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After his arrival in
York, now Toronto, Mr. Macdonell presented his credentials to
Lieutenant-General Hunter, then Lieutenant Governor of the Province, and
obtained the land stipulated for his friends according to the order of
the Sign Manual. He was immediately appointed to the Mission of St.
Raphacis in Glengarry, which remained his headquarters for some
twenty-five years. "I had not," he writes in an address, "been long in
this Province when I found that few or none of even those of you who
were longest settled in the country had legal tenures of your
properties. Aware that if trouble or confusion took place in the
Province your properties would become uncertain and precarious, and
under this impression I proceeded to the Seat of Government, where,
after some months' hard and unremitting labour through the public
offices, I procured for the inhabitants of the Counties of Glengarry and
Stormont patent deeds for one hundred and twenty-six thousand acres of
land."
That may be taken as a
fair indication of the magnitude upon which he was able to conduct
affairs, of the extent of his business capacity, and of the influence he
always possessed with the Colonial as well as with the Home Government.
Another example of his exertions oil of the temporal welfare of the
people of Glengarry is given in the same address, which was published by
him in a time of great public excitement, when he felt called upon to
warn the people of the counties against those whom he designated as
"wicked, hypocritical radicals, who are endeavouring to drive the
Province into rebellion, and cut off every connection between Canada and
Great Britain, your Mother Country, and subject you to the domination of
Yankee rulers and Lynch law"
"I cannot pass over in
silence one opportunity I gave you of acquiring properly which would
have put a large proportion of you at ease for many years—I mean the
transport of war-like stores from Lower Canada to the forts and military
posts of this Province, which the Governor-in-Chief, Sir George Prevost,
and the Quartermaster-General, Sir Sidney Beckwith, offered you at my
request.
"After you refused that
offer it was given to two gentlemen who cleared from thirty to forty
thousand pounds by the bargain."
One of Mr. Macdonells
first and chief objects was the building of churches and establishing of
schools, for which purpose he subsequently obtained grants of money from
the Home Government, but these grants were not permanent. On his arrival
in Upper Canada he found only three Catholic churches in the whole
Province, two of wood and one of stone, and only two clergymen—one a
Frenchman, utterly ignorant of the English language; the other an
Irishman, who left the country soon afterwards.
For more than thirty
years Mr. Macdonell's life was devoted to the missions of Upper Canada.
He himself, in a letter to Sir Francis Bond Head, referring to an
address in the House of Assembly in 1836, in which his character had
been aspersed and his motives assailed, gave a statement of the
hardships he was called upon to endure in the discharge of his sacred
functions when he first came to the country, and of his efforts on
behalf of religion subsequently:-
"* * * Upon entering upon
my pastoral duties, I had the whole of the Province in charge, and
without any assistance for the space of ten years. During that period I
had to travel over the country from Lake Superior to the Province line
of Lower Canada, carrying the sacred vestments sometimes on horseback,
sometimes on my back, and sometimes in Indian birch canoes, living with
savages—without any other shelter or comfort but what their tires and
their fares and the branches of the trees afforded; crossing the great
lakes and rivers, and even descending the rapids of the St. Lawrence in
their dangerous and wretched craft. Nor were the hardships and
privations which I endured among the new settlers and emigrants less
than those I had to encounter among the savages themselves, in their
miserable shanties, exposed on all sides to the weather and destitute of
every comfort. In this way I have been spending my time and my health
year after year since I have been in Upper Canada, and not clinging to a
seat in the Legislative Council and devoting my time to political
strife, as my accusers are pleased to assert. The erection of
five-and-thirty churches and chapels, great and small, although many of
them are in an unfinished state, built by my exertion, and the zealous
services of two-and-twenty clergymen, the major part of whom have been
educated at my own expense, afford a substantial proof that I have not
neglected my spiritual functions, nor the care of the souls under my
charge; and if that be not sufficient, I can produce satisfactory
documents to prove that I have expended, since I have been in this
Province, no less than thirteen thousand pounds of my own private means,
besides what I received from other quarters, in building churches,
chapels, presbyteries and school houses, in rearing young men for the
Church and in promoting general education."
By his zeal, prudence and
perseverance, the settlers belonging to his faith, as they multiplied
around him, were placed in that sphere and social position to which they
were justly entitled. |
