vindication.
Carleton was himself a creation of the British Atlantic world, and his pre-revolutionary experiences in North America shaped the attitudes he brought to his later career. Born outside Londonderry in 1724 into the ranks of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry, Carleton, like so many other boys from ambitious families on the margins of the British Isles, joined the army as a teenager—a path chosen by his brothers as well. He soon became close friends with another officer two years his junior, James Wolfe. While Carleton doggedly served out his lieutenantcy, Wolfe shot up through the ranks, impressing his seniors and fighting in some of the period’s key battles. Soon Carleton’s friend had become his most important patron. In 1758, Wolfe got Carleton appointed quartermaster-general on a campaign the younger man was to command against the French in Canada. They sailed out in 1759—Carleton’s first voyage to North America—and together spent a frustrating summer laying siege to the city of Quebec. In September 1759, Wolfe plotted a daring assault on the fortified capital, hoping to take it by storm. As the morning mist rose on the day of the attack, Carleton stood in the front line of redcoats on the Plains of Abraham, outside the city walls, commanding an elite detachment of grenadiers. By afternoon, he had fallen wounded in the head. His friend Wolfe lay dead. But the battle had been won, and it proved a significant victory indeed. Thanks to the capture of Quebec, the whole of French Canada was ceded to the British Empire in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. In his will, Wolfe left “all books and papers” to Carleton, and a handsome legacy of £1,000.14
Carleton would not figure in the phenomenally popular 1771 painting The Death of General Wolfe produced by the American-born artist Benjamin West, which catapulted Wolfe (and West) to stardom—and Carleton must have felt the loss of his friend’s patronage power at least as much as the loss of his companionship. By then, Carle ton had returned to Quebec as imperial governor and brigadier general. He took up his post within the stone-walled capital almost seven years to the day after he had fought on the battlefield outside it. As he surveyed the city from the windows of the crumbling old Château Saint-Louis, Carleton might have felt he had returned full circle in one further respect. As a colony overwhelmingly composed of white but Catholic, non-Anglophone subjects, Quebec resembled no part of the British Empire so much as his native Ireland. Carleton applied himself to learning French, and to managing the competing interests of the majority French Catholic population (the habitants) and the small but vocal community of Anglophone Protestant merchants. British forms of government “never will produce the same Fruits as at Home,” Carleton decided, “chiefly because it is impossible for the Dignity of the Throne, or Peerage, to be represented in the American Forests.” As such, he systematically supported preserving French systems in place of introducing British laws and institutions “ill adapted to the Genius of the Canadians,” and equally strongly upheld the power of authoritarian direct rule.15 In 1770, he traveled to England to consult with the government on how to reform Canadian administration. These discussions culminated in the Quebec Act of 1774, widely understood as a milestone in British imperial legislative efforts to accommodate culturally and ethnically alien subjects.
Carleton returned to his post later that year, bringing with him a charming new wife—aristocratic, French-educated, and thirty years his junior—their two small sons, and clarified powers under the Quebec Act. While maintaining French civil law and ensuring freedom of worship for Catholics, the Quebec Act also ostensibly protected French Canadian interests by entrusting sole legislative authority to the governor and council. There was to be no elected assembly, no trial by jury, no habeas corpus—measures, according to Carleton, that French Canadians had no wish for. Edmund Burke, among others, condemned the measure as despotic, but as one minister quipped back, “if despotic government is to be trusted in any hands . . . I am persuaded it will be as safe in [Carleton’s] as in anybody’s.”16 Carleton himself, highly satisfied with an act drawn up in large part to his own design, was pleased to find that most Québécois welcomed its terms.17
The trouble was that Anglo-Canadians—to say nothing of British subjects in the thirteen colonies—did not. They saw it as both overly authoritarian and an affront to their own rights and interests. The discontents tearing apart the American colonies to the south soon made their way into the coffee houses of Canada. Reports told of travelers from Boston being intercepted and searched on the roads by Canadian dissidents who were trying to sever communication between British officials. Agents from Massachusetts infiltrated the province to organize antigovernment resistance. A few days after the battles at Lexington and Concord, Anglo-Canadian patriots in Montreal poured black paint over a bust of George III, topped it with a mitre, and hung a rude sign around it reading, “Behold the Pope of Canada or the English Fool.”18 Though the habitants did not rally en masse to the patriots, much to Carleton’s relief, they also appeared unresponsive to his efforts to form a militia for provincial defense.19
Neutrality is all well and good until you get invaded. Ill-equipped, and reluctant to recruit large numbers of Indians (as some British officials encouraged him to do), Carleton had just about managed to fend off guerrilla raids with his limited troops. But in September 1775 the Continental Army invaded Canada, under the command of Generals Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery, and sped against the onset of winter toward Quebec. Would it have encouraged or chastened the governor to know that he himself had successfully besieged the city he now endeavored to defend? Before dawn on the last day of 1775, the hungry, half-frozen Americans assaulted the city with a stinging blizzard blowing at their backs. By the time the late sun curved into the sky, it was all over. As in 1759, the leading attackers had fallen outside the walls: Arnold with his left leg shattered, Montgomery dead in the snow. But the American painter John Trumbull’s attempt to immortalize the episode with The Death of General Montgomery enjoyed less success than his teacher Benjamin West’s depiction of Wolfe. Because this time it was Quebec’s defenders who won, securing the province in the British Empire. Years later, Carleton would find himself lending the lamed Arnold a supportive arm, as the American limped into his first audience with the king.20
With the American invasion repelled, and the habitants having rejected a diplomatic overture from Congress to join the revolution, Carleton launched a counteroffensive into New York. In October 1776 he smashed the patriots at Lake Champlain and joined forces with Burgoyne. But, seeing “the severe season approaching very fast,” he withdrew into Canada for the winter.21 Burgoyne and others chastised him for not proceeding farther south to Fort Ticonderoga, a fatal blunder (they said) that allowed the Americans to get away. Whether or not they were right, the decision proved fatal for Carleton’s career. He had already made an enemy out of the influential colonial secretary Lord George Germain. Fortified by Burgoyne’s hostile reports, Germain fired Carleton from his military command and tried to recall him from the governorship. Carleton preemptively resigned his positions in 1777 and returned to England in disgust.
His sixth Atlantic crossing carried him toward an uncertain future, his reputation tarnished and position reduced. Yet leaving North America ultimately put Carleton in the most advantageous situation he could have hoped for. One by one British generals fell in America, while Sir Guy and Lady Maria, comfortably distant from a badly managed war, made the rounds of London society, cementing their connections among the British elite. Carleton, without knowing it, had also landed in a fortunate political position. His abilities had made him an enduring favorite of the king, and now his feud with Germain endeared him to the parliamentary opposition as well. The appointment as commander in chief of British forces in North America offered an especially sweet satisfaction after his earlier dismissal from military command. And it must have been even better to know that his rehabilitation had helped force his hated rival Germain out of office.22
So as he faced America again in the spring of 1782, Sir Guy had much to reminisce about. But it was