"French Papist Horde Enslaves America!" Anti-Catholicism and the Quebec Act

Twenty-first century Americans aren’t accustomed to thinking of Canada as a threat. It is the nation in all the world that is the most similar to the United States, the most inoffensive and pacific of neighbors. The generation that fought the Revolutionary War, however, thought very differently of its neighbor to the North.

More than a century of sporadic warfare between Catholic New France and Protestant New England had habituated Americans to perceive Canada, even under English rule, as a potential danger.

The raid on Deerfield; the battles along the Kennebec; the defeat of Braddock; the bloody incidents of the Deportation of the Acadians; the siege of Québec with the dramatic deaths of Generals Wolfe and Montcalm; these events were on the minds of Anglo-America's leaders in the Revolutionary War period and some of them had witnessed the more recent of these affairs.

These memories were aroused when the British Parliament's Quebec Act, among other Acts the Americans perceived as "intolerable," allowed tithes to be paid to the Roman Catholic clergy of Canada. Many American colonists viewed the British government’s policy of accommodation as the prelude to the invasion of a French ‘papist’ horde with the aim of enslaving Protestant America.

Such charges sound so exaggerated, so outrageous to modern ears that there is a tendency to downplay them. They are viewed either as the extravagance of a few firebrands or as propaganda aimed at arousing popular opinion against the King.

Charles H. Metzger S.J., in his book The Quebec Act,* investigates newspapers, court records, private papers, minutes of assemblies, and other primary sources. He amasses a formidable collection of well-documented evidence that anti-catholic sentiments were a major cause of opposition to the Quebec Act. He shows that it was no small motivator of the Revolutionary movement as a whole.

Even before the Quebec Act was passed no less a figure than Samuel Adams opined, “Much more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery in America, than from Stamp Acts or any other acts destructive of civil rights; Nay, I could not help fancying that the Stamp Act itself was contrived with a design only to inure the people to the habit of contemplating themselves as the slaves of men; and the transition thence to a subjection to Satan is mighty easy (Metzger 24).”

Insofar as it established “popery” the redoubtable Adams believed the Quebec Act to be a greater affront than the Stamp Act, which is cited frequently among the major causes of Revolutionary ferment.

After the passage of the Quebec Act in 1774 American pens let loose a flood of anti-catholic paranoia. The Maryland Journal held that American Protestant liberty was in danger from “French laws and popery…'the one enslaving the body, the other the mind'.” A broadside printed in New York had Lord North “dwell on the feasibility of recruiting an army of ‘papists in Canada’ who would be ‘glad to cut the throats of those heretics the Bostonians’ (40).”

The Mitred Minuet
Anti-Catholic Engraving by Paul Revere
The Royal American Magazine, October 1774

Source: John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

Rumors crossed the Atlantic that the Pope was set “to publish a Crusade against the Rebellious Bostonians, to excite the Canadians…to extirpate those bitter enemies to the Romish Religion and monarchial power (46).” Dark purposes were assigned to the British General Carleton’s orders “to raise an army of thirty thousand Roman Catholic Canadians without delay. Was it not high time for Protestants…to resort to effective measures for the securing of their civil and religious liberties? (45)”

A Pennsylvanian scribe feared that the colonies “were surrounded by enemies, with a ‘Popish, French government’ set up for the express purpose of destroying their liberties, [and that] their all was at stake (48).”

The Newport Mercury asserted the futility of any effort to accommodate “free and Protestant Americans to that most detestable [Quebec] act” intended to bring “the whole force of the French Papists…to destroy the British Protestant colonies (51).” A New England newspaper reported “that guns and bayonets were to be sent to America and put into the hands of Roman Catholics and Canadians (77).”

The fears of the French ‘papist’ horde were not confined to print. The people of Portsmouth seized military supplies in anticipation of a Canadian/British invasion. Reports stated that Fort Ticonderoga was garrisoned with a force of 2,800 men (certainly an exaggerated figure) “to secure the people ‘from the incursion of the Roman Catholics’ (78).” Military precautions were also taken in Cumberland and York Counties in the district of Maine.

