HUMOURS OF ’37
GRAVE, GAY AND GRIM

REBELLION TIMES IN THE CANADAS.

BY
ROBINA AND KATHLEEN MACFARLANE LIZARS,
Authors of “In the Days of the Canada Company: the Story of the
Settlement of the Huron Tract.”

“The humours are commonly the most important and most
variable parts of the animal body.”

TORONTO:
WILLIAM BRIGGS,
Wesley Buildings.

1

Entered, according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven, by Kathleen MacFarlane Lizars, at the Department of Agriculture. 2

PREFACE.

The title of this book is built upon the assumption that humour is a sense of incongruity, not that there was anything specially humorous in the affairs of ’37 beyond that which arose from the crudeness of the times.

A medium between the sacrifice of detail attendant on compilation, and the loss of effect in a whole picture through too close application of the historic microscope, has been attempted. True proportion is difficult to compass at short range, yet the motives, ideas and occurrences which produced the animosities leading to the Rebellion were the inheritance, the special property, of the men who lived then; and of them few remain. To those who do and who have so kindly given their reminiscences special thanks are due. The works of the documentary and the philosophic historian lie on the shelves ready to one’s hand; but those who were “Loyalist” and “Rebel” are quickly dropping into that silence where suffering and injustice, defeat and victory, meet in common oblivion.

Like lichens on rocks, myths have grown about that time; but the myth is worth preserving for the sake of the germ of truth which gave it birth. Historians sometimes tell the truth, not always the whole truth, certainly never anything but the truth, and nothing is to be despised which gives a peep at the life as it really was. For complexion of the times, the local colour of its action, there can be nothing like the tale of the veteran, of the white-haired, dim-eyed survivor, whose quaking voice tells out the story of that eventful day. A page from Pepys or Bellasys lifts a curtain upon what really took place when the historic essence fails; then some morsels of secret 3 history come to light, and motives and actions hitherto puzzling stand revealed.

Were all contributed sentences herein to have their rights in inverted commas the publisher’s stock would be exhausted. The prejudice in favour of Italics has not been observed in certain cases. “A bas les prejudices;” in Canada French is not a foreign language.

It is also assumed that every Canadian is familiar with Canadian history, and that some one or other of its masters is well fixed in school memories. To those masters, and to many others, an apology is tendered for wholesale appropriation of their matter. If every statement made herein were substantiated by the customary foot-note many unsightly pages would be the result; therefore, as no statement has been made without due authority, we commend our readers to the writings of Parkman, Garneau, Dent, McMullen, McCarthy, Macaulay, Michelet, DeGaspé, LeMoine, David, Morgan, Carrier, Bonnycastle, F. B. Head, George Head, Macgregor, Bender, Lindsay, Rattray, Scadding, Thompson and others; to the writings and biographies of the statesmen and governors quoted; to Governmental Journals and House of Commons Debates; for the record of events as they daily took place to innumerable manuscripts, pamphlets and newspapers, written or published between Sarnia and Quebec and in many American cities, covering in particular the years ’36, ’37, ’38, ’39, ’40; and to various sources where Canada is treated as a side issue and not as a main point. Theller and McLeod have been used where the corroborative testimony of others warrants a transcription of their humours.

“Whether an eagle or ant in the intellectual world seems to me not to matter much,” says Joubert. The work of the humble ant is to gather fragments, and, as the humblest in the tribe, the collectors of the data from which this mélange has risen offer it to the public, and as humbly hope they have come within the same writer’s further observation: “A small talent, if it keeps within its limits and rightly fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well as a great one.”

Stratford, October, 1897. 4

Several score of authorities, known or comparatively unknown, have been drawn on in the compilation of Gallows Hill. Bill Johnston and Colonel Prince, as they appear here, are derived from twenty-one and twenty-six authorities respectively. Therefore when the hundredth, and the twenty-second, and the twenty-seventh, shall arise to contradict, or disagree with, each and every word herein, the authors beg to be allowed to see nothing but a humour in the situation. 5

NEW WORDS TO AN OLD SONG;
OR, JOHN GILPIN TRAVESTIED.

[We are indebted to Miss FitzGibbon for a copy of the Cobourg Star of February 7th, 1838, in which appears, under the above title, an epitome, from one point of view, of Rebellion events. Its humours make it a fitting introduction for the papers which follow.]

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CONTENTS.

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HUMOURS OF ’37.

Baneful Domination.

“Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.”

The vivacious Pompadour enlivens the twenty years of her boudoir conspiracies playing les graces with her lord’s colonies. She throws the ring; Pitt, at the other end of the game, catches Canada.

The mills of the gods in their slow grind have reversed the conditions of the contestants; the Norman conquest of England becomes a British conquest of New France. The descendants of the twenty thousand barbarians who landed at Hastings have but come to claim their own.

Life is “moving music.” The third movement in this historic sonata comes back to the original subject, even if the return to the tonic opens in a minor mode.

“Gentlemen, I commend to your keeping the honour of France,” says the dying Montcalm.

“Now, God be praised, I die in peace!” and Wolfe expires.

The fiercest of the conflict ever rages round a bit of bunting on the end of a stick. The lilies of France come down; up goes the Union Jack to usher in the birthday of 14 the Greater Britain, and Horace Walpole says, “We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one.”

Voltaire gives a fête at Fernay to celebrate the deliverance from fifteen hundred leagues of frozen country; the Pompadour tells her Louis that now he may sleep in peace; and outsiders ask of Pitt that which a celebrated novelist, a century later, asks of his hero—“What will he do with it?” “The more a man is versed in business,” said the experienced Pitt, “the more he finds the hand of Providence everywhere.”

But Providence would need to have broad shoulders if generals, kings and statesmen are to place all their doings there.

By 1837 Canada was no longer a giant in its cradle. Colonial boyhood had arrived; a most obstreperous and well-nigh unmanageable youth, with many of the usual mistakes of alternate harshness and indulgence from the parent. For it was not all wisdom that came from Downing Street, either in despatches or in the gubernatorial flesh. It is easy now to see that much emanating therefrom came from those whose vision was confined to the limits of a small island.

The great lubberly youth was given to measuring himself from time to time; for Canadian epochs are much like the marks made by ambitious children on the door jamb, marks to show increase in height and a nearer approach to the stature of the parent.

Canadians’ privileges, like children’s, existed only during the good pleasure of those who governed them. Some meant well and did foolishly; others were “somewhat whimsical, fond of military pomp, accustomed to address 15 deputations, parliamentary or others, as if they had been so many recruits liable to the quickening influence of the cat-o’-nine-tails.” One peer in the House of Lords, during a debate on the vexed Canadian question, demurred at the members of Colonial Assemblies being treated like froward children, forever tied to the Executive leading-strings. Canada was, in fact, bound to the Mother Country by bonds of red tape and nothing else. “Who made you?” catechized Great Britain. In the words of Mr. Henry Labouchere’s precocious young catechumen: “Let bygones be bygones; I intend to make myself,” replied the colony.

The problem of assimilation created by the influx of all nations, and the fact of two divisions, a conquering and a conquered, with languages, customs and creeds as diverse as the peoples, made up an enigma the solution of which still occupies French and English wits alike.

The English and the French temperaments, each the antipodes of the other, called for mutual patience and forbearance. But historic truth compels many admissions: first, that British rule with British freedom left out made a dark period from the Conquest to the Rebellion; second, that the national, religious and intellectual ideas of the French-Canadians, their whole mental attitude, were dominated by the Quebec Act; and the motto given them by Etienne Parent, “Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois,” had become a kind of fetich. They looked upon themselves as the agents of their mother country and the Church in the New World; and they argued did they give up these laws, institutions and language, and become Anglicized, their nationality would be forever lost.

The toast among officers en route to the Conquest had been, “British colours on every fort, port and garrison in America.” For many years after the British flag had first 16 waved on the citadel the habitant on the plain lifted his eyes to where he had seen the lilies of France, and with heavy heart said to himself that which has become an historic saying, “Still we shall see the old folks back again”—words as pathetic in their hope as the Highlanders’ despairing “We return no more, no more.”

It is doubtful if at this period the old folks bothered themselves much about their late colony. Like their own proverb, “In love there is always one who kisses and one who holds the cheek,” French Canada was expending a good deal of sentiment upon people who had forgotten that tucked away in a remote corner of the new world was “a relic preserved in ice,” a relic of France before the Revolution, its capital the farthermost point of manner and civilization, a town with an Indian sounding name, which yet bore upon its front the impress of nobility. For Quebec is and should be the central point of interest for all Canadians; the history of the old rock city for many a day was in effect the history of Canada. History speaks from every stone in its ruined walls—walls that have sustained five sieges.

The Revolution did not create the same excited interest in Canada that might have been looked for, yet there were those who “wept bitterly” when they heard of the execution of the King. The patois, ignorance, superstition, devotion of its inhabitants, were identical with a time prior to the Revolution; and with them were the same social ideas and the same piety.

But the power divided in France among king, nobles, and priest, in Canada was confined to priest alone; and when the dream of a republic was dreamt it was the priest and not the British soldier who made the awakening. The British soldier and those who sent him seem to have been 17 not a whit better informed about the colony gained than France was about the colony lost. Some London journalists were not sure whether Canada formed part of the Cape of Good Hope or of the Argentine Republic. For a long time the English Government annually sent a flagpole for the citadel, probably grown in a Canadian forest. Nor did time improve their knowledge, for as late as the Trent affair one statesman in the House of Commons informed his more ignorant brethren that Canada was separated from the United States by the Straits of Panama.

The acts of Regicide France inspired horror in Canada, yet were not without their fruits. Despite his title of the “Corsican ogre” and their horror of revolution, the submission of all Europe to Napoleon did not make the French of Canadian birth more submissive. Nor did the nation of shop-keepers, whom he despised and who were to cut his ambition and send him to his island prison, become more plausible, courteous or conciliatory, through their sense of victory. Many a thing, had the positions been reversed, which would have been passed unnoticed by a phlegmatic Briton, was to the Gallican a national insult.

And LeMoine, that past grand master of the Franco-Anglo-Canadian complexion, says all too truthfully that conciliation was not a vice-regal virtue; and one of the singers of the day, a Briton of the Britons, confirms the opinion:

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But, under its fossil simplicity, Quebec, the “relic preserved in ice,” untrue to its formation, burned with a fearsome heat and glow in the years ’37-’38, and those prior to them. The thoughtless words of such birds of passage as commandants and governors were not calculated to put out the fire. The very origin of the name Jean Baptiste, applied generically, arose from a Jean Baptiste answering to every second name or so of a roll called in 1812, when he turned out in force to defend the British flag. Getting tired of the monotony of them, said the officer in his cheerful English way: “D—— them, they are all Jean Baptistes.” And so the name stuck. General Murray, outraged at any gold and scarlet apart from his own soldiers, lost all patience at the sight of French officers in the streets of Quebec. “One cannot tell the conquering from the conquered when one sees these —— Frenchmen walking about with their uniforms and their swords.”1

But the French-Canadians did not struggle against individuals except as they represented a system considered vicious. With the British Constitution Jean Baptiste was a veritable Oliver Twist. He was not satisfied with the morsels doled out, but ever asked for more.

True, there were many—at any rate, some—of the higher class French whose horizon was not bounded by petty feelings regarding race and religion. These men accepted 19 British rule as one of the fortunes of war and enjoyed its benefits. An old seigneur, when dying, counselled his grandson, “Serve your English sovereign with as much zeal and devotion and loyalty as I have served the French monarch, and receive my last blessing.” And that king in whose reign insurrection was on the eve of breaking—irreverently called “Hooked-Nose Old Glorious Billy”—strangely enough had great sympathy with French-Canadian feeling, a sympathy which did much to hearten the minority who counselled abiding by the fortunes of war. But “Old Glorious” was also called the “People’s Friend,” and the Quebecers had lively and pleasant memories of him.

In the nine years preceding the fateful one of ’37 there had been eight colonial ministers, the policy of each differing from that of his predecessor, and all of them with at best but an elementary knowledge of colonial affairs and the complexities arising from dual language, despite the object-lesson daily under their eyes in the Channel Islands. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Each Colonial Secretary had that little, and it proved the proverbial pistol which no one knew was loaded. By them Canadians were spoken of as “aliens to our nation and constitution,” and it was not thought possible that Lower Canada, any more than Hindostan or the Cape, could ever become other than foreign. It was popular and fashionable in some quarters to underrate the historic recollections which were bound up in religion and language; and as for Canadian independence, that was an orchid not yet in vogue. By 1837 he who sat in state in the Château St. Louis (says LeMoine) in the name of majesty had very decided views on that subject. H. M. William IV.’s Attorney-General, Charles Ogden, by virtue 20 of his office “the King’s own Devil,” who was an uncompromising foe to all evil-doers, held it to mean a hempen collar.

The question of British or French rule grew steadily for a half century, until Melbourne’s cabinet and Sir John Colborne made effort to settle it in one way and forever. “Les sacres Anglais” was, in consequence, the name applied to the followers of the latter; and as to the former, probably the illiterate habitant, who could not read the papers but who had an instinct wherewith to reach conclusions, had his own patois rendering of an English colonial’s opinion that the politicians comprising the cabinet might “talk summat less and do summat more.” All classes, indeed, of all sections, were not backward in giving opinion as to the quality of ministerial despatches; for a titled lady, writing from a far-off land where she did much work for the Home Government, dipped her pen in good strong ink and wrote, “My Lord, if your diplomatic despatches are as obscure as the one which lies before me, it is no wonder that England should cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign relations which she once could boast of.”

A humorous naturalist had said that the three blessings conferred upon England by the Hanoverian succession were the suppression of popery, the national debt, and the importation of the brown or Hanoverian rat.

Strange to say, one of the complexities of the Canadian situation was the position taken by that very popery which in England was still looked upon with distrust and suspicion. In 1794, not a decade’s remove from when the streets of London ran alike with rum and Catholic blood, through Protestant intolerance and the efforts of a mad nobleman, Bishop Plessis had thanked 21 God in his Canadian Catholic Cathedral that the colony was English and free from the horrors enacted in the French colonies of the day. “Thank your stars,” cried another from the pulpit, “that you live here under the British flag.”

“The Revolution, so deplorable in itself,” wrote Bishop Hubert of Quebec, “ensures at this moment three great advantages to Canada: that of sheltering illustrious exiles; that of procuring for it new colonists; and that of an increase of its orthodox clergy.” “The French emigrants have experienced most consolingly the nature of British generosity. Those of them who shall come to Canada are not likely to expect that great pecuniary aid will be extended; but the two provinces offer them resources on all sides.”

Many of the French officers whom the fear of the guillotine sent over in numbers to England found their way to that country which the Catholic Canadian priesthood so appreciated. Uncleared land and these fragments of French noblesse came together in this unforeseen way. But there was another view of their position when Burke referred to them as having “taken refuge in the frozen regions and under the despotism of Britain.” Truly has Britain shouldered many sins, made while you wait in the factory of rhetoric; nor is it less true that glorious sunny Canada has suffered equally unjustly as a lesser Siberia from a long line of writers, beginning with Voltaire, ending—let us hope—with Kipling.

The French Revolution over, and a mimic one threatening in the colony, the clergy did not hesitate to remind one another of the fate of their orders in France, to congratulate themselves they were under a different régime, nor fail to remember that the War Fund to sustain British action 22 against the Republicans of France in 1799 had been subscribed to heavily by many of their brethren and themselves. Le Seminaire stands in that list, in the midst of many historic names, against the sum of fifty pounds “per annum during the war.” One point of great difference between new and old was that the habitants, who were more enlightened and more religious than their brother peasants left behind in France, had, with the noblesse, a common calamity in any prospect which threatened subjugation. The variance ’twixt priest and people could only end in one way where the people were devout; and the Lower Canadian has ever been devout and true to Mother Church. But the “patriot,” who was more apt in diatribe against Tories than in prayers, spared not the priests in their historical leanings. “Who was the first Tory?” cries a patriot from his palpitating pages. “The first Tory was Cain, and the last will be the State-paid priest.”

But if the British Government had in some things acted so kindly and justly to those of French extraction as to merit such words, in other matters there had been much of harshness increased by ignorance and indifference, and the time had come when all had to suffer for such inconsistencies, and, unfortunately, those most severely who already were the victims of them.

“C’est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le monde.” Said one of their own writers, “la force en attendant le droit.” In both Canadas “la force” was local supremacy. The painful development as to when it should be superseded proved “le droit” and British supremacy identical.

It was a political struggle prolonged beyond endurance, more than a real wish to shake free from Britain; a 23 political struggle, where the combatants were often greedy and abusive partisans who appealed to the vilest passions of the populace and who were unscrupulous in choosing their instruments of attack. Capital was made out of sentiment most likely to appeal to the suffering: “Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow ——”
and Papineau, by speech, manifesto and admission, looked toward the seat of vice-royalty and made plain the homely sentiment, “Ote toi de là que moi je m’y mette.” He did not agree with the humble habitant saying, “C’est le bon Dieu qui nous envoya ça, il faut l’endurer.” His opinion leaned more to that of O’Connell, who said the French were the only rightful inhabitants of the country. How much baneful domination had it taken to so change the Papineau of 1820, when on the occasion of the death of George III. he says, “... a great national calamity—the decease of that beloved sovereign who had reigned over the inhabitants of this country since the day they became British subjects; it is impossible not to express the feeling of gratitude for the many benefits received from him, and those of sorrow for his loss so deeply felt in this, as in every other portion of his extensive dominions. And how could it be otherwise, when each year of his long reign has been marked by new favours bestowed upon the country?... Suffice it then at a glance to compare our present happy situation with that of our fathers on the eve of the day when George III. became their legitimate monarch ... from that day the reign of the law succeeded to that of violence.... All these advantages have become our birthright, and shall, I hope, be the lasting inheritance of our posterity. To secure them let us only act as British subjects and freemen.” 24

About ’31 the Lower Canadian Assembly received a lot of new blood; and very hot, adventurous and zealous blood it was. Young men like Bleury, Lafontaine, and their confreres, were not backward in naming what they considered their rights; and they had somewhat unlimited ideas. The most ardent of the group centred round Papineau and excited him still further. They scouted Lord Goderich (Robinson) and his concessions so long as his countrymen formed a majority in their government. This was a “demarcation insultante” between victor and vanquished. Lord Dalhousie, “glowing with scarlet and gold,” and followed by a numerous staff, had brought a session to a close in a peremptory manner, with words which might have furnished a cue to himself and others. “Many years of continued discussion ... have proved unavailing to clear up and set at rest a dispute which moderation and reason might have speedily terminated.”

To the Loyalist Papineau was the root of all evil. A French loyal ditty attributed every calamity of the era to him, cholera morbus, earthquakes and potato-rot included, each stanza finishing with the refrain, “C’est la faute de Papineau.” “It is certain,” said the latter, “that before long the whole of America will be republicanized.... In the days of the Stuarts those who maintained that the monarchic principle was paramount in Britain lost their heads on the scaffold.” This, surely, was the proverbial word to the wise.

Naturally, such sentiments made him receive cool treatment in Downing Street, even when his Ninety-Two Resolutions embodied much truth and called for affirmative answers. Nothing but the most absolute democratic rule would satisfy the irreconcilables. Their act in the House had led to Lord Aylmer being forced to advance the 25 supplies from the Military Chest, and to embody his disapproval in a resolution of censure. They in turn voted his censures should be expunged from the journals of the House. Then Papineau, from the Speaker’s chair, inveighed against the Mother Country. After the presentation of the Resolutions, Lord Aylmer, alluding to them, imprudently said that dissatisfaction was mostly confined to within the walls of the Assembly rooms, that outside of them the country was at peace and contented. The men who framed them lost no time in giving him a practical denial. Resolutions from many parishes approved of the acts of the Assembly, and the newspaper columns teemed with accounts of popular demonstrations. Lord Aylmer, however, supposed himself within his rights. After his recall, at his interview with the King, and supported by Palmerston and Minto on either side, the monarch declared he entirely approved of Aylmer’s official conduct, that he had acted like a true and loyal subject towards a set of traitors and conspirators, and as became a British officer under the circumstances.

Lord Glenelg sent to the rescue that commission of enquiry, the prelude to the later Durham one, whereof Lord Gosford was chief. This nobleman, who became governor of the province, was Irish, and a Protestant, an opponent of Orangeism, a man of liberal opinions and decisive in speech and action. He tried every means to make friends in the French quarter; visited schools and colleges, enchanted all by his charming politeness of manner, gave a grand ball on the festival day of a favourite saint, and by his marked attentions at it to Madame Bedard showed at once his taste and his ability to play a part. He made a long address to the Chambers, breathing naught but patriotism and justice; so some still had 26 hope. “To the Canadians, both of French and British origin, I would say, consider the blessings you might enjoy but for your dissensions. Offsprings as you are of the two foremost nations of the earth, you hold a vast and beautiful country, having a fertile soil with a healthful climate, whilst the noblest river in the world makes sea-ports of your most remote towns.” He replied to the Assembly first in French, then in English. There is a possibility of doing too much, and the Montreal Gazette censured this little bit of courteous precedence so far as to deny the right of a governor to speak publicly in any language but his own, and construed this innovation by the amiable Earl into one that would lead to the Mother-Country’s degradation. Then what of the Channel Islands, where loyalty was and is above suspicion; where the Legislature declared that members had not the right to use English in debate, and “that only in the event of Jersey having to choose between giving up the French language, or the protection of England, would they consent to accept the first alternative.”

