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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