Silver and hotcakes and beer: Irish Montreal in the 1840s.
Olson, Sherry
Abstract
The papers of Bartholomew O'Brien, innkeeper and broker of
silver, offer a fresh look at Montreal's Irish Catholic community
in the 1840s. His interventions illustrate the way an individual
navigated an "ethnicized" social network and circulated
resources between the market economy and the gift economy, spheres that
Ferdinand Tonnies termed the Gesellschaft and the Gemeinschaft (1887).
In a city embarked on the revolution of steam power, the two circuits
were braided together, and, despite the obsolescence of Tonnies'
original formulation, the distinction reveals some persistent features
of the invasive nature of capital and human responses to its perennial
re-structuring of the urban economy. When the market faltered, each of
the severat ethnic communities worked to buffer its members through a
personal web of trust. The evidence is based on archival sources:
O'Brien's own correspondence and daybook, parish registers,
and leases and loans conserved in notaries' repertories.
Resume
Les papiers de Bartholomew O'Brien, aubergiste et changeur
d'argent, offrent une nouvelle perspective sur la communaute
iriando-catholique de Montreal. Membre de la generation pionniere, ses
interventions au cours des annees 1840 font comprendre comment
l'individu naviguait dans un reseau social << ethnicise
>> pour faire circuler des ressources entre l'economie du
marche et l'economie du don, les deux spheres que Ferdinand Tonnies
nommait Gesellschaft et Gemeinschaft (1887). Dans une ville qui amorcait
une revolution industrielle, les deux circuits s'entrecroisaient.
Bient qu'elle soit depassee, la distinction de Tonnies decouvre la
nature envahissante du capital et la reponse humaine a la
restructuration de l'economie urbaine. Lors d'une defaillance
du marche, chaque communaute culturelle s'acharnait a proteger les
siens en mobilisant son propre reseau de confiance.
L'interpretation est fondee sur des sources archivistiques: un
journal de bord tenu par O'Brien, une correspondance et
comptabilite, et baux et prets conserves dans les repertoires des
notaires.
**********
The papers of Bartholomew O'Brien, innkeeper and broker of
silver, offer a fresh look at Montreal's Irish Catholic community
on the eve of the arrival of the "ships of death" in 1847. His
daybooks, accounts, and bar chits have much to tell us about lifestyles
and sociability in a city shared by several ethnic communities, and his
activities reveal the dual nature of the urban economy. On the one hand,
in the market economy that Ferdinand Tonnies labeled the Gesellschaft,
every person's coin was equally attractive, and traders were
presumed blind to ethnicity. There operated, at the same time, a moral
economy of reciprocity that he termed the Gemeinschaft, suffused with
religious values, cultural sensitivities, and personal loyalties.
Tonnies is recognized as one of the three founders of urban
sociology, with central pertinence to ethnic studies (Adair-Toteff
1995). The tidy correspondence he postulated between the Gemeinschaft
and rural life, between the Gesellschaft and urban life, is undermined
by the intense exchange between Montreal and the surrounding
countryside. The contrasts nevertheless frame a useful line of
investigation, and the question I raise here is: how did townspeople
manage to function in both worlds? In the nineteenth century, as surely
as today, city-dwellers could satisfy their basic needs for bread and
firewood and self-respect only by operating simultaneously in both the
market economy and the gift economy, by constant reference to two sets
of values, often in contradiction. The way Bartholomew O'Brien
juggled these values provides insights into an urban vitality generated
by their interplay.
Most cities, as gateways of trade between economic regions,
continue to thrive by attracting people from several ethnic backgrounds.
With the object of participating in the common marketplace,
city-dwellers come from diverse communities of culture, each requiring
safeguards for its values and intermediaries for exchange with others.
From ancient times, Mediterranean cities were remarkable for the
development of formal institutions for resolving intercultural disputes
and adjusting the differences among several bodies of law (Heer 1968; H.
Pirenne 1927; J. Pirenne 1947). Over the nineteenth century, cities grew
with the pulsing of international capital, and Montreal, with all the
other cities of North America, surged every 15 to 20 years (Snowden
2006). Each surge of city-building was associated with a massive
transfer of fortune-seekers and refugees, producing a shift in the
cultural mix, with a cascade of demographic consequences that renewed
tensions and, in the next generation, required further negotiation
(Baier 1997; Simon 2006).
Because O'Brien made a legacy of 1000 pounds for the creation
of a servants' refuge, his story can be traced from a box of papers
preserved intact for 150 years by St Patrick's church. (1) The
carton contains a ledger of the purchases of silver from 1841 to 1848, a
list of the books he owned, an inventory of furnishings of the inn in
1845, and a guest register that noted food and drink (1 May 1845 to 7
August 1848): the haddock and hotcakes, turkey, gin slings, and strong
beer. In another journal, O'Brien entered a wider range of
observations, a line or two a day from 1836 to the end of April 1848.
Dozens of little packets of letters, receipts and IOUs record credits he
never recovered, the earliest from the year 1819 for sums as small as a
few shillings. (2)
Having immigrated with his father, three brothers, and two sisters
in about 1815, O'Brien year by year watched the ice shove and noted
spring and fall the first and last runs of the steamboats. In the 1820s
he received window blinds for the tavern by way of the new Lachine
Canal, and, three blocks from his home, watched the great pile of stone
rise for the new parish church of Notre Dame. In 1843 he witnessed the
baptism of its "monster bell," and heard it toll for the first
time at midday on Christmas Eve. He and his wife were present that year
when the first stones were laid for St Patrick's church and blessed
by the bishop. (Their alignment substantially exceeded the dimensions he
had authorized). They were present four years later at the first Mass,
on St. Patrick's Day 1847, and again in June at the auction of
pews. In those last years, O'Brien took the steam-powered railway
cars between Saint-Jean and Laprairie to meet the steam ferry (1848),
and invested in the railway from Montreal to Lachine. He served as one
of the early directors of the Savings Bank (1846), and witnessed the
massive arrivals from Ireland.
Since O'Brien died 8 March 1849 and nothing was added to the
box after the will was acknowledged (12 October), his papers have the
special value of documenting the Irish Catholic community of Montreal as
it had developed before the famine arrivals. For this community,
information has been scarce, and his records enlarge our perspective on
the politically volatile 1830s and 1840s, the incorporation of the city
(1840), and its brief span as the capital of a "Union of the
Canadas" (1844 to 1849). This was a period of transition from a
traditional view of property as security to a more speculative use of
urban real estate. Critical steps were taken toward dismantling the
seigneurial system and restructuring the system of civil law (Kolish
1994; Young 1986 and 1994). Historians have had to rely primarily on
journals, speeches and letters left by members of either the
Anglo-Protestant elite or the French-Canadian elite. Bartholomew
O'Brien did business with both but belonged to neither. A most
uncommon man, his documents offer clues to the activities of a wider
range of common people living their everyday lives. Like other
Irish-born citizens, O'Brien day by day negotiated the cultural
boundaries that crisscrossed the urban space, and his fragmentary
accounts document several distinct patterns of exchange. We look first
at his activities in the market economy. Second, drawing from the
daybook, we observe some features of a network of reciprocity in the
Irish Catholic community; and in the third section we reflect, from the
loans he made, on the tensions generated by relations of credit. These,
I shall argue, reveal contradictions between the values implicit in the
Gemeinschaft and the market economy--contradictions that inhere in the
economy of a city today.
THE MARKET ECONOMY
As a trader in silver, O'Brien was steadily and unequivocally
immersed in the global economy. The accounts of his purchases of silver
in 1841--doubloons, napoleons, Spanish dollars, silver spoons, and
snuffboxes--list prominent commission merchants, importers and
forwarders, commissariat officers (who handled purchasing, logistics,
payroll and foreign exchange of the British garrison at Montreal), as
well as a sergeant and soldiers who had obtained silver in the Mexican
War, "one of the three Yankee Irishmen" and "four savages
from Laprairie," one of them a storekeeper. Protestants made up
only one quarter of Montreal households, and merchants, highest in the
pecking order, made up only six percent of the population; but three
quarters of the merchants were Protestant; and of the identifiable names
in the silver account, half.
