the colonies. On the Chats in the heart of the Ottawa Valley, contractor McDonald sent agents in all directions throughout the surrounding countryside and to communities such as Hull and Chaudière to lure men from farming and lumbering. Counter on the Junction Canal sent his overseer up and down the St Lawrence to Quebec and Kingston to secure labourers.46 Men who responded from the rural sector posed serious problems for contractors because of the tension between the rhythm of agricultural work and that of construction. Counter complained that he was unable to hire a sufficient force during harvesting, and some of those he was able to secure compounded his problems by suddenly deciding to leave the canal and work the harvest after all. McDonald on the Chats expressed the same frustration that just when he was gearing up for the spring push, the Canadiens were “leaving the work for the spring cropping of their farms,” and in the last drive of construction before winter, they were “leaving for the Harvest.”47 From the contractors’ point of view, ties to the rural sector rendered labourers less reliable and stable as a workforce; from the labourers’ point of view, their ties rendered them less dependent on construction.

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Contractors would return repeatedly to this theme throughout the century, as they attempted to secure a malleable workforce. It was the argument used by contractors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries against the employment of settler-navvies in construction of the transcontinentals and for the recruitment of Italian and Polish “industrial” navvies instead.48 Despite disruptions to the work schedule created by men from the rural economies, during the 1850s contractors in Lower Canada drew heavily from this sector. Rare surviving pay sheets for labourers on a public work, though not one of the works which comprise the primary focus of this study, provide hard evidence of the extent to which local men were attracted to such work and the importance of construction work to those in the changing rural economies. Sixty men from St Pierre, St Thomas, Berthier, and Pointe Levi and 189 more from the area immediately around Quebec City made up the workforce building the Loading Piers below Quebec in 1852.49 For some, income from public works may have reinforced their hold on the land. Many were probably part of the body of journaliers in rural and agricultural parishes who, coming out of the 1830s, were seeking additional opportunities for work and whose numbers grew as the commercialization of agriculture and the accompanying process of proletarianization generated an expanding pool of day labourers with varying attachments to and positions within rural economies. Some were relegated to small plots attached to larger holdings, using those plots to contribute to their subsistence while being heavily dependent on wage labour for survival. Others had an even more tenuous hold on the land, some had no hold at all, and some were becoming part of the increasing numbers who let go and joined in migration to urban centres and to the labour market south of the border in industrial New England.50 In the Atlantic colonies men from the rural economies also responded enthusiastically to posters and newspaper advertisements recruiting workers from the area around construction sites. Men such as Robert Ellison of Vinegar Hill, on the Cumberland Road, travelled a relatively short distance to the European and North American to secure work which would help defray the costs of raising seven young children.51 Roderick McDonald, recently emigrated from Scotland, travelled farther to the same stretch of construction, leaving his wife and seven children in Cape Breton, where the family had settled.52 What proportion in any concentration of labourers were freeholders and improving farmers, and how many were squatters on infertile soil in the backlands? How many still hoped to, and how many would, realize greater economic stability through labouring at construction,

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and how many were already trapped in a hand-to-mouth downward spiral when they arrived at a project? Imagining the extraordinary range of circumstances which made construction work attractive is possible, but defining the precise configurations of men those circumstances created on each site is not. However, the inability to generalize beyond specific references to individuals and groups is the key point to understanding the shifting nature of the workforce.53 One group which attracted attention were the Scots Highlanders from Cape Breton, members of the Presbyterian Free Church, who sought work on the Nova Scotia Railway; in the summer of 1854 more than seven hundred were divided into one block on the main line and another on the Windsor Branch.54 For some, construction work may have been the beginning of migration out of the rural sector; for many more it was a complement to their primary rural occupations, a means of earning cash for consolidation or expansion or simply to supplement their subsistence. They maintained their strong commitment to the rural economies, irritating contractors by leaving the works for planting, harvesting, and fishing and abandoning the work in the crucial last days before the winter slowdown in order to find employment for the whole winter elsewhere, particularly in lumbering.55 What contractors interpreted as a lack of commitment to the job at hand had also been exasperating to British contractors who had condemned the Highlanders as the most indolent of all labourers because their desire to maintain their homesteads and herring fishing had allowed only a “see-saw” contact with navvying. Distinguished engineer Thomas Telford had gone so far as to argue that if Highlanders could be made to take it seriously, work on the Caledonian Canal could train them to “habits of industry and civilization.” Failing to appreciate their commitment to their established economic cycles, observers on both sides of the Atlantic helped to perpetuate the stereotype of the feckless Highland Scots, lacking the will to succeed in undertakings requiring steady, disciplined labour.56 In this spirit, the landlord on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides warned immigration agent Buchanan that the crofters he was shipping to British North America were poorly suited to hard work and should, as much as possible, be dispersed throughout the colonies as the “best means of eradicating those habits of indolence and inertness to which their impoverished condition must in some measure be attributed.” Hundreds of their number did journey to Sherbrooke for jobs on the St Lawrence and Atlantic Railway in 1851, but neither landlord nor Buchanan expressed surprise when reporting that most stayed only a few months. Despite the relatively high wages, the Scots moved on to join kin and countrymen

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and in search of land, and Irish labourers moved in to take the jobs. Among the 828 railway labourers enumerated in the spring of 1852 were only sixty-three Scots.57 As labour shortages turned to gluts over the second half of the 1850s, men from the rural sectors were increasingly joined on construction sites by the urban unemployed. On the maritime railways special trains extended the distance labourers could travel each day to the work, and residents of Halifax and Saint John followed construction mile after mile into the countryside. Newspapers across the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies encouraged this practice, admonishing unemployed day labourers to rouse themselves and seek work wherever it was to be found, ten miles out the railway track or at a much greater distance. In response to these exhortations and advertisements and in a pattern consistent with their general mobility, members of the urban labour pool pursued construction jobs close to home and farther afield.58 The winter of 1857–8 in Saint John provided a glaring example of the build-up of the unemployed seeking jobs on public works. To the suffering of the city’s day labourers, some of whom had taken jobs on the railways, was added that of the migrant navvies who flocked into the city at the close of work for the winter. Private citizens and politicians demanded that construction of the European and North American continue as an enormous winter works program and circulated a petition throughout the community, warning that the labourers planned to leave the country if they could not secure a livelihood and might not return when they were needed for the next season. Although the results were not entirely satisfactory and some of the work completed under winter conditions had to be redone, upwards of a thousand labourers secured employment for much of the season, demonstrating the way in which, even in the worst of times, “the necessities of the labouring poor could be made to dovetail with the general interest of the whole community,” as the New Brunswick Courier put it. Continuation of the work benefited contractors with very cheap labour, an advantage to which the government was sensitive. It also answered the dilemma faced by contractors forced to lay off great numbers of workers: how to maintain a generous supply of labour in the area against the time when it would again be needed.59 Employment of local labourers from various sectors of the economy and the contribution of new immigrant groups combined in the mid1850s to produce a workforce more heterogeneous than that of the 1840s. On six and a half miles of the Nova Scotia Railway extending from the head of Grand Lake, five to seven hundred men were grading in the spring of 1854, among whom a reporter found “English, Irish,

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Scotch, Chezetcook French, Negroes, Micmacs.” In the fall of 1855, as the Nova Scotia Railway advanced from Halifax, another reporter described the new villages at the end of the line, with their shanty population “like Jacob’s cattle spotted and speckled … Highlandmen and Lowlandmen, Englishmen, and Irishmen, and the natives of the country.”60 Yet even here, where labourers from surrounding and outlying areas were most abundant, the newly arrived Irish Catholic immigrants and migrants from the United States attracted considerable attention and at times appear to have outnumbered those drawn from closer to home. During the 1860s the demand for construction labour on both public works and private railways within British North America fell off sharply, as governments and private investors struggled with the accumulated debts of the canal and railway booms. South of the border the Civil War continued the demand for a railway construction force drawn from throughout the continent, but not until the end of the decade did the revival of public and private transportation projects fuel the demand for construction labourers within the new Dominion. This demand quickly surpassed that of earlier decades and encouraged an expanded search for the unskilled. On both private and public projects contractors complained of the difficulty of securing cheap labour.61 Anticipating problems in attracting men to construct the Intercolonial Railway, in 1867 the federal government undertook a detailed study of the number and type of workers in the sparsely populated areas of New Brunswick through which the proposed routes would run. It concluded that Restigouche, Gloucester, Northumberland, and Kent Counties could provide a total of twenty-eight hundred labourers, in addition to many of the necessary skilled workers and horses.62 When construction commenced in 1869, local farmers, fishermen, and men from urban centres within New Brunswick reported for work on the railway to an extent far exceeding these government projections, and local men turned up for jobs in equally impressive numbers on sections through Nova Scotia and Quebec. In the spring of 1869 the local press was happy to report that instead of bringing in labourers from Ontario, as had been feared, contractors on the sections within Nova Scotia were hiring men locally.63 In Quebec, along the twenty-four miles of Jobin and Company’s contract between Eel River and Jacquet River, the one hundred employed at the commencement of construction in the spring of 1869 were “principally French Canadian.”64 In August and September of 1870 the workforce along the entire line was made up overwhelmingly of local farmers, fishermen, and men from urban communities in the Atlantic Provinces and

7 4   R oug h Work

Quebec. The following year men from the rural areas and small urban centres along the route once again supplied the bulk of a force which fluctuated around forty-five hundred unskilled in the peak summer construction months.65 Some simply stepped out their front door each morning for a brisk ten-minute walk to work. The twenty-year-old youngest son of John Urquhart, whose family had been in the Newcastle area since 1802, lived close enough to the construction site on Section 10 that he probably walked to work from home each day.66 So eager to participate were inhabitants along the line that when construction in their area was suspended or completed they migrated to other sections of the work, supplementing the local labour there. Some contractors and sections were temporarily left out of this shuffling of labour along the line. When Tuck and McGreevy took up their contracts through the Matapédia Valley, they found only seventy houses along the whole forty miles and no labourers available, but with construction underway on both sides of them, they remained hopeful that labour would spill over, at least from the adjacent sections. Their hopes were initially frustrated: “[A]ll the labor from the St Lawrence side was intercepted and employed by the sections to the west of them, and all the labour in New Brunswick was similarly intercepted and employed by the sections to the east of them.” Yet even in such sparsely populated areas, contractors who could afford to be patient could count on receiving a share of the men migrating from communities along the line.67 Men further afield within the Atlantic Provinces also travelled to the works. Among this group Cape Bretoners were well represented by men such as Angus McCush, who left his wife and seven children in Cape Breton to take work on the Intercolonial through Colchester County.68 Men from Prince Edward Island also found work on the railway as they travelled through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the early 1870s seeking jobs.69 Some contractors also brought in labour from Newfoundland. Three hundred Newfoundland fishermen, “mostly Irish,” arrived in the summer of 1869 to work on the sparsely settled section between Campbellton and Eel River. They appear to have spread beyond that section of the line, to the annoyance of local Newcastle men who complained about being shut out from the work in their own county, until the Newfoundlanders abandoned the work, and more jobs became available.70 These railway labourers were not seasoned navvies, according to a newspaper reporter who gave as evidence his own informal survey. Of the 160 men he had visited along the line above Campbellton in July 1869, only one had had any experience at railway construction.71 They appear to have satisfied the contractors, however. In the first seasons

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of construction, contractors on the Intercolonial demonstrated only a lukewarm interest in recruiting immigrant labourers from across the Atlantic, despite government promotion of them as men with valuable experience. When in the summer of 1870 the government offered to bring in immigrants to speed up work between Newcastle and the crossing into Quebec, contractors declined the offer on the grounds that they were discovering an unexpectedly rich supply of local labourers. Skilled workers were another matter. Contractors responsible for heavy stone and masonry work found the local supply of stonecutters and masons inadequate and worked through their own and government agents to bring in primarily Scottish and English skilled immigrants.72 By the fall of 1871, as the work accelerated and reports of labour shortages increased, contractors did broaden their search for labour and tapped the flow of newly arrived unskilled immigrants, beginning to build up a workforce which included among the unskilled Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Swedes, and Norwegians, as well as a contingent of experienced railway navvies.73 Still, through to completion of the last straggling sections in 1876, the Intercolonial remained the work of labourers drawn primarily from within the Atlantic Provinces and Quebec. Hundreds of these labourers were on the worksites when census takers passed down the line in April 1871. Though many had been discharged for the winter or had chosen to return home or find alternate work, the pressure of deadlines had forced contractors to continue with a reduced force under less than ideal circumstances. From among this force scattered along the entire line, census takers identified a small number of men as railway labourers, railway navvies, or navvies. But were they typical of the larger body of labourers or of those who might have described themselves as navvies, or did they emerge randomly? Did the census taker single them out, or did they single themselves out, and if so, why? How many others called themselves navvies but were entered simply under the official omnibus category labourer? Without answers to these questions this fraction of the workforce cannot be considered representative. Yet it can provide a sense of the range of ethnic and religious backgrounds among labourers on the Intercolonial and, in a few instances, of the migration paths they followed to the works. The largest cluster resided south of Newcastle at Nelson, where the railway crosses the Miramichi River. Six boarded with a subcontractor and six more in the home of another railway labourer close by. All the boarders were reported as single. One “railway labourer” lived with his wife and children in a neighbouring shanty. Of these fourteen, ten

7 6   R oug h Work

had been born in British North America, four in New Brunswick, four in neighbouring Nova Scotia, one in Prince Edward Island, and one in Newfoundland. Three had been born in Ireland and one in England. Those born in New Brunswick were the youngest, ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-three, perhaps an indication that they were still residing at home, close to the work. Of the eight born in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, five were of Scottish descent and three of Irish. With the exception of three Presbyterians, they were all Catholic. Their ages ranged from nineteen to forty-five. Those born in the Old World were old enough that they might have been among the railway navvies recruited in Britain two decades earlier. Equally, they may all have been recent immigrants.74 The migration paths of two more navvies at Moncton are clearer, assuming they were the natural fathers of the children residing with them. A fifty-year-old Irish Catholic, born in Ireland, lived with his wife and children. Their twenty-one- and seventeen-year-old sons, born in Ireland, had followed their father into railway construction. After the birth of a daughter who was by then eight years old, the family had emigrated to the United States and then moved on to New Brunswick at some point after the birth of a daughter who was currently six years old. Close by lived a fortythree-year-old railway labourer, English and a member of the Church of England. At some point at least fourteen years earlier, he had emigrated and married a New Brunswick woman who had borne two daughters, thirteen and eleven.75 Ten more railway navvies were identified by census takers along the Nova Scotia section of the line running south to Minas Basin between Wentworth and Onslow. Of these, six were natives of Nova Scotia, each living with their families in separate dwellings: two Irish Catholics, John O’Doe and Tom O’Doely, and four Scots, Catholic John Maginis, Methodist John McDoe, and Presbyterians Angus McFerson and John McLeod. The remaining four had been born in the Old World: Thomas Burnette, a Scots Presbyterian, unmarried and boarding with a shoemaker’s family in Wentworth; one Catholic from Ireland, widower James Harris, along with his fifteen-yearold son Thomas, a labourer, boarding in the home of a Wentworth farmer; and another Irish Catholic, John Clancey, boarding in a farmer’s shanty in the same area. Clancey had emigrated from Ireland at least fourteen years earlier, married a Nova Scotia woman, and with her raised a family. One lone navvy from France, a fifty-five-year-old widower, lived in a shanty in Onslow.76 Where are the hundreds of other labourers, and how did so many escape detection? Pockets of labourers in temporary lodgings or

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camps away from home are recorded in clusters, but not individually, simply as blocks of ten or fifteen men “domiciled elsewhere.” Their location suggests an attachment to the Intercolonial, but equally, they might have been occupants of lumbering camps who were frequently recorded in similar fashion.77 Linkage of the census tracts with newspaper and government reports reveals other small groups designated only as labourers but possibly working on the railway. In boarding houses in Amherst which were used by railway labourers were twelve labourers born in Nova Scotia, Presbyterian and Catholic Scots and Presbyterian and Catholic Irish. Among them were labourers listed as born in England, Ireland, Scotland, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Quebec, also Catholic and Presbyterian. They might have been part of the workforce on the Intercolonial, but they might also have been engaged in any number of unskilled jobs in the area.78 In Bereford, just north of Bathurst on Baie des Chaleurs, were twelve labourers from Newfoundland, and in Nelson ten more, all Roman Catholic. They may well have been the remnant of the three hundred Newfoundland fishermen who came in for the first season of construction on these sparsely settled sections and who abandoned the work after only a brief sojourn, leaving only a few of their number behind.79 But these labourers’ direct association with railway construction can only be suggested from their location. Without greater detail concerning the labourers it is only possible to suggest who was most likely to have been drawn to construction work: men in an often precarious cycle of subsistence for whom construction jobs offered much-needed additional income; the better off, who saw the opportunity to earn cash for expansion or consolidation; those already caught in the scramble for work that would end in outmigration for many and in cycles of cross-border migration for others; and younger members or younger sons of the rural economies supplementing the domestic income or taking their first independent steps away from the family hearth.80 All these could have found construction jobs well suited to their needs and goals. From a contractor’s point of view, however, they were a frustrating pool from which to draw labour because of their commitment to their own rural enterprises. During seeding and harvesting and in the peak fishing season, the railway works were “stripped of labour,” particularly through the Miramichi and Baie des Chaleurs, where farmer-fishermen made up the major segment of the workforce.81 In the winter months contractors complained that labourers chose to pursue their traditional winter work in the lumber camps rather than remain on construction sites. Whether lumbering offered higher or more dependable wages is

7 8   R oug h Work

unclear, but it held out the prospect of steadier and longer-term seasonal work. Lumbering also jeopardized the supply of labour during peak construction seasons, for once they had gone to the lumbering camps men were reluctant to return to railway work. Consequently contractors through the sparsely settled parts of New Brunswick felt constrained to provide steady work in an effort to keep men attached to construction over the winter slowdown. On the sections between Newcastle and Moncton government officials endorsed this strategy, recommending it as “wise economy” for contractors to offer winter employment crushing stone rather than lose a workforce which could only be lured back with difficulty.82 Despite their frustration with the established seasonal rhythms of local labour, contractors targeted this source of manpower. Their agents travelled throughout the Maritimes posting notices of job opportunities wherever they would catch the attention of local men – in taverns, grocery stores, and churches – and they advertised in news­ papers.83 Advertisements for available jobs were similar in format to those of earlier decades, with one important shift in emphasis. In the early 1870s it was not uncommon for contractors to include information designed to make the conditions they offered more attractive than those on other sections. Thus, men looking for work on the Intercolonial had choices to make as they read through the Saturday edition of the Gleaner for 22 July 1871. Should they apply to the store of H. Wyse, Chatham, for “steady Employment” on Section 10 at wages from $1.25 to $1.50, “PAYMENT ALL CASH,” or should they try at Bathurst, also on Section 10, for “STEADY EMPLOYMENT until Christmas” at “as good Wages as are given anywhere on the North Shore”? Were the terms offered by King and Gough on Section 16 too good to be true or too good to pass up – a guarantee of the “Highest rate of wages paid and twelve months Employment”?84 Contractors on canals in Ontario and Quebec also confronted problems competing with a range of employment opportunities in the early 1870s, when government officials reported that demand for all types of labourers was exceeding supply.85 Between 1871 and 1873 contractor Goodwin struggled to maintain an adequate workforce on the Grenville on the north shore of the Ottawa River. His advertisements and labour recruiters reached out to farmers throughout the surrounding countryside and to all the churches within twenty-five miles of the canal. Farther afield his agents also appealed to labourers along completed sections of the Intercolonial and to those in the major urban centres of Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Cornwall, and Toronto. Goodwin also tried to secure the cooperation of government

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immigrant agents in funnelling labour his way.86 As farmers in the immediate area became the backbone of his workforce, Goodwin had to adjust to the restrictions which planting and harvesting placed on their contribution. Labourers from Montreal and Quebec also disrupted his work schedules, their attachments calling them back home for holidays, family responsibilities, and other work opportunities. Goodwin discovered that labour from all these sources could afford to be choosy. When rumours spread that the men on the Grenville had to work continually in water, potential labourers refused to come until friends already on the site assured them the rumours were unfounded. To compete with what he considered his major competition, the lumbermen and contractors on other construction projects, Goodwin offered wages as high as $2.50 per day. While government superintendent George Sippell chided Goodwin for not recruiting aggressively enough, he confided to the Department of Public Works that there was little hope of getting men because “they [were] all taken away by lumbermen.” The department itself would have to help out, and it did. The government stepped in to guarantee wages of $3.00, and Sippell himself took 219 men up to Grenville. He warned Goodwin not to take any chances of alienating his workers, to treat those he had well.87 In the face of heavy demand throughout the continent, engineers and contractors gearing up for large-scale improvements to the Welland in 1872 also wrestled with problems identifying and securing a supply of cheap labour. In his attempt to commence removal of the East Bank of the Deep Cut, Robert Mitchell confronted competition in the immediate vicinity from railway contractors offering high wages. Government officials gave him the same advice they had given Goodwin, to offer whatever wages were necessary and not to alienate his workforce. He ended up paying to bring in labourers from Quebec at wage levels he had not anticipated.88 Further down the canal system, Bonneville on the Lachine also confessed to difficulties in hiring men at the rates he had expected to pay, despite his proximity to the pool of unskilled labourers in Montreal.89 But this was all in the opening years of the 1870s. When the depression hit hard the impact on the supply of labour was dramatic. In the winter of 1873 the superintendent on the Welland reported that “the supply of labourers [had] become more abundant in Canada than it [had] been for years” and predicted it would remain so throughout construction. Labourers began to gravitate to construction sites at what local citizens considered an alarming rate,90 and as depression deepened major projects along the St Lawrence experienced labour build-ups reminiscent of the 1840s. Men desperate for any type of work hung around waiting

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for new sections to open up, and labourers laid off by one contractor remained in the area, hoping to be taken on by another. Even men “of the better walks of society” applied for unskilled work and booked into temporary lodgings in the hope a job would open up before their resources ran out.91 Through the depression years and until the supply of labour began tightening in the late 1870s, contractors along the St Lawrence had little need for formal recruitment schemes. For all the major canal projects labourers in the immediate area provided a readily accessible pool of unskilled labour. For projects in thinly populated and difficult-to-reach areas, advertisements explained the arrangements available to help transport men to the worksite. But for projects in built-up areas contractors simply posted notices on the works, confident that labourers would quickly appear. For the Lachine, residents of Montreal, Lachine, and Côte de Paul were on the spot, ready for work, and among their number were the general surplus of casual labourers as well as those thrown out of work by the economic downturn. From November to April, any contractor able to continue some aspect of his contract could also count on ready hands from among men discharged from those sections for which winter construction was not viable. Contractors hoping to undertake work on the Lachine in the winter of 1878–9, for example, were “at no loss for laborers” as the Star noted: “All the old hands are ready to go to work again, and in addition there has been a large influx of laboring men from both the east and the west.” Reports suggested that as many as two thousand men formerly employed on the canal would be given the opportunity to commence work on a different section.92 But despite technological innovations, winter work could be exceedingly costly; in some types of clay, excavation down to the depth penetrated by the frost was a minimum of four times the cost of summer excavation. Contractors could only proceed to their advantage if they were assured that a labour surplus in the area would drive wages down. On the Welland contractors attempted to take advantage of the drawing-off of the water to push sections of the work. Farther down the St Lawrence system the climate and the conditions of the canals in winter more sharply restricted the opportunity for jobs. At the best of times, the vagaries of winter work made it frustrating for both contractor and labourer, though for different reasons.93 On the east coast the major federal project also became an important source of livelihood for those in its immediate area. The St Peter’s Canal held out the prospect of intermittent employment to residents of farming-fishing communities on the southern shore of Cape Breton

T he L ab ou r Forc e   8 1

for whom the depression compounded cyclical bouts of extreme hardship.94 Members of these communities had already established migration patterns which carried them long distances in their search for jobs. The opportunity for temporary construction work in their immediate area interrupted this migration briefly. When construction dried up they would resume the trek for employment throughout North America. Fragments of pay chits submitted after the 1878 canal shutdown reveal the men from Bras D’Or dispersed close to home in Richmond, Inverness, and Victoria Counties, but also across the United States, in Boston, New York, and California.95 In the heart of the depression some communities helped the unemployed in their midst to travel to public works in hopes of alleviating the strain on both the community and the labourers and their families.96 The mayor of Ottawa, for example, handed out approximately five hundred passes for transit in late 1876 and early 1877 to “poor men” wishing to go and work at Lachine and St Catharines. The following year he sent more of the unemployed to Grenville, to seek jobs on the modest improvements recommenced there.97 French Canadians from agricultural communities and the environs of Quebec City, some with public assistance, also travelled to the Lachine, and a smaller contingent of men made the longer trek from the Atlantic Provinces.98 How many of these secured employment is unclear, but in every season the numbers of strangers and their families attracted to major public works generated concern, as the communities where they congregated struggled to provide what services they could. Politicians lobbied the federal government for work or relief,99 and private citizens, charities, and religious groups attempted to meet immediate needs. On the Welland enlargement by the mid-1870s, enough destitute “strangers” were coming in with families that the local Roman Catholic priest established two schools for the instruction of their children, though he could do little to provide what they needed most – the means to earn a living.100 Strangers around construction sites included the unemployed from the United States who came again to Canada in the 1870s, as they had in earlier decades, to find jobs on canals and railways. In late 1873 they came “flocking in” to the Welland, bringing considerable destitution with them. Three years later they were still descending on the canal, coming north in their hundreds from Washington, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and Buffalo, “making a beeline for Canada, where they expect[ed] to get work on some of the Public Works.” Migrants from the United States also headed for Montreal, hoping to find jobs

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on the Lachine. Their countrymen continued to swell the ranks of would-be labourers until 1879, when officials noted a marked dropoff in migration north across the border.101 This intrusion of labourers from the United States at a time of high unemployment provoked an outcry from press, politicians, and workers worried about the competition they posed to native labour. The Welland Tribune accused contractor Charles Dunbar of importing labourers “from the other side” while Canadians starved under his nose. Dunbar may have been correct that barely one-tenth of his labourers were American, but the spectre of a wholesale importation of labour from south of the border became an argument against awarding contracts to Americans. As the representative for Lachine explained to the federal government, “It has long been felt in my own country a great public grievance that contracts should be awarded to Americans who brought with them from their own country not only plant, but also labourers, boarding house keepers etc.”102 Even on much smaller public works, the cry against American labour was raised. In Ottawa workingmen organized a mass meeting to protest the extension of the water works by contract, on the grounds that contractors might bring in “foreign,” not local, labourers.103 Public works in the 1870s also attracted men who had migrated over much longer distances, as Irish, English, Scottish, and German immigrants followed the paths worn by earlier generations. Scandinavians, attracted to this type of work since the 1850s, also arrived in increasing numbers, establishing a role in construction that would expand into the next century.104 Together these groups created an immigrant component of the workforce more heterogeneous than that of earlier decades. This was an important development, but more significant was the arrival of another group who represented not just the tapping of new areas of Europe and expansion of a multinational labour force but also the refinement of recruitment strategies for the industry. By the closing years of the 1870s, the migration which would carry tens of thousands of Italians to North America was evident on the Lachine and to a greater extent on the Welland, where hundreds of Italian workers came in under contract. On the Welland many were skilled, brought in as part of an attempt to diminish the power of the Thorold stonecutters. By 1878, however, contractors were building up the force of Italian labourers who would play a crucial role in the final phase of construction.105 How contractors secured Italian workers is unclear, but they probably turned to padroni, the middlemen between capital and labour, and linchpins in a system which recruited and transported labourers from the old country and organized their dispatch

T he L ab ou r Forc e   8 3

to labour markets and labour-hungry employers in industries across the continent. Padroni also provided services necessary to labourers concerned to maintain their home base in the Old World and use their income to improve their lives and those of their family members there. They arranged for transfer of earnings to families at home and in general offered support in an alien land, but at the same time they drew labourers into a network of dependence which enhanced the opportunities for their exploitation. In the following decades Italians and other European immigrants would become an even more important source of unskilled labour for the transcontinental railways and less-spectacular projects throughout the Dominion.106 The diversity on construction sites of the 1870s comes through in surviving lists of workers on two projects. On the Carillon, French Canadians comprised half of 107 labourers to whom wages were owing in December 1877. The remaining half were Scots, Irish, and English. On a less complete list of labourers on the same canal in July 1877, one half were again French Canadians, the remainder again Scots, Irish, and English. In the quarry opened by contractor Cooke at nearby L’Isle Bizard, all but two of thirty-three recorded as unskilled were Canadien. Some of these may have come from nearby St Andrews, whose mayor appealed to the federal government in 1879 for assistance in finding jobs on the public works for labourers of his community who were suffering and with little means of support.107 For the Lachine a combination of sources suggests the fluctuating ethnic breakdown of the labour force in the closing years of the 1870s. Of the 122 men – the majority labourers, but some provisioners and skilled – who petitioned for lost wages on one section of the canal in January 1878, one quarter appear to have been of French extraction and the remainder of Irish, Scottish, and English extraction. Among another 138 labourers also petitioning for wages in the same month, fifty-six were of French extraction, once again the remainder of Irish, Scottish, and English.108 Two years later, a reporter found greater ethnic diversity among the workforce on Davis’s section of the Lachine. In August 1880 he estimated that of 450 labourers only fifty were English-speaking, the rest French, German, and Italian. Among the Canadiens a large number were from the Back River area in southwestern Quebec who would soon be leaving for the shanty life of lumbermen.109 Canadiens were not as well represented on the Welland, where census enumerators captured a segment of the workforce on two major contracts still ongoing in 1881. Only one cluster is clearly identified as canal labourers, fifty-three men in Humberstone Township. Unfortunately, they had just recently vacated a boarding house “for work on

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other public works”; fortunately the boarding-house proprietor provided their names, which suggest labourers of English, Scottish, and Irish extraction, the Irish predominating.110 Linking the census with information in other sources strongly suggests that among a group of over four hundred labourers clustered in the hotels and boarding houses in the immediate area were men who were also part of the “winter campaign” of contractors McNamee and Bannerman, whose approaching deadlines forced them to employ at least one thousand labourers in a season when the workforce was normally much smaller. But who from among this group were employed at construction and who at other types of work cannot be determined, and even were most of them discovered to have been canallers, they cannot be considered representative of the larger force employed year round throughout the 1870s or in one year, 1881. Missing are those who opted for winter in the cities or seasonal labour at another occupation; not included are those who would have been living in smaller boarding houses or with a family, perhaps their own. Yet some features of the workforce are suggested by this cluster of labourers in one census district.111 The Scandinavians do not appear. This may reflect an aspect of their participation in the workforce which occasioned comment – their tendency to move in blocks, though their comings and goings may have attracted unusual attention because of their novelty in the area. Most were reported to have left for work in the United States following an unsuccessful strike in 1875, with a smaller number returning over the next four years and some coming back for a brief period in 1880.112 A portion of the Italians brought in to labour on the canal were captured in the census in two dwellings. Of the forty-four, all Roman Catholic and born in Italy, thirty-two were listed as married but living without wives and children. This makes the Italians appear unusually well represented among married labourers, but the irregularities in recording of marital status for men living outside a family unit undermine conclusions in this regard.113 Breaking through the anonymity of the labourers on public works is challenging. But if the individuals are difficult to identify and the paths they followed to construction elusive, the few men identified on fragments of paylists, in pockets of the census, in press reports, and in government reports and correspondence suggest important trends in the composition of the workforce on public works from mid-century into the early 1880s. The predominance of Irish Catholics on the canals of the 1840s gave way to a more heterogeneous labour force as immigrants and migrants from diverse ethnic and national backgrounds and increasing numbers of men drawn from the changing

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rural and urban economies of British North America created along each project clusters and communities which reflected local conditions and international patterns in labour migration. By the 1870s, an even more heterogeneous labour force reflected the addition of immigrants from previously untapped areas of Europe, the continuing participation of migrants from across the border with the United States, and, of particular significance once again, the increasing numbers of men drawn from various sectors of Canada’s regional economies. All of these for various reasons sought out employment on the public works. Some chose it because it suited the seasonal rhythms of their work in other sectors; some used it as a means of securing cash to maintain or expand their place in the rural sector. Others chose it as the avenue to establishing themselves in the New World, and others appear to have had no choice at all, or only the choice between heavy labour or unemployment and destitution. The following chapter’s analysis of the demands of the work reveals why contractors found all but the weakest in their number suitable for hire. It also reveals why all, even the small proportion of seasoned navvies, would have found the work unrelentingly hard, and why some would have found reason to regret their time on the public works.

3

The Work

Away some distance on the other side of the canal were black objects toiling like a colony of ants up and down the steep hill. On getting nearer, it could be perceived they were men and horses taking away the side of the hill by means of “scrapers.” The old fashioned pick and shovel “with a man at the end,” as the navvies say, are superceded in many kinds of work by machinery. Welland Tribune, 23 July 1875 As construction sites expanded along the Welland in the mid-1870s, the Welland Tribune offered its readers one perspective on the dramatic changes over previous decades in the work environment and in methods of prosecuting the work. For those viewing the activity from a distance, by the 1870s machinery appeared to dwarf the labourers. Rows of derricks towering along the skyline with booms stretching ninety feet to the canal bank dominated major canal sites. A reporter brought them to life on Section 35 of the Welland at the end of the decade. The site was “fairly alive with men, horses and derricks, for even the derricks move and have their being … three steam derricks, five quarrying derricks, and five wall-building derricks, continuously swing their ponderous arms over the work, while their great wooden hands carry off tons upon tons of rock and earth to the dump.”1 Giant machines captured the public’s imagination and epitomized progress. Dredging technology held a particular fascination. Along the Welland the local press kept readers informed of the comings and goings of the most powerful dredges, Goliath and Samson, brought in to work on the new aqueduct, and it noted with affection and 86

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admiration the departure of Little Giant, who had performed heroically in the hard pan on Section 26 and was off to a new challenge, the dredging of Collingwood Harbour.2 But the down side to these machines was not lost on local observers. Goliath, Samson, and Little Giant each displaced hundreds of labourers on the improvements to the Welland, prompting the Welland Tribune to recall the earlier decades of construction when a massive influx of labourers had boosted sales of goods and services: “[I]f for every dredge employed we had 300 to 400 hundred [sic] Irishmen digging mud, times would be … flusher.”3 This perspective – of men at work in the shadow of giant machines or replaced altogether by technological advances – presents an important dimension to the changing work environment over the period studied here. By the 1870s along the St Lawrence canal system and on stretches of the Intercolonial, all manner of machinery appeared poised to take over from labourers the backbreaking toil in the cuttings and on the rock face. Yet analysis of the heavy work on canals and railways reveals that through the 1870s, even on highly mechanized worksites, machinery’s role was restricted and left much room for human sweat and muscle, and the balance between human and steam power varied widely from section to section on the same projects, the much-touted heavy machinery of some contractors excavating only a few miles or a few hundred feet from the gangs of another contractor toiling to move the same material with shovels and wheelbarrows. This chapter begins by looking back to chapter 1’s discussion of contractors’ investment in machinery and suggests what the impact of that investment was on the workforce, specifically those required for the heavy manual labour. It then moves to the regimentation and supervision on the work. Finally, it focuses on the threat this type of heavy outdoor work posed to labourers’ health and well-being and on the death and injury on the job in a workplace dedicated to moving tons of heavy materials. On sections of the Lachine and Welland and on the Intercolonial at the Bay of Fundy and the crossing of the Miramichi, the machinery and steam of production dominated the skylines of the 1870s. Not just the appearance of these worksites was changing. Mechanization was transforming the sounds, smells, and feel of construction. The familiar clop and slosh of horses’ hooves and of spade into soil and soil into wagon were becoming the undertone to the grinding of engines and the pounding of massive drills. Few construction sites had ever been as quiet as that romanticized by a reporter in 1855, who heard above the noise of work on the Nova Scotia Railway “a wood pecker [sic]

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hammering a decayed tree, with a bill like a carpenter’s mallet.”4 But the sounds of the workplace of mid-century were more in tune with the natural environment. By the 1870s the struggle with nature had become shrill, at times intensified by nature’s fierce fight back. Man and animal experimented with evolving methods of visual communication in much the same way they worked to communicate across linguistic groups.5 They also battled the sickly smell of industrial progress which competed with the old and organic. Grease, scorched gears, and the toxic aftertaste of new explosives at times overpowered the sweat, earth, horses, and dung. Ground vibrated with the power of steam and exploded with the detonation of nitroglycerine. What footing could men retain in this changing environment? Even here, against this backdrop of mechanization, analysis of the labourers’ experience must focus on two key points: where machines were most in evidence  – digging, drilling, crushing, lifting, hauling, and packing earth and rock  – considerable need remained for picks and shovels, and the nature of pick-and-shovel work changed little. A core of manual labourers remained necessary to go where machines could not: where the ground was soft, the incline steep, the space small, or the drop precipitous. They persisted in work with centuries’ old techniques, working beside and around machines, anticipating and following up on their progress, preparing the way for the machine as the machine struggled to find its place, so that in the midst of a dramatically evolving work environment the labourers’ primary tasks changed little. A widening array of shovels, picks, and hammers adapted for specific terrain increased the manual labourer’s productivity, enabling him to work more efficiently and rapidly, but they did not alter the basic nature of his tasks or the fundamental sweat-and-muscle aspect of the work. This was not the primary purpose of technological innovations. Nor was their purpose to make the work less dangerous. Labourers still dug in the cuttings, brought down the earthfall, filled the wagons, hacked at the rock face, chopped down trees, pounded at the muck of the canal bottom in the traditional tedium of puddling, and spread and smoothed the embankments for the railway beds  – all in an environment made more, not less, dangerous by machinery which added its own unpredictability and instability. Machinery created the need for machine tenders and operators and for men on the spot ready to make repairs and modifications. The latter group were among the growing body of skilled practical mechanics at the heart of technological developments. For much of their machinery contractors might rely on established machine shops in the area of the works. Along the Welland in the 1870s, for example, local

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Figure 3.1  Intercolonial Railway. Section 7, Embankment over 100 feet high, Library and Archives Canada / PA-021998

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Figure 3.2  Work at St Gabriel Locks, Lachine Canal, Alexander Henderson, Canadian Illustrated News, XVI, 22 (December 1877)

mechanics were described as doing a brisk trade servicing and repairing machinery on the canal. But for work in areas in which expertise was not readily available, contractors hired and took men with them. For the most sophisticated machinery, contractors retained mechanics knowledgeable about each machine’s peculiarities and able to not only repair but modify it as the need arose. The constant attention such machinery could require is demonstrated by the decision of Davis and Sons to place mechanics and a workshop right on their custom-built combination drill, dredge, and excavator at work in the Galops Rapids rather than consume time transporting men back and forth from shore to vessel. In such circumstances the positions of mechanic and

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Figure 3.3  Construction of the Miramichi Bridges on the Intercolonial Railway, Library and Archives Canada / PA-022055

operator overlapped to some extent. This was likely the case on a number of the sophisticated dredges in use in the 1870s.6 On other types of steam machinery a clearer distinction was drawn between the men who understood the workings of the machine and the men who worked it, the machine tenders and operators. In the area of drilling, for example, the award-winning Ingersoll Drill used by Murray, Hunter, and Cleveland on their section of the Welland was promoted as decreasing the time and money contractors might otherwise need to invest in training men who could run it. Easy to use, the Ingersoll was advertised as cutting back not only on the need for unskilled manual labour but also on the services of skilled mechanics and semi-skilled operatives. Whether the contractors found this to be the case is unclear, but the advertising for the Ingersoll underlines

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the focus of much of the technological innovation in the construction industry – the intertwined desires to harness inanimate sources of power for the heavy work and to pare back dependence on labour. Analysis of contractors’ investment in technological innovation in chapter 1 emphasized the ability of machinery to reduce reliance on unskilled labour, the cost and supply of which was unpredictable. But it is unclear the extent to which contractors were able or willing to invest in men adequately trained to work that machinery efficiently and safely. Those with cash flow problems may have chosen, unwisely, to skimp in this area. On the steam derricks on the Welland, for example, one operative was described as an inexperienced young lad, and another was a local storeowner. Possibly either or both were under the immediate supervision of a trained operative but not closely enough to prevent them from becoming a danger to themselves and others.7 Evidence is lacking concerning the number of operatives on any one site, and the extent and adequacy of their training, but by the 1870s room had certainly opened up for increased numbers of men with specialized knowledge to contribute to the construction process. Contractors would have saved relatively little by foregoing that knowledge and risked much by entrusting costly machinery to untrained hands. Consequently, despite advertisements emphasizing ease of operation, much of the technology introduced on the public works was likely operated by men with the requisite expertise. Below that knowledge and expertise there was also room for men with just enough training to ensure the routine functioning of derricks, drills, and excavators. If contractors invested in such men, the ranks of the unskilled on construction sites were an ideal source from which to draw them and to the labourer work as an operative, and the increase in wages that went with it, would have represented an important avenue for advancement within the industry. That said, only a small number could rise to become semi-skilled operatives, while a very large number were needed to remain where they were for the heavy manual labour on canals and railways. Punishing best describes the work of the manual labourers, in the middle and through the late nineteenth century. Like men employed in mining, longshoring, lumbering, and heavy industries within workshops and factory settings, canal and railway construction labourers worked, and therefore lived, by the continuous and brutal expenditure of their muscle power, but perhaps because their labour was more visible than that of men labouring in the forest or underground or within factory walls, they occupied a special place among those who sweated for their bread. Even as the term navvy expanded to include

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men in a host of heavy manual labouring jobs, it lost little of its capacity to inspire, and the demands of the job kept alive the myth of the brawny navvy, a man set apart from the mass of labourers by his prodigious strength and stamina. Contemporaries wrote with fearful awe of the men who cut through the countryside to build transportation networks. Navvies came to epitomize strenuous labour, appearing as stock characters in nineteenth-century literature and surviving into the twentieth century in popular parlance and in fiction and non-­ fiction alike as the elemental manual labourer.8 Coordination and regimentation were crucial to the efficient deployment of men labouring at close quarters on interrelated tasks. Along the more isolated excavations and embankments or on any section where the workforce was thinly stretched, close surveillance was difficult, but ideally it was built and maintained through a rigid hierarchy of supervision moving up through gangers and foremen to the section supervisors who patrolled the work. At mid-century a gang of roughly seven to fifteen members worked to the rhythm set by the ganger tasked with maintaining the pace of the work and paid at a higher rate to ensure his commitment to the contractors’ interests. On some private railway projects in British North America during the 1850s, gangs were modelled sometimes on the “butty gangs” of Britain’s early railway age. The aristocrats of the pick and shovel, members of butty gangs either formally subcontracted for a quantity of the work or worked collectively at piece rates. They were only indirectly responsible to the contractors’ supervisory personnel and consequently enjoyed considerable independence on the job. On public works by mid-century the relative independence of the butty gang appears to have been reserved for small groups of skilled workers. For the unskilled, division into gangs was a means of supervision, not a measure of autonomy. How gangs formed, how long and at whose discretion they remained together, and whether the gang travelled as a unit from project to project were questions of fundamental importance to the labourers. The men with whom they worked most closely helped determine not just the quantity and quality of their output but also the tone of interpersonal relations on the site and the labourers’ capacity to survive without injury. The composition of gangs in industries such as longshoring, mining, and lumbering suggests the likelihood that labourers themselves played an important role in determining those who worked alongside them. Likely they preferred to labour beside those whose work rhythms and proficiency they had learned to trust, and experienced contractors and supervisory personnel would have seen

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the advantages to gangs whose productive capacity was well oiled by familiarity, provided that familiarity did not undermine the authority of those pressing the work. Pragmatism would also have endorsed what the gang members of the 1840s and 1850s clearly embraced, the opportunity to work with those whose language they readily understood. How strong that preference remained into the 1870s is less clear. The familial and kinship ties which helped define immediate workmates in mining and longshoring probably were also important among labourers on construction sites. Bonds of family and kin within gangs are suggested but confirmed only in rare images: of one family’s relief when two brothers escaped a cave-in on the Lachine in January 1877; of another family’s grief compounded when the same cave-in claimed brothers-in-law working side by side.9 Above gang and ganger was the foreman, responsible for coordinating the efforts of a number of gangs and reporting up the chain of supervision to the contractor’s representative. Fragmentary evidence suggests that from the 1840s into the 1880s some contractors eroded the importance of or dispensed altogether with the ganger and concentrated in foremen the responsibility for both setting the pace and coordinating the work. This shift could directly shape the work environment by giving to the contractor’s staff more immediate control over how hard the work was pressed. In the all-too-appropriate language of the industry, the foremen gained increased power to “drive” the workers to greater expenditures of energy.10 Even as gangs grew in size to as many as twenty-five and more members on sites in the 1870s, foremen, with or without gangers’ assistance, attempted to keep labourers working at a gruelling pace. In this, they were aided by the increasing substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power. Horses experienced at strenuous labour could set an arduous pace, but their energies were expended at the dictates of men, from teamsters through foremen and up to contractors, only the most shortsighted of whom would drive beyond endurance the power in which they had made a significant investment, either through hire or purchase. Less biddable by those working directly with them were the machines whose impersonal appendages regularly and continually swung round and down, bringing more fill or carrying away muck. Machinery operated at the dictate of foremen, men commonly paid more than twice the wages of labourers to help maintain their focus on the contractors’ interests. That focus was sharpened by the widespread belief in and numerous-enough examples of the ability of a diligent foreman to rise within the industry and become the contractor, or at least subcontractor, through learning the industry from the ground up

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and attracting the attention of men with capital. From within Canada came few better examples of such a rise than Horace Beemer’s ascent from foreman for an American subcontractor on the Welland in the 1870s to the position of principal contractor on one of the most difficult sections of the same canal by 1880. Similar examples from within construction and analogous industries demonstrate the value of the foreman’s ability to identify with both those he supervised and those for whom he worked.11 Experienced navvies on the site may have helped to maintain the pace, by force of habit or to demonstrate their abilities. On the other hand, one of the first lessons in heavy manual labouring jobs was to resist the drive to accelerate the work and instead conserve energy for the long haul. The pace likely became appreciably slower and more ragged on those sites on which unseasoned labourers predominated. But nothing suggests a deliberate slackening of the pace on the part of overseers to accommodate those men not yet toughened up. Ideally gangers and foremen were experienced labourers promoted above their fellows and taking what might prove their first significant steps upward within the industry. Following this path, John Power, a native of Newfoundland, worked for two years as a labourer, then ganger, for Elliott and Grant on the Intercolonial until he was hired by Berlinguet as the foreman overseeing one of the difficult cuttings near Campbellton.12 The value of such men lay in their first-hand knowledge of the best methods of pushing the labourers. Over the course of the century those best methods changed. By mid-century, alcohol was being phased out in a wide range of workplaces, though its consumption on the job would survive into the twentieth century at a reduced level and less as an employer-provided stimulant or panacea to keep men working during the heat, cold, and monotony of their tasks. As temperance gained ground contractors may have introduced coffee to British North American construction sites as early as the 1850s to replace the regular visits of the jiggerman along the works. As the jiggerman officially disappeared from construction sites, some labourers would have experienced a gut-wrenching adjustment as alcohol was withdrawn and would have found their own means of easing the transition by smuggling a supply onto the job and by chivvying supervisory staff.13 Physical driving of the workers had long been established as crucial to production in a number of related workplaces, in the building trades in particular, where the cost of heavy manual labour was frequently the main cost over which employers could hope to exercise a degree of control. This put a premium on the speed at which manual labourers worked.14 However, by the middle decades of the

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nineteenth century rods and whips were being phased out where the workforce was drawn from the ranks of free labourers, less likely to tolerate, though not immune to, the brutality with which slaves, convicts, and the indentured were harried. In the later decades of the century, physical force was still used to drive men who, though technically free, were in some way indebted or peculiarly vulnerable to recruiting agent, contractor, or company. Chinese and Italian labourers were reportedly beaten viciously to increase their output on railways pushed across the prairies and through the Rockies and even on worksites where their treatment was more open to observation.15 However, gangers and foremen working with the labourers studied here appear to have depended on verbal abuse and used their rods and firearms as symbols of power, though during workplace confrontations the pistols foremen packed on sites such as the Lachine in the 1870s were ready and used to maintain order and protect men at work as much as to protect themselves and contractors’ property.16 At mid-century experienced engineers argued that a major drawback in the type of contractor attracted to the public works was their failure to invest in an adequate staff of trained supervisors and foremen. To Laurie and Light on the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways respectively, this was a measure of both poor business practice and insufficient capital. Both argued that until contractors channelled more resources into supervisory staff, governments would have to pay the price for shoddy construction or pay for more government supervisors, or both.17 Concerns about inferior supervision continued into the 1870s, when inexperience, the need to cut costs, and the inability to secure seasoned foremen led some contractors to skimp in this area of operations. For example, when Goodwin ran into trouble on the Grenville in 1871, he readily admitted that he lacked men able to oversee the work effectively, and the department agreed to send the expertise he needed. A gift or charge to Goodwin’s account, the foremen were a good investment and one which contractors overlooked to their detriment.18 Whether Goodwin is representative of a significant number of contractors in the 1870s is unclear. A key aspect of supervision throughout the period was the extent to which contractors themselves played an immediate and direct role in overseeing the work. This was true not just for small contractors and subcontractors. In large partnerships and among those major contractors in business on their own, close personal supervision appears to have been the norm right through the 1870s. To look at only three of the largest firms on the Welland, in each case at least one principal engaged in active supervision. In executing their contracts worth

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approximately $2 million, two principals in Hunter, Murray, and Cleveland worked on the site to such an extent that they were described in the press as fulfilling the functions of foremen, and the men immediately under them, the functions of subforemen. Hunter assumed direct day-to-day supervision at one end, and Cleveland at the other.19 Ferguson, Mitchell, and Symmes adopted a similar approach to their four contracts which comprised approximately one-sixth of the work of enlargement. Symmes’s daily personal supervision was credited with keeping the work progressing “with the regularity and harmony of clockwork.”20 John Brown oversaw his workforce with such attention to detail that on his daily inspection of the works he reputedly took note of those in the workforce, skilled and unskilled, whom he considered capable of assuming more responsibility.21 Major contractors on the Lachine demonstrated the same commitment to personal supervision, though not always as amicably as Brown. Michael Davis, one of the sons in Davis and Sons, stands out for his aggressive personal attention to the conduct of labourers, on at least two occasions reprimanding them physically, once with his blackthorn walking stick and once with a revolver.22 Along the Intercolonial principals in major firms also appeared regularly, like Grant and Sutherland, who superintended their own work. Those from outside the immediate area took up temporary residence on the spot to facilitate oversight, including Berlinguet, who positioned himself at Dalhousie while Bertrand was stationed at Bathurst.23 Such direct supervision suggests these firms had not yet created the impersonal management structure that came to characterize their even larger counterparts. Having the top men on the worksite did encourage a heightened sense of accountability, however, and it opened up the possibility of clearer communication with government engineers who patrolled the works regularly. Beneath the chief or superintending engineers were resident district engineers and their assistants stationed permanently along the sites. In their concern to ensure timely completion of contracts, they paid particular attention to the deployment of the workforce, noting whether the numbers and the manner of their employment would enable the contractors to meet both deadlines and quality standards. They were not loathe to intervene where they detected inefficiencies, to not only suggest but demand that gangs be reorganized and workers not pulling their weight terminated. Not surprisingly, government officials seldom found fault with their own place and performance within the hierarchy of supervision. Whether they achieved the level of efficiency they claimed for themselves was subject to debate, by those who considered government staffing of public works inadequate, those who

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considered it excessive, and those who perceived it as a profligate extension of patronage in which incompetent party faithful supervised incompetent contractors chosen for their political connections. The niceties of these debates aside, on the ground the goal was strict control of the work process and production of maximum and disciplined output from the men. On a well-run construction site work progressed at a steady, gruelling pace. One writer described what he had observed on construction sites in England during the 1850s: I think as fine a spectacle as any man can witness who is accustomed to look at work, is to see a cutting in full operation with about twenty wagons being filled, every man at his post, and every man with his shirt open, working in the heat of the day, the gangers looking about and everything going like clockwork. Another thing that called forth remarks was the complete silence that prevailed among the men.24 Another testified to the remarkable regimen on worksites: “Everything on the ground appears to be conducted a [sic] la militaire, the strictest discipline being enforced and every movement like clockwork. So strict are the regulations that amongst the hundreds employed there is not such a thing to be seen as a labourer leaning on his spade or enjoying a whiff of his pipe.”25 Observers reported comparable regimentation on construction sites in British North America. The Acadian Recorder used military analogies to convey the sense of order among gangs along the Nova Scotia Railway, and the Antigonish Casket provided a similar picture of work on the St Peter’s Canal, where in the summer of 1855 some three hundred men worked quietly and steadily under the close and regular supervision of the overseers.26 It was an image which contrasted strikingly with the stereotype of lazy and disorderly workers during their leisure hours, and it may have been promoted to offset that stereotype and to highlight labourers as the embodiment of the speed and energy at the heart of the transportation revolution. It was, nonetheless, a consistent image across projects and across decades. By the 1870s, accounts of construction sites placed even greater emphasis on well-regulated and disciplined output by the labourers. Everyone on the site undertook their tasks “like clockwork”; the work proceeded “scientifically” and “energetically”; the men were compared to ants and bees. Advances in machinery increased the need for order and sharpened attention to booms and buckets swinging overhead and steam-powered machinery close at hand, in the interests of self-preservation, if nothing else. Even on the

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less-mechanized sites an experienced navvy, or any labourer accustomed to working at close quarters in gangs, would have welcomed a well-coordinated worksite as an important protection against injury and death.27 In the 1840s the pace on construction sites was maintained for twelve hours in the summer months, at times fourteen, and normally was reduced to ten hours for those who worked through the winter. During the 1850s labourers on some sites worked slightly fewer hours.28 By the 1870s the working day was generally shortened to ten, perhaps eleven, hours in summer and ten, perhaps nine, in winter. These hours could vary from section to section on the same project, depending on the nature of the work and the contractors’ needs.29 Hours were strictly enforced, the blowing of the horn or whistle signalling the beginning and the end of the workday. A typical day’s end on the Welland in 1880 occasioned amused comment from a local reporter: “[W]hen the whistle blows to shut down work, and the men grab their coats and make a rush for the embankments one would think an army of men were scaling the walls and were bent on taking the town by storm.”30 In addition to the normal workday, labourers might work overtime into the late evening when contractors were rushing to beat the winter freeze or the opening of navigation.31 In emergencies, it was every man to the task for as long as was necessary to remedy the problem. When cracks appeared in a canal bank workers could be called from bed and expected to work around the clock to repair them. When a break occurred on the west bank of the Welland at midday on a Sunday in June 1877, the labourers ran from church to meet the emergency. Two years later, on a Sunday evening in July, when a brace gave way on the wall between the old and new aqueducts, the men worked through the night to prevent a disastrous cave-in.32 When necessary, working through the night was routinized by dividing the men into two shifts or even three. In part this was an extension of contractors’ desire to maximize the benefits of machinery by keeping it operating round the clock, and with it those labourers needed to press the advantage. But night shifts were also a means of packing more manual labour into short working seasons, made even shorter by unscheduled interruptions to the work. Shift work could also maximize use of the available labour during seasons when the supply was tight. In the 1850s gangs on the Cornwall Canal were working from 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., what was described as a day and a half every day, with a few days to recuperate before returning to the 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. schedule. Why is unclear, but the arrangement was

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related to the need to speed up the work despite a labour force whose numbers were not adequate to the task. When men were brought from a distance to bolster numbers and the contractor faced what was perhaps too large a force, he proposed using the men to advantage by dividing them into two groups which would work “alternate intervals of six hours night and day without interruption.”33 Working through the night, men, horses, and machines presented images of industrial progress which grew increasingly harsh as the century progressed. At mid-century men and horses dug in the trenches and pushed forward embankments in the soft glow of bonfires lit along the work; by the late 1870s on some sites electricity lit the night.34 Contemporaries romanticized about the hardy rural environments which produced men who could move mountains, and ideally those who persevered in the work developed powerful frames and iron constitutions. But the picture of fine specimens of manhood at their prime should be balanced by the image of the labourer in middle age. For this was an industry which broke men. Canal and railway construction took a fearful toll on workers in Britain and North America. Navvies did not work in cramped factories and the fetid air of the sweating rooms, but outdoor labour posed its own threat to health. Work continued in all types of weather. A week of rain turned canal and railway construction sites into bogs, but if it was possible, even if it seemed impossible, and the contractor was racing to meet a deadline, work carried on, men labouring knee-deep in mud and thighdeep in water, never dry. In spring and fall, earth mixed with freezing rain chilled navvies to the bone in mud and water. Then there were the extremes of winter and summer. During winter labourers might be profitably employed in tasks such as hauling materials, preparing stone, and hacking rock, frost permitting. But other work also continued, if it could only be executed after the water had been drawn off at the end of navigation or, once again, if the contractor was behind schedule.35 During part of some winters men worked in the cuttings in much the same way they did in the warmer months. A newspaper editor argued, from the comfort of his office, that during the winter of 1858 men would have found conditions in the European and North American cuttings similar to those in spring and fall except on a handful of days.36 Those experienced at the work knew that as the temperature began dropping in late fall those men still working confronted the formidable challenges of cold, wind, snow, and sleet. Before getting down to shifting muck, navvies shovelled snow and pumped freezing water, tasks which could consume a demoralizing segment

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of their workday. On the Intercolonial from Newcastle to Bathurst in early April 1872, labourers devoted approximately one-fifth of their time to snow removal.37 On canals snow removal might be followed by clearing ice, before the men could climb into the freezing water. Once in, they raced against rising water levels, frozen pumps standing helpless in the face of strong currents which ruptured coffer dams and frost which heaved the ground, creating leaks in the canal bottom. This was perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of the work. In the winter of 1842 on the Welland below Broad Creek, engineer Thomas Keefer complained that out of a potential workforce of eleven hundred men, only nine hundred could be counted on to show up for work on any one day, partly because of sickness and what he considered laziness, but also because of a widely shared aversion to climbing into the icy mud. Twenty-five years later, the Montreal Star was more sympathetic to the labourers, taking off its hat to men willing to continue working on the Lachine in winter. Though they were losing “considerable time” because of machinery malfunctions, when given the opportunity they clambered into the freezing water. The work was “horrid,” but the alternative worse – no work at all.38 Even the deepest cuttings offered little protection against the winter wind. Embankments seldom offered any. In blinding snowstorms contractors might try to press ahead. In such weather, farmers might pull their horses from the work, but the labourers were usually the last to leave, small groups continuing under the shelter of wind breaks, their numbers dwindling, until they, too, refused to continue.39 Little wonder the men suffered with fevers, pneumonia, rheumatics, and inflammation of the lungs, as the navvy diseases of the Old World became even more virulent in the harsher weather of the new.40 Summer brought its own trials. Which was worse, the blistering heat of the sun or the visitation of insects? Through uncleared areas they were dense, and the Intercolonial offered many such areas. One contractor working through northern New Brunswick, a lumberman experienced in the very area through which his section ran, had reason to anticipate smooth execution of the work. But he had worked the woods in winter and had forgotten to take into account the insufferable blackflies which would drive the men from the work faster than he could bring them in. The blackfly was bearable, though, if the pay was right. More dangerous was the Anopheles mosquito, which thrived on low-lying construction sites of North America well into the 1850s. Its toll on sites in the United States was heavy, even on the projects farthest north such as the Erie Canal, where “the annual sickly time” so decimated the workforce that the blockhouse at Fort Schuyler

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was used as a hospital.41 Crossing the border into the Canadas, it attacked labourers on the Rideau and Welland Canals in the 1820s and 1830s42 and struck again hard on the canals of the 1840s. The doctor tending labourers on the Welland in the fall of 1842 warned the Board of Works: “Scarcely an individual that has been upon the works will escape.” Four hundred out of a workforce of nine hundred were already suffering from the disease. Most of the workmen would recover, but they took from the canal a lifetime of recurring and incapacitating attacks.43 As the spread of settlement destroyed the environment in which the vector could thrive, malaria receded from construction sites. It was still a threat in the 1850s, however, and on projects such as the Great Western Railway, seriously impeded the work.44 Vague descriptions of remittent fevers along construction sites in the 1870s may have been references to the final assault of the Anopheles mosquito, or they may have been flare-ups of malaria symptoms in men previously exposed to the disease. In the summer of 1876, for example, the Welland Tribune noted considerable “sickness of the bilious type” on part of the work and linked it to the hot weather and the “exhalations from mud being thrown up by the dredges.” This is how malaria was described by laypersons and medical practitioners alike; however, the sickness was more likely part of the pattern of viral and bacterial infections to which the undernourished were particularly susceptible, a continuation of the pattern of chronic ailments and epidemics from earlier decades.45 No reports refer specifically to outbreaks of brucellosis or blackleg, the debilitating navvy disease of the Old World which flared up on the CPR, but the intermittent fevers fit the pattern of both the acute and chronic form of a disease considered an occupational hazard for men such as navvies.46 Old age came prematurely to men crippled by rheumatics, chronic bronchial complaints, and the recurring fevers of malaria. By middle age a man who had spent years at navvying might not only be unfit to continue at heavy manual labour but also be incapable of any type of work. This was work for younger men. On the railways of England and Scotland at mid-century, estimates put two-thirds of the unskilled on construction sites under the age of thirty.47 In North America the workforce appears to have been roughly the same age. Of the sixty-eight men identified as canallers among those convicted and imprisoned along the Welland in 1842 and 1844, sixty-one were between twenty and thirty, though court records may capture a disproportionate number of the younger men. Among the 828 labourers identified on the St Lawrence and Atlantic in 1851, approximately

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two-thirds were between sixteen and thirty-five, with another 17% between thirty-six and forty-five. Of the 143 railroad labourers constructing the St Andrews Railway identified in the 1851 census, 67.2% were between seventeen and thirty-five, with another 22.4% between thirty-six and forty-five.48 By the 1870s, increasing numbers of men over thirty-five were included in the workforce, if the labourers clearly identified as navvies in the 1871 Census along the Intercolonial are reliable indicators.49 This may partially reflect the changing origins of the workers, an increasing number of whom were drawn from the areas around construction sites. Alternatively, the men over thirty-five may have been continuing into midlife the work they had commenced in their younger years. One analysis of navvies in England and Scotland suggests the latter as a plausible explanation for a similar increase in the age of men constructing railways over the second half of the nineteenth century; however, by the 1870s the same upward pattern in ages among those who came to the work from the immediate area, and were thus most likely to see their stint at construction as temporary, indicates other factors at work such as the possibility that younger men were choosing other types of work.50 Whatever the increase in age suggests, it does not change the fact that the work remained the preserve of men in their prime; only a small percentage would have been capable of pursuing heavy labouring jobs to the end of their wage-earning years. They shared with labourers such as longshoremen the restricted prospects for employment in later life. Work lives were also cut short by injuries on the job. No government official or agency recorded the casualties of construction. Indeed, government reports and correspondence rarely even noted this aspect of the work. Newspapers provided citizens with fragmentary evidence of the cost of public works measured in human lives, but their reporting was far from systematic, a point made clear by the fact that of those few injuries and deaths noted in government correspondence, only a fraction appeared in the press. Newspaper reporting also appears to have varied over the decades, to such an extent that trends can be presented only tentatively. In the 1840s, injury and death on the construction site were all but passed over as not newsworthy. The press of the 1850s showed more interest in this aspect of public works, particularly in those incidents in which a number of individuals were killed or seriously injured. By the 1870s, coverage had picked up. Perhaps the expanding popular press sought to broaden its appeal with sensational and human-interest stories. Perhaps also as papers serving smaller communities renewed their focus on items of local interest, death and injury in the workplace found a niche, though it was

1 0 4   R oug h Work Table 3.1  Partial Listing of Deaths and Serious Injuries on Public Works in the 1850s and 1870s

Earth Fall Death Serious Injury Total Blasting Death Serious Injury Total Machinery Malfunction Death Serious Injury Total Drowning

Nova Scotia 1855–7

Intercolonial 1870–3

Welland 1874–9

Lachine 1877–9

17 26 43

21 15 36

8 6 14

10 17 27

5 4 9

11 10 21

0 7 7

7 5 12

4 6 10 –

11 20 31 2

9 10 19 6

8 14 22 5

Sources: Compiled from injuries and deaths cited in newspapers consulted from the period. Note: List includes only injuries and deaths for which the cause and nature are given and does not include statements in newspapers or government records such as “more accidents to report again this month.”

a small niche, with serious limitations. Minor injuries such as fractures and head injuries were all but ignored; however, the spectacular and tragic, involving multiple injuries and deaths, worked their way into the evolving press, particularly, it would appear, if those involved had ties to or roots in the immediate area. Still, even a serious injury might need an additional human-interest element before it made it into print. The story of the McCann brothers is instructive. In October 1880, a stone seriously fractured the ankle of John McCann, working on Hunter, Murray, and Cleveland’s section of the Welland, but he was expected to make a good recovery. Previously a stone had knocked out the eye of his brother at Port Colborne. Taken separately, it is unlikely either injury would have been reported. But the eye of one brother and the ankle of the other added up to a story which could capture readers’ attention.51 With these points in mind, the partial listing of death and serious injury in table 3.1 can only serve to suggest the range of casualties in an industry which exacted a heavy toll in life and limb. With the exception of freak accidents, unpredictable and perhaps unavoidable, the death and mutilation in the workplace resulted directly

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from the standard methods of deploying labour and technology. Some of these methods had evolved as part of the logic of the butty gang system in which labourers who had already agreed on a price for a quantity of work had good reason to endeavour to speed up the work in the interests of moving more quickly to their next contract, even if that meant taking risky shortcuts and cutting corners on safety. Any labourers who had been part of that system would have been accustomed to these practices, and contractors who now held the vested interest in speed would have had little reason to change them. Excavation was gruelling and hazardous. In shifting muck, labourers varied their technique to suit the material excavated. In soft earth they created a vertical face ranging from six to twelve feet in height, undercut the bottom of the face, drove wedges into the top to produce a fall of earth, then shovelled the earth into wagons or cars to be taken away.52 A contractor could expect a pair of seasoned men to fill a daily average of fourteen wagons, the equivalent of swinging roughly twenty tons of earth more than six feet high. For men unaccustomed to rigorous physical labour, the first weeks on canal and railway construction were brutal. British contractors at mid-century estimated that it took at least a year at construction before an agricultural labourer could build up the stamina to endure the work, let alone match the output of a seasoned canal or railway labourer.53 Rock excavation could proceed in the same fashion, labourers hacking through sheets of rock to create an overhang and driving wedges or boring into the top to trigger the fall.54 In a procedure predicated on bringing down tons of earth and rock, injury and death were expected, even among experienced navvies. The work became unusually hazardous when the men were working in material not of uniform consistency or when uneven freezing and thawing made the behaviour of the surface less predictable. Some sites also proved particularly treacherous because of the combined pressure of earth and water which had to be held back or because of the depth of the cut. During the early summer of 1878, a major part of the Lachine cut was only kept clear by constantly pumping quicksand and water by hand. Mild weather brought continual falling of banks, “so much so that it was found extremely dangerous for men to work to advantage.” Excavation for the retaining wall between the new and old aqueducts on the Welland ran so close to the canal itself and was cut to such a depth that unusually complicated and numerous braces and stays were required to support the bank, and workers laboured under the constant threat of a “catastrophic” cave-in.55

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Cave-ins usually involved multiple casualties. Gang members who escaped a fall began a frantic search for survivors. When a wall gave way in a cutting on the Windsor branch of the Nova Scotia Railway in February 1856, labourers raced to dig out four of their fellow gang members. One died shortly after his rescue, and one was so mangled he was not expected to recover. The other two had been killed instantly. The following winter on the same part of the line, rescuers reached three seriously injured men. One, Flynn, would die later; two would survive.56 In the closing months of construction on the European and North American, the collapse of a bank seriously injured one gang member and killed Roderick McDonald, an immigrant from Scotland who had recently settled his wife and seven children in Cape Breton before heading to New Brunswick for work on the railway.57 The toll, however, could be significantly higher. When the collapse of an embankment buried labourers on the European and North American fourteen miles outside Saint John, their workmates succeeded in pulling seven to safety, though all seven were seriously injured, with broken and crushed bones and unspecified internal injuries. How many of the seven ultimately died was not reported.58 Such deaths and injuries remained a serious threat on the railways and canals of the 1870s, where creating the fall remained the fundamental principle driving excavation. At the outset of construction of the Intercolonial through Colchester County, Angus McCush, Cape Breton father of seven, was killed instantly by the fall of a clay bank.59 At Shillalah Cove on the Intercolonial through the Miramichi, Alex Allison and William Leach were buried up to their necks, their chests crushed, when the ten- to twelvefoot earth and rock face at which they were working gave way.60 The workforce on canals experienced similar tragedies, particularly on the Lachine, where banks were at times extremely unstable. Thomas Kylie was killed by the collapse of a bank on Worthington’s section. Jurors inquiring into his death took their job seriously, inspecting the worksite and questioning men who had witnessed the collapse. A representative of Worthington testified that shortly before his death Kylie had looked over the bank with him and commented, “I don’t think there is any danger,” to which the representative had replied, “I think not.” Two other witnesses, Randall Croft and Patrick O’Donnell, who had been working near the victim, agreed that the situation had not appeared dangerous and professed a willingness to return to work at the same spot immediately. O’Donnell did say that while they were working he had seen a half-inch crack between the frozen earth and the soft earth, the type of crack that was taken as a warning sign by anyone on lookout duty. But the jury, like

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O’Donnell, did not consider the crack a serious matter and returned a verdict of “accidental death and not otherwise.”61 Their verdict reflected the assumption that deaths and serious bodily injuries on the job were accidents, and accidents happened. In January 1877, sixty tons of partially frozen earth fell on James Hennesey, George Kinnear, and Patrick Walsh undermining a bank on Section 4 of the Lachine. All suffered serious fractures to their limbs.62 In a similar incident the same month, this time on Section 5, two men lost their lives. Honoré Belair and Eustache Filiatraut, brothers-in-law and each with a wife enceinte, were crushed by a rock which broke free from the bank they were undermining. The inquest revealed that no one had been stationed on top of the excavation to warn of the development of a fault in the overhang, the traditional but frequently ignored method of safeguarding the men excavating. But the jury accepted the argument of the subcontractor that he had always warned his men not to do anything dangerous, and it brought in a verdict of “accidental death and not otherwise.” The fact that the subcontractor’s own brother was working in the pit beside the men killed and only narrowly escaped death himself likely added weight to his testimony that he had taken what he considered adequate precautions under the circumstances. But what the subcontractor and the jurors considered adequate did not satisfy the Montreal Star which concluded: “It is strange that no person was specially employed to watch the bank when the men were employed in such close and dangerous proximity to it.” It went further and took the jury to task for shirking its responsibility and not demanding that contractors be forced to adopt stricter safety measures, such as posting lookouts to warn of developing faults: Although juries seem to think that “no one is to blame” after an accident that hurries two heads of poor families so suddenly into eternity, how does it come that so many fatal accidents have occurred under precisely similar circumstances? Until juries do their duty, and fasten responsibility on contractors for the lives of their workmen, these accidents will go on plunging wives and children into the saddest grief and distress.63 Hauling and hoisting materials on and off the site was inherently risky. Where possible, rock and earth were carried out of the cuttings along temporary rails extended with the excavation. If the distance was short and the incline permitted, the wagons coasted to the dumping ground, a man riding the load and regulating the speed with a foot lever. When necessary, horses provided the power to pull carts along tracks or hastily cleared roadways. The ride was far from pleasant in

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a springless vehicle over an uneven track, but the job was considered soft enough that it could be reserved for men not yet equal to continuous toil at the face, or for the older men, sometimes as old as seventy, and for boys as young as ten.64 That did not mean it was not risky, particularly if the muck was run from a cutting to be dumped on an embankment. With the horse pulling the wagon from the side, the labourer, riding or running alongside, accelerated the pace until the wagon crashed up against a board at the edge of the advancing earth mound and tipped its contents. The “tip” was dangerous for both man and horse. If the man did not detach the horse in time, it was carried by its own momentum over the edge with the fill; if the man became entangled in the reins or lost his footing he could be trampled or sent hurtling over the edge, too. McDonald, an orphan boy from East River in Pictou County, working on the Intercolonial at Wallace River, fell under the wheels of the trolley he was driving. The doctors who amputated his crushed leg held out some hope that he would recover.65 Twenty-year-old Urquhart, native of Newcastle, was not so fortunate when he fell under the wheels of a dump cart at White’s Cut on Section 10 of the Intercolonial. The wheels crushed both his thighs, and he was carried the one mile to his home, where he lived only five hours.66 The addition of steam to haulage appears to have increased risk, most dramatically evidenced in the death and injury associated with the movement and loading of cars used to transport heavy loads. Solitary victims fell or were dragged into the path of locomotives, men such as Eric Johnson, just out from the old country, watering his horses on the Welland when they took fright and pulled him onto the tracks running along the works.67 Groups of labourers were battered by loads of rails, poles, and rock shaken loose in the journey over uneven track. Those handling the loads were at greatest risk. In a typical incident several men were “seriously, and might have been fatally,” injured while unloading telegraph poles along the track between Truro and Sackville on a Sabbath in November 1872. The reporter for the Eastern Chronicle had difficulty disguising his satisfaction that the workers had perhaps got what they deserved for thinking they could “violate human and Divine law with impunity” by working on the Lord’s Day.68 But divine intervention was not required for casualties in work involving daily movement of hundreds of men and tons of material over frequently temporary, rough track, lacking adequate signal and switching devices. The inquest into the death of John Brown on the European and North American revealed the multiple factors which carried the potential for injury and death on a large scale. Brown was among a group of forty or fifty labourers being transported back to their homes

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from a day’s work on the line in November 1858 when the engine and platform cars in which they were riding collided with a lorry lodged across the track. Two of the cars derailed on impact, throwing labourers in every direction. Many sustained serious injuries, but only Brown died immediately, pinned under tons of iron. Testimony revealed that an incredible combination of defective switches, inadequate signalling devices, and bad judgment on the part of the track master might easily have claimed dozens of lives. Weighing the factors responsible for this collision, the inquest jury held only the track master responsible, and he was tried for manslaughter. The jury at trial appeared willing to accept that faulty equipment, lack of safety precautions, and inadequate coordination of movement along the line, though unnecessary risks, were all part of constructing a great public work.69 When rail lines opened for traffic both the state and private companies became more vigilant and assumed greater authority in protecting the travelling public from the dangers posed by faulty equipment, inadequate maintenance, and poor coordination. But during the initial construction phase contractors on both privately and publicly built railways were under little pressure to address known hazards on the track.70 Temporary structures built for haulage and unfinished structures not yet adequately strengthened also threatened multiple deaths and injuries. Along the path of the Intercolonial, bridges crossing rivers and ravines strained and snapped, propelling men to the rocks and water beneath. In August 1872 the bridge hastily constructed for hauling supplies on Section 20 gave way under the weight of a trolley of rails. Most of those on the bridge escaped serious injury, but the seven men pushing the trolley were not so fortunate. Among those seriously injured, and no doubt the reason for press interest in the story, was Prince Edward Island’s popular athlete and champion hammer thrower, Angus McDonald.71 In hoisting, the horse-powered derricks employed at mid-century threatened not just the men working on them but anyone in their vicinity. In February 1859, as construction on the European and North American outside Saint John drew to a close, thirty-five-yearold Edward Leahy, just two years out from Ireland and with a wife and five children still back in County Cork, was killed when the derrick he was using to hoist a stone collapsed. Stability would continue to be a problem as the bigger and more powerful steam derricks of the 1870s took over the work. Their growth in size and in the speed at which they operated also increased their potential to do harm. Those used on the Welland in the 1870s were impressive in action and real crowd pleasers, but they were still not as sure-footed as those working in

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their vicinity would have liked. During one November storm, five derricks collapsed between Allanburg and Stonebridge. Fortunately, only one man appears to have been killed and one seriously injured.72 But strong winds were not necessary to bring them down. In six separate incidents between the fall of 1873 and the summer of 1879, three men were killed and five seriously injured by collapsing derricks.73 Derricks struck in multiple ways. Labourers were blindsided by arms, broken poles, buckets, stones, and timbers slipping, circling, rising, and falling in their vicinity. Their limbs and torsos were trapped when the machinery malfunctioned, or their skulls were crushed in the framework when they stooped at the wrong moment, like young Slattery in charge of a horse derrick near St Catharines in June 1876.74 Others were crushed by loads of earth and stone unleashed by the snapping of chains, guy wires, and pulleys. Baptiste Cazaraghi, an Italian with a wife and four children, was killed instantly just before quitting time on a Saturday afternoon in March 1879, when a hoisting chain on one of the derricks on Section 9 of the Lachine snapped, sending a box of stones collapsing onto his head.75 Young Everett from Lockport, New York, labouring on the Welland in the winter of 1874, was badly scalded when the wooden plug of a steam derrick came unstuck. Some made deadly mistakes, the result, at times, of inexperience. Local boy James Bromley, the son of E.M. Bromley of Clifton, did not survive his first shift on the Welland in August 1876. He was put to work learning how to use a horse derrick, and when something went wrong he was “almost completely scalped.”76 Then there were the labourers working with Benjamin Woods. Woods’s level of experience tending construction machinery is unclear; he appears to have divided his time between running his feed store and operating one of the derricks at Allanburg on the Welland. Six labourers were in the pit loading boxes for his derrick when a guy rope gave way, sending a box load of stone and Benjamin Woods crashing towards them. The six were quick enough to escape uninjured, and Woods was able to return to his store a few days later.77 Working to secure dry foundations for structures such as locks and bridges frequently entailed the peculiar risks associated with working under pressure. Where the depth of the water and the speed of the current allowed, labourers built coffer dams, temporary structures of stone and earth which dammed up part of the canal, river bed, or bay and enabled workers to dig down to find a solid bottom and pump out the water to maintain a relatively dry working bed of muck or stone. Where coffer dams were not feasible, workers laboured in the compressed air of watertight caissons lowered to the canal or river

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bed. These could be deadly. During the 1840s and 1850s, when the dangers of working under pressure were not adequately understood, caissons produced considerable sickness. Headaches, nausea, dizziness, and disorientation were associated with what was popularly known as “the bends.”78 Twenty years later technological innovation had addressed some of the problems associated with working under pressure, and the caissons on the public works appear to have been of high quality and the labour of those within them more carefully monitored. Enormous caissons were employed on Sections 10 and 20 of the Intercolonial.79 To fight the current on the Miramichi and in the Bay of Fundy, contractors built thirteen state-of-the-art caissons, approximately seventy-five by thirty-five feet and forty feet high, each containing close to four hundred tons of timber.80 Sickness and death from working under pressure was consequently reduced, but it could not be eliminated. Too much could so easily go wrong. A reporter documented his own experience “Under the Caisson” on the Welland in the early 1870s. He told his readers: “They brought up a dog that had been down with us. He died instantly.” When the reporter asked whether any of the workers died as a result of labouring in the caissons, he was told, “Well, yes; it is no uncommon affair to lose a man.”81 Water claimed lives in a variety of ways. At the Junction Canal in 1855, a young man of about twenty-three lost his life when a mud scow loaded with stone capsized during an early fall gale. The superintendent’s report stressed that the tragedy was preventable and predictable. Rather than undertaking the necessary repairs – of which they were well aware – the Board of Works had allowed the work to continue with mud scows which leaked so badly that in high winds labourers often had to dump part or all of the load they were transporting in order to avoid sinking.82 In a similar incident twenty years later, a local man, Medford, fell out of the scow Red Bird and drowned.83 A man named Pierce, with family in Port Colborne, drowned when knocked from a dredge on Dunbar’s stretch of the Welland in the fall of 1875.84 Two men barely escaped the same fate when they fell between one of Brown’s dredges and a mud scow; foreman William Stewart risked his own life to save them.85 Men also simply lost their footing or were knocked or dragged into the water by horses and machinery. Twentytwo-year-old teamster William Brittania, working on the Deep Cut just south of Allanburg, tried to draw water from the canal for his horses, “fell in head first and did not rise again.”86 Blasting produced the most gruesome casualties. Men lost limbs while driving jumpers into the rock with sledges or drilling holes for charges and cartridges, but the real risk came with handling the

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explosives and triggering the blast. By mid-century engineers’ knowledge of blasting techniques and materials had expanded sufficiently to allow them to astonish onlookers with amazing feats, destroying four-hundred-foot cliffs in seconds with one carefully placed series of charges. As routinely practised on nineteenth-century construction sites, however, blasting was less precise and consequently extremely hazardous. Contractors frequently attempted to secure experienced blasters, if they were available, to at least oversee the work, but gunpowder blasting was often the job of untrained labourers who learned the ropes on a trial-and-error basis. Newspapers reported some of the carnage from premature and delayed blasts. On the Nova Scotia Railway, Davis from Wallace was one of three men who escaped with only minor injuries when they took a blast in the face. In similar circumstances, another local man was not so fortunate. Hugh Fraser, “a Pictou man of excellent character,” was killed by debris thrown up by a blast between the four and five mile houses. One of the fatalities on the European and North American was Robert Ellison, husband and father of seven from the nearby rural community of Vinegar Hill, struck and killed by a flying stone. His wife buried him beside the son she had lost the previous month.87 By the 1870s blasting accidents were either more frequent and serious or more likely to be reported. It is not clear which. In the space of a few weeks in the spring of 1871 the blasting on Berlinguet’s section of the Intercolonial produced at least four serious accidents. In one of the cases reported to the commissioners, one man was killed and two badly injured. In another, Dougall McIntyre of Pictou exploded in flames while pouring powder from a keg.88 Of the men who took the force of a premature explosion at the rock-blasting near Folly Lake, a number were injured, two severely, and one was killed, the tamping rod passing through his body and reportedly throwing him fifty feet into the air.89 New explosive substances did not save lives, at least not initially. That was not their purpose. Nitroglycerine was welcomed onto construction sites by contractors and engineers, but it was an extremely unstable compound, and innumerable risks accompanied its use. Its handling required special precautions, and contractors working near populated areas appear to have treated it with respect, making arrangements for storing and preparing the cartridges at some distance from the blasting site and transporting them to the work gingerly.90 But the risks were hard to eliminate. Cartridges were considered relatively stable when stored frozen, but thawing them for use was a dangerous process and led to serious accidents such as that on the Lachine

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in February 1877, when a stray spark alighted on nitroglycerine cartridges spread out to thaw in a conveniently warm but not ideal spot, the floor of a blacksmith’s shop. The “resulting explosion … blew the forge into atoms, [and] shook every house in Côte St Paul. Had the accident happened at any other time than when the men were at dinner, a frightful disaster would have occurred and many lives been sacrificed.”91 Some contractors used what were considered safer nitroglycerine compounds as they were developed during the 1870s. But when John Brown wrote to the department concerning dualin, a more stable form of nitroglycerine he was employing on the Welland, he described it as extremely dangerous and only to be used with caution.92 Even an experienced blaster took his life in his hands when he went on the worksite. Edward Stevens of Miramichi, supervisor of the heavy rock excavation on Section 15 of the Intercolonial and a man who was remembered as taking his job seriously enough to check each charge personally, was killed while plugging a cartridge: “When last seen, he was kneeling on one knee with the cartridge in his hand.”93 If a man like Stevens was vulnerable, what were the odds that two less experienced labourers, Sullivan and Deemers, could emerge unscathed from their work with explosives on the Lachine? A delayed explosion mangled Sullivan and Deemers so badly they could not be moved to a hospital but were taken instead to die in Doran’s shanty on the canal bank. If such disasters occurred “at a distance from civilisation,” victims lingered without adequate treatment. In October 1878 Foreman Mackenzie, working on the division of the Canadian Pacific undertaken as a public work, lost a hand, his nose, and both eyes, when he went back to check a charge. His wounds were “bandaged up as best the ‘navvies’ knew how,” and only when he had recovered his strength was he transported to his home in Nova Scotia. He stopped in Montreal to have his arm properly amputated.94 Those injured on sites such as the Lachine and Welland at least had some hope of receiving the type of medical attention which could save their lives or ease their deaths. On a well-run construction site methodical supervision could hope to limit the number and severity of casualties. William Kesson used his forty years’ of experience working with explosives to strictly enforce procedures and safety precautions on Section 35 of the Welland. As one newspaper report explained, once the wires were run from the cartridges to the power source, “the horn blows as a signal of danger, & then comes the scramble of men and horses to a safe distance. And singular to say the horses know well the meaning of the notes from the horn and are uneasy and anxious to move away from the coming explosion.” Men like Old Bill helped Hunter, Murray, and

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Cleveland earn what was described as the best safety record for use of high explosives on the Welland. During a year of periodic blasting ending in the fall of 1880, the firm used thirty tons of explosives without blowing anyone up. The Welland Tribune was quick to note that the tally for casualties did not include those “foolish fellows who tried to stop falling rocks and were more or less injured.”95 Among such “foolish fellows” were men not directly working with explosives. Missiles thrown out by the blasts threatened anyone in their vicinity. They did not need to be large to be lethal. They might be as small as the fragment of rock which pierced the heart of Joseph Granger on the Lachine or the small stone which struck down a French Canadian father of five on the same worksite.96 Labourers’ responses to the risks inherent in the work are revealed in rare instances, and then only indirectly. One such instance involved the danger of labouring on the rock face. This unusually hazardous work was not reserved for experienced miners or men with related experience. Any man with sufficient stamina and stomach might be put to work scaling the rock to widen a cutting, test for loose rock, and open up seams or crevices which could potentially harbour frost and heave rock onto the road bed. On an unusually difficult stretch of the Intercolonial, the cliffs rising along the Matapédia River in Quebec, the precipitous face against which men were suspended heightened the risks to such an extent that workers proved reluctant to continue in the scaling gangs. After several men had been killed labourers refused to climb the ladders, ropes, and scaffolding rigged against the face until contractors offered two forms of incentive: special rates for the work and the threat of exclusion from all other types of labour.97 Labourers’ views on workplace safety became clear on another occasion, this time on Section 9 of the Lachine, where in the spring of 1878 a combination of factors had so undermined the stability of the banks that labourers refused to continue the work, and the contractor found it almost impossible to get men to go on the walls.98 “Almost impossible” says much about the difficulty of trying to assess labourers’ attitudes to dangers because the contractor did, in fact, find some men willing to work even in this highly unstable cutting, and on multiple construction sites tens of thousands of labourers regularly demonstrated their willingness to accept aspects of the work inherently hazardous. Why? Lack of options goes a long way as an explanation. In the developing heavy industries of early industrial capitalism, how many were the alternatives for safe and healthy work; and in a swollen labour market, how many had the luxury of choosing from among those alternatives?

