Canada, French
Canadians and Franco-Americans in the Civil War Era (1861-1865)
Preface
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliographical Note
Last modified:
2001-08-13
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Chapter
Three
The
Growth of French America During the Civil War
Most
of the French Canadians who immigrated to America during the Civil
War probably did not come to fight but rather to participate in
a booming economy. Nonetheless, the conflict disrupted French
Canadian immigration. Indeed, during the Civil War the United
States was experiencing rapid but uneven growth. After an initial
slump, the war stimulated the manufacturing sector but retarded
overall growth. Soon, large numbers of women entered the labor
market. Real wages stagnated as inflation and currency devaluation
ate away at income. While the American economy grew as demand
for food, uniforms, blankets, shoes and weapons soared, there
was a slump in other sectors, notably in railway construction,
or in the cotton industry of New England. On the whole, the Civil
War both dislocated immigration and trade.1
The
slowdown in the cotton industry would have serious repercussions
on the fledgling Franco-American communities of New England. Many
immigrants returned to Canada as mills closed or cut wages and
work weeks. During the Civil War, the Canadian dollar was still
on a gold basis. While the American Federal Government printed
millions in greenbacks, the U.S. dollar depreciated in value and
Canadians could buy farms in Michigan at bargain prices. Some
French Canadians did use this opportunity to buy land at twenty
to thirty cents per acre. Nonetheless, the Civil War brought about
a major shift in French Canadian immigration patterns. Before
the War, French Canadians headed to the American Northeast and
to the Midwest in roughly equal proportions. However, after the
conflict, New England and New York State began to attract the
vast majority of immigrants. The rapid industrialization of the
Northeast accounts for part of this shift but it can also be attributed
to the changing nature of French Canadian immigration. Before
1860, an important proportion of immigrants from French Canada
settled on farms in Illinois or Michigan. As the American agricultural
frontier continued to shift Westward towards the Dakotas, Montana
and Kansas, French Canadians who could afford to homestead turned
their sights on the regions of Quebec which had remained largely
untilled, like the Saguenay-Lake St. John or parts of the Laurentians.
The new immigrant was poorer. He could not afford to travel as
far, and was more likely to be seeking industrial work. Hence,
the mills and factories of New England and New York State became
more attractive.2
Between
1860 and 1870, about 100,000 French Canadians settled in the United
States. During this period, the total population of French America
roughly doubled. By 1870, almost half a million Americans were
born in British North America. About a third of these new immigrants
were French Canadians. Most would have arrived between 1863 and
1870. Indeed, many Franco-American communities in New England
experienced negative population growth from 1860 to 1863. In his
memoirs, Rémi Tremblay described how and why many immigrants,
including his family, returned home:
The
industrial crisis deepened in the beginning of the war. The
mills had cut two days out of the work week and everyone expected
that they would soon close outright. Discouraged, many French
Canadian families began to think about returning to the Saint-Lawrence
Valley. Some former farmers decided to make the trip home using
horses that, owing to deflation, could be bought at reasonable
prices. The savings it generated compensated the slowness and
discomfort of this mode of transport. A farmer saved on railway
tickets and arrived in Canada with a horse and wagon [and could
start homesteading immediately].3
Problems
in the cotton industry, temporary passport regulations, a low
U.S. dollar and the fear some immigrants had of being drafted
kept many away, especially during the first half of the War. However,
prosperity in Canada was the main cause for the decrease of French
Canadian immigration. As a general rule, French Canadians would
not leave their homeland if they could earn a decent living there.
Immigration was stimulated by necessity and not by greed. During
the Civil War, the Canadian economy flourished. Tied to the U.
S. by a reciprocity treaty negociated in 1854, British North America
exported huge amounts of food and raw materials to a bulimic American
war economy. In the Atlantic colonies, fish and lumber exports
rose while shipbuilding and smuggling, which were an important
segment of the regional economy, grew substantially as huge profits
could be made in running the Union blockade of the Confederate
States.
However,
by 1863-1864, Canadian wages began to return to their prewar level
as thousands of American draft dodgers, deserters, copperheads
and escaped Confederate POWs began to stream into Canada and drive
wages down. Millions of dollars of depreciated American silver
coins also found their way North, which helped alleviate Canada’s
traditional shortage of hard currency but also stimulated inflation.
