CHAPTER 12

I

At the end of 1835 the British government concluded that a powerful movement of political discontent had arisen in Upper Canada and that it represented majority opinion in the province. As embodied in the reform party, that movement had captured the Assembly in 1834 and in the Seventh Grievance Report had called for sweeping changes in the provincial Constitution, notably an elective legislative council, an executive council responsible to the Assembly, and severe limitations on the lieutenant-governor’s control over patronage. In consequence, the Colonial Office believed that redoubled efforts must be made to conciliate provincial opinion. Although demands for fundamental constitutional changes could not be met, every effort must be made to remedy practical grievances if the province was to retain its British allegiance. It was in this spirit that instructions were written to Sir Francis Bond Head, Colborne’s successor, in December 1835.

On the other hand, it was the view of the Family Compact that the British government wholly misjudged the political state of Upper Canada. The leaders of the Compact believed that conservative forces in the province were far stronger than the forces of innovation, and that they would prevail if given firm leadership and provided with unwavering support from London. Although the political scene was in fact chaotic, and subject to wild fluctuations, the Compact leaders were correct in placing a high estimate on the strength of the conservative forces.

To be sure, there had been a time in the early 1830’s when the Compact leaders were seized with the darkest pessimism. The reform spirit in Britain raised the danger, in their minds, that the mother country might cut loose from its moorings and sail out into the uncharted seas of innovation and even anarchy. They believed that the Whig government’s policy of conciliating the colonies encouraged agitators to redouble their efforts. In Lower Canada the campaign led by Papineau not only slowed economic progress in the two provinces but threatened the very existence of British rule. In Upper Canada much of the population was unreliable and growing more republican in outlook. In his first years in the province, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John Colborne, seemed to the Compact to show little grasp or firmness. In a fit of extreme exasperation John Strachan cried out that the British Ministry should be told that “if they continue to attend to such persons as Ryerson & McKenzie & break down the Constitution the Conservative party will turn round upon them & first trample on the necks of these miscreants and then govern ourselves.”¹

Nevertheless, the conservatives were never people to confine themselves to handwringing and futile denunciation. While they continued to fight vigorously against their political opponents, they had good reason to think that reinforcements were on the way. The Solicitor General wrote hopefully of “the influx of British Emigrants” that would save them from the “ ‘Canadian Native’ or the neighbouring republic.” He noted that the province was “filling with people of wealth and intelligence” who would not be gulled by “such fellows as Ryerson and McKenzie.” When “thinking people” of this type began to exert an influence on their neighbours, the “overthrow of these miserable factionists” would be certain. The future security of the province, then, lay with emigrants whose “predilections will be English” and who would “strenuously adhere to the Unity of the Empire.” Efforts must be made “to conciliate the Emigrants by every act of kindness in our power” and to warn them constantly of “the mischievous designs of such fellows as Bidwell, Ryerson and McKenzie.”² Such was the conservative strategy of counter-attack against the reformers. As events were to show, it proved to be remarkably successful.

Sir John Colborne consciously adopted this strategy from the beginning of his term as the only way to make Upper Canada “a really British Colony,” and to combat the influence of “Settlers from the United States,” who were “generally active, intelligent and enterprising.”³ Consequently, he undertook to do everything in his power to assist the emigrants who were now pouring out of Britain in unprecedented numbers, a great many of them indigent and destitute. He posted agents along their route from Montreal westward to give emigrants information and advice. He placed superintendents in the townships open for settlement, who were to provide temporary shelters and to assign indigent settlers fifty-acre lots on which no payment was to be made for three years. The government undertook to build access roads to new settlements which, incidentally, provided much needed employment to the able-bodied among the newcomers. In addition, Colborne encouraged the formation of emigrant societies throughout the province to draw local authorities and individuals into the work of relieving and assisting those who came. This work took on enormous and fearful proportions in the summer of 1832 when a cholera epidemic raged among the emigrants and was carried to many in the province. But all fell to with a will, and although hundreds died, the crisis was surmounted. Altogether, it was a magnificent effort, an epic in the province’s history.

Within three years, from 1830 to 1833, population increased by nearly fifty per cent. After that the influx fell off somewhat but continued at a substantial rate until 1837. All of the settled parts received a share of the increase, but townships around Lake Simcoe, north of Rice Lake, in the southwest between Colonel Talbot’s domain and the Huron Tract, and up the Ottawa River received a major part of the new settlement. Colborne tried to steer some of the most reliable emigrants to the western parts of the province, where American settlers were numerous. A Presbyterian minister learned from a recent visitor to York that “it is the intention of the government to raise up such a body of persons attached to the Constitution of Great Britain as may counteract the influence of Yankeeism so prevalent about St Thomas and along the lake shore,” while John Langton had to resist Colborne’s urging that he go to the western townships.⁴

The great contribution of the tens of thousands of new settlers lay in their work in further opening up the province. No one could be sure what impact they would have on its political life, and whatever it might be it would take time to be felt. They were necessarily almost entirely uninformed about provincial affairs, and since most of them had been too low in the social scale at home to be politically active there, they would be slow in learning an unaccustomed role. Some of them belonged to religious communions that discouraged any concern with politics. Moreover, they were ineligible to vote until they received patents for their freeholds. Most important, they were too busy getting established to be able to look much beyond their own clearings for some time. Their letters home reflected this concern with immediate things: “…we have plenty of good food and grog…we dine with our masters…. We have no poor rates nor taxes of any consequence…. We shall never want timber nor water…. Bricklayer is a good trade here…a poor man can do a great deal better here than he can at home…. I do not like Canada so well as England; but in England there is too many men, and here, there is not enough; there is more work than we can do, here…our dogs…live better than most of the farmers in England.”⁵ And there were heartaches and disappointments that were not written about.

Nevertheless, interested observers in the province often speculated on what political part they would play. Reformers hoped that men from the middle and lower classes, who had felt the mighty reform surge in Britain, would turn naturally to their ranks. Yet they were disturbed by the influence which the governing group was able to exert in teaching “Emigrants from the old Countries…to regard the Reformers of Upper Canada” with a “spirit of enmity.” “From the moment an Irishman or an Englishman sets foot upon our soil, his ears are stunned by the cry of Treason and Rebellion which is constantly kept up…to deceive the ignorant and unwary.” They were taught to view the old American settlers with suspicion, and to call them “Yankees, Republicans, &c., by way of reproach…. Hence the supercilious deportment of Europeans towards Canadians when they first come amongst them.”⁶ In a lengthy letter addressed to his newly arrived countrymen a writer of Protestant Irish origins and reform sympathies, who had long resided in the province, sought to show that the same aristocratic “high church and tory system” from which they had fled was growing up in the province. He pleaded with them not to be deceived by demagogues who tried to convince them that they should take up their shillelaghs to defend “a British colony from Yankees, mosquitoes, bullfrogs, or something or other they knew not what.”⁷

But conservatives were confident that they would win over the new settlers. One of their leading newspapers observed that the political conflicts in Upper Canada differed essentially from those in Britain. In the latter, Whigs and Tories disagreed over the powers of the Lower House of Parliament, but both were “alike ardently attached to a Government of Kings, Lords and Commons.” In the province, however, the contest was between “monarchical government” and “Democratic Republicanism”; in consequence, “every acceptable individual of the Whig, and even the Radical party in England, with scarcely a solitary exception, becomes what the disaffected party term a ‘Tory,’ the moment he comes to Canada.”⁸ Looking more deeply, Christopher Hagerman, as well as many other observers, counted on the change that the possession of property and a new economic security would effect: “however turbulent or discontented individuals may have been prior to their arrival in the province, comfort and plenty soon work wonders on those who are of industrious habits, and loyalty and good-humour speedily follow.”⁹ And in discussing the elections of 1834, Colborne noted that it was too early to expect them to “be generally affected by the recent Emigration,” but that better results could be expected in the future.¹⁰ This proved to be an accurate prophecy.

