It was the third day of the year 1800. The dawn of a new century. But John White wouldn’t live to see much of it. On that cold January morning, he found himself standing in the middle of a field with a pistol in his hand. The last few months had not been kind to him. In 1799 his wife had left him — again. He’d been passed over for a big promotion. The new lieutenant-governor didn’t seem to like him at all. And in the last few weeks, what was left of his life had been torn apart. All through Christmas and New Year’s, the tiny town of York had been seized by a sordid sex scandal. White — the attorney general of the new province — was at the centre of it all.
So now, he was standing in a wintry field about to fight a duel. York was six years old, a remote frontier outpost still carving a place for itself out of the Canadian forest. Only a few hundred people called the new capital home and only about a dozen houses had been built along the first few streets. A ten-block grid had been laid out: from the shoreline up to Adelaide, from George Street over to Berkeley. At the very eastern edge of town, far at the back of the bay, was the town’s most recognizable landmark: a pair of modest brick Parliament buildings. Today, the spot where they stood is at the foot of Parliament Street, next to the Distillery District, but back then it was not far from the vast marsh that stood at the mouth of the Don River. It was there behind those Parliament buildings that John White and John Small were standing a few metres apart. Two of the most powerful men in Upper Canada were ready to kill each other in the name of honour.
The Whites had been one of the most influential families in the colony right from the very beginning. John was a lawyer back home in Britain, with a reputation for “considerable practice, great respectability and character without reproach.” And so, when Upper Canada was created, he was picked as part of the team of government officials to be sent across the ocean to get the colony going. As the first attorney general of the new province, he’d be Upper Canada’s top lawyer.
He arrived in York just as the tiny town officially took on its role as the province’s new capital. There, he was tasked with the job of bringing British justice to the distant Canadian frontier. What Elizabeth Simcoe had begun to do for social life in the new colony, White would do for the legal system.
It wasn’t an easy task, but at first things seem to have gone pretty well. He was respected and powerful, with a handsome salary of £300 to go along with his important new job. He played an active role in the founding of the Law Society of Upper Canada — an organization that still exists today as the Law Society of Ontario — and served as its first president and treasurer. He even ran for office, getting elected to the Legislative Assembly in no small part thanks to the active support of Simcoe himself. Once in power, White played a leading role there, too, shepherding important legislation through Parliament.
Even better, there were signs that after years of trouble, his family life might finally be improving, too. John and Marrianne had been married back home in England while he was still just a young law student, not long before he got called to the bar. But by the time he left for his new job in Upper Canada, the marriage was on rocky terrain. When John set sail for North America, Marianne and their children stayed behind.
Now, finally, they were all back together. With John settled in York, Marrianne and the children joined him there, ready to give it another go.
And then along came 1799 — a terrible year for the Whites.
When John came to Canada, he was in considerable debt. And things only got worse upon his arrival. His generous salary failed to keep up with his even more generous spending. He was constantly looking for new ways to make money on the side, squabbling with other officials in the capital as they scrambled to collect fees on government business and receive the best grants of land.
It all took a toll. By the end of the century, White’s health was failing him. He was growing depressed. He’d alienated himself from the other colonists and nearly lost hope, disillusioned with Canada and his life there. His letters were full of complaints about everything from his fellow settlers to his money troubles, to his wife. In one letter to his brother-in-law, he complained that he felt “banished, solitary, hopeless, planted in the desert … disappointed — and without prospect.”
“The attorney general is … not very robust,” a friend worried. “His spirits seem to have left him. I fear he is not happy.”
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. John White was about to spark one of the most salacious scandals Upper Canada had ever seen. He would spread a rumour so sensational it would kill him.
It all started at a Christmas party. In a town as small as York, it was impossible to keep people’s paths from crossing. And so, not only was John’s wife, Marrianne, at the ball, so was his former mistress: Elizabeth Small, the wife of another important government official. In the midst of all the holiday revelry, Elizabeth Small snubbed Marrianne White, ignoring her when she tried to say hello.
This, apparently, outraged John White, who raced to his wife’s defence. The next day, he showed up at the Smalls’ house demanding an explanation. When he didn’t get one, he confided his terrible secret to a close friend: he and Elizabeth Small had had an affair. He claimed he had broken it off “from fear of injury to his health from the variety and frequency of her Amours with others.” It was a shocking insult. Not only was John White claiming that he’d slept with Elizabeth Small, but that he’d dumped her because she was sleeping with so many other men that he was in danger of contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
The accusation was made all the more believable by the fact that his affair with Small wasn’t White’s only infidelity. He’s believed to have had a secret second family: two children with a mistress by the name of Susanna Page. It wasn’t even that rare an occurrence in the capital; York’s first priest reported there were at least six “kept mistresses” in town.