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Other explanations have focused on the extent to which workers may have become inured to the physically demanding and dangerous aspects of their work and in the process generated and embraced workplace conduct which prized risk-taking and competitive, daring feats of strength. Studies of masculinities and the gendering of work have added an understanding of the extent to which the bravado and risk-taking was likely to have extended to the workers’ self-identity and relationships beyond the workplace.99 Taken together these arguments suggest that at least some of those who worked on construction sites may have made of their necessity perhaps not a virtue, but a mark of distinction and a symbol of status. Whatever the reasons for accepting dangerous work, newspapers at times held the labourers themselves responsible for death and injury. They argued that drunkenness and fatigue arising from long nights of debauchery dulled the workers’ wits to the point that they made fatal slips. The press also suggested that some strange perversity prompted labourers to vie with each other in taking unnecessary risks, some “suicidal mania,” as the Montreal Star put it: “The evidence at the inquest upon the latest victim at the canal works reveals a degree of perversity on the part of the workmen which is simply astonishing.” According to the deposition of the foreman, he had told the labourers to stop working when the overhang became unstable because “he did not wish to be held responsible for manslaughter.” But they had sneered at his warning. The paper concluded that workmen needed to be protected from their own recklessness by warnings which “g[a]ve way to imperative orders … followed by instant dismissal.”100 This attitude was summarized succinctly by Charles Tupper during an 1874 Commons debate over the great number of accidents to employees on the operations end of the Intercolonial. Tupper told the House, “[I]t is one of the things which it is difficult to understand, but which is familiar to the minds of gentlemen who turn their attention to these subjects, that nothing is so surprising as the recklessness of the risks taken by persons engaged in hazardous employments.”101 Three decades earlier the 1846 British Select Committee on Railway Labourers had found more compelling reasons for the casualty rate in the industry, resting blame for accidents primarily on the heads of the employers. The committee argued that “what was called accident too often arose from neglect of precautionary arrangements or of improved implements or methods of working, recourse to which was entirely within the power of the Company.” If labourers suffered in some degree from their own recklessness or negligence, they also suffered from the negligence of their employers. These conclusions

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were based largely on the testimony of contractors and engineers, who frankly admitted that they scrimped on safety measures and moved quickly without adequate precautions, justifying their actions on the grounds that it would cost more to avoid accidents than it did to kill or injure workers. When asked why he did not use the safety fuse, much safer than those in operation, an engineer explained that considering the time that would be lost in using it, he “wouldn’t recommend it for all the extra lives it would save.”102 This was an attitude understood by men such as Sandford Fleming with years of experience in the transportation industry. Thirty years later, Fleming put it bluntly during an 1878 Commons debate over deaths and injuries in the operations end of the industry: “It cost nothing to kill a man, but it would cost something to make use of a mechanical contrivance that might save his life.”103 The British Select Committee on Railway Labourers acknowledged that the gruesome toll in railway construction seemed part of the very rationale of the industry, but would not accept that it was “part of the necessary price” to be paid for the transportation revolution. So large a sacrifice of life and limb was not reasonable. It recommended that the only solution to a problem that seemed built into the industry was to make railway companies prima facie civilly responsible for all injuries incurred and lives lost on the job, placing the burden of proving its innocence on the company. By singling out the company rather than individual contractors, the committee was attempting to lay responsibility on the party with the greatest power to improve safety. The recommendation seemed reasonable given that British contractors had learned to live with similar legislation when operating in France and the United States.104 The idea was rejected, however, and within Britain, labourers, or their survivors and public prosecutors, still had to prove a contractor at fault before securing compensation or criminal conviction. Even if a labourer was able to take his case to court, negligence was difficult to prove and made more difficult by the defences available to employers who could argue that the labourer had assumed the risk of the work voluntarily or that he or a fellow labourer shared responsibility for the injury or death. Such arguments were easily accepted at common law by judges who continued to operate on the principle that issues of safety and risk were to be worked out between workers and employers when they entered into employment contracts. On the assumption that worker and employer met as equals in the market place, it became the responsibility of workers to either refuse to accept unsafe working conditions or to demand wages

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sufficiently high to compensate for risks which they then voluntarily assumed.105 Considering the importance of cost-cutting to most contractors’ operations, any apparent indifference to human life likely seemed a necessity to an entrepreneur’s survival in the industry. Extra time required by safety fuses, extra wages spent for lookouts on cuttings, and expenditures on safer machinery could all mean the difference between keeping afloat and going under. This concern with saving time and money and the resulting cost in human life has been powerfully depicted as part of a more general spirit of commercialism, of “frantic progress and improvement” which encouraged men to take risks which would speed up the realization of their dreams and profits. The mentality was pinpointed by British canal engineer Thomas Telford, who warned of the consequences of sacrificing safety to speed. Living to see the cost in human misery which railway construction produced, he denounced the indecent haste with which railways were being constructed, “such haste pregnant as it is, and ever will be with risks.”106 Combined with this indecent haste and commercialism were the technological improvements which in themselves, and in the excitement surrounding their introduction, invited risk. New techniques and machinery which carried unknown – and known – dangers to human life were not used cautiously. Instead, even innovations considered extremely dangerous were adopted to speed up the work and cut costs, as the utilization of nitroglycerine graphically demonstrates. Not by evil intent, but inevitably, the cost of new hazards and of the drive to completion was borne by the labourers who lit the charges on raw explosives, operated the faulty machinery, and paid for the inaccurate assessments of stress and strain made too quickly and optimistically.107 Private citizens in the area of construction gained some appreciation of reckless construction methods, most notably those near largescale blasting, where the local population experienced firsthand, but on a modest scale, some of the dangers faced by workers. Ladies out for a ride on a summer evening in 1857 barely escaped serious injury when stone fragments thrown up by blasting on the European and North American ripped through their carriage top to land on the seat beside them. Travellers and residents in the immediate area of construction sites were still at risk twenty years later. Lovers riding through Montreal streets at dusk were “terrorized” by debris from the Lachine Canal blasting. Families sitting down to afternoon tea in Welland were interrupted by missiles from the canal excavations.

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Employees and customers of businesses near Section 5 on the Lachine ran for cover when an eight- to ten-pound stone from the blasting came crashing through one of the windows of Kinmond’s leather belt store, “and a much larger stone block, approximately 300 pounds, split the wood work on the wall of the adjoining building.” Stories of such “remarkable hair breadth escapes” were carried by an outraged local press which demanded that contractors exercise greater supervision over their blasting operations. At one point the Montreal Star advised its readers: “If this kind of cannonade goes on the people might as well be in the Turko-Russian war at once, as there is quite as much danger in one place as the other.”108 A private citizen of Montreal went so far as to take the contractors for Section 5 to court in February 1877 on the charge of committing a dangerous nuisance with their blasting. But this apparently failed to induce adequate care. Six days after their first appearance in court, the contractors were once again experimenting with explosives. Unable to break up a bank of clay using ordinary charges, they tried a much larger charge without knowing what the outcome might be. A “terrible explosion” shattered windows and roofs in the vicinity, and a little boy at play in his father’s garden about two hundred feet from the canal was thrown to the ground when a large lump of clay passed within a few inches of him.109 If administrators and politicians were troubled by the death and serious injury in canal and railway construction or in heavy industry in general, their concerns did not translate into legislation directed at prevention. The early 1870s saw an increasing number of voices raised in federal and provincial legislatures and in the press against unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. During its brief life the Ontario Workman, in particular, called its readers’ attention to death and injury in the workplace, and the workers brought together in the Canadian Labour Union began their own campaign on issues such as safer conditions for child labour and shorter hours to promote the health of workers of all ages.110 But the depression which dominated the 1870s slowed momentum around these issues, and not until the following decade did pressure again mount for the state to investigate and expand its power to intervene to protect workers from death and injury on the job. Even then, meaningful action came slowly and piecemeal. The 1880s began with a federal commission into conditions in mills and factories and ended with the1889 Royal Commission on Relations between Labour and Capital. In between came provincial and federal legislation to protect some types of workers. Not until the end of the century, however, did a government within Canada undertake a serious inquiry into accidents among construction workers on

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transportation projects, when the federal government commissioned the investigation into the treatment of British immigrants on the Crow’s Nest Pass Railway.111 The findings of that commission were a partial indictment of the attitudes and practices of major contractors, some of whom had begun their careers on the public works of earlier decades. As politicians, the judiciary, entrepreneurs, and workers confronted death and injury on the construction site, they wrestled with questions at the heart of the new relationships being created by industrial capitalism. These were questions with immediate cost, policy, and political implications and with larger ramifications for the division of power within industrial relations, and in these decades the nature of their resolution was by no means certain. Should workers bear the responsibility for the loss of life and limb when they were losing, had lost, or had never had control of the conditions under which they worked? If employers shared in the responsibility, would that cripple business and enterprise and kill the spirit of innovation with which men risked their capital? And if some were willing to risk their capital, why should others not risk their lives? In a free market, what was the appropriate role for the state? Should it protect workers in the workplace and from their employers, if they had freely chosen both? Should governments legislate to protect workers from themselves? Did they have a special responsibility to do so when those workers were employed on public works? Most men walked away from their time at construction with little more than minor injuries. If they spent a few seasons or a few years at the work, the toll on their bodies would have been cumulative, something which crept up on them, could be managed, and did not cripple them in the short term. But this was rough, sometimes brutal, work. At mid-century summer days were as long as twelve to fourteen hours, and winter days from ten to twelve. The shorter hours of the 1870s were still gruelling enough. The longer men spent at construction, the more likely they were to take away chronic bronchial problems, rheumatics, and muscular and skeletal complaints associated with heavy outdoor work, the types of ailments which persisted and cut short their working lives. In the short term, though, even many of these men would have found the immediate reward for their labour worth the immediate pain and exhaustion. The following chapter analyses the potential remuneration the work offered and suggests why in some years the wages advertised would have made it an acceptable option, in years of high wages an attractive option, and why in other years many would have found it met their needs or was their only

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option. Calculating in the dangers inherent in the work need not have deterred many. Injury at work was not uncommon, and on the public works it was a small percentage of the labourers who suffered serious injury or were maimed or killed on the worksite, small enough that men could have considered it worth the risk and the cost, assuming they were in the position to make that type of calculation. There was that small percentage, though, for whom the cost proved very high and who raise questions about how labourers, their families, and their communities dealt with the tragedies woven into the story of public works. When young Urquhart was injured during his first shift on the Intercolonial and was carried the short distance home to die, those in his community mourned the passing of a member of a well-respected local family and perhaps took some comfort in the part he had played in a great public venture. But how did those closest to Urquhart deal with his death? On the most intimate level, as his mother mourned the death of her youngest son, how did she live with the sound of the engines passing over the Intercolonial, bringing back the final hours of his life? How did she make sense of his death and of her life after he was gone? Unanswerable, like so many of the most important questions.

4

The Living

The rudimentary and primitive living conditions of many canallers and navvies at mid-century emerge from an 1855 newspaper report of “the long range of villages” on a stretch of the Nova Scotia Railway a few miles out from Halifax, villages which like Jonah’s guard, have sprung up in a night, thickly settled with men, women, and children. The villages are so new they have not received their proper names but for want of more dignified ones till they grow older and get a more popular and attractive appellation; they may be called Virgin Town, Serape Town, Scrabble Town, Bramble Town, and Slab Town. In imagination I was conducted to the morning of the world when our first parents erected a booth to shelter themselves from the rays of an Eastern sun, or to the first year when Halifax was settled by Lord Cornwallis when the emigrants leaped from the boats into the green woods … The houses are stuck in among the rocks and green woods, so close together that you might hand a biscuit to your neighbor [sic] across the street, and with the other hand touch the tree which shades your home. Nova Scotian, 17 September 1855 Even such a romanticized account of new beginnings could not ignore the poverty within these communities. In makeshift and transitory shelters, located on the works for a few months or seasons and cobbled together from resources carried to or found in the area, labourers and their families lived in buildings “constructed of the humblest materials, a few poles fastened together, the crevices filled with moss 121

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and roofed with hemlock bark.”1 Like much else in the labourers’ lives, their shelters were shaped by the transitory nature of the work and the worksites themselves and capture essential elements of the living conditions among the labourers and their families. They are a good place in which to begin an analysis of the material conditions of labourers who pursued canal and railway construction. The first section of this chapter analyses the changing patterns in housing from the early 1840s through the 1870s and the challenges living conditions presented to health and well-being. The chapter then turns to an analysis of wage rates which as advertised could be attractive but which as experienced were frequently undercut by methods of payment which the labourers described as exploitative: payment in credit and goods when cash had been promised and long waits for payment while contractors and engineers argued over the quantity, quality, and cost of completed work. Equally important to an understanding of remuneration is the frequency with which contractors went bankrupt or absconded, leaving labourers with little hope of receiving more than a fraction of what they had earned. By the 1870s the issue of lost wages was on the agenda for politicians and political parties attempting to court working class voters, but analysis of the federal response shows politicians reluctant not just to assume responsibility for contractors’ debts but also to interfere in the workings of the free market, even when that left labourers on public projects destitute. More than any other this chapter struggles to find a balance in assessing the experiences of labourers, some of whom suffered through appalling poverty and struggled to secure basic necessities, particularly in periods of high unemployment and low wages, while others enjoyed the benefits of high wages early in the 1850s and in the opening years of the 1870s. The extent to which labourers and their families benefited from their time on public works also depended on the resources labourers brought to the work, be they the abilities of family members to contribute to the domestic economy or the attachments to other sectors of the economy to which they would return. That said, it is hard to escape the sense that many of these workers occupied a fragile place in a changing economy and had only a tenuous hold on subsistence. The Scrabble Towns and Bramble Towns along the Nova Scotia Railway were mirrored along a sixteen-mile stretch of the European and North American in New Brunswick in 1858, where a reporter described no less than 136 railway labourers’ dwellings which had sprung up, it seemed, “over night.” Many other shanties were hidden from view further back from the road. Another account describes the

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mushrooming of three clusters of shanties on another stretch of the same railway in the summer of 1857: one group of twenty just beyond eleven mile house, another “shanty settlement” a short distance from Hampton’s Ferry, and another under construction near twelve mile house.2 Such makeshift and ramshackle housing was hardly unique to construction labourers and their families. Squatters reproduced similar shacks and cabins on the edge of urban communities and on unoccupied land in rural areas throughout British North America. What was remarkable about canal and railway shantytowns was the rapidity with which they sprang to life then disappeared. Intended to be temporary, some to last perhaps only a summer or winter, they were in constant flux, and when their occupants moved on they frequently uprooted and carried away what materials they could for the makings of new homes somewhere further down the line. Even in settled areas the concentration of labourers on a public work strained existing accommodation and crowded workers into makeshift facilities. Contracts might call for the provision of suitable dwellings for the workforce; however, contractors were left to find their own definition of “suitable” for what was, after all, short-term accommodation for men and families with few possessions and accustomed to rough living.3 While these definitions could vary widely, contractors seem to have agreed that what was appropriate for skilled workers was unnecessarily lavish for the unskilled. On the Chats in the 1850s, for example, contractors attempted to provide comfortable “dwelling houses” for foremen and skilled workers to attract them and keep them on the works. The unskilled they packed into crude boarding shacks likely modelled on the lumbering shanties in which many of the labourers were accustomed to spending their winters. These might be as large as twenty by forty feet and house between sixty and seventy-five men, or as small as the twelve-foot-square shanties which each housed two dozen individuals on the Williamsburg in the 1840s. They might include sleeping lofts, like the contractors’ shanties along the Nova Scotia Railway, or one floor of tightly packed rows of beds. The principle was to create enough room for men, and sometimes women and children, to bed down for a few months or seasons. The results were predictable. The “Man from Kent” who wrote to the Toronto papers denouncing treatment of immigrants by canal and railway contractors may not have been too far off the mark when he argued that labourers were “‘herded like pigs in temporary shanties’, and eaten alive by vermin.”4 Not all contractors and subcontractors provided even this minimum of accommodation. The ethos and necessity of paternalism

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which had encouraged contractors in earlier decades to assume some responsibility for housing and other aspects of their labourers’ welfare was shaken by cycles of at times massive labour surpluses. The location or timing of construction might prompt a contractor to provide lodging and other necessities: when competition for labour was stiff or the worksite relatively remote; when the work was particularly unpleasant; or when government officials warned that rumours of illness were keeping labourers away. However, when faced with labour surpluses, as they usually were in the 1840s, contractors frequently left labourers to make their own arrangements for housing, perhaps patching together shelter for the earliest contingent of labourers in order to ensure timely commencement of the work, but then leaving later arrivals to fend for themselves. While paternalism might have been a defining characteristic of early relations between employer and employee in the operations end of railways and canals, during the construction phase, and as early as the 1840s, relations between contractors and unskilled workers took on the qualities characteristic of an emerging order in which concepts of mutual obligations and social bonds were redefined and labourers expected to accept, with their wages, expanded responsibility for their own welfare.5 Motivated by a combination of charity and enterprise, citizens along the Welland found room for a small percentage of labourers throughout the 1840s in their homes, barn lofts, and improvised boarding houses. A larger proportion of labourers on the Lachine were able to squeeze into existing housing, settling into the hovels of Griffintown, one of Canada’s earliest industrial communities. Those left to their own devices begged, scavenged, and stole bits of boards and timber, dotting the landscape around construction projects with an assortment of huts. They burrowed into hills, squeezed timbers between boulders, and propped up boards against trees and fences. For more permanent accommodation labouring families with sufficient resources erected freestanding structures using turfs and rough timbers.6 Huts and shacks erected by the labourers themselves were much less prominent on construction sites of the 1870s. Early in the decade, those moving into the more thinly populated areas found facilities created by contractors competing for a labour force. Along isolated sections of the Intercolonial contractors built camps such as “the clearing” on Section 21 in the heart of the forest south of the Miramichi River. Over one hundred buildings  – shanties, stores, workshops, and stables  – accommodated the three hundred foremen, supervisors, skilled and unskilled, and horses working on the line. Smaller encampments for between thirty and fifty men were staggered along the right of way.7 In

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Figure 4.1  Labourers’ shanty at Tartigou River, Quebec, on the Intercolonial Railway, Alexander Henderson / Library and Archives Canada / PA-022002

more populous areas contractors might still build boarding shanties and lease or buy local farm buildings in which to house their labourers.8 These various arrangements may not have matched the stark squalor of later bunkhouses along the transcontinental railways, but they did provoke complaint. When men brought out from Scotland abandoned the work on the Intercolonial near Bathurst and were later arrested in Chatham for breaking their agreement with the contractor, they argued that the contractor had voided their contract by failing to provide adequate accommodation, instead offering shanties in which they were only “indifferently protected” from the winter cold.9 Their complaint echoed that of the labourers brought in from Newfoundland who abandoned the work around Campbellton in 1869.10 In some areas local health regulations may have imposed minimum standards for sanitation.11 But the higher levels of government did not become formally involved in regulating housing conditions on public works. On projects through more populous rural areas and in the vicinity of urban centres, a much larger proportion of labourers than at mid-century made their own arrangements for renting rooms or

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for room and board, as a result of a combination of personal preference, local building ordinances restricting improvised shanties, and expanded opportunities for accommodation in private boarding houses and with families near the works. Along sections of the Intercolonial and on the St Peter’s Canal labourers boarded with farmers and fishermen, many of whom were themselves labouring at construction.12 Where possible they squeezed into established boarding houses and hotels or into new facilities created by local citizens and entrepreneurs from a distance attempting to cash in on the pressure for accommodation. Small communities such as Clifton, on the River Philip, Nova Scotia, mushroomed within a few months; larger centres went through a similar, if less conspicuous expansion. James Upper, a hotel proprietor in Welland, was among those who did not miss the opportunity to expand their businesses by catering to the labourers. Upper improved his already prosperous hotel by the addition of a large kitchen and more bedrooms and was reportedly doing “a thriving business” in 1877.13 Housing public works labourers, however, could be risky, as other proprietors along the Welland discovered. According to one report, although hotels along the canal were filled at the end of 1877, they were “not … very profitable, because of the low rate of wages, and because many labourers, had had their wages attached for arrears in Thorold place.”14 Consequently those who provided housing might find themselves dragged down by the labourers’ precarious position. Eliza Hurly and her husband, Daniel Sheehan, ran a boarding house for fifty canal labourers at Lachine. One evening in March 1878, while her husband was serving a term in prison, Eliza Hurly left her boarding house in the care of a boarder and stepped out to buy groceries. She returned to find the bailiff and Theophile Gariepy, a butcher and grocer to whom she was in debt, stripping the house of furniture, bedding, and even the proverbial shoes from her children’s feet.15 Attempting to collect money owed by labourers might also carry the risk of physical harm, as a boarding-house keeper on the Welland discovered. George Gleenan decided to approach subcontractor Patrick Shannon personally to redeem the wages that had been signed over to him by a labourer in Shannon’s employ. Shannon seemed reluctant to pay. The fourth day the boarding-house keeper came calling for his money, the subcontractor climbed out of the ditch in which he was working, knocked Gleenan to the ground, and kicked him in the face. According to one of the witnesses a friend came running to Shannon’s aid, kicked Gleenan, and “ground his heel on his face.” Whether Gleenan recovered the money owed is not clear.16

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On each project some labourers already resident in the immediate vicinity may have enjoyed a higher standard of living than those seeking only temporary shelter in the area. Study of the areas in Montreal where the working class congregated has demonstrated the need to treat with care contemporaries’ broad generalizations concerning appalling living conditions among working families. Clustered in various types of housing depending on personal circumstances such as the number, age, health, and earning capacity of any family members, labourers created and experienced living conditions across a spectrum from adequate to indifferent to wretched. Those with more than one able-bodied labourer contributing their earnings might enjoy an appreciably higher standard of housing than those in which one male wage earner attempted to support a young family or those in which members of the family were suffering the crippling poverty associated with sickness and injury.17 Whatever their family circumstances, the desperate search for cheap housing during the depression years of the 1870s ensured that unskilled labourers such as those on the Lachine were crowded into the worst conditions, the unhealthy tenements which alarmed urban and social reformers. Honoré Belair was one of the many who made the short journey from Workman Street in St Cunegonde to the Lachine each morning. Belair lived in a “cooped up, wretched shanty … in the same block with a stable.”18 Inadequate and makeshift accommodation threatened the health of labourers and their families, who were particularly susceptible to ailments and diseases associated with crowded and unsanitary housing. Chronic gastrointestinal disorders and bronchitis were punctuated by epidemics such as cholera which raced through construction sites in mid-century.19 At Stonebridge on the Welland in 1849, “at least 20” died from cholera in one eight-day period.20 Immigrants played their part in spreading disease along canals and railways, but the congested boarding shanties and improvised housing of the New World provided the environment in which epidemics could breed and thrive. The virulence of cholera’s attack on the Junction Canal in 1854 was largely attributable to the contractor’s failure to provide any type of accommodation, let alone sanitary facilities, for many labourers’ families. An initial outbreak in July brought twenty-three deaths in three weeks and produced a general panic. Those with sufficient health and resources fled the area, and work was suspended. When the outbreak had partly abated the contractor tried to rebuild his workforce with between a hundred and a hundred and fifty Germans brought from Montreal. Incredibly, he failed – “forgot,” according to a local official – to furnish them with shelter and provisions, and they lived outdoors,

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“under the trees and in the fields.” Superintending engineer Page reported to Begly: “[A]lmost destitute of everything and the common necessaries of life in a strange Country without the means of leaving it, and speaking a language few in the vicinity understood, [they] have and still do suffer in a manner barely within the range of language to describe.” Lack of shelter and decent food brought on sickness, and more than forty men, women, and children died. When the disease finally subsided it left behind twenty-five to thirty widows and sixty to seventy children who existed on the charity of local citizens until the government provided relief six months later.21 The toll from malaria was also high. At mid-century the Anopheles mosquito thrived on the doorsteps of shanties located beside the works, and conditions in those shanties, together with lack of adequate nourishment, made its attacks deadly, particularly among women and children, who proved more susceptible to and more likely to die from the disease than the labourers. In the early fall of 1842, Dr Jarrow reported that three-quarters of the women and children were down, and the youngest and most vulnerable were unlikely to survive.22 In the 1870s labourers still suffered from epidemic and endemic illness brought on by their living conditions. In 1879 the inhabitants of Lachine complained to the Public Works Department that the labourers who came in to work on the canal were a singularly sickly lot who bred contagious diseases and cost the municipality dearly for their medical care. A major problem among the labourers was typhoid fever, a frequent visitor to communities of railway and canal workers in the Old World and the new because of a combination of working and living conditions. In 1880 the Board of Health for Montreal discovered a striking example of that combination. Growing concern about the concentration of cases among canal workmen prompted it to send a special investigator to Lachine. Focusing on the neighbourhood along the canal, the investigator concluded that the canal itself was infecting workers. Residents used it as a dumping ground for refuse and waste, while those lower down drew their drinking water from it.23 Consequently, labourers were infected both at home and at work. Neither colonial nor federal administrations accepted a general and ongoing responsibility for day-to-day standards of health along public works; however, both took some steps to ensure that medical attendance was brought within reach of workers and their families. During the 1840s the Board of Works appointed doctors to care for at least the larger canaller communities, though payment for services varied. On the Beauharnois, for example, contractors coordinated a rudimentary system of health insurance funded by compulsory deductions from

T he L iv i ng   1 2 9

labourers’ wages. In contrast, on the Welland labourers paid for services as required, a system which made both remuneration for doctors and care for patients less certain. This was particularly true during periods of labour unrest, when government officials toyed with, and may very well have implemented at some point, a system of withholding medical attention until the unrest had quieted.24 In the following decade on the Nova Scotia Railway, government officials accepted responsibility for some medical costs, though payments were jeopardized by the inflated medical fees reportedly charged by some doctors who took the opportunity to overcharge a captive clientele. In response to this overcharging, the Legislature passed a resolution intended to “interpose some checks on the enormous charges sometimes made by medical men against Railroad labourers.” It stipulated that in future any remuneration for services provided to the labourers by doctors needed first to be recommended by the railway commissioners.25 Increasingly by the 1870s labourers living near urban centres received the attention of local health authorities anxious to control the spread of disease within their environs. Even in more remote areas the threat of a major epidemic could prompt action to provide the type of preventive and curative treatment offered to labourers on the Intercolonial Railway during the smallpox scare along the North Shore of New Brunswick. Here, the medical community was concerned the disease would be spread rapidly by immigrant and migrant labourers travelling in the area seeking work, in particular “the large influx of Railway labourers to take place on the opening of navigation.” Their fears were compounded by the likelihood that the crowded conditions in boarding houses would accelerate its spread. Sanitary commissioners visited Miramichi camps, and once smallpox hit, doctors were “very busy” isolating and caring for labourers on the construction sites.26 But the experience of Lawrence Moore, a labourer on a private railway connecting to the Intercolonial, suggests the problems labourers could face in attempting to secure necessary help when they fell ill away from home – if they had a home other than the construction community – and in a jurisdiction not obliged to provide care. When Moore became sick while working on the Western Extension in New Brunswick in August 1869, the contractor sent him by train to receive medical attention in St Andrews. But Moore was seriously ill, missed his connection, and was stranded in St Stephen, where the local commissioners of the poor refused to provide shelter and medical help on the grounds that he was a transient and not entitled to local assistance. The police were unable to find a citizen willing to help, even at public expense, and Moore hung around the police station on an old sofa,

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dying. Mrs Dennis Cleland finally volunteered to care for him, until “he passed beyond the reach of human sympathy.”27 In striking contrast to the reluctance with which governments at every level intervened in the treatment of canal and railway labourers was the care labourers and their families provided each other in sickness and death. On one section of the Intercolonial through Nova Scotia workers subscribed to a fund for the support of the widows and orphans of the men who had been killed on the railway works. Contributions were deducted from their monthly wages. In another instance on the same section, the workers donated over one hundred dollars to a young boy seriously injured on the job. Whether this was common practice and whether contractors encouraged and facilitated this type of assistance is unclear. But it stands out as an act of both charity and mutual aid, particularly in light of the wages these labourers earned, and demonstrates the labourers’ participation in the spirit of mutualism increasingly manifest in associations and societies in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some labourers and their families likely also received aid from the mutual benefit fraternalism offered by societies organized around ethnicity, religion, and variously defined communities.28 Wage levels and the standard of living they provided labourers form one of the most intractable aspects of life and work along canals and railways. Data is insufficient to reconstruct regional patterns in real wages and the cost of living, but scattered information concerning wage rates combined with official observations and investigations suggest that during the 1840s canallers received the average or slightly above average wage for unskilled labour in the Canadas.29 Since individual contractors set wage rates, they varied from canal to canal and from contract to contract along the same canal. On the canals in Lower Canada they usually hovered around 2s. 6d., the average rate for unskilled labour during the decade. In Upper Canada they were slightly higher, between 2s. 6d. and 3s. along the St Lawrence and slightly higher again on the Welland. According to the most detailed contemporary investigation of these wages, the government inquiry into the shootings on the Beauharnois Canal, they were barely adequate to sustain life. Many of those who testified at the inquiry, labourers and representatives of contractors and the Board of Works, argued that labourers along the St Lawrence struggled to survive and faced serious problems providing for their families on 2s. 6d. per day. A conservative estimate gave the cost of food alone for a single labourer for one day at 1s. 3d., suggesting that at the going rate a labourer could only feed himself and his wife, not to mention children, and then only on days when he was

T he L iv i ng   1 3 1

employed. Under the best of circumstances, with work being pushed ahead during the summer months, this could mean only twenty days out of the month. In winter he might only put in ten days in some months, assuming he was lucky enough to get work.30 Lewis Drummond, Reform member of the Legislative Assembly for Montreal and then Portneuf and member of the Beauharnois Inquiry, denounced the “grinding oppression” along the canals and the “sleek” contractors who had “risen into a state of great wealth by the labour, the sweat, the want and woe” of the labourers. He charged the government with having betrayed and abused the immigrant labourers: “They were to have found continued employment, and been enabled to acquire means to purchase property of their own. They expected to meet with good treatment and what treatment had they met with? – With treatment worse than African slaves, with treatment against which no human being could bear up.” Drummond was backed up by fellow assembly member Dr Nelson, whose experience as medical attendant to the labourers on the Lachine prompted a less passionate, but no less devastating appraisal of the conditions he encountered: “He had frequently to prescribe for them, not medicine, nor the ordinary nourishments recommended by the profession, but the commonest necessaries of life; he daily found them destitute of these necessities, and he was, therefore, most strongly of opinion that the system under which they were employed, and which afforded them such a wretched existence ought to be fully enquired into.”31 Work did not guarantee adequate food even on the Welland which offered the highest wages. David Thorburn, magistrate for the Niagara District, wondered how the labourers could survive as he watched them hit by a drop in wages and a simultaneous increase in food prices, struggling to feed their families, unable to provide a “sufficiency of food – even of potatoes.” Thorburn’s concern was echoed by the conclusions of the Grand Jury investigation into disturbances on the Welland in late 1843: “[I]n consequence of the Super-abundance of laborers the Contractors have been paying no more than half a dollar a day, which, as in consequence of the season of the year labourers cannot work more than three or four days per week, is not sufficient to defray their board.”32 Wages climbed on construction sites throughout British North America in the early 1850s and by mid-decade fluctuated from 5s. to 6s. on the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways. On the Junction Canal, as indicated in table 4.1, wages rose to 5s. through the summer of 1854, declined over the winter, and then rose to 5s. 6d. in the summer and fall of 1855, peaked at 6s. 3d. in December, and in the following summer were again at 5s.

1 3 2   R oug h Work Table 4.1  Wage Rates for Categories of Work on the Junction Canal, July 1854–July 1856 Recorded

Labourers Mechanics

Horses / Teams Foremen

Days Worked

For July 1854 5s.

6s. 3d.

6s. 3d.

For Aug. 1854 For Sept. 1854 5 Feb. 1855 2 Mar. 1855 17 Apr. 1855

5s. 5s. 3s. 9d. 3s. 9d. 3s. 9d.

6s. 3d. 6s. 3d. 4s. 8¼d. 7s. 6d. 4s. 8¼d. 7s. 6d. 4s. 8¼d. 7s. 6d.

per diem for 19 days per diem for 23 days per diem for 26 days

2 May 1855 May 1855 4 June 1855 7 July 1855 Aug. 1855 6 Sept. 1855 6 Oct. 1855 10 Dec. 1855 Jan. 1856

3s. 9d. 4s. 5s. 5s. 2d. 5s. 6d. 5s. 6d. 5s. 6d. 6s. 3d. 4s.

6s. 3d. 6s. 3d. 5s. 8½d. 5s. 8½d. 5s. 8½d. and 5s. 7s.

4s. 8¼d. 7s. 6d.

per diem for 11 days

7s. 6d. 7s. 7s. 7s. 7s. 7s.

6s. 3d. 6s. 3d. 6s. 3d. 6s. 3d. 6s. 3d. 5s.

per diem for 26 days per diem for 26 days per diem for 27 days per diem for 25 days

Feb. 1856 4 Apr. 1856 For May 1856 5 July 1856

4s. 4s. 5s. 5s.

7s. 7s. 7s. 6d. 7s. 6d.

5s. 5s. 6s. 3d. 6s. 3d.

8s. 8s. 7d. 8s. 7d. 8s. 7d. 8s. 7d. 7s. 10½d. and 8s. 9d. 7s. 10½d. 7s. 10½d. 8s. 9d. 8s. 9d.

per diem for 25 days per diem for 26 days per diem for 27 days per diem for 26 days

Source: RG11, vols. 20 to 26.

Table 4.2 demonstrates a similar pattern for the Chats Canal, where wages reached 5s. 6d. by June of both 1855 and 1856. This appears to represent an increase in wage rates shared by workers in a number of industries across the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies, offset to some extent by the rise in commodity prices from 1850 to 1854. However, the second half of the decade brought a decline in wage rates on the public works as labourers shared in the hardships of the depression years.33 Women who accompanied men to the work fulfilled roles in construction communities familiar to their counterparts among the working class throughout Europe and North America. In addition to caring for their husbands and children, they earned crucial additional income by providing room and board to lodgers in the structures labouring families built along the works, taking in washing, mending, cooking, and cleaning for the larger boarding shanties, and providing

T he L iv i ng  1 3 3 Table 4.2  Wage Rates for Labourers on the Chats Canal, January 1855–June 1856 Recorded

Labourers

31 Jan. 1855

3s. 9d.

22 Mar. 1855 4 June 1855 3 July 1855 1 Jan. 1856 1 Mar. 1856 1 June 1856

4s.* 5s. 6d. 5s. 10d.** 4s. 6d. 5s. 5s. 6d.

*  In March 1855, when labourers were earning 4s. per day, drillers were earning only slightly more, 4s. 3d. **  In July 1855, when labourers were earning 5s. 10d. per day, stonecutters and mechanics (other skilled workers and machine operators) were demanding, and receiving, 10s. to 12s. Source: RG11, vols. 22 to 26

similar services to contractors’ barrack-like bunkhouses. Women tended small family and communal gardens and any family livestock. Livestock most frequently meant pigs and chickens, though along the Beauharnois the cattle of labourers who had come into the area for work were reportedly numerous enough to provoke local residents to threaten to kill them if their owners “persist[ed] by force in causing them to graze in the meadows, and on the grain, in spite of proprietors.” Women also made and sold alcohol for consumption within the construction communities and perhaps beyond, and, in the most desperate circumstances, women assumed the responsibility for moving among the better-off members of society, begging for relief for their families. But the location of construction communities often restricted women’s ability to find remunerative employment outside the home. Isolated from the larger centres or inserted into an area already saturated with women seeking work, they faced serious obstacles to securing employment as domestics, charwomen, and laundresses. The investigation into conditions on the Beauharnois concluded that the poverty of canaller families was compounded by the lack of options for women who needed to contribute to the domestic economy.34 On this site, as on many others, they could not even secure and cultivate small plots of land. In the 1850s, as a higher proportion of men travelled to construction sites without their families, the women who remained behind

1 3 4   R oug h Work

shouldered the responsibilities of maintaining a home base. They did so in patterns familiar to women in families in which the male earner regularly left for seasonal work in lumbering camps or for work of longer duration, perhaps at sea or on the trail for gold, and for many this would have been a role to which they had become accustomed. Women’s and families’ strategies for survival varied across regions and across rural and urban economies and were shaped by the nature of the stake they had – or did not have – in those local economies. They also depended on the number and age of household members who could contribute in the form of paid or unpaid work and on the number whose need for care increased the workload. The wife of Roderick McDonald, who was away working on the European and North American, raised her seven children and maintained the small family holding in Cape Breton under circumstances decidedly different from those in which the wife of Edward Leahy, who was also away working on the European and North American, raised her five children and maintained a living back in Ireland. Different again were the challenges faced by the wives, children, and extended families left in Boston when husbands, fathers, and sons travelled to work on the Nova Scotia Railway. Those without an established home squatted on infertile soil and scraped by on potatoes, without livestock or crops and without credit arrangements or the means to barter a living, or they crowded into rented rooms, caring for dependents and turning to family, neighbours, or strangers for the necessities of life. The more fortunate, those established on a small holding or with existing work outside the home, continued their role in the domestic economy, tending to family, working their farms or outside their homes, as well as taking on any additional work necessitated by the absence of their spouses. They did not simply wait for the return of their spouses or for monies sent home. Their success in managing the domestic economy was crucial in determining whether the family profited from the male wage-earners’ stint on public works and did not spiral downward, accumulating debts which would have undermined the value of the hoped-for additional income. Construction labourers’ standards of living may have been little worse and perhaps a little better than those of other unskilled, though the government reports for the 1840s present a consistent image of labouring families struggling to maintain a livelihood. Representations of that struggle among public works labourers in the 1850s were less dramatic, particularly in the more buoyant economy early in the decade. Still, the censuses and other government records suggest that for common labourers in general, the 1850s did not represent

T he L iv i ng   1 3 5

a general and comparative rise in standard of living either in Central Canada or in the Atlantic colonies.35 Looking just at the public works, a close comparison of labourers’ wages with those of the skilled demonstrates the enormous material disparity of which they bore the brunt during the early years of transition to industrial capitalism. On the canals of the 1840s masons and stonecutters might under some circumstances expect to receive twice the wages earned by labourers. In the following decade, during the climb and then drop in wage rates, the gap between skilled and unskilled on public works remained wide. It could narrow depending on variations in the local availability of labour and broader fluctuations in supply and demand, but it could also widen if a project required a high proportion of skilled workers but its location and working conditions were sufficiently unattractive that contractors had to reach deep to secure stonecutters, masons, and carpenters. On the Chats Canal, for example, as table 4.2 indicates, when labourers’ wages climbed to a high of 5s. 10d. per day in July 1855, stonecutters and other skilled workers and machine operators were demanding, and receiving, 10s. to 12s.36 In the 1850s, with the significant increase in the numbers of men combining construction work with farming, lumbering, and fishing, an improvement in their material conditions was a possibility for some, though for how many is not calculable given the lack of evidence concerning fine variations in circumstances among those coming to public works from other sectors of the economy.37 It seems unlikely that many of those from Cape Breton who took work on the Nova Scotia Railway, and the European and North American to a lesser extent, were able to turn their earnings into an appreciable improvement in circumstances, given the heavy dependence among Cape Breton farm households on off-farm income to maintain an adequate supply of food. On the other hand, any men drawn from the système agroforestier in Prescott County to the Chats Canal in the mid-1850s, or even to the Junction, likely had a better chance of using the high wages offered on the canals to invest in land, provided they secured steady construction work and were willing to invest in the significantly cheaper low-lying land in the county or elsewhere.38 Intense competition for labourers throughout North America helped push up wages in the late 1860s and early 1870s. This was recorded dramatically in government reports on the Intercolonial. An 1867 report on the potential cost of construction projected that, based on current wage rates, on those sections of the line running through New Brunswick labourers would be available at between $0.70 and $0.80 per day. By the time construction commenced, however, rates

1 3 6   R oug h Work

were at $1.00 per day, and by 1872 the deputy minister of immigration and agriculture reported that contractors could not secure common labourers along the line for $1.25. The following year wages on public works in general peaked, outstripping the less-dramatic gains for lumberers, farm labourers, and other labourers in the area of public works.39 At the end of 1873, however, contractors along the canals were attempting to lower wages as the slide into depression accelerated, and by early 1875 it had taken hold. Table 4.3 demonstrates the pattern in wage rates on three canals in the 1870s, the Grenville, Lachine, and Welland. From the spring of 1875 until the closing years of the decade, wage rates on public works dipped to levels more closely corresponding to those in other unskilled occupations, fluctuating between $0.90 and $1.25, only rarely rising to the $1.30 or $1.40 briefly available on the Welland where labourers were most successful in challenging contractors’ attempts to enforce the laws of supply and demand.40 Late in the 1870s and into the 1880s, labourers on public works shared in the general, but modest, rise in wage rates for the unskilled. As wages fluctuated over these years, they could be as little as one-half of those of the skilled on construction sites.41 No official inquiries collected information concerning the standard of living public works labourers could maintain on these wages; however, anecdotal evidence suggests that along the Lachine in the second half of the 1870s, single male wage-earners faced hardship when wages dropped below $1.00 per day, while $1.00 per day was barely adequate to sustain families. When the Corporation of Montreal announced that it was lowering wages for labourers on its road works from $1.00 to $0.80, it precipitated a debate in the press through August and into the fall of 1877 over what the Montreal Star dubbed the “Starvation Wages Question.” In what was part of a larger political debate over municipal spending policies, the Star expressed amazement that a labourer with five or six children could manage on $1.00 per day and argued that anything less would “pauperize the laboring classes.” When the Montreal Witness contended that the generally low wages paid by contractors throughout the city were responsible for bringing down wages on municipal public works, the Star rejoined that “the regular rate paid by all respectable and honest contractors in the city, men who do not grind the laborer into the dust to throw his family upon charity, [was] $1.” It concluded that a reduction below $1.00 would deprive labouring families of many of the bare necessities and wondered how they could survive even at $1.00 a day. In support of this position a reporter shared his interview with a labourer earning $0.80 a day:

T he L iv i ng  1 3 7 Table 4.3  Wage Rates on the Grenville, Lachine, and Welland Canals, 1871–1881 Recorded

Grenville Lachine

Feb. 1871

$1.25

Nov. 1871 Dec. 1871 Jan. 1872 Apr. 1872 May 1872 Apr. 1874

$1.00 $1.20 $1.20 $2.00 $2.50

May 1874 May 1875 Sept. 1875 May 1876 Jan. 1877 Feb. 1877 Spring 1877 Oct 1877

$0.90 (S3) $1.00 (S4, 5, 6) $1.00 (S6, 7)

Dec. 1877 Dec. 1877 Dec. 1877 Feb. 1878 Mar. 1878

Apr. 1878 Dec. 1878 Feb. 1879

$0.80 (S6, 7) $0.90 (S1–7, 9, 10) $1.00 (S8)

$1.12½ (S8) $0.90 (S3, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Mar. 1879 Apr. 1879 Sept. 1879 Oct. 1879 Jan. 1880

$1.50 (S3, 5, 6, 7)* lower than $1.50

Welland

$1.25 (between Port Dalhousie and Thorold) $1.37½ (between Port Dalhousie and Thorold) $1.37½ (between Port Dalhousie and Thorold) $1.12½ (S11) $1.25 (Secs. 1–16: Port Dalhousie to Allanburg) $0.80 (S4, 5, 6) $1.00 (Aqueduct and Port Colborne) $1.25 (S28) for “men of a better class than the common”) $0.90 (S19, 20: between Thorold and Allanburg)

$0.90–$1.00 (on 7 Secs) $1.12½ (Junction) $0.90–$1.00 (Welland) $1.25 (5 Secs between Allanburg and Port Colborne) $1.00 (S33, 34: between Ramey’s Bend and Stonebridge) $1.00 (S33, 34: between Ramey’s Bend and Stonebridge) $1.00 (Port Colborne) $1.00 (S1–16) (Continued)

1 3 8   R oug h Work Table 4.3  Continued Recorded

Grenville Lachine

Feb. 1880 July 1880 Aug. 1880 Sept. 1880 June 1881

$1.00 (S11) $1.10 (S11) $1.15 (S11)

Welland $1.25 (on some sections)

above $1.00 (S33)

Sources for Grenville: RG11, vol. 180. #14379, Page to Sec PWs, 31 Jan. 1871; vol. 181, #20321, Goodwin to Braun, 30 Dec. 1871; #20506, Goodwin to Braun,13 Jan. 1872; #21301, Goodwin to Braun, 1 Mar. 1872; #21310, Goodwin to Braun, 1 Mar. 1872; #22377, Goodwin to Braun, 23 Apr. 1872; #22682, Braun to Sippell, 4 May 1872; #22695, Sippell to Braun, 6 May 1872; RG11, vol. 789, #14577, Braun to Sippell, 3 May 1872. Sources for Lachine: RG11, vol. 473, #71442, Baillarge to Braun, 19 Dec. 1877; #71633, Baillarge to Braun, 29 Dec. 1877; vol.476, #81370, Sippell to Braun, 28 Apr. 1879; #81371, Davis & Sons to Braun, 28 Apr. 1879; RG43, vol. 937, #88969, Davis to Secretary Dept Rlwys & Canals, 28 Aug. 1880. La Minerve, Dec. 1877 to Jan. 1878; 29 Sept. 1879; Montreal Star, 22, 23 Jan. 1877; 18 to 24 Jan. 1878; 29 Mar., 10 Apr., 23 Sept. 1878; 28, 29 Apr. 1879; 27 July, 27, 28 Aug., 1 Sept. 1880. Sources for Welland: RG11, vol.162, #40971, Brown, Manning & Ginty, Cairns Morse Hart & Co. to Alexander Mackenzie, Minister of Public Works, 7 May 1874; vol. 452. # 59541, contractors on sections 1 to 16 on Welland to Mackenzie, 17 May 1876; RG 43, vol.792, #91470, McNamee to Tupper, 16 May 1881; vol. #91785, Bannerman & Co to Tupper, 20 June 1881; Thorold Post, 10 Sept. 1875; 28 Apr., 5 May 1876; 8, 14, 21, 28 Mar. 1879; Welland Tribune, 19 Oct. 1877; 8 Mar. 1878; 8, 14, 21, 28 Mar., 10 Oct. 1879; Welland Tribune, 9 Jan. 1880; Globe, 4 Mar. 1878. *  This rate reflected the emergence from the depression and labourers’ concerted push for higher wages.

Here is what the poor fellow said: “I am living in Duquesne Street in rooms, and I have four children, and my baby and missus is sick. I can earn only $4.80 a week, and the doctor’s bill last week was $1; I only get meat once a day, and the children none, because it is too dear. We have potatoes and bread always, and mostly always have tea, though we was out last Thursday and my money was done. I haven’t had berries but one Saturday evening, and the children is crying for them all day long, or for apples. At a dollar a day I could get these things.”

T he L iv i ng   1 3 9

When asked if he was able to put anything by for the winter he replied sadly, “No, not a red cent; and will need work right along or starve.”42 He noted that rent and clothes were the most costly items. The latter were particularly expensive for men working on the canal, as a labourer on the Lachine would explain to a reporter three years later. The cost of the heavy clothing required for all outdoor work was bad enough; canallers required as many as three pairs of boots a month because of the wear and tear from water and stones on the canal bed.43 The difficulty of covering bare necessities prompted the Star reporter to chide the labourer for spending money on non-essentials such as smoking a pipe: REPORTER: You shouldn’t use tobacco these hard times. LABOURER: (After a pause) – my pipe is the only comfort left. If I go

hungry, a smoke makes me more contented like. It’s what the tea is to the woman, and only costs fifteen cents a week.44

The humble luxuries of this labouring family, the father comforted by his pipe and the mother by her tea, reflect the hardship of the depression years, when even many skilled workers were thought lucky if they found work labouring for $0.70 or $0.80 a day. Women’s ability to contribute to the domestic economy remained crucial, but opportunities varied with the condition of the local labour market and demand for their labour and any produce they might sell or barter. The increasing availability of waged labour for women and children in major centres meant that in Lachine, Montreal, or St Catharines, relatives of a construction labourer  – wife, sister, or child  – might hope to supplement the family’s earning power; in those same centres, in the lean years, they were likely to find the demand for their labour or service already met by neighbours if they themselves were members of the community or by established residents if they were newcomers. Less-populated areas might offer less competition but also less demand. However, with fewer women and children travelling with men in the 1870s, many women and families who were left behind maintained the home base as they had in the 1850s and once again faced a range of circumstances dictated by family size, the nature of their ties, and opportunities for earning in their home communities in the absence of the menfolk.45 Analysis of potential income must factor in various ways in which wage rates were undermined, did not reflect actual earnings, and, in

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the most unfortunate circumstances, became almost irrelevant. The truck system of payment, long waits between paydays, contractors’ failure to pay wages, and irregularity of employment were central to defining levels of remuneration but confound attempts to calculate real wages or standards of living.46 Frequently inseparable from wage rates was the system of truck under which labourers received all or part of their earnings in the form of credit tickets redeemable at any store with which the contractor had made prior arrangements. In a society in which transactions at every level frequently involved credit and the exchange of goods rather than payment in cash, and among labourers from regions and areas of the world only just undergoing the process of monetization, payment in truck or credit would not have been unfamiliar or unacceptable in itself, nor was truck payment necessarily a source of unusual hardship. The location of many construction sites, however, left labourers vulnerable to employers ready to take advantage of the potential for abuse in the truck system, particularly if those employers were struggling with cash flow problems, as they frequently were. Cut off from other sources of foodstuffs, labourers might have no choice but to accept provisions in truck and at inflated rates. Even in built-up areas in which provisions were available from multiple vendors, the necessity of redeeming credit tickets at specified stores deprived labourers of the opportunity to shop around for the cheapest goods and thus encouraged the escalation of prices, further devaluing their wages.47 In addition, storekeepers received a percentage of the cost of the transaction as compensation for their willingness to take the risk of accepting tickets which might become worthless should the contractor go bankrupt. If the risk seemed high, nervous storekeepers might take as much as 25 per cent, though the rate was usually 8–10 per cent.48 A combination of these variables led to complaints about truck payment from labourers through the 1840s and into the 1870s. Drawing a clear line between exploitative credit arrangements, on the one hand, and the remnants of paternalistic relations in the workplace, on the other, is not easy, largely because they were not mutually exclusive. By its very nature payment in credit could be a practicable vehicle for transition to impersonal labour market relationships in cash-strapped economies. However, canal and railway labourers and those who investigated the use of truck by contractors argued that the remnants of paternalism had been stripped away, and workers left vulnerable to cycles of debt and dependency within a context in which they were being asked to assume responsibility for their own welfare both in the present and for the future. For their part, contractors

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argued that their stores protected labourers from unscrupulous speculators and supplied provisions for men who might otherwise starve in relatively remote camps such as those along the Intercolonial and at the Grenville Canal. They might also have argued that they had a vested interest in providing good nutrition to their workforce: only the shortsighted or desperate would deliberately undermine their labourers’ productivity by providing contaminated food or scrimping on meals and provisions. A reporter who spent time in a railway camp joined the men in complaining about the monotony of the regular diet of meat and fish: breakfast of codfish, bread and butter, molasses, and tea; a dinner of pork, tea, molasses, and acidic bread with no butter; and the same again for tea, this time with butter. Particularly unappetizing but common in work camp settings was burgoo, boiled bread crusts with a molasses sauce, and sitting around the fire at night the labourers joked about spicing up their diet by throwing in some of the meatier members of the camp.49 But it was primarily the price of food, not the quality and quantity, which provoked protest on a number of worksites, though price, quality, and quantity quickly became linked when labourers attempted to turn credit into provisions. From the labourers’ perspective truck payment forced them into a downward spiral of debt from which they saw little hope of escape. As men on the Lachine canal in the 1870s argued, under the truck system actual wage rates became immaterial. In their experience, whether the rate of pay was $0.80 or $1.25 per day, after storekeepers had taken their percentage the total cost for the transaction equalled or exceeded the value of the credit tickets, with the result that many men worked for nothing more than provisions doled out at the company store. This eroded hopes of carrying away cash or sending money home to those dependent on their earnings. Many might even be indebted to the contractor or storekeeper when their period of work ended.50 Government investigations on both sides of the Atlantic agreed with the labourers. In Britain the Select Committee on Railway Labour­ers concluded that truck was more a “system of plunder” than a system of payment; many contractors and subcontractors reaped their profits from the sale of provisions, not from actual construction. The British Parliament, however, refused to extend the protection of the truck acts to railway labourers.51 In British North America an investigation by the Board of Works for the Canadas condemned the abuses associated with truck and inserted into the contracts a clause demanding payment in cash. Yet the board was not enthusiastic about eliminating truck, perhaps because the practice temporarily alleviated contractors’ problems in maintaining a cash flow. The board argued

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that truck should be controlled, not wholly abandoned, but according to its officials on construction sites it was not very enthusiastic even about controlling it.52 Through the 1870s, the federal government, in its turn, chose to condemn but not suppress truck. On the Lachine the use of truck became a sufficiently volatile issue that in January 1878 the Mackenzie government intervened with a letter to all contractors instructing them to pay labourers in cash. But it refused to go further and ensure its instructions were followed. During questioning in the Commons, Mackenzie argued that the government had no power “in its hands” to eliminate truck, and it had no intention of passing legislation which would give it that power. Even where legislation to control truck did exist, it avoided the central issue. In Quebec, the law allowed workers to refuse truck payment, but employers were also given the right to make “such conditions as they considered proper” for employment. In practice, many men who wanted work on construction sites were being asked to choose between taking wages in credit or tickets for provisions or not taking a job at all.53 The continuing importance of this type of payment to the employment relationship in a variety of occupations is evidenced by the mounting fight against it among the ranks of labour during the 1870s and the continuation of that fight well into the twentieth century among key segments of organized labour.54 Important in maintaining truck and an exacerbation of the hardship it imposed was the long interval between paydays, known to labourers as the long pay. In keeping with employers in a variety of industries throughout the period, contractors frequently paid labourers once a month. When wage rates were adequate and wages paid in cash, not credit, this schedule of payments was not uniformly denounced by workers.55 It also fitted neatly with the monthly payment of estimates by the government. One contractor on the Lachine also pointed out that paying more frequently would require more frequent checking of the payrolls for his force of over four hundred men, a tedious and time-consuming endeavour that would increase management costs.56 The petition of labourers working along the Lachine in late 1877 and early 1878, however, argued that the long pay devalued their wages in two ways: it pushed even the most frugal to secure the necessities of life on credit, and it forced men to “make sacrifice of portions of their earnings as discount for advance payments.” An added hardship was the practice of forcing men discharged from the work to wait for their pay until the regular payday, and under the long pay that might mean a wait of three or four weeks. Meanwhile, the contractor or his creditors

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earned interest on their money, and the labourers were unable to leave the area to seek work elsewhere.57 Contractors operating on a combination of the long pay and the truck system trapped labourers in a relationship of dependency, but it was at least a relationship that was roughly defined and allowed the worker some sense of security. It was also a relationship which, depending on the rate of wages and with payment in cash not credit chits, was not necessarily objectionable to workers. The employers who posed a more serious threat were those who paid wages irregularly and not in full. Unfortunately, they became all too common. As contractors and subcontractors struggled with mounting costs, labourers frequently worked without pay for as long as three or four months, trying to hang on to their position in the workforce and struggling to maintain themselves and their families. Simply to stay alive they might enter into transactions with cutthroat speculators.58 In extreme circumstances, on the more remote construction sites where even the speculators might not be available, a contractor’s inability to meet his commitments could leave his workforce without any means of securing sustenance. On the Chats, superintendent Gallwey alerted his superiors to the fact that letters had been published in the local papers alleging what was described as the “irregular payment of the men.” He had to acknowledge the truth in the allegations, at least for the 1856 working season.59 When contractor Macdonald had exhausted all sources of credit by November 1856, he was not only unable to pay his labourers’ wages but could not even maintain provisions for his camp. With food for only twenty-four hours remaining and public works officials still pondering the appropriate course of action, superintendent Page pressed government officials to sort out their priorities and immediately “make some arrangements to keep the men from starving.”60 The unluckiest labourers discovered that their wait for payment had been in vain: the contractor went bankrupt and promised wages disappeared, or the contractor disappeared with the wages. This feature of public construction was well established during the 1840s when the Board of Works reported that the frequent bankruptcy of contractors along the St Lawrence canals left the labourers “more or less unpaid,” an interesting choice of words but perhaps reflective of the board’s ambivalence towards tackling the problem.61 The pattern is not clearly documented on the canals and railways of the 1850s.62 The public works of the new Dominion, however, still witnessed scenes of absolute desperation arising from late and lost wages. Trouble came early on the Intercolonial. Newspapers keeping citizens abreast of

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progress along the line might differ in the assignment of responsibility when contractors proved unable to pay workers, apportioning blame among the railway commissioners, the federal government, “foreign” contractors, and the whole scheme of Confederation, depending on their political leanings. At least one paper, the Halifax Evening Express, found a way to blame the workers themselves for not exercising due diligence as free labour and “find[ing] out, before accepting employment, whether or not those employing them are in a condition to fulfil their engagements.”63 Despite differences in perspective on the issue, by the first summer of construction through the Atlantic Provinces, local papers were in agreement about the heavy burden imposed by the loss of wages. As early as July 1869, the press was reporting that subcontractors and contractors on Sections 4 and 7 were “imposing mercilessly upon the men employed”; groups of labourers were leaving the works by the day and the week, “without receiving one cent for their labor.”64 By fall, more grim details were emerging, and these included the ripple effect throughout local communities as citizens who had extended credit to workers shared their losses. On what appears to have been the hardest-hit section, between Amherst and River Philip, first the subcontractors began abandoning the work and their debts. Responding to the crisis, Mr Whitehead, partner and managing director in the principal contracting firm of Elliott and Company, assured the press that all the labourers had been paid in full, and if they had not been they would be. He then headed to Ottawa to make good his promise, received full payment from the government for the work to date, and proceeded back to Halifax where he boarded a steamer headed to “the land of freedom.”65 Left behind on this one contract alone were workers owed at least three months’ wages totalling over $15,000. Most of that fifteen thousand was owed by the labourers to the citizens of Amherst, many of whom now found themselves facing ruin. Once Whitehead’s disappearance became public, boarding-house keepers and grocers shut their doors to the navvies, “unable, even had they been willing, to extend further credit. [T]he navvies gathered by the hundreds at Amherst Corner in a starving condition, and had to be fed by Overseers of the Poor.” Some labourers were able to unload their contractors’ due bills at a discount of only 15–20 per cent of their original value. But by the time the federal government agreed to step in and pay the contractors’ creditors, Elliott and Company’s due bills were worth only $0.50 on the dollar, and those of subcontractors significantly less, between $0.12½ and $0.33½ on the dollar.66

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Labourers and citizens along the Folly Lake section of the Intercolonial sustained similar losses. Wages were already weeks overdue and labourers in desperate need of payment when, in December 1869, Mr Angus, partner in H.J. Sutton and Company of Ontario, hurried to Ottawa to pick up the $10,000 needed to cover the major portion of his obligations to the navvies. Instead of returning he “skedaddled” “over the lines into Uncle Sam’s dominions.”67 As the effects of Angus’s fraud rippled through the surrounding area, the merchants of Cumberland joined those complaining of “severe loss” resulting from contractors’ failure to pay wages.68 But hardest hit were the labourers. After barely one year of construction on the Intercolonial through Nova Scotia, labourers had “suffered so much from defaulting contractors” that the Chignecto Post marvelled that they could still appear “to work with the conviction that they were to be paid for their labour.”69 On behalf of the federal government, the Intercolonial commissioners stepped up and agreed to pay the debts of the contractors and subcontractors in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but not before they had been castigated in the local press for their participation with “those Ontario swindlers” in a scheme to defraud citizens of the Atlantic Provinces and not before their dawdling indifference had pushed labourers, local merchants, and those who boarded the labourers into debts from which they could not easily recover.70 As 1869 drew to a close, many citizens would have echoed the sentiments of the Eastern Chronicle: “Railway operations, instead of being a benefit to the County, as expected, have been, so far, a decided injury.”71 These were not sensationalized instances of defaulting and the resulting distress, but part of a pattern, the dimensions of which are underscored by the fact that on the fifteen major contracts on the Intercolonial through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, eleven contractors were forced to surrender their work to the federal government, leaving creditors struggling in varying stages of economic embarrassment and the government debating whether and how to intervene.72 Acting as an arm of the federal government, the railway commissioners took limited proactive steps to forestall further robbery of labourers and citizens along the line. In March 1870, in response to sustained public outcry and protest by labourers, the railway commissioners instructed their chief engineer to report every month whether labourers on each contract had received the previous month’s wages. That might at least prevent the accumulation of months of arrears. Perhaps this belated action limited future losses to labourers, but it did not prevent them. In 1874 the government was still intervening to cover the wages lost to defaulting and absconding contractors on the Intercolonial,73 and

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through the remainder of the 1870s federal administrations continued to wrestle with the problem of unpaid labourers on public works. When labourers turned to the government for assistance in recovering their wages, administrations continued to resist the argument that they had any special moral or legal responsibility for the wages of labourers employed on public projects or that they should officially assume special responsibility. Instead they reluctantly weighed the pros and cons of intervening depending on the circumstances in each case. To maintain or mollify a segment of the workforce, to facilitate rapid resumption of operations, or even to alleviate particularly acute suffering, government bodies frequently found the resources to do what in principle they rejected. Contracts for the Intercolonial spelled out clearly the most pressing reasons for intervention: if the security of the works was endangered or the peace of the neighbourhood “likely to be disturbed, or any other difficulty likely to arise.”74 In such instances the commissioners paid arrears of wages and charged them to the contractor’s account. They did so, however, on an ad hoc basis. Relative to labourers on the Intercolonial, those on the Welland appear to have been spared the worst but not all of the difficulties associated with overstretched and unreliable contractors. The Thorold Post reported in September 1876 on the stretch of the canal running through Thorold: “[F]rauds are unknown.” Four years later it could not have said the same. In 1880 the Welland Tribune was delighted to report on Ferguson, Mitchell, and Symmes’s three years of work on four major sections of the canal: “They have never missed a payday.”75 Their record was all the more remarkable in light of the difficulties experienced by labourers on other parts of the work, most glaringly at Thorold in December 1877 and on McNamee’s contract in the early 1880s. In April 1880 when McNamee’s paymaster was robbed of $15,000 while on his way to pay the workmen, the government appears to have come through with funds to cover the loss before the workers were seriously affected. But the following spring, when McNamee ran into trouble finding money for wages the problem was not as speedily addressed. While he waited for government funds, he noted two factors contributing to his difficulties: the “great increase of wages” had taken him by surprise, and he was experiencing difficulty turning his fixed capital – he had plant worth $45,000 on the Welland alone – into ready cash. On the Welland chronic problems with subcontractors also led to delays in paying wages. Still, contractors were more successful in meeting their commitments to labour. This reflected, in part, the significant drop in wage rates by the mid1870s after prices for the first thirteen contracts had been agreed, and,

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in part, Page’s refusal to accept the first-round tenders for eight of the twenty-two later contracts.76 But the Lachine was a different story, in part because of the timing of letting contracts. Here, when problems paying wages arose, government officials and politicians adopted an ad hoc approach similar to that adopted on the Intercolonial and consistent with the broader perspective of both Conservative and Liberal administrations which seemed unable or unwilling to justify acting to prevent clearly foreseeable problems. The case of contractor John Lyons illustrates the point. In January 1876 Lyons took up Section 9 of the Lachine “at rates which at the time were looked upon as exceedingly low.” Struggling through one year of capital shortages, he became insolvent in March 1877. The work limped along into the summer, when, instead of placing the work in the hands of those with the capital to complete it, the Department of Public Works advanced to Lyons the full percentage which had been retained as security on his contract. In doing so the department gave away the funds it would need if Lyons failed completely. Again unable to continue, Lyons and his assignee passed the work to a subcontractor, Phelan. Under the terms of their contract with Lyons the government could not formally recognize this arrangement: subcontracting was not allowed. But “no objections were made nor intended to be made so long as the work was satisfactorily executed.” Under the circumstances, a happy ending for the government, Lyons, Phelan, and labourers seemed unlikely; however, it was only months later, after the disappearance of Phelan, that the government cancelled Lyons’s contract.77 By then it was too late. Friends and acquaintances jumped to the missing Phelan’s defence. Powerful Montreal contractor McNamee described Phelan as “a man of the very best character for honor and honesty,” with a reputation for meeting his obligations fully and with a respectable family lodged in one of McNamee’s own houses. As an American and a stranger in the country, he might have “lost his head” and sought temporary refuge among his friends in Albany, New York. Indeed, Albany papers argued that Phelan, having suffered a financial setback when one of his backers had withdrawn his support, had headed to the United States to secure backing from another capitalist and was likely to be in a position to recommence construction within a few days. As it turned out, he had absconded and left among his creditors 850 labouring men and carters, owed six weeks’ wages and not in a position to wait longer for payment. Their credit at local shops and boarding houses quickly ran out, and hundreds found themselves on the streets and desperate for food. According to superintendent Page, a particularly knowledgeable

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and credible observer, “many of the men (were) left so destitute of means as to be unable to procure the ordinary necessities of life or even to obtain a place in which to shelter themselves or families.”78 The workforce on Section 3 faced similar hardships in the spring of 1878. At the end of May the Montreal press alerted readers to the mysterious disappearance of yet another contractor, this time John Kelley Jr of Hickler and Company. Kelley had been missing since midMay with over $15,000 in Canadian bank notes, but the Montreal Star had received assurances that the contractor had no reason to abscond. The member of a wealthy Boston family, he was a respected alderman and prosperous real estate owner in Buffalo, an honourable individual whose financial affairs were in good order. Maybe he was the victim of foul play? On 5 June the firm received the following telegraph from their investigator in New York: “Made thorough detective search to-day; records ocean steamships examined; no clue; mystery complicated.” But perhaps not all that complicated. As Montrealers waited for news of Kelley, dead or alive, he had all the appearance of just another contractor who had taken the money and run. On 22 June, the Montreal Star published information suggesting that was, indeed, the case: “The Missing Contractor – A gentleman in this city has just received a letter from a friend in New York, stating that he had seen Mr. Kelley depart on a trans-Atlantic steamer en route for Paris.”79 During the 1870s, a variety of overlapping variables pressed federal administrations to respond more sympathetically to the distress generated by unpaid wages. For large pockets of public works labourers, immigrants or migrants hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles from home, possibly not citizens of the country, and probably not qualified electors, appeals for government intervention could not carry much force. To a considerable extent such individuals went without direct representation in the political arena. But movement to broaden the franchise in the 1870s, combined with heavier reliance on labour drawn from the area of public works, meant that governments faced an increasingly political, not simply an administrative, problem when confronted by unpaid labourers, some of whom were electors. When the number of private citizens providing accommodation and provisions for labourers was taken into consideration, the failure of a contractor could have wide-reaching and direct political repercussions. In Ottawa, government officials and politicians wrestled with fundamental questions concerning the responsibility of elected officials for private losses sustained in the prosecution of public works; in the immediate area of public works, finding the answers became more urgent as local representatives of both government and opposition

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faced the practical implications of leaving labourers unpaid. Thus, in the fall of 1878, in an attempt to secure wages owed to his constituents in Montreal East for work on the Lachine, Désiré Girouard warned the government that in the last local elections the Liberals had assisted their candidate by paying wages to labourers and debts owed to storekeepers in relation to work on the Lachine, and if the Conservatives did not do likewise they would suffer at the polls. Constituents’ feelings that they were not sufficiently protected against the loss of wages needed to be addressed.80 In similar circumstances, MP J.C. Rykert, whose riding covered much of the work on the Welland, was more subtle, but the message was the same when he appealed to the government to meet the needs of his constituents owed money when the contractors on Section 4 failed. Communications with Tupper in late 1878 pressed the argument that any money the government had on hand should go first to the labourers and those who had provided supplies to both labourers and contractors, many of whom were going further into debt just to meet the necessities of food and shelter. His second letter put it more bluntly: “[D]on’t let Quebec Bank swallow up money.” The response from Ottawa was not encouraging. The minister of justice advised the Department of Public Works against adopting the course of action recommended by Rykert. It was against government practice to intervene between a contractor and creditors except in special circumstances, and these did not qualify. Three months later Rykert was still appealing for payment of monies due to local businesses, boarding-house keepers, and, in particular, labourers, some of whom had been served with landlords’ warrants. Intervention by the government would be “a great act of charity.” Rykert did not need to mention that it would also be sound politics.81 Such arguments became more compelling as the depression of the 1870s brought the issue of lost wages home to workers in various industries and as workers themselves campaigned aggressively at both the provincial and federal levels for remedial legislation and a political solution.82 Debate over lost wages on the St Peter’s Canal demonstrates the reluctance with which federal administrations intervened in such cases. Contractor Tuck disappeared from the canal in the summer of 1877; he owed between two and a half and three months’ wages to labourers and skilled workmen, most of whom came from the immediate Bras D’Or region. Not only did men lose their wages, but those who had housed and fed men from outside the area lost their board money as well. Families went hundreds of dollars into debt to merchants. Some mortgaged their land; others would be forced to do so

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as soon as the merchants intervened. The local Presbyterian minister for Baulordern reported that some of his people would be financially “crippled for years.” Widows were owed seventy and eighty dollars; a man owed fifty dollars had survived on charity during the winter. To make matters worse, the labourers had missed the fishing season, lost the chance to get other employment in the area, and could not leave the country for work as late as the end of the summer. Even if they had been able to leave, they had no means to travel.83 For months the government baulked at accepting responsibility for the losses. Mackenzie told the Commons he would do all he could to protect the workmen, but it was “entirely out of the power” of the government to “make provisions for payment of labourers employed by a contractor.” The government ignored the fact that it had not taken reasonable and sufficient steps to protect the workers’ interests. Not only had it not held back the percentage of the contract price intended to cover debts a contractor could not meet, it had advanced the drawback to Tuck because of his severe financial difficulties  – shortly before he absconded.84 Once Tuck had absconded, the government held to its policy of not requiring securities to make good on contractors’ debts and did not insist the assignee cover the labourers’ back pay either. As for paying the wages itself, the government’s attitude was most clearly expressed by an official of the Department of Public Works. Secretary Perley argued that even if the government had sufficient money on hand from the contract, it was “hardly possible” they would use it to pay wages: “First, because the Dominion is not in any way liable for these wages; second that having paid for the work represented by these wages it [could] not be expected it should be paid for again.”85 The new Conservative government in Ottawa initially appeared ready to continue the approach of the previous government and ignore the claims of the labourers. But whatever the government might have wished to do, in the face of mounting public pressure its policy shifted. Local MLA H.F. McDougall told Tupper, the new Conservative minister of public works, that the people had assumed that on a government enterprise provision would have been made for the protection of their interests. The MP for the riding, McDonald, also intervened for the labouring men, and local politician C.W. Harrington endorsed the statement of Murdock McRae, ex-MLA for St Peters, Cape Breton. Harrington explained to Tupper that the people of Cape Breton knew that the Liberals had acted to secure the lost wages of the workmen on the Lachine, and they expected the labourers on the St Peter’s Canal to receive “equal consideration.” They were “fully conscious that the present Cabinet desire[d] to mete out equal justice to all portions of the

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Dominion, and protect the poor man from fraud.” When the matter was presented in this light, the government responded favourably and found money to pay a small portion of the claims more than four years following the initial pleas for help. By this time many of the labourers and skilled workmen had left the area to look for work elsewhere.86 Added to the variables affecting earnings were recurring cycles of unemployment. Availability of work fluctuated dramatically in response to weather, the seasonal nature of demand, staggered construction schedules on any one contract, and broader business cycles. The press might admonish workers to set aside money to see them through periods of unemployment and other life misfortunes, advice which was echoed from the pulpit and by concerned citizens in a variety of capacities. However, that option was least available to those who needed it most. Wage rates alone suggest that for a labourer with a small family, saving enough to weather predictable and unpredictable periods of unemployment would have been exceedingly difficult without additional sources of income. The labourer who had been paid in truck or had lost weeks or months of wages when a contractor went bankrupt or absconded found the difficult impossible. The impact of unemployment was most visible in the 1840s, when labourers moving from project to project were least likely to have alternative sources of income on which to fall back. As local Magistrate Thomas Keefer explained concerning men and their families seeking work on the Welland in the winter of 1843, many had used up what few resources they had in travelling to the canal and were already suffering from severe malnutrition when they arrived: “[M]any of the families of poor men who have flown to this quarter for employment had not tasted bread or meat for many days together. Men they were then setting to work actually staggered under the weight of their tools for want of proper nourishment.”87 The following winter, the St Catharines Journal described families suffering similar hardship along the same canal: the greatest distress imaginable has been, and still is, existing throughout the entire line of the Welland Canal, in consequence of the vast accumulation of unemployed labourers … There are, at this moment, many hundreds of men, women, and children, apparently in the last stages of starvation; and … in the spring, … more than one half of those who are now employed must be discharged … This is no exaggerated statement; it falls below the reality, and which requires to be seen, in all its appalling features to entitle any description of it to belief.88

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From further down the canal system came equally harrowing reports of the condition of men and their families waiting for jobs to open up. Images of anguished mothers and malnourished children cast a shadow over the bright prospects of economic advancement. Perhaps only a very small proportion died as a direct result of starvation and only a slightly larger proportion from the indirect effect of severe malnourishment, and perhaps the fatalities were concentrated among the very youngest and oldest, who would have succumbed most rapidly. But the threat was all too real in a decade in which hundreds of thousands within the British Empire, and much closer to the seat of imperial power, died of starvation.89 Public works labourers experienced unemployment in different ways, depending to a considerable extent on the nature of their attachments or prospects in other sectors of the economy, a fact best illustrated by following them into the next decade. Particularly in the early years of the 1850s, the interval between the closing down of one section of the work and the opening of another for many men would have been a period in which they returned to take care of business at home or sought employment elsewhere. A significant number of those working on the canals of the Canadas and on the railways in the Atlantic colonies, for example, might simply have returned to juggling work on their farms with work in the lumbering industry. Or some might have travelled further afield for wage labour to supplement farm income.90 Later in the decade, with depression cutting into opportunities for alternative employment, public works again became the site of acute suffering, though the descriptions rarely matched the images from the 1840s, perhaps because many in a workforce drawn from the immediate area or from rural and urban centres at a distance took their suffering home, where it was less concentrated and less visible. In the early years of the 1870s, those combining work on the Intercolonial or canals with the maintenance of farms could weather fluctuations in the demand for wage labour, depending on the viability and extent of their holdings; and the relative shortage of labour for key sectors of the economy meant those without a stake in the land could move on from public works in hopes of securing other means of supporting themselves and families. But when depression stripped away options for earning a living, labourers working intermittently on public works once again suffered visible hardship, in particular those who had travelled to the work from outside the area and who lacked family and friendship networks to help them through the worst seasons. A priest found the suffering along the Lachine “beyond [his] ability to grasp.”91 Girouard, representing Montreal East, was also at a loss to

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comprehend the dimensions of the problem, writing to Tupper: “Lots of strangers are [at Lachine] with their families perfectly destitute and without friends to call upon and if something is not done for their relief I really do not know what will become of them.”92 Both priest and politician would be among those who lobbied vigorously for measures which could ease the suffering, not just of those congregating around public works but of the much larger pool of unemployed of which they formed a part.93 Too stark a portrayal of the living conditions and prospects of labourers and their families underestimates their ability to craft strategies for survival. It also disregards the variation in their circumstances shaped by age, health, marital status, number of dependents, and life’s vicissitudes. Those able to use construction to maintain a stable livelihood and with it build a more promising future were at one end of the continuum of public works labourers. In the years when wages were high and on sites where their value was not undermined appreciably by payment in goods or credit or by delinquent contractors, men who avoided prolonged periods of unemployment might take away or send home the means to secure a better living. Perhaps in the middle could be placed those not building for the future so much as keeping themselves and their families out of the ranks of the labouring poor. But at the other end of the continuum were men and families among the most impoverished, who appeared to have little prospect of rising above a meagre subsistence either in the immediate or the long term. Throughout North America the completion of canals and railways left pockets of the destitute, the refuse of the golden age of transportation. From south of the border came reports of hundreds of men, women, and children stranded on abandoned or floundering construction projects. Not far south, in northern New York State, one thousand women, children, and labourers were reportedly “scattered through the northern wilderness, utterly destitute,” attempting to make their own way to the nearest communities after contractors on the Saratoga and Sackitt’s Harbour Railway failed in 1854. Many were believed to have died of starvation. Within British North America and Canada, the remnants of construction communities were smaller, but not insignificant. As contractors and the Board of Works abandoned the Chats in 1856, they were at a loss what to do with their former workers, a large percentage of whom were too poor to move on. Officials estimated that some one hundred men, fifty of them with families, were abandoned. The representative for the provincial riding of Pontiac, John Egan, advised the commissioner of public works that they had no food and “no means of getting away” and were left in “extreme distress.” It

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was even harder to know what to do with the widows and orphans of deceased labourers. Reporting on the “disposal” of the families of those who had died on the Junction, superintendent Baillarge told his superiors that he had felt compelled to ship some of them to the United States, while some orphans had been taken in by local farmers.94 These destitute labouring families may attract disproportionate attention because in being left behind they became easier to identify. But they warrant that attention because they create the sense of having been left behind in something bigger, in the march of progress and the struggle for individual improvement. In that respect they speak to the broad vision of the public works as the avenue to advancement and pose the most visible challenge to the image of canals and railways as agents of economic progress. From them come images such as those of the Murrays and the Lynches. Charles and Mary Murray squatted on land along the Williamsburg Canals. In response to a complaint that the Murrays’ pigs and geese were running wild and that apples were disappearing from an orchard near their shanty, the government moved to evict the squatters in 1861. Charles Murray’s last petition to the government noted that he had worked for twenty years on the public works before being hurt on “this last canal.” He was now seventy years old, helpless and desperately poor, and had no “son in this world or nothing to support him.” His wife appealed to the authorities: “[A]llow me to remain while he lives which can not be long and God will bless you.” Her plea was denied. The fate of Charles and Mary Murray following their eviction is unknown.95 Two decades later, the appeals of a cluster of labouring families squatting on government land along the Welland were also rejected. With the support of the local priest and prominent citizens, Edward Lynch, Patrick O’Mara, and Joseph Newton petitioned for permission to remain in the shanties they had built on government land when they were labourers on the canal in the 1870s. Lynch’s eyes had been injured on the works, he was unwell and unable to continue work, and his large family depended on his wife’s miserable earnings. Despite strong testimonials from influential members of the community, the Lynch family was removed. Their fate is also unknown.96 Somewhere between and among the improving farmers and the Murrays and the Lynches, labourers on the public works made their living, precariously.