One important consequence of the immigration was a great strengthening of the Orange Order in Upper Canada. For several decades this fervently Protestant organization had been fighting vigorously against the Catholics in Ireland, so vigorously that by the 1830’s the British government, as a contribution to the peace of that strife-ridden island, was striving to disband the Order. But Orangemen were always more British than the King, and they paid little attention to official discountenance. When Protestant Irish came to Canada they brought the Order with them.

The first lodges were formed in the early 1820’s. In 1824 the Assembly deplored their existence and advised the public to treat them “with silent disregard.” Sir Peregrine Maitland publicly expressed his opposition to them.¹¹ For several years they were few in number and confined largely to the eastern counties. With the large influx of Protestant Irish in the late 1820’s and following, however, their numbers grew rapidly, especially after the arrival in 1829 of Ogle Robert Gowan, who became the leading figure in the movement. He was untiringly zealous in the cause, an effective organizer, and at once at home in the rough and tumble of provincial journalism.

In Ireland, Orange devotion to the British Empire required constant vigilance against the subversive schemes of Roman Catholics, but in Upper Canada for a time it took a different form. In Upper Canada, to be sure, there were the usual riots and broken heads on the Glorious Twelfth as their Papist brethren tried to break up their parades. And good Orangemen could not but be alarmed at the thought of so many French Canadian Catholics just down the river. But for the time being, in the 1830’s, the task of keeping Canada British required a different tack. The French Canadians were outside the province, and the Catholics within posed little immediate threat. In later years Orangemen returned to their traditional campaign of keeping the country alive to the dangers of Catholic power, but for the present there was a more threatening enemy: the reformers, with their supposed separatist and republican tendencies.

An order that so loudly proclaimed its loyalty to the Empire was naturally welcome to conservatives and to people who felt that the British connection was in peril. Many residents, including descendants of United Empire Loyalists, who knew nothing of the controversies back in Ireland, gladly joined this militant organization. To be sure, others joined it simply because, like good North Americans everywhere, they had a natural affinity for fraternal orders. Such members often retained previous reform sympathies for a time, but if they remained they usually became convinced that it was disloyal to go on voting for a party labelled as pro-American and anti-British. As we shall see later, the Orange Order played an important role in deciding the crucial election of 1836. By providing, as it often did, the shock troops of Upper Canadian toryism, it proved to be one of the most important consequences of the recent British immigration. An element had been introduced into Canadian life that was to have remarkable durability over the next century and more.

But apart from the ordinary people in the new immigration, who could be expected to remain loyal to their British heritage, Colborne and his government placed especial reliance on the much smaller but still sizable number of men of quality who were arriving at the same time. These men had been far from destitute at home, but had concluded that they could no longer maintain or improve their existing status, or provide adequately for their often numerous families. Among them were professional men, substantial farmers, and of particular importance, military and naval officers who were languishing in the long peace following Waterloo. Many of them brought considerable amounts of money with them. Very often they carried letters of introduction from prominent men in Britain addressed to the lieutenant-governor. The latter received them cordially, and advised them fully on the opportunities available in the various sections of the province. It was hardly an accident that they often received the choice lots in new townships and other advantages. Within a very short time they were likely to receive appointments as Justices of the Peace, militia commissions, and other local posts.

Neither political group in the province ever had any doubt of what the influence of these men would be. A conservative paper, for instance, predicted that when the country had “received over its wide expanse even a slight sprinkling, so to speak, of such incomers,…we may rest pretty well assured that the vocation and the importance of the demagogue will soon be both at a very small discount.” On the other hand, one reformer, referring to the half-pay officers, complained that the “curse of Canada is an unprincipled aristocracy, whose pretensions to superiority above other settlers would disgust a dog…getting possession of a few hundred acres of wild land [they think] themselves Lords of Canada.”¹²

Some of they may have looked like lords to the average settler, because they had enough capital to hire labourers to clear land and to employ house servants, while they engaged in gentlemanly sports and attended balls and dinners in the provincial capital. But most of them were not so circumstanced, and these did their share of hard work. And it was work done at the edge of settlement, without the amenities by then enjoyed in the older townships at the front. Somewhat self-consciously, perhaps, Mrs Traill, the wife of a half-pay officer, spoke of her kind as “the pioneers of civilization in the wilderness, and their families, often of delicate nurture and honourable descent, are at once plunged into the hardship attendant on the rough life of a bush-settler.” Yet into the bush the half-pay officer went, “bringing into these rough districts gentle and well-educated females, who soften and improve all around them by mental refinements.” In Canada, where property was so easily acquired, it was only “education and manners that must distinguish the gentleman.”¹³

And so it happened that the most polite and cultivated society to be found anywhere in Upper Canada flourished in some of the most primitive settlements of the backwoods. There the newcomers of this type preferred to be, where servants were “as respectful, or nearly so, as those at home” and the “lower or working class of settlers” were “quite free from the annoying Yankee manners that distinguish many of the earlier-settled townships.”¹⁴ There in the bush one might “meet with as good society, as numerous and genteel, as in most of the country parts of Ireland,” consisting not only of “ex-officers of the army and navy” but also of “young surgeons, Church of England clergymen, private gentlemen, sons of respectable persons at home, graduates of the colleges, &c.”¹⁵ But not all of these people succeeded; certainly their hopes of becoming gentleman farmers were nearly always disappointed. Some of them returned home, either disappointed or satisfied to have had a brief experience of a novel but essentially dull existence. Others escaped to provincial towns to take up more rewarding and less back-breaking activities. But enough of them remained to strengthen greatly the British cast of the Upper Canadian back country.

In summary, then, while the reformers were improving their political organization in the early 1830’s, the conservative side was also being greatly reinforced by immigration from the British Isles. It need hardly be said that the immigrants were not necessarily supporters of the Family Compact, about which in fact they knew relatively little. Probably the great majority of them were quite hospitable to the idea of moderate reform. When, however, the issue appeared to be reduced to a vote for or against the British connection, there was no question where they would stand. They were forerunners of those young men from Britain who filled up the first Canadian contingent in 1914.

