these meetings to old scores, impelling “the people to wrestle with
the serried hordes of their oppressors in the bloody struggles which
must intervene” before “the injured, oppressed, and enslaved Canadian”
could escape from “the diabolical policy of England.” There was a
liberty pole, and Papineau, burning, energetic, flowery of speech,
promised all things as crown to laudable effort “in the sacred cause
of freedom.” It was a Canada “regenerated, disenthralled, and blessed
with a liberal government” which the prophetic speech of Papineau
had foreshadowed; and the “lives, fortunes, and sacred honour” of
his hearers were there and then pledged with his own to aid in that
regeneration. That “Frenchified Englishman,” Dr. Wolfred Nelson, also
spoke; and Girod,--a Swiss, who taught agriculture in a Quebec school
for boys, got up by that true patriot Perrault,--destined shortly for
a tragic fate, was there. At this meeting Papineau thought he had
set a ball rolling which would not easily be stopped. Already it was
careering in an unpleasantly rapid manner. He deprecated the use of
arms, and advised as punishment to England that nothing should be
bought from her. This reprisal on the nation of shopkeepers Nelson
thought a peddling policy; that the time was come for armed action, not
pocket inaction. Papineau’s opinion was disappointing to the fiery wing
of the Confederation. Again did Bishop Lartigue warn generally against
evil counsels, reminding his flock that a cardinal rule of the Church
was obedience to the powers that be; and every one of his clergy echoed
him.
“Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte” was once oddly applied by a
lady who heard a canon of the Church say that St. Piat, after his head
was cut off, walked two leagues with it in his hand. She could not
gainsay such an authority, so said, “I can quite believe it. On such
occasions the first step is the only difficulty.”
Alas, many at these meetings were to exhibit the price of a first step;
heads were to come off and necks to be broken, and every step in that
blood-stained via doloroso which led to the Union, to the righting of
Englishmen’s and Frenchmen’s wrongs, to establishing Canadian rights
to be French or British, was to cost bitterly,--cost how bitterly only
one can know who reads the story in its human aspect, not politically
alone. It is a strange thing that privileges so purely British as
those asked for, the abolition of the death sentence except in case of
murder, “that chimera called Responsible Government,” the unquestioned
use of a national language in public affairs, freedom of the press,
should have been asked for by Frenchmen, denied by Englishmen, and
fought for to the death by many of each nationality.
All time from the Conquest to the Rebellion seems to belong to the
latter event. For the causes of it reach back by perspective into
Misrule, making a vanishing point in Mistake.
More Baneful Domination.
“_Away with those hateful distinctions of English and Canadian._”
--EDWARD DUKE OF KENT.
Treason always labours under disadvantage when it makes preliminary
arrangements; and it is often obliged to found combinations on
defective data, not reckoning upon disturbing forces and the sudden
appearance of the unforeseen. But if so in ordinary cases, what must
it have been when, in Upper Canada, sympathy with the French and
dissatisfaction with existing Upper Canadian institutions ended in a
determination to combine forces and make a common cause.
Each province had its distinct enemies; but distance was one common
to both. They were divided from the metropolis and arsenal of the
Empire by ocean, storm, and wooden ships; and tracts of native roadless
wilderness, long stretches of roads of mud and corduroy, and the
intercepting reserve, helped to keep man from man. A huge place; and
the badness of its affairs was in proportion to its size. With no
hint of the future iron belt from Atlantic to Pacific, all travel was
by stage, a painful mode, and costing some $24.00 from Montreal to
Toronto; or if by water, in long flat-bottomed bateaux rowed by four
men, Durham boat, barge, or the new ventures, steamboats, where as yet
passenger quarters were in the hold.
The element of Upper Canada was crude, and the homesick letters of the
new-come emigrants sighed over the rude surroundings. But perhaps the
rudest thing which the settlers of ’37 found was the apology for a form
of government then offered to them. An idea had prevailed in the home
countries that Canada was the best of the colonies. But this idea was
dispelled by Mackenzie; those of his earlier writings which reached
Britain rendered such a sorry account of Canadian happiness that people
who had confidence in his book thought twice before they risked fortune
in what evidently had become his country through necessity.
Some time previous to the publication of his book (“Sketches of
Canada and the United States”), he had been good enough to write
Lord Dalhousie, “So far, your Lordship’s administration is just and
reasonable.” To him Canadian affairs were like a falling barometer,
soon to end in storm, and there was every ground for the statement of a
United States editor that Mackenzie constituted himself the patron or
the censor of the race.
