Upper Canadian Loyalism: What the textbooks tell

Upper Canadian Loyalism: what the textbooks tell DENNIS DUFFY With the French Canadians, the loyalists form indisputably the most basic historical ingredient of Canadian nationhood.I Equally as indisputable is the existence of a body of mythology ·around those losers of the U.S. Civil War I. Mythology is not used here as a synonym for lies, propaganda or pieties; rather the term refers to a body of symbols and associations that coheres around a set of historical events and comes to take on a life of its own. In time, it is possible for those symbols and associations to interact among themselves in such a way that the public consciousness will refashion the historical events to suit the dynamics of the symbolic structure. For example, the actual nature of the Republican Roman aristocracy has for some time been of less significance in our culture than the amalgam of associations with plain living and high acting fostered by artistic mythmakers from Livy to David. Those Republican heroes who so inspired French and American revolutionaries alike cannot be seen from an "objective" viewpoint alone; any treatment of them as historical figures must also take into account their histories as symbols. The Loyalist myth in our culture stands as a typical product of the Enlightenment: a displacement of a religious pattern of experience into secular terminologies which place the attainment of the good in terms of mundane, rather than other-worldly experience. As the writings of JoAnn Fellows and Murray Barkley2 make clear, the structure of the Loyalist myth stresses a pattern of defeat, exile, hardship and struggle followed by future triumph in a righteous cau$e. It resembles the configuration of the withdrawal and return pattern familiar enough in accounts of heroes, historic and mythical.3 The myth touches us in other ways as well, through such features as the Journal ofCanadian Studies upper-class standing of the Loyalists and the steadfastness of their allegiance to the Crown. But it is the essentials of the myth which most impress its hearers: the intertwining of the tragedy of the exilic experience (Old Testament) with the vision of triumph so central to the Western experience , sacred and secular. Such a pattern of experience can then be flexible enough to incorporate two widely-divergent sets of feelings, those associated with rejection , betrayal and suffering (the sort of nationalist myths most closely associated with irredentist movements), and those common to triumph and vindication (which many such "loser" myths have to postpone to a future state of bliss). A prosperous Canada is that Loyalist future, now. The Loyalists can thus appear as persecuted by a vindictive enemy, betrayed by an indifferent government and finally doomed to struggle for bare necessities in a barren land (the "Hungry Year" in Upper Canada). They can also shine forth as the makers of a moral and political entity of some worth and the saving remnant who wisely rejected doctrines and practices which could end only in social unrest and dissolution (a point most frequently made when the U.S. seems to be enduring a crisis from which Canada is exempt). As Carl Berger has amply shown, early postConfederation Canada saw the Loyalist myth brandished in direct proportion to the need for asserting Nationalist aims, especially when they could be put forward as assuring Canada her rightful place within the Empire.4 This employment of the myth in the service of novel cultural assertions demonstrates its flexibility. Part of that suppleness may lie in its assimilative powers. For example, the early history of Upper Canada is generally viewed as interchangeable with Loyalism . "Late Loyalism" and subsequent waves of land-hungry pioneers had diluted the original arrivals, but the War of 1812 became fixed in the Loyalist myth as the visible sign of vindication and therefore as the proof of the Loyalists' claim to represent the essence of Upper Canada. Egerton Ryerson's great, loose, baggy monster of a compendium, The American Loyalists (1880), includes the War of 1812 within its purview. A repository of the myth rather than an historical 17 work, it offers what is pretty nearly a conspiracy theory of the American Revolution, and is itself firmly within the...