James Douglas
James Douglas (c1757 - 26 Sept. 1803) was an office holder and
land agent. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of John
Douglas, a writer there, and younger brother of John Jr, who became
a well-known Edinburgh advocate.
After obtaining a
commercial education, James Douglas spent some time in the
counting-house of Sibbald and Company, merchants of Leith, Scotland,
trading to the West Indies. In 1779 he immigrated to America, where
he took up a clerkship with a firm of traders operating in the
frontier region between the Niagara and Detroit rivers. Able,
honest, and righteously Calvinistic in outlook, in 1781 he
complained to Governor Frederick Haldimand that William Taylor and
George Forsyth, his employers at Fort Niagara (near Youngstown,
N.Y.), had been engaged with Colonel Guy Johnson*, superintendent of
the Six Nations, in a large-scale fraud involving official presents
to friendly Indian tribes. This embezzlement of several years’
duration had netted the perpetrators upwards of £15,000. Douglas
went to Montreal in 1781 and assisted the governor in a successful
prosecution of the merchants. On his return to Niagara he apparently
set up in business on his own account, but he found himself
ostracized and harassed by all the traders of the region, who
resented his part in the termination of an exceedingly profitable
racket in which they saw no harm.
Having suffered heavy
losses in his trade and finding himself in an intolerable situation,
Douglas, with Haldimand’s backing, petitioned the British government
for some form of compensation on account of his services. Instead of
receiving financial assistance, however, he was appointed controller
of customs on St John’s (Prince Edward) Island at the meagre salary
of £40 per annum. Married by this time to the daughter of a Detroit
merchant, and with several children to support, he moved to the
Island in 1787. (His first wife apparently died there, for about
1789 he married Waitsill Haszard (Hassard); the couple were to have
at least eight children.) Taking up his appointment on arrival as
second in command to William Townshend, the collector of customs,
Douglas entered a society in which cliques of poorly paid officials
fought as in a jungle for perquisites and preferment. Amid all these
tensions, he maintained a high reputation for probity, and did his
utmost to keep out of the squabbles over land, fees, and salaries.
He found, however, that his fees as controller were negligible since
the colony’s trade was negligible.
In 1788 Douglas was
appointed an assessor in the adjudication pending between James
William Montgomery, the Island’s largest proprietor, and his agent,
David Lawson. Montgomery, a regular supporter of the Henry Dundas
group that dominated Scottish politics, had long been prominent in
public life there and in 1788 was serving as lord chief baron of the
exchequer. He was also a leading agricultural improver. Having
acquired lands on St John’s Island, first in the notorious lottery
of 1767 and later by purchase, he had determined to create there an
estate similar to those he owned in Scotland, which were based on a
capable tenantry enjoying long leases, and on experienced
supervision, sound agricultural practices, and strict accounting
procedures. Although, given the difficulties, Lawson’s attempt to
establish a flax farm on Montgomery’s Lot 34 was reasonably
successful, he fell foul of the lord chief baron’s exacting
standards in bookkeeping and was dismissed as agent in 1788.
Douglas’s part in the appraisal of Montgomery’s estates so impressed
the proprietor’s son William*, an army officer on leave from Halifax
to attend to the family’s Island affairs, that he recommended to his
father the appointment of Douglas as agent for most of the extensive
Montgomery interests. Douglas was put in charge of lots 30, 34, 12,
and 7, under the superintendency of Lieutenant Governor Edmund
Fanning. Seven years later he visited Scotland and met Montgomery Sr,
who, already impressed by his agent’s performance and integrity,
committed himself fully to Douglas as the trusted servant of his
interests. Montgomery certainly needed such a servant, for his past
experience, both with Lawson and with David Higgins*, had been
dismal. In Douglas he found, as historian J. M. Bumsted has
observed, “that rara avis in colonial North America, a scrupulously
honest man.”
