Read Ebook: Humours of '37 Grave Gay and Grim: Rebellion Times in the Canadas by Lizars Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars Robina

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 624 lines and 114902 words, and 13 pages

Although Murray said the ignorance of the French-Canadian and his devotion to his priest ran together, and that the veneration was in proportion to the ignorance, he has to say also that, with the exception of nineteen Protestant families and a few half-pay officers, most of the British population were traders, followers of the army, men of mean education. All had their fortunes to make: "I fear few are solicitous about the means when the end can be obtained.... The most immoral collection of men I ever knew, of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion and customs, and far less adapted to enforce these laws which are to govern."

Canadians were then a frugal, industrious, moral set of men, noblesse and peasantry alike, knit to each other by ties made in the time of common danger; the former as much contemned by Murray's compatriots for their superior birth and behaviour as the latter were by him for their ignorance. In his despatch to the king's advisers he is particularly hard on the judge and attorney-general, neither of whom knew the French language,--nor, indeed, did any of the men to whom offices of greatest trust were bestowed by the sub-letting of posts whose property they became through favour. In a word, a more worthless set of officials could not be gathered together than that which carried out the beginning of British rule in Lower Canada. Haphazard circumstance placed them where they were, and they scrupled not to make themselves paramount.

This oligarchy, made up "of the driftwood of the army and manned by buccaneers of the law, knew how to seize occasion and circumstance;" and the governors, "fascinated by these official anacondas, fell into their folds and became their prey, were their puppets and servants, and made ministers of them instead of ministering to them."

Papineau contended that when all the people in any country unanimously repudiate a bad law it is thereby abrogated. To which sentiment Mr. Stuart responded, "This is rebellion." Unfortunately, with many high in office, some governors included, any measure of opposition meant rebellion, and, like Mr. Stuart, they did not hesitate to say so.

Papineau, and those whom he represented, looked upon the British Government as a m?lange of old usages, old charters, old fictions, and prejudices old and new, new and old corruptions, the right of the privileged few to govern the mass. The boasted "image and transcript" in Canada was called by them a veritable Jack-'o-lantern, a chameleon that assumed colour as required.

In Papineau's interview with Lord Bathurst some years before rebellion, that nobleman, after allowing that difficulties existed, blaming remoteness from England and nearness to the United States as aggravating circumstances, asked for only twenty-five years of patriotic resignation to what he considered a hard but, under the circumstances, natural state of things. But Papineau's Utopia differed from Lord Bathurst's; and he told him so.

It was now that it came to be acknowledged there was something more powerful than Parliament, governor, or priest. That was opinion after it had spoken in print. On being asked how much treason a man might write and not be in danger of criminal prosecution, Horne Tooke replied: "I don't know, but I am trying to find out." Where anything belonging to Majesty, even so remotely as an article in the military stores, was irreverently treated, the article in question became of importance through the importance of its royal owner, and treason could lurk in a misused garment.

"For grosser wickedness and sin, As robbery, murder, drinking gin,"

the penalties were then heavy indeed; but the nature of treason, according to the Common Law of England, is vague, and judges were sometimes put to rare shifts to find it. Evidently it did not always dwell in the heart alone, but on occasion could be found by a diligent judge considerably below that organ. A tailor, tried for the murder of a soldier, had the following peroration tacked on to his death sentence by a judge who was loyal enough to have been a Canadian:

"And not only did you murder him, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propel the lethal weapon through the belly-band of his breeches, which were His Majesty's!"

"To slay a judge under specified circumstances" was also a count in treason, and this knight of the bodkin doubtless longed to thrust his tool into his wordy antagonist. But as a phrenologist has told us, the judge could best illustrate his bump of veneration by the feeling with which Tories of the old school regarded their sovereign. In Canada a man had not to show sedition in order to be suspended; for there was a law to banish him if he were "about to endeavour to alienate the minds of His Majesty's subjects ... from his person or Government." She foreshadowed the methods of the Mikado; when it was desired to punish a man "a crime was invented to suit his case"--an inversion of the punishment fitting the crime. Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in passing two bills lessening the list of crimes punished by hanging; but Lord Eldon demurred at the noose being done away with in case of five shillings worth of shoplifting, as the small tradesmen would be ruined. Then, why not quartering and other horrors for treason?

