Episode 18: The Resurrection

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 18: The Resurrection

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published August 26, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE 
This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE   
In 1755, he became a deputy agent under Sir William Johnson, the crown-appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who managed Britain’s relationships with Indigenous peoples in the northern colonies. Johnson’s efforts had been crucial to bringing the Haudenosaunee into the war, ensuring New France’s defeat. At the war’s end, Johnson faced the difficult task of reconciling the Ohio nations to their new British reality, leaving it to Claus in 1760 to work with native peoples in Quebec.   

AMBUSKE 
Thirteen years after first arriving in Montreal, Claus returned to Quebec in the summer of 1773 with British America in the throes of an imperial crisis brought on by the very world the Seven Years’ War had made. Parliament’s attempts to reform the empire by taxing the colonies, the king’s negotiations with Indigenous nations to restrict western expansion, and the deployment of troops to towns like Boston had led to protests, riots, and deadly shootings. And now, ships carrying cargos of East India Company tea would soon be on their way. 

AMBUSKE   
In Quebec, Claus encountered discontent of a different kind, one also born of the world the war had made. On July 26th, he met with members of the Huron in their village at Lorette, just to the west of Quebec City.

AMBUSKE   
As one of the Huron diplomats explained, nearly a century earlier a French Jesuit priest had convinced their people to remove from their lands around Lake Huron and move east toward Quebec City to live among white people, where he might better attend to their spiritual needs, with a promise that their new lands would be theirs forever.

AMBUSKE  
But now, a new Jesuit priest presided over the Indigenous flock, and he had begun renting lands in their village to settlers without their permission. They feared that soon their village would be gone, and they would be made to “shift for ourselves in the Wilderness.” The Huron found themselves and their hunting grounds “hemmed in by the white people,” the tenets of the priest. They appealed to Claus to help them.   

AMBUSKE   
Two days later, Claus told them there was nothing he could do. He had spoken with the colony’s officials, including the lieutenant governor and the secretary of the province, who interrogated the priest about the property. The Jesuit denied that his predecessor had ever agreed to place a boundary around the Huron lands. In fact, the land wasn’t even theirs to begin with. A search of the provincial records found that: 

AMBUSKE   
In the summer of 1773, Daniel Claus set out from his home in Albany, New York and headed north for the colony of Quebec. He was nearly 46-years-old when he began a familiar journey to the conquered province. 

AMBUSKE  
For thirteen years now, Quebec had been under British dominion. It had once been the heart of New France, the heart of Catholicism in eastern North America, and the center of a French empire that stretched from Nova Scotia in the east to the Great Lakes in the west, and down south into the Ohio Country and beyond to Louisiana.   

AMBUSKE   
The Catholic French population could never match the size of its more numerous and Protestant British rivals, who settled along the east coast, but then again, the French never wanted to. Theirs was an empire of trade encompassing a vast territory claimed by the French crown, but in reality these were the lands of many native nations.

AMBUSKE  
For more than 150 years, the French had nurtured relationships with Indigenous peoples like the Huron, Mi'kmaq, and Haudenosaunee, binding them all in webs of reciprocity, faith, and warfare that kept the British at bay and the fur trade profitable. 

AMBUSKE  
But with the outbreak of war in the Ohio Country in 1754, a conflict that soon engulfed the Atlantic world in turmoil for seven years, the balances of power began to shift. 

AMBUSKE  
Early French and Indigenous victories drove the British to the precipice of defeat. But French commanders sent from Europe insulted their native allies by refusing to supply them with the gifts and goods so central to Indigenous diplomacy, and the British government began borrowing ghastly sums of money to fund its war effort. Soon, the tide began to turn. 

AMBUSKE   
When the war began, the Haudenosuanee were the most powerful people in eastern North America, skillfully balancing the French and British against each other to preserve their own homelands, their sovereignty, and the rights they claimed over the Ohio Country. They broke their neutrality in the late 1750s, siding with the British in a bid to bring a long war to a swift end, granting the British the key to victory in the Great War for Empire. The British captured Quebec City in 1759. Montreal fell to British forces a year later.

AMBUSKE  
With New France’s defeat, tens of thousands of Catholic French settlers became subjects of the Protestant British king. British Americans celebrated the defeat of popish tyranny and the triumph of their empire of liberty, though some were uneasy about adding a Catholic colony to the Protestant British constellation.  

AMBUSKE  
With victory came new responsibilities and new relationships to nurture. In London, the king’s ministers began deliberating on how best to fold Catholic Quebec into Protestant British America.

AMBUSKE 
In the colonies, Daniel Claus was appointed deputy Indian agent for the Canadian territories now claimed by the British crown. For Claus, his journey to Quebec had been an unexpected one.

AMBUSKE 
Born in Boennigheim in what is now southwest Germany, Claus was among the many German-speaking migrants who made their way to Pennsylvania in the late 1740s. He was lured to the colony with false promises of becoming a merchant who dealt in tobacco and silk. With his dreams dashed, and unable to afford passage home, Claus found work as a tutor for the son of Johann Conrad Weiser, a fellow German, who served as Pennsylvania's chief diplomat to Indigenous nations like the Lenni Lenape and the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois.

AMBUSKE   
Claus quickly became involved in that work as well, spending time with the Onondaga and living with the Mohawk, immersing himself in the language and customs of Indigenous diplomacy.

DANIEL CLAUS  
“the Land you live on was to all intents & purposes a Deed of Gift from a french Gentleman…to the Jesuits at this Place for spiritual Services, so that they are the sole and lawful proprietors.”

