Читать книгу Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - Oscar Douglas Skelton - Страница 7

The Peopling of New France—An Outpost of the Faith—A Soldier of France—The Laurier Stock—The Habitant—New France and British Policy—Charles Laurier, Inventor—Carolus and Marcelle Laurier—Birth of Wilfrid Laurier—Boyhood in St. Lin—An English Schooling—L'Assomption College—Student at Law—Early Partnerships—The Eastern Townships—A Happy Marriage.

WILFRID LAURIER was born at St. Lin, a little village on the Laurentian plain north of Montreal, on November 20, 1841. Exactly two hundred years earlier his first Canadian ancestor had fared forth from Normandy, a member of the little band of pioneers who had undertaken to plant an outpost of France and the Faith on the Iroquois-harried island of Montreal. For eight generations his forefathers took their part in the unending task of subduing the Laurentian wilderness. Striking deep roots in Canadian soil, shaping and shaped by the new ways and new interests of the colony, they worked, like thousands of their compatriots, for the most part in obscurity and silence. Then at last the sound and sturdy stock found expression. We cannot understand Wilfrid Laurier, his character, temperament, viewpoint, his problems, limitations, achievements, unless we bear in mind those two centuries of life and work in the Canada which had become his kinsmen's only home.

France had entered late into the race for overseas possessions. The wars of religion, entanglements in Europe, court intrigues, had occupied the whole interest of her rulers. When at last, in the seventeenth century, with a measure of unity attained at home, France had brief leisure to dream of New-World empire, there seemed little place left in the sun. Spaniards and Portuguese, English and Dutch, were staking out the lands of sun and gold. French adventurers found a footing in India and Florida and Brazil, but for the most part they followed the track of Breton fishermen to the fogs and furs of the St. Lawrence. In 1608, a year after the London Company had founded, in the marshes of Jamestown, the first enduring English settlement in the South, Champlain founded, on the rock of Quebec, the first enduring French settlement in the North. For all Champlain's courage and persistence, it grew but slowly. The weary and perilous voyage in crude and comfortless craft barred all but the most courageous or the most despairing. There was no gold to lure. The fur-trade was monopolized by the trading companies to which in turn kingly favour inclined. It was a task of years to clear an opening in the dense forests, and the little settlement planted in a vast fertile continent was long dependent for food and stores on the yearly ships from France. The Iroquois lurked at the gate. Winter and scurvy and brandy played havoc with men who would not learn the country's ways. If New France was to become more than a fur-trader's post, some other power was needed to drive or draw men forth.

That power was religion. In the English settlements to the south, it was religion more than any other factor that impelled men to leave the land of their birth and seek homes overseas. Men who could not find in England freedom to worship as their conscience dictated, or power to make others worship as they themselves pleased—Puritans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and, in Long Parliament days, Episcopalians—formed the backbone of the settlements on the Atlantic coast, and gave the young colonies their fateful bias toward self-government.

In New France it was not the discontent of a religious minority that sent men and women overseas. This solution of France's colonizing problem had been definitely rejected. France, like England, had its dissenters: there were in Europe no more resolute or enterprising men, no better stuff for the building of a new state, than the Huguenots. But they were not allowed to find an outlet in America, under the flag of France. For years advisers of the court, lay and cleric, urged that New France should be saved from the evil of a divided faith which had brought old France to the verge of ruin, and that the simplest way to avoid conflict was to bar the Huguenot. Insistent pressure and the flaring out again of Huguenot revolt, brought Richelieu to yield, and in the charter granted the Hundred Associates trading company, in 1627, all Huguenots and foreigners were forbidden to enter the colony. The discontented minority who might have emigrated to New France and who eventually were exiled from France to build up her rivals, were not allowed to grapple with the task. The contented majority for whom the colony was reserved had little wish to go.

Yet in another way than in the English colonies religion was destined to provide the impelling force. There were among the Catholics of France men and women of burning zeal, who felt a call to bring the Indians to Christ. While English settlers with their families were flocking to New England and Virginia, seeking to better themselves both here and hereafter, in New France martyr priests and devoted nuns were facing endless perils and privations in the hope of winning savage souls. There are no more glorious pages in the annals of missions than those which record the womanly tenderness and practical efficiency of Jeanne Mance and Marguerite Bourgeoys and Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, or the devotion of Franciscan and Jesuit fathers, Le Caron and Dablon, Lalemant and Brébeuf, Le Jeune and Massé and Jogues, following the shifting, shiftless Montagnais through filth and famine, labouring patient years in the great Huron villages of what is now western Ontario, or braving the Iroquois in their innermost strongholds, only too often crowning a life of service by martyrdom under the scalping-knife or at the stake.

