Where Did the Term “Franco-American” Come From?

We have a nomenclature problem. There is no unambiguous way to refer to ourselves. We have many origins as descendants of French colonists in Canada and Acadia, detached from France hundreds of years ago, and then relocated to the United States. Some call themselves Franco-Americans, others French-Canadians, or French-Canadian-Americans, or Acadians (as the case may be), or just French.

I’ve written about the nomenclature issue here and here. Eventually, I became bored with the semantics. Most any of those terms will do, depending on who is speaking and to whom. In the introduction to my book A Distinct Alien Race I parse these terms, but only to define how I am using them for clarity’s sake. I don’t insist that these terms have precise meanings or that my usage is prescriptive.

In my experience, the term “Franco-American” is and was used more frequently by elites and historians than by the descendants of French-Canadian industrial workers. I didn't hear it growing up. And it’s a term used almost exclusively in the Northeastern U.S. Elsewhere, it tends to get a puzzled look. Or it evokes images of canned pasta. 

Some observers believe that the term is of recent vintage. It’s not. It’s well over a century old. And, I believe, it was promoted right after 1900 for a purpose: to unite the French-Canadian (we’d say Québécois today) and Acadian elements in the Northeast U.S.

The General Conventions

The evidence for this assertion is in a book called Historique des Conventions Générales des Canadiens-Français aux Etats-Unis 1865-1901 (Woonsocket: L’Union Saint-Jean Baptiste d’Amerique, 1927) by historian and congressman Félix Gatineau (1851-1927), leading light of the Southbridge, Massachusetts Franco-Americans. As the title makes clear, Gatineau’s book is a compendium of the correspondence, minutes, speeches, and occasional press reports surrounding the nineteen General Conventions of the French-Canadians of the United States held between 1865 and 1901.

These conventions brought together the elites from among the French-Canadians of the United States, mainly journalists, professionals, and priests, to discuss matters of interest to their community. These conferences usually involved hundreds of delegates meeting over several days. They convened all over the northern states from Detroit (1869), to Chicago (1872), to New York City (1865, 1866, 1874), as well as in smaller industrial towns like Biddeford, Maine (1873), Cohoes, New York (1882), and Nashua, New Hamsphire (1888). Questions related to preserving the French language, to parochial schools, and to naturalization were perennials on the agendas of these conventions. 

Our story focuses on the materials in Gatineau’s book about the 19th such convention, held in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1901 (Gatineau, 354-498). Although Gatineau numbers this among the general conventions, the papers related to it make clear that this was a regional conference involving New England and New York.  

Before 1901, the organizers and delegates refer to these gatherings as the general conventions of the Canadiens-Français des Etats-Unis [The French-Canadians of the United States]. The people who are the subject of these conventions are invariably referred to as Canadiens-Français or Canadiens. These terms are used consistently. Unless some eagle-eyed reader corrects me, I see zero usage at these conventions of the term Franco-Américains (or its English equivalent) to describe any group of people prior to 1901.

Enter The Acadians

A new term came into use at the dawn of the 20th century because of an influx of Acadians. Over the twenty years or so before 1900 and into the early 20th century, there was a significant Acadian emigration from Canada’s maritime provinces, especially toward Maine and Massachusetts.

The later 19th century was also the era of the Acadian Renaissance. In this period, Acadian nationality solidified. Acadians adopted a flag and a national holiday. They held regular conventions of their own to gather representatives from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, New England, and Louisiana (yes, there was a Louisiana delegate or two at these early Acadian conventions).

Since the era of the general conventions of French-Canadians of the United States began in 1865, a new national consciousness had taken hold of the Acadian community that then grew on both sides of the border. When it came time to call such a general convention for 1901, the committee appointed to this duty sent a communiqué around the Northeastern states. These organizers, led by President Dr. Omer Larue of Putnam, Connecticut, employed the familiar language of conventions past. The organizing committee called delegates to a “congrès générale des Canadiens-Français.” This message went out on June 22, 1901.

But Dr. Larue and his crew received complaints from the Acadians of the Northeast because the term Canadiens-Français did not include them. That Acadians lodged such complaints is evident from a second communiqué Larue and company sent dated August 3, 1901. This document is addressed to the “Acadiens-Français de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et de l’Etat de New-York” [French-Acadians of New England and the State of New York] specifically. The French text of this fascinating document [Gatineau, 356-57] follows with my translation below.

COMPATRIOTS,

The attention of the organizing Committee of the Congress, that will take place in Springfield next October 1st and 2nd, was attracted to the fact that the text of the announcement published last June 22nd does not mention the Acadian-French in precise terms. Recognizing that this omission, if omission it is, could become a subject of misunderstanding for the valiant sons of those knights who survived one of the greatest crimes against humanity that history has recorded;

Recognizing also that, if, even in Canada, there could remain a line of demarcation, a semblance of division, between the French of the province of Québec and the French of the maritime provinces, it is not the case in the United States; everywhere French-Canadians and French-Acadians live as brothers, are part of the same parishes and societies, and share the same aspirations since they have identical interests;

The organizing Committee of the Congress of Springfield invites the French-Acadians who are part of distinct societies or who live in isolated groups in New England and the State of New York to kindly make themselves represented at the Springfield Congress, according to the conditions indicated in the announcement mentioned above.

