Revolutionary War veteran Clément Gosselin was not alone. Basile Mignault, too, fought in the ranks of the Continental Army. Both would spend the better part of the post-war period in Canada, although Mignault could claim a more settled existence.

Indeed, while Gosselin travelled as far as Yorktown, where he was injured, his counterpart’s war was essentially over when the Continental Congress adopted its Resolution of Independence. Briefly a lieutenant of the revolutionary army, Mignault chose to remain in the Province of Quebec as a British counter-offensive drove out the occupying force in the spring of 1776. He married, fathered at least nine children, and became a leading figure of Saint-Denis, a middling village on the Richelieu River.

We should not assume, on the basis of the brevity of his military service, that Basile Mignault’s support for the American cause was half-hearted. His Acadian roots—his father had been deported to the Southern Colonies—and his later support for Le Canadien, a newspaper founded to challenge the British governor’s administration, hint at a consistent anti-British or anti-colonial attitude. Several descendants would join the Patriotes in the midst of the Rebellion of 1837.

In fact, the retreat of insurgent forces in 1776 did not mark the end the family’s encounters with the states that would form the Great Republic. In 1828, Mignault crossed the border, visiting Rouses Point at the northeastern tip of New York State, on the shores of Lake Champlain. He readily declared himself a veteran of the Continental Army and sought, with the help of attorney Calvin Averill, to obtain proper compensation for services rendered more than a half-century earlier. Mignault would die several years later, his efforts still unfulfilled. But his many children and grandchildren were ready to take the baton, even if many entered the professions and seem to have done perfectly well for themselves.

Pierre-Marie Mignault, a son, took the lead, not least because he had the capital and status to do so. Basile may have defied the ecclesiastical authorities of his province when joining the revolutionary forces; that did not signal definitive estrangement from the Roman Catholic Church. Pierre became a priest. For more than forty years, he tended to the spiritual needs of Catholics in Chambly, located roughly half-way between Saint-Denis and the international border.

He inherited his father’s interest in the United States. In the 1850s, it was Pierre who led the family’s quest for the funds that Congress apparently still owed them. By then, the parish priest was well-acquainted with New York State and Vermont. As a missionary he travelled widely to celebrate Mass and to provide the sacraments to some of the earliest French-Canadian expatriates—the “advanced guard” of the grande saignée. He helped to organize the first Canadian “national” parish in Burlington, established in 1850, and, after providing valuable services in the United States’ northern dioceses, he obtained from Pope Pius IX the title of apostolic vicar.

The pursuit of cultural and economic capital, or status, in the United States, among members of the Mignault clan survived Pierre’s death in 1868. Pierre-Basile, born to a relative in Worcester, Massachusetts, returned to the “old country” and became a justice of the Canadian Supreme Court. Arthur Mignault practiced medicine in the United States, made a small fortune in pharmaceuticals and, in his native land, helped to found the French-Canadian 22^nd Battalion during the First World War. Evidently, one could embrace the resources offered by the United States without sacrificing an inherited identity or the promise of the homeland.

These cases and many more, from patriarch Basile through his many descendants, help to shed light on an overlooked aspect of French-Canadian encounters with the United States, which stretch far beyond mill life in Fall River, Lowell, and Manchester. From an early date, the Richelieu River–Lake Champlain axis served as a major site of exchange between the Canadiens and their neighbours. The varied dimensions of those exchanges still require a great deal of research, but the rewards will no doubt be numerous.

You can read more about this fascinating family in “Le cas particulier de la famille Mignault: Prospection d’une histoire transnationale” in the latest issue of Quebec Studies. Here is a sneak peek:

It is now apparent that the curious case of Basile Mignault and his descendants, though unique in some respects, invites scrutiny of the standard narrative of Quebec’s relationship with the United States. Studies focused on the “grande saignée” and beginning in the 1860s fail to capture the transnational encounters in such borderlands as the Champlain–Richelieu axis. And just like the border, Canadian and American identities as we know them today took time to crystallize.

After 1840, the dominant political discourse of Canada East (later Quebec) was both anti-revolutionary and anti-republican—it told of an ascendant Roman Catholic faith that could flourish under the perfectly balanced British Constitution. Of course, that narrative relegated to near-insignificance the Patriotes of 1837 and the Patriots of 1775-1776, both groups having derogated from their bishops’ orders. By rescuing from historical margins these individuals and their fascinating story, historians are well placed to re-evaluate national myths, for our current geopolitical definitions deviate substantially from early-nineteenth-century experiences.

For decades, the boundary line along the forty-fifth parallel could hardly have been more artificial. To our narrative of Canadian and American national development, then, we must add a transnational approach that takes these vast sites of exchange into account. After all, these are two countries that share a common history which, if not entirely republican and revolutionary, remains indivisible.

Further Reading

From Archive.org, J.-B.-A. Allaire’s Histoire de la paroisse de Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu (Canada) and J. O. Dion’s Souvenir du Révérend Pierre Marie Migneault.

A biography of Pierre-Marie Mignault in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Mason Wade, “Some Aspects of the Relations of French Canada with the United States,” Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, vol. 23 (1944), 16-39. Full version here.