5

The Boundaries of Belonging: Navvy Communities of the 1840s and 1850s

Samuel Frost’s wild ride through a navvy community on the European and North America outside Saint John exposed him to what the local press called “Navvy Law.” Returning from Saint John at a fast clip, Frost’s horses ran over a small child who raced out from one of the shanties. While he waited to see how badly the child was hurt, a crowd assembled. By Frost’s account, he was lucky to have escaped with his life: [A] woman ran out from the shanty and began hurling billets of wood sawn in stove lengths at my head, which I managed to prevent reaching my head with one hand, on which I received a slight wound, while with the other I held my reins, having nothing with which to defend myself. I moved on; she followed, without having ascertained whether her child was hurt or not, screeching imprecations of revenge. Her screetches brought from their work a railroad gang, who met me and seized my horses about fifteen or twenty rods from Adams’ barn, armed with their shovels, and threatening to take my life … They yelled “To h-l with the Magistrate  – you shall not leave this spot – we will have your life,” which I believe they would have done, had I been out of sight of the village, as their gestures and menaces were full of revenge ... Thus I was left alone with beings more like demons than men, my horses held fast, surrounded by men armed with shovels and spades, the father of the child, who had been sent for from a gang more distant, holding my horses, holding a club which he had brought with him in one hand, while the mother, a woman about four feet some inches height, 155

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with a waist about the thickness of the largest part of a barrel, stood with a stone in her hand threatening to kill me. Frost ignored the navvies’ warnings not to travel back that way, and three weeks later, again by his account, he was stopped about thirteen miles from Saint John, and when he attempted to arrest the man holding his horses’ reins he “was set upon by eight or ten ruthless villains with sticks and stones, who abused and beat him shamefully.” The Morning Freeman held Frost partially responsible for the initial altercation and suggested he could not expect to be given license to run over “a mere navvy’s child.” But magistrate’s law found the father guilty of assault and sentenced him to hard labour.1 Even those whose sympathies were with the “mere navvy’s child” and his distraught parents had trouble embracing the inhabitants of navvy shanty towns as the stuff of permanent communities. As the composition of the workforce shifted at mid-century, as it became more ethnically heterogeneous and drawn from diverse sectors of the colonies’ economies, public works labourers continued to generate anxiety. Contemporaries found some comfort in believing that many of the labourers were only temporarily part of the landscape and would move along. But until they did, bold schemes of colonization through public works struggled to come to terms with the labourers and labouring families clustered along construction sites and with the prospect that some would remain, like Charles and Mary Murray on the Williamsburg with their pigs and geese running wild.2 This chapter looks inside the clusters of labourers and labouring families around construction sites. Its analysis relies heavily on the perspective of outsiders: individuals and groups whose opinions were shaped by stories such as that of Samuel Frost, by broader currents of moral and social reform, and by the racism and religious prejudice pervading North Atlantic communities. In doing so it focuses on what the labourers were perceived to represent. Beginning with family life about which little is known, it looks into the shanties and boarding houses at the centre of a rough culture. Drinking and moral laxity are seen through the eyes of priests ministering to the Catholic faithful, Protestant missions reaching out to the expanding number of their co-religionists on the line, temperance advocates on their own mission, and police and military officers tasked with enforcing law and order. Analysis of crime reported among these shanty towns finds few sensational crimes and primarily the assaults and fracases common in communities of rough labourers, hardly enough in itself to match the navvies’ international reputation. In two respects, however, the

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inhabitants stood out as serious threats not just to those living among and around them but to those in the larger society. In the 1840s, in particular, the labourers were heavily armed. They were also organized in groups which engaged in large-scale internal conflicts and confrontations with those outside their immediate communities. Critics at the time focused on the Irish Catholics’ role in these conflicts: in faction fights and in clashes with ethnic and religious groups against whom they nursed grievances. Presenting these conflicts more broadly, historians have emphasized their place in the process of fragmentation central to the study of class formation. For its part, when the state intervened in labourers’ lives, attempting to control their consumption of alcohol and possession of weapons, the language used to justify and the specific intent of restrictive legislation emphasized the position of canallers and navvies both as members of undesirable ethnic groups and as groups apart, in need of special measures to restrain their conduct and beyond the protections others enjoyed from arbitrary policing measures. Close examination reveals the overlapping of these critiques. As canallers and navvies injected themselves or were pulled into conflicts already alive and thriving within the areas in which they worked, they demonstrated that the processes of ethno-racial and religious exclusion were also processes of integration. In electoral confrontations in the Canadas and Nova Scotia, in disputes over loyalty to the British crown, and in Protestant-Catholic conflict in all the colonies, labourers demonstrated how much they were at home with old tensions, conflicts, and hatreds which defined for them a familiar place as clearly as did the language of moral and social censure. On the edge of an established community or alone in the wilderness, each encampment of labourers took on a life of its own, expanding and contracting with the work and the seasons. Members shared the daily struggle to subsist, the material poverty and insecurity, and the threat of destitution. They suspended work and mourned together when a labourer was killed on the construction site,3 but they also joined in the routine of each day, the day-to-day social interaction and leisure activities, lying out on the hillsides on summer nights, visiting from shanty to shanty, drinking and playing cards, attending Sunday service, and writing letters home; and they shared more intimate experiences, men, women, and children of all ages reproducing familiar patterns of family life and giving to makeshift shanty towns a richness which belied their impermanence.4 Families played an important role in shaping the canaller and navvy communities at mid-century, though little information has survived concerning family life among fathers,

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mothers, and children. One of the rare tallies of a canaller community offers a snapshot of the labour force on the stretch of the Welland between Port Dalhousie and Allanburg in mid-February 1844. Sharing accommodation with 1303 labourers were 666 women and 1209 children.5 The following decade a smaller number of wives and children accompanied labourers to the Junction and Chats Canals, but officials noted their presence, particularly among newly arrived immigrants.6 Along the Nova Scotia Railway, shanties with all-male occupants and a woman to cook and clean alternated with those containing two or three families, varying numbers of male boarders, and “lots of children.” The European and North American labour force also included many men with families. Along a sixteen-mile stretch of temporary housing a reporter discovered wives and children in each of the labourers’ shanties “into which a peep could be obtained.”7 A closer look into a cluster of shanties at the Junction on the Nova Scotia Railway reveals families extended beyond father, mother, and children to include adult brothers, sisters, and in-laws with their children, the type of family living arrangement not uncommon among labouring families. In one shanty, for example, the boarding-house keeper’s family lived with his sister-in-law and members of her extended family, along with a number of male boarders. Close by, the three McVicar brothers boarded together, whether with wives and children is unclear.8 Little concerning intimate relations and friendships emerges from such shanties, though in a few instances the details of family life become painfully precise. The German families on the Junction are recorded in official tallies of orphans and widows left in the wake of the cholera epidemic of 1854.9 The report on cases of malaria at Broad Creek on the Welland in the summer of 1842 concluded that among the many children suffering, of those under two, nine in ten would die, creating what on one level might be measured as a missing age cohort among the families who had been part of that summer and what on another level was an incalculable collective grief, as one after another families buried their infants and toddlers.10 The navvy or canaller as father seldom appears. A doctor who cared for the families along the Lachine in the 1840s testified from his experience “that never did he see more affectionate husbands and fathers.”11 But the rare images of individual navvy fathers are not as flattering. In one glimpse into a navvy family along the St Lawrence, grief and folk belief met in the father who, disabled in an accident, put his sickly infant outside the shanty door on a shovel to die because he thought it was a fairy’s child.12 And there was the father of the toddler run over by Samuel Frost whose fierce devotion to his child resulted in

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his conviction for assault.13 Images of the mothers, wives, and other women who lived among the labourers were also unflattering, if a little more sympathetic. In Britain, contemporaries argued that even for women in a family unit, life was demoralizing. Individuals who probed into navvy families, those who tended the women’s bodies and ministered to their souls, saw them as objects of pity, and their reports centred on the frailty of woman, doomed to a life among violent men, whose reputation for virility and animal passions might fascinate women who watched from a distance but could only degrade those who lived under its power. On both sides of the Atlantic the material and moral conditions endured by navvy women aroused sympathy. Their lot was hard, its rewards meagre, and when combined with bearing and caring for children and all the miseries of life on the road, it added up to an existence so wretched that missionaries in Britain were saddened, but not surprised, to find that when many navvy women spoke of God it was to curse him for their fate.14 In England, even the most compassionate observers mixed pity with censure of women seduced to follow men who offered only fleeting attachments, bound without the sacrament of marriage and, when abandoned, forced to seek the protection of any willing partner or sell their bodies in return for a place in the navvy communities. This perception of women living among navvies was reinforced in England and Scotland by reports that the practice of solemnizing marriage by jumping over a broomstick remained common on construction sites into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Navvy encampments were also reported to be one of the last strongholds of the practice of wife-selling which had declined throughout Britain by the mid-nineteenth century.15 Did the practice survive on construction sites of the New World? The investigations of a police detective later in the century suggest that perhaps it did. In October 1888 Ontario’s chief detective, John Murray, investigated a murder in Slabtown, formerly Merriton, a collection of shanties on government reserve land on the feeder to the Welland, whose occupants included the remnants of earlier construction communities. Murray reported finding a community with “a code of morals all their own” which included a tradition of wife-selling accepted by the women and men alike, a wife fetching as much as a cow or as little as a few dollars.16 Fact or fiction, Murray’s account belongs among the characterizations of navvy communities as the refuge of practices and mores dying out elsewhere in the face of the moralizing and civilizing zeal of religious and social reformers. Such stories go a long way in explaining the attention these communities, and in particular the women and

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children within them, attracted among those championing religious, social, and moral reform.17 How can women in navvy communities emerge as other than victims? Perhaps Mary Leary can help. Leary and her husband ran a boarding house for canallers working on the Welland in the early 1840s. When a dispute between her husband and two men turned violent in the early morning hours, Leary intervened to defend her husband and subdue one of the combatants and took an elbow in the face for her troubles. In her appearance before a magistrate the following day, Mary bore the visible signs of the active role she played in maintaining order in her establishment.18 Women’s central role in attempting to maintain a degree of control over the establishments they ran is demonstrated most dramatically in the experiences of two women boarding-house keepers who rose above obscurity in tragedy and scandal on the Nova Scotia Railway. Mrs Gallagher, keeper of a boarding house approximately six miles outside Windsor, achieved notoriety when a navvy who had been drinking in her shanty was killed by another navvy, one of her lodgers. Named as an accomplice in the murder, she was ultimately set free, but not before her relationship with the lodger and potential role in the killing had been subjected to public scrutiny.19 Honora Healy, boarding-house keeper on the same railway, provided another cautionary tale. While her husband lay passed out on a bench in the kitchen after an evening of drinking with a lodger, Cornelius Murphy, that same lodger, went to Honora’s bed in the dark, claimed to be her husband, and claimed a husband’s right. Alarmed to discover that his “little finger” was not her husband’s and unable to rouse the boarders to help, Healy drove her attacker from the loft and beat him to death with a billet of wood. The fact that she cropped off his ears probably went against her in court and with the public. But public outrage turned to sympathy and petitions for clemency when she was sentenced to be hanged. Ultimately, Healy’s life was spared when the Nova Scotia Supreme Court found that the jury’s irregular verdict did not amount to a conviction for capital murder.20 Still, like Mary Gallagher, she was the proof of women’s vulnerability and corruptibility when they entered into the rough world of navvies. At a time when the growing number of urban boarding establishments were sharply dividing along lines of class and respectability, the respectable accommodating the respectable and the disreputable catering to the roughest members of society, the services provided by women like Gallagher and Healy placed them at the bottom of the moral hierarchy, defined by the company they kept.21

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Gallagher and Healy’s stories provide the most detailed evidence of the central role women played in maintaining the institutions for leisure and socializing. Even when families shared with only a few boarders, the domesticity shaped by father, mother, and children frequently included the coming and going of men for whom the shanty was not just a place to eat, rest, and sleep but a place in which to congregate and socialize, talk, play cards, gamble, fight, and drink. According to priests, ministers, magistrates, and reporters, drink was at the centre of this shanty socializing, as navvy families joined itinerant alcohol peddlers and local inhabitants in the liquor trade, adding to women’s responsibilities the making and dispensing of home brew, a role familiar to women in communities throughout North America, Britain, and much of continental Europe.22 On the Welland the superintendent of police, William Benson, counted 124 unlicensed grog shops along the line of the canal, along with thirty-two “legitimate” inns. The head of the Special Police on the European and North American reported that liquor was sold in almost every house and shanty along the line. To the labourers, grog shops offered much more than drink. They were the meeting places where men exchanged gossip and listened to music. Here also they engaged in the serious debates and discussions which government officials found threatening, all unfolding at the centre of domestic life, children running underfoot or sleeping overhead, women going about their work or sharing in the enjoyment.23 To contemporaries the rash of drinking spots confirmed the depravity of navvy folk and fed growing concern about the labouring poor in general. Whether the consumption was as excessive as observers claimed, whether it was significantly in excess of the amount of alcohol imbibed less publicly by other segments of society, and whether the combination of alcohol consumption on and off the job approached the level of social pathology some scholars have suggested, the key point is that members of respectable society believed that among the working class, but in particular among those involved in rough labour such as construction, lumbering, and seafaring, drink was part of a social contagion threatening the advance of civilization.24 Government officials suggested and implemented ways to limit consumption. On the Welland, superintending engineer Power was adamant that nothing less than “despotic power to suppress grog shanties” could combat the drinking, to him a major cause of trouble.25 In the following decade, John Page reported from the Junction that he was attempting to stem the flow of liquor from “low drinking shanties in the neighbourhood of the works.” To this end, he took it upon himself to give notice that anyone dispensing or trafficking in

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liquor would be barred from the land along the canal belonging to the Department of Public Works, and anyone who “in any way” dealt with liquor would be denied employment on the canal.26 On the European and North American the head of the Special Police for the railway works, Scoullar, shared the concern to stamp out this “great evil” and the cause of much of his trouble in maintaining the peace. Like Power, anxious to end the sale and consumption of alcohol on public works, Scoullar embraced the idea of broadening the power of the law when it came to railway labourers, suggesting amendments to existing legislation: “If the present License Law was so amended, to make it evidence of a Sale of Liquors, the fact of any persons being seen resorting to, and remaining about any Shanty, in a state of intoxication it would not be very difficult to put a stop to sale, in such places, but as the Law stands, it is impossible to detect the offenders, as it only applies to Licenced Taverns, and that on Sundays.” His report of the following year repeated the recommendation. He also suggested that if the government would not ban alcohol along the works, contractors should take it upon themselves to refuse employment to men who sold intoxicating liquors in their shanties.27 Temperance advocates carried their campaign directly to the public works. Invaluable to their fight were representatives of both the Catholic and Protestant faiths committed to rooting out what they perceived as a major threat to God’s work and primary evidence of faltering faith workers’ attendance at taverns and grog shops, what some social and moral commentators referred to as “the church of the working class.”28 Among Irish Catholic labourers the temperance movement received a powerful boost from the work of Father Matthew, a priest whose crusade against drink spread throughout Britain and North America in the 1840s. On canals this broad campaign received local support from priests who held revival meetings and sponsored organizations such as the Committee of Vigilance on the Beauharnois. In the following decade local priests continued their work among the labourers. In the fall of 1855 the Nova Scotian noted with dismay that in comparison to the relative inactivity of Protestant ministers along the Nova Scotia line, members of the Catholic Church were zealously “alive to their own interests,” the priest “walking his round among his people.”29 Their work was encouraged by railway commissioners, who offered tangible support such as the reduction of fares in August 1857 for passage to a bazaar and picnic intended to raise funds for a church for the navvies.30 Priests were joined by increasing numbers of Protestant ministers, come to witness to an expanding contingent of Protestants in the

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workforce who were not about to leave the drinking to the Catholics. In Nova Scotia, these ministers reported their dismay at discovering that it was not just the Protestants among the immigrants who needed their help, but those drawn from throughout the province, and in particular the Highlanders from Cape Breton, at home devout Presbyterians and respectable family men, but in the construction communities dissipated and dissolute, their appetites unleashed by the distance from their homes and their stint on the public works. This perception of a general moral decay within navvy shanty towns posed a serious problem for the churches. These were not just communities in need of routine spiritual succour. Within England and Scotland the spiritual plight of the navvies had been answered by the evangelical zeal of societies and missionaries from a range of denominations, and within British North America similar efforts brought Protestants together in a fretful unity, as the experience of Presbyterians on the Nova Scotia Railway demonstrates.31 The Free Church Record portrayed the shanty towns as “nurseries of iniquity and a rallying point to the ungodly”; the Presbyterian Witness described them as a “social gangrene” spreading along the Nova Scotia Railway, men smoking, fighting, gambling, and lounging in fields and under trees drunk.32 In the summer of 1855, the Presbyterian Witness floated the idea of a government-appointed chaplain for the railroad labourers, many of whom were in need of moral guidance. Other ideas for furnishing that guidance included enlistment of a colporteur and tract distributor. A letter to the editor suggested that the youth in particular would be “enthralled” by the popular religious tracts and Christian books, though a subsequent letter argued such an approach would not be well suited to the navvy communities, since so many of those along the line were unable to read.33 For the largest block of Protestants on the Nova Scotia Railway, the Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland established a mission to navvies, teaching the word of God in both English and Gaelic at Sunday services and weeknight revivals in contractors’ boarding houses, churches of other denominations, taverns along the line, and labourers’ shanties. One minister engaged by the synod in the fall of 1856 reported on the encouraging response to his efforts. During a threeweek period he had held twenty-eight services, some on the Sabbath, others throughout the week, and more than half in the shanties close by the worksites on the line between Windsor and Halifax.34 Various proposals for sustaining the ministry were advanced, the most ambitious suggesting that pastoral resources could be maximized by reorganizing the workers, asking contractors to cooperate in employing

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all the Cape Breton Protestants on one section or on adjacent sections of the line so that they could be readily tended to by one minister. And who better for the job than their own minister from back home, paid by the labourers to follow them to the work and reside in their midst? Rough calculations suggested that the minister’s salary and expenses could be met by as few as two hundred labourers contributing one day’s pay, in addition to their Sabbath offerings. The proposal was not feasible, and it is not clear that the Cape Breton men would have responded “most gladly” to this arrangement, but it demonstrates the problem migrant labourers posed to the churches. Clusters of men removed from the salutary influence of home, family, and church came to be regarded as a mission field in their own right and stretched the resources of those attempting to provide the means of grace.35 By summer of 1857, ministers from the presbyteries of Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, Pictou, and Halifax had each agreed to cover a month of services, partially funding their efforts through voluntary collections from the navvies who attended meetings for the Home Mission of the Free Church.36 Yet so much remained to be done. A minister invited his readers to follow him along the construction sites and listen to the cursing provoked by minor interruptions to the work; or into a shanty, where men under the influence revelled and rioted “as those bereft of reason”; or along the roadway on the Sabbath where men desecrated the Lord’s Day falling down drunk, building shanties, and hunting small game.37 Such reports drew labourers into the debate raging over desecration of the Sabbath. The railway, too, became a powerful symbol of that desecration. Men might sit at home unobserved playing cards or slip unnoticed into the shanty next door for a drink. But it was hard to muffle the sound of the locomotive conveying men and materials along the track on Sundays in preparation for an early start Monday morning. Citizens along both the European and North American and the Nova Scotia Railways demanded the government intervene to censor officials and contractors who encouraged or turned a blind eye to Sunday work, for if the government could not enforce Sabbath-day observance laws on its own projects, where it had a variety of means to sanction transgressors, where could it enforce them?38 In these portrayals navvies stood as an affront to the emerging ideal of respectable godly masculinity which combined sobriety with duty to God, family, and community.39 Some came to a lukewarm defence of the labourers. The Nova Scotian reminded its readers not to write off all the labourers too quickly, to remember that “[s]ome good men have come to the Railway to make an honest living.” When the

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Gleaner carried an editorial deploring the “floods of rum along the line” a reader reported that he and a companion had travelled twenty miles along the line on the previous Sunday and had not seen any evidence of drunkenness, not even one man “the worse for liquor.”40 By mid-century more vigorous limitation of the dispensing of alcohol on the job by contractors’ men, combined with the temperance campaigns sweeping Britain and North America, likely had an appreciable impact on the amount of alcohol consumed by canallers and navvies. But for any labourers who responded to the appeal for temperance, many continued to enjoy their drink and the censure of respectable society. In public representations, navvies and, in particular, Irish navvies, became men who drank their way through this life and whose vision of the next was “sitting in public, over a good jug of ale, with a fiddle going.”41 Characterizations of navvies coupled dissipation and ungodliness with the excessive violence of men who subscribed to their own codes and laws which threatened men like Samuel Frost, going about their business on market day. Much of the behaviour which alarmed respectable members of society consisted of the common or garden-variety interpersonal violence condemned among other disreputable segments of the population. Police Magistrate Scoullar on the European and North American compiled records of tavern and boarding-house brawls which would not have been out of place in court records for jurisdictions home to other rough labourers, whose recreation and even much of their private lives unfolded in streets and public houses. Violent acts perpetrated by one or two individuals stand out.42 Of the eighty-seven individuals prosecuted during 1858 and 1859, sixty were convicted of assault, eight of those for assaulting a police officer, and eleven more for drunk and disorderly conduct. Of the remainder, two were convicted of selling liquor without a license, one for threatening, and one for destruction of property. Twelve were found guilty of more serious crimes: eight for theft, one for rape, and three for murder. Scoullar would have been the first to advise against overdependence on his tallies. For a variety of reasons they represented only a fraction of offences along the line: the area policed was too large; lockups were inadequate; men to assist in policing were too few, and the few available could not be in two places at once; rescues were frequent; escapes were common; witnesses were unreliable; and complainants lost interest. Police resources were also stretched by the concentration of offences on Saturday nights, Sundays, holidays, and immediately following paydays. In addition, other magistrates in the area dealt with offences committed by railway labourers, though they did not

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identify the offenders as such. All this considered, the preponderance of law-breaking by navvies on the European and North American falls into the category of petty offences common on public and private construction sites in North America and Britain.43 During construction of the St Lawrence and Atlantic Railway, the 1851 jail records for Sherbrooke revealed an increase in petty crime attributable to railway workers whose appearance in the records was disproportionate to their numbers but who were being held for “minor misdemeanors and assaults” linked to drunkenness.44 Similarly, an investigation of crime related to railway construction in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, in the mid-nineteenth century reveals that the railway navvies failed to “live down to their stereotype.” Here minor offences increased, but felonies to a much lesser extent.45 Serious crimes stand out from this general pattern among canal and railway labourers. Along the Welland, canallers were suspected of involvement in organized gangs of horse thieves, highway robbers, and smugglers. On the railways in the Maritimes, tavern and boarding-house brawls could turn deadly among men frequently armed. On a winter morning in 1857 on the Windsor branch of the Nova Scotia Railway, an argument around a kitchen fire ended in death when a labourer named Ryan stepped up to Murdoch McKinnon, “gave him a slap in the face with one hand, and with the other stabbed him in the side with his knife.”46 During a scuffle in a boarding shanty on the European and North American, eight miles outside Saint John, labourers Bradley and Kenan sustained only minor injuries, but Constable Jackson, who intervened, was killed by a blow to the head.47 Most sensational was the attack on a family at Mispeck on the Bay of Fundy, ten miles southeast of Saint John, out the Black River Road. There, Robert McKenzie, his wife, and four children were robbed and murdered and their home set ablaze by three men introduced to the court as having met while working on the European and North American. The men barely escaped “lynch law” when they were apprehended just three miles from the crime, holed up in a temporary shelter of boughs and birch bark, but they did not escape the law of the land. The senior Patrick Slavin hanged himself in his cell; his sixteenyear-old son, Patrick, was imprisoned for life on a recommendation for mercy; and the state executed Hugh Breen, alias Williams, alias Green, alias McGuire.48 Particularly troubling was what observers portrayed as a general spirit of disrespect for the law and those enforcing it. Refusing to cooperate with the authorities and closing ranks to protect their compatriots, the canallers frustrated those attempting to bring order to the

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canals in the 1840s and were unusually worrisome in the wake of the Rebellions in communities where allegiance to the government of the United Canadas was problematic and in urban and rural centres alike where traditional means of maintaining order grew tenuous. A member of the assembly and a contractor, Mr Sherwood – not an impartial observer but speaking for many in the legislative and executive bodies – described labourers who had placed themselves beyond the law. He asked how one brought to justice the perpetrators of acts committed by men whose names were unknown, whose residences could not be ascertained, and over whom consequently the civil law had no control. Constables who had been sent to arrest these men had been shot down; and when the murderers had been tried, parties came forward and swore that they had seen them elsewhere at the time; and in fact convictions could not take place on account of a perfect system of perjury. The witnesses for the prosecution upon these trials were waylaid, and murdered, for some had been killed.49 Part of a broader pattern of resistance to authority at mid-century, the sheer numbers of construction labourers congregated at close quarters appeared to pose a special danger, and moving east and into the 1850s, police on the European and North American targeted the same spirit of defiance of law and order. Eight arrests for assaulting police officers on the European and North American could not adequately capture what Scoullar perceived to be a much larger problem  – a whole community whose numbers and relative anonymity enabled them to close ranks against law enforcement officers. In what he described as a serious incident involving dozens of labourers, he was able to secure only two men for the lock-up. A ringleader escaped; another individual refused to help with the investigation, even though he himself was charged and stood to benefit from cooperation; onlookers had seen nothing; and those who had been attacked left the works and consequently were unavailable to identify their assailants.50 Heavily armed labourers compounded difficulties in maintaining order. Use of weapons on the European and North American and the Nova Scotia Railways during the 1850s raised concerns,51 but it was primarily on the canals of the 1840s that labourers went to extraordinary lengths to stockpile firearms in particular. Many colonists possessed firearms, and they considered it their right to do so. But within the Canadas government officials used a variety of stratagems and arguments to strip canal labourers of any such right and ultimately

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brought in legislation empowering the state to disarm those on the public works. By January 1844, growing unease over incidents involving local citizens and armed labourers had led the Grand Jury for the District of Niagara to call for an investigation into the “immense quantity” of firearms along the Welland. Many, it appeared, were Americanmade and smuggled into the Canadas along a network organized by the labourers or were stolen during raids on local citizens living within a two- to three-mile radius of the works.52 Similar incidents raised concerns along other canals. On the Williamsburg in the fall of 1844, labourers marching from Rapide Plat to Farran’s Point seized “all the fire arms they could find” along the route, helping themselves to food and drink at the homes they passed along their way. Weapons and ammunition in the possession of the captains of militia were particularly attractive targets, and in November 1844 five magistrates from the townships of Osnabruck, Williamsburg, and Matilda joined those pressing the government to do something to protect those stockpiles; otherwise, loyal and law-abiding citizens would find themselves defenseless to meet a serious threat to the peace. If the labourers were not stealing weapons, they commandeered the shops and material necessary to their manufacture, taking “forcible possession” of blacksmith shops and from stock on hand making weapons such as pikes and halberds. Official estimates suggested that among one group of twelve to fifteen hundred, one-quarter to one-third were carrying guns, the remainder clubs and sharpened staves; among another group of five hundred, half carried firearms.53 The first attempts to disarm labourers had run up against legal and logistical hurdles. On the Beauharnois in 1843, calls for canallers to surrender their weapons were abandoned “partly because there [was] no legal basis for keeping them.” The following year on the Welland a more ambitious attempt to control weapons had to be abandoned because of objections from the contractors. Every member of the workforce was to swear on the Holy Evangelist that they would keep the peace and declare and surrender for safekeeping any gun, firearm, or offensive weapon. Faced with the choice of losing the opportunity for work or handing over their weapons – or at least appearing to hand them over – three thousand labourers had agreed to the plan within a matter of days. But contractors objected that the process of administering the oaths would delay the work and were concerned they would lose their stonecutters, who refused to sign certificates to keep the peace. Against the strong urging of superintendent Power, contractors abandoned the plan as unworkable; more importantly, the Board of Works received legal advice that, like the earlier plan on the Beauharnois, it went beyond the scope of the law.54 The next step was to change

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the law, and in 1844–5 the assembly debated a bill which would give the executive the power to enforce registration of all firearms on any public work as it saw fit. Among the bill’s most vocal supporters were representatives from areas in which public works were in progress, who drew on the experience of their constituents. Reporting on trouble along the St Lawrence through Dundas County in the previous year, the member for Dundas, George MacDonell, charged that the four thousand men employed on the works in the area had behaved like “a horde of savages,” robbing and plundering and very nearly killing a number of citizens. Member for Cornwall, Rolland Macdonald, argued that labourers in his area were so out of control that “on one occasion they had marched military fashion, and took possession of the town, and kept it for two or three days.”55 However, other members raised concerns about perceptions of such a bill in light of recent events. In the wake of the Rebellions and the coercive acts in Lower Canada in particular, the bill might further offend the Canadiens who had suffered under measures repressing dissent and violating their liberties; and coming on the heels of election violence in Montreal in which the perpetrators had gone unpunished, the measure might be seen as unfairly targeting one group while others acted outside the law with impunity. Advocate for better treatment of the canallers, Drummond argued: “Where it was necessary to adopt violent measures let them put down the lawless of every class, name and nation, no matter how composed.” Then there were those who challenged members to look further back and across the Atlantic for their history lessons. Aylwin of Quebec City warned that the bill bore a disturbing likeness to “one of those disarming Bills which had aroused the indignation of the people of Great Britain and Ireland, not once but a dozen times.” Citizens of the Canadas would end up where the people of Ireland had found themselves: “They would next have the Peel Acts, and their doors would be marked, and the names of the inmates chalked upon them; they were coming to this when measures of this sort were proposed.” Aylwin was among a small number of members who could not be reconciled to a bill which reeked of past injustices.56 The largest block of those reluctant to support the bill opposed the general principle of disarming the citizenry and feared that even were the measure warranted in extreme circumstances, it might be easily abused and used against inoffensive citizens. This was the position of Lafontaine. But, along with Lafontaine, this block was willing to set aside their “opposition in principle” in the face of assurances that

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the attorney general “had never intended that the Bill should apply to citizens of the country but only to those who had no (local) habitation in the country except that afforded them by their employment upon the public works.”57 Indeed, even those most concerned with the treatment of canallers convinced themselves that the right to bear arms was not being infringed. As Drummond explained it, that right only applied to those with property to protect, and the labourers had no property, therefore no right to carry weapons. Others added that any weapons the canallers possessed had been stolen or given to them by individuals attempting to incite them to treason. Still others maintained that disarming the labourers was in their own best interests, was, in fact, “an act of kindness” for which the labourers would be grateful because it would protect them from the natural desire to retaliate when oppressed by contractors and from their own “warmblooded” temperaments and inclination to quarrel.58 Thus, by tortuous logic and careful delineation of labourers on public works as a group apart, landmark legislation put the power of the state behind gun control. The 1845 Preservation of the Peace Act would be amended in the following decades until the new Dominion crafted its own gun control legislation using the act as its template. In part, the legislation was and would remain an important means of protecting the state’s investment in public works, as discussion of workplace action will demonstrate. But the arguments presented in defence of the legislation underlined perceptions of the labourers as frightening in their separateness. Local inhabitants cried out for protection against the armed and dangerous men whose crime threatened those in the area of the works.59 Even more disruptive were the ongoing tensions and bloody confrontations involving large groups of labourers divided against each other along factional, national, ethnic, and religious lines. This type of lawlessness was central to the navvies’ reputation, helping to define the boundaries of belonging among the labourers and magnifying the tensions and hostilities which set them apart. In much of their factional and sectarian violence, navvies reproduced tensions already flourishing within the larger society, tapping into hostilities rooted in the surrounding communities. But they also reinforced stereotypes with which observers distanced themselves from the violence. In reports of conflict between groups of labourers along public works, the role of the Irish stands out. Their reputation no doubt preceded them and prepared observers to finger them as culprits when trouble arose. But that reputation was hard and well earned, as has been carefully documented in studies such as that which found that in the United States, between 1828 and 1861, of the thirty-nine riots

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involving labourers and based primarily on national or ethnic identity, all but two involved Irish labourers, and in those two the ethnic derivation of the participants was not identified.60 For the canaller communities of the 1840s, the greatest source of turmoil was the faction fighting between two subgroups of Irish, natives of the provinces of Munster and Connaught in southwestern Ireland. The feud was part of the tradition of faction fighting which thrived in Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its earliest manifestations were semi-ritualized, almost recreational, violence, a means of establishing the group’s territory and addressing problems between members of opposing factions. But by the 1820s and 1830s factional conflicts were reportedly becoming more violent and deadly, involving severe beatings and loss of life. Analysis of these conflicts has suggested they were rooted in the old familial ties of the partible farming system surviving in the mountainous regions. Or hostilities could have taken shape during confrontations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between striking agricultural labourers of one area and blackleg labourers from across county lines. Factional divisions may also have overlapped to some extent with the secret societies operating during this period.61 The rivalries of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught enlivened construction sites in England and migrated with immigrants across the Atlantic. In the United States they became so disruptive and brutal along construction sites that according to one estimate they accounted for two-thirds of all the inter- and intra-ethnic confrontations across America from the late 1820s to the Civil War.62 When they migrated into British North America they remained brutal. The St Catharines Journal provided an outsider’s perspective on the feuding as it manifested itself to the public eye in the first seasons of construction along the Welland. To the Journal, the participants were nothing short of “strange and mad belligerent factions – brothers and countrymen, thirsting like savages for each other’s blood – horribly infatuated.”63 Thirty-five-yearold Edward McAvoy, a Roman Catholic born in Connaught, provided a rare labourer’s-eye view of the antipathy and group identity on which it thrived when he explained to a Niagara District magistrate his part in a general faction fight. McAvoy “did not care a curse for any bloody ‘Tip’ or Munsterman.” He went on to pronounce himself “King of the Connaughtmen, who were ready to turn out at his command.”64 McAvoy no doubt overstated his importance when he publicly claimed for himself special status among the Connaughtmen, but he did not exaggerate the extent to which individuals could rely on the support of their faction to settle disputes and secure material assistance.

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The feud was part of the way in which the canallers organized their lives. Members of a faction usually preferred to live together, maintaining close day-to-day contact which facilitated communal help and mutual aid. They also preferred to work together, a preference which became part of the struggle between labourers and contractors and was interwoven into conflict over work and wages. Cork and Connaught might spend leisure time together, drinking and playing cards, but not without incident. A fist fight in a grog shop could bring out hundreds of combatants within minutes. More serious incidents could touch off open conflict up and down construction sites for weeks at a time, as “friends of the worsted party rally from all quarters,” even from communities across the border, to exact revenge.65 On the Welland in September 1844 a quarrel ended in a Connaughtman stabbing and killing a Leinsterman, and the fight was on: “The former party being the strongest, determined on revenge, and soon forced the others from the works, and their vengeance then fell on the shanties, several of which were burned.” Similarly, at Stonebridge, on Christmas Day 1843, the fighting of two inebriated men led to riots that spread “like wild fire” along the entire line of the canal. In bodies of four, five, and six hundred, the Corkmen attacked. Women and children “flew from their Shanties for safety and took refuge wherever they found a door whether it was a Stable, Barn, Dwelling House or even a church and many of them fled to the woods.” Construction came to a standstill for days and intermittently for weeks into the new year.66 Faction fighting extended out to disrupt the lives of those not part of the immediate canaller communities, parties of armed men in the hundreds turning local communities into war zones and harassing citizens travelling in the area. According to the attorney general for the Canadas, the factions “barricaded the frontier against one another, they erected barriers across the works. After plundering the inhabitants of their arms, they mounted the ramparts in military fashion, and waged deadly war against one another.” Even more disturbing, the canallers reportedly attacked citizens they identified as belonging to the opposing camp, waylaying travellers at night, demanding they give an account of themselves, and stopping others in broad daylight to establish their identity. According to evidence before Justice of the Peace G.C. Wood, attacks on inhabitants along the St Lawrence canals were not indiscriminate but calculated, targeting those who had emigrated from Munster as much as twenty years previous.67 The major impact of feuding, however, was on the progress of construction and relations in the workplace as each faction attempted to monopolize the work.

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Feuding did not maintain its fever pitch on public works through the 1850s. It came alive in some circumstances, most prominently on private railway construction sites in the Canadas, where it continued to figure in conflicts among workers and between workers and others in the area. However, a combination of variables was undermining the feud. State suppression of faction fighting in Ireland played an important part in its demise, but scholars have stressed as more important the evolution and adaptation of feuding in response to developments within the homeland where it declined sharply in the late 1830s, in some areas all but disappearing, as organizations emerged which were more broadly based on national rather than regional and local affiliations and loyalties.68 This suggests that Irish immigrants continuing to arrive in North America over the following decades were redefining the feud to meet new circumstances and demands. Within the United States the feud also lost steam in the middle decades of the century, reflecting a combination of changes in Ireland and the growth of different types of affiliations in the New World. One scholar has also noted the concerted effort by the authorities to root it out.69 Thus, Irish migrating north across the border for work in the 1850s were less likely to engage in intense factional hostilities, and those who did met state resistance similar to that mounted in Ireland and the United States. The feud might have maintained its vibrancy within British North America had it continued to serve an important purpose. But during the first half of the 1850s, as work grew more plentiful and competition for jobs less fierce, how useful was the feud, and as the labour force on public works became more heterogeneous, could benefits derived from the feud exceed its cost to participants? Even at its peak when it was tearing construction communities apart, feuding stood as a compelling example of the shared traditions, values, and history which enabled the Irish labourers to close ranks against those they perceived as hostile to their interests. Like other immigrants from capitalism’s periphery, Irish peasants shared a culture based on communal organization and emphasizing mutuality and fraternity, primarily within family and kinship networks. Back home in Ireland patterns of work had sustained and promoted traditions of cooperation and mutual aid in the workplace. As small farmers and labourers they had held land individually or in partnerships but had worked it cooperatively. When forced into wage labour to supplement yields from tiny holdings, the pattern of work again had been cooperative, often familial, and friends, relatives, and neighbours travelled and worked together in harvesting or construction gangs throughout the British Isles.70 Powerful in perpetuating these communal bonds

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and maintaining distinctiveness was Gaelic. It embodied persisting cultural practices and beliefs that lived within the language, and it was the barrier to and point of interface with other cultures. Gaelic was dying out in the Old World, but many of the immigrants of the 1840s came from areas in which the language still thrived, “a crescent of poor soil that swept westward from the mountains of Waterford and south Kilkenny, through west Munster and most of Connaught, north to Donegal, and eastward through the Ulster uplands to Louth, north Meath, and the Irish Sea.”71 Thus, for many of those who immigrated to North America between 1845 and 1855, and to a greater extent than for earlier immigrants, Irish was their first language. Adding to these the many for whom Irish was a strong second language or was the language spoken in the home by parents or grandparents, a leading scholar of Irish immigration concludes that the famine immigration at mid-century had “a decidedly Gaelic character.”72 This Gaelic cast was striking among Irish canallers in the 1840s and into the 1850s among a significant portion of Irish Catholics on construction sites.73 It did not give them the capacity to communicate with Scottish Gaelic speakers such as those from Cape Breton with whom they worked on the Nova Scotia Railway. But Gaelic drew an important line between those who spoke the “language of the state” and those who did not.74 Irish labourers also closed ranks in a pattern of conflicts with other ethnic groups on construction sites, most importantly with Canadien, German, English, and Scottish labourers. Relations between Canadiens and Irish Catholics on the canals of the 1840s reflected their broader pattern of interaction. Brought together as competitors, Irish and Canadiens attempted to monopolize work in important industries. Conflict between the two groups was particularly virulent in the Ottawa Valley lumbering industry; hostility flared up among ship labourers in Lower Canada; and on canals only a small number of Canadiens secured work, no doubt as a direct result of the Irish attempts to exclude them. Contemporaries considered the hostility largely attributable to the Canadiens’ distaste for the cruder and more violent Celt, to Irish xenophobia, or to Canadiens’ fears that the Irish influx was part of the larger attempt at assimilation by the British.75 Historians have called for greater emphasis on the struggle for economic advantage, noting that although ethnicity provided the lines along which the labourers divided, the goal of open conflict was to monopolize work.76 Seen in this light it bears a striking resemblance to the brutal skirmishes in France between Irish navvies brought in to build railways and the local French labourers who sought a share in the work, and possibly knowledge of these clashes migrated across

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the Atlantic and added fuel to the conflict along the St Lawrence. But additional fuel was not necessary. To the Canadien in the urban centres, in the woods, and on the land, the Irish were outsiders who could be perceived all too readily as threats to their livelihood or their culture or both.77 Some militant Canadien nationalistes held out hope that nationalists among the Irish could unite with them to fight the form British rule took in North America. Among those Irish who maintained a passionate commitment to Irish nationalism and repeal of the legislative union of Britain and Ireland were canallers whose commitment took various public forms. During the 1843 trans-Atlantic campaign for repeal, the labourers held meetings to publicize and raise funds for the cause. On the Welland they met at Thorold to offer “their sympathy and assistance to their brethren at home in their struggle for the attainment of their just rights.”78 On the Williamsburg Canals they celebrated Daniel O’Connell, the “Liberator” of Ireland. A local tavern keeper who offended the canallers by interrupting one of their nationalist celebrations by asking them to move their bonfire so it did not burn down his tavern lived in fear they would be back to do just that.79 On the Lachine they became an important source of support for the movement, according to one prominent Irish nationalist: “[T]hough these are always a shifting and migratory portion of the population, yet they are generally succeeded by the same class of persons. They are in the main, I am informed, very friendly to the cause.”80 Reflecting and shaping labourers’ commitment to Irish nationalism was the strong exile motif running through their culture. If that motif has seemed overdrawn to later generations and historians, at mid-century it was receiving powerful reinforcement. As the death toll from the famine years mounted, Irish exiles had reason to nurse and nurture an increasing anger over a homeland not only lost but devastated.81 In the tense political climate of the 1840s and the struggle for responsible government, colonial authorities expressed concern over the ardent nationalists among the influx of Irish Catholics from across the Atlantic and the border with America. In Lower Canada, in particular, canallers’ support for Irish nationalism drew them into the heart of political struggles. British officials worried that shared nationalist and reform aspirations made the Irish and Canadiens potential allies. Fears peaked in 1848 when military men besieged Governor General Lord Elgin with requests to prepare the defence of the country against “a rising of Canadiens and Irish to welcome the Yankees.” In the context of the time and in the wake of the Hunters’ Lodges operating on the border with the United States, only a small number of

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Irish meeting with their counterparts in the United States was necessary to create a palpable threat. Elgin himself expressed more moderate, but nonetheless serious, fears that the French population, “deeply imbued with French sympathies,” and the Irish Catholics, egged on by a “large Irish contingent on the other side of the border – fanatics on behalf of republicanism and repeal,” were ready to explode: “Guy Fawkes Papineau … is waving a lighted torch among these combustibles.”82 For their part men like Papineau expressed hopes that the Irish and French could be welded into a potent political force and actively worked to forge an alliance. Prominent Canadiens participated in the Irish repeal agitation in Montreal while Irish nationalists demonstrated their sympathy and active support for Canadien grievances and the cause of reform. Canallers were among those who threw tangible support behind reform candidates. During the elections of 1844 they defended the polling places for Drummond, candidate in Portneuf. Their willingness to use physical force to achieve their goals opened them up to charges by some contemporaries and later historians that they were hired thugs and “ignorant dupes,” easily manipulated to pick up a cudgel but lacking informed commitment to the political cause in which they were enlisted. But at a time when individuals from all levels of society participated in attempts to control polling stations and intimidate voters to achieve political ends, the fact that canallers contributed the physical strength of “able bodied men” is no reason to question their capacity to make a serious commitment to the cause Drummond represented. According to a Tory organizer, they paid dearly for that commitment. At least two were killed and several critically injured in election violence.83 Potential for Canadien and Irish unity in a political cause must be weighed against the formidable obstacles to such unity. Competition in the labour market and fears that the Irish were key to British plans for assimilation might have been mitigated by a shared Catholic faith, but that faith also became a source of contention as Irish and French Catholic communicants divided on doctrinal questions. In the political sphere the willingness of Irish Catholics to ally with Protestant Irish and English when it appeared advantageous also made for an unstable alliance with their co-religionists. Over the second half of the century, the partial integration of Irish into French Catholic families and neighbourhoods in a major centre such as Montreal provided a framework for greater harmony, but during the volatile 1840s and 1850s and in subsequent decades, considerable ground remained for tension and conflict.84

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Conflict between Irish and Germans on the public works fits into a broader pattern of ethnic antipathy in two respects. It may have had links to battles between Irish navvies imported to build part of Germany’s railway network and native Germans who resisted their intrusion into the labour market in the same way that French workers had resisted the navvies brought in to work on France’s railways. It also fits into the pattern of clashes between Irish and Germans in the United States, on construction sites but also in a range of occupations such as longshoring.85 These clashes would continue into the second half of the nineteenth century and spread through British North America as the number of German immigrants straight from Europe increased and as German labourers migrated north to find work within the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies, some of whom were likely veterans of workplace skirmishes with the Irish. Any conflict involving the Germans introduced into the workforce on the Junction was not significant enough to occasion official comment, perhaps because they were unlikely to have been perceived as a threat. They arrived in desperate shape, and their condition only deteriorated under the ravages of cholera, prompting other labourers to flee for their lives rather than stay and fight for their jobs.86 Under markedly different conditions on the European and North American, however, a series of minor altercations through 1857 culminated in a large-scale clash in September. While press reports varied in their assignment of blame, they agreed that the trigger for the final melee was an exchange between an Irish and a German labourer at the shanty where the Germans boarded, and the Germans were significantly outnumbered. After a German stabbed an Irishman, companions of the men joined battle, and “the news of the war spread to the neighbouring shanties, and in less than half an hour upwards of two hundred persons were engaged in deadly conflict: knives, stone(s) and clubs were freely used; several persons were severely cut; one of the Germans was almost hacked to pieces, and now lies in a critical state, beyond the hope of recovery.” Less passionately, Scoullar reported that this and similar incidents were manifestations of the Irish labourers’ determination to drive the Germans from the work. In this they were ultimately successful. Many of the Germans escaped down the river in boats, and most of them eventually left for Boston.87 Hostilities also surfaced between groups with a much longer history of internecine conflict. Within Britain industrialization fostered violent antipathy between Scottish and English on the one hand, and on the other Irish labourers, primarily Roman Catholic, seeking work

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throughout Scotland, England, and Wales. On railway construction sites resistance to the intrusion of the Irish was particularly fierce. Often outnumbered by hostile Scots and English, the Irish faced brutal treatment: their dwellings were burned, women and children were terrorized, and they themselves were driven off.88 From one perspective, historians have emphasized the xenophobic and racially charged nature of such confrontations, fuelled by depictions of the Irish Celts as an inferior, primitive race threatening British civilization, evolutionary throwbacks caricatured in the popular press as orangutans.89 Historians have also emphasized the economic basis of these clashes. As one study of Irish navvies in northern England argues, superficially ethnic conflict was rooted in economic conditions which fostered fears that one group was undercutting the wages or taking the jobs of the other. It concludes that however deep the racial or cultural animosities between groups of workers, historians ignore at their peril “economic motivation, admittedly narrowly conceived in terms of personal advantage, but for that very reason immensely strong.”90 On construction sites in the United States, a similar combination of economic competition and racism combined with nativism to foster violent conflict between Anglo-American and Irish immigrant labourers, though here the conflict took on a somewhat different texture and shape. American nativism thrived on antipathy towards both Catholics and the Irish, among whom common labourers proved particularly vulnerable targets.91 Irish immigrant attachment to Catholicism tapped into long-incubating anxieties of Anglo-Saxon Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic, reproducing fears of papist influence and reinforcing perceptions of Irish Catholics as bound by superstition to a foreign power.92 It also operated within the trans-Atlantic paradigm which marked the Irish Catholic as not amenable to the principles of self-improvement and self-government perceived to be at the heart of American society and politics. On a broader level, racial discourse surrounding the Irish was shaped by the presence of African Americans, free and unfree, with the result that as the Irish fought to create their place in the working class and society, they also participated in the process of racialization which prized whiteness and measured and found wanting Blacks in particular but also successive groups of new immigrants.93 Questions concerning Irish loyalty to the British crown were not central to religious and racial tensions within Republican United States; however, within British North America they combined with what appeared to be well-founded fears of Irish labourers’ disloyalty to the empire in what, after all, remained British colonies. That gave

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labourers’ demonstrations of religious faith a dangerous edge. When they built shanty chapels for worship along the canals, donated to the church and priests ministering to them along railways, and built the St Catharines cathedral as their “monument to faith and piety,” labourers earned grudging approval among some.94 But for many Protestant faithful, Irish Catholic piety was difficult to separate from disloyalty and potential treason. Along the canals in the 1840s, each 12 July brought the threat or reality of violent conflict between Orangemen commemorating the Battle of the Boyne and Roman Catholic Irish infuriated at this celebration of their subjugation. All members of Irish Catholic canaller communities were encouraged to participate in impressive shows of unity, and along the Welland the sizable workforce was bolstered by friends who travelled up from public works in Buffalo. By 1849, the shrinking labour force was mounting smaller demonstrations, but the emphasis on unity continued, and when Orangemen held their annual celebration at Slabtown, in the heart of canaller country, Catholic labourers were given the ultimatum to join in a show of force against the Orangemen or leave the canal. In the resulting confrontation, four labourers were wounded and two killed. One of those killed was a labourer with a large family who had initially refused to participate in the demonstration: “[H]e reluctantly complied, and was shot in the head.”95 When Catholic and Protestant met along the public works in the 1840s it was primarily as unskilled against skilled. Clashes involving the two groups were a foretaste of what would become a major conflict with the growing importance of Scots and English among the unskilled segment of the workforce. One such clash on the Welland came at the end of the December 1843 faction fight. While the Corkmen went home and broke open a barrel of whiskey, the Connaughtmen went back to their section of the line and intimidated the Scottish stonecutters, posting notices warning them to leave or forfeit their lives.96 This assault on a mutual enemy from the Old World, and increasingly the new, continued into the 1850s, though for the Canadas more careful and broader analysis of the pattern and variables in religious conflict remains necessary. Labourers on public works were among those whose continued celebration and defence of their faith provoked hostility and contributed to year-round clashes with citizens and attacks on property. On the Chats “party feelings” led to disturbances among the workforce but, according to superintendent Gallwey, did not appear to interfere directly with the work. On the Junction the role of such tensions in the workplace is not clear, though open hostilities between Catholic and Protestant in the area

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of the canal prompted a group of canal labourers to attack St George’s Church in broad daylight. Two of their number were apprehended by a magistrate and committed to stand trial for serious depredations which included smashing all of the windows.97 For New Brunswick, rich analysis has effectively linked ethno-religious tensions in the 1840s to the economic downturn fed by England’s move towards free trade, the rattling of investor confidence, decreased demand for the colony’s forest exports, and the increased application of steam to sawmilling. During the same years, the steady increase and then surge in Irish Catholic immigration during the famine years turned centres such as Saint John and Portland into battlegrounds, dramatic representations of hostilities in pockets throughout the colony. A nativist Orange Order assumed the role of paramilitary vigilantes and led the open conflict with the growing Catholic Irish population. Interwoven with long-standing religious animosity were fears that Catholic Irish would swallow up the unskilled jobs sought by Protestants, native and newcomer alike. Helping to generate and intensify such fears, Orangemen incited Protestant workers to stand up for their livelihoods and pushed employers to adopt segregation in their hiring practices. As one scholar has persuasively argued, nativism, a sense of racial superiority, and Protestant-Catholic hostilities combined to produce violent Orange-Green clashes in a combined defence of Protestant jobs and attack on Irish Catholic culture and religion. Such clashes eased in the early 1850s in response to a combination of factors: the drain of Irish Catholics south across the border; a shift in immigration patterns from Catholic Irish to Protestants from England, Scotland, and Ireland; and the healthier economy of the early 1850s.98 Yet they resurfaced on the European and North American and elsewhere as unskilled jobs became scarcer throughout North America, and the summer of 1858 brought escalating violence between English and Irish, and Scottish and Irish labourers on the section from Moncton to Salisbury. According to the railway police, such skirmishes continued along the line into the fall, when the Irish made a concerted effort to drive the Scots and English from the work. Police apprehended and made an example of two ringleaders, which Scoullar believed had at least a temporary “salutary effect” among labourers along the line.99 Along the Nova Scotia Railway, religious animosities and anxiety over the loyalty of Irish navvies fuelled a conflict which raged throughout and beyond construction. The most celebrated clash reported to have involved religious differences among Irish, Scottish, and English labourers occurred at the shanty of Scots Protestant subcontractor

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Thomas Gourlay, on the Windsor Branch in May 1856.100 The unfolding of the “Gourlay’s shanty outrage” reveals the complex intertwining of religion, ethnicity, nationalism, and workplace tensions and demonstrates the ease with which these variables merged in the world views of contemporaries and the difficulty of attempting to separate them out artificially. Accounts agreed that the trigger for the Gourlay Shanty Riot was a fight between Irish Catholic labourers returning from mass on the feast of Corpus Christi and labourers boarding at Gourlay’s, the majority of whom were Presbyterians. The parties separated with scores still to settle. The following day, with work suspended by heavy rain, the residents of Gourlay’s shanty, thirty railway labourers and seven or eight women and children, were passing the time talking, playing cards, resting, and catching up on chores, when between forty and one hundred labourers descended from both sides of the line, ransacked the shanty, set fires, and bludgeoned the men with pickaxe handles. Women and children fled to the woods for safety, but most of the men were wounded, a number gravely, and two would subsequently die from their injuries. Military and police searched along the railway line but arrested and charged only ten labourers. Despite a vigorous effort by the prosecution, the contradictory evidence of its witnesses, and, more importantly, the influence of religion on the administration of justice, produced either acquittals or hung juries.101 Controversy over Gourlay’s shanty became a battleground for Protestant and Catholic and a focus in the debate over Irish Catholic loyalties; it was used for personal political ends, to destroy alliances and forge new ones; and it reflected deep cleavages within Nova Scotian politics and society. At the centre was Joseph Howe, whose Liberal Party had enjoyed support from the Catholic minority for a decade, but whose credibility with that constituency had been seriously undermined by his recent involvement in the Crimean enlistment scandal. In 1856 Howe had travelled to Boston to arrange for recruitment of Irish railway labourers for Crimea. Charges that Howe had deceived the labourers into thinking they were headed for Nova Scotia, not Crimea, touched off a major political scandal. The spectre of Roman Catholic Irish tricked into the service of the crown infuriated Irish nationalists in British North America and the United States, many of whom hoped that trouble in Crimea would increase Britain’s vulnerability to an uprising in Ireland. It also unleashed a storm of protest against Irish terrorists, recruited to build public works and destroy British institutions in the bargain.102 Perhaps some navvies had believed they were enlisting for Crimea. At times reluctant foot soldiers of Britain’s imperial ambitions, the Irish had for decades

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advanced those ambitions on foreign shores while chafing under their weight at home, and a contingent of experienced Irish navvies had already begun work in Crimea, digging trenches and building railways for wages sufficiently attractive to generate discontent among the poorly paid rank-and-file soldiers.103 Whatever their original intentions, once in Nova Scotia, the men from Boston appear to have opted for good wages outside the direct line of fire. Still embroiled in the enlistment scandal, Howe took it upon himself as commissioner of railways to investigate the riot at Gourlay’s and as newspaper editor and politician to denounce the campaign of intimidation waged by wild-eyed Irish terrorists against native Nova Scotian labourers and to remind Nova Scotians of the danger of papist bigotry.104 The Catholic joined the debate, arguing that the inhabitants of Gourlay’s shanty had brought the wrath of their fellow workers down upon them by ridiculing the Catholic belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Church Times countered by reminding its readers of the persecution of their forefathers under the Stuarts in Scotland and Mary Tudor in England. The Nova Scotian defended that “sacred right” of all Nova Scotians, “the right to laugh,” while Howe asked the burning political question of the day: “May not a Baptist and a Methodist discuss Infant Sprinkling on the Public Works without arson and murder?”105 Neither in the press nor at trial did the accused labourers explain or justify the attack on Gourlay’s, since all denied having been present. But if the labourers did not provide their perspective, others suggested that religion might not have been the cause of the altercation. Roderick McKay of Pictou, overseer on the Western line, doubted the role of religion in the rioting. McKay testified that Catholics on the works were not averse to fighting among themselves. He recalled that it had been an Irish Catholic and a Scottish Catholic who had had the first significant quarrel in the spring of 1856 which had led to larger confrontations: “The Irish bet (sic) the shanty of 4 Scotch Catholics last spring, and made them run to the woods in the middle of the night, and would have broke their house down only for others being handy.” As further evidence of the conflict among Catholics, he quoted an Irish labourer’s reason for not going to mass with his fellow workers: “[Y]ou will see them drunk and fighting before night. That was the night when the Irish and Scotch Catholics fought after coming from Mass.” The initial magistrates’ enquiry into the Gourlay Shanty Riot also suggested that religion had not been the cause.106 If something more or other than religion was at the root of the riot, Howe and the contractors gave the clearest indication of what that

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might have been when they noted that interwoven with religious animosities along the line was the Irish labourers’ belief that if they could force all other labourers from the work, they would be in a position to exercise greater power over the contractors. Acting on this belief, they engaged in ongoing conflict with other groups of labourers who they perceived as undermining their bargaining power with contractors simply by their presence on the works. This would become a recurring theme in workplace conflict and crucial to an understanding of relations between labourers and contractors on the Nova Scotia Railway.107 That said, religious animosities and questions concerning the loyalty of the Irish navvies were an important part of existing tensions along the railway and tapped into conflicts and political struggles in the broader community of the late 1850s. Farmers travelling to market in railcars clashed with labourers along the line. During an auction at Grand Lake in 1857 Irish navvies and hostile Protestants engaged in a general melee, reportedly touched off when one of the Protestants broke into an Orange song. Though the auction was postponed until the following week, the two hostile parties “assembled again in considerable force” and fought it out on the highway. The Protestants were “roughly handled” and several of the navvies shot.108 Not surprisingly the running battle between Catholic labourers and Protestants in Nova Scotia became interwoven with election violence. In 1854, in anticipation of an influx of foreign labourers for the railway works, the Legislature had crafted legislation clarifying that only those who had been resident in the colony for five years and in the relevant county for one were eligible to vote. Nonetheless, navvies attempted to vote and influence the voting in key elections in the closing years of the decade. In the 1858 by-election in Nine-Mile River, for example, a contractor made available an estimated one hundred heavily armed navvies in the hope that they could help secure a Conservative victory. Whether any succeeded in voting is unclear, but their attempts at intimidating election officials and electors were answered by local men armed with upwards of twenty-five fowling pieces and double-barrelled guns.109 In the general election the following year the navvies again turned out at the polls, perhaps to register concerns over the government’s prosecution of the work, but certainly in response to escalating rhetoric between Protestants and Catholics. Even for those navvies planning on moving on, the election raised important questions which reached beyond the borders of Nova Scotia and, for the devout, beyond the grave. Those questions were underlined by electioneers who circulated literature and songs which promised Catholics, “we have men will kill and send you prayerless to your grave.”110 In like

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spirit, the Catholic railway men responded: “[W]here are the Protestant b – – – s? I’ll fight” and “send word up to the boys in the country to bring down their coffins when they come again.”111 In the end, it was the Catholics who needed the coffin-maker. Apparently taking advantage of a day off with pay, navvies travelled to Grand Lake polling station with the intention either of voting or influencing those who did. Protestants also turned out in force, many armed with guns. Towards the end of a day of jostling, shoving, and verbal threats, Patrick Hurly, a thirty-five-year-old immigrant from Ireland, confronted a group of armed Protestants and was shot dead at point-blank range. Hundreds of navvies followed Hurly’s body into Halifax for burial at St Mary’s Church. George Preeper, a local man, was indicted for murder. At trial, the presiding judge urged jury and community to set aside partisan sympathies and consider the evidence in the light of the law. He asked jury members to assert the power of justice over prejudice and bring in a verdict of guilty. A jury of mainly Protestants, however, found the defendant not guilty.112 Slabtown, Gourlay’s shanty, and Grand Lake underline the extent to which much of the conflict involving labourers on public works is only understandable as an extension of already existing tensions within the communities and the larger society in which the labourers lived and worked, in these three instances interwoven religious, ethnic, political, and class tensions. Irish Catholics and Scots Presbyterians, immigrants, migrants, and men from the immediate area found that around the public works familiar stereotypes and old hatreds flourished, and history repeated itself in variations specific to place and time. Rhetoric and special legislation and policing arrangements for canallers and navvies may have focused on their status as Irish Catholics who carried trouble with them, and to some extent the Irish brought their own ingredients for group conflict, most noticeably in the form of faction fighting. However, conflicts revolving around religious beliefs, loyalty to the British crown, and ethnic, political, and class affiliations drew strength from ongoing divisions within the broader society, represented most clearly by the power of the Orange Lodge, political tensions in Lower Canada, and the controversy over Joseph Howe’s recruitment of Americans to serve Britain’s imperial ambitions. If old hatreds were overlaid or overlapped with the movement for moral and social improvement, that only made them more palatable to some and  more powerful to others. Appeals to racism, religious prejudice, and moral reform worked nicely together in efforts to enforce labourers’ compliance with social norms and evolving attitudes towards alcohol consumption, violence, respectable pastimes, and godly pursuits.

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That was in the 1840s and 1850s. During the 1870s concerns about public works labourers returned to these themes, focusing again on alcohol consumption, rough and disreputable behaviour, and questionable violent pastimes. The increased heterogeneity of the workforce, however, meant that any critiques of the labourers based on ethnicity and race could have only limited applicability, and any focus on outsiders who did not belong failed even more than in the 1850s to cover the large proportion of labourers from the immediate area of the works or with ties to communities in the emerging Dominion. The following chapter’s analysis of perceptions of public works labourers during the 1870s necessarily broadens the discussion to include new anxieties and old anxieties with a new focus that included the harsh economic realities and social tensions of that decade.

6

Degrees of Separation: Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging through the 1870s

Clifton is a place built up at the River Philip Bridge within a few months. It is a wide awake place – awake night and day. It has hotels, boarding houses, stores that drive a good trade, a new Episcopal church, blacksmiths shops, shanties, “balloon residences,” and establishments providing facilities for those who wish to “licker up.” The large influx of navvies in the evenings often make the nights lively with whiskey drinking, dancing, singing, fighting, and other like innocent amusements whereby the weary laborer relieves the tedium between working hours, and the moral sentiments of the community are edified. Chignecto Post, 27 July 1871 As Clifton, Nova Scotia, awakened to the activities connected with the building of the Intercolonial, the labourers necessary to that endeavour remained problematic. The Chignecto Post’s tone of indulgent censure reveals continuing ambivalence towards men whose “innocent amusements” were at odds with the community’s moral edification. Northwest along the right of way through New Brunswick to Bathurst, where the Nepisiguit River empties into Baie des Chaleurs, the nightlife of the navvies provoked similar concerns. The many strangers attracted to the works brought a welcome boom in building, commerce, and services necessary to construction, but with them came the proliferation of rum shops, making liquor available for sale at all hours of the day and night, even on the Sabbath. A reporter for the Daily Morning News assured his readers that those associated with 186

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the railway works, including the labourers, were “with few exceptions, peaceable, inoffensive, respectable and intelligent men,” but brought together in such numbers the “stir” they created was not altogether welcome.1 From other public works through the 1870s came similar reports of congregations of strangers reminiscent of the navvy shanty towns of mid-century, drinking, carousing, fighting, disturbing the peace, and straining the capacity of nascent forces of law and order, and the sheer volume of men building up in the area of construction still evoked images of invasions and takeovers of communities. Newspapers, in particular, stressed the disruptive impact of the influx of labourers who changed the physical and social landscape along public works. In this, local papers captured key elements of the influence of the workforce on nearby communities and on a broader level the perceptions of social ruptures and discontinuities which were part of the transportation revolution. But they did so at the risk of rendering less visible the large numbers of men who came to the work from the immediate area, maintained their ties to communities close by or in the region, and fitted their time as construction workers into familiar social and economic patterns. An even larger segment of the labour force than in the 1850s were men with socio-cultural, economic, and political supports and obligations to individuals and groups in their locale. The result was that, for a variety of reasons and in a number of ways, the edges where navvies met other groups blurred, making them more difficult to distinguish from the larger society within which they worked and spent their leisure hours. On the most remote construction sites geography created a more easily measured degree of separation, but this was for many part of a larger pattern which stretched but did not break their primary ties with other segments of society to which they continued to belong from across a distance, their ties expanding and contracting as they followed work. Thus, the navvy clusters of the 1870s are only understandable when those with attachments in the immediate area or at a modest remove are not overshadowed by or lost in the comings and goings of those from a greater distance. This chapter begins with an overview of the different types of attachments labourers maintained or created with the population centres in or near which public works were prosecuted. In many locations the labourers’ presence offered inhabitants opportunities to participate in a mini-economic boom either by taking jobs on the works or providing services, accommodation, and provisions to those who did. But inhabitants also pointed to the threat labourers posed to the

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integrity and morality of their communities, even when many of the labourers were themselves members of those communities. Anxiety focused on the labourers in idleness. The intermittent bouts of hard work and idleness which characterized construction work raised concerns about men with time on their hands, and those concerns were heightened where large numbers of unemployed began to congregate in hard times, becoming or attracting to their number the tramps and vagrants who emerged as a social menace in the 1870s. Even where men were regularly employed, the all-male sociability which filled their leisure time was an affront to respectable manhood and was denounced as a threat to respectable women. Analysis of that sociability focuses on the drinking which mobilized temperance advocates to enlist labourers in the cause of sobriety and on the federal government’s legislation to control the consumption of alcohol on public works. It also looks at the fighting among navvies which at times took the form of organized prize fights, a growing target of moral reformers during the decade. Concern about this type of violence is presented as part of a larger campaign which included debates throughout the decade over gun control. Those debates reveal hesitance to restrict citizens’ ability to carry arms; however, for the public works the federal government enacted stringent legislation capable of depriving all labourers of weapons and then went further and provided for its application to a variety of other workplaces. Despite the state’s aggressive approach to labourers’ perceived threat to the public peace, analysis of fighting along public works finds little evidence of ongoing violent group conflicts such as those in the 1840s and 1850s. A look at religious hostilities, for example, finds that if labourers shared in the open violence which erupted between Orange and Green, they appear to have done so as individuals or as members of local religious organizations. Incidents of verbal and physical abuse motivated by religion do surface among the workers; however, an examination of boarding arrangements among one segment of labourers on the Welland suggests the extent to which Protestant and Catholic were redefining what one historian has called “the boundaries of ethnicity,” by simple acts such as sleeping under the same roof.2 But the final section of the chapter demonstrates that room remained for violent ethnic clashes. Examination of violence involving Irish and Italians on the Welland makes the point dramatically that ethnic exclusion and racialization still had a place on the public works. On long stretches through the heavily forested areas of New Brunswick, men building the Intercolonial lived in camps which in the early days of construction could be reached only by foot or cart. A reporter’s

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research into “Life on the Railroad” took him on a five- to six-mile trek to a cluster of half a dozen shanties and a more substantial contractor’s residence. This was the camp near Chatham, at the head of Miramichi Bay, in July 1871, home to men temporarily cut off from quick and easy access to the nearest communities until they had prepared the way for wagon ruts then rails.3 Even larger camps with over three hundred men and upwards of one hundred buildings might be effectively cut off from the outside world for much of their brief existence. Until the labour force had worked their way out of their isolation, their material and social needs were met in the relatively closed camp environment similar to that of lumbering and mining camps and the work camps which sprang up along the transcontinental railways.4 Similar camps dotted the route through the Restigouche, across into Quebec, and running down along the St Lawrence, each with its own degree of isolation varying with the terrain and the stage of construction. Occupants of these camps might go for a season without direct contact with the nearest community, their social intercourse restricted to those involved in construction in their immediate area. Men in other, less isolated camps might be able to journey to spend their leisure in the communities in their area. During evenings, on their days of rest, or on scheduled and unscheduled interruptions to the work, labourers made the short trek to enjoy the amenities and social interaction offered by established towns such as Moncton and Truro and smaller centres such as Nelson and Amherst. Those close enough to their homes may have chosen to visit their families and communities if the distance and break in the work made that feasible. When construction passed through or on the edge of existing communities and many labourers found room and board with established residents, in that respect at least they were more integrated into village and town life, though their sheer numbers would change temporarily the complexion of centres which hosted them. Towns like Moncton supplied labourers for construction as well as accommodation for migrant navvies in existing housing and purpose-built boarding houses. Smaller settlements, villages, and hamlets ballooned into thriving centres as a direct result of construction, their hotels, stores, taverns, and even churches providing for the needs of the various segments of the construction force.5 Farther along the Intercolonial and past the Acadian Peninsula, Dalhousie was another community close enough to the right of way to open its doors to house and feed the construction workforce in early spring of 1871. The result was a significant increase in the circulation of money and a welcome boost to businesses directly and indirectly associated with construction.6 North

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then northwest along the shore of Baie des Chaleurs to the narrowing of the Restigouche River, where the right of way crossed into Quebec, Campbellton was also inundated by the contractors, engineers, workers, and machinery which brought prosperity. By the fall of 1871 the community had seventeen stores, eleven of which had been created in direct response to work on the railway. Hotels were overflowing, and new ones were being built. As the railway helped to define the future path of commerce, some of these host communities would enjoy lingering prosperity. Campbellton would become a hub of the new commercial network, though its future could not match the frenzied days of the construction period.7 For other centres the railway boom was short lived. Dalhousie learned quickly that six miles from the right of way was not close enough to sustain longer-term prosperity in the age of railways. After a brief flurry of activity, the village was quiet again as early as the fall of 1871; most of the construction workforce had moved on, and the road they had prepared bypassed Dalhousie, taking with it a significant portion of that community’s former trade.8 The same pattern recurred along the line in both directions, into Quebec and Nova Scotia, communities expanding and shrinking as the completed railway reinforced or rerouted social and economic intercourse. But during the brief, heady days of construction residents of many small centres like Clifton, Dalhousie, and Campbellton shared their streets and their lives with railway navvies. For projects in more densely populated areas, where a larger proportion of the workforce came from the immediate vicinity of the works, many labourers remained resident in their existing domiciles, temporarily changing their occupation and their route to work, but maintaining routine day-to-day familial and social interactions. This was particularly true of the workforce on the Lachine, and it was true to a lesser extent on projects moving up the St Lawrence waterway to the Welland, where communities had grown accustomed over previous decades to the coming and going of people associated with construction, repair, and operation of the canals, and whose residents pursued seasonal work in other parts of North America but frequently returned to their communities when jobs opened up along the canal. Thus a significant number of labourers from urban centres such as Moncton, Montreal, Lachine, and St Catharines combined their place in the construction workforce with their continuing attachments to community and neighbourhood life. They remained closely integrated into immediate and extended family and social networks, returning each evening to mothers, wives, and children and participating in the informal gatherings and celebrations which solidified their place in

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the community. They socialized in their favourite taverns, holed up to gamble in their familiar haunts, and congregated on familiar street corners. They continued to attend – or not – their parish services and to receive the care and support of their ministers and priests. They also remained immediately vested in local politics and in broader social and political debates as they played out in their communities. Yet even for centres such as Lachine, Montreal, and St Catharines, the construction of the 1870s brought a build-up in population the proportions of which had not been seen since the canal building program of the 1840s and the railway construction of the 1850s. It was this influx of labourers which attracted the most attention among contemporaries and skewed representations of the labourers away from local men and towards those migrating into the area, distorting perceptions of the workforce but pointing to important recurring sources of anxiety. In part, the focus on strangers resulted from the sensational stories they generated of bodies discovered and crimes unpunished, of the remains of a labourer found in the woods at Tattamagouche in the fall of 1871, thought to be those of a man named Graham who had recently arrived from England to work on the Intercolonial. Little was known of him except that before he had disappeared he had been seen on the line in the company of two other strangers, each known only as Pete, who were presumed to have killed him before they, too, disappeared. The canals had their mysterious disappearances and discoveries. In February 1877 workers on Section 3 of the Lachine discovered a body locked in the ice at McGee’s Bridge, thought to be that of canal labourer John O’Brien who had been “lost” in the canal the previous year. In May 1879 police investigated the discovery of the body of a man found on the bank of the Lachine who appeared to have died under suspicious circumstances. He was ultimately identified as John Kehoe, a canal labourer believed to have friends in Trenton, Ontario. Police also found  – alive and working on the canal  – the runaway apprentice for whom Montreal had been on the alert.9 But beyond the sensationalism and on a broader level, as the strangers merged with the resident population, they were not easily identified or separated out and became interchangeable as members of communities in flux: French Canadians migrating west and south to work on railways and in mines, mills, and forests, and in the process crossing paths with men travelling to Montreal for work and men from the Atlantic Provinces also moving west and south as other men moved north and east to find jobs, if not homes. In the opening and closing years of the 1870s, labourers coming into an area for work may have contributed to local and fleeting booms in

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the economy as businesses and services expanded to meet the needs of machines, men, and horses. The worst of the depression years at mid-decade, however, focused attention on a key concern generated and represented by the labourers: the large numbers hanging around idle, unable to find jobs, particularly in the area of the Lachine and the Welland. Their work might be welcome, but labourers in idleness were another matter, troublesome as individuals and collectively representative of a serious challenge to the social, economic, and moral order. Even in peak construction seasons periods of enforced idleness were part of the rhythm of the work, intense labour interspersed with necessary downtime, sometimes long stretches of weeks or even months when the weather or other impediments to the work forced a slowdown or a complete stop to construction. But during the depression years citizens along major projects grew alarmed at the sheer number of able-bodied men doing nothing, their unemployment evidence not of misfortune or lack of jobs but of a failure of will and a fitful commitment to work. The Welland Tribune in August 1877 lamented, “The increasing amount of ‘loaferage’ on the streets reminds us that consequence off [sic] the carrying on of the canal work here we are likely to have a good deal of that kind of thing.” It was necessary to find an effective way of confronting “the evil.” On a lighter note, in January 1879 a judge of the Montreal Recorder’s Court could dismiss a defendant with the quip, “the Lachine Canal, that’s where all the loafers work.”10 When what appeared to be their unstable work habits were combined with their transience, the public works labourers were easy to condemn as among the tramps and vagrants who emerged as a prominent social problem throughout North America during the depression years, particularly following the strike wave of 1877. Arriving in a new location without possessions and often unable to obtain work for a period of time, they appeared to have turned their backs on regular work habits and a settled, ordered life. Like the tramp, they symbolized the rejection of the work ethic, the “laziness, improvidence, intemperance, instability ... [which] reformers discerned at the root of the crisis in social order.” The migrants flooding in from across the border during the American Centenary were greeted as “[a]n Army of Centennial Tramps, marching and counter marching,” more dangerous than official invading forces. Some expressed concern to distinguish the honest labouring man from the tramp. The Welland Tribune, for example, cautioned local authorities in the fall of 1877 not to forget, in their zeal to arrest the tramp nuisance, that “many of the wanderers [are] honestly looking for work and do not deserve committal as