AMBUSKE  
Claus chided them that their ancestors had chosen to live near Quebec City under French law. And now,

DANIEL CLAUS  
“as Providence would have it that by the Success of the British Army this Country became Subject to the Crown of England you have seen that the English Laws have taken place with the French Inhabitants of this Country and they are ruled and Governed by them. It’s therefore supposed you cannot have the least Objection of conforming to these Laws as you have done to the french.”

AMBUSKE  
Their minor dispute was part of a much larger story of a former French Catholic colony struggling to find its place in a Protestant Empire, one that George III’s ministers in London had been laboring over for years, drawing up plans for reform.

AMBUSKE  
By 1774, their plan was complete, and their timing couldn’t have been worse. For just as British Americans began rallying to resist Parliament’s new Coercive Acts, they learned of a new measure that resurrected an old fear: Quebec’s border would be extended south to the Ohio River, French law would be restored, the Catholic religion would be tolerated, and it seemed that New France would be reborn.  

AMBUSKE  
I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution.

AMBUSKE   
Episode 18: The Resurrection

AMBUSKE  
In September 1760, British General Jeffrey Amherst and his army began laying siege to Montreal. Quebec city had fallen to British forces a year earlier, leaving Montreal as the last major town to resist the conquest of New France.  

AMBUSKE   
Over the protests of his senior military commanders, who believed that capitulation to their British adversaries would shame and dishonor them all, the colony’s governor the Marquis de Vaudreuil saw little choice but to strike his king’s colors and surrender Montreal and New France to Amherst and his British king.

AMBUSKE  
In surprisingly generous terms, Amherst permitted French settlers, known as the habitant, the continued free exercise of their Catholic faith, and agreed to allow the seigneur, the landed lords of the colony, to keep their lands and their property.

AMBUSKE 
Amherst knew that his decisions would be vetted by the king’s ministers in London, who would eventually negotiate a final treaty of peace with the French in Paris, though he was confident they would ratify them.

AMBUSKE  
Nevertheless, in dealing with Governor Vaudreuil, Amherst wanted to make one thing very clear: This was the end of New France. The old colony –  was now a British dominion. He denied Vauldreuil’s request that French settlers would not be compelled to fight against their old king should the war continue, and that they remain governed “according to the custom of Paris, and the Laws and usages established for this country.”

AMBUSKE   
Of Vaudreuil’s pleas in favor of French settlers, Amherst simply replied: “They become subjects of the king.”

AMBUSKE   
The full meaning of the general’s terse reply was not as simple as at first it might seem. What it meant to now be a subject of the British crown was not immediately clear. Nor was it readily evident how the British intended to govern Quebec as a colony, or what the limits of its territory might be.

AMBUSKE  
But the choices the British made in the wake of the war and the addition of thousands of Catholic French settlers and new Indigenous nations to George III’s dominions only complicated British efforts to reform the older Protestant colonies and realize a new imperial vision.  

JEFFERS LENNOX 
Quebec is a British colony at the time of the outbreak of the American Revolution. It's just a very unique British colony. Jeffers Lennox professor in the Department of History at Wesleyan University. It fits unevenly in the story, and it's easily written out when we are writing nationalist histories backwards, because it does not become part of the United States, but it was centrally important to the revolutionary process.

AMBUSKE 
So, how did the conquest of New France and Quebec challenge the idea of a Protestant British America? How did the British govern these conquered lands? And why did British reforms in Quebec inspire fears of a resurgent New France in the east? 

AMBUSKE 
To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to Quebec, to chart the contours of the conquered colony. We’ll then head to London to draw up new plans to reimagine a very old colony, before returning to British America to consider why colonists who helped bring New France to its knees found the Quebec Act so intolerable.  

AMBUSKE 
With the Treaty of Paris in 1763, King Louis XV of France ceded a vast territory in North America to King George III of Great Britain.

LENNOX 
Canada, in the later 18th century has become a shorthand for what we would now think of as the province of Quebec. Quebec and Canada were sometimes for the French synonymous with French North America. They would use these terms interchangeably.

AMBUSKE  
From Quebec, French officials maintained their king’s claims over the contested Ohio Country, a region long prized by British settlers in Pennsylvania and Virginia. In reality the French exerted little actual control over the space. It was inhabited by powerful native nations like the Odawa, Lenni Lenape, Myaamia, and Shawnee, over whom the Haudenonausnee claimed dominion.  

AMBUSKE  
When the British formally annexed New France in 1763, the king’s ministers began making changes to Quebec’s boundaries. George III’s Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763 drew new lines on a map. It created the Province of Quebec and placed it under a civil government. 

LENNOX 
The 1760s and then to the 1770s the British redefine Quebec as a much smaller slice of land along the St Lawrence River, and it was a settlement project, like just about all these settlement projects, it was primarily indigenous. The French had claimed it and claimed to control it, when in reality, and this is the same for British settlements, they had little pails, they had towns, and they had urban centers, and some settlements outside of those urban centers, but for the most part, this was indigenous territory.

AMBUSKE  
The British not only acquired land, they acquired conquered peoples.

LENNOX
There are about 70 - 75,000 French inhabitants living in what had been New France.

AMBUSKE   
The loss of New France was devastating for the French colonial elite. Many evacuated and resettled in France, only to face scorn, and in some cases, official government inquiries. Within a few years, some returned to the now British colony.  

LENNOX 
Most of the French habitants stay and find ways to work under the British system.

BRAD JONES
When it becomes a British colony at the end of the Seven Years' War, those French Catholics don't leave. They just become British subjects. My name is Brad Jones. I am a professor of history at the California State University Fresno. The question for Parliament becomes in the 1760s: What do you do with French Catholics in a nation where Catholicism is perceived not just of a threat, but it's actually illegal to be Catholic, how do you incorporate them into this empire?

