Winslow Papers

The Family in Exile: Loyalist Social Values After the Revolution

In Margaret Conrad ed., Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759-1800 (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1995), pp. 42-53.

"All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion." Thus begins Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, that extraordinary fictional journey into the private lives of the Russian aristocracy in the nineteenth century.1 While modern anthropologists might gasp at Tolstoy's willingness to make such sweeping generalizations about the family, no one can deny his success in creating a vivid world of intimacy and intrigue, devotion and deceit, noble suffering and base humiliation, climaxing, of course, in the necessary self-destruction of its flawed heroine, followed by a ringing affirmation of traditional, and very Christian, family values.

Culturally, Tsarist Russia was a far different place than colonial Canada, but they did, for a short while, have one thing in common: an official ruling class. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the British North American provinces were ruled by a group of privileged officers who held their powers independently of the people they governed and reinforced their authority by elaborate social codes and extensive family connections. Indeed, so powerful and so notorious were these sets of provincial oligarchs that they are known pejoratively even to this day in the former colony of Upper Canada, now Ontario, as "The Family Compact."

Alas, thus far Canada's period of gentry rule has inspired no Tolstoyan masterpiece, no insider account of the intimate life, passions and pairings of this select group. In fact, it is both remarkable and regrettable that, for all the many treatises on the political operations of the Family Compact, we have so few accounts of its internal dynamics: its elaborate network of filiations and obligations, its shared aspirations and anxieties, and the mechanisms by which it ensured the transmission not only of property and power from generation to generation, but of a distinctive code of values.2

Using the new methodologies developed by family historians and the wealth of personal letters left by prominent Loyalist families (which extend in some cases through four generations), I have begun a research project aimed at discovering the personal bonds and ideals which united these people over such a long stretch of time. Eventually. I will include representative family writings from five of the British North American colonies, spread over three generations. I have started with the Maritime provinces because the Loyalist style of cultural leadership was established here so very quickly after their arrival in the 1780s and is so well chronicled in their letters to each other.

This essay represents the "first fruits" of my work, my first attempt to identify patterns and figures in this very complex material, based mainly on the Jarvis Papers and Robinson Papers in the New Brunswick Museum and the Bliss Papers in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. Unfortunately editorial constraints will not permit me to explore the wealth of material in these letters fully, but let me at least hint at the tone and atmosphere of family life among the Loyalist grandees by quoting three sets of love letters from prominent Loyalists to their wives.

My first example is a letter from Edward Winslow, the unfailingly gallant, but perpetually impoverished, Massachusetts Loyalist, to his wife Mary. The two had married before the revolutionary war and she accompanied him on his circuitous flight pattern after 1775 - from Boston, to Halifax, to New York City, to Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and finally, ten years later, to their permanent abode in Kingsclear, New Brunswick. Throughout this long hegira, Mary managed the family household which at times included the first eight of their 11 children, Edward's elderly parents and his two spinster sisters. The letter I quote was written in 1784, while Edward was in Halifax, looking, as always, for a profitable job, and apparently aware that his lonely, overburdened wife could use some cheering up. Winslow starts off with trumpets blaring:

what do I care whether it's the fashion for men to write long letters to their wives or not .... In matters where my own feelings are concerned I will not be shackled by any of the rules which bind the generality of mankind .... I cannot enjoy a pleasure equal to that of writing to you, and that's sufficient for writing. If other men do not experience the same sensation they have not the same degree of affection.

He then launches into a hilarious description of the fashionable ladies of Halifax and, with mock pity, bemoans the fact that the

immensity of False-Tops False Curls, monstrous Caps. Grease, Filth of various kinds, Jewels, painted paper and trinkets, hide and deform heads of Hair that in their natural state are really beautiful. Rouge & other dirt cover cheeks and faces that without would be tolerable, whilst the unfortunate neck and breasts remain open to the inclemency of the weather & the view of the World ....