Matters progressed till rulers were burned in effigy, and bands of armed men, prowling about the most disaffected parts, confirmed M. Lafontaine’s saying, “Every one in the colony is malcontent.” “We have demanded reforms,” said he, “and not obtained them. It is time to be up and doing.” “We are despised!” cried M. Morin, “oppression is in store for us, and even annihilation.... But this state of things need endure no longer than while we are unable to redress it.”

“It is a second conquest that is wanted in that colony,” said Mr. Willmot in the House of Commons, when he heard the Canadian news via the Montreal Gazette.

So Lord Gosford asked for his recall, got it, stepped 27 into a canoe after a progress through streets lined with guards of honour composed of regular and irregular troops, amid “some perfunctory cheering,” and was paddled to his ship, the band of the 66th playing “Rule Britannia.” She might rule the waves, but many of those who listened were more than ever determined that she should not rule Canadians.

The Gosford report was vehemently protested against by Lord Brougham and Mr. Roebuck, who did not mince matters, but predicted the rebellion and outlined a probable war with the neighbouring republic.

But Lord John Russell, like Sir Francis Bond Head, did not anticipate a rebellion.

Lord Gosford had found his task more difficult than he expected. His predecessor, Sir James Kempt, had done his best and failed, through no fault of his own but because there was a determination in the majority of his subjects not to be satisfied. Lord Gosford tried the effect of a proclamation as an antidote for revolutions. But the habitants tore it to shreds, crying, “A bas le proclamation! Vive Papineau, vive la liberté, point de despotisme,” and made their enthusiasm sacred by holding their meetings at parish church doors. Papineau was omnipotent; one would imagine ubiquitous, for he seems everywhere. He made the tour of the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, while his supporters, Girouard and Lafontaine, took the southern, making the excited people still more discontented. In after years, as a refugee in Paris, Papineau disclaimed any practical treason at this time: “None of us had prepared, desired, or foreseen armed resistance.” Yet the pikes were further sharpened, and the firelocks looked to; and at St. Thomas (Que.) alone sixty men on horseback, carrying flags and maple boughs, preceded him, 28 and following him were several pieces of artillery and the remainder of the two thousand people who formed his procession. Bishop Lartigue, a relative of Papineau, warned his people to beware of revolt, declaring himself impelled by no external influence, only actuated by motives of conscience. Addressing one hundred and forty priests, he used unmistakable terms as to how they were to resist rebellion in the people; no Roman Catholic was permitted to transgress the laws of the land, nor to set himself up against lawful authority. He even speaks of “the Government under which we have the happiness to live,” while his relative was contending that the yoke on the necks of the Canadians was made in a fashion then obsolete—the Stuart pattern. But he spoke too late; his people were beyond his control, and they in turn condemned clerical interference in politics, and the curé in charge at the combustible Two Mountains had his barns burned in answer to his exhortation. On the first Monday of every month these sons of Liberty, organized by Storrow Brown, met—“Son projet réuissoit à merveille, chaque jours le corps augmentoit en nombre et déjà de pareilles sociétés se formaient dans la campagne.”

The chronic state of eruption in unhappy Lower Canada had intervals of quiet only when some governor, with manners of oil and policy of peace, made an interregnum. All time was not like that of the little Reign of Terror, full of fear and arbitrary measures, after the suppression of Le Canadien and the arrest of the judges; but the country felt itself to be a plaything of not much more weight than the cushion dandled by Melbourne or the feather blown about by that minister of deceptive manner. The famous Ninety-two Resolutions embodied the Canadian view of what was wrong, and the remedy for it. Papineau, 29 their author, owed much in their construction to his colleague, M. Morin, a gentle, polite man of letters, with the suave manners of a divine, who neither looked nor acted the conspirator, despite his many fiery words—as fervid as those of the idol of the people, the eloquent leader in Canadian debate, who was nightly carried home to his hotel on the shoulders of the enthusiastic crowd.

“Since the origin and language of the French-Canadians have become a pretext for vituperation, for exclusions, for their meriting the stigma of political inferiority, for deprivation of our rights and ignoring public interests, the Chamber hereby enters its protest against such arrogant assumptions, and appeals against them to the justice of the King and Parliament of Great Britain, likewise to the honourable feeling of the whole British people. The numerical though not dominant majority of this colony are not themselves disposed to esteem lightly the consideration which they inherit from being allied in blood to a nation equal, at least, to Britain in civilization and excelling her in knowledge of the arts and sciences—a nation, too, now the worthy rival of Britain for its institutions.”

Certain it is, the policy of the British Clique, so called, was moulded more upon old than new country needs and ideas, and was suited to the times of George I. and Louis XIV. more than to the dawn of the Victorian era. But ’tis always darkest the hour before day, and the torch lighted by Papineau was unfortunately to make conflagration as well as illumination. It was the old, old story of theorists and political agitators exciting popular discontent and alarm more than the occasion warranted, by exaggerations retarding instead of speeding a cause, with another story of procrastination and cross-purposes from the 30 Mother Country. Further, history was corroborated in that a demagogue ends as a tyrant. A super-loyal newspaper did not hesitate to say that the only way to calm Canada was to purge the Colonial Office from King Stephen down to Glenelg, and to do so by one huge petition to Majesty signed by every Canadian from Quebec to Amherstburg. For Lord Glenelg, with the best intentions in the world, had a positive genius for doing the wrong thing.

But even such evidences of ignorance as did arrive by despatches and otherwise did not warrant, in the minds of many Liberals, the overthrow of a monarchy. They made allowance for good disposition in the abstract, and spoke of “want of knowledge and characteristic apathy.” The influence of these men cannot now be overestimated. They were then looked upon with suspicion by either side, for they recognized that gigantic obstacles and class exclusions were to be met; a recognition which lessened the credit of their heartfelt “Je suis loyal.” On the other hand, a good many French Canadians were made to join the rebel side by intimidation.

If the assurance of “Je suis loyal” did not come quickly enough some inoffensive Frenchman would find himself popped into the guardhouse, and the results of jealousy and over-zeal have left us many absurd stories. A county M.P., at the Château one sultry evening, seeing the rest all busy at ice-cream, asked for some. The Canadian Solon took a huge spoonful, his first taste of such a delicacy. With a feeling of rage at what he thought an insult, or at least neglect, he cried out what is translated into, “You abominable rascal, had this been for an Englishman you would have taken the chill off.”

No more condemnatory record exists of the British 31 Clique than that left of it in its earliest days by Governor Murray, a man not likely, to judge by the personal anecdotes we have of his reign, to be accused of French proclivities. For a time everything was given a French turn, and “Don’t moushify me,” in the words of an eminent literary man, showed the essence of British feeling of the day.

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. 32 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 mélange 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. 33 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 34 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?

They certainly left no stone unturned in Canada to find out details in matters of treason or libel. The John Bull and other English papers handled some cases without gloves; but it was reserved for Canada to show what could be done with printers’ ink. The type fairly flew into place under the willing fingers of compositors who were also politicians. Minerva in the printing office is oftentimes undignified. She seems to have been particularly so in the case of Le Canadien, a paper founded in 1806. Its wood-cut frontispiece had the arms and emblems of Canada, with two beavers hard at work biting the slender tie which attached the scroll to the insignia of Great Britain, and, of course, a suitable motto. Two reporters of that stormy time added to the excitement of the Assembly by throwing assafœtida on the stoves. The odour was insupportable, and the too enthusiastic scribes were taken in charge by the sergeant-at-arms. Like many others whose freedom that functionary sought to curtail, they could not be found when wanted. When the type, paper and presses of Le Canadien office, under a warrant from Judge Sewell, were seized in 1810, the magistrate, attended by a file of soldiers, removed all to the vaults of the Courthouse. This act, with the long imprisonment without trial which followed, 35 was considered one of the most arbitrary committed since Hanoverian rule began. The printers were arrested, as were also the leading members of the Assembly, Messrs. Pierre Bedard, Tachereau and Blanchet. When some of these members had been admitted to the bar, M. Perrault, one of those discreet men who were the saving of their country, patriotic but prudent, made the caustic remark: “So many men forced to steal in order to make a living! I shall certainly yet see some of you hanged.” It was quite easy to hang a man in days when the death penalty covered an incredible number of offences, when a boy could receive that sentence for killing a cow or a child for stealing sweets from a pastry cook’s window. So M. Perrault had a margin for his prediction. This half-jocular condemnation of the legal profession was prevalent to a degree which made many believe that in a corner of the Protestant hell, which was separate from and hotter than the Roman Catholic one, was a place reserved for lawyers. “There they will have a little hell of their own, and even well lighted for them to see each other the better; and there, after having deceived their poor clients on earth, they will tear each other to pieces without the devil having the bother of helping them.”

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 (pendu); there are now three of you suspended (suspendu), 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 36 those in power made them redouble the city guards and patrols.

But if Le Canadien had been conducted with animosity, it was also marked by much ability. Nor had it a monopoly of the former. The Anglo-Canadian papers, too, knew how to be bitter and violent. The press of those times indulged in wonderful prophecies. But the future is in the lap of the gods, so said the more knowing ancients; and if any of those ’37 prophecies had the flavour of truth it is to be found in those of the contemned Reformers.

Early in the century Judge Sewell had got into trouble. He was accused of usurping parliamentary authority, by undue influence persuading the Governor (Craig) 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. 37 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 38 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 curé, 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. 39

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.”

“If anyone has a cause,” said one dignified prothonotary, “let him appear, for the Court is about to close.” “But,” said the judge above him, “the law states we must sit to-morrow.” Turning to the public the prothonotary made further announcement: “The judge says he will sit to-morrow, but the prothonotary will not be here.” And in his Louis XIV. costume, cut-away coat with stiff and embroidered collar, knee-breeches of black cloth, black silk stockings, frills on shirt-bosom and cuffs, the silver-buckled shoes of the prothonotary bore their somewhat stubborn wearer away.

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 40 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 Gaspé 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.

Nor was other travel in a very advanced state. The palm of beauty was then, as now, accorded the St. Lawrence, but one traveller from abroad wrote, “’Tis a sad waste of life to ascend the St. Lawrence in a bateau.” By 1818 “a first-class steamer” made its exhausted way from Quebec to Montreal; aided by a strong wind it covered seven leagues in nine hours. This exhilarating motion caused the historian Christie, one of the pleased passengers, to open his window and hail his friends, “We are going famously!” By the third day’s voyage they were at the foot of the current below Montreal, and with the 41 united aid of forty-two oxen they reached the haven for which they were bound.

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 42 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 43 England that nothing should be bought from her. This reprisal on the nation of shopkeepers Nelson thought a peddling policy; that the time was come for armed action, not pocket inaction. Papineau’s opinion was disappointing to the fiery wing of the Confederation. Again did Bishop Lartigue warn generally against evil counsels, reminding his flock that a cardinal rule of the Church was obedience to the powers that be; and every one of his clergy echoed him.

“Il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte” was once oddly applied by a lady who heard a canon of the Church say that St. Piat, after his head was cut off, walked two leagues with it in his hand. She could not gainsay such an authority, so said, “I can quite believe it. On such occasions the first step is the only difficulty.”

Alas, many at these meetings were to exhibit the price of a first step; heads were to come off and necks to be broken, and every step in that blood-stained via doloroso which led to the Union, to the righting of Englishmen’s and Frenchmen’s wrongs, to establishing Canadian rights to be French or British, was to cost bitterly,—cost how bitterly only one can know who reads the story in its human aspect, not politically alone. It is a strange thing that privileges so purely British as those asked for, the abolition of the death sentence except in case of murder, “that chimera called Responsible Government,” the unquestioned use of a national language in public affairs, freedom of the press, should have been asked for by Frenchmen, denied by Englishmen, and fought for to the death by many of each nationality.

All time from the Conquest to the Rebellion seems to belong to the latter event. For the causes of it reach back by perspective into Misrule, making a vanishing point in Mistake. 44

More Baneful Domination.

Treason always labours under disadvantage when it makes preliminary arrangements; and it is often obliged to found combinations on defective data, not reckoning upon disturbing forces and the sudden appearance of the unforeseen. But if so in ordinary cases, what must it have been when, in Upper Canada, sympathy with the French and dissatisfaction with existing Upper Canadian institutions ended in a determination to combine forces and make a common cause.

Each province had its distinct enemies; but distance was one common to both. They were divided from the metropolis and arsenal of the Empire by ocean, storm, and wooden ships; and tracts of native roadless wilderness, long stretches of roads of mud and corduroy, and the intercepting reserve, helped to keep man from man. A huge place; and the badness of its affairs was in proportion to its size. With no hint of the future iron belt from Atlantic to Pacific, all travel was by stage, a painful mode, and costing some $24.00 from Montreal to Toronto; or if by water, in long flat-bottomed bateaux rowed by four men, Durham boat, barge, or the new ventures, steamboats, where as yet passenger quarters were in the hold.

The element of Upper Canada was crude, and the homesick letters of the new-come emigrants sighed over the rude 45 surroundings. But perhaps the rudest thing which the settlers of ’37 found was the apology for a form of government then offered to them. An idea had prevailed in the home countries that Canada was the best of the colonies. But this idea was dispelled by Mackenzie; those of his earlier writings which reached Britain rendered such a sorry account of Canadian happiness that people who had confidence in his book thought twice before they risked fortune in what evidently had become his country through necessity.

Some time previous to the publication of his book (“Sketches of Canada and the United States”), he had been good enough to write Lord Dalhousie, “So far, your Lordship’s administration is just and reasonable.” To him Canadian affairs were like a falling barometer, soon to end in storm, and there was every ground for the statement of a United States editor that Mackenzie constituted himself the patron or the censor of the race.

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 46 time was allowed for reflection, the governors so cleverly governed that they knew it not. Gifts of the Crown naturally followed, and the great Pact grew richer, alongside of that older Compact of the sister province. It is a case for “put yourself in his place.” The burden and heat of the day had fallen on these men; they but followed the instinct to reap where one has strawed, and carried out to the letter the axiom that unlimited power is more than mortal is framed to bear.

“The tyrannical government of palace pets” furnishes pages of misgovernment. It took a clear head, a steady will and a true heart to cling to British connection and the Union Jack, when desperation made some determined to be rid of the Toronto rule, which was to them odious, unjust, intolerable. And yet, when we review that epoch of dissolution and transformation, the errors and shortcomings of either party, the two sides of the dispute stand out so clearly that we wonder anyone could then think he was altogether right. “Flayed with whips and scorped with scorpions,” one side said, “there is no alternative but a tame, unmanly submission or a bold and vigorous assertion of our rights as freemen;” while the other, by the mouth of its governor, likened Canada, standing in “the flourishing continent of North America,” to a “girdled tree with drooping branches.” Certainly, the simile was good; and with all justice to the side of Tory or Reformer, Royalist, Rebel, Loyalist and Loyalist, a retrospective glance discloses a knife on either side busy at the process of girdling. “What is the best government on earth?” asks a school-book in use in Duncombe’s District and printed in Boston for Canadian schools; “A Republican Government like the United States,” is the unqualified next line. “What is the worst government on earth?”—“A Monarchical 47 Government like that of England and Canada.” “Can the King of England order any man’s head cut off and confiscate his property?”—“Yes.” “Will you, if the occasion arrives, rise up and rebel against such a government as yours, and join the States?”—“Yes, with all my power and influence.” The Yankee school-master, a chief agent of this propaganda, was one of the first prisoners.

The Family Compact believed the chief beauty of government to be simplicity, the foremost tenet loyalty to one another. But men outside the Pact, every whit as much gentlemen and each in turn bearing his part of that heat and burden, awoke to a sense of individualism, each to realize that he was a unit in the commonweal.

The forerunner of the new dispensation was Robert Gourlay. And what and if his sorrows had so overwhelmed his wits, he yet was the founder of public opinion in Upper Canada; nor is it less true that the first outcome of his martyrdom was that life was made harder for those who dared to follow where he had failed.

“Whaur ye gaun, Sawndie?” “E’en to the club just to conthradick a bit;” and Mackenzie, right as he was in many points, leaves us in no doubt as to his descent and his ability to “conthradick” for pure love of so doing. Also his club covered a wide area, and his influence over a tract as wide as his ability to contradict was phenomenal.

Passing the line between the Canadas, Glengarry showed the change from French to British ways. Not only were the features and tongues of the inhabitants different, but there was an entire absence of that thrifty, snug cottage comfort which distinguished the half-brother below. With outsides unfinished, no taut lines about them, both houses and original huts proclaimed a people undaunted 48 by obstacles and surmounting them by indifference to detail. Here all were loyal. Stories of the famous Glengarry Fencibles of 1812 took up the leisure hours, and the spirit of the Loyalist fighting bishop was paramount. That prelate would not tell his people how to vote, but he talked of “these radicals who aim at the destruction of our Holy Religion;” and this word to those already wise was sufficient.

Next came Prescott, once La Galette, well built on a rocky prominence, the site of a former entrenchment, a place mentioned in old French diaries from the time of La Salle, the white of its tall, massive tower, roofed with a tin dome and built out on a rounding point covered with evergreen, making an abrupt feature in the river bank. Enormous sails flapping in the breeze proclaimed its functions, and a fort in process of erection, not having a moiety of its aggressive strength of appearance, lay near it. Here the people were of two minds, many ready to be sympathisers in a movement though lacking the force to be leaders; prominent men, some of them, and wishing for a lead, while others, living in the remote shadow of the dominant party, were so securely attached to crown and flag that they were ready to defend that party for the sake of the flag whose exclusive property it seemed to be.

Farther on, as the river broadened towards the chain of lakes, came Kingston, its “agreeable, genteel society accommodated in houses of stone and wood,” also much divided by party. In the harbour ships of war stood close to the shore, where blockhouse and fort commanded the entrance. Fort Henry, begun in ’32, had by February, ’36, cost England more than £50,000; its area did not exceed an acre, the walls, massive 49 outworks and aspect evidently conveniently designed for the success of the enemy. A few more years were required for its completion and to level the glacis; but although unfinished it was to be the theatre of a tragedy. In its finished state it has been described as a colossal monument to military stupidity. From the top of the inner fort lie in view the famous “cow pasture,” Dead Man’s Bay where some fourteen men were drowned during construction of the fort on Cedar Island, and Shoal Tower, all points of arrest to the eye in that ever-beautiful scene. Several old war-ships left from 1812 were in 1831 kept at the dockyards, shingled over and protected, some fated later to be sunk as useless, one to be burnt to the water’s edge. Hard by there was a dockyard, furnished with every article of naval stores required for the equipment of ships of war. Two seventy-fours, a frigate, a sloop of war and eleven gunboats reposed under cover on stocks. They were not planked, but men employed for the purpose replaced decaying bits of timber, and it was estimated that in little more than a month they could be got ready for sea. Immense sums had been expended during that war upon unnecessary things, unaccountable ignorance having sent the woodwork of the frigate Psyche to a country where it could have been provided on the spot at one-hundredth of the expense and in one-tenth of the time necessary to convey it there. Even wedges had been sent, and the Admiralty, full of salt-water notions, was paternal enough to include a full supply of water casks for use on Lake Ontario, where a bucket overboard could draw up water undreamed of by Jack tars, from a reservoir through which flowed nearly half the fresh water supply of the globe. Clearly, details of geography were not included in the lists for those bright youths who were 50 preparing for the Admiralty, and nowhere in Canada was the foolish touch of a prodigal-handed parent seen to more advantage than in Kingston.

Across the lake at Sackett’s Harbour was a ship of 102 guns, apparently put together in a substantial manner in forty days from the day the first tree used in her construction was cut down. Peace declared, she was never launched; and, agreeably to the terms of the treaty, which called for the abolition of an armed force on the lakes, six or seven more American vessels were sunk in the harbour and, in the parlance of their owners, were “progressing to dissolution.” Green timber might have proved as good a vehicle for the squandering of money as imported wedges and water-casks.

But although there was then this show of vessels in Kingston, a practical military man of ’37 records that the dockyard was a grazing ground, that the Royal Engineers’ department did naught but patch up barracks in much the same state as the ships, not a ship, boat, sail or oar was available, and that sad havoc had been made by the twenty-two years of profound peace and disuse in harness, waggons, carriages, limbers, wheels, drag-ropes and other munitions of war. The powder would not light, and moths had destroyed blankets and bedding. Artillery with no horses to the guns, and part of the 66th regiment, represented the military force at the half-finished fort.

At Kingston Her Majesty’s accession was proclaimed on a certain Monday in August of ’37 by Mr. Sheriff Bullock and the other authorities, but “the procession was meagre and pitiful in the extreme.” And this state of affairs was because of the dislike “manifested by many to petticoat government.”

Farther on, the peninsula of Prince Edward should have 51 been the very paradise of loyalty if any inference were to be made from its nomenclature: Adolphusburg, Maryburg, Sophiasburg, a transatlantic inventory of major and minor royalties. But, although it had sent forth a Hagerman, the Bidwells were there too, all champions in the coming struggle for what each loyally believed to be the right. Every town and hamlet along that immense waterway had heard the call of Mackenzie from either lips or pen, and some dwellers in each had responded.

