dappling in blood to try to get him within their clutches, while
he showed the truth of the third quotation by returning to first
principles and displaying another Highland indication--petticoats.
Earlier in the day a lady on her way through Toronto to Cornwall
had been in the stage when he stopped it to intercept the news of
Duncombe’s rising, and to seize the general contents of the mail-bags.
With a pistol at her head he had possessed himself of her portmanteau,
and in the contents was enabled later to disguise himself. He was
described in Sir Francis’ reward for his apprehension as a “short man,
wears a sandy-coloured wig, has small twinkling eyes that can look no
man in the face....” At the Golden Lion, about ten miles above the
city, he overtook Colonel Anthony Van Egmond, and they agreed to make
at once for the Niagara frontier. But the colonel was taken and only
Mackenzie escaped. In those mail bags he had been made a sorry dupe by
Mr. Isaac Buchanan, who anticipated that they would be so robbed. The
mail contained two decoy letters from him, representing matters in the
beleaguered city in a most flourishing condition, letters which were
read by Mackenzie and no doubt helped to bring about the desired result.
The encouraging terms of the proclamation made many scour the country
at breakneck speed, and it is a marvel that any escape should have
taken place; Mackenzie’s own recital of it sounds like the tale of the
magic ring. The word was given to save themselves, and in a twinkling
the woods were full of the flying and the hiding; the beacon, intended
for loyalist eyes in Toronto as one of victory, told all was lost to
the rebels. The hunting parties did not return empty handed. Many
respectable yeomen, some Reformers but not rebels, others neither of
these, were unceremoniously taken from their farms and work. These
rebels by coercion, and those who had been fugitives, were bound to a
strong central rope and paraded along the highway amid the hootings
and jeerings of the loyal, in all to the number of sixty. To keep them
company there was a party, equally mixed, who arrived in Toronto the
same day from the north, with the five hundred men who reached there
too late for battle. The latter were reinforced by one hundred Indians,
all in paint and native splendour, but burning with as much zeal as any
Briton.
The records of the whole affair show that the disaffected were always
of one colour, while the African and the native were unhesitatingly and
to a man for the Queen.
The last-mentioned party, in their march, could see the flames from
Montgomery’s and thought the city was on fire. They were met by many
flying northward from there, who in a twinkling changed their politics
and their route and returned to town among the guards over those
unhappy ones who had been made look like a string of trout. Powder was
taken from stores; cake-baking and bacon-frying were made the business
of every house passed; they carried the usual medley of gun, pike and
rusty sword; and each man, to distinguish him from his fellow-man who
was prisoner, wore a pink ribbon on his arm.
Naturally, there was renewed sensation when the guards and prisoners
marched to the gaol; sensation greater still when Dr. Morrison and
three others, who were exceptionally important, were added, their
march preceded by a loaded cannon pointed towards them. A concourse
of citizens, anxious to see the whole event, followed. Happily a
farmer, detained in town by the impressment of his horses and waggon
in Government service, and who knew the city well, left the crowd and
reached the northern gate of the market in time to perceive a gunner,
with a lighted portfire in his hand, standing by a cannon which was
loaded with grape. Thinking the approaching crowd was a body of rebels
the gunner was about to apply his light, when the farmer, with great
presence of mind, stopped him. Had the piece been fired more lives
would have been thus sacrificed than were lost during the whole winter.
One of the prisoners was now lying in hospital at the point of death
from a grape-shot wound, and a small detachment under Captain Gamble
was detailed to take a party of other prisoners from the gaol, to be
led before him for recognition. Among them was Colonel Van Egmond. The
dying man lay on his bed propped up with pillows, his mangled shoulder
and arm slightly covered, his ghastly face telling his moments were
numbered. It was night-time, and lights were held at the head and foot
of the bed as his fellows were slowly marched before him. Some he knew,
replied to questions, and mentioned them by name. When Van Egmond’s
turn came, he must have intentionally touched the man’s foot for when
the usual question was put, he said: “Why do you push my foot, Colonel
Van Egmond? I am a dying man; I cannot die with a lie in my mouth. You
were with us, and were to have commanded us at Montgomery’s tavern, but
you did not arrive in time.”