(Signed)

President,

DR. OMER LARUE, of Putnam, Connecticut.

Secretary,

J.-A. FAVREAU, of Worcester, Massachusetts

August 3, 1901.

A third communiqué from Larue’s committee dated August 17, 1901, providing more detailed information about the Springfield convention, takes cognizance of Acadian objections. It is addressed to the “Canadiens-Français et Acadiens-Français de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et de l’Etat de New-York” [French-Canadians and French-Acadians of New England and the State of New York]. 

This third communiqué ends with the following note: “N.-B.—Il est entendu que pour les fins de ce Congrès les Acadiens-Français de la Nouvelle-Angleterre ne forment qu'un seul corps avec les Canadiens-Français.” [It is understood that, for the purposes of this Congress, the French-Acadians of New England form a single body with the French-Canadians].

But “Canadiens-Français et Acadiens-Français de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et de l’Etat de New-York” is a mouthful. Larue and his colleagues had a solution. They would use the term Franco-Américain to describe the delegates at the 1901 convention in Springfield and the people they represent. This term would apply equally to both French-Canadian and Acadian people living in the U.S. It would unite these two elements in a new U.S.-based, francophone identity.

A New Term Appears

In 1899, a Société Historique Franco-Américaine [Franco-American Historical Society] appeared in Boston. Its mission was to “bring to light…the share which the French race has played in the evolution of the American people.” [cf. Adair, E. R. Review of Les Quarante Ans de la Société Historique Franco-Américaine. The Canadian Historical Review 23, no. 4 (1942): 423-423.] Speakers at the Springfield Convention of 1901 refer to this historical society. But it's at the convention that I see the term Franco-American applied to people. 

In the third sentence of his speech opening the Springfield convention, Dr. Larue introduced this term. He speaks of a “réunion plénière des Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre” [plenary meeting of the Franco-Americans of New England]. Larue repeats the term “Franco-Américain” several times in his opening speech.

Other speakers at this convention follow suit. Charles-Edouard Boivin, a journalist of Fall River, Massachusetts, refers at the beginning of his speech to “les sociétés et les groupes Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et de l’Etat de New-York” [Franco-American societies and groups from New England and New York]. As did Larue, Boivin uses the term more than once. 

The discourse of Edouard Cadieux of Holyoke, Massachusetts, President of the Union Saint-Jean Baptiste d’Amérique refers to the “Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre.” Speaking on the subject of naturalization, Dr. Camille Coté of Marlboro, Massachusetts also uses the term “Franco-Américain.” And when the mayor of Springfield addresses the convention in English, he calls it “the Congress of French-Americans.”

There were also discussions in Springfield of “LA PRESSE FRANCO-AMERICAINE” [the Franco-American Press] and a “PROJET DE COLLEGE FRANCO-AMERICAIN” [the project of a Franco-American college], although the editor Gatineau may have supplied these headings. 

When the convention adopted its final resolutions they are offered by “les représentants des Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et de l’Etat de New-York” [the representatives of the Franco-Americans of New England and the State of New York]. And when the convention called for a permanent commission to continue its work, Larue and company penned a circular letter on this subject in February 1902 addressed to the “Franco-Américains” of the region.

“Franco-Américain” is not the only term these speakers in 1901 use to describe themselves. They continue to use Canadiens and Canadiens-français. The eminent Major Edmond Mallet, friend of Louis Riel and a stalwart of the conventions, prefers the term Canado-Américain. But, in the recorded history of the conventions, the term “Franco-American” appears quite suddenly in Springfield in 1901 and it is used fairly consistently in the papers related to that convention, and that convention alone, of those recorded in Gatineau’s Historique.

This consistency, especially in the discourse of the leaders of the 1901 convention, suggests to me that not only did these organizers adopt this term, but they coached others to use it. In adopting this term, elites moved to unite the Québécois and Acadian elements in the Northeastern states, to persuade them that they formed “a single body.” And in doing so, “Franco-American” began to emerge as an identity in the region.

Why a Regional Identity?

This issue of accommodating both Acadians and French-Canadians was a concern for the Northeast U.S. because there was a self-consciously Acadian element there by 1901. This helps explain why the term “Franco-American” is reasonably well-established in New England and New York but almost unknown among our compatriots in the Midwest. Although I’m sure one could find some Acadian descendants there (they tended to be everywhere), to my knowledge, the Midwest did not have a self-identified Acadian element.

Further, the Springfield Convention was a regional, Northeastern conference and the nomenclature issue the convention’s organizers had to solve was a regional affair. There was no one lobbying in the Midwest for the term “Franco-American” because there was never any reason to. 

It is credible to me that the term Franco-American was intended to unite Acadian and Québécois groups in the region because a very similar thing happened much later. Politically-minded people in the State of Maine revived and promoted the term Franco-American in that state in the later 20th century to unite, as a voting block, descendants of Québec in the mill towns with the more rural, Acadian-identified people in the state’s North. This information comes from veteran activist Yvon Labbé and at least equally veteran Maine politico Severin Beliveau.  

I do not claim that the papers of the 1901 Convention contain the earliest attestations of the term “Franco-American.” Nor do I conclude that the Convention is the only reason some of us use the term. But I do contend that the Springfield Convention was a catalyst in promoting that term in the Northeast and in its eventual acceptance.   

