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Continental Congresses

The Quebec Act

Q

The Quebec Act

The Quebec Act was a British parliamentary action that received royal assent on 22 June 1774. It was to go into effect on 1 May 1775, giving full power to the Canadian province of Quebec to maintain its laws as a separate entity and extend British boundaries into the Ohio River Valley. Instead, it convinced the American colonists that the British intended to circle them with forts and troops and ultimately lead to full occupation of the entire colonial structure. Fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord before the law could go into effect.

Codified at 14 George III, c.83 {1774}, the enactment is officially known as “An Act for making more effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec in North America.” It reads, in part, “Whereas his Majesty, by his Royal Proclamation bearing Date the seventh Day of October. in the third Year of his Reign, thought fit to declare the Provisions which had been made in respect to certain Countries, Territories, and Islands in America, ceded to his Majesty by the definitive Treaty of Peace, concluded at Paris on the tenth day of February, one thousand seven hundred and sixty-three . . .” [1]

The Quebec Act was part of a series of actions by the British Parliament passed in response to “commotions and insurrections” in the colonies: these have come to be known as “The Coercive Acts” or “The Intolerable Acts.” These included The Boston Port Bill (also known as The Boston Port Act), The Massachusetts Government Act, The Administration of Justice Act, and The Quartering Act. From the view of liberty, these are some of the most restrictive acts ever enacted against the American people. Ironically, The Quebec Act was the “least” restrictive—but it was part of a program in which the colonists believed that England was moving to encircle the colonies and strangle them, economically and judiciously. The acts were passed in response to the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the several boycotts of British goods, lasting back to The Stamp Act in 1765.

And while the other acts pushed the colonies closer to the war that would soon come, it was The Quebec Act that was the last straw. Many colonists, who were Protestant, believed that the British Prime Minister, Lord North, a Roman Catholic, intended to extend the hand of “Popery” across the American colonies. Others merely saw this action as a strike against democracy. When William Henry Drayton, a Loyalist from South Carolina, received word of the actions as a whole, he denounced them, in a letter, calling them a “Tragedy of five Acts.” He penned:

Hitherto I have opposed the local popular policy of this colony. I thought the principles of action were unconstitutional. I am of the same opinion—I may be wrong—my judgment is my guide. But now! the Tragedy of five Acts composed in the last Session of Parliament, in my opinion, violates all the rules of the Political drama and incapacitates me from saying one word in favor of [the British] Administration—Nay, the same Spirit of indignation which animated me to condemn popular measures in the year 1769 because, although avowedly in defense of Liberty, they absolutely violated the freedom of Society by demanding men, under pain of being stigmatized and of sustaining detriment in property, to accede to Resolutions which, however well meant, could not from the apparent constraint they held out but be grating, very grating to a Freeman. So, the same Spirit of indignation, yet incapable of bending to measures violating Liberty, actuates me in like manner now to assert my Freedom against the malignant nature of the late five Acts of Parliament . . . Thus, from one and the same center of action and principle of conduct, I opposed succeeding violations of my rights—then, by a temporary Democracy—now by an established Monarchy. [2]

The First Continental Congress had ended, and a second was preparing to gather when The Quebec Act was published in the colonies. Historian Caroline Robbins wrote:

News of these acts reached America in May. The Virginia Assembly, expressing its distress, was dissolved by James Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore. Meeting as a convention on May 27, it arranged a further session in August and called for a congress of all colonies. Others followed similar procedures. The amended Quartering Act and the Quebec Act of June dealt further blows to liberty. These and the earlier intolerable acts were mentioned in the Declaration of October 14. All of these statutes, it stated, “are impolitic, cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and most dangerous and destructive of American Rights.” The Continental Congress was determined to secure a settlement safeguarding America’s laws and liberties against past and forthcoming subversion. [3]

Some Britons—led by Edmund Burke—saw the danger in The Coercive Acts, and called for their repeal. Noted historian Allan J. McCurry stated:

When Edmund Burke on 22 March 1775 made a motion for a repeal of the Coercive Acts plus features of the other acts considered oppressive by the colonies, he was convincingly defeated. David Hartley’s proposal for a return to the requisition system was rejected; and his second plan, calling for a suspension of the Boston Port Bill and the Massachusetts Government Act for three years and the Administration of Justice Act for two years, was also crushed. An effort to repeal the Quebec Act was defeated. Lord North defended the Quebec Act as a just and sound measure. He admitted the intention of arming the Canadians if the “refractory” colonies could not be reduced by the present force. The Roman Catholic population offered a reserve to be used against the Americans. North stated, however, that the dispute was not as alarming as some believed. It would be settled “speedily, happily, and without bloodshed.” All this, before the news of Lexington and Concord arrived. [4]

William Pitt, Lord (later 1st Earl) Chatham, rose in the House of Commons and gave extensive remarks on The Quebec Act, covered in-depth in a British magazine at the time:

June 18, took into consideration the amendments made by the Lower House. The question being put for the House to agree to the amendments, Lord Chatham rose up and entered fully upon the subject of the bill; [he] said it would involve a great country in a thousand difficulties, and in the worst of despotism, and put the whole people under arbitrary power; that it was a most cruel, oppressive, and odious measure, tearing up justice and every good principle by the roots; that by abolishing the trial by jury, he supposed the framers of the bill that mode of proceeding, together with the Habeas Corpus, mere moonshine, whilst every true Englishman was ready to lay down his life sooner than lose those bulwarks of his personal security and property. The merely supposing that the Canadian would not be able to feel the good effects of the law and freedom, because they had been used to arbitrary power, was an idea as ridiculous as false. He said the bill established a despotic government in that country, to which the royal proclamation of 1763 promised the protection of the English laws: here the noble lord read part of the proclamation, and then entered fully on the council and power vested in the governors, the whole mode of which, he said, was tyrannical and despotic; he was likewise very particular on the bad consequences that would attend the great extension of that province, that the whole of the bill appeared to him to be destructive of that liberty which ought to be the ground work of every constitution: ten thousand objections, he was confident, might be made to the bill, but the extinction of the mode of trial abovementioned was a very alarming circumstance, and he would pronounce him a bold man who proposed such a plan. When his lordship came to the religious part of the bill, he directed his discourse to the bench of bishops, telling them that as by the bill the Catholic religion was made the established religion of that vast continent, it was impossible they could be silent on the occasion. He called the bill a child of inordinate power, and asked if any of that bench would hold it out for baptism; he touched again upon the unlimited power of the governor, in appointing all the members, and who might be made up of Roman Catholics only. He deduced the whole series of laws from the supremacy first revindicated [sic] under Henry the Eighth down to this day, as fundamentals constituting a clear compact that all establishments by law are to be Protestant; which compact ought not to be altered, but by the content of the collective body of the people. He further maintained, unanswered, that the dangerous innovations of this bill were at variance with all the safeguards and barriers against the return of Popery and of Popish influence, so wisely provided against by all the oaths of office and of trust from the constable up to the members of both Houses, and even to the sovereign in his coronation oath. He pathetically expressed his fears that it might shake the affections and confidence of his majesty’s Protestant subjects in England and Ireland; and finally lose the hearts of all his American subjects. His lordship then said, that for those and other reasons, he gave his heavy negative to the bill. Lord Dartmouth the spoke a short time by way of answer, as did Lord Lyttelton. [5]

Historian Derek H. Davis summed up the response of the Continental Congress:

In considering the implications of the Quebec Act, the Continental Congress was far less interested in masterminding plots to increase American sentiment for independence than it was in making serious efforts to win the support of the citizens of Quebec in the colonies’ dispute with Great Britain. This would not be easy in view of the popularity of the Quebec Act among Canadians; after all, did the Act not guarantee to Canadian Catholics the right to freely exercise their faith without civil penalties of any kind? The strategy that Congress settled on was to convince the Canadians that the religious freedom granted them in the Act was already theirs—granted by God—and that their submission to British grants of pre-existing rights would strengthen the power of Parliament to arbitrarily remove such rights in the future. [6]

Historian Milo Quaife explained in 1938:

If we seek for the explanation of this individuality, we are led inevitably to the ordinance enacted by the dying Congress of the Confederation on 13 July 1787. As mountain peaks overtop the surrounding plain, a few great legislative acts in our history tower above the vast body of statutes which fills the rows of books in our law libraries. Magna Charta, extorted from reluctant King John at Runnymede seven hundred years ago, is one such document; the Quebec Act of 1774, fateful for the future of Canada and the United States, is another. Of like character are our Federal Constitution and the Ordinance of 1787, both drafted in the same year; one for the government of the American nation, the other for the government of the land lying north and west of the Ohio River. [7]

Historian Stephen Stein quoted the Reverend Samuel Sherwood, who delivered, in 1776, a sermon entitled “The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness: An Address on the Times”: “Not only has the monarch of England flirted with the ‘old mother of harlots,’ but the ministry has openly attempted to establish Roman Catholicism in America by the passage of the Quebec Act and has raised armies ‘to dragoon us into slavery and bondage, or massacre and butcher us and our families, and lay our pleasant country in desolation and ruin.’” [8]

[1] [1] “Anno Regni. Georgii III. Regis Magna Britanniæ, Franciæ, & Hiberniæ, Decimo Quarto. At the Parliament begun and Holden at Westminster, the Tenth Day of May, Anno Domini 1768, in the Eighth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Third, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. And from thence continued, by several Prorogations, to the Thirteenth Day of January, 1774: being the Seventh Session of the Thirteenth Parliament of Great Britain” (London: Printed by Charles Eyre and William Strahan, Printers to the King’s most Excellent Majesty, 1774), 5.

[2] [2] Gibbes, R.W., “Documentary History of the American Revolution: Consisting of Letters and Papers Relating to the Contest for Liberty, Chiefly in South Carolina, From Originals in the Possession of the Editor, and Other Sources, 1764-1776” (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1855), 12-13.

[3] [3] Robbins, Caroline, “Rights and Grievances at Carpenters’ Hall, September 5-October 26, 1774,” Pennsylvania History, XLIII:2 (April 1976), 108.

[4] [4] McCurry, Allan J., “The North Government and the Outbreak of the American Revolution,” Huntington Library Quarterly, XXXIV:2 (February 1971), 156-57.

[5] [5] “Lord Chatham’s Speech on the Québec Act,” The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, f0r June 1775, 286.

[6] [6] Davis, Derek H., “Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774-1789. Contributions to Original Intent” (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 154.

[7] [7] Quaife, Milo M., “The Significance of the Ordinance of 1787,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, XXX:4 (January 1938), 416.

[8] [8] Stein, Stephen J., “An Apocalyptic Rationale for the American Revolution,” Early American Literature, IX:3 (Winter 1975), 214.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
"The Quebec Act." Continental Congresses, edited by Mark Grossman, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Cong_0352.
APA 7th
The Quebec Act. Continental Congresses, In M. Grossman (Ed.), Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Cong_0352.
CMOS 17th
"The Quebec Act." Continental Congresses, Edited by Mark Grossman. Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Cong_0352.