MacNab’s superior in military knowledge and experience, his senior in
every way, heard, for the first time, of the other gentleman’s midnight
promotion, and advanced his own superior claims with no uncertain
voice. MacNab wanted to make the attack at three in the morning;
FitzGibbon contended it was impossible “to organize the confused mass
of human beings then congregated in the city during night-time,” that
such an attempt would ruin them, for the “many rebels then in the city
(were) only waiting the turn of affairs to declare themselves.” The
meeting over, another and semi-secret conclave arranged that MacNab
should be relieved and that FitzGibbon should take his place. “It was
now broad daylight, and I had to commence an organization of the most
difficult nature I had ever known. I had to ride to the Town Hall and
to the garrison and back again, repeatedly; I found few of the officers
present who were wanted for the attack. Vast numbers of volunteers were
constantly coming in from the country without arms or appointments of
any kind, who were crowding in all directions in my way. My mind was
burning with indignation at the idea of Colonel MacNab, or any other
militia officer, being thought of by his Excellency for the command,
after all I had hitherto done for him. My difficulties multiplied upon
me. Time, of all things the most precious, was wasting for want of
officers, and for the want of most of my men from the Town Hall, whose
commander was yet absent, till at length the organization appeared
impossible. I became overwhelmed with the intensity and contrariety
of my feelings. I walked to and fro without object until I found the
eyes of many fixed upon me, when I fled to my room and locked my door,
exclaiming audibly that the province was lost and that I was ruined,
fallen. For let it not be forgotten that it was admitted at the
conference at the Archdeacon’s the evening before that if the attack
of the next day should fail the province would be lost. This, however,
was not then my opinion, but I thought of my present failure after the
efforts I had made to obtain the command, and the evil consequences
likely to flow from that failure; and I did then despair. In this
extremity I fell upon my knees and earnestly and vehemently prayed to
the Almighty for strength to sustain me through the trial before me. I
arose and hurried to the multitude, and finding one company formed, as
I then thought providentially, I ordered it to be marched to the road
in front of the Archdeacon’s house, where I had previously intended to
arrange the force to be employed. Having once begun, I sent company
after company, and gun after gun, until the whole stood in order.”
The Governor moved his headquarters from the market-place to the
Parliament buildings, and issued his orders from there. Colonel MacNab,
in recompense for his withdrawal, was given command of the main body.
The force, drawn up “in order of battle” on the street and esplanade
by the Archdeacon’s house, only numbered some eleven hundred men,
and those whom they were about to attack were considerably less.
But the interests at stake, the results involved, their historical
significance, remove from the affair that ludicrous view attached to it
by unthinking persons as a kind of mimic battle, in keeping with “the
mimic king,” the Governor, and “the mimic Privy Council,” the Executive.
About eleven o’clock, his Excellency, surrounded by his staff, galloped
up, and was received with three hearty British cheers. Immovable in his
saddle, he looked with pride, not unmixed with relief, at the picture
before him, wondering why, now they were so well got together, they did
not proceed, when an officer galloped up and said it was the wish of
the militia that the Governor himself should give the word of command.
He did so, and in the bright summer-like sunshine, not a cloud in the
blue sky above them, the two bands playing, arms and accoutrements
flashing unpleasant signals to those awaiting them on Gallows Hills,
people in windows and on housetops cheering them and waving small flags
and those not in sympathy remaining discreetly silent, they went off at
his bidding.
“This,” says Colonel FitzGibbon, “was the only command he (Sir Francis)
gave till the action was over.”
By now the name rebel was almost as odious as some others, very high
in dignity, had recently been. There is not a doubt that much of the
cheering came from that ignorance of the point at issue which made
Solicitor-General Blake in after years say, “I confess I have no
sympathy with the would-be loyalty ... which, while it at all times
affects peculiar zeal for the prerogative of the Crown, is ever ready
to sacrifice the liberty of the subject. That is not British loyalty.
It is the spurious loyalty which at all periods of the world’s history
has lashed humanity into rebellion.”
