For his new British master he had assuredly
no love, but he was no longer dragged off to war and his property
was not plundered. He was free, too, to speak his mind. During
the first twenty years after the British conquest of Canada the
Canadian French matured indeed an assertive liberty not even
dreamed of during the previous century and a half of French rule.
The British tyranny which Washington pictured in Canada was thus
not very real. He underestimated, too, the antagonism between the
Roman Catholics of Canada and the Protestants of the English
colonies. The Congress at Philadelphia in denouncing the Quebec
Act had accused the Catholic Church of bigotry, persecution,
murder, and rebellion. This was no very tactful appeal for
sympathy to the sons of that France which was still the eldest
daughter of the Church and it was hardly helped by a maladroit
turn suggesting that "low-minded infirmities" should not permit
such differences to block union in the sacred cause of liberty.
Washington believed that two battalions of Canadians might be
recruited to fight the British, and that the French Acadians of
Nova Scotia, a people so remote that most of them hardly knew
what the war was about, were tingling with sympathy for the
American cause.
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