Throughout O'Brien's lifetime, the Montreal economy was
handicapped by a shortage of specie and a rigorous seasonality of
shipping, factors that forced artisans, traders, and consumers to rely
on credit and on repeated renewals of the conventional three-month
promissory notes. Beneficiaries of urban growth included a number of
British immigrants who reaped great profits through contracts for public
works, windfalls in the subdivision of land on the edge of town, or war
time prices for wheat and timber, the major exports coming downstream
into the world market. But Montrealers of every station in life,
individually and collectively, spent much of their energy coping with
economic crisis or attempting to buffer themselves against it. In a
January 1843 letter, O'Brien remarked, "Money at present is
very scarce here, scarcely any persons paying their bills, nothing but
failures daily. Numbers of our butchers are making great sacrifices to
keep their credit good at the banks, people who has money ... now can
invest it to good advantages." (3) As we shall see, some of the
failures of 1842-1843 resulted in losses he was never able to recover.
Citizen participation was based on property; a voter
"qualified" by possession of real estate. In the prolonged and
violent contest of 1832, the Irish Catholic community registered several
hundred votes--O'Brien's among them--for Dr. Daniel Tracey, a
mana little younger, who had spent four student years in
O'Brien's home town of Clonmel, county Tipperary. As editor of
The Vindicator (1828-1832), Tracey (and after him Edmund
O'Callaghan) was attracting an Irish readership and forging an
alliance of Irish Catholics with the French-speaking Patriotes (Daley
1986; Harvey 2011; Verney 1994). For a decade O'Brien hoarded a
long run of the paper (165 issues), but his daybook makes no mention of
the riots, the rebellions, or the participants, (4) indeed no explicit
mention of politics until 20 September 1842 when the financial crisis
again generated a new excitement. He notes having paid 50 shillings at
the Repeal Meeting at Eniss Market (St. Ann's Market Hall); he
attended a "Great Repeal meeting in French Square, Ryan Hinks &
Drummond spoke" (OP 8 April 1844), where the support for
O'Connell's demands for repeal of the Union of Ireland with
Britain (1801) resonated with resentment of the Union of the Canadas
(effected 1840). Three days later O'Brien attended an election
meeting, and on the 17th "OB gave his vote--Dun & J Cassidy was
present." He mentions also the municipal elections of 2 March 1846
and 1 March 1847, as well as the "axe handles" hired by the
opposition, and a legislative election 11 January 1848.
The openness of a merchant economy to the Atlantic world was marked
by intensity of travel; and the merchant thirst for news was aggravated
by the five months ice-fast harbour. To forward mail and collect unpaid
bills, the O'Briens noted the destinations of their guests, and the
register of 1847 therefore offers a view of certain flows of people
through Montreal. They may not be representative of the whole, since the
inn, centrally located at St John and Hospital streets, three blocks
from the water, was a very modest complement to the larger hotels.
Raftsmen made up a seasonal clientele; some came every year. The owner
or foreman arrived with two or three men, occasionally as many as seven,
in May from the zones of heavy cutting upstream in 1823 from the Bay of
Quinte, 1828-35 from the watershed of the Grand River, 1824-35 from the
Nation River, and in 1843 from the Lievre. They left the inn to rejoin
their rafts at Lachine, Chateauguay, Isacove, or Bord a Plouffe, and
from those points round the Island of Montreal headed downstream to
Quebec City, where the timber was loaded for British ports. Others,
returning upstream with money in their pockets, took the stage to McNab,
Cornwall, Lochiel, Ithaca, Garden Island, or Allumettes. Other guests
were steamboat passengers heading upstream to Bytown (Ottawa) or
downstream to Quebec City, others moving by stage or by cab to Albany or
New York City via Laprairie and St John, to Lachine, Prescott, Aylmer or
North Williamsburg, Finch, Osnabruck or Kingston, occasionally an Indian
to Saint-Regis.
Can we situate O'Brien in the roller-coaster economy? There is
no indication that he was ever directly involved in the major export
commodities of grain, timber, or ashes, the "staples" about
which much has been written (Careless 1954; Cross 1968; Innis 1995;
Tucker 1964). Nor was he an importer of tea and wine and dry goods,
commodities central to the high-status merchant elite. So far as we
know, his principal dealings with the merchants and the military were
the purchases of silver.
O'Brien was well off by the mid-1820s, and his investments (or
re-investments) reflect some of the trends of a quarter-century, bur
with a tantalizing gap in the record. By 1824 he owned a building across
the street from the inn, (5) but he did not favour investment in real
estate: In January 1843, he commented on the fact that a new building
that had cost 5000 pounds to put up, was rented for only 345 pounds a
year, on the block for 1517 pounds with no bidders. (6) In a letter
rejecting an offer of property he is explicit: "To invest money in
the purchase of property I have never done as yet, in fact it is at
variance with my business as money broker." (7)
Table 1 displays the assets we can verify: first, the assets he
secured from 1820 to 1835, and second, those reported in the inventory
after death. Between 1824 and 1835, O'Brien made six loans to the
vestry (marguilliers) for construction of Notre Dame church. Although
they were made for terms of one to seven years, he kept the funds in
this form for up to eleven years, to a maximum of over 2000 pounds. (8)
Assets in a church were considered sound security; they earned the legal
6 percent per annum (paid semi-annually), and O'Brien was not alone
in choosing to avoid the Bank of Montreal and the other factious banks
that served the interests of particular cliques of merchants. He
liquidated all of those loans in 1837-1838, precisely at the moment of
peak activity of the Patriotes and founding of the Patriote-sponsored
Banque du Peuple. At his death in 1849, his assets included 450 pounds
in shares in banks, as well as 1000 pounds in bonds in a railway, local
gas companies, and the waterworks that belonged to the municipal
corporation. We'll see later that these financial instruments were
acquired in order to re-float other investors, and in the next section
we shall see the nature of his initiatives of the 1840s: smaller
investments with higher turnaround, greater risk, and impacts close to
home.
THE GIFT ECONOMY
The historian has more difficulty estimating the dimensions of the
Gemeinschaft, since the economy of the gift is rooted in a wholly
different system of values. As presented by anthropologists, this refers
to goods and services "freely given, without expectation of
return" (Luke 6:31), but a generous act invited and stimulated the
recipient to make a return gift, and the sequence maintained
communication, cultivated virtue and mutual concern. Ideally, it
spiraled into a more intense human relationship with wider ramifications
of trust and respect (Godbout and Caille 1998; Mauss 1967; Titmuss
1970). Among the relationships Tonnies identified as fundamental to the
Gemeinschaft were religion, family life, and neighboring--all those
close relationships sociologists refer to as primary sociability. It is
in these realms that such acts of generosity and trust were valued, and
we observe in this section how this form of exchange--the gift and the
counter-gift--reinforced the meaning of "being Irish" in
Montreal in the 1830s and 1840s.
Many of the guests at the inn, as well as a majority of the
raftsmen, relatives, and others mentioned in the day books were fellow
countrymen. Travelers and immigrants from Ireland came recommended as
part of a network that stretched between Clonmel and Prescott, Ontario.
(9) As I have argued elsewhere, the persistence of ethnic identity in an
urban community required continual maintenance and grooming of the
network (Olson 1991 ). Conversely, the survival, well-being, and advance
of members of the ethnic network depended upon "the gift" An
immigrant community that starts on a low rung of the ladder is under
urgent pressure to find ways to tap into the world of expanding capital,
in order to capture a share for itself; and, to hold onto that share,
recirculate income within its own precincts. We shall see how
O'Brien (or "OB", as he styled himself in the journal)
promoted that internal circulation.
There is a large literature on the functions of the ethnic
neighborhood, the advantages of its institutional completeness, and the
extent to which ethnic allegiances are generated from both within and
without the community (Barth 1969; Breton 1964; Conzen 1979). Without
reviewing these issues, I am treating all groups in the city as
"ethnic." The four largest all perceived themselves as
vulnerable minorities, even the powerful Anglo-Protestant community with
its Scottish merchants and fur trade fortunes that were now re-invested
in subdivision of the terraced slope of Mount Royal and water-powered
mills on the Lachine Canal. From the census of 1842, 42 percent of
Montrealers were French Canadian in origin, 20.6 percent Irish Catholic,
9.6 percent Irish Protestant, and 28 percent Protestants of other
origins, born in England, Scotland, or the U.S. (Olson 2004, 11).