II

Despite previous efforts of conservative leaders to emphasize the overriding importance of the loyalty issue, it had never yet been possible to focus all attention on it in a provincial election. This fact was first accomplished by the new Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, who arrived in the province at the beginning of 1836.

Historians, with their eyes on the sequel, have usually regarded Head’s appointment as one of the strangest ever made by the Colonial Office. He had had no previous experience in colonial government and, indeed, none in politics, as he was the first to admit and proclaim. After a career as a military engineer, which took him to several parts of Europe, he retired from the army as a half-pay major. Later he had an adventurous but not very successful experience as the manager of British silver mines in South America. From this and other journeys he acquired some reputation as the author of sprightly travel books; already he had revealed a facile pen. He was an assistant poor-law commissioner in Kent when the sudden call to Upper Canada reached him; perhaps his vigorous administration of the new Act had brought him to the attention of the Whig government. Following their irritation with Colborne they wanted a new man who would make a fresh start, yet they could not aspire much higher than to a person of Head’s attainments. Upper Canada was not an attractive post to qualified civilians, and it had been decided not to appoint another high-ranking military officer.

In an attempt to demonstrate the British government’s sincere intention of conciliating provincial opinion, Lord Glenelg provided Head with a long dispatch instructing him on the course to follow.¹⁶ Most of the dispatch took the form of comments on the Seventh Report on Grievances. Although he disputed the Report’s extreme charges on the matter of the Crown’s control of patronage, he ordered Head to review the whole subject, to limit and reduce its amount where possible, and to make appointments on the basis of qualification, not politics. Regarding other complaints Head was to do everything possible to meet the wishes of the Assembly, and Glenelg reiterated the British government’s determination not to interfere in the internal affairs of the province. The reformers’ demand for an executive council responsible to the Assembly could not be conceded, however. True responsibility lay in the Lieutenant-Governor’s accountability to the British government which always stood ready to receive and to investigate complaints coming from the province. In short, without promising any basic change in the system of government, Glenelg was ready to support the reform of all concrete and specific grievances and to defer to provincial opinion in every practicable way. No one could have been more well meaning. But Glenelg apparently assumed that after vigorous debate the provincial legislature would reach agreement on outstanding issues, something that was quite impossible, given the composition of the two houses. Moreover, in Sir Francis Bond Head, he had chosen a strange instrument to accomplish his laudable purposes.

How strange was not long in becoming apparent. Soon after his arrival in Toronto Sir Francis divulged his instructions to the legislature, not just their substance, as Glenelg had ordered, but the full text, which contained material certain to embarrass Lord Gosford, who had come out to Lower Canada a few months before as the head of a conciliating royal commission. Apparently Sir Francis felt very little sense of obedience to his superiors in London. At about the same time he was forming his impressions of provincial politics, which he did with amazing quickness. Taking an immediate dislike to Mackenzie and Bidwell, and being much impressed by Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, he soon decided that “strong Republican Principles [had] leaked into the country from the United States,” and were predominant in the Assembly, whose majority did not represent “the general Feeling and Interests of the Inhabitants.” The “Republican Party,” as he henceforth described the Reformers, were “implacable” and would never be satisfied by concessions.¹⁷ It was an unpromising beginning for Glenelg’s policy of conciliation.

Nevertheless, Head did take one important step that was within the spirit of his instructions. Finding it essential to make additions to the membership of the executive council, he asked informed observers for the names of qualified men who would serve to make the council a more balanced body and one more representative of political opinion. As a result of these inquiries he offered appointments to Robert Baldwin, John Rolph, and J. H. Dunn, the Receiver General. The last named was a member of the administrative group, and had long been active in Welland Canal affairs, but was not directly identified with the Family Compact. The first two were well known as reformers but had been politically inactive in recent years. At first, Baldwin refused the offer, saying that he could not accept office unless his well-known views on a responsible executive council were acceded to. Head, however, argued that he should come in, and then speak for his views from within the council. With much foreboding, Baldwin agreed.

It was not long before he felt his apprehensions to be fully justified, since he was soon quite dissatisfied with the extent to which the Lieutenant-Governor consulted the council. Thereupon, he convinced his colleagues, the old tory members as well as Rolph and Dunn, to unite in a formal complaint which, by coincidence, was very much in the spirit of Strachan’s letter to James Stephen of five years earlier. The Council asked to be consulted on all general matters relating to the conduct of government; if this were not to be done, they thought that the public should know how little they had to do with affairs.¹⁸ Head flatly rejected this proposal. With both precedent and Glenelg’s instructions to back him up, he argued that the responsibility for carrying on the government was his alone, and could not be shared with the council, although he would consult it whenever he saw fit to do so. All six councillors then resigned, the old members being forced out as well as the new, although they were now ready to draw back.

These resignations fell like a thunderclap upon the reform majority in the Assembly, already disgruntled and irritated by other events. After calling on Head for more information, in which step they were joined by all but two conservative members, they then set up a select committee, chaired by Peter Perry, to investigate and report on the incident. After Head had appointed a new council, made up of men of conservative views, the Assembly, in a straight party vote, passed a motion of want of confidence.¹⁹ As well, reformers throughout the province quickly wheeled their formidable political organizations into line of battle. Meetings were organized. Petitions and addresses were adopted and forwarded to the provincial capital.

The conflict reached a new intensity after Perry’s committee made its report in the middle of April. During its deliberations the committee, and the province, had learned a new fact, not directly related to the current controversy, that drove reformers into a fury, and for a time brought all elements of the party together in outraged opposition to the government. The new fact was that Sir John Colborne, in his last important act before leaving the province, had set up fifty-seven rectories as endowments for Anglican clergymen. (Actually, he had had time to sign only forty-four patents, and these were all that were established.) In Colborne’s view, this was a perfectly defensible step. Glebe lands for this purpose had been set aside, partly from the Clergy Reserves and partly from Crown Lands, from time to time over the previous forty-five years. Altogether, they amounted to some twenty thousand acres. On more than one previous occasion Colborne and his predecessors had received explicit approval from the Colonial Secretary to take the step, but the rising tide of provincial opposition to the exclusive claims of the Church of England had hitherto delayed action. Now it had been taken, in flat defiance of this opposition, and in a secretive, midnight fashion.

