In Search of the Visible Past: History Lectures at Wilfrid Laurier University 1973-1974

IN SEARCH OF THE VISIBLE PAST

HISTORY LECTURES AT

WILFRID LAURIER

UNIVERSITY

1973–1974

edited by

Barry M. Gough

COPYRIGHT © 1975

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

WATERLOO, ONTARIO, CANADA

ISBN — 0-88920-019-X — (cloth)

CONTENTS

Editor’s Note

The Family in New France, by John F. Bosher

British Wartime Inflation, 1793–1815: The Beginnings of a Pragmatic Tradition, by John Norris

Bibles, Banjoes and Bones: Images of the Negro in the Popular Culture of Victorian England, by Douglas A. Lorimer

Joseph Chamberlain and the New Imperialism in West Africa: The Case of the Gold Coast, 1895–1903, by Raymond E. Dumett

Mackenzie King and the Historians, by H. Blair Neatby

EDITOR’S NOTE

During the academic year 1973–1974, the History Department of Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, offered five public lectures to the university and community. These lectures were given by leading scholars in their individual fields, and are published here in accordance with the belief that these contributions to scholarship should appear in print. The first, by Professor John F. Bosher of York University, deals with family life in New France; it is certain to be of interest to those persons who wish to know more about family history in Canada and particularly Quebec, while other readers will find this essay a model by which to evaluate other societies in other times and places. The second essay, by John Norris of the University of British Columbia, deals with a subject of great relevance to our own times: inflation. His explanation of the origins of British fiscal policy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars shows how Whitehall sought to grapple with the economic uncertainties of a former age. The next contribution, by Douglas A. Lorimer of Wilfrid Laurier University, is an addition of significance to our understanding of race attitudes in western societies. His subject is images of the negro in Victorian popular culture, and his title — Bibles, Banjoes and Bones — well describes the focus of British stereotypes of blacks at that time. The fourth essay, by Raymond E. Dumett of Purdue University, is an analysis of how a leading imperialist of his age, Joseph Chamberlain, pursued the New Imperialism in West Africa’s Gold Coast. Though Gold, God and Glory were underlying motives of the Pax Britannica, Professor Dumett gives us an excellent case study in how Mr. Chamberlain developed the backward estates of the British Empire. Our last essay is by no means the least important. H. Blair Neatby of Carleton University is the distinguished biographer of William Lyon Mackenzie King, the controversial prime minister of Canada during much of the first half of this century. His essay on Mackenzie King and the historians shows that historians, like other human beings, are not infallible, and that in Canada we have tended to relegate to obscurity a man who may well have been important in pursuing national compromise at difficult stages of the nation’s history. These five essays then are in their own individual ways contributions to the historian’s ongoing search for the visible past. They are published with the aid of a grant made possible by Dr. G. Vallillee, Dean of Arts and Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, whose kindness is here acknowledged.

Barry M. Gough

THE FAMILY IN NEW FRANCE

John F. Bosher

One of the fundamental changes in Quebec since the 1940’s is a marked decline in the birth rate which has lately become the lowest in Canada.¹ The large family is quickly disappearing, but until recently it was, as is well known, characteristic of French-Canadian society. Furthermore, if we go back to the history of that century and a half before 1763, when Quebec was a French colony, we find that the family, large or small, was a stronger and more prominent group than it is now. It was, indeed, one of the main institutions in New France. The study of it may help to explain how early Canadian civilization is so different from our own.

The typical family of New France may be described in figures drawn from statistical histories, making a sort of statistical portrait.² In the early eighteenth century, families had an average of five or six children, but this average includes families in which one of the parents had died and so stopped its growth. Those arrested families had, on the average, four or five children, whereas the complete family, in which neither parent had died, had eight or nine. These averages conceal the variety, of course: some 16% of all families had from ten to fourteen children and 2.8% had no less than fifteen children. Death among the children also kept numbers down, and to a degree staggering in comparison with our present-day infant mortality. We now lose twenty or twenty-one babies out of every thousand; but in New France 246 out of every thousand died during the first year of life, and that was normal in the eighteenth century. What the figures suggest is that the small families at the bottom of the statistical scale were made so by the hazards of death, not by the habits or the wishes of the parents. If no parents or children had died, most families would have numbered a dozen or more children. These figures are for the early eighteenth century, it should be added, after the immigration from France had fallen off; and an analysis of the population in 1663 shows it at an earlier stage when four-fifths of all families had no more than from one to six children. But at every stage the family was enormous compared to the average Quebec family in 1951 which had only 2.2 children.

