Cambridge Journals Online

Migration, Radicalism, and State Security: Legislative Initiatives in the Canadas and the United States c.1794–1804

Comparison of Canadian and American state security legislation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals striking similarities. This is somewhat surprising, given the political and constitutional gulf between the loyalist British provinces of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) and the revolutionary U.S. republic. Indeed, Murray Greenwood's study of treason laws and their administration in the United States, Lower Canada, and Great Britain during the period of the French Revolution highlights the contrasts between the liberal American approach and the repressive alarmism of Pitt's government which was taken even further by British colonial administrators in Lower Canada. ¹ Differences extended to other matters related traditionally to state security, such as the availability of habeas corpus and formal protections of judicial independence from executive and partisan influence.

Footnotes

¹ F.M. Greenwood, “Judges and Treason Law in Lower Canada, England, and the United States during the French Revolution, 1794–1800,” in Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1608–1837, ed. F.M. Greenwood and B. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 241.