Young, Brian

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS 211 RONALD RoMKEY, ed.-Expeditions of Honour, The Journal of John Salusbury in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1749-53. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982. Pp. 221. John Salusbury ( 1707 -62) epitomized one type of British official in the eighteenth-century British empire. Unfit for anything but the misspending of other people's wealth, he was obliged by his own poverty to accept a position in the new government established at Halifax in 1749. Ignorant of trade, without capital, he survived on credit. Of little weight in politics, he was arguably the man on the Council least fitted to hold office. He appears in ali to have been one of the least successful of that curious breed of migratory Welsh gentlemen. He went to Halifax as an "unavoidable inconvenience" (p. 24), after a career at Cambridge which trained him as a "fortune hunter and gigolo". (p. 27) His debts were paid off upon his marriage in 1739 to his cousin, Rester Cotton. Y et his mother managed to encumber his own expected inheritance, so that he was soon incapable of supporting himself, his wife or his daughter, the celebrated Rester Lynch Piozzi Thrale . Dr. Romk:ey says his ±:365 a year salary did not go far; but he should remember that it was the equivalent to having a fortune of {12,000 at 3 percent! In addition he bad a small allowance from his brother. The fool and his .money were soon parted, while his wife supported herself and daughter on { 125! Financial rescue came ultimately from his sister-in-law, the daughter of Sir Henry Penrice, a wealthy judge of the Admiralty Court in London; and Salusbury was able to desert Halifax and live on his brother's charity in comfortable London bouses. The death of this dear lady left the Salusbury brothers in a financial position which even John could not successfully assail. lt seerns utterly fitting, to this most inconsequential of individuals that he died of an apoplectic stroke, occasioned by a prolonged argument with his daughter over a suitor, the Southwark brewer, Henry Thrale, ber first husband. The value of his diary is lirnited . He was witness to the first British expedition to the Chignecto Basin in April 1750, a fiasco. Also of interest is his reference to the immigration of German and Swiss "Protestants" to Halifax between 1749 and 1752. He complained that many were deserting to Louisbourg. Though he does not mention it, they were in reality Catholics, sorne of whom even resett1ed in Halifax after the capture of Louisbourg in 1758. They appeared then as Anglicans, only tore-emerge as Catholics after 1784 when priests again began to minister to the Roman Catholic faithful in Nova Scotia. Furthermore, his diary reinforces the impression that the ear1y sett1ers felt isolated and displayed an inordinate fear of both French and Indians. This derived from their garrison, or fortress, mentality. "Here is nothing but dullness, the very Empire of dullness." (p. 15i) Perhaps it was a suitable epitaph for himself; but how different the view taken by enterprising New Englanders, of whom the editor says too little, whom the prospects of trade and the fisheries excited. To have brought the journal, the original of which is in Manchester's John Rylands Library, to the public eye was useful, and puts, marginally at least, ail historians of early Nova Scotia in the editor' s debt. * * * Julian GWYN University of Ottawa NoËL BAILLARGEON, Le Séminaire de Québec de 1760 à 1800. Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1981. Pp. 297. The book under review is the third volume-and the most interesting to this point-of Baillargeon's history of the Séminaire de Québec. Volume one covers the Seminary's 212 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY origins under Bishop Laval, the second treats the period 1685 to 1760, and this volume describes the reorganization of the Seminary in the decades after the conquest. Already over 1000 pages, the volumes can be characterized as essentially descriptive, chronological and uncritical of the Seminary. lnstitutional history is an enticing but sometimes dangerous turf. Given the nature of archivai holdings and particularly the collecting practices of religious communities, the historian of institutions often has vaults of data. Added to the richness of their documentation, many institutions have political or ideological power at their disposai which permits them to create their own historical framework and momentum: the historian can be tempted sim ply to attach his wagon to the institution's self-defined and invariably self-justifying reality. Placing his institution at centre-stage and relying on minutes, accounting records and eulogies from the institution's own archivai service, the historian risks emphasizing the buildings, artifacts, manorhouses and convents over the soldiers, the peasants and the parishioners who remain hidden bit-players in the trenches, the fields and the pews. Baillargeon begins this volume in 1760. The conquest was of course the major political crisis of the eighteenth century for Quebec religious communities, jeopardizing their properties, their legal privileges, and their social and religious raison d'être. Although faring better than the Jesuits, the Seminary had its buildings and seigneuries ravaged during the hostilities, and !ost revenues of sorne 23,000 livres (p. 13). The war scattered its members and with the cession of New France they had to decide whether to repatriate or to adjust to a British régime. Like severa! other Quebec religious communities, the Seminary adapted nicely to !ife under the British Crown. Despite an early confrontation with Govemor Murray over the naming of a superior, it separated from its Parisian mother-house with a minimum of trauma and adopted a new constitution. In the years after 1760 the Seminary abandoned its parish duties and its Indian mission in Illinois. Integrated into the Canadian ecclesiastical hierarchy and subordinated to