| Chapter 1: | New Brunswick and Canadian Confederation, 1861–1866 |
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in the 1870s. Prior to that development in communications, the French, Irish, and British communities of New Brunswick, even when reinforced by Loyalists, believed their economic interests lay in Maine rather than Canada, especially during the period of commercial reciprocity from 1854, secured by treaty with the United States. Railway expansion was strongly promoted by New Brunswick merchants with business to the south, and the favoured direction was through New Brunswick's western boundary to join with the American railway system. New Brunswick's trade with Canada—meaning Ontario and Quebec—even by 1861 amounted to no more than six per cent of Canada's imports and less than three per cent of exports. None of those exports or imports passed through the port of St. John. The population south of the river looked to Maine for supplies of flour and other provisions, while the population over the North Shore saw its commercial future with the St. Lawrence basin along the projected Intercolonial. 2On the other hand, New Brunswick and the other Maritimes were essential to projects for a form of union between all the Canadian provinces and a railway giving access to their ice-free ports.
These weighty issues in geo-politics had to be debated by a small population—no more than 254,000 by 1851—divided ethnically, by religion, and by perceptions of economic interest. 3The province, with its history of diverse immigrant settlement and population movements, was unusually complex in its pattern of loyalties, especially in the economic ties between farmers, small manufacturers, and sources of capital and markets among the wealthier elites. Ethnic competition—animosities on religious or political grounds—frequently erupted into violence in St. John, until a lieutenant-governor in 1847 appointed stipendiary magistrates responsible for raising an armed police force. By the mid-century, much of the politics of the population centred on returning representatives to the provincial assembly from which they expected county and urban shares of revenue. It was in that relationship between the central structure of the colonial state and male voters that political patronage operated, mediated through political brokers for their own communities. A second form of patronage operated through executive appointments