Part 5

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.

At one of these outside meetings emblems, devices and mottoes were even more significant than words. On one flag was a star surrounded by minor stars, a death’s head in the centre, with “Liberty or Death;” another showed “Liberty” surrounded with pikes, swords, muskets and cannon, “by way of relief to the eye.” In another decoration Father Time discarded his scythe and rested his hands in an up-to-date fashion on a cannon. A Liberty Pole one hundred feet high was contemplated in imitation of the Papineau pole; but methods likely to be successful under skilful French management came to naught with the clumsier Anglo-Saxon. Certain it is, no poet had yet arisen from that hot-bed of poesie, treason, though doggerel adorned many flags. The concluding lines in one effort show Pegasus’ attempt to settle into a steadier trot:

“Ireland will sound her harp, and wave Her pure green banner for your right; Canadians never will be slaves-- Up, Sons of Freedom, to the fight!”

But Ireland’s other arm was waving a banner of a different colour. Orangeman followed Liberal with the usual results, fights and many black eyes; horsemen then escorted the organizers of the meetings; and after threats of assassination and guns snapping in the pan, angry cavalcades of hundreds of carriages and mounted men, quiet at the shilelah’s point was in most instances gained. The pretended constitution was announced a humbug, the people living under the worst of despotism. Discontent, vengeance and rage were in men’s hearts.

Two years before this period Mackenzie had visited Quebec, one of a deputation to cement the fellowship existing between Reformers of the two provinces. They found many of their grievances identical, and their oneness in determination to overcome them would, it was hoped, prove to Canadian and English authorities alike that “the tide was setting in with such unmistakable force against bad government that, if they do not yield to it before long, it will shortly overwhelm them in its rapid and onward progress.”

Truly the progress had been rapid and onward. It was now “Hurrah for Papineau” in every Upper Canadian inn where the two hundred meetings held in this year of ’37 might happen to rendezvous. And yet there were some who opined that Mackenzie’s bark was worse than his bite; who, with Lord Gosford and the Provincial Governor, did not apprehend a rebellion. The province was, in the words of its Governor--in his opinion--more tranquil than any part of England; and because there was a demand for Union Jack flags it was argued that if people loved that flag they would willingly die for the oligarchy. To many minds, the Pact was the most untrue and disloyal element in the province; and according to the point of view the sides unfurled these significant bits of red and blue bunting, each man defining to his own satisfaction the meaning of that vexed word loyalty.

The Hon. Peter McGill had said at a loyalist meeting, “... the organization (to repel rebels), that it may combine both moral determination and physical force, must be military as well as political. There must be an army as well as a congress, there must be pikes and rifles as well as men and tongues.” The answer to these wise words, useful to either side as containing solid truth for each, was a miserable attention, an exhibition of incompetence on the rebel side towards that necessary military wing, and on the Governor’s side the answer was the removal of all the troops in the province. The one party was no longer the superior of the other; with the dreadful difference that there was unanimity on the loyalist side, as against jealousies and multiplicity of leadership on the other.

It so happened that in the year ’34, partly in compensation to him for his expulsion from the House of Assembly, Mackenzie had been raised to the dignity of first Mayor of York, and, as in the words of his own rhyme, changed the name to the far better Canadian one of Toronto:

“Come hither, come hither, my little dog Ponto, Let’s trot down and see where Little York’s gone to; For forty big Tories, assembled in junta, Have murdered poor Little York in the City of Toronto.”

Calendars tell us that the pillory was abolished in ’37. When reading the life of Mackenzie one would imagine the statement a mistake, so popular did pillory methods seem. So far as unmerited obloquy, misrepresentation at home and abroad from those who pretended to despise and at heart feared him, personal insult, outrage, hard words, kicks from men who made up in inches what they lacked in justice, could constitute a pillory, Mackenzie had for years stood in it metaphorically, the old conditions being carried out faithfully, since practically it had been a punishment thought meet for authors and publishers of seditious pamphlets. A wise man has said: “Whereas before, our fathers had no other books but the score and tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper mill.” In certain cases, too, the persecution was unpopular, and the intended disgrace became a species of triumph. A public pillory and stocks were still part of the actual machinery of government in Little York, and unfortunately for his own good name Mackenzie celebrated Toronto’s first year by using the stocks and otherwise conducting himself in a way mortifying to his friends, most satisfactory to his enemies, and calculated to still further alienate those members of the Reform party to whom he seems to have been personally objectionable even when his mistakes of judgment did not run the length of seditious writing or putting women in the stocks.

