When Wolfe captured Quebec and Canada came under British rule, some
of the best known of his officers and several of his men were Irish.
After the Peace was signed many of them settled in Canada, not a few
of them marrying French wives, and as a consequence there are
numerous Irish, Scotch, and English names among the French speaking
inhabitants of Lower Canada. Two of Wolfe's officers, Colonel Guy
Carleton, born at Strabane in the county Tyrone, and General Richard
Montgomery, born only seven miles away at Convoy, in the same county,
were destined to play an important role in the future history of
Canada. Montgomery was in command of the Revolutionary Army from the
Colonies, when it attempted to take Quebec, and Carleton, who had
been a trusted friend of General Wolfe, was in command of the
Canadian forces. The two men were the lives of their respective
commands, and with the death of Montgomery Carleton's victory was
assured. Carleton was made Governor-in-Chief of Canada, and during
the trying years of the early British rule of New France and the
American Revolution, his tact did more than anything else to save
Canada for the British. Bibaud, the French historian, says, "the man
to whom the administration of the government was entrusted had known
how to make the Canadians love him, and this contributed not a little
to retain at least within the bounds of neutrality those among them
who might have been able, or who believed themselves able, to
ameliorate their lot by making common cause with the insurgent
colonies." Shortly after being made governor, Carleton went to
England and secured the passage of the Quebec Act through the English
parliament, which gave the Canadian French assurance that they were
to be ruled without oppression by the British Government.
Subsequently, in 1786, Carleton, as Lord Dorchester, became the first
governor-general of Canada, being given jurisdiction over Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick as well as Upper and Lower Canada, and to him more
than to any other is due the early loyalty to the British crown in
the Dominion.
After the army the next important source of Irish population in
Canada were the loyalists who after the Revolution removed from the
United States to the British Dominions in America. There were
probably many thousands of them, more than enough to make up for the
French who left Canada for France when the territory passed over to
England. Among the Irish loyalists who went to Canada was the Rev.
John Stuart, who had become very well known as a missionary in the
Mohawk Valley before the Revolution, and who, though born a
Presbyterian, was destined to win the title of the "Father of the
Church of England in Upper Canada." When the first Canadian
parliament met in December 1792, Edward O'Hara was returned for
Gaspé, in Lower Canada, and D'Arcy McGee could boast that
henceforward Lower Canada was never without an Irish representative
in its legislative councils.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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