AMBUSKE  
The British had faced a similar question when they conquered Acadia or Nova Scotia in the early 18th century.

LORD DARTMOUTH  
It runs counter to our understanding of what this could be like. My name is Christian Ayne Crouch, I am the Dean of Graduate Studies and associate professor of history and American and Indigenous Studies at Bard College. For the habitant who are not in the Laurentian Valley, it is not the disaster that we would imagine it to be, because much of the fighting takes place much closer to the coast. It doesn't change their day to day farming for those who are voyager or merchants who circulate in the continental interior, it doesn't change their relationships with native peoples. It doesn't change French presence at these forts and other places. So it's not the dramatic event that we imagine it to be.

LENNOX 
When the British conquer what was called Acadia and then became Nova Scotia, that was again a primarily French settlement the British then had to control in the Acadian example, they just left the Acadians alone. For the most part, the Acadians were famously neutral. They had always promised they wouldn't fight for France and they wouldn't fight for Britain. They just wanted to be left alone. And the British largely do leave them alone, up until mid 1750s where they think, ah, you know what? We're just going to get rid of you. And so they expel 15,000 of them during the Seven Years' War, when they see they have an opportunity to clear the land of French inhabitants, which is not successful in the ways that the British want by the time that they capture Quebec, this is not a new idea for them. They have to think about, how are we going to incorporate these groups into our British system?

AMBUSKE  
Expelling 75,000 French settlers was an impractical choice. Besides the logistical feats involved in such an operation at the end of a very expensive war, rapidly depopulating the colony would open the territory to competing Indigenous nations who claimed it and even British Americans from the east who desired it.

AMBUSKE   
Even so, the British had little reason to trust French colonists in the years immediately following the conquest. Having just defeated the French, the British quickly began planning for the next war against their old enemies.  

AMBUSKE  
In 1760, the British placed Quebec under military rule, and divided it into three districts, with governors named in Quebec city, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières.   

AMBUSKE   
General James Murray was named governor in Quebec city. Murray, the son of a Scottish lord, ordered a census of each parish under his government so that he and his superiors in London could have a better portrait of the people that Britain now ruled. Completed the following year, the census recorded more than 30,000 people living in Murray’s district, including over 7,000 males, many of military age. As Murray argued, the census along with new maps and other information would ensure that Britain would: 

JAMES MURRAY  
“never again be at a loss how to attack, and conquer this Country in one Campaign.”

AMBUSKE   
But as the terms offered by General Amherst in Montreal would suggest, the British quickly realized that maintaining peace and order in Quebec meant tolerating Catholicism and French culture. 

LORD DARTMOUTH
The terms by which the colony is seated or that it capitulates with are actually quite generous to the evitan and ultimately are codified after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 French Canadians still get to serve in local government. The right to Catholic worship is protected. They continue to use French as the primary language.

LENNOX
They realize that the French Canadians in Quebec are quite Catholic and are quite religious, and take their instruction from their priests and bishops. Those are the groups that the British first try to win over. And this is an era of Catholic faith where what you were doing during your life was secondary to what would happen when you die. That's what the real payoff was. And part of the Catholic instruction was, you listen to people who are in charge. And so a lot of these habitant would go to their parishes on Sunday, and their priest would say, Look, we are now under the British it's your duty to follow what the British want to do. And that was not a huge issue.

AMBUSKE 
Besides Catholicism, the British appropriated the deeply-rooted land system in Quebec as they built part of British America atop the old French regime. In the seventeenth-century, the French had established the seigneurial system, a type of feudal land tenure, in which French kings granted land to the colonial elite. The elite sub-granted land to the habitants, who worked the ground and paid their rents out of what their farms produced.

AMBUSKE   
Labor obligations, known as corvée, were also key to the seigneurial system. Each year, male settlers owed two to three days worth of service on their feudal lord’s property, anything from repairing the seigneur’s home to digging ditches. These labor obligations extended to the colonial government as well. The habitants were obliged to spend several days a year laboring for the state, often building roads or improving fortifications. 

AMBUSKE   
The British were all too willing to preserve a system that ensured stability, kept the land under cultivation, and provided Quebec’s new rulers with a guaranteed source of labor reinforced by over a century of law and custom.  

AMBUSKE   
Both Governor Murray in Quebec and Governor Thomas Gage in Montreal saw the crucial value in corvée, especially as the colony’s fortifications were in need of repair following the war. As a result: 

LENNOX 
Over the course of the 1760s one of the interesting things that develops is the first British governors of Quebec rave about the French Catholics. They talk about how they are fantastic citizens and how they could become model British subjects if they were allowed to maintain the things that defined them as a collective and individually, their religion, their language, coming off of the Acadian expulsion. There's almost a 180 when they get to the French in Quebec, because these governors, who think they're going to go in and try to have a very hard line realize that the French Catholics are exactly the kind of subjects that they want. They're willing to keep working. They don't really want to pay taxes, but they will contribute to their churches. They are not causing a whole lot of problems for the British. They just want their language and they want their faith.

AMBUSKE  
French Canadian merchants maneuvered to make the best of their new world as well. In New France’s defeat, François Baby saw opportunities.  

AMBUSKE  
Baby was born in Montreal in the early 1730s into a family that was heavily invested in the Indigenous fur trade. Educated by the Jesuits in Quebec, Baby joined the family business in the early 1750s, handling imports from major French cities like La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Paris.  