Why I Prefer the Term Franco-American

The term “Franco-American” unites the French-Canadian and Acadian elements and that’s why it is my preferred term. My grandmother was an Acadienne, born and raised on Prince Edward Island, although my other grandparents had roots in Québec. 

My great-grandfather, Félix Doucette, had a small role in the Acadian Renaissance as a student at Fr. Georges-Antoine Belcourt’s school in Rustico, PEI; his father Joseph Doucette fought and suffered for Acadian rights in the Tenant League Riots on the island. It seems appropriate for me to honor them with a label that includes them. Since I unite in myself French-Canadian and Acadian elements, I call myself a Franco-American. 

That term also embraces the fact of our Americanness, after some generations on this side of the border. I was born and raised in one of the original 13 states. I’m from the U.S. and rather undeniably so. Nothing against Canadians, but I’m not any kind of Canadian. 

I won’t correct you if you get it wrong, because for me there’s more than one right answer. But, if you ask, I will tell you why I prefer “Franco-American.”

Errata – A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans

Mistakes. You try to avoid them of course. You check your facts and then check them again and still errors sneak through.

If you read many books about the same subject – as I did when I was researching the textile industry – you will find factual errors in all of them. Without exception. This includes books published by the likes of Harvard and Yale. This is not to make excuses for my own errors. There is no excuse. But I am in good company.

Below are a few mistakes of fact (excluding typos) that we have discovered after publishing the book A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans.

Page 220: I state that William MacDonald was President of Bowdoin College. He was not the President but a professor of Political Science and History at Bowdoin from 1893 to 1901. The President of Bowdoin in this period was William De Witt Hyde – who, like MacDonald, also wrote about Franco-Americans.

Page 238: I state that “One of the first General Conventions of Canadiens of the United States in October 1868 condemned the then-recently created Dominion of Canada. It censured what the convention saw as undue pressure on Nova Scotia to enter the Confederation. The Convention called for U.S. annexation of Canada or a republican form of government for the latter.”

This passage is based on press reports of the 1868 convention and I cite an article in the New York Times from October 9, 1868 as my source. Apparently, a telegraph press release regarding the convention was issued, and used as the basis of the Times's report and several other press accounts.

Gatineau's History of the Conventions
of the French-Canadians of the U.S.

However, in the October 13, 1868 edition of the New York Times, J.B. Paradis, a Secretary at this convention, in a letter to the editor, corrects that newspaper’s account of the convention’s work. Paradis confirms that political resolutions along the lines indicated by the Times were offered at the convention but voted down. He writes that the convention “was in no respect of a political character. Its only object was to promote the interests of the St. Jean Baptiste societies in this country, and especially to effect a union among them all.”

The book Historique des Conventions Générales des Canadiens-Français aux Etats-Unis 1865-1901 (Félix Gatineau, ed., Woonsocket: L’Union Saint-Jean Baptiste d’Amerique, 1927) has only brief notes about this 1868 convention, but what is there tends to corroborate Paradis’s account. It is as of yet unclear to me exactly what happened at that convention, but I would tend to honor Paradis’s eyewitness report.

In my text, the point of citing this convention was to show support among Franco-Americans of this period for the annexation of Canada by the U.S. The offering of these resolutions, even if voted down, tends to corroborate that annexation was on the minds of at least some Franco-Americans.

Page 296: I place the Whitin Machine Works in Whitinsville, Rhode Island. Whitinsville is in fact a village of Northbridge, Massachusetts, about ten miles from the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border.

None of these factual errors overturn the conclusions of the book. But truth is a high priority. Where mistakes were made, we'll correct them. The mistake regarding William MacDonald was corrected in the second printing of the book. The others will be handled in subsequent editions. I will update this list should further errors of fact come to light.
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Purchase the book here.
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A French Catholic State in North America? Rescuing Tardivel

“La Vérité,” the organ of the Ultramontane Party, says that confederation is merely a half-way house for the French Canadians; their goal is “the complete autonomy of the French Canadian nationality, and the foundation of a French Canadian and Catholic state, having for its mission to continue in America the glorious work of our ancestors." 

Thus wrote W. Blackburn Harte in a November 1890 issue of a U.S. news magazine called The Forum. Harte's quotation in this passage is a not inaccurate translation from a piece that had appeared in La Vérité, a Québec newspaper, the previous year.1 

La Vérité was frequently cited in both the U.S. and Canada as a source for the notion that the 19th c. French-Canadian Catholics were engaged, in Harte’s phrase, in “open sedition.” Supposedly, they were plotting to separate Québec from its rightful sovereign in Great Britain, perhaps taking part or all of New England with them. 

An Immigrant Becomes an Advocate

Jules-Paul Tardivel, the founder and editor of La Vérité, was an immigrant to Québec. He was not Québécois de souche. Born in Covington, Kentucky in 1851, Tardivel’s father was French (of France), while his mother was English (of England). His parents were immigrants in the United States. The future Jules-Paul grew up calling himself Julius Tardeville. 

Right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Covington emerged as an industrial center in the 19th century. Like its neighbor in Ohio, Covington attracted immigrants from Europe, Catholics in particular.

