Canadians and Americans

Myths and Literary Traditions

Katherine L. Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351313469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Much can be learned from a nation's literature. Examining three hundred years of cultural traditions, Katherine L. Morrison, a former American, now a Canadian, takes the reader through the historical, political, and sociological milieu of Canada and the United States to dispel misconceptions that they share near-identical social attitudes and historical experiences.To most Americans and much of the rest of the world, America and Canada differ little except in terms of climate. It is true that they share a common British heritage and immigration patterns, but there are subtle cultural differences between the two countries. These may appear insignificant to Americans, but they are not insignificant to Canadians. Comparing mythologies each of the countries share about the other, the author examines national views of their histories, from the common origin of both nations in the American Revolution, through the two world wars. She also examines the role of nature and images of place and home in Canadian and American literary writing, noting the disparate historical development of the two national literatures. Using specific works by recognized authors of their time, Morrison considers the role of religion and the church, violence and the law, and humor and satire, in the literature of both countries. The book also explores the role of women, race, and class in the literature of both countries. It concludes with a discussion of the tenacity of national myths, and draws some tentative conclusions.Now published in paperback in the United States, Morrison's broad-based approach to a largely unexplored subject will invite future study as well as improve understanding between Canada and the United States. Canadians and Americans will be of interest to cultural historians, American studies specialists, political scientists, and sociologists.

Chapter
One

The Launching of National Myths

‘THOSE WHO KNOW ONLY ONE COUNTRY KNOW NO COUNTRY,” writes Seymour Martin Lipset, arguing that it is impossible to understand any nation unless it is compared to another.¹ Canada and the United States are particularly suited for throwing light on each other’s differences. On the surface, they appear much alike, have a long common border, and have faced essentially the same obstacles as they developed westward to the Pacific Ocean. Canada, with a larger land mass but only one-tenth the population of the United States, has never ceased struggling to remain free of its powerful neighbor, a struggle that has always mystified Americans. This has led to an unusual relationship, like no other “in the world,” according to Northrop Frye.²

Forces Dividing the Continent

THE FORCES THAT DETERMINE A NATION’S BOUNDARIES, characteristics of a people, and distinctive qualities of the literature that they produce are so numerous and complex that only the most dramatic can be isolated. Migration patterns and the wars that often result from struggles over land are primary determinants. In the case of Canada and the United States, different ideologies turned the American Revolution from an argument over rights to a demand for independence. British Whigs and Tories living in the American colonies, disagreed over independence, so they fought a civil war. The defeated Tories were expelled; the majority of them forced to move north to colonies that remained British. They came from every colony, a splitting of the American population, exiles burdened with anger and bitterness. Such early opposing ideologies sparked national myths that have lasted for generations and found expression in two bodies of literature.

Geography plays a vital role in the development of nations, no less in North America than in the rest of the world. Canada is a northern country, made known to European cultures by the Vikings and John Cabot; the United States was explored by the followers of Columbus. The St. Lawrence river system and Hudson Bay opened the interior of the continent to outside explorers and traders before settlers reached the Alleghenies in what is now the United States. J.M.S. Careless views the St. Lawrence as a “broad funnel” through which people poured into the heartland of the continent.³ There they established a trading system that set the pattern for the settlers’ relations with the Native people of North America.

Economist Harold Innis has made a strong case for Canada as a geographically natural country, one that developed along river basins that run predominately east-west. These were the routes of the fur traders, who gradually moved west along the edges of the Canadian or Precambrian Shield. “It is no mere accident,” he says, that the present borders of Canada coincide roughly with “the fur-trading areas of northern North America.”⁴ When the fur trade died out it was replaced by lumbering and mining, resources found in the same east-west wilderness. There was enough arable land in the St. Lawrence river basin, southern Ontario, and the prairies to support these activities. W.L. Morton speaks of “alternate penetration of the wilderness and return to civilization” as the “basic rhythm of Canadian life” that forms the “Canadian character whether French or English.”⁵

According to Innis, the continent was divided into three areas at the time of the American Revolution: a northern area that was dependent on the fur trade, a southern area where cotton and tobacco were grown, and a central diversified area that was beginning to industrialize. Because of the enormous distances and harsh climate of the fur-trading area, central organization was thought necessary. Centralized paternalism was traditional in New France, which, along with the tight organization of the Hudson’s Bay and later the North West Companies, influenced the “institutional development of Canada.”⁶ The cotton-and-tobacco-growing states of the American south were forcibly reunited with the central industrializing area after the American Civil War, at which time the United States expanded rapidly westward, not bothering to capture the northern area. Americans believed that the northern colonies would willingly join the Union in due course; instead, those colonies formed a confederation to try to protect themselves against an, expected invasion from the Americans. John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, wrote to a friend in India in 1867 with news of the British North America Act, which would bind the colonies into a confederation: “A brilliant future would certainly await us were it not for these wretched Yankees ... War will come someday.”⁷

Canadians and Americans seem unaware of how much geography has shaped their lives, their borders, and their institutions, for mountain ranges and prairies running north and south give the continent an appearance of a natural unit. Americans embraced Manifest Destiny early in the nineteenth century, certain that they were fated to take over the entire continent, while Canadians feared American invasion or annexation. The popular belief is that the borders of Canada and the United States were formed solely by three rapidly succeeding wars in the latter half of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries: the Seven Years’ War (1756-1765; U.S. French and Indian War, 1754-1765), the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the War of 1812 (1812-1814). Besides the American struggles with Spain and Mexico, these three North American wars largely settled control of the continent.

