Epilogue

For some time after Levius reached home, Sarah sustained a hope that Justus would be found. When he left her during the war years, he had always turned up safe. Surely this was possible once more. Gradually she came to accept that he would not be coming. She mourned him, but she had three girls to raise and the farm to run. Samuel and Levius were capable men and willing to help, but they were fully occupied with the law office and the timber rafts.

One piece of unfinished business was the ‘200 acres’ in Vermont that still belonged to Justus. In 1801, Levius sold Simon Bothum ‘150 acres for 150 dollars’ and he gave his uncle the remaining 50 acres — the farm Simon occupied.1 Simon had been working the land ever since Justus fled to Crown Point in 1776, and since the title to this piece was in Elijah Bothum Sr.'s name, Levius did not want to press a claim to it.

Samuel became the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Grenville County at the election of 1800. The other member for the District of Johnstown was William Buell, representing Leeds County, who declared himself in opposition to the government.² Buell, rather than Samuel, carried Justus' torch. Samuel had lived most of his life under a military regime, and his knowledge of Connecticut institutions was second-hand. Little is known of Samuel's later life, although he opened a law office in Montreal before the War of 1812. He served as a major in the militia, and in 1818, with Levius assisting him he successfully defended two of the men accused of murdering Governor Semple of the Hudson's Bay Company.³ He was in the Lower Canada Assembly, and indicted for libel in 1816.⁴

Levius had a distinguished career in the law and politics in Upper Canada. In 1803, he was called to the bar, by which time he was the Registrar of Leeds and Grenville. He opened his law office in Elizabethtown, where a village was growing on William Buell's land. In 1812, when the country was on the verge of war, Levius was elected to the assembly representing Leeds County.⁵ That year, he was appointed the lieutenant-colonel of the first battalion, Leeds Militia. On February 7, 1813, a force of American riflemen raided Buell's village, then called Brockville after the slain hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights. They carried off fifty-two men, including Levius' second-in-command, Major Bartholomew Carley, and Captain Adiel Sherwood. Levius was away at the time and he reported on the effects of the American incursion when he returned.⁶

The attack on Brockville affected Levius' political views and his subsequent actions. When party lines were drawn between reformers and conservatives, Levius favoured the latter. Like other thoughtful people, Levius feared that too strident demands for home rule might induce the British government to withdraw the garrisons of regulars, without whose protection the country could not survive.

William Lyon Mackenzie accused Levius of being in the Family Compact.⁷ He was married into it, for his wife, Charlotte, was Ephriam Jones' daughter. Loyalists from New York, the Joneses were accustomed to a landed gentry and determined to be the backbone of the Upper Canadian aristocracy, but in Levius' case Mackenzie's charge was misplaced. Prior to the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, the governor of the day, Lord Sydenham, had gone to great lengths to break the power of the Family Compact. Yet Sydenham appointed Levius his Speaker of the Legislative Council, which he would not have done had Justus' second son represented the interests of a discredited ruling clique.

Levius was a moderate man, diplomatic and with a talent for keeping out of trouble which his father lacked. This younger son displayed his tolerance in his choice of a wife, for Charlotte Jones' mother was a French-speaking Canadian who raised her daughters in her own faith.⁸ Levius agreed that he and Charlotte would follow this example. His four sons (Henry, George, Samuel and Edward) were Anglicans, his three daughters (Charlotte, Helen and Amelia) were Roman Catholics.

Levius Peters Sherwood, 1777-1850. Courtesy: Judge Livius Sherwood

Of Justus' daughters, Diana lived in Augusta after she and Samuel had pioneered on the Rideau River. Sarah married Andrew McCollom, also of Augusta, while Harriet married Dr. Benjamin Trask of Montreal. Sophia's life was tragically short. She married Jonathan Jones at age nineteen, died three years later, and was buried in the cemetery on the town plot in Augusta, where in 1809, the settlers erected a church. After Sophia's passing, Justus' widow Sarah moved to Montreal, where she died in 1818 at age sixty-four.⁹

The kinsman who most closely emulated Justus was his cousin Reuben. The surveyor of the next generation, Reuben laid out many townships and lots in eastern Upper Canada. When the War of 1812 broke out, Reuben was a Captain of Guides from Côteau du Lac to Kingston, and he did some spying on the side, keeping up that family tradition. In the summer of 1813, he was near Cape Vincent, New York, a village opposite Kingston, travelling in a canoe with his lieutenant and nine men. Landing the men on an island, and taking his lieutenant, Reuben paddled to the American shore, and found some militiamen building a blockhouse. Boldly he told them that an invasion had begun and asked to be taken to their commanding officer.