“Oh, England is a pleasant place for them that’s rich and high,
But England is a cruel place for such poor folk as I.”
There was no iron hand in a silken glove about the oligarchy; the hand
was always in evidence to Mackenzie and his kind, and Canada was not a
whit better than Kingsley’s apostrophized land.
It is easy at this time of day to cast reflections upon the ruling
class of that period, a class chiefly composed of sons of officers in
the army and navy, for the most part gentlemen in the conventional
sense of the term--a crime laid to their charge by some who could not
forgive it. They naturally came to centre in themselves all offices of
honour and emolument; and the governors, all gentle if some foolish,
looked to them for counsel and support, before time was allowed for
reflection, the governors so cleverly governed that they knew it not.
Gifts of the Crown naturally followed, and the great Pact grew richer,
alongside of that older Compact of the sister province. It is a case
for “put yourself in his place.” The burden and heat of the day had
fallen on these men; they but followed the instinct to reap where one
has strawed, and carried out to the letter the axiom that unlimited
power is more than mortal is framed to bear.
“The tyrannical government of palace pets” furnishes pages of
misgovernment. It took a clear head, a steady will and a true heart
to cling to British connection and the Union Jack, when desperation
made some determined to be rid of the Toronto rule, which was to them
odious, unjust, intolerable. And yet, when we review that epoch of
dissolution and transformation, the errors and shortcomings of either
party, the two sides of the dispute stand out so clearly that we wonder
anyone could then think he was altogether right. “Flayed with whips and
scorped with scorpions,” one side said, “there is no alternative but a
tame, unmanly submission or a bold and vigorous assertion of our rights
as freemen;” while the other, by the mouth of its governor, likened
Canada, standing in “the flourishing continent of North America,” to
a “girdled tree with drooping branches.” Certainly, the simile was
good; and with all justice to the side of Tory or Reformer, Royalist,
Rebel, Loyalist _and_ Loyalist, a retrospective glance discloses a
knife on either side busy at the process of girdling. “What is the best
government on earth?” asks a school-book in use in Duncombe’s District
and printed in Boston for Canadian schools; “A Republican Government
like the United States,” is the unqualified next line. “What is the
worst government on earth?”--“A Monarchical Government like that of
England and Canada.” “Can the King of England order any man’s head cut
off and confiscate his property?”--“Yes.” “Will you, if the occasion
arrives, rise up and rebel against such a government as yours, and
join the States?”--“Yes, with all my power and influence.” The Yankee
school-master, a chief agent of this propaganda, was one of the first
prisoners.
The Family Compact believed the chief beauty of government to be
simplicity, the foremost tenet loyalty to one another. But men outside
the Pact, every whit as much gentlemen and each in turn bearing his
part of that heat and burden, awoke to a sense of individualism, each
to realize that he was a unit in the commonweal.
The forerunner of the new dispensation was Robert Gourlay. And what
and if his sorrows had so overwhelmed his wits, he yet was the founder
of public opinion in Upper Canada; nor is it less true that the first
outcome of his martyrdom was that life was made harder for those who
dared to follow where he had failed.
“Whaur ye gaun, Sawndie?” “E’en to the club just to conthradick a bit;”
and Mackenzie, right as he was in many points, leaves us in no doubt
as to his descent and his ability to “conthradick” for pure love of
so doing. Also his club covered a wide area, and his influence over a
tract as wide as his ability to contradict was phenomenal.
Passing the line between the Canadas, Glengarry showed the change from
French to British ways. Not only were the features and tongues of the
inhabitants different, but there was an entire absence of that thrifty,
snug cottage comfort which distinguished the half-brother below. With
outsides unfinished, no taut lines about them, both houses and original
huts proclaimed a people undaunted by obstacles and surmounting them
by indifference to detail. Here all were loyal. Stories of the famous
Glengarry Fencibles of 1812 took up the leisure hours, and the spirit
of the Loyalist fighting bishop was paramount. That prelate would not
tell his people _how_ to vote, but he talked of “these radicals who
aim at the destruction of our Holy Religion;” and this word to those
already wise was sufficient.