Taken by themselves, the statistical facts for New France may seem to confirm two common traditions about the family habits of all our ancestors: first, that women married very young; and secondly, that they tended to be eternally pregnant thereafter and to have a baby every year. Yet the facts for New France — as for Old France and England also — contradict both those traditions. The average age of women at their first marriage was nearly twenty-two in New France and about twenty-five in Old France. There are, of course, some well-known cases of girls being married at twelve, which was the youngest a girl might legally marry in New France. In 1637, the explorer, Jean Nicollet, set an extreme example by marrying an eleven-year-old girl, Marguerite Couillard, who was Champlain’s god-daughter. Not many girls followed that example, it appears, because on 12 April 1670 the royal government ordered the Intendant to pay a premium—or a bounty, perhaps—to every girl under sixteen who found a husband, and to every man who married under twenty. The Crown thought it necessary to encourage people to marry younger. For the same purpose, the Crown also decided to help poor families with the dowries for their girls, and this brings to our notice one of the impediments to an early marriage: the dowry, often a struggle for a father to find for a numerous family of girls. For this and other reasons, too, no doubt, some 18% of women did not marry until they were thirty or more; 10% waited until they were thirty-five or over; and 6% until they were over forty. Women married later than tradition and a few famous examples have led us to believe. Men, too, married older—on the average at nearly twenty-seven.

As for the frequency of births in a family, we learn that in New France women tended to have babies about every two years, not every year as legend has held. The demographic effects of such a difference were, of course, enormous; and one historian has concluded that the reason for this pause between babies, a pause of some twenty-three months from birth to birth or fourteen months plus nine months of pregnancy, was that women tended to remain temporarily sterile during the period of breast-feeding.³

To sum up, a typical complete family, which had not lost a parent, might consist of a father just over forty, a mother in her middle thirties and about eight children ranging from fourteen years of age down to a few weeks old. This may seem to be a very simple conclusion, disappointingly obvious, but it has the great merit of some basis in historical fact.

It leaves us wondering how to account for the phenomenal rate of the population’s growth. In 1663, there were just over 3,000 people in New France, and a century later there were perhaps 70,000.⁴ The population had multiplied by more than twenty-three. During that century, it appears that less than 10,000 immigrants came from the mother country. The remaining 57,000 people had all been born to the 3,000 Canadian families or to immigrant families as they came in, in less than five generations. If the French population had multiplied at that rate during the same century there might have been some 400 million Frenchmen by 1763, whereas there were, in fact, only twenty-two or twenty-three million. Lest we should be tempted to dismiss the figures for New France as improbable, we should glance at the increase during the two centuries after 1763 which amounts to an even more staggering rise of from 70,000 to 5½ million, or an eighty-fold increase. If the French had multiplied as quickly as the French Canadians since 1763 there would be nearly two billion Frenchmen by now, or more than half the population of the entire world. In this context, the figures for the twenty-three-fold increase in New France during the century before 1763 do not seem improbable. But they are nevertheless in need of explanation.

Leaving the mathematics of the problem to the demographers, we may sum up in general terms as follows: if women did not marry so young as we thought; if they had babies half as often as we thought; if nearly one-quarter of those babies died before they were a year old and nearly another fifth of them died before the age of ten; and if the annual crude death-rate for the country was somewhere between twenty and forty per thousand; then why did the population increase so quickly? Why was the crude birth-rate so much higher than the crude death-rate or from forty-eight to sixty-five per thousand? The answer (and the missing fact in the problem as I have posed it) is that the people of New France had a high propensity to marry. They were exceptionally fond of the married state.

People in Quebec today marry at an annual rate of about seven or eight per thousand, which is below our national average. The French during the eighteenth century used to marry at the rate of about 16.5 per thousand. But in the colony of New Franee, the marriage rate was between 17.5 and 23.5 per thousand. The result of this high marriage rate was that from 30% to 40% of the total population were married or widowed, and this proportion seemed to be increasing in the first half of the eighteenth