Protestants of Irish origin show a curious mix of occupations at both
the highest and lowest levels, that is, wholesalers and shoe makers or
labourers. Irish Catholics were present in all parts of the city, and in
several districts constituted a politically challenging "swing
vote." In each group, an extended family was likely to cluster in a
neighbourhood and to hire members of their own group. While some issues
split Protestant from Catholic, others brought "the Irish"
together, as in 1828, 1831, and 1847, when the "Friends of
Ireland" sent aid to victims of the famines. In perennial
re-negotiation of boundaries, Irish Catholics occupied a pivotal
position between French-speaking Catholics and English-speaking
Protestants.
Religion
The entire city and its rural periphery were formally a single
parish under the care of the Priests of Saint-Sulpice whose mission in
1657 had re-confirmed and grounded the development of Montreal as a
French settlement. Since 1760 the British colonial government had
created a parallel Anglican establishment. By 1840 they were curtailing
the role of the Priests as seigneurs of the entire Island, and the
Catholic bishop was challenging the Priests' management of the
parish and threatening to subdivide it. Within the Catholic parish, the
Irish formed an intensely interactive community, segregated in its
sociability. From 1815, about the time O'Brien arrived in the city,
a succession of several English-speaking Sulpicians--Messieurs Richards,
Phelan, Connolly, Morgan, and Dowd--organized services for their
"Hibernense," first in Bonsecours Chapel, then in the old
Recollet chapel a block from O'Brien's home. Surviving cahiers
des prones record the marriage bans announced, the funerals, the sick
who needed their prayers, and the Sunday schedule of Mass, Vespers, and
Catechism. The O'Brien documents add to the evidence that the
community of English-speaking Catholics already perceived themselves as
a parish. (10) Of the people O'Brien mentions in his personal day
book, and whom we can identify as Montrealers, 96 percent were members
of that community.
A high point in the religious life of Montreal was the
thirteen-month visit of mission preacher Forbin-Janson, Bishop of Nancy
(France), and O'Brien's seven references specify the provision
of parallel events for the English-speaking:
13 December [1840] Retreat began, Mr Quiblier said Mass in
Recollect
15 Bishop of Nancy said Low Mass in Recollect Church
18 Renewal of baptisms in Recollect lighted tapers
27 Bishop of Nancy ... gave an account of the ceremonies in
Bethlehem on Christmas Eve
28 ... joining banners of Christ without ...
29 Dec 8 o'clock dead bell for parish church tolled ...
5 January Bishop of Nancy ... blessed the beads, all the small
& sucklings was there, Mass was said for them.
By this time, church-centred activities of the Hibernense included
schools for both boys and girls, and within the next three years they
added a children's society, a temperance society, and a committee
to raise funds for a church of their own (Leitch 1999; Olson 2013).
Charity was channeled through the clergy, and the aumonier du pauvre
assigned by the Sulpicians for the Irish kept a pocket notebook of his
expenditures: cotton shirting, an entire raft of firewood, cloaks for
four women, a blanket, two pairs of shoes, a coffin for an orphan ... In
the winters of 1839 and 1840, he prepared weekly lists for soup tickets
(recognized by the Grey Nuns), firewood, and recommendations of men for
jobs at the city's stone-breaking yard. The Protestant community,
too, had founded institutions to assist their own, rather than invite
municipal intervention. Toward the end of February 1843, a seasonal
"house of industry" was assisting 500, but could provide only
oatmeal and potatoes (at about 1 shilling 3 pence per person per week),
bread being too dear; they wanted the Corporation to employ an
additional 500 men at stone breaking for street improvements. In
February 1847, well before the arrival of the hundred ships from Cork, a
grand jury estimated 100 families were sleeping on straw, and 1100
families--about one in seven--were going to bed several nights a week
without fire or supper. (11)
The Priests of Saint-Sulpice contributed substantially to the
construction of St. Patrick's Church. Although the handsome new
edifice was technically a mere annex of the Parish of Notre Dame, and
did not receive authorization to keep its own registers until the 1870s,
or to elect its own vestry till 1903, O'Brien, from the day of the
first Mass, ceased to refer to Notre Dame as "the parish
church" and began calling it "the French church." He was
among the 280 householders who rented a family pew at St Patrick's,
and, like a dozen other tavern keepers, he paid one of the highest rates
(five pounds a year) to sit under the pastor's nose. The daybook is
peppered with five-shilling donations, and, as the obituary stated,
"Few know how much good he did" (The Pilot 14 March 1849).
With so few Irish Catholics in the top echelon of Montreal society,
charitable and institution-building demands were heavy, and the pressure
was unrelenting: "Rev W Morgan when preaching after Mass said there
could not be 10 just persons found in Montreal" (OP 14 February
1847).
Family life
The family was Tonnies' model for the Gemeinschaft, but
O'Brien's household does not fit neatly into the model. In
1822 he married Eliza McDougall, a widow, in St Gabriel's
Presbyterian Church, a congregation known for its moral severity, its
many farmer members, and its internal disputes. A year after the
wedding, in the same church, O'Brien stood as godfather to one of
his wife's nephews. (12) Throughout the century at least two or
three percent of the Irish were marrying across the religious divide
each year, despite objections of their clergy. The daybook and other
documents refer frequently to "Mrs OB" and their regular joint
attendance at Catholic services; in 1876 she was buried from an Anglican
Church. His will (two months before his death) refers to her as his
"housekeeper" of many years, and the inventory, handled
entirely by the clerical executors and their notary, distances its
reference to "Mrs McDugald." The Montreal Witness later
referred to the O'Brien will in a tempest against the Catholic
clergy for its ability to wring out deathbed donations of funds the
editor felt should go to Protestant heirs. The Sulpicians were working
to separate Irish Catholics from their Protestant compatriots, notably
Father Patrick Dowd who insisted on separation of the St Patrick's
Society. (13)
The O'Brien and McDougall kinfolk, despite religious
difference and a scatter of rural locations, stayed in close touch. The
couple brought up Eliza's grandson, James Sibbetts, over the years
1843-1849, and the daybook mentions dozens of trips Eliza made to St
John's, visits by James to his father in Chateauguay, visits to
Montreal from Eliza's sister Mary as well as nephews and nieces
from both sides. (14) Not all members of the extended family occupied
the same "station in life," but all were struggling in a
market economy. In 1848 he and Eliza made detailed recommendations about
management of her brother's farm, and her sister Margaretta's
at Morristown, New York. (15)
Although gender discrimination was cast in law and custom (Bradbury
2011), Eliza McDougall's marriage contract protected her right to
all the furnishings of the inn, sufficient to ensure a livelihood. She
kept an independent account in the savings bank; the will provided a
further annuity of 50 pounds, and she continued to operate a boarding
house at the same location into the 1860s. The daybooks indicate her
firm opinions, her humour, as well as intense activity in managing an
establishment that offered six large guest rooms. As described in 1845,
the inn offered an array of comforts and small luxuries: cherry drop
leaf table, spring-bottom sofa, silver candlesticks, conch shells, a
patent foot scraper and boot jacks, a large backgammon board, a roller
map of Canada, and in one guest room a child's bedstead with turned
rails, calico curtain and valence, its own straw mattress, linen tick,
and featherbed. In a stone house in a gloomy and narrow street, keeping
warm was a central concern: in the small sitting room, a fireplace and a
double stove with 19 lengths of stove pipe and 5 elbows; in the
"large gentleman's bedroom" another 24 inch stove; in the
winter kitchen (upstairs) a 36-inch "Three River double stove"
with 12 lengths of stove pipe; and in the summer kitchen on the lower
flat a premium cooking-stove. Meals included fish, hominy, haddock and
pancakes, roast turkey, tongue, roast beef, pork, and apple pie. On
occasion, "Mrs OB bought 1 barrel Bonckouick oysters ... bushel
turnips & half bushel carrots"; (16) and she offered late-night
suppers, drinks, and "sundries."
The O'Briens always had a young woman servant and a young man,
both of whom must have worked long hours, constantly on their feet. The
servant boy shared his sleeping room next to the summer kitchen with the
oak washtub, oak churn, boilers, milk pail, and shoe brushes.
O'Brien made a habit of entering in his daybook the arrivals and
departures of the servants: a new one arrived every four weeks, most
young and most with Irish names. (This is a conservative estimate, since
we cannot be sure he included all of them.) Their departures suggest the
great difficulties they had in establishing themselves:
8 April Margaret began service. May 3 she broke table. 13 or 12 she
left ...