With the cooperation of Fanning, Douglas was
eventually able to straighten out the complicated issue between
Montgomery and Lawson. A final arbitration in 1793 established
Lawson’s total debt to the lord chief baron at £9,219 12s. 2 1/2d.,
but Montgomery, realizing that Lawson was, in fact, impoverished,
was not vindictive. On the contrary, he arranged for Douglas to give
his former agent an annual payment of £12. Meantime Douglas had been
active in the general administration of Montgomery’s estate. A
system of regular accounting had been instituted, and rentals and
back rentals collected. As early as 1789 Montgomery was receiving a
small income from his lands. The tenantry on his properties
increased slowly, but steadily; tenants were generally not turned
out if they failed to pay full rentals, for Montgomery wisely
preferred occupancy to eviction. Arrears and back rentals were,
however, assiduously recorded by Douglas, the arrears alone
amounting to £3,400 by 1802. More land was brought into cultivation,
and the extensive Montgomery holdings made genuine, if uneven,
progress under Douglas’s able stewardship. His efforts did much to
justify the initial expenses of his remarkable employer.
Douglas’s devotion to the interests of this employer eventually
involved him in Island politics. Among Montgomery’s tenants who had
never paid any, or at most only a slight proportion, of their rents
were several members of the “inner ring” of the governing clique,
including the Reverend Theophilus DesBrisay* (son of Thomas
Desbrisay, the secretary and registrar), Councillor Joseph Robinson,
and Chief Justice Peter Stewart. When Douglas moved against them,
they set out to break him. In 1797 Douglas took the chief justice to
court in an effort to collect arrears of rent but found himself
blocked by the Stewart family’s tight control of the judicial
apparatus. Within a few months Stewart’s son-in-law, William
Townshend, who as collector of customs was Douglas’s superior,
complained to London that Douglas had illegally entered a ship with
smuggled goods from the United States at Three Rivers (Georgetown).
Luckily for Douglas, he had the support of Montgomery at home, and
John MacDonald of Glenaladale and Joseph Aplin took his part in the
colony. The Montgomery–Stewart dispute dragged on for some years,
with the chief justice managing to evade the attempt to bring him to
account. The crisis was eased only after his resignation from the
bench in 1800.
Although provoked himself by Stewart’s
evasion, Montgomery reproached his agent for becoming a “violent
party man” in the contest with the chief justice. Douglas replied
frankly that his disputes with the Stewart clique were indeed “very
high political concerns.” In this his judgement was excellent, and
his statement no more than the bare truth. The partiality of the
judicial system was not the only political issue in which he had
become involved in his attempt to administer his employer’s estate.
Of Montgomery’s tenants, Joseph Robinson, in particular, had since
1796 actively campaigned for the escheat of the holdings of absentee
proprietors, most of whom, unlike the lord chief baron, had made no
attempt to develop their lands. In time Douglas had come to believe
that Lieutenant Governor Fanning and Chief Justice Stewart were
behind this agitation (which he saw as a conspiracy to defraud the
proprietors of their holdings), as well as the attempt to ruin him
personally.
The core of opposition to the Fanning
administration, Douglas, MacDonald, and Aplin maintained that
annexation to Nova Scotia was the best solution for the colony’s
political and economic ills. Montgomery, however, did not favour
annexation. He believed that the proprietors’ interests would suffer
if the colony were ruled from Halifax and that their discomfiture
would harm the Island. Although he admitted that most of the
absentees had failed to meet their commitments, he held that the
colony would progress only if proprietors such as himself were
prepared to finance emigration and provide the capital needed for
the stimulation of commerce. When in 1797 the House of Assembly
passed resolutions calling upon the British government either to
oblige the proprietors to develop their lands or to establish a
court of escheat, Montgomery was specifically mentioned as an
outstanding example of a landholder who had done much to fulfil his
obligations. Early in the new century it seemed that the home
authorities might act on these resolutions, but in the end the
matter was shelved.
An old man by 1802, Montgomery turned
over his affairs to his heir, but he retained a keen interest in his
Prince Edward Island holdings right up to his death in April 1803,
his estate there “being the last subject on which he spoke.” Douglas
himself died five months later, of “rapid asthmatic consumption.” He
had been a strong and principled advocate of the Montgomery
interests, which after his death were entrusted to James Curtis, and
of more impartial government. In the integrity of his principles, in
the maintenance of his employer’s concerns amid the miasma of petty
jobbery in which he found himself on the Island, and in the brave
defence which he more than once had to mount against the groundless
allegations of his enemies among the controlling clique, James
Douglas truly stands out as an admirable personality.
He died on 26 Sept. 1803 on Prince Edward Island.
Any contributions will be
gratefully accepted
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