Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [60]
Beneath the ebb and flow of immigration, however, was another, more corrosive cause for Canada’s slow rate of growth. The British government was losing interest in its colony. England was no longer the depressed country that the sisters had left behind; Britain was finally emerging from its post-Napoleonic doldrums. The puffing, clanking, booming age of the railways had begun, and the mother country was being transformed into the wealthiest nation on earth. Far-sighted capitalists preferred to invest in British coal mines, railways and factories instead of distant and doubtful engineering projects.
A new class had stepped onto the British stage: the industrialists, whose entrepreneurial skills and muscular ambitions made the cities of the Midlands and the north—cities like Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester—hum. These “masters of the new manufacturing machine,” in historian Donald Creighton’s phrase, were men who “sought world markets and the traffic of the Seven Seas.” They were free-traders, with all the contempt for victims of such policies that free traders always display. They had no time for underpopulated colonies—like Upper Canada, the Cape Colony or Australia—that needed British subsidies for defence or administration. They were impatient with Canadian colonists who wouldn’t cut the umbilical cord with the mother country, and who relied on shipping monopolies and tariff preferences to protect their transatlantic trade. These ambitious manufacturers were more interested in the giant market in the United States than in sparsely populated British North America.
At the same time that Britain was turning its back on its North American possessions, tensions were emerging within the colony itself. The interests of the governed were visibly diverging from those of the governors.
The titular ruler of Upper Canada was the lieutenant-governor, a well-born Englishman (usually the possessor of a title, several military honours or at the very least a coat of arms for his carriage) sent by Westminister to Toronto to run the colony’s affairs. The actual governors were his local advisers—the clergymen, officers, officials and landowners of the Family Compact whose idea of government was entirely feudal. Members of this local oligarchy were linked by blood, marriage or at least allegiance to the Church of England. Comfortably ensconced in their impressive stone mansions in Toronto, members of the Family Compact dominated the judiciary, the Executive Council and the Legislative Council (neither of which was elected) and much of the House of Assembly (the elected lower house, which was virtually powerless). They dispensed favours to their friends and directed British policy to their own advantage.
The Traills and the Moodies would have loved to belong to this exclusive élite of families like the Boultons, Jarvises and Powells. They felt connected to them by virtue of their education and background, and they yearned to be recipients of their patronage. Either Thomas Traill or John Dunbar Moodie would have been ecstatic to get his hands on a government job like local land registrar, which gave its holder an income. Thomas Traill was overjoyed when he was appointed a justice of the peace. Even though remuneration was derisory—a small proportion of the fees charged for performing marriages or the fines levied for minor crimes—the office bestowed on its holder a dab of prestige.
However, neither the Moodies nor the Traills had the wherewithal to join the exalted ranks of bigwigs in the colonial capital. Both couples were stuck in the backwoods because that was where they could get free land. Like everybody else who was roughing it in the bush—from rude Yankees to Anglo-Irish gentlefolk, from Irish paupers to Scottish labour-ers—they were the governed. And like the rest of the backwoods settlers in the late 1830s, the sisters and their husbands faced mounting problems: crop failures, a shortage of money, a slow-down in immigration, struggles with inadequate transportation facilities.
A brilliant