College and Research Libraries Canadian'American Colonial Printing IN C A N A D I A N - A M E R I C A N R E L A T I O N S , o n e fact stands out which helps us to under- stand each other. I t is much more signifi- cant than the notoriously undefended frontier. I t is the number of people living in Canada with American background, and the number in the United States of Ca- nadian origin and upbringing. T h i s "mingling of the Canadian and American peoples," as Marcus L . Hansen and J . Bartlet Brebner so aptly term it,1 has been characteristic of this continent since the eighteenth century. T h a t century, the latter half a revolutionary epoch in so many ways like our own time, was different from the twentieth in that the Canadian-American frontier was the scene of sporadifc conflict. Nevertheless, settlers moved across that frontier in both directions. About the middle of the century the Maritime Provinces changed from nominal to actual British control, and a decade later French Canada became a British colony. Colonials from N e w Eng- land, and from farther south and west, came* north to trade, sometimes to settle, oc- casionally to fight. T h e northern settlers found their way down the seaboard, in- land waterways, and trails. T h i s mingling of Canadian and American peoples resulted in a mixing of their cultural resources from the earliest days. A recent attempt to record early Ca- nadian imprints revealed a surprising num- 1 Hansen, M a r c u s L . , and Brebner } John B . The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (in R e l a t i o n s of C a n a d a and the United States s e r i e s ) . N e w H a v e n a n d Toronto, 1940. JANUARY, 1946 By M A R I E T R E M A I N E Relations in ber south of the undefended frontier. Printing offices were established in the eastern five provinces of Canada in the latter half of the eighteenth century: in Nova Scotia at Halifax in 1751; in Quebec at Quebec City in 1764 and Montreal in 1775; in N e w Brunswick at Saint John in 1783; in Prince Edward Island at Char- lottetown in 1787; and in Ontario at Ne- wark (near Niagara) in 1793 and at York, now Toronto, 1798. Products of these early presses passed from Nova Scotians and Quebecois to relatives, fellow officials, and professional and business associates, through N e w England, N e w York, Penn- sylvania, etc. In these older settlements the precarious pioneer era passed earlier, living conditions became stable, society ma- tured and prospered, and cultural institu- tions developed sooner than in the newer, rather meager, and isolated settlements in the Canadian provinces. So a fair propor- tion of early Canadian publications which went south survived, while a much greater proportion of the larger number which re- mained in Canada perished in hands more concerned with the bare necessities for sus- taining life. Of approximately a thousand Canadian imprints recorded for the eighteenth cen- tury, perhaps a third of the copies extant are in American libraries. Some of these are relatively recent purchases from Ca- nadian or British dealers. But a large number show evidence of long American custody; for example, the only known copy of one of the earliest Halifax imprints, a 1 3 7 Price Current of the firm Nathans and H a r t , 1752, is in the Massachusetts His- torical Society. A typical case is that of a more common piece, A Sermon Preached at Halifax July 3d 1770 at the Ordination of the Rev. Bruin Romcas Comingoe . . . by John Seccombe, Halifax, A Henry, 1770. Of eleven copies located so far, five are in Canada and six in the United States —the copy in the John Carter Brown Li- brary having copious manuscript notes written about 1772. Of six fairly good files of the N e w Brunswick sessions laws (be- ginning 1786) two are in Canada, one in England, and three in eastern American libraries—and this is typical of Canadian government serials of the period. Most early Canadian newspapers had brief lives, and runs are scattered (excepting the long- lived Quebec Gazette with its practically complete file from 1764 in the Public Archives, O t t a w a ) . If we tried to micro- film the succession of Gazettes produced in Halifax from 1752, we should have to mix runs and issues from the Massachusetts His- torical Society, Nova Scotia Legislative Library, N e w York Public Library, Ameri- can Antiquarian Society, Nova Scotia Archives, and Dalhousie University. The Catalogue of English and French Books in the Quebec Library, Quebec, 1792, p r i n t e d in an edition of one hundred, survives in two known copies, of which one is in the Bibliotheque Saint Sulpice, Montreal, the other in the Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College—a clean copy, stitched in original marble-paper cover, has its fly- leaf inscribed: "Presented to Dartmouth College Library by John Cozens Ogden, a Presbyter of the Episcopal Church, D . College Library, 1792." T h e catalogs of the Quebec library, and indeed the collection itself, are excellent re- search material for one investigating con- temporary opinion. T h i s library, the first in Canada, was a subscription library in- stituted by Governor Haldimand, who wrote from Quebec, M a r . 2, 1779: " T h e ignorance of the natives of this colony hav- ing been in my apprehension the principal cause of their misbehaviour, and attach- ment to interests evidently injurious to themselves, I have sought to encourage a subscription for a public Library, which more are come into than would have been first expected. A pretty good sum has al- ready been raised and I hope . . . [the library] will tend to promote a more perfect coalition of interests between the old and new [i.e., English and French] subjects of the Crown than has hitherto subsisted."2 T h e Quebec library developed and con- tinued to function till the midnineteenth century. Its stock was taken over by, and is now housed in, the Literary and His- torical Society of Quebec. T w o of its early catalogs are described by Aegidius Fauteux in "Les Bibliotheques Canadiennes et Leur Histoire I I " in Revue Canadienne 1916, v. 17, p. 199, et seq. A significant factor in the dissemination of early Canadian publications was the antecedents of their printers. M a n y of these were of American origin or training. Of the fourteen printing offices opened in Canadian settlements in the eighteenth century, eight were established by printers from the American colonies. Besides these pioneers who founded and maintained the offices, came other printers and journeymen in search of work or adventure, while others arrived as refugees from the American Revolution. A few came earlier, and many later, in the waves of migrants seeking new opportunity or escaping economic pressure in older settlements. Some of these moved back to American towns; others stayed. In either case family and business connections were maintained both ways across the border. 2 C a n a d a P u b l i c A r c h i v e s , H a l d i m a n d papers, B 6 6 : 107. 28 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES T h e first was Bartholomew Green, a Boston printer. H e was grandson of the Samuel Green who was Stephen Daye's apprentice and successor in the first Ameri- can press at Cambridge, Mass. W h e n the British government began a systematic settlement in Nova Scotia as a base against the French, Green arrived in H a l i f a x in the fall of 1751 in the van of a long procession of migrants who made Nova Scotia for a time " N e w England's Outpost." 3 W h e n Green died soon after his arrival, his former Boston partner, J o h n Bushell, came and actually started the printing office. H e p r i n t e d t h e Halifax Gazette ( v . I, no. I , M a r . 25, 1752), proclamations, laws, etc., for the government. Of his nine years' work (he died in J a n u a r y 1761) but twenty- two publications are known today. Bushell's son and daughter both learned printing. Characteristic of families at that time, the latter remained in Halifax, while the son served apprenticeship with Daniel Fowle at Portsmouth and then moved to Philadel- phia. A f t e r the British conquest of French Canada, another stream of settlers from the older English colonies began to trickle north. Fewer in number than the earlier eastern migrants, they were, in the main, merchants and f u r traders. Among them were W i l l i a m Brown 4 and T h o m a s Gil- more, printers f r o m Philadelphia. Fi- nanced by William Dunlap, in whose shop Brown had learned the trade, they set up the second printing office in Canada, pro- ducing the Quebec Gazette from v. 1, no. 1, J u n e 21, 1764. Gilmore had little influ- ence in Canadian printing and died in 1773, but Brown's shop in Quebec became the * B r e b n e r , John B a r t l e t . New England's Outpost; Acadia before the Conquest of Canada. N e w Y o r k C i t y , C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1927. 4 P a r t s of B r o w n ' s s t o r y a r e told in Canada's First Printer, b y H u b e r t Neilson, a g r a n d n e p h e w , in the Dominion Illustrated, A u g . 18, 1888, and in William Brown (1737-1789) Premier Imprimeur, Journaliste, et Libraire, de Quebec, b y F . J. A u d e t , in R o y a l S o c i e t y of C a n a d a , Memoires, 1932, ser. 3, v . 26, sec. 2, p. 97- 112. principal printing and bookselling house in the colony. Born in Scotland, he had come to Virginia about 1752 at the age of fifteen. H e studied briefly at W i l l i a m and Mar> College, worked for a banker in Williams- burg, then became an apprentice to William Dunlap. Brown maintained his connec- tions with Philadelphia for a time, paying off the loan from Dunlap, and importing f r o m him Father Abraham's Almanack, Dilworth's Spelling Book, New England Primer, Young Mens Companion, etc., which were the stock in trade of a colonial bookshop. For his unusual French-English public, however, Brown soon began print- ing simpler and bilingual substitutes for these almanacs, schoolbooks, etc. His in- genious substitute for the almanac, that indispensable adjunct of the colonial house- hold, w a s his L'Almanac de Cabinet o r Calendrier—his "sheet almanac" as he termed it in English. I t was a broadside showing the year's calendar, zodiac, moon's phases, religious feast days, and other miscellaneous almanac information. I t sold usually at sixpence the copy because, as it was one of the few publications he did not have to set entirely in French and English, its production was relatively cheap. Brown printed three hundred copies in 1765 and complained bitterly at the number left on his hands by unappreciative Quebecois. So he issued none in 1766, and from 1767 his market was assured. Of the hundreds of copies published each year through the eighteenth century, about two dozen sun- tanned and flyblown examples survive. In the long years of the American Revo- lution Brown's American past receded, for he was King's Printer under the w a t c h f u l eye of government and the Lieutenant Governor reported: " O u r Printer has some penchant for the popular [i.e., American] cause and when he gets a cup too much, which is not seldom, his zeal increases. I have cautioned him two or three times . . . JANUARY, 1946 3 7 and desire him to lay before me whatever he intends to publish." T h e American Revolution retarded the customary travel and trade between the " N e w and Old Colonies," as they were still called by British officials. But one of the notable American excursions to the north brought another printer to Canada. H e was Fleury Mesplet, a protege of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was one of the three commissioners who were to follow the revo- lutionary army to Montreal in the fall of 1775. T h e y were to organize among the French Canadians what we now call a fifth column. Mesplet, born in France, had gone to London and thence to Philadelphia in search of work. There, Congress, urg- ing the " N e w " colony to join the " O l d " in their stand for liberty, had Mesplet print its Lettre Addressee aux Habitants de la Province de Quebec Cidevant le Canada, de la Part du Congres General de l'Ameri- que Septentrionale Tenu a Philadelphie . . . Fleury Mesplet MDCCLXXIV. T h e following year he printed Congress' further a p p e a l : Lettre Addressee aux Habitants Opprimes de la Province de Quebec de la Part du Congres General de VAmerique Septentrionale Tenu a Philadelphie [ F l e u r y Mesplet, 1775]. Mesplet apparently made a trip to Montreal in 1775. T h e town had never had a printing press. Its Catholic institu- tions, cut off from France, were ill-supplied with devotional and schoolbooks, and its French-speaking society very remote from William Brown's press a couple of days down the river in Quebec. I t seemed a good prospect for a French printer and especially for a French printer with Ameri- can backing. Congress granted him two hundred dollars for expenses and in the spring of 1776 Mesplet moved his printing office to Montreal, then occupied by the Americans. T h e latter, however, withdrew very soon, even the commissioners being con- vinced that the "habitants opprimes" would not join the revolution; but Mesplet, in some financial straits, remained. H e began printing devotional books, schoolbooks, a French almanac, and a newspaper, Gazette du Commerce et Litter aire pour la Ville et District de Montreal, v. I , no. 1, J u n e 3, 1778- H e had a troubled career beset by suspicious authority and pressing creditors.5 I t is interesting to note that after the revo- lution Mesplet petitioned Congress6 in 1783 and again in 1784, begging relief for losses suffered by his move to Montreal. Another copy of the 1784 petition was pre- sented M a r . 11, 1785, with Mesplet's claim for $9189. T h i s was $330 for "extra ex- penses" and $8859 for other ". . . damage sustained in the sale of books and for debts contracted in the maintenance of himself, workmen, and family, whilst the said Mesplet was on account of his attachment to the cause of America confined in Jail." I t was recommended that he be paid $426.45 for transportation expenses to Montreal and that his other claims be sub- mitted to the "wisdom and benevolence of Congress." Except for this contact with Congress Mesplet seems to have had little connection with Americans after he settled in Montreal. H e served an almost exclu- sively French and Catholic community. T h e books advertised for sale in his shop were limited to his own publications. Even well after the revolution, when he could publish freely and was in fact producing the bilingual Montreal Gazette, there is no evidence of his friendly exchange with printers across the border. Few of his French publications are located today in 6 See M c L a c h l a n , R . W . , " F l e u r y Mesplet, the F i r s t P r i n t e r at M o n t r e a l , " in R o y a l Society of C a n a d a , Transactions, 1906, ser. 2, v. 12, p. i97-3°9> a n ( i F a u t e u x A e g i d i u s , in " F l e u r y M e s p l e t , u n e E t u d e sur les C o m m e n c e m e n t s de I ' l m p r i m e r i e dans la V i l l e de M o n t r e a l " in B i b l i o g r a p h i c a l S o c i e t y of A m e r i c a , Papers, 1934, v. 28, pt. 2, p. 163-93. 6 H i s petition w a s r e p r o d u c e d b y D o u g l a s C . M c - M u r t r i e in A Memorial Printed by Fleury Mesplet. C h i c a g o , L u d l o w , 1929. 30 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES American collections, but the situation is different with respect to his productions not in French. T h e only known copies of his two memorials to Congress are in the Li- brary of Congress. H e published two Mohawk primers, of which four of the five known copies are in American libraries. But unlike that of most early Canadian printers, Mesplet's work survives mostly in long-established institutions in his own province. His publications, almanacs, de- votional works, and even the political pieces, were produced for the local French market. And the French of Canada tradi- tionally had a different cultural and social background and limited intercourse with American settlers. T h e great shifting of population occa- sioned by the American Revolution brought a number of pro-British printers to Canada. T h e first of these were Mills and Hicks, who had been publishing the Massachusetts Gazette in Boston. W h e n the city was evacuated in March 1776 they came to Halifax with the British Army. W e know of only one Halifax production by them, and it was a curious contretemps. It con- tained the text of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, apparently, and an Act of Rhode Island renouncing allegiance to the king. I t was published on July 11, 1776, with the t i t l e Extracts from the Boston and New Hampshire Newspapers. T h e p r i n t e r , summoned before the lieutenant-governor- in-council, explained that the notes showing the heinous nature of this document had been omitted by mistake. All copies were ordered to be collected and destroyed, and this was done so effectively that by J u l y 13 a military officer in Halifax was unable to get one to send to London, "altho' [he wrote] I have offered to give a Dollar apiece." T h i s was the only contemporary edition of the Declaration of Independence printed in Canada. Mills and Hicks moved on to England, then back to N e w York while it was occupied by the British. T h e r e in 1778 they resumed publication of their a l m a n a c , t h e British-American Register . . . with British Army Lists and an Alma- nack. T h i s had been sold in Halifax for some years by a protege of the governor. A t the end of the revolution Mills and Hicks were back in Halifax. Nathaniel Mills remained there, but John Hicks re- turned to settle in Massachusetts. Mills and Hicks typified the experience of many American printers set adrift by the revolution. James and Alexander Robert- son went to Shelburne, N . S., Canada, with the crowd of loyalists who tried to make a city on the ocean-swept coast of the pen- insula. They opened a printing office, re- sumed publication of their newspaper, the Royal American Gazette, a n d t h e n as t h e new settlement petered out James moved on to Charlottetown. T h e r e he opened the first printing office in Prince Edward Island, printed a few more numbers of his newspaper and some laws, but in 1789 left the island for parts unknown. His press was continued with a meager output by young William A. Rind, till Rind returned to Virginia in 1798 with a wife from a Loyalist family on the island. James Humphreys, who had printed the Philadel- phia Ledger, also settled for a time in Shelburne. H e issued the Nova-Scotia Packet for a couple of years, sat in the provincial assembly, then moved back to Philadelphia in 1797. Humphreys kept in touch with Loyalist colleagues in Nova Scotia, advertised in their newspapers, and received their publications. Thomas and James Swords were associ- ated with Humphreys for a time in Shel- burne. T h e y received land grants as Loyalist settlers, but by 1790 they were back in N e w York in the printing business. Lewis and Ryan (William Lewis of N e w York and John Ryan of Newport, R . I . ) were part of the great Loyalist migration JANUARY, 1946 3 7 which pioneered the province of N e w Brunswick. Arriving at the mouth of the St. John River in 1783, they set up a press and issued the first number of the Royal St. Johns Gazette, D e c . 18, 1783, b e f o r e the townsite on the edge of the wilderness was surveyed. Young Ryan, who had turned twenty-two years in October 1783, carried on the printing office when, in the spring of 1786, Lewis left the settlement after a couple years' struggle and a stiff fine for libel. Ryan developed a respecta- ble business and trained his sons to be printers. T h e n he moved on, in 1807, to open the first printing office in Newfound- land. Ryan's father-in-law, the printer John M o t t , and his family, also came to the St. John River settlement with the Loyalist mi- gration. But, M r s . M o t t declaring she would "never live in such a God-forsaken place," they returned to N e w York. A f t e r the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, however, the M o t t s moved back to St. John. By this time the son, Jacob, was trained as a printer. T h e Ryans and the M o t t s printed in half a dozen places on both sides of the boundary for many years, visiting back and forth and working in each others' shops. T h e Sowers were another example of the same process. Christopher Sower I I I , of the third generation of a family of able printers of Germantown, Pa., settled in St. John, N.B., Canada, after the revolution. H e w^s King's Printer in the province 1785-99, and his official publications as a whole are the finest productions in early Canadian printing. Christopher's son, Brook Watson, was sent back to Philadel- phia to train in his uncle Samuel Sower's shop. And Christopher was in Baltimore arranging to set up a type foundry with his brother, when he died in 1799. Practically all of Sower's publications were official