He was so close. For two days and two nights, he and his companions had been rowing across Lake Erie, freezing in the winter winds, fighting the rough waves, drenched by the icy water that threatened to swamp the small boat. They’d barely eaten, hadn’t slept, but were now finally within striking distance of the southern shore. If they made it, they’d have reached the United States. Freedom.
But now the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. A great gale was gathering, the waves were growing bigger, and the boat was being pushed back, away from the shore, away from safety, out toward the middle of the lake. For hours they fought the wind and the waves with everything they had, desperately trying to keep from being blown backwards. But it was all in vain. Finally, they gave up and let their boat float back toward Canada. Toward danger.
They came ashore near the mouth of the Grand River. A farmer was waiting for them there. He’d been watching them for a while; he assumed they were smugglers bringing salt across the border illegally. He gathered a few neighbours and seized the men when they landed, carrying their prisoners off to a nearby town to be handed over to the authorities.
It would be a while before they realized who they had in their custody. The man who tried to row across Lake Erie was one of the most wanted men in the province. They’d captured Samuel Lount, the rebel blacksmith.
It had been twenty years since Samuel and his wife, Elizabeth, had settled in Upper Canada. They ended up living in Holland Landing, near Lake Simcoe, where they earned the respect of the community. Lount was a soft-spoken blacksmith, who lent his skills to many other projects: he owned a tavern for a while, farmed, surveyed with his brother, and helped build the first steamship on Lake Simcoe. He was a kind and generous man, known to give free axes to new settlers who arrived without their own. He was so popular he was eventually drafted into politics, running and winning a seat for the Reform Party, becoming close friends with William Lyon Mackenzie.
But his political career would be short lived. Lount was a victim of a corrupt election; he lost his seat — and with it, his faith in the system. When Mackenzie began to talk of revolution, Lount listened. The rebel mayor convinced him they could launch a bloodless coup. Not a single drop of blood would have to be spilled.
Lount was in. As Mackenzie travelled the province drumming up support for the rebellion, Lount’s smithy rang with the sound of revolution: hammers forging pikes in preparation. By the time the day came to meet the rest of the rebels at Montgomery’s Tavern — on Yonge Street near Eglinton Avenue, well north of Toronto back then — Lount had gathered ninety men to the cause. They were among the first to arrive.
It quickly became clear that Mackenzie’s revolution would not, in fact, be bloodless. When a Tory from Richmond Hill tried to gallop straight through the rebel barricades on Yonge Street, riding south to warn the lieutenant-governor, he was shot. And while he lay slowly dying inside the tavern, the rebels suffered a loss, too. They captured a prisoner while on patrol: the Tory judge John Powell, grandson of Anne Murray Powell and son of the Powells whose old Niagara home was haunted by the ghost of Sophia Shaw. When he was politely asked whether he was carrying a pistol, Powell lied. As soon as he got his chance, he shot his captor dead and escaped, fleeing south to the city to raise the alarm. A few weeks later, he would be elected mayor of Toronto, hailed as a hero for shooting that man in the back.
The rebellion hadn’t even started yet and already two men were dead. Lount was beginning to have doubts.
Meanwhile, the element of surprise was slipping away. In Toronto, James FitzGibbon was rushing around, organizing the militia, posting guards, preparing the city’s defences. And that was bad news for the rebels. When Lount heard the reports of what FitzGibbon was up to, he did everything he could to convince Mackenzie to strike immediately, before the city was fully prepared. At first, the rebel mayor was determined to wait. Many of his supporters hadn’t arrived yet; they were still a couple of days away from the date he’d been telling everyone to show up. But in the end, he agreed. They would march south now, with the five hundred men who had gathered so far.
That created another problem: the man who was supposed to be leading their army — an experienced Dutch general named Van Egmond, who’d fought both for and against Napoleon — wasn’t there yet. The backup, Captain Anderson, was dead — he was the man who’d been shot in the back by John Powell. When Mackenzie asked Samuel Lount to take command of his army, Lount refused. That left the job to Mackenzie himself.
