"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.
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