the people’s story

> - THE BATTLE FOR CONFEDERATION

By HAL GRIFFIN

pn THE five years between the union of Vancouver Island
and British Columbia on November 19, 1866 and the
united colony’s entry into Confederation on July 1, 1871, the
men who represented the two great forces pulling at British
Columbia fought their battle to determine its future.

Would the colony succumb to the natural pull of geog-
raphy and north-south development of trade along the Pacific
coast and join the United States? Or would it follow the
course already outlined by its historical development and
respond to those who dreamed of uniting all the colonies and
territories of! British North America into a new nation
reaching across a wilderness in which there was neither road
nor railroad to link them? The thisd course, to remain as a
colony, was at the most only a deferring of the inevitable
decision.

At the Quebec Conference in 1864 which established
the framework of Confederation, provision was made for the
eventual inclusion of British Columbia and the North-West
Territories. But in the United States the forces of Manifest
Destiny were still reaching out and the extremists among
them still talked of bringing British Columbia into the
Union and closing the Pacific coast to Britain — and the
new nation struggling to be born.

A jingle popular in the United States in these years ep-
itomized an expansionist appeal that found some echo in
British Columbia:

You want the mail,

You want the rail,

You want the cars to hie on.

Come join us and we'll thread your land
With passageways of iron.

It was an extremist, General Banks, who, on July 2, 1866,
introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives his “bill
for the admission of the States of Nova Scotia, New Bruns-
wick, Canada East and Canada West, and for the organiza-
tion of the Territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan and Colum-
bia.”

Under this audacious bill, the U.S. was to assume all
the debts and contingent liabilities of the British North
American colonies to the extent of $36,500,000 and make
an annual grant of $1,646,000 in aid of local expenditures.
It was to pay the Hudson’s Bay Company $10,000,000 for its
territories. And it was t® build .a railroad from Bangor,
Maine, by way of St. John, Truro, Riviere du: Loup, Ottawa
and Sault Ste. Marie across the continent to the Pacific,

The bill died in committee, but on far-off Vancouver
Island, among the same circles that had opposed union of the
two colonies, it helped to fan the sentiment for annexation
to the U.S.

In British Columbia the first frantic surge of develop-
ment had spent itself in the creeks of the Cariboo, Placer
mining was declining and the hard rock discoveries which
would give some stability to the mining ndustry had yet. to be
made. The expanding lumber industry, which was now shift-
ing its centre to Burrard Inlet, was still too small to. compen-
sate for the falling revenues from placer mining.

With no more than 10,000 white population strung in
towns and communities from Victoria to Barkerville, the
colony had a public debt of $1,500,000 and a revenue in 1866
of $475,000. The colonists complained that there were too
many officials on the government's payroll, but Governor
Frederick Seymour was loath to reduce the official clique
on whose support his colonial regime depended.

All this gave the annexationists a fertile field of discontent
to exploit.

The annexatonists’ main strength was among the mer-
chants of . Victoria which, until 1866, had been a free port

into which U.S. goods came duty-free although tariffs were
imposed on the mainland, They had a scattering of support
among American-born colonsts on Vancouver Island and even
a few of the British-born like J. Despard Pemberton former
government surveyor, who advocated casting off the British
tie Bee ee fee was “a source of weakness and not of
strength to England, commerciall f i
arene 00% ne ey y unprofitable in peace and
The Victoria merchants saw their future in a free and un-
hampered trade with San Francisco, the colony’s chief line of
communication. The U.S. Pacific coast provided a growing

market within their reach, The Canadi i
: adian market w
and uncertain. piece

A petition circulated in Victoria in July, 1867 called upon
the British government “‘to relieve us immediately of chee:
pense of our excessive staff of officials, assist the establish-
ment of a British steam line for Panama so that immigration
may reach us, and also assume the debts of the colon or
- + permit the colony to become a portion of the U.S.” Z

‘ Governor Seymour reported to the Duke of Buckingham:
There is systematic agitation going on in this town in favor
of annexation to the United States. It is believed that the
money for its mantenance is provided from San Francisco

On the mainland the question of annexation is not mooted >

Similar warning was given to the British House of Com-
mons in June, 1868 by Viscount Milton, who had visited
the colony. Intimate trade relations, he said, had ae
desire in British Columbia to join the Union. If the ae
ment wanted to retain the colony it must offer pea thi
more than advice and vague promises, Sue

; In wie colony itself, Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, son-in-
aw ae Sir James Douglas, voiced the annexationists’ attitude
to Confederation when he asserted that the colonists “care

nothing about the distinction b
etween the governm
Canada and that of the United States,” = ne

But there were others in the colony, and they spoke for

the majority, to whom the form
: of governmen :
ing concern. 8 t was of burn

esa nots Somme eer
sent council of British Col-
umbia nine members were elected and 14 appointed by the
governor — and actual power remained in the cover one
hands, the movement for responsible government could
unite all its forces for a new advance. ae

_To the appeal of the annexationists for union with th
United States, through which the Victoria merchants hoped =
increase ‘their own profitable trade, and the delving an u-
ments of the colonial clique, complacently battening on the
public payroll while the colony sank deeper into debt, the
movement for responsible government counterposed the iden
of joining the Canadian Confederation, which even then was
being shaped at London.

The demand, when it was voiced in the legislative
council and taken up by public meetings in the Cariboo. Vic-
toria and elsewhere, evoked popular support throughout the
colony. If the leaders of the movement served their own
interests in seeking to unite with the more established and
rising capitalist class of Canada and so share in the surge
of development they believed would follow Confederation
it was the miners and settlers who were most directly exclud-
ed from representation and carried the burden of the colony’s
autocratic and extravagant regime.

On March 18, 1867, the legislative council unanimously
adopted a resolution proposed by ‘Amor De Cosmos asking
Governor Seymour to take immediate measures to secure ad-
mission of British Columbia to Confederation on fair and
equitable terms. But when the resolution was considered at
London, the British North American delegates, while agree-

(CONCLUDED ON NEXT PAGE)

i
TOP: Bell of the Be .
first steamship on the er:
coast, found in Seattle 1 “a |
CENTRE: Alfred Wadd) |
ton who exploited feat ;
British Columbia’s joinin& 4 |
U.S. to promote his 144 |
ventures. BOTTOM: fF jo! |
shacks on Vancouver's

Lagoon in 1868.

F
April 25, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE |