The Most Disloyal Man in the Parish: My 6th Great-Grandfather and the Revolution Nobody Talks About (today was his birthday).
Most people, when they go digging through their family tree, hope to find a Revolutionary War hero. A Continental soldier. A name on a muster roll. Maybe, if they’re lucky, a letter home.
I found something better.
My 6th great-grandfather, Augustin LaCroix, didn’t fight in the American Revolution the way you’d read about in most textbooks. He didn’t cross the Delaware or freeze at Valley Forge. He stood at a river crossing in rural Quebec with a musket and blocked his own neighbors from helping the British Crown. And when the royal commissioners came through afterward to sort out who was loyal and who wasn’t, they had one thing to say about him:
“One of the most disloyal subjects in the parish.”
I’ll take it. And I’ll be visiting the area in a couple of weeks.
The Revolution Nobody Talks About
A new article published in the Journal of the American Revolution — “Augustin Lacroix and the Insurgency of Saint-Féréol, 1775–1776” — lays out in archivally-grounded detail what my ancestor was actually doing while Benedict Arnold was slogging through the Maine wilderness and Richard Montgomery was dying in the snow at Quebec City.
Here’s the part of the Quebec Campaign that usually gets flattened into a footnote: the American invasion wasn’t just a military operation — it was a civil war. Inside the rural parishes of the Saint Lawrence Valley, French-Canadian farmers were being asked to choose sides, and they didn’t all choose the same one. The British had passed the Quebec Act in 1774, which was designed to keep the French-Canadian population loyal by protecting Catholic Church authority and seigneurial land arrangements. The Continental Congress countered with a letter addressed directly to the inhabitants of Quebec, attacking both and making the case that their interests aligned with the American cause.
Augustin LaCroix, a third-generation farmer in Saint-Féréol on the Côte-de-Beaupré, was listening.
A Man With Roots and Grievances
Born April 28, 1726, in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, LaCroix was no rootless agitator. He was a scion of one of the founding families of the Côte-de-Beaupré — the kind of man whose ancestors had been farming that same stretch of the Saint Lawrence since the mid-seventeenth century. He had standing in the community, which is exactly what made him dangerous.
He also had grievances. His family had watched General James Wolfe’s army occupy their land in 1759 — fifteen years before this rebellion — and the British administration that followed brought with it continued tithe collection by the Catholic Church and seigneurial dues that pressed hard on working farmers. When the Continental Congress’s rhetoric came filtering through the tavern networks and trade routes of the Beaupré parishes, it landed on fertile ground.
By the summer of 1775, as Fort Ticonderoga fell and the American invasion became real rather than theoretical, LaCroix moved from grievance to action.
What He Actually Did
The article reconstructs his insurgency in three distinct phases, and it’s worth being precise about what that word means in this context — because LaCroix wasn’t a guerrilla fighter or a militia officer. He was a community organizer with a musket.
Phase one was incitement. As Arnold approached via the Chaudière River and Montgomery moved down the Saint Lawrence, LaCroix was in Saint-Féréol undermining the authority of the royally appointed militia captain, a man named Lessard, and recruiting young men to the American cause. The Baby Journal — the record kept by British royal commissioners François Baby, Gabriel Taschereau, and Jenkin Williams during their 1776 loyalty inquisition — notes that LaCroix “incited several young men from this parish to join the rebels”. In a parish economy built on family labor and clerical authority, pulling young men away from both was a direct attack on the social order.
Phase two was the blockade, and this is where LaCroix crosses from dissident into tactician. In November 1775, loyalist volunteers from the neighboring parish of Saint-Joachim were attempting to cross the Montmorency River to reach Quebec City and join the British defense. LaCroix stood at the crossing and physically stopped them. He wasn’t fighting Redcoats. He was leveling a musket at men he almost certainly knew — men he’d traded with at market, sat beside at mass — to prevent them from reinforcing Governor Carleton’s garrison. The article makes the point bluntly: this was an act of high treason. It was also an act of fratricidal violence that directly contributed to Carleton’s isolation inside the walls of Quebec City.
Phase three was loss and survival. On April 10, 1776, Augustin LaCroix Jr. — his son — died at Quebec, thirty years old, in the final desperate weeks of the failed American siege. The Americans retreated. The British Commission of Inquiry arrived in late May to sort the loyal from the disloyal, and Augustin LaCroix received his formal condemnation: “Most Disloyal.” Despite that verdict, he was never imprisoned, never executed. He lived another twenty years in the same parish under the same British administration he had actively worked to undermine, died in August 1796, and was buried in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré.
Why This Matters
The Canadian theater of the Revolutionary War gets compressed, when it gets treated at all, into Montgomery’s charge and Arnold’s retreat. What gets lost is everything that happened in the farmhouses and at the river crossings — the local politics, the economic calculations, the men who chose a side and paid a price for it even when the cause they’d chosen didn’t prevail.
And he’s officially listed as a Patriot in the DAR records. So there’s that.
A Note on the Source
The archival backbone of this article is the Baby Journal — the official record of the 1776 British Commission of Inquiry into loyalties across the Beaupré parishes. It’s a primary source that has been underused in American Revolutionary historiography, possibly because the story it tells is complicated and inconvenient for tidy national narratives on both sides of the border.
Read the full article here: Augustin Lacroix and the Insurgency of Saint-Féréol, 1775–1776