In Duty Bound: Men, Women, and the State in Upper Canada, 1783-1841 by J.K. Johnson (review)

A quarter century ago, in his book, Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791-1841, J.K. Johnson endeavoured to provide a “collective biography” of the Upper Canadian elite through a social and demographic analysis of the colony’s elected officials. In his new study of Upper Canadians and the state, he broadens his scope to include colonists of more modest means, and even those who lived in grinding poverty.

Generations of historians have delved into the voluminous correspondence between individual Upper Canadians and the provincial authorities, extracting rich material for specific regional and thematic studies. Yet Johnson recognizes that the thousands of individual petitions drafted by Upper Canadians offer a rare window into colonial society as a whole, both from the perspective of the province’s “ordinary people” and from the officials who governed them.(4) The documents restore some voices of the colony’s silent majority—people who do not appear elsewhere in the historical record. By systematically mining these petitions and the subsequent correspondence, Johnson provides new insight into the workings of the colonial regime and the relationship between Upper Canadians and their government.

It has often been assumed that ordinary settlers had little interaction with the limited state apparatus in Upper Canada, and that government remained largely irrelevant in a dispersed, mostly agricultural colony. Yet, after sifting through samplings of individual colonists’ appeals, Johnson challenges that assumption. He concludes that at some point in their lives, a striking number of Upper Canadians drew on the age-old right of English subjects to petition the Crown—in this instance as individuals requesting everything from land, employment, and schools to pensions, pardons, and poor relief. His comprehensive study explores the ways in which settlers sought to extract tangible benefits from officials who had the power to grant them.

The most common type of petition involved applications for Crown land grants and deeds, reflecting the centrality of agriculture and land speculation to the province. These appeals often entailed years of back-and-forth interaction between individual colonists and the governing regime. To obtain land between 1797 and 1819, for example, applicants needed to journey to the provincial capital (at their own expense) for in-person interviews with the colony’s Executive Council. As Johnson notes, “Here the state and the people were definitely not abstract entities, not at arm’s length from one another, but in the same room together…”(19) Even after satisfying the authorities of their good character, settlers needed to navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth in order to acquire land and, eventually, to have their title confirmed. This required time, money, and persistence. Aspiring land owners had to make multiple trips away from their farms and livelihoods in order to shuttle between various officials, most of whom collected a share of the required—and steadily increasing—fees. After receiving location tickets for their tracts, many never bothered applying for deeds, creating legal problems for their heirs. Indeed, the colonial land system proved so arcane that even the lieutenants governor struggled to comprehend its intricacies.

Despite the raft of regulations, the authorities made exceptions to the rules, or crafted unspoken ones of their own. Several black settlers had their land applications rejected. Johnson, and perhaps the historical records, provide little reasoning for this, beyond the obvious persistence of racial prejudice. Disabled veterans, unable to clear and settle their lands as required by law, failed for years to obtain the patents they needed in order to sell their tracts for badly needed cash. After their individual petitions reached a critical mass, however, the government carved out a loophole and confirmed their titles. At other times, the authorities bent the rules for widows, Loyalist families, and especially the well-connected. Notwithstanding the system’s shortcomings, Johnson concludes that most petitioners who asked for land received it.

Among Johnson’s chief aims is the deflation...