With York is reached the centre of grievance, the house of hate, where the principals in the coming struggle dwelt in a succession of patched-up peace, revolts, domineering unfairness, harsh punishments and secret reprisals, a panoramic play in which the first act was tyranny and the last revolution. Some of the by-play reads childishly enough. Mackenzie’s stationery shop in King Street contained window decorations of the most soul-harrowing kind, and all belonging to the era of belief in eternal punishment. The asperities of Mackenzie’s truly Presbyterian enjoyment had not yet been softened by a Farrar or a Macdonnell. The prints there displayed depicted Sir Francis Bond Head, Hagerman, Robinson, Draper and Judge Jones as squirming in all the torments of a realistic hell, relieved by sketches of a personal devil whose barbed tail was used as a transfixing hook for one or other of these Tories, the more conveniently to spit and cook him. The Canadian ejaculations of former times, “May an Iroquois broil me,” or “Tors mon âme au bout d’un piquet” (Twist my soul on the end of a fence rail), were forever routed. Like Pope and an interrogation point, Mackenzie was a little thing who would ask questions, any crookedness about him being the peculiar twists and turns made possible by nature to his rapier-like tongue. His paper heralded the day of 52 Carlyle and Doré, anticipating the former’s “gloomy procession of the nations going to perdition, America the advance guard.” When he thus bearded these lions in their dens they promptly called—through the government organ—for the suppression of the first issue of this obnoxious paper; further, that the editor should be banished, and the entire edition confiscated. Vituperative, he had a command of uncomfortable words fitted to every circumstance, his ability to scent out abuses phenomenal. But he was not banished, nor his pen and pencil confiscated, nor yet did his influence stop at this point in the long journey from Glengarry to Windsor. And why should such a pen be confiscated? While the Family Compact were expelling Mackenzie, imprisoning Collins, and hunting to death any poor stray printer who dared put his want of admiration of them in type, no less great a person than their King was feign to be out of his wits because he was not only libelled but had no redress. He laments the existence of “such a curse ... as a licentious and uncontrolled press,” and of a state of things which renders the law with respect to libellers and agitators a dead letter. Poor King, happy Family Compact; Canada had no dead laws if the people who administered them wished them quick. “The Irish agitators, the reviews and, above all, the press, continue to annoy the King exceedingly;” but Earl Grey said the only way with newspaper attacks was the Irish way, “to keep never minding.” Also Lord Goderich writes to Sir John Colborne in ’32: “I must entirely decline, as perfectly irrelevant to any practical question, the inquiry whether at a comparatively remote period prosecutions against the editors of newspapers were improperly instituted or not.” It is needless to look beyond Mr. Mackenzie’s journal to be convinced that there is no 53 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 54 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.” 55

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.” 56 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 57 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, 58 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 59 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 60 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, 61 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 62 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. 63

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 64 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 65 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.”

“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,

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 66 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.”

What in Canada were called Roebuck’s “remarques ordinaires” were constant philippics against administrative abuses there. He wanted some means to be found as remedy for the defects. He laboured unceasingly. In speeches, writings in journals and pamphlets and periodicals, in season and out of season, he lost no chance to plead the cause of the Canadas. Naturally, he was “abusive and ridiculous” in these letters to such as did not agree with him. Had his nomination been properly 67 confirmed, his income as agent would have been £1,000 a year; but the want of it did not slacken his efforts. “While such is the nature and conduct of this petty and vulgar oligarchy, I beseech the House to consider the peculiar position of the people over whom they domineer.” He then goes on to draw a picture of the superior scene across the St. Lawrence; a natural enough picture to be drawn by an American, born with prejudices in favour of his native land. He goes on: “With such a sight before them it is not wonderful that the Canadian people have imbibed the free spirit of America, and that they bear with impatience the insolence, the ignorance, the incapacity and the vice of the nest of official cormorants who, under the festering domination of England, have constituted themselves an aristocracy, with all the vices of such a body, without one of the redeeming qualities which are supposed to lessen the mischiefs which are the natural attendants of all aristocracies. It is of a people thus high-spirited, pestered and stung to madness by this pestilential brood, that I demand your attention.”

But the Canadians, though grateful, were aware he did not always act with prudence in their behalf. He and Mr. Hume together had presided at a meeting where the latter declared that Canada was of no advantage to Britain. But they gave him and all who mentioned them kindly in the House of Commons—O’Connell, Pakington and others who had spoken for them—their heartfelt thanks.

Labouchere, French by descent, stood up in their defence and vindicated their claims. “I look upon the Act of 1791,” said he, “as the Magna Charta of Canadian freedom,” and contended that a more rigid following of Pitt’s intentions would have resulted in better things. He denounced the prejudice of one race against another, nor 68 deemed a council so altogether British wholesome government for people so entirely French. The French had many champions in that historic chamber. Sir James Mackintosh, author of “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” a man whose whole bias of mind had been turned and held fast by French revolution, equipped by nature with all the powers and attributes of statesmanship, and who had brought all to bear on home politics and legislation in the broadest imperial sense, was not the least of these. He had undertaken, years before the blooming of that bitter blossom, the Canadian aloe—tenacity of life is one of its virtues,—the successful defence of a French emigrant for libel on the consul; his residence in Bombay, as Recorder, had been famous for his wholesome administration between British and native rights; he had strongly opposed “the green bag and spy system;” had voted against the severe restrictions of the Alien Bill, and had moved against the existing state of the criminal law; so that he did not speak, as many did on Canadian affairs, without special or collateral experience. He wanted the dependency governed on principles of justice, few and simple; protection against alien influence, and freedom to conduct their own affairs and manage their own trade. “A British king see now assume
Judicial sovereignty, ‘coutume,’
And that of Paris cease to reign
Throughout the Canada domain.”[2]
He even allowed merit to that old coutume in comparison with affairs as they existed under British law, and in sarcastic humour ran a parallel between them.

When “Quebec first raised the legal courts
For Does or Roes to hold their sports,”2
69 the spirit of the Conseil Souverain was one which did not at the Conquest migrate to the new body: “Nous avons cru ne pouvoir prendre une meilleure résolution qu’en établisant une justice réglé et un Conseil Souverain dans le dits pays, pour y faire fleurir les lois, maintenir et appuyer les bons, chatier les méchants, et contenir chacun en son droit.”

Sir James now held the Governor responsible for the existing state of affairs; he accused the Colonial Minister of appealing to the sympathies of the House in favour of British interests only. Were the twenty thousand British to be privileged at the expense of the four hundred thousand French? Were the former to be cared for exclusively, their religious sympathies so fostered as to bring about Protestant domination? Again he draws a parallel between what Ireland was and what Canada might become, and in the name of heaven, his eloquence aided by large grey melancholy eyes, adjured them solemnly that such a scourge fall not a second time upon any land under Britain’s sway. “Above all, let not the French-Canadians suppose for a moment that their rights or aspirations are less cared for by us than those of their fellow-adult colonists of our own blood.... Finally, I look upon a distinction in the treatment of races and the division of a population into distinct classes as most perilous in every way and at all times.”

Then Melbourne rose to reply that nothing was as unsafe as analogy, particularly historical analogy.

And Lord Aylmer thought, after an extensive tour of the French province, giving all these questions earnest consideration, that the best way to settle the question was to bring in thousands of the Irish to the colony; the Eastern Townships he estimated could take five hundred 70 thousand, and the valley of the Ottawa one hundred thousand. These painstaking, conscientious governors generally left England laden with minute instructions, and came on the scene with exact directions as to their action. The Canadians, first credulous, afterwards wary and lastly suspicious, shrewdly guessed that many of the “impromptus” were in the Governor’s pocket; they also knew that Lord Glenelg was a Reformer in London and a Conservative in Quebec. They believed that orders publicly given carried with them secret advice not to have them enforced, as they were meant “only to blarney the Radicals.” And Papineau had told them that the same hand which wrote the King’s speech penned the answer to it. When the Irish emigrant did come he brought the cholera with him, and Jean cried out again that legislation and emigration only meant fresh trouble.

The amount of thought bestowed upon the Canadas by these statesmen no one, not even the most discontented Canadian, denied. But the mistaken data from which many of the arguments were drawn maddened some; and aristocratic mannerisms, when brought into contact with the democratic Upper Canadian, gave offence. There was a great deal of the picturesque about Jean Baptiste, and of him much was known; retiring governors and officers took with them bulky note-books full of anecdotes. In Upper Canada there was nothing of the picturesque, and the same note-books, developed into goodly volumes, tell us it in print without flinching. True, those intent on learning had Basil Hall’s Sketches, with accounts of Hall’s five thousand two hundred and thirty-seven miles of travel; but though the former were beautifully done the latter were meagre, and with the exception of Niagara make the Upper Province as uninteresting as its own crows. For foundation 71 they had Charlevoix; but, says Charlevoix, “The horned owl is good eating, many prefer his flesh to chickens. He lives in winter on ground mice which he has caught the previous fall, breaking their legs first, a most useful precaution to prevent their escape, and then fattens them up with care for daily use.” Could housewife with Thanksgiving turkey do more!

Now a good many of those who came after Charlevoix and reported on us took him—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps conscientiously, for Charlevoix was a good man—for a literary model, pushing to the extreme limit their rights and privileges as travellers. They read, did these mighty and well-meaning statesmen, in their leisure hours. Nor in later years were the English less credulous when Canadian curiosities came to them bodily. When a party of Indians were nightly attracting large and wondering masses of the classes, one of the Royal Household, with two others as white as himself, one of the trio six feet two of apparent savagedom, arrayed themselves as magnificent Bois Brûlé, a Sac and a Sioux respectively, to appear before a brilliant array of fashion, wealth and beauty, carry out an unusually thrilling programme and be loaded with gifts by the spectators. The “interpreter” of the three got into rather a mess through his attempt to interpret too much, and in a final frenzy of dancing they danced off some paint made liquid by their desire to be honest in giving enough for their lavish remuneration. An earl in the audience failed to recognize his brother in one of the chief actors, voice and speech being disguised by a rifle bullet held in the mouth. The sequel was the return of the presents and a chase home to lodgings, followed by a yelling crowd of ragamuffins who turned out to be truer savages than those whom they termed Hopjibbeways. The 72 Indian came first in romantic interest to the Englishman, particularly when got ready for an audience by a clever manager. To hear a handsome, strapping Bois Brûlé sing “To the land of my fathers, white man, let me go,” was enough to draw tears. Next in point of interest to this link between red and white came the habitant. The Upper Canadian was very tame after these two, and Toronto was but “a place of considerable importance ... in the eyes of its inhabitants.”

Another writes of travel by water as he finds it in America: “There is no toothbrush in the country, simply I believe the article is entirely unknown to the American toilet. A common towel, however, passes from hand to hand, and suffices for the perfunctory ablutions of the whole party on board.” No man in England would take the trouble to contradict this; it was much easier to buy the book, read, be amused, and believe—as he did with the Indian party.

Much as Mackenzie was instrumental in doing for his country, he was scarcely a person to make his province interesting when he presented himself in London.

“Now Willie’s awa’ frae the land o’ contention,
Frae the land o’ mistake and the friends o’ dissension;
He’s gane o’er the waves as an agent befitting
Our claims to support in the councils o’ Britain,”
sang a Canadian bard in 1832, when Mackenzie, with his monster grievance book under his arm, set sail for the Home Office.

The quiet of the vessel after his late life in Little York was irksome; so this stormy petrel went aloft one night in a howling tempest, no doubt in a fit of home-sickness, and 73 remained for hours at the masthead. Scarcely had he descended when one of the sails was blown away.

“Then there the Reformers shall cordially meet him,
An’ there his great namesake, King William, shall greet him.”
He lost no time in putting himself in communication with Hume, Roebuck, Cobbett and O’Connell, and with Lord Goderich, then Colonial Secretary; but just how far the meeting was cordial, with those from whom cordiality was expected, only a long comparison of data can show. Even then our opinions had weight, as in ’31 when Brougham wrote: “Dear Lord Grey, the enclosed is from a Canadian paper; they have let you off well, as being priggish and having a Newcastle burr, and also as not being like O’Connell.” Mackenzie was in the nick of time to see that wonderful sight for eyes such as his—a great aristocracy bowing to the will of a great people—to hear the third reading of the Reform Bill. He was lucky enough to get into that small gallery in the House of Lords which accommodates only some eighty persons. He noticed that but few peers had arrived, and that a number of members from the Lower House stood about. To stand they were forced, or sit upon the matting, for there were neither chairs nor benches for them—a state of things highly displeasing to the fiery little democratic demagogue perched aloft, anxious to hear and determined that others should yet hear him.

At the Colonial Office he was simply a person interested in Canadian affairs, and useful as one able to furnish information. But he furnished it in such a discursive manner and adorned it with so much rhetoric that the Colonial Secretary found his document “singularly ill-adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a 74 definite issue.” The impression Mackenzie might have made was nullified by the counter-document adroitly sent in ahead of his own by the Canadian party in power, wherein a greater number of signatures than he had been able to get appended to dissatisfaction testified to satisfaction with affairs as they then existed in the Upper Province. The customary despatch followed. Some of Mackenzie’s arguments were treated with cutting severity; but an impression must have been made by them, for the despatch carried news most distressing to the oligarchy, which was modelled after the spirit of St.Paul,—that there should be no schism in the body, that the members should have the same care one for the other.

To these Tories of York it was all gall and wormwood. Nor could they accept it. Mackenzie had spent six days and six nights in London, with only an occasional forty winks taken in his chair, while he further expressed himself and those he represented. His epistolary feat was regarded by the Upper Canadian House with unqualified contempt, and Lord Goderich’s moderately lengthy one as “not calling for the serious attention of the Legislative Council.” Mackenzie had ventured to predict in his vigil of ink and words that unless the system of the government of Upper Canada was changed civil war must follow. But peers also sometimes have insomnia and know the distressing results; so he was warned: “Against gloomy prophecies of this nature, every man conversant with public business must fortify his mind.” The time was not far distant when he might say, “I told you so.” The Home Office listened with great attention, but observed close reticence in regard to itself. The Colonial Minister looked upon such predictions as a mode to extort concessions for which no adequate reason could be 75 offered. Nevertheless, the two Crown officers who were Mr. Mackenzie’s most particular aversions at that time had to go. The weapon of animadversion sent skipping across seas for the purpose of his humiliation had proved a kind of boomerang, and the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General were left free to make as many contemptuous expressions as they pleased concerning the Colonial Secretary and his brethren, being looked upon by the last-named as rebels themselves, since they had, “in their places in the Assembly, taken a part directly opposed to the assured policy of His Majesty’s Government.” Such is the strength of point of view; for the libellous rebel doing his busiest utmost against them was to them “an individual who had been twice expelled” this same House of Assembly. Under the first affected hauteur of the dismissed officials there had been many qualms; the Attorney-General thought it ill became the Colonial Secretary to “sit down and answer this rigmarole trash” (Mackenzie’s hard work of seventy-two sleepless hours), “and it would much less become the Canadian House of Assembly to give it further weight by making it more public.” One, a little more sane, thought that if Mackenzie’s papers contained such an amount of falsehood and fallacy, the best way to expose such was by publication. But a large vote decided that it should not go upon the Journals, and the official organ called Lord Goderich’s despatch an elegant piece of fiddle-faddle, ... full of clever stupidity and condescending impertinence. The removal of the two Crown officers was described as “as high-handed and arbitrary stretch of power as has been enacted before the face of high heaven, in any of the four quarters of this nether world for many and many a long day.” The organ’s vocabulary displayed such combinations as 76 “political mountebank—fools and knaves—all fools and knaves who listened to the silly complaints of the swinish multitude against the honourable and learned gentlemen connected with the administration of government.”

Whenever time dragged withal in the Upper Canadian House they re-expelled Mackenzie and fulminated anew against “the united factions of Mackenzie, Goderich, and the Yankee Methodists.”

Mackenzie’s friends lost no time in celebrating what was to be a short-lived triumph:

Lord Goderich’s polite wish not to hamper any nor coerce—that these gentlemen might be “at full liberty, as members of the Legislature, to follow the dictates of their own judgment”—ended in the dictates of anger appearing in hard words in the official press. The affections of these tried Loyalists were said to have been estranged; moreover, “they were casting about in their mind’s eye for some new state of political existence” which would put them and their colony beyond “the reach of injury and insult from any and every ignoramus whom the political lottery of the day may chance to elevate to the chair of the Colonial Office.”

Now Mackenzie himself could not have done better than this, nor had he yet gone even thus far. 77

But the official in that chair was used to many hard knocks, and the individual was changed so often that the blows had no time to take effect. Nor was the incomer ever anxious to avenge the woes of his predecessor.

“Prosperity Robinson,” alias “Goosey Goderich,” soon to be Lord Ripon, “the dodo of the Reform party,” stepped out. Mr. Stanley, “Rupert of debate,” stepped in. The two dispossessed of Canadian power lost no time in presenting themselves at the Colonial Office, one of them going in as his small adversary, Mr. Mackenzie, happened to be coming out, and the personal interview with the possessors of “alienated affections” made the new Secretary make a bid for the return of these valuables by reinstating the ex-Solicitor-General, and giving the ex-Attorney-General the Chief-Justiceship of “Some place abroad,
Where sailors gang to fish for cod,”
in what was called the Cinderella of the colonies, Newfoundland. History is silent, as far as we can learn, on the state of his affections thereafter, transplanted and uprooted so often. We presume they withered and a’ wede awa’.

Now this Chief-Justice had formerly called Mackenzie a reptile, and the other gentleman had dubbed him a spaniel dog—quite a leap from the general to the special, had but Darwin, then somewhere near American waters casting his search-light of enquiry from H. M. S. Beagle, known of it.

Mackenzie was in despair: “I am disappointed. The prospect before us is indeed dark and gloomy.” But rallying from this despondency, in his usual peppery style he told Mr. Stanley the appointments would be “a spoke in the wheel in another violent revolution in America.” 78 Hume wrote that he judged the disposition of the Secretary was to promote rather than to punish for improper conduct, and thereby encourage the misgovernment in Canada, which Lord Goderich’s policy had been likely to prevent.

Well might a Canadian paper, announcing the advent of the new Attorney-General, Jameson, say: “It is to be hoped he will view the real situation of the people of this province from his own observation.”

The Iroquois was always ready to drink to the King’s health, be he a George or a William; Stanley might declaim about “the most odious and blood-thirsty tyranny of French republicanism;” but this little Canadianized Scotchman, with his clever pen and tongue, misty conceptions of statesmanship, real grievances and revolutionary speech, was more than the Home Government could “thole.” The Earl of Ripon, in 1839, stated that Mackenzie in his correspondence of 1835 sought to make himself appear a very great man, whereas in reality he was a very little man. In his apologetic we find: “Well, he saw Mr. Mackenzie. He did not know that Mr. Mackenzie was a broken-down peddler. He knew that Mr. Mackenzie was an exceedingly troublesome person. He was perfectly satisfied, from the conduct of the individual, that Mr. Mackenzie was as vain and shallow a person as he had ever encountered. If the conference alluded to by Mr. Mackenzie was of only two hours’ duration, he must say it was the longest two hours he had ever known.”

How to make a common unity, a compact and harmonious people, out of their uncommon ancestors became the problem. “Not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald,” said the Canadian mélange, “but that our wits are so diversely coloured.” Some 79 of the men who were to solve the problem do not read as if equipped by appearance or culture to handle with their delicate fingers such homely subjects. Scarcely a week passed without a fresh turn up of the cards in Canada; and although Mr. Warburton wondered if the colony were worth retaining, the game worth the candle, the young Queen, in that part of her speech which dealt with the Canadian question, had an undertone of determination “to maintain her supremacy throughout the whole of the North American colonies,” and how the game would finally turn out became daily involved at Westminster in greater doubt and difficulty. At this time an editor in the United States uttered prophecy: “We do earnestly believe that the Virgin Queen of England is destined to be one of the most extraordinary characters of the present age or any country. She is a little Napoleon in petticoats—as determined, as lofty, as generous, as original as he was. Wait and see.”

“My Lords,” said the Great Duke, referring to her speech quoted from, “I could have wished that this declaration of Her Majesty had been accompanied by corresponding efforts to enable Her Majesty to carry those intentions into effect.”

“Sir Robert Peel, who played upon the House as upon an old fiddle,” regretted that there was not also in that speech a stronger expression of sympathy for the sufferings of their brave and loyal fellow-subjects in the colonies—at which there were cheers from both sides of the House. He could not too much admire the bravery, the loyalty, the devotedness of the Canadians. Nor did this arise from interested motives; it was sincere attachment to monarchical principles, and sincere opposition to a republican form of government. 80

There were many men, interesting in themselves, in debate on us then; but individually, and as he borrowed interest from his position towards that centre of all observation, the young Queen, came Melbourne.

While still William Lamb he had hated what he called the creeping palsy of misgiving, tried hard to resist it, and developed into one of those not afraid to advance with the age. He had no “extreme faith in religion, politics, or love.” Accordingly, to him patriotism and wisdom were not confined to the Whigs alone. The oh-oh’s and ironical cheers from what he knew to be a powerful majority moved him not; he was as easy, comfortable, good-humoured, as ever. Quaintness, originality of a manner fitful, abrupt, full of irony, at times of a tenderness almost feminine, distinguished him, together with an insuperable aversion to “platitudes, palaverings,”—and bishops. In an age when swearing was as common in drawing-rooms as in the field, England’s Prime Minister was an acknowledged past-master in the art, and by inflections gave a dozen changes to the small familiar four-lettered British adjective in most common use. In ordinary transactions he loved a chirpy oath; but in his dealings with the bishops was forced to coin a “superdamnable.” The Order of the Garter was a great favourite with him, “because there was no damned merit about it.” Utilitarian levelling like Bentham’s he regarded as nonsense; state parsimony like Hume’s, a “pettifogging blunder;” radicalism after the manner of Cobbett and others he called mere ragamuffinism; but he told his peers plainly that the time had gone by when any set of men could put themselves up as a check against national opinion, that antique usages could not prevail against reason and argument—truths spoken with the voice of the Commons in that place where such 81 a voice was almost unknown, seldom heard. Yet rancour was foreign to his nature: “The great fault of the present time (1835) is that men hate each other so damnably; for my part, I love them all.” And all with the air of a good-tempered, jovial gentleman.

