"Damn TORYISM say I": Dissent, Print Culture, and Anti-Confederation Thought in James Barry's Diary

Abstract

"Damn TORYISM say I":Dissent, Print Culture, and Anti-Confederation Thought in James Barry's Diary Daniel Samson (bio) Should some old pamphlet or bundle of newspapers of the present day find its way into some old chest, packed away and forgotten in some cellar or attic, should its resurrection two or three hundred years hence disclose the truth that there were actually people, in 1867, who poured out their wretched tirades against this Union; and that talked of it as selling the rights and liberties of Nova Scotia, they could scarcely believe their eyes. It is difficult to realize it even now.1 Tomorrow we will be swallowed up in the Dominion of Canada. Nova Scotia will become a province of Canada and Canadians will rule and suck the life blood out of it. Damn TORYISM say I.2 LATE JUNE 1867 WAS HOT AND DRY. Pictou County had seen only a few dribbles of rain around mid-month. As a miller, James Barry worried about dry spells. His diary entries that summer nervously commented on lack of rain and the low water levels in his mill pond. Poor water levels limited how much grain he could grind and often prevented sawing altogether. His mother-in-law, "Widow McLennan," was dying, or at least "folks say, for I have not been up there in years." "Up there" was Roger's Hill, the settlement his wife Bell came from. It was not far, about two miles from Barry's house on a route Bell covered two or three times most weeks. The widow's passing on the 27th drew barely a mention in his diary. Amidst talk of the weather, however, Barry devoted lots of space to lamenting the passing of an independent Nova Scotia. He was not pleased. The "great struggle" for independence, he was sure, would continue, but on 1 July 1867 patriotic Nova Scotians like him would mourn. Confederation and its baneful impact is the hoariest of tales in Nova Scotian history. While the political history is well documented, there remains little attention to the equally important cultural context. This paper situates the Confederation saga in one man's immersion into the trans-Atlantic network of book culture. Considering the diary of one very extraordinary, but also quite ordinary, man–James Barry–suggests we have misread part of the Confederation debates. A key aspect of this misreading is religion, which has played a significant role in the Confederation historiography, but usually as a proxy for faction. Barry, however, allows us to see religion as a dimension of critical political culture. I argue here that James Barry's [End Page 177] politics closely aligned with a major stream of anti-Confederation thinking in Nova Scotia, and that we can see in his position a rich historical vein of dissenting church opposition to imposition by larger political forces. This was neither factionalism, nor sad rural provincialism. Barry's position was thoughtful, careful, and considered, and it drew on decades of popular dissenting Presbyterian responses to the political and intellectual impositions of powerful state churches. This essay situates Barry in the wider Presbyterian-colonial networks of the Atlantic world. Following suggestions in the historiography on Scottish Presbyterianism in British North America,3 I explore the place of Presbyterian print culture in an ordinary man's position on Confederation. Scottish Presbyterianism has a complex history, marked by bitter debate, several major fissures, and often sharply divided congregations. The most basic divide was over the issue of the relationship to the state, where a statist and hierarchical church with Calvinist beliefs contended with opposition from various liberal evangelical groups who were congregational in their views on church governance and liberal democratic in their secular politics. Three key ruptures tore the church apart over the 18th and 19th centuries. The last one, in 1843, saw fully two-thirds of Presbyterians leave the Church of Scotland ("the Kirk") to form the Free (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. This was particularly true in Pictou, where political divides between conservative "Kirk" and reform "anti-Burgher" Presbyterians marked politics from the 1790s to the 1850s.4 Significant dimensions of liberal political reform in 19th-century Britain–most notably...