These counties would one day be the home of many thousands of Franco-American Catholics an irony not lost on Fr. Metzger. Writing in the 1930s, he comments upon the “millions of Catholics” in New England in his day including “the mill towns…overrun by French Canadians (32).”

Father Metzger’s work leaves little doubt that the fears of a French ‘papist’ horde were not merely the fancy of a handful of bigots. The theme was ubiquitous and persistent in the public and private expressions of well-known figures, including John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, as well as rank and file American Patriots. 

However, we must avoid the fallacy of mistaking the part for the whole. Not all Americans were intolerant of Roman Catholicism nor did all of them harbor the French ‘papist’ horde meme.

We recall that a Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence. An embassy including this delegate and his cousin, a Catholic priest, was dispatched by Congress to garner the support of the Canadiens to the American cause. Congress also published an address to the Canadiens in conciliatory tones even if it contradicted a parallel communiqué to their British brethren.

During the American occupation of Montréal, Washington restrained New England hotheads ensuring that the Catholics of that city were treated tolerably. At last, the anti-French Catholic rhetoric withered following the 1778 American alliance with France.

The French ‘papist’ horde image faded into the background but did not die. It went into hibernation to reemerge when French-Canadians, as Fr. Metzger notes, "overran" the New England mill towns a century after the Revolution. The image was placed in a different context, and some of its features changed, but the core of this meme remained remarkably self-similar in its late 18th and late 19th century forms.

This latter-day reemergence of the French ‘papist’ horde meme will be the subject of my next post.

* The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolution, Metzger, Charles H., New York: The United States Catholic Historical Society, 1936. Parenthetical references refer to this book.

The Quebec Act: Forgotten Cause of the American Revolution

“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”

This text from the American Declaration of Independence refers to the Quebec Act of 1774. This Act of the British Parliament was one of the major causes of the American Revolution. New Englanders in particular feared that this law threatened the very survival of their political and religious institutions.

Religious ideology was at the heart of this imagined threat to American liberty. The religious controversy surrounding the Quebec Act opens a gateway to a forgotten story line in the narrative of the American Republic.

The former French colony of Canada, renamed the Province of Quebec, came under English rule following the Treaty of Paris of 1763. The intention of the 1774 law was to create a political and legal basis for a British province that was, at that date, almost entirely French-speaking and Roman Catholic.

The provisions of the Quebec Act and its subsequent mandates...

• Restored the pre-1763 borders of the province, which included the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley
• Reinstated French civil law, while it established English criminal law in the Province
• Reestablished both the tithe for the Roman Catholic clergy and the traditional privileges of the land-holding seigneurs as a consequence of the restoration of the French civil code

With the exception of the imposition of English criminal law, these provisions reinstated Canada’s status quo ante. The Declaration of Independence, however, frames the Act’s provisions not as a revival of Quebec’s former customs but as an assortment of innovations both outrageous and dangerous:

“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province…”

This refers to the restoration of French civil law. The “free system of English laws”  had been in effect in the "neighbouring Province," and only partially at that, for a mere ten years or so prior to the Quebec Act. This "free system" was insufficiently established to speak reasonably of its abolition.

“establishing therein an Arbitrary government…”

The Quebec Act provided for an appointed council, rather than an elective assembly, to aid the governor’s oversight of the Province. A not dissimilar council had existed under the French Regime. This is the arbitrary government referenced in this clause. Rather than establishing arbitrary rule, the intent of the Act was to normalize the political and legal structure of the Province along lines familiar to its elite.

In fact, the period of British rule prior to the Quebec Act, which involved the refusal of its governors to implement the constitution in full, and the exclusion of most of the inhabitants from any role in civil affairs, might be liable to a charge of “arbitrary government.”