The curious, and those who were anxious to see the result of the fight
as the turning point to decide which side of their coat of two colours
should be displayed, followed, like the tail of a comet, the vanishing
point of splendour. One militia colonel came prepared to contribute
two fat oxen to the rebel cause; they made equally good beef for the
loyalists. Another colonel presented the patriots with a sword, pistol
and ammunition--a much worse kind of soldier than the man who wears a
uniform and will not fight. There were the actively loyal, the actively
rebellious, and the connecting link of such as were passively either or
both.
All went merry as a marriage bell, and indeed the chronicle says one
might fancy they were all bound for a wedding. To what Sir Francis
calls “this universal grin” was added the solemn face of many a
minister of religion, headed by the Archdeacon himself, a man as well
fitted by nature to wear the sword as the mitre.
“Our men are with thee,” said the Reverend Egerton Ryerson; “the
prayers of our women attend thee.” The clergymen withdrew at the first
exchange of shots. “They would willingly have continued their course,
but with becoming dignity they deemed it their duty to refrain.”
This was all very real, very serious to us. Yet a Scottish paper said
that Canada was still more wonderful than the Roman state; that the
latter was saved by the cackling of a flock of geese, the former by the
cackling of one. Who that one was it were unkind to say. The anger of
the Scotch editor is divided between Head, MacNab and FitzGibbon. “Men
eaten up of vanity are they all,” he finishes.
At the rebel camp the morning had been frittered away like the
preceding day--desertions, hopes of reinforcements disappointed,
Mackenzie’s plans called stark madness by Van Egmond, Van Egmond
threatened to be shot by Mackenzie, the Tories reported by friends from
town as ensconced behind feather beds from behind which they would fire
and make terrible slaughter if the Reformers once got into the streets,
new officers appointed--one of whom was to leave his post the moment he
caught sight of the enemy--false alarms brought in by scouts, until at
last Silas Fletcher rushed up to say that the cry of “wolf” had ceased,
and the wolf had arrived.
“Seize your arms, men! The enemy’s coming, and no mistake! No false
alarm this time!” Van Egmond and Mackenzie mounted their chargers, and
soon saw what seemed an overwhelming force passing the brow of Gallows
Hill. The strains of “Rule Britannia” and “The British Grenadiers” came
wafted in unpleasant bursts of melody.
The bell had rung and the curtain was about to go up.
The most formidable part of the army consisted of the two cannon in
charge of Major Carfrae of the militia artillery. At St. Eustache the
French had thought “Le bon Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons;”
here, also, the God of battles, to whose care “the bold diocesan”
commended them, was on the side of those who had most artillery.
The day before, a party of rebels on warfare bent had encountered a
stranded load of firewood, which imagination and the uncertain light
turned into a gun loaded to the muzzle with grape or canister. The
sight of it caused them to skip fences, like squirrels, to right
and left, a dispersion which no effort of their officers could
withstand. Now the real thing began to play, and the woods rang to its
reverberations. The fringe of pine trees on the western side of the
road suffered if nothing else did; huge splinters were torn from them
and hurled here and there, as destructive as any missile. The hidden
men were protected by bushes and brush heaps, but the rushing of balls
and crashing of trees made enough uproar to cause death by fright. The
cannon were then moved farther up the roadway, their muzzles directed
to the inn; two round shot, and like bees from a hive the rebels
came pouring out, “flying in all directions into the deep, welcome
recesses of the forest.” Their prisoners, until then kept in the inn,
fortunately had been conducted out by the back door some moments before
and given their liberty. It now became a question to preserve their own.
The right wing of the loyalist force, under command of Colonel S. P.
Jarvis, had meanwhile been moving by by-ways and fields half a mile
eastward, the left, under Colonel Chisholm, Judge McLean and Colonel
O’Hara, moving westward to converge at Montgomery’s.