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criminals.” But as North Americans confronted the widespread unemployment of the 1870s and the higher levels of involuntary migrancy which this forced on skilled and unskilled alike, the line between the tramp and the unemployed, would-be industrious worker blurred.11 Critics believed that for the labourers themselves that line was becoming dangerously blurred, with disastrous consequences not just for the individuals and their families but for the larger society to which they were accountable. Even those initially anxious to find work were being tutored by a dangerous combination of circumstances. As the Welland Tribune warned its readers, idleness and necessity worked together to destroy the belief in private property rights and replaced it with “some dimly defined right of existence” which convinced the unemployed that they were entitled to secure the necessities of life by any means available.12 What they could not have by legitimate means they would take by force, and once having broken God’s commandments and man’s laws, they would be more easily corruptible. Some would abandon any attempt to earn their living by the sweat of their brow. In the process they would rob society not just of its material goods but of its most cherished values, and as they lost their commitment to work they would become more susceptible to agitators challenging authority in communities throughout Europe and North America. They were glaring examples of the need for action against layabouts and ne’er-do-wells, and one of the important tasks of the new Dominion was to refine the law as it related to vagrancy. In this lawmakers both replicated the assumptions of earlier colonial legislation and honed the details to more adequately reflect the values of the emerging order.13 Harsh vagrancy legislation reinforced the responsibility of free labourers to support themselves and their families or pay the penalty. Even in years when jobs were scarce, not to enforce that legislation was to encourage the crime of idleness, and worse.14 When work was proceeding apace and the labour force was steadily employed, labourers’ leisure time, little though it might be, generated related concerns about moral decay.15 High concentrations of unattached men, single or temporarily separated from their spouses, meant that a large proportion of labourers passed their leisure hours in the type of all-male sociability which, unchecked, threatened the emerging ideal of responsible manhood. Freed from the restraints imposed by mother, grandmother, sister, and wife, they also lacked the softening and uplifting influence of women which helped to restrain male excesses even if the family life they nurtured was itself of the rough sort. In built-up areas, boarding houses and hotels catering to the labourers created temporary geographic pockets of moral

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degeneracy, according to social critics.16 This disreputable sociability was even more concentrated on isolated railway construction sites where bunkhouses took on the flavour of the lumbering camps which had gained early notoriety for offering a rough life for rough men. Stories from these camps made their way to the outside world, but they were the least-visible manifestations of male degeneracy and were likely the least threatening in that respect. As construction camps edged to the outskirts of rural communities and labourers took their pleasure under the eyes of local inhabitants, it was as if the lumbering camp had come to town, bringing with it all its vices, the drinking, gambling, carousing, and fighting. In established urban centres leisure activities became more visible as, more than in previous decades, men spent their leisure outside family groggeries and instead in public streets and taverns and gaming houses frequented by other members of their class. Along the Lachine, canallers crowded into wharf-side saloons and backstreet unlicensed facilities, many of which also welcomed the underside of Montreal life, the down-and-outs, those migrating into the city looking for work and cheap bed and board, and the most disreputable members of society, among them tramps, petty criminals, the Sunfish, the Black Horse Gang, and other waterfront street gangs. Canallers also mixed with other casual labourers, sailors, longshoremen, and men from a range of occupations, and here they encountered women with whom they shared a passing intimacy.17 Taverns and the street life which spilled from their doors formed an important after-work meeting point, where those already living in the area met with those who had come from a distance. In predominantly working class neighbourhoods along the Lachine, fourteen taverns were a particular source of concern to contractors because of the nature of their clientele, which, not incidentally, included men perceived to be labour agitators.18 Notorious among these taverns, but by no means an isolated phenomenon, was that of Charles McKiernan, alias Joe Beef, tavern keeper and friend of the working man, whose establishment in equal measure repelled respectable Montrealers and attracted labourers seeking companionship, entertainment, and refuge. Entertainment included a bear, Jenny, who “never retired sober” and who had passed her drinking problem on to her cub, Tom, said to drink more than any of the customers, on his hind legs at the bar, a mug in his paws, and downing twenty pints a day without spilling a drop. Refuge included the type of social support offered by similar taverns to workingmen throughout North America, who could expect to benefit from the code of reciprocity and the expression of mutuality which saw men not just buy each other drinks as an expression

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of camaraderie but also offer support in time of need, buying meals, loaning small sums, and offering their good name in support of aid from others. Tavern keepers facilitated and participated in demonstrations of goodwill and support.19 In the late 1870s such Montreal saloons were crowded with labourers employed on or “hoping for work on the Canal,” who found spartan but cheap lodging and food provided by taverners willing to wait a few days for payment, even those with families frequently finding temporary accommodation. Only the range and extent of McKiernan’s support was unusual. He regularly offered food and accommodation to the sick, disabled, unemployed, and destitute; in the grim winter of 1876–7 he opened his establishment to hundreds of the starving and homeless. Canallers and would-be canallers were among the recipients of his charity.20 Along the Welland, a number of long-established taverns also opened their doors to the ebb and flow of men working or seeking work on the 1870s canal improvements. Here the regulars from the area mixed with those who had come from a distance, creating a clientele which included working men from a range of occupations and across the age spectrum, from young men getting their first taste of unfettered leisure nights to seasoned workers stopping in for a drink on their way home from work. They created the type of drinking solidarity which generated at least passing ties between transient labourers and the local communities, and they made the existing taverns and hotels woefully inadequate to meet the demand. Local authorities attempting to balance the pressure for more taverns against the demands of temperance advocates tried to find a middle ground by approving enough licensed premises to enable them to regulate the flow of alcohol and at the same time clamp down on the growth of unlicensed grog shops which regularly popped up to service the canallers. Licensed premises such as White’s Hotel, one of six in Stonebridge, were perfectly located close to the paymasters’ office to do extremely well. White and his family were reputed to be clearing $600 a month after expenses. But the unlicensed groggeries also thrived, despite a vigorous local campaign to stamp them out. On Section 12 between Port Dalhousie and Thorold, two immigrant brothers, the Scallions, operated a lucrative business specializing in the sale of lager beer, a favourite among the Germans in the workforce and rapidly growing in popularity among the working class, perhaps in part because it was promoted as unable to induce intoxication. So popular was the Scallions’ establishment that the local licensing authorities were convinced much more than beer was available. The following year they continued to do a “roaring business,” not even troubling to apply for a

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license in the face of their well-publicized controversy with the licensing authorities.21 Much of the canal labourers’ reported drinking consisted of the payday binges common among both skilled and unskilled workers. The release from work in bouts of hard drinking was a time-honoured and, in the right hands, tolerable tradition. Though these drinking bouts were under attack from temperance advocates and other members of respectable society, they remained common practice among segments of the working class through the latter half of the nineteenth century. The sheer numbers and concentration of construction labourers, however, gave to their payday binges a particularly frightening edge. The first payday on the Welland in 1873 offered the surrounding community a foretaste of future problems. With all the appearance of a “jamboree,” labourers took over the bars and served themselves, ran the city, and drank their way through the town’s supply of alcohol, though they were careful to pay their way. According to the Welland Tribune, these sprees followed a long dry spell: “Dry as a sponge after a month’s forced abstinence,” labourers settled their accounts for board and lodging and then descended on taverns and hotels.22 Repeated each month, these binges became an expected, if not welcome, part of the construction process. From the more isolated Grenville, reports of payday binges emphasized less the threat to the peace of the community and more the disruption to the work. In the early months of construction before the supply of labour became more plentiful, the contractor claimed that problems in maintaining an adequate labour force were compounded by the opportunities for heavy drinking in the area. When the Department of Public Works recommended paying the workers more frequently to make the job more attractive, Goodwin countered that he had no problem with paying as often as once a week, but that would only create another problem. As it was, he lost too much time to the men’s monthly drinking binges. More frequent payment would increase those binges to the point that “it would be impossible ... to keep the men at their work.” Of course, contractor Goodwin had his own reasons for preferring the longer interval between paydays, not to mention reasons to blame drinking for his slow progress; he raised an important point, nonetheless, for those who tied excessive drinking to paydays. From his perspective, unless the means could be found to stop or at least regulate the sale of alcohol, the choice appeared to be between a small workforce sober much of the time and a larger workforce too frequently drunk.23

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Along all the public works accounts of dissipation and drunkenness agitated temperance advocates. From the Intercolonial came reports of death by drink, framed in recurring temperance motifs. Under the influence, navvies committed blood-curdling acts of violence. After several days of drinking, navvy James Coleman, “insane from the effects of drink,” bedded down in a boarding shanty two miles outside Newcastle on the Intercolonial, took a sheath knife from the nearby ledge, slit his own throat, and quietly bled to death beside his bunkmate. The following morning early risers found his blood dripping through a crack in the attic floor onto the breakfast table in the room below.24 Others stepped out into the night blind drunk and died on the trek back to their shanties. William McGilvery of Antigonish was lost in the snow with his bottle of rum, less than a mile from the safety of the contractor’s store on Section 10 of the Intercolonial between Bathurst and Newcastle. A group of drunken men set out for the short trip from a groggery to their shanties on the railway works at Little Fork: “[O]ne after another the drinkers fell.” The one sober labourer managed to get three to their shanties, one was found insensible and carried home, and the last was found dead.25 Then there were those who left behind innocent victims: Harry O’Neal, a labourer in his mid-twenties, carried out of the bar to sleep it off and found dead in a barn at Martin Mulhall’s Hotel, Newcastle, left a wife and young child destitute in Saint John.26 Motivated and supported by stories which dramatically captured temperance motifs, temperance advocates rallied to establish societies exclusively for public works labourers and to encourage labourers’ participation in existing societies. Their efforts are most visible where the largest groups of labourers congregated, on the Welland and Lachine. Here, groups promoted sobriety through organizations uniting workers locally, nationally, and internationally. Labourers already resident in the area might count, among their attachments to community, ties to a local temperance society; those moving into the area might reach out the hand of fellowship from membership in a society at a distance. In a pattern which strengthened the bonds of temperance advocates throughout North America, the celebration of sobriety went hand in hand with celebration of ethnic and national origin, the allegiances overlapping with and reinforcing each other. When the community of Lachine joined in what was advertised as its first St Patrick’s Day celebration, a grand parade of the Irish Temperance Societies, organized among the workmen on each section of the canal, was bolstered by the French Temperance Societies of Lachine,

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French Canadian canallers joining in “cheers for old Ireland” and the “glories of St. Patrick.”27 Along the Welland, St Patrick’s Day and other Irish Catholic festivities in St Catharines owed much of their success to the strong turnout of temperance societies from throughout the Niagara District and farther afield.28 Prominent in these endeavours were local clergy. On the Lachine, Father Flavel interwove piety and temperance in his ministry to the canallers. His efforts were supported by a local Montreal and Lachine temperance group which founded branches of the Lachine Canal Abstinence Society for Labourers.29 On the Welland, the Catholic Church was also highly visible among temperance advocates, primarily in the person of Dean Patrick Mulligan, priest to St Catharines Parish, who also erected two churches for canallers and their families and church schools for children of Catholic migrant labourers. At the heart of his ministry were weekly temperance lectures and meetings along the works specifically for those building the canal. In this he worked closely with the Reverend Thomas Sullivan of Thorold. Both men earned praise and a special citation from their archbishop, who believed that the improvement in the attitude and behaviour of the labourers over that of their counterparts in earlier decades was largely attributable to Mulligan and Sullivan’s successful temperance drive. Reverend Mulligan was still working hard in 1880 as much of the construction drew to a close. Among the newly founded societies in St Catharines in the early 1880s was The Society of the Sacred Thirst with two hundred active members pursuing temperance under the reverend’s guidance.30 Mulligan was singled out for special commendation by local citizens and contractors who so prized his contribution to temperance and the suppression of unruly labourers that they petitioned the federal government on his behalf, though unsuccessfully, to secure government payment for his services: “[I]f it had not been for his labors as above it would have been necessary for the Government to have established and maintained a Police Force on the Enlargement between Sections 1 and 10 at a large annual expense to the Dominion.”31 The federal government provided temperance advocates with a potentially powerful ally in the form of legislation designed to restrict consumption of alcohol along canals, railways, and other public works, this in response to early calls for help in controlling alcohol and a reflection of lessons learned on colonial projects.32 In 1869–70, as construction of the Intercolonial commenced and the canal improvement program began to take shape, the federal government passed an Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace in the Vicinity of Public Works, a

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major provision of which was a ban on the barter, sale, or exchange of liquor in the immediate area of government construction projects. The act was an unambiguous statement of what members of Parliament believed would be necessary to control large concentrations of workers. It also demonstrated the state’s willingness to attempt to regulate labourers on public works to a degree not considered feasible, desirable, or politically expedient for other segments of society.33 That said, the act was not easy to apply. In well-populated areas such as along the Lachine and the Welland, the act raised questions about infringement on the rights of others in the vicinity, and the requirement that the boundaries within which it was to be enforced be clearly specified could not get around potential unintended restrictions on the rights of consumers and dispensers not attached to construction.34 Even in less-settled areas such as along the Grenville, questions of jurisdiction complicated its application. In response to contractor Goodwin’s request for federal intervention to control alcohol consumption, the minister of justice recommended that the Executive Council proclaim those sections of the act which dealt with the prohibition of liquor in the immediate area of the work.35 But time was required to sort through problems posed by overlapping and divided federal and provincial jurisdiction. While Ottawa could proclaim the act, the provincial government had the responsibility for enforcing it, and the federal Department of Justice was reluctant to share in that responsibility, in part because federal policing resources, like those of the provinces, were already stretched, and in part because it considered it a “doubtful policy” to “relieve a Province from the responsibility which lies on it of protecting the peace.”36 The request to proclaim the act in force in the area around the St Peter’s Canal in Cape Breton raised similar concerns about the responsibility and resources for its enforcement. In the fall of 1875 before improvements to the canal commenced, Justice of the Peace R.G. Morrison wrote to the minister of public works, explaining that itinerant grog sellers were already on the spot, setting up shop to the consternation of the local inhabitants who were anticipating the worst. Of course, they might also have been hoping to cash in on the demand for drink by providing their own local brew. Morrison requested a copy of the act which could prohibit the sale of alcohol in the area, together with a public notice which would warn that the law was in force. Over a month later he received a response explaining that the process was more complicated than he had assumed and not without its down side. He was to first direct his concerns to the local authorities, who in turn should address an official request for proclamation of the act

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to the government in Ottawa. Morrison was also cautioned to weigh the jurisdictional problems which the act would create.37 The struggle among the various levels of government over responsibility for enacting, enforcing, and paying for administering the law should not detract from the clarity of vision of those who emphasized the need to control the sale and consumption of alcohol among large concentrations of labourers such as those on the public works. In those areas in which they were partially freed from the jurisdictional disputes inherent in the legislation and when satisfied that only the workers’ access to alcohol would be restricted, such as on stretches of the Canadian Pacific Railway under its control, federal officials acted quickly to attempt to enforce the legislation.38 Excessive drinking was linked to other aspects of male sociability, chiefly gambling and violence in various forms. Card games, which in more respectable settings provided frivolous but harmless after-dinner relaxation, in the hands of labourers in boarding houses and taverns became one of the vices at which moral reformers took aim in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Labourers gambled away their pay at cards or dice or at the race track, and at a time when the movement to protect animals was gaining ground, they were among those who took gambling to its lowest level, combining profligacy with cruelty in cockfights and dogfights. In all of this the labourers were not alone; they were joined by the urban swells, young men frequently from the middle class enjoying their independent leisure in venues in which they rubbed shoulders with their social inferiors. Nor did all labourers indulge. But concentrated in large numbers they continued to be perceived as they had been at mid-century – as highly visible harbingers of moral degeneracy. As the capitalist ethos of individual responsibility and self-sufficiency through hard work took hold, games of chance became explanations for the poverty of those not sharing the fruits of economic development.39 Measured against the cost of contractors’ reckless ventures in the construction industry and the risks workers confronted in the workplace, those taken at leisure in sports and games of chance may seem paltry, but not to those attempting to shape social and economic development. The high-stakes speculation in transportation infrastructure and the death lottery on the construction site could ultimately be justified as necessary to building individual and national prosperity; gambling at cards or fights could not. It spoke to the rejection of the ethic of hard work and the lack of thrift which kept men in the ranks of those who lacked the drive to make their way in the world.

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Closely associated with gambling and a major outrage to some citizens along public works were organized prize fights. In England, the upper and middle classes had temporarily abandoned organized pugilism as it came under attack from reformers and advocates of rational recreation during the middle decades of the century. Segments of the working class reaching for a redefined respectability also backed away from prize fighting, rejecting the brutal physicality associated with men whose work required strenuous physical exertion. It remained popular, however, among large segments of the population, and navvies were prominent among those who furtively organized, attended, and participated in fights.40 Prize fighting also fell into disrepute in North America, but here, too, it continued wildly popular even as  – perhaps partly because  – laws against it toughened up. Within Canada, its rejection as undesirable culminated in the 1881 Act of Parliament which defined a wide range of criminal offences related to the practice and stiff punishments demonstrating the seriousness with which legislators attacked it. Anyone who played any role in a prize fight was subject to a fine of between $50 and $500 or imprisonment for up to twelve months or both. Those who took part in fight training or promoting faced a stiffer fine of between $100 and $1,000 or imprisonment for up to six months or both. The principal in a fight faced imprisonment for between three and twelve months. To protect against the importation of prize fighting into Canada, sheriffs were charged with summoning a force of citizens to suppress individuals or groups suspected of entering the country to engage in or simply attend a fight.41 This final provision was an attempt to clamp down on what had become a common practice in the face of toughening criminal sanctions against bare-knuckle fighting in many of the United States: individuals slipping across the Great Lakes by the boatful to Canadian soil to evade American justice. Indeed, it was on the more hospitable Canadian soil, after a crossing from Buffalo with promoters and spectators in tow, that John Heenan had launched his spectacular but brief fighting career in 1858.42 Like their counterparts in Britain and the United States, public works labourers in Canada braved public censure to enjoy prize fights.43 Participants and spectators took pains to keep them secret; however, two which did not escape public and police attention involved canallers on the Welland at the close of the decade. At Port Colborne in August 1878, “two canallers stripped to the waist … and engaged in a genuine prize-fight in an empty tenement house in town.” Another fight took place near Welland in the summer of 1880:

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On Tuesday morning there was a fight after the prize ring style, between two canallers. It took place in a woodshed, there being about 200 spectators present. The men were not allowed to clinch, but must stand off and pummel each other a [sic] la Heenan and Sayers. After about half an hour one of them gave up, acknowledging his opponent a better man on the fisticuff than he, but the names of the illustrious pair we did not learn.44 Such fights were a gross distortion of the culture of masculinity built around robust but respectable physicality. So, too, was the less-organized pugilism of drunken brawls, fisticuffs, and violent street life. Here it becomes particularly difficult to separate perception from reality and anticipation from actuality. The roughhousing and brawling associated by contemporaries with lumber camps, mining towns, frontier settlements, and gold rush communities was anticipated and provided by the build-up of almost exclusively male construction communities in sparsely settled areas of the country and also in the clusters of labourers in more densely populated areas where their presence temporarily, but dramatically, shifted the gender ratio in favour of males. That many of the labourers were young men heightened the sense of imminent violence and disorder, as could the fact that many were single, though the extent to which age and marital status shaped the level of violence is unclear.45 What is clear is that those in the vicinity of construction believed that the labourers meant trouble. Citizens of Lachine petitioned the federal government for aid in controlling the rough and disorderly canal labourers “fighting, swearing and revelling in the streets” and showing signs of becoming uncontrollable, “principally after pay-days.” Farther down the canal the Municipal Council of Côte St Paul asked that a force of the Marine Police be sent to maintain the peace. As construction on the Welland geared up in 1873, the Welland Tribune warned its readers that “[v]icious untamed characters must necessarily congregate where large bodies of men are employed on public works,” and citizens along the canal appealed for protection in the face of open violations of the public peace and the “helpless state of Thorold,” where much of the labour force was assembling. So inevitable seemed disorder that even before the labourers arrived at the St Peter’s Canal, inhabitants petitioned for help in preventing the “Rows and troubles [that would] be Common.”46 Much of the trouble took the form of boarding-house and tavern roughhousing, part of the sometimes playful, sometimes ugly, violence associated with heavy drinking, and much of this minor scuffling appears to have been tolerated without arrests and with little

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more than admonitions towards more appropriate behaviour. Maintaining and restoring order were part of the boarding-house keepers’ and tavern proprietors’ traditional responsibilities and not the subject of serious police crackdowns and arrests. Nor were centres like St Catharines, Montreal, and Halifax strangers to brawls and fisticuffs. Particularly in ports and shipping centres, slugfests were accepted as part of the cost of doing business. Fighting crossed the line and became cause for action, though, when it seriously impeded the progress of the work. A boss on the Welland complained that on a Friday evening in February 1878, as part of the “usual effects” of pay day, a “free fight” in a Division Street boarding house left members of one of the gangs sufficiently battered that not one was able to show up for work on Saturday.47 Other fights alarmed citizens because they intruded into their space. Free-for-alls in public streets in the middle of the day which could involve ten to twenty “half drunken navvies” stripped to the waste outraged the modesty of passers-by and violated the morals and peace of the community.48 Labourers’ liaisons with women other than their spouses were left to the imagination of contemporaries, rarely noted in newspapers and other public records unless they led to conflict with the law; however, they took place on what was perceived to be dangerous moral terrain defined by the simple presence of the large numbers of men undertaking rough work. They created the type of moral geography portrayed in studies of Northern Ontario mining communities and camps, seaports, and urban centres springing up in the west, where the ratio of men to women was perceived as encouraging flagrant illicit relationships and worse.49 The threat “half drunken navvies” posed to women became horribly real on the Welland. Watching the construction labour force build-up through 1873, the Welland Tribune voiced concerns that respectable women were being “insulted” and subjected to treatment which could not be put in print by groups of men whose inhibitions had been lowered by drink. Hanging around on street corners and verbally accosting females going about their business or consorting in broad daylight with the women of the night, the canallers were an affront to the morals of the community.50 One widely publicized case was more than enough to prove the point: the attempted rape of Clara Ellen Walters. On a May evening in 1877, William O’Toole, employed as a helper on the Welland enlargement, attempted to rape Clara Ellen Walters, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Mrs Potts, who ran a boarding house at Allanburgh which catered to canal labourers. Three other men were in the boarding house at the time, preparing to go to bed in the

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loft. According to the men’s testimony at trial, while Clara screamed and struggled to beat off her attacker, two of the men unsuccessfully attempted to push open the door into her room. Afraid O’Toole might be armed, one man took a seat in the kitchen, one ran out to get a constable, and the other stayed in the loft fearing for his own safety. Discretion was not the better part of valour in Judge Baxter’s courtroom. The judge found that “the conduct of these three grown up men in doing nothing to succour the young girl, who they knew was being outraged, was brutal, cowardly, and most disgraceful.” While the law did not give him the power to punish their cowardice, he decided to set an example with O’Toole and sentenced him to three years hard labour in the penitentiary.51 All of the witnesses noted that the men had been drinking heavily, and O’Toole argued that he would never have behaved as he had but for the drink. Two months later papers along the Welland carried news that another young woman, this time in Thorold, had been attacked by a canal labourer, one of three “ruffians” who “forced [the] young woman to their will, committing an outrage the description of which [was] too sickening for publication.” On further investigation by the police, the canaller was tried for and convicted of only assault with intent to commit robbery, not indecent assault. Whether assault or indecent assault, the crime provided further proof that women were not safe in broad daylight, even in areas in which hundreds went about their business.52 Authorities might turn a blind eye to much of the violence and immorality among the labourers but could not ignore fights which involved grievous injury, death, or open defiance of law officers who chose to intervene. On the Welland Eugene O’Neil faced charges for stabbing fellow worker Joseph Colligan during a fight in the streets of St Catharines. In a similar disturbance on the same canal, Squire Stevens sustained serious injuries when he was stabbed twice by a labourer. Local police attempted to hunt down his assailant, without success. In a near-fatal encounter on the Intercolonial at St Croix, New Brunswick, labourer Doherty broke into Sam Howard’s boarding house to settle an old score. Howard met the intruder with revolver shots, and Doherty clubbed the boarding-house keeper with his doublebarrelled shotgun. What made this encounter particularly troubling was what it said about attitudes to officers of the law. When the deputy sheriff attempted to take Doherty into custody, labourers made it clear they would prefer to settle such matters themselves and formed a crowd around the deputy and Doherty. Only the timely arrival of the train bound for the gaol at Fredericton prevented rescue of the prisoner. Five labourers on Section 16 of the Intercolonial through the

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Miramichi demonstrated the same disrespect for authority when Constable Gammon attempted to serve a civil process on boarding-house keeper Murray. According to witnesses, the labourers who were in the shanty at the time kicked and clubbed Gammon. The magistrates collected a number of men to go out and attempt to make arrests, but not without the forces of law and order taking a beating in the press for the behaviour of one of the arresting officers who “valiantly took to his heels, although he had a seven-shooter in his pocket, leaving Gammon to his fate.”53 Isolated incidents reveal the use of weapons by labourers, though whether they were heavily armed relative to other groups in their vicinity is unclear. Nevertheless, anxiety over deadly weapons among men on public works remained high following Confederation, and as early as 1869 the federal government brought in legislation enabling aggressive intervention in this area of the workers’ lives. With the example of the legislation of the Canadas before them and with stillfresh memories of disturbances on projects throughout the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies, the federal government included control of weapons in its legislation to control alcohol. The Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace in the Vicinity of Public Works explicitly addressed the need to protect lives and property in the area of canals, railways, and other public works along which labourers congregated, but it went further than the Act of the Canadas on which it was modelled in calling not simply for registration but for prohibition of weapons in all areas in which it was in force. Here it was careful to proscribe all types of weapons: any gun “in whole and in part”; any cutting and stabbing instruments ranging from swords to daggers; and any “other deadly or dangerous weapons.” These included the increasingly popular steel and metal knuckles. Under the act, labourers arriving at a construction site were to check their weapons with a designated individual who would hold them until they left the work or until the act was no longer in force. Those discovered with unsurrendered weapons were subject to a fine of between two and four dollars for each weapon, not a hefty sum, but significant to men for whom it represented between two and four days’ pay. The weapons were forfeit to the Crown. Those who attempted to subvert the process of disarming by facilitating the receiving and concealing of weapons faced considerably stricter punishment: a fine of between $40 and $100 dollars. To aid in enforcing the act, informers were offered a reward equal to one half the fine, a significant incentive to individuals whose monthly pay hovered around twenty dollars at the height of the construction season and even to those receiving the remuneration of supervisory

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personnel.54 Discussion and modification of this legislation into the 1880s clarifies three important themes in the federal government’s approach to labourers: the belief in the need for and the willingness to create greater restrictions on labourers’ freedom to possess weapons than on the freedom of other citizens; the extent to which the template developed for the public works was used in discussion and drafting of laws restricting weapons among other groups, not necessarily labourers; and, ultimately, the extension of laws crafted for the public works to include workers in a variety of enterprises. Through the 1870s and 1880s, recurring debate over weapons control reveals both concern that guns were too readily accessed by the wrong individuals and concern that the state tread carefully in restricting that access. Perceptions of increased gun violence in the streets of large communities, escalating sectarian violence, and fears of civil unrest, particularly during the depression years, provoked calls for the protection of innocent citizens but at the same time warnings against restricting citizens’ liberties. The year in which the act to control weapons on public works came into effect, members of Parliament registered concern that a different act, this one directed at the public at large, threatened to infringe on citizens’ liberty when it made it a misdemeanor to carry offensive weapons such as pistols and knives unless they were being used at work. The act was considered unenforceable largely because of this infringement on citizens’ liberty.55 Other legislative efforts to combat gun violence in particular ran up against similar concerns to preserve the citizens’ ability to carry arms in self-defence and to not be subjected to unreasonable and unwarranted searches of their persons or premises. In 1877 when Minister of Justice Edward Blake introduced his Bill to Make Provision against the Improper Use of Firearms, he struggled against clearly articulated fears that the rights of law-abiding citizens would be trampled by an unjustified extension of state power in the hands of magistrates given too broad discretion to infer intent. Blake insisted the proposed law would be used to target only two specific groups: “the rowdy and reckless characters” becoming all too common in the streets of major urban centres like Montreal and the boys and young men for whom carrying revolvers had become something akin to a rite of passage, “almost part of their ordinary equipage.” Those with legitimate reason to fear for their safety would not be prohibited from carrying weapons, only those with reckless or criminal intent. In the end, however, safeguards to protect the law-abiding from prosecution weakened the bill, and the resulting act was considered by many unenforceable.56

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When Parliament revisited gun control the following year, with an eye to creating legislation applicable only to designated troublemakers in specific parts of the country as the need arose, and not to the general citizenry, Blake reminded members that the 1869 act to preserve peace on public works provided a Canadian precedent and a template for legislation which could target just one group and thus allay concerns about general disarming of the citizenry on the one hand, while offering an aggressive assault on problem groups and problem areas on the other. In introducing his 1878 Crimes of Violence Prevention Bill, Blake underscored the value of the special law which allowed for extraordinary measures to disarm those who presented an extraordinary threat: in the case of the act to preserve peace on public works, public works labourers in “certain districts in which it was thought possible that owing to the congregation of fluctuating bodies of labourers there might be increased danger to the public peace, and consequently the necessity of increased precautions, increased rigour, and diminution of the ordinary liberties of the subjects of this country.” In backing Blake’s proposed legislation, Prime Minister Mackenzie warned that its enforcement would run into the same difficulties as those encountered by the act targeting public works labourers. Those who needed to be controlled would least appreciate and likely oppose attempts at control, as experience with the act to preserve peace on public works had demonstrated: “[W]here there were vast masses of workingmen assembled, who were not, perhaps, as well informed as the other classes of the community, and not perhaps so much above the reach of excitement, which might be brought on by imprudent acts committed by a few persons, it was not easy to obtain that sympathy which was necessary for the observance of the law.” But that made such legislation all the more crucial.57 In committee, members continued to debate the bill’s violation of individual liberties. But the majority agreed with Langevin, who concluded that the violation of liberty was necessary “in order to avoid a greater evil,” and they concurred with Devlin, who, as an MP for Montreal, could claim to speak with authority on the situation in that community and who argued that not to pass such legislation “would, in his judgment, be criminal, in fact, on the part of the House.”58 As members advanced arguments for legislation similar to that applicable to public works, the need to shore up defence against disorder on public works became in itself reason to support Blake’s bill. As Senator William Miller from Nova Scotia pointed out during debate, if nothing else, the bill might prove a handy supplement to resolving difficulties on major public works where the current legislation for

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preserving peace was inapplicable or inadequate. Again, in 1882 when the Crimes of Violence Prevention Act was extended for a fourth time, Prime Minister Macdonald, who had consistently argued for preservation of citizens’ liberties to the extent that was compatible with the public peace, reminded members that one of the best reasons for keeping the law on the books was the great number of public works underway in unprotected areas of the country.59 He saw the act as a particularly valuable complement and supplement to the act concerning public works because it could be used when circumstances generated reluctance to apply all or part of the latter. Meanwhile, and most significantly for workers in general, the federal government used the act drafted for public works to expand its control over workers in a wider range of occupations and areas of the country. As early as 1875 the House of Commons broadened the circumstances under which the Executive Council could declare in force the Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace, extending its reach beyond railways, canals, or other public works to encompass railways, canals, roads, bridges, “other work of any kind ... in progress of construction,” and “any place or places at or near which any mining operations [were] being carried on.” Crucial here was the power assumed by the federal government to intervene to protect not just its own projects but those undertaken by any province, any incorporated company, or any municipal corporation, and the amendment went one step further in making the act explicitly applicable to any project undertaken “by private enterprise.”60 This sweeping amendment, which appears to have occasioned little controversy, significantly broadened the power of the state to intervene in controlling groups of workers whose behaviour threatened, and whose regulation appeared crucial to, the economic development of the country.61 Any questions concerning violation of the workers’ freedom to defend themselves appear to have been answered with the continuing belief that they were their own worst enemies and that any threat which workers might pose to those in their vicinity was greater than any threat those in their vicinity – or in Parliament – might pose to them. Two overriding conclusions emerge from the process of enacting legislation to control weapons. Lawmakers still perceived concentrations of labourers on public works as threats to public order requiring special laws for their control, and the history of public works construction would have convinced many of the reasonableness of this perception. But by the 1870s many other groups of workers – citizens and non-citizens alike – were being drawn under the umbrella of such special legislation and defined under the law as a potential danger to the peace and well-being of the public and the nation.

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In discussions of the threat labourers were perceived to pose, little in government reports or the press speaks to the type of confrontations involving large groups of labourers which had frequently defined construction communities in the 1840s but much less so in the 1850s and had violently divided labourers among themselves and against others in the area along factional, ethno-racial, and sectarian lines. The tensions and hostilities underlying those confrontations had not evaporated and in communities throughout the provinces still drew blood and brought together participants in demonstrations of solidarity or against perceived injustices. But if public works labourers took part in these demonstrations, they did so as individuals or as members of groups defined and organized other than by workplace or occupation. Conflict between Catholic and Protestant provides a good case in point. Religious affiliation remained important to hiring and firing in many workplaces of the 1870s. Religious discrimination was particularly visible, though not necessarily more common, in the public sector, where jobs were dispensed as part of political patronage, and organizations like the Orange Order were part of the lifeblood of politics in many regions. The awarding of positions in the operations end of the Intercolonial Railway and the Lachine and Welland Canals, for example, prompted charges of religious partisanship and would continue to do so well into the twentieth century. This partisanship reflected continuing tensions within the larger society. During the 1870s, developments within Canada and the United States and developments within Ireland which would be echoed in North America were mapping out ground on which Protestant and Catholic Irish could stand together, but not until the 1880s would Canada see significant manifestations of unity across a centuries-old divide. Indeed, the second half of the 1870s featured a dramatic surge in sectarian conflict, varying in scale and intensity from region to region but evinced from Nova Scotia to the west and certainly alive in the area of the two largest construction projects, the Lachine and Welland.62 Along the Welland sectarian celebrations reached across the border to bring in participants from the United States. In 1876, for example, the Orange celebration of 12 July in Welland was expected to be “one of the largest Orange gatherings ever” in Canada, bringing together the Orangemen from Welland, Lincoln, and across the border in Buffalo. It lived up to expectations, with over four thousand men representing twenty-nine lodges attending.63 Many communities enjoyed such celebrations and organized expressions of loyalty and were well placed to play their part in the flare-up of hostilities in the late 1870s. But it was in Montreal that conflict between Orange and Green became

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most bloody and deadly: during the 12 July procession in 1877, young Orangeman Thomas Hackett was shot and killed, and on an April evening in 1878 in what became known as the Wellington Street Tragedy, a clash between young Orangemen and Unionmen resulted in the death of John Colligan, apparently shot in the head by mistake by a fellow Unionman.64 Men who figured prominently in these conflicts were labourers from the areas in which canallers lived and worked. They were also young men, a troubling finding for those attempting to suppress sectarian violence because it revealed that mutation of the antipathy of Orange and Green was creating a new generation of partisans willing to pick up pistols to settle old scores and add new scores to be settled in the future. But if canallers were among the hundreds who were most active or among the thousands who lined the streets to watch the demonstrations, they were not identified as such, and that is the key point. Ethno-religious tensions still erupted in acts of violence on construction sites, as they did in other workplaces. For example, when Michael Quinlan inquired about the possibility of securing work at Brown’s kilns on Section 15 of the Welland in the fall of 1875, he let it be known that he would “rather work under a Scotchman than an Irishman.” A workman, Dixon, overheard the comment and called Quinlan’s manhood into question. Words led to blows, Dixon was badly beaten, and Quinlan was charged with attempted murder, though he served only seven days for fighting.65 But this did not become an issue around which labourers rallied against each other, in part because labourers were redefining the boundaries and dimensions of their ethnic identity, of what it meant to be Irish or Scottish, Catholic Irish or Protestant Scot, and of when and how that identity was expressed. The easing of old tensions on the public works is a reflection of that. It is also a reflection of the ethnically heterogeneous workforce of the 1870s which would facilitate and necessitate united action across ethnic groups, as an examination of workplace action will demonstrate. No longer represented as sites of collective, violent religious conflict, the public works were also no longer portrayed as harbouring a special threat to the British Crown and Canadian sovereignty, despite the continuing high number of Irish among the workforce on many sites, the likelihood that some in their number still held nationalist aspirations, and the continuing rhetoric which cast Irish Catholics as a threat to the British way of life. Fear of Fenian raids had been interwoven into debates over the choice of the route for the Intercolonial, and the actual raids of 1866 and 1867 were still fresh in the minds of citizens, in particular those along the border with the United States.

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The lodges which had provided fellowship and entertainment, as well as a base for support of Irish liberation, did not dissolve overnight, and through the 1870s papers remained alert to rumours that remnants of the Fenian Brotherhood had not abandoned their designs on Canada, were regrouping for new attacks, and were still coming north to spread disaffection. Talk of war over Hawaii in 1876 briefly heightened fears that Irish nationalists would take advantage of the preoccupation of Britain and the United States to launch an attack in Canada, where Britain appeared most vulnerable. The press kept citizens apprised of the potential threat while volunteer companies were ordered to stand by, ready to be called into action in the spring of 1878 and again in November 1879, when a rash of political arrests in Ireland led to reports of meetings to prepare an invading army in those parts of North America in which the Ancient Order of Hibernians retained a strong base, such as the Pennsylvania mining region. But speculation that the order, once so strong in the area along the Welland and along the Lachine, was still a serious threat appears to have been just that, speculation.66 Living arrangements offer the clearest evidence of the space within which relationships and perceptions could be reshaped. One section of the Welland in 1881 suggests the extent to which labourers lived in groups comprised of what one historian has defined as “familiar strangers,” but also in the type of close accommodation which offered what another historian has defined as the opportunity to redefine the “boundaries of ethnicity.”67 On first arriving at a construction site, men may have had little choice as to where they bedded down and, once settled, who joined them as boarding mates. Hoteliers may have taken steps to minimize the potential for problems among their lodgers by allotting sleeping berths judiciously and monitoring the mix in their clientele. Nonetheless, the various boarding arrangements in a cluster of establishments which can be identified as including canallers provide some sense of the community and company in which they lived, if only for a short period of time. Widow Mary McGowan and her son Michael, who had emigrated from Ireland at least nineteen years previous, ran a boarding shanty on the Welland in Humberstone, probably with the help of Michael’s wife and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Maggie. In the spring of 1881 they took in eleven Irish Catholic labourers, seven of whom had been born in Ontario and four in Ireland. Also boarding with the McGowans were three English Protestant labourers, all born in Ontario, two Church of England, and one Methodist. Widow Bridget McCarthy, with the help of her daughter or daughter-in-law Susan, took in eleven Irish Catholic labourers, all

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but one of whom had been born in Ireland. Close by, a married couple, forty-year-old Hannah and thirty-seven-year-old Michael Potts, Irish Catholics born in Ontario, took in nine boarders, eight Irish Catholics and one French Catholic. The French labourer and three of the Irish had been born in Ontario, the rest in Ireland.68 These relatively small boarding shanties demonstrate the tendency which continued into the twentieth century for families taking in a small number of boarders or lodgers to prefer “familiar strangers,” individuals who shared their ethno-religious culture.69 That said, other families who took in canallers provided a more heterogeneous ethno-religious environment: the Goldens’ eight boarders included five labourers who, like themselves, were Irish Catholics born in Ireland and three English labourers born in England and adherents of the Church of England; widow Ellen Kingston, English and adherent of the Church of England, took in four Irish Catholics and five Scottish Presbyterians; and labourer John Mosier and his wife Mary, German Lutherans, boarded two German Lutherans, four Irish Catholics, and two English Methodists.70 Large boarding houses and hotels generally offered the opportunity for the most heterogeneous living arrangements. The boarding shanty of James and Cathern McNiff stands out in this respect. The McNiffs were Irish Catholics who had left Ireland at some point before the birth of their oldest daughter, twenty-two-year-old Margret. Along with their three grown daughters, two young daughters, and one young son, they shared their shanty with twenty-nine labourers: of the seventeen Irish, eleven were Catholic, three Church of England, and three Methodist; of the eleven English, five were Church of England and six Methodist. The one Scot was Presbyterian. A similar, but smaller, boarding establishment catering to canal labourers was run by a young French Canadian couple who took in eleven Irish Catholics all born in Ireland and eight English adherents of the Church of England, all but one of whom had been born in England. For the largest boarding house, proprietor George Ramey provided a list of fifty-three labourers who had just left for other public works; the list included English, Irish, Scots, Germans, and French. This degree of heterogeneity, measured by ethnicity, was not always the case in large boarding houses. In a shanty near Ramey’s and Golden’s, the location of which suggests it accommodated at least some canal men, of the thirty-nine labourers, three were Scots and four English, but the remaining thirty-two were Irish and like the proprietors, James and Cathern Stanley, had been born in Ireland. Of the sixteen Irish for whom religion was indicated, all were Roman Catholic. The English and Scots were Protestant.71 Still, interpretation of the scanty information concerning canallers’ boarding

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arrangements suggests that the largest establishments were most likely to provide the atmosphere within which the “boundaries of ethnicity” were not simply defined but redefined, as important studies have suggested.72 Perhaps some boarding-house fracases were manifestations of the painful side of that process of redefinition, unwelcome to some who found themselves part of it. From among this cluster of labourers on one section of the canal, one group stands out as an exception to the tendency towards multi-ethnic and multireligious boarding arrangements. The Italian labourers lived in what were referred to as their own “Italian shanties.”73 This relative isolation likely reflects their recruitment as a group and subsequent arrangements to house them as such, as much as it reflects a preference for living among those whose language they spoke. Whatever their preference, unambiguous evidence indicates that other labourers did not welcome them in their midst. Against a backdrop of newspaper articles poking fun at the peculiar customs of the newcomers, workers on the Welland began their own more vigorous and violent campaign against the introduction of the Italians into the workforce. Once again the streets of St Catharines witnessed collisions between parties of workers seeking revenge for perceived slights and assaults on their fellows. In an unusually well-reported clash in June 1876, trouble between Irish and Italian workmen on Section 12 of the canal erupted into “open war.” As Pasco Schumaker was returning to his shanty with eggs for the evening meal, a group of Irish labourers attacked the Italian, broke his eggs, and blackened his eyes. The attackers moved on to their own boarding houses but returned approximately one hundred and fifty strong and descended on one of the little Italian shanties with a seemingly inoffensive accordion and a request that the Italians play so they could dance. When the Italians refused, the stage was set for a general melee. Retreating only to regroup and return, the Irish workers all but gutted the Italian shanty, tossing its contents into the road, rifling through boxes, smashing the crockery and stoves, beating the inmates, and driving them out. Advancing on another Italian shanty, the Irish beat the occupants with pick handles, drove them from their home, and attempted to clear them off the works. An old Italian attempting to escape was pursued, fell to the ground, and was assaulted with kicks and stones. Later that night he died in his shanty. In the subsequent trial of John Cahagan for the murder of Vincenzo Brach, a foreman described an attack earlier the same day on the Italians working on Section 12. Six or seven men and boys had amused themselves by throwing stones at the Italians working down in the tunnel. One

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Italian who fled the worksite had been run down and repeatedly kicked in the head. Others testified that the Italians had been armed with revolvers and that one Irishman had been shot in the thigh. The trial provided ample evidence of an ongoing conflict between Italians and Irish, in particular, but not enough evidence to sustain a guilty verdict in the eyes of both judge and jurors. On the judge’s direction, the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” without leaving their seats. In a related proceeding, labourer Robert Stewart was tried for riot, found guilty of a misdemeanour, and sentenced to one day in gaol and a modest fine.74 One trial and two boarding shanties contribute a fragment to the larger pattern in the reception of Italian workers in North America. As burgeoning scholarship on the importance of being white has revealed, Italians, as new non-whites, became part of the frequently violent negotiation of exclusion and inclusion based on race and ethnicity, facing on construction sites just one variation of the racialization pervading North America.75 Like successive groups of unskilled foreigner workers before and after them, labourers from Southern Italy confronted the combination of economic competition and racism which pushed them to the bottom of the social hierarchy. In those labourers sharing their position near the bottom and whose acceptance had been hard won, the Italian workers sparked unusually intense bitterness as a threat both to their livelihood and their self-image, their presence not simply expanding the labour pool but polluting it. They were pitted against workers from across the ethno-racial spectrum, some, like the Polish, fiercely contending for their own place in the labour force and others like native-born English and Scots, holding their position and with it their image of their place in society.76 Among the most bloody and widely publicized conflicts was the 1874 clash in the coal mines around Pittsburgh, where the New York Italian Labor Company, founded to safeguard Italians against their Irish “adversaries,” deployed its labourers as armed strikebreakers against miners of Irish, Welsh, and English extraction. After one month of intermittent shooting and intimidation from both sides, a final confrontation left three Italians dead and eight others wounded and strengthened the hostility between Irish and Italian.77 Response to the Italian labourers on the Welland is best understood within this context, as a reminder of the reception of earlier groups of immigrants and the resulting fragmentation of the labour market and workforce and as a foretaste of the treatment awaiting successive waves of immigrants in future decades. Even as the labour force on public works became more diverse, reflecting the changing

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composition of the markets for unskilled labour, and as the workplace brought groups together in collective action, as chapters 7 and 8 will explore, labourers still found the opportunity to resist the introduction of some groups into the workforce. Two interrelated processes were at work here. Guardians of the nation’s morals and advocates of social and economic advancement still found much that was threatening and censurable in the behaviour of public works labourers. For their part, labourers narrowed and shifted the focus of social exclusion to target those groups, usually foreigners, they found not simply culturally or morally threatening but a direct challenge to their position in the labour market. Picking up these processes of fragmentation and attempted exclusion, pervasive and violent in the 1840s and 1850s and still present but less obtrusive on the public works studied for the 1870s, the following two chapters analyse the extent to which labourers were able to identify and find the means to make common cause against contractors in the workplace. Chapter 7 begins the analysis with the groups of labourers on the canals of the Canadas in the 1840s and 1850s and on the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways in the 1850s.

7

Defining a Community of Interests: The 1840s and 1850s

This is not that union or reciprocity of interest existing between the employer and the employed that there should be, and many evils grow out of it. New Brunswick Courier, 20 March 1858 During the bleak winter of 1858, one of the toughest in recent memory for the labouring poor of British North America, construction continued on the European and North American Railway, partially in response to pressure from politicians, the press, and private citizens of New Brunswick who had lobbied for winter work to help the destitute. Hundreds of men worked in conditions less than satisfactory from the contractor’s perspective. But instead of feeling suitably grateful, as the weather improved and contractors geared up to press the work more vigorously in the spring and open up even more jobs, labourers on the upper sections of the line struck for an advance in their wages from 4s. 6d. for a twelve-hour day to 5s. for ten hours. To the Morning News, this was additional proof, if any was needed, of the character of “the whole ungrateful tribe”: “Do as much as you may for them in their adversity, as soon as they get upon their feet and see that they have strength and get you in their power, they will turn upon you and wring the last copper from your pockets.”1 From a distance, the Halifax Morning Journal joined in denouncing the ingrates and offered to send some of Halifax’s labouring poor who, it was confident, would be more than happy “to take the leavings of those saucy navvies who do not know when they are well off.”2 Coupling this story with the news of a strike for higher wages among the masons who had also 216

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worked the winter preparing stone for the railway bridges, the New Brunswick Courier lamented the self-destructive course of action “too frequently pursued both by our Mechanics and Labourers.” Those on strike would see their jobs taken by men contractors were attempting to bring in from the United States, and workers and contractors alike would be ruined. There was not “that union or reciprocity of interest existing between the employer and the employed that there should be, and many evils grow out of it.”3 To these commentators the construction force on the European and North American was fundamentally wrongheaded in its approach to employer-employee relations. Rather than identifying with the interests of their employers they mounted a direct challenge to those investing in the creation of jobs and the economic advancement of the community. In this they joined thousands of labourers in workplace confrontations on both public and private transportation projects, maintaining the pattern of militance established on the canals of the Canadas in the first half of the century and dating back further in the United States. Analyses of strike patterns across industries have concluded that as one of the first groups to come together in a large, impersonal workplace, canallers may have been responsible for as many as one-third of the strikes in British North America prior to 1850. During the early 1850s, when the skilled stand out for their contribution to what has been described as an “insurrection of labour,” canal and railway labourers still made an impressive contribution to the total number of strikes, as much as 32 per cent, according to one pioneering study; and factoring in of additional strikes studied on projects here suggests this segment of the unskilled may have played a larger, though not easily defined, part in that strike action.4 Studies of workplace conflict on North American canals in the first half of the nineteenth century make a compelling argument that the labour unrest of the early 1840s marked a shift to the strike as the dominant instrument for expressing demands and discontents, though they caution against attaching too much importance to the form and missing the substance of labour unrest and against losing sight of other forms of conflict continuing alongside the strike.5 The present study reveals an even more pronounced shift to the strike on canal and railway construction sites of the 1850s, perhaps in part because strikes stand out for their relatively clear demarcation of goals, achievements, and beginning and end points. As in earlier decades, other more difficult to quantify forms of conflict also continued to shape relations between capital and labour. Taken together, the various forms of resistance reveal an ongoing power struggle over key aspects of the work:

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who would secure it, how many jobs would be available, who would control firing and supervision and supervisory personnel, how many hours they would put in each day, and what and how they would be paid. The extent of that struggle was captured by a frustrated member of the engineering staff following an 1843 strike on the Beauharnois: “Are the Workmen to control the Work to determine the prices of labour and the hours they are to work? Are they to dictate as to who is to be employed upon the Canal either as labourers, Gangmen, or otherwise? Are the Contractors to be … protected in directing and controlling their work  – to determining who is to work for them  – how much they are to pay – and what hours the men must work?”6 To this the labourers posed their own question, posted along the works during an 1843 Lachine strike: “Are we to be tyrannized by Contractors … surrender / To no Contractors who wants to live by the sweat of our Brow.”7 As contractors and labourers worked out the answers to these questions at mid-century, labourers struggled with the complementary question which ran as a powerful undercurrent in conflict on construction sites: in their disputes with contractors, who were their allies, and with whom could and would they unite? When labourers took their labour into the marketplace and to the works, they did so as members of subgroups whose allegiances and hostilities at times divided them against each other and impeded their capacity to develop a sense of a larger collectivity. At the same time, allegiance to their subgroups sustained a powerful world view that stood in opposition to the individualism at the heart of the evolving capitalist ethos. It was a sense of community which had the capacity to resist the ideology which reified the individual at the expense of the group. It could promote and sustain collective action – but within limits. As labourers worked within and redefined those limits, in some contexts they undermined and in others enhanced their power relative to that of the contractors. This was most obvious in the contest to obtain employment, but it also shaped strikes and other struggles in the workplace. This chapter begins analysis of workplace struggles with the conflict for work which at times pitted the members of Irish factions against each other and at other times united the Irish to keep other ethnic groups from the work, primarily Canadiens in the 1840s and in the following decade English, Scots, and Germans. It then moves to the many strikes and the variety of goals which labourers pursued in their conflict with contractors. What was described as a general spirit of insubordination focused in strikes on issues of hiring and firing, disciplining of workers, and questions concerning general supervision

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s  2 1 9

and specific supervisory personnel. Exploitative forms of payment, lost wages, and hours of work also triggered walkouts; however, the majority of strikes were related to wage rates, primarily demands for higher wages and, less frequently, protests against wage reductions. The following section of the chapter explores the various ways in which the state intervened to enforce the law during strikes with stipendiary magistrates and special police, the moral suasion of Catholic priests, and the military. The final third of the chapter asks how labourers were able to maintain workplace action in the face of not only the power of the state but also the threat and reality of hunger. Here the focus returns to the Irish Catholics, their ethnic cohesion, and the vehicle for organization offered by secret societies. The chapter concludes with the potential for cohesion across ethnic groups whose histories of struggle might have provided shared perspectives and with the achievement of that cross-ethnic cohesion most noticeably on the Junction and Chats Canals in the Canadas in the 1850s. Like other groups of unskilled workers throughout North America, Europe, and other continents, however, canallers and navvies faced formidable obstacles to organization and would not create formal unions until later in the century. Early in the 1840s contractors learned they would not have a free hand in hiring from among the labourers who congregated around construction sites. To a considerable extent, the labour force would be shaped by the factional, ethno-racial, and religious loyalties of the labourers themselves. In the 1840s, the feud of Cork and Connaught became the primary vehicle in a conflict for work which stretched along the entire St Lawrence system in skirmishes and running battles which spilled over from one project to another; for example, Connaughtmen drove Corkmen from the Cornwall, and Corkmen retaliated by driving Connaughtmen from the Queenston-Grimsby Road works; on larger projects one faction took over the work under one contractor, and the displaced faction moved to take jobs on another contractor’s section.8 Representatives of the Board of Works, contractors, and local magistrates came to see the feud as primarily a fight over work, going so far as to argue that “[t]he sole object” of the combinations of labourers in factions – Cork and Connaught and the subdivisions of Leinster and Roscommon and Mayo and Sligo – was to secure employment. In this the feud was a direct attack on the powers of the board and contractors to control the labour force and workplace. Contractors could only take back control if unemployment was reduced dramatically, leaving no reason to fight, or if surplus labourers were forced to move on, leaving no one to fight.9 The Connaughtmen

2 2 0   R oug h Work

made the argument most succinctly during a meeting with government officials and James Buchanan, a respected member of the Irish community and ex-consul at New York: “[G]ive us work to earn a living, we cannot starve, the Corkmen have all the work, give us a share of it.”10 Studies of feuding have likened it to the labourers’ version of the closed shop, the means by which to restrict access to work, and to a primitive syndicalist organization.11 But it was the form without the consciousness and, in this respect, part of the process of fragmentation in which subgroups fought for advantage in the labour market and workplace. The waning of the feud at mid-century meant it was less visible and divisive on construction sites in the 1850s, though it still figured in reported conflict on private railways in the Canadas and the United States at the beginning of the decade.12 The struggle to secure work could transcend factional divisions and become all about being Irish. United demonstrations of Irish labourers were appeals to government and community leaders to do something to alleviate hardship among the unemployed. In the summer of 1842, as work commenced on the Welland improvements, the thousands of labourers congregated in the area sent an ominous message of unity to contractors and the board: labourers and their families repeatedly paraded the streets of St Catharines with a red flag and placards demanding “Bread or Work”; patrolling bands ensured that none broke ranks and took the few jobs available; posters threatened “death and vengeance to any who should dare to work until employment was given to the whole”; and a petition to the people of Upper Canada warned, “we all Irishmen; employment or devastation.” As increasing numbers of jobs opened up, this impressive show of unity cracked, and hunger pressed labourers onto the works. A similar show of unity the following summer was also short lived. With a major section drawing to a close, the three thousand men thrown out of work, many with families, were joined by hundreds still arriving in the area. Power warned the Board of Works that he was surrounded by men “infuriated by hunger,” and any delay in commencing new sections of the work would “drive them to despair.”13 Such collective demonstrations were part of a long tradition of both peaceful and violent protests in which participants demanded food, took control of foodstuffs to ensure their distribution at fair prices, and in some instances ransacked mills and stores and attacked wagons and ships transporting food into or out of an area. Still very much alive in Europe, these protests escalated and became particularly aggressive in the mid-1840s during the early stage of the famine in Ireland, when supplies were still moving in sufficient quantity to be worth the effort. Those from

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s  2 2 1

the rural areas travelled into towns and cities, marching in formation to demand either food or the means to purchase it, in much the same manner as the Irish labourers paraded through communities along the canals in the Canadas.14 Perhaps united demonstrations for work or food at times stretched to include non-Irish labourers. Farther down the St Lawrence, though, where the Irish met Canadiens seeking work on the Beauharnois and Lachine, the evidence is of conflict, not unity or a sense of common cause. Canadiens had their own history and traditions of aggressive demands for work or food which might well have dovetailed with those of the Irish labourers, but not when they met on the canals of Lower Canada in the early 1840s. In the face of the labour surplus around the Lachine in March 1843, Irish labourers demanded that any available work go to their countrymen. Contractors attempted to assert their control over hiring by terminating the employment of those Irish then on the works and taking back a smaller number to work with Canadiens. But the arrangement did not sit well with the Irish, employed and unemployed alike, and they drove off the Canadiens.15 On the Beauharnois, demands for work intertwined with the fight for higher wages in what became a four-sided struggle among the Irish factions, the Canadiens, and contractors. Outnumbered, the Canadiens were unsuccessful in the competition for work, and even when the Irish labourers struck for higher wages Canadiens could not take advantage of the opportunity to slip into the jobs temporarily abandoned.16 The impact of the ethnic conflict on the railways in the Atlantic colonies, also characterized as attempts by the Irish to monopolize the work and gain control over the contractor, is less clear. According to the police magistrate on the European and North American, the Irish were successful in their “war” against the German labourers, driving them off the works and back to Boston.17 Such clashes between the two groups would continue throughout North America, the Irish not always the winners, until they were overshadowed by demonstrations of Irish and German workers’ united action, though that unity was frequently manifested in joint resistance to the inclusion of Jewish and Black workers in key labour organizations.18 The English and Scottish labourers were another matter. They continued on the works until construction ended, and conflict with the Irish only subsided with the wrapping up of all the sections. No side in the conflict appears to have exercised the type of control over the contractors that the Irish had enjoyed on the canals of the 1840s.19 This appears to have been true on the Nova Scotia Railway also. Here

2 2 2   R oug h Work

attention focused on attempts by the Irish to secure and maintain work on their own terms by force, in the face of competitors described both by their ethnic derivation as Scottish and English labourers and by their local origin, Cape Breton, Pictou, or Colchester men.20 During the investigation into the fighting at Gourlay’s shanty in spring 1856, contractors reported that “wherever there were a large number of Irishmen, and a small number of Nova Scotians or Scotchmen from the east,” the latter lived in fear of being driven from their shanties and their jobs. A deposition by contractor Thomas Rowlands of Shubenacadie summarized what he considered to be the rationale behind such conflicts: This Deponent believes that it is the purpose and policy of these rioters, and of others who have acted in the same spirit elsewhere, to drive off the Railway Works the natives of the Province, and other industrious persons coming from other countries, and to secure to the Irish the complete command of the works. That unless the Government interfere, and make life and property and industry perfectly secure on the Public Works, all other labourers but Irishmen will be driven off or terrified from coming in from the distant Counties. That the monopoly thus created will place Contractors at the mercy of the riotous and unruly, raise the price of labour, lessen the competition among Contractors, and cost the Province very large sums of money before the Railroads are completed.21 Like other contractors, Rowlands had his reasons for perceiving conflict on the works in this light. But would the Irish labourers have disagreed with this characterization of their short- and long-term goals? Fighting for what were among the least desirable jobs in the emerging social and economic order  – in extreme instances killing for work – labourers demonstrated the extent to which factional, sectarian, and ethno-racial allegiances helped to define their community of interests. They also demonstrated how fragile their position was in the emerging order. Despite that fragile position, those labourers successful in securing work struggled further to attain the treatment and reward they considered their labour warranted. From contractors and government officials came complaints of a general state of disorder and ongoing attempts by labourers to challenge their authority through “daily acts of insubordination”22: brief altercations involving individual labourers, acts of intimidation involving groups of men, and more prolonged disputes which disrupted the work for days. On the Williamsburg Canals in the fall of 1844 contractors were said to be

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s  2 2 3

so thoroughly intimidated that one of them did not dare go near the work, while another was “so much afraid of the labourers employed by him, that they worked as they pleased, & set him at defiance.” In the same year further down the St Lawrence at the Lachine, a contractor professed that he and his foremen faced verbal and physical harassment to the point of fearing for their lives, while some of the more amenable labourers had to dodge bullets on and off the worksite. At the Beauharnois labourers reportedly acted as if they were in charge, working as it suited them.23 Conflict around hiring, firing, and disciplining of the workforce can be interpreted in part as an extension of labourers’ attempts to protect the jobs of members of their own subgroup, however that subgroup was defined. This came out clearly in the summer of 1844 when the board attempted to institute the policy of refusing employment to those known to have weapons. Chairman Killaly warned that the major impediment to what ended up a futile policy would be labourers’ unwillingness to give contractors a free hand in hiring and firing. Experience had taught that “it would be very hard for contractors to try to choose men without facing a strike.”24 Even if the men did not strike, they would intimidate contractors and their staff into keeping on the works those who enjoyed their protection. Less frequently, labourers forced the hiring of additional, and from contractors’ perspective unnecessary, men. On the Williamsburg in January 1845 a group of approximately forty labourers intimidated Chamberlain and Company by stopping their wagons and the wagons of those doing business with them, disrupting the work until the contractors were forced to hire as many as 190 labourers, far more than could be used to advantage given the season.25 But attempts to interfere in hiring and firing cannot always be linked to ethno-racial or sectarian loyalties. If such loyalties continued to define preferences in workmates on sites such as the Junction and Chats in the following decade  – and they probably did  – contractors, government officials, and the labourers themselves are silent about any role they may have had in what were serious confrontations over dismissals. On the Chats, with its workforce mix of Canadien, English, Irish, and Scots, some drawn from the area and some from farther afield, a well-documented incident in May 1855 bears no visible mark of factional or ethnic ties. The contractors’ firing of a number of labourers for “disorderly conduct” precipitated trouble with many more who downed tools and refused to go back on the works without their fellows. Ultimately the contractor rebuilt his workforce with new recruits. The following April brought a similar incident. The contractor dismissed six men for what he termed

2 2 4   R oug h Work

“very disorderly conduct” and in doing so faced even further disorder. Labourers assaulted their foreman, and the entire force “left the works in a body,” this time waiting out the contractor, who was forced to reinstate those dismissed.26 Dissatisfaction with particular supervisory personnel and their direction of the work was at the heart of strikes on the Lachine and Beauharnois in the 1840s.27 For the 1850s, two examples reveal the dimensions such disputes could assume. A major strike on the Junction in November 1854 challenged the contractor’s unpopular actions in transferring general management of construction from a Mr Millan to a Mr Anderson, not a favourite with the men. Labourers also resisted the dismissal of foreman Thomas Hoy for his failure to obey Anderson’s orders to move some of the labourers from his pit to the task of scowing stone. Either in support of Hoy’s refusal to assign them to more unpleasant and dangerous work or in support of Hoy himself, labourers in his pit “dropped their Picks and Shovels the Moment he was dismissed.” They encouraged the rest of the men to put down their tools and put out the fires in the steam engines, effectively stopping the pumping. Threatened by a devastating setback to the work which could potentially push progress back by weeks if not months, superintendent Baillarge convinced the men to relight the fires so pumping could continue during the night. He also secured a promise that the men would remain at work until contractor Counter’s return the following week. His official report underlined the threat this type of action posed: “Contractors … have already lost and will continue to lose all Control over the rest of the Men.”28 On the Chats, dissatisfaction with American foremen helped precipitate a similar strike in January 1856. Initial reports indicated that the men struck when they learned their wages were to be lowered, but as the men worked their way down the line, encouraging and pressing others to join their strike, their goal crystallized into a demand for the dismissal of one particular American foreman. According to superintendent Gallwey, conflict over supervision had come to a head when the contractor’s new agent, a Mr Camp, had initiated many changes, including replacement of certain foremen. Labourers had intimidated one foreman in particular, dragging him out of a smithy, and might have seriously injured him but for the interference of a clergyman. When intimidation failed they had struck work.29 Gallwey felt that the work had benefited greatly from changes to the supervisory personnel and that the men had been “obliged to work a little more honestly than before” and consequently had threatened trouble. The labourers on both the Junction and the

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s  2 2 5

Chats, however, probably would have countered that the unpopular foremen were driving for unreasonable output, not making them work “more honestly.” This type of conflict was not the struggle to maintain control mounted by artisans and skilled workers as they faced the erosion of traditional prerogatives and practices which had defined their work life and their place within society. But it was a struggle for power which went to the heart of questions concerning how labourers’ energies were to be expended and who was to make that determination. The workforce on some sites likely included men who had known the relative autonomy of the butty gangs which, at the height of Britain’s railway age, had contracted to complete a section of the work for a predetermined price or by piece rate and had worked at a pace they themselves set and at the direction of a member of the group who enjoyed the respect of the whole.30 These men were comfortable on construction sites and knew what a well-run operation looked like, and though they became less common as the century progressed, at mid-century they were still contributing that knowledge to North America’s transportation revolution. Even in the absence of such men, it is not difficult to conceive of sites on which some labourers’ experience would have exceeded that of supervisors and foremen and certainly that of contractors such as James Jack, who by his own admission had little idea what he was doing.31 Whatever the labourers’ previous experience, the work was sufficiently demanding and many aspects unusually unpleasant and dangerous, that little margin remained for aggravation from overseers and unreasonable attempts to accelerate the work. Disputes over the length of the working day arose directly from concerns over both how labourers’ energies would be expended and how much they would be compensated for that expenditure and cannot be separated out easily from wage disputes. Attempts to extend working hours beyond what labourers considered reasonable provoked outcries that contractors were attempting to increase output without considering the toll on workers’ bodies. In one of the clearest examples of this type of dispute, labourers on the Chambly Canal in 1842, discontent with working from five in the morning to seven in the evening, refused to continue unless the contractor moved to a twelve-hour day, beginning at six and ending at six. When the contractors attempted to appease the workforce by increasing the wage rates, labourers made it clear that wages were not the issue. What they objected to was the long day. The following year, in a dispute near St Timothe on the Beauharnois, labourers addressed the issue of hours

2 2 6   R oug h Work

by demanding a decrease from twelve to eleven hours combined with an increase of 6d. per day.32 Labourers proposed a similar formula which combined a reduction in hours with an increase in wages on the European and North American in March 1858 when they struck for a ten-hour day at a 6d. increase. In another twist on the interplay between hours and wages, a contractor on the Nova Scotia Railway in the spring of 1857, who apparently believed he could move to a longer spring and summer workday without increasing the daily wage, discovered he could only do so with considerable difficulty.33 Late and lost wages triggered a number of strikes during the 1840s and 1850s and generated sympathy, if not support, among government officials and the press, who shared to some extent the labourers’ outrage that they should be deprived of the fruits of their labour.34 Protests and work stoppages over the twin issues of truck and the long pay also generated some sympathy and expressions of concern over injustices,35 coming when they did at points when labourers and their families were either growing desperate for food, racking up crippling debts at a company store, or worse, facing the prospect that no payment of any kind would materialize. Most strikes for which details exist, however, involved demands for higher wages. Combining his investigation into conflict along the canals with direct experience handling unrest in Lower Canada, Captain Wetherall concluded that the disputes over whether labourers were receiving a fair wage was “the chief cause from which all the bitter fruit comes.” The Reverend James Clarke, Catholic priest among the labourers on the Williamsburg Canals, argued that if a reasonable wage rate could be established neither police nor military would be needed along the canals. Evidence from specific work stoppages supports these generalizations, though unsystematic reporting and recording and the random element in the survival of records means they reveal at least as much about what mattered to observers as about what mattered to participants, and information such as that provided in table 7.1 concerning specific strikes on the canals needs to be treated with caution and as suggestive, not definitive. Government sources and the press were even less detailed in their reporting of strikes on railways in the 1850s. Analysis, then, depends on general statements concerning “many” or “the usual” strikes and scattered specifics which underestimate or exaggerate the number of strikes and the disruption they caused, depending on the observer.36 Wage rates for this type of work were so low and the increases labourers demanded at times so paltry, that strikes for higher wages might be interpreted as simply desperate attempts to maintain a subsistence, particularly if each strike is analysed separately. But beside

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s   2 2 7 Table 7.1  Partial Listing of Labourers’ Work Stoppages on Canals, 1840s and 1850s Where*

When

Who

Why

Result

Chambly

May 1842

labourers

Beauharnois

May 1843

labourers

Beauharnois

June 1843

all labourers

Beauharnois Beauharnois Beauharnois Lachine Lachine

Aug. 1844 Sept. 1844 Aug. 1845 Jan.–Feb. 1843 Mar. 1843

labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers

Lachine

Apr. 1844

labourers

Lachine Welland

Oct. 1844 Mar. 1842

labourers labourers

Welland Welland Welland Welland Welland Welland Welland Welland Welland Welland

Aug. 1842 Jan. 1843 Mar. 1843 Mar. 1843 July 1843 Sept. 1843 Nov. 1843 Dec. 1843 Mar. 1844 Apr.–June 1844

labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers

Welland Welland Welland Welland

Mar. 1845 Mar. 1845 June 1849 July 1849

labourers labourers

Williamsburg Williamsburg Williamsburg Williamsburg Williamsburg Williamsburg

Mar. 1844 Mar. 1844 Apr. 1844 May 1844 June 1844 Nov. 1844

labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers

Williamsburg Williamsburg

Jan. 1845 Nov. 1845

labourers labourers

increased wages / decreased hours increased wages, decreased hours increased wages, decreased hours increased wages working conditions supervision changes increased wages increased wages, against truck wages not paid or increased wages supervision work and increased wages work increased wages increased wages wages not paid increased wages increased wages decreased wages wages not paid increased wages four strikes for increased wages increased wages increased wages wages not paid wages not paid and “many strikes” increased wages wages not paid increased wages increased wages increased wages decreased wages, shorter hours work decreased wages

lost lost

won lost lost

won won

won won lost

lost won won won

(Continued)

2 2 8   R oug h Work Table 7.1  Continued Where*

When

Who

Why

Result

Williamsburg Junction Junction Junction Junction Junction Junction

July 1846 Mar. 1852 Apr. 1852 May 1852 Aug. 1854 Nov. 1854 Nov. 1854

labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers

lost won won won

Chats Chats Chats Chats

Jan. 1855 Mar. 1855 May 1855 May 1855

labourers labourers labourers labourers

Chats Chats

July 1855 Jan. 1856

labourers labourers

Chats Chats Chats Chats

Feb. 1856 April 1856 May 1856 Oct. 1856

labourers labourers labourers labourers

increased wages increased wages increased wages increased wages increased wages decreased wages supervision changes / firing of foreman increased wages increased wages increased wages dismissal of some labourers increased wages decreased wages, unpopular foreman increased wages dismissal of six men increased wages wages not paid

won won won lost won lost won won won won

Sources: Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q, app. T; Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Q, app. T, app. Y, app. AA; RG11, vols. 17, 20 to 26; vols. 54-26, 59-23, 60-9, 68-5; vol. 90, file 94, Clarke to Killaly, 6 March 1845 (Pre-Conversion); vol. 381, file 56, Godfrey to Begly, 9 April 1844 (Pre-Conversion); vol. 390, file 93, Mills to Killaly, Nov. 1844, 29 Nov. 1845 (Pre-Conversion); WCLB, 1842–5 (Pre-Conversion); RG43, WCLB; Montreal Transcript, 28 Mar., 15 June 1843; St Catharines Journal, 7 June, 20 Sept. 1844; OA, RG22, vols. 47, 48, 52. *  Strikes are arranged according to location in order to emphasize the pattern on each canal.

desperation, at times acute, lie patterns of offensive strikes in which labourers’ escalating demands tested their power to push up wages. The general pattern saw labourers in the years from 1842 to 1845 push wages above the 2s. or 2s. 6d. which the Board of Works considered the most labourers could and should expect along the canal system.37 On the Lachine a series of strikes in 1843 and 1844 attempted to push wages above 2s. per day, with little success, though the combination of a work stoppage with an increase in the length of the day could secure 2s. 6d. from reluctant contractors. On the Beauharnois in the same period labourers won and maintained increases to 3s. and at one point 3s. 6d. They enjoyed more consistent success further up the St

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s  2 2 9

Lawrence. On the Cornwall and Williamsburg, strikes secured and maintained modest increases to 3s. and 3s. 6d., and on the Welland, labourers won a series of aggressive strikes, despite the large surplus of labourers in the immediate area.38 As early as the winter of 1843 labourers had driven wages to “the highest rate being offered on the continent,” according to superintendent Power. He was likely exaggerating, but his statement remains an important measure of the muscle labourers were perceived to be flexing. A series of strikes over the remainder of 1843 and into 1844 led into a particularly tense period through April to July 1844, when labourers on one section of the Welland struck four times for increases with marked success and pushed wages to rates the board argued were at least 30 per cent higher than those labourers secured on any of the other works then under its superintendence.39 The drive for higher wages was even more marked in the first half of the 1850s, when contractors’ difficulties in securing labour at the prices they hoped to pay temporarily increased the labourers’ bargaining power. Labourers on the Junction were part of the insurrection of labour in the opening years of the 1850s. They began work on the canal in January 1852 at a rate of 3s. and struck in March for an increase to 3s. 6d. To superintendent Page the worst feature of the strike was that it flexed the labourers’ muscle and would “pave the way to future difficulties.” His fears were confirmed within a month. In April labourers won an increase to 4s. and at the beginning of May a further raise to 4s. 6d. Intermittent work stoppages continued through the remaining two years of construction, culminating in major strikes in August and November 1854.40 A similar pattern emerged on the Chats, where again the difficulty of acquiring men rendered the contractor particularly vulnerable to demands for higher wages. In January 1855 labourers on the canal engaged in a strike of almost two weeks’ duration and returned to work, having won an increase to 3s. 9d. per day. Two months later the labourers won a further increase to 4s. Some of these men would then leave “for the spring cropping of their farms.” But their positions were taken by men who appear to have understood their value and appear to have been as willing to push up wages. By July three more strikes had forced wages up to 5s. 10d. per day.41 The following January, labourers were unsuccessful in their attempt to resist a reduction to 4s. 6d. But undeterred, they won strikes for 5s. in February and for 5s. 6d. in May.42 In their turn, railway labourers became notorious for their propensity to strike. Strikes on private projects were characterized by an engineer on the Great Western as something “as predictable as the

2 3 0   R oug h Work

croaking of the frogs.”43 The same might have been said on both the Nova Scotia and the European and North American Railways. On the Nova Scotia Railway a contractor argued that experienced men expected and accepted strikes as one of the inevitable aspects of railway construction. The Saint John Daily Morning News made the same argument concerning strikes on the European and North American in 1858 when it gave its opinion and reportedly the opinion of men who knew the business: “[B]ad weather and ‘strikes’ are things inseparable in all railroad undertakings, and are allowed for by a man, as one of the adverse contingencies, in making up his estimates.” However, it worried that the contractors might not have given serious enough consideration to what strikes would cost them, after a lengthy strike in early March over wage rates and hours, followed by a ten-day strike in early May, also over wage rates and hours; and it warned its readers to be prepared for the contractors to use the many strikes they had faced as arguments in favour of increases in their contract prices and delays in meeting their deadlines.44 Sketchy details suggest an aggressive approach to wage demands similar to that taken by labourers on the canals in the same decade. In May 1856 labourers on the Nova Scotia Railway sustained a lengthy strike of ten days’ duration to win an increase from 5s. to 5s. 6d. per day. Within a month labourers working near Windsor were striking for an increase to 6s. 3d.45 In April of the following year men on the European and North American began the spring strike offensive with a demand for 6s. 3d. A year later, however, deepening depression was reflected in the labourers’ more modest demand that wages which had been reduced to 4s. for the winter months be increased to 5s.46 Circumstances could render a contractor unusually vulnerable to labourers’ demands: the pressure of a deadline combined with a scarcity of labour might make a modest wage increase more attractive than a troublesome delay and may go some way in explaining the success strikers on public works enjoyed. On the other hand, the constant struggle with escalating costs always gave contractors reason to outright resist strikers’ demands, and this appears to have been the course of action most frequently adopted. Initially contractors might attempt to use labourers in the immediate area to break strikes, perhaps hoping to capitalize on factional or ethnic divisions, but they also brought in men from a distance. The rudimentary nature of the transportation network of the 1840s, and to a lesser extent the 1850s, could mean costly delays in securing labourers from outside the area, but a delay could be preferable to giving in to strikers. When labourers on the Junction struck in August 1854, as a follow-up to strikes earlier in the

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season and immediately on the heels of the cholera epidemic which had already disrupted the work, contractor Counter had had enough. He sent his overseers to Quebec to hire one hundred labourers and to Kingston for further men to replace his workforce.47 Attempts to continue the work set the stage for conflict, though not the indiscriminate violence the press was tutoring citizens to associate with strikes. Some strikes involved little, if any, violence. Although he claimed to have looked very hard, Dr Jarrow could find no instances of “outrage” during the first week of the 1843 Marshville strike of fifteen hundred labourers along the Welland. In another large strike on the Welland the following summer, the St Catharines Journal reported there were no riotous disturbances.48 But protecting jobs could prove a violent business, particularly when surplus labourers offered a ready supply of potential strikebreakers and contractors went the extra miles to find replacement workers. Their sheer numbers meant strikers presented a formidable body whose presence at strategic points and marching en masse or patrolling in organized groups gave would-be strikebreakers pause for thought, particularly given that the assembled strikers were usually well armed with bludgeons, firearms, and the picks and shovels of their work. Any who required clearer warnings of the consequences of attempting to work found them in death threats posted along the work. Those who did not respond to written and verbal threats were driven off the site, frequently pursued to their shanties, and encouraged to leave the area. Men who turned out to work in sufficient numbers might respond in kind, chasing strikers off or standing their ground to fight, though contractors and government officials argued that even when those willing to work were in the majority they usually were intimidated from doing so. Strikers applied maximum pressure by targeting foremen, contractors, and their property. This was particularly true in work stoppages prompted by lost wages when tactics came closest to the “riots” and “lawless exploits” described in press and official correspondence and could extend to threats to destroy the work itself and any traffic passing through the canals or along the rails. This fits the broader pattern uncovered for the antebellum United States, where the loss of wages accounted for a significant proportion of the violence related to strikes.49 On the European and North American, Police Magistrate Scoullar assured the government that what he considered the unusual degree of restlessness and violence on one section of the railway during the winter of 1858–9 was prompted by concerns over late and potentially lost wages. He was confident it would subside if the new contractor scheduled to take over operations proved more punctual in paying

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wages.50 In the less violent strikes over wage rates, foremen and other supervisory personnel were still targets, intimidated into lying low, leaving the area, or openly demonstrating their support by patrolling with gangs of strikers. On the Welland, James McCloud, foreman for Thompson and Company at Turney’s quarry, gave a firsthand report of being warned during a September 1844 strike to “attend to patrol with the mob” or get off the work.51 Attacks on contractors’ property focused on items necessary to the work, from wheelbarrows to railway cars, though the motivation in destroying property frequently went beyond the immediate desire to hold up the work during one strike and was a deliberate targeting of machinery which threatened to erode job opportunities, as the situation on the Welland in the 1840s illustrates. Here, running parallel to strikes, canallers repeatedly threatened to burn the dredging machinery Carmichael was bringing from Buffalo because it would reduce the number of labourers required. Power took this threat seriously enough to recommend speeding up expansion of other sections in order to decrease the number of labourers at the Deep Cut, the “headquarters” of those agitating for destruction of the dredge.52 The Chats and Junction in the following decade provide clear examples of a similar two-pronged campaign against machinery. Here the Canadiens and Anglo-Celts, many of them local farmer-lumbermen, mounted a particularly aggressive attack on contractors’ plant and machinery, including cutting down derricks and blowing up one of the powder magazines. Superintendent Gallwey on the Chats argued that the attacks went beyond the vandalism which often accompanied strikes and were part of the labourers’ resistance to “all Labor saving machinery” which they perceived as a threat to their own power: “[T]he determination of the people here (on the Works) appears to be to destroy all the machinery etc.” Gallwey warned that given this general attitude, damage to machinery, magazines, and the works was “likely to be very great.”53 Also from the Chats came allegations that strikers attacked the buildings and horses of the contractor. On the evening of one mass walkout the contractor’s barn and stables were torched and one horse killed in the blaze. Dramatic prelude to the strike or coincidence? Many in the vicinity believed it was the latter and thought the labourers were being unjustly accused. According to one government official, “Public Opinion in the area” held that the labourers were not responsible. Far from setting the fire, they had struggled to save the horses and had submitted a petition to contractor McDonell denying that a labourer would take such action. For the

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real culprits, the contractor was advised to look to his own officials who used open candles in the barn and to the local children who hid there to smoke tobacco.54 Contractors who appealed for protection of strikebreakers and their property had good reason to expect armed intervention by the state. In British North America the law appeared ambiguous as to the legality of combinations of workers. Intersection of common law and criminal statute in the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia left room for conflicting judicial decisions in this area and remains the subject of debate among legal historians. However, a primary advisor on labour relations to the Board of Works for the Canadas was unequivocal in declaring the labourers’ combinations illegal, and in this was representative of others involved in controlling labour on the canals. This was also the clear message presented to the government and the labourers by the commissioners investigating disturbances on the Lachine and Beauharnois. Their 1843 report concluded that the stipendiary magistrate appointed for the Beauharnois, on learning of the plans for a general strike, had been remiss in not impressing on the labourers “the illegality of all combinations of that nature and the punishment reserved for all those, who would dare to resort to such violations of the law.”55 Moreover, little ambiguity surrounded the contractors’ right to continue operations during a strike. Contractors enjoyed widespread support among newspaper editors and the government, courts, and state law enforcement officers, who shared a general belief that strikers who interfered with those continuing work were, at best, acting outside the law and, at worst, “evil.”56 They invited criminal charges for a wide range of activities, not necessarily violent. Men on the ground like superintendent Power might decry the low wages which pushed families to destitution, but their overriding responsibility was to continue the work, and even he could not condone any action which disrupted operations. As one scholar has argued, lack of clarity in this area of the law may have encouraged a legal zone of toleration of trade unions and strikes, which reflected a social zone of toleration evolving prior to Confederation, though strikes by canallers did not fall within that zone.57 Even had they, most meaningful action towards achieving their goals left strikers liable to prosecution. At the heart of official efforts to protect strikebreakers was the belief that most labourers would be content to accept the wages and conditions offered if they were properly instructed concerning their responsibilities to their employers, the government, and God and if the few troublemakers could be weeded out. The Board of Works

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was also attuned to the argument that any labour problems contractors were experiencing would have a negative impact on the government. With all this in mind, board supervisory personnel adopted a multi-pronged approach to heading off and confronting trouble. As part of its program of educating labourers, it encouraged lectures and impromptu speeches from board officials and officers of the law concerning the appropriate relationship between employer and employee and in some circumstances – in the wake of the 1843 Lachine strikes, for example – printed and distributed among canallers relevant sections from the law relating to combinations. It also worked openly with contractors to craft and provide necessary manpower and funding for stratagems such as the abortive attempt to force all workers to swear an oath to keep the peace and surrender any weapons and the more successful system of blacklisting. Collaborating with contractors, the board helped to generate, maintain, and enforce a blacklist of the “evil-disposed,” such as Patrick Mitchell, who was to be denied employment in any capacity along the canal system. The list could at times be bolstered by more than two dozen names on one worksite, as was the case following a series of labour disputes on the Lachine in the opening months of 1843, when thirty individuals were added to the number of those already barred from public works in the Canadas.58 The board also threw the resources of the state into policing. In 1843 it took the initiative in creating a constabulary to serve along the Welland, and during 1843 and 1844 from ten to twenty constables were on duty at any one time, their numbers diminishing as the workforce decreased after 1845. The board also wasted no time in creating an armed constabulary of twenty-two officers on the Williamsburg Canals under the command of Captain Wetherall, and in the wake of the labour unrest on the Lachine and Beauharnois, it reinforced its commitment to routine policing of the canals in Lower Canada. The 1845 Act for the Preservation of the Peace near Public Works committed the state more deeply to enforcement of the law through mounted police stationed on the public works wherever the government considered them necessary, not on a piecemeal basis as had been the case to that point.59 At a time when even the larger communities in the Canadas, along with most communities in North America, still relied on only a few constables working under the direction of a magistrate, the size of these police forces, frequently reaching over twenty officers on any one canal, demonstrated the government’s commitment to labour control. The board also set out a model for state intervention in labour unrest which would be emulated, though hard to match, in subsequent decades.