Next came Prescott, once La Galette, well built on a rocky prominence,
the site of a former entrenchment, a place mentioned in old French
diaries from the time of La Salle, the white of its tall, massive
tower, roofed with a tin dome and built out on a rounding point covered
with evergreen, making an abrupt feature in the river bank. Enormous
sails flapping in the breeze proclaimed its functions, and a fort in
process of erection, not having a moiety of its aggressive strength
of appearance, lay near it. Here the people were of two minds, many
ready to be sympathisers in a movement though lacking the force to be
leaders; prominent men, some of them, and wishing for a lead, while
others, living in the remote shadow of the dominant party, were so
securely attached to crown and flag that they were ready to defend that
party for the sake of the flag whose exclusive property it seemed to be.
Farther on, as the river broadened towards the chain of lakes, came
Kingston, its “agreeable, genteel society accommodated in houses of
stone and wood,” also much divided by party. In the harbour ships of
war stood close to the shore, where blockhouse and fort commanded the
entrance. Fort Henry, begun in ’32, had by February, ’36, cost England
more than £50,000; its area did not exceed an acre, the walls, massive
outworks and aspect evidently conveniently designed for the success of
the enemy. A few more years were required for its completion and to
level the glacis; but although unfinished it was to be the theatre of
a tragedy. In its finished state it has been described as a colossal
monument to military stupidity. From the top of the inner fort lie
in view the famous “cow pasture,” Dead Man’s Bay where some fourteen
men were drowned during construction of the fort on Cedar Island, and
Shoal Tower, all points of arrest to the eye in that ever-beautiful
scene. Several old war-ships left from 1812 were in 1831 kept at the
dockyards, shingled over and protected, some fated later to be sunk
as useless, one to be burnt to the water’s edge. Hard by there was a
dockyard, furnished with every article of naval stores required for
the equipment of ships of war. Two seventy-fours, a frigate, a sloop
of war and eleven gunboats reposed under cover on stocks. They were
not planked, but men employed for the purpose replaced decaying bits
of timber, and it was estimated that in little more than a month they
could be got ready for sea. Immense sums had been expended during that
war upon unnecessary things, unaccountable ignorance having sent the
woodwork of the frigate _Psyche_ to a country where it could have been
provided on the spot at one-hundredth of the expense and in one-tenth
of the time necessary to convey it there. Even wedges had been sent,
and the Admiralty, full of salt-water notions, was paternal enough to
include a full supply of water casks for use on Lake Ontario, where a
bucket overboard could draw up water undreamed of by Jack tars, from
a reservoir through which flowed nearly half the fresh water supply
of the globe. Clearly, details of geography were not included in the
lists for those bright youths who were preparing for the Admiralty,
and nowhere in Canada was the foolish touch of a prodigal-handed parent
seen to more advantage than in Kingston.
Across the lake at Sackett’s Harbour was a ship of 102 guns, apparently
put together in a substantial manner in forty days from the day the
first tree used in her construction was cut down. Peace declared, she
was never launched; and, agreeably to the terms of the treaty, which
called for the abolition of an armed force on the lakes, six or seven
more American vessels were sunk in the harbour and, in the parlance of
their owners, were “progressing to dissolution.” Green timber might
have proved as good a vehicle for the squandering of money as imported
wedges and water-casks.
But although there was then this show of vessels in Kingston, a
practical military man of ’37 records that the dockyard was a grazing
ground, that the Royal Engineers’ department did naught but patch
up barracks in much the same state as the ships, not a ship, boat,
sail or oar was available, and that sad havoc had been made by the
twenty-two years of profound peace and disuse in harness, waggons,
carriages, limbers, wheels, drag-ropes and other munitions of war. The
powder would not light, and moths had destroyed blankets and bedding.
Artillery with no horses to the guns, and part of the 66th regiment,
represented the military force at the half-finished fort.
At Kingston Her Majesty’s accession was proclaimed on a certain Monday
in August of ’37 by Mr. Sheriff Bullock and the other authorities, but
“the procession was meagre and pitiful in the extreme.” And this state
of affairs was because of the dislike “manifested by many to petticoat
government.”
Farther on, the peninsula of Prince Edward should have been the
very paradise of loyalty if any inference were to be made from its
nomenclature: Adolphusburg, Maryburg, Sophiasburg, a transatlantic
inventory of major and minor royalties. But, although it had sent forth
a Hagerman, the Bidwells were there too, all champions in the coming
struggle for what each loyally believed to be the right. Every town and
hamlet along that immense waterway had heard the call of Mackenzie from
either lips or pen, and some dwellers in each had responded.