Indignation at this action did much to heighten the language of the committee’s report, which was a bitter attack upon Sir Francis Bond Head. His appointment of Baldwin, Rolph, and Dunn was termed “a deceitful manœuvre to gain credit with the country for liberal feelings and intentions where none really existed,” while he continued to act “under the influence of secret and unsworn advisers.” The committee could not understand why “a Lieutenant-Governor, at a distance of more than four thousand miles from his superiors, is so much more immaculate and infallible than his royal master,” who always acted on the advice of his councillors. With a government resorting to “arbitrary principles” and with conditions in sad contrast to the prosperity, activity, and improvement “in the adjacent country,” it was clear that the state of public affairs was growing steadily worse. The last straw was the knowledge that “57 government parsons” had been established, “in contempt of all our humble remonstrances”; final proof, if it were needed, of “the necessity of having a responsible Government.” All other measures having failed, the committee advised the Assembly to stop the supplies.²⁰

Events now moved rapidly to a climax. On April 15 the Assembly approved the committee’s report and voted to stop the supplies. Tension was further increased when four days later Mr Speaker Bidwell laid before the House a letter sent to him by Papineau, which denounced the British ministers and asserted that “the state of society all over continental America requires that the forms of its Government should approximate nearer to that selected…by the wise statesmen of the neighbouring Union, than to that into which chance and past ages have moulded European societies.” On the next day Sir Francis prorogued the legislature, letting it be known that in retaliation for the stoppage of supplies, he would refuse his assent to money bills already passed, a measure that was far more crippling to provincial prosperity than was the Assembly’s rather empty gesture. He also took the opportunity to make an appeal to the “backwoodsman” and to “every noble-minded Englishman, Irishman, Scotchman, and U.E. Loyalist”; clearly, he knew where to look for support. In the same breath he assured the province that the best hope for genuine reform lay in cleaving to him, not to a selfish faction.²¹

A month later, he dissolved the legislature and the province was soon in the midst of a bitterly fought election campaign, with Sir Francis boldly assuming the leadership of the conservative forces. He had already concluded that he “was sentenced to contend on the soil of America with Democracy, and that if I did not overpower it, it would overpower me.”²² In vigorous, colloquial, or as he put it, “homely” language, he never missed an opportunity to pin the republican label on his opponents or to assert that all who stood for the British Constitution and the British connection should throw their weight against Bidwell and his party. The reformers also tried to take this ground, arguing that all they wanted was the Constitution as applied in Britain, but they were never able to seize the initiative from the Lieutenant-Governor. When the smoke had cleared early in July, it was at once obvious that the reformers had been routed. Although the vote was close in several constituencies, they would be outnumbered more than two to one in the next house. Bidwell, Perry, and Mackenzie were only the most notable of the party to suffer defeat; only Rolph among leading reformers had survived the landslide.

Many factors combined to produce so striking a political reversal. For many voters, economic considerations bulked large. With the boom in the neighbouring states reaching its peak, just before the crash of the next year, Upper Canada seemed to be losing in the race for prosperity and development. While people were leaving the province for the western states, reformers argued over abstract principles of government, complained about the Welland Canal and the banks, and seemed not to welcome an inflow of British capital. To be sure, in the last Assembly they had voted money for roads, bridges, and other local improvements, but much of it went to their own constituencies in the older settled districts rather than to the struggling townships in the back country. Moreover, in an attempt to provide themselves with some patronage and to keep the money voted out of the hands of the executive, the reformers had set up commissionerships to supervise its expenditure and had distributed these among themselves. This device could easily be made to appear as a political job. It was also well known that the reformers regarded themselves as the protectors of the interests of the farmers, the “honest yeoman.” In the last Assembly they had passed a bill, killed in the legislative council, to impose higher duties and other restrictions on agricultural imports from the United States. This measure undoubtedly pleased many established farmers, but in newer areas, which still needed to import food, and in the lumbering centres of the Ottawa Valley, it was disliked. It was especially disliked by all who were engaged in mercantile pursuits, and who lived by forwarding goods down the St Lawrence. If to these is added the reformers’ often expressed opposition to the Canada Company and the lukewarm attitude of many of them to British immigration, it is apparent that they had offended important economic interests in the province.

The reformers were also more vigorously opposed than in any previous election. Conservative forces were alerted as never before, although now they called themselves Constitutionalists. They believed that the British connection – to which the province “principally owe[d] its rapid advancement” – was in danger, and they believed that the provincial Constitution was threatened with innovation. They were seeking to prevent revolution, not to impede honest reform. Indeed, reform would be accelerated by a “Constitutional House”: the land granting system would be improved, the Clergy Reserves would be returned to the Crown, immigration would be encouraged, “capital and wealth” would flow in from the mother country “like a fertilizing stream,” and “Sir Francis Head would be enabled to carry into effect those Reforms and improvements for which he has been expressly sent here by our good KING.”²³ Appeals such as this combined with increasing political activity roused intense feeling against the “Bidwellian Party.”

The victory also owed something to the Lieutenant-Governor’s skill as a campaigner. He never wavered from one simple theme: that the contest was between a loyal people and a disloyal faction. He sought, with much success, to sweep away all previous distinctions between tories and radicals, conservatives and reformers. He announced frequently that he himself was a reformer, and that the best way to achieve true reform was to support him. Conservative leaders were delighted by his firm opposition to the radicals and by the support which he brought to their cause. He knew how to strike responsive chords in the breasts of many residents. For instance, on one occasion he denounced the letter from Papineau recently placed on the Assembly’s journal, suggested that there were “one or two Individuals” in Lower Canada who welcomed the prospect of foreign interference in the provinces, and then concluded with the rousing challenge, “In the Name of every Regiment of Militia in Upper Canada I publicly promulgate – Let them come if they dare!”²⁴ To the reformers this was ludicrous bombast, and they did their best to pour ridicule upon it. But to all, and there were many, who disliked the course of the French Canadian extremists, and who had memories of the War of 1812, the challenge had a reassuring sound.

A remarkable feature of the campaign was the ready co-operation of Orangemen and Roman Catholics to defeat the reformers. The Orange Lodge in Toronto and Bishop Macdonell publicly complimented each other’s loyalty. Orangemen voted for Roman Catholic conservative candidates, and Roman Catholics similarly supported Orange candidates. It has been calculated that from one-third to one-half of the reform defeats were caused by this uniting of the Orange and the Green. The Orangemen even abstained from their annual parades on the Glorious Twelth, just after the election, to show their appreciation of Catholic loyalty. Mackenzie, who had probably been defeated by this joint effort, denounced the “Orange Papists,” but the two groups continued to co-operate until after the Rebellion.²⁷

The Methodist leaders were also in the field against the reformers in this election. The gulf between the Mackenzie wing of the party and the Methodists had widened after the publication of the Seventh Report, while the denomination had grown more conservative under British Wesleyan influence. When the issue was narrowed to one of loyalty, there was no question where its leaders would stand. The Guardian staunchly supported the Lieutenant-Governor and the Constitutional party, with Egerton Ryerson publishing several letters in criticism of the reformers in general and Peter Perry in particular. Some months after the election John Ryerson informed his brother that “Not one Radical was returned from the bounds of the Bay of Quinty Districts. The preachers & I laboured to the utmost extent of our ability to keep every scamp of them out & we succeeded. And had the preachers of done their duty in every place, not a ninny of them would have been returned to this parliament.”²⁸