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Canal police forces worked closely with existing magistrates, whose responsibility it was to ensure the police acted within the law, though official investigation into the conduct of the Welland Canal force revealed that magistrates did not always keep constables from abusing their powers, exceeding their authority, operating outside the law, and increasing sectarian tensions by expressing open hostility to Catholicism.60 Along the Williamsburg Canals inhabitants provided additional details of mounted police who, far from generating respect for the law, made fools of it and themselves and endangered local citizens by carrying out their responsibilities recklessly and while drunk. Inhabitants of Williamsburg Township petitioned the governor general concerning the conduct of Captain James MacDonald and his men during a circus at Mariatown, when “through the misconduct of the police on their duty two persons have been maltreated and abused cut with swords and stabbed, taken prisoners and escorted to the police office that all this abuse was committed by having the constables in a state of intoxication on their duty when the Magistrate who commanded them was so drunk that he fell out of a cart. A pretty representative is Mr. MacDonald.”61 Their conduct provoked the priest on the canal to warn the labourers: “They are like a parcel of wolves and roaring mad lions seeking the opportunity of shooting you like dogs and all they want is the chance in the name of God leave those public works.”62 While the forces fulfilled various functions, in the eyes of the Board of Works their primary purpose was to ensure completion of the works within the scheduled time. Even protection of contractors from higher wages was not in itself sufficient reason for increasing the size of one of the forces. When, in December 1845, Power asked for accommodation for a superintendent of police at the Welland Junction, the board answered that the old entrance lock was the only place where a strong force was necessary, since no combination of labourers for wages on the other works could delay the opening of the navigation, “the paramount object in view.” A later communication expressed more forcefully the board’s general approach to funding police forces, stating that the only circumstances under which the expense of keeping the peace could be justified were those in which the availability of the canals to trade was in jeopardy. Despite this apparently strict criterion for funding police, the board usually intervened to protect strikebreakers, probably because any strike threatened to delay opening of the navigation in the long, if not the short, term. Indeed, in their 1843 report to the legislature, the commissioners argued that it was part of their responsibility to help contractors meet deadlines by providing

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adequate protection to those labourers willing to work during a strike. In meeting this responsibility the board at times hired as many as sixteen extra men on a temporary basis. When it was a question of getting the canals open for navigation, the government appears to have been willing to go to almost any lengths to continue the work. In the winter of 1845, the governor general finally gave Power the authority to hire whatever number of constables it would take to ensure completion of construction by spring.63 In the following decade, no special force was created for either the Junction or the Chats Canal; perhaps the expense did not appear warranted, given the number of labourers employed at any one time and the relatively sparsely settled area of the country in which the projects were located. That left policing to local magistrates. Magistrate Cook, responsible for the area around the Junction, complained that he could not provide the additional time and money necessary to respond to disturbances on the canal, particularly since he could not afford the help of special constables. Were the department able to help cover his expenses and the cost of a sufficient number of special constables, he would do his best to maintain the peace. Inhabitants along the canal also believed they were in need of protection from the disturbances in their immediate area and requested appointment of a stipendiary magistrate and police force. Superintendent Page advised the department that a stipendiary magistrate and what he called “a sort of reserve police,” along the lines suggested by Magistrate Cook, might ultimately be required, but it does not appear to have been created.64 On the European and North American Railway, the special railway police force created by the New Brunswick government included in its mandate protection of the work and those who wished to continue work during a strike. It expanded from an initial four permanent constables to nine by the end of the first year, and the head of the force argued that more were always needed, particularly on the thirty-two miles between Sussex and Salisbury, where the “facilities for the protection of the settlers [were] anything but good.”65 The force was large enough, however, to protect those labourers who wished to return to work when the contractor refused to accede to strikers’ demands in May 1858, and all of the labourers were soon back on the job.66 The force was also buttressed by twenty special constables drawn from contractors and their foremen. On the canals of the Canadas in the 1840s such direct involvement of employers in law enforcement had been questioned as undermining the image of the law as an impartial force and perhaps promoting trouble as much as controlling it. But questions of image and propriety aside, cloaking contractors with the

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authority of the law had the advantage of drawing into law enforcement men with the most immediate interest in order on the public works and the type of relationship with labourers which allowed them to exact their own harsh forms of punishment such as docking pay, firing, and blacklisting.67 A special constabulary was not created to police the Nova Scotia Railway, though the desirability of such a force was debated in the press. Both those papers critical of government officials and those politicians most directly responsible for prosecuting the work argued that all along the line the state of lawlessness had reached such extreme proportions that it would be difficult to find men willing to accept the role: “Constables come out here and go home scared to death.”68 The result? Only “a mad fool” would take a position as railway magistrate in Nova Scotia.69 Roman Catholic priests provided invaluable assistance to constables and magistrates along the St Lawrence canal system in the 1840s. Referred to as “moral” or “spiritual” agents, they were in reality police agents, paid out of the Board of Works’ police budget, and stationed among canallers with a commission to preserve “peace and order” by employing the ultimate threat – hell. They were of limited value in controlling confrontations between Orange and Green. Indeed, they were suspected of encouraging them. Their effectiveness in stopping factional fights was also limited, at least on the Welland, where Reverend McDonagh was suspected of harbouring sectional sentiments. Their most important function was to prevent or break strikes by admonishing labourers to give up their “illegal” combinations and return to work, to show “that the Gospel has a more salutary effect than bayonets.” Priests were not insensitive to the suffering of their charges and argued the canallers’ case with government officials, contractors, and civil and military authorities. On the Williamsburg Canals, Reverend Clarke’s criticism of the treatment of labourers became such an embarrassment to the government that he was shipped back to Ireland, apparently for health reasons. But at the same time that priests were protesting conditions along the canals, they were devoting their energy to subverting the protests of their parishioners. On the Welland, McDonagh fulfilled this function so successfully that the superintendent on the Welland told the board he knew of “no one whose services could have been so efficient.” In this respect he was a model of the Catholic priests who, on canal and railway construction sites throughout North America, challenged labourers to bear their burdens in obedience to God and man. Uniquely situated as moral and spiritual counsellors to the labourers and their families and possessing intimate knowledge of their lives and communities, priests

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were invaluable as advisors, some as informers, on labour unrest, and as advocates of peace and harmony in the workplace.70 No doubt those who ministered to the labourers on the Nova Scotia and European and North American Railways were also vigilant in counselling obedience to the law. Protestant clergy, too, would have embraced this as part of their general ministry to the workers and their families. Troops became the ultimate defenders of the peace during strikes in the 1840s, turning out from their permanent headquarters at the call of civil authorities and for temporary postings at trouble spots for a few hours, days, or weeks. Longer postings necessitated temporary barracks such as those constructed at Broad Creek and Marshville in the fall of 1842. No troops were posted on either the Cornwall or Williamsburg, despite the requests of contractors and inhabitants. Detachments in the vicinity, however, were readily available for temporary postings. With a long tradition of military intervention in civil disturbances both in Britain and British North America, the use of troops was a natural response to the inadequacies of the civil powers, and they were deemed crucial to ending disturbances quickly and stopping the escalation of dangerous situations.71 Their presence during a confrontation increased the risk of needlessly sacrificing innocent lives. In the bloodiest encounter with the military, during a strike on the Beauharnois in the summer of 1843, at least eight strikers were killed and many more seriously injured when troops opened fire on labourers, many of whom were attempting to flee. The Montreal Transcript applauded this “efficient” method of dealing with labour unrest, much preferable to what it saw as the conciliatory approach too often adopted by contractors and government.72 It argued that had the government not “temporized” and attempted to placate strikers on the Lachine the previous winter, but had instead responded with a show of force, the situation on the Beauharnois would not have spiralled out of control. Others were less easily reconciled to the loss of life. A Patriote and then a Reformer and representative in the Assembly for Portneuf then Quebec City, Thomas Aylwin reminded the Legislature during debate over the best means to control canallers that mistakes made by constables could usually be remedied and a man wrongfully incarcerated returned to his family: “[W]hen, however, the military are called out the soldier is obliged to do his duty, and men are shot down who perhaps … are quite as unwilling to break the peace as any man in the world.” Troops were called in and “bloody murders were committed.” Labourers were “shot, and cut down, and driven into the water and drowned.”73

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Despite reservations about their use, troops were readily available to back up the civil authorities and acted effectively as a preventive force. Before special detachments were posted along the Welland, the governor general explicitly instructed magistrates to use the troops in a preventive capacity, calling them out if “there should be any reason to fear a breach of the Peace, with which the civil power would be inadequate to deal.”74 Magistrates gave the broadest possible interpretation to the phrase “any reason to fear” and repeatedly called in the military when there had been merely verbal threats of trouble. When a large number of unemployed labourers appeared “ripe for mischief ” or when strikers seemed likely to harass the strikebreakers, magistrates requisitioned troops.75 They used the troops to such an extent that they provoked the only significant opposition to military intervention in civil affairs – opposition from the military itself. Both on-the-spot commanders and high-ranking military officials complained that troops were being “harassed” by the magistrates, that the requisitions for aid were “extremely irregular,” and that the troops were marching about the frontier on the whim of alarmists.76 After the provincial secretary ruled that commanders must respond to all requisitions, even the grumbling stopped. Particularly on the Welland, regular troops were kept patrolling the canal areas in apprehension of disturbances, looking for trouble, as Colonel Elliott put it. In the following decade, magistrates on at least two occasions requested the assistance of the Enrolled Pensioners stationed at Ottawa to help with disturbances on the Chats. During the labour unrest in February 1856 an officer and twenty Pensioners responded and were stationed on the canal primarily to protect the machinery of the contractor; two months later, the request for troops appears to have been denied, and, instead, officials in the Department of Public Works were advised to send sufficient money to pay the workforce.77 Troops were closer to hand for disturbances on the Junction, though the extent of their deployment is unclear. They were used on the Nova Scotia Railway to assist in the pursuit and apprehension of labourers during disturbances, fulfilling the role the special stipendiary force played on the European and North American Railway.78 In the face of the moral suasion and armed intervention brought to bear by agents of the state, how did these members of a fluid labour force, engaged in casual, seasonal work, achieve the solidarity necessary to mount aggressive strike action? The basis for cohesion necessarily changed over the two decades at mid-century as the workforce became increasingly heterogeneous. During the 1840s the predominance of Irish Catholics on the construction sites focused observers’

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attention on ethno-religious cohesion and shared traditions and cultural forms capable of facilitating group action. Bonds which allowed Irish Catholics to close ranks and resist the intrusion of other ethnic and ethno-religious groups could become a powerful source of cohesion. Even the antagonistic relationship between the factions of Cork and Connaught could be subordinated to a common front of Irish labourers against employers and would-be strikebreakers. During a major ten-day strike at Marshville on the Welland in 1843, a government investigator reported that the factions were united peacefully to resist continuation of the work. Similarly, in the unusually welldocumented Lachine strike of 1843, the labourers themselves stated this clearly. Corkmen and Connaughtmen issued joint petitions and posted notices along the works, warning employers and would-be strikebreakers that they were not simply all canallers, they were “all Irishmen.” Unity between the factions was fragile but possible.79 A shared ethnoculture provided concrete aid in organization. At least in the summer of 1844 on the Welland, leadership in anti-Orange demonstrations overlapped with leadership in labour organization. During this season of frequent strikes, as many as one thousand labourers assembled for mass meetings. The authorities could not discover what transpired at these meetings, since admittance was restricted to those who knew the password; a military officer, however, was able to observe one meeting at a distance. Ensign Gaele reported witnessing a collective decision-making process in which those present discussed, voted on, and passed resolutions. He drew particular attention to the participation of a man “who appeared to be their leader,” a well-spoken individual of great influence, the same individual who had ridden at the head of the canallers on their march to intercept the Orangemen at Niagara Falls.80 Even had he been admitted to the meeting, it is unlikely Officer Gaele would have been able to understand the proceedings. The labourers’ ability to communicate in Gaelic was a powerful force for unity and an obstacle to those attempting to anticipate their actions.81 Central to Irish labourers’ strike activity were the secret societies which flourished in nineteenth-century Ireland and became important vehicles for organizing labour protest among Irish workers in North America, notably the Molly Maguires of the Pennsylvania coalfields and the miners of Butte, Montana, Division 1 of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, the centuries-old order around which rebels united in Ireland. These organizations offered the secrecy and sophistication necessary to sustained resistance in workplace struggles as well as immediate and tangible collective insurance in death and

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against illness and injury, and they were well suited to labour organization in the New World.82 At a time when those active in strikes were subject to prosecution, immediate dismissal, and blacklisting, oath-bound societies offered protection from the law and the reprisals of employers, binding labourers to be faithful to each other, ensuring solidarity and commitment in united action, and enforcing sanctions against any who betrayed his fellows. In addition, societies operated through an efficient chain of communication and command which allowed for tactics to be carefully formulated and executed. They were valuable among canal and railway labourers in the United States.83 There, officials speculated that the efficiency and rapidity with which they allowed members to communicate might be responsible not simply for organizing strikes on individual sites but for coordinating simultaneous work stoppages across a number of projects. Faced with strikes among construction labourers on the Central Rail Road in Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, the Cumberland Civilian, newspaper for a west Maryland town watching anxiously as construction crews approached, published a series of articles which warned of widespread secret organization among the Irish across multiple projects: [W]e should not be surprised if there was concert of action among the laborers on the public works throughout the United States, in reference to this subject. It is a well known fact that they employ confidential agents, through whom they communicate, secretly, with operatives engaged on another section, or even in another state. The order comes, and it must be obeyed, or else there is a riot, and the mandate is thus carried out perforce. – This is the common history of such transactions.84 The tone is alarmist, but in that respect represents contemporaries’ perceptions of the danger posed by Irish cohesion and the forms it took. Within the Canadas, government officials also tied secret societies to strikes. Investigation into disturbances on the Beauharnois found sufficient evidence to conclude that secret societies were the means by which the canallers organized their strikes. But neither government officials nor contractors were able to break through the labourers’ secrecy and uncover details concerning the operation of the societies. Similarly, despite his intimate knowledge of the canallers’ personal lives and the power of the confessional, Reverend McDonagh could only offer the authorities the names of two societies operating along the Welland – the Shamrock and the Hibernian. He could provide no

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information as to how they functioned, whether there were a number of small societies or a few large ones, or whether all labourers or only a segment of the canallers belonged to them. And he “couldn’t break them.”85 Deep roots and a resilience based on their proven ability to adapt over time and place made secret societies formidable and tied Irish labourers to a long tradition of militant opposition to employers in the Old World and a growing tradition in the new. Those which flourished in Dublin throughout the first half of the nineteenth century were feared by moderates in the Irish nationalist movement because of their aggressive pursuit of working class interests. During the same period, the agrarian secret societies of the southern Irish countryside primarily organized agricultural labourers and cottiers around issues such as rising conacre rents and potato prices. Although the ruling class of Britain and Ireland insisted that agrarian societies were essentially sectarian, these societies were, in fact, the instruments of class action, which at times united Protestant and Catholic labourers in a common cause.86 This cultural legacy of united opposition to landlords and employers equipped peasant labourers of Southern Ireland with a belief system and values necessary to effective united action in the workplace. Likely only a few in their number shared a belief system which included a political critique of society demanding fundamental change in the relationship between labour and capital. Although Chartist and Irish nationalist leaders worked closely together in the mid-nineteenth century, none of the varied radical strains of Chartism made significant inroads in Ireland, which suggests that the Irish labourers may not have seen their interests as irreconcilable to the interests of capital.87 But if they had not embraced a theoretical framework within which to understand the conflict of capital and labour, through experience many Irish peasant labourers had acquired sensitivity to exploitation and a keen suspicion of employers. They brought to the New World the belief that their interests were in conflict with their employers’ interests. As a magistrate with experience in meeting labour unrest along the canals of Upper and Lower Canada explained to the Board of Works: They look on a Contractor as they view the “Middle Man” of their own Country, as a grasping, money making person, who has made a good bargain with the Board of Works for labour to be performed; and they see, or imagine they see, an attempt to improve that bargain at their expense ... such is the feeling of the people, that they

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cannot divest themselves of the feeling that they are being imposed on if the contractor has an interest in the transaction.88 As long as Irish Catholics were dominant or present in sufficient numbers, this spirit of collective resistance could provide a formidable basis for action in the workplace. But moving into the 1850s it cannot go very far in explaining the collective action among the much more heterogeneous workforce on public works. What pulled together groups with recent and continuing antipathy towards each other both in workplaces and other contexts? Without records of the experiences and expectations of individuals and groups, questions and speculation about past experience and potential have to serve. The German labourers, for example, were willing to fight for work, but for what else, and what did their fight look like? Many came from areas in the old country inflamed by the agrarian protests which precipitated abolition of serfdom and formed one part of the Germanic revolutions of 1848. Within the New World they built new traditions of militant workplace action, most obvious among the skilled German workers but including participation of the unskilled in strikes on American canals and railways and among other segments of the unskilled workforce. In this broader history as workers they demonstrated the importance of ethnic identification both to group solidarity and to confrontations with other groups in the multiethnic labour force in North America. At the same time, radicals within their midst, some political refugees, were committed to the ideal of a national labour federation which could unite workers regardless of nationality or occupation.89 Though little is known about their role in the conflicts on the European and North American Railway and the Junction Canal, nothing suggests they would have been reluctant to join in pursuit of higher wages. However, relatively few in number and driven from the former and weakened and sick on the latter, their impact remains unclear. Like the German immigrants, many English and Scottish immigrants came from regions of aggressive land clearance. Revived studies of agrarian resistance suggest that historians may have underestimated the extent to which these immigrants had experienced firsthand the activities of Captain Swing and informally organized collective action.90 By the 1850s increasing numbers were also bringing to British North America a history of immiseration and conflict in other sectors of the economy. Though their history included violent clashes among ethnic groups, most notably between Irish on the one hand and English and Scots on the other, in some regions and sectors of the economy common workplace interests at times trumped

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ethnic hostilities. Even on railway construction sites, where hostilities between ethnic groups had reached a peak, instances of unity were also evident. Those English and Scots who arrived on public works from the United States may also have brought experience in collective action, though their experience, like that of individuals coming to public works from within British North America, has proved impossible to trace. Similarly, Canadiens had their own histories of struggle in a variety of workplaces and localities, significantly in the lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley and Michigan, in longshoring and shipbuilding, and in the mills of New England. They participated in the strike waves on those American construction sites on which they found work and, despite their small numbers on projects in British North America in the 1840s, proved far from acquiescent, most notably when they took the initiative in the six-week confrontation with contractors leading into the bloody encounter with British troops in July 1843.91 In the following decade, their militance on the Chats, in particular, was crucial to sustaining the running conflict over supervision and wages. Among all of these workers, given their seasonal, geographic, and occupational mobility, it is reasonable to assume cross-fertilization, militance in one work setting feeding into militance in another and preparing the ground for collective action. Strikes on sites such as the Chats and Junction Canals, where English, Scots, Irish, and Canadiens combined, likely benefited from the transfer of experience from lumbering, the docks, shipbuilding, and the range of occupations in rural communities. The possibility and potential of such transfers can only be ignored by assuming that individuals segmented and compartmentalized their work experiences according to occupation and location. Was that likely? More likely they carried over patterns of thought and action which had served them well or which they still hoped to turn to their advantage. Still, examples from the Nova Scotia Railway underline the difficulty in bringing together the experiences of different groups to build effective united action in any one place. On a cutting near Elmsdale, where a large proportion of the labourers were Irish and the rest English and Scots from various counties of Nova Scotia, labourers approached the contractor with a demand for a wage increase. When the contractor refused, the English and Scots were prepared to return to work at the same rate; the Irish were not. They drove the English and Scots into the woods and threatened to keep all other workers off the line. Their warning to the contractor’s staff was unambiguous: if more labourers were brought in they would “kill them” before they would allow them on the job.92 In this

D ef ining a C om mu n it y of Inte re st s  2 4 5

confrontation, strikers and potential strikebreakers were divided along ethnic lines, at least in the minds of the contractor and, if the contractor is to be believed, in the minds of the Irish labourers. A similar situation was reported during a strike on the St Croix section of the Windsor Branch of the Nova Scotia Railway. A fight between six Scots and seven Irishmen grew into a major confrontation. Peace was temporarily restored by the suspension of work and the promise of one of the supervisory staff that all the Scots would be fired. But contractor Cameron came up with another resolution to the problem, what the local press considered a “masterly stroke of financial policy”: he agreed to take back all the men, but only at a rate reduction of 6d. per day. That was the end of the strike.93 Not in Britain, continental Europe, the United States, British North America, or the Antipodean colonies did canal or railway labourers develop formal trade unions until much later in the century. Consequently, in comparison with the activities of workers in the few trade unions which existed in the mid-nineteenth century, their direct action appears spontaneous and unscripted. But when situated within the international array of informal collective action through much of the nineteenth century, canal and railway labourers’ protests and strikes become part of the broader international pattern of collective resistance, well documented by studies which have pushed past boundaries of nation, race, ethnic group, gender, and occupation to map multiple forms of resistance well adapted to various types of workplace, labour force, and political and economic configurations. These range from the actions of slaves, the indentured, convicts, and those labouring under military discipline or the exactions of ship masters, to rural resistance, and to the wide array of workers whose actions confronted employers, government officials, and agents of the state actively hostile to worker organizations.94 These studies have underlined the extent to which resistance was normative and have taken the pressure off older attempts to evaluate collective action according to the predilections of particular groups, or to pinpoint labour protest on a continuum progressing from primitive or spontaneous to sophisticated and organized. In so doing they have helped to narrow the distance between the labour history of Europe and North America and that of other continents.95 They have also become increasingly sensitive to the importance of understanding connections between the collective activity of workers formally organized in a union or association and action which had no apparent direct connection to formal organization. In the process they have revealed just how thin – and in important respects arbitrary – the line between organized and unorganized and formal and

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informal activity may have been. They have demonstrated the halting beginnings and brief lives of many formal organizations of workers in the nineteenth century and the many repeated failed attempts at organization; and they have uncovered the remarkable strength and solidarity which sustained much informal collective action.96 As studies of transnational labour resistance expand they will produce a richer sense of what different groups and individuals brought from their own histories and how they wove their experiences into a shared history of collective action, combining across linguistic, religious, ethnic, gendered, and national divides. But much of that work will continue to depend on extrapolating from generalizations concerning the origin and migration paths of groups within which individuals remain anonymous. For the labourers studied here only generalizations are possible, and they speak more to possibilities than to probabilities. The intensity of factional fighting among the Irish threatened and at times actively undermined their unity against contractors. At other times their broader shared ethnoculture provided the basis and the organizational vehicle, in the form of secret societies, for sustained collective action in the workplace. That shared ethnoculture could divide Irish labourers against other ethnic groups – Canadiens, Germans, English, and Scots – and work against broader unity with any who were not Irish, evidenced most clearly on the canals of the 1840s and less clearly on the Atlantic colonial railways of the 1850s. Then again, the Junction and Chats Canals were sites of aggressive strike action which brought ethnically diverse groups together. More was at play here than sharply defined ethnic cohesion and division. Taken together, the manifestations of militance on the public works at mid-century provide a checkered pattern of labourers’ response to particular configurations of power on the ground. Fluctuations in the labour market, locally and extending as far as the contractors’ reach, were major determinants of relative power, restricting or expanding a contractor’s options in the face of a strike and determining, in part, whether labourers saw an advantage or necessity to dividing against each other. The composition of the workforce also shaped action; in some instances it made available well-oiled mechanisms to sustain cohesion and in others increased the potential for division among openly or potentially hostile groups; at times it likely included men whose strong local roots strengthened community support and at others likely brought together men uniquely experienced in organizing protest. Location and season mattered. So did the availability and willingness of police and military to intervene to protect contractors and strikebreakers or, in rare circumstances, the inclination of government

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representatives to intercede on the labourers’ behalf. Labourers did the calculations, found a contractor unusually vulnerable or his actions insupportably egregious, or they found their own need acute. Multiple shifting variables determined labourers’ workplace militance at specific times and places. Moving into the 1870s, chapter 8 demonstrates that the variables shaping labourers’ actions remained much the same and the pattern of response still checkered. But in their calculations labourers appear to have identified a broader basis for unity. That unity was manifest not just in collective workplace action by members of a heterogeneous workforce but also in what the labourers considered to be the beginnings of formal organizations. That unity also expanded to include members of other organized labour groups who not only provided advice and material assistance but even joined with the labourers in strike action.

8

Labour Unity and Militance on Public Works through the 1870s

There is a time and place for everything and with the supply of labour what it is, this isn’t the time or the place. Thorold Post, 28 April 1876 As labourers on John Brown’s section of the Welland planned a strike for 1 May 1876, the Thorold Post warned against what could only be a “suicidal” course of action, given the state of the labour market. Frequently sympathetic to strikes by men working on the Welland, provided they stayed within the law, the Post cautioned the labourers to obey a higher law which they challenged at their peril, the law of supply and demand: there is “a time and place for everything and with the supply of labour what it is, this isn’t the time or the place.”1 The labourers ignored the warning and went ahead with their plans. An organizational meeting of the Labourers Union chose delegates to present contractor Brown with their demands: $1.37 for labourers employed at routine tasks and $1.50 for those working the hard rock. Armed with Brown’s promise that he would accede to their terms if the other contractors did likewise, the union members proceeded down the works appealing to the men on other sections to unite in their venture. Approximately 450 strikers marched to Queenston, where the labourers dropped their tools and climbed out of the pits, becoming not only part of the strike but part of a new branch of the Labourers Union, 250 men strong. Two days later, close to six hundred men rallied and marched down the line of the new canal to Port Dalhousie, where labourers also created a branch of the union, bringing the total membership in their organization to roughly 750 men, a diverse 248

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group of Protestant and Catholic Anglo-Celts, Germans, Swedes, French Canadians, possibly Italians, and a mix of local men and those from a distance.2 This all-too-brief description of a labourers’ organization in the making suggests important ways in which labour militance on public works in the 1870s differed from that of earlier decades. Analysis of this militance, of what seemed possible and reasonable to labourers on at least three major projects, reveals significant changes in the nature of their relationships among themselves, with others in the workplace, with citizens in the area, and with the organized labour movement. The Grenville, Lachine, and Welland Canals brought together diverse ethnic groups in impressive demonstrations of unity which halted progress on multiple sections of the work, on the Lachine and Welland uniting as many as six hundred to one thousand labourers. The Lachine and Welland also provide evidence of the creation and functioning of what the men considered to be labourers’ unions, with a structure on the Lachine which accommodated the two major language groups on the works, the English-speaking and French-­ speaking. On the Welland labourers reached out to create united strike action with other groups in the workplace, most notably with teamsters and with the stonecutters’ union waging its own battle with contractors throughout the decade. All this raises questions about the ways in which their actions intersected with the broader labour turbulence of the 1870s. In the face of their unusually large and sometimes successful strike action, observers speculated and worried about the influence of labour agitators and radical ideas among the labourers, about socialists and communists promoting unrest in communities throughout North America, and specifically about Communards and Molly Maguires on the public works. The most visible influence on the workers, however, were representatives of the two major political parties reaching out to offer their counsel and speak for the labourers, though not without resistance from some in their number not willing to trust the intervention of politicians. Analysis of the labourers’ militance begins with an overview of their strike action through the decade: the early strikes for higher wages on the Intercolonial which quickly turned into demands for lost wages, and the clearer pattern of strikes on the canals, where spectacular successes on the Grenville at the beginning of the decade were followed by the more modest gains of the depression years on the Lachine and Welland. Their strikes concerned wage rates, payment in truck, working hours, and unsafe working conditions but indicate little tension around the issues of supervision and supervisory personnel and

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machinery which had been important in earlier decades. Analysis of those involved in strikes reveals primarily French Canadian, English, Scots, and Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, on the Lachine Canal; and on the Welland, a similar ethnic mix, though with fewer French Canadians and a larger presence of Swedes and Germans and possibly Italians. Though contractors continued to describe the workforce and strikers in terms of ethnicity, the importance of ethnic ties in planning and maintaining strike action is unclear. The identities of leaders and those most active in strikes are also unclear, and the outside advisors, or agitators as contractors and the press characterized them, are even more elusive, though the sources from which they might have been drawn were numerous, given the demonstrations of the unemployed and spectacular community-supported strikes throughout North America during the decade. The third section of the chapter explores the beginnings of unions among labourers on the Lachine and Welland and the joint strike action of labourers with teamsters and skilled workers on the Welland. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the uphill battle of the unskilled in a time of widespread unemployment and against contractors whose interests overlapped with the government’s desire to complete public transportation projects as cheaply and quickly as possible. In light of legislative changes concerning unions and the definition of criminal activity related to strikes, the state’s intervention in strikes on public works appears more restrained in the 1870s; it did not create special police forces or station military units in barracks on worksites. However, when labourers attempted to keep strikebreakers off the works, provincial police were ready to arrest and magistrates to punish. When the new Dominion launched its massive public works program in the late 1860s, the labourers took the offensive on both the Intercolonial and the federal canal projects, engaging in various forms of collective action, primarily strikes for higher wages and to a lesser extent against wage reductions. A government official on the Intercolonial Railway stoically referred to the labour unrest he was facing as one of “the pleasantnesses of railroading,”3 but details concerning this unrest are disappointingly sketchy. Contractors and government officials made only vague references to demands for increases and their impact on prices and schedules. Partly attempts to justify cost overruns by falling back on the image of troublesome railway labourers, their comments offer little about the forms, goals, and success or failure of strike action, but they do suggest a struggle which put contractors on the defensive, threatening to drive costs well above the contract prices and at least 10–15 per cent above the federal government’s 1867

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projections of the cost of labour along the permanent way. Particularly in the initial seasons of construction the spotlight was captured by contractors’ failure to meet their payrolls, shifting the focus from how much labourers expected or demanded to whether they would be paid and indicating that however much was won in strikes likely profited them little. Patterns in strikes on the canals are more easily recreated, in part because they unfolded in the pages of newspapers servicing the more populous communities around canal construction sites and under the watchful eye of government officials pressed by the costly disruption to shipping which improvements necessitated. Those on the Grenville, Lachine, and Welland Canals for which the purpose is known are listed in table 8.1. Early in the 1870s, contractors already complaining about the cost of the unskilled in a tight labour market confronted labourers prepared to push that cost even higher. The pattern emerged early and dramatically on the Grenville, where labourers won a 100 per cent increase in wage rates from late 1871 through to the end of 1873.4 This reflected labourers’ sensitivity to the unique pressures faced by contractor Goodwin. Visits from representatives of the Department of Public Works and deputations of forwarders anxious about disruptions to commerce on the Ottawa River made it all too clear that construction had to be expedited, despite the cost of giving in to extraordinary wage demands.5 Contractors for the early sections on the Welland and Lachine in 1873 also lamented labourers’ demands, and any hopes that the beginning of depression would dampen their workforce’s enthusiasm to push up wages were only partially realized.6 As depression took hold, labourers’ demands and victories became more modest, but both canals were sites of aggressive strike activity, the contours of which reflected the seasonal nature of the work and the business cycles of the decade. Labourers attempted to maximize their bargaining power by striking consistently through the spring, when contractors geared up for five months of intense activity. Spring strikes also increased labourers’ flexibility, warmer weather bringing them the option to take to the road and “camp out without freezing” when searching for more remunerative or simply different employment. This inclination to go “on the tramp” could ease the press of men seeking work after lean winter months; it could also provide strikers a degree of independence in the knowledge that they could head for work elsewhere if a strike dragged on or ended badly. Thus, spring strikes became embedded in the industry, as in many others.7 After a wage increase in April 1874, labourers on the Welland at Thorold struck for a further increase

2 5 2   R oug h Work Table 8.1  Partial Listing of Strikes on the Grenville, Lachine, and Welland Canals, 1872–1881 Canal

When

Who

Why

Result

Grenville Grenville Grenville Grenville Lachine

Mar. 1872 June 1872 Oct. 1872 Sept. 1873 Sept. 1874

increased wages increased wages increased wages increased wages wages not paid

won won won won

Lachine

Jan. 1877

Lachine

Jan. 1877

Lachine Lachine

Jan. 1877 Dec. 1877

Lachine Lachine

Mar. 1878 Apr. 1878

labourers labourers labourers labourers labourers at Basins 450 labourers, Sec 4 400 labourers, Sec 4 labourers, Sec 5 1000 labourers, Sec 1–7, 9 labourers, Sec 1 labourers, Sec 8

Lachine Lachine

Sept. 1878 labourers Apr. 1879 labourers, Sec 3, 5, 6, 7 Apr. 1879 labourers May 1879 labourers, Sec 9 Sept. 1879 labourers July 1880 300 labourers, Sec 11 Aug. 1880 400 labourers, Sec 11 Sept. 1880 75 labourers, Aqueduct Mar. 1874 labourers May 1874 labourers, Thorold, with quarrymen and stonecutters June 1874 labourers, Sec 29, 32 May 1876 labourers, Sec 1 to 16 with quarrymen Mar. 1878 labourers, Port Robinson

Lachine Lachine Lachine Lachine Lachine Lachine Welland Welland

Welland Welland Welland

wages not paid increase $0.80 to $1.00 paid fortnightly in cash increase $0.80 to $1.00 increase $0.80, $0.90 to $1.00, cash fortnightly wages not paid $1.125 for 10 hrs., not $1.25 for 12 hrs. increased wages increase to $1.50

lost

won

cash and more work wages not paid increase to $1.50 increase $1.00 to $1.25

won $1.10

increase $1.10 to $1.25

won $1.15

compromise lost won

increase $0.80 to $1.25 increased wages increase $1.25 to $1.50, proportionate increase

compromise won $0.12½

increase $1.25 to $1.50 increased wages increase $0.90 / $1.00 to $1.25

won

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Canal

Welland Welland

Welland Welland Welland Welland

When

Who

labourers, Allanburg labourers, Port Colborne labourers, Humberstone labourers, Junction labourers, Welland May 1878 labourers, Port Colborne Mar. 1879 500 labourers, Port Colborne Mar. 1879 500 labourers, Humberstone Mar. 1879 labourers, Stonebridge April 1879 labourers Jan. 1880 labourers, Sec 1 May 1881 labourers, Sec 33 June 1881 labourers, Sec 33

Why

Result

increase $0.90 / $1.00 to $1.25 increase $0.90 / $1.00 to $1.25 increase $0.90 / $1.00 to $1.25 increase $0.90 / $1.00 to $1.25 increase $0.90 / $1.00 to $1.25 against reduction

won won won won $1.12½ lost

increase $1.00 to $1.25

lost

increase $1.00 to $1.25

lost

increase increased wages increase $1.00 to $1.25 increased wages increased wages

won won

Sources for Grenville: RG11, vol. 181, #21301, Goodwin to Braun, 1 Mar., 1872; #21310, Goodwin to Braun, 1 Mar. 1872; #21364, Goodwin to Braun, 2 Mar. 1872; #22682, Braun to Sippell, 4 May 1872; #23695, Goodwin to Braun, June 1872; vol. 182, #26154, McGillivray to Braun, 22 Oct. 1872; #28041, Goodwin to Braun, Jan. 1873; RG11, vol. 791, #21989, Braun to Sippell, 25 Sept. 1873. Sources for Lachine: RG11, vol. 177, #44234, Mackenzie, 12 Sept. 1874; vol. 473, #71442, Baillarge to Braun, 19 Dec. 1877; #71633, Baillarge to Braun, 29 Dec. 1877; vol. 476, #81355, #81370, Sippell to Braun, 28 Apr. 1879; #81371, Davis & Sons to Braun, 28 Apr. 1879; #82143, Jones to Braun, 30 May 1879; RG43, vol. 937, #88969, Davis to Secretary Dept Rlwys & Canals, 28 Aug. 1880; La Minerve, Dec. 1877 to Jan. 1878; 29 Sept. 1879; Montreal Star, 6, 8, 22, 23 Jan. 1877; 18 to 24 Jan. 1878; 29 Mar., 10 Apr., 23 Sept. 1878; 28, 29 Apr. 1879; 27 July, 27, 28 Aug., 1 Sept. 1880. Sources for Welland: RG11, vol.162, #40971, Brown, Manning & Ginty, Cairns Morse Hart & Co. to Mackenzie, public works minister, 7 May 1874; vol. 452. # 59541, contractors on sections 1 to 16 on Welland to Mackenzie, 17 May 1876; RG43, vol. 792, #91785, Bannerman & Co. to Tupper, 20 June 1881: Globe, 4 Mar. 1878; Thorold Post, 5 May 1876; Welland Tribune, 14 May, 4 June 1874; 1, 8 Mar., 7 May 1878; Mar., Apr. 1879, 9 Jan. 1880.

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from $1.25 to $1.50 per day. Contractors settled for a $0.12½ rise. The following month, labourers and teamsters on Sections 29 and 32 of the Welland between the Junction and Ramey’s also struck for a $0.25 increase which would have brought labourers’ wages to $1.50, had they been successful.8 The pattern continued even as depression deepened. The May 1 strike in 1876 brought work along the entire Welland to a halt just as contractors were accelerating the pace, and two years later, in March 1878, labourers from Port Colborne to Allanburg demanded a uniform rate of $1.25 on all sections, regardless of whether contractors had been paying $0.90 or $1.00, a demand all but those at Welland won, though the labourers at the Junction appear to have gained an initial increase to $1.12. Again, the following March brought demands for an increase to $1.25, though this time the strike included only labourers at Port Colborne and Humberstone, where most work remained to be done, and this time the labourers lost.9 During the same years on the Lachine labourers’ demands were more modest, in part a reflection of the general pattern of lower wages and the impact of the larger labour surplus in the immediate area. Still, labourers consistently attempted to push up wages beginning in early 1877 and continuing through 1878. By this point the Montreal Star had good reason to warn its readers to brace themselves for “the yearly recurrence of strikes.”10 In these strikes, in particular, another dimension of the seasonal struggle for wages stands out. Here labourers engaged in their toughest battles against contractors attempting to lower wages in late fall to reflect the fewer hours labourers could work per day and the conditions which lowered their output. To labourers the reduction was unreasonable given the increased unpleasantness of winter work and the increased cost of living when expenditures on fuel and heavy clothing were factored in. The major strike in December 1877 involving labourers along the canal addressed these issues forcefully, demanding maintenance of the summer and fall wage rates, despite a reduction in the workday of one hour, and on one section potentially two. Labourers and contractors were still wrestling with this issue into the new year.11 Emerging from the worst of the depression years and with the supply of readily available labour tightening up at least briefly, labourers on the Welland stepped up demands for wage increases through 1879 and 1880 until by the summer of 1881 contractors on Section 33 were complaining, it would appear without exaggeration, that they were being “compelled to pay higher wages than were paid on any other Public Work in Canada.”12 On the Lachine in the spring of 1879, labourers on Sections 3, 5, 6, and 7 made an unusually high demand for, and

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won, an increase to $1.50 per day. In the fall of the same year another group also won an increase to $1.50, right at the point at which contractors would usually have been pushing for a seasonal wage reduction.13 The following year, however, labourers had to struggle to keep wages at a level fluctuating between $1.15 and $1.25, rates disappointingly below their high mark of $1.50 in the previous year, but more closely reflecting the usual gap between wages on the Lachine and the Welland.14 But then in May 1881 labourers again successfully secured a “great increase in wages.”15 Few reported strikes focused directly on the related issues of the long pay and store pay or truck; however, labourers on the Lachine became highly visible in the struggle across a number of occupations to eliminate exploitative methods of payment. Shorter intervals between pay days and an end to credit chits had been aggressively pursued in the building trades, in particular, through the middle decades of the century and were important goals embraced by organized labour in the 1870s in the face of employers’ attempts to stay afloat by sharing cash flow problems with their workers. On the Lachine, truck and the long pay were at the heart of a January 1877 strike and then ran as a troubling undercurrent from spring into fall until the major strike in December, when labourers all along the canal fought for a wage increase combined with an end to truck. Public support from the ranks of organized labour, the press, the local community, and local politicians pressured Prime Minister Mackenzie to circulate a memorandum instructing all contractors on the Lachine to pay more frequently and in cash. His government did not follow up to ensure compliance, and it refused to pass legislation or draft policy guidelines concerning truck on public works, so that in the short term the labourers did not win an end to truck. However, the dispute situated canallers at the heart of a broader struggle and rallied the type of widespread support which demonstrated and built connections with a larger movement.16 Disputes over lost wages even more effectively drew the labourers into the orbit of the formally organizing labour movement and political campaigns for protective labour legislation. Part of an old struggle and like the fight against truck led by the building trades, the drive for recovery of wages gained momentum during the 1870s as unions and the Canadian Labour Union denounced the injustice of this aspect of capital-labour relations in a free market economy. Public works labourers provided some of the most sensational examples in support of their campaign. Barely two months into construction of the Intercolonial near Amherst, Nova Scotia, labourers protested the

2 5 6   R oug h Work

disappearance of their wages with a vehemence reminiscent of that of their counterparts at mid-century: “Last Friday a number of navvies, who said that they had two months’ wages due, became exasperated at the delay in paying them, drove all the men on this end of the section from the line, upset the carts, took possession of the road, and threatened the agent of the contractors with personal violence, if they did not get their pay. They then assaulted peaceable residents when passing along the highway.”17 This was among the first in a series of work disruptions clustering in the early seasons of construction but continuing until completion. In the St Lawrence District, where a number of subcontractors were unusually tardy in paying wages, labourers ultimately confined a contractor in a house near the works to encourage him to find money fast. They pressured another contractor to pay up by demolishing fences they had recently erected.18 In the same spirit, though with what could have been much more serious consequences, labourers striking for overdue wages on the Lachine in April 1878 threatened to stop the pumps and flood the canal, and in the same year labourers striking for overdue wages on a different section reportedly took steps to blow out the gates at the western entrance, going so far as to bore a hole for dynamite before they were discovered.19 Despite the violence of their tactics, labourers attempting to recover lost wages found support in community papers which lashed out at those who could have prevented disturbances through greater diligence rather than colluding in a “species of cold-blooded robbery.”20 Politicians championing the interests of working class constituents and labour more generally joined the attack, not simply lobbying for immediate solutions to individual injustices but pushing for laws which could override the federal governments’ ad hoc approach to claims for lost wages. Fighting primarily at the provincial level, legislators targeted both federal and provincial public works in their campaign for effective mechanics’ lien legislation. In June 1878 in debate over LeCavalier’s Bill to Ensure the Wages of Workingmen, Quebec Assembly members cited the system of defrauding workers practised by contractors and subcontractors on the Lachine as one example of the ways in which recovery of wages could be frustrated. When labourers seized a subcontractor’s plant in order to recover wages, the principal contractor intervened to claim ownership of machinery, materials, and tools. LeCavalier’s bill was intended to protect against just such opposing claims. In the same session, James McShane, representing Montreal West, gave notice of a bill obliging the provincial government to award future contracts only to those who could

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demonstrate their ability to cover indebtedness to employees resulting from default and fraud.21 The struggle would continue, and only in the following decade would some provinces enact meaningful mechanics’ lien legislation which offered a reasonable hope of partial payment of wages from defaulting employers’ assets – and only to those workers who could afford to assert and pursue their claims. Some labourers and activists in their midst likely envisioned their strikes for a shorter workday as part of another broad labour initiative in the 1870s, the movement for a nine-hour day. Some would have known that labourers on public works in the United States had been important to the struggle for a shorter day there, even securing an eight-hour day on federal projects.22 Details are sketchy, but at least one strike on the Lachine demonstrated labourers’ concern to shorten their working day, even if it meant foregoing additional pay. In April 1878, when one contractor attempted to increase hours from ten to twelve, he was surprised that his labourers refused to work despite what he considered a generous offer of an accompanying daily wage increase to $1.25. The men opted to return to work for a ten-hour day at $1.12½ rather than accept what they regarded to be an unreasonable demand on their time and energies.23 Only three work stoppages stand out as protests against dangerous working conditions, and they met with mixed results. The labourers’ refusal to work on the cliffs along the Matapédia won a partial victory at best when the contractor’s agreement to an increase that amounted to danger pay was accompanied by the threat to blacklist any labourers who refused to take the work if asked.24 Labourers who abandoned work on the unstable banks of Section 9 of the Lachine in the spring of 1878 were not successful in earning a wage increase.25 The outcome of a similar work stoppage two years later, this time over the unpleasant and dangerous conditions at the lock on Section 11 of the Lachine, is unclear. Some of the strikers appeared willing to settle for an increase from $1.00 to $1.25 per day, though others insisted on more. A reporter tracked a gang of the strikers to a ramshackle boarding house at the Lachine Bridge, where he found men adamant that they would not return to work for anything less than $1.50. In July 1880 a settlement at $1.25 would not have been out of the question and even $1.50 not inconceivable in light of the wages won by others on the Lachine the previous year.26 Those who went back at $1.25 likely considered the strike a success. Noticeably absent from the record of workplace action are major confrontations over issues related to authority in directing the work, the type of collective acts of open insubordination and naked

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indiscipline which had been prominent on construction sites of the 1840s and 1850s, where groups of labourers had challenged supervisory staff and contractors over who supervised them, who worked alongside them, and how fast the work was pushed. This is a significant absence which raises important questions, but any answers to those questions must be tentative and speculative. This type of conflict may have diminished for a variety of reasons related to the changing nature of the workforce and the changing nature of the work. Diluted, though not entirely lost in the more heterogeneous workforce of the 1870s, was the power of one or two subgroups of workers to effectively challenge their employers in important areas such as hiring and firing members of their subgroup. Did that diminish conflict over disciplining the workforce and regulating the work? Also diluted was the influence of experienced navvies from the heyday of the migrating butty gangs who had perceived themselves as an elite among labourers and able to direct their own work. They were dying off, and while still important to aspects of the work such as railway plate laying and some hard rock excavation, their numbers were not sufficient to mount and sustain a challenge to contractors’ authority. Their shrinking role in construction might go some way in explaining the relative absence of direct attacks on the decisions of supervisory personnel. For their part, major contractors were creating a more routinized workplace through mechanization and investment in permanent and experienced supervisory staff. Within the changing work environment on major contracts overseen by experienced men under contractors like Brown and Dunbar, how much room remained for the questioning of authority and the assertion of a counterauthority? Not that resistance to what workers perceived as unreasonable demands by specific foremen did not surface.27 What is missing, however, is the endemic power struggle over supervision on canals in the 1840s, in particular, but also in the 1850s. Also noticeable was the reduction over previous decades of attacks on machinery, perhaps primarily because machinery now occupied a different place on the worksites and in the minds of the workers. At mid-century labourers had witnessed the halting introduction of labour-saving machinery, the experimentation and the ineffectiveness of some innovations and the expense of others; the triumph of the machine would not have appeared inevitable. New and massive technological innovations were more firmly grounded on construction sites in the 1870s, however, and the struggle against them must have seemed futile and in some respects counterproductive. Given the extent to which man and machine had become interdependent in

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an increasing number of tasks, attacking machinery such as pumps, derricks, and dredges in labour disputes could impose unacceptable delays on any return to work and hurt labourer as well as contractor. In some circumstances, though, when the machine posed a direct threat to workers, it was still marked as the enemy and liable to be attacked. When contractor Whitney on the Lachine threatened to wait out a strike by suspending work and proceed by dredging in the spring, labourers threatened to remove that option by burning his dredging equipment.28 Also, when labourers had no hope of returning to work – or receiving pay for their work – machinery, like all contractors’ property, became vulnerable, which helped to make disputes over lost wages spectacularly destructive. Strikes rarely included fewer than the labourers on at least one section of a project and most frequently began with, or within hours spread out to encompass, men on adjacent sections, causing work stoppages involving hundreds and potentially close to a thousand men.29 Strikes of this magnitude brought together diverse groups and individuals. In describing this heterogeneity, press, contractors, and government officials usually focused on ethnicity or nationality, perhaps because it was the easiest way to represent subgroups, but probably also because they viewed ethnicity as a key variable in defining their workers and in their workers’ definition of themselves. While the precise ethnic mix in each strike varied, on the Lachine French Canadian and Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, usually united with smaller numbers from other ethnic groups. Thus, in the January 1877 strike, French Canadians, Irish, and “a few Americans” on Section 6 were described as hovering on the sidelines, unsure whether to participate. A larger strike eleven months later involved mainly English, French Canadians, and Irish, and a strike of 450 men on Davis’s contract on the Lachine in late summer of 1880 reportedly included French-, German-, Italian-, and English-speaking labourers, the latter group apparently the least inclined to stop work.30 In strikes on the Welland, French-speaking labourers were less in evidence, but here, too, ethnic diversity was the order of the day: English, Scots, Germans, Irish, Swedes, and to a lesser extent French Canadians and Italians appeared in strikes.31 Identifying workers by their ethnic derivation was also likely a continuation of stereotyping, as, for example, when contractor McNamee made a point of noting, incorrectly as it happened, at the commencement of the December 1877 Lachine strike that “there were no Irish among the disaffected” which explained to him why it was “a peaceable affair.”32

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The extent to which strikers themselves would have drawn attention to the ethnic groups among them is difficult to determine, though isolated incidents point to the importance of the ethnic group in shaping the decisions of individuals concerning strike participation. During the May 1874 strike on the Welland, the Swedes reportedly decided en masse to set out for work elsewhere rather than continue what was becoming a lengthy dispute. During a summer 1880 strike on Section 11 of the Lachine, a French Canadian labourer gave his personal perspective on the importance of ethnic identification when he indicated to a reporter that while he himself would have been happy to continue working, he had not wanted to continue “alone” and had decided to join the other French Canadians in their determination to strike. In this context he would have felt “alone” despite the company of the English-speaking labourers who had chosen to stay on the job.33 The extent to which contractors attempted to take advantage of such perceptions of alone and together is unclear. From the labourers’ perspective, the composition of the workforce during the 1870s meant that no one ethnic group could mount and maintain a strike encompassing the men on any one section, let alone one involving as many as one thousand labourers on a number of sections. Violent exclusionary campaigns could have enjoyed only limited success, and the cost of such tactics would have been high among a multi-ethnic workforce, large segments of which had strong ties to the local community. The very rationale for collective action based primarily on ethnic group or faction was undermined in this time and in these places. Yet to underestimate the importance of ethnic bonds is to lose sight of a continuing and powerful source of group identification which could overlap with and reinforce unity based on common workplace goals. Negotiation of ethnicity was key to the success of organizations attempting to bring workers together in a variety of work settings throughout North America in the 1870s and would continue to be important into the twentieth century.34 From among groups of strikers, even those most active and those in leadership roles are seldom identified. Contractors provide little help here, since, according to them, strikes seldom originated among their own workers. The ideas and even the people for strikes were imported from elsewhere, another part of the work, or a segment of the populace that had nothing to do with construction. Contractors cast the men they employed as reluctant participants or easily led dupes. During the December 1877 strike involving upwards of one thousand labourers along the Lachine, some contractors noted the “perfect contentment” among their labourers and marvelled that they could have

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Figure 8.1  Lachine Canal Strike of January 1878 : “La grève des ouvriers du canal Lachine,” Henri Julien, L’Opinion publique 9, 2 (10 January 1878)

been induced to join the strikers, and all of the contractors agreed that the strike was “instigated by ruffians in no way interested” in the works. Whitney and Doty, contractors on Section 4, singled out the “low brothel” of Joe Beef as the headquarters where ruffians fomented trouble.35 Spokespersons for Davis and Sons, on whose contract the strike had commenced, insisted they could identify “fourteen taverns in the vicinity of the works” where “men who were never employed on the canal works convinced some of the workmen that they were not receiving value for their labor, simply for the purpose of causing a general disturbance.” Here agitators and labourers passed the time of day, turning their minds to confrontations with contractors.36 The outside agitator, who looms so large in histories of strikes as told by employers, could take many forms. There was no shortage of individuals and groups emerging as threats to public order and peaceful relations between capital and labour. Men who refused to do “an

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honest day’s work” and encouraged others to demand more than their labour was worth were harmful enough. But more subversive elements were believed to be fomenting discontent with dangerous ideas and programs for action. The combined experiences of any one group of public works labourers extended far beyond the local tavern and community, and any construction site might be home to men who had already been part of militant practice in the immediate area, in another part of the continent, or on the other side of the Atlantic. The capture of one labour activist and fugitive made the case dramatically. Through the 1870s, newspapers detailed the exploits, trial, and execution of the Molly Maguires, the secret society whose militance had sustained conflict in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields. The Montreal Star was only one among a number of papers convinced that when the Molly Maguires fled justice members of the “infamous fraternity” homed in on Montreal as an ideal refuge in which to enjoy anonymity yet still foment unrest. The Star pointed to the sectarian violence in Montreal as evidence of their presence.37 If the paper was alarmist, it was in good company. Major North American papers warned that the influence of the Mollies would spread, since rather than being condemned they were being held up as martyrs in much of the North American labour press and at labour conventions.38 Along the Welland, local papers echoed these concerns. Then in early 1878 news broke that one of the Mollies had been found labouring near Thorold, and a number of other Mollies had formed an active branch of their organization in the area. No evidence emerged of an active lodge, but the police did arrest Martin McCarthy, wanted in connection with the 1870 murder of mine clerk Patrick Burns in Pennsylvania. McCarthy had been working on the Welland for four years, living with his family in Meritton under the name Martin Bergin. Nothing suggests that he had been active in promoting labour unrest or organization. A hunted man, he would have been foolhardy to expose himself to unnecessary attention. Still, Bergen’s very presence on the Welland provided proof, if any were needed, that the migrants of the late 1870s were dangerous in their anonymity. On the testimony of an individual who claimed to have known him in Pennsylvania, McCarthy was extradited, escorted by Pinkerton detectives back to Pennsylvania, and executed eleven months later, the nineteenth man to die on the scaffold in the offensive against the Molly Maguires.39 Fears that foreign radicals and labour agitators were infiltrating Canada fitted neatly with reports of labour unrest in communities across North America. A strike wave into the late 1870s, highlighted within Canada by the dramatic 1876–7 strike of the engineers on the Grand

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Trunk Railway which brought communities into the streets to support the strikers,40 demonstrations of the unemployed in the depths of the depression, and mass meetings of hungry workers demanding public assistance – all of these spoke to workers struggling and disenchanted and susceptible to the ideas of anarchists, socialists, and communists, who were establishing a tenuous hold in labour circles and surfacing on street corners and in meeting halls, though certainly in much fewer numbers than was feared at the time. It was as yet unclear how much influence they could or would muster; however, in the context of the 1870s, fears of social upheaval appear an understandable outgrowth of reports of radicals’ activity internationally and of their movement back and forth across borders. In this international exchange, Canada’s reception of immigrants opened her to the individuals in whose minds radical ideas were germinating. Some carriers of those ideas would travel on south across the border to fuel the American side of the unrest that would build in the final decades of the century. Others found a natural home away from home within Canada’s borders, where many spoke their native tongue, if not the language of revolution. Refugees from the fall of the Paris Commune were of particular concern within Quebec, where they were believed to have blended into the working class areas of major urban centres. Faced with a report that one of its agents inadvertently had sent many Communists among the immigrants of 1873, the Quebec government became “very much exercised” and alert to any signs of their influence.41 No wonder, given the general tenor of international press reporting of civil unrest in the wake of the Commune. Throughout Europe and North America the press became vigilant in denouncing any signs of working class unrest with reminders of mob rule and revolution.42 As depression deepened and workers throughout North America gathered in meeting halls, on street corners, in parks, and on commons to voice their grievances, fears of communist and socialist agitators grew.43 Developments bolstering those fears included their reported involvement in the strike of labourers on public works in Quebec City in June 1878. There, what began as a protest against a wage reduction for men constructing the provincial legislative buildings spread to include labourers on public works throughout the city and then other segments of the workforce. Encouraging workers to join the strike and impelling employers to close their establishments, strikers mobilized what quickly approached the dimensions of a general strike. The rhetoric of strike leaders, the speed with which the strike spread, the enthusiastic support of some citizens, and the more reluctant support of others shook the authorities well beyond Quebec

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City. Bloody confrontation with the military left at least ten men seriously injured and one dead, reported to be one Edouard Beaudoire, a Frenchman who had escaped the fighting and executions of the Paris Commune’s final semaine sanglante. Close examination of the strike by one scholar finds no evidence of communist or Communard involvement in the strike and underscores the extent to which partisan rhetoric played on fears of radical involvement to discredit participants. The study, however, acknowledges that communists and even Communards might have found good reason to participate in a strike which, while firmly rooted in the local history and culture of Quebec, addressed issues international in scope. It also demonstrates the importance of the fear of contagion by international activists in shaping local perceptions and responses.44 At the time, then, it was not a stretch to transpose the violence on Quebec City’s public works to similar concentrations of workers along the St Lawrence, and the press spread fears of lingering contagion by Parisienne Communards wherever agitators went unchecked. Those less convinced of the ability of radicals to win converts emphasized instead the fertile ground among men driven by desperation, not radical theory. In this they highlighted the potentially explosive union of hunger and radical leadership,45 an important dimension to the fear of militance among labourers such as those on public works, frequently from the poorest segment of society, day labourers shifting from one job to another and in the mid-1870s often on the verge of destitution. Their poverty gave a dangerous edge to their militance. They had less to lose than better-off members of the working class. In this they appeared to pose a more serious threat. Contemporaries may have overestimated the potency of this threat. Equally, historians may have paid it too little attention. Anxieties over the destructive potential of hungry mobs were heightened as workers throughout North America took to the streets, demanding work or food, in gatherings which echoed the cries for “Bread or Work” of the 1840s. Vivid reminders of the precarious livelihoods of workers in many sectors of the economy, protests against unemployment became uniquely tied to public works as the demand for jobs on public works became the focus of much of the protest. Politicians at every level debated the desirability of defusing tension through the expansion, reopening, and commencement of a wide range of infrastructure projects including maintenance, repair, and improvement to roads, bridges, water works, canals, and railways. What in earlier decades had been presented as part of a hopeful vision and process through which immigrants could ultimately establish

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themselves now became part of a desperate attempt to provide the necessities of life to those shaken loose from their position in the workforce. For the public good and for peace in the streets, the public purse was to fund work which might not otherwise have been considered financially feasible. Unemployment pulled public works labourers into combined protests with other segments of the working class and with activists in the organized labour movement who stepped forward to protest high unemployment among skilled and unskilled, organized and unorganized.46 Agitation in communities throughout the Dominion is demonstrated on a large scale in Montreal where unemployed labourers demanded expansion of work on the Lachine as well as creation of jobs on more modest projects. In the summer of 1877 a force of predominantly French Canadian and Irish workingmen staged mass meetings in Montreal’s Bonsecours Market. One meeting passed resolutions demanding that the federal government proceed with as many works as possible, that the provincial government expand its railroad works, and that the city fulfil its financial commitments so the province could continue the Northern Railway. Montreal was further urged to discontinue ornamental projects and instead employ citizens on necessary works, providing a livelihood to men of all ethnic groups desperate for food or work.47 Similar meetings the following year included a rally of approximately three hundred public works labourers, most of them recently discharged by the Montreal Road Department. The men elected a delegation of ten “old countrymen” and ten French Canadians to present a petition to city council. A second meeting and growing support for the petitioners increased unease among city officials. Police arrested two speakers they took to be labour agitators on a charge of collecting a crowd and dispersed the protesters. The Star reflected and fed the growing anxiety of respectable Montrealers: “[N]othing could be more dangerous to the peace of the city than meetings of this kind.” With many in desperate need and most susceptible to fiery rhetoric, they brought together the lowest and most volatile elements of the city with communists and agitators pursuing “some socialistic idea.”48 Less ominous than mass demonstrations were the solitary protests of labourers like Michael Dwyer, a resident of Griffintown who called at the Star office in March 1879 to complain that he could not find work. Dwyer claimed to speak on behalf of the English-speaking men of diverse nationalities in Griffintown who were starving for want of food and united in their determination to secure relief. He said he was “a loyal subject of the Queen, and would die for her at any time … But he wanted to live at

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present – wanted work and bread; and so did the men that sent him … seven or eight hundred of them – English, Irish and Scotch, and they all agreed together first rate.” If they did not get work soon, “the streets of Montreal would run with blood.”49 The streets of Montreal did not run with blood, and the fleeting potential for dramatic social change, envisioned by a few but feared by many more, did not materialize. Until transnational labour microstudies are able to chart more effectively the migration and interconnection of individuals and their experiences and ideas,50 the story of labour militance among groups such as canal and railway labourers will be dominated by less frightening and more visible influences. Among the least frightening and most influential were members of the two major political parties who stepped forward, in various guises, to help channel discontent into their contest for power at each level of government. Even politicians reluctant or averse to declaring any special identification with the workingman found occasion to listen to and echo the concerns of their constituents on issues such as starvation wages, extortionate credit arrangements, and the recovery of wages through liens. Many labourers on the public works were prepared to accept their advice and intervention. During the December 1877 strike the Lachine labourers were prepared to meet with Bernard Devlin, MP for Montreal Centre, to discuss their demands; however, when Devlin counselled a conciliatory approach, suggesting the strikers return to work and submit their case to an arbitrator, he touched off an acrimonious dispute among the labourers, some of whom were not prepared to trust either the intercession or advice of a workingman’s friend too closely tied to the major political parties. Their preference for continuing confrontation, not mediation or arbitration, underlines the need to look for the variety of perspectives represented among labourers, however difficult that might be. Devlin did, indeed, exert influence; many labourers eligible to vote in his constituency likely supported him at the polls. Similarly, the MP for Montreal East, Louis-Amable Jetté, enjoyed sufficient influence with the labourers that he was selected to speak on behalf of the French-speaking labourers during the December 1877 strike.51 But dissenting voices calling for continued confrontation, not the intervention of politicians, emphasize the need to listen to the range of voices when attempting to define labourers’ perspective. Assessment of the influence of an individual such as McKiernan, self-styled leader of the Montreal waterfront community, requires similar caution. Among the more flamboyant spokespersons for labourers, the proprietor of Joe Beef ’s tavern was a staunch Conservative

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whose fiery oratory and material assistance to working families in hard times convinced contractors that he was using “his brothel” to foment unrest, most importantly during the December 1877 strike. Beef himself was reputed to have told a reporter, “[I]f I choose to give myself the trouble I could make them embrace any faith or none at all or become free thinkers.”52 Contractors and Beef exaggerated his influence, but he is an excellent example of the impact individuals in his position could have in a process in which exchanges between proprietors and their clientele “helped a working-class community to define itself,” as one historian has put it.53 Many labourers received his speeches with enthusiasm, if their cheers and applause are any indication, when he denounced the injustices and indignities poverty visited along the waterfront and defended the worth of the common labourer as opposed to that of the middle class reformers and “Beaver Hat Aristocrats.” He endorsed labourers’ combinations and strikes, urging them to a greater unity which could supersede differences of ethnicity, race, and religion. Yet he rejected ideas of class antagonism and called instead for the fair deal, which could be achieved if labourers spoke “rightly” to the contractors. He did not counsel challenges to the existing order or creation of political alternatives. What labourers themselves believed about class antagonisms and unity is best read in their actions, so rarely were labourers’ arguments given and then only indirectly. Leadership in the December 1877 Lachine strike gave what the Montreal Witness regarded as “inflammatory speeches,” a Scotsman characterizing the labourers as “the dirty, lousy strikers” who “put bread in the mouths of the big bags of the city” and calling for unity against “cruel oppression.”54 A French Canadian strike leader insisted they would stop all labourers from working until “they got their rights”: “They were not rich in money, but were as rich in honor as the best and highest in Montreal; in short, though they were labourers, they were gentlemen at heart.”55 Rare interviews with strikers return to the same themes of their rights and personal honour and the value of their labour. When asked to justify demands for higher wages they did not focus just on the difficulty of meeting their families’ needs. They spoke about what their labour was worth to contractors and what contractors could afford to pay.56 Their perceptions might be based on experience from past seasons. For example, on the Grenville Goodwin argued that he was facing repeated strikes in part because he had hired back many men from the previous season who expected the same wages.57 Labourers themselves made the point in the March 1878 Welland strike when they claimed $1.25 was no more than their due, “Labourers’ Rights,” since they had been paid

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as much at the same time the previous year.58 Perceptions of what contractors could afford to pay were also based on an expanding sense of wage rates elsewhere. Calls for some type of parity most frequently pointed to what contractors in the immediate area were paying; if one contractor could pay $1.00 or $1.25 a day, so could the rest.59 But by the 1870s, relatively rapid transit gave labourers firsthand appreciation of wages on distant construction sites, and at times they argued for a broader parity with workers more than five hundred miles away. Thus, during the August 1880 Lachine strike a labour spokesperson instructed a reporter concerning comparative wage rates throughout much of Canada. Noting that “they always paid dreadfully low in Quebec,” he contrasted $1.15, “the highest wage ever offered” on Section 4 of the Lachine, with the $1.25 available on the Canadian Southern and Canadian Pacific Railways. On the Welland, he himself had recently worked for $1.50 a day.60 Strikes on both the Lachine and the Welland provide evidence that labourers were establishing structures which could facilitate ongoing unity in pursuit of their goals. During one of the largest strikes on the Lachine labourers presented themselves as members of some type of labour organization. At the head of strikers’ processions along the Lachine in December 1877, standard-bearers carried a blue, white, and red flag, bearing on one side the letters “T.U.” and on the other “U.A.”; the labourers referred to the group representing them with contractors as the “Committee of the Labourers Union.” The labourers also formed what they considered a mutual aid society to help solve their most pressing problem, the need for food. Under the terms of this society, those labourers fortunate enough to be employed by a contractor paying the demanded $1.00 per day were allowed to return to work and from their wages help meet the needs of those “continuing the struggle.” Though different from traditional mutual aid societies, it expressed the idea of shared interests and responsibilities on which such societies were built, and it was a form well adapted to the particular needs of these workers.61 Labourers also created formal mechanisms and procedures which could reach across language barriers and solidify and sustain communication. At mass meetings held each morning to draw up plans of action, speeches in French were repeated in English, and vice versa, and the back and forth of questioning and deliberations was translated before decisions were taken. The committee tasked with communicating those decisions and acting on behalf of the strikers between meetings was comprised of representatives of the two main language groups, French and English. Above the committee, leadership was shared between French- and English-speaking

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individuals, and the top leadership position was held by an individual fluent in both languages.62 Informal accommodation of broader linguistic diversity likely ensured inclusion in decision-making of those who understood neither English nor French. Strike action on the Welland also suggests a sense of common membership in an ongoing collective body. At the heart of the May 1876 strike was the Labourers Union based on Brown’s section. Whether the union took form as the men formed the intention to strike or had germinated during earlier collective action is unclear. Two additional branches of the union were the direct outgrowth of the strike, their membership recruited as strikers moved down the works, speaking with the men all along the line and successfully uniting them in not just a general strike but an organization more than 750 strong. Rallies, meetings, the election of delegates, and deliberations on their reports held a heterogeneous workforce together for more than ten days along sixteen sections of the work.63 But what did it mean? Were the union and its branches simply the logical mechanism for maintaining support for the labourers’ goals in one time and place? Did the labourers give its formation only passing thought because it was an organization that would quickly pass? Had some, perhaps only a handful, already thought it through and into the future, and if so, what was their perception of a shared future? Did the union on either the Lachine or the Welland survive long past the strikes which brought them to public attention? The odds were against it and very long, indeed. The nature of the work itself was prohibitive, constantly shifting location. With construction sites springing up and disappearing in some areas in a matter of months, organization could not be based on the place of employment, and unity could not derive from a geographically defined community except on a fleeting basis. This type of worker could be organized effectively only within a large umbrella group which enabled any ad hoc collection of labourers on a site to take action as a formal union. Without any formal training or skill acquisition required for “shifting muck,” that ad hoc collection could be drawn from an abundant and, in many years and seasons, swollen labour pool, a pool expanding with the transportation networks the labourers built. As attempts at the creation of such unions were to demonstrate, they were formidable to organize and extraordinarily difficult to maintain.64 The first formal, sustained organizations bringing together navvies would come later. In Britain, organization of general unions for labourers involved in heavy work such as construction developed in the new unionism wave of the late 1880s which brought together the previously unorganized and those

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among whom organizations had proved difficult to sustain. The timing was similar in continental Europe, though the different historical context produced unions with a different political orientation. A key organization involving construction labourers was the Norwegian general union which had at its core migrant navvies.65 Study of the relationship between militance and organization on the other side of the world has demonstrated that in the Australian colonies, while canal and railway labourers engaged in the largest percentage  – at least 16.8%  – of the total number of strikes identified among skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers in the years 1860 to 1879, formal organization did not come until the late 1880s with the encouragement of the Amalgamated Shearers Union, whose migratory membership engaged in a variety of occupations over the course of one year and was instrumental in the creation of formal collectivities involving rural carriers and navvies.66 Part of a pattern which saw increasing unionization in sectors of the economy in which workers had united in workplace action but not in unions, it effectively represents the relationship between strike activity and formal organization. In the United States the growth of unions for labourers involved in heavy manual labour also lagged behind organizations of the skilled and of other groups such as miners, despite their militance in the workplace; however, from the 1870s and among labourers in a range of activities from the building trades and finally railway construction, organizations sprang up, initially as part of initiatives by the Knights of Labour, in particular, and later under syndicalist organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World. In some environments the hurdles to organization could be more easily overcome. On the Lachine and Welland, the nature of the work and the workforce suggest why labourers’ unions might have emerged and survived more than a season. Enlargement and improvement of each of these projects extended over a much longer period than on most. While one contract might be completed within three to four years, taken as a whole, major construction lasted longer than a decade. On the Welland most of the work stretched from 1872 into the early 1880s, with completion of the final contract in 1886, and on the Lachine the work stretched through the 1870s, a final contract also wrapping up in the mid-1880s. Such unusually long periods of construction, requiring concentrations of many hundreds of labourers in most years, gave a sense of permanence to the work which was missing on projects with more compact construction schedules and stretching over greater distances. These lynchpins of the St Lawrence waterway also required regular repair and maintenance on a large

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scale, employing a core of labourers intermittently after the 1840s. The potential was here for an enhanced attachment to both place and work. In addition, men might stay in the area and hope to find other work until opportunities at construction again opened up. In the immediate area of the Lachine, though to a much lesser extent the Welland, labourers might hunt among a range of jobs connected with shipping, seafaring and their ancillary occupations, and local industrial and commercial enterprises. From these locations labourers might venture far afield to find work, but families left behind could maintain a home base and with it attachments to community, kin, and friends which provided ground in which a sense of ongoing collective interests could flourish. Attachment to place strengthened the belief of some labourers that they had a proprietary right to jobs opened up in their area. This was more than the collective appeals of the depression years for work to ease hardship around public works. A particularly narrowly defined sense of entitlement was captured in an 1880 petition to the federal government from the labourers, teamsters, and mechanics of St Catharines and Lincoln County, who pointed out that instead of benefiting from work on the Welland in their own backyard, they saw the jobs to which they believed they had a right taken by labourers, mechanics, and teamsters from Thorold and Welland County, men not all that far away who might also have argued their right to work in their immediate vicinity. They did not claim a “monopoly on the work” but asked that the government intervene to ensure work was distributed “in proportion to [their] numbers, and locality.”67 This was work in their neighbourhood in which they deserved a share. However narrow, the collective impetus behind such petitions demonstrated the potential for broader neighbourhood solidarities which included not only those with whom the labourers worked but individuals and families with whom they shared the streets, dwellings, churches, and community facilities. This encompassed more than those with an immediate interest in the labourers’ ability to pay bills and continue as customers of groceries, taverns, and boarding houses. It included bonds of extended families, friends, fellow congregants, and associates in a variety of endeavours and was revealed most convincingly during the mass demonstrations and festive parades which were part of their strikes and typical of the methods used by both the organized and unorganized to bolster their collective spirit and attract public sympathy. On the Lachine, labourers processed along the canal and in and out of Montreal’s working class neighbourhoods, rallying support. Details of one march noted the welcome they received in Griffintown,

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in particular: “hearty ‘God be wid yees’ from the women or ‘More power to you,’ ‘Success to you,’ indicating the sympathy of the sex.”68 On the Welland, strikers early in spring of 1874 engaged in similar processions, at one point marching through Thorold with bagpipes and a Union Jack, and they enjoyed the same warm reception. They “carried public sympathy with them,”69 according to the local press. In May 1876, strikers marched along the canal and through Port Colborne and Humberstone with a drum band, their banner, and a show of public support which impressed the Thorold Post.70 On the Lachine, an important source of support was members of the surrounding community who counselled the labourers early in the December 1877 strike, meeting with their committee to organize demonstrations and rallies such as those in Chaboillez Square and joining in setting up a strike fund and soliciting tangible aid. Such aid came in the form of citizens’ individual donations and public expressions of support. A series of advertisements in the Montreal Witness reveals the ideas of one such supporter. A local dry goods merchant, Carsley, took out three column inches in which to make his position on the strike clear. He attacked the so-called workingmen’s representatives who “promised on the husting, if elected to do all in their power for the workingmen.” Since they could not count on politicians, labourers were counselled: “Strike!! Strike!! Strike!!”71 Equally significant were indications of support from groups formally associated with the organized labour movement. Among those who contributed to the December 1877 Lachine strike were the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers fresh from their ultimately successful struggle with the Grand Trunk. At a meeting in Point St Charles to consider how best to assist the strikers, they voted twenty dollars to help sustain the men and their families. The contribution was small when measured against the needs of the canallers but large in possibilities. It also invites speculation that engineers and members of similar organizations were among those who met with canallers in area taverns to offer their advice.72 More public and less ambiguous were instances in which labourers on the Welland united with other segments of the workforce, engaging in joint strikes with quarrymen and quarry labourers,73 demanding one rate increase for themselves and a greater increase for the quarrymen who received higher wages. Labourers on the Welland also engaged in strikes with teamsters, once again setting out different demands for the two groups, and in one strike they made common cause with both teamsters and quarrymen. They were also reaching out to forge bonds with the skilled workers, already organized in strong unions. During

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the 1870s the militance of skilled workers on construction sites appears to have been even more disruptive than in previous decades, when they had also been a force with which to reckon. Notable in this action were the stonecutters, whose importance to the general level of strike activity throughout Canada during the decade ranked them with moulders, miners, and shoemakers, topped only by the moulders for number of strikes in the period 1860 to 1879. In the following decade their militance would be overshadowed by that of other groups of workers, skilled and unskilled; however, during the 1870s they were prominent in organized labour’s workplace and political struggles. Narrowing in on their activity on the Lachine and Welland, stonecutters of Montreal and Thorold and, to a lesser extent, the stonemasons engaged in a series of strikes which may have exceeded in number and certainly far surpassed in days lost to strikes, the work stoppages of the unskilled.74 Of the strikes by stonecutters on the Welland listed in table 8.2, one beginning in November 1875 lasted four months, and one lasted through March and April of 1879. The duration of the stonecutters’ other strikes is less clear. Strikes by the skilled had a significant positive and negative impact on labourers. They forced unwelcome downtime for those working directly with the skilled and for any indirectly affected by work disruptions. But they also enabled labourers to time their own work stoppages to maximize pressure on contractors. During the spring of 1876 strike by labourers and quarrymen along Sections 1 to 16 of the Welland, contractors complained to the government that they had been squeezed first by a four-month strike by stonecutters against a wage reduction from $3.00 to $2.50 per day. Then, having settled with the stonecutters in March, “as soon as we were prepared for quarrying stone and doing other labour work, the labourers and quarrymen struck for higher wages, and are now on strike, refusing to work and driving off those men who are willing to work, so that our work is almost entirely stopped.”75 This temporarily increased the labourers’ and quarrymen’s bargaining power. Such dovetailing of strikes did not require cooperation between skilled and unskilled, but at least one strike on the Welland was a planned united action, the strike which began 1 March 1874. This was a concerted effort at unity between labourers and stonecutters, not the type of strike in which labourers ancillary to the skilled stopped work as an extension of their action, though those stoppages no doubt occurred. Labourers appear to have taken the initiative in uniting with quarrymen and stonecutters on Brown’s section at Thorold and then quickly expanding the strike to include most men working along the canal. Though contractors had

2 7 4   R oug h Work Table 8.2  Partial Listing of Strikes of Stonecutters on the Welland Canal, 1873–1881 When May 1874

Who

Why

stonecutters at Thorold proportionate increase (with quarrymen & labourers) Nov. 1874 stonecutters, Brown’s contract June 1875 stonecutters along canal rate increase of 20% Nov.–Mar. 1876 stonecutters, Secs 1–16 $0.30 per hour and further increase; refuse drop to $2.50 from $3.00 June 1876 stonecutters increase / uniform scale Sept. 1877 stonecutters, Sec. 12 demand piece work Nov. 1877 stonecutters, St refuse $2.50 winter and Catharines summer Feb. 1878 stonecutters at Thorold Mar. 1878 stonecutters Feb. 1879 stonecutters along canal union rules infringed Mar.–Apr. 1879 stonecutters along canal nonunion hiring & masons May 1879 stonecutters at Queenston