AMBUSKE  
In the spring of 1760, Baby fought with French forces in a failed attempt to retake Quebec city from the British. Later that year, he sailed for Europe. Inexplicably, if not naively, with the war still raging in Europe, Baby followed the advice of another merchant and tried to make contact with an English firm, leading to his capture and imprisonment in London.  

AMBUSKE  
Following his release, Baby crossed the English Channel, and settled in La Rochelle for a time, all the while making efforts to shore up his connections in England and France, ensuring his own and family’s future in the post-war era.   

AMBUSKE  
Baby returned home in 1763 after the war came to an end. Having once refused to pledge fealty to the British king, Baby accepted what had been done and what could be. He settled first in Montreal, and then returned to his native Quebec in 1765, where he became an importer of British goods for the provincial market.   

LENNOX 
The same is true with the Indigenous nations living in their homelands. They are forced to adjust as they had always been forced to adjust to new settler realities.

AMBUSKE  
This was especially the case for peoples like the Huron whom Daniel Claus encountered at Lorette, who were living within the bounds of French and later British settlements in Quebec, and challenging European ideas about property that did not conform to their own Indigenous ways of thinking.  

AMBUSKE 
It was also true for Indigenous nations in the Ohio Country.

AMBUSKE 
The Seven Years’ War had begun in the Ohio Country and in the years that followed both the British and the French competed to win over Native allies in the region. Gift giving was central to sustaining these alliances. From the Indigenous perspective, the quality and quantity of gifts and goods offered to them signaled how much their allies valued and respected them. Presented at regular diplomatic conferences governed by Indigenous cultural protocols, these items helped brighten the chain of friendship between Native and European peoples.

AMBUSKE   
After Montreal fell and New France surrendered in 1760, however, General Amherst ordered British officials to reduce the number of goods and gifts sent to Indigenous nations in the Ohio Country. He did so over Sir William Johnson’s objections, who understood how important gift giving was to sustaining alliances. What Amherst saw as necessary measures to reduce unnecessary expenses with the war all but over, Native peoples like the Odawa warrior Pontiac saw as insults. Nor did they believe British promises that they could restrain Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and other British Americans from heading west over the Appalachian Mountains into their homelands. 

AMBUSKE   
Distressed by these insults, and inspired by a prophetic vision from the Master of Life, who instructed Indigenous people to abandon the ways of white people, Pontiac and other Native leaders launched an uprising against the British in 1763 that nearly drove them out of the Ohio Country. 

AMBUSKE  
While the British managed to suppress the revolt, its outbreak only confirmed for the king’s ministers the necessity of reorganizing what had been New France, and closing off the Ohio Country from immediate white settlement.   

AMBUSKE 
By order of George III’s Royal Proclamation of October 1763, British Americans were forbidden from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains to prevent violence between white settlers and Native peoples, and to keep settlers within the bounds of the older colonies, oriented east toward the Atlantic economy. The crown became solely responsible for negotiating with Indigenous peoples in the region, creating a legal framework by which the British government recognized them as sovereign nations in their own right.  

AMBUSKE  
In many ways, the Proclamation bought the British time. Although some officials had spent years by this point sketching out plans to reform the empire, the magnitude of Britain’s victory in the war and the people and territories now under its control meant that it would take time to realize a new imperial vision, one of which both the Ohio Country and Quebec were a part. 

AMBUSKE   
In the months and years that followed, British and Native diplomats negotiated segments of a boundary line to divide British and Indigenous America. Yet, that line began eroding and buckling almost as soon as surveyors marked it out. In several conferences in the late 1760s and early 1770s, the Cherokee, Haudenonsaunee, and British officials like Sir William Johnson bent the proclamation line to serve their own interests. The Cherokee and Haudenosaunee recognized that the British could not really stop white settlers from moving west. They negotiated segments that deflected white settlers away from their own homelands, and vectored them toward the Ohio Country.   

AMBUSKE   
 The decisions made by the British in Montreal’s Articles of Capitulation, The Treaty of Paris, and the Proclamation of 1763 were only the beginnings of a very long process of folding Quebec and the rest of New France under the British crown.

AMBUSKE 
After the Seven Years’ War, the king’s ministers faced the delicate challenge of incorporating different peoples of different faiths – from the Indian subcontinent in the east to French Canada in the west – into one coherent empire. From London, they possessed a view of a global project that British Americans could rarely see or ever truly comprehend. The Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, and the Tea Act were all measures – however ill formed or ill advised – to make the whole of the empire work as one.

AMBUSKE 
 In the noise and clamour of the rioting and protests, the crackle of the burning effigies, the splash of tea dumped in harbors, in the fighting between soldiers and civilians, it is often hard for us to hear the pleas of George III’s French Canadian subjects in Quebec. 

AMBUSKE   
By the late 1760s, the king’s ministers in London and British officials on the ground in North America were gathering mounting evidence that Quebec needed reforming. For Sir Guy Carleton, it was an urgent matter. 

AMBUSKE 
Born into a Protestant family in Ulster, Ireland, Carleton had fought at the Battle of Quebec in September 1759, where he was wounded. In 1768, the king appointed him governor of Quebec, with instructions to make an assessment of the province and recommend improvements. When Carleton arrived later that fall, the resistance movements in Boston and other towns on the east coast over the Townshend Acts, colored his view of Quebec and French Canadians. In a letter home to London, he reported that:  

SIR GUY CARLETON 
“Should France begin a War in hopes the British-colonies will push matters to extremities, and she adopts the project of supporting them in their independent notions, Canada, probably, will then become the Principal scene, where the fate of America may be determined.”

AMBUSKE  
Though he grossly overestimated British American ambitions in the east at this moment, having fought in the last war on ground he now governed, Carleton could easily imagine that if matters were pushed “to extremities” and the French intervened in British affairs, French Canadians could be an internal enemy laying in wait. More must be done to ensure the loyalty of the king’s conquered subjects.