3 July William, English boy, came to live at midday.
9 July William went off taking a small market basket ...
1 December Gave Nancy Wilson a character for near 2 months service
...
4 August the Girl began service & she went away pregn ...
The range of experience with servant turnover gives meaning to the
unusual choice O'Brien made in assigning his bequest for a
servants' refuge. Protestants had already established a
"registry" or employment office, and servants were peculiarly
exposed in the dual economy. As part of the household, they were
marginally part of the Gemeinschaft, but the moment they left its
paternal authority and shelter, they had no claim or protection in the
Gesellschaft, and any young person without employment was presumed not
only lazy but suspect. The census reported 2669 servants in Montreal in
1842, three quarters of them girls and women, most of them Irish
Catholic young people isolated in Protestant households. (17) Their
aloneness in trouble is apparent in the numerous deaths of servant girls
in the Hotel Dieu. In the parish as a whole, ten births in a hundred
were to unwed mothers, most of them young, of marrying age. Of the women
who gave birth in the Protestant Lying-In Hospital (founded 1846), half
were Catholic, with Irish surnames, many of them servants in Protestant
households, some of them abused by their employers.
Were the O'Briens better employers than most? Can we suppose
turnover was as high in other households? Was O'Brien's a dour
personality? The journal is a little more revealing of the strong
character of the mistress, through her husband's playful or
self-conscious remarks, scattered between the tooth-pulling, a fall on
the ice, the mosquitoes and other vexations:
Mrs said I had no business here I was a mean dog (10 Jan 1846).
Mrs O'Brien scolded OB in presence of Mrs Gentle being a
Sunday (17 December 1837).
Mrs OB made OB take an oath he did not take her money ... (15 July
1839).
Mrs OB sent for NP Rossiter to complain OB had kicked her (5 or 6
August 1839). Mrs said May the curse of G attend you day & night,
said after dark (9 December 1846).
Neighboring
Very different from the relation of power between master and
servant, and from the longer-lived and more complicated relations of
power between man and wife, was the neighboring relationship, founded on
reciprocity. Solidarities were expressed in visiting, minding children,
borrowing the cup of sugar, or sending beef tea and gruel when someone
was sick; and all these small kindnesses were promptly returned. About
1845, O'Brien, with the help of grandson and nephews, returned a
stepladder, a horse rug, and a scraper ... and compiled another list of
residuals, items they had tried to return: "Things borrowed that
their owners knew not of." The charm lies in its similarity to our
own experience of neighborly borrowing: the books, a whiskey barrel, the
wire rat trap, six hole mouse traps, two old umbrellas, and "Rev Wm
Dolan's silk handkerchief and specks." Four out of five of all
the lenders can be identified as Irish Catholic Montrealers, half as
pewholders in the first auction at St Patrick's, and nine out of
ten as residents of West ward or Saint-Joseph suburb, close to the inn.
(18) They lived within a stone's throw, within the range of a
spark, or within earshot of a row: "Joseph O'Kean's
trimmer worked & hammered till half past 1 at night" (OP 10
September 1842). "Two pistol shots fired at 10 minutes to 7pm out
of Sinclaire window" (OP 31 July 1846).
Social events and charitable fund-raising contributed to the
continual grooming of the gift economy, and Montreal, as a city of
37,000, offered a lively mix of seasonal entertainments. The daybook
mentions treats in the company of grandson, nephews and nieces. These
included sociable activities that were frequently attacked from the
pulpits of both Sulpician and Presbyterian clergy: dancing, the faces,
theatricals, cards, and the circus:
19 Feb 1840 Mrs Gentle & Mrs OB & John Ryan went to Jonsons
ball.
25 Feb 1840 Mrs Gentle & John Ryan went to Anthony Walsh's
Ball, and
2 Mar 1840 John Ryan went to Beaty's Ball.
18 Aug 1840 OB went to the faces.
20 Dec 1843 Grace & Mary first went to OFlyns dancing School.
4 Feb 1845 Irish Soiree at Davids House OB & Dohonor was there.
29 July 1845 OB Mrs OB Jane Miss McCarthy was at circus.
5 Jan 1847 Mrs OB James went to Gainess Ball OB went with them from
10 till midnight.
31 Jul 1847 P Muldoon & James W to theatre on Saturday night
2 Aug 1847 took Mary & Grace to the Theatre.
In Nov 1847 James went to Adams' dancing school one time.
29 Feb 1848 Mary and James was at Wm Butler's Ball this night.
Although the O'Briens kept no carriage, they were occasionally
offered the use of McShane's. More often they "walked
out" on a Sunday afternoon: On New Year's Day 1841, "Mrs
OB & OB went to see them shooting turkeys on the ice." In
January 1846, "walked round by the Canal" in the spring
"as far as the Emigrant Sheds," in summer (2 July) "a
cool sunny day OB wf & James walked to Rivers through the
Grass" and the next couple of "warm summer days OB wf &
Jas went in calesh 2 hours each evening." In January 1847 he
mentioned a ride in a dog cart and a sleigh trip. Visits were punctuated
by McShane's black puppy, the presence of "the Irish
piper" or the carpenter with his fiddle. "Had dinner, she told
Mrs a very improper story." Or again, "P.M. was very tipsey at
OBs from half past 3 to half past 5 pm."
From the variety of everyday acts of generosity--the cup of beef
tea, the shared card game or outing--a relationship might ripen into
more frequent and many-sided interaction or a longer-term commitment
such as a guarantor, executor, trustee, or godparent (cf. Fine 1995).
The management of credit was structured in law by creation of mutual
sureties. At the semi-annual auction of city market stalls, the butchers
"pledged" one for another; and the local contractors who
supplied flour and fuel to the British garrison co-signed with their
fellow wholesalers, partners, or in-laws. The new tenant, or the
woodcutter who needed an advance to feed his winter crew, rounded up
their relatives or neighbours to pledge for them, and the guarantors
served to bind the marginally solvent or marginally dependable
individual into a web of social pressures. On condition of guarantors,
an individual could be "bound to keep the peace"; thus
O'Brien bailed Patrick Larkin out of jail; and since debt was the
most frequent cause of jail sentences, his financial guarantee released
several others from prison.
Such relationships of trust were grounded in a sense of
brotherhood, and "brothers" did not hesitate to urge
generosity and denounce usury (Jones 1989; Nelson 1949). O'Brien
owned Father Jeremiah O'Callaghan's treatise on usury written
during a winter 1822-1823 that the Irish-born priest spent in Montreal.
(19) Schrauwers (2011) describes a parallel example in 1830s Ontario of
farmers who organized mutuai loans to escape the destructive
exploitation of seasonal or cyclical debt. Like the Irish Catholics of
Montreal, those rural evangelicals grounded their moral economy in a
shared religious affiliation.
In Tonnies' conception, the Gemeinschaft had its roots in
voice, music, gesture, dress, and body language, whereas the new
commercial economy, to guarantee contractual and long-distance
relations, set high value on reading, writing, and accounting.
Contributing to this rich and challenging intellectual environment was
the variety of media for sharing both feelings and ideas. The everyday
world sketched in O'Brien's terse notes illustrates the
"early modern" nature of Montreal society and the challenging
contradiction between the demands of capital and the old world of
"our mother country the church" (Clavero 1996). Here is a man
who recorded the unpaid gin slings he consumed with his friends and
relations. He gave and wrote it down, he liked a good bargain in
firewood or calico for his niece, he lent in the expectation of being
repaid, received no interest higher than the legal 6 percent; he
protested unpaid notes, and occasionally threatened to sue, but when his
friends, his kin or his fellow parishioners needed a guarantor, he
rallied. Whether we consider the network of religious ties, family ties,
or neighboring, O'Brien made those relationships function to the
advantage of the Irish Catholic community. Recognized as a
"gatekeeper" he exercised a certain leadership side by side
with the Irish priests and their clerical guests, men with whom he
exchanged books, to whom he confessed, and to whom he contributed day by
day and week by week, "for the Irish poor" or the building of
a rural church. (20)
THE TENSION INHERENT IN THE DUAL ECONOMY
Mutual sureties offered some protection and supported expanding
social relationships, but obviously they harbored tensions when a debtor
left town, an alcoholic betrayed the trust, or a tradesman died before
he had repaid a loan. O'Brien's documentation of a mass of
petty "bad debts" reflects three low points in the economy. Of
the packets of bar chits and notes of raftsmen, carpenters,
"Ladies," and "Dead Men," most were compiled
1821-1823 or 1835-1836; and in the years 1843 and 1847 we find two
flurries of dunning letters: to rope manufacturer John Converse,
"desirous of seeing you ...," to market gardener Michael
Shanley," ... unless you pay me what you are owing ... I shall be
under the necessity of transferring your note into other hands." By
the time O'Brien died, the municipal corporation, overextended in
street improvements and acquisition and expansion of a waterworks, found
itself on the verge of bankruptcy and carried out a rigorous
"restructuring" (Dubuc 1962; Roy 1974).
