Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion 1812–40 (review)

In the nineteenth century the Eastern Townships, the region south of the St Lawrence River and north of the American border, was geographically part of Quebec, but until the demographic victory of the French Canadians in the latter part of the nineteenth century it remained culturally distinctive. In several books and a vast number of articles Jack Little has explored the history of the Eastern Townships, and in Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion 1812–1840 he traces how people in the region responded to the War of 1812 and the Rebellions of 1837–8. Most of the immigrants to the southern heartland of the Eastern Townships came from south of the border and the region was part of the northern frontier of New England settlement – a classic borderland. Little uses the borderlands approach cautiously and effectively. Its main advantage, he points out, is that 'it shifts the focus of attention from the central state to local communities as active agents in history' (7), but he is critical of those borderland historians who overemphasize the common features of contiguous societies and reduce the border to an artificial line in social space that has no meaning. As Little shows, during the War of 1812 most of the American-born settlers in the Eastern Townships rejected allegiance to their country of birth, and a substantial number served in Eastern Townships militia and volunteer units. Although they were undoubtedly motivated by a strong sense of local identity rather than any broader imperial loyalty, and close border ties persisted after the War of 1812, by the time that the Rebellion of 1837 broke out, the inhabitants of the Eastern Townships had developed a strong sense of regional identity 'that was quite distinct from that on the other side of the border' (56). In short, the region was no longer a borderland in any meaningful sense, although it had not completed the transformation from a society whose political and social values were essentially American to one that defined itself as British Canadian.

The rebellions of 1837–8 were important in that transformation. Initially the patriote movement had widespread support among the rural population of the Eastern Townships. In his meticulously researched study Little shows just how widespread it was. What then prevented the Eastern Townships from supporting the rebellions? Little's answer is that the majority were frightened into supporting the colonial administration because of their minority status in a French-Canadian nationalist republic. Although he blames 'the paradoxical role that Papineau's rather conservative and intransigent ethnic nationalism played in alienating what might have been a powerful source of support' (106), he insists that his study of the Eastern Townships undermines Durham's argument that tensions between the two major linguistic groups lay at the root of the Lower Canadian rebellion. But does it really? The majority of the reformers in the Eastern Townships certainly did want to put an end to the selective distribution of patronage to a small British elite and they did want greater local control over their own affairs. But these were objectives that could have been achieved without rebellion – a rebellion that only a small minority of the population of the Eastern Townships supported. Little stresses the key role in drumming up anti-francophone sentiment played by the constitutionalist press. But they did not have to invent the threat posed to the long-term survival of the English-speaking population if the imperial government had simply given in to all the patriotes' demands. Ironically in the long run there was really no future for the Eastern Townships as an English-speaking enclave, even within a Quebec that remained an integral part of a Canada with an English-speaking majority. How much more quickly would this region have lost its distinctive character within a French-Canadian dominated colony or an independent republic? The anti-colonial...