r The Catholic Democracy of America,64 - Digital Repository Services

The Catholic Democracy of America, 52
western territory, south of Canada, was made subject to the
Bishop of Quebec under the Quebec Act, which declared the
exercise of the Catholic faith in those regions free from the
operation of the penal laws, and this enactment was considered
by the Protestant colonies as one of the last wrongs done
to them by the British government. " We think," protested
the Continental Congress of 1774, "the legislature of Great
Britain is not authorized to establish a religion fraught with
sanguinary and impious tenets." The address in which the
passage occurs was the work of John Jay, of whose interference
on this occasion it has been said that " all Canada would
have been won but for the influence of John Jay's bigoted
address to the people of England, in which the Canadians
and their religion were assailed in the grossest terms." It
appears certain that the Protestant demonstration at New York,
after the Quebec Act, drove a colony of Roman Catholic
Highlanders from the Mohawk valley into Canada, and the
loyalty of the Canadian Catholics was so great to the government
which protected them that the same bishop who censured a
French priest for admitting to the sacraments Canadians serving
in the American army, likewise reprimanded him for his
courtesy in receiving at his house in Montreal the Rev. John
Carroll.
The leaders of the revolution soon recognized that this was
not a moment for sectarian jealousy and division. Father
Carroll's journey to Canada was for the purpose of urging
the Canadians to remain neutral, a mission which he undertook
at the request of the Continental Congress, early in 1776,
which in little more than a year had learned wisdom. The
great opportunist, who had the chief individual share in
making the United States a nation, had given religious intolerance
a lesson three months previously. On arriving in
camp before Boston, after Lexington and Bunker's Hill,
General Washington found preparations being made for the
celebration of Gunpowder Plot—" Pope Day," as it was called
in New England—and in Puritan Massachusetts the Virginian