The particular drama of 1847-1849 was the massive scale of both
deaths and failures. The city experienced its most devastating epidemics
in 1832, 1847, and 1849, in each case associated with unusually heavy
arrivals of immigrants and a disproportionate burden on the Irish-born
in terms of urgent services required, risks encountered, and numbers of
orphans and widows. "Connely told OB there was 1860 sick in M
sheds" (OP 10 July 1847). Even in an ordinary summer, death was an
everyday companion that gave great intensity to the Sulpicians'
frequent sermons on the Last Judgment (Rousseau 1976) and the
admonitions of devout manuals: "Preparation for Death" and
"The Means of Acquiring Perfection." In recognition of
O'Brien's generosity, he was buried "in the walls of the
parish church," a privilege extended to only eight persons in the
years 1847-1849.
Trust is the mechanism of trade and of credit, but a collapse of
trade or credit renewed the deep-seated conviction that the people you
could trust were "family"--people whose values you shared by
virtue of a common religion, origin, and upbringing. It was therefore in
the clamp of debt that people faced contradictions in their dual system
of values. The threat arose when "the market" failed, when
credit collapsed, and everybody was simultaneously trying to collect
overdue payments. The more substantial of O'Brien's
never-satisfied credits arose from co-signed promissory notes. The
largest--Ryan, Donegani, McShane, and Kelly--arose from a longstanding
line of credit or recurrent assistance, and three of the four, caught
overextended in the crisis of 1843-1844, had the misfortune of dying at
the wrong moment. The legal requirements for dissolving a partnership to
settle an estate threatened insolvency for a business that might
otherwise have ridden out the storm. (21) The O'Brien records do
not lend themselves to systematic analysis of business conditions, but
they point to salient events that evoked sympathy, indignation, or
anxiety.
Maurice Ryan, for example, was an architect and builder in the
nearby town of Trois-Rivieres. Since 1841 O'Brien had carried
Ryan's notes, ranging 60 [pounds sterling] to 200 [pounds sterling]
working capital, in view of "work that I am doing for Government
which leaves me Bear of money at this moment until I get my contract
compleated." Ryan died 2 February 1843, leaving a widow and three
young children, after 30 days of excruciating pain and sickness. A
mutual friend wrote to O'Brien, "On 2 Jan while in the act of
putting to bed a drunken friend, he was bit by him on the thumb of the
left hand. It mortified. Amputate near the shoulder on 30th Jan. Mrs
Ryan is still confined to her room, delivered of a child the day
before." He commented on the "melancholy scene, each occupying
bed ...," (22) and ended the letter, "Mrs Ryan asks to tell
you that you not be uneasy, You will be first paid." (23)
The obligations of John and Michael Kelly, brothers,
carpenter-builders, were larger, and affected by the onset of business
depression. In September 1843, the Kellys apologized for their inability
to pay off a note. At the root of Kelly's eventual failure was a
delay in payment by the municipal corporation for his work on Bonsecours
Market and his overextension of real estate development 1842-1845. (24)
He signed over to O'Brien the municipal bonds the city had paid him
in lieu of cash. He declared bankruptcy 5 June 1849, and the death of
William, a third brother, complicated the accounting. (25) John
Donegani, from whom the Kellys had obtained a piece of land in
Pres-de-ville (3500 [pounds sterling] late in 1845), subsequently
failed, on a much larger scale. (26)
Within O'Brien's own extended family, aventure was
brought to crisis by the combined impacts of a death and a business
recesssion. O'Brien had provided a line of credit for his
brother-in-law Robert Noxon and partner Cochrane, hatters well situated
on Notre-Dame street. Noxon's death in 1842 left Eliza's
sister Mary with five children and accumulated obligations to
O'Brien: 262 pounds to cover expenses involved in the hatting
trade--"shellack, insurance, rabbit linings, squirrel
skins"--and the cost of the funeral. Since the widow of a
hatter-furrier had to be properly attired, the note included 9 pounds to
cover 31 yards of black crepe, dyeing the furs for mourning, a fur sack,
and silk for a body for a dress. (27) Mary Noxon renewed the partnership
with Cochrane the hatter, but she was financially involved also in a
marginal brewery operated by her daughter and her son-in-law J.D.
Pennie, in St John (Dorchester county). Sales of brewery utensils show
mounting difficulties in February 1843 ("vente faite avec reserve
de remere"). The equipment was valued at 113 [pounds sterling], and
led to five years of irritable correspondence. (28)
O'Brien appeared as security on contracts of the brothers
James and Patrick McShane, cattle drovers at the corner of Prince &
William streets, Griffintown, and occupants of the No. 1 butcher stall
in St Ann's market. He provided them a line of short-term credit
for butchering 1839-1847. It is likely that the involvement with a
network of butchers was initiated with O'Brien's brother
Michael who had been a butcher in Montreal. Bartholomew O'Brien
took part in a first rescue of McShane in fall 1845 (several notes at
100 [pounds sterling]), and over six months (April to October 1847)
allowed close to 2000 [pounds sterling] in notes to roll over a bank
note. Also involved were Patrick Brennan, chandler and innkeeper in
Griffintown, and a farmer-supplier T. Coffee. A similar rescue of
carriage maker Michael O'Meara also succeeded, O'Meara having
been caught short by the failure of John Keenan in Trois-Rivieres. (29)
O'Brien's extension of credit induced a multiplier effect
in the Irish Catholic community. McShane the butcher used his line of
credit to buy beef from Irish-born farmers, and on at least one occasion
from Eliza's brother John McDougall. In the public market, McShane
sold choice cuts to the urban elite, English, Scottish, and French
Canadian, and he reserved soup bones and stew meat for needy families
identified by the Irish-born priest. When O'Meara the chandler
borrowed to expand his business, he took on another "good Irish
boy" as apprentice. When Maurice Ryan built a mansion and designed
an elegant "park gate" for a wealthy Protestant family in
Montreal, he hired an Irish Catholic plasterer. Donegani the speculator
sold four adjoining lots to four Irish peddlers who built homes and set
up retail stores that lasted three generations; and he sold a larger,
more central location (Pres-de-Ville) to the Kelly brothers who in turn
built houses for Irish artisans O'Kane, McAuley, and Brock. All of
the people I have named here were among the contributors to construction
of St Patrick's church, and John Kelly was keeping a close watch
over the nearby site for the Irish committee, necessary because the
contract was let by the French Canadian vestry of Notre-Dame, in
conflict of interest with a rival for those pew rents. (30) All belonged
to that first generation of Irish immigrants who constituted the
reception committee for the "boat people" of the 1840s, and
emerged as an important political elite (James 2001; Jolivet 2010; King
2010; Leitch 1999; Trigger 2001).
In good years the distinction between the two sets of values might
seem arbitrary, since they were mutually reinforcing: greater demand
meant more spending, more credit, more apprentices ... In hard times,
however, when credit grew tight in Britain, international trade
collapsed, or banks failed in U.S. cities, the Gemeinschaft came to the
rescue, cushioning, succoring, and, as we see in O'Brien's
letters, kibitzing, kvetching, distributing praise, advice, and
condemnation. To O'Connor in Perth (Upper Canada), he wrote 11
August 1843: "Sir, As a countryman, I take the liberty of sending
you this scroll requesting of you to call on Messrs Thos Brooke & co
against whom I hold a note endorsed by William Glasfest Innkeeper, both
parties residing in Perth, and know from each party what they intend
doing ..." To the pastor of Saint-Cesaire O'Brien appealed for
payment of a sum owing for six years: "Reverend Sir ... I have been
so indulgent ... As soon as the roads became good, the farmers would be
enabled to get to market with their produce, you thought ... We have had
excellent sleighing and strange to say, I recelved no money." (31)
Like the others, O'Brien was subject to the recurrent tensions
between the two "economies," and his most important function
was the cushion he provided for a series of immigrant Irish artisans and
entrepreneurs. Despite the rigour of class in Montreal, and his own role
as a broker and lender, O'Brien remained closely associated with
artisans, and he identified with an immigrant's expectation of
opportunity and reward for hard work and determination.