With York is reached the centre of grievance, the house of hate,
where the principals in the coming struggle dwelt in a succession of
patched-up peace, revolts, domineering unfairness, harsh punishments
and secret reprisals, a panoramic play in which the first act was
tyranny and the last revolution. Some of the by-play reads childishly
enough. Mackenzie’s stationery shop in King Street contained window
decorations of the most soul-harrowing kind, and all belonging to the
era of belief in eternal punishment. The asperities of Mackenzie’s
truly Presbyterian enjoyment had not yet been softened by a Farrar or a
Macdonnell. The prints there displayed depicted Sir Francis Bond Head,
Hagerman, Robinson, Draper and Judge Jones as squirming in all the
torments of a realistic hell, relieved by sketches of a personal devil
whose barbed tail was used as a transfixing hook for one or other of
these Tories, the more conveniently to spit and cook him. The Canadian
ejaculations of former times, “May an Iroquois broil me,” or “Tors mon
âme au bout d’un piquet” (Twist my soul on the end of a fence rail),
were forever routed. Like Pope and an interrogation point, Mackenzie
was a little thing who would ask questions, any crookedness about him
being the peculiar twists and turns made possible by nature to his
rapier-like tongue. His paper heralded the day of Carlyle and Doré,
anticipating the former’s “gloomy procession of the nations going to
perdition, America the advance guard.” When he thus bearded these lions
in their dens they promptly called--through the government organ--for
the suppression of the first issue of this obnoxious paper; further,
that the editor should be banished, and the entire edition confiscated.
Vituperative, he had a command of uncomfortable words fitted to every
circumstance, his ability to scent out abuses phenomenal. But he was
not banished, nor his pen and pencil confiscated, nor yet did his
influence stop at this point in the long journey from Glengarry to
Windsor. And why should such a pen be confiscated? While the Family
Compact were expelling Mackenzie, imprisoning Collins, and hunting to
death any poor stray printer who dared put his want of admiration of
them in type, no less great a person than their King was feign to be
out of his wits because he was not only libelled but had no redress.
He laments the existence of “such a curse ... as a licentious and
uncontrolled press,” and of a state of things which renders the law
with respect to libellers and agitators a dead letter. Poor King,
happy Family Compact; Canada had no dead laws if the people who
administered them wished them quick. “The Irish agitators, the reviews
and, above all, the press, continue to annoy the King exceedingly;”
but Earl Grey said the only way with newspaper attacks was the Irish
way, “to keep never minding.” Also Lord Goderich writes to Sir John
Colborne in ’32: “I must entirely decline, as perfectly irrelevant
to any practical question, the inquiry whether at a comparatively
remote period prosecutions against the editors of newspapers were
improperly instituted or not.” It is needless to look beyond Mr.
Mackenzie’s journal to be convinced that there is no latitude which
the most ardent lover of free discussion ever claimed for such writers
which is not enjoyed in Upper Canada. Had he looked beyond Mr.
Mackenzie’s journal he would have found the Reformers called “juggling,
illiterate boobies--a tippling band--mountebank riffraff--a saintly
clan--Mackenzie a politico-religious juggler.” The Reform Parliament
was “the league of knave and fool--a ribald conclave;” and Mr. Ryerson,
when under a temporary cloud, was called “a man of profound hypocrisy
and unblushing effrontery, who sits blinking on his perch like Satan
when he perched on the tree of life in the shape of a cormorant, to
meditate the ruin of our first parents in the Garden of Eden!”
Following the frontier line, Niagara, looking like a “dilapidated
hennery,” had not much in the aspect of its feeble fort to awe the
rebellious spirits. They remembered the cruel sufferings of Gourlay,
the demolition of Forsyth’s property, and could not be awed back into
what had technically come to be known as loyalty by any associations
of “Stamford,” or by the leavening power of the U. E. Loyalism which
abounded in that district. Thence on to the hamlets of Dunnville and
Port Dover, past the Dutch settlement called the Sugar Loaves--six
conical hills rising from the low ground near the lake--to where that
old lion, Colonel Talbot, perched midway between Niagara and Detroit,
on Lake Erie, dared any among his many settlers to name a grievance.
Thence to Amherstburg and Windsor, and on to Goderich, youngest of
them all, and beyond which was primeval wilderness, a matted and
mighty forest on which clouds and thick darkness still rested--known
only to the savage, the wild beast, or perhaps to some stoic of the
woods who was hustled out of his dream of quiet by the hunt after that
ever-receding point of the compass, the West. Over such an area did
the influence of this small, almost childish figure of a man extend.