It was a weird scene. The man died that night, and was followed by
the Colonel himself, whose years could not endure the dampness and
many other horrors of his cell, where the temperature was arctic.
Inflammatory rheumatism and a complication of maladies brought him to a
cot in the same hospital, where, with some of his unhappy companions,
he closed his life.
* * * * *
The farce of rebellion, so far as Toronto was concerned, had been
played; but the tragedy was to follow. Of the two men who had pitted
themselves against each other, and who have left page upon page of
their mutual opinions--let there be gall enough in the ink, though
thou write with a goose pen, no matter--one was completely victorious,
one completely vanquished. The progress of the first was attended with
enthusiastic cheers; that of the other by hunger, cold, fatigue, and
by much sympathy, which meant death to those showing it. Christmas Day
of ’37, the year “of one thousand eight hundred and freeze-to-death,”
saw the apostles of the “sacred dogma of equality” of either province,
fugitive; and even Sir Francis himself recorded of the season, “I
cannot deny that the winter of the past year was politically as well
as physically severer than I expected.” “Several times,” he says,
“while my mind was warmly occupied in writing my despatches, I found
my pen full of a lump of stuff that appeared to be honey, but which
proved to be frozen ink.” Sir Francis flatters the Canadian climate.
Beautiful, vivifying, transforming as it is, it had no power to turn
the gall in that compound to honey. He looked upon himself as the
eminent man who makes enemies of all the bad men whose schemes he
would not countenance; others looked upon him as having done more to
alienate those whom he was sent to govern than any other person or set
of persons. “If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or
Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-bred Highland
poverty for substantial Lowland wealth who would dare insult Upper
Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal
character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him Francis Bond Head.”
When Sir Francis first arrived he was informed that his chief duty
was to sit very still in a large scarlet chair and keep his hat on.
The first was easy, but the second was repugnant to his feelings; and
thinking the dignity of the head would lose nothing by being divided
from the hat, he meditated holding the latter between his white gloved
hands. His English attendants agreed with him in this idea of courtesy.
But he quailed beneath the reproof of a wordless stare from a Canadian
who thought this a bid to democracy; “What,” said the look, “what! to
purchase five minutes’ loathsome popularity will you barter one of the
few remaining prerogatives of the British crown?” And so he wore his
hat.
Of deceptive stature, the governor’s presence did not tally with his
militia register. He owed much to a wonderful personal magnetism; old
and young alike loved him--when they did not hate him. Seated in that
chair he is described by an eye-witness on his first appearance in it:
“Although too small to fill it, his shoulders and the poise of his head
did much to counterbalance the lack of nether proportions; his feet,
unable to reach the floor, were not allowed to dangle, but were thrust
out stiffly in front and kept in that position, apparently without
effort, during the opening. One of two Americans, in the space near him
reserved for visitors, plucked his friend’s sleeve. ‘That,’ said he,
‘is a man of determination, and will gain his point.’
“‘Why do you say so,’ said the other. ‘Because no other kind of man
could or would hold his feet like that.’”
The Governor’s opinion of the unaccredited grievance-monger was more
elaborate than the one he gravely records in his “Narrative” as given
of himself--“proclaimed the d--dst liar and the d--dst rascal in the
province.” Condensed, his opinions amount to a never-ending diatribe
against that book bound in boards of five hundred and fifty-three
closely-printed pages, in which it was calculated there were three
times as many falsehoods as pages, penned by one who had been “an
insignificant peddler-lad.” “Afraid to look me in the face, he sat with
his feet not reaching the ground and with his face averted from me at
an angle of about seventy degrees; while with the eccentricity, the
volubility, and indeed the appearance of a madman, the tiny creature
raved in all directions ... but nothing that I could say would induce
the peddler to face his own report.”
Perhaps, after all, there was something in the management of legs which
would not reach the floor.
Yet the aphorism that “Next to victor it is best to be victim” never
had better exemplification.
Autocrats All.