But his Mary, he notes, is the exact opposite: "From 16 years old to the present time you have literally set your Cap at no creature on earth but me. Regardless of Fashion you have only endeavoured by uniform cleanliness to make yourself desirable in my eyes." After declaring his continuing love for her, Winslow closes by saying he still hopes that she will be able once more to enter the world of fashion and elegance.3

My second example is a series of letters from Beverley Robinson, the dashing young military officer from New York. Beverley had married Nancy Barclay during the war, and he proved, in New Brunswick, to be a bit of a martinet. Even though Nancy had abandoned a comfortable home in New York City for a refugee farm on the Nashwaaksis River, and had borne 11 children during their marriage, Beverley cannot resist chastising her for "laziness" and negligence. In one 1799 letter, he gave her elaborate instructions on the proper way to cool down and curry horses, and then proceeded to remind her to wrap his doughnuts securely so they will remain moist. The last batch were so dry he could not eat them!4

Yet the petty irritations of married life did not undermine Beverley's devotion to his wife. For example, when he heard that Nancy was worried about losing her attractiveness now that she was forced to wear spectacles, Robinson rushed to reassure her with this stunning declaration:

... my present feelings have nothing to do with the respectability of your appearance, no madam my imagination is not confined to the age of 45 but wanders back to those days of yore when you was all youth and beauty I all ardour and affection ... you are and shall be my beloved and adored mistress and as such only I will cherish the recollection of you ....5

A year later on their twenty-second wedding anniversary Beverley acknowledged, with exquisite sensitivity, that although many changes had taken place since "the day that gave my Nancy to me, I can truly say that she is dearer to me now than when I received her with the rapture of a Bridegroom ...."6

My final example concerns Jonathan Bliss. A crusty, 47-year-old bachelor when he came to New Brunswick, Bliss had spent the revolutionary war in England, enjoying, to the full, the pleasures of London and Bristol. He came to New Brunswick for sake of a job, but candidly admitted that he was too old, too spoiled by England to appreciate such a new country, however promising.7 Bliss performed his duties as Attorney General in a minimal sort of way and amused himself by writing political poetry. In 1789, after much deliberation, he decided to take a wife. He returned to his American home in Massachusetts and married the daughter of the richest man in Worcester County. She was Mary Worthington, a woman in her late 20s, and thus a full 20 years younger than Bliss. Her letters to her husband make it clear that she embodied the ideal of female grace and submissiveness so cherished by people in the eighteenth century.8

Unexpectedly, passionately, Jonathan Bliss fell in love with his young wife. She and the four sons she bore became the enchanted centre of his life. In his letters to Mary, this aging, cynical lawyer resorted to baby talk. He confessed to her that she had made him the "happiest man in New Brunswick" - but ruined him for living alone. Mary was more deferential and demur in her responses to this older man, but she did assure Bliss that his companionship supplied all the love and support she once drew from family and friends. When Mary died in 1799 delivering their fifth child, Bliss was crushed. He would never remarry, and for both Jonathan and their sons, her memory would profoundly shape their ideals of womanhood and of happiness.9

It seems to me that, on the surface at least, these are remarkable letters - delicate, witty, warmly demonstrative. They suggest deep mutual concern and enduring affection, the ideal of "companionate marriage" which Lawrence Stone has described so forcefully for the English gentry of the eighteenth century and which Bernard Bailyn finds so powerfully at work within the family of Thomas Hutchinson in colonial Massachusetts. It is an ideal, according to Richard Sennett, which calls for detachment and careful control in public roles, but a warm, expressive, supportive behaviour among one's intimates.10

Yet how are we, citizens of the late twentieth century, living as we do in the "Age of Deconstruction," to interpret these letters? Do we take them at face value? Or do we look for evasions, masks and ambiguities, which subvert and undermine the highly polished surface? These are some of the questions I am pursuing through the thousands of Loyalist family letters still available in our public archives. My goal is to uncover the inner workings of power and intimacy among the people known universally in Canadian history as The Family Compact. As for the all-important question of interpretation, my strategy is to pursue a dual track: to try to appreciate at full value the depth of feeling and mutual dependency radiating through these letters, and at the same time to recognize that these statements were also calculated performances, survival measures and personal defences against an undeserved fate and a relentlessly cruel world.11

Rather than digress into methodology, I would like to use the balance of this essay to describe the three major conclusions which I have reached at this stage in my research. I hope this will provide a concrete sense of the richness of the material contained in these Loyalists letters, as well as practical examples of my interpretive strategy.