Result won

won

won lost compromise lost

Sources: RG11, vol. 162, #40971, 7 May 1874, Brown, Manning & Ginty, Cairns Morse Hart & Co. to Alexander Mackenzie, Minister of Public Works; vol. 451, #56650, Lawrie to Mackenzie, 19 Jan. 1876 enclosing petition from contractors on Secs. 1 to 16; vol. 452, # 59541, contractors on Secs. 1 to 16, Welland to Mackenzie, 17 May 1876; Thorold Post, 28 Jan., 19, 26 Nov., 10, 17, 24 Dec. 1875; 18, 25 Feb., 10 Mar. 1876; 8 Feb., 8, 15 Mar. 1876; 8 Feb., 8, 15 Mar. 1878; Welland Tribute, 5 Nov. 1874; 24 June 1875; 8 Feb. 1878; 14, 21, 28 Mar., Apr.–May 1879.

increased labourers’ wages to $1.25 the previous month, the labourers now demanded $1.50 and proportionate increases for all other categories of workers. After fourteen days  – what appears to have been the longest-documented work stoppage involving labourers in this study  – Shannon on Section 6 had agreed to the strikers’ demands; most of the other contractors conceded an increase of $0.12½ per day for all workers.76 Participants might have taken from this joint venture a shift in perspective as to what was desirable and possible, but the May 1874 strike was not normative. For a number of practical reasons skilled and unskilled would have had difficulty sustaining joint action. Those reasons became all too clear during a March 1879 strike of labourers at Port Colborne and Humberstone for a wage increase from $1.00 to

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$1.25 which overlapped with a strike by stonecutters and stonemasons over the hiring of nonunion men. Labourers were able to hold out for an unusually long time, nine days, principally because storekeepers who supplied the boarding houses continued to furnish provisions. But as the labourers’ strike dragged on, the Welland Tribune set out for its readers its sense of why joint action by the two groups was problematic. As soon as the storekeepers refused credit the boarding houses were forced to do likewise, leaving the labourers to choose between returning to work or leaving the area, since only two days after receiving their pay most lacked resources to eat for even a week. In contrast, the stonecutters were “an entirely different class of men” from the labourers: “They make comparatively good wages when they work, and have more or less union and capital among them.”77 Changes in legislation concerning unions and the definition of criminal activity related to strikes had the potential to give labourers a greater sense of power and of the legitimacy of their strike action and are therefore important to analysis of labourers’ willingness to strike and the nature of their actions during strikes. Equally important, legislative changes may have altered the tone of press reports of strikes to such an extent that they helped shape a more receptive audience and environment within which they could unfold. The Trade Unions Act of 1872, with its provision that combinations to raise wages or shorten hours were not in themselves criminal conspiracies, may have encouraged the more cautious to join with their fellow strikers and may have promoted community support. At the same time, labourers would have found cause for second thought in the Criminal Law Amendment Act which gave the courts considerable latitude in interpreting those acts for which workers could be prosecuted, in particular in defining so broadly the charge of “watching and besetting” that it blurred the line between peaceful and violent actions. Even subsequent redefinition of criminal conspiracy in 1875 and 1876 left the judiciary with sufficient discretion to undercut any meaningful action the labourers might take to protect their jobs.78 Contractors jumped at the latitude remaining for state intervention. Their collective and individual communications reminded politicians and government officials of the negative political impact of spiralling costs and interruptions to the work and to shipping schedules, and, above all, they emphasized the government’s responsibility to protect property and the lives of endangered citizens from actual or apprehended criminal violence. Contractors petitioning for armed intervention on the Welland in May 1874 focused on violence and the threat of further violence:

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A large number of men would willingly go to work, but are not allowed to do so, and many acts of violence have been committed on those who ventured to work and the Contractors are powerless to protect them. They are now regularly organized and marching in bands along the whole line of work to prevent any work being done, and many acts of violence are being daily committed and we may say that they have full possession of all the Contractors works. And we cannot invite other men to take their places so long as this state of things continues and as soon as their present little means are exhausted we are apprehensive of greater acts of violence, and that they will not hesitate to take life and destroy property.79 Were they surprised by the prime minister’s less than encouraging response? Following a meeting with his ministers, Mackenzie wrote to explain the law in the area of labour disputes, something he felt he “need scarcely” do, and to emphasize that “the Government [had] no possible means of preventing strikes”: “So long as they keep within the law, workmen have a perfect right to strike and to demand any wages they choose.”80 On the question of protecting life and property, his response was also discouraging: responsibility for deployment and payment of any force of police for keeping the peace rested with the local government. Intervention was beyond the federal government’s normal jurisdiction, and Mackenzie had no intention of exceeding that jurisdiction. Two years later, the contractors’ request for federal protection of strikebreakers was simply forwarded to the provincial government, where it should have been addressed in the first place. Similar refusals to intervene with a show of force during strikes frustrated contractors on the Lachine. During the December 1877 strike Charlebois was one of a number of contractors who put it to the government directly: “[I]f the Dominion Government wish the work completed by spring, they will have to send protection to men who are willing to work.”81 But the telegram he received in response was equally clear: “Government has no desire to hurry the work.”82 However – and this was a big however – Mackenzie’s reminder that strikers could not be interfered with “[s]o long as they keep within the law” pointed to the considerable latitude remaining for state intervention. Though Mackenzie attempted to pass along to the local governments the thorny issue of whether and when labourers violated the law and how the state should intervene, each level of government would end up providing armed support for contractors. This was not because strikes on public works were as violent or threatening as contractors argued; comparison of newspaper reports with contractors’

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pleas for protection suggests otherwise.83 But physical force remained a crucial tactic employed by labourers against any who threatened their jobs. Contractors took advantage of the more extensive and reliable rail and canal service in the 1870s to tap the supply of labourers at a distance. Though a costly expedient in the short term, it also allowed contractors to shift the power balance during strikes and invest in the long-term prospect of what they hoped would be a more malleable workforce. In less than twenty-four hours they could bring in labourers from Montreal, Ottawa, or the northeastern United States to replace strikers on the Welland, or French Canadians from the environs of Quebec City or Trois-Rivières to continue the work on the Lachine.84 Capital’s ability to widen the catchment area from which strikebreakers could be readily drawn meant increasing use of groups from capitalism’s periphery. In the 1870s, this included intensified recruitment of Italian workers, a group whose hostile reception by other workers had the potential to dilute any growing sense of a community of interests. Italians were not necessarily more willing than other ethnic groups to act as strikebreakers. Indeed, transportation contractors, as well as employers in other areas of industry, expressed reluctance to hire a group which seemed all too ready to down their tools in defence of an injustice suffered by one of their number. On the Welland contractors found that the Italian stonecutters they brought in were more than willing to unite with their local counterparts and were also reportedly more inclined to supplement their militance with revolvers.85 But the convenience of the padrone system and the constraints it could impose on workers’ behaviour attracted contractors to Italian workers. Whatever the Italian labourers’ attitudes, contractors on the Welland hoped to employ them as strikebreakers. During one labourers’ strike contractors threatened to bring in Italians from a distance, and it was during a subsequent conflict over wages that large numbers of Italians appear to have been recruited.86 Stonecutters on the Welland were not averse to employing violence to keep men from taking their jobs, particularly in the face of what appeared to be a concerted effort during the depression years to break their union both in Montreal and along the Welland. Yet in their formal union structures the organized possessed nonviolent weapons, such as fining and blacklisting, which could curb the enthusiasm of those brought in to replace them. During the strike of stonecutters on the Welland through the winter of 1875–6, the union adopted the standard practice of sending notices and advertising in papers throughout the continent, asking their brothers not to seek work on the canal. When twenty-four stonecutters came in from Montreal under the false

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impression that no strike was in progress, their Montreal association expressed solidarity with their brothers on the Welland by running a front-page notice in the Thorold Post for three weeks, denouncing the deception practised by the contractors and pledging to assist in preventing other men from being similarly tricked into acting as strikebreakers.87 In another instance, stonecutters on the Welland met with those brought in to fill their spots and convinced some of their number to join their union, taking them to the union hall and signing them up immediately, making them members of one of the more powerful and active trade unions of the decade. Stonecutters also had financial means to assist potential strikebreakers to return home or look for work elsewhere. When contractors brought in stonecutters from New York and Montreal to break a strike, the Thorold stonecutters pooled their resources to pay the men’s fare home. But in at least one instance stonecutters met strikebreakers with pistols, not train tickets. When contractors succeeded in recruiting nonunion men from Buffalo in February 1878, stonecutters at Thorold assembled in force, some with revolvers drawn, and succeeded in driving many from the works until police protection arrived.88 Still, skilled and formally organized workers such as stonecutters had options not available to the labourers; labourers lacked those alternatives to physical force which “union and capital” made possible.89 Labourers usually signalled the commencement of a strike by marching along the works, communicating their demands, and encouraging men from other sections to join them. However orderly and peaceful this initial recruitment procession, the numbers involved evoked images of a military campaign and of men whose very discipline rivalled the menace of the mob. When words failed, a volley of projectiles followed. In the winter months snowballs appear to have been the weapon of choice for toughening up negotiations. Snowballs, ice, and stones, in that order, marked the escalation of violence between strikers and men attempting to work on Sections 4 and 5 in January 1877 and again in December 1877 during the strike which spread along the Lachine. In both strikes, contractors’ men upped the ante by responding with bullets. In the January strike, paymaster and manager Adgate, son-in-law of contractor Whitney, reportedly pointed a gun at the strikers and threatened to shoot if they did not leave the work. When the strikers returned the next day, foremen armed with revolvers drove them off. Shots were fired on both sides, according to press reports, but no one was seriously injured.90 In December, however, a confrontation between armed management and strikers resulted in the shooting of a striker in the chest at close range. Reports varied as

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to whether the walking boss of Davis’s section, Cosgrove, was attempting to protect the work implements or to defend himself against attack by a labourer armed with an axe handle. Also in dispute was whether strikers had opened fire first. But all agreed that Cosgrove shot Lucien Paquette, brother of one of the strike leaders. While Paquette fought for his life, Cosgrove fled across the St Lawrence and into the United States to escape reprisals.91 The shooting was an extreme manifestation of contractors’ willingness to use force to protect men willing to work, but arming of contractors’ men was not uncommon on construction sites and in other workplaces such as mining camps, where on a normal workday employers’ representatives carried guns. Even without the protection of revolvers, contractors stepped forward to physically confront strikers. In July 1880, contractor Michael Davis attacked strikers who he believed were trying to prevent others from working: “[H]e ordered them all off the ground, and to those who were the least tardy in complying he promptly applied his blackthorn walking stick to their backs, and with good effect, for it soon dispersed them.”92 At the end of the following month, Davis was again in the news for attacking a striker, this time with his fists. When he appeared before a magistrate on a charge of assault, he was found guilty of pushing and striking a labourer, Trudeau, but he received a minimal punishment of a $1.00 fine and costs, a punishment the Star considered appropriate “[f]or the offence, such as it was.”93 Contractors could expect protection from police constables, special constables, and the militia, though the latter was called out sparingly.94 Specially appointed police officers were not the backbone of labour control, though they were in evidence. On the Grenville, for example, the Department of Public Works went through the Department of Justice to secure appointment of a constable to assist in controlling labour, but likely only as a supplement to the local force and only at the request of the Quebec commissioner of police.95 In the 1870s the federal government relied to a much greater extent than had the colonial governments on local forces in the early stages of their evolution. The newly created Ontario and Quebec Provincial Police offered valuable help along the canals in Ontario and Quebec. But their ranks were thin and strained to confront the disorder of the 1870s. On the Welland two provincial constables stationed at Clifton worked closely with local authorities to maintain the peace. At times two or three more officers were posted at trouble spots. Under the Police Act of Canada commissioners of the Ontario and Quebec forces could request that specially appointed Dominion police

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constables be stationed where they were urgently needed.96 But the reluctance of federal and provincial authorities to fund additional resources for this purpose left public works officials and contractors to rely on the municipal forces in their area. Of the available municipal units, those of Montreal, Lachine, and Côte de Paul were potentially valuable because of their numbers; however, their size was a function of the area they policed, since keeping the peace on the Lachine was only a fraction of their responsibilities. Available to supplement civil authorities were the units of militia which assumed increasing responsibility for the domestic peace, as regular British troops were phased out. Whether or not the militia were efficient and reliable, increased protests and strikes over the decade overtaxed their resources.97 On the Welland, the Ontario Provincial Police at times handed over a significant number of strikers for the pleasure of the court. Early in March 1878, of the two hundred labourers on strike on one section, ten were rounded up to appear before Police Magistrate Hill. All ten were fined; the four unable to pay their fines went to gaol.98 In March the following year Hill and the provincial police were on the spot again to intervene at Stonebridge, where first, stonecutters and masons, and then labourers, went on strike. Officers patrolled through the day and into the evening and ultimately handcuffed roughly a dozen men around the town-hall stove for the night. This time Hill opted for incarceration, not fines, and sent eight labourers to Welland gaol for one to two months each. As labourers and stonecutters continued to move in to take the strikers’ jobs, special police augmented the regular force patrolling the streets.99 During a strike two months later more labourers appeared before Hill, charged with interfering with officers attempting to protect strikebreakers.100 The Quebec Provincial Police were called to intervene on the Lachine, though how effective or necessary they were is unclear. Reports concerning the inadequacy of the force appear in particular from 1877 to 1879, when Orange demonstrations, labour conflict, and unrest among the unemployed demanded simultaneous intervention in major centres. Intervention of police and military to enforce the law was a crucial contribution of the state to relations between capital and labour. However, even when the unskilled were successful in confronting police and military and in keeping strikebreakers off the job, they faced bigger obstacles. During the early 1870s the relative shortage of labour throughout much of Canada and the United States gave men on projects like the Grenville increased bargaining power and rendered contractors more vulnerable to labourers’ demands, unless they had the means and the time to bring in men from a distance, and even then

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they had no certainty that replacement workers would be more malleable or that the men on the ground would make way for strikebreakers. But the slide into depression meant that until the final years of the decade the 1870s were marked by labour surpluses, and, as in earlier decades, surplus labourers gravitated to major public works projects where they competed for any available jobs. Indeed, the unemployed lobbied for expansion of public works at every level of government to help provide work and sustenance for the many hungry men and families congregating in poverty. It was in the face of the unemployed close at hand and the surpluses at a distance that men attempted to gain an increase in wages or at least to resist a reduction in wages. The victories they enjoyed, though limited, they won in the face of the poverty of others and their own families’ immediate need. How? On the Welland and Lachine, how did they go further and think they could create labour unions? On the Welland, what was the basis for united strike action with teamsters and stonecutters? The answer lies in part in the extent to which others made the labourers’ conflict their own. Tangible material support in meeting immediate needs came from local citizens in a number of forms: donations such as that of the Grand Trunk Railway Engineers; the provision of food and extension of free lodging by tavern keepers; and the expansion of credit by grocers and boarding-house keepers which increased their immediate stake in the outcome of strikes. Less-tangible public support and advice came from various quarters: the attempts at intervention by elected representatives to local legislatures and to Parliament; the local newspaper advertisements taken out by dry goods merchant Carsley, who warned workers not to trust that intervention; and the echoing of Carsley by local politicians who professed to being more in touch with the working man. Then there was the behindthe-scenes advice of the “agitators” meeting with strikers in Montreal taverns and the more visible support of the teamsters and Thorold Stonecutters demonstrated through unity in strike action. Add to this the moral support of community members along the Welland and Lachine who turned out to cheer the strikers’ processions. All of this points to the importance of concrete ties in the immediate area, ties formed in commercial transactions, ties of constituents to elected representatives, and ties of family and neighbours. Still nebulous for this group of workers are connections being formed around ideas, both ideas grounded in local experience and ideas brought to the workplace from other sites of conflict. The types of support suggested here could help rally strikers against strikebreakers and sustain them in tough battles in hard times. But

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they could only go so far. The ending to the Lachine Canal strike in December 1877 reveals what labourers were up against and cautions against reading too much into what they could and did accomplish. The strike was one of a number of impressive demonstrations of unity among canallers in the 1870s. The strong encouragement of the chief of police that the labourers return to work under police protection and the presence of one hundred members of the Prince of Wales Rifles to back up that protection could not induce the men to return to work. But hunger could. After five days, the strikers and their families were in desperate need. The men on Lawson and McRae’s section were among those still holding firm, when on Saturday evening, three days before Christmas, the contractors gave to each of their employees a Christmas goose. To men with large families they gave two. Turkeys were also distributed liberally. According to the Labourers Committee this well-calculated gesture hit the labourers where they were most vulnerable, in their stomachs, and on Monday morning Lawson and McRae’s men were back at work at $0.90 a day, the first group to settle for less than $1.00 a day, fortnightly in cash. Their return seriously weakened morale on other sections and signalled the beginning of the end for men whose material resources, if not their will, had run out. Men gradually began the return to work. It was not the military presence, which proved unnecessary, nor the counsel of the police, which went unheeded, but hunger which ultimately brought defeat. In the words of a strike leader, “the turkeys broke up the general strike.”101

Conclusion

At the height of the depression in August 1877, the Montreal Star admonished labouring men to persevere at their allotted tasks, and they, too, would share the rewards of industry: “[O]ne might today find prosperous families in the townships of Pullstinch, Pilkington, Peel, Arthur, etc., who had once been common ditch diggers and canal men.” The Welland Tribune argued the same, though counselled patience. It reminded its readers that the “descendants of present labourers, by and by become gentlemen,” according to a natural progression, “but not in a single leap.”1 Recreation of personal life histories would uncover a small proportion of canal and railway labourers who, after a period at construction, rose to prominence in their communities and a larger proportion who found a place on small holdings or in more stable employment in the area of public works. Others would be found continuing the cycles of farming, fishing, lumbering, and other work into which they had fitted labour with picks and shovels. Still others would be identified following construction jobs and finding in them the immediate livelihoods they sought for themselves and the means of nurturing new generations with their own possibilities for the future. Of those labourers able to persist at construction into middle age, perhaps the majority were able to support a family at or a little above the subsistence level during the periods in which they worked and with the assistance of other family income, but frequently living from hand to mouth, it is unlikely they were able to save for the future and against adversity. And adversity came in many forms to canal and railway labourers: illness bred in bleak and unsanitary living conditions; dismemberment and death in harsh and dangerous work environments; too-frequent periods of unemployment and 283

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underemployment; the constant struggle to stretch wages to cover costs; the precarious dependence on wages discounted by payment in credit and truck; cycles of debt waiting for overdue wages and more debt when wages did not come through; and crippling family tragedies from which there was no recovery. To move beyond these generalizations is to venture into the realm of speculation for the overwhelming majority of labourers. They found choices, and as they chose they created individual life paths which suggest patterns but resist definition. During peak construction seasons in the 1840s the many labourers and their families who had migrated into the area frustrated representatives of the local and central governments by their unwillingness or inability to move along. But as construction wound down, a large segment did as public works and emigration officials had predicted: they moved on south of the border to remain part of the itinerant labour force building throughout North America. A portion may have found their way to indifferent soil in the hinterland, to clear and claim title to small holdings or settle without title on as-yet-unoccupied land. With resources from construction labour alone, few could have acquired desirable acreage. The tighter labour supply and higher wages early in the 1850s may have encouraged more to try for land, but desirable acreage was growing scarce, likely beyond their means, and emigration agents were still warning that regular employment for a number of years was necessary before immigrants could begin to establish themselves as freeholders. Settlement did expand along completed railways and the improved canal system. But if a community grew up along the works, was it because labourers had stayed, or because canals and railways demarcated a path for future development, making settlement more attractive? Men from the rural economies may have turned their earnings into increased acreage and hiring of farm labour, sinking deeper roots into the land. Some would have continued subsistence farming in combination with lumbering, fishing, and working the land for others, and some would have found increased opportunities for new types of work as the transportation projects they created pulled communities and regions closer together. Still others would have made a break with the rural economies, perhaps following the promise of jobs in the United States, not necessarily lost to British North America but continuing as part of an international pool of labourers. Those with attachments in urban communities may have returned there or moved on to other centres to participate profitably in the expansion of key economic sectors at mid-century or to find instead underemployment and unemployment.

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Labourers of the 1870s could have moved on to other construction sites, to municipal works and railway projects throughout the new Dominion, east to the Western and Eastern Extensions, the Windsor and Annapolis, the Prince Edward Island, or the Newfoundland Railways, and west to the Canadian Pacific, where many French Canadians found employment until they became more trouble than they were worth by demanding better conditions and higher wages. Moving from project to project, they would have replicated the patterns of labourers at mid-century, travelling close to home if possible but following work throughout the continent if necessary, not just in construction but in heavy industries consolidating through the 1880s. Men from centres such as St Catharines, Montreal, Moncton, or Halifax need not have moved far to maintain fitful employment and continue to swell the pools of labourers building up in urban areas, not attached to particular industries but part of the surplus from which emerging industries could draw. The wage rates in the early 1870s may have enabled some to expand existing acreage or to simply maintain a place on the land and in rural occupations. Alternatively, labour on public works may have represented a step away from marginal lands or a step towards even more marginal soil in the Laurentians or on the fringe of settlement, promoted by governments as desirable by virtue of its location close to new transportation networks. Others, among whom the Italian labourers stand out, stretched their rural ties much further, continuing at labouring jobs in North America and sending earnings back across the Atlantic to help maintain their place in communities there. As labourers came and went on public works they created communities which were internally differentiated by age, marital status, the number of women and children present, degrees of poverty, types of attachments in the area of construction, and all the life experiences and circumstances individuals brought to the works. Over the decades they brought an increasing and remarkable diversity to construction sites. By the 1850s and through the 1870s immigrants from a growing range of countries and men from the expanding urban and rural sectors of North America produced on the largest projects, and to a lesser extent on the smaller ones, microcosms of the enormous pool from which unskilled labourers could be drawn. But much of the differentiation within any one cluster of labourers is lost in the historical record, and with it the day-to-day interactions within family networks, neighbourhoods, communities of faith, and leisure affiliations from taverns to temperance associations. These have been obscured by the processes which marginalized in the past and into

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the present. Aspects of labourers’ lives which attracted considerably more attention were the public and frequently violent demonstrations of group allegiances and group conflicts: faction fighting between Cork and Connaught, clashes between Protestant and Catholic, and fighting for work between groups usually defined by ethnicity and usually involving the Irish. Labourers’ involvement in local and international political conflicts also focused attention on the group and on the Irish in particular: in their support for reform candidates in Lower Canada, their appearance at the polls in Nova Scotia, their nationalist demonstrations for Repeal of the Act of Union, and their opposition to Joseph Howe’s attempts to recruit for Crimea. That focus reveals much about the deep and ongoing divisions within the broader society rooted in religious beliefs and antagonisms, pervasive racism and nativism, questions of loyalty to the British crown, and challenges to the exercise of political power. But these were issues that belonged to more than one ethnic group and to more than troublemakers on the public works and spoke to the concerns of Scots Presbyterian labourers from Cape Breton, English and Canadien farmer-lumberers on the works, and farmer-fisher folk, who had their own place in the social ruptures and political conflict in these years. Moral and social reformers’ critique of labourers on the public works also spoke to broader tensions within the larger society, not just on the public works, and to the moral failings of more than just the Irish. Though in the 1840s moral and social reformers spoke primarily in the language of racial and religious prejudice, by the 1850s the critique of the Irish was being absorbed into a more general attack on men and women whose dissolute behaviour and disregard for established authority stood as a challenge to the vision of an ordered and orderly society. Those under attack included the spectrum of men and women clustered around construction sites, highly visible representatives of emerging groups who threatened to undermine the sober hard work necessary to moral, social, and economic advancement. In the 1870s, the shift in focus from ethno-racial critiques became more apparent as the workforce grew more ethnically heterogeneous, and conflict between ethnic groups occasioned less comment, though still could occur as the clash between Irish and Italians on the Welland demonstrated. Attention focused more sharply on labourers’ apparent indolence and the spectre of the tramp and vagrant who emerged as a menace during the depression years, and on the excesses of male sociability, the drinking, brawling, and dissipation. Taken together across the decades, the result was representations of the labourers’ lives which slanted towards moral, social, and political critiques of the

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disruption they threatened in the areas in which they worked. These representations are valuable in situating labourers within the processes of social and class formation, though their primary impact was and has been to define public works labourers according to a moral and social geography which set them apart. The state’s multiple roles in public works construction reflected and expanded this moral and social geography. Legislation attempted to control alcohol consumption and weapons possession and created the means to enforce law and order. Introduced in the Canadas in the 1840s with a major focus on an ethno-racial critique of the labourers, the discussion and expansion of similar legislation in the 1870s underlined its class nature. In the face of the ethnically diverse workforce on public projects, the governments of the day focused more sharply on the labourers as defined by their work and position in the labour force and marketplace, and they broadened the legislation’s applicability to include any area in which a large number of workers were engaged in major construction projects, both publicly and privately prosecuted, as well as private enterprises considered crucial to development, such as mining. Parallel attempts to restrict the carrying of weapons by other targeted segments of society and the ongoing battle to control the sale and consumption of alcohol by the public at large do not detract from the clarity of the message concerning labourers on public works. It would have been difficult to be clearer about the perceived threat this segment of workers posed when they came together in their numbers. From the 1840s into the early 1880s, groups of public works labourers themselves became clearer about the nature of the threat they posed, providing abundant evidence of the divisions opening up between capital and labour, though divisions among the labourers also thrived. Workplace conflict on canals and railways focused on machinery, hours of work, methods of payment, and late and lost wages and included a running battle over the exercise of authority in the workplace. But the major manifestation of conflict took the form of work stoppages over wage rates, by the 1840s portrayed more in the language of strikes than that of riots, though riots would long remain an excellent descriptor with which to discredit strikers, confuse and outrage the public, and invite government intervention in labour-capital conflict. The struggle for power on construction sites also involved conflict among groups of workers attempting to monopolize the work or intervene in a strike. Despite the threat of such divisions, labourers demonstrated unity and success in numerous strikes. In the 1840s that unity was based on already well-established traditions

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and mechanisms for organization among the predominantly Irish workers, and evidence of the importance of those traditions would continue into the following decade. However, the 1850s witnessed successful strike action uniting men from diverse backgrounds on a number of projects. The potential for divisions did not disappear, but the potential for unity was manifest, as labourers redefined their ethnic and racial bonds and identities throughout North America. The challenge posed by labourers on public works was even less ambiguous in the 1870s. Early success in pushing up wages on the Intercolonial was quickly overshadowed by the succession of delinquent and runaway contractors and the struggle to secure lost wages. On the Grenville Canal, however, labourers forced up wages early in the decade, and those on the Lachine and Welland engaged in regular large strikes which, while less successful, demonstrated impressive unity in attempts to maintain and push up wages in hard times and across a workforce comprised at a minimum of French Canadians, English, Scots, and Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, on the Lachine Canal, and a similar breakdown with the addition of Swedes, Germans, and Italians on the Welland. What makes the strikes on the Lachine and Welland stand out is the evidence of the labourers’ attempts to signify and solidify their unity by the creation of what they publicly proclaimed to be labour unions which met to consider strategy and choose representatives to present their demands to contractors and politicians. Also significant as evidence of ties forming with other groups of workers are the examples on the Welland of united strike action with teamsters and even with the stonecutters, one of the most powerful unions of the decade. From the Lachine comes evidence of financial support from another powerful union, the Grand Trunk Railway Engineers, and on both canals moral support came from the local community. The broader connections and basis of support are not surprising at a time when a maturing industrial capitalism was appropriating the skills of many and depression was shaking the security of many more, as workers across industries and skill levels confronted employers attempting to lower costs and meet cash flow problems by cutting wages, increasing payment in credit, and not paying wages at all. Entering a deflationary period with the accelerated consolidation of capital and all that meant for the relative power of capital and labour, the experience of labourers such as those on the public works resonated with a wider segment of the working class. This resonance situated them at the centre of the larger labour campaign for security of wages, giving their protests and strikes a significance in the political

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arena their earlier actions had not achieved. The changed composition of the workforce and the expansion of the franchise gave the labourers themselves more political clout. These were not just strangers and foreigners labouring in the wilderness; many were constituents and eligible to express their displeasure at the polls, and if many labourers still did not meet the franchise qualifications, those who housed and fed them or advanced credit in various forms did. Politicians whose success depended on resolution of workers’ grievances pressed for remedial action in the face of government legal advisors and accountants more narrowly focused on rights and responsibilities as defined by existing law and seemingly less concerned with the broader political implications of the failure to act. Remedial action was ad hoc and in that respect neither broadly applicable nor a firm commitment to future action, and improved legislation, on mechanics’ liens, for example, came at the provincial, not federal, level. But labour lobbyists and like-minded politicians worked at every level of government to draw the reluctant into debates over issues which were bringing members of the working class together. Changes in the law as it related to trade unions and strikes must be considered important in shaping labourers’ strike action and the support it received. Hard-won legislation in the 1870s clarified the legal status of trade unions, and Prime Minister Mackenzie’s sharp reminder to contractors that labourers had the right to strike, together with his expressed disinclination to intervene during strikes on the Lachine and the Welland, are among signs of a shift in the legal landscape within which labourers struck in the 1870s. However, the state’s direct role in dealing with cost overruns and disruptions to construction schedules and commerce situated it squarely in the domain of labour and capital relations, and within that realm its constituent parts possessed considerable scope and power to prosecute strikers and limit their collective power. Strike-related offences for which workers could face criminal sanctions were capable of such broad interpretation and the actions they represented so crucial to successful strikes that labourers on public works were among those who spent time in gaol as a result of their demonstration of what they considered to be their rights during strikes. The instruments for state intervention which put them behind bars or shackled them for the night around courthouse stoves changed with the dramatic reduction in Britain’s military presence and the division between provincial and federal powers brought by Confederation. Reliance on British troops and special police on the canals in the Canadas and along the European and North American Railway gave way to dependence on expanding local

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forces; in Ontario and Quebec newly created provincial police were supplemented by the Dominion Police or special constables when jurisdictional boundaries were successfully negotiated, and by the militia when the case was successfully made. Though these resources and the mechanisms for their cooperation strained to meet the multiple challenges of the 1870s, their deployment revealed the continued commitment to protecting those willing to work during strikes. This was not inconsistent with the efforts of politicians and state officials to mediate on behalf of labourers whose grievances some believed warranted state intervention. It was part of a view of capital and labour relations which favoured remedial action to contain workers’ protests, if necessary, but denounced protests except when the treatment of workers appeared particularly egregious. This multifaceted approach to militance on the public works reflected fears that strikes and protests over unemployment and the support they received represented a frightening development, something more sweeping and threatening than the struggle to secure work and lost and higher wages, and perhaps it did in the hearts and minds of the few who could imagine what others could not. Primarily, though, it represented the material and relationships of everyday life. Local storekeepers, hoteliers, and boarding-house keepers needed reimbursement for credit extended. Children, mothers, in-laws, and others needed the material contributions labourers hoped to make. Neighbourhoods needed resilience for a host of relationships in danger of being fractured by prolonged periods of hardship. Skilled workers and the formally organized also demonstrated that they could benefit from the success of labourers’ strikes, most obviously and directly when they joined them in strike activity, but also in solidarity around political campaigns such as those for security of wages. Were advocates of radical social and political change among the men on the public works? Even if they were not working alongside the labourers, under what circumstances would they have passed up the opportunity to meet with them in neighbourhood taverns and large public gatherings to share their perspective? As labour history continues to chart the migration of individuals and their experiences and ideas across national borders and the interconnections among groups of workers who acted internationally as they moved internationally, clearer images of the transfer of ideas and interconnections among organizations will emerge. For labourers such as those on public works, not formally organized and unusually mobile because of the nature of the work, making the connections will be difficult. But the spread of alternative critiques of capital and labour relations and the movement

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of a small number of political exiles and fugitives through the 1870s into the 1880s suggest the value of remaining open to finding a Molly Maguire or a Communard in their midst. More valuable will be the search for clearer ties with the more visible labour activists and organizers for whom the framework of local and international cooperation has already been sketched, groups such as the Grand Trunk Railway Engineers and the Thorold Stonecutters whose interactions with the unskilled on the Lachine and Welland suggest the important place of public works as sites where labour networks were building and ideas germinating. That leads to final questions concerning what labourers themselves took from their experience on the public works. As they moved off the construction sites, what of their experience had a lasting impact in their lives? What consciousness left its mark on them, and what of their consciousness left its mark on others? On the most immediate level, but also perhaps the most difficult to analyse, what was its impact on their children? When capital and employers came for members of the next generation, how much of the experience of their parents and of their own experience as children of labour would they weave into their own lives? Among the labourers themselves, the experience of resistance may have appeared of little lasting import to many who moved back to more familiar rural rhythms of work which construction had temporarily disrupted or to those who moved on to new sites of employment in which they neither identified nor created reason or means for collective resistance. For many, perhaps the majority, their time at construction may not have altered the way in which they perceived their place within socio-economic structures and in relation to capital, and no record of continuing association or organization helps in situating them in relation to the broader processes of resistance which continued to unfold. Many may have experienced their strikes and protests as exercises in futility which underlined their relative lack of power. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy enough to see their collective action as adding up to many failures and a few small victories. Even in their most aggressive and successful actions, the labourers’ gains seem paltry and the cost for those gains frequently very high. Even when sustained two or three years, to what did they amount? Particularly during the depression years of the 1870s, some of their collective action could be interpreted simply as attempts to stave off hunger, though sometimes the hungry think and see with astonishing clarity. The difficulty lies in trying to think and see as they did, looking forward, not with the enormous disadvantage of the historian, knowing how it ended, looking back.

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Whatever they saw looking forward, as they moved on as individuals or in small groups, back to the land, to urban centres, to regions throughout Canada and the United States, and to a variety of work settings, they and their experiences were diffused and dispersed. That is the crucial, if frustrating, point in any attempt to understand their impact on capital and labour relations. Here was a broadly dispersed base on which the labour protests and organizations of the 1880s could build. And it was a base which stretched back into rural communities and small urban centres, to the many fronts on which men and women met the power of industrial capitalism. It was receptive soil for the message of organizations such as the Knights of Labour and the vision of uniting workers across skill level, gender, and ethno-racial divides. More than receptive soil, the labourers helped to shape workers’ collective action and the response of the state through the 1870s and helped to prepare the ground for the labour upheaval of the 1880s and the new dimensions of labour and capital relations in the late nineteenth century.

Appendix

Location of Contracts (Sections) on the Intercolonial Railway and Third Welland Canal Intercolonial Railway: Contiguous Contracts (Sections) from Rivière du Loup to Truro St Lawrence District: 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 14 Restigouche District: 17, 18, 19, 3, 6, 9, 15 Miramichi District: 16, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23 Nova Scotia District: 11, 4, 7, 12

Intercolonial Contracts (Sections): Numbered as Routes Decided and Calls for Tenders Issued ICR 1: Grading, Masonry, Rivière du Loup toward Trois Pistoles, 20 miles (St Lawrence) ICR 2: Grading, Masonry, past Trois Pistoles into valley of St Simon, 20 miles (St Lawrence) ICR 3: Grading, Masonry, Restigouche River east to Baie des Chaleurs, 24 miles (Restigouche) ICR 4: Grading, Masonry, east from Amherst to River Philip, 27 miles (Nova Scotia) ICR 5: Grading, Masonry, St Simon to head of Bic Bay and Rimouski, 26 miles (St Lawrence) ICR 6: Grading, Masonry, along Baie des Chaleurs and from Eel to Jaquet Rivers, 21 miles (Restigouche) ICR 7: Grading, Masonry, River Philip to Folly Lake, 24½ miles (Nova Scotia) 293

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ICR 8: Grading, Masonry, Rimouski approaching the Metis River, 20½ miles (St Lawrence) ICR 9: Grading, Masonry, from Section 6 approaching Bathurst, 21 miles (Restigouche) ICR 10: Grading, Masonry, from Newcastle toward Bathurst, 20 miles (Miramichi) ICR 11: Grading, Masonry, Missiguash River boundary with New Brunswick to Amherst, 4½ miles (Nova Scotia) ICR 12: Grading, Masonry, Folly Lake Section through to Truro, 24½ miles (Nova Scotia) ICR 13: Grading, Masonry, past Metis River to Matapédia Valley, PQ, 20½ miles (St Lawrence) ICR 14: Grading, Masonry, Metis to Matapédia Lake basin and Valley, 22½ miles (St Lawrence) ICR 15: Grading, Masonry, south past Bathurst harbour towards Miramichi, 12½ miles (Restigouche) ICR 16: Grading, Masonry, south from Section 15, 18½ miles (Miramichi) ICR 17: Grading, Masonry, through valley of Matapédia, Quebec, 20 miles (Restigouche) ICR 18: Grading, Masonry, through valley of Matapédia, Quebec, 20 miles (Restigouche) ICR 19: Grading, Masonry, through valley of Matapédia and crossing the Restigouche River, 9½ miles ICR 20: Grading, Masonry, from Newcastle, crossing Miramichi River, 6 miles (Miramichi) ICR 21: Grading, Masonry, east of Miramichi to west of River Kouchibouguac, 25 miles (Miramichi) ICR 22: Grading, Masonry, west of River Kouchibouguac to River Boutouche, 25 miles (Miramichi) ICR 23: Grading, Masonry, from the River Bouctouche crossing to Moncton, 22½ miles (Miramichi) ICR Contract #25: Track laying, ballasting from Rivière du Loup to Trois Pistoles ICR Contract #27: Track laying, ballasting from Trois Pistoles to Ste Flavie (Quebec) ICR Contract #54: Track laying, ballasting, approx. 79 miles, for Sections 3, 6, 9, 15, and parts of 18 and 19 ICR Contract #58: Track laying and ballasting, approx. 45 miles, for Sections 10, 16, 20 (New Brunswick) ICR Contract #65: Track laying and ballasting, approx. 72.5 miles, for Sections 20, 21, 22, 23

App e nd i x  2 9 5

Location of Sections on Welland Canal Sec. 1: Port Dalhousie Secs. 2–14: Between Port Dalhousie and Thorold, contiguous and overlapping Sec. 15: Thorold Secs. 16–20: Between Thorold and Allanburg Secs. 21–3: Between Allanburg and Port Robinson Secs. 24–6: Between Port Robinson and Welland Sec. 27: At Welland Sec. 28: At Junction Secs. 29–32: Junction to Ramey’s Bend Sec. 33: At Ramey’s Bend Sec. 34: At Stonebridge Secs. 35–6: At Port Colborne

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Notes

Introduction 1. Nova Scotian, 15 Dec. 1856. The altercation and subsequent trial is discussed in chap. 5. 2. Brooke, The Railway Navvy: “That Despicable Race of Men,” 108, 205n1. Brooke’s example is from along the Leeds and Thirsk Railway. 3. See in particular Brooke, The Railway Navvy; Coleman, The Railway Navvies; Handley, The Navvy in Scotland; and Treble, “Irish Navvies in the North of England,” 227–47. For the larger context within which British navvies laboured and interacted with the host societies of continental Europe see Bensimon, “British Workers in France, 1815–1848,” 147–89. 4. Rowe, “The Robust Navvy,” 28–46. 5. For discussions of canal and railway labourers in North America see, in particular, Way, Common Labour; Way, “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits,” 1397–1428; Way, “Shovel and Shamrock,” 489–517; Pentland, “The Lachine Strike of 1843,” 255–77; Boily, Les Irlandis et le Canal de Lachine; Horner, “Solemn Processions and Terrifying Violence,” 36–47; Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 9–39; Wylie, “Poverty, Distress, and Disease,” 7–30; Kesteman, “Les Travailleurs à la construction du chemin de fer,” 525– 45; Appleton, “The Sunshine and the Shade”; Morris, “Andrew Jackson, Strikebreaker,” 54–68; O’Day, “Constructing the Western Railroad,” 6–21; Bard, “Violence along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: 1839,” 121–34; Tobin, “The Lowly Muscular Digger”; Mason, “The Hands Here Are Disposed to Be Turbulent,” 253–72; and Hall, “The Construction Workers’ Strike,” 11–35. 6. Nova Scotian, 15 Nov. 1856.

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7. For immigrant labourers on later projects of the North American West see, in particular, Avery, Dangerous Foreigners; Avery, Reluctant Host; and Peck, Reinventing Free Labor. 8. That international dimension of labour markets has been explored in groundbreaking work covering the build-up of labour pools through the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, most significantly for this study in Way’s impressive analysis of construction labourers on canals throughout North America, Common Labour. From among the studies of labour migration in the later period see, in particular, Ramirez, On the Move, and Peck, Reinventing Free Labor. 9. McCalla, “The Internal Economy of Upper Canada,” 397–416; McCalla, Planting the Province; Little, Crofters and Habitants; Craig, Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists; Bitterman, “The Hierarchy of the Soil,” 33–55; Bitterman, “Farm Households and Wage Labour,” 34–59; Bittermann, MacKinnon, and Wynn, “Of Inequality and Interdependence,” 1–43; and Samson, Spirit of Industry and Improvement. 10. Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers; DePastino, Citizen Hobo; Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts. These scholars cover themes central to this study. 11. Indeed, in England, the term was broadened even more to become and remain into the twentieth century applicable to any labourer involved in heavy work, usually related to construction, but not always. See the discussions in Brooke, The Railway Navvy, 50–4; and Treble, “Irish Navvies.” This work uses the terms as they were used by contemporaries in their reports and observations. 12. New Brunswick Courier, 11 June 1859; Chignecto Post, 27 July 1871; Morning Journal, 19 Mar. 1858. 13. Dickens, Mugby Junction, 92; Zola, La bête humaine. 14. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era. Lawrence Friedman’s foreword to the 2012 edition of Harry Scheiber’s classic study of the Ohio Canal provides excellent coverage of key debates concerning the relationship between state and economy during the nineteenth-century American transportation revolution. Scheiber’s concluding bibliographic note covers important studies of state enterprise in its various forms. 15. Cruikshank, Close Ties, 4. As Ken Cruikshank has argued persuasively concerning private railway ventures, “close ties between governments and the railway industry meant that railways were considered public projects, extensions of local, provincial, and even national ambitions.” Both the rhetorical and actual merging of private and public interests had significant impact on the relationships among capital, labour, and the state on both public and private construction projects. 16. The role of the imperial and colonial state in promoting and funding transportation projects leading up to Confederation has been well

Note s to Page s 9 – 1 7   2 9 9

documented from a variety of perspectives. See, in particular, the contributions to Greer and Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: Radforth, “Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform,” 64–102; McCalla, “Railways and the Development of Canada West, 1850–1870,” 192–229; Baskerville, “Transportation, Social Change, and State Formation, Upper Canada, 1841– 1864,” 230–56; and Piva, “Government Finance and the Development of the Canadian State,” 257–83. See also den Otter, Philosophy of Railways; and Piva, “Continuity and Crisis,” 185–210. The guidance provided by these articles has been further focused by the challenge of McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 616–78, and the continuing debate as represented by perspectives in Constant and Ducharme, Liberalism and Hegemony. 17. Langhout, “Developing Nova Scotia,” 3–28. Langhout demonstrates the extent to which the commitment to railway construction fundamentally changed Nova Scotia’s financial structure and the role of the state. 18. Langhout, “Public Enterprise”; and Allen, “The Origins of the Intercolonial Railway.” Langhout and Allen disagree as to whether New Brunswick was reluctant to assume construction of the European and North American as a public enterprise. 19. For federal commitment to improving navigation see Canada, Sessional Papers (hereafter cited Sessional Papers), 1871, No. 54, Report of the Commission on the Inland Navigation of the Dominion; and Sessional Papers, 1867–8, No. 8, General Report of the Commissioner of Public Works, app. 70. 20. McCalla, “Railways and the Development of Canada West.” See also Baskerville’s emphasis on the “discontinuous development” of the activist state in the area of transportation. Baskerville, “Transportation, Social Change, and State Formation.” 21. Owram, “Management by Enthusiasm,” 171–88. Appointed and elected officials were, of course, concerned with private ventures, and here ties between politicians and enterpreneurs were close, an important theme in numerous studies of railways, transcontinentals in particular. 22. This study uses the term transnational to emphasize the extent to which individuals, groups, ideas, and capital moved across boundaries and the desirability of tracing those movements to make direct connections, without aspiring to the broad reach suggested by the terms global and globalization. See the contributions of Isabel Hofmeyr, Sven Beckert, Matt Connelly, and Chris Bayly to “AHR Conversation: On Transnational His­ tory,” 1441–64. 23. See Andreae, “Railways,” and Passfield, “Waterways,” in Ball, Building Canada. 24. For an early exchange on fragmentation and working class history within the British North American and Canadian context see Drache,

3 0 0   Notes to Pages 1 9 – 2 6

“Formation and Fragmentation,” 43–89; and Palmer, “Listening to History,” 47–84. The debate continues profitably and is inseparable from analyses of division and unity which focus on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, region, and levels of skill. 25. Little has been written concerning labour on projects in the 1850s. The end of the canal era in the late 1850s is the logical cutting-off point for Way’s study, but the sharp decline in construction during the 1850s means he includes little on the projects of that decade. For important studies of railway construction labourers in the 1850s and 1870s see note 6 above. For the broad contours of labour organization and protest in this period see the relevant sections of Palmer, Working Class Experience; Palmer, “Labour Protest and Organization,” 61–83; Forsey, Trade Unionism in Canada; Hamelin, Larocque, and Rouillard, Répertoire des grèves; Hamelin and Bélanger, Les Travailleurs québécois; and Heron, Canadian Labour Movement. 26. Census records, so valuable in reconstructing working class lives, only capture labourers on a project during enumeration, and their value is limited by difficulties distinguishing construction workers from others in the area and the impossibility of identifying who among locals took temporary jobs on canals and railways. This study uses labourers who identified themselves, or were identified by census takers, as canallers, navvies, railroad navvies, or railroad or canal labourers, but does not do as some scholars have, and assume that proximity to a public work indicates individuals entered as “labourers” were working construction, in the absence of support for that assumption. It also makes limited use for comparative purposes of census data for labourers identified on a small number of private projects underway during enumeration. For British North America see Kesteman, “Les Travailleurs à la construction du chemin de fer”; and Bleasdale and Campbell, “Cost Benefit Analysis.” Way makes use of fragments of census information for the United States. Census data has been particularly valuable for the study of canal and railway labourers within Britain: Patmore, “Navvy Gang of 1851,” 182–9; Treble, “Irish Navvies”; Brooke, The Railway Navvy; Gerrish, “The Dock Builders,” 45–58; and Leiver, “The Modern Ishmaels,” 141–55. 27. Ontario Archives (hereafter cited OA) RG22, Court Records, Series 372, Box 48-31, April Sessions 1843, Regina v. Florence Sullivan and Dennis Gagan.

Chapter 1 1. OA, RG18, Civil Court Cases, C-11-23, Report of Committee appointed to enquire into the circumstances attending the non-fulfilment of the contract entered into by John Counter, 24 July 1857.

Note s to Page s 2 6 – 3 0   3 0 1

2. Ibid. Crawford and Milner had taken over the work when the previous contractor failed. 3. National Archives of Canada (hereafter NAC), RG11, Records of the Board of Works, 1827–1866, and Department of Public Works, 1821– 1880, vol. 33, #37973, Petition of James Jack, 17 Aug. 1858. 4. Thorold Post, 17 Sept. 1875; Welland Tribune, 30 June, 7 July 1876; Thorold Post, 30 June 1876. 5. See, for example, Currie, The Grand Trunk Railway of Canada; Stevens, Canadian National Railways; Regehr, The Canadian Northern Railway; and Fleming, The Railway King of Canada. For studies challenging this image see, in particular, White, “Losing Ventures,” 237–60; White, Gentlemen Engineers; White, Railroaded; and Angus, A Respectable Ditch. An early work in this vein is Young, Promoters and Politicians. 6. On the global impact of British engineers, in particular, by the second half of the nineteenth century see Stromquist, “Railroad Labor,” 623–47. For an earlier study see Buchanan, “The Diaspora of British Engineering,” 501–24. On the role of the British Royal Engineers see Weiler, “Colonial Connections,” 3–18. 7. White, “Canadian Civil Engineers Pre-1850,” 73–95; White, Gentlemen Engineers; Chrimes, Civil Engineering of Canals and Railways before 1850. See also Millard, Master Spirit of the Age; Ball, Mind, Heart, and Vision; Gagnon, Histoire de l’école polytechnique; and Owram, Building for Canadians. 8. Rolt, Victorian Engineering, 37–8. 9. Nova Scotia, House of Assembly, 1858, Railway Committee, 26 Apr. 1858; James Laurie, Report on the Nova Scotia Railway (Halifax: A. Grant, 1858), 9–11. Laurie’s report was instrumental in earning him the position of chief engineer. New Brunswick, Report of Railway Commissioners, 1859, 37, 40. 10. RG11, vol. 828, Fleming to Commissioners, 27 May 1870. See problems on the Miramichi in Fleming, The Intercolonial, 187–9. 11. “Evidence taken before a Committee of the House of Assembly of the Province of Nova Scotia,” 9 Apr. 1858, reproduced in Morning Journal, 26 Apr. 1858. 12. RG11, vol. 161, #37327, Page to Braun, 23 Dec. 1873; Welland Tribune, 16 Feb., 20 Apr. 1877; NAC, RG43, Records of the Department of Railways and Canals, vol. 792, #91470, McNamee to Tupper, 16 May 1881. The increased cost of labour in 1872 and 1873 also hit hard at James Goodwin on the Grenville and at Bonneville, who took one of the earliest contracts on the Lachine. RG11, vol. 182, #26428, Page to Braun, 4 Nov. 1872; and vol. 176, #31232, Bonneville to Langevin, 27 May 1873. 13. Price, Masters, Unions and Men. For the process in general building contracting see Price’s discussion of wildly erratic speculative tendering

3 0 2   Notes to Pages 3 1 – 3

which drove prices down and increased sweating. For the impact of general contracting on bidding and prices in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada see Schrauwers, “Gentlemenly Order,” 9–45. 14. Brooke, “Brassey, Thomas”; Hidy, House of Baring; and Langhout, “Railways and Public Accounts.” Brassey’s experience in Europe and connections with Baring Brothers was key to financing projects such as the Quebec and Richmond and Grand Trunk Railways. 15. Canada, Legislative Journals (hereafter Legislative Journals), 1843, app. Q, Report of the Board of Works; 1844–5, app. AA, Report of the Board of Works. 16. Legislative Journals, 1854–55, app. O, Report of Commissioners. 17. RG11, vol. 17, #16549, May 1852; Legislative Journals, 1854–5, app. EEEE, Return of all Contracts ... the Junction Canal. 18. New Brunswick, Railway Commissioners, 1859, 26; NAC, Manuscript Group 9, Provincial, Local, and Territorial Records, Al, New Brunswick Executive Council (hereafter MG 9), vol. 52, Jardine to Tilley, 18 Oct., 27 Feb. 1858; Morning News, 28 Jan. 1857; Laurie, Report. The engineer for the European and North American, Alexander Light, reported that to his knowledge and in particular after the end of 1857, all contracts had been let to “the lowest responsible bidder, who could procure the necessary securities.” 19. Canada, Commons Debates (hereafter Commons Debates), Shanly, 12 Apr. 1870, 994. 20. Canada, Senate Debates (hereafter Senate Debates), Tessier, 6 Mar. 1871, 267. 21. Halifax Evening Express, 27 Oct. 1869, quoting the Ottawa Times. 22. RG11, vol. 827, Report, Fleming to Governor General, 11 Feb. 1869. 23. RG11, vol. 479, #76949, Page to Braun, 19 Oct. 1878; Welland Tribune, 14, 28 Sept., 12 Oct. 1877. 24. Major contracts exclude those solely for furnishing supplies or constructing buildings. Included are contracts for moving earth and rock and preparing railway and canal beds. The latter usually included supplying of necessary material and building edifices subsidiary to moving earth and preparing beds. See the appendix for the location of contracts. 25. RG11, vol. 180, #12487, Page to Secretary, Sept. 1870; vol. 479, #76949, Page to Secretary, 10 Oct. 1878. 26. New Brunswick, Railway Commissioners, 1859, 56–7. 27. Legislative Journals, 1854, app. O. 28. OA, RG18, Report of Committee on John Counter, 24 July 1857. See note 1 above. 29. RG11, vol. 161, #37327, Page to Trudeau, Secretary of Public Works, 23 Dec. 1873.

Note s to Page s 3 3 – 8   3 0 3

3 0. Commons Debates, Shanly, 12 Apr. 1870, 994. 31. Ibid., Tupper, 11, 15 May 1883, 1159, 1221. 32. Ibid., Mackenzie, Tupper, Blake, McCallum, 1 May 1882, 1240–4. 33. Ibid., Tupper, 1 May 1882, 1241–2. 34. Ibid., Langevin, 28 Feb. 1878, 624–5. Engineers used this mechanism to disqualify the most obviously inadequate tenders, but it did not address the fundamental problem. 35. Angus, A Respectable Ditch, 167–8. The offer was not sufficiently attractive. See analysis of the incident and of the winning of a contract on the Trent-Severn system in the 1890s by Carroll’s partner, Larkin. 36. Reford, “Manning, Alexander Henderson”; Angus, A Respectable Ditch, 168–9. 37. Brassard and Hamelin, “McGreevy, Thomas.” See also LaPierre, “Joseph Israël Tarte and the McGreevy-Langevin Scandal,” 47–57. 38. East Chronicle, 5 May 1869. Bitterness over contracts awarded to other than local entrepreneurs reached a peak when Ontario and Quebec contractors secured major sections of the Intercolonial through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, particularly when local entrepreneurs had submitted the lowest tenders. See, for example, the outcry over the awarding of Section 7 to H.J. Sutton and Company of Paris, Ontario, whose bid had been $248.12 per mile higher than that of McDonald and Company of New Glasgow. Newspapers along the Intercolonial raised embarrassing questions concerning the vetting process. 39. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Beauharnois Report, J. Black; Johnson, “One Bold Operator,” 26–44; Merritt, Biography of the Hon. W.H. Merritt, 310. 40. Nova Scotian, 11 July, 10 Dec. 1855. Profiles of contractors in the 1840s and 1850s were created by combining references in the press and government documents with census material, where possible. 41. Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (hereafter PANB), RS22, Provincial Secretary, Railways, vol. 41A, File 2, 847–65; vols. 41A / 42, #3359, Petition of William T. Nibble and 20 others, Sept. 1851. 42. Any definition of Canadian is problematic, but it was a designation increasingly important in deliberations over awarding contracts during the 1870s. The working definition of Canadian in the late 1860s and through the 1870s includes contractors who had established and maintained a home base within Canada or what would become Canada, but might temporarily relocate to provide personal oversight of contracts. The choice of ten years is arbitrary, based in part on the possibility of tracing residence over two census enumerations and in part on the fact that contracts rarely extended longer than five years, at which point contractors chose whether to pull up stakes and move on to establish a new

3 0 4   Notes to Pages 3 8 – 4 2

base. Many contractors would have seen themselves as operating within and defined by the larger North American context, despite the establishment of homes within Canada. Concerns and questions about the use of the designation Canadian by contemporaries and in this study are noted in the text and endnotes. 43. No one source provides information on the background of those who tendered for or won contracts in the late 1860s through the 1870s. Conclusions are based on combining profiles of contractors who could be identified in census records from 1851–2 through 1881 and in municipal and commercial directories with material in government documents, Record Groups 11, 12, 30, and 43, and newspapers. 44. RG11, vol. 161, #38794, Braun to Fisher, 20 Feb. 1874; #38796, Sweet to Langevin, public works minister, 11 Feb. 1874; vol. 469, #56863, Mowbray to Braun, 19 Jan. 1876; Montreal Star, 1 Nov. 1878. 45. See chap. 4, notes 59 to 72, below. 46. RG11, vol. 161, #37327, Notice to Contractors from Braun, 29 Dec. 1873. 47. See chap. 2, note 102, below. Thorold Post, 27 Aug. 1875. The charges against Denison and Beldon were reported as initiated in retaliation for the part the company had played in defeating Tilden’s run for the presidency. 48. RG11, vol. 161, #37327, Page to Trudeau, 23 Dec. 1873. 49. RG11, vol. 159, #26872, Langeois to McNamee, 25 Nov. 1872; Montreal Star, 17 Nov. 1877, 22 Oct. 1878; Welland Tribune, 3 May 1878; RG11, vol. 159, #28430, Benner to Langevin, 30 Jan. 1873; Stagg, “Ryan, Hugh.” 50. Thorold Post, 17 Sept. 1875; Welland Tribune, 30 June, 7 July 1876; Thorold Post, 30 June 1876; Light, Report on the European and North American; Laurie, Report on the Nova Scotia Railway; Brassard and Hamelin, “McGreevy.” Unless otherwise indicated, patterns are traced using the method set out in note 42 above. Since careers for only one quarter of all contractors could be discerned, patterns are suggestive. 51. Welland Tribune, 7 Dec. 1877, 28 May 1880. 52. Benoit, “Beemer, Horace Jansen.” See the debate over Beemer’s winning of the contract on the Welland, Commons Debates, 1 May 1882, 1240–8. 53. Montreal Star, 12 May 1879; Andreae, “Buck”; Creet, “Fleming”; Welland Tribune, 2 Sept. 1875; White, Gentlemen Engineers; Gouglas, “Schreiber.” Schreiber’s limited private contracting included work on the Prince Edward Island Railway. 54. Légaré, “Berlinguet.” 55. Warwick, “Larkin.” 56. Rolt, George and Robert Stephenson; Middlemass, The Master Builders; Johnson, “One Bold Operator.” 57. Reford, “Manning”; Angus, A Respectable Ditch, 168–9.

Note s to Page s 4 2 – 6   3 0 5

58. RG11, vol. 828, Fleming to Commissioners, 27 May 1870. Sandford Fleming captures the approach of government bodies and officials to subcontracting in British North America and Canada. 59. See the descriptions of extensive subcontracting on sections of the Intercolonial Railway in Union Advocate, 17 Jan., 3 Apr. 1872; RG11, vol. 829, Fleming to Commissioners, 4 Dec. 1871. 60. See, for example, arrangements for “skilful and experienced” subcontractors on King and Gough’s section of the Intercolonial, RG11, vol. 829, Fleming to Commissioners, 4 Dec. 1871, and for Martin Murphy on the Restigouche Bridge on Section 19. RG11, vol. 829, Fleming to Mackenzie, 4 Feb. 1874; Mackenzie to Fleming, 27 Feb. 1874; Vol. 810, #6338, Secretary of State to Fleming, 24 Mar. 1874. 61. Welland Tribune, 3 May 1878. 62. The number with experience in both canal and railway construction would likely be significantly higher had the careers of a greater number of contractors been traced. 63. RG11, vol. 182, #36452, Sippell to Braun, 11 Nov. 1873. 64. Immediate disputes over estimates were resolved by the government of the day. 65. MG9, vol. 52, Light to Jardine, 8 Apr. 1858. 66. RG11, vol. 56–15, #20215, Begly to McDonald; Report of Committee of Executive Council, 8 Nov. 1856; Order in Council, #25586, Page to Begly, 12 Apr. 1855. 67. MG9, vol. 52, Light to Jardine, 8 Apr. 1858. 68. RG11, vol. 829, Fleming to Mackenzie, 18 Feb. 1874. 69. RG11, vol. 26, #31136, Gallwey to Secretary, 7 Oct. 1856. 70. RG11, vol. 181, #21630, Goodwin to Langevin, 14 Mar. 1872. 71. RG11, Record of Provincial Arbitrators, vols. 3745, 3746; Record of Official Arbitrators, vols. 3754, 3765–76; Nova Scotia, House of Assembly, Committee to Investigate Claims of Contractors, Mar. 29, 1858. Beginning in 1846 legislation set out terms for arbitrators in the Canadas and the Dominion. 72. Brassard and Hamelin, “McGreevy.” See also LaPierre, “Joseph Israël Tarte”; and Brassard and Hamelin, “Tarte, Joseph Israël.” 73. NAC, RG30, Canadian National Railways (hereafter RG30), vol. 12470, Commissioners to Smith, 27 Apr. 1870; Fleming to Langevin, 15 Jan. 1872; Committee of the Privy Council, 31 May 1873; Clerk of Privy Council to Commissioners, 3 Jan. 1874; Smith to Fleming, 21 Sept., 27 Apr. 1871; Fleming to Jones, 15 July 1872; vol. 12471, Home to Schreiber, 20 Apr. 1871; vol. 12470, Berlinguet and Bertrand to Commissioners, 3 Feb. 1873.

3 0 6   Notes to Pages 4 6 – 5 1

7 4. RG11, vol. 829, Fleming to Fry, 30 Oct. 1875. 75. Retracing of the treatment of defaulting contractors by the various administrations and subsequently by the courts in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, the Canadas, Canada, and England would reveal subtle patterns, and perhaps glaring anomalies, but that is beyond the scope of this study. 76. Commons Debates, Blake, 15 May 1883, 1222; Tupper, 11, 15 May 1883, 1158, 1222; Tupper and Mackenzie, 25 Apr. 1882, 1146. 77. Ibid., Shanly, 12 Apr. 1870, 994; and Senate Debates, Tessier, 6 Mar. 1871, 267. 78. Commons Debates, Tupper, 11 May 1883, 79. MG9, vol. 52, Light to Jardine, 8 Apr. 1858. 80. RG11, vol. 21, #23376, Baillarge to Begly, 12 Aug. 1854. 81. Superintending Engineer Robinson placed an order with Noble of Ohio. Legislative Journals, 1842, app. F; and Niagara Chronicle, Aug. 1843. 82. RG11, vol. 23, #26739, Baillarge to Begly, Sept. 1855; vol. 24, #27357, Baillarge to Begly, 6 Oct. 1855. 83. RG11, vol. 488, #82503, Perley to Braun, 16 June 1879. 84. RG11, vol. 690, #84234, C.H. Harrington, 22 Aug. 1879; #84873, Richard White, 10 Sept. 1879. 85. RG11, vol. 469, #58600, Charlebois to Mackenzie, 10 Apr. 1876; #58732, Sippell to Braun, 13 Apr. 1876. Steam hopper dredges available on loan from the government were not adequate for much of the work along the St Lawrence. RG11, vol. 791, #22980, Trudeau to Mackenzie, 24 Nov. 1873. 86. Welland Tribune, 23 July 1875. 87. Montreal Star, 22 July 1880; Sessional Papers, 1881, #5, app. 8, Page to Secretary of Railways and Canals, 8 Dec. 1880. 88. RG11, vol. 475, #78422, Davis to Minister of Public Works, 2 Jan. 1879. 89. Montreal Star, 22 Jan. 1877. 90. RG11, vol. 24, #27582, Gallwey to Begly, 6 Oct. 1855. 91. RG11, vol. 181, #21151, Page to Braun, 21 Feb. 1872; #20420, Catin to Langevin, 27 Dec. 1871. 92. Welland Tribune, 5 Nov., 20 Aug. 1880. 93. Montreal Star, 22 July 1880; Sessional Papers, 1881, #5, app. 8, Page to Secretary of Railways and Canals, 8 Dec. 1880; RG43, vol. 935, #86621, Davis and Sons to Minister of Railways and Canals, 14 Jan. 1880. 94. RG30, vol. 2027, Nova Scotia Railway Letterbook, Morse to Forman, 19 June 1856, 18 Nov., 4 Apr. 1857; RG11, vol. 160, #31775, Mitchell to Langevin, 17 June 1873. Welland Tribune, 8 Oct. 1875. 95. RG30, vol. 2027, Morse to Commissioners, 18 May 1858; Morse to Forman, 4 Feb. 1858; New Brunswick, Report of Railway Commissioners, 1859, 36.

Note s to Page s 5 1 – 4   3 0 7

96. New Brunswick, Report of Railway Commissioners, 1859, app., Alexander Light, Report on the European and North American Railway, 51; RG30, vol. 2027, Morse to Commissioners, 3 Feb. 1858. See also Morse to Forman, 27 Apr. 1857, for officials’ attempts to shuffle inadequate engine power. 97. Union Advocate, 10 Aug. 1871, 16 Oct. 1872. 98. Welland Tribune, 23 July 1875. 99. Coleman, The Railway Navvies, 50. 100. Habakkuk, American and British Technology. Though Habakkuk’s overriding argument concerning the comparative proliferation of technology has been challenged for lack of subtlety and failure to factor in fluctuations in the availability of capital and the cost and type of labour as it varied from industry to industry and region to region in a country the size of the United States, for the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when Britain faced a sharp increase in the availability of seasoned construction workers, it remains persuasive. 101. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. AA; Great Britain, House of Commons, Report of the Select Committee on Railway Labourers and Labourers on Public Works, 1846, Evidence of Carmichael. 102. Saint John Daily Morning News, 30 July 1858; New Brunswick, Railway Commissioners, 1859, 36; New Brunswick, Railway Commissioners, 1858. 103. Welland Tribune, 23 July 1875. 104. Welland Tribune, 7 July 1876; Thorold Post, 23 July 1875; RG11, vol. 177, #45526, Lemay and Bowie to Braun, 31 Oct. 1874; RG30, vol. 12471, Home to Schreiber, 6 Apr. 1871; vol. 12470, Murphy to Bell, 1 Aug. 1873; Chignecto Post, 7 Mar. 1872. 105. Union Advocate, 10 Aug. 1871; Eastern Chronicle, 30 May 1872. 106. MG9, vol. 52, Light to Jardine, 8 Apr. 1858; RG30, vol. 12471, Report of Commissioners to Privy Council, 24 Oct. 1870. 107. Ibid., Peterson to Smith, 10 Mar. 1871. See also Odell to Smith, 3 June 1871, and Schreiber to Brydges, 4 June 1871. 108. RG11, vol. 56-15, #25322, Page to Begly, 21 Mar. 1855. 109. RG11, vol. 23, #26165, Gallwey to Begly, 4 June 1855; #26728, Gallwey to Begly, 4 Aug. 1855; vol. 24, #27582, Gallwey to Begly, 6 Oct. 1855. 110. RG11, vol. 24, #28292, Gallwey to Begly, 9 Jan. 1856; vol. 26, #29726, Gallwey to Secretary, 8 May, 1856; vol. 26, #30628, Gallwey to Begly, 9 Aug. 1856. 111. RG11, vol. 181, #21156, Page to Braun, 21 Feb. 1872; Welland Tribune, 25 Nov. 1875, 1 Feb. 1878. 112. “The Ingersoll Rock Drill,” Manufacturer and Builder Magazine 6, 4 Apr. 1874, 78–9; ibid., 11, 7 July 1879, 153–4.

3 0 8   Notes to Pages 5 4 – 6 1

113. RG11, vol.181, #21156, Page to Braun, 21 Feb. 1872; #20701, Goodwin to Braun, 25 Jan. 1872; vol. 182, #26154, McGillivray to Braun, 22 Feb. 1872; vol. 486, #65825, Shanly to Mowbray, 19 Mar. 1877; Mowbray, Tri-Nitro-Glycerine. Welland Tribune, 4 Nov. 1875; RG11, vol. 163, #42373, Brown to Braun, 25 June 1874. 114. Sandstrom, The History of Tunnelling, 277–85; RG30, vol. 12470, Townsend to Bell, 16 Aug. 1873; vol. 12471, Home to Schreiber, 6 Apr. 1871. 115. Welland Tribune, 3 May 1878; Thorold Post, 30 June 1876; Welland Tribune, 7 July 1876.

Chapter 2 1. For descriptions of the work of labourers on railways see Coleman, The Railway Navvies, 43–52, and Brooke, The Railway Navvy, chaps. 2 and 3. For canal construction in the first half of the nineteenth century in North America see Way, Common Labour, 135–40. 2. Heisler, Canals of Canada, 92–119; Robert Passfield, “Waterways,” 113–30. 3. The scale of railway construction is drawn from Andreae, “Railways,” 88–104; Stevens, Canadian National Railways; and Trout, Railways. 4. For immigrant labourers on transportation networks in British North America prior to the 1840s see Pentland, Labour and Capital; Wylie, “Poverty, Distress, and Disease”; and Way, Common Labour. 5. Radforth, “Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform,” 76–81. 6. Bridges, Ireland and America, app., Earl Grey and Evidence on the Railway Colonization of British North America, Select Committee of the House of Lords. One of the many pamphlets is MacDougall, Emigration. For contemporaries’ perceptions of the links between British capital, public works, and immigration see Piva, “Continuity and Crisis,” 185–210. 7. See Grey’s correspondence with Elgin in Doughty, ed., Elgin-Grey Papers: 1846-52, Grey to Elgin, 22 Mar., 14 Apr. 1848. 8. Pemberton, Depopulation of the British Empire Unnecessary; Smyth, Employment of the People; Howe, Speech on Inter-colonial Railroads, and Colonization; Perley, Handbook of Information, 48; Canada, Canada: A Brief Outline, 49. See also Francis Hinck’s advocacy of public funding of private railways, defined by him as public works, as an important means of promoting economic growth and political harmony. Hincks, Canada. 9. The debate continues over such schemes and William Fitzgibbon in particular. Bleasdale and Campbell, “A Cost Benefit Analysis.” 10. From important studies of Irish immigrants see Akenson, Irish in Ontario, chaps. 1 and 7; Akenson, “Agnostic View,” 123–59; Elliott, Irish Migrants;

Note s to Page s 6 2 – 4   3 0 9

Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Power, Irish in Atlantic Canada; and Wilson, New Lease on Life. 11. Legislative Journals, 1841, app. D, Chambly Canal Commissioners; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q. 12. Pentland, Labour and Capital, 104–6; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Darroch and Ornstein, “Ethnicity and Occupational Structure,” 305–33; Darroch and Ornstein, “Ethnicity and Class,” 111–37; Greer, “Wage Labour and the Transition to Capitalism,” 7–22. 13. Akenson, Being Had; Akenson, “Agnostic View”; Elliott, Irish Migrants, 242. 14. Chilton, “Managing Migrants,” 231–62. Lisa Chilton argues that study of the state’s role in “managing migrants” must look well beyond a traditional focus on immigration agents and agencies to the multiple levels of state-implemented agendas and programs which reflected diverse, sometimes conflicting, approaches and messages. 15. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1842, #373, A.C. Buchanan. See, for example, the run of advertisements in the Cornwall Observer, 24, 31 Mar., 7, 21, Apr., 5 May, 2 June 1842. See Elliott, Irish Migrants, and Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, for the importance of kinship networks to the choice of destination. See Powers’s analysis of sixty-four adult males on the Blackstone Canal at Worchester in the 1820s for kinship networks: Powers, “Invisible Immigrants,” 118–19. 16. The statements of government officials and of those labourers who provided depositions to the inquiry into the disturbances on the Lachine and Beauharnois are supported by broader studies of the two-way migration across the British North American-United States border in the 1840s. Morehouse, “Irish Migration,” 579–92. 17. Stephenson, “Gathering of Strangers?” 31–60 18. Tobin, “Lowly Muscular Digger,” chap. 3; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q, app. T; RG11, vol. 67–11, Hobson to Daly, 20 Jan. 1844; NAC, RG5, Civil and Provincial Secretaries Office, Canada West, C1 (hereafter P.S.O., C.W.), 1841–43, #4997; NAC, RG4, Civil and Provincial Secretaries Office, Canada East (hereafter cited P.S.O., C.E.), 1843, #1200; Way, Common Labour, 90–9. 19. Montreal Transcript, Aug. 1843; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Martin Donnelly, John Ford, John Farley; Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. T, app. Y. Lists containing names and demographic information concerning labourers employed are rare, but sources give general descriptions of the workforce on major projects. 20. Pentland, “Lachine Strike”; Montreal Transcript, 1, 6 Apr. 1843; RG11, vol. 60-9, Memorandum of Charles Wetherall, 3 Apr. 1843; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q, app. T; Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. T.

3 1 0   Notes to Pages 6 4 – 6

21. OA, RG22, vol. 372, General Quarter Sessions, Convictions, and Prison Records for St Catharines. Estimates of government officials and priests suggest no fewer than two thousand Catholic labourers working on the Welland between 1842 and 1844. See, for example, RG11, vol. 388, file 87, Petition to Rev. Lee, 11 Aug. 1842 (Pre-1975 Record Group Reorganization and Conversion, hereafter Pre-Conversion). 22. For the history which contributed to the predominance of the Irish on public works in the United States and to their similar role in British North America in the 1840s see Way, Common Labour, 90–8. 23. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 8 Apr. 1843; Niagara Chronicle, 4 Aug. 1847. 24. RG11, vol. 60-9, Scott and Shaw to Sir James Hope, 31 Mar. 1843; Atherton to Hope, 29 Mar. 1843. 25. Wylie, “Poverty, Distress, and Disease,” 8–13; Bush, Builders of the Rideau Canal, app. F; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Messrs Andres’ Deposition, 17 July 1843; McInnis, “A Reconsideration of the State of Agriculture,” 9–49; Lavoie, L’émigration des Québécois; Little, Crofters and Habitants, chaps. 3 and 5; Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant. 26. Pentland, Labour and Capital, 63–78; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Andres; Greer, “Wage Labour and the Transition to Capitalism”; Bleasdale, “Unskilled Labourers”; Drache, “Formation and Fragmentation”; Bourque, Classes Sociales. 27. See, in particular, Ramirez, On the Move, chaps. 1, 3, and 5. 28. Tobin, “Lowly Muscular Digger,” 60. Legislative Journals, 1849, Select Committee on Emigration; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Murdoch to Laviolette, 5 Aug. 1842; Laroque; Petition of 73 cultivators and parties of the parishes of St Clement and St Timothée de Beauharnois, 30 June 1843. 29. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Fortier, Joseph Bergevin. 30. RG11, vol. 17, #16154, Page to Begly, 17 Mar. 1852; vol. 21, Gallwey to Begly, #23412, 23 Aug. 1854; vol. 22, #24608, 16 Jan. 1855; vol. 23, #26165, 4 June 1855; #25949, 5 May 1855; #26940, MacDonald to Begly, 3 July 1855; vol. 24, #27075, Baillarge to Begly, 6 Sept. 1855; #27668, Gallwey to Begly, 8 Nov. 1855; Legislative Journals, 1854–55, app. EEEE, Crawford and Chabot, 26 Sept. 1853; Crawford and Milner to Begly, 3 Mar. 1854; Legislative Journals, 1854–5, app. DDD, Annual Report of A.C. Buchanan. For the Canadiens’ labour migration patterns in the fur trade industry see Greer, “Fur-Trade Labour,” 197–214. 31. Kesteman, “Les Travailleurs à la construction.” 32. I am grateful to G.G. Campbell for sharing census data concerning the workers on the St Andrews Railway identified in the 1851 Census for St Andrews Parish, New Brunswick. See Bleasdale and Campbell, “Cost Benefit Analysis.”

Note s to Page s 6 7 – 9   3 1 1

33. Legislative Journals, 1854–5, app. DDD, Annual Report of A.C. Buchanan; RG11, vol. 21, #23876, G.M. Douglas to Begly, Moore to Chaveau, 17 Oct. 1854. 34. Legislative Journals, 1854–55, app. DDD; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858; Morning News, 2 Sept. 1857. 35. Maréchal, “La Construction des lignes,” 64–89. The estimated two to five thousand British navvies brought in for work on these two major lines in France were part of the much larger force which would be dispersed along railways on the continent. 36. MG9, vol. 50, Petition to lieutenant-governor, 18 Dec. 1854; Saint John Weekly Chronicle, 14 Oct., 2 Dec. 1853; New Brunswick Courier, 30 Sept. 1854; Bridges, Ireland and America, 3; Herepath’s Journal, 4 Mar. 1854; New Brunswick Courier, 9 Sept. 1854. How many experienced navvies Peto and Brassey brought to their brief activity in the Atlantic colonies is unclear. 37. Legislative Journals, 1854–55, app. O; RG11, vol. 22, #25949, Gallwey to Begly, 9 May 1855; #27668, Gallwey to Begly, 8 Nov. 1855; vol. 33, #38133, Meagher to Begly, 25 Aug. 1858; vol. 22, #24636, Slorah to Begly, 18 Jan. 1855; vol. 23, #25647, Gallwey to Begly, 14 Apr. 1855. For the Maritimes see New Brunswick, Railway Commissioners, 1858; and Halifax Catholic, 12 May 1855. 38. RG30, vol. 2027, Morse to Forman, 1 Sept. 1856; Evening Express, 13, 15 Sept. 1858; Antigonish Casket, 28 Aug. 1856. 39. Nova Scotia, Debates, 16 Feb. 1857, Howe, 103; Nova Scotian, 21 Apr. 1856. 40. Tobin, “Lowly Muscular Digger,” 60; Grimsted, “Ante-Bellum Labor,” 5–29; Schreiber, Ohio Canal Era. Germans have been identified on projects, particularly in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. For American contractors bringing workers from America see New Brunswick Courier, 13 May, 30 Sept. 1854; Nova Scotian, 21 Apr. 1856; Halifax Catholic, 1 May 1855; and Evening Express, 13, 15 Sept. 1858. 41. Morning News, 18 Sept. 1857. For the practice among other groups of workers such as miners see Davey and MacKinnon, “Nicknaming Patterns and Traditions,” 71–83. 42. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q. For this perception of the Irish in the United States see Knobel, Paddy and the Republic. This point is expanded in chap. 5. 43. Powers, “Invisible Immigrants”; Way, Common Labour, 269–72; Tobin, Lowly Muscular Digger, 245–7. Powers could not trace the movement of the unskilled canallers. Way and Tobin agree that only a very small proportion of labourers they study would have been able to establish

3 1 2   Notes to Pages 6 9 – 7 2

themselves as farmers, despite enticements such as redeeming script for land. An earlier study concurs. Potter, To the Golden Door, 317. 44. Studies have identified individual construction labourers settled along particular projects and speculate on the extent of such settlement; however, systematic study has yet to trace persistence and ultimate destinations of canal and railway labourers. In British North America, as in the United States, establishment of population bulges along completed projects cannot satisfactorily address this issue. 45. Wylie, “Poverty, Distress, and Disease”; NAC, Manuscript Group 24 (hereafter MG24), D8, vol. 127 cited in Bush, Builders of the Rideau Canal, app. F. 46. RG11, vol. 23, #26165, Gallwey to Secretary, 4 June 1855; vol. 21, #23886, Merrill to Commissioners, 17 Oct. 1854; vol. 23, #26940, McDonald Co. to Commissioner Public Works, 3 July 1855; vol. 21, #23376, Baillarge to Begly, 12 Aug. 1854. 47. RG11, vol. 23, #26739, Baillarge to Begly, Aug. 1855; vol. 22, #25949, Gallwey to Begly, 9 May 1855; vol. 23, #26728, Gallwey to Begly, 4 Aug. 1855. 48. Avery, “Canadian Immigration Policy”; Avery, Dangerous Foreigners. 49. RG11, vol. 89, letters to the governor general from J. Chabot, 18 May 1853; J.B. Talbot, Dec. 1852; E. Larochalle, 4 Dec. 1852; C. Jonas, 9 Nov. 1852; superintendent, 1 Dec. 1852, Balance du pour Salaire etc., aux divers personnes du Quai de Berthier. 50. For the process of proletarianization see, in particular, Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant, and Ramirez, On the Move, chaps. 1, 3, and 5. 51. Morning Freeman, 16 Dec. 1858. 52. New Brunswick Courier, 24 Sept. 1859. 53. For the broad pattern see Samson, Spirit of Industry and Improvement, chap. 5; Bitterman, “Hierarchy of the Soil”; Bitterman, “Farm Households and Wage Labour”; MacKinnon, “Roads, Cart Tracks, and Bridle Paths,” 177–216; and Craig, Backwoods Consumers. 54. Presbyterian Witness, 19 Aug. 1854; Free Church Record, 4 Nov., Dec. 1856, Oct. 1857. 55. Nova Scotian, 21 Apr., 2 June 1856; RG30, vol. 2027, Morse to Forman, 5 Nov. 1857. 56. Handley, Navvy in Scotland, 60–2; MacNeil, “Cultural Stereotypes,” 39–56; Pentland, Labour and Capital. Pentland’s analysis of varying ethno-cultural responses to farming and disciplined work in general rests on the old stereotype of the Highland Scot. 57. James Matheson to A.C. Buchanan, 10 Oct. 1851, in Little, Crofters and Habitants, 22. Little also comments on Kesteman’s findings concerning the number of Scots enumerated in the 1852 Census.