“_It is in me and shall out._”
At about this period of her history Canada threatened to become
that against which Washington had warned his countrymen, a slave to
inveterate antipathies. The mass of the people were violently for
or against each person, cause or abstract question, in turn; and
naturally, the times being critical, weak men went to the wall and
those who were by nature autocrats came to the front, and in their way
did the best of work. Sir John Colborne, St. Eustache notwithstanding,
was the right man in the right place; his severe acts were not
committed either thoughtlessly or wantonly. Each was useful in his
own way as circumstances and a narrow orbit permitted. After Sir John
came Prince, MacNab and Drew. None of them hated in a small, toothy
way; there was nothing of the schemer about any one of them. It was
a word and a blow. And although at one time it seemed as if the most
prominent of them, Prince and MacNab, had given force to the saying
that the man who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy, the
two events in which they figured--as criminals or heroes according
to prejudice--and which nearly caused a great war, were the means of
putting down the rebellion. The _Caroline_, and the prisoners who were
“shot accordingly,” showed that the iron heel could stamp, that the
iron hand was better without the glove.
Following closely upon Gallows Hill came the occupation of Navy Island
and the burning of the _Caroline_.
“What,” asked Canada, “is meant by Neutrality?” and Jonathan, smoothing
the rough edges of his meaning in poesie, replied:
“Excite fresh men t’invade that monarch’s shore,
And fill a loyal country with alarms,
And give them men, with warlike stores and arms,
Encourage brigands and all aid supply;
I guess that’s _strict, downright Neutral-i-ty_!”
At the foot of the terrible three hundred and thirty-four feet of
water-leaps taken in the last thirty-six miles of the river-bed of the
Niagara, lay Navy Island, only a mile and a half above the cauldron,
and within three-quarters of a mile of the worst of the mysterious
strugglings and throes of the rapids. This, with several other small
islands, forms a strait and two channels, and lies within a half-mile
row of the Canadian shore. The Canadian boatman, intrepid as he is,
knows the meaning of that sound, which is ocean at its maddest--a
rolling sea heralding a coming storm that is born in the countless
million tons of clear, deep green water and milk-white bubble, bubble,
toil and trouble, which leap into the appalling confusion below.
Here, on December 13th, was run up the patriot flag, with its twin
stars supposed to represent “the Canadas--two pretty provinces, like
two pretty daughters kept in durance vile by an old and surly father;
they will either soon elope, or be carried off _nolens volens_.”
The Provisional Government, set up on this Juan Fernandez, where
Mackenzie hoped soon to be monarch of all he surveyed, had also its
seal, which showed, besides the twin stars, a new moon breaking through
the surrounding darkness--the Egyptian night of Canadian thraldom--with
the legend, “Liberty--Equality.” Luckily, the third word from their
French model was missing, for they did fall out and scratch and fight
in a way to serve any local Watts with themes. At Gallows Hill nothing
would satisfy Mackenzie but the Governor’s head. So now there was an
issue of money, and a proclamation, the latter offering five hundred
pounds for the apprehension of Sir Francis Bond Head, “so that he may
be dealt with as appertains to justice.” “Would you as it were dethrone
him and bring him to the block,” had queried Rolph some time before,
in his well-known and clever serio-comic supposititious trial of that
dignitary. The commissions issued were embellished with an eagle and
other insignia of patriotism, the eagle lifting a lion in his claws and
evidently about to fly away with him, the legend “Liberty or Death.”
It looked as if the would-be Cromwell, after he had
“Come in with a rout, kicked Parliament out,
Would finish by wearing the Crown.”
His coadjutor from the United States was Rensselaer van Rensselaer.
Together, they were dubbed Tom Thumb and Jack-the-Giant-Killer. Van
Rensselaer, a naturally handsome man, under thirty, looked much older
from dissipation, “A lean and bloated dram-drinker, a spectacle his
nose,” called by his countrymen Rip van Winkle the Second, who spent
his time on Navy Island in the double occupation of drinking brandy,
of which he always had a bottle under his head at night, and writing
love-letters. By his own account he spent his days plodding “four
weary miles through mud and water” round their little republic to
dispose of recruits and to erect defences; was prostrate, haggard and
careworn, and, when about to partake of a much-needed meal, would be
called away to receive a boat-load of visitors and leave it untouched.
By the account of others, he bade fair, like Lord Holland in his
epitaph, to be drowned sitting in his elbow-chair, or properly speaking
camp-stool, for furnishings were meagre on Navy Island. The New York
_Courier and Enquirer_ had the honesty, in the recapitulatory articles
which all border events called out, to say, “It is idle in this matter
to affect concealment of the fact that the present Canadian rebellion
receives its chief impulse and encouragement from the United States.”