In '37, when three of the members had become judges, Perrault made his pun by saying, "I have often predicted that I should see some of you hanged ; there are now three of you suspended , which is nearly the same thing." Those who were partners in guilt in the writings of this "seditious paper" were sent to gaol, and we learn that the article which gave chief offence was one entitled "Take hold of your nose by the tip." Maladministration was evidently malodorous. Such proceedings naturally caused excitement, and the fears of those in power made them redouble the city guards and patrols.

Early in the century Judge Sewell had got into trouble. He was accused of usurping parliamentary authority, by undue influence persuading the Governor to dissolve the House and also to address the members in an insulting manner; and later there were the Bedards' affairs. Judge Monk was also accused. Judge Sewell went to London to defend himself, which he did to such good purpose, backed by the influence of Prince Edward, that he gained the ear and confidence of Lord Bathurst. His explanations were accepted, and fresh favours were in store for him from the incoming Governor Sherbrooke.

Although "each new muddler" blamed his predecessor for his own misgovernment, the tasks falling to the Governors were not easy. Under Kempt came up the question of giving legal status to Jews and Methodists, the question regarding the former going back some twenty years, when, under the administration of "little king Craig," there was endless trouble over Mr. Ezekiel Hart's presence in the House. Expelled and returned alternately, Hart was doubly obnoxious as a Jew and an Englishman. Methodism had an equally hard time since the First Gentleman in Europe had said that that faith was not the faith of a gentleman. The characteristics of the personnel of the House of Assembly in the years of the century prior to the Rebellion could doubtless fill volumes of humours. Most of the members from the Lower St. Lawrence arrived in schooners, sometimes remaining in them as boarders; or they put up at some Lower Town hostelry, content with their cowpacks and scorning Day & Martin. The members from down the Gulf were sure to be of the right political stripe, from a clerical point of view, or their constituents stood a chance of being "locked out of heaven." One head of a house who dared to be a Liberal in those illiberal times, an educated man, and likely to have possessed weight in character as well as by his appointments in his native village, so locked himself out. His child of seven came home from school in tears one day, and after much coaxing to disburden his woe confided to his mother that in seven years his father, a parent much-beloved, would be a loup-garou. The end of this persecution was a removal over the border.

But there were not many who had the courage of their convictions in the face of the Church's No--they were all too good Catholics then. Stories of their religious life provide material for a picture whose beauty cannot be surpassed. A niche was hollowed in a wall of most Canadian homes to hold a figure of the "Blessed Lord," or His equally dear Mother; and it is recorded of one of the first of Canadian gentlemen of his time that he never passed a wayside cross without baring his head, saying once in explanation, "One should always bare the head before the sign of our redemption and perform an act of penitence." The humbler sort began no dangerous work, such as roofing, without a prayer. With heads uncovered, the workers knelt down, while some one of the oldest of the company recited the prayer to which all made response and Amen. Nor was thanksgiving omitted when the harvest firstfruits were sold at the door of the parish church. Close by the housewife's bedhead hung her chaplet, black temperance cross and bottle of holy water; from the last the floor was sprinkled before every thunderstorm. And nothing was done by natural agency. Even the old, worn-out cur?, who met death by the bursting of the powder-magazine on board the ship in which he was returning to France, was "blown into heaven."

But once the primitive ones left their village they were much at sea, and we have a member for Berthier, whom we shall credit as being both pious and Tory, arriving in Quebec with his wife one winter's evening in his traineau. They drew up at the parliamentary buildings and surveyed the four-and-twenty windows above them, wondering which one would fall to their lot for the season. They descended, boxes and bundles after them, rapped at the door and presented their compliments to the grinning messenger. "He was the member for Berthier, and this was Madame his wife;" they had brought their winter's provisions with them, and all in life needed to allow him to pursue his work of serving his country as a statesman was a cooking stove, which he looked to a paternal government to supply. When told that not one of the four-and-twenty windows belonged to him, and that family accommodation did not enter into the estimates, the member from Berthier stowed his wife and bundles back in the traineau, gave his steed a smart cut, and indignantly and forever turned his back upon the Legislative walls of his province.