Undoubtedly, then, the Methodists made their contribution to the defeat of the reformers but, as Professor Sissons has noted, it was probably not as decisive as has sometimes been claimed. Many of the rank and file again voted the reform ticket, as they had always done.²⁹ Reformers at the time complained more about Orangemen than about Methodists, and put particular emphasis on the role of the new voters. Although the St Thomas Liberal, for instance, referred generally to the “unholy exertions of the State-paid Priests,” in which group it probably included the Methodists, it also spoke of the “exhibition of ruffianism, club-law and intimidation” put on in every constituency. The editor continued:

Above all…heaps of new Deeds, the ink scarcely dry on them, were sent in all directions, not only the week preceding, but absolutely the very week of the Elections…. The honest and legitimate constituency of the Province – the old – the peaceable – the respectable settlers were thus overwhelmed, in almost every County, by pensioners and paupers, who never before exercised the elective franchise, who did not know any more about the Constitution of Canada or about the subjects in dispute, between the late House of Assembly and Sir Francis Head, than the man in the moon.³⁰

Acting on this last complaint, Charles Duncombe, a leading reformer from the western part of the province, took a petition to England which stated that the Lieutenant-Governor had favoured tory candidates in various ways, and in particular had overwhelmed “legally registered voters” by illegally issued patents.³¹ This petition was referred back to a select committee of the newly elected Assembly which, not surprisingly, found no truth in it. The committee was able to show convincingly that patents issued just before the elections could not have influenced the results.³²

The charge of fraud, as drawn by Duncombe, was clearly exaggerated, but he and his reform colleagues had good reasons for complaining that it had not been a fair election. In 1836, as in previous elections, they suffered from the fact that the election machinery was in the hands of their opponents. Above all, it was intolerable that they should have a recently arrived lieutenant-governor openly in the field against them, accusing them of treason. Undoubtedly there was a real shift of opinion in the provincial electorate in 1836, intensified by the activity of new voters. Many voters genuinely felt that the reformers sought dangerous changes in the Constitution, and that a victory for them would imperil the British connection. Yet, not without some cause, a great many reformers drew the conclusion that a free expression of public opinion was impossible under existing circumstances. Their feeling that the scales were tipped against them was heightened when the newly elected conservative Assembly passed a bill providing that it should not be automatically dissolved at the King’s death, which was expected soon. Reformers were quite convinced that this measure would never have been accepted by the Legislative Council, the Lieutenant-Governor, and the Colonial Office, or any of them, if they had been in a majority.

Disheartened by the nature and results of the election campaign, many reform leaders of moderate outlook turned their backs on political life. Bidwell, smarting from defeat after twelve years of representing his county, wrote to Robert Baldwin in bitter tones of the practice of “denouncing every man as disloyal, a revolutionist, a secret traitor, etc., who happens to differ from the Provincial government, on questions of expediency or constitutional principles.”³³ He returned to his law practice. Baldwin himself had gone to England before the elections to warn the Colonial Secretary that the province’s connection with Britain was being endangered by Sir Francis Bond Head’s actions. Although refused a personal interview, Baldwin stated his views in a lengthy memorandum, which fully set out his conception of responsible government as the one means of bringing harmony and stability to Upper Canada. If this “English principle” were denied, the people of the province might be driven to turn “to another Quarter” and “call for the power of electing their own Governor, and their own Executive,” but they would never “abandon the object of obtaining more influence than they now possess, through their Representatives, in the administration of the Executive Government of the Colony.”³⁴ Baldwin, too, stayed in private life upon his return.

For the time being, however, the province enjoyed harmonious government, with an Assembly that had confidence in Sir Francis Bond Head and his executive council. In the first session of the new legislature, a large number of bills easily passed through both houses providing for overdue changes in the judiciary, amendments to the University Charter and, especially, internal improvements. In the latter category there was not only more money for the Welland Canal and for roads and harbours but the first railroads for the province were projected. Sir Francis gladly approved all of these bills, although his instructions required him to reserve several banking bills that were also passed.³⁵ The constitution of 1791 could work fairly effectively when there was a conservative Assembly.

For some months after the election, then, the province was relatively quiet in contrast to the furious political debate of the previous months. Attempts were made by some reformers to rebuild their shattered organizations, but with limited results. Mackenzie, who had returned to journalism with a newspaper entitled The Constitution which began publication, somewhat symbolically perhaps, on July 4, 1836, attacked the government and all its works as bitterly as ever, but he seemed to be shouting into the wind. The province as a whole seemed to be more concerned to participate in the prevailing boom that was sweeping North America than to revive the sterile debates of earlier years. Conservatives congratulated themselves on having brought the people to their senses by the firm stand taken against radicalism.

Yet these appearances were deceiving. Farmers had little opportunity to benefit from the commercial boom; instead they were suffering from low prices and lack of good markets. Opponents of the government were suffering from a kind of emotional exhaustion, but they nursed the old complaints as much as ever. Shortly after she arrived from England, at the end of 1836, Anna Jameson, the wife of the Attorney General recently appointed from England, found “among all parties a general tone of complaint and discontent – a mutual distrust – a languor and supineness…. Even those who are enthusiastically British in heart and feeling…are as discontented as the rest: they bitterly denounce the ignorance of the colonial officials at home….”³⁶ Sir Francis Bond Head’s glorious victory had not really cleared the air very much.

Sir Francis was in fact throwing away the fruits of victory as rapidly as possible. Having defeated the forces of democracy and republicanism, he was then determined to disperse and destroy them. He proceeded to dismiss from office certain men accused of showing sympathy for the reform side in the recent election, including a judge who flatly denied the charge. He urged upon the Colonial Office an end of the policy of conciliation, and its replacement by stern and decisive measures. Not only did he begin to lose some of the support of moderate men in the province, but his action and views met with diminishing acceptance in Downing Street. From the end of 1836 onward he was engaged in an increasingly acrimonious correspondence with Lord Glenelg that led eventually to his resignation. Despite the Lieutenant-Governor’s coup the Colonial Office could no longer entrust Upper Canada to this erratic and insubordinate “damned odd fellow,” as Lord Melbourne dubbed him on his return to England. Sir Francis had no answer to the problems facing the province.

But these problems, real though they were, did not drive Upper Canada to rebellion. If the province could have been insulated from outside pressures it would have had every prospect of a peaceful political evolution. The British government had no desire to interfere in its internal affairs; instead, it was fully prepared to approve of and assist in the transition to a broadened political structure. And with the gradual rise of effective political parties within the province that transition was inevitably and inexorably coming. A rebellion was not needed to solve Upper Canada’s political problems; the rebellion that did come complicated rather than eased the transition.

Upper Canada, however, was not insulated or immunized from outside pressures. Instead, it was caught up in a severe financial crisis that reached in from the larger Anglo-American world of which it was a part and that greatly disturbed its economic life. In addition, and at the same time, it was directly affected by the bitter struggle coming to a head in Lower Canada. And now more than ever, political differences were exacerbated by proximity to the neighbouring republican states. Alternately goaded and inspired by these outside pressures, Mackenzie and a small group of followers determined on their ill-starred plan to overthrow by force a nearly unprotected government.

