ResourcesIrish History |
God's Unfortunate People:
in Nineteenth Century Canada
by William M. BakerIn 1866, parishoners of St. Patrick's Catholic Congregation in Montreal wrote a
public letter to Bishop Ignace Bourget which included the following passage:
Your Lordship, referring to the sad events of 1847, is pleased to call us an
"unfortunate people". We admit it, we were unfortunate in 1847 though the
insrutible ways of God, who, however, often chastises in love. In 1866, we are
"still unfortunate" - for your Lordship will not allow us to forget our sad destinies.
The memory of all past afflictions must be kept fresh; and all the charities of which we
have been the sad recipients, must be turned into an argument to force us to surrender in silence,
all the advantages of our present altered condition, and which we owe to our own efforts, under the blessing of God
and the generous sympathy of our immediate Pastors. Certainly, we are a pecularlarly "unfortunate" people. Thousands of our fellow countrymen left their native land in 1847, in order to seek a home in Canada. They
did not come here to live on charity. They were for the most part in the prime of life.
Their intention was to repay the hospitality promised them in this new country
by the riches of their labor, of their enterprise and of their virtue. God willed it otherwise"
My own interest in the history of Irish Catholics in Canada began over 15 years
ago. I was involved in writing a biography of Timothy Warren Anglin, a Catholic who left his home town of Clonakilty Cork
in 1849. He had been a school teacher of sorts and was a well educated man of considerable literary ability.
Circumstances in Ireland did not, however, offer him good prospects and he emigrated to Saint John, New Brunswick where he established himself as the editor
and owner of a newspaper, The Freeman. Through its pages, he became the most prominent
of lay spokesman of Irish Catholics in New Brunswick from the 1850's to the 1880's.
He was also a politician of note, being an elected member of the New Brunsick Assembly from
1862-66 and becoming one of the most important cabinet Ministers of the short lived
anti-confederation Government of 1865-66 From 1867-1882, he was a member of the House of Commons, acting as Speaker
of the House from 1874 to 1879. After electoral defeat in 1882 and the decline of his newspaper, he moved to Toronto
as part of a plan by the Reform, or Liberal, political party to woo the Catholic vote in Ontario.
This proved to be a disapointing experience and he died in 1896, but not before he saw his eldest son
become a successful lawyer, en route to his eventual position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Other
children also achieved success, his daughter Margaret becoming an internationally acclaimed actress.
The interpetation I proponded in the biogrphy was that Anglin was an
Irish Catholic leader and that his career depended on that. In other words, his ascent and eventual decline depended on the existence
in reality and/or the belief of an Irish-Catholic sector within the Catholic polity. His role was to
mediate between the two, to act as a liason between Irish-Catholics on the one hand and the wider Canadian society on the other.
In effect, while advocating the fair treatment and social advancement of Irish Catholics. Anglin urged
Irish Catholics to adopt Canadian norms and practices. He, along with another prominant Canadian Irish Catholic, D'Arcy McGee,
advocated a type of assimilation, one which would remove the distinctiveness of Irish Catholics
within Canadian society, although it would preserve their religious committment. I argued that
Anglin's perspective and role were important, in that they assisted in closing the gap between Irish Catholics
and other Canadians. Indeed, it seemed that the decline of Anglin's influence in the
80's and 90's was, in a sense, a measure of his success, for he had worked himself out of a job.
Irish Catholics had become accomodated, not considered equal to other ethnic groups, but at least acceptable to them. They had,
to all intents and purpose, disappeared as an ethnic group, although they retained their religious distinctiveness.
My biography of Anglin focused, naturally enough, on the individual rather than the
group for which I claimed he was a spokeman. Equally obvious, however, is the fact I required some knowledge of the
nature and the evolution of the Irish Catholic community in British North America.
Prior to 1970, there were no available general account of the Irish experience in Canada,
let alone one for Irish Catholics. The only item that even promised comprehensiveness was
Nicholas Flood Davin's The Irishman in Canada but it had been published in 1877 and really was of little use, especially
for the Catholic Irish. A handful of articles had studied the famine immigration to Canada; various items dealt with the Fenian "troubles";
some popular works had been published on the so-called 'Black Donnellys', a rather obnoxious famine Irish Catholic family
who had settled in rural Ontario and had been brutally massacred by their neighbours in 1880. Numerous articles and dissertations had examiined
the Irish in such local or regional settings as Montreal, Toronto, Quebec, Sudbury, the Peter Robinson settlement
around Peterborough, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. In addition, there was Ken Duncan's interesting and influential article "Irish Famine
Immigration and the Social Structure of Canada West", and a number of useful dissertations such as David Lyne's "The Irish in
the Province of Canada in the Decade Leading to Confederation", Peter Toner's thesis on the New Brunswick Schools Question (which
told far more about Irish Catholics in New Brusnwick than its title might suggest), Robin Burns' work on D'Arcy McGee, Stan Horrall's
dissertation on the Canadian response to the Irish Home Rule Question, and Michael Cross's thsis which among
other things examined Irish lumbermen in the Ottawa Valley. There was also H.C. Pentland's thesis, "Labor Development of Industrial
Capitalism in Canada", which was completed in 1961 but did not attract much attention from scholars concerned with Irish Catholics in Canada
or in Canadian histiography in general, until the 1970's, although his articles on the Lachine strike of 1843 and on the development of a capitalistic labor
market in Canada was made use of. Certainly, this is not an exhaustive biography of pre-1970 writings relevant to Irish Catholics in Canada,
but perhaps it is enough to indicate that it was a topic which had attracted considerable attention and on which a significant body
of literature had already accumulated.
Prior to 1970, there was no general account of the Irish Catholic experience in Canada but it seems to me both possible
and useful to suggest that certain generalizations can be drawn from the scholarship. Put in the form of questions which can be asked of
post-1970 writings, the important interpretive themes are as follows:
The pre-1970's literature in general provides an affirmative response to all these questions.
Few prominant studies examined rural Irish Catholics or placed much emphasis on the distinctiveness,
as a group, of pre-famine Celtic immigrants. The impression was left that, as much by ommission as anything else, was
that the core of Irish-Catholic experience was that of the famine Irish, a group which Gilbert Tucker described
as "probably the most diseased, destitute and shiftless that Canada has ever receieved". For example, Kenneth
Duncan brushed aside the pre-famine Irish in four sentences, asserting that even the earlier Irish
immigrants had shown a "preference for urban life". Duncan then focused on the famine immigrants and argued that
their entry into Ontario had, along with other effects, the following consequences:
Pentland's focus was less fixed on the famine immigrants but the image that
emerged was much the same. According to him, the "migration of Irish peasants,
mostly from Munster and Connaught, was to provide the main constitution of Canada's capitalistic (labour)
market." They worked on canals, in the timber industries. on railways and in unskilled work in towns and cities.
Portand's characterization of Irish-Catholics was as follows:
These quotations from Pentland and Duncan speak mainly to the first two questions posed.
But what about the absorption of Irish Catholics into Canadian sociey? Duncan did
not deal with the matter at all. Portland claimed that although the second generation of Irish
Catholics still "clung to the cities" they did progress economically, "dispersed among many occupations",
and saved to acquire a lot, build a house...put funds in savings banks", thereby integrating into their
environment by the 1860's.
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