It was an annus horribilis in Montreal. On 25 April 1849, an angry mob descended on the legislature, forcing politicians to flee and burning the building to the ground. The rioting continued for a week before being quelled by British troops stationed in the city. Over the summer, prominent Montreal merchants, despairing of their well-being in the era of British free trade, discussed various remedies for their plight. In October they issued a manifesto calling for annexation to the United States. While many European nations had experienced uprisings the previous year and were no strangers to manifestos – 1848 was, after all, the year of the Communist Manifesto – the Canadian version of public protest was distinctly odd. The perpetrators were mostly conservatives (“Tories” in the vocabulary of the day), rather than liberals and radicals. Clearly, much had changed since the War of 1812.

POSTWAR IMMIGRATION

Between 1815 and 1850 nearly a million people emigrated from Great Britain to British North America. Phillip Buckner has argued that the Anglicization of the northern half of North America in this period, owing largely to immigration from Great Britain, is one of the most significant developments in the history of the British Empire. It is, without question, a major chapter in the history of Canada. The tide of immigration receded for a time in the 1850s, but by then the British character of much of settler society had been set. The Irish, who had been incorporated into Great Britain by the Act of Union in 1801, made up 25 percent of a British North American population approaching 2.5 million, while those identified as English and Welsh accounted for about 20 percent, and the Scottish nearly 16 percent.