Part IV: Religious Encounters

See Part III here.

The invasion was in keeping with recent events outside of the colony, from Lexington and Concord through the capture of Fort Ticonderoga – clearing the Lake Champlain axis – to the Battle of Bunker Hill, all in the spring of 1775. The Continental Congress sought to protect the Thirteen Colonies from armies that would serve as the heavy arm of despotism. While the rebels might, by seizing Quebec, deprive the British of a point of entry and “liberate” Canadians, they would also capitalize on the merchants’ dissatisfaction with the recent implementation of the Quebec Act. The invasion would reveal anti-Catholicism to be a political or more precisely a constitutional concern, rather than a social one.

As Congress courted Canadians – and as Colonel Benedict Arnold advanced against Quebec – General George Washington, the commander-in-chief, forbade the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day within the ranks. The decision was made explicitly so that Catholics would not be so alienated as to turn against Congress’s efforts. In John Tracy Ellis’s view, the prime concerns of security and independence lessened public and often well-entrenched manifestations of an anti-Catholic spirit. It is doubtful that the feelings of Protestant colonists towards Catholicism changed over such a short period. Yet it was all to the colonies’ advantage to alter the terms of the debate. Religious rhetoric was either reformulated to elicit sympathy for the Patriot cause or silenced (as with the long-standing 5 November ritual) according to the immediate, strategic imperatives of the Revolution.[1]

There is little in the diaries and memoirs of American soldiers who served in Quebec that would indicate profound sectarianism. Certainly, there was no immediate hostility; numerous soldiers commented on the kindness and material support of Canadians in the late months of 1775. About 160 locals took up arms for the Patriot cause under Colonel James Livingston, an insurgent from the Montreal area. Colonel Arnold and several others were quick to depict French Canadians as gentle savages: ignorant by virtue of religion, and slaves to British power, but not, in their hearts, enemies to “the cause of liberty.” In a letter to the commander of Quebec, Arnold lamented British efforts “to make innocent Canadians instruments of their cruelty, by instigating them against the Colonies, and oppressing them on their refusing to enforce every oppressive mandate.” The habitants were pawns of British authority and in this, for Arnold, the Quebec Act had likely appeased Canadians and brought together the levers of political and religious oppression. Yet in most parishes there were Canadians who provided aid or expressed support for the American force, showing that the British ploy would not triumph over liberty.[2]

American soldiers discovered French-Canadian culture as well as a form of Catholicism that was very different from the dark, diabolical designs presented to them during the French and Indian War. In some slight way, the minds of the soldiers were opened. At Pointe-aux-Trembles, John Joseph Henry found “a spacious chapel, where the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion were performed with a pomp not seen in our churches, but by a fervency and zeal apparently very pious, which became a severe and additional stroke at early prejudices.” One James Melvin wrote a terse diary, preoccupied with little more than weather, but still stopped to describe the last rites given to a Canadian and, six months later, with evident curiosity, a priest’s ceremonious visit to a dying person. Caleb Haskell of Rhode Island was sincerely religious and, no doubt intrigued, chose to attend Catholic Mass in Beauport on St. Patrick’s Day, 1776. Private Simon Fobes would recollect, many years after the fact, working as a prisoner on a British store ship. He remembered the boatswain losing patience with a Catholic priest leading the burial of crewman on shore, cursing at the “Papist friar” and telling the man “he would hear no more of his ‘Paternoster’.” Fobes himself displayed little hostility in his writings.[3]

For his part, Arnold’s surveyor, John Pierce, when ill, was taken into a Canadian home. “I Slept between two Frenchmen,” he wrote, “it was very odd to hear them at their Devotion.” He recognized the strong religious feelings of the local population and seems to have delighted in exploring this new culture.  In Sainte-Marie, Pierce was “very well entertained” by a French priest; farther down the Chaudière River, he met another clergyman, through whom he witnessed a Catholic baptism. His remarks made Canadians to be gentle and childlike in their secular and religious celebrations. Struck by the ubiquity of crucifixes, Pierce found that “[t]he French . . . Appear to be very ignorant Worshiping their images,” he explained. “In the [aisles] of their mass houses Chapples and Temples they have their Saints Placed as big as the Life which they Bow down to and worship as they Pass them when about their worldly Business.” Following the failed assault at Quebec, Pierce’s language shifted slightly. He considered the “mischief” caused by priests who organized the Canadians against the invaders and worked as British spies.[4]

Throughout, Pierce was representative of his peers in expressing no enmity towards the Catholic population, as opposed to Catholic institutions. Perhaps because they saw in Canadians a yearning for liberty, a people oppressed, or yet because they did not find zealots seeking to destroy American Protestantism, New England’s soldiers did not echo the militant anti-Catholic rhetoric that had surrounded colonial wars and the Quebec Act. They were further cognizant of the need to rally the local population to their cause, much as the Patriots would discard the most virulent religious discourse as an alliance with France was struck in 1778. Motivated by military necessity, Arnold had sworn to protect Catholic clergy and to leave houses of worship undisturbed as he approached the colony’s capital. No doubt, nevertheless, that these soldiers easily associated Catholic power with British tyranny, together stifling the winds of freedom.[5]

In 1776, in lieu of reinforcements, Congress sent three of its own and a Jesuit priest to mollify Canadians. Through Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll, Congress promised freedom of religion and no interference in clergy’s “possession and enjoyment of all their estates,” an unlikely scenario if Canadians were to judge by Boston publications. Carroll, his cousin Father John Carroll, and the printer who followed them to Montreal, Fleury Mesplet, were all French-speakers who might appeal to clergymen and seigneurs. To his wife Abigail, John Adams wrote of Charles Carroll as a Catholic, “yet a warm, a firm, a zealous Supporter of the Rights of America, in whose Cause he has hazarded his all.” “Your Prudence,” Adams added, “will direct you to communicate the Circumstances of the Priest, the Jesuit and the Romish Religion only to such Persons as can judge of the Measure upon large and generous Principles, and will not indiscreetly divulge it.” Secrecy was necessary to prevent backlash at home. In the end, it was a moot point: the commissioners’ efforts failed, in the spring of 1776, as the military situation deteriorated. Lacking reinforcements and fearing the mass arrival of British troops in New York City, American forces retreated from the St. Lawrence valley.[6]

From these forces’ time in the Province in Quebec, it is apparent that Catholicism and anti-Catholicism remained political issues more than cultural ones: there were few Catholics in the Thirteen Colonies, precluding in most areas difficult questions about pluralism and the rights of non-Protestants. If Catholicism were to be a threat, it would come imposed by hostile political forces from above or beyond, making slaves of Americans much as Catholic power in New France had turned its faithful there into ignorant creatures ready to be manipulated into gross outrages. Catholicism was primarily a constitutional problem, or one of public policy. American revolutionaries preoccupied with civil and economic liberties expressed concern over complicity between Anglican or Catholic authority and the Crown, seen in the reign of James II. Thus there was ultimately little contradiction between anger over the Quebec Act and the limited attention given to the culture of Catholicism in a neighbouring province. In any event, from political liberty, religious “enlightenment” might follow in Canada.[7]

To be continued.

In the next installment: The Exigencies of War and Conclusion

[1] John Tracy Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America (Baltimore: Helicon, 1965), 395-96.

[2] “Col. Arnold’s Letters,” diaries and memoirs of Henry Dearborn, Return Jonathan Meigs, Isaac Senter, John Joseph Henry, George Morison, and Abner Stocking, all in Kenneth Roberts, ed., March to Quebec: Journals of the Members of Arnold’s Expedition (New York City: Doubleday, Doran, 1940), 77-84, 89-90, 110, 118, 140, 143, 186, 189, 220-21, 348, 536, 557. See also Gayle K. Brown, “The Impact of the Colonial AntiCatholic Tradition on the Canadian Campaign, 1776-1776,” Journal of Church and State 35, no. 3 (1993): 559-75; Michael P. Gabriel, ed., Quebec During the American Invasion, 1775-1776: The Journal of François Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, and Jenkin Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005).

[3] Henry, James Melvin, Caleb Haskell, and Simon Fobes, in March to Quebec, 361, 443-44, 452-53, 492, 599-600.

[4] Numerous priests refused absolution to Canadians who collaborated with the invaders and later provided information on treasonous activities to a commission of enquiry in 1776. See John Pierce, in March to Quebec, 670-75, 677- 79, 709-10; Cohen, Canada Preserved, 73-74, 89; Gabriel, Quebec During the American Invasion; Brunet, Canadiens après la Conquête, 240-44; on the part played by the Church and individual clergymen, Gustave Lanctot, Canada and the American Revolution, 1774-1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 120-23.

[5] Among the important exceptions is David Wooster, the Puritan general who interfered with Catholic worship in Montreal. See Gabriel, Quebec During the American Invasion, xxxix; Fobes, in March to Quebec, 584; Brown, “Colonial AntiCatholic Tradition,” 567.

[6] Communications with France and Silas Deane’s sending of French officers to America also remained closely-guarded secrets. See Brantz Mayer, ed., Journal of Charles Carroll, 1776 (New York City: New York Times – Arno Press, 1876), 27; Lanctot, Canada and the American Revolution, 127-36; Thomas, “Walker, Thomas (d. 1788)”; John Adams to Abigail Adams, 18 February 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 1, Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed. by C. James Taylor (On-line: Massachusetts Historical Society); Gaines, For Liberty and Glory, 45, 65-66.

[7] John Tracy Ellis estimates their number to be twenty thousand out of 2.5 million subjects in the Thirteen Colonies. See Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, 395.