Province of Quebec 1774
Source: l'Annuaire du Québec, 1972

“and enlarging its Boundaries…”

Control of the Ohio Valley had been a casus belli in the so-called French and Indian War. Reestablishing the Province’s former borders allowed the Montréal merchants, via the Great Lakes, Ottawa, and St. Lawrence waterways, to compete with the Albany/Hudson/New York trade. The American colonists saw the territory that had been restored to Quebec as a natural field for their own western ambitions and resented its return to the Canadiens.

“…so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”

Following a politicized construal of the Act's provisions, this language reveals the Americans' gravest concern. They feared that King George was sharpening his sword on Canada in preparation for the reduction of the American colonies to “absolute rule.” The colonists viewed what was in reality a pragmatic policy with regard to Quebec as a mere prelude to a tyrant’s gambit.

The phrase about Quebec becoming a “fit instrument” for the King’s supposed despotic designs touches on the Americans' darkest fears. What most exercised New England in the Quebec Act is that their Protestant king had not only tolerated but also established the Roman Catholic faith in “a neighbouring province.”  The next step, they feared, was that King George would unleash a French “papist” horde as his “instrument” for imposing a romanizing religion and government upon them.

In his book The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolution, Charles H. Metzger, S.J. argues that anti-Catholic bigotry with its fears of the French “papist” horde was by no means a minor subplot to the tea tax, the Stamp Act, and other American grievances. 

Writes Metzger, “[the] writings [of the American colonists] prove that to many of them the ‘Church of Rome’ was little less than the incarnation of evil; its adherents were thought capable of any crime; its creed was believed to be perversive and destructive of the very foundations of the social order.”*

In my next post I will explore in greater depth this picture of a French “papist” horde sweeping down from the North to extinguish Anglo-Saxon Protestant liberty. This meme was not only a major cause of the American Revolution. It also illumines the unique, virulent opposition faced by the French-Canadian workers who descended upon New England  in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

These latter-day Canadiens came not with weapons of war but with tools of labor. What I term the French “papist” horde meme, however, exerted so powerful an influence on the New England mind that these immigrant workers evoked anew the fears of 1774. I will show that the French "papist" horde image persisted for more than a century after the Quebec Act.

* The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolution, Metzger, Charles H., New York: The United States Catholic Historical Society, 1936, p 11.
My book A Distinct Alien Race is now available for pre-order

A Canadien in the American Revolution: The Reluctant Patriot Charles Racine

The American Revolution was a conundrum for the Canadiens. Under British rule for a mere dozen years prior to Lexington and Concord, the Canadiens faced an American invasion in the first years of the War for Independence. The British Parliament’s Quebec Act of 1774 had secured the privileges of the seigneurs (lords) and the clergy winning these elites over to the cause of Great Britain. The great mass of the population, les habitants, was ambivalent.

Caught in the crossfire of what they regarded as a civil war between Englishmen, the habitant's tendency was one of neutrality with modest aid proferred to either side in accordance with the shifting winds of war.

During the American invasion of Canada in 1775, a certain Charles Racine, my 16-year-old 4th great-grandfather, was driving his cattle southward when he encountered the American invaders in the Richelieu Valley and was taken prisoner. Why the Americans seized Racine is unknown. It would take little imagination to devise that the Americans chose to “requisition” Racine’s cattle, that the latter took exception, and found himself arrested.

After serving time as a prisoner of war, the Americans gave Charles the choice of joining their cause or remaining a prisoner. He opted for the former and officially enlisted on December 16, 1777, becoming a Private in Captain M. Gilbert’s regiment of foot under Colonel Moses Hazen. Congress had given Hazen the commission to raise a regiment in Canada, which, since it was not part of any State’s militia, came to be known as Congress’ Own.