CONCLUSION
From those practices in the Irish Catholic community of Montreal,
what can we now make of Tonnies' distinction? The immigrant
community of O'Brien's generation, by capturing resources from
the larger and wealthier segments of the urban economy, began to
overcome the handicap of the newcomer. Its internal recirculation was
effective as a survival mechanism for the larger numbers who arrived in
the 1840s, and subsequently as a springboard for the ambitions of their
children. Critical to Irish achievements of the 1860s and 1870s (Olson
and Thornton 2011 ) were the politically significant size of the
community who preceded them and, in a generation, developed substantial
social and political capital in the form of leadership, experience, and
collaborations with both Protestant English-speaking and Catholic
French-speaking communities. These social assets were combined with the
toil of the newcomers, their demands, and the political clout of
increasing numbers and brawn.
In O'Brien's case, a significant portion of returns on
the circulation of silver was redistributed into the Irish Catholic
community through his investments in the enterprises of butchers and
chandlers and masons and plasterers. A further portion was retained
within the community through the recirculation of the small stakes in
the card games, the day-after-day transfers of five shillings for the
poor, and the hundreds of glasses of warmth. As in the villages of
Ireland and Quebec, the priests and the tavern keepers of Montreal kept
up a running battle over temperance and political influence, but the
extent to which they shared priorities is apparent in
O'Brien's occupancy of a pew, his nephew's schooling, his
legacy for the refuge, and the trust he placed in Father Dowd as his
executor. The refuge was built and twenty years later was receiving
yearly more than sixty thousand "overnights" of out-of-place
servants. The concentration of St Patrick's Church, St
Bridget's Refuge, and the orphanage on adjoining sites ensured a
rapid and effective institutional development which in turn furthered
solidarity of Irish Catholics and their ability to deploy cultural and
political capital in the oncoming generation.
If we take Tonnies' terms as he offered them--as mere
"clamps for bundles of ideas"--they are still useful for
making a conceptual distinction between the circulation of resources
within a community and their circulation between its membership and the
expanding market. In the urban economy the two circuits, as we have
seen, were braided together. They did not occupy wholly separate spheres
or wholly separate spaces, and the city dweller had to maintain a
footing in both worlds. The elaborate web of small financial
transactions demonstrates the intergenerational working of the economy,
its gendered structure, complementarities between the several cultural
communities, and sources of vulnerability. (33) Under normal
circumstances, the various communities of Montreal acknowledged shared
values: thrift, hard work, looking after the nephew or grandson, and a
judicious mixture of sobriety and jollification. In the recurrent
failures of the market economy, however, severe pressure on the several
ethnic communities challenged the solidarity of each, irritated the
relations between them, and produced those crises of governance that
have preoccupied the historians of Canada's 1830s and 1840s
decades. The same tensions are apparent today as we face the invasive
nature of capital and its perennial re-structuring of the urban economy.
Were there in Montreal, in 1847, ten just men? When O'Brien
died, child of Clonmel and "success story" of New World
opportunity, the editor of The Pilot remarked, "Even his most
confidential friends were never made acquainted with the number and
extent of his charities" (14 March 1849). Today, hidden within
other communities that make up the city, stretched between their two
sets of loyalties, living at once in the grip of modern mercantile
ambitions and a pre-modern Patria with its web of commitment, there may
yet be ten, and if not ten, perhaps one, watching the soft fine snow
from the window of the pub, opening his wallet, and then tucking into
haddock and hotcakes, a pint, and a game of cards.
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Archives of the Priests of Saint-Sulpice, Montreal (APSSM).
Archives des Soeurs de la Congregation de Notre-Dame (CND).
Bibliotheque et Archives nationales du Quebec a Montreal (BAnQ) :
Fonds Cour des sessions generales de la paix, 1839-42 (TL32); Fonds
Protonotaire. Parish registers o f births, deaths, and marriages;
Greffes de n otaires (CN601), entered as "BAnQ, Act of ..."
with the notary's name and date; Dossiers des faillites
(TP11,S2,SS2).
Census of Canada, nominal registers, microfilms, and digital files
created from the microfilms.
Fabrique de la Paroisse Notre-Dame de Montreal (Fabrique) :
Necrologie, 1847-1849; Payrolls, construction of St Patrick's
Church, 1843-47; Registers of pew rentals.
Harvard University Business School, Baker Library: R.G. Dun &
Co. Collection, credit ledgers.
McCord Museum, O'Brien Papers (OP), Daybook of Bartholomew
O'Brien PO83.
St Patrick's Parish Archives (SPPA): St Bridget's Refuge.
Annual statement of accounts, 1865-1900; Father Dowd's Cahier des
prones, 1843-45.
Ville de Montreal, Service des archives, Roles d'evaluation et
feuilles de route, 1847 and 1848.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am great]y indebted to Pamela Miller. who, as Archivist in the
McCord Museum, first pointed me to the O'Brien Papers; to the
present curators and archivists at the McCord; to Mary McGovern,
administrator and archivist at St Patrick's Parish; and to Patricia
Simpson and her colleagues at the Congregation Notre Dame, Centre
Marguerite-Bourgeois, custodians of records of the Irish congregation
from its early years when they met at the Bonsecours and Recollet
churches. La Paroisse Notre Dame opened its archive, as well as the
Seminaire Saint-Sulpice. I received help from Dominique Deslandres and
all the members of her team who contributed to the history of
Saint-Sulpice de Montreal. Jean-Claude Robert shared in the collection
of the census of 1842, Robert Lewis in collection and analysis of the
taxrolls of 1847 and 1848; Ollivier Hubert in collection of pew rentals.
Robert C.H. Sweeny compiled the census of 1825, the taxroll of 1833, and
the electoral register of 1832. The search for additional sources on the
Irish community was initiated in joint research with Patricia Thornton
on infant survival, and supported throughout by the Social Science
Research Council of Canada and by Fonds quebecois de la recherche sur la
societe et la culture (FQRSC) through the Centre interuniversitaire de
recherche quebecoise (CIEQ) Laval-UQTR. Rosalyn Trigger shared her ideas
and critical skills, as well as her experience in the archives of St
Patrick's. Additional leads were provided by Claude Bourguignon,
Francois Dufaux, Jason Gilliland, Michael Keneally, Marc Lacasse,
Francois Lachance, Gillian Leitch, Sandy O'Brien, and Meredith
Watkins.
REFERENCES
Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 1995. Ferdinand Tonnies: Utopian
Visionary. Sociological Theory 13.1: 58-65.
Baier, Lothar. 1997. A la croisee des langues, du metissage
culturel d'est en ouest. Montreal : Actes Sud / Lemeac.
Barth, Fredrik, ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social
Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little-Brown.
Bouchard, Gerard. 1988. Co-integration et reproduction de la
societe rurale. Pour un modele saguenayen de la marginalite. Recherches
sociographiques 29.2-3 : 283-310.
Bradbury, Bettina. 2011. Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics
in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Breton, Raymond. 1964. Institutional Completeness of Ethnic
Communities and the Personal Relations of Immigration. American Journal
of Sociology 70.2: 193-205.
Careless, J. M. S. 1954. Frontierism, Metropolitanism and Canadian
History. Canadian Historical Review 35.54: 1-21.
Clavero, Bartolome. 1996. La Grace du don, Anthropologie catholique
de l'economie moderne. Paris : AlbinMichel.
Conzen, K. N. 1979. Immigrants, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and Ethnic
Identity: Historical Issues. Journal of American History 66.3: 603-615.
Cross, Michael. 1968. The Dark Druidical Groves: The Lumber
Community and the Commercial Frontier in British North America to 1854.
Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto.
Daley, Robert. 1986. Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan: Irish
Patriote. Ph.D. thesis (History), Concordia University.
Deslandres, Dominique, John A. Dickinson, and Ollivier Hubert, eds.
2013. Les Sulpiciens de Montreal, Une histoire de pouvoir et de
discretion, 1657-2007. Montreal : FIDES.