Young Captain Clarke Gamble, of the latter wing, felt sure his
directions “to proceed until beyond the tavern, wheel to the right
and take it while the column attacked in front,” had been complied
with; he did so turn, and felt his way through several clearings,
examining every building and shelter himself. He reached a grove of
second-growth pine and other wood when the sound of the first gun,
trained on the doomed tavern, greeted him. The company had now reached
the high rail fence which bounded Montgomery’s property on that side,
fencing a field full of stumps, one of them very large. The young
captain climbed the dividing line, calling on his men to follow. They
were in time to see rebels in front and right and left of them running
from the house just struck, some of them stopping to discharge their
rifles at the men so singularly well displayed for their benefit
upon the fence. From three or four between the rails the fire was
returned, but the shots on each side fell harmless. A man then ran
from Yonge Street, and as he passed the large stump, squatted behind
it, took what seemed to be a very deliberate aim at Captain Gamble,
his eyes and a line of forehead all that could be seen between the
stump and the top of his cap. One of Gamble’s company, a coloured man
named Boosie, sprang forward, saying, “Shall I shoot him, captain!”
Without waiting for a reply he did so, reloaded, and called out to a
fellow-soldier, young Gowan, a student-at-law, to bear him out that he
“had shot that rebel.” Judge McLean, hearing shots from his position
nearer the tavern, came up with another company at the double quick,
his heightened colour, flashing eye and cool, erect bearing becoming
him better in his soldier dress than even in his robes of office. “Oh,
Gamble, that’s you, is it? All right,” was all he permitted himself,
and disappeared. Between the time of looking into the barrel of the
rifle pointed at him from behind the stump, and the crack of Boosie’s
musket, which told of a life taken on his account, the seconds seemed
long to the captain. He reformed his company, and on passing the dead
man, Ludwig Wideman, the thrifty Boosie said, “Can I take his rifle,
captain?” took it, and continued his victorious march to the inn with
a gun on each shoulder, the proudest and happiest man, white or black,
in the force--“not even exceeded by Sir Francis himself.” In the centre
of the dead man’s forehead was a pink record of Boosie’s good aim. To
the captain’s surprise he recognized in Wideman a client who had but
lately been in his office and from whom he had parted with a firm shake
of the hand. It is more than likely that when Wideman was taking his
aim he had recognized Captain Gamble, and in the hesitation following
had given the minute which lost him his own life and saved his legal
adviser’s. The proud negro constituted himself his captain’s body-guard
for the rest of that day. “I believe we must leave the killing out when
all is done;” and this, according to Dent, was the “death roll” of
Montgomery’s or Gallows Hill battle.
The full force was too much for the insurgents. The whole affair was
of not more than a half hour’s duration, and after some perfunctory
firing, a number of the “embattled farmers” standing about inactively
and wishing themselves anywhere but at Thermopylæ, the outcome was
confusion to the one side and a well followed-up victory on the other.
The wounded were tenderly picked up and carried off in carts to the
hospital; and Sir Francis, followed by the flower of his army, went in
pursuit of his flying subjects, to give his second word of command.
Before he could do so, Judge Jones, by now as full of “over-zeal” as
FitzGibbon himself, with a comrade who was noted as a splendid officer
and was known as handsome Charlie Heath, was trying to ride in at the
open door of the tavern. MacNab, thinking Jones was some prominent
rebel, promptly gave the word to “shoot me that man.” But some one in
the ranks, not so zealous, cried, “Don’t fire, it’s Judge Jones,” and
so saved the Judge’s life.
Two prisoners were now brought before his Excellency, who sat upon his
horse by the raised platform at the inn door. By his account, they were
arrantly frightened and gazed at the adjacent trees wondering which
ones they might be sent to decorate. But the dramatic Sir Francis was
fond of strong contrasts, he was a masterhand at light and shade.
These two were all that remained of Mackenzie’s army. So, after a
little homily, he pardoned them “in their sovereign’s name.” The
unhappy men nearly fainted, unable at once to take advantage of their
freedom.
The Governor next deemed it expedient to mark by some stern “act of
vengeance the important victory which had been achieved.” He forthwith
took a leaf out of his enemy’s book of tactics, and burned what his
detractors call the “houses of private citizens,” what he calls the
place “long the rendezvous of the disaffected;” the floors of one
“stained with the blood of Colonel Moodie,” “the fortress” from which
Her Majesty’s subjects had been fired upon.
