Loyalty and Disloyalty in Political Discourse of British North America in Early 19th Century.pdf (original) (raw)
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Languages of Loyalism: Patriotism, Nationhood and the State in the 1790s
The English Historical Review, 2003
IF much of the work published during the past decade on British responses to the French Revolution is to be believed, England was swamped during the s with a tidal wave of conservative loyalism focused on the defence of a British ancien régime against revolutionary France. Loyalism, having won an intellectual propaganda war against popular radicalism by superior argument, organization and force of numbers, had appropriated and reconfigured old cultural traditions into a new British conservative identity commanding widespread popular support. To Francophobia, divine-right political theory and High Church Anglican anti-deism were added the apotheosis of the monarchy, a cult of veneration for the British constitution and a reconfiguration of patriotism, for much of the eighteenth century the intellectual property of radicals, as a fiercely defensive nationalist creed. 1 This image of loyalism has been successfully challenged in recent years. The language of patriotism, by no means appropriated by conservative loyalists during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, remained a site of contest and an inspiration for liberals and radicals well into the nineteenth century. Loyalism too, is much more complex than it appears. Though in theory a submissive and inflexible doctrine, in practice loyalism was an empowering movement that gave its followers a public presence and political voice with which to criticize the polity they sought to defend. 2 Loyalist associations and volunteer corps were no more the tame servants of the state than the press, which portrayed many shades of loyal opinion during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Despite the increasing interest displayed by scholars in the loyalist writings of the s and s, much remains unknown about the intellectual and rhetorical strategies employed by loyalist writers, the interplay of old and new modes of political discourse in .
In Defense of Liberty: 17th-Century England and 19th-Century Maritime Political Culture
2019
The history of every country in Europe commences in the reign of fable.2 Membership, the saying goes, has its privileges. For a great many people in 19th century New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, membership in the British Empire brought an important privilege: access to an epic national history stretching back to the Roman Empire. The Maritime British American political class, racked by religious, ethnic, regional discord and lacking disciplined political parties and a common economic and communications system, naturally looked to Britain for historical guidance. Aside from the Loyalists and the Acadians, there was scant local material for the manufacture of tradition. Awareness was not lacking of ancient history nor of the history of continental Europe and the United States, but the touchstone in political language was England. Part of the "British Diaspora" was the transmission of English history into colonial political culture.3 This paper explores this influence in the Maritimes from the 1820s until Confederation. During this period, the civil and religious struggles of 17th century England, although distorted by an idealized philosophy of history and the demands of partisanship, were very much alive in the colonial mind. This attachment to the 1600s was reinforced by political debate, the press, Protestant religion, British immigration, the growth of education and literacy, and voluntary organizations and the flowering of British Victorian historiography. The historical symbols discussed below were not the exclusive property of the political class: merchants, lawyers, journalists and prosperous farmers and artisans. That class, however, was the most vocal and important. The degree to which political rhetoric reflected popular understanding and uses of history must remain somewhat impressionistic. Nonetheless, a number of speculations can be made.
British Journal of Canadian Studies, 2016
In 1849, the conservatives of Montreal engaged in a series of ostensibly disloyal actions: the burning of the Parliament, attacks on the Governor General, and the publication of the Annexation Manifesto. Yet even as they did so they refused to abandon the language of loyalty. Canadian conservatives instead chose to follow the political philosophy of John Locke, endorsing his 'right of revolution'. In so doing, they demonstrated an ideology eerily similar to that of the American Patriots three quarters of a century earlier. They held a conditional conception of loyalty as a social contract between monarch and subject. The British Crown was seen to have broken this contract through its sanctioning of the Rebellion Losses Bill and its implicit support of 'French Domination'. The connection between mother country and colony was now conceived as open to negotiation.
The loyalism that emerges from this book is a debate, rather than a neat definition. Bell’s narrative prevents us from making an easy equivalence between loyalism and conservatism. The Saint John experience reminds us that loyalism was also compatible with dissent, though the language of “loyal subjects” was fiercely contested. And, while Loyalists may have been united by their allegiance to the Crown, sectional rivalries and economic interests also divided them. What this means, then, is not simply that there was more than one way to be a Loyalist, but that the language of loyalism disguised other social, political, and economic cleavages. Loyalist Rebellion reveals the diversity of experiences and range of ideologies behind the term “Loyalist.”
Acadiensis, 1994
THE FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION BY The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History of the first in a projected multi-volume series, Canadian State Trials, will help to focus attention on the hitherto much neglected subject of 18th-century crimes against the state, especially during the period of the American Revolution. l A legal history perspective on New England Planter attitudes towards the American Revolution will also help to counterbalance a recent tendency by historians of Loyalism to reconceptualize the New England Planters as undifferentiated loyal Americans. Chief among these "revisions in need of revising" is J.M. Bumsted's 'loyalty' or 'Canadian Loyalist' thesis,2 against which John Bartlet Brebner's hitherto normative 'neutrality paradigm' must now be set. Indeed, the evidence of the wartime sedition proceedings suggests that disloyalty was far more endemic and widespread than Bumsted and other revisionists who view the New England Planters as proto-Loyalists, are prepared to admit. 3 The colonial government of the time recognized this fact and responded accordingly. The only way in which the loyalty thesis can be sustained is by ignoring the evidence of the sedition proceedings, which suggest that the New England Planters were neither neutral nor loyal. If Brebner's neutrality thesis erred by attempting unsuccessfully to 'acadianize' the New England Planter experience during the American Revolution, then Bumsted's loyalty thesis errs by reconstructing the Loyalist myth in order to accommodate New England Planters of ambiguous loyalty and forced allegiance. Both paradigms stand in need of revising in favour of a 'quasi-loyalty' thesis, 1 This article was occasioned by reading Ernest Clarke and Jim Phillips, "Rebellion and Repression in Nova Scotia in the Era of the American Revolution", in F.
Early Modern Imperial Governance and the Origins of Canadian Political Culture
Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1999
For the last three decades, scholars of Canadian political culture have favoured ideological explanations for state formation with the starting point being the American Revolution and Loyalist resettlement in British North America. This article challenges both the ideological bias and the late eighteenth-century chronology through a reassessment of early modern developments in the British imperial state. It shows that many of the institutional features associated with the state in British North America and later Canada—strong executives and weak assemblies, Crown control of land and natural resources, parliamentary funding of colonial development and accommodation of non-British subjects—were all institutionalized in the imperial state before the American Revolution and before the arrival of significant numbers of ethnically British settlers to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Ideological discourses in the British North American colonies that became Canada, unlike those that be...