No wonder then that a Canadian sheet should say: “Marshals, governors
and generals were on the look-out for patriots; but one such in charge
met a number of the last en route to Navy Island hauling a piece of
ordnance. ‘Where are you bound for?’ said the gentle general. ‘Oh, we
are only going to shoot ducks,’ said they, and they were allowed to
proceed.”
The Attorney-General said that the wording of Marcy’s and other
messages deprecated the invasion of Canada in an “Oh-now-don’t” kind
of appeal, which, read between the lines, meant “Go on like good
fellows--do just as you like.”
“The doors were opened,” writes a patriot, “and the patriots told to
help themselves.” Ten pieces of State artillery were given up on the
strength of the following note, a fine compliment to General Winfield
Scott’s literary reputation--than whom no finer military man in any
service ever stepped:
“BUFFALO HEAD QR., Jan. 18, 1838.
“COL. H. B. RANSOM, Commander-in-chief, Tonawanda.
“Pleas sen on those pieces of Canon which are at your place; let the
same teams come on with them.
“Your in hase,
“W SCOTT Commander in Chief on the
“Frontier of Niagara.”
There was no forgery, for the patriot guard was W. Scott, afterwards,
by the way, a candidate for presidential honours.
New York papers could not see any similarity between the Rebellion and
the Revolution; and as to comparing leaders, “why, it was likening barn
door fowls to soaring eagles.” But in case of the pother ending in war,
a correspondent of the _Toronto Palladium_ says, “There would not be a
house left to smoke, nor a cock to crow day, within ten miles of the
shore on the banks of navigable rivers--and a finger-post might be set
up, ‘Here the United States was.’”
As for volunteers, they were as plentiful as United States arms, and
comprised all sorts and conditions of man and boy. Two thirty-six
pounders, one eighteen-pounder, two thousand stand of arms, one hundred
cannon balls, five hundred musket cartridges, is the enumeration of one
contribution; and only the state of the roads prevents one contributor
setting out with a six-pound brass cannon. An old gun is actually sent
with the message, “If you want cannon we are ready to cast them for
you.” An ex-member of the New York Legislature, with two certified
captains, goes with a letter to Van Rensselaer, to talk over what
measures sentries, presumably of an arsenal, might take to furnish
material without infringing the law; and D. M’Leod writes, “Arms in
abundance can be had for the asking.” Another friend sends blankets
and arms; one old man, a follower of Murat, asks a cavalry commission
for his son, a lad of nineteen, adding pathetically, “I am now old and
poor, but if you will grant my request I will send you my son, the last
descendant of a noble line of warlike commanders of France.”
A blacksmith in Buffalo had an order for nine hundred creepers, other
artisans were busy at daggers and bowie knives, and a Mr. Wilkinson
furnished five hundred pounds of boiler cuttings as a substitute for
grape-shot. Canadians were used to this kind of ammunition. Away back
in 1758 the Highlanders wounded at Carillon had died of cankered wounds
from the broken glass and jagged metal used instead of “honest shot.”
“An empty hand, a stout heart, and a fair knowledge of military
tactics,” blankets, boots and shoes, one hundred and seventeen loaves
of bread, eight tons of grape-shot, two loads of beef, pork, and bread,
together with “some gentlemen well equipped for fight,” one hundred
muskets, four loads of volunteers, swell the original twenty-six men
who accompanied Mackenzie and Van Rensselaer at first, when the frame
of a cannon, upon which Mackenzie had sunk inert and spirit-broken
till aroused by some false alarm, is the only defence mentioned. But,
undaunted, “Push off!” had been the cry of this handful. A proclamation
was issued, drawing attention to the country in front which was
languishing under the blighting influence of military despots,
strangers from Europe; an end forever was promised to the wearisome
prayers, supplications and mockeries attendant upon our connection
with the lordlings of the Colonial office, Downing Street, London; the
time was favourable, owing to the absence of the “hired” red-coats of
Europe; and ten millions of acres of fair and fertile lands were at the
disposal of the Provisional Government, to be divided into portions of
three hundred acres, which, added to one hundred dollars in silver,
would be the reward of those who would bring this glorious struggle to
a conclusion.