Of these outside pressures the most clearly disruptive was the financial crisis. After several years of unprecedented business expansion in both Britain and America, the bottom suddenly fell out of the boom at the end of 1836, and conditions became steadily worse during the following year. The causes of the downturn in the business cycle were essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic – excessive speculation and optimistic expansion by business men, and indeed the public at large, who were eager to seize the opportunities made available by a rapidly growing economy – but the effects were felt with particular sharpness in the young debtor communities of the New World. The latter were heavily dependent upon the British money market for capital. When they could no longer borrow there, when indeed British investors began to liquidate their holdings in America, the western communities found themselves in an intolerable position. That position, moreover, had already been made highly precarious by the policies adopted by the Jackson administration in the United States. By destroying the Bank of the United States the administration had removed the one agent that might have restrained the headlong speculation of the 1830’s. Then, in his own attempt to halt the speculation, Jackson issued, in July 1836, a Specie Circular, ordering that henceforth only hard money would be received in payment for the public lands. This measure drained specie away from the banking centres of the eastern seaboard, which were soon also suffering from insistent British demands. By the spring of 1837 business failures and unemployment were followed by the decision of banks throughout the United States to suspend specie payments.

The province of Upper Canada, inevitably affected by business conditions across the line, as well as in Britain, was in a very poor condition to weather the resulting storm. Following the prevailing pattern, the provincial legislature had also borrowed heavily, in an attempt to speed up economic progress, and was in no position to meet its commitments. Bankers in the province were suffering from the same drain of specie as across the line, but because of the Lieutenant-Governor’s belief that suspension would be dishonourable, they were unable to protect themselves, unless they met very difficult requirements. This quixotic attitude of Sir Francis soon lost him much of the popularity among conservatives that he had earlier enjoyed. It was W. H. Merritt’s view, expressed after the event, that Head’s policy of placing obstacles in the way of specie suspension, which was persisted in “against the expressed opinion of the Inhabitants and their Representatives,” had done more “to create a feeling in favour of Responsible Government than all the essays written or speeches made on the subject.”³⁷

Few voices had been raised in opposition to the orgy of bank bills and borrowing that reached its climax in the session of 1836–37. Most reformers were just as enthusiastic for this course as were conservatives. Indeed, it was only at the extremes of the political spectrum that doubts and antagonism were expressed. At one end were some tories who wanted strict regulation of the note-issuing powers of banks, perhaps following a recent New York law on the subject.³⁸ At the other end was William Lyon Mackenzie who opposed the craze for banks root and branch.

As we have seen, Mackenzie had always opposed the banks. He had followed with the closest sympathy the efforts of Jackson and the hard-money men to break the power of the banks in the United States, and he was determined to follow their example in Upper Canada. Needless to say, he was not deterred by the fact that most reform leaders did not agree with him, any more than Jackson had been deterred by the fact that many in his party had campaigned against the Bank of the United States in order to open the way for an expansion of local banking. When the provincial banks found themselves in difficulties in the spring of 1837, because of the heavy drain on specie reserves, Mackenzie made every effort to mount a campaign against them. He warned the “Farmers of Upper Canada” that they would be “richer and happier” if these “vile Banking Associations” were swept away. He advised them to “Get Gold and Silver for your Bank Paper, while it is yet within your power.” In particular, he denounced the Bank of Upper Canada for having “controlled our elections, corrupted our representatives, depreciated our currency, obliged even Governors and Colonial Ministers to bow to its mandates, insulted the legislature, expelled representatives, fattened a host of greedy and needy lawyers, tempted the farmer to leave his money with it instead of lending it to his worthy neighbour, shoved government through its hands, sent many thousands of hard cash to foreign lands as bank dividends, taxed the farmers and traders at £18,000 a year for the use of its paper, and supported every judicial villainy and oppression with which our country has been afflicted.” In Mackenzie’s mind, Upper Canada suffered just as much from the money power as did the United States, but with a vital difference. In that country Jackson, and now Van Buren, were “purging the nation of vile rotten cheating bank folks,” while these were still all powerful in the province.³⁹ Considering the difficulties that bankers had with Sir Francis in the summer of 1837, they must have been astonished to learn how much power they had.

With the bank power ruling Upper Canada and ruining its farmers, Mackenzie was more than ever impressed with the contrast between this sad picture and the glorious scene across the lakes. His paper was once again filled with glowing accounts of the virtuous simplicity of American state governments. Michigan, newly arriving at statehood, had a “government by farmers” while Upper Canada had “a government by strangers from beyond the great sea, who do not intend to become permanent settlers,” and were paid salaries five to ten times as high as those of their opposite numbers across the Detroit River.⁴⁰ With blithe inconsistency Mackenzie also pointed repeatedly to the rapid progress of the western states, ignoring the fact that this progress was inseparably connected with the banking expansion and business speculation which he so vehemently opposed. Instead, he was secure in his simple faith that Upper Canada, too, could achieve such utopian bliss if it could only achieve a pure agrarian polity, which in fact nowhere existed across the line except in Mackenzie’s imagination.

A final factor was needed to turn Mackenzie’s thoughts in the direction of armed uprising, and that was the abrupt reversal of British policy toward Lower Canada. Following the failure of Lord Gosford’s mission of conciliation, Lord John Russell announced a return to firmness in his Ten Resolutions of March 2, 1837. These Resolutions rejected the demands of the Papineau party and allowed the governor to take funds from the provincial treasury that the Assembly had refused to vote. When the Lower Canadian radicals learned that these Resolutions had been approved by Parliament they immediately intensified a campaign of agitation and organization that led to rebellion within six months.

The passage of the Ten Resolutions brought Mackenzie to new heights of furious indignation. He denounced “the mercenary immoral wretches” who had supported resolutions “more suitable for the Meridian of Russia in its dealing with Poland.” He was soon in correspondence with Wolfred Nelson, perhaps the most militant radical leader in the lower province, and he was soon preaching the doctrine of non-importation. “Buy, wear, and use as little as you possibly can of British manufactured goods or British West India merchandize or liquors.”⁴¹ Mackenzie now agreed with his Lower Canadian friends that a bold attack must be made against British authority, not simply against the local oligarchy.

By the beginning of July 1837 he was seeking to convince his readers that the Lower Canadians had both the will and the means to make good their independence; moreover, he asserted, “There are thousands, aye tens of thousands of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and above all, of Irishmen, now in the United States, who only wait till the standard be planted in Lower Canada, to throw their strength and numbers to the side of democracy.”⁴² Two weeks later he began to reprint Tom Paine’s Common Sense, which had sparked the movement for independence in 1776.⁴³ At the same time he set forth in great detail a scheme for local reform organizations, some features of which had distinct military overtones. One of his subscribers reported finding a note from Mackenzie folded in his paper, asking him to accompany the editor to Lower Canada “to assist the french” and then return and conquer the upper province.⁴⁴ At the end of July he met with a group of radicals in Doel’s brewery in Toronto to adopt a Declaration closely modelled on the famous document proclaimed at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. It ended by asking the reformers of Upper Canada to make common cause with Papineau and his colleagues, to organize political associations and public meetings, and to select a convention of delegates to meet at Toronto “as a Congress, to seek an effectual remedy for the grievances of the colonists.”⁴⁵ A Committee of Vigilance was named, with Mackenzie as agent and corresponding secretary.

