Economic Life

That the Protestant Irish are generally considered to have blended into the background of Canadian society suggests successful assimilation and adjustment. Given their comparatively early arrival and majority status in much of central and western Canada, however, they may be considered to have set the standard to which other groups adjusted, especially in rural areas.

The Irish, Protestant and Catholic alike, were small commercial farmers at home, and so it was not surprising that they made a successful adjustment to the uncomplicated demands of Canadian pioneer farming. A study drawing upon 1861 agricultural census data for a single eastern Upper Canadian township, Leeds and Lansdowne, shows that the Irish-born, who were mostly Wexford Protestants, owned farms and equipment that were worth more than those of the Canadian-born. The handful of immigrant Catholics fared better in this regard than the Protestants, but in fact the differences between the two groups were not large and could be explained by a whole host of factors, such as length of residence, sequence of arrival, and variable land quality. Significantly, the Canadian-born included many offspring of post-Napoleonic Irish immigrants who could be expected to have had their farms in a more rudimentary state of cultivation than those of their parents, whose enterprises were in many instances of forty years’ standing.

Another, much more broadly based, statistical study claims that date of arrival was more significant than religion or ethnicity in explaining differential levels of agricultural progress. Through linking a sample of 10,000 individuals in the 1861 and 1871 census returns for central Ontario (east of London and west of Peterborough), this study concludes that Irish Protestants and Catholics were equally likely to have moved onto farms over the decade but that Irish Catholics were more likely to have been labourers (though not so frequently as Scottish and French-Canadian Catholics) and to have remained labourers. The differences were ones of small degree rather than of kind, however, and are explainable less by cultural predilections and systemic segregation than by the later arrival of a large proportion of the Irish Catholics, who therefore faced greater difficulty breaking into the economy of a settled country.

That farming was far and away the most common occupation of both Protestant and Catholic Irish in Ontario in 1871 reflects the fact that Irish immigration to the province was most intensive in the pre-industrial period when opportunity lay mostly in the countryside. Nonetheless, Irish Catholics were about 10 percent less likely to be farmers than were Irish Protestants or Scots, and to be over-represented in urban-labouring occupations to about the same degree. In individual cities, moreover, Irish Catholics were often strongly working class. As well, a sample of employed males from the 1871 census nationally shows that the disparity between Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic experience was much greater in the Maritimes. Though in Ontario there were only 10 percent fewer Irish Catholics than Irish Protestants in farming, the disparity was more than 20 percent in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and reached nearly that in Quebec. In Nova Scotia the Catholics were greatly overrepresented in semi-skilled jobs, including the fishery, and in New Brunswick in labouring occupations, including the forest industries. Irish Protestants were slightly over-represented in farming in Ontario as compared with the provincial average, but they were not as likely to be farmers as Scots or Germans and were slightly under-represented in every other occupational category. In New Brunswick this tendency was even more pronounced, with Irish Protestants the least likely of any group but the French to be in white-collar, skilled, labouring, or servant-level positions and the most likely of any non-French group to be in farming. In Nova Scotia they matched the provincial average in participation in farming but were more likely than any other group to be labourers, even though nearly 90 percent were not. They seem to have supplemented Irish Catholics in the labouring category since many Catholics abandoned it for fishing, where Protestants were underrepresented. Such summary statistics, of course, can only hint at the dynamics behind work-sector participation.

The study mentioned above argues that all the differences between the occupational experiences of Irish Protestants and Catholics in Ontario can be explained by sequence of arrival, and it notes that the already narrow gap between Protestant and Catholic narrowed even further between 1861 and 1871. However, still another study, utilizing 1851 data for New Brunswick, concludes that structural inequality favoured Protestants and restricted Irish Catholic advancement there. In New Brunswick, English and Scots were twice as likely as the Irish to be farmers, but when one divides the Irish by religion the Protestant experience resembles closely that of other British immigrants (55 percent farmers, 23 percent labourers) whereas Irish Catholics were just as likely to be semi-skilled or unskilled labourers as they were to operate farms (41 percent farmers, 39 percent labourers). Unique New Brunswick census data on year of arrival yields indications that Protestants did consistently better than Catholics, no matter how long they had been in the province. The same study finds that Irish Protestants occupied less developed farms than the English and Scots but had them in a much higher state of cultivation than did the Irish Catholics. These statistics merely measure difference; they do not explain them. It is quite possible that even early-arriving Irish Catholics in New Brunswick came with consistently fewer resources than their Protestant counterparts and that they obtained a substantial portion of their income from off-farm work, such as lumbering. New Brunswick Catholics settled disproportionately in the mixed farming/ lumbering areas of the Miramichi valley.

A number of local studies have explored the question of Irish economic adjustment to farming, which in nineteenth-century Canada occupied the vast majority. For example, in Montague Township on the Rideau River in eastern Ontario, the Irish did much less well economically than the American-descended population that dominated the township’s institutions even though the Irish far outnumbered them. Outsider perceptions of the Irish majority, most of them Wexford Protestants, bestowed upon the township the image of a municipality of underachieving squatters, “tramps, drunks, burglarious, revolver-bred.”