and are located today in public collections, American and Canadian almost equally. While there are thus many early Ca- nadian imprints in American custody, it is doubtful if there is a corresponding number of American productions of that period in Canadian hands. A systematic search of Canadian libraries might unearth interest- ing items, like a broadside in Acadia Uni- versity Library at Wolfville, N.S. T h i s was evidently issued in Boston 175?, as witness: "Advertisement: All Gentlemen Voluntiers that have a mind to serve His Majesty King George the Second in an independent Company of rangers for the Service and Defence of Nova Scotia, under command of Benoni Danks Esq. may repair to the sign of the St. George on Boston Neck." Circumstances, however, which mitigated against the preservation of native works in the pioneer period, were probably effective also with imported publications. Undoubtedly American publications, pamphlets, and newspapers came into Ca- nadian towns in the portmanteaux and saddlebags of travelers. W e hear of them only incidentally, as in the case of the Boston and New Hampshire News Papers, brought into Halifax by Judge Hutchinson of Massachusetts in July 1776, from which Mills and Hicks printed the Declaration of Independence as noted above. M a n y such publications probably circulated quietly, wore out, and helped light a fire or stuff a drafty crack. Canadian printers were de- pendent upon American sources of news for a large part of the year. N o t only Ameri- can but European news came through Boston to Halifax and St. John, and through N e w York to Quebec, Montreal, and Upper Canada. News of Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile on Aug. 1, 1798, was published in York (now T o r o n t o ) on J a n . 12, 1799, in an Upper Canada Gazette Extraordinary. T h e Ga- zette's issue was made up from the columns of t h e New York Mercantile Advertiser of Nov. 30, 1798, which reprinted dispatches 32 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES f r o m t h e London Gazette of O c t . 5-6, 1798. Canadian printers occasionally advertised and distributed publications of their American confreres. John Dickinson's Letters from an American Farmer w a s sold in Halifax in 1768 and probably also in Quebec. Lewis and Ryan of St. John sold the H a r t f o r d 1783 edition of the Narrative of the Life of William Beadle of Wethers- field, Connecticutt, containing Particulars of the Horrid Massacre of Himself and His Family. T h e Boston 1772 edition of Wellins Calcott's Candid Disquisition of the Principles and Practice of . . . Free and Accepted Masons was being read in Halifax the same year. T h e same work was advertised by Lewis and Ryan, almost as soon as they opened their shop in St. John. Masonic publications were sold by William Brown of Quebec, himself a good Mason. But, except in the 1760's, these were prob- ably imported from England. Religious pamphlets deriving from a popular preacher or sect with adherents on both sides of the frontier circulated on both sides. Henry Alline, a native of Rhode Island and a fiery N e w Light evangelist, published his sermons in Nova Scotia, while his Life and Journal a n d his Hymns and Spiritual Songs, were published in N e w England after his death. Thomas Wood's Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Abigail Belcher, Consort of Jonathan Belcher, Chief Justice of Nova-Scotia, w a s printed in Halifax, 1771, and in Boston, 1772. Jonathan was the son of Governor Belcher of Massachusetts. Loyalist writers brought their American works, and Loyalist readers brought their American reading interests with them to C a n a d a . A Particular Account of Mr. Thomas Say of Philadelphia While in a Trance for Eight Hours, Giving a Strange Revelation of What He Both Saw and Heard . . . To which is Added: A Re- markable Vision by the Rev'd. Isaac Watt, went through several American editions from 1774 onwards. About the time of Say's death it was advertised continuously in St. John, 1796-97, by John Ryan, who may even have issued his own edition. William Cobbett's works had considera- ble sale in Canada in the 1790's. In fact his sympathizers there are said to have com- pensated him for losses from the libel suit of D r . Benjamin Rush. His Democratic Principles . . . Sixteenth Edition, w a s issued in Quebec in 1799. T h e Canadian printing trade was sufficiently precarious in those early days. And we may be sure that a Canadian edi- tion of an American work is evidence of a local market which knew the book by repu- tation at least. These random notes on early American publications in Canada, gathered inci- dentally in connection with another project, suggest an interesting field for research. T h e latter part of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a unique relationship between the peoples of these two countries and also between their printing establish- ments as these developed—a relationship so close that very many families and many publishing houses have branches and connec- tions on both sides of the line. And many books like The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples by M . L . H a n s e n and J . B. Brebner are issued with Ameri- can-Canadian imprints. JANUARY, 1946 3 7