It’s a small wooden box, just a few inches long and nearly two hundred years old. It was carved by hand and elegantly decorated, despite the circumstances in which it was created: a beautiful artifact chipped and chiselled out of scraps. There wasn’t much to work with in prison, just a few pieces of firewood. But there were hundreds more made like it. Today, you’ll find them in museums and private collections all over Ontario and Quebec: small wooden boxes carved by the rebels of 1837 — those who were captured and spent months in jail awaiting their fates. Each Rebellion Box is unique, a personalized gift for the family and friends who waited on the outside, hoping and praying the prisoners would someday be set free. And this box, like so many others, bears a sentimental message: a love poem inscribed in ink by the rebel Joseph Gould for the woman he hoped to marry, but worried he would never see again.
Gould was born into a Quaker family in the early 1800s, just a few years after his parents left Pennsylvania to settle in Upper Canada. He grew up in Uxbridge, about fifty kilometres outside York, where many Quakers lived. By his early twenties he had already begun to find success as a farmer and a miller, and he didn’t hesitate to enjoy his prosperity. By his own admission, he was getting “a little wild.” He liked to attend balls and dances. He liked to flirt with women. He indulged in a series of romances.
Even with all the partying, he’d built a reputation as a hard-working professional. Now that he was twenty-seven, he decided it was time to reign in his excesses and settle down. And he could think of no better type of woman to settle down with than a Quaker woman.
He knew the perfect place to look. Ezekiel James was one of his neighbours, and one of the most respected men in town. His family had been part of the first wave of Quakers to leave Pennsylvania for Canada, settling on Yonge Street when he was a young man. He’d gone on to become one of the first settlers in Uxbridge, living in a log cabin as he cleared his land and established a farm. Before long, he’d done well enough to build himself a stone house and pay for a school to be built. That’s where Joseph Gould would get his education. And when Gould was old enough to start building his own life, it was Ezekiel James who gave him the loan that allowed him to start his own farm.
James also happened to have three teenaged daughters. Gould was impressed with all three. “Now those girls,” he later said, “were perfect models of what a good Christian girl should be; so innocently pure, unassuming and modest that, after my wild career, I despised myself in their presence, and frequently wished that I could obliterate the history of the last five years of mylife.”
He found their fashion sense particularly alluring. “They dressed strictly in the old Quaker style — rich, plain, clean and tidy,” he remembered. “And to my mind, no dress in the world sets off a young woman so well as the Quaker dress. No trail to sweep the streets, sidewalks and barnyard; no flounces, frills or tuckbacks to catch the dust, rain and snow, and shackle the agility of a girl’s movements.” Those Quaker dresses weren’t just attractive, they were emblematic of a practical lifestyle that he now longed for. “They take less material, less making, less time in washing and ironing, and are warmer, and far more durable, and in every way the most sensible kind of dress.” Any woman wearing that kind of clothing seemed like a promising match, someone who would share his temperament and his religious views.
Gould began to spend more and more time with the James family, getting to know the three daughters as they got to know him. In time, it became clear that it was Mary — at nineteen, the oldest of the three — that he was particularly attracted to. And that attraction only grew stronger when he learned that she felt the same way about him, too. He asked her father for his permission to marry Mary; the answer was yes. And Mary was delighted when he proposed.
“I went home,” he said, “with a light heart, and bright hopes of the future.” If all went to plan, they would be married in just four months.
And then along came Mackenzie’s rebellion.
Gould had long been political. As soon as the first post office opened in Uxbridge, he’d subscribed to William Lyon Mackenzie’s Colonial Advocate. He found himself agreeing with just about everything Mackenzie wrote. He believed strongly in the idea of democratic reform and that the Family Compact had far too much power. He thought the people should have more say over how their government was run. Before long, Gould was an active member of the Reform Party, relied upon to get out the vote during elections.
That was no easy task in the 1830s. Just getting voters to the poll was a major challenge. There was only one place to vote in each riding, and the ridings were huge. Settlements were scattered, with few roads linking them together. The roads that did exist were often nearly impassable, just roughly hewn passages through dense forests. Getting the vote out was a physically demanding job. And the stakes were high: getting stuck in the mud or losing a wheel might mean getting stranded with a wagonful of voters. You could be unable to reach the polling station as the election slipped away.
There was also no election day — it was an election week or more. Polls stayed open for at least seven days; they only closed when they went an hour without anyone casting a vote. That meant political parties who got the sense they were losing could keep a poll open indefinitely by having a pool of voters at the ready, sending them in one by one, once every hour. Keeping these voters happy until the time came to vote usually involved plenty of alcohol, as well as having a place for them to sleep if they were forced to wait overnight.
With all those drunk and passionate voters hanging around, taverns and polling places frequently became scenes of violence. “Those open public houses were fertile spots for securing plentiful crops of violence and bloodshed,” Gould’s biographer, W.H. Higgins, explains. “Broken-heads and black-eyes were ordinary events. And sometimes men were maimed for life, or were killed outright, at those scenes of strife during an election contest.”
Things got even worse in 1836. After Mackenzie’s failed mission to London, the British made one change. They’d replaced the lieutenant-governor with a new one. Sir Francis Bond Head was supposed to be a reformer; that’s why he got the job. But when he arrived in Toronto, it quickly became clear he agreed with the Family Compact. He praised their “industry and intelligence,” while calling Mackenzie “an unprincipled, vagrant grievance-monger.” And during the election of 1836, he openly took the side of the Tories, campaigning for them in what would prove to be one of the most corrupt and violent elections in Canadian history. Gould was on the front lines as the Reformers lost by a landslide. Even Mackenzie lost his seat, going down to defeat for the first — and only — time. Samuel Lount lost his too. For many, it was the final straw. The very next year, preparations for the rebellion began.
But as Mackenzie drilled farmers for war and blacksmiths forged pikes and spears, Gould was uneasy. Pacifism is a key tenet of Quaker faith. And while dozens of Quakers abandoned that belief to join the rebellion, Gould later insisted that he never did believe that violence was the solution to the colony’s political problems. He was sure that no matter how unsympathetic Bond Head was, they’d still be able to find some peaceful solution. In fact, he told Mackenzie as much, trying to talk him out of his armed insurrection at a secret rebel meeting just a week before it was scheduled to begin. In return, Gould was ridiculed. “I was taunted with cowardice,” he complained, “because I refused to give encouragement or approval to violent measures.” When the day came for the rebels to meet at Montgomery’s Tavern, Gould found himself surrounded by about fifty of his friends who insisted that he join them. Otherwise, they told him, he would be a hypocrite and a coward. In the end, he felt he had no choice. “They were determined to go, and there was nothing else left for me, but to take my place amongst them.”
By the time they arrived at the tavern, the rebellion was nearly over. The march down Yonge Street had already failed. And soon an army, filled with friends and neighbours who were now their mortal enemies, was spotted marching north. James FitzGibbon led a force of twelve hundred men. Bond Head was riding a big white stallion; Reverend Strachan was there, too, wrapped in a black cloak. They’d made their way up from the city to the sound of marching bands and cheers from their supporters, who leaned out windows and climbed up on rooftops, waving the Union Jack. The Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern was about to begin.
Gould and a few others grabbed their weapons, some of them armed with nothing but pikes and pitchforks, rushing south along Yonge Street to meet the approaching army. As they did, a group of militiamen headed into the forest, trying to cut around them and reach the tavern. Gould and his companions raced into the woods after them. They scrambled over dead trees and climbed over the underbrush, until they found themselves within range of the government’s biggest weapons: two small field guns. There, in the forest near Yonge and Eglinton, the artillery opened fire. Gould could see that one of the guns was controlled by a friend, who launched grapeshot high into the hemlock trees above their heads, bringing dead branches crashing all around them. A shot from the other gun smashed into the ground near Gould’s feet, nearly blinding him with a shower of sand. A third shot struck a tree, sending shards of bark and splinters of wood slicing through the air and into his face. One rebel was shot through the shoulder. A second fell dead.
Meanwhile, the rest of the government army had reached the tavern, opening fire on the rebels’ makeshift fortress. Cannonballs smashed through the dining room window. Chimneys came crashing to the ground. Rebels rushed out of the building, some fleeing into the woods as the militia fired upon them with rifles and muskets. Some fell dead right there. Some were wounded and captured. Most escaped. The battle was over in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes. The rebellion was crushed. The government had won. FitzGibbon ordered the tavern burned to the ground.
