Loyalist Rebellion in New Brunswick by David Bell

Author:David Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Formac
Published: 2013-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Laws tortured to the purpose of a party

The New Brunswick elite’s vision of the most “gentlemanlike” government on earth did not include a political opposition. Theirs was an age in which opposing political alignments were not seen as necessary, permanent or wholly legitimate. If this were so for Britain, then how much more so for a model Loyalist community whose exiled inhabitants had been ruined by too much politics in the old colonies? True, Carleton and his advisors soon became aware that their inherited colony was not a blank political slate and that a “violent party spirit” had prevailed in the days of rule from Halifax. Yet they assumed that all tears were wiped away now that the king’s governor was on the spot. A formerly aggrieved and agitated multitude had become, in Ward Chipman’s expression, the “fortunate ones.” Aided by the royal bounty, they had raised an already flourishing colony. Their proper attitude towards the king’s local representatives was grateful obedience. Certainly, New Brunswick’s rulers were not to be opposed.

So it was that, despite Saint John’s difficult birth, Carleton could assume in calling his election that political dissent was entirely done away. When the campaign produced first a riot and then victory for the faction whose supporters had caused it, the governor and his Council viewed the scene with “utter astonishment.”33 At the very outset of their Loyalist experiment the goal of a model colonial constitution was in peril. Seven bold critics led by the irrepressible Elias Hardy were set on making their life difficult in the House of Assembly. Victory for the Lower Cove candidates meant their dream of a most gentlemanlike colony had failed when it had hardly begun.

What was to be done? Carleton and his Council might have chosen to respond to the triumph of the Dickinson slate in political terms. They might have used their hoped-for assembly majority to outvote the Lower Covers, or the seductions of patronage to divide them or the passage of time to neutralize them. They might even have agreed to investigate the conduct of the former agents and directors. They chose otherwise. Rather than meet the challenge of political dissent in political terms, they moved to expel their opponents from the political realm altogether. In the days and months following the initial election result they denied the Lower Cove candidates their seats in the House of Assembly, intimidated their lieutenants and muzzled their rank and file. Ultimately they sought to freeze their enemies out of the realm of legitimate political debate by branding them with the high Loyalist crime of disloyalty.

Sheriffs of the eight counties were supposed to respond to Carleton’s writs of election by November 24, the day the Saint John poll finally closed. Sheriff Oliver merely sent in a letter. It reported that Attorney-General Bliss and his Upper Cove colleagues had demanded a scrutiny of the votes won by the Lower Cove candidates.34 The basis of their protest was a list of between two and three hundred votes alleged as ineligible for failure to meet the three-month residency requirement.

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