And up and down the land within this water-bound border, in outlying
interior townships, did his message penetrate until, as the seasons
advanced and the times grew ripe, he seemed to hold within the hollow
of his small palm--a palm never crossed with gold--the power for which
Governor and Council schemed without tiring or maintained by the right
of might.
As early as ’34 the Canadian Alliance had been formed, not local in
aim, but “entering into close alliance with any similar association
that may be found in Lower Canada or other colonies.” The democratic
tendency of its resolutions caused it to be called revolutionary by
the governmental party; but then anything outside of that party was
“rebel.” When matters focused between Sir Francis and that which
he called his “low-bred antagonist, democracy,” evenly balanced
persons became “notorious republicans;” Postmaster Howard, who came
of ultra-loyal stock, was deposed from office chiefly because his
son, a lad of ten, read a radical newspaper; and we find an “old
dyed-in-the-wool Tory, a writer of some note,” afterwards saying: “When
I look back over events which were thought all right by the Loyalists
of those times, I only wonder there were not thousands of Mackenzies
and Papineaus.” Might with the Loyalists made right; Mr. Hagerman would
not “stoop to enquire whether this act was right or wrong, it was
sufficient for him the House had done it.” It was clear, too, that the
Chief-Justice himself was no student of George III. in the meaning of
the word “mob,” and it was exasperating to the last to hear themselves
spoken of as “a few individuals,” their serious conclaves as “casual
meetings,” their petitions as “got up by somebody or other.”
The Alliance was pledged to disseminate its principles and educate
the people by gratuitous issues of political pamphlets and sheets.
The series of meetings organized to bring the people together showed
sympathy with Papineau throughout. Lloyd was the trusted messenger sent
to convey that sympathy; but at first it was not a sympathy backed up
by physical force. “Much may be done without blood” was the keynote
of its temperate tone. Yet, as where Papineau’s own disclaimers of
physical force were heard, in Upper Canada the meeting ended in drill;
Brown Besses were furbished up, and the clink of the blacksmith’s
hammer might be heard in any forest forge busy fashioning into shape
the pikes which were made in such shape as to be equally happy in
ripping or stabbing.
In November, ’37, Papineau sent despatches to Upper Canada by the
hands of M. Dufort, with an appeal for support as soon as they should
have recourse to arms there. The mission carried Dufort still farther
west, and in Michigan a Council of War was held, embracing many names
prominent in that section. Cheers for Papineau and “the gallant people
of the sister province” were tempered in their enthusiasm by fears
in some minds that there was a disposition to establish the Roman
Catholic as a dominant or State Church in the Lower Province. State
Church, they said, was one of their own most formidable enemies. At
one meeting those composing it were called upon to divide, those in
sympathy with Papineau to go to the right of the chairman. Only three
remained on the left. The sympathy, which was general, grew more
enthusiastic over common woes. “They,” (the British) said Papineau,
“are going to rob you of your money. Your duty then is plain. Give
them no money to steal. Keep it in your pockets.” The women of the
country, handsome and patriotic, were exhorted to clothe themselves
and their children in a way to destroy the revenue, and to assist
the men to prevent the forging of chains of undue taxation and duty.
“Henceforth there must be no peace in the province, no quarter for the
plunderers. Agitate, agitate, agitate. Destroy the revenue, denounce
the oppressors. Everything is lawful when the fundamental liberties
are in danger.” In his newspaper Mackenzie calmly discussed the
probability of their success under the question: “Can the Canadians
conquer?” drawing a picture of two or three thousand of them, headed by
Mr. Speaker Papineau, muskets on shoulders, determined to resist and
finally throw off British tyranny. He argued that they could conquer,
everywhere, except that “old fortalice, Quebec,” the daily sight of
whose sombre walls, no doubt, was instrumental in keeping her own
citizens the quietest in those troublous times. He pointed out how
their organization was better than dreamed of by Lord Gosford, how as
marksmen they were more than a match for the British Atkins, how the
garrison might possibly desert rather than fire, how blood would tell
and Britons over the border come flocking to the Canadian standard;
how no House of Commons would spend fifty or sixty millions to put
down rebellion in what was already “a costly encumbrance,” and how the
men who commanded these malcontents were, as already shown, renegade
regular or dismissed militia officers.