Note s to Page s 7 2 – 5   3 1 3

58. See, for example, New Brunswick Courier, 22 Nov. 1856, 10 Jan. 1857; Morning News, 22 May 1857, 22 Feb. 1858; Morning Freeman, 11 Dec. 1858; Evening Express, 20, 25, Jan., 28 Apr. 1858; Morning Journal, 22, 29 Jan. 1858; Morning Freeman, 11 Dec. 1858. On transience see the pioneering work of Katz, People of Hamilton, chap. 3, and Thernstrom and Knight, “Men in Motion,” 7–35. Subsequent work has refined, not undermined, their conclusions. 59. Morning News, 21, 25 Sept. 1857, 29 Jan. 1858, 3 Mar. 1858; Morning Freeman, 8 Feb. 1858; New Brunswick Courier, 30 Jan. 1858. For similar touting of the railway works as providing much needed work the following winter see Morning Freeman, 11 Dec. 1858. 60. Nova Scotian, 17 Sept. 1855; Acadian Recorder, 1 July 1854. 61. From among official projections of the need for this type of labour see Ontario, Department of Agriculture and Public Works, Emigration to the Province of Ontario (Toronto: Province of Ontario, 1869); Sessional Papers, Reports of Minister of Agriculture, 1869, #76; 1870, #80; 1871, #64; and 1872, #2A. 62. Sessional Papers, 1867, #18, Return of Copies of Reports, Correspondence and other Papers relating to the Intercolonial Railway. 63. Eastern Chronicle, 17 July 1869. 64. Halifax Evening Express, 11 June 1869, citing the Saint John Telegraph. 65. Sessional Papers, 1872, #25, app. C; Railway Commissioners, Annual Report 1873; Montreal Gazette, 26 Dec. 1871; RG30, vol. 12470, Berlinguet to Ross, 16 June 1870; Wesleyan, 23 Nov. 1870; Morning Freeman, 12 Aug. 1871; Union Advocate, 15 Nov. 1871. A special Gazette reporter covered railway construction. 66. Union Advocate, 22 June 1871. 67. Chignecto Post, 25 Apr. 1872; Wesleyan, 9 Feb. 1874; Montreal Gazette, 26 Dec. 1871; Union Advocate, 21 Sept. 1871; Morning Freeman, 12 Aug. 1871; RG11, vol. 828, Schreiber to Walsh, 11 Mar. 1871. 68. Evening Express, 25 Oct. 1869. 69. Wesleyan, 11 Nov. 1868; RG11, vol. 808, #11096, Brown to Elliott, Mar. 1876; Railway Commissioners, Annual Report, 1873. 70. Eastern Chronicle, 23 June 1869; Halifax Evening Express, 2, 7 July 1869. 71. Daily Telegraph, 16 July 1869. 72. RG30, vol. 12470, Berlinguet to Ross, 16 June 1870; Union Advocate, 15 Nov. 1871; Saint John Daily Morning News, 28 Sept. 1871; Morning Freeman, 23 Sept. 1871. 73. Sessional Papers, 1872, No. 2A, Immigrant Agent, Chatham; Sessional Papers, 1873, No. 26, Immigrant Agent, Miramichi; Saint John Daily Morning News, 17 Nov. 1871. See, for example, the 1871 experience of

3 1 4   Notes to Pages 7 6 – 8

five hundred Shetlanders contracted to work three years on the Rivière du Loup in exchange for land; most left for the United States. Morning Freeman, 23 Sept. 1871; Wesleyan, 19 June, 14 Sept. 1872. Of the Icelanders expected to clear their land in Kinmount while also labouring on the Victoria Railway at $0.80 a day, the majority ended up in Muskoka. Macdonald, Canada: Immigration and Colonization, 208–9; New Brunswick Gleaner, Report of the Immigrant Agent at Chatham, William Wilkinson, for 1872, 9 Aug. 1873. 74. NAC, RG31, Statistics Canada, Census Records, 1871 (hereafter Census Records, 1871), Reel C-10389, Northumberland County, New Brunswick, Nelson. 75. Ibid., Reel C-10393, Westmoreland County, New Brunswick, Moncton. 76. Ibid., Reel C-10555, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, Wentworth; Reel C-10556, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, Westchester; Reel C-10558, Colchester County, Nova Scotia, Onslow. 77. Small numbers could be identified by linking information on locations of boarding houses and hotels with information on clustering of “labourers” in establishments identified in the enumeration rolls. 78. Census Records, 1871, Reel C-10555, Cumberland County, Amherst. Another group boarding along the Maccon River may also have been part of the large block residing in the Nova Scotia Amherst area in July 1871. 79. Ibid., Reel C-10386, Gloucester County, New Brunswick, Bereford; Reel C-10389, Nelson; RG11, vol. 829, King and Gough to Jones, 5 Nov. 1873; Chignecto Post, 30 Mar. 1871; Daily Telegraph, 16 July 1869; Wesleyan, 11 Nov. 1868. 80. Inability to identify those from the area who took temporary work as railway labourers undermines attempts to establish patterns of land ownership and labour amongst men attracted to construction. 81. RG30, vol. 12470, Schreiber to Fleming, 4 June 1871; vol. 12471, Odell to Smith, 3 June 1871. 82. RG11, vol. 829, Bell to Fleming, 31 Oct. 1873, 15 July 1872; Union Advocate, 3 Apr. 1872. 83. RG11, vol. 808, #11096, Brown to Elliott, Mar. 1876; #1112, Hamilton to Fleming, 27 Mar. 1876; vol. 829, King and Gough to Fleming, 31 Oct. 1871; Fleming to Jones, 6 May 1872; McGreevy to Jones, 13, 15 July 1872; Fleming to Jones, 29 Jan. 1873; Fleming to Jones, 13 May 1873; McDonell and Co., 23 Apr. 1873; Fleming to Jones, 31 Oct. 1873. 84. New Brunswick Gleaner, 22 July 1871. 85. Sessional Papers, 1872, No. 2A, agriculture minister reports; Sessional Papers, 1873, No. 26, agriculture minister reports; Canada, Dept. of Agriculture, Labour Wants of Canada (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1873).

Note s to Page s 7 9 – 8 1   3 1 5

86. RG11, vol. 180, #14379, Page to Braun, 31 Jan. 1871; vol. 181, Correspondence from Goodwin to Braun, #20321, 30 Dec. 1871; #20506, 13 Jan. 1872; #20934, 4 Feb. 1872; #22377/8, 23 April 1872; #20934, 4 Feb. 1872; #22414, 22 April 1872; vol. 182, #33347, 11 Aug. 1873. 87. RG11, vol. 181, Correspondence from Sippell to Braun, #22682, 3 May 1872; #22695, 6 May 1872; #22697, 5 May 1872; #22751, 8 May 1872; #22786, 9 May 1872; vol. 181, #20506, Goodwin to Braun, 13 Jan. 1872; vol. 788, #13836, Sippell to Braun, 29 Feb. 1872; vol. 789, #14577, Braun to Sippell, 3 May 1872. 88. RG11, vol. 158, #21577, Mitchell to Braun, 2 May 1872; RG11, vol. 160, #31775, Mitchell to Langevin, 17 June 1873. 89. RG11, vol. 176, #31232, Bonneville to Langevin, 27 May 1873; #31305, Order in Council, 31 May 1873; #31489, Sippell to Braun, 9 June 1873. 90. RG11, vol. 161, #37327, Page to Commission, 23 Dec. 1873. 91. Montreal Star, 8 Jan. 1877, 1, 6 Feb. 1878; Irish Canadian, 13 Feb. 1878. 92. Montreal Star, 11, 14 Dec. 1878. 93. RG11, vol. 479, #55951, McNamee, Gaherty, and Frechette to Braun, 18 Dec. 1875; Montreal Star, 23 Dec. 1879; RG43, vol. 935, #86426, Girouard to Tupper, 24 Dec. 1879; RG11, vol. 475, #78275, O’Gilvie to Tupper, 18 Dec. 1879. 94. RG11, vol. 488, #77854, Drummond to Tupper, 15 Nov. 1878; #72935, Petition to Mackenzie, Feb. 1878. 95. RG43, vol. 1040, #87954, McDonald to Braun, 18 May 1880; #89856, McDonald to Braun, 27 Nov. 1880 and Drummond to Tupper, 29 Dec. 1880; #92875, Hon. H.F. McDougall, MPP, to Tupper, 13 Oct. 1881. Neither the individuals named in the petition nor those for whom pay chits have survived could be definitively identified in the census, in part because of the frequency with which their names appear in the census records for the area. 96. RG11, vol. 469, #58601, Forest to Mackenzie, 10 Apr. 1876; vol. 470, #59527, Sippell to Braun, 22 May, 1876; #59578, Pigeon, Mayor, and contractors to Mackenzie, 23 May 1876; #61544, secretary-treasurer to Mackenzie, 24 Aug. 1876; vol. 476, #81899, Lachine Mayor to Braun, 16 May 1879; RG43, vol. 935, #86421, Girouard to Tupper and Piche to Conway, 22 Dec. 1879; #86426, Girouard to Tupper, 24 Dec. 1879. 97. Montreal Star, 6 Apr. 1877, 25 Feb. 1878. 98. Montreal Star, 24 Apr., 14 May 1877; La Minerve, 25 Apr. 1879. 99. RG11, vol. 179, #55951, McNamee to Braun, 18 Dec. 1875; RG43, vol. 935, #86421, Girouard to Tupper, 22 Dec. 1879; #86426, 24 Dec. 1879; #86483, Cross to Tupper, 31 Dec. 1879; RG11, vol. 469, #56118, 22 Dec. 1875; RG43, vol. 938, #90243, Lyons to Tupper, 31 Dec. 1880; vol. 935, #86407, Girouard to Tupper, 24 Dec. 1879.

3 1 6   Notes to Pages 8 1 – 4

100. RG11, vol. 453, #65207, James Norris to MacKenzie, 23 Feb. 1877, enclosing Petition of Mulligan to the governor general, 3 Feb. 1877, signed, Norris et al. 101. Welland Tribune, 3 Dec. 1873; Thorold Post, 28 Apr. 1876; Welland Tribune, 26 Dec. 1879; Montreal Star, 22 Jan. 1877. 102. Welland Tribune, 2 Sept. 1875; RG11, vol. 475, #77515, Girouard to Tupper, 14 Nov. 1878. 103. Montreal Star, 31 May 1877, 30 Dec. 1879. 104. Welland Tribune, 7 May 1874, 16 Jan. 1880. On attempts to attract Scandinavian immigrants to Canada see Ljungmark, “Canada’s Campaign,” 21–42. 105. Welland Tribune, 8 Feb. 1878, 28 Nov. 1879; Montreal Star, 27 Aug. 1880. Ramirez, On the Move, chaps. 2 and 4. On the increasing importance of Italian labourers in the late nineteenth century see Harney, “Men without Women,” 79–101, and Peck, Reinventing Free Labor. Pioneering work on women and their role in this international process includes Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives. 106. On the padrone system see Harney, “Montreal’s King of Italian Labour,” 57–84; Peck, Reinventing Free Labor; Avery, “Canadian Immigration Policy”; and Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions. For Italian labourers on the Trent-Severn Waterway in the 1880s and again during World War I, see Angus, A Respectable Ditch, 172–3, 382–3. 107. RG11, vol. 479, #72045, List of payments for Messrs R.P. Cooke, 28 Jan. 1878; L’Isle Bizard wages due, Nov. 1877; vol. 478, #71095, C. Martin and others, 26 Nov. 1877; vol. 692, #39414, Braun to Page, 11 Nov. 1877; vol. 480, #82750, Mayor, St Andrews, 30 June 1879. 108. See letters to Tupper, RG11, vol. 475, #78222, O’Gilvie, 18 Dec. 1878; #78331, Gault, 26 Dec. 1878; #77622, Perry, 15 Nov. 1878; #78706, Davis, 6 Jan. 1879; RG43, vol. 938, #90243, Lyons, 31 Dec. 1880; and RG11, vol. 475, #77515, Girouard, 14 Nov. 1878. On the build-up of French Canadians looking for work in the 1870s see Linteau, Durocher, and Robert, Histoire du Québec contemporain. See Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers, for the build-up of the unemployed and underemployed in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. 109. Montreal Star, 27 Aug. 1880. This is a reference to Rivière des Prairies. 110. RG31, Census Records, 1881, Reel C-13253, Welland County, Ontario, Humberstone Sub-district, Household #270. 111. Welland Tribune, 20 Aug., 24 Dec. 1880, Humberstone Sub-district. 112. Welland Tribune, 24 May 1874, 16 Jan. 1880. 113. RG31, Census Records, 1881, Reel C-13253, Humberstone Township. Listed as the only occupants of one dwelling are eighteen Italian Roman Catholic labourers, all born in Italy, individual entries #444 to #465,

Note s to Page s 8 6 – 9 4   3 1 7

and French Canadian Roman Catholic labourers, all born in Quebec, individual entries #462 to #465. Listed in a nearby dwelling are twenty-six Italian Roman Catholic labourers, all born in Italy, individual entries #475 to #504, together with contractor Nish of Quebec and a male servant, also from Quebec.

Chapter 3 1. Welland Tribune, 20 Feb. 1880. 2. Welland Tribune, 7 Dec. 1877, 7 June 1878, 28 May 1880. 3. RG11, vol. 159, #26872, Morse and Hart to McMamee, 14 Nov. 1872; Welland Tribune, 8 Oct. 1874, 19 Aug. 1875. 4. Nova Scotian, 17 Sept. 1855; Greene, Horses at Work. Chap. 5 discusses parallel processes in which technology was adapted to maximize horsepower in the workplace even as machines replaced horses. 5. Helps, Life of Brassey, 62–3. 6. Welland Tribune, 20 Jan. 1876. For the Galops see the discussion and references in chap. 1, note 87, above. 7. Welland Tribune, 10 Dec. 1874; Thorold Post, 15 Mar. 1878. 8. Elliott, Impressions. In chap. 2 Elliott’s navvy captures rapid and irrevocable change: “Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother’s face or a new curve of health in the blooming girl’s, the hills are cut through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level and the white steam pennon flies along it.” Dickens, Mugby Junction; Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier. In chap. 13 Orwell discusses Socialist propagandists’ use of navvy and miner as archetypal proletarians. For his encounters with navvies in Paris and London see Orwell, Down and Out. In chap. 28 of H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, the “burly” and “huge” navvies feature in Kemp’s attempt to evade the invisible man. 9. Montreal Star, 30 Jan. 1877. 10. Scattered references support only tentative suggestions about ratios of gangers and foremen to labourers. Foremen normally coordinated between fifteen and twenty-five men at mid-century. The numbers under one foreman appear to have increased over the decades. Estimates are based on rare tallies such as those for the Chats, RG11, vols. 23 to 25, and for the Junction, RG11, vols. 17 to 21. Reporters’ details of supervision are less reliable. For example, Halifax Evening Express, 11 June 1869, citing the Saint John Telegraph, reported that three hundred labourers on the Intercolonial between Campbellton and Eel River were divided into seven gangs, but the meaning of gang is unclear and a ratio of seven to three hundred high, though possible.

3 1 8   Notes to Pages 9 5 – 9

11. For Beemer see Benoit, “Beemer, Horace Jansen.” See chap. 1, notes 50 and 51, for discussion of the rise of men such as Beemer within canal and railway construction. For a broader discussion of the foreman’s potential within a range of developing industries in this period see Kristofferson, Craft Capitalism, 101–08, in particular. 12. Union Advocate, 15 Nov. 1871. 13. For analysis of alcohol in a variety of work settings see Heron, Booze: A Distilled History. Way emphasizes the debilitating and alienating impact of alcohol. Way, “Evil Humors.” 14. On the logic of general contracting which tempted employers and foremen to maintain some form of driving at the heart of the work process see Price, Masters, Unions and Men, 22–34. 15. See Peck on driving of vulnerable labourers. Peck, Reinventing Free Labour, chaps. 3 and 6. 16. See discussion of firearms on Lachine and Welland sites in chap. 8, notes 94 to 98. 17. Laurie, Report; New Brunswick, Railway Commissioners, 1859, 56–7. 18. RG11, vol. 181, #21333, Goodwin to McGillivray, 4 Mar. 1872. 19. Cleveland paid special attention to explosives. Welland Tribune, 3 May, 1 Feb. 1878, 11 June 1880. 20. Welland Tribune, 29 Oct. 1880. 21. Thorold Post, 30 June, 7 July 1876. 22. Montreal Star, 27 July, 1 Sept. 1880. 23. Halifax Evening Express, 12 Jan. 1870; Union Advocate, 10 Aug. 1871. Whitehead directly supervised the work for the company in which he was a partner. 24. Helps, Life of Brassey, 72–3, Brassey’s timekeeper. 25. Handley, Navvy in Scotland, 18. 26. Acadian Recorder, 1 July 1854. On overseers’ ability to maintain disciplined output on the Nova Scotia Railway see Nova Scotian, 17 Sept. 1855. Antigonish Casket cited in Nova Scotian, 3 Sept. 1855. 27. See, for example, Way, Common Labour, 134, 137; Graziosi, “Common Laborers,” 517–18; and Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 62. 28. Morning News, 8 Mar., 12 May 1858. For hours in the 1840s see Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 15, and Way, Common Labour, 117, 239. 29. Montreal Star, 18 Jan. 1877. For example, on the Lachine in early 1877 working hours varied between nine and ten hours on one section and between ten and eleven hours on an adjacent section. 30. Welland Tribune, 20 Feb. 1880. On strict enforcement of hours in the 1820s on the Rideau see Wylie, “Poverty, Distress, and Disease.” 31. Welland Tribune, 3 Sept., 17 Dec. 1880.

Notes to Page s 9 9 – 1 0 3   3 1 9

32. Welland Tribune, 21 June 1877, 18 July 1879. See also Montreal Star, 17 June 1878. 33. RG11, File 49, Keefer to Begly, 4 Nov. 1850 (Pre-Conversion). 34. For the European and North American see New Brunswick Courier, 1 Nov. 1856; and Morning News, 12 Mar., 30 July 1858. For electricity see RG43, vol. 789, #89892, McNamee to Braun, 30 Nov. 1880. 35. For general discussions of the risks to health posed by the work and the type of endemic and epidemic disease fostered by working and living conditions see, for canal construction sites in the first half of the nineteenth century in North America, Way, Common Labour, 152–58; for British railway construction sites in the nineteenth century, see Brooke, The Railway Navvy, 42–3. 36. Morning News, 12 May 1858. 37. Union Advocate, 3 Apr. 1872. 38. RG11, vol. 389, File 90, 1 Mar. 1842, Keefer to Robinson (Pre-Conversion); Montreal Star, 23 Dec. 1879. 39. RG11, vol. 17, #15702, Page to Begly, 23 Jan. 1852; RG30, vol. 12470, Bell to Smith, 9 July 1871. 40. Brooke, The Railway Navvy, 43–4. 41. Way, Common Labour, 153–54; Shaw, Erie Water West, 19. 42. Wylie, “Poverty, Distress, and Disease,” 23–5. 43. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 1 Oct. 1842; Memorandum of Dr Jarrow, 1 Oct. 1842; Robinson to Begly, 1 Oct. 1842; Power to Begly, 18 Aug. 1843. 44. University of Western Ontario, Regional Collection, Diary of Silas Burt, 33. 45. Welland Tribune, 18 Aug. 1876, 22 Aug. 1877. Reports of fever and ague were even more vague. 46. Montreal Star, 7 Mar. 1879. 47. Brooke, The Railway Navvy, 37. 48. OA, RG22, V.372, General Quarter Sessions, Convictions, and Prison Records for St Catharines, 1842–4; Kesteman, “Les Travailleurs à la construction,” 534. Another 7 per cent were fifty-six or older, and 7 per cent were under sixteen years. Bleasdale and Campbell, “Cost Benefit Analysis.” 49. Among those identified along the Intercolonial, eighteen were between sixteen and thirty-five, and fourteen over thirty-five. See chap. 2, notes 74, 75, and 76, above. Ages are not given for the small group identified as canal labourers on the Welland in the early 1880s. RG31, Census Records, 1881, Reel C-13253, Humberstone Sub-district. 50. Brooke, The Railway Navvy, 37. Brooke finds that the contribution of those over forty rose from 10 to 40 per cent between 1841 and 1891.

3 2 0   Notes to Pages 1 0 4 – 1 1

Despite his ability to draw on demographic information on a number of construction sites, the fragmentary nature of his evidence allows only tentative conclusions. 51. Welland Tribune, 22 Oct. 1880. 52. For bringing down an overhang and related work see Handley, Navvy in Scotland, 42–4, 109–17. 53. Coleman, Railway Navvies, 41–2. 54. See Handley, Navvy in Scotland, 42–4, 109–17. 55. RG43, vol. 938, #90243, Lyons to Minister of Canals and Railways, 31 Dec. 1880; RG11, vol. 474, #74029, Lyons to Mackenzie, 21 May 1878; Montreal Star, 18 July 1879; Welland Tribune, 18 Apr. 1879. 56. Nova Scotian, 4 Feb. 1856; Acadian Recorder, 10 Jan. 1857. 57. New Brunswick Courier, 24 Sept. 1859. 58. Morning News, 9 July 1858. 59. Halifax Evening Express, 25 Oct. 1869. 60. Union Advocate, 10 Dec. 1871. 61. Montreal Star, 29 Mar. 1878. 62. Montreal Star, 11 Jan. 1877. 63. Montreal Star, 30 Jan. 1877. 64. Union Advocate, 28 Aug. 1872; Kesteman, “Les Travailleurs,” 535. 65. Colonial Standard, 3 Oct. 1871. 66. Eastern Chronicle, 29 June 1871, citing the Union Advocate. 67. Welland Tribune, 14 May 1874. 68. Eastern Chronicle, 14 Nov. 1872. 69. Morning Freeman, 4, 11 Nov. 1858. The jury could not reach a verdict. 70. For the role of death and injury in promoting the state’s part in management of railway operations in pre-Confederation Upper Canada see Baskerville, “Transportation, Social Change, and State Formation.” 71. Wesleyan, 14 Aug. 1872. 72. New Brunswick Courier, 12 Feb. 1859; Welland Tribune, 9 Nov. 1877. 73. St Catharines Evening Journal, 1 Oct. 1873; Welland Tribune, 28 Aug. 1875, 14 July, 2 Nov. 1877, 4 July 1879. 74. Welland Tribune, 30 June 1876. See also St Catharines Journal, 19 Feb., 13 Sept. 1844; Welland Tribune, 18 Apr. 1879; Montreal Star, 19 Feb. 1879. 75. Montreal Star, Mar. 17, 1879. 76. Welland Tribune, 10 Dec. 1874, 11 Aug. 1876. 77. Thorold Post, 15 Mar. 1878. 78. Caisson sickness hit hard at men footing the Grand Trunk’s Victoria Bridge in the St Lawrence. 79. Union Advocate, 16 Oct. 1872. 80. Union Advocate, 10 Aug. 1871. 81. Welland Tribune, 28 Aug. 1873.

Notes to Page s 1 1 1 – 1 6   3 2 1

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

RG11, vol. 24, #27075, Baillarge to Begly, 6 Sept. 1855. Thorold Post, 21 Apr. 1876. Welland Tribune, 7 Oct. 1875. Welland Tribune, 8 Oct. 1874. Welland Tribune, Sept. 1876. Morning Journal, 10 Dec. 1855; Presbyterian Witness, 30 Sept. 1854; Morning Freeman, 16 Dec. 1858. 88. Sandstrom, History of Tunnelling, 277–85; RG30, vol. 12470, MacLeod to Smith, 4 May 1871; Chignecto Post, 18 May 1871. For the 1850s see Nova Scotian, 10 Dec. 1855. 89. Colonial Standard, 28 June 1870. 90. Welland Tribune, 22 Feb. 1878. On one section a member of the New York Mining Powder Manufacturing Company, supplying explosives, prepared cartridges half a mile west of the Welland. 91. Montreal Star, 22 Feb. 1877. 92. RG11, vol. 163, #42373, Brown to Braun, 25 June 1874. 93. Union Advocate, 20 May 1872. 94. Montreal Star, 9 Feb. 1877, 12 Oct. 1878. 95. Welland Tribune, 20 Feb., 15 Oct. 1880. 96. Montreal Star, 10 Feb., 12 Sept. 1877. 97. RG11, vol. 829, McDonell to Fleming, 23 Apr. 1873. 98. RG11, vol. 474, #74029, Lyons to Mackenzie, 21 May 1878. 99. Mills, “Hazardous Bargain,” 53–71; Johnston and McVicor, “Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies,” 135–151. From the Canadian literature which has addressed masculinity among those engaged in rough work, see the pioneering studies by Ian Radforth and Craig Heron. Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses; Heron, Working in Steel. More recent studies more sharply focused on masculinities have paid attention to Steven Maynard’s call for analysis of the historical processes by which capitalism shaped such labourers’ perceptions and projections of their masculinities  – specifically their heterosexual masculinity  – and tied masculinity to skill. Maynard, “Rough Work and Rugged Men,” 159–69. 100. Montreal Star, 23 Feb. 1877. 101. Commons Debates, Tupper, 18 May 1874, 632. 102. Great Britain, House of Commons, Report of the Select Committee on Railway Labourers and Labourers on Public Works, 1846, 13, 411. See the same conclusions in Roberton, Rawlinson, and Chadwick, Papers read before the Statistical Society of Manchester. 103. Commons Debates, Fleming, 21 Feb. 1878, 407. On safety legislation on operating lines in Britain see Giles, “Railway Accidents,” 121–42. 104. Report on Railway Labourers, 20–248. On the context for Britain see Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery. The law in France did not guarantee

3 2 2   Notes to Pages 1 1 7 – 2 4

safe working conditions. See conditions on Blaisy Tunnel: Derainne, “Au Milieu du XIXe Siecle, Blaisy (Cote-D’Or),” 1–6. 105. On workers’ attempts to deal with risk, injury, and death in the workplace see recent studies: Galer, “Friend in Need,” 9–35; and Stubbs, “Patriotic Masculinity,” 25–49. See, in particular, Palmer’s contribution to studies of mutualism as expressed in mutual benefit societies. Palmer, “Mutuality and the Masking,” 111–46. 106. Rolt, Victorian Engineering, 25, citing Telford. 107. Tucker, Administering Danger in the Workplace. Tucker notes that dangers to these labourers, like those to other segments of the waged labour force, “remained peripheral” to early legislation. See also Kostal, “Legal Justice, Social Justice,” 1–24. 108. New Brunswick Courier, 22 Aug. 1857; Montreal Star, 10 Feb. 1877; Welland Tribune, 28 Feb. 1878; Montreal Star, 26 Apr. 1877. 109. Montreal Star, 6, 10 Feb. 1877. 110. See, for examples, the discussion of the need to factor in the dangers to workmen of machinery when apportioning the products of industry among capital and labour in Ontario Workman, “Distribution of Products,” 26 Mar. 1874, and the discussion of the sacrifice of lives resulting from the criminal negligence of rich men in manufactories and mines in Ontario Workman, “Fallacies,” 4 Dec. 1873. 111. Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labour in Canada (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1889); Sessional Papers, 1899, Report of Mr R.C. Clute on the Commission to Inquire into the Death of McDonald and Fraser on the Crow’s Nest Railway.

Chapter 4 1. Nova Scotian, 17 Sept. 1855. 2. Morning News, 10 June, 29 July, 18 Sept. 1857; New Brunswick Courier, 16 Jan. 1858. 3. For such a clause see RG11, vol. 388, file 87, Articles of agreement between the Board of Works and Lewis Schiclaw, 1 Apr. 1845 (Pre-Conversion). 4. RG11, vol. 32, #37172, Dufton and Bell to Merrill, 7 May 1858, Merrill to Begly, 24 May 1858; RG30, vol. 2027, Morris to Forman, 14 Jan. 1856; Nova Scotian, 23 June, 15 Dec. 1856; Macdonald, Canada: Immigration and Colonization, 115. 5. On paternalism in the operation of railways see Craven and Traves, “Dimensions of Paternalism,” 66. Way discusses the decline of paternalism on canals of the 1830s in Common Labour, 230–6. 6. For the 1840s see Bleasdale, “Class Conflict.” For examples from the 1850s see notes 1 and 2 above.

Note s to Page s 1 2 4 – 8   3 2 3

7. New Brunswick Reporter, 18 June 1872, gives a reporter’s description of a hastily built bunkhouse on a private railway, the Rivière du Loup: “a model Railway shanty, which had been erected in the short space of two days, and which is fitted up with ‘all the modern improvements’ and capable of accommodating not less than fifty workmen.” It is not clear whether the report is meant to be favourable. 8. Union Advocate, 17 Jan. 1872; RG11, vol. 828, Light to Fleming, 14 June 1870; vol. 829, Light to Fleming, 4 Dec. 1871; vol. 158, #21597, Mitchell to Braun, 12 Mar. 1872; vol. 160, #35441, Morris to Braun, 14 Oct. 1873; Welland Tribune, 9 Nov. 1877. 9. Bradwin, Bunkhouse Man. Saint John Daily Morning News, 28 Sept. 1871. 10. Eastern Chronicle, 23 June 1869; Halifax Evening Express, 2, 7 July 1869. 11. Union Advocate, 23 Mar. 1871. 12. RG11, vol. 488, #72935, Petition of J.P. Haliburton and others to Mackenzie, Feb. 1878. 13. Chignecto Post, 27 July 1871; Welland Tribune, 28 Dec. 1877; RG11, vol. 158, #21597, Mitchell to Braun, 12 Mar. 1872; vol. 160, #35441, Morris to Braun, 14 Oct. 1873. Upper was among those who tendered for an old sawmill in which contractors on the Welland hoped to accommodate workers. 14. Welland Tribune, 28 Dec. 1877. 15. Montreal Star, 25 Apr. 1878. 16. Thorold Post, 21 Apr. 1876. 17. See Bradbury, Working Families, 70–9, in particular. 18. Montreal Star, 31 Jan. 1877. 19. Bilson, Darkened House; Godfrey, Cholera Epidemic. For the cholera outbreak on the Grand Trunk Railway see Helps, Life of Brassey, quoting Hodges, 205. For one contemporary medical opinion on the role of working and living conditions on canals in promoting cholera see RG11, vol. 57-11, Cornwall Canal, 1854–5. 20. NAC, MG24, E 10, Killaly Papers, Killaly to Robert Travers, 3 Sept. 1849. 21. Legislative Journals, 1854–55, app. EEEE; RG11, vol. 21, #23841, Petition of Counter to Elgin, n.d.; vol. 20, #23376, Baillarge to Begly, 12 Aug. 1854; #25868, Baillarge to Begly, 30 Apr. 1855; vol. 22, #24636, Slorah to Department of Public Works, 18 Jan. 1855. Scurvy, known in England as the railway disease because of navvies’ diet, was not regularly reported in British North America. 22. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 1 Oct. 1842, Power to Begly, 18 Aug. 1843; Memorandum of Dr Jarrow, 1 Oct. 1842, Robinson to Begly, 1 Oct. 1842. 23. RG11, vol. 691, #49556, Secretary of Public Works to Mayor of Lachine, 31 May 1879; Montreal Star, 13 Feb., 27 Apr., 16 June 1877, 6 Aug. 1878, 4 Feb., 24 July, 23 Oct., 15 Nov. 1879, 14 Sept. 1880.

3 2 4   Notes to Pages 1 2 9 – 3 5

24. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Martin Donnelly’s Deposition; Bleasdale, “Irish Labourers,” 23. The extent of government encouragement of or involvement in such arrangements is unclear. 25. British Colonist, 24 Feb. 1857; Morning Journal, 1 May 1857; Nova Scotian, 4 May 1857; Nova Scotia, Assembly Debates, Killam, April–May 1857. 26. Union Advocate, 23 Mar., 6 Dec. 1871, 26 Mar. 1873. 27. St Croix Courier, 5 Aug. 1869. 28. Eastern Chronicle, 19 Jan. 1870; Colonial Standard, 3 Oct. 1871. See chap. 3, note 101, above. 29. Farm labourers’ wages appear in NAC, RG5, Emigration Records, B21, 1840–44, Information to Immigrants, Apr. 1843, for Brockville, Chippewa, Cornwall, Fort Erie, Niagara, Port Colborne, Prescott, and Queenston; for the Johnston District see “For the Information of Emigrants of the Labouring Classes, Dec. 1840, Johnston District.” In Upper Canada, they do not appear to have been consistently higher around any one canal. For discussion of assessing wage levels in Lower Canada see Pentland, “The Lachine Strike.” Newspapers also provide information on wage rates. 30. All wages are represented in Sterling using the conversion rate of 22s. 2¾d. currency per £ sterling, published in Canada, RG5-B21, Quarterly Return of Prices in the Province of Canada in the Quarter Ending 31 Oct. 1844. Figures are drawn from references to wages in the Department of Public Works records, newspaper articles, and Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, 1843, app. Q, and 1845, app. AA. Way and Pentland underline difficulties in generalizing about wage rates and extrapolating standards of living. 31. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T; Nish (Gibbs) and Blais, eds., Debates of the Legislative Assembly of the United Canadas (hereafter Canadas, Debates) 4, 1844–45, Lewis Drummond, 1460, Wolfred Nelson, 1511; Little, “Drummond, Lewis Thomas.” 32. RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Daly, 19 Jan. 1844; OA, RG22, Series 372, Box 51, Grand Jury, District of Niagara, 4 Jan. 1844. 33. For wage rates on canals in the 1850s see RG11, vols. 17, 22, 23. The general pattern is drawn from government reports and communications and from newspapers. 34. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, General Report, Fortier; OA, RG22, Series 372, Quarter Sessions Jan. 1844, Box 51, file 39, Examinations and Testimony; Nova Scotian, 11 May 1857; Morning Chronicle, 6 Mar. 1858; Morning Journal, 13 Feb., 18 May 1857. 35. See, for example, Katz’s still compelling study of structural inequality in Hamilton measured by comparative economic standing which found a significant increase in the poor among labourers, from 75 per cent

Notes to Page s 1 3 5 – 4 0   3 2 5

in 1851 to 84 per cent in 1861. Katz, People of Hamilton, 69–83. From among similar studies for the Atlantic colonies see Gwyn and Siddiq, “Wealth Distribution in Nova Scotia,” 436–52. Gwyn and Siddiq find that for unskilled and most skilled workers in Nova Scotia wages fell significantly below inflation in the period 1851 to 1871, and the result was a significant decline in real wages. See also Bittermann, MacKinnon, and Wynn, “Of Inequality and Interdependence,” 1–43. 36. On the Chats the gap between wages for unskilled and skilled is striking, probably due to location. 37. See Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 163–71, on the “hierarchy of farmers” in the 1850s and 1860s in the Saint John Valley from which labourers might have been drawn and for a comparison of her findings with those for other regions in Canada and the United States. See also T.W. Acheson’s discussion of the broad range of agriculturalists throughout New Brunswick who, like those found by Craig, would have used offfarm income such as that offered by construction work either for their immediate needs or to their long-term advantage. Acheson, “New Brunswick Agriculture,” 5–26. 38. Bitterman, “Farm Households and Wage Labour”; Gaffield, “Boom and Bust,” 172–95. 39. Sessional Papers, 1867, #18, Copies of Reports, Correspondence and other Papers relating to the Intercolonial Railway, 3 Dec. 1867; Sessional Papers, 1872, #2A, Report of Minister of Agriculture and Immigration, Report of Deputy Minister, 34; Welland Tribune, 3 Dec. 1873. 40. Government reports and newspapers discuss wages in the context of strikes, labour supply, and prices. 41. For the skilled, as for the unskilled, reports of wages are random. For the general variations in wage rates in the 1870s see Darroch, “Early Industrialization and Inequality,” 31–61; and Bradbury, Working Families, 80–9, 98–103. 42. Montreal Star, 7 Aug. 1877. See also Montreal Star, 4, 9 Aug. 1877. Debate continued into the fall. 43. Montreal Star, 27 Aug. 1880. 44. Montreal Star, 7 Aug. 1877. 45. For just one analysis of the many roles and responsibilities of women when men left see Linda Reeder, “When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and Mass Migration, 1880–1920,” in Gabaccia and Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives, 45–74, and Introduction. 46. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 1–14. Snell’s study of quality of life in eighteenth- and nineteenth century England begins with an early and excellent discussion of problems in calculating standards of living, even

3 2 6   Notes to Pages 1 4 0 – 3

with the most reliable data and methodical analysis. On assessing poverty in the past see McClymer, “The Historian and the Poverty Line,” 105–10. 47. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q; RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 1 Oct. 1842; OA, RG22, Series 372, Box 51, Grand Jury, District of Niagara, 4 Jan. 1844. 48. Eastern Chronicle, 10 Nov. 1869. Uncertainty concerning the contractor’s financial situation meant labourers on Section 4 reportedly lost more than 25 per cent when they cashed due bills at local stores. 49. New Brunswick Gleaner, 22 July 1871. For analysis of the type of industrial paternalism which involved the unskilled in the late decades of the nineteenth century as part of corporate welfare policies see, in particular, Peck, “Divided Loyalties,” 49–68. 50. Among the few details on truck in the 1850s are comments on contractors’ role in supplying provisions on the Atlantic railways. See, for example, New Brunswick Courier, 24 Oct. 1857. For truck in the 1870s see examples in Chignecto Post, 14 Dec. 1871; and RG11, vol. 803, Screiber to Walsh, 11 Mar. 1871. 51. Report on Railway Labourers, Q 1286, Q 1918, Q 1278. 52. Bleasdale, “Irish Labourers,” 38–40; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q. 53. RG11, vol. 691, #42937, Public Works Circular to Contractors, 19 Jan. 1878; Commons Debates, Mackenzie, 18 Feb. 1878, 352; RG11, vol. 475, #77990, Girouard to Tupper, 14 Nov. 1878. For Quebec law see RG11, vol. 473, #71967, Laflamme to Mackenzie, 23 Jan. 1878. For the Intercolonial see RG11, vol. 810, #4090, R. Fisch, MP, to Fleming, 18 Aug. 1874; and Chignecto Post, 2 June 1870, 14 Dec. 1871. 54. This point will be picked up in the discussion of workplace action, chap. 8, below. 55. For example, details of payment contained in the diary of a highly skilled worker in Victorian Canada, that of Andrew McIlwraith, register no discontent on the part of McIlwraith and other workers with what were at times monthly intervals between paydays in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Holman and Kristofferson, More of a Man. 56. Montreal Star, 22 July 1877. 57. RG11, vol. 473, #71894, Petition of labourers, 15 Jan. 1878. 58. For examples from all projects see Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q; NSARM, RG1, Public Records of Nova Scotia, vol. 457, Duncan MacDonald to Provincial Secretary, 11 June 1858; Johnston and Blackie to Provincial Secretary, 6 Mar. 1858; RG11, vol. 21, #22496, Baillarge to Begly, 1 May 1854; vol. 25, #29471 1/2, Drummond to Tullock, 12 Apr. 1856; vol. 828, Commissioners to Fleming, 7 Mar. 1870; vol. 829, Fleming Memorandum, 19 Dec. 1873; vol. 1962, #2281, W.E. Macdonald to Governor General, 12 Sept. 1870; vol. 472, #67075, Harrington to Page, 17

Note s to Page s 1 4 3 – 9   3 2 7

5 9. 60. 61. 62. 6 3. 64. 65. 6 6. 67. 68. 6 9. 70. 71. 72. 73. 7 4. 75. 76. 77.

78. 7 9. 80.

May 1877; vol. 454, #67555, Higgins and Sullivan, 11 June 1877; vol. 459, #77570, Rykert, MP, to Tupper, 16 Nov. 1878; RG43, vol. 791, #91470, McNamee to Tupper, 16 May 1881; RG11, vol. 478, #48292, Noel to Braun, Feb. 1875; vol. 480, #82750, St Andrews’ Mayor to Braun; Morning Freeman, 17 Jan. 1874. RG11, vol. 26, #29726, Gallwey to Secretary, 8 May 1856. RG11, vol. 56-16, #31402, Page to Begly, 6 Nov. 1856. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q. Scattered references indicate labour unrest stemming from loss of wages. See, for example, the report concerning problems on the European and North American, MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 19 Feb. 1859. Halifax Evening Express, 2 July 1869. Eastern Chronicle, 17 July 1869. This article draws on reports appearing in the Truro Mirror. Halifax Evening Express, 15, 27 Oct. 1869; Eastern Chronicle, 10 Nov., 29 Dec. 1869. Colonial Standard, 25 Jan. 1870. Eastern Chronicle, 4 Dec. 1869; Halifax Evening Express, 1 Dec. 1869. Wesleyan, 29 Dec. 1869; The Border, 18 Nov. 1869; Chignecto Post, 27 Oct. 1870. Chignecto Post, 27 Oct. 1870. Eastern Chronicle, 29 Dec. 1869, quoting the Amherst Gazette. Eastern Chronicle, 10 Nov. 1869. See chap. 1 at notes 19 to 25, above. RG11, vol. 828, Commissioners to Fleming, 7 Mar. 1870; Morning Freeman, 17 Jan. 1874. RG30, vol. 12470, Report of Committee of Privy Council, 30 May 1873. Thorold Post, 17 Sept. 1876; Welland Tribune, 29 Oct. 1880. Welland Tribune, 28 Dec. 1877; RG43, vol. 786, McNamee to Tupper, 23 Apr. 1880; vol.791, #91470, McNamee to Tupper, 16 May 1881. Tupper was Minister of Railways and Canals. RG11, vol. 474, #72967, Sippell to Braun, 19 Mar. 1878; #73408, Darling to Braun, 10 Apr. 1878; #73582, Copy of Report of a Committee of the Honorable the Privy Council, approved 24 Apr. 1878; vol. 472, #66451, Page to Braun, 19 Apr. 1877; #66551, Justice Minister to Braun, 23 Apr. 1877; vol. 474, #73582, Order in Council, 28 Apr. 1878. Montreal Star, 23 Mar. 1878; RG11, vol. 472, #66451, Page to Braun, 19 Apr. 1877; vol. 474, #73436, Page to Braun, 12 Apr. 1878. Montreal Star, 29 May, 5, 22 June 1878. RG11, vol. 475, #77515, Girouard to Tupper, 14 Nov. 1878. For Girouard’s career in politics and law see Smith, “Girouard, Désiré,” 1911–1920.

3 2 8   Notes to Pages 1 4 9 – 5 3

81. RG11, vol. 459, #77477, Rykert to Tupper, 15 Nov. 1878; #77570, 16 Nov. 1878; #78145, Minister of Justice to F.H. Ennis, Department of Public Works, 18 Dec. 1878; vol. 460, #80647, Rykert to Page, 27 Mar. 1879. 82. Chap. 8 returns to this issue. 83. RG11, vol. 488, #77854, Drummond to Tupper, 15 Nov. 1878; #72686, Haliburton to Mackenzie, 4 Mar. 1878; RG43, vol. 1040, #89856, Drummond to Tupper, 29 Dec. 1880. 84. Commons Debates, Mackenzie, 5 Mar. 1878, 7, 39–40. 85. RG11, vol. 488, #73947, Perley to Braun, 13 May 1878; Kennedy to Perley, 9 May 1878; #72935, Perley to Braun, 13 May 1878. 86. RG43, vol. 1040, #92875, McDougall to Tupper, 13 Oct. 1881; #87777, D. McDonald to Tupper, 3 May 1880; #81155, Harrington to Tupper, 2 Apr. 1879; Senate Debates, 7 Feb. 1881; RG43, vol. 1040, #90802, Perley Memorandum, 16 Feb. 1881; #94309, Braun to Justice Minister, 18 Mar. 1882, enclosures. 87. RG11, vol. 389, file 89, Keefer to Begly, 1 Feb. 1843 (Pre-Conversion). See also RG11, vol. 30, file 3, Public Notice of Board of Works, 26 Feb. 1844; file 94, Mills to Begly, 16 Feb. 1847 (Pre-Conversion); and Niagara Chronicle, 4 Aug. 1847. 88. St Catharines Journal, 16 Feb. 1844; Lee and Baynes to Bagot, in Harris, Catholic Church, 255. 89. Recent studies of the famine in Ireland have refocused attention on the staggering death toll and the high mortality rate per capita. See, for example, Grey, Famine, Land and Politics. 90. Gaffield, “Boom and Bust.” Chad Gaffield’s study of families in Prescott County involved in the système agro-forestier is a window into how many in the Lower Ottawa Valley might have adapted fluctuating opportunities for wage labour to maintenance of farms. For insights into strategies, successful and unsuccessful, in the Atlantic colonies see Samson, Spirit of Industry and Improvement, and Bittermann, MacKinnon, and Wynn, “Of Inequality and Interdependence,” 1–43 91. RG11, vol. 473, #71894, Petition of Labourers, 15 Jan. 1878; vol. 477, #84143, McClanaghan to Mackenzie, 15 Aug. 1879. 92. RG11, vol. 179, #55951, McNamee to Braun, 18 Dec. 1875; RG43, vol. 935, #86421, Girouard to Tupper, 22 Dec. 1879; #86426, 24 Dec. 1879; #86483, Cross to Tupper, 31 Dec. 1879; RG11, vol. 469, #56118, 22 Dec. 1875; RG43, vol. 938, #90243, Lyons to Tupper, 31 Dec. 1880; vol. 935, #86407, Girouard to Tupper, 24 Dec. 1879. 93. For contemporaries’ assumptions and attempts to understand the contours of unemployment in late-Victorian Canada see Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers, chap. 1.

Note s to Page s 1 5 4 – 9   3 2 9

94. New Brunswick Courier, 16 Dec. 1854; RG11, vol. 27, #31827, Gallwey to Begly, 8 Dec. 1856; #31880, Egan to Lemieux, Dec. 1856; vol. 22, #24278, Baillarge to Begly, 4 Dec. 1854. 95. RG11, vol. 164, #53073, James Thompson to Commissioners of Public Works, 10 May 1861; vol. 165, #55755, Charles Murray to Trudeau, 26 Oct. 1861; #54931, Petition of Mary Murray, 7 Sept. 1861; #56041, Petition, 3 Sept. 1861. 96. RG43, vol. 787, #88719, Petition of Mulligan et al. to Ellis, 30 July 1880.

Chapter 5 1. Morning News, 22 Oct. 1858; Morning Freeman, 28 Oct. 1858; Morning News, 4 Nov. 1858. 2. RG11, vol. 164, #53073, James Thompson to Commissioners of Public Works, 10 May 1861. See above, chap. 4, note 95. 3. Morning Freeman, 16 Dec. 1858. In a common practice, navvies took the rest of the day off out of respect for Hugh Fraser, “Pictou man of excellent character,” killed between four mile house and five mile house. 4. RG11, vol. 68-5, 1 Oct. 1842; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T; Kesteman, “Les Travailleurs à la construction,” 532–3; New Brunswick Courier, 16 Jan. 1858; Morning News, 10 June 1857. 5. St Catharines Journal, 16 Feb. 1844. The head of the police force on the canal provided the report. 6. RG11, vol. 27, #31827, Gallwey to Begly, 8 Dec. 1856; #31880, Egan to Lemieux, Dec. 1856; vol. 22, #24278, Baillarge to Begly, 4 Dec. 1854. 7. Morning News, 10 June 1857; New Brunswick Courier, 16 Jan. 1858. 8. In a boarding house nearby three men named O’Brien were not related, according to a reporter. See the press transcript of the trial discussed below in note 101. 9. RG11, vol. 22, #24278, Baillarge to Begly, 4 Dec. 1854. 10. RG43, WCLB, Dr Jarrow, 1 Oct. 1842; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T. 11. Legislative Debates, 1844–5, Nelson, 1511. 12. Morning Chronicle, 1 Mar. 1850. 13. Morning News, 22 Oct. 1858; Morning Freeman, 28 Oct. 1858; Morning News, 4 Nov. 1858. 14. Coleman, Railway Navvies, 190. Coleman’s colourful rendering of women is based on the even more colourful writings of evangelical missionaries, most vocal about navvy immorality. See, in particular, Garnett, Our Navvies; and Barrett, Life and Work. 15. Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 141–8; Thompson, Customs in Common, chap. 7.

3 3 0   Notes to Pages 1 5 9 – 6 3

1 6. Murray, “Shanty City of Slabtown.” 17. On the linking of religious and civilizing fervour which carried missionaries and social reformers to what they perceived to be the darkest corners of the Empire see Twells, The Civilizing Mission. 18. RG22, Series 372, Box 48-31, April Sessions 1843, Regina v. Florence Sullivan and Dennis Gagan. 19. Acadian Recorder, 2 May 1857; NSARM, RG39, Supreme Court Records, Halifax (hereafter RG39) vol. 1, #9, The Queen v. Kennedy and Gallagher, 4 June to 4 July 1857, enclosures. Gallagher was found not guilty. Kennedy was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged; his sentence was commuted. 20. Ibid., #191, The Queen v. Honora Healy, 10 Feb. to 14 May 1857, enclosures. Morning Chronicle, 6 Mar. 1858; Morning Journal, 13 Feb., 18 May 1857; Nova Scotian, 11 May 1857. Irregular wording of the verdict  – “Guilty of Murder, with a recommendation to Mercy, as there is no evidence to shew malice aforethought and premeditation” – likely reflects the reluctance of the all-male jury to find Healy guilty of a capital offence as much as it does confusion over the distinction between capital murder and manslaughter or excusable homicide. Thomson, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined, 331–4. 21. On women boarding-house keepers and their clientele in North American centres see Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders”; Tyber, “The Boardinghouse Murders”; Gamber, “Tarnished Labor,” 177–204; and Gamber, Boardinghouse. 22. Roberts, In Mixed Company; Roberts, “Games People Played,” 154–74. 23. RG11, vol. 17, #15899, Page to Begly, 17 Feb. 1852; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 19 Feb. 1859; OA, WCLB, Power to Begly, 2 May 1845; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858; New Brunswick Courier, 29 May 1858. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 10 Mar. 1843; Nova Scotian, 25 June 1856; Morning Journal, 27 May 1857. See also RG22, Series 372, Boxes 47, 48, 51, witnesses. 24. Way, “Evil Humors.” 25. RG11-5, WCLB, Power to Begly, 17 Jan. 1845 (Pre-Conversion). 26. RG11, vol. 17, #15899, Page to Begly, 17 Feb. 1852. 27. MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858; Scoullar to Tilley, 19 Feb. 1859. 28. Haine, “Priest of the Proletarians,” 16–28. On taverns and tavern keepers in Lower Canada as subversive see Greer, “The Birth of the Police.” 29. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T; Nova Scotian, 17 Sept. 1855. 30. Morning Journal, 19 Aug. 1857. 31. For a discussion of missionary endeavours in England and, in particular, the work of the Church of England’s Navvy Mission Society, see Brooke, The Railway Navvy, chap. 7.

Note s to Page s 1 6 3 – 6   3 3 1

3 2. Free Church Record, Nov. 1856; Presbyterian Witness, 21 July 1855. 33. Presbyterian Witness, 21 July 1855, 18 Aug. 1855. 34. Free Church Record, 4 Nov. 1856. 35. Free Church Record, Nov. 1856. 36. Free Church Record, July 1857, Dec. 1856. 37. Free Church Record, 4 Nov. 1856. 38. See, for example, New Brunswick Courier, 29 May 1858. 39. For important strains in the debate and campaigns for temperance and prohibition see Noel, Canada Dry; Heron, Booze, A Distilled History, in particular, chaps. 3 and 4; and Warsh, Drink in Canada, in particular, the first five essays. For a rare firsthand account of a craftsman’s day-today pursuit of manly respectability, combined with critiques of those not engaged in the same pursuit, see Holman and Kristofferson, More of a Man, and, in particular, note 41 below. 40. Nova Scotian, 17 Sept. 1855; Morning Journal, 29 May 1857. 41. New Brunswick Gleaner, 20 Mar. 1858. The stereotype was not always experienced as negative. Andrew McIlwraith, a highly skilled craftsman frequently employed in drafting and patternmaking for railway construction projects and a practiced chorister, describes passing an enjoyable time waiting for a late train by singing with a group of railway navvies just down from clearing the track: “Had a regular concert with them in the waiting room, they having set to the singing to pass the time.” In other circumstances McIlwraith was not pleased to encounter Irishmen: he was “[t]ormented with the Paddys kicking up rows thro’ the night” in one establishment in New York and moved on only to wake and find them sleeping in his room and eating at the breakfast table in another establishment. Holman and Kristofferson, More of a Man, 310–11, 211, 246. 42. MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, “Proceedings Connected with the Railway Police Saint John and Kings County, September 1857 to January 1858”; “Criminal Cases Before Police Magistrate Kennecabasis Station, May 1858 to February 1859.” For the focus of the Saint John police force on similar activities see Marquis, “A Machine of Oppression under the Guise of the Law,” 58–77. 43. For a concise discussion of the difficulties involved in attempting to trace and compare patterns of crime see Weaver, Crimes, Constables, and Courts, 188–224. 44. See Little, State and Society in Transition, 72–7. Little notes a serious incident in 1853 in which the sheriff and three police officers were severely beaten in a failed attempt to arrest railway labourers. Soldiers and militiamen were called out to arrest thirty-five workers. 45. Ireland, “Increasing Mass of Heathens,” 55–61. Ireland notes that in addition to problems in any attempt to assess crime rates, his study does not include crimes dealt with by navvies themselves and not in official

3 3 2   Notes to Pages 1 6 6 – 7 0

4 6. 47. 48.

4 9. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 5 6. 57. 58.

59.

records. Brooke, “Lawless Navvy,” reaches the same conclusion, particularly for navvies in rural areas. He examines criminal court records for Berkshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Devon Counties during a period of intense construction, 1837–1845. Acadian Recorder, 3 Jan. 1857. Morning Freeman, 21, 23, 28 Dec. 1858; Nova Scotian, 3 Jan. 1859. New Brunswick Courier, 31 Oct., 7, 14 Nov. 1857; PANB, Petitions, 44802, Dr Waddle to Sutton, 25 Nov. 1857; Pardons, 4489, Judge Parker to Lt. Gov. John Sutton, 16, 20 Nov. 1857; Parker to S.L. Tilley, 28 Nov. 1857. Patrick won the penitentiary governor’s trust and privileges which went with it; in 1871 he escaped while tending the governor’s horses. Saint John Daily Morning News, 20 Sept. 1871. Legislative Debates, 1844–45, Sherwood, 1465. MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858, 19 Feb. 1859; “Proceedings ... September 1857 to January 1858”; “Criminal Cases ... May 1858 to February 1859.” Morning Journal, 9 Nov. 1857. For firearms on the Nova Scotia Railway see the discussions of the conflicts at Gourlay’s Shanty and Grand Lake, below. RG22, Series 372, Box 51-31, January Sessions 1844, Grand Jury Presentment for the District of Niagara, Jan. 1844. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Y, Report of Miller, 18 Jan. 1845; Jarvis to Daly, Oct. 28, 1844; Jarvis and four other Justices to Daly, 25 Nov. 1844; RG11, vol. 68-5, Hobson to Daly, 20 Jan. 1844. RG11, vol. 68-5, Wetherall to Killaly, 26 Mar. 1844. Stonecutters the contractors wished to exempt were the sworn enemies of Cork and Connaught. By 26 March Wetherall dismissed the plan as “futile.” Legislative Debates, 1844–5, MacDonell, 1448; Rolland Macdonald, 1466. Legislative Debates, 1844–5, Drummond and Aylwin, 1450, 1458–9. Legislative Debates, 1844–5, Smith, 1515. Legislative Debates, 1844–5, Drummond, 1517, Duggan, 1512, Colville, Hale, 1513. For brief discussions of this legislation see Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 33–4, and Brown, Arming and Disarming, 30–4. Brown also notes the 1849 legislation in New Brunswick and the 1851 legislation in Nova Scotia which grew largely from concerns about Irish immigrants and conflict between Orange and Catholic Irish, 34–5. RG11, vol. 17, #15899, Page to Begly, 17 Feb. 1852. Page reported on the Junction with a familiar refrain: “The Department will not be surprised to learn that some of the labourers employed on the works here, are rather of an unruly and turbulent character, whose disposition incites quarrels

Note s to Page s 1 7 1 – 4   3 3 3

not only among themselves, but frequently disturbs the peace of the entire neighbourhood.” 60. Grimsted, “Ante-Bellum Labor,” 8–9. 61. Roberts, “Caravats and Shanavests,” 64–101. Roberts makes a convincing argument that the early nineteenth century witnessed the evolution of faction fighting from local ritualized conflicts with little basis in class antagonisms to broader and more violent struggles increasingly based on class allegiances which could foster class consciousness and political action. 62. Grimsted, “Ante-Bellum Labor,” 9–10; Tobin, “Lowly Muscular Digger,” 181–7. Faction fights in the United States led to as many as four, eight, or ten deaths during one encounter. See also Way, Common Labour, in particular 194–204; and Mason, “The Hands Here Are Disposed to Be Turbulent.” 63. St Catharines Journal, 7 July 1842. 64. RG22, Series 374, Box 51-45, Jan. 1844 Sessions; Box 47-16, Jan. 1843 Sessions, Conviction of McAvoy; Box 51-39, Jan. 1844 Sessions, Indictments. 65. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 25 Aug. 1843; RG11, vol. 68-5, Robinson to Begly, 19 Oct. 1842; Power to Colonel Elliott, 28 Dec. 1843. 66. St Catharines Journal, 20 Sept. 1844. On these fights see Montreal Gazette, 13 Sept. 1842; St Catharines Journal, 7 July 1842; Legislative Journals, 1844–45, app. Y, Killaly to Daly, 5 Nov. 1844; RG11, vol. 389, file 89, Power to Begly, 17 Jan. 1845 (Pre-Conversion); RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Daly, 10 Jan. 1844; St Catharines Journal, 7 July 1843; Brockville Recorder, 8 Aug. 1844; Canadas, Debates, IV, 1844–45, Macdonell, 1448; and RG11, vol. 68-5, Power to Colonel Elliott, 28 Dec. 1843. 67. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Y, Report of Miller, 18 Jan. 1845. 68. Clark and Donnelly, “The Unreaped Harvest,” 421; Roberts, “Caravats and Shanavests,” 98. Clark and Donnelly have emphasized the “ways in which class, religion, territorial divisions, and family structures shaped the character of collective action” such as the feud. Roberts cites oral traditions that a remnant of feuding survived into the twentieth century. 69. Way, Common Labour. 70. Clark, Social Origins; Boyle, “A Marginal Figure,” 311–38. 71. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 78. 72. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 297. 73. Clearest evidence of the persistence of Gaelic is the frequency with which interpreters were used in court proceedings in OA, RG22, Series 372 and the efforts to provide missionaries who spoke Gaelic to minister to workers along the Nova Scotia Railway. Government officials also noted the importance of Gaelic among the labourers and their families. See, for example, chap. 7, notes 85 and 86, below.

3 3 4   Notes to Pages 1 7 4 – 7

74. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 75. By this time the two versions of Gaelic divided by the Irish Sea had diverged to such an extent that they were considered separate languages, not simply separate dialects. 75. On colonial policies seen as part of the plan to assimilate or overwhelm Canadiens see Bourque, Classes sociales. Evidence of the board’s expectation that labourers would be primarily of Irish and English descent, even on projects passing through areas inhabited almost solely by Canadiens, is provided by arrangements to ensure the presence of men with magisterial power fluent in English and French. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. T, No. 33, Murdoch to Laviolette, 5 Aug. 1842. 76. Cross, “Shiners’ War,” 1–26; Cooper, “Quebec Ship Labourers’ Benevolent Society,” 336–43; Pentland, Labour and Capital, 113–21. 77. Derainne, “Le Travail, les migrations, les conflits en France,” 163–78; Derainne, “Les Perceptions sociales des travailleurs migrants Britanniques,” 351–65; Maréchal, “La Construction des lignes de chemin,” 64–89 78. St Catharines Journal, 24 Aug. 1843. 79. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Y, Gibbs to Higginson, 6 Jan. 1845. 80. OA, Fonds F-37, Mackenzie-Lindsey Series, McLeod to Mackenzie, 7 Dec. 1841. 81. For recent analysis of hunger and famine as part of British imperial policy and immiseration and starvation as part of the movement to improve the Irish in the years leading up to and during the famine years see Nally, “That Coming Storm” 714–41. 82. The Elgin-Grey Papers, 1, Elgin to Grey, 11 June 1849, 4, 10, May 1848, 368–70, 148–50, 160–1. For Irish Nationalists in the United States see Knobel, Paddy and the Republic. 83. NAC, MG24, Derby Papers, Metcalfe Transcripts, [name not readable] to Metcalfe, 24 Apr. 1844; RG7, G14, Governor General’s Correspondence, vol. 15, Turner to Higginson, 20 Apr. 1844. For a general discussion of election violence in the Canadas see Careless, The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions 1841–1857 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1967), 43. 84. Olson and Thornton. Peopling the North American City; Trigger, “Geopolitics of the Irish-Catholic Parish,” 553–72; Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec, 135, 196–204, 214–16, 227, 251. Lamonde surveys the connection between the demands of O’Connell’s supporters and those of the Patriotes and concludes that they “imposeront leur presence dans la vie politique et electorate de meme que dans des formes culturelles comme la presse et les associations.” 85. Levine, Spirit of 1848. Way, Common Labour, 217–18, 223, discusses the pattern of conflict between German and Irish on American canals. See also Grimsted, “Ante-Bellum Labor,” 9.

Notes to Page s 1 7 7 – 8 0   3 3 5

86. Legislative Journals, 1854–5, app. EEEE; RG11, vol. 21, #23841, Petition of Counter to Elgin, n.d.; vol. 20, #23376, Baillarge to Begly, 12 Aug. 1854; #25868, Baillarge to Begly, 30 Apr. 1855; vol. 22, #24636, Slorah to Department of Public Works, 18 Jan. 1855. 87. Morning Freeman, 10 July, 21, 23, 28 Dec. 1858; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858; Morning Chronicle, 8 Jan. 1857; Acadian Recorder, 10 Jan. 1857, 23 Oct. 1858. 88. See Handley, Irish in Modern Scotland; Neal, Sectarian Violence. 89. See, in particular, MacLaughlin, “Pestilence on Their Backs,” 53–6. 90. Treble, “Irish Navvies.” For early and important presentations of subgrouping and fragmentation see Foster, Class Struggle, and Kirk, Growth of Working Class Reformism. Analyses continue to multiply, focusing on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in particular. See chaps. 7 and 8 below. 91. For recent analysis of the legacy of discrimination and the shifting nature of the way in which it was perceived and experienced among Irish emigrants see MacRaild, “No Irish Need Apply,” 269–99. 92. See, “An Unprecedented Influx,” 429–53; See, Riots in New Brunswick, 61–2. Scott See presents the important points for the United States and the British North American colonies. 93. See, in particular, Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; and Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic. For valuable analysis of points of contention in the scholarly debate over whiteness studies see Arnesen and the responses by authors of key works in the area of race and labour. Arnesen, “Scholarly Controversy,” 1–92. 94. Harris, Catholic Church, 262–4; St Catharines Journal, 25 Aug. 1843. The stone tablet on the cathedral read: “[T]he Irish working on the Welland Canal built this monument to faith and piety.” 95. RG11, vol. 68-5, MacDonald to Daly, 14 July 1849. Orange and Green clashed in Perth, Cornwall, Kingston, Ottawa, Toronto, and other communities as well as on public works, prompting many citizens and politicians, Protestant and Catholic, Reformer and Tory, to urge suppression of the Orange Order, or at least banning of parades and demonstrations. But Orangemen continued to organize and march. 96. RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Daly, 17 Jan. 1844. The labourers also attacked “strange carpenters.” 97. RG11, vol. 25, #28959, Gallwey to Begly, 26 Feb. 1856; RG11, vol. 17, #15899, Page to Begly, 17 Feb. 1852. 98. See, Riots in New Brunswick, 61–91; See, “The Orange Order and Social Violence,” 90–2. 99. Morning News, 2 June 1858; Morning Freeman, 10 July 1858; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858.

3 3 6   Notes to Pages 1 8 1 – 8

100. For discussion of Gourlay’s shanty and the general role of religion in Nova Scotia elections see Beck, Joseph Howe, Volume 2: The Briton Becomes Canadian, chaps. 4, 5, and 6; Punch, “The Irish in Halifax”; Punch, “Irish Halifax”; Johnston, “Nativism in Nova Scotia,” 23–9; and Blake, “Where Are the Protestant Bastards?” 101. Nova Scotian, 2 June 1856. The clash at Gourlay’s and the trial of the accused received extensive coverage in the Catholic, Church Times, Evening Express, Morning Chronicle, Morning News, and Nova Scotian. Robert Gaston, a boarder at Gourlay’s, later died from his injuries. Nova Scotian, 22 Mar. 1858. 102. Morning Journal, 10, 17 Dec. 1856. In 1847 Howe was accused of catering to Catholic voters. Beck, Joseph Howe, Volume 1: Conservative Reformer, ch. 18. On navvies in Crimea see Chadwick, “Army Works Corps in the Crimea,” 129–41. Many took work on the railway. Halifax Catholic, 14 Apr. 1855; Nova Scotian, 23 June, 29 Dec. 1856; Nova Scotia, Assembly Debates, Wilkins, 11 Feb. 1857, 42. 103. Royle, Crimea, 3–7, 354–5, 404–9; Brooke, Railway Navvy, 123–31. Brooke devotes chap. 6 to what many at the time considered the most successful part of Britain’s Crimean campaign, the Balaklava line. 104. Church Times, 3 Jan. 1857; Nova Scotia,  Assembly Debates, Howe, 17 Feb. 1857, 105; Nova Scotian, 12 Jan., 2 Feb. 1857. 105. Nova Scotian, 12 Dec. 1856, 9 Feb. 1857; Church Times, 31 May 1856. 106. Nova Scotian, 23 June 1856. 107. Nova Scotia, Assembly Debates, Howe, 7 Feb. 1857, 27. 108. Nova Scotian, 18 Oct., 1 Nov. 1858, 16 Nov. 1857. See also Antigonish Casket, 26 Nov. 1857. 109. Nova Scotian, 19 July, 2 Aug. 1858; Morning Chronicle, 14 Aug. 1858. See Nova Scotian, 19, 26 July 1858, for discussion of the idea that navvies and contractors attempted to use the vote to elect an administration sympathetic to their direct interests – increases in contract prices and payment for extras. 110. Nova Scotian, 9 May 1859; Evening Express, 13 May 1859. Claims for extra work were in dispute. 111. Nova Scotian, 16 Nov. 1859. 112. Nova Scotian, 9, 16, 23 May, 13, 14 June, 14, 21, 28 Nov., 5, 12 Dec. 1859; Evening Express, 13, 16, 18, 20, 23 May, 12, 23, 28, 30 Nov., 2 Dec. 1859; Acadian Recorder, 3 Dec. 1859. For charges navvies had voted in previous elections see Nova Scotian, 19, 26 July, 2 Aug. 1858; and Morning Chronicle, 17, 29 July, 14 Aug. 1858.

Chapter 6 1. Saint John Daily Morning News, 17 Nov. 1871. 2. Harney, “Boarding and Belonging,” 19.

Notes to Page s 1 8 9 – 9 5   3 3 7

New Brunswick Gleaner, 22 July 1871. Halifax Evening Express, 11 June 1869. Chignecto Post, 27 July 1871. Union Advocate, 9 Mar. 1871; Saint John Daily Morning News, 30 Sept. 1871. 7. Saint John Daily Morning News, 30 Sept. 1871. 8. Union Advocate, 9 Mar. 1871; Saint John Daily Morning News, 30 Sept. 1871. 9. Colonial Standard, 24 Oct. 1871; Montreal Star, 23 Feb. 1877, 12 May 1879. In happier stories, lost men are found. Hector Munroe, a local hero who had saved lives in a tragedy, was found, suffering from amnesia, working on the Eastern Extension by an old friend whose name he had assumed and who was labouring close by on Section 11 of the Intercolonial. Wesleyan, 3 Aug. 1870. 10. Welland Tribune, 3 Aug. 1877; Montreal Star, 28 Jan. 1879. 11. Welland Tribune, 18 Jan. 1878; Pitsula, “Treatment of Tramps,” 116–32. Pitsula cites an instance of navvies being mistaken for tramps by authorities. Welland Tribune, 27 Oct. 1876, 19 Oct. 1877. Ringenbach, Tramps and Reformers; Rodgers, “Tradition,” 655–81; DePastino, Citizen Hobo; Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts. See Higbie, in particular, on this phenomenon and on middle-class characterization of it for the later period. 12. Welland Tribune, 7 Oct. 1875. 13. Phillips, “Poverty, Unemployment,” 128–62; Bright, “Loafers Are Not Going to Subsist,” 37–58. 14. Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 83–9. David Montgomery provides an overview of perspectives on the crime of idleness in a free market during these years in American history. See also the discussion in DePastino, Citizen Hobo, 3–47. 15. Chignecto Post, 27 July 1871; Saint John Daily Morning News, 17 Nov. 1871. 16. For developments in the debate over moral geography see Howell, Geographies of Regulation; and Valverde, “Moral Capital,” 213–32. Works focusing on Canada and important to this study are Dubinsky, Improper Advances, in particular, chap. 6 in which Dubinsky discusses foreign radicals in an industrial frontier; Valverde, Age of Light, Soap, and Water; and Strange and Loo, Making Good. 17. Cross, “The Shiners War”; Wynn, “Deplorably Dark and Demoralized Lumberers.” 18. Montreal Witness, 17 Dec. 1877. 19. Powers, “The Poor Man’s Friend,” 1–15. 20. Globe, 14 Apr. 1876; Montreal Star, 24 Apr., 8 Dec. 1877. The Montreal Star provided the most detailed coverage of Beef ’s tavern and philanthropy. For analysis of Joe Beef see DeLottinville’s pioneering study, “Joe Beef of Montreal,” 9–40. On the broad social functions of working class

3. 4. 5. 6.

3 3 8   Notes to Pages 1 9 6 – 9

taverns and saloons in this period see also Kingsdale, “The Poor Man’s Club,” 472–89. 21. Thorold Post, 28 July, 21 Apr., 30 June 1876. 22. Welland Tribune, 22 Oct. 1873, 22 Feb. 1878. On tension between work and drink see James Roberts, “Drink and Industrial Work Discipline,” 25–38. For similar binges on the Grenville see RG11, vol. 181, #21682, Sippell to Braun, 18 Mar. 1872; and #21357, Sippell to Braun, 2 Mar, 1872. On the place alcohol retained in work settings in the twentieth century see also Heron, “Boys Will Be Boys,” 6–34; and Heron, “The Boys and Their Booze,” 411–52. 23. RG11, vol. 788, #13835, Braun to McGillivray, 29 Feb. 1872; #13836, Braun to McGillivray, 29 Feb. 1872; vol. 181, #21285, McGillivray to Langevin, 29 Feb. 1872. 24. Union Advocate, 23 July 1873. 25. Wesleyan, 9 Feb. 1874; Halifax Evening Express, 27 Feb. 1871; Amherst Gazette, quoted in the Wesleyan, 1 Mar. 1871. 26. Union Advocate, 22 Oct. 1872. The coronor’s jury concluded that those in charge of the hotel had contributed to O’Neal’s death by failing to keep check on him as he recovered from his drinking bout. 27. Montreal Star, 15, 19 Mar. 1878; La Minerve, 25 Apr. 1879; Montreal Star, 2 Aug. 1879. 28. Welland Tribune, 18 Feb. 1874. For the tangled interplay among ethnicity, temperance, and politics in earlier decades, which carried over into this period, see Lockwood, “Temperance in Upper Canada as Ethnic Subterfuge,” 43–69. 29. Montreal Star, 2 Apr. 1878. 30. Thorold Post, 21 June 1878; OA, St Catharines, St Catharines Directory, 1881–2, 30. 31. RG11, vol. 453, #65207, Norris to MacKenzie, 23 Feb. 1877; Petition of Mulligan et al. to Governor General, 3 Feb. 1877. 32. See requests for control of alcohol on the Intercolonial Railway: RG11, vol. 161, Boggs, 30 July 1872; vol. 806, Himsworth, 2 Aug. 1872; Jones, 11 Oct. 1872; Bernard, 6 Nov. 1872; Restigouche Municipal Council, 25 Apr. 1873; vol. 810, Carvell, 5 Jan. 1874; and Goudge, 27 May 1874. 33. Canada, Statutes, “Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace in the Vicinity of Public Works,” 1869, 32–33 Vic., c. 24; 1870, 34 Vic., c. 28; 1871, 35 Vic., c. 24; 1875, 38 Vic., c. 38; and 1885, 48–49 Vic., c. 80. 34. RG11, vol. 162, #40219, 16 Apr. 1874, Justice Minister to Public Works Minister, and enclosures. 35. RG11, vol. 788, #13837, Braun to Minister of Justice, 29 Feb. 1872; vol. 181, #21323, Department of Justice to Department of Public Works. 36. Within Quebec that enforcement was complicated by jurisdictional divisions with which their Ontario counterparts did not need to contend.

Note s to Page s 2 0 0 – 3   3 3 9

Dominion Police constables operating within the province under the Police Act of Canada, 31 Vic., c. 73, could enforce “the Criminal Laws and other Laws of the Dominion only”; they lacked broader powers conferred in Ontario by the Act of Ontario, 1871. RG11, vol. 181, #21323, Department of Justice to Department of Public Works, 1 Mar. 1872. 37. RG11, vol. 487, #54489, Morrison to Braun, 14 Oct. 1875; vol. 693, #32861, 16 Nov. 1875; #54489, Braun to Morrison, 14 Oct. 1875. 38. Those provisions of the “Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace in the Vicinity of Public Works” which related to alcohol were proclaimed in force as of 1 Jan. 1879 on Sections 14 and 15 of the CPR and as of 8 Sept. 1879 on Contracts 25, 41, and 42. Canada Gazette 12: 704, and 13: 372. Concerning the control of alcohol on the CPR see Hall, “The Construction Workers’ Strike,” 22–3. Contracts held contractors responsible for controlling and discouraging alcohol on their sections. 39. Campbell, “Canadian Gambling Legislation”; Wamsley, “State Formation and Institutionalized Racism,” 77–85; Baker, “Going to the Dogs,” 97–119; Fabian, Card Sharps; Lears, “Playing with Money,” 7–22. 40. Gray, “For Whom the Bell Tolled,” 53–64; Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 24–27; Handley, Navvy in Scotland, 33. For the criminal prosecution of prize fighting in England see Anderson, “Pugilistic Prosecutions,” 35–53. 41. Canada, Statutes, “An Act Respecting Prize Fighting,” 1881, 44 Vic., c.30. 42. Gorn, Manly Art. 43. Anderson, “Brief History of Prize Fighting,” 32–62; O’Donnell, Irish Faction Fighters. Anderson notes O’Donnell’s suggestion that for many Irish immigrants part of the attraction of prize fights was their ability to replicate on a small scale faction fighting of their homeland. 44. Welland Tribune, 15 Aug. 1878, 9 July 1880. 45. For a provocative, sweeping analysis which is, perhaps, too uncritical in accepting contemporary stereotypes associating single men with social disorder, see Courtwright, Violent Land. 46. RG11, vol. 470, #59578, Lachine Mayor and Contractors to Mackenzie, 23 May 1876; #61544, M.C. to Mackenzie, 29 Aug. 1876; vol. 469, #58601, Lachine to Forest, 10 Apr. 1876; vol. 161, #37143, McDonagh to Dorian, 5 Dec. 1873, Currie to Dorian, 6 Dec. 1873; Welland Tribune, 10 Dec. 1873; RG43, vol. 785, #86726, McNamee to Braun, 22 Jan. 1880; RG11, vol. 693, #32861, correspondent unclear, 16 Nov. 1875; #54489, Braun to Morrison, 14 Oct. 1875. For the Grenville see RG11, vol. 181, #21285, McGillivray to Langevin, 29 Feb. 1872; vol. 788, #13837, Braun to Justice Minister, 29 Feb. 1872; and vol. 791, #21989, Braun to Sippell, 25 Sept. 1873. For the Intercolonial see examples in RG11, vol. 806, Rev. Duval, 25 Dec. 1871; and vol. 832, correspondent unclear, 12 Aug. 1874. 47. Welland Tribune, 22 Feb. 1878.

3 4 0   Notes to Pages 2 0 3 – 1 1

Montreal Star, 7 May 1878. See above, note 15. Welland Tribune, 10 Dec. 1873. Trial transcript, Welland Tribune, 25 May 1877. Welland Tribune, 27 July 1877. Newspapers along the canal reprinted the St Catharines Review’s description of the assault. 53. Montreal Star, 7 May 1878, 13 Aug. 1877, 21 Aug. 1878; New Brunswick Reporter, 8 Nov. 1871; Wesleyan, 15 Aug. 1874. 54. “Preservation of the Peace,” 1869, 32–3 Vic., c. 24. 55. Canada, Statutes, “An Act respecting Offences against the Person,” 1869, 32–3 Vic., c. 20. 56. Ibid., “An Act to make Provision against the Improper Use of Firearms,” 1877, 40 Vic., c. 30. An 1882 amendment allowed seized weapons to be given to municipalities for use by peace officers. 57. Ibid., “Act for the Better Prevention of Crimes of Violence in Certain Parts of Canada,” 1878, 41 Vic., c. 17. Commons Debates, Blake, 1 May, 1878, 2338–9; Mackenzie, 1 May, 1878, 2341–2. See Susan Binney’s analysis of the Blake Act in “The Blake Act of 1878,” 234–42. 58. Commons Debates, Langevin and Devlin, 4 May, 1878, 2408–9. 59. Senate Debates, Miller, 8 May, 1878, 973–4; Commons Debates, Macdonald, 16 May, 1882, 1569. 60. Canada, Statutes, “An Act to Amend the Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace in the Vicinity of Public Works,” 1875, 38 Vic., c. 38. 61. Ibid., 32–3 Vic., c. 24; 34 Vic., c. 28; 35 Vic., c. 24; 38 Vic., c. 38; 48–9 Vic., c. 80; Brown, Arming and Disarming; Binnie, “Maintaining Order on the Pacific Railway,” 204–55. 62. Walker, “The Land Question,” 230–68; Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be, 313–16. For unrest in Toronto in the latter half of the 1870s see Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond, 14–23; and Trigger, “Irish Politics on Parade,” 159–99. 63. Welland Tribune, 30 June, 4 Aug. 1876. 64. La Minerve, Montreal Star, Montreal Witness, June 1877 to Nov. 1878. In addition to reports on the killings and legal proceedings, the press featured learned commentaries from clergy, the legal community, and private citizens, and editorials and letters to the editor, assigning blame, denouncing all partisans, and suggesting remedies for sectarian violence. Bross, “Secrets Don’t Make Friends.” 65. Thorold Post, 17 Sept. 1875. 66. For local press portrayal of this potential conflict see Welland Tribune, 17 Nov. 1876; 17 May 1878; and 22 Nov. 1879. On fears of Fenians in the North Atlantic world and continuing linking of Irish Catholics and disloyalty to the British see de Nie, “‘A Medley Mob,” 213–31. Macdonald 4 8. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Notes to Page s 2 1 1 – 1 7   3 4 1

analyses one of a number of contexts in which political debate cast Catholics and their supporters as pro-Fenian: Macdonald, “Who’s Afraid of the Fenians?” 33–51. Sheppard analyses the continuing role of Fenian lodges within Canada West / Ontario in bringing together Irish Canadians for entertainment, fellowship, and self-protection, with perhaps a measure of support for the liberation of Ireland, depending on the membership and history of individual lodges: Sheppard, “God Save the Green,” 129– 44. David Wilson argues for the importance of the Fenians in shaping Canadian history, not just Confederation and the route for the Intercolonial: “Swapping Canada for Ireland,” 24–7. On the important role of the Fenian threat in the evolution of the policing of politics see Parnaby and Kealey, “The Origins of Political Policing in Canada,” 211–40. 67. Baskerville, “Familiar Strangers,” 321–46; Harney, “Boarding and Belonging,” 19. 68. RG31, Census Records, 1881, Reel C-13253, Humberstone Township. Dwellings #12, #13, #15 were all identified as boarding shanties. 69. Baskerville, “Familiar Strangers,” 321–46 70. RG31, Reel C-13253, Humberstone Township, Dwellings #158, #148, #166. 71. RG31, Reel C-13253, Humberstone Township, Dwellings #26, #181, #270, #159. 72. Harney, “Boarding and Belonging,” 19. 73. RG31, Census Records, 1881 Reel C-13253, Humberstone Township. Given as the only occupants of one dwelling are eighteen Italian Roman Catholic labourers, all born in Italy, individual entries #444 to #461, and four French Canadian Roman Catholic labourers, all born in Quebec, individual entries #462 to #465. In a nearby dwelling, twenty-six Italian Roman Catholic labourers, all born in Italy, are listed as individual entries #475 to #504. 74. Welland Tribune, 23, 28 June, 28 Oct. 1876, 4, 11 May 1877; Thorold Post, 23, 30 June, 28 July 1876. The name of the victim is also given as Brack. 75. Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White? See in particular the introduction, afterword, and essays in parts 1 and 2. 76. Peck, Reinventing Free Labour; Avery, Dangerous Foreigners. 77. Fenton, Immigrants and Unions; Oestreicher, “Solidarity and Fragmentation,” 60; Gutman, “The Buena Vista Affair,” 251–93.

