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| Quebec Act |
American colonists, predisposed by parliamentary legislation over the previous decade to see evil intent in any policy initiative of the British ministry, were joined by the Whig opposition in British Parliament in their vehement protests against the Quebec Act because of its apparent threat to the colonies’ political, religious, and economic interests.
Passed hastily late in a parliamentary session, with all official papers connected to its preparation suppressed, and with the public barred from the most controversial debates, significant colonial and British interests regarded the Quebec Act as part of a larger plot to subvert the English constitution on both sides of the Atlantic.
While the Quebec Act appeared shortly after the Coercive Acts (it was explicitly associated with those acts by American supporters of independence from Great Britain), considerable evidence indicates that most of the act’s basic provisions had been under consideration by imperial officials for nearly a decade.
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Designed to resolve problems of British governance in French-speaking Canada (renamed Quebec after the conquest of 1760), the Quebec Act provided for the establishment of the Catholic Church in the province, preserved existing French civil law alongside English criminal law, maintained the system of seigneurial land tenure, and arranged for all political authority to reside with the governor and an appointed executive council.
A final significant element, the imposition of a western boundary that extended provincial jurisdiction into the Ohio River valley, was added to the draft legislation of the Quebec Act after news of the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773) reached England.
Clearly intended to reconcile the Canadian population to life under British rule, the act has been praised by modern historians for its liberal and tolerant elements. Yet many American colonists, as well as the small British population residing in Quebec, expressed shock and horror over the unprecedented nature of the Quebec Act’s provisions for the hated Catholic Church.
Strident anti-Catholicism explains why, although the Quebec Act nullified the western claims of four American colonies and imposed nonrepresentative government on a vast expanse of the continental interior, the loudest protests against it came from Protestant New England.
There memories of devastating raids by parties of French Canadians and allied Native Americans during intercolonial wars still haunted the collective consciousness. The view that the Quebec Act represented a conspiracy arose principally out of speculation over British Prime Minister Sir Frederick North’s aims in enacting the law.
Suspicious critics on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the content and timing of the Quebec Act as a signal of the North ministry’s intention to restrict the recalcitrant thirteen colonies to the Atlantic seaboard, and to employ a pacified Canadian territory and population as a base for offensive operations in the event of armed conflict with the colonial American population.
Unbeknownst to many of its opponents, strategic considerations regarding Canada were in fact at the heart of the Quebec Act. Imperial policymakers placed great weight on the opinions of Sir Guy Carleton, Quebec’s military governor.
Carleton thought of Quebec in military terms, and considered his key problem to be one of securing the allegiance of the French Catholic majority, especially in the context of increasing instability in the thirteen colonies after 1765.
s recommendations, based on his belief in the social influence of Quebec’s seigneurs and clergy, were intended to insulate the province from the growing radicalism of the thirteen colonies.
The omnibus nature of the Quebec Act meant that it likely offended more colonial Americans and British Whigs than any other single piece of imperial legislation during the decade prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
The American Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in October 1774, determined to insist that Parliament repeal the Quebec Act on the grounds that it constituted a parliamentary effort “by the influence of civil principles and ancient prejudices, to dispose the inhabitants [of Quebec] to act with hostility against the free Protestant colonies, whenever a wicked ministry shall chuse to direct them” (Ammerman, 70).
Opponents of the Quebec Act in Britain went even further, arguing that the Quebec Act subverted the church, law, and constitution of England at one stroke, and warning of the grave consequences of “digging the pit for America into which we ourselves must fall” (Lawson, 135).
Additionally, had the terms of the Quebec Act been followed to the letter, the Canadian habitants might have realized that this ostensibly liberal policy actually placed severe limitations on the traditional exercise of church authority in Quebec, and that it reflected a policy of “gentle but steady and determined anglicization”.
If the Quebec Act’s creators truly believed that in 1774 they could pass such legislation without bothering to consider the broader context of potential reaction to its provisions on both sides of the Atlantic, it would appear to indicate, at best, their astonishing political tone-deafness in the midst of an imperial crisis.
At worst, the Quebec Act could be viewed as a reflection of the North ministry’s desire to permit the appearance of conspiratorial policymaking against constitutional interests on both sides of the Atlantic in order to present a show of force against colonial and domestic opposition. Expressions of suspicion concerning the Quebec Act, emanating in Britain and America, represented more than simply “a stick with which to beat the ministry” (Lawson, 149).
The Quebec Act violated the imperial axiom of the British constitution following the flag, it appeared to repudiate the idea of Protestant ascendancy, and it appeared amidst a number of other political developments that appeared to threaten the constitution at home and throughout the larger empire.