Mackenzie then set out on a tour of the country north of the capital to organize public meetings and to superintend the adoption of the Toronto Declaration and other inflammatory resolutions. More than a score of such meetings were held, and there was similar though less intense activity in other parts of the province.⁴⁶ Orangemen and other opponents of the radicals attempted to break up the meetings by force; in turn, the radicals armed themselves with clubs and other weapons. Soon they were drilling and shooting at targets, although with no clear idea in their minds why they were doing these things. Mackenzie sought to convince them, however, that everything was within their grasp if they should move against the government. “ …Britain has no power here if opinion be concentrated against the measures of her agents. We are far from the Sea – for five months our shores are ice bound – the great republic is on one side of us, the Lower Canadians on another; Michigan and the wilderness, and lakes are to the west and north of us. The whole physical power of the government, the mud garrison, redcoats and all, is not equal to that of the young men of one of our largest townships.”⁴⁷ This line of argument became all the more persuasive in October when Sir Francis, who was prepared to rest the fate of his government entirely upon the loyalty of the people of Upper Canada, denuded the province of regular troops in order to strengthen the garrisons in Lower Canada.

Meanwhile, Mackenzie and his lieutenants sought to convince their followers that a display of physical force was both justified and necessary. A rising tone of nationalism marked their appeals. Reformers were asked to be “more Canadian” in their “habits and feelings,” to throw away their “lip-loyal feelings and sayings of other countries,” and to “substitute the word patriotic for the word loyalty.”⁴⁸ “Foreign” colonial ministers and “foreign” governors were vigorously denounced, while at the same time the advantages of membership in the American Union were set forth in attractive terms. As a state in the Union, the people of Upper Canada would enjoy complete local self-government, universal suffrage, and vote by ballot.⁴⁹ Mackenzie’s nationalism was now a North American nationalism. With the same grievances that the old thirteen colonies had suffered from, the Canadian people had the same right to rebel;⁵⁰ their logical haven after successful rebellion was in the Union that had emerged from the earlier Revolution.

From this rising campaign of agitation, which looked to co-operation with the Lower Canadian radicals and to separation from the mother country, the main body of reformers in Upper Canada kept themselves increasingly aloof. None of the party’s prominent leaders, Perry, Bidwell, or of course the Baldwins, had any part in it, although John Rolph’s private attitude was somewhat equivocal. In effect, these men abdicated their responsibility to give a lead to public opinion, leaving the field to Mackenzie and his radical associates. And the moderate rank and file of the party also withdrew from political activity rather than follow Mackenzie’s leadership. They still believed firmly in the reform objectives but also believed, as one correspondent informed Mackenzie, that they must “be attained in peace.” This man asserted that Mackenzie’s extremism had nearly wrecked the cause by driving Methodists, Catholics, and Presbyterians into the ranks of Toryism and by making it almost impossible for the British government to continue its policy of conciliation.⁵¹

These were accurate observations, but Mackenzie was past heeding them. Let the old-line politicians stay on the sidelines and frown; he did not need them or want them. Instead, he was now working closely with a number of men who were ready for action. In the main, these men were drawn from among the old American settlers north of Toronto, who had lived in the province for a generation. They were well-established farmers and artisans, but they had never become reconciled to a government which, they were convinced, discriminated against them at every opportunity, and went out of its way to favour British immigrants at their expense. Notable among them were Samuel Lount, born in Pennsylvania in 1791, Silas Fletcher, born in New Hampshire in 1780, and Jesse Lloyd, born in Pennsylvania in 1786.⁵² Working with these men, and in conjunction with the American-born Charles Duncombe in the London district, Mackenzie convinced several hundred supporters that a demonstration of physical force would easily, indeed peacefully, sweep away the oligarchy, the banks, the land-grabbers, and the state-paid priests, and inaugurate a democratic government controlled by the plain people, under which all would prosper.

The blueprint for the new order was published in Mackenzie’s paper on November 15, 1837, in the form of a draft constitution for the State of Upper Canada. In presenting it to the public Mackenzie invoked the names of Henry Grattan, John Locke, Algernon Sydney, Benjamin Franklin, John Hampden, William Pitt, Charles James Fox, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Brougham, J. A. Roebuck, Joseph Hume, and George Washington in support of the course he was taking. The document itself closely followed the outlines of the Constitution of the United States, although many of its individual clauses were related directly to Mackenzie’s long-standing complaints against the provincial government. In particular, he would require that money bills and bills of incorporation be passed only after a three-fourths vote of each House, while the agrarian purity of the new commonwealth was to be protected by a total prohibition against bank charters.

A month before publishing this constitution Mackenzie had sought to convince his associates in Toronto that Head’s removal of the troops gave them the perfect opportunity to seize the arms and ammunition in the City Hall and capture the government in one bloodless and decisive move. These more cautious men had backed away from the fatal step at that time, but in subsequent weeks Mackenzie had convinced them that he had the men needed to bring off a successful coup. The more respectable members of the conspiracy, particularly John Rolph and Dr T. D. Morrison, now agreed to join the movement at the appropriate time. In every way they tried to cover their tracks in the event of failure. By the middle of November, however, Mackenzie was determined to force the hands of his timid colleagues. On a trip north of the city he set a date for the uprising, December 7, and put plans in motion that could not easily be reversed. The news, toward the end of November, that the Lower Canadian Patriotes had risen, was the final proof for Mackenzie that the time to act had come.

On a last trip north of the ridges at the end of November Mackenzie distributed a handbill calling on the “Brave Canadians” to strike for “Independence,” and made final arrangements with his trusted friends. But with plans in their last stages everything began to go wrong. First, there was a worried call from John Rolph that the authorities in Toronto were alerted to the uprising – in fact, they refused almost to the last moment to take seriously the possibility of rebellion – and that the date must be advanced in order to retain the element of surprise. This eleventh-hour change threw out of line arrangements for assembling, arming, and victualling the men. Then the disheartening news arrived that the Patriote uprising in the lower province had been put down. Rolph now tried to convince Mackenzie that the project was hopeless, but the latter had crossed his Rubicon. In any event the men were already marching.

During the evening and night of December 4–5 some seven to eight hundred of them gathered at Montgomery’s Tavern, about two miles north of Toronto. Rebel guards were posted down Yonge Street to prevent any movement into the city, and a well-known tory, Colonel Robert Moodie of Richmond Hill, was mortally wounded as he tried to ride past them. Coming up from the city to reconnoitre, an alderman, John Powell, was captured, but escaped after shooting dead the rebels’ most capable military leader, Anthony Anderson. Powell got back to the city with conclusive proof that long-rumoured rebellion was a fact. Now all chance of surprise was gone.

