Loyalist Day

 

Loyalist Day used to be an important annual celebration here in Saint John, New Brunswick. The city traces its founding to the summer of 1783 when 17 ships arrived from New York and Boston harbour, unloading the losers in the American Revolution. They found themselves on a small rocky peninsula, an island at high tide. There was nothing here but rocks and trees, and the winters were severe. That first winter, most built tents insulated by spruce boughs. Someone had to stay awake at all hours to keep the fire going. There was an average of one death each day among them.

Only two years later, they had a royal charter for the first official city in British North America. Saint John, as we know it, had begun.

But in recent years, the city has refused to fund any special activities to commemorate Loyalist Day, the day the first ships landed. The memorial plaque and stone marking where the Loyalists came ashore, was pulled up and abandoned in a quarry on the west side.

When local historians complained, they were told by city council, “We don’t care about those English people.” And someone remarked “I wonder what the native people thought, when they came to steal their land?”

I find this callous, racist, and willfully ignorant. The whole reason Canada exists apart from the United States, is loyalty to the crown and the British connection. If we reject that, if we reject the Loyalists, we reject Canada. And there is no good response to Trump’s proposal for assimilation.

The people who waded ashore that summer were not, of course, English. They were American. Even then, America was something of a melting pot. Among them were 500 freed blacks who had made it to the British lines, for Britain refused to recognize slavery. Although not among the group that landed at Saint John, a significant number were native people, notably the Iroquois of upstate New York. There were Dutch from New York, which had been New Amsterdam. There were many Germans, including discharged Hessian soldiers. There were Jews among the group that landed in Saint John; and of course Scots, Welsh, and Irish. Don’t ever tall a Scot or an Irishman he is English.

But ethnicity should not matter. People are people. Suffering people deserve our sympathy regardless of their skin colour or language or race, and brave people deserve our admiration regardless of where they were born.

Especially when we are their inheritors. This is a question of filial piety: honour thy father and thy mother. We owe them a lot. They laid out the streets, established our forms of government, our first social institutions, many of our sports and pastimes, our cuisine, our arts, our folkways; although of course other groups have contributed since. And the city and nation they bequeathed us is, most certainly, one of the finest we could hope for in this fallen world. Travel a bit and you will see. People want to move here from most other places.

As for the local native populations, the matter is complex. Groups and individuals fought on both sides during the American Revolution; as they had in the French and Indian Wars. They were not passive victims, but participants, in these conflicts. Some lost, just as some Europeans lost. 

Broadly speaking, however, European settlers did not steal their land, at least in Canada. Everything was done by treaty, in principle by mutual agreement and with compensation. And the end result: Canada is still 89% unsettled Crown Land—over which, by treaty, today’s native people are free to roam, hunt, and forage as they always did. Only eleven percent of their prior lands have been given over to settlement—and of course, native people have been as free as any other citizens to take up these lands too. They own that eleven percent still in the same sense all other Canadians do.

Back in the day, in 1783, the presence of the European settlers was generally welcomed. It granted the native people security in possession and use of their lands—before this, before treaties and redcoats, warfare was more or less constant. If you encountered a member of a different tribe in the forest, you feared violence. You feared violence at home in your sleep. The presence of Europeans, especially in a place like Saint John, at the mouth of a long river, offered opportunities for trade that made native groups located near a European settlement rich. It gave them military advantages over distant rivals: not just through alliance with the Europeans, but by trading for iron knives and hatchets, guns, horses. And perhaps most importantly, having Europeans nearby protected native people from the ever-present danger of famine: crops, crop storage, and ships arriving with cargo from overseas were far more reliable food sources than the rivers or forest.

Not such a bad deal.

I have not a drop of English blood, so far as I know. I do not believe any of my ancestors were UE Loyalists, But happy Loyalist Day.

On My Noble Ancestry

 

My father always claimed to be descended from United Empire Loyalists. It was a family tradition, passed through his paternal grandmother, whose name was Van Luven. The Van Luvens were supposed to have been early settlers in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, and to have owned land in what is now Brooklyn. 

The United Empire Loyalists were Americans who dissented from the Revolution, and relocated  to Canada to preserve their ties to Britain and the crown. It is a thing in Canada, like those in America who claim to have been descended from passengers on the Mayflower.

A nephew recently got his DNA examined, one of those heredity kits. The test turned up no Dutch or Flemish blood. Mostly Irish, then Welsh, then Scottish, a smattering of Scandinavian.

