At Your Service

by Rob Fisher, Library and Archives Canada

Introduction | Directives | Debates | Dreams | References

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Debates

Where should I go? This question confronted prospective emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, who could choose from Canada, Australia, and the United States, among other inviting places. Canadian winters were cold, Australia was far, and the United States was hostile to the British Crown. Ultimately the choice came down to personal preference and resources. Did the emigrants wish to continue to enjoy the rights and privileges of British subjects in British North America? Did the religious freedom of the United States appeal to them? Could they afford the longer and more expensive voyage to Australia? Did they have friends or relatives who had gone before them and written glowing letters home from a certain locality? Kinship could ease the transition in a strange land.

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Eighteen-year-old Robert Hume asked these very questions in the spring of 1836 when he sailed from Newcastle, England, for Québec. Letters of introduction from his family and friends, addressed to those they knew in North America, attested to his good character. He journeyed first through Lower and Upper Canada and then went on to New York and Ohio to test the waters there.

The outbreak of the rebellion in Upper Canada against British authority in 1837 brought home to Hume that there were other debates afoot in the young colony. Reform-minded newspapers fought a losing battle to win the hearts and minds of immigrants; disappointment with his unsympathetic audience led the editor of the St. Thomas Liberal to complain of "that spirit of enmity with which Emigrants from the Old Countries are taught to regard the Reformers of Upper Canada. From the moment an Irishman or Englishman sets his foot upon our soil, his ears are stunned by the cry of Treason and Rebellion which is constantly kept up by the curs of office to deceive the ignorant and unwary." The tide of immigrants from the British Isles in the 1820s and 1830s had indeed reinforced pro-government sentiment in Upper Canada. The resort to violence by the rebels provoked Hume's disdain for those who wished to impose their political views by force, and popular support in New York State for the rebel cause set his heart against settling there.

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During his travels Hume had felt most at home among the other immigrants from northern England whom he met in the Cobourg and Port Hope area of Upper Canada. When a farmer there hired him as a labourer, he expressed his feelings in his diary: "I feel on the whole pretty comfortable and reconciled to the idea of being a servant which is now for the first time my situation." Pondering the decision to remain in Canada in 1838, he reflected, "... if the kindness of friends to one who went among them a complete stranger can have any influence Canada has many claims on me and altho' it as a country has many disadvantages and no society is without its failings yet I feel that I can live pretty well in it if I wish to be content...."