The reports or Relations in which each year the Jesuits recorded their efforts, fired the imagination of pious men and women throughout France. Not least they stirred one extraordinary group of men and women, in whom mystic piety, hard-headed grasp of practical affairs and unquestioning courage were strangely mingled, to a resolve to plant the Cross far toward the heart of the new land. Jerôme le Royer de la Dauversière, tax-gatherer of Anjou; Jean Jacques Olier, Paris abbé and later founder of the Order of St. Sulpice; Pierre Chevrier, Baron de Fancamp; Mme. de Bullion, as pious as she was rich; Mlle. Jeanne Mance, honoured of all Canadian nurses who have followed in her footsteps, and Paul de Chomedy, Sieur de Maisonneuve, Christian gentleman, whose simple faith had withstood contact with soldiers and with heretics, were only the more notable of the associates who thus came together to found the Society of Our Lady of Montreal. Their aim was to found a mission outpost on the island of Montreal, which lay at the junction of the two great Indian waterways, the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, and was famed through all North America as a rendezvous. Here priests were to minister to the spiritual needs of such savages as could be made to halt and heed; nursing sisters were to care for the sick and the aged, and teaching sisters to instruct the young. Funds were raised, a grant of the island secured, soldier colonists selected, and three small vessels equipped. In the summer of 1641 the expedition reached Quebec. Here they found little backing for their rash venture. Governor and Jesuit sought to dissuade them from inevitable and useless sacrifice; it was unwise to scatter forces when the whole white population of Canada was less than three hundred; the island of Montreal was straight in the track of the Iroquois hordes who every year swept up the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa in their relentless hunting of men. But Maisonneuve insisted that to Montreal he would go "if every tree on the island were to be changed to an Iroquois," and in the following spring the undaunted little band took possession.

Among the soldier colonists who followed Maisonneuve there was found Wilfrid Laurier's first known Canadian ancestor. [1] Augustin Hébert was a native of the Norman town of Caen, the birthplace of William the Conqueror. Four years after his coming he married a girl of twenty, Adrienne Du Vivier, daughter of Antoine Du Vivier and Catherine Journé, originally from Carbony, in the province of Laon. Four children were born to them, Paule, Jeanne, Léger, and Ignace. Paule, who died in infancy, was sponsored by M. de Maisonneuve and Mlle. Mance. In August, 1651, Augustin Hébert died of wounds received in an engagement with the Iroquois. Three years later his widow married Robert Le Cavelier. M. de Maisonneuve granted them forty arpents of land near the fort, on condition that the land might be resumed if needed for building, that Adrienne Du Vivier renounced her dowry and her rights in the estate of her first husband, and that they would undertake to bring up the three surviving children of Hébert until they attained their twelfth year. [2]

The vision of Indians flocking peaceably from all the St. Lawrence valley to hear the gospel message faded before the stern reality of Iroquois attack. The Five Nations had vowed to destroy the whole French colony, and particularly the outpost at Montreal. They were then at the height of their power. An unusual capacity for political organization, a shrewd mastery of diplomacy, a grasp of military strategy, a persistence as rare among Indians as their ruthlessness was common, and, not least, ample stores of firearms sold by recklessly profiteering Dutch traders from New Netherlands made the Iroquois the most formidable of all Indian peoples, unquestioned lords from Maine to the Mississippi and from Hudson Bay to Tennessee. Hurons, Neutrals, Eries, Andastes, in turn were exterminated. Only their French foes withstood them. For twenty-seven years (1640-67) the war continued, with only two brief breathing spells. Now great bands of warriors attacked in force; now single braves lurked for days in ambush to catch a Frenchman unawares. The builders of this New Jerusalem, as of the Jerusalem of old, worked in the fields with their weapons by their side. "Not a month of this summer passed," a chronicler recorded, "but the book of the dead was marked in letters of red by the hand of the Iroquois." Maisonneuve and his comrades fought hard, worked hard, prayed hard, and against all chance the little colony survived. Rarely had they strength to take the offensive. One breathing spell came when in 1660 Adam Dollard and his immortal sixteen young comrades, all but two in their twenties, after making their wills, their peace with their Maker, and their last farewells, struck up the Ottawa to meet the oncoming Iroquois, and at the Rapids of the Long Sault, Canada's more glorious Thermopylæ, fought for eight days and nights against seven hundred frantic foes, until arms, water, strength but never courage failed, and one by one the little band had fallen by musket or tomahawk or at the stake.