Chapter 7

1. Morning News, 8 Mar. 1858. 2. Morning Journal, 19 Mar. 1858. 3. New Brunswick Gleaner, 20 Mar. 1858. 4. Palmer, “Labour Protest and Organization,” 61–83. Palmer’s characterization is taken from contemporary press reports. He discusses difficulties

3 4 2   Notes to Pages 2 1 7 – 2 1

in identifying and distinguishing between types of labour protest in these years. 5. Way, Common Labour, 248. Way’s chap. 8 analyses the conditions under which this transition occurred. 6. RG11, vol. 54-26, Mills to Begly, 1 June 1843. 7. Montreal Transcript, 28 Mar. 1843. 8. RG11-5, vol. 379, file 44, Harvey to Killaly, 30 Aug. 1842 (Pre-Conversion); Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Y. 9. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Deposition of Thomas Reynolds; RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Daly, 10 Jan. 1844; vol. 60-9, Hobson to Daly, 20 Jan. 1844, Wetherall to Killaly, 26 Mar. 1844. Wetherall reported: “Strife to obtain work takes place between the two great sectional parties of Cork and Connaught. They are subdivided into smaller parties, the Leinster and Roscommon, versus Mayo and Sligo. The sole object of these combinations is to obtain work for themselves by driving off the other party.” 10. RG11, vol. 68-5, Public notice to the Sons of Erin, 12 Jan. 1844; Thorburn to Daly, 19 Jan. 1844. 11. Way, Common Labour, 202; Roberts, “Caravats and Shanavests,” 66. 12. For Irish faction fighting in the United States in the early 1850s see the study of labourers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Mason, “The Hands Here Are Disposed to Be Turbulent.” 13. Petition of Lee and Baynes, cited in Harris, Catholic Church, 255; RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Murdock, 18 Aug. 1842; St Catharines Journal, 11 Aug. 1842; RG11, vol. 388, file 87, Petition presented to Reverend Lee, 1 Aug. 1842 (Pre-Conversion); RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 15 Aug. 1842; Power to Begly, 14 Feb. 1843; Power to Begly, 20 Mar. 1843, 17 July 1843, 25 Aug. 1843. 14. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 290. 15. From the material cited in Pentland’s “Lachine Strike” see RG11, 60–9, Charles Atherton to Begly, 3, 5, 6, 7 Feb., 30 Mar. 1843; Atherton to Hope, 29 Mar. 1843; and Memorandum of Wetherall, 3 Apr. 1843. 16. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. T. Government investigation of military intervention on the Beauharnois provides unusually rich material on the struggle for work among the Irish factions and Canadiens. See also Way’s discussion of conflict on the Lachine and Beauharnois, Common Labour, 248–53. 17. Morning Journal, 9 Nov. 1857; Morning Freeman, 10 July 1858; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858; Morning Chronicle, 8 Jan. 1857; Acadian Recorder, 10 Jan. 1857, 23 Oct. 1858. 18. In his analysis of the diversity of experience and perspective among German immigrants to America Levine explores German and Irish conflict

Note s to Page s 2 2 1 – 9   3 4 3

in the labour market and German and Irish cooperation in confronting employers and other workers. Levine, Spirit of 1848. 19. Morning Freeman, 10 July 1858; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858. 20. Nova Scotia, Assembly Debates, Howe, 7 Feb. 1857, 27. 21. Nova Scotian, 23 June 1856. 22. RG11, vol. 390, file 93, Mills to Killaly, Nov. 1844, 29 Nov. 1845 (Pre-Conversion); RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 7 Jan. 1845; Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Y, Mills, 20 Dec. 1844. 23. RG11, vol. 60-9, Wetherall to D. Daly, 16, 1 Aug. 1844; B. McGrann & Co. to Killaly, 19 Aug. 1844; Wetherall to Begly, 21, 27 Aug. 1844; RG11, vol. 54-26, Mills to Begly, 19 Oct. 1844. 24. RG5, CI, P.S.C., C.W., 1844, #8410, Daly to Killaly, 1 Aug. 1844 and Killaly to Daly, 20 Aug. 1844. 25. Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. Y, Report of Miller, 18 Jan. 1845. 26. RG11, vol. 23, #25949, Gallwey to Begly, 9 May 1855; vol. 25, #29400, Gallwey to Begly, 12 Apr. 1856; #29459, Gallwey to Begly, 12 Apr. 1856. 27. J. Conway to Wetherall, 27 Aug. 1844; Deposition of John Conway, 2 Aug. 1844. 28. RG11, vol. 17, #24055, Baillarge to Begly, 4 Nov. 1854. 29. RG11, vol. 24, #28292, Gallwey to Begly, 9 Jan. 1856; vol. 25, #28959, Gallwey to Begly, 26 Feb. 1856. 30. See discussion above, chap. 3, note 7. 31. See above, chap. 1, for government engineers’ assessment of some contractors’ inexperience which translated into incompetence in overseeing their operations and inadequacy of supervisory staff supplied. 32. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q, app. T; Montreal Transcript, 15 June 1843. 33. Morning News, 8 Mar. 1858; Morning Journal, 19 Mar. 1858, 29 May 1857. 34. See, for example, RG11, WCLB, Power to Begly, 4 Oct. 1845 (Pre-Conversion), and press reproof of contractors who did not meet commitments to labourers. See, for example, Nova Scotian, 26 July 1858. 35. RG11, WCLB, Power to Begly, 18 Aug. 1845 (Pre-Conversion); Pentland, “Lachine Strike”; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Depositions of Cross and Dowling, Petition of Carnes et al., Begly’s Examination. 36. RG11, 60–9, Memorandum of Wetherall, 3 Apr. 1843; vol. 90, file 94, Clarke to Killaly, 6 March 1845 (Pre-Conversion). 37. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q, 1844–5, app. AA. 38. St Catharines Journal, 7 June 1844; RG11-5, vol. 381, file 56, Godfrey to Begly, 9 Apr. 1844 (Pre-Conversion); Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 26–7. 39. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 10 Mar. 1843; Legislative Journals, 1844–5, app. AA, Report of the Board of Works, Dec. 1844. The St Catharines

3 4 4   Notes to Pages 2 2 9 – 3 3

Journal, 20 Sept. 1844, claimed there were four strikes by labourers on one section of the Welland between Apr. 1 and July 20. 40. RG11, vol. 17, #16154, Page to Begly, 17 Mar. 1852; #16508, Bowie and Cassels to Begly, 3 May 1852; vol. 21, #23376, Baillarge to Begly, 12 Aug. 1854; #24055, Baillarge to Begly, 4 Nov. 1854. 41. RG11, vol. 22, #24799, Gallwey to Begly, 31 Jan. 1855; #25355, Gallwey to Begly, 22 Mar. 1855; #25949, Gallwey to Begly, 9 May 1855; vol. 23, #26940, A.P. McDonald to Commissioners of Public Works, 13 July 1855. 42. RG11, vol. 24, #28292, Gallwey to Begly, 9 Jan. 1856; vol. 26, #29856, Gallwey to Begly, 20 May 1856; #30080, Gallwey to Begly, 9 June 1856. 43. University of Western Ontario, Regional Collection, Diary of Silas Burt, 21; See the analysis of the strikes on the Great Western Railway in the early 1850s and the bitter conflict over unpaid wages on the Buffalo, Brantford, and Goderich Railways. Appleton, “The Sunshine and the Shade,” 46–7, 80–6. 44. Morning News, 12 May 1858. 45. Nova Scotian, 23 June 1856. 46. Morning News, 29 Apr. 1857, 5 May 1858. 47. RG11, vol. 17, #23376, Baillarge to Begly, 12 Aug. 1854. 48. RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Daly, 10 Jan. 1844; St Catharines Journal, 28 June 1844. 49. RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 8 Aug. 1845; Grimsted, “Anti-Bellum Labour,” 10. 50. MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 19 Feb. 1859. 51. RG8, C Series, vol. 60, Testimony of James McCloud, sworn before Justices Kerr and Turney, 14 Sept. 1844 (Pre-Conversion). 52. Brockville Recorder, 21 Mar. 1844; Montreal Gazette, Aug. 1843; RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 14 Aug. 1843. 53. RG11, vol. 25, #28959, Gallwey to Begly, 26 Feb. 1856; #28939, Gallwey to Begly, 23 Feb. 1856. For a concise discussion of the ends to which machine-wrecking could be employed see Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” 7–26. 54. RG11, vol. 25, #29459, Gallwey to Secretary, 12 Apr. 1856; #29598, John O’Shanahan to Chief Commissioner of the Department of Public Works. 55. On ambiguities in this area of the law see Craven, “Canada, 1670–1935,” 175–218; Craven, “Workers’ Conspiracies in Toronto,” 49–72; Craven, “Law of Master and Servant,” 175–211; Webber, “Labour and the Law,” 105–201; and Tucker, “That Indefinite Area of Toleration,” 15–54. 56. RG11, vol. 60-9, Wetherall to Begly, 3 Apr. 1843; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T; RG11-5, vol. 390, file 93, Mills to Killaly, 29 Nov. 1845 (Pre-Conversion); Mills to Killaly, Nov. 1844; Legislative Journals, 1845, app. AA. See Pentland, “Lachine Strike,” for opinions on combinations and strikes.

Note s to Page s 2 3 3 – 8   3 4 5

5 7. Tucker, “That Indefinite Area of Toleration.” 58. RG11, vol. 68-5, Jarrow to Merritt, 6 Jan. 1843; RG43, WCLB, Power to Begly, 10 Feb. 1843; Begly to Power, 8 Apr. 1843; RG11, vol. 60-9, Charles Atherton to Begly, 30 Mar., 1 Apr. 1843; Reports of instigators of the late riots, 31 Mar. 1843. As Way has demonstrated, the number blacklisted could reach over one hundred as a result of just one dispute, as happened following an 1838 strike on the Chesapeak and Ohio Canal. Way, Common Labour, 222. 59. Act for the better preservation of the Peace and the prevention of riots and violent outrages at and near public works while in progress of construction, 8 Vic. c.6. On the stationing of police on the canals see Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 34–6; Pentland, “Lachine Strike”; and Way, Common Labour, 253, 260–1. For a discussion of the influence of the British model of policing in Ireland on policing institutions in British North America and Canada see Marquis, “The ‘Irish Model,’” 193–218. 60. RG11, vol. 68-5, Wetherall to Killaly, 26 Mar. 1844. 61. RG5, P.S.O., C.W., vol. 161, #11, 362, Memorandum of Inhabitants of Mariatown to Lord Metcalf Governor General. 62. Ibid., vol. 164, #11, 611, MacDonald to Daly, 12 Sept. 1845. In contrast with this image of an overly zealous police force were examples of constables who shied away from their responsibilities because of the overwhelming number of labourers they confronted and because of fear of reprisals. 63. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. Q; WCC-8, Begly to Power, 2 Dec. 1845; Begly to Power, 27 Dec. 1845 (Pre-Conversion). On the key role of evolving policing institutions in Lower Canada in extending the state’s power into the area of social reform of those perceived to have an indifferent relationship to the labour market and to be on the margins of the law, see Greer, “Birth of the Police.” 64. RG11, vol. 17, #15899, Page to Begly, 17 Feb. 1852; #16007, Inhabitants of Edwardsburg, via A. Keefer, to the Department of Public Works, 26 Feb. 1852. 65. MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 19 Feb. 1859. 66. Morning News, 5 May 1858. 67. Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 34–6; Legislative Journals, 1846, app. NN, 1843, app. T; MG9, vol. 52, Scoullar to Tilley, 27 Jan. 1858. 68. Nova Scotian, 16 Nov. 1857. 69. Nova Scotian, 30 Nov. 1857. 70. Bleasdale, “Class Conflict,” 36; Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T. The board’s investigation of the Beauharnois and Lachine disturbances found

3 4 6   Notes to Pages 2 3 8 – 4 1

Reverend Falvey diligent in instructing labourers to obey their employers and laws concerning combinations, and offered him their “highest praise.” 71. See, for example, RG11, WCLB, Power to Begly, 3 Jan. 1844 (Pre-Conversion); and RG11, vol. 68-5, Hobson to Daly, 20 Jan. 1844. 72. Montreal Transcript, 15 June 1843. 73. Legislative Debates, IV, 1844–5, Aylwin, 1456; Garon, “Aylwin, Thomas Cushing.” 74. RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Murdock, 18 Aug. 1842. 75. RG11, WCLB, Power to Elliott, 3 Jan. 1844 (Pre-Conversion); C Series, MacDonald to Col. Elliott, 2 Apr. 1844; Merritt to Daly, 21 Sept. 1844 (Pre-Conversion); RG5, P.S.O., C.W., V. 100, #4956, Milne to Bagot, 21 Dec. 1842. 76. C Series, vol. 60, Wm. Fielder to Taylor, 8 Sept. 1843 (Pre-Conversion); RG11, vol. 379, file 44, Harvey to Killaly, 30 Aug. 1842 (Pre-Conversion). The expense of keeping four or five detachments on the march does not appear to have been at the centre of the dispute over use of troops. The British Treasury continued to pay for salaries, provisions, and stores, but the board accepted responsibility for constructing barracks and for providing transportation and temporary accommodation at trouble spots when necessary. 77. RG11, vol. 25, #28939, Gallwey to Begly, 23 Feb. 1856; #28959, Gallwey to Begly, 26 Feb. 1856; #29471½, Drummond to Tullock, 12 Apr. 1856. 78. Most is known about the participation of the 76th Regiment of Foot in the aftermath of the Gourlay’s shanty confrontation. See chap. 5, notes 104 and 105. Plimsoll, “The Militia of Nova Scotia,” 99–103. 79. RG11, vol. 68-5, Jarrow to Merritt, 6 Jan. 1843; Montreal Transcript, 28 Mar. 1843. Pentland describes the betrayal of one faction by the other during a strike in “Lachine Strike.” See also RG11, vol. 68-5, Cotton and Rowe to Wheeler, 26 Aug. 1846. 80. C Series, vol. 60, Gaele to Elliott, 23 July 1844; Elliott to Young, 23 July 1844 (Pre-Conversion). 81. RG22, Series 372, Box 52-29, April Sessions 1844, Examination of Joel Dodge, overseer; Box 51-37, January Sessions 1844, Testimony of Constable Beel. Gaelic speakers also frustrated constables who attempted to apprehend suspects in one language while the suspects organized their escape in another. 82. Clark, Social Origins, 65–95; Roberts, “Caravats and Shanavests,” 64–101; Tom Garvin, “Defenders, Ribbonmen, and Others,” 133–55. On the Molly Maguires see Broehl, Molly Maguires; Aurand, From the Molly Maguires; and Emmons, “Immigrant Workers and Industrial Hazards,” 41–64. Following the Civil War, the miners of Butte had the option of

Note s to Page s 2 4 1 – 6   3 4 7

also joining forces in the more militant Camp 90 of the Clan-na-Gael, the north branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. 83. Williams, Secret Societies, 31; Way, Common Labour, 214–18, 224–6. 84. Mason, “Hands Here Are Disposed to Be Turbulent,” 265–66 (emphasis in original). 85. Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T; RG11, vol. 68-5, Thorburn to Daly, 10 Jan. 1844; Garvin, “Defenders, Ribbonmen, and Others,” 146. 86. Williams, Secret Societies, 31, 7, 25–7; Roberts, “Caravats and Shanavests.” 87. O’Higgins, “Irish Influence in the Chartist Movement,” 83–96; Thompson, “Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism,” 120–51. 88. RG11, vol. 60-9, Wetherall to Begly, 3 Apr. 1843. 89. Grimsted, “Anti-Bellum Labor,” 10, 22, 26. On German immigrants in the labour movement in America during the 1850s see Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 228–34, and Levine, Spirit of 1848, 122–45. 90. Revitalized and deepened analysis of agrarian unrest and the myth and reality of Captain Swing, in particular, has demonstrated the extent to which immigrants from England and Scotland may have had personal experience of rural protest, despite the likelihood of exaggeration of the threat by the press and officials struggling with agrarian unrest. See two important articles which review recent literature: Navickas, “Captain Swing in the North,” 5–28; Griffin, “Violent Captain Swing,” 149–80. Griffin stresses the key role of Swing as “a historical pivot that was partly responsible for politicizing many rural workers.” 91. For the Chats Canal see note 15, above; for Canadiens initiatives see Legislative Journals, 1843, app. T, Deposition of Laroque; and P.S.O., C.E., 1844, #179, Killaly to Daly, 23 May 1844. 92. Nova Scotian, 23 June 1857; Nova Scotia, Assembly Debates, Howe, 7 Feb. 1857, 27. 93. Morning Chronicle, 8 Jan. 1857; Acadian Recorder, 10 Jan. 1857; Nova Scotian, 12 Jan. 1857. 94. From the range of important studies of protest outside formal structures see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra; Turner, From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves; and Lis, Lucassen and Soly, eds., Before the Unions. 95. Lucassen, “Brickmakers’ Strikes on the Ganges Canal.” Of particular relevance and interest is Jan Lucassen’s work and his analysis of others’ work on labour resistance among those constructing India’s transportation infrastructure in the nineteenth century. See also Kerr, “Working Class Protest in 19th Century India,” 34–40, and Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj. 96. Quinlan, Gardner, and Akers, “Reconsidering the Collective Impulse,” 35–6, 16–17. Though workers in the crafts and mining in Australia established longer-lasting structures in the mid-nineteenth century, “the vast

3 4 8   Notes to Pages 2 4 8 – 5 4

majority” of organizations created by workers were ephemeral, surviving one and two years, and not until the 1880s did life expectancy of unions across industries increase dramatically. “[O]f the 102 unions formed between 1826 and 1850 only 3 are known to have survived more than 10 years and even then not much longer.” “Volatility rather than permanency was the norm.” Quinlan and Gardner note why details concerning collective action in Australian colonies can only be applied to the British North American experience with care, but they point out key considerations for any study of collective action and labour organization. Quinlan and Gardner, “Strikes, Worker Protest, and Union Growth,” 175–208. Palmer, Kealey, and Patmore also set out important considerations in any attempt to compare the experience and action of labour across these jurisdictions and their successor states. Palmer, “Nineteenth Century Canada and Australia,” 16–36; Kealey and Patmore, “Comparative Labour History,” 1–15. Together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate that there are always legitimate reasons to be cautious about comparative labour studies, but never enough to undermine their enormous value.

Chapter 8 1. Thorold Post, 28 Apr. 1876. 2. Thorold Post, 5 May 1876. 3. RG30, vol. 12471, William Home to Schreiber, 20 Apr. 1871. 4. RG11, vol. 181, Correspondence, Goodwin to Braun: #20321, 30 Dec. 1871; #21301, 1 Mar, 1872; #21310, 1 Jan. 1872; #21323, 1 Mar. 1872; #21364, 2 Mar. 1872. Vol. 181, #22682, Braun to Sippell, 4 May 1872; #23695, Goodwin to Braun, June 1872; #23804, Goodwin to Braun, 27 June 1872; vol. 182, #26154, McGillivray to Braun, 22 Oct. 1872; #28041, Goodwin to Braun, Jan. 1873; vol. 791, #21989, Braun to Sippell, 25 Sept. 1873. 5. RG11, vol. 181, #23695, Goodwin to Sippell, June 1872; vol. 182, #26154, McGillivray to Braun, 22 Oct. 1872. 6. RG11, vol. 160, #31775, Mitchell to Langevin, 17 June 1873. See also Bonneville’s problem on the Lachine for the same period, RG11, vol. 176, #31232, Bonneville to Langevin, 27 May 1873; #31305, Order in Council, 31 May 1873; and #31489, Sippell to Braun, 9 June 1873. 7. Welland Tribune, 28 Feb. 1878. This pattern was common among skilled and unskilled in those occupations in which spring offered greater bargaining power or more options for work elsewhere. 8. RG11, vol. 162, #40971, 7 May 1874, Brown, Manning & Ginty, Cairns Morse Hart & Co. to Alexander Mackenzie, Minister of Public Works; Welland Tribune, 4 June 1874.

Note s to Page s 2 5 4 – 7   3 4 9

    9. Thorold Post, 28 Apr., 5 May 1876, 8, 14, 21, 28 Mar. 1879; Welland Tribune, 8 Mar. 1878, 8, 14, 21, 28 Mar. 1879. 10. Montreal Star, 22 Jan., 17 Dec. 1877, 10 Apr., 23 Sept., 28 Nov. 1878. 11. Montreal Star, 18 to 24 Jan. 1878; La Minerve, Dec. 1877 to Jan. 1878. 12. RG43, vol. 792, #91785, Bannerman & Co. to Tupper, 20 June 1881 (emphasis in original). 13. Montreal Star, 28, 29 Apr. 1879; La Minerve, 29 Sept. 1879. 14. Montreal Star, 27 July, 27, 28 Aug. 1880. 15. RG43, vol.792, #91470, McNamee to Tupper, 16 May 1881. 16. RG11, vol. 691, #42937, Public Works Circular to Contractors, 19 Jan. 1878; Commons Debates, Mackenzie, 18 Feb. 1878, 352; RG11, vol. 475, #77990, Girouard to Tupper, 14 Nov. 1878. For example, see condemnation of truck in the Globe, 24, 25 Jan. 1878. For discussion of the Quebec law see RG11, vol. 473, #71967, Laflamme to Mackenzie, 23 Jan. 1878. For truck on the Intercolonial see RG11, vol. 810, #4090, R. Fisch, MP, to Fleming, 18 Aug. 1874; and Chignecto Post, 2 June 1870, 14 Dec. 1871. 17. Eastern Chronicle, 13 Oct. 1869, quoting the Amherst Gazette. 18. RG11, vol. 828, Report to Commissioners, 3 Jan. 1870. In one example from a private railway in New Brunswick, in December 1874 passengers on the newly completed Rivière du Loup Railroad passed a series of warning signs before they were stopped near Woodstock Junction by unpaid labourers manning a blockade built from giant boulders, frozen earth, and telegraph poles left over from construction. Only after the company treasurer scrambled up the line in a handcart to settle accounts did labourers clear the tracks and allow the train to continue. Saint John Daily News, 8 Dec. 1874. 19. Montreal Star, 6 April, 4 May 1878. Debate over the veracity of the report ensued. 20. Eastern Chronicle, 13 Oct. 1869, quoting the Amherst Gazette; The Border, 23 Sept. 1869; Montreal Star, 8, 9 Jan. 1877. 21. Quebec, Assembly Debates, as reported by Alphonse Desjardins in Le Canadien. For details on the political career of McShane, The People’s Jimmy as his Irish constituents called him, see Comeau, “McShane, James.” 22. Battye, “Nine Hour Pioneers,” 25–56; Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond, chaps. 4 and 8; Palmer, Working Class Experience, 106–8, 110–14. See Kristofferson’s analysis of the significance of the nine-hour movement among Hamilton craftsworkers in Kristofferson, Craft Capitalism, 201– 40. See also Christina Burr’s discussion of the nine-hour movement as part of the broader movement of labour reform and its rhetoric in Burr, Spreading the Light. 23. Montreal Star, 10 Apr. 1878.

3 5 0   Notes to Pages 2 5 7 – 6 3

24. RG11, vol. 829, McDonell to Fleming, 23 Apr. 1873. See chap. 3, note 92, above, for more detail. 25. RG11, vol. 474, #74029, Lyons to Mackenzie, 21 May 1878. 26. Montreal Star, 27 July 1880. 27. On the Quebec government’s North Shore Railway, for example, labourers struck over a change of foreman. Montreal Star, 2 Oct. 1877. 28. Montreal Star, 22 Jan. 1877. 29. Smaller strikes are most likely to have gone unreported by government officials and press. 30. Montreal Star, 18 Jan., 17, 24 Dec. 1877, 27 Aug. 1880. 31. See, for example, Thorold Post, 5 May 1874; and RG43, vol. 792, #91785, Bannerman & Co. to Tupper, 20 June 1881. See also chap. 2, notes 108 and 109. 32. Montreal Witness, 17 Dec. 1877. 33. Montreal Star, 27 Aug. 1880. 34. From among the wealth of studies of the negotiation of race and ethnicity in labourers’ organizations in specific locales and industries see Winslow, Waterfront Workers. Sometimes this negotiation was brutal and within Canada perhaps most brutal in the late 1870s’ conflict between the Irish Ship Labourers Society of Quebec City and L’Union Canadienne. Reports of the Aug. 1879 dispute demonstrate the difficulty of untangling the ethnic dimension to tensions in a labour conflict and the ease with which ethnic hostilities could be evoked. Though dubbed a “race war,” conflict was between French Canadian and Irish labourers on the one hand, and French Canadian on the other. Montreal Star, La Minerve, and Quebec Telegraph, Aug. 1879; Bischoff, Les Debardeurs au Port du Québec. Clashes between labourers on the North Shore Railway were reportedly based on hostilities between Canadien and Irish, but might better be interpreted as conflicts between strikers and strikebreakers, the latter predominantly one ethnic group. 35. RG11, vol. 473, #71948, Whitney and Doty to Braun, 22 Jan. 1878. 36. Ibid. 37. Montreal Star, 20 July, 9 Aug. 1877. 38. Doyle, Valley of Fear. Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear is based on popular perceptions of the ruthless criminality of this type of organization. Concerns had prompted the American archbishop to ban the organization on which the Molly Maguires was founded. 39. St Catharines Weekly News, 30 Nov. 1876; Thorold Post, 8 Feb. 1878; Welland Tribune, 8, 15 Feb., 15 Mar, 1 May 1878; Montreal Star, 15 Mar. 1878; Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, 25 Jan. 1879. 40. Morton, “Taking on the Grand Trunk,” 5–34; Craven, “The Modern Spirit of the Law,” 142–70.

Note s to Page s 2 6 3 – 7   3 5 1

41. RG17, Agriculture Department, Letterbook, vol. 1665, English Agents letters, John Lowe to Dixon, 9 May 1873. 42. Leach, “Chaining the Tiger,” 187–215. 43. Hall, “Construction Workers’ Strike,” 26–7. See Hall for press coverage of the purported communist involvement in the construction labourers’ strike on the CPR in May 1878. For the argument that historians have not taken seriously enough contemporaries’ concerns about the possible presence of agitators in labour confrontations see Darlington, “Agitator ‘Theory’ of Strikes Re-evaluated,” 485–509. 44. Mathieu, “C’est le peuple qui est maître” 133–57. Mathieu focuses on the need to place the general strike within the context of economic conditions and the experience Quebec City workers gained from participation in local and continental labour militance. 45. La Minerve, June 1878; Montreal Star, June 1878; Quebec Gazette, May, June, and July 1878; Montreal Star, 13 June 1878. The strike was covered in the international socialist press. See, for example, Cri du Peuple, 4 Aug. 1878. 46. Goutor, Guarding the Gates. Goutor analyses the ways in which questions concerning unemployment and immigration posed a challenge to the unity and ideology of a labour movement based in Ontario during the 1870s and to the Knights of Labour in the following decade. 47. Montreal Star, 7, 9, 14 Aug. 1877. Meetings and demonstrations throughout Canada were reported in major papers such as the Toronto Globe, Montreal Star, La Minerve, Morning Journal, and Morning Chronicle in 1877 and 1878, as well as in local papers. See discussion of calls from politicians and private citizens for work to be opened up on the Lachine Canal, chap. 4, notes 91 and 92, above. 48. Montreal Star, 19 June 1878. The same issue warned against “socialistic propagandists.” 49. Montreal Star, 19 Mar. 1879. A “lial subjik uv our grashus Queen” was the Star’s rendering. 50. A sampling of provocative studies of particular interest to analysis of the workers here includes work on networks and transfers of ideas between French and British anarchists, Communists, and syndicalists. See for example, Bantman, New Perspectives on Labour and Syndicalism; Bantman, French Anarchists; and Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame. See also Kirk, MacRaild, and Nolan, “Introduction: Transnational Ideas, Activities, and Organizations,” 221–32; and Koller, “Local Strikes as Transnational Events,” 305–18. 51. Montreal Star, 24, 26 Dec. 1877. 52. Montreal Star, 20 to 24 Dec. 1877. 53. Haine, “Priest of the Proletarians.”

3 5 2   Notes to Pages 2 6 7 – 7 2

Montreal Witness, 17 Dec. 1877. Montreal Star, 18 Dec. 1877. Montreal Star, 22, 18 Jan. 1877. RG11, vol. 181, #23645, Goodwin to Sippell, June 1872. Welland Tribune, 8 Mar. 1878. Montreal Star, 21 Dec. 1877; RG11, vol. 473, #71442, Baillarge to Braun, 19 Dec. 1877. See the Lachine strike in Jan. 1877, Montreal Star, 18, 22 Jan. 1877, and the March 1878 strike on the Welland in which contractors able to offer their labourers a compromise also broke the unity across the sections. Welland Tribune, 8 Mar. 1878. Similarly, one thousand labourers on the Cross Lake Division of the Canadian Pacific, undertaken as a public work, engaged in a ten-day strike in May 1879 for a “uniform rate of wages” on the line. Montreal Star, 7 May 1879; Hall, “Construction Workers’ Strike.” 60. Montreal Star, 27 Aug. 1880. 61. La Minerve, Montreal Star, Montreal Witness, 17 to 24 Dec. 1877. 62. Montreal Star, 20, 21, 24 Dec. 1877. 63. Thorold Post, 5 May 1876. 64. Seminal discussions of the difficulties in organizing this type of worker include Hobsbawm, “General Labour Unions in Britain,” 179–203, and Montgomery, “New Unionism,” 509–29. 65. Hobsbawm, “New Unionism in Perspective,” 167. 66. Statistics are drawn from Quinlan and Gardner, “Strikes, Worker Protest, and Union Growth,” 175–208. On navvy unionization see Rowe, “‘Robust Navvy.’” See also Markey, “Explaining Union Mobilization,” 3–8, 20–1, and Quinlan, Gardner, and Akers, “Reconsidering the Collective Impulse,” 35–6. For the North American context see Avery, Dangerous Foreigners; Avery, Reluctant Host; McCormack, Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries; Bercuson, Fools and Wise Men; Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows; and Dubofsky, We Shall Be All. The role of race, ethnicity, gender, and skill level in defining labour organizations and labour relations continues to produce important analyses of responses to the changing nature of work, the growing ranks of industrial workers, and the shifting composition of labour markets. 67. RG43, vol. 789, #90113, Petition of laborers teamsters and Mechanics of the City of St Catharines & County of Lincoln, 21 Dec. 1880. See similar complaints of the difficulty local Newcastle men faced in getting work on the Intercolonial in their county because of the three hundred men from Newfoundland. Chap. 2, note 68. 68. Montreal Star, 23 Dec. 1877. 69. Welland Tribune, Mar. 1874. 70. Thorold Post, 5 May 1876. 5 4. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Note s to Page s 2 7 2 – 7   3 5 3

7 1. Montreal Witness, 18 Dec. 1877. 72. Montreal Star, 22 Dec. 1877. 73. This was not a strike of quarrymen and quarry labourers, but a strike which brought together labourers on a variety of construction tasks with quarrymen and possibly quarry labourers. 74. Palmer, “Labour Protest and Organization,” 73; Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond, 145–8. Palmer cautions that his study could not capture all strikes. Kealey discusses the militance of Toronto stonecutters in testing the federal legislation modifying the position of organized labour under the criminal law. 75. RG11, vol. 452. #59541, Contractors on sections 1 to 16 on Welland to Mackenzie, 17 May 1876. 76. RG11 vol. 162 #40664, Bodwell to Mackenzie, 1 May 1874; #40971, 7 May 1874, Brown, etc., to Mackenzie; vol. 791, #25063, 9 May 1874, Braun to Brown; Thorold Post, 1 May 1874. 77. Welland Tribune, 28 Mar. 1879. 78. 35 Vic., c. 30; 35 Vic., c.31. Despite further narrowing of the definition of criminal conspiracy in the 1875 and 1876 amendments to the criminal law, the judiciary retained considerable discretion. The Master and Servant Act does not appear to have been used in any identifiable pattern by or against labourers on public works in this period, though it was used by and against the skilled. See Craven’s interpretation of judicial decisions in this area in Craven, “Law of Master and Servant,” 181; Craven, “Canada, 1670-1935”; and Craven, “The Modern Spirit of the Law.” Also see Webber, “Labour and the Law” and Tucker, “That Indefinite Area of Toleration.” Men brought out from Scotland to work on the Intercolonial were hunted down and brought before a magistrate when they abandoned the work because of poor-quality accommodation, among other grievances. They appear to have been skilled. See chap. 4, note 9, above. 79. RG11, vol.162, #40971, Brown, Manning & Ginty, Cairns Morse Hart & Co. to Alexander Mackenzie, Minister of Public Works, 7 May 1874. For a similar petition see RG11, vol 452, # 59541, 17 May 1876, Contractors on Sections 1 to 16 on Welland to Mackenzie. 80. RG11, vol. 791, #25063, Braun to Brown, 9 May 1874. 81. RG11, vol. 473, #71464, Charlebois to Braun, 20 Dec. 1877. 82. RG11, vol. 691, #42555, Braun to Sippell, 19 Dec. 1877. 83. RG11, vol. 162, #40971, Brown, Manning & Ginty, Cairns Morse Hart & Co. to Mackenzie, 7 May 1874; vol. 452, #59541, Contractors on Sections 1 to 16 on Welland to Mackenzie, 17 May 1876; Welland Tribune, May 1876; Thorold Post, 5 May 1876. To give two examples, during the first half of the May 1874 strike on the Welland, where the contractors saw “many acts of violence” by men who “[would] not hesitate to take life

3 5 4   Notes to Pages 2 7 7 – 8 0

and destroy property,” the local press saw men who were “good natured throughout.” Again, during a May 1876 strike on the Welland, where contractors perceived disorder and violence, the local press applauded the orderly conduct of the strikers during the first week. 84. RG11, vol. 451, #56650, Robert Lawrie to Mackenzie, 19 Jan. 1876, forwarding the representations of Contractors on the Welland Canal Sections 1 to 16 to Mackenzie, 18 Jan. 1876; Welland Tribune, 20 Mar., 28 Nov. 1879; Montreal Star, 28 Apr. 1879; La Minerve, 23 Nov. 1877. During a strike on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a contractor could threaten to bring in one thousand Chinese labourers to replace his entire workforce of uncooperative French Canadians, without anticipating a lengthy work disruption. 85. On the importance of analysing Italian workers as part of internationalism, including international radicalization, as early as the 1870s, see Donna Gabaccia, “Worker Internationalism and Italian Labor Migration,” 63–79; and Ramirez, “Immigration, Ethnicity, and Political Militance,” 115–141. 86. Welland Tribune, Mar. 1879, 8 Mar. 1878. 87. Thorold Post, 10, 17, 24 Dec. 1875. 88. Welland Tribune, 8 Feb. 1878. RG11, vol. 451, #56650, Robert Lawrie to Mackenzie, 19 Jan. 1876, forwarding the representations of contractors on the Welland Canal Sections 1 to 16 to Mackenzie, 18 Jan. 1876. Contractors on the Lachine complained of similar conduct by stonecutters. 89. Welland Tribune, 28 Mar. 1879. 90. Montreal Witness, 17 Dec., 18, 22, 23 Jan. 1877. 91. RG11, vol. 691, #42562, Braun to Baillarge, 20 Dec. 1877; #43556, Braun to Baillarge, 13 Mar. 1878; Montreal Star, 20 Dec. 1877. 92. Montreal Star, 27 July 1880. 93. Montreal Star, 1 Sept. 1880. 94. The Prince of Wales Rifles were called out to deal with strikers on the Lachine Canal. 95. RG11, vol. 791, #21989, Braun to Sippell, 25 Sept. 1873. The previous year the Department of Justice had explained the divided jurisdiction which limited the federal government’s power to appoint peace officers except to supplement forces provided by or in response to a request by the Quebec police commissioner. RG11, vol. 181, #21323, Department of Justice to Braun and Goodwin, 1 Mar. 1872. 96. Montreal Star, Montreal Witness, Quebec Gazette, 1877 through 1879; RG11, vol. 181, 21323, Dept. of Justice to Langevin, 1 Mar. 1872. Intervention of the Quebec Provincial Police on the Lachine appears to have been more limited. Reports concerning the inadequacy of the QPP appear in particular from 1877 to 1879, when Orange demonstrations, protests by

Note s to Page s 2 8 0 – 3   3 5 5

the unemployed, and labour conflicts demanded simultaneous intervention in major centres throughout the province. Montreal Star, Montreal Witness, Quebec Gazette, 1877 through 1879; RG11, vol. 181, #21323, Dept. of Justice to Langevin, 1 Mar. 1872. 97. Morton, “Aid to the Civil Power,” 407–25; Pariseau, Disorders, Strikes, and Disasters, chap. 4. 98. Welland Tribune, 8 Mar. 1878. 99. Welland Tribune, 14, 21 Mar. 1879. 100. Welland Tribune, 9 May 1879. 101. Montreal Star, 24, 26 Dec. 1877.

Conclusion 1. Montreal Star, 15 Aug. 1877; Welland Tribune, 4 Feb. 1874.

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Select Bibliography

Archival Collections National Archives of Canada (NAC) Government Records Agriculture, Immigration Branch III (RG17) British Military Records (RG8, 1, “C” Series) Canadian National Railways, Intercolonial and Canadian Government Railways and Predecessors (RG30, IVA) Civil and Provincial Secretaries’ Office, Canada East (RG4) Civil and Provincial Secretaries’ Office, Canada West (RG5) Department of Railways and Canals, Canal Branch Records (RG43, B) Immigration Records, Emigration Records (RG5) New Brunswick Executive Council, Provincial, Local, and Territorial Records (MG9, A1) Public Works, Board of Works Records (RG11A) and Department of Public Works (RG11B) Manuscript Censuses (RG31, Statistics Canada) 1871 New Brunswick Census Districts within Gloucester, Kent, Northumberland, Restigouche, and Westmoreland Counties 1871 Nova Scotia Census Districts within Colchester, Cumberland, Halifax, and Hants Counties 1871 Ontario Census Districts within Lincoln, Haldimand, and Welland Counties 1871 Quebec Census Districts within Kamouraska, La Matapédia, Rimouski, Rivière du Loup, and Témiscouta Counties 357

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1881 Ontario Census Districts within Lincoln, Haldimand, and Welland Counties 1881 Quebec Census Districts: Hochelaga – Sub-districts F-St Henri; G-Ste Cunégonde; H-St Gabriel; J-Côte-Ste Paul Jacques-Cartier – Sub-districts A-Lachine; B-Lachine; C-Ste Anne; I-IleBizard South; J-Ile-Bizard North Montreal – Sub-districts A-Ste Anne Ward; B-West Ward Private Papers Alexander Mackenzie fonds (MG26-B, R5744-0-6-E) Hamilton Hart Killaly fonds (MG24-E10, R3740-0-7-E) Joseph Howe fonds (MG24-B29, R5365-0-3-E) Sir John A. Macdonald fonds (MG26-A, R14424-0-3-E) Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management (NSARM) Coroners Reports (RG41, C) Public Records of Nova Scotia, Railway Papers (RG1) Railways, Nova Scotia (RG28) Supreme Court Records, Halifax (RG39) Ontario Archives Civil Court Cases, C-11-23 (RG18) Court Records, St Catharines Court of General (Quarter) Sessions (RG22, Series 372) Francis Shanly Papers Mackenzie-Lindsay Series Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (PANS) Provincial Secretary, Railways (RS22) Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec In the Exchequer Court of Canada between François-Xavier Berlinguet and Marie Charlotte Mailloux, suppliant v. the Queen, defendant; and between Jean-Baptiste Bertrand and François-Xavier Bertrand, suppliant v. the Queen, defendant. Ottawa: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, 1980. Extensive and systematic colonisation in connection with the construction of the Intercolonial Railway through the Canada dominion, being

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a series of letters published in the “Glasgow Sentinel,” and addressed to Alexander Campbell, Esq, emigration agent for Nova Scotia, by Alexander Doull. Ottawa: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, 1982. St Catharines Museum Welland Canal Archives

Government Documents Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1869–1882 Canada, House of Commons, Journals, 1869–1882 Canada, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1867–1882 Canada, Senate, Debates, 1869–1882 Canada, Statutes, 1868–1885 Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labour in Canada. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1889 Canada, Province of, Legislative Assembly, Journals, 1841–1861 Canada, Province of, Legislative Assembly, Debates, 1841–1861. Elizabeth Nish (Gibbs) / Danielle Blais, eds., Debates of the Legislative Assembly of the United Canadas, 1–13. Montreal: Presses de l’École des hautes études commerciales and Concordia University, 1970–1995 Great Britain, House of Commons, Report of the Select Committee on Railway Labourers and Labourers on Public Works, 1846 New Brunswick, House of Assembly, Journals, 1856–1860 New Brunswick, Legislative Council, Journals, 1857–1859 New Brunswick, Report of Railway Commissioners, 1859 Nova Scotia, House of Assembly, Debates and Proceedings, 1849–1860 Nova Scotia, House of Assembly, Journals, 1851–1860 Ontario, Sessional Papers, 1868/69–1882 Quebec, Legislative Assembly, Journals, 1869–1882 Quebec, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1869–1882

Newspapers Acadian Recorder (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Amherst Gazette (Amherst, Nova Scotia) Borderer (Sackville, New Brunswick) British Colonist (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Brockville Recorder (Brockville, Upper Canada) Canadian Illustrated News (Montreal, Quebec) Le Canadien (Quebec City, Quebec)

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Casket (Antigonish, Nova Scotia) Catholic (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Chignecto Post (Sackville, New Brunswick) Church Times (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Cornwall Observer (Cornwall, Upper Canada) Daily Sun (Halifax) Eastern Chronicle (New Glasgow, Nova Scotia) Evening Express (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Free Church Record (Nova Scotia) Gazette (Montreal, Lower Canada) Gleaner (Chatham, New Brunswick) Globe (Toronto, Ontario) Head Quarters (Fredericton, New Brunswick) Herepath’s Railway Journal (London, England) Irish Canadian (Toronto, Ontario) La Minerve (Montreal, Quebec) Montreal Star (Montreal, Quebec) Montreal Witness (Montreal, Quebec) Morning Chronicle (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Morning Freeman (Saint John, New Brunswick) Morning Journal (Halifax, Nova Scotia) New Brunswick Courier (Saint John, New Brunswick) New Brunswick Reporter (Fredericton, New Brunswick) Niagara Chronicle (Niagara, Upper Canada) Nova Scotian (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Ontario Workman (Toronto, Ontario) L’Opinion publique (Montreal, Quebec) Presbyterian Witness (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Quebec Chronicle and Quebec Chronicle and Gazette (Quebec City, Quebec) Saint John Daily Morning News (Saint John, New Brunswick) Saint John Daily Telegraph and Morning Journal (Saint John, New Brunswick) St Catharines Journal (St Catharines, Upper Canada) St Catharines Weekly News (St Catharines, Ontario) Thorold Post (Thorold, Ontario) Union Advocate (Newcastle, New Brunswick) Welland Tribune (Welland, Ontario) Wesleyan (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

Miscellaneous Issues of Newspapers The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York, New York) London Illustrated News (London, England) Manufacturer and Builder Magazine (New York, New York) New York Times (New York, New York)

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Laurie, James. Report on the Nova Scotia Railway: Its Present Condition and Probable Cost. Halifax: A. Grant, 1858. MacDougall, P.L. Emigration; Its Advantages to Great Britain and Her Colonies. Together with a Detailed Plan for the Formation of the Proposed Railway between Halifax and Quebec by Means of Colonization. London: T. & W. Boone, New Bond Street, 1848. Marsh, Catherine. English Hearts and English Hands: Or, The Railway and the Trenches. London: James Nisbett, 1858. Mowbray, George M. Tri-Nitro-Glycerine, As Applied in the Hoosac Tunnel, Submarine Blasting. North Adams, MA: James T. Robinson, 1872. Murray, John Wilson. “The Shanty City of Slabtown.” In Memoirs of a Great Canadian Detective. Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1977. Pemberton, G. Depopulation of the British Empire Unnecessary. London: Trelawny Saunders, 1850. Perley, M.H. Handbook of Information for emigrants to New Brunswick. Saint John: H. Chubb, 1854. Roberton, J., R. Rawlinson, and Edwin Chadwick. Papers read before the Statistical Society of Manchester on the Demoralization and Injuries occasioned by the want of proper regulations of labourers engaged in the construction and working of Railways. Manchester: Simms and Dinham, 1845. Roe, A.D., and W.B Roe. Atlas of the Maritime Provinces of the Dominion of Canada, with Historical and Geological Descriptions. St. John & Portland, NB: Roe Brothers, 1879. Smyth, R.C. The Employment of the People and the Capital of Great Britain in her own Colonies. London: Metchim, 1849. Thomson, James, ed. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia Including Also the General Rules of Court from Easter Term, 1856 to Michaelmas Term, 1859. Halifax: James Bowes and Sons, 1860. Tregelles, A.R. The Ways of the Line: A Monograph on Excavators. London & Edinburgh: William Oliphant, 1858. Trout, John Malcohm. The Railways of Canada for 1870–1. Toronto: Office of the Monetary Times, 1871.

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Index

References in italics refer to tables. accommodation, 121, 122 – 8, 158, 188 – 90, 195. See also boarding-house keepers Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace at and near Public Works, 169 – 70, 234 – 6, 287 Act for the Better Preservation of the Peace in the Vicinity of Public Works, 198 – 200, 205 – 8, 287 Act Respecting Prize Fighting, 201 Adgate, George, 278 African Nova Scotians, 72 – 3 age of labourers, 76, 102 – 3, 319nn49 – 50 alcohol, 17 – 18, 133, 161 – 5, 186, 194 – 7; on the worksite, 95. See also temperance Allison, Alex, 106 Amalgamated Shearers Union, 270 anarchists, fear of, 8, 263 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 211, 240 – 1. See also Irish nationalists Angus (partner in H.J. Sutton and Co), 145 Aylwin, Thomas, 169, 238 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 241 Banks, George, 42 Bannerman (of Bannerman, Nicholson, and Brown), 84 Beauharnois Canal, 13: contractors and contracting, 26, 31, 37, 48; labour 393

conflict, 218, 221, 223 – 8, 233, 234, 238, 241; labour force, 63 – 4, 65 – 6, 128 – 9; wages, 130 Beemer, Horace, 41, 94 – 5, 304n52 Belair, Honoré, 107, 127 Benson, William, 161 Bergevin, Joseph, 66 Berlinguet, Francois-Xavier, 41, 45 – 6, 54, 95, 97 Bertrand, Jean-Baptiste, 45 – 6, 53, 97 Bill to Make Provision against the Improper Use of Firearms, 206 Black, John, 37 blackleg, 102 blacklisting, 234, 236 – 7, 241, 257, 345n58; used by stonecutters, 277 – 8 Blake, Edward, 46, 206 – 8 Bloody Hammer, 68 boarding-house keepers, 19, 76, 126, 160, 180 – 1, 204 – 5, 211 – 12 Bonneville, Simon, 79, 301n12 boys, employment of, 107 – 8 Brach, Vincenzo, 213 – 14 Bradley (labourer), 166 Breen, Hugh, 166 British Select Committee on Railway Labourers, 115 – 16, 141 Brittania, William, 111 Bromley, James, 110 Brookfield, John, 37 – 8

394 Index Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. See Grand Trunk Railway Engineers Brown, John, 26 – 7, 40, 52, 54, 97, 113, 248 Brown, John (labourer), 108 – 9 Brown, Brooks and Ryan Brown, 51, 52 brucellosis, 102 Buchanan, Alexander, 66 – 7, 71 – 2 Buchanan, James, 219 – 20 Buck, Walter, 41 Burns, Patrick, 262 butty gangs, 93, 105, 225, 258 Cahagan, John, 213 – 14 Caledonian Canal, 71 Cameron, Duncan, 37, 245 Canadian Labour Union, 118, 255 Canadian Pacific Railway, 10, 268, 285, 352n59, 354n84 Canadien labourers, 64 – 6, 69, 81, 83, 223, 232: and conflict with Irish, 174 – 6, 221; and possible common cause with Irish, 175 – 6; and labour conflict, 232 – 3, 244, 249, 250, 259 – 60, 267, 268 – 9, 288 canallers, definition of, 6; international reputation of, 4 – 5 Cape Breton, labourers from, 73, 163 Carillon Canal, 32, 40, 46, 83 Carmichael (contractor), 37, 51 – 2, 232 carpenters, 40, 42, 58, 135; attacked by canallers, 335n96 Carroll, John, 36 Carsley (merchant), 272, 281 Catholics: ministry to labourers, 81, 162, 198, 226; priests as agents of the state, 198, 237 – 8; Protestant-Catholic conflict, 179 – 80, 180 – 4, 209 – 11, 240, 335n95 Cazaraghi, Baptiste, 110 Chamberlain and Co, 223 Chambly Canal, 61 – 2, 225, 227 Charlebois, A. 48, 276 Chartism, 242 Chats Canal, 13: contractors and contracting, 44, 45, 53; labour conflict, 223 – 5, 228, 229, 232 – 3, 239, 244 – 6; labour force, 59, 69; wages, 132, 133, 135

children, 75 – 6, 121, 128, 155 – 61 passim, 181, 190 – 1, 198 Chinese, 96, 354n84 cholera, 61, 127 – 8, 158, 177, 230 – 1, 323n19 Clancey, John, 76 Clan-na-Gael, 346 – 7n82. See also Irish nationalists; secret societies Clarke, James, Rev, 226, 237 Cleland, Dennis, Mrs, 129 – 30 cockfights, 200 Coleman, James, 197 Colligan, John, 209 – 10; and Wellington Street Tragedy Colligan, Joseph, 204 Columbia Dam, 37 Committee of Vigilance, 162. See also temperance Communards, 249, 264, 291. See also Paris Commune communism and communists, fears of, 249, 263 – 5, 351n43 Connolly, John, 36 contracting system: awarding contracts, 28 – 35; overseeing contracts, 10 – 12, 43 – 7, 97 – 8. See also contractors; engineers; patronage; subcontracting contractors: absconding and defaulting, 16, 26, 45 – 7, 122, 146 – 51; background of, 26, 37 – 43; capital requirements of, 43 – 7; investment in supervisory staff, 94, 96 – 7; investment in technological innovations, 47 – 54, 86 – 7, 88, 90 – 2; paternalism, 123 – 4, 140 – 2, 326n49. See also contracting system Cook, Magistrate, 236 Cooke, R.P., 43, 46, 83 Cornwall Canal, 13, 42, 99, 219, 229, 238 Cosgrove (walking boss), 279 Counter, John, 69, 224, 230 – 1 Crawford, James, 26 – 7, 33, 301n2 crime and criminality among labourers, 156, 160, 165 – 8, 191, 203 – 4, 331 – 2n45. See also vagrancy and vagrants; violence; weapons Crimea and the Crimean War, 7, 181 – 2, 286, 336n103

Ind e x   3 9 5 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 275 – 6, 353n78 Croft, Randall, 106 – 7 Davis (labourer), 112 Davis, Michael, 97, 279. See also Davis, William, and Sons Davis, William and Sons, 48 – 50, 83, 90, 259, 261, 278 – 9 Deemers (labourer), 113 demand for labourers, 58 – 9, 59 – 60, 73 – 4, 78 – 80 Denison and Beldon, 39, 304n47 Dennis, Gaherty, and Frechette, 38 Devlin, Bernard, 207, 266 Dickens, Charles, 8, 298n13, 317n8 diet, 138 – 9, 141, 282; inadequacy of, 130 – 1, 143, 144, 147 – 8, 152 – 3, 195 Dixon (a workman), 210 dog fights, 200 Doherty (labourer), 204 domestic, family economy, 16, 83, 122, 127, 130 – 9 passim, 161. See also families; boarding-house keepers Dominion Police, 279 – 80, 290, 338 – 9n36 Drummond, Lewis, 131, 169 – 70, 176 Dunbar, Charles, 39, 82 Durham, Lord, 65 Dwyer, Michael, 265 – 6 Eastern Extension Railway, 285 Egan, John, 153 elections, labourers’ participation in, 176, 183, 336n112 Elgin, Lord, 60 – 1, 175 – 6 Elliott, Colonel, 239 Elliott, George, 317n8 Ellison, Robert, 70, 112 engineers and engineering staff, 11 – 12, 29 – 30, 34, 41, 43 – 6, 97 – 8 English labourers, 57, 65 – 7, 72 – 3, 75 – 6, 82 – 4, 211 – 12; conflict with Irish, 177 – 8, 180 – 2, 221 – 2, 244 – 5; labour conflict, 223 – 4, 232, 243 – 4, 248 – 9, 259, 288; skilled immigrants, 75 Enrolled Pensioners, 239 Erie Canal, 37, 64, 101 – 2 ethnicity and racialization, 17, 174 – 5, 178 – 84, 209, 211 – 13, 213 – 14

European and North American Railway, 9, 13 – 14, 302n18; contractors and contracting, 29 – 31, 32 – 3, 37 – 8, 40, 44, 51 – 2, 96; labour conflict, 216 – 17, 221, 226, 229 – 30, 231 – 2, 236, 243; labour force, 60, 67 – 8, 70, 72, 158, 177; wages, 131 Everett (labourer), 110 faction fights, 171 – 3, 179, 209, 219 – 21, 223, 240 families, 75 – 6, 84, 120, 155 – 6, 157 – 60, 190 – 1. See also children; domestic, family economy Farran’s Point. See Williamsburg Canals Fenians, 210 – 11, 340 – 1n66 Ferguson, Mitchell, and Symmes, 48, 51, 97, 146 feud of Cork and Connaught. See faction fights Filiatraut, Eustache, 107 Fitzgibbon, William, 61 Flavel, Rev, 198 Fleming, Sandford, 29 – 30, 32, 41, 44 – 6, 116 Flynn (labourer), 106 Fortier, Martin, 65 – 6 fragmentation process in the labour market, 17, 157, 214 – 15, 220 franchise, 12, 35, 148, 183, 289 Fraser, Hugh, 112, 329n3 French Canadian labourers. See Canadien labourers Frost, Samuel, 155 – 6, 158, 165 funeral customs, 27, 157, 329n3 Gaele, Ensign, 240 Gaelic, 163, 173 – 4, 240, 333n73, 346n81 Gallagher, Mary, 160, 330n19 Gallwey, W.B., 45, 53, 143, 224 – 5, 232 Galop Canal. See Williamsburg Canals gambling, 161, 163, 190 – 1, 194, 200 – 1 Gammon, Constable, 205 Gariepy, Theophile, 126 German labourers, 15, 57, 63, 66, 68, 82 – 3, 127, 212; and conflict with Irish, 177, 221; and labour conflict, 243, 248 – 9, 250, 259, 288 Gibson, Robert, 40

396 Index Girouard, Désiré, 39, 149, 152 – 3 Gleenan, George, 126 Goliath, 86 – 7 Goodwin, James, 45, 54, 78 – 9, 96, 196, 251, 301n12 Gourlay, Robert, 180 – 1 Gourlay Shanty Riot, 180 – 3 Graham (immigrant labourer), 191 Grand Trunk Railway, 14, 67, 320n78, 323n19; and engineers, 262 – 3, 272, 281, 288, 291 Granger, Joseph, 114 Great Western Railway, 40, 102, 229 – 30 Grenville Canal, 13: contractors and contracting, 32, 43, 45 – 6, 49, 54, 96, 301n12; labour conflict, 251, 252, 267, 279, 280, 288; labour force, 78 – 9; wages, 136, 137 Grey, Lord, 60 Hackett, Thomas, 209 – 10. See also Orange Order and Orangemen Harrington, C.H., 150 – 1 Harris, James, 76 Harris, Thomas, 76 Heald and Sisco pump, 49 – 50 Healy, Honora, 160, 330n20 Heenan, John, 201 Hennesey, James, 107 Hincks, Francis, 308n8 horses and horsepower, 47 – 53, 86, 87 – 8, 94, 101, 107 – 13 passim, 132 hours of work, 99 – 100, 119; strikes over, 216, 218, 225 – 7, 230, 254, 257, 318n29 Howard, Sam, 204 – 5 Howe, Joseph, 9, 181 – 2, 184, 286 Hunter and Murray, also Hunter, Murray, and Cleveland, 40, 53, 54, 91 – 2, 96 – 7, 113 – 14 Hunters’ Lodges, 175 – 6 Hurly, Eliza, 126 Hurly, Patrick, 183 – 4 Icelanders, 313 – 4n73 immigrant labourers on public works, 5, 15, 57 – 8, 60 – 3, 66 – 7, 75, 82 – 3 Industrial Workers of the World, 270 Ingersoll Rock Drill, 53 – 4, 91 – 2. See also technological innovation injury and death in the workplace, 103 – 14: response of governments

to, 115 – 19; response of labourers to, 114 – 15, 119 – 20, 257. See also working conditions insects: blackflies, 101; mosquitos, 101 – 2, 128 Intercolonial Railway, 10, 14, 21: contractors and contracting, 29 – 32, 35 – 6, 38 – 9, 40 – 2, 45 – 6, 51 – 4, 97, 303n38, 305n60; labour conflict, 250 – 1, 255 – 6, 257, 288; labour force, 57, 73 – 8, 89, 91, 352n67; wages, 135 – 6 Irish Famine, 7, 62, 152, 174, 175, 220 – 1, 334n81 Irish labourers, 58, 60 – 9, 72 – 3, 75 – 6, 82 – 4, 211 – 12: and conflict with other groups, 157, 170 – 1, 174 – 83, 213 – 14, 221 – 2, 244 – 5; and factional conflict, 171 – 3, 219 – 20; and labour conflict, 223 – 4, 232, 240 – 4, 248 – 8, 259, 288; and potential for unity with Canadiens, 175 – 6; shared ethnoculture of, 173 – 4, 220 – 1, 239 – 43 Irish nationalists, 7, 175 – 6, 181 – 2, 211, 242, 286 Italian labourers, 58, 70, 82 – 3, 84, 96, 316 – 17n113: and racialization and exclusion, 17, 213 – 14; and labour conflict, 249, 250, 259, 277, 286, 288 Italian stonecutters, 82, 277 Jack, James, 26 – 7, 225 Jackson, Constable, 166 Jarrow, Dr, 128 Jetté, Louis-Amable, 266 Jobin, Jacques, 73 Joe Beef, 194 – 5, 261, 266 – 7 Johnson, Eric, 108 Johnston, James, 3 Jones, Ephrum A., 41 journaliers, 15, 70 jumping the broomstick, 159 Junction Canal, 13: contractors and contracting, 26, 31, 48; labour conflict, 224 – 5, 228, 229, 230 – 1, 232, 243, 244 – 6; labour force, 59, 66 – 7, 69, 158; wages, 131, 132, 135 Keefer, Thomas, 101, 151 Kehoe, John, 191 Kelley, John, 148 Kenan (labourer), 166

Ind e x   3 9 7 Keniff, Patrick, 5 Kesson, William, 113 – 14 King and Gough, 78, 305n60 Kinnear, George, 107 Knights of Labour, 270, 292, 351n46 Kylie, Thomas, 106 – 7 Labourers Union: on the Lachine Canal, 268 – 72, 288; on the Welland Canal, 248 – 9, 269 – 72, 288 labourers’ unions, international growth of, 219, 245 – 6, 269 – 70, 347 – 8n96 Lachine Canal, 13, 23: contractors and contracting, 32, 37 – 40, 43, 48 – 50, 52, 90, 97; labour conflict, 218, 221 – 8 passim, 233 – 4, 240, 252 – 61 passim, 266 – 82 passim, 288; labour force, 59, 63 – 5, 79 – 83; wages, 130 – 1, 136, 137 – 8, 139 Lachine Canal Abstinence Society for Labourers, 198. See also temperance Lafontaine, Louis-Hippolyte, 169 – 70 Langevin, Hector, 36, 207 Larkin, Patrick, 36, 41 Laroque, Louis Isaac, 65 – 6 Laurie, James, 29, 96, 301n9 Lawson and McRae, 282 Leach, William, 106 Leahy, Edward, 109, 134 Leary, James, 19 Leary, Mary, 19, 160 Light, Alexander, 32 – 3, 44 – 5, 47, 96, 302n18 L’Isle Bizard, labourers at, 83 Little Giant, 86 – 7 long pay, 142 – 3; strikes related to, 226, 252, 255 lost wages, 143 – 51; strikes related to, 226 – 8, 231 – 2, 252, 255 – 7, 259, 287 – 8 Lynch, Edward, 154 Lyons, John, 147 – 8 Macdonald, A.P., 44, 143 MacDonald, Duncan, 40 MacDonald, James, Captain, 235 Macdonald, John A., 33, 36, 46, 208 Macdonald, Rolland, 169 machine-tenders and operators, 88 – 92, 133 Mackenzie, Alexander, 33 – 5, 47, 142, 150, 255, 276, 289 Mackenzie, Foreman, 113

malaria, 101 – 2, 128, 158 Manning, Alexander, 36, 42 masculinity, 115, 158, 159, 321n99; and respectable manhood, 164, 202, 331n39, 331n41. See also families Matthew, Father, 162. See also temperance McAvoy, Edward, 171 McBean, Alexander, 52 McCallum, Lachlin, 34 McCann, John, 104 McCarthy, Martin (alias Martin Bergin), 262. See also Molly Maguires McCloud, James, 232 McCush, Angus, 74, 106 McDonagh, Rev, 237, 241 – 2 McDonald (orphan boy), 108 McDonald, Angus, 109 McDonald, D., 150 McDonald, John, 37 McDonald, Roderick, 70, 106, 134 McDougall, H.F., 150, 315n95, 328n86 McGilvery, William, 197 McGowan, Maggie Mary and Michael, 211 McGreevy, Robert and Thomas, 40, 45, 74 McIntyre, Dougall, 112 McKay, Roderick, 182 McKenzie, Robert, 166 McKiernan, Charles. See Joe Beef McKinnon, Murdoch, 166 McNamee, F.B., 38, 40, 48 – 9, 84, 146, 147, 259 McNiff, James and Catherine, 212 McNiff, Margret, 212 McRae, Murdock, 150 McShane, James, 256 – 7, 349n21 mechanics, 58, 88 – 92, 132, 133, 271; liens, 256 – 7, 289 mechanization. See technological innovation Medford (labourer), 111 medical care, 113, 128 – 30 migration patterns of public works labourers, 14 – 15, 56 – 8, 62 – 72, 74, 79 – 85 Mi’kmaq, 72 – 3 military intervention on public works, 181, 238 – 9, 250, 263 – 4, 280, 282, 289

398 Index Mitchell, Patrick, 234 Mitchell, Robert, 79 mobility of public works labourers. See migration patterns of public works labourers Molly Maguires, 240, 249, 262, 350n38 Moore, Lawrence, 129 – 30 Morrison, R.G., 199 – 200 Mulligan, Patrick, Dean, 198. See also temperance Murphy, Cornelius, 160 Murray, boarding-house keeper, 204 – 5 Murray, Charles and Mary, 154, 156 Murray, John, 159 – 60 mutual aid among labourers, 130, 172, 173, 194 – 5, 240 – 1, 268 Myers, Dillon, 37 – 8 National Policy, 39 navvy, definition of, 6; international reputation of, 4 – 5 Nelson, Wolfred, 131 Newfoundland, labourers from, 74, 76 – 7, 95, 125 Newfoundland Railway, 285 Newton, Joseph, 154 New York Italian Labor Company, 214. See also Italian labourers nine-hours movement. See shorter-hours movement North Shore Railway, 350n27, 350n34 Norwegian general union, 269 – 70 Norwegian labourers, 75 Nova Scotia Railway, 9, 13: contractors and contracting, 29, 30, 31, 37, 51, 96, 129; labour conflict, 221 – 2, 226, 230, 237, 239, 244 – 5; labour force, 56, 60, 71, 72 – 3, 163; wages, 131, 324 – 5n35 O’Brien, James, 3, 5 O’Brien, John, 191 O’Connell, Daniel, 175, 334n84. See also Irish nationalists O’Donnell, Patrick, 106 – 7 O’Mara, Patrick, 154 O’Neal, Harry, 197 O’Neil, Eugene, 204 Ontario Provincial Police, 279 – 80

Orange and Green conflict. See Irish nationalists; Orange Order and Orangemen Orange Order and Orangemen, 179 – 80, 180 – 4, 209 – 11, 240, 335n95 Orwell, George, 317n8 O’Toole, William, 203 – 4 Pacific Scandal, 35, 39 padroni, 82 – 3, 277 Page, John, 32 – 4, 39, 44 – 5, 161 – 2, 229, 236 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 175 – 6 Paquette, Lucien, 278 – 9 Paris Commune, 263 – 4 patronage: and building public works, 28 – 9, 33 – 7, 39, 46 – 7; and staffing public works, 97 – 8, 209 Pennsylvania Canal, 37 Peto, Brassey, Betts, and Jackson, 31, 67, 302n14, 311n36 Phelan, John, 147 – 8 Philadelphia Railway, 37 Pierce (labourer), 111 Pitblado, James, 41 Police Magistrate Hill, 280 policing of public works labourers, 165 – 7, 202 – 5, 234 – 7, 276 – 82 passim, 290. See also crime and criminality; violence Potts, Hannah, 203 – 4, 212 Potts, Michael, 212 Power, John, 95 Power, Samuel, 64, 161 – 2, 168, 220, 229, 232, 235 – 6 Preeper, George, 183 – 4 Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland, 163 – 4 Presbyterian Home Mission of the Free Church, 163 – 4 Prince Edward Island, labourers from, 74, 109 Prince Edward Island Railway, 285, 304n53 prize-fighting, 188, 201 – 2, 339n43 Protestants: ministry to labourers, 150, 162 – 3; Protestant and Catholic conflict, 179 – 80, 180 – 4, 209 – 11, 240, 335n95. See also Presbyterian Home Mission of the Free Church

Ind e x   3 9 9 Protestants riot, 164, 170 – 1, 213 – 14, 222, 231, 287. See also Gourlay Shanty Riot public works, definition of, 8 – 9: as avenue to advancement, 60 – 1, 283; and colonization, 60 – 2, 63, 66; as relief for unemployment, 81, 83, 264 – 5 quarrymen, 252, 272, 273, 274, 353n73 Quebec Provincial Police, 279, 280, 354 – 5n96 Quinlan, Michael, 210 racialization. See ethnicity and racialization Ramey, George, 212 rape, 160, 165, 203 – 4 Rapid Plat. See Williamsburg Canals religion. See Catholics; Orange Order and Orangemen; Presbyterians Rodgers, J.C., 38 Rowlands, Thomas, 222 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital, 118 – 19 Ryan (labourer), 166 Ryan, Hugh, 40 Rykert, J.C., 149 Sabbatarianism, 17, 108, 164, 186 Samson, 86 – 7 Saratoga and Sackitt’s Harbour Railway, 153 Scallion brothers, 195 – 6 Scandinavians, 15, 57, 82, 84 Schreiber, Collingwood, 41, 304n53 Schumaker, Pasco, 213 – 14 Scots labourers, 57, 66 – 7, 70 – 3, 75 – 6, 82 – 4, 212; and conflict with Irish, 177 – 8, 180 – 2, 221 – 2, 244 – 5; and labour conflict, 223 – 4, 232, 243 – 4, 248 – 9, 259, 288; and skilled immigrants, 75 Scoullar, W., 162, 165, 167, 177, 180, 231 – 2 seasonality of labouring work, 50, 72, 77 – 8, 99 – 101, 251, 254 secret societies, 171, 219, 240 – 2, 246, 262. See also faction fights Shanly, Walter, 31 – 2, 33 – 4, 41, 46 – 7 Shannon, Patrick, 126, 274 Sheehan, Daniel, 126 Sherwood, Henry, 167 Shetlanders, 313 – 14n73

shorter-hours movement, 118 sickness, 100 – 2, 110 – 11, 127 – 30: smallpox, 129; typhoid fever, 128 Silcox, J.D., 40 – 1 Sippell, George, 48, 79 Slattery (labourer), 110 Slavin, Patrick, Jr, 166, 332n48 Slavin, Patrick, Sr, 166 Slusser’s Excavator, 52 Smith, Robert, 41 socialism and socialists, fears of, 8, 249, 263 – 5, 351n45, 351n48 Society of the Sacred Thirst, 198. See also temperance St Andrews and Quebec Railway, 37, 66, 103 Stephenson, George, 42 Stevens, Edward, 113 Stevens, Squire, 204 Stewart, Robert, 213 – 14 Stewart, William, 111 St Lawrence and Atlantic Railway, 40, 66, 71 – 2, 102 – 3, 166 stonecutters: demand for, 58, 75, 168; Italian, 82, 277; Scottish conflict with Irish labourers, 179; strike tactics, 277 – 8; strikes, 249, 252, 273 – 5, 274, 280 – 1, 288; united action with labourers, 249, 252, 273 – 4, 281, 291; wages, 133, 135 stonemasons, 58, 75, 135, 216 – 17, 273, 274 – 5, 280 St Patrick’s Day, 197 – 8 St Peter’s Canal, 13, 80 – 1, 126, 149 – 51, 199 – 200, 202 strike on Quebec City public works, 263 – 4 strikes by labourers: breakdown of, 227 – 8, 252 – 3; over dangerous work, 257; over hours, 216 – 17, 225 – 6, 230, 254, 257; over late and lost wages, 226, 255 – 6; over long pay, 255; over supervision, discipline, hiring, and firing, 223 – 5, 257 – 8; over truck payment, 255; over wages, 216 – 17, 225 – 30, 248 – 9, 251 – 55, 267 – 8, 273 – 5 strikes by skilled workers: stonecutters, 273 – 5, 274, 277 – 8, stonemasons: 216 – 17, 274, 275, 280 subcontractors and subcontracting, 27, 37, 42 – 3, 94 – 5, 143 – 7, 256

400 Index

vagrants and vagrancy, 188, 192 – 3, 286, 337n11 violence: during strikes, 231 – 3, 256, 258 – 9, 276 – 9, 349n18, 353 – 4n83. See also crime; faction fights; policing of public works labourers; military intervention on public works

132 – 3, 135 – 9; for skilled workers, 135, 136. See also long pay; lost wages; truck payment; entries for wages under individual projects Walker, Rankin, and Walker, 38, 51, 52 Walsh, Patrick, 107 Walters, Clara Ellen, 203 – 4 weapons: and contractors, 96, 278 – 9; control of, 157, 167 – 70, 188, 205 – 8, 223, 287; and labourers, 167 – 8, 205, 223; and local inhabitants, 183, 184, 205, 206 – 7, 209 – 10; and skilled workers, 278 Welland Canal, 13, 24: contractors and contracting, 26 – 7, 30, 32 – 43 passim, 48 – 54 passim, 91 – 2, 96 – 7, 295; labour conflict, 219 – 20, 227, 229 – 41 passim, 248 – 55, 259 – 81 passim, 288 – 9; labour force, 59, 64, 79 – 83, 83 – 4, 211 – 13, 310n21; wages, 130, 136, 137 – 8 Wellington Street Tragedy, 209 – 10 Wells, H.G., 317n8 Welsh miners, 214 Western Extension Railway, 129, 285 Whitehead (contractor), 144, 318n23 Whitney and Boyd, also Whitney and Doty, 49, 259, 261, 278 wife-selling, 159 Williamsburg Canals, 13: contractors and contracting, 48 – 9, 90 – 1, 123; labour conflict, 122 – 3, 226 – 9, 234 – 5, 237, 238; labour force, 62 – 3, 63 – 4, 154, 175; wages, 130 Windsor and Annapolis Railway, 285 women: in construction communities, 128, 132 – 3, 139, 157 – 61, 190 – 1, 203 – 4, 271 – 2; and the domestic economy, 132 – 4, 139, 160 – 1, 285 – 6; violence against, 160, 165, 172, 178, 181, 203 – 4. See also families Wood, G.C., 172 Woods, Benjamin, 110 work gangs, 93 – 4, 317n10 working conditions, 92 – 3, 98 – 102. See also injury and death in the workplace

wages: for foremen, 94, 132; for labourers, 16, 30, 61 – 2, 78 – 9, 130 – 3,

Zimmerman, Samuel, 37, 42 Zola, Émile, 298n13

Sullivan (labourer), 113 Sullivan, John, 40, 41 Sullivan, Thomas, Rev, 198. See also temperance Sumner and Somers, 40 supervision of labourers, 93 – 8 Swedes, 66, 75, 248 – 9, 250, 259 – 60, 288 Sydenham, Lord, 60 Sykes, James, 37 teamsters, 18, 249, 254, 271, 272, 281, 288 technological innovation: contractors’ investment in, 47 – 54, 86 – 7, 88, 90 – 2; labourers’ response to, 232, 258 – 9 Telford, Thomas, 71, 117 temperance, 156, 162 – 5, 188, 195 – 200, 285 Tessier, Ulric-Joseph, Senator 46 – 7 Thorburn, David, 131 Trade Unions Act, 275, 289 tramps. See vagrancy, vagrants Trent-Severn Waterway, 42, 303n35, 316n106 truck payment, 140 – 1, 151, 284: government responses to, 141 – 3, 255; strikes over, 226, 227, 249, 252, 255 Tuck, S. Parker, 48, 74, 149 – 50 Tupper, Charles, 33 – 4, 46 – 7, 115, 149 – 51 unemployment and underemployment, 15, 18, 151: and destitution, 64 – 5, 151 – 3; and factional and ethnic conflict, 219 – 22; and moral failure, 192 – 3; and outcry against foreign labour, 81 – 2, 351n46; and protests for work or food, 220 – 1, 264 – 6; and public works, 81, 264 – 5 Upper, James, 126, 323n13 Urquhart, son of John, 74, 108, 120

THE CANADIAN SOCIAL HISTORY SERIES Terry Copp,

Craig Heron,

Alison Prentice,

Wendy Mitchinson and Janice Dickin McGinnis, Editors,

The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal, 1897–1929, 1974. isbn 0-7710-2252-2 The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada, 1977. isbn 0-8020-8692-6

John Herd Thompson,

The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914–1918, 1978. isbn 0-7710-8560-5

Joy Parr, Editor,

Childhood and Family in Canadian History, 1982. isbn 0-7710-6938-3

Alison Prentice and Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, Editors, The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women’s History, Volume 2, 1985. isbn 0-7710-8583-4

Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883–1935, 1988. isbn 978-1-4426-0984-6

Essays in the History of Canadian Medicine, 1988. isbn 0-7710-6063-7

Joan Sangster,

Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–1950, 1989. isbn 0-7710-7946-X

Angus McLaren,

Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945, 1990. isbn 0-7710-5544-7

Bruno Ramirez,

On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860–1914, 1991. isbn 0-7710-7283-X

Ruth Roach Pierson,

Mariana Valverde,

‘They’re Still Women After All’: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood, 1986. isbn 0-7710-6958-8

‘The Age of Light, Soap and Water’: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925, 1991. isbn 978-0-8020-9595-4

Bryan D. Palmer,

Bettina Bradbury,

The Character of Class Struggle: Essays in Canadian Working Class History, 1850–1985, 1986. isbn 0-7710-6946-4

Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal, 1993. isbn 978-0-8020-8689-1

Alan Metcalfe,

Andrée Lévesque,

Marta Danylewycz,

Cecilia Danysk,

Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport, 1807–1914, 1987. isbn 0-7710-5870-5 Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920, 1987. isbn 0-7710-2550-5

Making and Breaking the Rules: Women in Quebec, 1919–1939, 1994. isbn 978-1-4426-1138-2 Hired Hands: Labour and the Development of Prairie Agriculture, 1880–1930, 1995. isbn 0-7710-2552-1 401

4 0 2   R oug h Work

Kathryn McPherson,

Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900–1990, 1996. isbn 978-0-8020-8679-2

Edith Burley,

Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker,

Labour Before the Law: The Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action in Canada, 1900–1948, 2001. isbn 978-0-8020-3793-0

Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770–1870, 1997. isbn 0-19-541296-6

Mark Moss,

Mercedes Steedman,

Joan Sangster,

Angels of the Workplace: Women and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Canadian Clothing Industry, 1890–1940, 1997. isbn 978-1-4426-0982-2

Angus McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren,

The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880–1997, 1997. isbn 0-19-541318-0

Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell, Editors, Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, 1999. isbn 0-978-0-8020-8690-7

Gillian Creese,

Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in a White-Collar Union, 1944–1994, 1999. isbn 0-19-541454-3

Geoffrey Reaume,

Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870–1940, 2000. isbn 978-1-4426-1075-0

Miriam Wright,

A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934–1968, 2001. isbn 0-19-541620-1

Manliness and Militarism: Educating Young Boys in Ontario for War, 2001. isbn 0-19-541594-9 Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario 1920–1960, 2001. isbn 0-19-541663-5

Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell,

Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899, 2002. isbn 978-0-8020-9542-8

Mark Kristmanson,

Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture, and State Security in Canada, 1940–1960, 2002. isbn 0-19-541866-2 (cloth) isbn 0-19-541803-4 (paper)

Robin Jarvis Brownlie,

A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918–1939, 2003. isbn 0-19-541891-3 (cloth) isbn 0-19-541784-4 (paper)

Steve Hewitt,

Riding to the Rescue: The Transformation of the RCMP in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914–1939, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8020-9021-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-4895-0 (paper)

Robert K. Kristofferson,

Craft Capitalism: Craftworkers and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840–1871, 2007. isbn 978-0-8020-9127-7 (cloth) isbn 978-0-8020-9408-7 (paper)

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Andrew Parnaby,

Citizen Docker: Making a New Deal on the Vancouver Waterfront, 1919–1939, 2008. isbn 978-0-8020-9056-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-8020-9384-4 (paper)

J.I. Little,

Lara Campbell, Dominique Clément, and Greg Kealey,

Debating Dissent: Canada and the 1960s ISBN 978-1-4426-4164-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1078-1 (paper)

Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812–1840, 2008. isbn 978-0-8020-9773-6 (cloth) isbn 978-0-8020-9525-1 (paper)

Janis Thiessen,

Pauline Greenhill,

Don Nerbas,

Make the Night Hideous: Four English Canadian Charivaris, 1881–1940, 2010. isbn 978-1-4426-4077-1 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4426-1015-6 (paper)

Rhonda L. Hinther and Jim Mochoruk,

Re-imagining Ukrainian-Canadians: History, Politics, and Identity, 2010. isbn 978-1-4426-4134-1 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4426-1062-0 (paper)

Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell,

Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba ISBN 978-1-4426-4213-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1113-9 (paper) Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914–1947 ISBN 978-1-4426-4545-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1352-2 (paper)

Kirk Niergarth,

“The Dignity of Every Human Being”: New Brunswick Artists and Canadian Culture between the Great Depression and the Cold War ISBN 978-1-4426-4560-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1389-8 (paper)

When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike, 2010. isbn 978-1-4426-4219-5 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4426-1116-0 (paper)

Dennis G. Molinaro,

Barrington Walker,

Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882 ISBN 978-1-4875-0248-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2199-8 (paper)

Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8020-9909-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-9610-4 (paper)

An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919–1936 ISBN 978-1-4426-2957-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-2958-5 (paper)

Ruth Bleasdale,