Dubuc, Alfred. 1962. La crise economique au Canada au printemps de
1848 : quelques considerations tirees de la correspondance d'un
marchand. Recherches sociographiques 3.3 : 317-327.
Fine, Agnes. 1995. Parrains, marraines, la parente spirituelle en
Occident chretien. Paris : Fayard.
Godbout, Jacques T., and Alain Caille. 1998. The World of the Gift.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Harvey, Louis-Georges. 2011. 'L'exception
irlandaise' dans la presse anglophone du Bas-Canada, 1823-1836. Les
Cahiers des dix 65.65 : 117-139.
Heer, Friedrich. 1968. The Intellectual History of Europe. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday.
Innis, Harold A. 1995. Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change:
Selected Essays. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
James, Kevin. 2001. Dynamics of Ethnic Associational Culture in a
Nineteenth-Century City: Saint Patrick's Society of Montreal,
1834-56. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 26.1: 47-66.
Jolivet, Simon. 2010. Orange, vert et bleu : les orangistes au
Quebec depuis 1849. Bulletin d'histoire politique 18.3 : 67-84.
Jones, Norman. 1989. God and the Money-Lenders: Usury and Law in
Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, Christopher J. 1988. Tradition and Transformation in
Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from
1791 to the Present. New York: Macmillan.
King, Jason. 2010. L'historiographie irlando-quebecoise,
conflits et conciliations entre Canadiens francais et Mandais. Bulletin
d'histoire politique 18.3 : 13-36.
Kolish, Evelyn. 1994. Nationalismes et conflits de droits : le
debat du droit prive au Quebec, 1760-1840. LaSalle, Quebec : Hurtubise
HMH.
Leitch, Gillian. 1999. Community and Identity in Nineteenth Century
Montreal: The Founding of Saint Patrick's Church. Master's
thesis, University of Ottawa.
Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in
Archaic Societies. New York: Norton.
Nelson, Benjamin. 1949. The Idea of Usury, From the Tribal
Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
O'Callaghan, Jeremiah. 1824. Usury, or Interest, Proved to be
Repugnant to the Divine and Ecclesiastical Laws, and Destructive to
Civil Society. New York: The Author.
Olson, Sherry. 1991. Ethnic Strategies in the Urban Economy.
Canadian Ethnic Studies 32.2: 39-64.
--. 2004. Ethnic Partition of the Work Force in 1840s Montreal.
Labour/Le Travail 53 (Spring): 157200.
--. 2011. Peopling the North American City, Montreal 1840-1900.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Olson, Sherry. 2013. St. Patrick's and the Irish Catholics. In
The Sulpicians of Montreal: A History of Power and Discretion 1657-2007,
eds. D. Deslandres et al., 303-318. Montreal: Wilson and Lafleur.
Olson, Sherry, and Patricia Thornton. 2002. The Challenge of the
Irish Catholic Community in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Histoire
sociale / Social History 35.70: 333-362.
Pirenne, Henri. 1927. Les Villes du Moyen Age. Bruxelles :
Lamartin.
Pirenne, Jacques. 1947. Les grands coumnts de l'histoire
universelle. Neuchatel : Editions de la Baconniere
Rousseau, Louis. 1976. La predication a Montreal de 1800 a 1830 :
approche religiologique. Montreal : Fides.
Roy, Jean-Louis. 1974. Edouard-Raymond Fabre, libraire et patriote
canadien (1799-1854). Montreal : Hurtubise HMH.
Schrauwers, Albert 2011. "Money Bound You--Money Shall Loose
You": Micro-Credit, Social Capital, and the Meaning of Money in
Upper Canada. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53.2: 314-343.
Shearer, Ronald A. 2005. Imperial Regulation and the Constitution
of Early Canadian Banking. Paper presented to Canadian Network for
Economic History, Kingston, April.
Shearer, Ronald A., and Donald G. Paterson. 2003. Monetary Control
in the 1840s: Was There an Incipient Central Bank?
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~cneh/pdfs/shearerPaterson.pdf.
Simon, Sherry. 2006. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of
a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Snowden, Kenneth A. 2006. Construction, Housing, and Mortgages,
Chapter Dc. Historical Statistics of the United States 4: 395-572.
Millennial Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sweeny, Robert C. H. 2007. Spatial and Social Dynamics of Rentier
Capital in an Industrializing Town: The Case of 19th Century Montreal.
Paper presented ar Economic History Association, Austin, 6 September.
Titmuss, Richard M. 1970. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood
to Social Policy. London: Allen.
Tonnies, Ferdinand. 1887/1963. Community and Society. Trans. and
intro, by Charles P. Loomis. New York: Harper.
Trigger, Rosalyn. 2001. The Geopolitics of the Irish-Catholic
Parish in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Journal of Historical Geography
27.4: 553-572.
Tucker, Gilbert N. 1964/1970. The Canadian Commercial Revolution,
1845-1851. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Verney, Jack. 1994. O'Callaghan: The Making and Unmaking ora
Rebel. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.
Young, Brian. 1986. In Its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of
Montreal as a Business Institution, 1816-1876. Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press.
--. 1994. The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil
Code of 1866. Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press.
NOTES
(1.) BAnQ, Acts of L.R. Lacoste 22 and 26 March, 4 May, 8 June 1849
(inventory and cloture). The collection was donated by the Fabrique of
St Patrick's Church in 1995 to McCord Museum. All sutas of money
refer to the pound current in Lower Canada, or "Halifax"
standard, which in the 1840s ran roughly equivalent to 80 per cent of
the British pound sterling or $4 US.
(2.) The principal gap in O'Brien's personal daybook is
the two months 24 August-24 October 1846. I have added punctuation to
the citations and, inevitably, made some inferences about abbreviations
and shorthand used for family names. I collected the silver purchases 1
February to the end of 1841 (on average, each client appeared twice in a
12- month span); and the guestbook from 1 February 1847 to the end.
(3.) OP, Letter of O'Brien to William Bowen in Frankford, 4
January 1843. On currency, banking conditions, and the monetary crises
of 1837 and 1849, see Shearer 2005; Shearer and Paterson 2003. To help
overcome the shortage of specie, the Bank of Montreal was founded in
1817, City Bank 1831, Banque du Peuple 1835, Bank of British North
America 1836.
(4.) The exception: An entry for 19 December 1837 notes that Mrs.
O'Brien and her kinswoman Mrs. Gentles "went to River
Duchene," where on the 17th British troops had routed the rebels,
burned the parish church, and destroyed much of the village. An errand
of mercy? Curiosity? Concern about specific individuals?
(5.) BAnQ, act of N.-B. Doucet 5 January 1828. O'Brien rented
the stone building for the tavern from Jobn Mackenzie (acts of Lukin 9
March and 8 September 1832).
(6.) OP, O'Brien to Bowen.
(7.) OP, O'Brien to Bowen.
(8.) The loans are recorded BAnQ, acts of N.-B. Doucet 2 August
1828, 7 January 1829, 28 July 1829, 19 October 1829; acts of Lacombe 27
January 1832, 7 March 1835, 26 August 1837, 4 May 1838.
(9.) O'Brien's father, the elder Bartholomew
O'Brien, was living in Prescott, Ontario; he remarried in Ottawa
1833 in the Catholic church and died 13 March 1843.
(10.) To confirm the Irish and Catholic affiliations, my
identifications, from Lovell's directory of 1846, the municipal tax
roll of 1848, or the census of 1842 were examined against the first pew
sale of St Patrick's (BAnQ, acts of T.-B. Doucet June and July
1847); SPA, cahiers des prones of the Recollets congregation
(1842-1846); and BAnQ parish registers of Norte Dame de Montreal
1847-49, where separate numbering distinguishes births, deaths and
marriages of members of the Irish community.
(11.) APSSM, Aumonerie despauvres, notebook 1811-1818; Accounts
1831-1840 of the funds for the poor. See also Transcript 7 March 1843;
and on the Grand Jury report La Minerve 15 February 1847.
(12.) BAnQ, CE601, S 126, St Gabriel Presbyterian Church 24 May
1822, p. 28. Eliza McDougall did not sign the marriage register, but
merely made her mark. Her death 11 December 1879 at the age of 94, is
recorded at St Martin's Anglican Church, CE601, S75, p. 24.
(13.) The Benevolent Society had also invested in the construction
of Notre Dame Church, and in 1846 reclaimed their capital. I could find
no reference in the daybook to the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society,
nor to the St Patrick's Society except for one occasion when they
"walked."