“If something of his amiable spirit could be caught by others,” said a friend, “and grafted on Lord Wellesley’s counsel to ‘demolish these people,’ matters would not be difficult.”

Called upon frantically by friend and foe at a time of crisis “to do something,” the responsibility of the times thrown on him, he sat tight and calmly answered, “Whenever you are in doubt what should be done—do nothing.”

This all sounds like the man for the Canadas. Nine hundred or so of his peers gnashed their teeth at him,—if peers ever so use their molars; and in Canada they wrote of “the prolific source of political evil, the profligate course of imbecile rulers.”

William the Fourth had called him “a great gentleman,” although he and his government had been “kicked out” by that obstinate, morbid, prejudiced and somewhat imaginative monarch. Naturally, Melbourne refused an earldom and a garter; but in his final advice to the sovereign he was as tactful as ever in making the latter partially modify the note of dismissal, thereby averting a storm of popular feeling and individual resentment of ministers. “Mind what you are about in Canada,” said the King when final instructions were given to Lord Gosford before he left England, and Melbourne and Glenelg—the Sleeping Beauty—found the monarch as hard to manage as the colony itself. “By —— I will never consent to alienate the Crown Lands nor to make the Council elective. Mind me, my lord, the cabinet is not my cabinet; 82 they had better take care, or by —— I will have them impeached. You are a gentleman, I believe, I have no fear of you; but take care what you do.”

Posing as a man of pleasure, in reality a capable man of business, Melbourne lounged through his duties in a way to exasperate friend and foe. But as he lounged, he learned men and manners, determined to see into things, and even in Ireland, when Chief Secretary, said, “If agitation would not go to bed he would like to have a chat with it.” He was ever pleading for concession to the demands of the people, dreading the consequences of refusal. “Everything about him seems to betoken careless desolation; anyone would suppose from his manner that he was playing at chuck-farthing with human happiness, that he was always on the heels of fortune, that he would giggle away the great Charter.... But I accuse our Minister,” said his critic, “of honesty and diligence; I deny that he is careless and rude; he is nothing more than a man of good understanding and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political roué.” Perfectly courteous to others, it was impossible for others to be discourteous to him, always excepting Brougham. But even before Brougham he did not quail, and always could give tit for tat, much to the delight of the audience of peers who, like schoolboys, exulted whenever their terror, the bully of the class, got a drubbing. The tongue which Brougham sarcastically spoke of as attuned to courtly airs, made to gloze and flatter, flayed him so completely with its quiet polish that he winced under its lash and betrayed, by his own increased violence of invective, the weight of the punishment. Soon after the accession the press said Lord Melbourne was about to publish a work on chess—the best method of playing the 83 Queen, of getting possession of the castle, an entire disregard of the old system as to bishops, being points in the book. This genial, indolent statesman, who fearlessly told the truth irrespective of party, was rubicund, with the aquiline nose of the aristocrat; his large blue eyes sometimes flashed with fire, but oftener brimmed with merriment. The noble head, sturdy plainly clad and careless-looking figure, consorted well with the laisser aller expression of face. Strange to say, he, like Lord John Russell, usually stuttered out his speeches, thumping the table or desk before him as if to work out the sentences that would not get themselves delivered. The Reform Bill made him specially energetic. Sitting next to him was a very noble earl who wore his hat well over his brows, weighing the pros and cons of too much liberty—for other people. Melbourne in his heat took his own white hat in his right hand, beat the air with it in inarticulate struggle, and brought the white to bear, crown to crown, upon the black one. The blow was fair, the arm muscular; the very noble earl looked like the ancient White Knight, with head apparently wedged between his shoulders. He sat speechless for a moment, and then nimbly springing to his feet, amid roars of laughter, twisted his head free and regained his vision. And when the roar subsided, the Duke of Buckingham thought that the great statesman so suddenly beclouded could scarcely see his way out of the difficulty, and the laughter was renewed. To see a way out of the Canadian difficulty was to find a clue in a maze.

Canadian Tories were triumphant over the fall of the Ministry on the Jamaica question. “We cannot guess,” says one editor, “into what hands Her Majesty may be pleased to commit the trust which Lord Melbourne has 84 declared his unfitness to administer.” The incoming man, Peel, quoted the state of Canada as among the trying questions which made the office of premiership the most arduous, the most important that any human being could be called upon to perform ... the greatest trust, almost without exception, in the whole civilized world, that could fall on any individual. A few moments later he had to confess that there was one question worse than the Canadian one, greater than colonial politics, a “question de jupons.” So the Government, after forty-eight hours’ attempt at change, reverted to its former holders; Canadian Tories were as glum as ever, and said Melbourne was again the governor of the petticoatocracy.

The St. Lawrence alone made the colony worth keeping; also, Canada by its confines came in contact with Russia; it was the seat of the most valuable fur trade in the world, and England would not be out of possession of it for two months before a French fleet would be anchored in the Gulf. These were thoughts impossible to think with calmness, worse even than annexation to the United States. The least calm of these men who debated upon what we were worth, and just what should become of us, was Brougham. Like most who love to torment, he himself was easily tormented. How does this champion of liberty look as he rises to condemn the policy on the Canadian question as “vacillating, imbecile, and indolent;” as he puts his awkward questions to those whom he calls his “noble friends” or “the noble lords,” all looking marvellously uncomfortable when their names are in that merciless mouth. We hear of him as absent from his place, ill in Paris through having swallowed a needle; yet after his return, one could imagine, in spite of his pointed replies, that his gastronomic feat had been to 85 swallow a flail. “The foolish fellow with the curls has absolutely touched him,” says a contemporary writer.... “Make way, good people, the bull is coming—chained or loose, right or wrong, he can stand it no longer; with one lashing bound he clears every obstacle—there he is, with tail erect and head depressed, snorting in the middle of the arena.” The eyes flash, the brows gather, the dark iron grey hair stands up rigid, his arm is raised, his voice high; he is well out of the lush pastures of rhodomontade and diffuseness. The display of his power and the fertility of his mind amazes friend and foe; for the genius of his fervent intellect includes French cookery, Italian poetry, bees and cell building, and a host of subjects seemingly far removed from law and politics. This must have been knowledge gained at the cost of his profession, for an epigram has it that he knew a little of everything, even of law. “Brougham, though a Whig, is not a goose,” says the Noctes. Certainly “the whipster peer” who was so lately defiant does not look as if he thought so, as his late pretty bits of rhetoric rattle about his own ears. Sarcasm on his tongue, bile in his heart, Brougham talks pure vitriol, and everywhere a word falls a scar remains.

His foes accused him of being “one of those juggling fiends” “Who never spoke before,
But cried, ‘I warned you,’ when the event is o’er.”
He contended that his conduct on the Canadian question had been “impudently, falsely and foully aspersed.” So far from being a juggling fiend who did not warn until the event was o’er, instead of standing by and not giving a timely warning, he had, not less than ten months before, standing 86 in that place, denounced the policy of the Government. More, he had entered his protests on the journals, warning, distinctly warning, the Government that their proceedings would lead to insurrection; and to mark the falseness of the quotation, more marvellous still, he had never twitted them when the event was o’er by saying he had warned them.

There were, however, occasions and combinations which dismayed even Brougham. He, Ellis, Hume, Papineau and Bedard, happened to meet in Paris. Much to the satirical disgust of some Canadian papers, Lord Brougham declined a dinner invitation and remained in bed in order to be quite incapacitated, as he had good reason to fear that his seat at table would be opposite Papineau.

But there is a grave in the Benchers’ Plot at Lincoln’s Inn which tells the tale of the one vulnerable spot, the wound which would not heal, in this extraordinary, audacious, eloquent man, this free lance, the critic of administrations, so prone to wound others. There he laid his only remaining child, a girl of seventeen, his application to have her so buried listened to by the Benchers because he too wished to be laid there in the same grave with her.

The third in this trio who faithfully laboured to abolish or mitigate “toil, taxes, tears and blood,”—who all for their pains were burned in effigy in Quebec and other places—was Lord Glenelg. The following is a travesty on what were supposed to be the instructions given by him, when debates as to what would prevent rebellion were followed by debates on what would cure it, Lord Durham chosen the Physician Extraordinary for colonial ills. The document was intended to regulate the Canadian Government, and showed the zeal and watchfulness of Lord Glenelg: 87

“First of all, endeavour to discover of what rebellion consists; it is not exactly murder or manslaughter, or precisely highway robbery or burglary; but it may, in a measure, consist of all.” The witty gentleman who wrote thus far was quite right, but his words were two-edged. Lount’s death has more than once been called murder, and rebellion losses discovered some pretty kinds of robbery. “I have looked into all the dictionaries, and I find that the definitions given are pretty much alike; but I would not be quite certain that they are right.” Lord Glenelg had personally written Sir F. B. Head on his appointment a year or so before, “You have been selected for this office at an era of more difficulty and importance than any which has hitherto occurred in the history of that part of His Majesty’s dominions. The expression of confidence in your discretion and ability which the choice implies would only be weakened by any mere formal assurance which I could convey to you.” Now any man who could ascribe discretion and ability to Sir Francis Bond Head had need of recourse to dictionaries.

The bogus Lord Glenelg then continues his theorizing, on the basis that a mascot is a mascot. “A rebel is undoubtedly a person who rebels, and rebellion is unquestionably the act of a rebel; you will therefore ascertain whether there is a rebel, whether that rebel rebels, and if he does rebel whether it be rebellion. Having decided the point, you will then consider what is to be done. I am strongly of opinion that as long as rebellion lasts it will continue. Now, it would be requisite to learn the probable duration of the rebellion, which, I should think, would depend in some measure on the causes which excited it. Your object will be, therefore, to make its continuance as short as possible; and if you cannot suppress it all at once, 88 you will do it as soon as you can. Then, as to the method of suppressing. I know of no way so efficacious as that of putting it down. I would advise neither severity nor conciliation, but only measures which will deter the bad or win them over. I would neither hang, pardon nor fine a single rebel, but let the law take its course, tempered with mercy.” The last Sir George Arthur did.

“By following these general instructions you will most assuredly set the Canadian question at rest, and I comfort myself with the idea that my rest will not be broken up again while I hold the colonial seat. Should any difficulty occur, I beg of you to send to me for further instructions; but I place such confidence in the advice I have already given that I shall not anticipate any application to disturb my slumbers.”

At the date of this ironical issue there were questions, seriously enough put, as to why Lord Gosford should be decorated with the Order of the Bath, the inference from the wording being that, unlike the Garter, it had some “merit” in it; merit which this Tory sheet failed to discover: “Given in a mad spirit of democratical arrogance to make rank and honours mere butts for public derision ... they generate a swarm of obscure baronets”—poor Sir Francis! “Last, and worst, they bestow that distinction, which was intended for the highest military and civil merit, on Lord Gosford, who found a colony in peace(!) and left it in rebellion.” The colony did not think so: il était un excellent homme. L. O. David says that only where he found it impossible to work out his mission of pacification he took vigorous measures, which were forced upon him. He left behind him, says the legend, le trop-célèbre Colborne.

I have laboured with all my wits, my pains and strong 89 endeavours, said each debater; and Canada, Shakespearian in turn, replied, “Pray you, let us not be the laughingstocks of other men’s humours.”

There were many winter nights of ’37 made anxious to the colonies, when “Goderich, amiable but timid, ... Lord Glenelg, sleepy, ... Howick, mischievous, ... and the real Judas, Mr. Stephen, debated leisurely, and Mr. Disraeli began his romance of politics.”

“Well, Mr. Disraeli,” said Lord Melbourne, “what is your idea in entering Parliament?” “To be Prime Minister, my Lord,” was the daring answer; not quite as, in their minor world of politics, Papineau and Mackenzie dreamt of presidency in new republics.

On the night of Gallows Hill, December 7, ’37, while Toronto was in a flutter of excited wonder and self-congratulation, while Mackenzie was speeding one way, Rolph another, and Papineau had already crossed the lines, the British House of Commons echoed to the sonorous brogue of the Celtic Thunderer and to Mr. Disraeli’s famous failure of a maiden speech. “A failure is nothing,” said the man destined to be great; “it may be deserved or it may be remedied. In the first instance, it brings self-knowledge; in the second, it develops a new combination which may be triumphant.” Words as prophetic for the failure in Canada as for his own.

If, with Henry VI., we can say of Mackenzie, a bedlam and ambitious humour makes him oppose himself against his king, so might these Lords and Commons, Governors and Commanders, have taken pains with the habitant to “attend him carefully and feed his humours kindly as we may.” The French were such very children. “Oh mon Dieu,” cried one from the bottom of a boat while he and his companions looked momentarily for destruction, 90 “if you mean to do anything, do it quickly! Once we are at the bottom it will be too late. Allons mon Dieu! just one little puff of wind, and we shall escape!”

Far back as the times of the beloved Murray, when they had at his recall petitioned the King to send him back to them—for he and his military council “were upright officers, who, without prejudice and without emolument,” did their best—and received as answer the arrival of Carleton in his stead, they were satisfied. For Carleton “was chosen by your Majesty.” Even the Duke of Richmond, in his short and stormy encounter with the Houses of Assembly, was beloved; why? They hailed the prestige of his exalted rank, for he was not only Duke of Richmond but Duc d’Aubigny, direct from the Duchess of that title, who had been invested with it by Louis Quatorze, their own Grand Monarque, as his other ancestors had been by Charles. Why did not some quick wit in the year ’37 follow the Scotch plan of providing a monarch for England instead of allowing that that place provided rulers for Scotland, and draw a parallel between James, who was Sixth of Scotland before he added England to his domain, and the young Queen whose claim to anything and everything came straight down from France? “The Norman-French of Quebec may well feel proud when they remember that they can claim what no other portion of the Empire can assert—that they are governed by a monarch of their own race, who holds her sceptre as the heir of Rollo, the Norman sea-king, who first led their ancestors forth from the forests of the north to the plains of Normandy.” 91

A Call to Umbrellas.
“We must have bloody noses, and cracked crowns, and pass them current, too.”

In 1837 people did not do things by halves. De mortuis nil nisi bonum doubled its meaning from the fervour of the abuse and obloquy cast upon the subject of it during life. William IV. found even his Queen—to whom, by the way, though she was jostled on the edge of accession by Mrs. Jordan and others, he seems to have been devoted—satirized, lampooned, vilified, by press and tongues alike. No sooner is he himself dead than his demise becomes “mournful intelligence,” “melancholy event,” “affecting news,” “distressing circumstance of the death of our beloved monarch.”

Out of the chaos left behind him steps a girlish figure, not unlike, in her bare feet and streaming hair, to some picture of early Italy, a Stella Matutina.

Her head and hands are touched with the holy Chrism; Melbourne redeems the sword of state with a hundred shillings; two archbishops and some peers lift the tiny figure into the throne; no champion throws the glove; the acclamations of thousands proclaim her crowned, peers and peeresses put on their coronets; trumpets blare above the boom of cannon; the heads of a nation are bowed in the silence of prayer; “Stand firm and hold fast,” adjures His Grace; the old do homage and become her liege men 92 of life and limb and of earthly worship, and of faith and truth which they will bear unto her, to live and die against all manner of folk. All the romance of the Middle Ages seems crowded round that small figure in St. Edward’s chair, and Stella Matutina becomes Queen Regnant.

When she opened her first Parliament the Repeal Cry and disturbed Canada were vexing elements in discussion; but the young sovereign placed her trust “upon the love and affection of my people;” and that trust, as we see, was not misplaced.

The Far West was long in hearing of her accession. “There was a deep slumberous calm all around, as if Nature had not yet awoke from her night’s rest; then the atmosphere began to kindle with gradual light; it grew brighter and brighter; towards the east the sky and water intermingled in radiance and flowed and glowed together in a bath of fire. Against it rose the black hull of a large vessel, with masts and spars rising against the sky. One man stood in the bows, with an immense oar which he slowly pulled, walking backwards and forwards; but vain seemed all his toil with the heavy black craft, for it was much against both wind and current and it lay like a black log and moved not. We rowed up to the side and hailed him, ‘What news?’ What news indeed, to these people weeks away from civilization, newspapers and letters. ‘William Fourth was dead, and Queen Victoria reigned in his stead.’”

“Canada will never cost English ministers another thought or care if they will but leave her entirely alone, to govern herself as she thinks fit.” Then came the division of opinion as to what was fit, to be followed later by the opinions of Lords Durham and Sydenham upon the dominant party, to be in the meantime fought for by all. 93 Some held it wisdom to say that a despotic government was the best safeguard of the poorer classes. A certain gentleman aired this idea in Canada, saying a governor and council was the only thing for that country. His Canadian listener looked at him fixedly for a moment, asking again if that were really his opinion,—“Then, sir, I pity your intellects.”

There was an ominous smoke from the fire in Canadian hearts over this question of class prejudices. Those were the days when a barrister would not shake hands with a solicitor, nor would a “dissenting” minister be allowed within the pale of society. Governor Maitland had been particularly hard upon this latter so-called shady lot of people. A store-keeping militia officer refused a challenge because the second who brought it was a saddler. The honourable profession of teaching was looked at so askance that to become a teacher was an avowal of poverty and hopelessness. Yet joined to this Old World nonsense, transplanted to a world so new that the crops sprung out of untilled ground, was the fact that many of the noblesse, indigenous as the burdock and thistle, drew their rent rolls from the village stores, and with the rearing of the head of what was called “the hydra-headed democracy,” Froissart’s fear was shared “that all gentility was about to perish.”

Under these circumstances military life naturally gave scope for much originality in uniform, accoutrement, and deportment. At one drill three or four hundred men were marshalled, or rather scattered in a picturesque fashion hither and thither. A few well-mounted ones, dressed as lancers, in uniforms which were anything but uniform, flourished back and forth over the greensward to the great peril of spectators, they and their horses equally wild, disorderly, spirited and undisciplined. Occasionally 94 a carving or butcher knife lashed to the end of a fishing pole did good duty for lance,—not a whit more astounding in appearance and use than the concert of marrow-bones and cleavers which some years before had nearly frightened the Duchess of York to death on her arrival in England.

But the lancers were perfection compared with the infantry. Here there was no attempt at uniformity of dress, appearance or movement; a few had coats, others jackets; a greater number had neither coats nor jackets, but appeared in shirt-sleeves, white or checked, clean or dirty, in edifying variety. Some wore hats, some caps; some had their own shaggy heads of hair. Some had fire-locks, some had old swords suspended in belts or stuck in waistbands; but the greater number shouldered sticks. An occasional umbrella was to be seen, but umbrellas were too precious to allow of liberties; some said, “But for these vile guns I myself would have been a soldier;” some were willing to enlist for gardin’, but not for shootin’. The word of command was thus given:—“Gentlemen with the umbrellas, take ground to the right; gentlemen with the walking-sticks, take ground to the left.” They ran after each other, elbowed and kicked, stooped, chattered; and if the commanding officer turned his back for a moment, very easily sat down. One officer made himself hoarse shouting out orders which no one thought of obeying with the exception of two or three men in front. But the lancers flourished their lances, galloped, and capered, curvetted (and tripped) to the admiration of all. The captain of the lancers was the proprietor of the village store, and shortly after the military display might have been seen, plumed helmet in hand, vaulting over his counter to serve one customer a pennyworth of tobacco and another a yard of check. The parade day ended in 95 a riot, in which the colonel was knocked down and one or two others seriously, if not fatally, injured. “Most elegantly drunk,” “superbly corned,” the gallant lancers, for want of an enemy, fought with one another. One invention of ’37 was a fuddleometer, an instrument designed to warn a man when he had taken his innermost utmost. But it does not seem to have been adopted at the War Office. Be that as it may, “these were the men who were out in ’37, and they did good work too.”

A glance at the method of preparation at times employed by their enemies shows a uniformity in style. One captain, in calling his company together, enumerating “You gentlemen with the guns, ramrods, horsewhips, walking-canes and umbrellas, and them that hasn’t any,” could not get his men together, because at the time most of them happened to be engaged either as players in, or spectators of, a most interesting game of fives. The captain consulted his hand-book of instructions to see what was proper to do in such circumstances, and exhorted them persuasively and politely:

“Now, gentlemen, I am going to carry you through the revolutions of the manual exercise, and I hope, gentlemen, you will have a little patience. I’ll be as short as possible; and I hope, gentlemen, if I should be going wrong, one of you gentlemen will be good enough to put me right again, for I mean all for the best. Take aim! Ram down cartridge—no, no, fire—I remember now, firing comes next after taking aim; but with your permission, gentlemen, I’ll read the words of command.”

“Oh, yes, read it, Captain, read it, that will save time.”

“’Tention, the whole then. Please to observe, gentlemen, that at the word ‘fire,’ you must fire, that is if any of your guns are loaded; and all you gentlemen fellow-soldiers, 96 who’s armed with nothing but sticks and riding switches and cornstalks, needn’t go through the firings, but stand as you are and keep yourselves to yourselves.... Handle cartridge! Pretty well, considering you done it wrong end foremost.... Draw rammer! Those who have no rammers to their guns need not draw.... Handsomely done, and all together too, except that a few of you were a little too soon and some a little too late.... Charge bagonet!”

