750 Chapter XXXI
and other French West Indian colonies. Such men, if not exactly fervent republi-
cans, were no lovers of England either; and their presence, especially in places like
Philadelphia, where they congregated, added fuel to the flame of American politi-
cal agitation. In a larger sense, the famous Cotton Kingdom of the American
South, if it be dated from Eli Whitney’s invention, was born simultaneously with
an increased dread of slave rebellion. The number of known slave revolts in the
United States rapidly rose in the decade of the 1790’s, culminating in the one
called Gabriel’s rebellion in 1800. The heightening of the tempo would seem to
reflect the growth of republicanism, with its demands for “liberty,” among Ameri-
can whites and especially Southern whites. American slaves must also have over-
heard conversations about what had happened in San Domingo. American Ne-
groes, like those of Brazil, or like the serfs of Hungary and Bohemia, were not
wholly impervious to news from the outside world.^5
British North America was in a way as much a product of the American Revo-
lution as was the United States. The Canada Act, passed by the British Parliament
in 1791, was designed, in the words of a Canadian- born historian, as a defense
against both the French and American revolutions.^6 It expressed the idea that the
troubles in the old thirteen colonies had been due to an excess of democracy. The
act created two provinces, Lower and Upper Canada (Quebec and Ontario), with
similar structures of government. Each received an appointed governor, an ap-
pointed upper house which it was hoped might become hereditary, and endow-
ments for an established church. In Lower Canada the British favored the old
French seigneurial land law; and in the development of Upper Canada, in which
éigrés from the United States had settled, they granted land in extensive tracts,
hoping that a good solid landed aristocracy would grow up. Adequate provision
was made also to support the dignity of officers of state. For example, William
Smith, a native of New York and a Yale graduate, who had been chief justice of
New York before the Revolution, went to Canada as a Loyalist, declaring that “all
America was abandoned to democracy.” He became chief justice of the new prov-
ince, where he received a larger salary than the chief justice of the United States.
The same was true for the new office of chief justice of Upper Canada, which still
had practically no population. Upper Canada, though a frontier community, was
deeply conservative, because peopled by refugees from the American Revolution.
In Lower Canada the French were more restless, having no affection for the Brit-
ish authorities; but they lacked sympathy also for the anti- Catholic New England-
ers with whom they had often been at war, and the arrival of some fifty émigré
priests from France, reinforcing the views of the British governor and such Loyal-
5 H. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943), 209–34.
6 J. B. Brebner, North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain
(New Haven and Toronto, 1945), 66–67. See also Mason Wade, The French Canadians (London,
1955), 97–101, and his “Quebec and the French Revolution of 1799: the Missions of Henri Mezière,”
in Canadian Historical Review, X X XI (1950), 345–68. An unpublished dissertation at the University
of Chicago (1950) by H. L. Vernon, “The Impact of the French Revolution on Lower Canada, 1789–
95,” stops short in the middle of the story. There is a good deal of detail in the older works by the
British Canadian, W. Kingsford, History of Canada, 10 vols. (Toronto, 1887–98), VII, 337–454, and
the French Canadian, F. X. Garneau, Histoire du Canada, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1913), II, 431–54.