AMBUSKE 
 In a lengthy draft report, Carleton and his governor’s council wrote that confusion reigned in the province over whether English or French laws ought to apply in the administration of justice.

AMBUSKE  
Since the conquest, English law was supposed to govern Quebec, but pronouncements made on paper were often impractical on the ground. Judges and lawyers often employed elements of both legal cultures when deciding civil cases. French Canadians used English laws when it was advantageous for them to do so, but still divided up and inherited property according to French civil customs. 

AMBUSKE   
In a petition to the king, nearly 60 French Canadians wrote: 

PETITION  
“Sans fatiguer Votre Majesté par le détail des meaux que leur a Occasionné La privation de ces avantages, dont elle a été instruite par des représentations précedentes de La part de vos fidels Sujets Canadiens; ils se contenteront de Lui dire que..."

PETITION
“Without wearying Your Majesty with details of the ills which the deprivation of their advantages have occasioned them, concerning which Your Majesty has been informed by previous representations, on the part of your faithful Canadian subjects, they will be content with simply telling you that from the different mode of procedure both as regards form and essence in civil affairs, and from the exorbitant rate of the fees exacted by the Lawyers there has ensued the Ruin of a considerable number of families. Your Canadian people, Sire, who are already overwhelmed by so many other calamities, had no need of this increase of misfortune.” 

AMBUSKE   
Carleton and his council suggested a compromise. As French Canadians seemed to have no objection to English criminal law, they recommended that it remain in place, but that French civil law be restored for civil proceedings.   

AMBUSKE  
The question of the continued toleration of the Catholic faith was just as important. By the terms of Montreal’s capitulation and the Treaty of Paris, French Canadians were free to practice their religion, but that faith now barred them from holding office in the province. Office holders had to swear an oath to George III as the defender of the Protestant Church of England, which Catholics could not do without violating their religious convictions.   

AMBUSKE  
As the petitioners asked the king:

PETITION 
“La Religion, Sire, que nous professons, et dans la profession de Laquelle Il vous a plû nous assurer que nous ne Serions jamais troublées..."

PETITION
“Could the religion we profess, Sire, and in the profession of which it had pleased you to assure us that we shall never be disturbed, though differing from that of your other subjects, be a reason, (at least in Your Province of Quebec) for excluding so considerable a number of Your submissive and faithful Children from participation in the favours of the best of Kings, of the tenderest of fathers ? No Sire, prejudice has never reached Your Throne you love equally and without distinction all your faithful subjects."

AMBUSKE  
Catholic French Canadians weren’t the only prospective office holders. By the time that Carleton began his tenure in Quebec, a considerable number of Protestant British merchants were residing in the province. Although the Royal Proclamation of 1763 empowered Quebec’s governor to call for the election of a general assembly when he believed “the state and circumstances” of the province would admit, the colony so far remained without one. The merchants petitioned the king to direct Carleton to call a provincial assembly, which they believed would: 

BRITISH PETITION
“strengthen the hands of Government, give encouragement and protection to Agriculture and Commerce, encrease the Publick Revenues, and we trust, will in time under Your Majesty's Royal influence be the happy means of uniting your new subjects in a due conformity and attachment to the British Laws and Constitution and rendering the conquest of this extensive and populous country truly glorious.”

AMBUSKE  
Carleton carried his report and the petitions with him when he returned to London in 1770 to consult with the British cabinet and begin drawing up plans to reimagine Quebec. Shortly after Parliament passed the Tea Act in May 1773, the plan for Quebec was nearly complete. 

AMBUSKE 
Théophile-Hector de Cramahé was happy to hear it. Quebec’s lieutenant governor had been born in Dublin to a French family. He believed that granting Catholic French Canadians complete religious freedom was the key to securing their loyalty to the crown. As he wrote to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies in June: 

THÉOPHILE-HECTOR DE CRAMAHÉ
“It has ever been my Opinion, I own, that the only sure and effectual Method, of gaining the affections of His Majesty's Canadian Subjects to His Royal Person and Government, was, to grant them all possible Freedom and Indulgence in the Exercise of their Religion, to which they are exceedingly attached, and that any Restraint laid upon them in Regard to this, would only retard, instead of advancing, a Change of their Ideas respecting religious Matters.”

AMBUSKE 
Dartmouth, Carleton, and other members of the government knew that shoring up the allegiance of French Canadians through a more liberal policy of religious toleration would be controversial. Many argued that a Catholic colony had no place in a Protestant Empire in the first place. In the Protestant worldview, Catholics were the antichrist, the Pope was the servant of Satan, and the King of France was the Pope’s minion. But by 1773, elite British members of the government who thought in imperial terms had experience dealing with such arguments.

KATHERINE CARTÉ  
When the British gained all this territory dominated by Catholics after the Seven Years' War, they needed to organize it, and they were kind of slow in organizing it. The first places that are organized are the ceded territories in the Caribbean. In places like Grenada, they try to give some rights to Catholics there. And there's some pushback in England. British legislators in England are aware that there's a potential problem. I am Catherin Carte. I am a professor of history at Southern Methodist University. But elite Brits at this point have taken the idea of the way that Britain ensures religious liberty, which is sort of an essential value of theirs. They've taken it to include toleration of Catholics on some level. In other words, they've taken it to believe that they can't become religious persecutors, and so when they organize Quebec, it was designed to show how benign the British Empire was, and to organize all of this massive territory and also to centralize it by allowing Catholics to have liberties in Quebec. The idea was that the British Empire would not demand that these people follow the kinds of Protestant policies that the rest of the Empire had to follow, and they would be more benign. Now, that was an elite perspective in Britain. Rank and file Brits continued to have real doubts that a Catholic could ever become a part of the British Empire.