First, it seems abundantly clear from the written sources that, for the Loyalist refugees, the family was the most important institution in their lives. Despite occasional attempts by historians (including myself) to embroider Loyalist life during their years in the Maritime provinces, the fact remains that these colonial gentry found their new physical environment forbidding and its public life totally lacking in beauty or grandeur. Even those Loyalists who came with money, servants and prestigious public posts found their new homes strange and alienating.12

Since there was little hope of returning to America, and neither their Christian beliefs nor their self-respect would permit them to give in to despair, these displaced people threw their energies into their immediate families - the one area of life they could control and also the one area capable of positive response. Within the day-to-day life of their families, within the houses so carefully constructed and tastefully furnished, they could reenact their days of glory. They could organize little entertainments for friends according to the remembered standards of colonial Boston and New York; they could dress in silks and velvets and dancing shoes; they could exchange gossip and wit and observe the courtesies of a world far removed from the frontier. In such ways, private life became far more important than the crude tedium of public affairs.

Second, the fact that the Loyalists were exiles, not simply immigrants, had important psychological repercussions. The mentality of exile has been described many times by novelists and essayists in our century. Indeed, exile has come to be the salient fact of modern existence. Put simply, exiles are rootless, mutilated people, who live two lives simultaneously: first, their ordinary life which they find dull, even repulsive; and second, their imagined life - their dreams, memories and feelings of nostalgia which are full of warmth, vitality and success. In a remarkable essay, "The Mind of Winter," the literary critic, Edward Said, notes how many outstanding chess players, novelists, poets and adventurers in the twentieth century are exiles - people to whom the imaginary life is much more important than the real world.13

The personal letters of the Loyalists provide multiple diverse glimpses into the imaginary world which they cherished during long exile in the Maritimes. And what were its contents? The answer is obvious: it was filled with remembered moments of glory and power in colonial America! It was the world painted so magnificently by John Singleton Copley and described most recently by Richard Bushman.14 It was a world of refinement, taste and elegance - a world where men were so confident of their authority in both society and the family that they chose to display the feminine side of their nature in their portraits. Hence the silk stockings, ruffled shirts and velvet suits worn by Copley's subjects. Hence the private, domestic backdrops of sinuously carved furniture and bookcases full of the bound books which signified a man of taste. Their wives' appearance complemented the men's. Although their dresses and jewels were dazzling, their faces were those of the hostess - gentle, attentive, welcoming. Despite their elaborate garb, there was nothing worldly about these women. They were domestic creatures - decorative, dependent, nurturing of husbands and guests. Their pride came from domestic accomplishment - a piece of needlework, a fine table, an appealing bowl of fruit. Their personal world did not extend beyond the front door.15

These prescribed male and female roles were reenacted in their letters as they doubtless were in the actual homes of the Loyalists. In fact, the extraordinary charm and grace of the Loyalist letters were quite deliberate, expressing affirmations of their cultural ideals. Although fewer in number, the )women's letters were as lively and extroverted as the men's. And they were cheerful, often deliberately so, for it was clearly against the common code for either men or women to complain about their fate. Unfortunately, we have no extant letters written by Edward Winslow's wife Mary. We do know that she was very upset when her husband decided to send their son Murray. aged 12, to military school in England. This could suggest that she had already experienced too many separations in her life. Otherwise, she seems to have borne her fate bravely and silently.16

Few letters from Beverley Robinson's wife Nancy have survived, but from her husband's comments it seems that she fell into a depression after moving with her 11 children to the howling wilderness. The fascinating response to her melancholy was that several members of her family - not only her husband, but her mother, her son and her brother - began writing letters urging Nancy to carry on and bear her burdens stoically.17

Jonathan's Bliss's wife Mary wrote letters regularly to her family and her husband, many of which survive. They are marked by delicate sensitivity and a humorous vein of self-mockery. Clearly, Mary, too, went through a difficult emotional period during at least one New Brunswick winter. After admitting to her sister that she felt a certain loneliness while her husband was away on business, Mary blamed herself for her low spirits -not her four young children, nor her absent husband, nor the piercing cold. She ended this confessional letter by telling her sister not to worry, for she had just written out two pages of resolutions to improve herself and now felt much better!18

It is notable that all letters from Loyalist women to men contained an apology for the "stupidity" of their letters, ascribed usually either to their allegedly poor handwriting or to the scattered nature of their thoughts. Although the letters themselves do not bear out this harsh judgment, it seems to have been an unwritten rule among these Loyalists that women must openly and repeatedly acknowledge their inferiority to men. Some historians call this trait "learned helplessness," but I find it more significant. Although they were encouraged to tease and flirt with the men of their circle, like other eighteenth-century women, Loyalist women did defer to male superiority - men's education and worldly knowledge. This seems to have been fundamental to the marriage bargain, an essential part of the reciprocal, complementary roles they performed as husband and wife. In accepting this deference, men implicitly agreed to protect and cherish such "stupid" but lovable creatures.