(14.) James Sibbets lived with Mrs. McDougald till he married; when
he ended an insolvent partnership with John S. Stalker (bought out by
James M. Henderson pipe manufacturer), he assigned her the residue; she
had presumably funded his share of the venture (BAnQ, acts of Beaufield
22 and 27 February 1861, and T. Doucet 12 February 1861).
(15.) OP, letters of O'Brien to John McDugald 4 May 1848; and
of "Betsy" to her sister Mrs. James Bert 5 May 1848. The
family councils convened under Quebec customary law for handling
guardianships and protecting minors at the settlement of an estate
uncover a polarization between Eliza McDougall's relatives and
O'Brien's close circle of Irish Catholic friends and
parishioners.
(16.) OP, inventory of furnishings taken by O'Brien and his
nephews, Dan and Ed Kingsbury, April 1845.
(17.) Census of Lower Canada 1842 (Olson and Thornton 2002).
(18.) BAnQ, acts of T.-B. Doucet, July 1847. Other cues to religion
and origin come from petitions of the Irish for a church; SPA,
fund-raising documents; Fabrique, register of leases of pews for the
year 1833; Ville de Montreal, roll of property owners.
(19.) The Catholic Church had long since come to terms with
money-changing and capitalist practice. O'Callaghan (1824) upheld
the more rigorous view of the 13th-17th centuries, more fully consistent
with the gift economy. In Canada, a legal ceiling was maintained on the
rate of interest (6%), challenged in the legislature year after year;
raised in 1852 to accommodate urban development capital, but evasion was
notorious.
(20.) Patrick Dowd, pss, was one of the executors of
O'Brien's will; he had been recruited to compensate for the
losses of English-speaking priests in the epidemic of 1847; he filled
the task of aumonier des pauvres or, as the will styled it,
"trustee to the Irish poor." Ou the political complexities,
the timing, and the difficulties of recruiting English- speaking
candidates into the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, see Deslandres et al.
2013; Kauffman 1988. All of the priests were French-speaking, and Father
Dowd in particular spoke an elegant Parisian French.
(21.) When the notaries went over the papers, they set aside as
worthless debts, "La plupart peu solvables sinon tout a fait
insolvables, que plusieurs sont inconnus." Among the credits
"filees entre banqueroutiers', they named J.A. Dwight 143
[pounds sterling]; Joseph Brennan (Ottawa) 246 [pounds sterling]; John
Kelly & Co; rope rnanufacturer John E. Converse 366 [pounds
sterling]; Richard Latham 250 [pounds sterling]; and the firm of C.P.
Holt, J.H. Dorwin and G.S. Holt 304 [pounds sterling]; forwarder R.H.
Perkins 1025 [pounds sterling]; as well as storekeepers John and Thomas
McNaughton (a note of 1800 [pounds sterling] pounds) and smaller sums to
John Dyde and Bernard McDermoth. All appear in the Court of Bankruptcy
files (BAnQ, TP11).
(22.) OP, letter of Peter Scannell 7 February 1843.
(23.) OP, letters from Maurice Ryan 25 May 1842, 7 January 1843;
Peter Scannell 7 February 1843; and Edward Freer 18 May 1843.
(24.) John Kelly was a candidate for Mayor 1845. See Canada,
Sessional Papers 1846, Appendix EEE 6 June, An enquiry into election
irregularities in Montreal.
(25.) Expansion of the building ventures of John Kelly & Co is
recorded in acts of Lamothe 11 October 1841 (a party from Rawdon), 11
January and 4, 17 and 21 March 1842, 15 April 1844; acts of Ross (notary
to the City) 27 August 1844; and acts of Lacoste for Dinning and George
Weekes as the assignees of John and Michael Kelly.
(26.) The failure of John Donegani in 1849 can be tracked in acts
of D.-E. Papineau 17 February 1848, with debts of the order of 29,000
[pounds sterling] pounds discounted through the Banque du Peuple; he
owned sizable stone buildings.
(27.) BAnQ, acts of Petrimoulx, 4 and 11 March 1845; act of
Garnelin 11 April 1843, both notaries in St John, Dorchester County.
(28.) BAnQ, acts of Gamelin 21 February 1843, 28 August 1845, 3
March 1848 (with note sous-seingprive 12 March 1847); 26 February 1845
(inventory).
(29.) O'Meara owed close to 500 [pounds sterling] to hardware
merchants and to John Donegani (act of Lukin 4 August 1834); and in a
composition agreed to pay 10 shillings on the pound (Act of E. Guy 19
January 1849). His subsequent affairs, traceable in the repertory of
Guy, include construction of a large omnibus (act of Guy 2 April 1852)
and hardware for installation of 214 street lamps for the City (acts of
Hunter 2 November 1840; Lamothe 11 February 1841 ). O'Meara was
long a neighbour of O'Brien, had lived in the same or adjoining
house in 1822; widowed in 1834 (act of Luken 15 April 1834), be
remarried.
(30.) Notre Dame parish collected 3000 [pounds sterling] a year in
pew rents; the Irish pewholders accounted for about one tenth.
(31.) OP, letters of O'Brien to cures Lamarre and Louis
Turcotte, January 1843, 24 Match 1848, 17 November 1848, and January
1849. The debt, created by act of Lacombe 23 Jan 1841, was settled by
order of the bishop after O'Brien's death.
(32.) For an analogous argument for "co-integration" of
the two sets of values, see Bouchard 1988 on a rural habitat penetrated
by urban capital.
(33.) Tonnies' 1887 assumptions about the separate spheres of
men and women have proved ahistorical and classspecific, and they are
not easily applied to mid-nineteenth-century Montreal where men and
women shared their enterpreneurial activities, their domestic lives,
their aches and amusements in very tight quarters. On gender relations
in 1840s Montreal, see Bradbury 2011.
SHERRY OLSON is Professor of Geography at McGill University, a
member of the Centre interuniversitaire d'etudes quebecoises,
co-author of the new Peopling the North American City: Montreal
1840-1900, and numerous papers on urban and environmental history.
TABLE 1. Assets of Bartholomew O'Brien
Loans to Paroisse
Notre Dame
Date of loan Amount Quittance Details
July 18, 1924 500 1839
2 Aug 1828 200 26 Aug 1837
7 Jan 1829 150 4 May 1838
28 July 1829 150 26 Aug 1837
19 Oct 1829 100 4 May 1838
27 Jan 1832 666
7 Mar 1835 500 26 Aug 1837
Lost to bankrupts
Name Amount Bankruptcy Other Details
parties
Dwight, J A 144 29 Dec 1846
Brennan, Js Hall/ 246 Bishop of
Katt Ottawa
Murray, Patrick 40 1 Dec 1846 Kelly,
John & Co
McMahon, Joseph 32 31 Jan 1846
Converse, John E 341 251u1 1842 Perkins,
R H & Co
Holiday, John the 8 19 Sep 1844 Bathurst,
Younger Upper
Canada
Link, John 6 19 July 1844 Upper
Canada
Day, Thomas 17 15 Feb 1848
Latham, Richard 343 4 Dec 1846 Loss 250
Holt, C P 304 17 Aug 1842 Dorwin,
J H Holt,
G.S.
Banque du
Peuple
Other credits not Loan
recovered
Perkins, R H & Co 1025 23 Feb 1845 Of 3000
in notes,
Brockville
Calder, Hugh 374 23 Mar 1843 Sheriff,
Kingston
McShane, Patrick & 100 20 Oct 1847
James
Ryan, Maurice 139 1 Aug 1848
McDermoth, Bernard 42 28 Jan 1846 Carre, Wm
Dyde, John 75 11 Feb 1844 Heaven,
Thomas,
Johns,
John
Philips, Charles D 150 1 Oct 1847 Storekeeper
(Dwyer) Rochester
NY
McNaughton, Patrick 19 12 Apr 1845 Smith,
James
Keenan, John 311 22 Oct 1847 O'Meara, Storekeeper
Michael Trois-
Rivieres
Pennie, J D 97 21 Feb 1843 McDougald- Brewery
Noxon equipment
Shown are date of bankruptcy of the original loan,
amounts rounded to the nearest pound (current)
Sources: O'Brien Papers; BAnQ notarial archives;
BAnQ bankruptcy files