As the flames consumed the building, Gould and about six or seven other men kept themselves hidden in the forest, trapped on the wrong side of Yonge Street, with the militia standing between them and home. They would be forced to camp out in the woods for about a week, debating what route to take to the United States. As time wore on, they felt safe enough to build a campfire in a swamp. That was a mistake. The smoke was spotted; soon, they found themselves surrounded by militiamen. They were captured and taken south into the city.
By then, the Toronto Gaol was already full, overflowing not just with rebels but anyone who was suspected of supporting democratic reform and opposing the Family Compact. Some would be held for months on end without any charges being laid, dozens crammed into a single cell. So many had been arrested, the government was running out of places to put them. Rather than being thrown immediately into a jail cell, the Quaker rebel first found himself imprisoned inside the Legislative Council room. Many years later, when he got elected to the assembly, he would joke about the day he first “took his seat in Parliament.”
His hearing came weeks later. He was found guilty. His life was spared, but he was condemned to exile. He seemed destined for the labour camps of Van Diemen’s Land. He spent months inside the Toronto Gaol and at Fort Henry in Kingston, awaiting his dismal fate, expecting that at any moment he would be sent to the other side of the planet. And all the while, he longed for Mary James, knowing he might never again see the woman he loved.
That’s when he made his box.
The whole thing started with just a few men carving away at scraps of firewood. Stuck in jail for months on end, the prisoners began to look for ways to pass the time. Since many of the rebels were skilled carpenters, they turned the pieces of firewood they were given into beautiful works of art: small decorative boxes they could send to their loved ones. Soon, scores of prisoners were sharing their skills, creating hundreds of boxes for their families and friends. Each of those boxes was inscribed with a message: some were memorials to their fallen comrades, some were defiant political declarations of their undying belief in Canadian democracy, and others were messages of love.
During his time in prison, Joseph Gould would make at least three boxes. One was dedicated to his sister, another to his future mother-in-law. But the very first box he made was for his fiancée, who, despite it all, he still hoped to marry. He might be on the very brink of being sent to a brutal Australian penal colony, but he hadn’t lost hope or the conviction of his beliefs. There, in the Toronto Gaol, he inscribed his box with a message in ink:
To Miss Mary James
When liberty with all its charms
Shall comfort the distressed
Then I’ll return with open arms,
And clasp you to my breast.
From Joseph Gould, in prison, June 1838
And there was indeed hope that he and his beloved might one day be reunited. The rebellion might have failed in its bid to overthrow the government, but it did spark gradual change. Far across the ocean in London, the British government was horrified by the violence. Bond Head was fired. He left Toronto a hated man. When the surviving rebels put a five-hundred-dollar price on his head, he was forced to cancel his plans for a grand departure through Halifax and sneak out through the United States instead. When the British picked a new governor general to oversee the Canadian colonies, they made sure they didn’t make the same mistake again; they chose one of the most liberal politicians in England.
Lord Durham, they knew they could trust. He was the nephew of Earl Grey — the reform-minded prime minister Mackenzie had met with years earlier. Durham had fought for public education, for better working conditions for miners, and for the right of every man to vote, no matter his wealth. He’d even been one of the leaders of the reform movement in England. He was so liberal, in fact, they called him “Radical Jack.”
When he arrived in Canada, Durham travelled across the country, listening to both sides of the conflict before submitting his findings to his bosses in England. The Durham Report recommended the thing the Reformers wanted the most: responsible government. Ministers, they argued, shouldn’t answer to the governor and his colonial overlords in London, but to Parliament — to the elected representatives of the people. In other words, they wanted real democracy. And while the British would ignore the idea for now, the Durham Report laid the foundations for the changes to come.
By then, Durham had also made another grand gesture of reconciliation. One of his very first acts as governor general was to release nearly all the political prisoners. Only the most radical rebels would be sent into exile. The rest were to be set free, finally allowed to head home to their families.
And so, Joseph Gould was saved from the horrors of Van Diemen’s Land. Nearly a year after the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern, the Quaker rebel was released from prison and allowed to return home to the woman he loved. They didn’t waste any time. Just three months later, they headed to a friend’s house at the corner of Yonge and Queen, not far from where he had been imprisoned for all those long months. And there, on New Year’s Day of 1839, Joseph Gould and Mary James declared their love for each other, exchanged their vows, and were finally, happily married.