Third, the letters suggest that Loyalist children were deeply affected by their parents' history, and the most talented devoted a significant portion of their lives to redeeming their parents' fate by achieving great distinction in their professional lives. The impact of Loyalist values on their redeemer children is without doubt the most important finding of my research thus far. These children were raised with enormous affection and care, but also with firm discipline and fond expectations. Children were expected to carry the torch - maintain the codes of manner and dress and use their talents to bring honour to family.19 Among the numerous examples available, consider the case of Henry Bliss. Perhaps the most talented of all the Loyalist sons, Bliss was educated at King's College, Nova Scotia, and the Inner Temple in London. He emerged laden with academic prizes, good looks and acclaimed charm. Bliss chose to settle in London where he painstakingly established a reputation as a distinguished lawyer, ran for Parliament, and, in his private moments wrote at least seven historical dramas in iambic pentameter, exalting Loyalist principles. Although he considered these verse plays to be the most important aspect of his productive life, they were anachronistic to English tastes and failed utterly to win Bliss any notice, much less any commercial success. Admittedly discouraged, Bliss nonetheless continued writing such plays to the end of his life, in order to affirm the parental code and his own unrealized sense of destiny.20

The lives of Edward and Maria Jarvis illustrate a similar pattern of frustrated idealism. He was the English-educated son of Loyalist merchant Munson Jarvis and she, the daughter of a prominent medical man in Saint John. Soon after their marriage they lived for four years in the British colony of Malta, where Edward held an appointment as a law officer, and they both enjoyed the elaborate social life of the colony's rulers. Eventually, Edward's appointment as Chief Justice of Prince Edward Island permitted the Jarvises and their growing family to return to North America. They were dismayed, however, by the dull, "bumpkin" life on the Island. In consequence, the two expended both their health and their limited fortune building a grand house - "Mount Edward" - near Charlottetown and giving heroic entertainments in order to expose the local population to the best British standards. Maria's exertions produced a heart condition, and she died soon after the house was finished. The disconsolate Edward remained heavily in debt for the rest of his life, and confessed to his brother that he was so short of funds he felt he could not comment on his children's choice of marriage partners, even though he disapproved! Such were the links between financial power and patriarchal authority.21

A variation on second-generation experience was that of William Bliss, son of Jonathan and brother to Henry. After English legal training, William returned to Halifax to marry the richest bride in that city, Sarah Ann Armstrong, the adopted daughter of his father's childhood friend, Loyalist Sampson Salter Blowers. Within a decade William's connections enabled him to get appointed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. But despite this great honour, his very comfortable life, and apparently happy family, William worried ceaselessly in his letters to his brothers that he had sold out, taken the easy road, instead of seeking fame by pursuing the law in London or risking his all on a literary career.22

The preoccupation of these Loyalist children with their parents' world - their lifelong efforts to redeem and vindicate the parental sacrifice - meant that they, too, lived a great deal of their existence in the "floating world" of the imagination. Unlike the sons of ordinary immigrants, they had difficulty sinking roots in the local Canadian soil, committing themselves to the realities of time and place. In 1825 Henry Bliss recognized the disadvantages of this outlook and told William that he was considering returning to New Brunswick and marrying a local beauty:

To marry a local girl will give me come connexion in the country, some friends. I mean some common interests with others; and I shall find somebody to sympathize with me, or seem to do it. That is just what our family has always wanted. We have been alone and unconnected with all the society in which we lived; and had any of us stumbled how the world would have trod on us! But then our situation ... had its advantages -for when their daughters whored, or their sons got drunk, it touched not us .... I sometimes regret that Father did not take a different side, or that the side he did take was not more successful in the American Revolution. We should now have been great Yankees at Boston - full of money and self conceit .... But then I might never have seen Kean ... nor the inside of the Louvre ... nor the Pont du Gard, nor so much of this beautiful Earth. No I am well content with my destiny. How can people doubt that God is good.23

