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After the Seven Years’ War, France gave up Canada to keep Guadeloupe and Martinique, and Britain inherited about 90,000 French Catholic subjects in Quebec. Early British rule tried assimilation, blocking a successor bishop and requiring office holders to swear test oaths rejecting transubstantiation and papal authority, but expected Protestant immigrants never came. Governors James Murray and Guy Carleton, watching unrest in the thirteen colonies, wanted a loyal northern province, and Carleton lobbied for the Quebec Act of 1774. It dropped the anti-Catholic oath, restored the church’s right to collect tithes, brought back French civil law and the seigneurial system, created an appointed governor and council with no elected assembly, and extended Quebec’s borders into the Ohio country.

The seigneurs and clergy welcomed the act, but the habitants, who had lived a decade without enforced tithes or labor dues, saw it as a return to their old masters and largely refused to muster when Americans invaded in 1775. Chief Justice William Hay wrote that the act passed to gratify the Canadians had become the first object of their discontent. In the colonies it was grouped with the Coercive Acts as one of the Intolerable Acts: it voided Ohio land claims of speculators including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, inflamed anti-Catholic feeling, and suggested elected assemblies could be abolished. Jefferson included it among the grievances in the Declaration of Independence. Modern scholars see it as a forerunner of the First Amendment’s religious protections.

• The First Continental Congress urged Quebec to resist British tyranny while telling Britain it was too lenient toward Catholics.
• Alexander Hamilton wrote pamphlets and Paul Revere engraved cartoons attacking the act.
• English criminal law stayed in force while French civil law returned for property and contracts.
• Lieutenant Governor Cramahé was among the officials who reported the habitants’ refusal to back Britain.
• The Constitutional Act of 1791 replaced the arrangement, splitting the territory into Upper and Lower Canada.