(Some of the men) “That can’t be right, Captain. How can we charge bagonets without our guns?”

“I don’t know as to that, but I know I’m right, for here it is printed, if I know how to read—it’s as plain as the nose on your—faith, I’m wrong! I’ve turned over two leaves at once. I beg your pardon, gentlemen,—we’ll not stay out long, and we’ll have something to drink as soon as we’ve done. Come, boys, get off the stumps.... Advance arms! Very well done; turn stocks of your guns in front, gentlemen, and that will bring the barrels behind; and hold them straight up and down please.... Very well done, gentlemen, you have improved vastly. What a thing it is to see men under good discipline. Now, gentlemen, we come to the revolutions—but Lord, men, how did you get into such a higglety-pigglety?”

The fact was, the sun had come round and roasted the right wing of the veterans, and, as they were poorly provided with umbrellas, they found it convenient to follow the shade. In a vain attempt to go to war under the shadow of their own muskets, and huddling round to the left, they had changed their crescent to a pair of pothooks. The men objected to the captain’s demand for further “revolutions,” as they had already been on the ground for three-quarters of an hour, and they reminded 97 him frequently of his promise to be as quick as he could. He might fine them if he chose, but they were thirsty and they would not go without a drink to please any captain. The dispute waxed hotter, until he settled it by sending for some grog, and the fifteen guns, ten ramrods, twelve gun-locks, three rifle-pouches and twenty-two horse-whips, walking-canes and umbrellas, fortified themselves for further exertions. The result of the next order or two was doubly groggy.

“’Tention to the whole. To the left, no—that is the left—I mean the right—left wheel—march.” He was strictly obeyed, some wheeling to the right, others left, and some both ways.

“Halt—let’s try again! I could not just tell my right hand from my left—long as I have served, I find something new to learn every day—now gentlemen, do that motion once more.” By the help of a non-commissioned officer in front of each platoon they succeeded in wheeling this time with some regularity.

“’Tention the whole—by divisions—to the right, wheel—march!”

They did wheel and they did march, and it seemed as if Bedlam had broken loose; every man took the command:

“Not so fast on the right!”

“Haul down those umbrellas!”

“Faster on the left—keep back in the middle!”

“Don’t crowd so!”

“I’ve lost my shoe!” And by this time confusion was so many times confounded that the narrative had to cease perforce.

There is a Sherlock Holmes-like story told of a deserter from the British army who tried to enlist in Buffalo. His good manner and address were noticeable, 98 and he was supposed to be no common recruit. A surgeon who suspected him suddenly called out “Attention!” and as the man’s hands dropped by his side he stood confessed a soldier.

At Fort Brady, with its whitewashed palisades and little mushroom towers, was a castle, unrivalled in modern architecture. On the greensward in front were drilled an awkward squad of matchless awkwardness, in that way the superiors of any Canadians whom they might propose to attack. On occasion one would give his front file a punch in the small of the back to speed his movements, another would aim a kick for the same purpose; each had a humour to knock his neighbour indifferently well. The sentinels, in flannel jackets, were lounging up and down, looking like ploughboys ready to shoot sparrows, quite in keeping with their surroundings. But on the Canadian side there were not even these vivid demonstrations of power. Enthusiasm, however, made up for many shortcomings.

In all the newspapers of the two provinces such productions as that shown in reduced fac-simile on the opposite page might be seen; age has robbed the original, now lying before us, of a few words, but the lettering and alignment are unaltered.

The chronicler has it that Brockville’s corps began with twenty-three inoffensive and respectable men of small merchandise, who essayed to hearten themselves and terrify the French by adopting the name Invincibles. This amused Kingston, and a corps was accordingly turned out from there, called the Unconquerables, in order not to be behind “the paltry little village down the river,” and in a bogus notice from one “Captain Focus, commanding,” there was an N.B.: “No Unconquerable permitted to attend 99 muster without his shoes well blacked and his breeches well mended.”

One colonel issued instructions that above all things solid form must be preserved,—should a man fall, close and cover the vacancy. An Irishman with a bass voice and sepulchral delivery gravely asked, “And would your honour have us step on a did man?”

The word “halt” had little power to make some militia corps stationary; it rather accelerated their speed. 100 “Halt—halt—halt!” cried a perspiring officer as he chased his men, and as near explosion point as his own gun; “if you don’t halt I’ll walk you five miles!” The threat prevailed, and they halted. But they were peremptory enough when individually they had to give the same order. Both sides, loyalist and patriot, saw an enemy in every bush and were always ready for a spy. Excitement was running high in a Yonge Street village one day, when a lad, young Jakeway, hearing an unusual noise in the street, walked out to see what it was. One of a number of armed men before the village inn called to him to halt, taking him for a spy. But the lad turned away and did not hear. The man, upon no further provocation, raised his gun to shoot, but another, less ardent, knocked the weapon up and contented himself with Jakeway’s arrest. The leader recognized him as an inoffensive onlooker, and dismissed him with an apology. No one was to pass certain outposts out of Kingston without passport, the parole and countersign. The Montreal mail with four horses dashed to the bridge at Kingston Mills as the militia sentry’s halt rang out. But the coachman, as fit as himself, paid no heed; so the sentry’s bayonet pierced the breast of one of the leaders. Complaint was made to the Postmaster-General, but the sentry was promoted and Government would afford no redress. It knew a good man. That same night brought commanding officer and men, clothed and armed, to parade. By lantern light they were made load and told “the time was come.” On the principle of first fire, then enquire, a man in the front rank—of course an Irishman—discharged his musket in his officer’s face. “Be jabers,” said he, when asked for explanation and congratulated on the harmlessness of his aim, “Colonel, I wuz that full of fight I cuddn’t help it.” 101

But at the grand inspection in and about Kingston, which took place chiefly before St. George’s church, with the same hearty bluff Englishman, Colonel Bonnycastle, in command, the troops, six hundred and fifty in number, newly clothed and equipped, made a handsome showing, and considering their rawness performed their evolutions creditably and without damage to themselves or him.

“Are these British soldiers?” asked an onlooker who was shrewdly guessed to be a military spy from the other side.

“Oh, no, not at all, only the Frontenac militia.”

“Then if they are militia,” returned the American, “all I can say is they must be regular militia.”

Old Peninsula officers, remnants of Brock’s army, veterans from everywhere British, helped from Quebec to Sarnia to leaven this mass of raw colonial fighting material, and they developed it into something very ugly to tackle.

But even veterans want substantial recompense for service, and in ’37 Sir Francis received a strong appeal from one of them: “May it please your Honor and Glory, for iver more,
Amen.

“I, —— ——, formly belonging to the 49th Regt of Foot was sent to this country in 1817 by his Majesty George the Forth to git land for myself and boys; but my boys was to small, but Plase your Honor now the Can work, so I hope your honor wold be so good to a low them Land, because the are Intitle to it by Lord Bathus. I was spaking to His Lord Ship in his one office in Downing Street, London, and he tould me to beshure I wold Git land for my boys. Plase your Honor, I was spaking to Lord Almor before he went home about the land for my 102 boys, and he sed to beshure I was Intitle to it. Lord Almor was Captain in the one Regt that is the Old 49th Regt foot. Plase your honor I hope you will doe a old Solder Justis. God bless you and your family.

“Your most humble Sarvint
“—— ——

“N.B. Plase your Honor I hope you will excuse my Vulgar way of writing to you, but these is hard times Governor so I hope you will send me an answer.”

Not one of them was too far off to hear the despatchmen as they rode along the half-made roads, with bugles blowing the call to arms. Spear in boot, sword clanking by his side, the despatchman was an impressive figure which still lives in the memory of some of those who in their youth answered to his call. No one disputed his word; at his behest the farmer had to go, and the farmer’s horses had to be harnessed to furnish transport for recruits. “Four of us were out, ’cause why, we had to. Two of us were stacking cornstalks, one was at the creek with the horses, and I was mending the fence. It was a beautiful day, and the air was clear enough to hear anything, let alone that bugle. The tooting was followed by the appearance of a lot of men, and we were ordered to fall in. It took me only a minute to run into the house for some things; none of us had a gun, and on the way we cut ourselves cudgels. There was not any volunteering about it, for it was a regular press. I was the youngest, and mother she did cry like sixty.”

Everywhere the rigours of barrack life, drill, and life generally were lightened by practical jokes and bogus challenges. John Strachan, junior, once gravely challenged a cow, gave her one more chance to answer, and then, in 103 defence of his country, took her life. What is more, he had to pay for her.

In Quebec the volunteer days of ’37-38 were festive times. With population that followed a thin line of river border and condensed at the two cities, and with superior means of equipment and drill, the period of formation was not so lengthy as in Upper Canada. Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable James Hope was chosen by Lord Gosford as commander of the volunteer force. In December, ’37, the garrison at Quebec was reduced to one company of Royal Artillery. No greater compliment could be paid Major Sewell, late of the 49th, Brock’s own—with his regiment in uniforms of “blue coat and buff breeches, white blanket coat and green facings, blue cap and light band”—than to put him in charge of that important post. He had some veterans among them, Henry Lemesurier, a captain minus his right arm, which had been carried away by a round-shot at the battle of Salamanca when bearing the colours of his regiment—the 74th—for one. The militia force in the beginning of the year was incomplete and inefficient, looking formidable with its list of every officer from colonel to corporal, but with many, officers and men alike, who had never handled a musket. But they were to get used to the smell of powder. “Lord love your honour, the smell of gunpowder, did you say? Divil a bit do we care for it—it’s the balls we do be moindin’.” And well he might say so, for not even H. M. Regular Rocket troop was to be entirely trusted. At St. Eustache, under the impression that rockets like wine improve with age, one, a relic of the Peninsula, was fired. It was a mellow old fellow, slow in making up its mind. Instead of rising it fell, failed to clear the unaccustomed snake fence which lay in the track, 104 broke off its tail and sent its huge head whirling and whizzing, twirling and sizzling, over a ploughed field, with Head-quarter staff, Rocket troop and all before it in mad flight to escape. It seized upon one volunteer to play particular pranks with, and chased him round and round the field, until, exhausted, he fell between the furrows, and the rocket, balked of its prey, went out with a final bang. Convinced that his enemy was defunct the man got somehow to his feet, and never drew breath—so the story goes—until Montreal was reached.

The first paid corps raised at Quebec was named the Porkeaters, a regiment some six hundred strong, able-bodied, resolute fellows, mostly Irish labourers, mechanics and tradesmen, who did no discredit to their supposed diet. These bacon-fed knaves began by looking the awkward squad; but drill by the non-coms, of the regulars, aided by strict discipline, soon made them perform their evolutions with the regularity and precision of their instructors. It is easy to fancy this regiment going into action under Colonel Rasher, with the wholesome advice, Salvum Larder, floating to the breeze in the hands of Ensign Flitch—“Charge, Sausage, charge; On, Bacons, on,” the last words of some local Marmion.

A fine cavalry corps, well-mounted, muscular fellows, under Major Burnet, did good work; yet temperate withal, not like Strange’s troop in Kingston. The latter had been in semi-activity since ’34—that is to say, they were drilled on foot, with sticks for sabres. The consequence was that when they were furnished with arms and mounted on steeds of many sizes, difficulties ensued. Calm Sergeant Nobbs, sword in hand, all his neighbours equally hard at work mastering horse and weapon, unfortunately drew the curb at an inopportune moment as he was demonstrating his 105 mode of parrying. Up came the horse’s head, and off went its ears.

Also at Quebec were the Queen’s Pets, composed of seafaring men, under Captain Rayside, a veteran naval officer, in long blue pea-jackets, blue breeches, round fur caps with long ears, and red woollen cravats—evidently the young Queen was supposed to be fond of novelty—their arms, horse pistols, broad cutlasses and carronade. Companies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 in this regiment had blue loose coats with red collars, blue breeches, and high fur caps with long ears; the Highland company had Rob Roy tartan trews, Scotch bonnets and dark frock coats.

The Fauch-a-Ballaughs were gayer still, in white blanket coat, red sash, green buttons, green facings and green seams, high cap with green top falling over—an old hat and the humour of forty fancies pricked int’ it for a feather—and blue breeches with a red stripe.

One corps had a euphonious and suggestive Dahomean title from corporations gained in forty years of piping peace and good dinners. They were chiefly Lower Town merchants, veterans in business if not in war, who soon brought their cognomens under the discipline of black leather belts, cartouche box and twenty rounds of ball cartridge; good Brown Besses rested on the shelves provided by a kindly Mother Nature; and with much puffing and blowing, their eyes fronted and righted until a permanent cast was threatened.

All corps dined much, whether they were to fight or not. Military dinners were frequent, and always went off with great éclat, the local excitement lending “go” to them all. Even in that time of ferment there were, as there had been since the Conquest, sensible men, French and English, of the better classes who had made the fact of a common 106 enemy—the American assault of Quebec—a ground for a common patriotism. History has handed down a glowing account of one St. Andrew’s dinner given in ’37, in Quebec, and Mr. Archibald Campbell’s lines, sung by himself in a clear and mellow voice, are worth reproduction as indicative of the Scottish spirit:

There were men then in Quebec whose denunciations of British rule were given with a vim not exceeded by Papineau himself, who were destined, fermentation over, to be like the wine kept for the end of the feast. It so happened that Sir E. P. Taché, aide-de-camp to the Queen in after years, was then Patriote—to be spelled in capitals and 107 rolled with the reverberation of the Parisian R. He was subjected to an unexpected domiciliary visit, as a cannon was supposed to be hidden under his winter supply of provisions. The searchers were rewarded by a pair of duelling pistols, then a part of every gentleman’s outfit, and a veritable Mons Meg, six inches long, which belonged to a small boy of the same number of years.

As history counts, it was not long before Etienne Taché, in the fold and one of our Queen’s knights good and true, declared “the last gun fired for British supremacy in America would be fired by a French-Canadian.”

From survivors, and from a few printed memorials, one finds that what was known as Training Day seems to have been a great farce in Upper Canada. The 4th of June, King George’s birthday, was its date. Descriptions of it take one back to the Duke of Brunswick’s lament over his army—that if it had been generaled by shoemakers and tailors it could not have been worse, for the Duke’s general marched with his division like cabbages and turnips in defile. Here there was no likeness to anything so formal; the army manœuvres partook of the wild luxuriance of native growths. If twelve were the hour for muster on the common at Fort George, it was sure to be after one before the arduous work of falling in began. “The men answered to their names, as the rolls of the various companies were called, with a readiness and distinctness of tone which showed that, in spite of the weather, they were wide-awake,” says the chronicle. Once they became more active a scene ensued which could not fail to gladden the eyes of the onlookers. In time, either slow or quick, the men did not seem to be guided by any rule of book, but exemplified home-made tactics, presenting lines for which mathematicians have yet furnished no 108 name, putting out flanking parties at either end, and as nearly squaring a circle and circling a square as possible. “Though many jokes were passed, fewer sods were thrown than usual.” Even later than ’37, once men had been out and had come home veterans their services were in demand by officers newly appointed. As in the days of the good Duke of York, ignorance was an officer’s perquisite; then some intelligent sergeant whispered the word of command which his officer was ashamed to know; here, the poor officer was willing, but perhaps had a sergeant as ignorant as himself. However, he was not too haughty to search for some private to help him. “Say, they tell me you were out,” said one of these officers to a private; “I suppose you know something of military training. Now, I am a captain and don’t know anything, and I believe I’ll appoint you my sergeant.” The scene of initiation was by the Little Thames, on what was later to be a Court House site, thenceforward to be known as Stratford. The captain wore the battered remains of a tall silk hat, a black tailed coat, white linen trousers about six inches too short, and hose a world too wide for his shrunk shanks. The hastily-made sergeant, Tom Stoney, a blue-eyed young Irishman with a spice of fun but kind at heart, armed his superior officer with his own cavalry sword, and taking him into his small saddler-shop made himself military tailor as well. The captain never would have rested without spurs had he known that the late King on his first appearance in military uniform, although unmounted, wore a pair of gold ones that reached halfway up his legs like a gamecock. Stoney drew down the white pantaloons as far and as tight as possible, sewed on buttons, and cut and sewed two leather straps to aid in keeping the captain together. The men were got into line; 109 the captain meekly took his place among them. “Right face!” cried the sergeant, and off flew a button, up went the trouser-leg to the knee—“pursued my humour, not pursuing his”—rejoicing in regained freedom, relented and came down again. Clump-clamp went the leather strap with every step. The sergeant’s commands came quicker than ever, the captain perspired, and toiling behind his men removed his silk hat to wipe his streaming face. Then he ventured his first “command”: “I think we have had enough drill; we’ll march down to the distillery, boys, if you like.” And they did.

In the Talbot District, Training Day since 1812 had been kept up with constancy. In spite of that, the inhabitants were somewhat unprepared when ’37 came. But the gathering of the Loyalists, however isolated they were from one another, was willing and surprisingly quick. Old officers of the army sought for and gathered up volunteers; they had neither drum nor fife, but there was a ready response from willing hearts, and from hands equally willing, however uncouth and unused to arms. The most embarrassing hindrances, sometimes, to everything like organization and drill and obedience to orders were those same old soldiers when, as was generally the case, they knew more than their officers. They stood in the ranks, and at the same time found fault with every word of command, so that they demoralized that which they had brought together. No set of volunteers was more difficult to handle than the old soldiers who had settled in Adelaide. Captain Pegley, although himself a retired regular officer, found them almost unmanageable when mixed with the more docile farmers and farmers’ sons. After much adjuration he at length broke out into exclamations which, on the whole, suited his mixed audience better than set 110 military phrase. “Haw, man! gee, man!” cried he, a startling contrast to the studied politeness of some of the subs, who, with nothing whatever of the drill-sergeant tone, whenever the openings in the ranks were too wide, would say, “Won’t you be kind enough to step nearer this way; now, you men, be good enough to keep your places.” The sharpest order delivered by these subs was, “Halt! and let the others come up, can’t you!” Wheeling into line disclosed a line looking like the snake fence surrounding the stubble field which contained the wheel.

Marching in quick time with one bagpipe and a fiddle, or with a single drum and fife, was not antidote enough to the stubble as they passed the gallant Lieutenant-Colonel in blue frock coat, white trousers shoved up from his boots, a round hat above his fat face, seated in unostentatious dignity on his venerable white mare, whose sides were blown out with grass and her neck adorned with a rope halter. “Now, men, won’t you fall in,” he would pathetically inquire, while they showed every disposition to fall out. For, instead of the drum boy, in the centre of the parade-ground was a keg containing that liquid which in Lower Canada, when carried in a seal-skin covered bottle, was known as Lac dulce, or sometimes as old man’s milk. Then would Captain Rappelje command to drink the Sovereign’s health, which was done con amore; trials of strength, boxing and wrestling, would follow, when “Abe would knock Jehial as straight as a loon’s foot.”

What would men not do to keep these kegs full. Once Colonel Bostwick and Captain Neville were temporarily absent at the same time, while certain points on the river were guarded against surprise; the rebels were hourly expected, but failed to appear. Advantage was taken of the officers’ absence to cross at one of these 111 points, to replenish the canteen. The boat, showing lights, returned before the expected time. Those on the pier bethought them of a Yankee boast to come across and eat the small village before breakfast. They prepared to fire into the boat, but changed their minds, and rushed to where their Captain and a companion were soundly sleeping. The pile of discarded clothing by the couch had been rather mixed, and the Captain measured six foot odd; his companion’s valour was contained in few inches.

“Come, come quick, quick, the rebels are upon us!” brought them to their feet, the big Captain thrusting himself as far as he could, and farther than the garments bargained for, into the unmentionables of the smaller man. They refused to cover below the calf; he tried to withdraw, they were obdurate, and in an agony of thought the enemy’s knock was heard. The small man had meanwhile decamped with a train at either heel. The Captain seized a jacket which matched the rest of his suit; in desperation he took the quilt, and in toga arrayed, like “that hook-nosed fellow of Rome,” reached the wharf in time to receive the whiskey kegs, where he delivered a lecture on breach of discipline and ordered the men to the guard-house. This Captain was a formidable figure out of his quilt, in his own red uniform with white facings and girt with a sword whose hilt of ivory and brass was further decorated with two beavers conventionalized beyond even the requirements of modern art. The sash, of double twisted silk, strange to say had been the property of John Rolph, who, during his life in Middlesex, had made his home in Captain Neville’s house—a queer foregathering, for we all know the one, and the latter was after the pattern of the U. E. Loyalist definition in 1777: 112

Captain Neville and Colonel Mahlon Burwell had a friendly rivalry as to who would furnish the country to which they were both so devoted with the most warlike sons. Leonidas, Blucher, Hannibal, Napoleon and Brock, did they call their unprotesting infants, until a mother rose to the assertion of her prerogative when Wolfe was suggested for one of her babies. The most warlike of this cream of heroism weighed but two pounds when he came into the world, and was put in his father’s carpet slipper to be weighed. Great, then, was the consternation when at the outbreak the following regimental order was issued, embracing fathers and sons:

“You are hereby ordered and required to warn all the men from sixteen to sixty, within limits of the late Captain David Rappelje’s company, to meet at St. Thomas, 13th inst., on Wednesday, with arms and ammunition, of whom I will take command.” The same village walls held another order from Sir Francis Bond Head. The result was more men brought together than ever before in the history of the settlement. The Mansion House was the great rallying point, and here, after the Scotch fashion, business was discussed, the suspected ones talked over by the extra loyal, and toasts and maledictions drunk according to the politics of the thirsty. That part of the country was one of the most disaffected sections, and neighbour looked upon neighbour with suspicion.