He gave the order to fire the premises. “The heaps of dirty straw on
which he (Mackenzie) and his gang had been sleeping” acted as good
kindling; the furniture of the house, piled with it, soon set fire
to the great structure of timber and planks. The deep black smoke
poured from the windows, and the “long red tongues sometimes darted
horizontally, as if revengefully to consume those who had created
them, then flared high above the roof.” The heat was intense, but
to those “gallant spirits that immediately surrounded it,” seated
on their horses, was a “subject of joy and triumph, and ... a lurid
telegraph which intimated to many an aching heart in Toronto the joyful
intelligence that the yeomen and farmers of Upper Canada had triumphed
over their perfidious enemy ‘responsible government.’” But it was only
scotched.
Sir Francis, by way of balancing aching hearts in Toronto with a few in
the country, now carried the fire-brand farther afield. He commanded
a detachment of forty men to ride up Yonge Street to fire the house
of a farmer who was most objectionable to him. On the way they met
Colonel FitzGibbon, Captain Halkett and others, returning after a
fruitless pursuit of Mackenzie. The order did not please FitzGibbon,
but he was forced to let them pass. Presently, Captain Strachan,
eldest son of the Archdeacon, came in headlong haste to countermand
the order; Sir Francis had had a qualm. It passed; and reining in his
horse, the Governor sent for the Colonel himself, and reissued his
directions. “Already,” writes the latter, “I had seen with displeasure
the smoke arising from the burning of Montgomery’s house, which had
been set on fire after I had advanced in pursuit of Mackenzie, and I
desired to expostulate with his Excellency, but he quickly placed his
right hand on my bridle arm, and said, ‘Hear me. Let Gibson’s house
be burned immediately, and let the militia be kept here until it is
done,’ exactly repeating his order; and then he set spurs to his
horse, and galloped towards town.” “It was now late in the afternoon,”
continues FitzGibbon, “and the house was nearly four miles distant. I
then commanded Lieut.-Colonel Duggan to take command of a party which
I wheeled out of the column and countermarched, and see the house
burned; when he entreated me not to insist on his doing so, for that
he had to pass along Yonge Street almost daily, and he probably would
on some future day be shot from behind a fence. I said, ‘If you will
not obey orders you had better go home, sir.’ Again he spoke, and I
then ordered him to go home; but he continued to express his reasons
for objecting, and I said, ‘Well, I will see the duty done myself,’ and
I did so, for I had no other officer of high rank near me to whom I
could safely entrust the performance of that duty; and with the party
I advanced and had the house and barns burned at sunset.” Mrs. Gibson,
the farmer’s wife, and her four young children, found shelter in the
house of a neighbour, and from there she beheld the soldiers riding
about with her precious poultry and porkers slung across their saddle
bows, the walls of her happy home going up in smoke and flame to the
rosy sunset sky above them, not knowing where her husband was. She was
destined not to see him until she joined him in Rochester, to which
town he, with so many others, escaped.
In his despatch which related his heroism Sir Francis tempered his own
acts with words likely to cast odium, where any might arise, on the
militia. “The militia advanced in pursuit of the rebels about four
miles, till they reached the house of one of the principal ringleaders,
Mr. Gibson; which residence it would have been impossible to save, and
it was consequently burned to the ground.”
Sir Francis would have done better to stand by his acts or to have
had the prudence to recall and destroy all his former writings before
transcribing anew, since by his writings is he most condemned.
Meanwhile, more prisoners had been taken, and he was in time to see and
exhort them, and also to see that proper care was taken of the wounded,
insurgent as well as his own followers. They were placed in carts and
taken to the hospital, and the body of Wideman given to his cousin for
interment. Some of the Loyalists were galloping about, seated behind
the living decorations of their saddle bows, and others bore the flags
taken out of Montgomery’s burning house. One of these, a large red
one, had on one side, “Victoria 1st and Reform,” and on the other,
“Bidwell and the Glorious Minority, 1837 and a Good Beginning.”[3] It
was supposed that this had been intended to take the place of the flag
flying from Government House staff, which was not always the same one,
for the latter was thriftily managed to reverse the proverb and temper
the flag to the wind; large, when it hung motionless in the burning
heat of summer, or was a flag poudré by drifting snows, and reduced to
a British Jack no larger than a lady’s pockethandkerchief when there
was a high blow. There were several others in the rebel group; one
decorated with stars, another with stripes, and yet another of plain
white, which was useless, since Sir Francis had supplied that article
of signal.
