Joseph Howe and the Anti-Confederation League

THE HON. JUDGE PATTERSON

“UNDER the above title Mr. Laurence J. Burpee has edited and published a series of letters written by Howe while in England in 1866-7, opposing the passage of the British North America Act, to William J. Stairs, one of the Vice Presidents of the League. Howe was himself the President, and its Constitution which Mr. Burpee gives in an Appendix is unmistakably his work. In expressing his thought in crisp sentences, where every word tells, there was in Nova Scotia no one aut similis aut secundus to the great Tribune.”

“True to its claim to represent the Maritime Provinces, the League did not limit its interests to Nova Scotia. There was an election, well do the Anti-Confederates know it, in New Brunswick in 1866. Elections then were not, any more than now, won by prayers alone. A Macedonian cry came from that province.”

Patterson, G. “Joseph Howe and the Anti-Confederation League” Dalhousie Review, Volume 10, Number 3, 1930 https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/58341/dalrev_vol10_iss3_pp397_402.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y