Some time before this, roused out of his retirement by the tales of agitation which he heard, Colonel Talbot attended the only political meeting of his Canadian life. On St. George’s Day of the year when Sir John Colborne, one of his nearest friends, took such a conspicuous 113 part in the provincial elections, a large party of his people went out to meet the Colonel on the way from his Canadian Malahide castle. They found him on the top of Drake’s Hill, from which a beautiful view was afforded of the pleasant valley they were ready to defend. He entered the town, surrounded by waving flags bearing “The Hon. Thomas Talbot, Founder of the Talbot Settlement,” and other descriptive legends. The venerable figure of the eccentric lord of the manor, Executive Councillor, friend and fellow-officer of Wellington, stood there surveying his flock, the majority cheering him to the echo; but knots here and there bestowed unfavourable glances on them and him. His address was full of wit and sage advice. Some of the veterans, clad like himself in home-spun, who had toiled under his eye and by his aid had emerged from poverty to wealth, stood, with hands in their capacious pockets, looking up at him as if they “could fairly swallow his words.” When he referred to the pains he had taken to preserve loyalty among them, “That’s true, Colonel,” came as involuntary response. “But,” said he, “in spite of all my efforts, some black sheep have got into the flock—aye, and they have got the r-r-rot-t-t, too!”

His well-known aversion to altercation or controversy resulted in his being the only speaker. A loyal address was dictated by him extolling the blessings of government as then enjoyed and resting the blame of disaffection on the religious teaching of a certain lot of immigrants who had come to the Talbot Settlement in time to enjoy its prosperity, and then, not having the devotion bred by being first-comers, found it easy to pick flaws. The year ’37 brought to them a mysterious individual mounted on a cream-coloured horse which ambled him along the lanes 114 and roads of Yarmouth. Like the clock peddler, the stranger wore deep green glasses in his spectacles. After his labours of disseminating dissension were over he managed to make his escape, but the cream-coloured nag figured as an officer’s charger on the Loyalist side—according to his late owner’s opinion, much after the manner of the unmounted Glengarries whose humour it was to steal at a moment’s rest—“convey, the wise it call”—but from the opposite point of view was pressed into government service. It was an animal of no prejudices, for with its rider it was always in the van.

Of those whose looks burned as they listened to the Colonel, and who would not subscribe to the address, some were yet to stand upon the drop to die for treason—a dignified name with which Colonel Talbot, in common with Drew, Prince and others, would have had little patience. These disaffected were chiefly influenced by an Englishman, George Lawton, who, like a good many of the demagogues of that day, had been a factious pate elsewhere. Concerned in the Bristol Riots, he was well up in the catch-words which thrilled the crowds there, and he used his strong mind and nimble tongue upon Canadian complications. He had to escape, somehow, from the consequences of his acts at home; so a sham illness and a sham death, a stuffed coffin and a funeral, and a voyage of the supposed deceased brought George Lawton to the Talbot District to sow those “seed-grains” of revolutionary doctrine which were to make him a second time an outcast. One of the first persons he met in this country was a chief mourner who had followed his coffin to the grave.

As early as ’33, Colonel Talbot writes to a friend: “My rebels endeavoured to hold a meeting at St. Thomas on the 17th, Dr. Franklin’s birthday as I am informed, but 115 in which they were frustrated by my Royal Guards, who routed the rascals at all points and drove them out of the village like sheep, numbers with broken heads leaving their hats behind them—the glorious work of old Colonel Hickory. In short, it was a most splendid victory. Mr. Fraser, the Wesleyan minister, behaved admirably on the occasion, and I scarcely think they will venture to call another meeting in St. Thomas. Their object was to form a political union, the articles of which were to elect the Legislative Council and magistrates.”

At all periods of the Rebellion Talbot’s District provided much “sympathy.” Several men from Port Stanley set out to join the sympathisers who were making ready at Detroit. Their small vessel was provided with boiler and machinery, and they made fair headway until off a spot near the Lake Road, when the rudder gave way. In a frenzy of conscience the boat made for her own shore and stuck in the sand-bank. Just at that point there happened to be a small company of dragoons, who, when they saw the boat coming towards them, with armed men in it, divided into two parties and galloped off in opposite directions. The officer of the company, in two minds to go both ways at once, solved his difficulty by popping under an upturned canoe. The would-be saviours of their country in the rebel boat got clear of the sand-bank and made off, upon which the dragoons galloped back to look after their captain. After a careful search, for he was very coy, they found him under his canoe canopy, not a bad makeshift where umbrellas were not procurable.

There was scarcely a locality which did not give evidence that the rebel spirit had a lodgment not far off. But also in each there were martial spirits eager and willing to lead 116 or be one of loyalist troops. Some of them tell their own stories so well that it would be a pity to garble or curtail them. One man describes how he gave up his professional work, as the winter and the Rebellion were coming on together. “... The political horizon at that time looked rather squally. The Rads. were holding frequent meetings in different parts of the country, at which loud and long speeches were made to the ignorant and wicked, until it broke out in a general rising among the disaffected portion—which was the largest portion of the County of York. In Simcoe the Rads. were fully half the population; but they did not turn out for fear of the other half, among whom were many fiery Orangemen. And to this Order I attribute the safety of our country, although many loyal men, not Orangemen, turned out in behalf of the Government. Without these men we should have failed, as, before troops could arrive from England, the Yankees would have flooded the country.

“The Home District appeared to be the stronghold of the disaffected in Upper Canada. On the 4th of December, as I was going towards Queensville, I met five or six men with rifles, whom I knew to be fond of hunting deer. We talked about hunting and I went on my way, when I met sixty or seventy more, straggling along, some with guns, some with swords, and others unarmed. They had several waggons with them, which appeared loaded, but were covered up. I began to suspect their object, but could get no satisfaction to my questions. Then I met a young fellow whom I followed into his father’s house, and saw his father give him a pair of boots and some money. That convinced me. I then turned back and followed the party, when I met a man who told me my suspicions were correct, and that they were going to take Toronto. I advised him 117 to go home, but he said he dare not; so then I told him he had better go to the States. He said he would, and I afterwards learned that he took my advice. On my way south I went into the tavern on Tory Hill, and asked the landlady if she understood the movement, to which she replied that they were going to take Toronto, and she had known it for several days. Her husband and several others had gone there three days before, and I may say here that when I went to the city I found him there as a volunteer—either that or go to prison. I next saw Mr. Samuel Sweasey, and asked him if he understood the movement. ‘Yes, they are going to take Toronto, rob the Bank, hang the Governor, and when they come back they will hang you,’ When I asked him where his sons were, he said he had sent them to the woods to get rid of them, as the rebels were after them.” Between this narrator and his friends the news was soon pretty well spread in the neighbourhood of the Landing, Bond Head, Bradford and Newmarket as to what he had seen and heard. “Farther on I met several men, too great cowards to turn out with the rebels, but mean enough to give me great abuse on account of my principles.” He and various other officers met at Newmarket, and agreed to do all possible to raise quickly what force they could in their respective neighbourhoods, the narrator being assisted by one of his sons, who was a sergeant. “Two men had been sent from Newmarket to inform the Governor that there were a number up here he could depend on. These men were taken prisoners by Mackenzie’s party.... We felt much the want of arms. Orders were given to search for and seize all the arms that could be found; but we had poor success, as most of them were in the hands of the rebels and the rest were 118 hidden away to prevent our getting them. About the 9th we heard that John Powell had shot Anderson,” followed by the rest of the doings after Montgomery’s. News reached the men of the north slowly, and for many reasons their march to the assistance of the city was delayed. “At McLeod’s inn, on Yonge Street, a most cowardly affair occurred. Some twenty-five or thirty of the Scotch and a few others, on hearing that a body of men under Lount was stationed in the Ridges, whom we might have to fight, turned tail and went home. Their minister did all he could to dissuade them; but home they would go. When he found persuasion useless, he mounted his horse and called for volunteers. A few fell in with him, and he and they were with us when we took up our march for the city.

“A certain officer had assumed the command, and was mounted on a horse that had been taken from a Lloydtown man as he was trying to get home after Montgomery’s. When we got down as far as Willis’s farm, at the entrance to the Ridges, a halt was called and a council held, and, as it was yet feared by some that there was a strong force of rebels in the Ridges, it was decided that a few of us, about eight, and mounted, should form an advance guard to reconnoitre. A man from the Landing had gone into Willis’s and got a gun, which when the colonel saw he called to the man to let him have. The other objected, whereupon the colonel went up to him and, in the presence of us all, wrenched it out of his hands. We were then ordered, the disarmed man one of us, to advance, which we did. The eight of us had two guns, three swords, one club, and this little party went through the Ridges while the colonel and his reserve waited for about half an hour. Hearing nothing from us in the shape 119 of a skirmish they ventured through. When we got to Bond’s Lake I got a pitchfork for the man from whom the colonel had taken the gun.” At Thornhill they learned that the rebels were completely dispersed, and many were for returning home; but it was decided to continue the march and tender their services to the Government. “By this time we mustered pretty strong, as several had joined us during the night and morning, many of whom I presume would have joined the other party had they been able to reach the city and make a stand there. We had now some twenty-five or thirty prisoners that we had picked up as we came. These we tied and placed in two strings, somewhat in the form of Ʌ.” Arrived in the city the volunteers were inspected by the Governor, and thanked by him in Her Majesty’s name for the tender of their services. “When they came opposite to where I was sitting on my horse, Colonel Carthew said, ‘A more loyal man does not live,’ and upon this the Governor bowed twice and passed on.” Some ten or twelve of them did not accept their billet upon the people, but went to a tavern and paid their own way. “I was officer of the guard on the night that Peter Matthews was brought into the Parliament House (used as head-quarters and prison) a prisoner. On the next night I went with Mr. Robinson, Dr. King and Sheriff Jarvis to the hospital, where Edgar Stiles, Kavanagh, and Latra were lying, to take their depositions.” On the next night he was sent “with a strong party to Sharon, where we captured some thirty or forty and sent them to Toronto. For three or four days I was at Newmarket attending to the guards, as we had a number of prisoners in the Baptist meeting-house.... I was ordered to where Collingwood now stands to look for Lount, who was said to be there at a lonely house of 120 one John Brasier. When we had got as far as Bradford a man was sent after us with a report that Lount had been taken somewhere below Toronto. When I went to Newmarket again I found that in my absence several gentlemen who had been nowhere at the first had come in, had got commissions and my men.... After this, some eighteen or twenty of us about the Landing and Sharon joined and formed a company for our mutual defence, armed with muskets. For a while we met for drill weekly, then monthly, and soon not at all.”

Lloydtown, although the seat of disaffection, had its loyalists, too; but as they were in the face of such odds they had to temper the exhibition of their loyalty with discretion. One of themselves says that when the call came for their aid they made a prompt response, but took the precaution to leave the village in small parties.

But loyalty was a term on a sliding scale, and a Scotchman whose vote was Reform was every whit as loyal as his Tory acquaintance who “suspicioned” him.

“Loyal? Of course I was loyal, as every one in our neighbourhood was; but most of us were true Reformers nevertheless, and not ashamed of the name, in spite of Mackenzie’s goings-on. I refused to volunteer in ’38 when the draftings began again, because all trouble in Upper Canada was over, and I could not see that I was called upon to give up important home duties; and besides that, the officers had nothing to do, and thought it would be a fine thing to get a company up and have the recompense for keeping it together. The captain only succeeded in getting a few volunteers, not twenty, and the thing was to be completed by ballot. That was a regular farce, and the ignorance of some of those who drew was ridiculous. A Scotchman, holding his slip in his hand, showed it 121 exultantly to a friend, who did not begrudge him his luck, saying, ‘O-o-aye, ah’ve drawed a prize.’ But I met an Irishman, soon after, who had been sharper than the Scotchman, pretending that he knew the peculiar twist of a paper that was intended not to be ‘drawed.’ The Irishman was rejoicing in his own exemption, and wickedly gloating over his brother who was not up to the twisted paper trick and had ‘drawed.’ One man, now our most prominent citizen, and certainly one of the oldest, refused either to draw or volunteer, for reasons the same as mine; he had fought in ’37 on the loyalist side, and now in ’38 a warrant was out for him on the score of disloyalty! They tried to arrest him, thinking he would submit quietly, but he fought the thing on every point, and these so-called loyalists found they had no legal ground to stand on. They dare not press the matter, so my friend was let alone.”

“Our captain was a regular autocrat in manner and appearance, and he spoke with a thick, fast utterance of a kind better imagined than written, when he was excited. Two others, who happened to be where we were stationed, also had an impediment in their speech, and none of them were remarkable for smooth temper. X. was sitting in the tavern one day when Z. entered to get something which was lying on the back of X.’s chair. Z. stutteringly apologized for disturbing him. X. was annoyed at being mocked, and stutteringly told him he would stand no such insult. Z. wondered why it was an insult to claim his belongings on the chair, and was equally angry at being stuttered at in response to his polite speech. Stutters were bandied until mutual anger, recrimination and exasperation led to a mutual invitation to the open and an appeal to the 122 captain’s sympathy, which was stutteringly refused, while he advised them not to be ‘such-ch f-f-fools.’”

“In the beginning of the winter of ’37-38, MacNab, president of our railroad, came with some of the directors into our office. He stood before the fire, with his coat-tails turned up, and seemed to have made up his mind to rival Cromwell, if not to surpass him. ‘Boys, the Rebellion has burst out and the railway has burst up. Make out your arrears of accounts due, get them verified and certified by the chief engineer and keep them safe—some day you may get the money. In the meantime we have none for you, and the banks are burst all over the country, and if we had any to give you you could not pass it. We have no further use for your services, unless you choose to enlist in the volunteer corps. In that case I can promise you lots of work at twenty-five cents a day without board, except by foraging on the enemy. I give you quarter of an hour to get your accounts verified, and then go. I want to lock up the office and put the key in my pocket by that time.’

“I don’t know what the other fellows did with themselves, but I got my $130 odd verified, and it will be just sixty years next December since that money started ‘coming’ to me. I joined the Guelph Light Infantry, under Captain Poore, and that afternoon we marched over awful roads to Ancaster. When we got there we made camp-fires along the street, and lay down in our blankets on the frozen ground. The object of our expedition was to annihilate Duncombe.

“At about two in the morning we were kicked till we woke up, when we were summoned to partake of the banquet the Government provided of pork and bread. For 123 the ensuing two weeks of our expedition we looked back in raptures at that meal, for we got hardly another bite except an occasional one stolen from the farmers. Once I got one hot potato from the table while the people were at breakfast; the other fellows took the rest, and it was all done in a moment. We got an occasional frozen potato or turnip, but the farmers, who were nearly all rebels there, generally left their houses empty. Lane, the commissary, was all the time a three-days’ journey behind us.

“When we reached Brantford we were quartered in the Methodist Church, three hundred of us, a coloured company from Toronto part of the three hundred. Many queer things happened there, including a burlesque sermon from the pulpit by a darkey, and the attempt to take up a collection after it for commissariat purposes. I was sentry that night over the so-called stores, and as I was leaving the church a kettle of boiling fat was brought in. I had not time to wait, so I dipped my india-rubber cup in and took a drink. I scalded my thumb and finger, burnt my mouth and tongue, melted my cup, and then had two hours in which to quietly meditate on the result of drinking red-hot fat in a hurry. As I was leaving the church a strip of red flannel was handed me to sew on my fur cap; none of us had uniforms, and the flannel was our distinguishing mark from the enemy. While on sentry a woman crossed the road and asked me if I had seen her husband; I said I had seen no one, and asked her to sew the flannel on my cap. It appeared I was keeping sentry over her husband’s bake-shop, which had been taken for commissary purposes, and she kept me bareheaded in a snowstorm for an hour waiting for that cap. That was our first snow, and before that all our teaming had been by waggons. While bareheaded 124 the commissary came along to get into his store; I challenged him, and he said he had not got the watchword. I would not let him pass; so he forced his way against my bayonet. That made him go off vowing vengeance. Soon Colonel MacNab and Colonel Mills and the commissary came up. I guessed what they came for, and challenged them. MacNab was in the middle. To ‘Advance, friend, and give the countersign,’ he said, ‘Don’t you know me?’ I said I knew no one on duty. He then came up and whispered ‘Quebec,’ and I let him pass. That ended the attempt to catch me tripping while on duty. When the woman brought me my cap I said I was not going to thank her for sewing it, because she sympathised with the rebellion. Suddenly I heard musket shots, and it appeared the rebels were marching in to take Brantford without knowing we were there waiting for them. A doctor in advance of their army had been taken prisoner at the bridge; but he lied to MacNab, and said he was on his way to see a sick person. This seemed probable, and he was let go, when he rode back to warn the rebels. A shot was sent after him, and that started the alarm I heard. All our companies were mustered in line in a great snowstorm, and furnished with thirty-six rounds of ball cartridge; then we began quick march to catch the enemy, who retreated when the doctor reached them. We caught up to them at Beemersville, when they took position and fired a volley; we charged, and they subsided; so we ate their breakfast. During the day several hundred Indians drew up in line in an orchard and took us for rebels; we took them for the same. We were in line to receive them, and pails of whiskey were dealt along. The others took it, but I refused, although the sergeant who dealt it out said it would give me Dutch courage. I said I wanted only English 125 courage. Officers met each other half way with flags of truce for a parley. It turned out we were all of the same side, so they brought their painted faces to within ten feet opposite; but we couldn’t speak Indian and they couldn’t speak English, so we were not very communicative. When there was to be no fighting I wanted my whiskey, but the sergeant would not give it.

“I went into the tavern to capture a prisoner almost in my hand. He had fired two rifles at me, and then he ran to the tavern; my musket was not loaded, so I could not return fire, but I threw it at him. I got him fast in the tavern, almost transfixing him with my bayonet before I could divert it; as it was, his long whiskers were pinned into the wall, and to withdraw the steel I had to plant my foot against his waistband. But when our men came pouring in several tried to kill him, so I stood before him and we fenced with bayonets, I against three or four. They desisted when I told them that the first blood spilt would be theirs or mine, and I sent for a sergeant to come and take the man. But when they went out I had to stand between my prisoner and the crowd.

“We slept three deep in straw that night. I came in late, found a place, and used another man for a pillow; soon a comrade came in and woke me up by sitting on my head while he pulled off his boots. I shook him off three or four times, but he remonstrated with me for being inconsiderate, as my head was the highest thing in the room and the best for his purpose. He was so persistent, and I so sleepy, that I agreed to let him stay if he would promise to get off when he got rid of his boots. He promised, and I went to sleep; and I suppose he must have done as he said, for I did not find him on my head in the morning. 126

“Near what was then Sodom-and-Gomorrah we came on seven haystacks in a row by the fence line; the cavalry had tied their horses to the fence and divided the stacks among them; then the teams came up, and the stacks were melted more thoroughly than the snow. My legs were stiff from walking, and a pock-marked Irishman’s hands were stiff from driving; so we exchanged musket and whip, and I had a day’s relief while driving for him. The snow had grown so deep that a team took the lead, breaking the way for the men, who would pass by in full procession, while the teamster drew to one side to rest his horses. Before we left Norwich three or four hundred men gave themselves up as prisoners, heartily sick of what they had supposed was patriotism. When we got to Ingersoll and asked for food they said there that everything had been bought up that was not poisonous; the grocery man had nothing to offer me but soft soap, and he recommended that in strong terms. I declined the inference.

“Our barracks there were in the blacksmith’s shop, without a floor, and built over the creek on the only street in the place. I took my bayonet out of the sheath and knocked at the kitchen door of the best looking house I could see. A lady answered, and I asked her if there was a gentleman in the house that I could talk to. She said no, her husband was with the officers. I said I came to buy a loaf of bread. She could spare me none, as she was going to give a dinner to the officers that evening, and at any rate she did not sell bread, that was not her business. I told her I was sorry there was no man in the house that I could talk to, but as there was not I must tell to her that I had been all over the village trying to buy food, and as I had not been able to get any I had taken this bayonet out with a view to fighting for some if I could not buy 127 it; that I was soldiering to drive the rebels out, and that we had no commissariat; that that sort of thing was hard for me and the rest of the men, when officers could have banquets given them after being too ignorant to organize a commissariat. I told her a great many things, and apologized for having to talk to her so, and that I was sorry there was no man to talk to. She ended by giving me nearly a whole loaf, the price for which she said was a York sixpence. I put a York shilling down on the table and took my loaf to the barracks, where I cut it in as many pieces as there happened to be men in. As soon as I had put a piece in my mouth I found myself reeling and getting blind. They led me out and I fell into the creek, with my head under water; they picked me out again, but my appetite was all gone, and I gave away my bit of bread. I wandered about, and after awhile heard that the Orangemen were having a feast. I and several others went to the same house, and we were all in the seventh heaven of happiness; good food, and served by a handsome hostess and two beautiful daughters. After eating, we joined the Orangemen in the next room, and we spent several hours drinking grog and singing. That was our tenth day out, and that supper was my third meal. Generally our meals consisted in sucking a corner of a blanket; we kept our mouths moist that way, and averted faintness and reeling.