They led Reuben and his lieutenant to Major John B. Esselstyn and his deputy, a captain whose name has been lost. Reuben told the privates they could go home on parole, but the officers were prisoners of war. When the enlisted men took to their heels, Reuben marched his captives back to the canoe and escorted them across the St. Lawrence. Later the major was exchanged for Major Carley, the captain for Adiel Sherwood. Reuben was decorated after the Battle of Crysler's Farm, and in 1814, he piloted gunboats down the St. Lawrence. He also recaptured some supply bateaux that had been taken by the Americans.¹⁰

Justus' dream of a New England town in Augusta was doomed to disappointment, and the only public building to stand on his town plot was the Blue Church. Yet the Johnstown District would not lack a central place. In 1808, the government ruled that the village of Johnstown, hitherto the administrative centre, was too far to the east, and a new district seat would be chosen in Elizabethtown. William Buell hired Reuben Sherwood to lay out a townsite on his property, and it had a square. Named Brockville in 1812, it grew into what one traveller called ‘the prettiest town I saw in Upper Canada’.¹¹ Through the foresight of another Connecticut Yankee, Justus' community had the kind of focus he cherished.

Tantalizing glimpses of later Sherwoods flit through source materials, and most pertain to Levius' descendants. His eldest son Henry — dark and handsome, more Jones than Sherwood — helped smash Mackenzie's printing press, and chased the rebels up Yonge Street at the head of his militia company. Despite three Roman Catholic sisters, Henry was the darling of the Orangemen, and mayor of Toronto. For ten months, in 1848, conservative Henry was the Premier of the Province of Canada.

George represented Brockville in the assembly for twenty years, and was Commissioner of Crown Lands and Minister of Public Works in the Macdonald-Cartier Ministry prior to Confederation. Samuel was the Registrar of the City of Toronto. Edward, the youngest, was expelled from Upper Canada College for striking the mathematics master, a man famous for harshness.¹² This abrupt halt to his education did not interfere with his later life, for Edward was the Registrar of the City of Ottawa. Levius and Henry were occasional visitors at Dundurn Castle, near Hamilton. Lady MacNab's mother, Sophia Jones Stuart, was Levius' sister-in-law, and her daughters called him Uncle Sherwood.

In Bishop Strachan's letter book is a note to Miss Christina Sherwood, Samuel's daughter, complimenting her on her verses. The cleric was being kind to a delicate child who only lived fourteen years. Her brother, Captain L.P. Sherwood, rode at the head of a company of Queen's Own Rifles to chase away the Fenians in 1866. Edward's son, Percy, was the Commissioner of the Dominion Police, and he was knighted.

A modern echo of Justus himself is his great great great grandson, Livius Sherwood, who was Director of Sailing at the 1976 Olympic yachting events in Kingston. Sailors from all over the world were protected by a high mesh wire enclosure. Patroling offshore was a Canadian destroyer, while overhead whirred watchful helicopters. The setting, amidst tight security, was reminiscent of the Loyal Blockhouse, separated from the rest of North Hero Island by pickets, the Royal George patroling offshore.

Certainly, Justus Sherwood qualifies as a hero and not just because he died young and not in his own bed. If at times Justus Sherwood seemed a trifle too land hungry and sharp in his business practices, he was a man of his own time. This steady, energetic man lived according to the example he found around him. A dedicated fighter for a cause, he was quick to forgive his enemies, whether loyalist or rebel. Despite personal suffering, the American Revolution did not leave him an embittered man. He was a colourful character, a pimpernel figure in his blockhouse, the loyalists' rescuer, and a hard driving pioneer in what became the Province of Ontario.