White wasn’t done with his insults. He kept piling them on, claiming that the Smalls weren’t legally married; that Elizabeth had been the mistress of a famous duke back home in England, who, when he got tired of her, had paid John Small to take her off his hands and sail her away to Canada.
The accusations were enough to destroy Elizabeth Small’s reputation. White’s friend promised to keep all this scathing gossip a secret — with permission to tell only one other person — but that, of course, is not what happened. Over the course of the holidays, the rumour spread like wildfire through the insular town. It didn’t take long for word to reach Elizabeth Small’s husband. Determined to defend his wife’s honour from such terrible insults, John Small challenged John White to a duel.
They met at dawn on the third day of the new year, took up their positions a few metres apart, and then fired their weapons. John Small escaped unscathed. But his shot hit the attorney general with full force. The ball struck White on his right side, tore through his ribs, and carved its way through his flesh all the way to the other side, where it lodged in his spine.
Toronto’s first duel was over. John Small had won.
White didn’t die quickly. With Marrianne gone back to England, he was taken to the home of his close friends, the Russells. Peter Russell was another one of the most powerful men in the province. Simcoe had chosen the former gambling addict to run the finances of Upper Canada, and when the Simcoes headed home to England, Russell had been appointed as the interim lieutenant-governor. He was one of the few slaveholders in town; he and his sister Elizabeth enslaved Peggy Pompadour and her three children, Jupiter, Amy, and Milly, and kept her husband as a paid servant. They all lived together at Russell Abbey, a small, stately home with a view over the lake, not far from the field where White had fallen.
The attorney general was in agony. The ball had struck a bundle of nerves, leaving him in severe pain, his body rocked by spasms. To Russell it looked like “the most excruciating torture.” White was still conscious and able to speak, but there was nothing to be done; it was clear the attorney general didn’t have long to live. For the rest of that day, all through the night, and into the morning, his life ebbed away. “Knowing his dissolution to be inevitable,” Russell later wrote, “he submitted to his fate with a most pious and Christian resignation to the divine will and forgiveness of all his enemies.”
The end came on the evening of the following day. John White finally slipped into unconsciousness thirty-six hours after he was hit by the fatal shot. Within an hour of that, he was dead.
The newspapers would remember him as a good man, despite the sex scandal that had claimed his life. The Upper Canada Gazette recalled “the lively sense of his virtues,” while the Constellation eulogized him as “a professional gentleman, a sincere friend, an honest and upright man, a friend of the poor who had often refused to take fees for the duties he discharged and for advice he had given. He was a man highly esteemed. This is the man whom we have lost!”
The story of John White had come to a bloody end. But for Elizabeth Small, the suffering was just beginning.
John Small and both of the seconds were arrested for their role in the fatal duel. Small was charged with murder. He would be tried by the very same judicial system White had helped to establish.
White had always complained that juries in Upper Canada were too lenient, lamenting the fact that no one accused of murder in the province had ever been convicted of the crime, no matter how clear the evidence against them. Some who would have been hanged in England found themselves walking free on the frontier. And this time would be no different.
Officially, duels were illegal. But they were also a respected tradition stretching back all the way to the days of medieval chivalry. Duels were a relatively common occurrence in Upper Canada’s early years, seen as an honourable way to settle passionate disputes, including affairs of the heart. Men who fought duels fairly tended to get acquitted despite the law. Including John Small. The jury accepted the idea that no one had actually seen Small fire his gun. They may have been swayed by the fact that the sheriff clearly approved — he served as Small’s second during the duel. And so, John White’s killer was found not guilty.
The judge in the case was appalled. He openly disagreed with the verdict, but there was nothing he could do. Small walked free.
It was his wife who would suffer the consequences. Where the justice system failed, gossip would step in. We can’t ever know for sure if Elizabeth Small really did sleep with John White, or if it was just a vicious rumour he concocted as revenge. But either way, she paid the price. She was ostracized for her role in the scandal, banished from respectable society. She was publicly spurned and left off the guest lists for all the most important social functions. Any event she was invited to was boycotted by the other leading ladies of York. In the wake of the New Year’s duel, Elizabeth Small was a social pariah. No one would even shake her hand.
And so, the Smalls were left to live a lonely life in a little wood cabin on the edge of town, not far from the scene of the fatal duel. In a town as small and petty as York, scandals and rumours could ruin lives.
Sometimes, they could even end them.