Imperial Immigrants by Michael E. Vance

Author:Michael E. Vance
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2012-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

This log house in Appleton, Ramsay Township, is one of several that still stand in Lanark County. While many of these early settler structures have disappeared, those that remain deserve to be properly recorded and studied.

Photo by M. Vance.

Sara Ann Robinson had briefly left her home as a consequence of the family discord. Advertisements placed in local papers by men refusing to honour debts contracted by their absent wives reveal that others had done the same. The newspaper notices do not reveal why the women left, but the kirk session records offer a possible explanation. James Dunlop admitted beating his wife “on one occasion,” but was absolved by the Ramsay session after acknowledging his sin.[40] The embarrassment of such public admissions was the only deterrent that the kirk elders could offer abused wives.

In some cases even this was not possible. In 1837 Robert Carswell, a member of Cambuslang Emigration Society who had been cited as a successful settler in testimony given to the Select Committee on Emigration, was confronted by two kirk elders with reports that he had been guilty of “striking his wife,” Helen Russell. Carswell’s response was to both deny the charge and declare that these were matters in which “the session had no business.” He refused repeated requests to appear before the kirk session, and in the end all that could be done was to suspend him from the church privileges that he did not appear to have been exercising in the first place.[41] Robert Carswell’s defiance demonstrates the limitations of church discipline in the colony, which could have contributed to women fleeing violent situations, but the case also demonstrates the extent to which church elders were prepared to go to impose order on the immigrant community.

Late in 1825, the Paisley Advertizer reported that William Jamieson and Jean Walker had failed to appear before the Glasgow Presbytery to answer the charge that they had “connected together in forbidden degrees.” According to the paper, the couple had already left Scotland for “America.”[42] In attempting to escape the discipline of the church by becoming colonists, Jamieson and Walker were following the example of many radical reformers who had crossed the Atlantic to avoid persecution.

Early politics in the Ottawa Valley, as in the rest of Upper Canada, indicates that Scottish artisan immigrants continued to hold reform ideals first formed in the homeland, and this was particularly evident in the electoral successes of Malcolm Cameron. William Morris’s early domination of local settler politics, however, demonstrates that other Scots, particularly among the merchant community, were keen to maintain the conservative social order that imperial planners envisioned for the colony. The intensity of these opposing views, first developed in Britain, was reflected in the reports of the raucous polling days that accompanied the earliest elections in Lanark County, but when examined from the perspective of daily religious practice, the social conservatism of all members of the immigrant community is striking. Prior attempts had been made to assert church discipline in the west of

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