“And though slavery’s cloud o’er thy morning hath hung,
The full tide of freedom shall beam round thee yet.”
Besides Van Rensselaer, the aid was announced of Colonel Sutherland
and Colonel Van Egmond. Alas, the latter, a good and true man, who
was worthy of a better fate than the one he earned by meddling in
misunderstood politics of a foreign country, was by then suffering
agonies in Toronto gaol; and Sutherland--as true-bred coward as ever
turned back--was destined for the tender touch of Colonel Prince
a little later. When proposal was subsequently made to exchange
Sutherland for Mackenzie, it drew the following query from an American
paper, “What should they do with him if they had him, and why not
give up Mackenzie to the Canadians in payment for the custody of
Sutherland?” Clearly the possession of Sutherland was a poor boast; he
was a mark for his countrymen’s contempt from the time he paraded the
streets of Buffalo, preceded by a fife and drum, enlisting volunteers,
until he disappears from the scene. The _Buffalonian_, when giving
a detailed account of thefts committed by the patriots, from cannon
to cabbages, says: “The patriot army have also robbed an uncommon
quantity of hen-roosts. In these exploits Brigadier-General Sutherland
is chiefly conspicuous for his gallantry in the attack and skill and
expedition in retreating.”
Robert Gourlay, then at Cleveland, Ohio, wrote his opinion of the
fatuity of this course direct to Van Rensselaer. Several of his letters
are condensed into, “Never was hallucination more blinding than yours.
At a moment of profound peace, putting on armour, and led by the
little editor of a blackguard newspaper, entering the lists of civil
broil, and erecting your standard on Navy Island to defy the armies
of Britain! David before Goliath seemed little, but God was with him.
What are you in the limbo of vanity, with no stay but the devil? Mr.
Hume is a little man, and you less.” He adds, alluding to the famous
letter, “That his four years of residence in the United States had let
him see things far worse than European domination. You call yourself
a patriot, and fly from home to enlist scoundrels for the conquest of
your country. This is patriotism with a vengeance.”
Mackenzie, like Gourlay, had a great aptitude in calculating the
difficulties they were powerful enough to create. But neither of them,
in his own case, counted on possible consequences.
At the finish of his proclamation Mackenzie has a prophecy: “We were
also among the deliverers of our country.” But he further says,
“Militiamen of 1812, will ye rally round the standard of our tyrants?
I can scarce believe it possible.”
Already that standard was floating before his eyes from one of the
tallest pines, and around it were gathered MacNab, Drew, and a host of
others whose own arms or their fathers’ had been borne in 1812,--two
thousand five hundred Canadian farmers, most of them delaying, when
called, for nothing but the clothing in which they now stood. Bayonets
glittered in the sun, and, on horseback as usual, Sir Francis trotted
up and down, reviewing with pardonable pride the troops, white, red,
and black, which had rallied round that flag.
“Canadians, rally round your Head,
Nor to these base insurgents yield,”
had been the cry of a Tory paper.
“I wonder how that rebel crew
Could clap their wings and craw, man,”
says another. But Sir Francis had one discomforting answer to his
appeal for aid against Navy Island. Mr. Absalom Shade, of Galt, replied
that not a few there declined to enter into any such frontier service;
while many in the Paisley Block, though not allying themselves with
Mackenzie, would have seen “Governor and Governor’s party drowned in
the depths of the sea and not a solitary cry of regret for them.”
But Sir Francis had his friends. (_Toast_): Sir Francis Bond Head--the
noble champion of our rights--distinguished alike for every virtue
which constitutes the gentleman and the scholar, whose name adorns a
bright page in the History of Upper Canada. (_Tune_: “Britons Strike
Home”).
* * * * *
Gallows Hill over, the Canadian muse took her lyre in hand and sang,
with a Scotch accent forbye:
“Oh, did ye hear the news of late,
Which through the Province rang, man,
And warned our men to try the game
They played at Waterloo, man.
All destitute of dread or fears,
Militia men and volunteers
Like lightning flew, for to subdue
The rebel loons and crack their croons,
And pook their lugs and a’, man.
Lang life to Queen Victoria,
Our Governor and a’, man!
We’ll rally round Britannia’s flag,
And fecht like Britons a’, man.”