Riot in St. John's, The

DESCRIPTION: "Ye Liberals all, on you I'll call, I hope you will attend." "On the nominating morning... The Tories heist their colours for St. John's East did flock." Protestants attack Catholics; Clifford and others are killed. The singer condemns violence
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1994 (Thomas and Widdowson)
KEYWORDS: political religious homicide
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
May 13, 1861 - the St. John's Riot
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
ADDITIONAL: Kenneth S. Goldstein, "A Report on Continuing Research into 'Treason Songs': A Private Newfoundland Tradition," essay on pp. 126-153 of Gerald Thomas and J. D. A. Widdowson, editors, _Studies in Newfoundland Folklore: Community and Process_, Breakwater Books, 1991, pp. 146-147, "The Riot In St. John's" (1 text)
ST ThWi146 (Partial)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "In Lonely Belvedere" (subject)
NOTES [722 words]: In Newfoundland, this was sometimes regarded as a "Treason Song." For background on Treason Songs, see the notes to "The Prooshian Drum."
Newfoundland, for most of its history, was almost evenly divided between Catholics of Irish ancestry and Protestants of all stripes. The Protestants were not as united as the Catholics, but by 1855 they had the slight edge in numbers (Noel, p. 22), and Newfoundland politics came to be split almost entirely along religious lines, with the "Conservatives" being mostly Protestant, resulting in the "Liberals" being mostly Catholic. And the government structure -- which, e.g., for many years gave its educational funds to sectarian schools, making no attempt to found or support multi-religious schools -- didn't do much to heal the rift. And Responsible Government was still only a few decades old in 1861. So it is easy to see how conflicts could arise.
According to Cadigan, p. 128, the whole mess arose when Sir Alexander Bannerman, the Governor (British Empire representative) since 1857, took the excuse to dismiss a divided Liberal government that he seems to have personally disliked. (Noel, p. 83, calls Bannerman a "grossly prejudiced near-octogenarian who had shown nothing but malice toward his Liberal ministers and who had almost certainly engaged engaged in a conspiracy with the Conservative opposition to remove them.) He perhaps didn't have the authority to throw out the government, but it resulted in elections. "The only justification that an alarmed Colonial Office could find for his illegal and unconstitutional behavior was that it had better succeed -- meaning that the Conservatives had better secure a majority in the elections that were bound to follow" (Noel, p. 23). Cadigan, p. 129, describes the aftermath as follows:
Victory in the ensuing election hinged upon two districts in Conceptions Bay. Both sides used violence and intimidation, which quickly assumed class and sectarian overtones.... Tensions ran high throughout Carbonear and St John's, as Liberal supporters threatened or attacked the property of Conservative merchant candidates. Violence tainted the elections in the district of Harbour Main, where no Conservatives ran, and where rival groups of Roman Catholics fought each other.... The governor intervened, declaring the Harbour Main returns invalid. [In addition, the polls in Harbour Grace had never opened because of the acts of a local magistrate; Noel, p. 23.] The governor intervened, declaring the Harbour Main returns invalid. The Liberals believed they would have won the seats and, therefore, a majority in the House of Assembly. As it stood, the election result was fourteen Tory seats and twelve for the Liberals. When the legislature was called into session, [Catholic] Bishop Mullock and the Liberals encouraged public protest, which led to violence outside the Colonial Building. Troops dispersed the crowd by opening fire, killing three people [i.e. the Clifford, Fitzpatrick, and Father O'Donnell of the song] and wounding twenty, including a Roman Catholic priest."
Noel, p. 24: "On the day the legislature opened a mob formed around the Colonial Building, stoned the governor's carriage, and were finally dispersed only after the troops had opened fire. The loss of life was not great -- three were killed and twenty wounded, one of the latter being a Catholic priest -- but the effect on the community was profound. Sectarianism had reached its inevitable nadir. Thereafter the Conservatives could govern alone if they were determined to do so, but only with military support...."
Thus the song's implication that ALL fault belonged with ALL Protestants is somewhat unfair; the Protestants had indeed engineered the election, but the Catholics had been responsible for some of the election violence, and they had started the riot. And it was the military, not Protestants in general, who started the shooting, BECAUSE it was a riot. Still, the Protestants -- or, rather, Bannerman and the merchants who controlled the Conservative party -- had made the first move, so it's easy to see why the Catholics blamed them.
Insofar as there was a compromise, it came when the government made it a policy to extend patronage and government appointments on a sectarian basis (Noel, p. 24), which hardly offered a long-term solution! - RBW
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File: ThWi146

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