But extraordinary acts and extraordinary words were not confined to Canada. It was reserved for a member of Parliament, a British statesman, to pen words the repetition of which alone was sufficient to overturn the feelings of the majority of the thinking and well-intentioned portion of the colony. Never did Tory press or Tory lips tire of abusing saddle-bag doctors and saddle-bag ministers as the purveyors of treason, the latter, in guise of Methodist preacher, supposed to scatter seeds of faith and sedition with the same hand. Strangely enough, Dr. Ryerson, the most prominent Methodist in the country, was Tory enough to provoke the wrath of the radical Mr. Hume. In a letter to Mackenzie, so abusive that all must wonder a gentleman could write it, Hume made the clergyman an object of abuse in words which stamped the receiver as well as the writer everything their most ardent enemies desired and believed them to be.

That letter did more for Loyalism in Upper Canada than the concentrated action of Governor, oligarchy, and Tory press could ever do to hurt it. Mackenzie, to work off a private spleen of his own against Dr. Ryerson, published the obnoxious document without comment. Vain was it for its author to hasten to say “that the misrule of the Government of Canada, and the monopolizing, selfish domination of such men as had lately (though but a small faction of the people) resisted all improvement and reform, would lose the countenance of the authorities in Downing Street, and leave the people in freedom to manage their own affairs.” The mischief was done. On the one hand, many of the most reputable of that body through which amelioration of condition might be hoped to come were forever divorced from a party that could voice such sentiments; and on the other, it placed a weapon ready to the hand of those men who, the incarnation of Toryism, honestly believed themselves to be the only conservers of loyalty left. By noon of that day, in May, ’34, when the “copious extracts” were published by Mackenzie, he and the writer of them were execrated by many who, an hour before that electrical sheet was issued, had been friends or silent sympathisers.

The whole country was under baneful domination; but not of the mother-land. Great provocations had brought just condemnations, and the match was about to be put to the torch. The rights of the people and the prerogative of the Crown bade fair to become parallel lines that could not meet. Some still believed in a brighter future; but the few streaks of light which they declared they could discern in that darkest hour before dawn were blood-red. Day was to be ushered in with much woe, although more than one writer has been found to call Rebellion “a magniloquent word” as applied to all the unsettled humours of the land in that episode of Canadian history.

Had Shakespeare, born to still further glory, tarried till Canadian times, he might have added a syllable or so when he wrote “The devil knew what he did when he made men politic.” But then, a contemporary diary of his time tells us: “I have heard it stated that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, but had not any art at all;” and he would have needed both to do justice to the Canadian question.

That which was called “the almost romantically loyal Canadian population” had diverse ways of showing loyal enthusiasm, when (to quote Mackenzie in after years), a “person known as Victoria, the sovereign of England and the Canadas,” came “to keep up the dignity of that article called a crown.” _Te Deums_ were sung in the French cathedrals, it is true, but many in the congregations rose and walked out. But at the coronation illuminations in Toronto, although one transparency quoted the words of the late king, “The Canadas must not be lost or given away,” another came as rider to it, “The Constitution, the whole Constitution, and nothing but the Constitution.” For many in Upper Canada were as dissatisfied with the portions of that system imported by Governor Simcoe as their French brethren were. Here as there the broad basis of it, the Will of the People, was a dead letter.

Happily for Toronto on that occasion it had that British characteristic which, however Tory might abuse Whig, or Reformer predict the ruin of everything Tory, made all men unite--for the day at least--in fealty to the young Queen, and, more wonderful still, in good-will towards one another. Elsewhere there were forecasts of petticoat government, when “the speech from the throne would dwell chiefly on embroideries, nurseries and soap.” How were they to know that the slim and beautiful young fingers which held the sceptre were strong, tenacious, and of an even touch, or that the girlish form held a mother heart large enough and to spare for her own and every bairn within her realm.

So did the shuttles angrily fly to and fro in the warp and woof of coming catastrophe in the year when Her Majesty came into her inheritance of discontent.

The Canadas at Westminster.