After his mother died, Julius and his sister lived first with an aunt and then with an uncle, a Catholic priest in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Influenced by priests from Québec who had come to the Midwest to counter the anti-Catholic agitation of Charles Chiniquy, Tardivel’s uncle sent him to Canada to receive a classical education. He matriculated at the Collège de Saint-Hyacinthe, an ultramontane stronghold. Tardivel did not speak a word of French before he was 18 years old and entered Québec to pursue his studies at the famed seminary. 

Upon completing his education, he made a brief, disappointing reappearance in the U.S. and then returned to Québec. He became a French-Canadian by adoption. Like the religious convert who is a more fervent believer than the lifelong adherent, Tardivel became more Canadien-français than the Canadiens-français. He was an outspoken advocate for a conservative, ultra-Catholic strain of Québec nationalism. 

When Tardivel founded the newspaper La Vérité in 1881, after an apprenticeship as a journalist and a literary critic, he intended to remain independent of party politics. Like Saint-Jean Baptiste himself, Tardivel would be a voice crying in the wilderness in the service of a vision of the Canadiens-français as a Catholic nation. This new nation would, proclaimed Tardivel, continue the work of 17th-18th c. France in catholicizing and “civilizing” the continent. 

Jules-Paul Tardivel (1851-1910)

In his long career as the gadfly of Québec, Tardivel took issue with nearly everyone of importance in the province, including members of his own ultramontane set. He stood fiercely alone, inhabiting his own ideological space. 

Yet writers like Harte and the editors of the Toronto Mail made this odd-man-out represent the views of the Québec elite at large. They took a fringe figure – with quite an unusual background by Québec lights – and made him represent the mainstream of French-Canadian opinion. 

Much if not all of La Vérité is available online. The first thing a modern reader notices is that the utterances and writings of the Pope were front-page news. If the paper had a dominant theme it was opposition to Freemasonry. I intuit that a closer scrutiny would reveal the influence of U.S. anti-masonic literature on Tardivel.

There’s much in Tardivel that is bizarre, often objectionable from many of our modern viewpoints. He had a colonialist turn of mind, seeing himself as the possessor of an allegedly superior civilization with expansionist proclivities. Although he hearkens back to the days of Nouvelle-France, his talk of “civilizing” has more the flavor of 19th c. European French imperialism.

I have no intention of defending Tardivel in toto. But the implication that his views on Québec's future amounted to “open sedition” was false. Elements of the English-language press misrepresented Tardivel's stance, tearing his statements out of context. 

Tardivel’s Vision

Harte’s quotation from La Vérité in his 1890 piece in The Forum appeared in Tardivel's October 12, 1889 issue under the headline “Un pas en avant” (“A step forward”). The subject at hand was Wilfrid Laurier's address to a Liberal group in Toronto. Tardivel shares with Laurier the view that the “current Confederation is not the last word on our national destiny.” But Tardivel differed with Laurier in having a specific post-Confederation future in mind for his people. 

Writes Tardivel,

But we know and we loudly proclaim what we want, the future that we dream of, that we foresee for the French-Canadian race if it remains faithful to its providential mission. Why not say frankly what every patriot wishes from the bottom of his heart? For us, ‘the step forward,’ that we would only wish to take at the hour marked by God, is a more complete autonomy for the French-Canadian nationality, towards which it must lead[:] to the foundation of a French-Canadian and Catholic state having for its mission to continue in America the glorious work of the country of our ancestors.2

However, the “realization of the project” of “a French-Canadian and Catholic state,” continues Tardivel,

…does not suppose the least infringement of the rights of other races which have established themselves on the soil that our fathers conquered for civilization. We desire that the change [in Québec's political status] should be done naturally, peacefully, without shock, without upheaval, by mutual consent; but at last we want French Canada to be a country absolutely autonomous, living its own life, having its distinct place among the nations of the earth. There’s space enough on this continent for us, having our place in the sun, without inconveniencing the other peoples in the process of its formation. We threaten no one; we ask only for our national existence.

Tardivel’s vision is clear. He wishes only that the French-Canadian people will continue to exist, and he imagines that a day will come when a peaceful political change will result in an independent Québec. On that day, “marked by God,” a new French-Canadian nation will emerge that will in no way infringe upon the rights of minorities living in Québec. 

“We threaten no one; we ask only for our national existence.” But the mere wish for the continued existence of the Canadien-francais, in some post-colonial future, was threatening to Harte and his ilk, despite Tardivel's reassurances. 

New England and the Providential Mission

Did Tardivel’s support for the “providential mission” of the French-Canadians in catholicizing the U.S. mean that he advocated the overthrow of New England by a revived New France?

As early as 1881, Tardivel addressed the question of emigration to New England.3  Far from supporting the New England Canadiens as an advance-guard of Catholic missionary activity in North America, Tardivel sought a means to discourage emigration. He believed that the solution to the population drain was to return to the land, to the rural identity which he assumes is essential to French-Canadian nationhood.  

Tardivel believes that his people must learn to love agriculture once again. They must see in it their best chance for well-being and independence, thought Tardivel. Only the “colonization” of the hinterlands of Québec will discourage the outflow toward New England mills and factories. 

