Grand Masters of Scotland - Onondaga and Oswego Masonic ...

frequent tours of the countryside, confiding his impressions to the pages of a journal. To record provincial life more graphically he
took with him an official draftsman, John Elliott Woolford*, whose artistic production, along with that of others, he patronized.
Dalhousie’s attention was immediately drawn to the plight of poor settlers and immigrants, then arriving in increasing numbers.
Refugee blacks sent from the United States during the War of 1812 posed an urgent problem. To avert starvation among them
Dalhousie renewed an issue of government rations until June 1817, hoping that, if then settled on land and given seeds and
implements, the refugees might subsist by their own efforts. With the British government urging economy, Dalhousie halved the
number of recipients in the summer of 1817 by restricting rations to families who had cleared land and to the aged and infirm. He
acknowledged, however, that most of the refugees would long require support, which neither the legislature nor the inhabitants were
keen to provide. “Slaves by habit & education, no longer working under the dread of the lash,” he commented despairingly, “their
idea of freedom is idleness and they are therefore quite incapable of Industry.” There was talk of repatriating them to the United
States or of sending them to join former Nova Scotian blacks in Sierra Leone; they refused to go to the West Indies lest they be
returned to slavery.
Dalhousie regarded the destitute condition of the Micmac Indians in much the same light. Critical of their apparent indolence, he
was willing to grant lands to be held in trust for those who “shew disposition to settle & plant potatoes.” He endorsed the
humanitarian endeavours of Roman Catholic priests and of social activists such as Walter Bromley, while opposing attempts by
Bromley and others to meddle with the customs and Catholicism of the Micmacs as “improper” and tending “to defeat the object of
settling them.”
British immigrants, too, experienced difficulties establishing themselves, and Dalhousie stressed the long-term advantages of
providing initial government aid in rations, tools, and seeds. The obstacles immigrants faced in obtaining land soon convinced him
that the substantial fees charged for processing titles, the deficiencies of surveys, the frauds of land-jobbers, and the tracts of
unimproved land in private ownership all required attention. The prospect of settling on their own smallholdings no doubt attracted
immigrants, but Dalhousie preferred the notion of conveying extensive areas to wealthier proprietors who would then grant long
leases to new settlers. As things stood, “every man . . . is laird here, & the classes . . . known in England as Tenantry & peasantry
do not exist in these Provinces & probably will not be formed untill a full stop is put to the System of granting lands” and public sale
introduced.
Dalhousie was keen to promote improved methods of farming. He established fruitful relations with John Young, a fellow Scot
and a Halifax merchant, whose celebrated Letters of Agricola . . . , first published from 1818 to 1821, were later dedicated to him. He
prompted a reluctant legislature to spend money on importing seeds and superior breeds of stock from Britain and was patron and
president of the Central Board of Agriculture, formed at Halifax. For a time local societies, with annual shows and prizes, were all the
rage, but such fashionable enthusiasm proved transitory, and Dalhousie remarked: “There is an obstinacy, an aversion to
improvement that may be led but will not be driven in this new world; a slowness that is sickening to a man of the other Hemisphere,
who has seen the rapidity with which art & science is bursting upon the intellects of the nations of Europe, & who feels the desire to
open the eyes & the energies of men here as there – but it won’t move out of its own pace, & will require the patience of more than
one man’s life to do what seems to me within the accomplishment of a very few years.”
Dalhousie believed the provincial government might accelerate development by constructing roads that would open up the
colony to settlement, commerce, and the readier exchange of information as well as possibly serve a military purpose. Typical of this
design was a project in which disbanded soldiers were located along a new cross-country road from Annapolis Royal to the South
Shore. A long-mooted reunification of Cape Breton with the mainland colony was again actively considered on the ground that it
would bring the people and coal mines of the island back into the mainstream of provincial development. Government action could
achieve only limited effects, however, even in this country “capable of great improvement,” and Dalhousie was quick to applaud
individual habits of industry and sobriety or to criticize laziness and improvidence in the lower class whenever he saw evidence of
them during his travels.
Given his aristocratic background, Dalhousie was most comfortable in the company of the civil and military élite of Halifax, some
of whom Lady Dalhousie mischievously satirized in delightful portraits. As ready to embrace dissenters as Anglicans, he
undoubtedly preferred councillors to assemblymen, and discriminated between “the most respectable men – disposed to support the
Government from Loyalty and right principles” and the “double faced Halifax Politicians, or Country Colonels, more addicted to Rum
and preaching than to promote the welfare of the State.” His attitude towards colonial merchants was more ambivalent, unless they
happened to be fellow Scots, but he actively supported petitions to the British government concerning the terms of the Anglo-
American commercial agreement of 1818. Congressional restrictions on access to American ports by foreign shipping threatened
Nova Scotia’s prosperous carrying trade as well as the import of necessary supplies from New England. Dalhousie therefore
welcomed Britain’s designation of Halifax as a free port, which might preserve its role as an entrepôt for British manufactures to be
sent to the United States and American produce destined for the West Indies. He believed it to be “the only measure which can
reanimate the industry & the spirit of the Merchants, at present failing & dejected.” Dalhousie also shared Nova Scotian anxieties
about the readmission of Americans to the fisheries, and he disliked the prospect of their establishing thereby closer commercial
and possibly political relations with the provincial outports.
With his Scottish educational background and enthusiasm for improvement, Dalhousie deplored the sorry state of higher
learning in Nova Scotia. King’s College, Windsor, inconveniently located 40 miles from the bustling capital, languished from a lack of
funds, a dilapidated building, and “violent open war” between its president, Charles Porter*, and its vice-president, William Cochran*.
More fatally in Dalhousie’s view, it served the needs only of members of the Church of England and was therefore unsuited to a
community three-quarters of whom were dissenters. To break the Anglican monopoly and rescue education from the competition of
denominations [see Thomas MCCULLOCH], Dalhousie conceived the idea of a college open to youth of all religions and every class
of society. Obtaining advice from Principal George Husband Baird of the University of Edinburgh, Dalhousie envisaged a school
modelled on that institution, with professors lecturing on classics, mathematics, and eventually moral and natural philosophy. A site
was chosen on the Grand Parade in Halifax and the venture launched through appropriation of customs duties levied in 1814–15 at
occupied Castine (Maine). On 22 May 1820, after agreeing with genuine reluctance that the college be named in his honour,
Dalhousie laid the cornerstone with full masonic and military honours. The difficulties of finding money to complete the edifice,
obtaining a royal charter of incorporation, and appointing the first instructors would fall to his friend and successor Sir James
Kempt*. Dalhousie himself could do little more than watch helplessly from a distance as the premature, under-subscribed, and as
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