The Irish came into northern Montague – a swampy, rocky area – in greatest numbers in the 1830s, spilling over from the earlier south Leinster settlement in Beckwith Township to the north. They arrived several decades after the best lands along the Rideau in southern Montague had been occupied and brought into production by American settlers. The Irish thus found few topographical advantages to work with but tended nonetheless to remain because cheaper land gave these people of modest means the opportunity of making a modest living. Literary and photographic evidence suggests that Montague’s Protestant Irish considered themselves to have been successful: for many of them, a squared-log house with an ample barn, twelve hectares of cleared land, and a sturdy team of horses represented a step up from their diminishing opportunities in Ireland. They could be considered failures only by outsiders or by a settler of three generations’ standing, resident in a fine stone house on one of the river-front farms that enjoyed all the advantages the settlers in the interior lacked. Hard work and creative stratagems (such as selling bark and firewood in town or begging for necessaries while putting all cash aside for land payments) enabled Montague’s Irish to achieve a modest competency. These Irish settlers derived from the same regional economy and society in the homeland as the more successful residents of Leeds and Lansdowne Township. Later arrival and different opportunities in their respective areas of settlement must account for their different levels of measurable achievement by 1861.

These eastern Ontario case studies suggest that “success” is a relative term that has in part to be understood in terms of the oft-different economic starting positions of various groups of immigrants, the circumstances in which they found themselves in the new land, and their often different aims and ambitions. The primary goal of Irish Protestant immigrants in the nineteenth century was to provide their children with a better start in life than conditions in Ireland permitted. Subdivision of small holdings in an already overcrowded countryside, and the paucity of economic alternatives in a land with little industry, made the Canadian frontier of cheap land attractive to Irish farmers who could afford to go there. As well, the lack of industry in British North America made the province a poor speculation for those lacking the means to contemplate farming, and for many Catholics especially the cheaper passages to the ports of Quebec and Saint John made these cities gateways to the mill towns of New England.

The desire to give the children a better start made emigration a strategy of heirship, and once established in Canada the passing of the farm from one generation to another assumed a critical importance both in perpetuating existing Irish communities and in creating new ones on emerging frontiers. Of 451 sons of Tipperary Protestant families who took up residence in the Ottawa valley, 231 (51 percent) were provided with land by their parents, 60 percent during their father’s lifetime and 40 percent by bequest. Seventy-four (16 percent) purchased land on their own, some no doubt with parental assistance, and 69 entered a trade or profession, usually through apprenticeship, which in most cases required parental financial subsidy. These statistics are suggestive of a high degree of establishment in the region of initial settlement. Only 10 percent emigrated from the region without securing land or a business, but even they should not be considered failures unless we know for certain that they did not establish a secure existence elsewhere. Migration was more often a thoughtful strategy than a desperate act. Many families moved as a group to new frontiers in western Ontario or the prairies, finding there through early arrival and better soil the success that had earlier eluded them in Canada.

Ideally, inheritance by men and women worked as complementary parts of a system. In the case of the Tipperary Irish in the Ottawa valley, for example, families of both bride and groom contributed to setting up a new household, with land coming from the groom’s family and a dowry from the bride’s. In its simplest form this consisted of cash, bed, and cow, assets that helped to stock the farmyard and dwelling. Widows who did not remarry were most often put in control of the farm until a son came of age. If a son was put in possession at his father’s death, maintenance of the mother was made a charge upon the property. It was therefore more usual for women to live with their sons than with daughters, which is perhaps the more common practice today. There was no means to impose legally a responsibility to care for parents on someone not inheriting land. Wills sometimes made provision for separate housing and support of the widow in the event that she disagreed with the son’s wife over management of the household.

Thus, women, like men, had a moral claim upon a share in the parental estate and enjoyed as much freedom of action as was consistent with the principle that land was to remain in the male line, itself perhaps a reflection of the law, which made a married woman’s property her husband’s. Testamentary clauses denying widows a separate income if they remarried did not reflect an attempt by the decedent spouse to control his wife’s actions by spitefully refusing to allow her to enjoy life with anyone else – a practice that has been labelled “patriarchy from the grave.” Rather, a woman remarrying was expected to be supported by her new husband and the clause was a protection against disinheritance, intended to ensure that property that came from the first marriage descended to children of that marriage and did not become the property of the second husband. Nonetheless, women’s shares in rural estates were seldom equal in value to those of their sons and brothers, and male interests in inheritance remained primary. The situation was different among wealthier classes, among tradespeople, and in urban areas, where the necessity of preserving the farm from ruinous subdivision did not apply since land did not constitute the means of production. In these cases it was customary for land to be divided equally among all children, male and female, or for the property to be sold and the proceeds similarly distributed.