Tardivel's views on this particular subject were, for once, not contrarian. In advocating agriculturalism and the "colonization" of Quebec, Tardivel embraced the conventional wisdom of French-Canadian Catholicism in his day (see the famous work of Fr. Antoine Labelle).

In an 1885 piece, Tardivel explained what he called “our program” regarding emigration.4  This definitive statement shows how Tardivel’s talk of a “providential mission” implied neither an aggressive expansion southward, nor a deliberate subversion of U.S. political institutions. Writes Tardivel, 

We do not deny the providential mission of the French-Canadians who emigrate to the United States. If they preserve the Faith…they will certainly contribute, in a large measure, to the conversion of the United States…but beside that beautiful role there is a very real danger, it is the loss, for a great number, of the inestimable gift of that same Faith. 

Tardivel’s recommendation for avoiding this “danger” was to “colonize the province of Québec; we are the true masters here, but it’s necessary to become still more so. Here is our program for the moment.” Tardivel’s “program” did not include the conquest of New England. He sought rather the concentration of French-Canadian forces within Québec, and the consolidation of the province as a Canadien homeland. 

Tardivel calls again for a renewal of agriculture that will serve to fill the crown lands, create new parishes, and put an end to mass emigration. He would direct those who must leave Québec toward Manitoba or the Canadian Northwest, reinforcing the “French element” in these regions.

When the notion of a French-Canadian takeover of New England arose, Tardivel rejected it. In an 1881 issue of La Vérité, Tardivel discusses the insightful observations of a Frenchman (of France) named Jannet, who commented on the French-Canadians of Québec and New England.5  Jannet noted that some “Canadien enthusiasts” spoke of “Frenchifying” (franciser) New England. For Jannet, such talk was delusional. The vast majority of the emigrants were working class. These poor workers were unable to impose their mores “on a powerful American civilization,” Jannet reasoned. Tardivel found this argument “persuasive.” 

Commenting on Jannet's observations, Tardivel acknowledges that a small number of French-Canadians in the U.S. had acquired political office. But the Kentucky-born journalist thought that the French-Canadians of New England did not understand the U.S. political system. He concurred with Jannet that they did not have the capacity to subvert U.S. institutions even if they wished to do so.
 

Hopes and Dreams Are Not Sedition

Tardivel hoped for nothing more than the continued existence of the French-Canadian people. He also speculated that if they should survive, one day they would establish an independent francophone Catholic state in North America. 

Recognizing that such pronouncements have led to misunderstandings, Tardivel emphasized that he imagined a peaceful political transition to an independent Québec, but only by the hand of le bon Dieu, and such that the rights of other peoples were respected. Mere hopes and dreams for independence, at some indefinite point in the future, hardly constitute the “open sedition” of which Harte wrote. 

Although Tardivel recognized that the French-Canadians in the U.S. had some role to play in catholicizing the States, he preferred that they “colonize” the hinterlands of Québec. This was his “program” in 1885 and he never rescinded it. He remained a lifelong opponent of emigration to New England.

Harte and other anglophones who mined La Vérité tended to distort Tardivel’s views in order to agitate their readers and to stigmatize French-Canadians as disloyal citizens and political subversives. 

Political discourse in this period dwelt much more on the U.S. annexing Canada than on Québec annexing bits of the U.S. I’m turning my attention next to this annexation question, that loomed large from about 1890 until the First World War.

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More about the "providential mission" of the French-Canadians in my book
A Distinct Alien Race
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Notes

1. "'Un Pas en Avant,'" La Vérité, October 12, 1889, 12:90.

2. All translations from La Vérité are my own.

3. "Les Canadiens emigres," La Vérité, August 4, 1881, 2:2.

4. "Emigration et Colonisation," La Vérité, January 24, 1885, 27:2.

5. "Le Canada en France," La Vérité, August 11, 1881, 3:2.

Were 19th Century Canadiens Bad Farmers?

Reading the usual literature about Franco-Americans one gets the impression that our Canadien forbears were bad farmers. The agricultural woes of the Saint Lawrence Valley in the 19th century are a ubiquitous theme, and bad farming is often mentioned in that context. Many such discussions describe a stock set of deficiencies said to have bedeviled the region’s agriculture.

For example, in his seminal book The French-Canadian Heritage in New England Gerard J. Brault writes,

The nineteenth-century Quebec farmer, like his New England counterpart, tilled the soil, planted, and harvested according to age-old custom and stubbornly resisted any change. He did not use manure or any other kind of fertilizer, kept turning over the same old top soil with a shallow plow, sowed unclean and unimproved seed, allowed weeds to grow everywhere, and knew nothing about crop rotation.1

A generation before Brault, agricultural historian Robert Leslie Jones gave a more detailed account of the alleged shortcomings of 19th c. French-Canadian farmers. Jones set these farmers against the background of the standard theory that Lower Canada (Québec) faced an agricultural crisis in the first half of the century. During this period, writes Jones,

Nothing the habitants could do, seemingly, promised economic salvation. By mid-century their situation had become one of chronic distress. Clergy, businessmen, newspaper editors, and politicians continually discussed it. They agreed in their analyses of the more obvious defects of agriculture in the St. Lawrence Valley – lack of fertilizing, lack of proper rotation, lack of approved stock-raising methods, lack of improved implements, too much concentration on wheat – but they showed much difference of opinion when they tried to account for these defects.2

The 19th c. French-Canadian farmer became a problem for “clergy, businessmen, newspaper editors, and politicians” to solve. It was not enough for them to make suggestions for improving the efficiency of farms. Elites also felt compelled to “account for these defects” in French-Canadian agriculture. The seigneurial system of land tenure was among the alleged causes of what Jones calls the “bad farming of the French-Canadians” and the “backwardness of the seigneuries.” Others blamed overpopulation in the region, poor access to markets, and a lack of formal instruction in agriculture.