This introspective, ambivalent letter, written at the age of 27, perfectly captures the dilemma of second generation Loyalists - their cosmopolitan outlook, coupled with a severe, often crippling detachment from ordinary life. Only with the third generation do we find Loyalist heirs rooting themselves in the local soil, identifying with its landscape and people, including even the Protestant dissenting sects who once represented the antithesis of all the Loyalist gentry stood for.24 Moreover, their obsession with Loyalist sacrifice lessened. It is true that genealogy became a hobby with the third generation, as did commemorating their ancestors in local churches and cemeteries, but such activities were not an unpaid debt, haunting their waking hours. As well, obsession with family life diminished. Relations between husbands and wives of the third generation were far more relaxed and informal, but also more separate. Husbands spent much of their leisure time in clubs or hunting camps or militia musters. This apparent preference for the exclusive company of males was a new development, an assertion of a type of "rugged" masculine identity which their grandfathers deliberately avoided.25 Likewise, the third generation of Loyalist wives and mothers became more civic minded, more involved in such reform movements as temperance, public health and religious education. Their children were increasingly sent off early to boarding school where the girls were permitted to study an academic curriculum and even aspire to university by the end of the century, while the boys' training emphasized military drill from school days onward.26

As an inevitable part of this evolution, Loyalist elegance, Loyalist exclusivity and Loyalist intensity gradually dissolved. Although their grandchildren certainly respected their ancestors, they themselves had become Canadians and Victorians. In the words of the great conservative historian William L. Morton, grace had been transformed into respectability.27

Thus the special Loyalist culture - the special circumstances produced by the exile experience - seems to have lasted two generations at most. What we need to define is how it shaped, and perhaps even transformed English Canada in general and Planter society in particular. It is a striking fact that the rampant individualism that seized American culture in the nineteenth century - the exaltation of success, of the loner, the wilderness and even of violence - never took hold of nineteenth-century Canadian culture.28 On the contrary, group loyalties to the community and the family, a cordial acceptance of the complementarity of the sexes, a strong emphasis on public duty as well as an equal insistence on the sheer joy of human companionship: all were values which the Loyalists brought with them from colonial America and kept vividly alive through most of the nineteenth century. Philosophically, these exiles were Aristotelians rather than Platonists, Arcadians rather than Utopians. Surely their dominance for 75 years left a residue which requires definition. Indeed, it seems singularly unfortunate that the ruling historical metaphor for the Loyalist contribution to Canadian culture is Northrup Frye's "the garrison mentality." Without denying the elements of arrogance and paranoia in the Loyalist personality, we must also recognize the social virtues of wit, learning, style and profound human solidarity. Sustained exploration of their private papers may bring both the positive and negative aspects of the Loyalist legacy into proper balance.

Notes

1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Rosemary Edmunds, tr., London, 1954), 13. Back

2. The laina series of Mazo de la Roche is, I believe, the closest fictional attempt to recreate the private life of Ontario's landed gentry but, unlike Tolstoy's novel, the Jalna novels are set in the period after the gentry's fall from political power and are essentially a romantic rejection of modern industrial Canada, not a depiction of the gentry in its years of power. More salient are several recent Volarly studies of Loyalist women. Especially noteworthy are Katherine McKenna, "Options for Elite Women in Early Upper Canadian Society: The Case of the Powell Family," in J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson, eds., Historical Essays on Upper Canada; New Perspectives (Ottawa, 1989), 401-24 and her recently published book, A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family (Kingston and Montreal, 1994), as well as Janice Potter-MacKinnon, While Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women in Eastern Ontario (Montreal and Kingston, 1993). Also valuable are three doctoral studies: Robin Burns, "The First Elite of Toronto: An Examination of the Genesis, Consolidation, and Duration of Power in an Emerging Colonial Society," Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1975: Robert L. Fraser, "Like Eden in Her Summer Dress: Gentry, Economy and Society. Upper Canada, 1812-1840;" Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1979; Beatrice Spence Ross, "Adaptation in Exile: Loyalist Women in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution," Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1981. My study, The Envy of the American States: The Loyalist Dream for New Brunswick (Fredericton, 1984) deals briefly with family life. Back