He proved to be a poor option. Before they’d even left the tavern, it was clear Mackenzie was beginning to buckle under the stress. As one rebel would later remember, “Little Mac conducted himself like a crazy man all the time we were at Montgomery’s. He went about storming and screaming like a lunatic, and many of us felt certain he was not in his right senses.” When Mackenzie finally mounted his white pony, stuffed into as many jackets as he could possibly wear in an attempt to make himself bulletproof, he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Not long after they’d started to march south, he let his men take a long lunch break; he then paused again to burn down the house of one of his enemies. Lount barely talked him out of burning down a second. They still hadn’t reached the city by the time the sun began to set.
The battle finally came at dusk, as the army neared the capital. FitzGibbon had sent a small force of twenty-six men to take up a position on Yonge, hidden behind some bushes near College Street. As the rebel army approached, the government supporters let loose with a volley of musket fire. The battle for Toronto had begun.
It ended almost immediately. A couple of the rebels were wounded in that initial volley, but the rest of the front line — with Lount leading — held true and returned fire. That was enough to scare off the defenders, who broke ranks and fled.
But the rebels didn’t last long, either. When they saw Lount and the rest of their front line drop to a knee in order to reload their muskets, they got confused about what they’d seen in the gathering darkness. They assumed they’d all been shot. So, as the defenders fled in one direction, the rebels fled in the other.
Mackenzie’s chance to take the city had been lost. As he regrouped with his rebels back at Montgomery’s Tavern, hundreds of government supporters were flooding into Toronto from the countryside and neighbouring cities, ready to defend the city and put down the rebellion. Two days after that brief skirmish at Yonge and College, their army would march north to attack the rebels at the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern. It quickly ended the uprising.
Lount was one of the lucky rebels who escaped, fleeing with another one of Mackenzie’s men. They spent the next few weeks wandering through the wintry countryside, government agents hot on their heels. They spent two nights sleeping on a forest floor, days hidden in haystacks and piles of straw, narrowly avoiding capture as friends, family, and allies risked their own safety to keep them from being discovered. Finally, exhausted and afraid, they decided to make a risky dash for the United States. A French Canadian sympathizer who lived on Lake Erie lent them a small boat and a boy to help. They set it into the water at Long Point: the thin peninsula that reaches out into the lake toward the United States, the tip less than forty kilometres from the shores of Ohio and Pennsylvania. And then they began to row.
In the wake of the rebellion, nearly a thousand Upper Canadians were arrested. The government cracked down hard; anyone who was even suspected of having rebel sympathies was rounded up and thrown into prison. In Lower Canada, where another coordinated rebellion had broken out, a dozen men were executed for treason. Many more rebels in both colonies were exiled without trial. Some were banished across the border into the United States, or to Bermuda. Others were shipped off to the far side of the world, forced to do hard labour in the penal colonies of Australia. The conditions were horrific. Many would die there.
After he was captured on the shores of Lake Erie, Lount was put on trial with another rebel: the farmer Peter Matthews, who’d led a contingent of fifty rebels from Pickering. They both pled guilty to the charge of high treason. Their lawyer thought their best chance was to throw themselves on the mercy of the court. It was a risky decision. Their judge was not exactly impartial.
John Beverley Robinson had done very well for himself since Anne Powell had died in her shipwreck while chasing him to England. He’d fought in the War of 1812 under Isaac Brock; he was there when they took Detroit, and again at the Battle of Queenston Heights. And he continued to build his life as a lawyer, judge, and politician. When nineteen Canadian settlers were accused of treason near the end of the war, charged with the crime of fighting for the Americans, it was Robinson who served as the prosecutor. William Powell presided as one of the judges. Robinson won nearly all of the cases; eight of the men were executed, hanged before having their heads chopped off and stuck on poles for public display. The grisly trials would go down in history as the “Bloody Assize of 1814.”
In the years since, Robinson had become even more powerful: he’d not only served as the attorney general, but as a member of the Legislative Assembly and president of the lieutenant-governor’s hand-picked Executive Council. He’d even taken over Powell’s old job as chief justice. As a leader of the Family Compact, Robinson was a sworn enemy of William Lyon Mackenzie. The rebel mayor had attacked him personally in the pages of the Colonial Advocate as “greatly overrated … a vain, ignorant man.” Robinson fired back, calling Mackenzie “a reptile … What vermin!”
It was no surprise that when Mackenzie launched his rebellion, Robinson was there to take up arms against him as a member of the militia. (Although when it came time for the attack on Montgomery’s Tavern, Robinson stayed home, already hard at work writing a history of the rebellion.) Now, as chief justice of Upper Canada, the rebels’ lives were in his hands. And he wasn’t in a merciful mood.
He sentenced Lount and Matthews to death. The two doomed rebels would spend their final days in irons, waiting for the gallows from inside the most miserable prison cells the Toronto Gaol had to offer.
But Elizabeth Lount wasn’t about to let her husband die without a fight. She visited him in his cell. “I found him a shadow, pale and debilitated,” she later wrote. “Poor man! Here I beheld him in prison, not that he had burned a city, for he had saved Toronto from flames — not that he had taken the lives of his enemies, for he was opposed to the shedding of blood. But he opposed himself to the oppressors of his countrymen — and for this was doomed to suffer death.” They’d been married for more than twenty years. They had seven children together. And so, as her husband awaited his execution, Elizabeth — now in her early forties — began to organize.
She circulated a petition asking the lieutenant-governor to spare the blacksmith’s life. Maybe, she hoped, if she could gather enough popular support, the government would be forced to back down and show mercy.
The petition was a dangerous document. With the authorities cracking down on dissent, signing your name meant risking that you might become a target yourself. But even so, thousands upon thousands of Upper Canadians were willing to put down their names, including many who opposed the rebellion. By the time she was ready to present the petition, Elizabeth Lount had collected the signatures of at least eight thousand settlers who believed her husband should be spared.
Still, it wouldn’t be an easy sell. There was a new lieutenant-governor in town. Sir George Arthur was not a man with a history of being easily swayed to sympathy. After fighting against Napoleon as a young man, he’d spent the rest of his career ruling over various colonies across the British Empire. In Honduras, he crushed an uprising against slavery — while also alienating white settlers with his “most tyrannical, arbitrary and capricious conduct.” As the ruler of Van Diemen’s Land — the island penal colony we now know as Tasmania — he oversaw the forced labour of thousands of prisoners. Many were subjected to brutal, even fatal, conditions. And while he was there, he oversaw the Black War — now known by some historians as the Tasmanian War — against Indigenous people in Australia, declaring martial law in order to give settlers free reign to kill as many Aboriginals as they could. Just a few years before he came to Canada, Arthur had ordered a bloody offensive called the Black Line: more than two thousand white settlers and soldiers formed a series of mobile cordons across Tasmania, forcibly driving Indigenous people into a single peninsula where Arthur planned to confine them forever. He promised rewards for the capture of Indigenous people, and paid bounties for their deaths.
Arthur had been knighted for his service and appointed as the new lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, where he found himself dealing with the aftermath of the rebellion. He was the man Elizabeth Lount would have to persuade.
The day before her husband’s execution, she went to meet the new lieutenant-governor, armed with her petition. When she was admitted into the room, he invited her to sit down, but instead she fell onto her knees, begging for her husband’s life.
It was a scene she later described, and a heartbreaking conversation she paraphrased. “Do not kneel to me,” Arthur said with disdain, “but kneel to your God.”
“I’m kneeling in prayer to the Almighty that you will soften your heart,” she answered. “My husband does not fear to die — he is prepared for death, but it is his wife and children asking for his life to be spared.”
“If he’s prepared for death,” the lieutenant-governor sneeringly replied, “he might not be so well prepared at another time.”
He did admit that the executions had less to do with the crime than with revenge — and the chance to make an example of the two condemned rebels. “Two lives were lost at Montgomery’s and two must now suffer.” He suggested that if Lount was willing to name names — to hand more of his rebels over to the government so they could be arrested and tried — that his life would be spared. But the rebel blacksmith had already made it perfectly clear: he was more than willing to sacrifice his own life in order to save anyone else from being persecuted for their democratic beliefs.