19th c. Habitants: Bad Farmers?

Another reason Jones cites as “commonly given” for the supposed “backwardness” of Québec farming was the “ingrained conservatism of the habitants.” He invokes this alleged trait to impute the futility of government sponsored efforts toward agricultural education. Behind this conservative posture, says Jones, lurked “the spirit of French-Canadian nationalism.” “Dedicated as they were to the preservation of their laws, their language, and their religion,” Jones writes, “they resisted any change, however small, in their mode of life. It was this aversion to innovation which rendered the distress in the seigneuries so acute, and made it so difficult to ameliorate.”3

Thus the biggest problem with the 19th c. French-Canadian farmers, according to Jones, is that they were French-Canadian. For Jones, had they stopped being French-Canadian, i.e., had they ceased to remain a people distinct as to “their laws, their language, and their religion,” then they would have been more open to “innovation” and their agricultural deficiencies would not have been “so difficult to ameliorate.” Jones suggests that “French-Canadian nationalism,” i.e. the desire of the French-speaking person of Québec to remain such, was a major cause of their alleged “bad farming.”

The 1850 Report on Lower Canada’s Agriculture

One of the documents Jones relied upon was an 1850 report of a special committee on agriculture filed with the Legislative Assembly of Canada.4  This committee had the parliament's mandate to investigate the state of agriculture in Lower Canada, to make recommendations for its improvement, and to address the disposition of crown lands. The report includes many pages of expert testimony submitted in writing.

Report of the Special Committee on Agriculture
for the Legislative Assembly of Canada (1850)

The report identifies “three capital vices” in Lower Canadian agriculture: “One relates to manure, another to the rotation of crops, and the third to the raising of cattle.” Another defect is too much land sown with a single crop: wheat, the principle product for market. Poor drainage is also an often-cited problem.

But this report lacks hard data to compare Lower Canada’s agriculture with that of other regions of North America. The report assumes that Lower Canadian farming is in a bad state, and much worse off than the best European operations. However, what little data is cited shows that in 1831, when insects that had devastated other 19th c. harvests were not a factor, Lower Canada's wheat output per capita was marginally higher than Upper Canada’s (i.e. Ontario's) and much higher than that of the United States. Even if French-Canadian farmers could have markedly improved their yields by using better methods, in terms of production of the staple crop they held their own with other North Americans all things being equal.

U.S. Farmers – Equally As Bad?

If mid-19th century French-Canadian farmers were bad, then their U.S. counterparts were little better. U.S. farms were also beneath the bar set by European agriculture. And the very same defects that observers claimed impeded French-Canadian agriculture beset U.S. farmers as well.

Consider the 1864 report by Joseph C. G. Kennedy, produced under the auspices of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior based on data from the 1860 Federal Census.5  Although this document is mainly quantitative in character, as befits the author’s position as Superintendent of the census, it is the qualitative description of U.S. farming in Kennedy's introduction that is relevant to the present discussion.  

“It has been said that American agriculture is half a century behind that of Great Britain,” writes Kennedy. “Our land is not as thoroughly under-drained, manured, and cultivated as that of England, Scotland, or Belgium.” Kennedy cites an English journal’s prediction that the U.S. would become an importer rather than an exporter of grain due to the American's "scourging" system of agriculture that exhausted the land.

Replying to these criticisms, Kennedy unwittingly reveals the defects in U.S. farming. Conceding that poor farming methods had exhausted some lands, Kennedy writes,

That any of our so-called exhausted land can be speedily restored to its original fertility, we have abundant evidence. All that is necessary, is to cultivate the soil more thoroughly, under-drain where it is wet, sow less grain and more clover and grass, keep more stock, and make more and richer manure….

American agriculture is in a transition state. In the older-settled sections of the country there is much land that has been exhausted of its original fertility. Here the old system of farming, which was simply to raise all the grain that the land would produce, is no longer profitable. But yet some farmers, with that aversion to change for which they are everywhere proverbial, are slow to adopt an intelligent system of rotation and manuring, and cling to their old ways.6

Kennedy’s account shows that the alleged defects of at least "some" U.S. farmers were identical to those ascribed to their Lower Canadian counterparts. These defects, common to both countries, included poor fertilization, poor drainage, and inadequate rotation of crops; insufficient livestock; and sowing too much land with a single crop. The same “ingrained conservatism” Jones attributed to French-Canadian farmers Kennedy bestowed upon their U.S. colleagues. But where Jones made this conservatism a national trait of the French-Canadians, Kennedy attributes it to the occupation of the farmer. Clinging to old ways is, for him, an occupational hazard. He thought that farmers “everywhere” were averse to change.