“_I put not my faith in Princes, for that would be forgetting the rules of Holy Writ; but, begging your pardon, I still put my faith in Peers._”

“‘_I am glad I am not the eldest son,’ said the younger Pitt when he heard of his father’s elevation to an earldom; ‘I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa._’”

“_A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, were among the ruling principles of our forefathers._”

The man who wrote the letter calculated to create trouble and promote that already begun was quite a personage in the Radical wing of the House of Commons. A Scotchman from Montrose, born in 1777, he was son of a captain of a trading vessel; the father’s early death left this Joseph and numerous brothers and sisters to the care of a mother who was a woman of extraordinary perseverance and energy. She kept a small stand on market-day in Montrose, and Fox Maule, afterwards Lord Panmure, seeing young Joseph there, was seized with the whim to apprentice him to a druggist. A subsequent apprenticeship to surgery and a voyage to India led to his study there of the native dialects, a knowledge of which he made such good use that in the war with the Mahrattas he became interpreter, an office of emolument and honour. He returned to Britain at the peace of 1807, and began a tour there so minute and exhaustive that he visited every manufacturing town. He then went as thoroughly through Southern Europe, and with his head thus equipped entered the House as Tory member for the borough of Weymouth in 1812, calculated to make a figure there and carry much weight through native ability and wide experience. Once more he tried his rôle of interpreter between those who could not or would not understand each other. His opponents found it impossible to tire or baffle him; repulses were thrown away on him, and he returned to the charge, unconscious, ready to repeat a hundredth time that which they had declared unreasonable.

“What manner of man is Joseph Hume?” asks _The Noctes_. “Did you never see him?” says North. “He is a shrewd-looking fellow enough, but most decidedly vulgar. Nobody that sees him could ever for a moment suspect him of being a gentleman born. He has the air of a Montrose dandy at this moment, and there is an intolerable affectation about the creature. I suppose he must have sunk quite into the dirt since Croker curried him.” “I don’t believe anything can make an impression on him. A gentleman’s whip would not be felt through the beaver of a coal-heaver.” He was, in fact, short, broad, stiff, square and copperfaced. He exhibited the uncouthness of the Scot in relief, and his speech, in all the worst of the Scotch brogue, “barbarous exceedingly,” baffled description. “Depend upon it, Joseph will go on just as he has been doing.” And he had been going on from his place as Radical member for Montrose. Added to all, he was a master of detail. In spite of his earnestness, he often convulsed the House with his Scotch bulls when he intended most to impress. Expatiating on the virtues of the French-Canadians, he exclaimed, “I say, sir, they are the best and gentlest race in Europe (laughter), aye”--waxing hotter--“or in Africa” (roars of laughter). Sir Francis Bond Head did not scruple to say that Hume was the greatest rebel of the lot, and, in his turn, Hume made a furious attack on Sir Francis. However, he was just as vigorously answered by Lord Grey, and then the morning papers said “that Hume had not been able to make Head.” Politics were so bitter then that all Reformers were rebels. Hume’s letter of March 29th, 1834, in which he says, “_Your_ cause is _their_ cause, _your_ defeat would be _their_ subjection. Go on, therefore, I beseech you, and success, glorious success, must inevitably crown your joint efforts,” sounds as if Sir Francis might have had reason for his opinion. By 1839 a public dinner had been given this erstwhile Tory, in testimony of his eminent public services and constant advocacy in the cause of reform. Says North, “Why, a small matter will make a man who has once ratted rat again. We all remember what Joe Hume was a few years ago!”

“A Tory?”

“I would not prostitute the name so far, but he always voted with them.”

“At the Whigs it was then his chief pleasure to rail, He opposed all the Catholic claims tooth and nail....”

“Why, no wonder ... he hates the Tories. They never thought of him while he was with them, and now the Whigs do talk of Joe as if he were somebody. But, as _John Bull_ says,

“‘A very small man with the Tories Is a very great man ’mong the Whigs.’”

It was a time of general unrest and suspicion, just from the likelihood of change and the alarming precedents set up. No two men could be seen anywhere in the same neighbourhood without arousing ideas of coalition, hope, suspicion and a host of feelings--as, for instance, when “Mr. Roebuck was seen in a quarter which left little doubt that he had been with Lord Brougham. It is very generally thought that something is about to happen.” Mr. Roebuck, like Mr. Hume, was a marked man and an out-and-out Canadian sympathiser. He, according to a well-known and accredited newspaper, “was paid by the Lower Canadian House of Assembly to expatiate on grievances, and to declare at all times and in all places to those who have no personal acquaintance with the Canadas that the people there are _restless, dissatisfied, yearning for republican institutions, and that unless the never-ending, still-beginning concessions they require are granted, another American war must be the result_.” The effect of his words was weakened by his appearance, which was that of a boy of eighteen. “If we do not immediately take active measures,” was Sir John Colborne’s antiphon from across the sea, “to arm and organize our friends, the province (Lower Canada) will be lost to us.”

He did organize--“Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.” “Very likely,” came the answer, “’tis in our power, then, to be hanged and scorn ye.”