“When going to Hamilton teams were pressed from the farmers, and we were carried seven men and a driver in each. When we got to the mountain the angle and state of the road sent the first sleigh over the precipice, and ours, the second, hung over at right angles; but we managed by hugging the bank and shifting our weight. I looked over and saw the first sleigh on a ledge about one 128 hundred feet below, and as the men were not visible I suppose they were buried in the snow.

“When sitting in the tavern that day I found in my pocket a small apple I had bought near Paris. I took a bite of it and that brought the saliva into my mouth, when, naturally, I fainted as I sat.

“As we marched into Hamilton we had to pass by my door, so I marched out of the ranks and into it. Of my three meals in two weeks, only one was at the expense of the Government.”

“When I was going from Hamilton to Windsor I had to take to sleighing at Chatham, and as we drove down the river, hugging the shore, many large fields of ice floated down the open. We passed three men on one cake, another on a second, and later a fifth, all dead and frozen Yankees, sympathisers. At Windsor I stopped with Mr. Baby, whose house windows were riddled with bullets, and I saw vacant lots broken up and dotted with graves. As an encouragement for me, on my way to Detroit, I was told that the Yankees had threatened to hang the first six Canadians they could catch, to the lamp posts, in return for Colonel Prince’s shooting. When I got my pass from a lieutenant to enable me to cross the river he told me the same thing. I got over and was trying to get my boxes examined by two men who called themselves custom house officers, when I found I had to go off, for peace’ sake, with three others, to report. I guessed what it was about, and made up my mind. They took me to a low tavern filled with unwashed men, and I was left sitting with one of my three while the other two reported on me to an officer. Was I in the ‘war’? Yes. Which side, the patriotic? Yes. Where? Under General 129 Duncombe. How did he make out? Beaten horribly. My questioner had been at Navy Island, and said ‘the British had sent over a —— rocket, which they all looked at while it zigzagged round until it fell plump on the island, where it fizzed away so long that they went to see what was the matter with it, and while they were looking the —— thing burst, and —— if it didn’t kill eight; they didn’t feel any curiosity to examine any of the rest that came.’ I treated this fellow to a drink, unrectified and tasting like sulphuric acid. I didn’t drink mine, so he did. Then I was conducted to the officers’ room, about eighteen gentlemanly looking fellows, apparently American officers, who were deputed to conduct the campaign, so as to give better prospects of success in the conquering and annexing of Canada. They tried to catch me tripping, but I lied manfully; I had no scruples about treating such gentry so. I knew all about what I had seen, and all I had to do was to reverse the position. But my stay in Detroit was short, and I soon returned to work in Canada.

“In our scrimmage with the enemy our captain of cavalry fired his pistol at a rebel, but his horse inopportunely pranced and the bullet ran along the animal’s neck and out at his forehead. He fell, stunned, crushing the captain pretty badly, one of whose hands was permanently injured. He told the story to some one, and that person said, ‘Don’t tell that story again; say the rebels shot your horse, and claim a pension.’ He took his friend’s advice, but I don’t know about the pension. At a review afterwards I saw the same captain on the same horse, and I told the story to the man I was with; we then went up to the captain, and asked him how he got his hand hurt, and he replied that the rebels had shot his horse!

“After our campaign I found I could drink thirteen 130 cups of tea at a meal for several successive meals; but I could not sleep in a bed, or in fact stay long in the house at night at all.” This narrator gives some most unflattering opinions of Colonel MacNab in his generalship in the Duncombe campaign, and many tales of the commissariat department alone seem to bear out his statements from a private’s point of view. He is contemptuous and satirical in describing the methods employed in the Little Scotland affair, “but considering we were about 30 to 1 it did not much matter.”

Another gives a summary of the few casualties at Little Scotland, and, as a death dealer, thinks sauerkraut almost equal to bullets: “A private from Hamilton nearly perished after eating a quart of raw frozen sauerkraut. I was detailed to bring in some prisoners, a cold trip in the snow, and I was fired at from behind an elevation in the road in front of us. We found two of the prisoners covered up in an oat bin in a tannery. Our luggage-train had such a hard time that in one place we had to build a bridge and hold it down with hand-spikes while the train went over. We had no rest and little to eat; no salt at all, and our rations only frozen bread. We would gnaw at it a while and then lay it aside to rest our jaws; but we had to be careful that the hero of the sauerkraut would not make away with it, as he had a hungry maw and a canvas bag. At night we slept in the open, and we wrapped ourselves in Indian blankets—to find them frozen round us. But a fire made of fence rails thawed us and our bread and blankets.”

Occasionally there were volunteers who were not made of the stuff which could be comfortable in a frozen blanket or willing to face a foe. An American, engaged in shipping lumber to Buffalo, with no love for Canadians, had 131 boards added in every possible way about his vessel and covered with all available lanterns and candles. This display sent terror, as he expected, to the hearts of the raw recruits. When ordered to hold themselves in readiness for the advancing foe, one of them approached the captain and declared he was not going, as he had “only listed to stan’ guard.” 132

Le Grand Brule.

“It appears to me that there is no danger in leaving Canada in Sir John Colborne’s hands for the present, and that his powers are amply sufficient for all emergencies that may arise.”

While in Upper Canada vigilance committees had merged into military organizations with much intended secrecy, in Lower Canada matters went with a higher hand. In the former, “shooting matches,” where turkeys took the place of Loyalists, were fashionable with the more advanced Reformers; sharp-shooting practice went on, with an occasional feu de joie in honour of Papineau when some courier brought an enthusiasm-begetting letter from below. Mr. Bidwell, an “incurable American in mind, manners, and utterance,” gave his legal opinion that trials of skill such as these were not contrary to law. It was found, too, that bayonets were much the handiest weapons in hunting deer; from humane desire some hunters added these to their rifles, so that such monarchs of the forest as came in their way could be speedily put out of misery.

But in Montreal and elsewhere the rebels drilled on the military parade grounds and complained bitterly if interfered with, and officers of the troops would make small knots of amused audience near them. The bulk of these patriots were boys, but they did not like to hear themselves so called; they were tired of the times of peace, when sons bury their fathers, and were ambitious for the 133 times of war, when fathers bury their sons. One of them challenged an officer, demanding satisfaction for such a “remarque insultante,” and two more jostled a soldier on sentry, trying to take his musket from him. His officer advised, “If the gentlemen come near you again, you have your bayonet; use it, and I will take the consequences.” For, withal hoping it was but an effect of humour, which sometimes hath his hour with every man, instructions were not to force matters by any hasty act. The only result of this incident was another private challenge, an exchange of shots, and Sir John Colborne’s disapproval, all part of the excitement surrounding the Doric-Liberty riots, when the patriots were ambitious to be “fils de la victoire” as well as “fils de la liberté.”

On his way to the famous Six Counties meeting, Papineau narrowly escaped a thrashing from a noted pugilist who would willingly have championed England had not a party of officers on “board the boat, bound for a fox hunt, interfered.” The officers did not scruple to ride at and rout with their whips the parcel of young boys, who, armed with duck guns, met Papineau as escort at Longueuil, the lads fleeing in all directions, while Papineau made his disappearance unostentatiously down a byway.

In after years Longueuil was a favourite haunt for Papineau. He would sit for hours in a small rustic arbour built upon a point of land where he could look upon a wide and beautiful view, pondering on the things that might have been had Sir John Colborne not been the man he was.

As early as the 14th of October matters were thought so ripe for insurrection that the troops were kept ready in barracks for a minute’s notice, and a loyalist meeting—a sure forerunner of disturbance—at which Campbell Sweeny was one of the ablest speakers, was held. By 134 afternoon Loyalists and Canadians had come to blows, and fought, off and on, into the night, the former thenceforth called the Axe-handle Guards, from their weapons on that occasion. On the following day a young officer named Lysons was sent to Toronto to ask Sir Francis Bond Head for as many troops as he could spare. He could spare all, except the detachment at Bytown. Garrison artillery was turned into field artillery, with guns, harness and horses newly bought; and Sir John Colborne, apparently the right man in the right place, was appointed commander of the forces. Asked what Cromwell had done for his country, an old Scotch laird once answered, “God, doctor, he gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks.” Colborne at once set about assuring Canadian rebels that they were made on the same anatomical principles as kings. He was not likely to make a plaything of Revolution. This old and tried soldier had been in New York ready to sail for home, not a little wearied after his Upper Canadian experiences, when he received his new command. He lost no time in repairing to Quebec to organize and appraise his available forces. He armed the Irish colonists; what they would do was the question, for there was much sympathy among them for the oppressed Canadians, but Garneau sarcastically remarks that Colborne possibly appreciated the versatility of that race.

Hitherto the military in Canada had been left unsupported by their own authorities. Colborne felt them to be something after the pattern of the standing army in the Isle of Champagne, which consisted of two, who always sat down; and he proceeded to make those under him stand up. He asked for reinforcements from home, his policy being of the kind which dictated the display of the British fleet in Delagoa Bay but lately—to frighten, overawe, 135 to show the case to be hopeless, and so save further demonstration from the disaffected. By his detractors he has been accused of taking measures to force premature revolt, knowing that to allow the movement to ripen it would become a grand combination of force which he would be unable to resist. Calumny of this kind was common and not confined to one side of politics, as witness the theory that Mackenzie was in the pay of the British Government to stir up rebellion.

It was a master-stroke of policy, said the cavillers, to force the first encounter in Montreal; and thence was traced the line of disaster which followed. Among the scuffles—“troubles sérieux”—was the famous one between the Doric Club and the Sons of Liberty. Warrants against the chief malcontents followed, including Papineau, Morin, O’Callaghan and Nelson. Arrests in the rural districts were resisted strongly. After the Governor (Gosford) had proclaimed martial law, the clash of arms began to be heard. Lieutenant Ermatinger of the Royal Volunteer Cavalry and some twenty men were despatched to St. John’s, via Longueuil and Chambly, to arrest Davignon and Demarais, two noted malcontents. Ermatinger did his work quietly, put irons on their hands and feet and ropes about their necks, and after placing them in agonizing positions on the boards of the waggon in which they were to be conveyed to Montreal, began his return. Their appearance of complete defeat struck the young lieutenant as possibly a wholesome lesson to others; so instead of returning by a direct route he took them where the display would not be lost. Near Longueuil he was warned by a woman that a rescue party awaited him on the road. Disregarding her, he went on till some three hundred men, armed with the usual long guns, in a field on their right, 136 and protected by the high fences, proved her to be correct. Shots were exchanged, Ermatinger himself was wounded in face and shoulder with duck-shot, and a plucky little Surgeon-Major of Hussars (Sharp) in the leg. Some half-dozen others of the Loyalists were disabled, and they began to make good their retreat. Sharp, in spite of his wounds, managed to cover it. The waggon upset prisoners and constables, and as there was neither time nor inclination to pack them in again, the escape was due rather to accident than to rescue. Meantime a party of regulars awaited Ermatinger’s return at the ferry, ready to escort the expected prisoners to gaol; the civil force was so inadequate that he and his men had in fact been doing the work of special constables. Shots in the distance, then the stragglers wounded or whole, told their story, and it was deemed expedient to send a stronger force. A detachment of Royals, Royal Artillery, and some cavalry, comprising a few of those wounded the day before, went back to the scene, commanded by Wetherall. Tracks of blood in the fields, an overturned waggon and a dead horse, wayside houses and barns with shutters and windows nailed tight but hearth-fires still burning, told of conflict and hurried departure. Not an inmate or weapon was to be found, but a pedestrian said he saw women and children and some armed men farther on. The cavalry in advance gave chase to some thirty armed horsemen, who, after leading their pursuers over very rough riding, took to the woods, leaving behind only one solitary footman, who at once gave himself up. The infantry then were ordered into the woods, and the cavalry drew up along its edge, twenty or thirty shots were exchanged, and this time they were rewarded with seven prisoners. 137

The miscarriage of the first attempt made the rebels ironical. Ermatinger’s followers, called the Queen’s Braves, were portrayed as “decamping across the fields, leaving Messieurs Davignon and Demarais to their farmer rescuers, ... one of the gallant soldiers first discharging his pistol, ... but his hand trembling with fear did no other execution than graze the shoulder of M. Demarais.... The disciplined mercenaries of tyrants were far from invulnerable when opposed by men resolved to be free.”

St. Denis and St. Charles were seats of discontent and determined resistance. A combined movement was therefore resolved on, one command under Lieut.-Colonel Wetherall, one under Lieut.-Colonel Hughes, and the whole under Colonel the Honourable Charles Gore. A magistrate’s general address preceded this action, accompanying the order of the Lieut.-General commanding. “Should our language be misunderstood, should reason be slow to make itself heard, it is still our duty to warn you that neither the military force nor the civil authorities will be outraged with impunity, and that the vengeance of the laws will be equally prompt and terrible. The aggressors will become the victims of their rashness, and will owe the evils that will fall upon their heads to their own obstinacy. It is not those who push you to excess who are your true friends. These men have already abandoned you, and would abandon you again at the moment of danger, while we, who call you back to peace, think ourselves to be the most devoted servants of our country.” D. B. Viger’s name heads the list of magistrates, a signature which made some eyes open wide.

But, in an evil moment, the Nation Canadienne persevered in its trial of strength; Papineau, at its head, 138 proclaimed himself “a brilliant leader and a constellation of moral excellence,” and his proclamation declared that “all ties were severed with an unfeeling mother country, that the glorious fate of disenthralling their native soil from all authority, except that of the brave, democratic spirit residing in it, awaited the young men of all the colonies.”

Meanwhile the Church issued its pastoral letter, never having countenanced either Papineau or his followers. The premier Bishop had ended his personal exhortation by proposing the health of the Sovereign, and his brother Bishops and all the clergy had risen and drunk the toast respectfully. His mandement was accepted with few exceptions. At the parish church of St. Charles the greater portion of its masculine hearers left the church cursing, and the Abbé Blanchet, curé of the parish, was a patriot who took no trouble to hide his sentiments.

At St. Charles the rebels had seized the château, substantial and built on old French models, of M. Debartch, seigneur of the manor. He fled for his life on horseback, while General Storrow Brown regaled his followers on the seigneur’s good beef and mutton, after which they cut down the trees and made the house into no bad imitation of a fortress. M. L’Espérance, whom they courted as a colonel, refused to act. They told him to leave the parish at once; he tried to do so, and then they took him prisoner, contributing $236 of his money to their exchequer. They loop-holed the walls, and made their barricades in the form of a parallelogram on the acres which lay between the river Richelieu and the hill at the foot of which the house stood. The tree trunks were banked with earth, a tidy fortress in appearance, but a trap from which there was no escape in case of defeat, 139 practically of no strength against the loyalist guns. But no outside strength of position availed where such miserable management prevailed within. General Brown had lost an eye in one of the late affrays in Montreal; he was now thrown from his horse on the frozen ground and severely injured. He had but a handful of men to resist attack, for he had sent out a number the night before on various errands. They had not returned, and the few with him were wretchedly armed. By the time the troops arrived he himself was in the village, trying to beat up recruits; and when the firing began without him he took the precaution to remove himself still farther. The unhappy followers he had forsaken were being killed or, trying to escape, taken; every building but the château itself was burned and the barricades demolished. The fields were by this time covered with flying women and children. One woman, who evidently had not time to save herself, was found dead, after the battle, in the midst of the smoking ruins of her dwelling.

There were two cannon within the fortress, but they were only used twice. Wetherall posted his men on the small hill, got his guns into place and began to play on the insurgents, who were left no egress but by the river. They managed to gall him, one party making a sortie; the firing was kept up for an hour but ever grew fainter, while the balls from the field-pieces made great breaches in the rude earthworks, and the undisciplined, unofficered defenders were deeper in confusion. Then came the cruel advance with fixed bayonets, and all who did not ask for quarter received none; the Richelieu was on the other side of them, and “many leaped into the lake who were not thirsty.” “The slaughter on the side of the rebels was great,” wrote Wetherall; “I counted fifty-six bodies, 140 and many more were killed in the buildings and the bodies burnt.” The rebel record reads not at all like this, and ends, “One hundred of these brave men took shelter in a barn filled with hay and straw. The Royal butchers set fire to it and burned them alive. One hundred were drowned in crossing the Richelieu. The village of St. Charles was entirely burned by the soldiers during the attack; those of the inhabitants who escaped the flames perished in the woods from the effects of fright and cold.... The prisoners that fell into their hands were inhumanly treated, and many of the wounded murdered in cold blood.” But, as a brother officer records, “Nothing succeeds like success. Colonel Wetherall was lauded to the skies.”

“We understand the capture of St. Charles was effected with great ease,” says a correspondent in a tone admiring the burning and complete destruction; “no loss of consequence to the troops.” “As soon as possible after the action, the troops, with the greatest humanity, began to bury the bodies of the killed, the scene truly deplorable, wives and daughters ransacking among the bodies for those to whom they wished to pay the last rites.” The Montreal Courier said that hot shot had been used.

In Montreal the welcome to the troops was, as might be expected, extravagantly joyful: “It was an interesting sight to see the hundreds who crowded on the wharf to witness it. The cavalry landed first, two of them carrying the liberty pole and cap erected at St. Charles at the meeting of the Six Counties, with its wooden tablet bearing the inscription ‘À Papineau par ses citoyens reconnaissants,’ the former fragment of the spoils looking sadly like a fool’s cap upon a barber’s pole. The artillery followed, with the two little guns taken at St. Olivière in addition to their 141 proper armament. After them rode the commanding officer, followed by the bands of the Royals and the infantry, the first company of which followed the prisoners, thirty-two in number.”

“The pole, it was hoped by some, would be deposited in that proud fane of British glory, where the tattered ensigns of extinguished rebels in Ireland and of blood-hunted Covenanters in Scotland wave over the tombs of sleeping monarchs in melancholy conjunction with the virgin standard of Bunkers Hill and the trophies of such days as Trafalgar, Cape Vincent, and Waterloo!”!!

It had been intended that the other half of the force, under Colonel Hughes, Colonel Gore accompanying it, should appear before disaffected and mutinous St. Denis simultaneously with Wetherall’s appearance at St. Charles. But the gods of war were not with them as with the others. Torrents of rain, pitchy darkness, rain turning to snow, men and horses sinking in mud, harness breaking, knee deep in water or winding along trails did the column bound for St. Denis find itself, while a few broken bridges were the only drawback to the victorious Wetherall. Four miles away, they surmised their plight and slow approach had led to a warning to their enemies and time for preparation. For eleven hours they toiled, at the rate of a mile and a half an hour, the mud pulling off the men’s boots and moccasins. The cavalry were kept busy driving away parties who were destroying the bridges, all of which had to be repaired before the gullies and streams could be crossed and the howitzers carried over. A most useful man was Cornet Campbell Sweeny, of the Mounted Dragoons, who prevented much damage and was alert in securing early intelligence. They heard the church bells ring the alarm—in rebel language usually called the tocsin—and they found 142 a welcome awaiting them from some eight hundred men armed with a scant stock of good and bad guns, pikes, pitchforks, and cudgels.

Before Colonel Gore left he had sent on young Lieutenant Weir, in plain clothes, to prepare for the advance. He was to meet the troops at Sorel, but failed to do so, as they had taken a byroad known as the Pot-au-Beurre to avoid St. Ours, a stronghold of the rebels. This Weir did not know. He took a calèche, and insisted that the man should drive him by the very road which it was impolitic to take. He gave up this calèche, being urged by a Frenchman to take one driven by himself. Weir believed the man’s assertions, engaged the calèche for the balance of his journey, and was driven straight to Nelson’s quarters. When he arrived there and was stopped by the rebel sentry he boldly asked where the troops were. This was the first intimation to the others that the troops were expected. Tied hand and foot, he was put into a cart and removed under escort. As Weir was at once arrested he had disappeared before his friends’ arrival. Among the preparations Nelson immediately set his son Horace and his pupil Dansereau to make bullets.

At the outskirts another skirmishing party gave the troops a brisk salute, and from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon the struggle lasted. Success in resistance seemed so uncertain that Nelson persuaded Papineau to retire and save the person most sacred to the cause. “It is not here you are most useful,” said he; “we shall want your presence at another time.” Papineau argued that his retirement at such a moment might be misinterpreted, but eventually agreed that his rôle was more that of orator than soldier—to breathe fire-eating words rather than to stand the fire of Colonel Gore’s guns. Nelson then 143 rode out to reconnoitre, was afraid he would fall in with the advancing column, and came back at a hard gallop. In the meantime Captain Markham at the head of his men was pushing on, taking house after house, till he reached a stockade across the road which fenced off the large stone building, four stories high, where Nelson had ensconced himself, with other houses so situated as to strengthen its position. The howitzer now came into play; one of the houses was taken, and attention was turned towards securing a large distillery near by. Captain Markham, severely wounded in the knee and with two balls in his neck, still kept with his men; but they, too, began to fall. The previous night’s toil, the cold and hunger, told on them; ammunition began to run out, and the insurgents received additions to their numbers from the neighbouring villages. One of the defenders was Père Laflèche, who had been soldier before priest and now combined his callings. He was telling his beads when he first caught sight of the troops, and in a twinkling exchanged his rosary for a musket. “Hue donc!” he cried, and a ball sped to the death of an advance guard. Another, David Bourdages, son of a celebrated patriot, kept two boys busy loading for him for nearly two hours; he then tranquilly lit his pipe and began again, still smoking. The chronicle says that nearly every shot dealt death. At that rate of computation a simple problem in junior mathematics would show that Bourdages alone could have comfortably despatched half the attacking force.