Moses Hazen was a man of great energy and determination but of questionable moral fiber. From Haverhill, Massachusetts, of Puritan stock, Hazen’s military career began with the British army in the Seven Years (“French and Indian”) War. In the epoch of the Deportation of the Acadians, Hazen bore the responsibility for the burning of four men, two women, and three children in a house he set ablaze, as well as for the scalping of six others. One of the women and the children Hazen immolated were the daughter and grandchildren of an Acadian leader who was forced to witness these killings.

During the siege at Québec in 1759, Hazen’s party was engaged in raids on the countryside, a mission that probably included the killing and scalping of a priest and thirty parishioners in the country near Québec City.

After the war, Hazen followed the victorious British armies into Montréal where he partnered with a merchant and succeeded in land speculation and development. When war came between Britain and its American colonies, Hazen first sided with the British and then switched allegiances. Before gaining his commission from Congress, Hazen had already been imprisoned by both the Americans and the British. He was later court-martialed by the Americans but acquitted. During the course of his career, Hazen was jailed no less than 14 times for debt, and was in an out of lawsuits for most of his life.

With Hazen’s regiment, Private Charles Racine, along with many other Canadiens, participated in some of the most storied events of the American Revolution. Congress’ Own was at Valley Forge, took part in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown in the Philadelphia campaign, and was present at the climactic siege at Yorktown. Racine served for the duration of the war and mustered out on June 30, 1783.

Uniform and Equipment of Congress' Own

In the war’s aftermath, the Canadiens who had served with the Americans were persona non grata in their native land since they had fought against their country’s sovereign. For a time they were under the ban of the Catholic Church as well. Hazen’s litigious habits, however, appeared to be a boon to the veterans since he pursued Congress doggedly on their behalf, securing them lands in upstate New York.

A return of January 26, 1785 confirms that Racine had been granted two lots totaling 500 acres in Clinton County, New York. However, Racine, like most of the refugees, seems never to have taken possession. The lands required surveying and the destitute veterans had no money for these services. Neither had they supplies nor tools with which to work the land. Their plight was exacerbated by the fact that they had become Congress’ own problem – foreigners and not citizens of any of the thirteen United States.

Racine tiptoed back into Canada in 1785. Evidently back in the Church’s good graces, in 1791 he married Josephte Desrochers at the parish of St-Charles-sur-Richelieu. After his homecoming, Racine sold off his New York holdings in parcels to Hazen’s nephew, Benjamin Mooers, who sent his agents into Canada to buy the lands of the Canadien veterans. Mooers eventually controlled about a quarter of these lands.

Racine worked as a carpenter and fathered seven sons and two daughters. He died at age 68 in 1827 and is buried at Saint-Damase, QC.

In 1855, the adult children of Charles Racine attempted to secure payment of the pension due to their late mother as a widow of a Revolutionary War veteran. They hired an American lawyer to press their claim and acquired affidavits from men who had known Charles Racine. These men testified that they had heard Racine speak many times of his service in the American army in the Revolution. These affidavits also reveal that Charles had documentary proof of his service but a 1795 fire had destroyed his house and everything in it.

One of Racine’s sons, Louis-Augustin, also testified under oath that his father had spoken of his adventures in the campaigns “near Philadelphia” and that Charles had mentioned Livingston, Allston, and Campbell as among the officers under whom he had served. Livingston had also raised a regiment in Canada that was folded into Hazen’s late in the war. There is a great deal of documentary evidence for Charles Racine's military service, but this was unknown or inaccessible to the Racine family in 1855.

19th c. Transcription of the Roll of Hazen's Regiment:
Charles Racine is No. 23 in the list of Privates

 

The only surviving possession of the fire of 1795 was the rifle with which Charles Racine had fought for American independence. His family preserved the weapon until about 1880 when it was dropped in a lake during a hunting expedition.

This rifle may well have seen action in the Québec Rebellion of 1837, in which Charles’s son Prudent Racine, my 3rd great-grandfather, fought. Three generations of Racines were involved in signal events of North American history since Prudent's sons, Philibert and Cyprien Racine, were volunteers in a Vermont company in the American Civil War.

