Loyalty and Disloyalty in Political Discourse of British North America in Early 19th Century.pdf (original) (raw)

There was a number of concepts of particular importance in the political discourse of British North America in the XIX century. One of them was "loyalty", a category used so frequently and widely that it even became a part of the Canadian national identity. The aim of the proposed study is to reveal what contemporaries understood by "loyalty" and, accordingly, "disloyalty", why it was so important for them and why politicians and intellectuals used this category. For this purpose, the article explores the discourse of participants of two important political debates of the first half of the 19th century: a debate about the bill barring judges from becoming members of the Assembly of Lower Canada in 1808 and the scandal surrounding the publications of William Lyon Mackenzie in the Colonial Advocate in 1826. As a result, it was established that the concept of "loyalty" did not have well-defined semantic content, but it was a strong argument in actual discussions on the authority of the colonial Assemblies and therefore actively used by all their participants and finally acquired absolute value.