Even so, the rebels were a larger force than any that was ready to meet them as they set off down Yonge Street about noon on December 5. After moving a little more than a mile they stopped to reform their ranks at the brow of Gallow’s Hill. There they were presently met by a truce party, sent out by Sir Francis, consisting of Robert Baldwin and John Rolph, men whom the rebels would know and presumably trust. (Rolph was still not identified with the conspiracy.) The rebels were offered a full amnesty if they would go home. Mackenzie asked for the promise in writing, and marched on another mile. Then the government withdrew its offer when it learned that militiamen were on the way. Rolph, however, secretly sent word that the city was still poorly defended, and that an attack would succeed.

And so the last act of the little tragicomedy was enacted. In the gathering darkness of the late December afternoon the rebel army trudged on down Yonge Street, with a few dozen riflemen at its front. The rest were armed only with pikes, pitchforks, and cudgels. As they neared the northern outskirts of the city they were observed by a small picket of some two dozen men, commanded by the sheriff. When the front ranks of the oncoming band were within musket range the sheriff gave his men the order to fire. Fire they did, but having done so, they promptly dropped their weapons and took to their heels, to avoid being crushed by the much larger force opposing them. Samuel Lount, commanding the rebel riflemen, ordered the fire returned. The front ranks then fell to their knees to allow their companions behind to continue the fusillade. But the smell of gunpowder in the fearful darkness brought as much confusion to the rebels as it had to the loyal picket. When the men behind saw the tall hats of the front riflemen disappear from the skyline, they at once concluded that these men had been shot down. Not knowing what hordes of well-armed tories were about to charge them they, too, turned and ran, carrying most of the army with them. Lount and his few riflemen had no choice but to follow them. One rebel had been killed, and two died later of wounds.

With the retreat of the rebel army up Yonge Street to Montgomery’s Tavern went the last flickering chance of scattering the government. On that same evening reinforcements led by Colonel Allan MacNab reached the capital by steamer from Hamilton, and by the next morning confusion and near-hysteria had given way to confident determination. A day later, with bands playing and with a couple of pieces of artillery, a force of more than a thousand men marched north to attack Mackenzie’s men. Contact was made south of the Tavern, and within half an hour the outnumbered, poorly armed, and almost leaderless rebels were put to demoralized flight. Through a combination of good luck and the help of many sympathizers Mackenzie managed to work his way round the lake to safety on the American side. A slight western phase of the rebellion came to nothing. Dr Charles Duncombe raised the standard of revolt in the country between London and Brantford, but his little band quickly fell away before militia advancing from several sides.

There is no certain way of knowing how much potential support there may have been for the uprising. An initial success might well have enlarged the movement somewhat. Some men who were marching to support Mackenzie quickly changed sides to become rebel-chasers when they saw how events were going. Mackenzie was often identified while escaping, as were other leaders, and yet they were not stopped despite a price on their heads. Nevertheless, the uprising had no broad following. Mackenzie and his associates managed to dupe only a few hundred farm lads and other rather simple people, many of whom paid a bitter price for their adventure, into believing that an armed uprising would cure the province’s ills. The vigour with which people from one end of Upper Canada to the other rose to support the government showed that in no sense was Mackenzie the leader of a popular movement. His later admission that resort to force had been a mistake was cold comfort to the men and their families whose lives he had helped to ruin and to the reform cause which he had greatly injured.

Mackenzie’s attempt to use force against the government, coinciding with the much more formidable rebellion in Lower Canada, was bound to disturb the political and social life of the province. Nevertheless, it had been a very small affair, engaging the support of only a fraction of the population. Within a few days all was quiet, with no possible chance of renewed disorder of any consequence originating within the province. If Upper Canada had been left free to absorb the consequences of the December rising a normal atmosphere might well have been restored in a relatively short time. But it was not left alone. Intervention from across the American border, lasting over several years, was to bring far more alarm, expense, and bloodshed than the rebellion itself produced, and was to complicate seriously the process of political and social transition.

The reasons behind this intervention were many, varied, and changing, and here they can be alluded to only briefly. To many Americans the fact that the Canadas still maintained a political tie with Great Britain was in itself proof that they must be suffering from tyranny and oppression; now they had imitated the patriots of ’76 by rising to strike off their shackles. Assuming that the rebellions represented a widespread popular movement that had been put down by British regulars, and that the provinces still yearned to be free, Americans instinctively extended their sympathy and many of them saw a duty to give their active support to the downtrodden Canadians. And these sentiments were reinforced by other considerations. A mood of Manifest Destiny was seizing the United States, and one of its aspects was the belief that Americans had a moral obligation to extend the “area of freedom” throughout the North American continent. Yet such feelings were general and vague; more was needed to bring action. In particular, there was an unstable border population, made restless by the panic of 1837, and ready for adventure especially if it was coupled with the promise of free land in Upper Canada. More substantial elements in the American population were ready to see the rank and file so occupied, and also ready to take advantage of anything they might accomplish. The recent history of Texas, and its emerging importance in American politics, could never be far from people’s minds at this time.

Thus it was that Mackenzie received an enthusiastic welcome when he arrived in Buffalo on December 11. After he had spoken of the bitter oppression under which the people of Upper Canada were labouring, many volunteers offered to join his cause, and a campaign to collect weapons and supplies was soon under way. Within two or three days a motley little band had established themselves on Navy Island, on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, where Mackenzie proclaimed a provisional government for Upper Canada and offered land in the province to all who would join him.

At first, the government and the people of Upper Canada watched these events with some calmness, assuming that American authorities would soon stop these hostile actions against a neighbouring province. But federal power was distant and ineffectual, and local and state officials showed little desire to act. When Colonel Allan MacNab of the militia saw that the American-owned steamer Caroline was openly and without hindrance engaged in ferrying men and supplies from the American side to Navy Island, to build up power for a raid on Upper Canada, he instructed Commander Andrew Drew, R.N., to destroy the ship. Not finding her at Navy Island, Drew’s naval party continued across the river, where they set fire to the Caroline. She was sent down the river, and broke up before reaching the Falls. In the boarding operation an American citizen was killed and others were injured.

This incident greatly heightened tension along the border. The Assembly of Upper Canada applauded the action, while many Americans were outraged at this violation of their territory. To the existing motives for filibustering against Upper Canada that of retaliation was now added. Moreover, the Caroline affair darkened Anglo-American relations for several years to come.

By the spring of 1838 “Patriot” preparations were in full swing all along the border of the two provinces. Mackenzie and other refugee Canadians had little part in these activities, which were led and supported almost entirely by American citizens. The favourite form of organization was the secret society, of which the Hunters Lodges came to be the largest and best known. It was only gradually that official American action against these offensive preparations became effective. For many contemporary Upper Canadians the outstanding consequence of the Rebellion of 1837 was the threat, which on several occasions became a reality, of further invasion from the United States, in a time of Anglo-American peace and of quiet within the province.