I have no evidence to support the claim but I tend to believe that Charles’s war stories influenced Prudent’s decision to serve in the cause of the liberty of “Lower Canada” (Québec) in 1837 and perhaps his grandsons’ efforts in the cause of preserving the Union Charles had, under duress, fought to establish.

And all of this because a teenager, tending his cattle, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I would like to acknowledge my distant cousin Janine LaFleur Penfield for sending me a large collection of documents regarding the story of Charles Racine. Most of these materials were scans of primary sources from which the majority of this post was gleaned. 

La Survivance and Revolution: The Ideological History of a Remnant (Part 1)

Following the Conquest of Canada by the English, ratified by the Treaty of 1763, our ancestors developed an ideology referred to as la survivance – survival. It has been said that in the early years following the English Conquest, Les Canadiens, as we were known at the time, expected the French to return. They could not believe nor would they accept that the French king would abandon his vast North American Empire, which had included a sphere of influence over some of the finest real estate on the continent.

Our ancestors reasoned that, inevitably, there would be another war with their rivals, the English, and this future war must bring the triumphant return of the armies and governors of the Kings of France. And when they returned, they must find everything in the colony formerly known as Nouvelle-France just as it had been before. Like the early Christians who expected the imminent return of the Savior, la survivance entailed the fervent preservation of our ancestor’s traditional cultural institutions in expectation of the ultimate return of France triumphant.

This return might have occurred within two decades of the Treaty of 1763. During the American War of Independence of the 1770s and 1780s, France allied itself with the fledgling American Republic against its common enemy, the British Empire. Historians claim that there was some talk of France recovering Canada in the negotiations that followed the English defeat in the Revolutionary War. However, Gallic diplomacy saw a greater advantage in allowing Canada to remain a part of the British Empire as a permanent menace to the Americans. By allowing the British to retain Canada, reasoned the French Crown, the United States might be made dependent on French military and naval power, maintaining a favorable (for France) balance of power on the North American continent.

The Cession of 1763 was the first break separating our ancestors from the mother country. Unbeknownst to them, the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which brought to an end the War of the American Revolution, would represent a second break.

Another Revolution, in France in 1789, would constitute a third and final break between our ancestors and their European mère patrie. The French Revolution, a cultural as well as a political milestone, swept away the ancien régime, ensuring that no future French King would rule over Canada.

The Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath created permanent cultural, ideological and political differences between the two French-speaking peoples on either side of the Atlantic. Staunchly Catholic, the more conservative elements among the Canadien elite, viewed the anti-clericalism, modernism and republicanism of the French Revolution with alarm.

Whatever the ideology, the France of 1815, when the dust from the Napoleonic Wars began to settle, was not at all the France from which the ancestors of the Canadiens had departed. With the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath, France crossed a Rubicon separating the mother country from its former colony. It is at this point that the French-speaking people of Canada took on the character of a remnant – a remnant of an older French culture, the France of the Sun King, the Catholic France of seigneurs and the fleur-de-lys.

At this stage, having lost its initial raison d’être, the strategy of la survivance in French North America took on a different task with a new intent – to preserve a pre-Revolutionary French ideal, against the secularizing tendencies of the modern world. This ideal possessed three main characteristics: a society which was French-speaking, Catholic and rural. To these three watchwords we might add a tendency – implicit in Catholicism – toward hierarchical institutions and viewpoints.

This culture, said this new version of la survivance, would stand as a bulwark on the continent against what one cleric at the time of the War of the 1750s had called “the detestable errors of Luther and Calvin.” The survival of this pre-Revolutionary French culture would provide an alternative vision of North America, one which was, claimed these ideologues, more spiritual, more ordered, less materialistic, and less addicted to change and mobility than was the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority on the continent. To some degree, this vision still exists in modern Canada, which wishes to portray itself as more humane, more pacific, less avaricious and less violent than its Southern neighbor.

Part 2