For the first time, Canadian banks and businesses were no longer
willing to accept American dollars on par. While the cotton industry
in New England slumped, the American leather and wool industries
flourished in response to the military’s endless demand for shoes,
belts, harnesses, uniforms and blankets. Meanwhile, the war cut
wide swaths through the American labor pool. Correspondingly,
thousands of French Canadians streamed into the U.S. from 1863
to the end of the conflict. One of these, Alfred Bessette (1845-1937)
of St-Grégoire-d’Iberville, Quebec, came to work in New
England’s textile industry in 1865. Orphaned at the age of twelve,
he had come to the United States in order to escape desperate
poverty. Bessette would return to Quebec in 1867 and join the
Congregation of the Holy Cross as Brother André. He would
go on to become Canada’s most important faith healer and was beatified
by Pope John Paul II in 1982. Today, Montreal’s St. Joseph’s Oratory,
North America’s only major urban shrine and an important pilgrimage
site, stands as a testament to Brother André’s intense
spirituality.
In
the Midwest, the Civil War brought employment and prosperity to
Franco-Americans. In Michigan, French Canadians arrived to work
in a lumber industry that was experiencing rapid growth as timber
prices soared. Michigan’s lumber barons preferred French Canadian
labor because it was more skilled and experienced. Other French
Canadians found work in iron and copper mining around Lake Superior
as wartime demand made prices soar. The Michigan mining industry
was so desperate for labor that the various companies got together
and founded the Mining Emigrant Aid Association to recruit workers
in Canada and Great Britain. In June 1863, a Franco-American agent
of the Association, Euchariste Brûlé, arrived in
the Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula with 250 workers he had recruited
in French Canada. However, most of these workers soon left their
mining jobs to work in an industry with which they were better
acquainted: lumber. Some Franco-American entrepreneurs managed
to obtain a piece of the action in Michigan. Félix Rouleau
imported Canadian horses to sell to the Union army. In 1863, Charles
Gariépy, Jean-Baptiste Jolicoeur, Paul Perrault and John
Fournier received government contracts to supply the constructors
of the Michigan Mineral Range State Road with wood.4
Illinois
witnessed important institutional growth during the Civil War
era. In 1861, nuns from the Congrégation de Notre-Dame
founded a convent in Bourbonnais. In 1865, a group of Clerics
of Saint Viator led by Father P. Beaudoin, c.s.v. from Joliette,
Quebec, founded a commercial academy in Bourbonnais that was destined
to become the most important institution of the Viatorians in
America: St. Viator College. Under the auspices of the Clerics
of Saint Viator, the college would play a key role in the fight
to preserve the French language and culture in the American Midwest.
St. Viator College received a university charter from the Illinois
Legislature in 1874. In Chicago, Father Montobrig, a French priest,
founded Notre-Dame parish in 1863. A year later, the parish was
taken over by Father Jacques Côté (1829-1911), who
was its curate for twenty years. Soon, Notre-Dame parish became
a transit point for many of the French Canadian immigrants arriving
in Illinois. By 1865, there were roughly 7000 Franco-Americans
in Chicago.
In
the American Northeast, immigrants began to change their settlement
patterns. As the following table attests, French Canadians headed
increasingly towards Southern New England. As industrialization
progressed in Southern New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island
and Connecticut, immigrants turned away from the farm labor, lumbering,
brickworks, marble quarries and slateworks of Northern New England
and headed for the industrial centers of Southern New England.
Northern New York State remained a popular destination for immigrants.
Between 1860 and 1870, the Franco-American population of New England
nearly tripled and immigration patterns profoundly shifted. New
England and upstate New York became the preferred destinations
for French Canadian immigrants, and Massachusetts replaced Vermont
as the New England state with the largest Franco-American population.
By the early 1860s, railway construction had made Southern New
England much more accessible for French Canadians. Around 1850,
it had taken five weeks for Napoléon Lord to travel by
horse-drawn wagon from Southern Quebec to Lowell, Massachusetts.
In 1864, Philippe Lemay’s family was able make the trip in five
days by riding the various rail lines which now crisscrossed the
American Northeast.5
Distribution
of the Franco-American Population of New England, 1860-18706
State
|
Total
Franco-American population by state in 1860
|
Percent
of total Fr.-American population of New England residing
in each state in 1860
|
Total
Franco-American population by state in 1870
|
% of
total Fr.-American population of New England residing in
each state in 1870
|
Maine
|
7,490
|
20
|
15,100
|
14.6
|
N.
Hampshire
|
1,780
|
4.8
|
7,300
|
7.1
|
Vermont
|
16,580
|
44.4
|
29,000
|
28
|
Massachusetts
|
7,780
|
20.8
|
34,600
|
33.4
|
Rhode
Island
|
1,810
|
4.8
|
8,900
|
8.6
|
Connecticut
|
1,980
|
5.3
|
8,600
|
8.3
|
Total
|
37,420
|
100
|
103,500
|
100
|
During
the war, Franco-American institutions experienced a slow but steady
pace of growth. In New England and New York State, only ten French
Canadian Catholic parishes existed in 1860. Most Franco-Americans
had to attend mass in English in predominantly Irish parishes.
