Planters, Paupers, and Pioneers - Lucille H. Campey The English in Canada

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and sailors, some of whom were of Irish descent, and tradesmen who worked in wide-ranging occupations.11 They were brought out by Governor Edward Cornwallis in 1749 to build the new capital, but the extremely tough conditions prompted many to leave.12 Around 1,500 or so of the hardiest remained and founded the town, as was intended, but they were soon joined by large numbers of merchants and other settlers from New England who had correctly anticipated Halifax’s potential as a future economic hub. Although there was much conflict between the immigrants from England and New England initially, both groups eventually came to live in harmony, as they shared common economic and political aspirations.

      The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had immediately sent an Anglican minister, together with funding to build St. Paul’s Anglican Church, one of the first Protestant places of worship in British North America. A school and hospital were hastily constructed and a site was chosen for the marketplace. By 1765 the Reverend John Breyton could report that the “Church of England is in a flourishing state. St. Paul’s is furnished in a most elegant manner and harmony prevails.”13 The church’s congregation of 1,300 symbolized the town’s strong English presence, despite growing rivalry from the Congregationalists, of New England origin, who had also built their own church by this time.

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      St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, erected in 1750. Its architectural plans were based on the design of St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, in London, which was created by James Gibbs, a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren. With the arrival of Charles Inglis in 1787 as the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia, St. Paul’s was made a cathedral and continued as such until 1865.

      Halifax attracted many Loyalists and, after the Napoleonic Wars ended, immigrants from Britain. Notable were the West Country arrivals who came in a short-lived influx from 1817 to 1819. Devon ancestry would be claimed later by a number of Halifax residents, including Francis Paulin, whose ancestors came from Jacobstone; Florence Edwards, whose father had been a carpenter in Barnstable; Thomas Maynard, who was descended from “a gentleman born at Tavistock”; and John Bond, whose father was born near Torquay.14 When John MacGregor visited Halifax in 1828, he concluded that “the style of living, the hours of entertainment and the fashions are the same as in England as were their ‘amusements’ — such as picnics, amateur theatricals, riding, shooting and fishing.”15 But eleven years earlier Lord Dalhousie had thought that Halifax was still “in its infancy.” He was shocked to find a town of around ten thousand people in which “there is not a bookseller’s shop.” He immediately authorized funds for a library at the military garrison, having previously “suggested to the officers the great comfort and advantages”16 that might result from it.

      Shortly after establishing Halifax’s population in 1749, the British government had sought a second source of settlers.17 Up to 2,700 so-called “Foreign Protestants,” chiefly Germans, Swiss, and French Huguenots, were recruited from Europe between 1750 and 1752 and they, too, received a free passage, land, and a year’s subsistence. However, because of difficulties in obtaining suitable sites, most remained in Halifax, but around 1,450 (mainly German immigrants) were moved to a location fifty miles west of Halifax, where they founded the town of Lunenburg.

      Despite an early riot sparked off by grievances over land allotments and later raids by Native people who were being encouraged by the French authorities at Louisburg to cause trouble, the settlers flourished.18

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      Since they immediately transferred their religious affiliation from Lutheranism to Anglicanism, the new Lunenburg arrivals gave the Church of England’s mission in Nova Scotia a terrific boost (see Map 6). By 1845 the Anglican minister, sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Lunenburg County, could take pride in the four Anglican churches, capable of holding 1,900 people, and ten outlying preaching stations.19 When Lord Dalhousie visited in 1817, he noticed that people still spoke their native language: “All here is German, scarcely do they speak English intelligibly. Agriculture is their only pursuit, they are not wealthy, but live very frugally and are all comfortable … there never has yet been a pauper maintained by the parish.” However, he was less approving of nearby Mahone Bay, with its “miserable farms, all in patches, raising potatoes and hay for the Halifax market.”20 Here, too, a committed Anglican minister would deal with the religious needs of its mainly German population, travelling to the various preaching stations which were sometimes twenty miles distant, including the one at Mahone Bay, to the north of Lunenburg town, and the one at New Dublin (now Dublin Shore), just south of it.21

      Meanwhile, back in 1755, Britain’s continuing hostilities with France were causing it to revise its military strategy in Nova Scotia. Acadians were now regarded as potential accomplices of the French, and the British solution to this threat was immediate and brutal. The entire Acadian population was deported in 1755, and a third group of land-hungry New Englanders was brought in to take their place.22 The expulsion certainly undermined French power and fighting ability in the region, but the policy was exceedingly inhumane for the people who were displaced. Civilized behaviour was thrown aside, and this terrible, barbaric act would continue to haunt the British for many years.

      Launching a generously funded emigration scheme, the government recruited eight thousand New Englanders who mainly originated from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — areas where good agricultural land was in short supply. Arriving between 1759 and 1762, they came in large family groups and sometimes as entire communities, with farmers settling mainly on the former Acadian lands in the Annapolis Valley, and fishermen along the southwestern coastline.23 The province’s fertile acreages also attracted the attention of highranking officials and politicians. After all, they had the easiest access to the choicest land. John Perceval (second Earl of Egmont), first Lord of the Admiralty and a prominent politician, helped himself to several thousand acres in Nova Scotia and East Florida. He hoped to establish a mansion house, park, and castle on his twenty-two-thousand-acre estate at Egmont Harbour, just east of Halifax, but his silly notions of creating a fiefdom in Nova Scotia bore little relevance to the needs of the province or its prospective settlers.24

      Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the Colonies from 1772, grabbed forty thousand acres of land in the same area for himself, although he at least intended to find tenants to work his land:

      I daresay that your lordship is acquainted with the method practised by proprietors of great territories in the northern district of North America; they lay out their tracts in several hundred lots, ensure some of them are in a favourable place for themselves and then let every 3rd or 4th lot by lease to tenants at a certain rent per annum.25

      Ten other prominent people, who included Halifax merchants, a former governor, and a naval commander, claimed tracts of land near to Lord Egmont’s property in Nova Scotia, although few made any serious attempt to recruit settlers or provide funds for commercial development.

      Being creatures of the New World, New Englanders refused to have anything to do with European-style leaseholds and insisted on having freeholds. While these aspirations were met, many were disappointed both with the quality of the land they received and the Nova Scotia government’s unwillingness to tolerate a strong local democracy. They became dissatisfied and possibly half of the new arrivals left within a few years of the termination of subsidies. Few had brought much capital with them, and, as a consequence, new communities progressed very slowly. With the great Loyalist influx of the mid-1780s, thousands more Americans came to the province. Many had English ancestry and were drawn mainly from New York and New Jersey. But, unlike the Planters before them who simply took over Acadian farms, they often had the backbreaking task of clearing vast wildernesses, and, feeling dispirited, many left. Like the New Englanders, they, too,

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