What did he not miss? Within them Papineau was making rounded periods, holding men entranced by his eloquence; Andrew Stuart was defending British rights; yet another Stuart thundered against the tyranny of the oligarchy, the privileged few; and Nielson and other discreet Liberals sought to steer a middle course of justice without rebellion. No wonder that from this concert discords met the ears of the audiences without.

Peculiarities and eccentricities were not confined to the rural populace and members of Parliament. "Go on board, my men, go on board without fear," was a magistrate's dismissal to two evil-faced tars who had deserted their ship at sailing time because they thought her unseaworthy; "I tell you you are born to be hanged, so therefore you cannot be drowned."

At the beginning of the century it was only occasionally that foreign news reached Canada. With time postal matters improved; but news was still only occasional. At the advent of a vessel at Father Point the primitive telegraph of the yard and balls was used, and at night fires were lighted to carry the tidings from cape to cape. The means of intercommunication depended upon the size of the post-bag, the fidelity of the carrier, and on the state of the storm-strewn paths or trackless wastes which had to be crossed. The bag for Gasp? and Baie des Chaleurs was made up once in a winter and sent to Quebec, dark leather with heavy clasps and strapped on an Indian's back. The man travelled on snowshoes, and when tired would transfer his load to the sled drawn by his faithful Indian dog. There were others whose mode of transit was much the same, but whose beats were shorter and trips more frequent. "Do not forget," would say a certain old Seigneur, "to have Seguin's supper prepared for him." Seguin was postman for that large country-side, and generally arrived during the night at the manor house. The doors, under early Canadian habit, were unlatched; Seguin would quietly enter, sit down, take his supper, and produce from his pockets the letters and papers which made the Seigneur's mail, leave them on the table, then as quietly let himself out into the night again, to pursue his journey to the next point. Such latitude in trust was possible in a country where law in its beginning was a matter of personal administration aided by keep, and four-post gibbet whose iron collar might bear the family arms.

With news so transmitted and the bulk of the population unable to read or write, and with only the comparatively wealthy and the adventurous able or willing to travel, it is not surprising that "the focus of sedition, that asylum for all the demagogic turbulence of the province," the Assembly rooms at Quebec, had not succeeded in disseminating their beliefs and hopes among the most rural of the population. One thing which made remote villages loath to be disturbed was that they had more than once seen noisy demagogues and blatant liberators side with the alien powers when opportunity for self-aggrandizement came. Also, in many cases their isolated lot precluded feeling governmental pressure. But in the county of Two Mountains, at St. Denis, St. Charles, and also at Berthier, they were alert enough, and the most stirring pages in the coming revolt were to be written in blood in these localities. There secret associations flourished; open resistance only waited opportunity. There the Sons of Liberty drilled and wrote themselves into fervour, with pikes made by local blacksmiths and manifestoes founded on French and Irish models for outward tokens of the inward faith: "The diabolical policy of England towards her Canadian subjects, like to her policy towards Ireland, forever staining her bloody escutcheon." The history of "my own, my native land," inspires all words written from this point of view; one patriot, "plethoric with rhethoric," had many fine lines, such as "the torch, the sword, and the savage," and pages devoted to the "tyrannical government of palace pets."

Away back in 1807 many militia officers of fluctuating loyalty had been dismissed, and the precedent established by Governor Craig was continued. Papineau was one of these officers; he had made an insolent reply--"The pretension of the Governor to interrogate me respecting my conduct at St. Laurent is an impertinence which I repel with contempt and silence"--to the Governor's secretary, and had to suffer for it. The political compact called the Confederation of the Six Counties was governed by some of those so dismissed, and they all grew still more enthusiastic from the sight of such banner legends as "Papineau and the Elective System," "Our Friends of Upper Canada," "Independence." The Legislative Council was pictorially represented by a skull and cross bones, and the declaration of the rights of man was voiced.

In addition to present troubles there was a perpetual harking back at 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 co?te" 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.

--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 .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 , 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.

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 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.

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.

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 ?me au bout d'un piquet" , 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 Dor?, 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.

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," 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 , 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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet