The Prophetic Anti-Gallic Letters

The Prophetic Anti-Gallic Letters Adam Thom and the Hidden Roots of The Dominion of Canada by Adam Thom was published in 1836 based on Thom's editorials in Montreal Herald written under the pseudonym "Camillus" in the previous two years. They were never reprinted, despite their importance and above all the people for whom Thom was the public voice, namely the executive committee of the powerful Constitutional Association of Montreal, that included the president George Moffatt as well as Peter McGill and John McCord. Thom was also co-author of the famous Durham Report. More than an anti-French, anti-Republican tract, The Anti-Gallic Letters, though generally ignored by historians, are crucial to understanding how British North America mutated into the Dominion of Canada in 1867. Erroneously characterized as a minor discord between the Melbourne cabinet in London and a select group of merchants, bankers and gentlemen of the Montreal Tory oligarchy, The Anti-Gallic Letters reveal the total disagreement among people of British culture and background in London or in Montreal on how power should be controlled in the colonies of Canada. Westminster, inspired by the 1832 Reform Bill, believed in a gradual and harmonious transfer of British parliamentary values and institutions to a majority group of a different culture, language and background, described as "The great body of people" by Governor Gosford in his 1835 Throne speech read in French. But the Montreal Tory Oligarchy, mobilized by fear and bravado, anticipated the worst, while still espousing the same British imperial world mission as Westminster. Seeing Montreal as the hub of British North America, they brandished the spectre of a British Empire dismembered by a French Republic arising in the St. Lawrence Valley or annexation of Upper and Lower Canada by the powerful American Republic. They thus considered themselves justified to threaten the use lethal force to make Downing Street change its course. Moreover, as François Deschamps shows, they succeeded: first in 1837 with the brutal repression of the Patriotes in Lower Canada and the Reformers in Upper Canada, second with the Durham Report and the Act of Union, and finally with the 1867 BNA Act creating the Dominion of Canada. Now reprinted, the Anti-Gallic Letters with Deschamps's fascinating presentation and notes provide a new but crucial point of...