AMBUSKE 
As the plan for Quebec took its final shape, British officials also reconsidered the colony’s boundaries. French and British Canadian settlers sent petitions to the king asking for the borders to be redrawn. François Baby himself carried a petition to London on behalf of several merchants and seigneurs asking for the preservation of their traditional French customs and the extension of Quebec’s borders to include Labrador, a major center of the fur trade. 

AMBUSKE   
Carleton, Dartmouth, and other cabinet ministers also looked southwest to the Ohio Country. Here’s Jeffers Lennox:

LENNOX
While the bulk of the French Canadian settlement is living roughly between Quebec and Montreal. There is a significant number of French settlers who have pushed down into the Ohio territories and are in now what is Illinois and when the British restructure Quebec after they capture it in the 1760s and reduce its size into something that's a manageable colonial geography. They do realize that they have left a significant population outside of the boundaries of British law and a British administrative state. And so there are some discussions about what to do to incorporate these French Canadians into a colonial legal regime. Eventually, the British realize that they need to extend the provincial boundaries of Quebec so that these French settlers fall within a legal regime and can be wholly counted as under the protection of the British. Empire. It doesn't happen overnight. It's actually years in planning.

AMBUSKE 
Extending Quebec’s borders southwest to the Ohio River would bring those wayward French settlers more properly under British rule, while also addressing another problem. As Lord Dartmouth admitted to the lieutenant governor in December:

LORD DARTMOUTH  
“There is no longer any Hope of perfecting that plan of Policy in respect to the interior Country, which was in Contemplation when the Proclamation of 1763 was issued; many Circumstances with regard to the Inhabitancy of parts of that Country were then unknown, and there are a Variety of other Considerations that do, at least in my Judgement, induce a doubt both of the Justice and Propriety of restraining the Colony to the narrow Limits prescribed in that Proclamation.”

AMBUSKE 
In other words, the British government’s attempts to stop British Americans in the older provinces from moving into the Ohio Country largely failed. The new plan, embodied in what became known as the Quebec Act, offered a remedy. Brad Jones explains the major components of the act as it was submitted to Parliament.

JONES
It reinstate French civil law in the colony of Quebec, which many of these subjects had asked for. It also establishes a royal government in which the colony would be governed, not by a representative assembly, this is really important, but rather by a royally appointed governor and Council, which is similar to what these French Catholics had lived under French rule. This is more familiar to them. And lastly, it tolerated the Catholic faith. French Catholics were required to still declare an oath of allegiance to George the Third the king, but they could practice their faith freely, and as a consequence of that, they could do things like own land, serve in government, these sorts of things.

LENNOX
So they could keep their language, they can keep their religion, so they can keep practicing their Catholicism, and they can maintain their civil law, this particular sort of French Code of Civil Law, the administrators in London are aware that if they extend those three things out into this massive territory in the Ohio River Valley, that will also likely prevent the Protestant settlers from pushing West, because what they know is that Protestant settlers do not like the French. They do not like Catholics. They're going to be very confused about the law. There's some explicit records here where they say, Look, if we want to prevent these settlers from pushing West, this is a great way to do it. And one of the reasons that they want to prevent these settlers from pushing West is because they know that that will result in more indigenous wars. And Great Britain is broke from fighting the Seven Years War. They're trying to regroup, and the last thing that they want to do is have to launch these new very expensive wars against indigenous nations who are supposed to now be allies with the British. It's this multi layered idea to both expand the idea of a British North America while protecting indigenous homelands from settlers who are just dying to push West and to get into these territories.

AMBUSKE   
Parliament was supposed to begin debate on the Quebec Act in early 1774, but ships soon arrived in British ports that January carrying news of the destruction of the tea in Boston. 

LENNOX
The Quebec Act was supposed to come out earlier. They just bumped it because they were dealing with what they saw as more immediate concerns.

AMBUSKE 
Parliament didn’t pass the Quebec Act until the summer of 1774, months after Prime Minister Lord North pushed through the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, and what some colonists called the Murder Act. 

LENNOX 
This is why the Quebec Act tends to fall into the Intolerable Acts when really it was crafted and ready to go before any of this happened.

AMBUSKE 
French Canadians gained many of the concessions that they had petitioned for, but as Katherine Carté explains, the British public did not look upon the act favorably. 

CARTÉ
There is pushback against the act in Britain, real anger against the act in Britain, and particularly anger against the Anglican hierarchy, which had supported the Quebec Act, the Anglican hierarchy pretty much did whatever the North government wanted them to do, so that was politically kind of no brainer from their end, but they were also supporting this benign policy, and lay people in Britain, particularly radicals, saw this as a sign that the Protestant bulwark of the British Empire was starting to crack. And it opens up this idea that maybe, even at the highest levels, maybe King George or some of his ministers, have been infiltrated by a Catholic conspiratorial menace, and fears that the actual British state has been corrupted by popery.

AMBUSKE 
How did British Americans react when they learned of the Quebec Act in the late summer of 1774?

LENNOX
Well, they weren't happy. This guy, Ezra Stiles, who was a congregational minister, he keeps a diary in the immediate after effects of the announcement of the Quebec Act, and he's in Rhode Island at the time, and he just casually mentioned. Oh, you know, they were marching all the effigies down the street, and there was Lord North, and there was the Pope. They're starting to imagine the British administrators in cahoots with the Roman Catholic Church. And of course, at the end of the procession, they're all lit on fire. This is happening in several places.