Exploits such as Dollard's checked the Iroquois, but only a great accession of force to the colonists could subdue them. Fortunately help was at hand. The rulers of France had at last both the will and the power to aid. The young king, Louis XIV, and his great minister, Colbert, were for the moment keenly alive to the possibilities of colonial strength. The Hundred Associates, the trading company which for a generation had misruled New France, lost its charter, and in 1663 the colony came virtually under the king's direct control. Jean Talon, intendant or business manager of the colony, came out to play Colbert's part on the smaller stage. Soldiers and settlers streamed in for a decade, and the Marquis de Tracy, at the head of large French and Canadian forces, laid waste the Iroquois country and brought peace for a score of years.

One of the soldiers in Tracy's crack force, the regiment of Carignan-Salières, raised by the Prince de Carignan in Savoy, tried and hardened in campaigns against the Turk, and brought to Canada under Sieur de Salières, was François Cottineau, dit Champlaurier, the first of the Laurier name in Canada. François Cottineau was born in 1641 at St.-Cloud, near Rochefoucauld, in what was then the province of Angoumois and is now the department of Charente, son, as the records say, of Jean Cottineau, vine-grower, and Jeanne Dupuy. In that day, when family names were still in the making, doubtless some ancestral field of lauriers or oleanders had given a sept of the Cottineaus the additional surname which in time was to become their only one.

The coming of Talon and Tracy assured the permanence of the colony. The little settlement on the island of Montreal shared in the brief outburst of vigour and support. Its religious purpose was not forgotten. Priests of the Order of St. Sulpice took spiritual charge and temporal lordship of the island, not without a bitter feud with the Jesuits which did not soon die. Mlle. Mance still gave to the Hotel Dieu her skill and judgment, and Marguerite Bourgeoys continued the work of teaching which the Congregation de Notre Dame has carried on to this day. But gradually the advantages of the island port for trade, and the rich farming possibilities of the volcanic island soil, led to growth in other directions which soon overshadowed the original activities of the associates of Our Lady of Montreal. Montreal, like all New France, had ceased to be merely a fur-traders' counter and a missionaries' base of operations; it had become for all time a land of settlers and of homes.

For a few brief years the State took unwonted care to stimulate the growth of New France. Officers and men of the Carignan-Salières regiment were induced to settle, Roman-wise, on the imperilled borders, though it is to be feared that more of them turned coureurs de bois, roaming far in the Western wilderness, than remained to till the soil of the Richelieu seigniories. Ship after ship of settlers came, and thrifty efforts were made to save the men of France for cannon fodder in Europe by encouraging early marriage in the colony itself. Hundreds of girls were brought from the old land, and married out of hand to soldier and settler. The quick to wed were rewarded and the tardy punished. The State provided dowries of money or supplies, while in anticipation of Honoré Mercier, Louis XIV offered a pension of three hundred livres to all Canadians who had ten children living and four hundred for families of twelve—girls who had entered any religious order not being counted. Fathers were fined if their sons were not married at twenty or their daughters at sixteen, and marriageable bachelors were forbidden to set out hunting unless they undertook to marry within a fortnight of the arrival of the next matrimonial ship from France. [3] Not even a Colbert could ensure that such drastic and paternal interference would be permanent, but pressure of Church and State and frontier conditions long made marriage at an early age a feature of New France.

This rapid marrying and the steady pushing back of the frontier which went with it, are brought out clearly in the annals of the Hébert and the Cottineau-Laurier families. Thanks to the care with which the parish registers were kept by the church authorities, and the tireless industry with which historians from Abbé Tanguay to M. Massicotte have delved into the records, and thanks also to the fact that immigration from France ceased early, making it possible to trace all the present families to the early stocks, we can follow the branching of these, as of countless other families of New France, without a break through the generations.

Jeanne Hébert, the only surviving daughter of Augustin Hébert and Adrienne Du Vivier, was married in Montreal in 1660, to Jacques Millot, son of Gabriel Millot and Julienne Phelippot; the bride was in her fourteenth year, but the husband, doubtless a newcomer, in his twenty-eighth. They did not quite earn the King's pension, for though they had ten children, not more than seven were living at one time. It was the eldest of these ten children, Madeleine Millot, who in 1677 in her fifteenth year, was married to the soldier of Carignan-Salières, François Cottineau, dit Champlaurier, then approaching thirty-six.