3. Edward Winslow to his Wife, W.O. Raymond, ed., The Winslow Papers (Saint John, N.B., 1901), 225-27. Back

4. Beverley Robinson to Nancy Robinson, 21 November 1799, Robinson Family Papers, New Brunswick Museum. Back

5. Ibid., 11 November 1799. Back

6. Ibid., 20 January 1800. Back

7. Jonathan Bliss to S.S. Blowers. 19 September 1786, Bliss Family Papers. Public Archives of Nova Scotia, [PANS]. Back

8. Phillip Buckner, "Jonathan Bliss," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, VI (Toronto, 1987), 74-6. Thomas Vincent, "The Image and Function of Women in the Poetry of Affection in Eighteenth Century Maritime Canada," in Margaret Conrad, ed., Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in Planter Nora Scotia, 1759-1800 (Fredericton, 1991), 234-46. Back

9. Jno. Bliss to Mary Bliss, 4 June 1792 and Mary Bliss to Jno. Bliss, 23 July 1792, Bliss Papers, PANS. The story of the devotion of the Bliss men to Mary Worthington Bliss has never been written, but can be traced through the family papers. Back

10. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977); Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge Mass., 1974), Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1977), 98107. For a fine survey of recent scholarship on the family in Europe and North America, see Tamara K. Hareven, "The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change," American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 95-124. Back

11. In developing my interpretive approach I have been especially influenced by the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricouer. For an explanation of this methodology see my "The Celestial World of Jonathan Odell: Symbolic Unities within a Disparate Artifact Collection," in Gerald L. Pocius, ed., Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture (St. John's, 1992), 192-226. I find the recent effort by Edward Said to develop a "contrapuntal" approach to historical experience an equally rich, if less systematic attempt to capture both the pure and impure elements of literary texts within a single conceptual framework. See Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993). Back

12. Neil MacKinnon captures this estrangement especially well in This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783-1791 (Kingston, 1986). Back

13. Edward Said, "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile," Harper's, 269 (1984), 49-55. For a subtle exploration of the imaginary worlds of exiled writers Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, amongst others, see Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven, 1987). Back

14. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992). Back

15. Margaret Doody, "Vibrations," London Review of Books, 5 August 1993, 13-14. Back

16. Edward Winslow to his wife Mary, 15 September 84, Winslow Papers. Back

17. Beverley Robinson, Jr. to Anna Robinson, 29 October [1799?] and Thomas Barclay to Beverley Robinson, 1 November 1799, Robinson Papers. Back

18. Mary Bliss to Frances Ames, 13 February 1797, Bliss Papers, PANS. Back

19. The best book on parent-child relations for this period is Philip G. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (New York, 1977). Equally insightful is a three generation study of Virginia families within almost the same time frame as this essay on Loyalist families: Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1985). Back

20. Bertis Sutton, "The Expression of Second-Generation Loyalist Sentiment in the Verse Dramas of Henry Bliss," Nova Scotia Historical Review, 13, 1 (1993), 43-77. Back

21. Anna Maria Jarvis to Caroline Boyd, 6 March 1832; E.J. Jarvis to William Jarvis, 4 August 1835 and 30 January 1837; E.J. Jarvis to Mrs. William Jarvis, 21 September 1849, Jarvis Papers, New Brunswick Museum. J.M. Bumsted and H.T. Holman. "Edward James Jarvis." Dictionary of Canadian Biography, VIII (Toronto, 1985), 428-30. Back

22. William Bliss to Henry Bliss, 18 May 1828, Bliss Papers, PANS. Back

23. Henry Bliss to William Bliss, Marseilles, 7 January 1825, Bliss Papers, PANS. Back

24. See for example, Ann Gorman Condon, ed., "'The Young Robin Hood Society': A Political Satire by Edward Winslow," Acadiensis, XV (1986), 120-43. Back

25. W.L. Morton, "Victorian Canada," in W. L. Morton, ed., The Shield of Achilles: Aspects of Canada in the Victorian Age (Toronto, 1968), 311-33. For the equivalent development in the United States, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993). Back

26. These impressionistic findings are based on my reading of the letters of William Jarvis, Jr. and his two wives and children in the 1860s and 1870s, Jarvis Papers. Back

27. Morton, "Victorian Canada." Back

28. Alexis de Toqueville was the first to recognize these traits in volume 11 of his Democracy in America (New York, 1957). For modern interpretations, see Richard Slotkin's trilogy: Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (New York, 1973); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985), and Gunfighter Nation: The Mythology of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York, 1992). For the Canadian comparison, see Marcia B. Kline, Beyond the Land Itself: Views of Nature in Canada and the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). Back