Whereas the authors of the 1850 Canadian report, and latter-day scholars like Jones, fretted over the problem of the “ingrained" traits of the French-Canadian farmer, Kennedy pinned his hopes on a younger, can-do generation. “We must look to the intelligent young men of our country for any great improvement in its agriculture,” Kennedy writes. “Our young men are beginning to realize that agriculture is worthy [of] their highest ambition, and that in no other pursuit will intelligent labor meet with a surer reward.”

Same Facts – Different Frame

Nineteenth-century North American farming, in the U.S. and Canada alike, appears to have been less scientific than the cream of European agriculture. To explain the differences between the two continents, Kennedy observes that there was an abundance of cheap land on the western side of the Atlantic, but a shortage of farm labor. In much of Europe, every cultivable scrap had been cultivated long ago, and a dense population meant plenty of available farm workers. Geography and demography explain why North American farming was different from the European brand. North American farmers of the 19th c. had not yet thought to learn the best methods available in Europe because it hadn’t been in their interest to do so.

Kennedy's report on U.S. Agriculture (1864)

While official reports from the period suggest that the same deficiencies dogged both U.S. and French-Canadian farmers, the frame put around the former was optimistic, while observers depicted the outlook for the latter as decidedly glum. 

In contrast to the discourse around the habitants, the defects in U.S. farming were not personalized; modern farming was seen as a set of practices, more or less interchangeable from one farm to another, that a younger generation could learn as the need arose. Kennedy’s report sees U.S. farmers as rational actors who will respond effectively as prompted by self-interest. 

On the other hand, observers cast French-Canadian farmers as inertial, influenced to move, if at all, only from the outside. For Kennedy, solutions to the problems of U.S. farming were technical, while, for generations, discussions of French-Canadian agriculture tended to become sociological, for instance Jones's talk about "nationalism" and allegedly "ingrained" traits. Elites pondered not only a change in French-Canadian farming practices, but in the French-Canadians themselves. 

Were 19th century French-Canadians bad farmers? Perhaps by world-class standards but not by North American ones. Especially in the eastern parts of North America, Canadian and U.S. methods of farming, and the limitations of those methods, were not much different from one another. A similar set of facts prevailed in many rural regions of North America, but the frame elites and subsequent observers placed around those facts, depending on whether they were looking at U.S. or at Québec farmers, was markedly different.

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Much more in my book:
A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans
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Notes

1. Gerard J. Brault, The French-Canadian Heritage in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 52.

2. Robert Leslie Jones, "French-Canadian Agriculture in the St. Lawrence Valley, 1815-1850," Agricultural History 16, no. 3 (1942): 145-46.

3. Jones, 148.

4. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, Volume 9, Issue 2, 1850, Appendix T.T.

5. Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of The Eighth Census, Under The Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864).

6. Kennedy, x.

In Search of a Community’s First Franco-American School

I was travelling around New England – in a cold rain mostly – talking about my book A Distinct Alien Race. It was the final day of April 2019 and I woke up at 5:45 A.M. sharp and drove an hour to Brunswick, Maine to do an interview with WCME radio. I was through with the interview before 9 A.M. and found myself with a day to kill before a book signing at Brunswick’s Gulf of Maine Books at 7:00 P.M. But it’s easy to bide my time in Brunswick, since I always have research to do on the Franco-American community there.

Former Convent on Oak St. Brunswick, Maine

For years I’ve been curious about a Brunswick house, 12 Oak Street, once a small convent. On that same property was the first St. John’s School, the Franco-American parochial school my grandfather and his siblings attended. I have seen a fading photo or two of a clapboard building known locally as “the Little School,” located behind the brick convent. Per the U.S. Census, in 1900 my grandfather, then 6 years old, lived with his family at 24 Oak Street, just down the street from the school. That year, his two older brothers Geoffrey and Ludger attended the Little School.  

A 1927 book commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brunswick’s St. John’s parish asserts that the school was a project of Father J.-B. Sekenger, the community’s third pastor who arrived in town in September 1892. The priest’s first concern was to establish a proper parochial school and he contacted an order of nuns known as la Congrégation des Dames de Sion which had directed parish schools in Lewiston and Auburn, Maine. On September 11, 1894, eight nuns of this order arrived at the train station in Brunswick, taking up residence at the small brick convent. A hangar located in the back of the convent was transformed into a schoolroom. 

There had been talk of a "French school" as far back as 1883 ("French School," Brunswick Telegraph, June 29, 1883), and lay teachers were employed before the nuns' arrival. But the Little School was the town's first, dedicated parochial school, with resident nuns as teachers.  

The convent and the hangar-turned-schoolhouse still exist. During my recent visit to the town, I managed to find and photograph the former school, now dilapidated. The photos below show the school, with the pupils arranged in front of it, circa 1890-1900 (photo courtesy of the Pejepscot Historical Society) and then the building's current state.

The 1927 commemorative book claims that the former Little School became a garage after the parish built a new school, in use by 1913. The former convent, says the 1927 book, became the residence of A. Tondreau, one of the most prosperous Franco-Americans of Brunswick.

Using publicly available county real estate records, now digitized and online, I was able to trace the history of the property at 12 Oak Street that contained the convent and the school, as well as the history of this street where my grandfather grew up.