I was delighted.

I have always had a visceral distaste for the UE Loyalists.

We Canadians think of them as admirably loyal to Britain, the crown, and to settled authority. 

After all, other than independence, the American Revolution accomplished nothing. We in Canada also have freedom, democracy, and human equality. 

If you read through the history, though, it is dead sure that Canada would not have these things, if not for the American Revolution. Very likely the UK would not either. The UK extended responsible government to Canada only when they feared that, if they did not, they would lose these provinces just as they lost the lower 13. There were reasons for the Rebellions of 1837.

In this, I have to stand against the UE Loyalists. They were the baddies.

They fought against equality and representative government in Canada, as they fought against it below the border. They saw themselves as the aristocracy. This classism has been a poisonous presence in Canadian history, through the Family Compact and Chateau Clique of the 19th century, up to the current concerns in the West of a “Laurentian elite.” Canada is inclined to be cliquish, in every sphere; and the Loyalists started this. They birthed and represent classism in Canada.

Do I need to elaborate on why privilege by birth is immoral? In the brotherhood of man, people must be judged on their merits and the content of their character, not who their parents were. That is never just; worse still in a nation of immigrants. Racism springs from the same font.

Here in Saint John, the newly-arrived UE Loyalists let only fellow Loyalists own property or operate a business inside city limits. When the Irish came, they had to settle, with the Indians, blacks, Congregationalists, and Acadians, north of the city line. That old line is still visible— on the north side of Union Street, the buildings are all wooden, but for the Catholic Cathedral. On the south side, they are solid brick. Loyalists and their descendants were buried in the city centre. The “Old Loyalist  Burying Ground” is still well-preserved. Others were interred north of the city line, and their graves are built over and no longer marked.

Towns and cities tend to take their character from their original inhabitants, barring some truly overwhelming wave of new immigration. Saint John has been rescued from this classism by Irish immigration in the 19th century, which swamped the original population. 

It gives the place an odd ambience. Everyone does still think in classist terms, but then everyone thinks of themselves as working class. There is no sense that anyone left today is a Loyalist descendant; the Loyalists seem only a mythical presence. Their modern successors are the Laurentian elite, or away in Europe. And we by and large don’t like ‘em. 

Kingston Ontario, another original Loyalist hotbed, did not get a large enough wave of later immigration to wipe out the local class distinctions. There is still a “north of Princess Street” stigma. In Saint John, “north of Union Street” no longer has such stigma. People are proud of coming from the North End. Wanna make something out of it? The Irish who got wealthy did not move out and try to pass; they built their new houses in the North End. Now it has nice neighbourhoods, like my own.

In Kingston, by contrast, it matters. There is also the vague sense among locals that Kingston is the rightful capital of English Canada. Toronto? Ottawa? Upstarts! Montreal? French!

Local people used to be ashamed of being seen at S & R, the local bargain emporium. In Saint John, everyone is proud of a bargain. 

And that is why locals are so determined, like the Van Luvens, to claim Loyalist ancestry. Or the Greenwoods, a local family that gained social prominence after they changed their name from Boisvert. Or former Mayor George Speale, whose real name, whatever it was, would have been Greek. In most places in Canada, a Greek or a Quebecois would not feel called to change their name. 

Now where did the Van Luvens really come from?

The family tradition was that it meant “from Louvain,” a city in modern-day Belgium. But hunting it down online, the web site Igenea says “It's important to note that the exact place called Luven doesn't seem to exist in contemporary maps of the Netherlands or Belgium.” Seeming to suggest the derivation from Louvain is also dubious. 

Even crazier, they write “Van Luven is thought to be a French-Canadian surname, and is found primarily in Quebec and the Maritime provinces.” 

And there is only one family of that name in the Netherlands; suggesting it is not a Dutch surname at all. Just Dutch-sounding.

Igenea gives several possible explanations for the “Van Luven” name other than as a place reference. “Van” in Dutch can also mean “son of.” Luven might be a personal name, although such a name is not known in Dutch. It could be a corruption of the Dutch for “lion,” the national symbol of Belgium. Or for the Dutch word for “love” or “beloved.” Like the English "loving."

That is, “love child.”

Why would a French family have a Dutch-sounding name?

Perhaps for the same reason indelicate body parts are commonly spoken of in Latin: as a euphemism. In the same way we refer to a toilet as a “washroom” or “rest room.” People rarely go there just to wash, or rest. 

Even better if it sounds like a noble title.