the Bishop of Quebec, it was forced to submit annual financial accounts and seek his consent for major expenditures, the initiation of important law cases and the addition of members. The Seminary's changing status was accompanied by a redefinition of its social function. With the disappearance of its parish and mission function, the Seminary's sole vocation became education. Much of Volume Three is devoted to the organization, teaching program and financing of the Collège and Grand Séminaire. Inspired by the Council of Trent, Jesuit colleges and the French seminary system, the Seminary's secondary and theological school emphasized classical subjects and strict moral training. The all-encompassing nature of a seminary education, the isolation of the student from his family and community, the correlation between the sound of the bell and the voice of the Lord, the emphasis on leaming by rote, use of Latin, on corporal punishment, hierarchy, cleanliness and obedience will be familiar themes to readers of the works of Claude Galameau or Yvan Lamonde. Class leaders, Baillargeon relates, were given the title of lmperator, the Jess brilliant were the Mediocres,-and then came the lnfimos (p. 158). Volume three includes a valuable section on the administration and financing of the Seminary's seigneuries. After financial hardship in the 1760's when it rented rooms and farms in retum for repairs and improvements, it had substantial profits by the tum of the century from its mills, fishing rights and other seigneurial dues; in 1782 the Seminary had ten mills and 1,349 heads of families on its seigneuries (pp. 202-3). What is missing from Baillargeon' s his tory is an overall interpretation and a sense of the milieu of the Seminary, its clientele and its constituency. Although he argues that the Lower-Canadian populace in 1791 "était en grande majorité satisfaite du régime seigneurial" (p. 225), much more needs to be said about the people on the Seminary's seigneuries, in COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS 213 its classrooms and on its retreats. At the same time, more of a scalpel is needed in subsequent volumes to eut away unnecessary detail. Surely our historiographical tradition has advanced beyond the point where we need to conclude that the Seminary's school directors acted as "des hommes éclairés et voués tout entiers à leur tâche d'éducateurs" (p. 141). * * * Brian YOUNG McGill University FRANCES HALPENNY and JEAN HAMELIN, eds .-Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol-ume V: 1801-1820. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Pp. xxv, 1044. The appearance of Volume V of the DCB and DBC (the eighth of twelve currently projected in the series) offers an occasion again to congratulate the entire project, including the able editorial teams that produced this volume, the severa! hundred historians and researchers who contributed, and the funding agencies that have made so accomplished a work possible-and at the remarkably low priee of $45 . Both the approach of the Dictionary and its many virtues are now so weil known that it almost suffices to say simply that Volume V fully maintains the standards of previous volumes. lts 500 articles, on individuals who died between 1801 and 1820, embrace the expected public officiais (e.g ., Peter Russell), religious leaders (e.g. , Charles Inglis), businessmen (e.g. , Alexander Ellice), fur traders (e.g. , Peter Pond), and military officers (e.g ., Sir George Prevost), along with a variety of others who may serve to represent such. more numerous but harder-to-know categories of people as Indians, artisans, farmers, and criminals. Also included is a major article, one of the two longest in the volume, on Sir Frederick Haldimand, who died in 1791. As in previous volumes, an attempt has clearly been made to make of the whole a kind of pointillist history of its age; presumably with this in mind, more than a few articles are Jess lives than lives and times of their subjects. Among the shorter articles, a number, apparently because sources were few, rely more heavily than one might have wished on the rather limited evidence of estate inventories. Most prominent of the volume's themes is war, from the Seven Years' War and the Conquest through the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812. Scarcely an individual in the volume was not significantly affected by war. Both well-known figures such as Sir James Craig, Sir James Yeo, Benedict Arnold, Tecumseh, and Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) and, equally, the many Loyalists, army and navy officers, traders, and others found their lives fundamentally altered by the impact of war-in sorne cases largely through the reshaping of political and economie life that war brought about, but very often by the physical experience of danger, hardship, and Joss. Almost as prominent is the not-unrelated theme of economie insecurity. To overcome it, many of those in the volume, including most businessmen, pursued economie diversification and general rather than specialized trades . Accompanying insecurity was, of course, debt. Many of the individuals profiled wrestled with its attendant problems at one time or another in the ir careers: not only those great and small whose enterprises actually failed, but even the successful and figures like Isaac Brock, much affected by his brother's bankruptcy in 1811, and Chief Justice John Elmsley, whose untimely death left his farnily apparently with liabilities rather than assets. Notable also in the volume, in the many articles on officiais and the politically active, but seldom absent for more than a few pages anywhere, is the theme of patronage and clientage-a reftection of the degree to which eighteenth-century society was organized along chains of persona! connections. 

NOËL BAILLARGEON, Le Séminaire de Québec de 1760 à 1800.

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NOËL BAILLARGEON, Le Séminaire de Québec de 1760 à 1800.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)