Marriages in those days might be made early, but they were not contracted lightly. The marriage contract of François Cottineau and Madeleine Millot, which is still preserved, reveals with what a multitude of witnesses—kinsmen, neighbours, old regimental officers—the solemn undertaking was made, and with what thrifty and cautious care the future family finances were detailed and guarded. [4]

When the eldest of the four children of François Cottineau-Laurier, fittingly named Jean Baptiste, was married at twenty-six to Catherine Lamoureux, a girl of sixteen, youngest but one of a family of eleven, it was not at Montreal but at St. François in Ile Jésus, to the northeastward, that the marriage was performed. That even Colbert could not mould the people to his will is made clear by the fact that the two daughters of François Cottineau-Laurier did not marry until one was twenty-nine and the other was twenty-four. Jean Baptiste made his home at Lachenaie, across the river from St. François, but at first in the same parish. Here his quiverful of children were born—Jean Baptiste, Marie Catherine, Marie, Agathe, Jacques, Rose, Thérèse, Joseph, Pierre, Marie Anne, and Véronique.

Here it was, in 1742, that Jacques, his second son, at twenty-six, married Agathe Rochon, aged twenty-one, and here for three generations more the family took root.

In every parish from Tadoussac to Montreal the same story of early and fruitful marriage and of steady widening of the bounds of settlement is to be told. All along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the habitants were clearing their deep narrow holdings, winning an acre or two a year from the dense forest. Facing the river-road, the steep-roofed whitewashed houses of logs or field stone, a furlong apart, soon gave the river bank the air of an unending village street. Fur-trader and explorer, missionary and soldier, ventured far into the unknown West; while the English colonists were still clinging to the coast or breaking through the Appalachian barrier, the sons of New France were blazing trails from Texas to Hudson Bay and from the Atlantic to the foothills of the Rockies. Yet the great bulk of the population remained in the St. Lawrence valley, and in that community farming more and more became the mainstay.

Farming methods were crude, but the soil was rich and the habitant hard-working. Save in a rare famine year, he had in his fields abundance of wheat and oats, of corn and rye and the indispensable peas, and of fish and game and wild fruits in the river and forest at his door. Home-brewed ale and, later, home-grown and home-cured tabac canadien helped to pass the long winter nights. Every household was self-sufficient and self-contained. The habitant picked up something of many a trade, and developed a versatility which marks his descendants to this day. From the iron-tipped wooden plough, the wooden harrow and shovel and rake, to the spinning-wheel that stood beside the great open fire-place, the many-colored rug, the homespun linens and étoffe du pays, the wooden dishes, the deerskin moccasin, the knitted tasselled toque and the gay sash, all were his own and his family's handiwork.

The habitant had found comfort. He had not yet found full freedom, though the independent strain in his blood and the democracy of the frontier ensured him much greater liberty than is usually recognized, and there was always the safety-valve of escape to the lawless life of the coureur de bois. In the wider affairs of the colony he had little voice. King and governor and intendant made his laws, with some slight aid from a nominated council; yet his taxes were light, and if he did not make the laws, neither did they greatly circumscribe his daily life. The seigneur counted for more in his eyes than the king, but had only a shadow of the authority wielded by feudal lords in France: the farmer proudly insisted that he was habitant, not censitaire. The Church came closest. The missionary aims of the founders of the colony, the unwearied devotion of the Church's servants, the outstanding ability of some of its servants, notably Bishop Laval—America's first prohibitionist—and the barring of heretics, gave the Church sweeping and for a time unquestioned and ungrudged authority. After Colbert came to office, and throughout the French régime, the State increasingly asserted its power, controlling the Church in matters of tithes, the founding of new orders or communities, appeals from ecclesiastical courts, and many issues of policy, but the Church remained the dominant social influence in the colony.