The property that became Oak Street was once owned by Hon. Charles J. Gilman (1824-1901) and his wife Alice McKeen Dunlap Gilman, a granddaughter of Joseph McKeen the first President of Bowdoin College. Charles Gilman was a lawyer and politician. In the 1850s, he served in the Maine legislature and in the U.S. Congress. He was a delegate to the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for President. It appears that the property owned by the Gilmans had come through Alice Gilman’s Dunlap family. 

An 1871 map of Brunswick shows that Oak Street did not yet exist. The map marks clearly the Gilman property. In 1889, Alice Gilman sold a large plot of land to Albert S. Rines of Portland, Maine. The red rectangle I placed on the 1871 map marks the property Rines purchased, as far as I can tell from its description in the deed.

Detail from 1871 Map of Brunswick
Red rectangle marks approximate range of Rines property
including future Oak St. 

Over the next several years, Rines sold bits of this property, lot by lot, much of it to Franco-Americans, who were expanding out of the company-owned tenements in this period. Those who could afford to buy property had started to occupy the northwest corner of downtown Brunswick, per an 1885 article in the local newspaper, the Brunswick Telegraph. The Rines lots were in this part of the town. Circa 1890, a new road, called Oak Street, was cut through property Rines had purchased from the Gilman family. By 1900, Oak Street was 100% Franco-American.

In 1890, a prominent Franco-American known as Alexis Sainte-Marie purchased one of the lots belonging to Rines on Oak Street. Per the 1880 U.S. Census, Sainte-Marie was a baker, apparently working on his own account, a rarity in a time when the bulk of the Franco-American workers toiled in the nearby Cabot textile mill. Sainte-Marie also operated a small boarding house in town, one of the few that the local paper writing in 1886 found to be in good shape, in a neighborhood that was in very poor condition at that time. Sadly, the Sainte-Marie family lost two children in the 1886 diphtheria outbreak caused by the poor conditions in the Franco-American neighborhood.

In 1893, Sainte-Marie sold the property on Oak Street to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland, under an 1887 Maine law known as the Corporation Sole. That law made all Catholic Church property in the state the sole possession of Maine’s ranking Bishop. Around the same time, a woman named Alphonsine Drapeau sold a property adjacent to Sainte-Marie’s to the Catholic bishop. I believe that these two properties, those sold by Sainte-Marie and Drapeau to the Church, are the property now demarcated as 12 Oak Street.

Real estate websites claim that the brick building at this address dates to 1889, but that is probably a year or two too early. Quite often, Maine's 19th c. deeds convey the "buildings thereon" when property is transferred, if there are buildings on the property in question. Since there are no buildings mentioned in the deed rendering the property from Rines to Sainte-Marie, I think it likely that Franco-American labor built both the brick convent and the wooden “hangar” that became the Little School. I believe that the brick convent was probably built for the purpose it first served, and was constructed right after Sainte-Marie purchased the property in 1890. It dates from the early 1890s, when another large brick structure in the town was built: the “new” Cabot Mill that still stands today as Fort Andross.

A local newspaper report of 1885 mentions that the Franco-Americans were building structures cooperatively in this part of the town. I surmise that Sainte-Marie bought this property on behalf of the Franco-American residents with the intention of building the convent and school there.  

After the nuns took possession of the convent, the Little School operated there for nearly 20 years. A 1901 map of Brunswick has the convent and school clearly labelled, ensconced at 12 Oak Street. The 1910 U.S. census lists the nuns who lived at 12 Oak Street and notes that nine of the eleven nuns residing there were teachers.

Detail from 1901 Map of Brunswick
Oak Street with convent and school indicated

When a new parochial school was built by 1913, Adjutor Tondreau purchased the property at 12 Oak Street from the Catholic Church. Tondreau, with his brother Omer, made a good living as proprietors of a local grocery store. They eventually purchased a block on Brunswick’s Maine Street that still bears their name. The block has a plaque commemorating the Tondreau brothers, born in Québec, who had made good in les États.

Tondreau Block, Maine Street, Brunswick
(Photo by Robby Virus)

With the 1913 sale, the former convent became a comfortable residence for a family, the former school serving as their garage. Per the historical plaque on the Tondreau Block, the brothers were famous for being among the first in the region to deliver groceries by truck, and I think it likely that, when not in use, the truck was parked in what had been the Little School.

The Tondreau family owned 12 Oak Street until 1995. The property, with the former convent divided into apartments, has had three owners since. Do the current owners or tenants know that the house was once the residence of pious nuns? Do they know that a generation or two of French-speaking students once filed into the school in their backyard, today a rundown outbuilding, resembling a barn, barely visible from Oak Street? There is no plaque or other recognition of the importance of these structures, most likely built by Franco-American hands. It was here, at this little school that my grandfather learned to read and write, and to speak English, since my grandfathers spoke French at home in Maine and learned their English in school.

To the town’s credit, there is some recognition there of the era of the Franco-Americans, who were quite visible and audible in Brunswick for about 100 years, from the mid-19th through the mid-20th century. There is a plaque near the pedestrian bridge that connects Brunswick with Topsham; there is the plaque on the Tondreau Block, and a photo in the former mill. But to the best of my knowledge and research, 12 Oak Street is one of the only remaining properties built by Franco-Americans to serve their community, when French was the language of this neighborhood – when it was the French Quarter where my grandparents lived and where my father was born.