Yankee Catholic

The author has long claimed that the Canadien population was a hotbed of anti-British sentiment merely waiting in the wings to rise up against the British rule. Of course, with the repeated failures to do so in 1775, 1812, or even 1866, one has cause to doubt the author's cocksure proclamations.

What the author repeatedly seems to fail to realize is that the populace of Canada East (modern Quebec) was predominantly, rural, traditional, and deeply Catholic. In fact here's a brief sketch the author paints of the region:

Although the country people were devout Catholics and deeply conservative, the prewar connections with the States made a difference when war broke out in April; very few of the sedentary militia had responded with enthusiasm to their call-ups, and the percentage of Canadiens in the volunteers – always low since the force’s organization in 1855 as an Anglophone-dominated service, with many traditions drawn from the units that had helped put down the 1837 and 1838 rebellions - had not risen significantly. The reality of how the war began, with the failed British attack at Rouse’s Point, had done even less to carry French Canada to the cause; unlike 50 years earlier, the Americans had not attacked first, and there were already thousands of men of Canadien extraction in the U.S. forces by the winter of 1861-62. 

The subsequent months of crisis and then war had split Francophone Canada, as it had split the Anglophone community in the Province; for every ultramontane like Étienne-Paschal Taché, who declared his loyalty to the crown publicly from the steps of Notre-Dame de Québec - with the archbishop in attendance - and tried to rally the militia where the British flag still flew, there was a patriote like Louis-Joseph Papineau, pursuing the age-old dream of “Canadien” nationalism and rallying his followers, in many cases under the green-white-red tricolor of the ’37 rising. As in any such situation, the vast majority of the French-speaking population of the Province, some 900,000 men, women, and children, living largely in the historically French territory of Lower Canada, also known as the Canada East District, wanted little more than to be left alone. The realities of war, however, forced increasing numbers of Canadiens – and, for that matter, Anglophones whose community showed similar divisions between English and Irish, town and country – to make a decision.

But a brief sketch of Canadien opinion from a work which seriously examines the matter states that this decision would probably have made itself, in the exact opposite manner the author desires:

"The Rouges, admirers of the republican form of government, lacked the numerical strength which would have entitled them to serious consideration.
The loyalty of the people was due in part at least to the fact that under British government they enjoyed certain privileges. Their religious leaders, the Roman Catholic bishops and priests, at all times counselled loyalty to the British Crown. "A large part of the Catholic clergy, a few of the seignorial families, and some of those who are inherited by ancient connections of party, support the government against revolutionary violence."[1] According to Francis Meseres, a descendant of the Huegnots, naturally hostile therefore, to the French Roman Catholics, only "eight or ten of the seigneurs, perhaps twelve, are noblesse according to the French ideas." If not noblesse according to the French usage of the word, there were many refined gentlemen who had been granted large seignories in the early days of Canadian colonization. Their descendants, with the conservatism natural to property holders, and the clergy of Canada East, were united in their opposition to republicanism. 

The French-Canadian majority was opposed to a union with the neighboring Republic. The opposition of the French Canadians was to a certain extent national, but to an even greater extent religious, for they had an undefined fear that their religion might be endangered if their annexation to the United States might be consummated. They could not forget that the Revolutionary Congress had objected to the French laws under which they enjoyed certain privileges. Moreover, the commercial advantages that a union with the United States would have secured for them never affected to any extent the French-Canadian attitude towards annexation[2], since they have ever been a primarily agricultural, not a manufacturing or trading people.
...
Perhaps the loyalty which undoubtedly animated the majority of French-Canadians might be better defined as loyalty to Canada, rather than loyalty to Great Britain. If Canada were invaded they were prepared to resist. John A. Macdonald declared that his prejudices against the French had been largely overcome, since he had realized the truthfulness of Colonel Taché's assertion: "My countrymen republican? They are monarchical in everything, in their religions, laws, institutions, principles, and even their prejudices, and I venture to predict that the last shot fired on this continent in the defence of the monarchial principle will be fired by a French Canadian."[3]

One should also note that the author overinflates the French populace by some 50,000 as the census of 1861 in Canada East gave a French speaking population of 847,320 in that province. The author of course, is not new to padding the numbers where he needs to.

Of course, the author also overlooks the power of the Church in the politics and social order of Canada East. However, he claims he has a trump card:

The Canadiens are not all going to be falling all over themselves to listen to the archbishop; les rouges, in particular... the Joseph Guibord affair is all of seven years in the future; Lartigue was met with Le Marseillaise during the '37 rebellion when he preached against the patriotes, and I doubt Bourget would have fared much better - especially when Archbishop Hughes was lined up on the "other" side of the field.

This is a curious thing to say. For one it appeals to an affair seven years in the future, and it fundamentally misunderstands it to boot. The Guibord Affair showed not a lack of support for the Catholic Church, but a fundamental support for it. It should be noted that Bourget's decision to not allow a member of the Institut to be buried on consecrated ground was supported by the public, and the Privy Court had to force the Catholic Church to allow the burial to go ahead, which aroused anger, not at the Church it should be noted, but the government which tried to force the Church to bury a man who had been denied that right. Notable of course is that it took an armed escort to bury a member of the Institut. The Church survived, but the Institut did not.

Now he also seems to doubt that Bishop Bourget got the last laugh. Compare if you will a portrayal of Hughes to one of Bourget

“He was impetuous and authoritarian, a poor administrator and worse financial manager, indifferent to the non-Irish members of his flock, and prone to invent reality when it suited the purposes of his rhetoric. One of the Jesuit superiors at Fordham with whom he quarreled said, ‘He has an extraordinarily overbearing character; he has to dominate.”

Hughes also supported the South's right to own slaves, and quarreled with the President over emancipation. Sure to endear him to Canadien Catholics.

Bourget on the other hand:

Even today the personality and work of the second bishop of Montreal still inspire intense feelings. One has only to look through recent historical works to realize that there are fewer devotees than there were 10 or 20 years ago, and that his religious and political conceptions are being scrutinized more and more critically. It is impossible to think of Ignace Bourget as other than a man of the church, but it was an authoritarian, uncompromising, intolerant church, in short the church of the last phase of the pontificate of Pius IX, whose anathema against the modern world in the end confined Roman Catholics as a body to a kind of ghetto. On the other hand, to do justice to the bishop, one must stress the tireless worker he proved to be despite an often deplorable state of health; the leader who awakened the devotion of so many; the man of prayer whose saintliness inspired a veritable cult; and finally the effective administrator who set up or helped to set up so many lasting institutions within and beyond his diocese. That is why Bishop Bourget remains, despite his inadequacies, one of the great architects of the province of Quebec.

Considering Bourget was himself French, a devoted churchman, and he had been leading the people against the rouges since 1838, one has to sincerely question the idea that Bishop Hughes could possibly hold a candle to the man who would greatly outlive him. After all, one is French Catholic, and the other is not.

Despite the poorly thought out attempts to make the Patriote/rouges look more powerful than they are, one cannot escape the conclusion that the author is massively inflating their supposed influence. When one sees how Bourget was able to force a schism in the Institut de Montreal in 1858, it is hardly surprising to see why the Church would win out in this conflict. And the Church, supported the Crown.

So it seems that any warm feeling towards the United States in a war with Britain exists only in the fancies of the author's imagination. Much like many of his conclusions in this TL.

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1] A direct quote from Lord Durham's report.

2] The author's much vaunted few hundred Montreal merchants nonwithstanding.

3] Quoted from: Canadian Public Opinion on the American Civil War, by Helen MacDonald.