AMBUSKE   
It is difficult to overstate the amount of fear that the specter of popery and the legitimacy that Parliament now afforded Catholicism in the Quebec Act raised in Protestant British Americans. 

AMBUSKE   
One quick look at a map showed Protestant British Americans that with the Quebec Act, and the apparent restoration of New France, they were now surrounded with a Catholic French knife at their backs. Ezra Stiles, the congregationalist minister, drew one such map.

LENNOX
It's one of my favorite maps. It's a hand drawn map. He was sort of an amateur cartographer, and it's North America, and he calls his map the bloody church, even if in its present state, where it's kind of faded, you can see that he has painted Canada sort of blood red, and it's huge. Just looking at it, it's this massive territory, and it's sort of bleeding into and crowding out the calmer green Protestant colonies. He has written on this map, these little descriptions, he says, For this territory, the church sold the rights of the British subjects, or the damned Presbyterians, as they call them. And then one of my favorite things is, you can see he's very religious. He strikes out the word Damn. I don't know if he feels bad about it afterwards, but like he's like I swore on a map. I should try to get rid of this. But it's a great visual representation of one man's interpretation. But I do think that it speaks to a broader theme.

AMBUSKE  
One writer, adopting the persona of Lord North, the Prime Minister, wrote gleefully of the Catholic army he could now raise in Quebec “to cut the throats of those heretics, the Bostonians.” Rumors swirled that Governor Carlteon was returning to Canada with orders to raise 30,000 Catholic soldiers to use against the obstinate  Protestant colonies. 

AMBUSKE   
In New York, publisher John Holt printed in the pages of the New York Journal an anonymous letter from Montreal recounting how Governor Carleton transubstantiated into a Catholic when he returned to Quebec in September 1774. Here’s Brad Jones: 

JONES
He returns in 74 and there's a story that appears in every newspaper of his return. In the 18th century, when British governors would return to the colonies they were governing, there would always be some entry ceremony. These entry ceremonies were very common, and the purpose of them is that they represent the monarchy. Their return was a return of monarchical rule to the colony, and so colonists would gather to celebrate their return. It was an opportunity to demonstrate the colony's loyalty to the crown and to the empire. It was also an opportunity for the local community to search their relationship with the returning governor, to recognize that they still had a representative government here, but that they recognize crown authorities. These always played out in really formulaic ways, but when guy Carlton returns, this is the story that they say. When he returns, He arrives and he gets off the boat with his wife, and he's greeted by the local French Bishop, who proceeds to stick out his hand, and Guy Carlton kisses the bishop's hand. And the story says that thereafter, Carlton effectively turned into a Catholic. And this is often how Protestant British subjects described Catholicism. They believed it was entirely based on sort of superstition and magic, that if you have this illiterate, subjugated population, things like the idolatry the French Catholic Church were methods that the Church used to trick their people into committing to Catholicism. They say in this story that he kisses the bishop's hand, and thereafter he basically scorned the local British population in Montreal and began to make friends with all the French in the city. In the eyes of Americans, this is what's happened, that British government is literally turning into French people.

CARTÉ  
Conspiracy Theory is one of the core doctrines of anti potpourri, this idea that there's going to be a conspiracy against liberty that's going to start at the top, and it's going to pull apart the whole structure. So it's fear that runs ahead of any kind of actual act. Americans respond with real passion. The first fast day organized against the course of Acts is organized in Virginia, actually, and it's stopped by the Royal Governor. But they start taking religious ceremonies and turning them towards the revolutionary ends. In New England in particular, you see really profound statements of fear of the British government, of anti potpourri being directed at the British government, that the British government is betraying its own heritage as a Protestant state.

AMBUSKE 
In Boston, the silversmith and Sons of Liberty member Paul Revere engraved a scene for the Royal American Magazine that visualized this betrayal. In a large room, four Catholic bishops dance a minuet around a copy of the Quebec act, to the delight of fellow clerics seated around them. The Prime Minister, Lord North, and one of his predecessors, the Earl of Bute, look on, as does the Devil, flying above the politicians with sharp horns, satanic wings, and hoofed feet. The demon is pointing to his nose with one hand, and to Lord North with the other, making sure the viewer knows that he is the true author of all this work.

AMBUSKE 
 In New York, one poet took the accusations a step further. In the poet’s view, the king was complicit as well and George III ought to remember what had happened to the Catholic tyrants Charles I and James II:

POET
“COULD James the Second leave his Grave, Or Charles peep up, without his Head, How the two royal Knaves would rave To find a Parliament so bread! To join the King, and the Religion own,  For which one lost his Head, and one his Crown!”

LENNOX 
There's lots of angry editorials and letters about what has happened. Some of them are satirical. There was one and the person signed it sort of the devil on two sticks. So it's supposed to be written by the devil, and he's talking about how great it is that the British have done this in part because one of the reasons he gives is it'll actually increase property values because you can't push West anymore, so the property you've got is going to be worth more.

AMBUSKE   
For Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and other colonists who had long prized the Indigenous lands in the Ohio Country, the satirical devil with the two sticks spoke of a wider truth.

LENNOX 
To be fair, the British settlers on the Eastern Seaboard are justifiably frustrated. They just fought a war for access to this land. They wanted to get the French out of New France so that they would have the opportunity to push west into these very fertile territories that were indigenous homelands. The French didn't actually control them, but they had just simply developed better relationships with the indigenous nations there. Of course, that's not on the minds of most British settlers. They just think this will be open territory for the taking. So they're upset that if they were to do this, they would then be in a territory that allowed the French language and the Catholic faith.