Three North American Wars

THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE TO THE BRITISH in the Seven Years’ War remains a pivotal event in the history of the French-Canadian people. Since then they have struggled to survive and to resist assimilation into the English-speaking culture surrounding them. To the residents of the American colonies, the British success in this war was a great relief, for the French in North America had been a dangerous enemy for a century and a half. Catholics and Protestants still hated and feared each other in most of Europe, and the hostility was even stronger between solidly Catholic New France and Puritan New England. The New England clergy described Catholic Quebec as “the last bastion of evil” in North America, and predicted a “golden age of peace and prosperity” following a “Protestant American victory.”⁸

The Americans had been happy to be British subjects as long as France remained a threat, but barely ten years after the elimination of that threat they turned hostile. The British parliament began taxing the colonies in order to help with its huge war debt and the cost of defense in North America. The colonial legislatures reacted angrily. The dispute continued for ten years, during which the British, needing their most skilled officials in other fields, left incompetent administrators in charge of the Colonial Office.⁹ The thirteen colonies, which had had little to do with each other during their long history, formed the Continental Congress in order to negotiate as a unit with their new adversaries.

During the ten years before the outbreak of war, the American colonists wanted their grievances addressed and only a tiny minority thought in terms of independence. When fighting broke out in 1775, Washington’s officers were still toasting the King. Pauline Maier points out that even “the most radical members of Congress professed a strong preference for remaining in the empire.”¹⁰ The Declaration of Independence came a year later and resulted in internal fighting as well as battles with the British. Those who favored independence called themselves Patriots, while those opposed were Loyalists — called Tories by the Patriots, who considered them traitors. There were many Loyalists in the colonies, including such notables as George Washington’s mother and Benjamin Franklin’s son.¹¹

The Declaration of Independence, based on Enlightenment ideals, is effectively the first written statement of the American Dream. It was designed to present the colonists’ case to the world, to “furnish a moral and legal justification” for rebelling. Troubles in the colonies are blamed on the king, and there is no mention of parliament or the “rights of British subjects.”¹² The Declaration was more effective in launching a myth and uniting the colonists than it was in persuading the rest of the world that the Americans were suffering under a tyrant. There was need for a communal myth because there was no effective government. The Continental Congress was no more than a gathering of delegates, representing a barely acquainted group of colonies with widely divergent interests.

The last straw for the British came in December 1773 with the Boston Tea Party, and the final outrage for the colonists was the Quebec Act of 1774, which extended the borders of Quebec to include the Ohio valley, closed the valley to settlement, disallowed a legislative assembly, and gave official recognition to the Roman Catholic religion. The Act was not intended to punish the colonists. Guy Carleton, British Governor of Quebec, admired the orderly French Canadian society and regarded it as a “valuable stronghold against disloyalty and violence in America.”¹³ He pressed for a recognition of French institutions in order to bind the people to the empire. The members of Parliament listened. The empire now encompassed many diverse peoples, and legal protection for its minorities was high on the agenda.¹⁴ Pontiac’s uprising of 1763 to 1765 had alarmed the British, who planned to make the Ohio valley a huge Native reserve to protect the fur trade and prevent Indian wars. Because France remained a serious and ongoing threat, the British considered it politically wise to allow the French in North America to retain their religion and their civil code. The British also hoped to divert settlement northward and dilute French and Catholic influences. Such arguments did not carry weight with the irate colonists to the south. They had little involvement in the fur trade, pressure for western land was becoming explosive, and “popery” was seen as the work of the devil. Of the thirteen colonies, only Maryland and Pennsylvania tolerated Catholics, and even there they were denied a franchise. To the American colonists, the Quebec Act was an act of tyranny, directly attacking their liberty.¹⁵

The American invasion of Quebec in 1775 was a failure. The Canadiens fought to defend their homes, but showed no interest in joining a dispute between the colonists and Great Britain. As Governor Carleton had predicted, the Catholic bishop decided that his people were far safer in the empire where the Quebec Act was in force than in joining rebelling colonists who had little tolerance for Catholicism. The situation in Nova Scotia was more ambiguous. Many of the settlers were from New England, but, being largely uneducated, they were out of touch with the news, “a people in a state of confusion.”¹⁶ Between the strength of the British navy at Halifax and the unwitting services of a traveling evangelist, Henry Alline, who turned the people’s attention from politics to religion, Nova Scotia remained in British hands.

Once fighting broke out, openly declared Loyalists were in considerable danger. A civil war broke out in New York, and as the war turned gradually against the British, masses of Loyalists were besieged in the port and had to be evacuated. About 30,000 were taken to Nova Scotia, which tripled the population of the colony. About 10,000 made their way by land to Quebec, where they joined the French and the few merchants and government authorities who spoke English.

Fighting ended when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, but a peace treaty was delayed for two years, a terrible period for the Loyalists. The Continental Congress openly encouraged the confiscation of Loyalists’ property and investment of the proceeds in continental loan, certificates. Slaves, the most valuable property, were grabbed, loaded onto ships and sent to the West Indies for sale to plantation owners. At Charleston twenty-four prominent Loyalists were hanged on the waterfront “in sight of the retreating [British] fleet.” Bills of attainder were passed by local legislatures naming individuals who could be “libeled, slandered, insulted, blackmailed or assaulted” without legal recourse. This practice was later outlawed in the first paragraph of the Bill of Rights. Mob rule was so widespread that it became acceptable behavior. Walter Stewart claims that the Ku Klux Klan and the lynch mob, “the [American] penchant for home-brewed justice,” had their roots in that period.¹⁷

The negotiations were long and rancorous, mainly over issues of compensation for the Loyalists. Benjamin Franklin suggested that Britain turn over the northern colonies as an act of goodwill. The suggestion was “not ...