Already New France had taken on a life and colour of its own. Governors and merchants and soldiers might come and go, but the ways of the colony were little changed. The striking and significant feature of these later years is the cessation of contact with France through immigration. The outburst of colonizing energy under Colbert proved brief. Louis XIV and Louis XV were seeking glory on European battle-fields, and could spare no men for the wilderness. Daring projects of American empire were staked out, but the men needed to hold and develop the vast arc from Montreal to New Orleans did not come. In the seventy years up to 1680 the colony had received at most three thousand immigrants from France; in the eighty years that followed, an incredibly small number came—a number which a distinguished authority, M. Benjamin Sulte, has put as low as one thousand all told. Through all this period France had more than twice the population of the British Isles, but did not send one settler to the New World for the twenty that Britain and Ireland urged and forced to go. In forty years half the Presbyterian population of Ulster sought refuge in the American colonies from British industrial and religious oppression; German, Dutch, Swiss settlers poured in during the eighteenth century by tens of thousands. The numbers of Ulstermen and of Germans coming to the English colonies in a single year exceeded the number of French settlers who crossed the Atlantic in the century and a half from the beginning to the end of the French régime. Of the four or five hundred thousand Huguenots exiled from France more came to the English colonies than Catholic France could spare for her own New-World plantations, and the names of Bowdoin, Faneuil, Revere, Bayard, Jay, Maury, Marion, and many another bear witness of their quality. For all the rapid multiplying of the original stock in New France, it continued to be outnumbered by the English colonies twenty to one.

For New France this cessation of new settlement and the limitation of growth to the natural increase of population, meant isolation and the development of a distinctive, homogeneous community. With each year that passed the men of New France knew less of any country other than the land of their birth. For old France it meant defeat in the struggle for colonial empire, defeat which might be postponed by the bravery and resource of individual leaders, by the firm military organization of the people of New France, and by the disunion of the English colonies, but which could not be averted.

The French régime came to an end a century and a half after Champlain had raised the flag of France on the rock of Quebec. The new rulers were faced at once by the most serious difficulty that had yet beset any colonizing power. Here were nearly eighty thousand Frenchmen and Catholics, firmly rooted in the soil, with ways of life and thought fixed by generations of tradition. What was to be the attitude of their English and Protestant rulers? On the answer to that question hung the future of Canada, and the answer, or rather the answers, that were given shaped the problems and the tasks that in after days faced Wilfrid Laurier and his contemporaries and that in changing forms will face the Canadians of to-morrow.

The solution first adopted was what might have been expected in a time when the right of self-determination had not even become a paper phrase. It was simply to turn New France into another New England, to swamp the old inhabitants by immigration from the colonies to the south and to make over their laws, land tenure, and religion on English models. No little progress had been made in this attempt when the shadow of the American Revolution and the sympathy of soldier governors for the old autocratic régime and for the French-Canadian people about them brought a fateful change in policy. British statesmen determined to build up on the St. Lawrence a bulwark against democracy and a base of operations against the Southern colonies in case of war, by confirming the habitant in his laws, the seigneur in his dues, the priest in his authority. To keep the colony British, the government now sought to prevent it becoming English. The Quebec Act, the "sacred charter" of French-speaking Canada, embodied this new policy. A measure of success followed. Then the unexpected result of the American Revolution in exiling to the St. Lawrence and the St. John tens of thousands of English-speaking settlers made it impossible to keep Canada wholly French, and the hatred for democracy and for all things French which developed during the wars with Napoleon made Englishmen unwilling to let French-speaking Canada rule itself.

The lesson which the statesmen in control in Britain learned from the two revolutions, the American and the French, was not the need of making terms with democracy, but the need of nipping democracy in the bud. Elective assemblies were conceded the people of Lower or French-speaking Canada, and Upper Canada, the newer English-speaking settlements to the west, as they had previously been granted to the old colony of Nova Scotia and the Loyalist settlement of New Brunswick, but beyond this British governments would not go. An all-guiding Colonial Office, a governor who really governed, an appointed, and but for the grace of God an hereditary, upper house which could always block the popular assembly, little cliques of a governing caste in control of administration, a church established and endowed to teach the people respect for authority, long barred the advance of self-government. Then the tide of democracy surging through the world, the constitutional campaigns of Baldwin and Papineau and Howe, the bullets of Mackenzie's and Chenier's men, the abandonment by Britain itself of the protectionist ideal of a self-contained empire, forced reform. This is not the place to repeat the familiar story of that early struggle for self-government. Later it will be necessary to consider what were the results of the half-century of British policy and Canadian development, on the political and party situation, the unity of the provinces, the relations of Church and State, the sentiment of French-Canadian nationalism, the evolution of the colonial status, and the other issues which faced Wilfrid Laurier and his fellow-countrymen as they came to manhood.