AMBUSKE   
The Quebec Act only added to a growing list of intolerable matters for the delegates from the twelve colonies who assembled in Philadelphia for a continental congress in September 1774.

AMBUSKE  
Just over a week after convening, congress adopted the Suffolk Resolves from Suffolk County, Massachusetts Bay as its own, which called: 

SUFFOLK RESOLVES
"the late Act of Parliament for establishing the Roman-Catholic religion and the French laws, in that extensive country now called Canada, is dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion, and to the civil rights and liberties of all America; and there-fore, as men and Protestant Christians, we are indispensably obliged to take all proper measures for our security.” 

AMBUSKE 
New York delegate John Jay was more dramatic. In an Address to the People of Great Britain, Jay wrote that Quebec was “daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe.” He feared that they “might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.” 

AMBUSKE 
Massachusetts Bay delegate John Adams left cryptic, curious notes about congress’s October 22nd debate on the Quebec Act, but the final line made his position – if not that of all the delegates – clear: 

JOHN ADAMS
"Proof of Depth of Abilities, and Wickedness of Heart. Precedent. Lords refusal of perpetual Imprisonment. Prerogative to give any Government to a conquered People. Romish Religion. Feudal Government. Union of feudal Law and Romish Superstition. Knights of Malta. Orders of military Monks. Goths and Vandals—overthrew the roman Empire. Danger to us all. An House on fire."

AMBUSKE  
The militancy of the Suffolk Resolves and the fear swimming through John Adams’ notes are difficult to square with the letter that congress sent to the inhabitants of Quebec at the close of the meeting. In a lengthy address, written mostly by Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson, and printed in both French and English, congress invited Quebec to send delegates to a second congress scheduled to convene in May 1775.   

AMBUSKE 
And it argued that the Quebec Act deprived the king’s French Canadian subjects of their rights as Englishmen. Among many rights listed, the right to elect an assembly was chief among them. Despite the petitions of some Quebec English inhabitants, the new act did not authorize a provincial assembly, depriving their new fellow subjects of the right to be “ruled by laws, which they themselves approve, not by edicts of men over whom they have no control.” 

AMBUSKE  
Congress ignored the public’s Protestant rage and animosity toward Catholics, pointing to Switzerland as a place where both Christian peoples lived in peace. Besides, love of freedom transcended faith, and if Catholic French Canadians would but join with their Protestant British brethren, they could together resist Parliament’s supremacy and restore British liberty. 

AMBUSKE   
But as the delegates in congress and many British Americans in the older provinces were only just beginning to understand, what it meant to be British was undergoing a revolution itself.  

JONES 
Parliament is beginning to reconceive of the nature of British subject hood. This is a kind of a progressive moment in the development of subjecthood that they're beginning to maybe move away from these sectarian attitudes and embrace the diversity of their empire. This is happening in other places as well, but for American colonists, or ones that are going to join this emerging Patriot cause, the Quebec Act, it makes the past decade make sense that if they were under the impression for the past decade. That's to say back to say the Stamp Act, that their government was growing increasingly tyrannical in its governing of the colonies. It all made sense now. In 1774 it made sense in the context that the reason that Parliament was doing this was becoming more aggressive in its governing of the colonies and depriving them of their rights of British subjects, because it was actually Catholic in nature. They're morphing into these French rulers. The kinds of tyranny that they'd experienced over the last decade was not how a good Protestant British ruler would act. But if they've succumbed to Catholicism, sure

AMBUSKE  
In the waning days of the Continental Congress, the delegates composed another address, this time, a petition to the king. 

AMBUSKE  
The petition told a story of a “destructive system of colony administration, adopted since the conclusion of the late war” to a king who proclaimed at his coronation oath thirteen years earlier that he “glories in the name of Briton.” 

AMBUSKE 
Standing armies had been kept in British America in times of peace; provincial assemblies had been dissolved; customs officials could seize property without a warrant; the commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America was now governor of Massachusetts Bay; Parliament had passed numerous acts to tax the colonies without their consent; crown officials could escape justice in the colonies by standing trial in England; Boston’s port had been shut up; colonies made to quarter troops; the charter of Massachusetts Bay altered; and now the establishment of an absolutist government “and the Roman Catholic religion through the vast regions that border on the westerly and northerly boundaries of the free protestant English settlements.”   

AMBUSKE  
 They believed that “designing and dangerous men” in Parliament had come between George III and free Protestant subjects in North America, misrepresenting their discontent with Parliament as signs of rebellion and disloyalty. 

AMBUSKE  
The die had not yet been cast; it was not too late for the king to end this recent unhappy history and make a better future. 

AMBUSKE  
Now, having composed their petition, all they could do was wait for the king’s answer. Theirs was a public plea for reconciliation. Little did they know that in a drawing room at 12 Grafton Street in London, secret talks would soon be underway to avoid a British civil war.   

AMBUSKE  
Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

AMBUSKE  
I’m your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske.  

AMBUSKE 
This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

AMBUSKE 
Head to r2studios.org to find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.  

AMBUSKE  
Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. 

AMBUSKE 
Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.   AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of cd squared.    AMBUSKE:  Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant. 

AMBUSKE   
Our thanks to Katherine Carté, Christian Ayne Crouch, Brad Jones, and Jeffers Lennox for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.  

AMBUSKE 
Thanks also to our voice actors Jan Hoffmann Craig Gallagher, Emmanuel Dubois, Grace Mallon, Bertrand van Ruymbeke, Adam Smith, Anne Fertig, Annabelle Spencer, and Patrick Long.   

AMBUSKE  
Special thanks to Andreas Frings.  

AMBUSKE 
Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.