During the war years, the Franco-Americans of Winooski, Vermont,
would travel the mile and a half that separated them from Burlington,
to attend a French mass in St. Joseph’s parish (founded in 1850)
until they could found their own parish, St. Francois-Xavier in
1868.
In
Maine, the French Canadians and Acadians of Aroostook County petitioned
Pope Pius IX to have the parishes of their region transferred
to the authority of the diocese of Portland, Maine. After their
half of the Madawaska Valley had become American, its parishes
had remained under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Saint John,
New Brunswick. Some even wanted an apostolic vicariate to be erected
in the Madawaska. In 1870, after several years of petitioning,
Rome transferred the American half of the Madawaska Valley over
to Msgr. Bacon (1814-1874), Portland’s first bishop.
One
Franco-American newspaper, Le Phare des lacs, of Watertown,
New York, was founded during the Civil War years by Alexandre
Grandpré and Claude Petit. It would remain in print for
the next dozen years. Another newspaper, Le Courrier de l’Illinois,
founded in 1857 in Kankakee, failed.
Fortunately
for Franco-Americans and all American Catholics, the Civil War
offered a brief respite from anti-foreign American nationalism.
The war temporarily disrupted organized nativism by absorbing
xenophobes and immigrants in a common cause. Indeed, the nativistic
Sons of America, the Order of United Americans and the very heart
of Know-Nothingism, the American party, all collapsed in the early
1860s. Suddenly Puritan New England’s arch nemesis ceased to be
the Pope and became "Johnny Reb." Despite a few incidents,
Catholics contributed to the war effort. Moreover, anti-British
sentiment stirred up by the Trent affair and other Anglo-American
incidents helped make the Irish, and Catholics in general, appear
more sympathetic to Protestant America.7
Like
all American Catholics, Franco-Americans had had to suffer the
high tide of nativism and Know-Nothingism in the 1850s. Claiming
that Catholicism was a threat to American liberty, nativism was
more anti-Catholic than it was anti-immigrant. The main target
of nativists had been the Irish, but French Canadians had also
had to suffer discrimination. Like the Irish, French Canadians
were triple outsiders: they were Catholic, poor and foreign. Moreover,
they spoke French, which made them face discrimination even from
the Irish. 8
After
a high tide in the 1850s, the war also largely submerged French
Canadian annexationism. Though some radicals like journalist Hector
Fabre (1834-1910) continued to speculate that French Canada would
have been better off if it had become an American State, annexationism,
once very strong in the late 1840s and early 1850s, was largely
a spent force by 1865. Increasingly marginalized in French Canada,
some annexationists, like the outspoken journalist and Civil War
veteran Jean-Baptiste Rouillard, would have to take their message
South, where they could preach to a more receptive audience. Indeed,
annexationism was fairly popular in nineteenth-century French
America. In 1893 Rouillard was in Boston publishing a monthly
journal dedicated to annexationism named L’Union continentale.
On
the whole, the Civil War severely tarnished the reputation that
America had enjoyed as a model of stable democracy in the radical
circles of French Canada. For years to come, Canadian Conservatives
would use the war as a club to beat their Liberal opponents. To
them, the American experiment in egalitarianism had failed. Democracy
and equality could only lead to anarchy and war because they denied
God’s will. Conservative French Canadian Catholics and some English-speaking
Protestants, especially High Anglicans, felt that society ought
to be hierarchical and ruled by a benevolent and paternalistic
elite. They argued that authority was derived from God and not
from the people. Should children elect their parents? Should
women be equal to men? French Canadian conservatives asked
rhetorically. They believed in duty, deference, and privilege,
not in rights and equality. For conservatives, the cause of America’s
failure lay not in slavery, but in democracy itself. Canadians
would have to learn to avoid the democratic and egalitarian pitfalls
that had caused the Civil War.9
Without
a doubt, the Civil War had a profound impact on Canada's political
and constitutional evolution. Fear of an American or Fenian invasion
and the need for a common defense strategy was one of the major
factors that launched British North America on the road to Confederation
from 1864 to 1867. Many of the delegates to the three constitutional
conferences that drafted the British North America Act of 1867
felt that the Civil War was an indictment of not only of egalitarianism,
democracy and republicanism, but also of decentralized federalism,
if not of federalism itself. In turn, Canadian conservatives drafted
a constitution that granted most of the powers that were considered
important in the nineteenth-century to the federal government
and contained several checks to "excessive" democracy. Canada
became a country based not on "life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness" but rather on "peace, order and good government."
Indeed, it was probably Canadian author and journalist Bruce Hutchison
(1901-1992) who put it best when he wrote that "the United
States is the affirmation of the revolutionary process; Canada
the negation."10 The Civil War was another American
Revolution that Canada wanted no part of.
©
2001 Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College |
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