Elizabeth Lount’s desperate pleas fell on deaf ears. The lieutenant-governor refused to be swayed. No matter how many people in Upper Canada called for mercy, the men would die.
The dreadful day finally came on a cool spring morning in 1838, as the rebel prisoners were roused by the ominous sound of hammering. The gallows were being built outside the jail; the sentence would be carried out not only in front of a large public crowd, but also in sight of the other captured rebels, who would watch from the barred windows of their cells. It was grisly and unpopular work — one foreman refused to help — but by eight o’clock, it was done.
They say Sheriff Jarvis broke down in tears when he went to collect the two condemned men from their cells, leading them out to the yard in chains. “We die in a good cause;” Lount reassured his fellow prisoners as he passed, “Canada will yet be free.”
Outside, a large crowd had gathered to witness the grim spectacle. Militiamen surrounded the gallows, muskets at the ready; the government worried there might be a rescue attempt. But it was not to come. The condemned men simply walked up the eight steps to the gallows and took their places.
Lount turned his head toward the prison’s barred windows, a last farewell to his fellow rebels. Then he and Matthews knelt in prayer before turning to the sheriff. “Mr. Jarvis, do your duty. We are prepared to meet death and our Judge.” The sheriff placed hoods over their heads, and a noose around each of their throats. All was quiet and tense. Then, the trap door opened and the rope snapped their necks.
Mackenzie, of course, wasn’t there to witness the moment for himself, but he still wrote about it in one of his papers. “The spectacle of Lount after the execution was the most shocking sight that can be imagined,” the rebel mayor claimed. “He was covered over with his blood, the head being nearly severed from his body, owing to the depth of the fall. More horrible to relate, when he was cut down, two ruffians seized the end of the rope and dragged the mangled corpse along the ground into the jail yard, someone exclaiming ‘this is the way every damned rebel deserves to be used.’”
Some even reported that Samuel and Elizabeth’s daughter was so deeply traumatized by the sight of her father’s corpse being dragged around the yard that she died almost immediately of grief.
Even then, Elizabeth’s suffering wasn’t over. Lount and Matthews were dead, but the authorities were still afraid of their power, that they would be seen as martyrs for the cause of democracy. The lieutenant-governor worried that a public funeral might become a rallying point for more unrest, so he refused to let the families bury the men. Instead, they were quietly laid to rest in the paupers’ cemetery: Potter’s Field at the corner of Yonge and Bloor. They were given a simple, flat gravestone with nothing but their names engraved upon it. It would be decades before Mackenzie could ensure they were safety moved to the Toronto Necropolis, where they are still at rest today. Despite Arthur’s best efforts, they are indeed remembered as martyrs. The simple stone he gave them has been joined by a fifteen-foot column and an official heritage plaque.
After her husband’s death, there was nothing left for Elizabeth in Upper Canada. The government seized the family’s property, including their house. Forced from her home, Elizabeth took the children to live in the United States. She would die there, in Michigan, as an old woman many decades later.
But she wouldn’t let her husband — and his cause — fade into memory. Two months after Samuel was hanged, Elizabeth Lount published a scathing open letter to John Beverley Robinson, condemning him and the executions.
It came with a warning. “Sir,” she promised, “all is not over yet. No government whose only acts are those of violence and cruelty, whose statute book is stained with the blood of innocent sufferers, and whose land is watered by the tears of widows and orphans, can long stand contiguous to a nation abounding in free institutions.”
The cause of Canadian freedom, she declared, would live on. The fight would continue. Someday, the Family Compact would lose; democracy would prevail. Her husband, she was sure, had not died in vain. “Canada will do justice to his memory,” she told the judge who had sentenced the man she loved to death. “Canadians cannot long remain in bondage. They will be free.… Then will the name of Canadian martyrs be sung by poets and extolled by orators, while those who now give law to the bleeding people of Canada will be loathed or forgotten by the civilized world.”