Among the men admonished were some as loyal as the soldiers who
arrested them, but the advance guard had assumed that all they met
were rebels, and deprived them of liberty accordingly. One was a youth
named William Macdougall, who, after the manner of boys, left his
uncle’s farm-house, where he happened to be making a visit, so that he
might see whatever was going on. The uncle tried to break through Sir
Francis’ exordium with explanations, but that flow, like Iser running
rapidly, was not easily stopped. Sir Francis was sorry to see such a
respectable youth in such company, and directed uncle and nephew to
return to their allegiance. This drew forth a spirited reply, and the
Governor rode away.
Sir Francis tells of a woman whose screams came from the direction
of the militia, where he quickly sought her. His intended kindness
only hastened the catastrophe. “For some reason or other, probably,
poor thing, because her husband, or brother, or son had just fled with
the rebels, she was in a state of violent excitement, and she was
addressing herself to me, and I was looking her straight in the face
and listening to her with the utmost desire to understand, if possible,
what she was very incoherently complaining of, when all of a sudden she
gave a piercing scream. I saw her mind break, her reason burst, and no
sooner were they thus relieved from the high pressure which had been
giving them such excruciating pain than her countenance relaxed; then,
beaming with frantic delight, her uplifted arms flew round her head,
her feet jumped with joy, and she thus remained dancing before me--a
raving maniac.” He had this sight, and the sinister blessing invoked on
his head by Mrs. Gibson, to further cheer him.
He fought his battle, came home, and by four o’clock published his
proclamation wherein, after giving much information on the definition
of traitor and loyalist and bidding them leave punishment to the law,
he offered a reward of £1000 to anyone who would apprehend and deliver
William Lyon Mackenzie up to justice, and £500 each for Lount, Gibson,
Jesse Lloyd and Silas Fletcher, with a free pardon to the one who
should so deliver his man, provided he had not been guilty of murder or
arson.
If the last should be punished by law, Sir Francis became outlaw by his
own proclamation.
But Mackenzie, leaving behind him his carpet-bag of papers--calculated
to assist in the hanging of many persons--was by that time seeking
safety in flight. The “rolls of revolt,” and certain criminatory
documents found with them, gave the address of every insurgent and
incriminated many persons hitherto unsuspected.
“So unwilling was Mackenzie,” says one eye-witness, “to leave the
field of battle, and so hot the chase after him, that he distanced the
enemy’s horsemen only thirty or forty yards by his superior knowledge
of the country, and reached Colonel Lount and his friends on the
retreat just in time to save his neck.” He not only saved his own
neck, but left behind him a directory in that padlocked carpet-bag to
expedite the search for those whom he had deserted. Small wonder that
many women cursed him as the cause of all their domestic unhappiness.
Standing by the belt of wood occupied by his own men, he heard the
word pass that the day was lost. He ran across a ploughed field,
encountering by the way a friend who inquired how things were going,
and Mackenzie’s blanched face gave a direct denial to his hurried “all
right.” At the side-line where young Macdougall happened to be when
on his way to the seat of war, his footsteps hastened by the sound of
cannonading, a horse stood saddled and bridled, evidently left there
as a precaution for someone. Women and children, terrified enough at
what they saw, more so at what they feared, were hurrying northward,
filling the air with their cries. While Macdougall was trying to
explain away their fears he saw a little man rush down a lane, mount
and ride swiftly away. There was blood on the man’s hand, doubtless
his own from a wound he had given himself on the Friday night, when
trying to extract one of Sheriff Jarvis’ pistol bullets from the toe of
a comrade. He had been so nervous that his shaking hand made him gash
himself, and the cutting out had to be done by Judah Lundy. Probably
the wound in the hand had reopened when he was scrambling over the
intervening fences and bushes.
“Oh, God of my country! they turn now to fly--
Hark, the eagle of Liberty screams in the sky,”
says Mackenzie’s muse in one place, and before this,
“Yes, onward they come, like the mountain’s wild flood,
And the lion’s dark talons are dappled in blood.”
Again he says, “I am proud of my descent from a rebel race, who held
borrowed chieftains, a scrip nobility, rag money and national debt in
abomination.”