Meanwhile Weir, hurried off in Nelson’s cart, complained to his captors of the tightness of the cords which bound him. Captain Jalbert, two men, Migneault and Lecour, with the young driver Gustin, who formed his guard, disputed with him; he insisted, they assailed him, and he 144 jumped out of the cart and underneath it to escape their blows. He was fired at twice with pistols, and had sabre cuts on his head and hands, the latter hacked away, as, tied together, they vainly attempted to screen the former. Dragged from beneath the cart the butchery was finished, and the body was secured under the water of the Richelieu by a pile of stones.

With the troops it had become a question how to manage a retreat. There was no ambulance, there were seventeen wounded, and it was decided to remove Captain Markham only. The circumstances demanded that they should so be left, but their comforts were attended to as far as might be. The rebel chronicles say that the troops deserted their wounded.

The insurgents had turned from the defensive to the offensive, and came out to dislodge some of their enemies in rear of a barn; a galling fire was kept up from the fortified house, and Captain Markham, in transit, was again wounded, as was also one of his bearers. The rebel fire was dexterous and precise; the retreating party had to cross a frozen ploughed field, and Captain Markham was put in the only cart and sent to the rear. Hughes needed all his cool address to conduct the rear guard, for the inhabitants seemed to swarm from every direction. Thus hampered they only removed themselves some three miles when, exhausted, in a freezing atmosphere, their gun-carriage broken down and frozen in the ground, they spiked the gun and threw its remaining ammunition in the river. They kept on their march till daylight, by which time the men were nearly barefoot, for their moccasins were cut by the rough ice and frozen earth; their horses were lamed, and the lighted villages through which they passed made them apprehensive of attack. At daylight a halt was 145 called, and the men, half dead through fatigue and hunger, lay wherever they could find a place in the barns of a deserted farmhouse. A young officer who in the plight of darkness the night before had got a lantern, stuck it to a pole and sent it on ahead of the men as a guiding star, now turned his attention to a search for potatoes—which he found and boiled in sufficient quantity to allow each man three or four before the weary march was resumed.

Nelson had had his triumph; a short-lived one, for he at once had to follow the advice so recently given by him to Papineau, that one’s discretions are one’s best valours. According to a manuscript letter historically quoted, the English commander had more faith in the dictum of a priest than in his own guns. Perhaps a submission gained by obedience to a higher authority than military force might be of greater service to the crown they served. Wetherall sent for the curé of St. Denis—as soon as “il voyait qu’il n’avait pas a faire à des enfants”—and besought him to tell his people that if they did not succumb they would be tormented in even a worse place than Lower Canada; that if they persisted, he would refuse them burial. The last was a former expedient to ensure an appearance of loyalty. Many graves were to be seen in old gardens or by the wayside along the south coast, outside of consecrated ground, the graves of “Canadian rebels;” rebels who, during the Revolution of 1776, had taken part with the Americans, thinking that by so doing they would hasten the coming of “the old folks back again.” “You smell English,” said one of them on his death-bed, raising himself to give his curé a scowling defiance on this his one strongest conviction, and, turning to the wall, died, outside the Church but true to France.

After the curé’s menace, “which succeded à merveille,” 146 the men on whom Nelson had counted were reduced one half, a story confirmed by Colonel Gore’s later despatch, wherein he also says, “I was accompanied by Mons. Crenier, the parish priest, who gave me every information in his power.” The Colonel revisited St. Denis with an increased force, but found the place abandoned; Nelson had escaped with Papineau and others, although there were many signs of greater defences having been made. So the troops marched on to St. Charles with their rescued howitzer. Montreal was now put in a state of defence; stockades surrounded it, and only a few gates, well guarded, were left open.

There were two searches now to be made, one for the body of Weir, another for the bodies, living or dead, of Papineau, Nelson, and others, the heads of the first two being valued at $4,000 and $2,000 respectively. The melancholy duty of searching for Weir was given to a lieutenant of the 32nd, Griffin, who, conducted to the place by a young girl who had witnessed the hiding of it, found the body. Several of the fingers were split, an axe, some said a spade, having been the last weapon used upon him. He had taken breakfast with Nelson and was well treated throughout by him. On leaving the house, Nelson, in Weir’s presence and after begging him not to be refractory, had commanded the men to treat him with all possible attention, but on no account to allow him to escape. Their tale was that the sound of the firing, as they travelled from the point of attack, so excited Weir that in his struggles he loosened the binding of one of his arms, and springing from them ran. They overtook him, and the appearance of his body told the sequel. It was taken to Montreal for burial with military honours, in which regulars and volunteers took an equal share. To 147 the patriot eye this natural action was making “a vile use” of an “unfortunate occurrence,” to “waken the old British horror against Frenchmen, Jacobins and blood-thirsty revolutionists.” As a set-off to this peculiar view of a terrible act there is the following sentence anent the second occupation of St. Denis, by a Tory paper: “We are not sanguine enough to expect that any regular opposition will be attempted.”

“Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir!” now became the war-cry of his incensed comrades.

The hunt for the leaders began in earnest. Papineau, a lawyer of some repute, was then a man of about forty-eight years, of good average height, inclined to corpulency, certainly not the figure to imagine under small haystacks or at full length in ditches. His face was strongly marked with those features which proclaim a Jewish ancestor somewhere; dark very arched eyebrows, hair nearly black, the eye dark, quick and penetrating; an exterior of determination and force in keeping with the well-stored mind, conversational power, cultivation and gentlemanly address which marked the man. His eloquence had passed into a proverb. An unusually precocious Canadian child always had said of it, “C’est un Papineau.”

His followers had every excuse for their worship, and thought him equal, perhaps superior, to Washington. His father, “le père des patriotes,” who had not let his patriotism go the length of severance from Britain, frowned on the more advanced son, still keeping to feudal tenure and the Catholic religion as the priests taught. The Code Papineau junior had not much feudalism in it, and politics may be said to have been the son’s religion.

So also did Robert Nelson say that feudal nonsense was abolished forever, and the Church of not much more 148 account. He and his brother Wolfred had their own interpretation of their relative’s saying that “England expects every man to do his duty.” Mrs. Wolfred Nelson’s grandfather, le Marquis de Fleurimont, was one of the French officers wounded in September, 1759; afterwards he took the oath of allegiance, and was again wounded in the repulse of Montgomery before Quebec. These Frenchified Englishmen seem to have been born for something better than treason, stratagem and spoils; they took none of the last and found the first two meant prison and expatriation. Wolfred Nelson was by far the best looking of the leaders, tall, with handsome features, and had moreover a brave and manly disposition. His proclamations were wonderfully worded, his Athanasian rendering declaring the Canadian Republic to be “one and indivisible.” Colonel Gore sought to take these prominent men, having heard that they were secreted at St. Hyacinthe. Accordingly a young officer and a picked party were told off, their sleighs without bells being timed to arrive after dark at the house where the leaders were supposed to be. The guide brought the sleighs there somewhere near midnight, and they found the usual comfortable French quarters, solid barns with yards and outbuildings. A chain of sentries was posted round the place and through the buildings; a knock brought madame, a most charming old lady, to the window; they were very welcome, and she showed them not only over the house, but she kept them seeking in many corners they would not have found for themselves, in cellars where stores of winter vegetables and fruit lay in rows, cupboards full of treasures, in cavernous depths beyond rafters which promised a reward for search, but only revealed much bacon and ham, flitches “the manifest product of a high-caste gramnivorous pig.” 149 But Papineau, on the watch, had had time to get to a deep ditch which ran back into the fields, whence he made his way to a small bush near by. From there he escaped to the States; but Nelson was taken and lodged in Kingston gaol. Years afterwards, at an evening party, after his return from France, the charming, white-haired Papineau said to a gentleman who had been the soldier so prominent in the search, “I hear you are the officer who came to call on me at Madame ——’s, in ’37. You little know how nearly you took me.... You did your work admirably, for, though we were on the watch, I had only just time to run away down that wet ditch before your sentries met.” Among the effects then seized were many papers of value to the captors, one of them a letter from Papineau, finishing, “Continue to push it (the rebellion) as vigorously as you can,” and another, a schoolboy letter from Nelson’s son, a lad of fourteen, somewhat after the manner of Tom Sawyer: “I wish that it (the rebellion) will do well and without any noise, which I hate very much—except with the other side. I believe that the prediction of that man Bourgeoi will be accomplished, which is that the province will be all covered with blood and dead bodies.” A Montreal newspaper deplores “the fattening of Nelson for the gallows,” and considered that “death on the scaffold was the best example such a father could give to such a child.”

And yet Dr. O’Callaghan could write from over the border, “If you are to blame for the movement, blame then those who plotted and continued it, and who are to be held in history responsible for it. We, my friends, were the victims, not the conspirators; and were I on my deathbed I could declare before heaven that I had no more idea of a movement of resistance when I left Montreal and 150 went to the Richelieu River with M. Papineau than I have now of being bishop of Quebec. And I also know that M. Papineau and I secreted ourselves for some time in a farmer’s house in the parish of St. Marc, lest our presence might alarm that country and be made a pretext for rashness.... I saw as clearly as I now see the country was not prepared.” Dr. O’Callaghan, the fidus Achates of Papineau, the editor of the Vindicator, was not likely to have been as innocent as he afterwards remembered himself.

Another who managed to hide safely but nearer home, after the battle of St. Charles, was George Cartier. With his cousin Henri he passed the winter at the house of Antoine Larose, in his native village of St. Antoine, and the person destined to be his father-in-law was in hiding not far off. The future Sir George, to make sure of a quiet resting-place, wrote, and had published in a Montreal newspaper: “George E. Cartier, advocate, a young man of great ability and talent, was found frozen in the woods by his father. He might have served his Queen in the highest councils of his country had he not been brought up in a line of politics which led to his untimely end.” He read his self-description and epitaph, and handed it to his cousin, remarking, “At present, my dear Henri, we can sleep tranquil.” But he reckoned, not without his host, who was incorruptible, but without his host’s servant-maid. The maid had an admirer, and the admirer grew jealous of the two young men who enjoyed advantages superior to those granted him, made a scene with his fiancée, threatened to inform on them and to denounce M. Larose to the authorities for harbouring rebels. So the two young men, nephews many times removed of the celebrated Jacques, had to decamp to the less confined 151 neighbourhood of les États Unis. In after years, when Mackenzie with questionable taste treated the episode of the rebellion as a comedy, he met M. Cartier, in parliamentary obstructive debate, and twitted him that they had both been “out” on the wrong side, and that the Government had shown its appreciation of the comparative values of their heads. He referred to the price of a thousand pounds set on his own, and only three hundred on that of the young man whose sudden demise from hunger and cold in the woods of Verchères had spoilt “une brilliante carrière.”

Naturally, Montreal was now in a highly excited state, distracted at defeat and elated at victory; openly rejoicing or inwardly chafing, as the case might be. The specie in the Bank found its way for safe keeping to Quebec, ammunition, arms and soldiers began to arrive, volunteer battalions were formed; the gaol was crowded with prisoners; the outlets of the city were barricaded, and a general hum of expectation was in the air.

Detachments of the 1st Royals under Colonel Wetherall, of the 32nd and 83rd under Maitland and Dundas, the Volunteer Montreal Rifle Corps under Captain Leclerc, and a strong squadron of horse with six pieces of artillery, fully served, under command of Major Jackson, one sunny day defiled through the streets with colours waving and bands playing. The field battery, rocket troop and all the transports were on runners, for it was now the 15th of December and the snow was deep. The Commander-in-chief, the generally popular and much-feared hero of Waterloo and a hundred other fights, Sir John Colborne, with his richly caparisoned staff and escorted by two hundred Dragoons, brought up the rear of this imposing display. 152

They proceeded to the western extremity of the island, past the ruins of two old forts and the smaller remains of a larger one, all telling of former war times. At the expansion of the river, caused by its narrow outlets, was the Lake of the Two Mountains, where one of the hills, in summer clothed with richest verdure to the water’s edge, was called Calvary. Within its shadow lay St. Eustache, St. Benoit, and Ste. Scholastique; any of them might have been named Golgotha, so soon were they to become the place of skulls. “Le Grand Brûlé” was so named before “le vieux brûlot” was to rechristen it with fire and blood, for a forest fire had swept it at the end of the last or the beginning of this century; the “Petit Brûlé” was near Ste. Scholastique—names significant to the dwellers there of a fate worse than burning by forest fire.

St. Eustache, most picturesque of the early French settlements, was built on a tongue of land. At that day it consisted of a square of handsome stone houses, comfortable and well finished, in which the wealthy but discontented owners lived; hard by were the manor-house, the presbytère and convent, and in the centre stood the parish church, its two towers topped by spires as glittering as the “panoply of war” then in full sight ready for the attack. The people of this village, between five and six hundred, were enthusiastic Liberals, disaffected French—traitors, rebels or patriots, according to the point of view. Sir John Colborne saw them in strong colours, and was determined on their downfall, extermination if necessary. The defence was under Dr. Chénier and Girod. The latter, a misguided Swiss adventurer, had figured in several of the South American revolutionary wars, and later was a protégé of Perrault the philanthropist; his career was one of singular folly; he loved to appear in buccaneer style, affected the 153 manner and language of a dictator, and accented his doings by usually riding a fine grey mare as his charger, which he had stolen from M. Dumont, a loyal Canadian. The parish priest, M. Paquin, assisted by his vicar, who read Colborne’s proclamation—a document not to be misunderstood and not of a cheerful tenor—succeeded in persuading the peasants to return to their homes in peace, that nothing but disaster awaited them if they persisted, and as a result of such persuasions but one solitary person was left to represent an insurgent garrison. But some fifteen hundred from about the Brûlé soon replaced them, some regularly armed, but most of them unarmed. M. Paquin now sent for Chénier, expostulated with him and showed how his undertaking was perilous and hopeless. Chénier was moved to tears, but he maintained that the news of Wetherall’s victory at St. Charles was false; he was resolved to die with arms in his hands. He and Girod turned the ecclesiastics out of their house, making it another point of defence and the church into a citadel. Many of the prudent were by now wending their way towards Montreal; some arrests followed; and those who remained and found themselves unarmed were assured by Chénier, “Be easy about that; there will be men killed. You can take their muskets.”

A habitant from l’Isle Jésu brought word of the approach of the troops, and soon Sir John Colborne’s two thousand men stood in the valley which looked made but for the place of peace. The whole force, field pieces, rocket mortar and train waggons, covered two miles of roadway. The advance guard would have reached there with the habitant had not the ice been unsafe, causing the men to make a detour to Ste. Rose, thereby increasing the march by six miles. The water had been open two days 154 before, but to prove that it would bear, Colonel Gugy—“a tall, majestic-looking gentleman who expressed himself in a beautiful manner”—galloped from shore to shore. About noon all had arrived, and as they neared the village and took up position their numbers and character must have impressed the unhappy people with the hopelessness of the coming conflict. The usual desertions began, until Chénier, looking at one road full of his enemies and another full of his retreating countrymen, addressed the few who remained with him: “My brothers, behold advancing before you, to burn and destroy your beautiful homes, the servile mercenaries of the despotic Government which has enslaved your country.” And they in return cried the old cry, “Liberty or Death.”... “We will never desert our wives and little ones.” Officers in charge of divided squads put in a state of defence the manor house, the presbytère, the convent and one villager’s house, while Chénier, in person taking command of from sixty to eighty, many of whom were still without arms, went to the church, where the women and children had already fled. The last, for further safety, he placed in the vaults underneath. The doors were then barricaded, and the windows removed to convert the openings into loopholes. Thus did they await the coming annihilation, “nor,” said a British officer afterwards, “did they quail as our overwhelming force approached; they raised one loud and shrill terrific cheer, and then all was still as death till the cannonading and musketry began.” The field battery opened fire; but there was no reply. At first it was supposed that the place had been abandoned; but as another brigade came down the village street a rattling fire poured from the church. It was evident they meant to show fight. The howitzers tried to batter down the barricaded 155 doors, but without effect. Colonel Jackson, of the artillery, asked for a surrender. The answer “was plucky but idiotic;” they pooh-poohed the offer, and among other preparations took a cannon to the top of the steeple. Then Jackson set his own gun, blew the steeple and all that was in it down, and those below who ran out of the doors were bayoneted. An officer who went into one of the empty houses close by upset a stove and placed on the coals all the combustibles he could find. In a moment the line of fire lengthened, and under cover of the smoke Colonel Wetherall and his men came at the double down the street; cavalry and still another regiment surrounded the village to prevent chance of escape, with a further precaution of a corps of volunteers spread out on the ice to pick off any unfortunate should he get through such a double line. The envelopment of fire was completed. The church and houses were now all ablaze. Driven by the flames the unhappy defenders abandoned one position for another, only to find the second worse. At the back of the church a small door leading into the sacristy had been forced, and the soldiers, groping their way through smoke and darkness, led by Colonel Gugy, were shot at by the few who remained. Gugy was one of those wounded. The staircase was gone, and another officer lighted a fire beneath the altar, got his men out, and the cessation of shots within told the success of his work. The simultaneous fire pouring on the French from all sides was liking boiling water on an anthill. Men half-roasted, with bullets already lodged in their miserable bodies, women creeping from the crypt, found that what flame and bullet had spared the bayonet could finish. Chénier and the few remaining, mad with despair, leaped from the windows into the graveyard, and fought there anew with 156 all the desperation of a forlorn hope. A ball brought the leader down; but rallying his sinking strength he rose, to be again shot, until, with the fourth bullet, he rose no more—the blackened semblance of a man. He died “comme un héros digne de la Grèce antique.” In the mêlée a few managed to escape, but for a moment only; those who made for the ice were picked off there, and those who fell on their knees and begged for quarter heard “Jock Weir, remember Jock Weir.” By half-past four the work was finished. Cannon and musketry had ceased, but the houses still burned; the churchyard and the convent were heaped with dead, and the wounded, burning alive, received now and then a merciful shot or a stab from a bayonet. The village swine added yet another horror. “Pshaw,” said a Scotch volunteer to a squeamish comrade, “it’s nothing but French hog eating French hog.” Pathos was added to horrors, when it appeared that the pockets of some of the youngest of the insurgents were full of marbles—toys turned to missiles.

The air was insufferable, but in spite of it loot and pillage went on. At Montreal, in the clear atmosphere of a Canadian December night, the bright belt of illuminated sky told as plainly as telegraph that the expedition had been a success. “Such a scene,” wrote a correspondent to the press, “was never witnessed. It must prove an awful example. The artillery opened fire at half-past one. Everything was over, except the shooting of a few fugitives, by half-past three.”

Quite a different view of the case is found in official despatches. Sir John Colborne writes to Lord Glenelg, 30th March, ’38: “On the evening in which the troops took possession of St. Eustache, the loyal inhabitants of that village and neighbourhood, anxious to return to their 157 homes and to protect the remainder of their property, followed the troops; and I believe it is not denied that the houses which were burnt, except those that were necessarily destroyed in driving the rebels from the fortified church, were set on fire by the Loyalists of St. Eustache and Rivière du Chêne, who had been driven from the country in October and November.” And in a despatch from Glenelg to Lord Durham, June 2nd, ’38, we find: “Having laid that despatch before the Queen, Her Majesty has commanded me to desire Your Lordship to signify to Sir J. Colborne, that while she deeply laments that any needless severities should have been exercised by one class of Her Majesty’s subjects against another, Her Majesty is gratified to learn, as she fully anticipated, that her troops are in no degree responsible for any of the excesses which unhappily attended the defeat of the insurgents at St. Benoit and St. Charles, but that in the harassing service in which they were engaged they maintained unimpaired their high character for discipline and training.”

Certainly some of her officers did their best to make up for “needless severity.” Colonel Gugy and Colonel Griffin afterwards were unwearied, and in a measure successful, in their mediations between exasperated nationalities. The former persuaded many at the time to return to their houses, and priest and layman alike commended him in his rôle of pacificator. Colborne appointed Colonel Griffin military magistrate, with civil powers, in the County of Two Mountains, and in that office he protected the weak, raised the fallen, and did much to assuage the necessary horrors of civil war.

When the curé Paquin had begged the people to give in, Chénier’s wife added her entreaties, saying there was no disgrace in surrendering to such a superior force. But her 158 husband had only fondly kissed her, repeating that well-worn sentence, “La garde meurt mais ne se rend pas,” bade her good-bye and sent her to a place of safety. One tradition has it that a greater ordeal than farewell and death awaited her. The usual terrors of the law were expended upon her scorched remnant of a husband; the mutilated quarters lay tossed about in the house of one Anderson, near the battlefield, and she was not allowed to bury them. After a burial of some fashion she had the hardihood to seek the remains, disinter and secrete them, and when opportunity came, in the refuge of a friend’s garret, sew the parts together and have them buried properly. The edge of romance is dulled when we read that there was more of the hot head and mulish foot about Chénier than the hero; but to the present day there is a local phrase, “Brave comme Chénier.” The day after the battle Colborne’s chief officers declared that they were obliged to despatch Chénier. A patriot dame standing by said none but an English soldier was capable of killing a wounded man. The Abbé Paquin declares that the mutilation of the body and the removal of the heart were incidents in the post mortem, held by the desire of the surgeons, to ascertain the precise wound of which he died, and the historian De Bellefeuille corroborates his assertion. This scarcely accounts for parading the heart about on the point of a bayonet, and it is also pertinently asked, “Depuis quand ouvre-t-on les corps des soldats tués sur un champ de bataille pour savoir de quoi ils sont morts!”

Terrified at the fate of St. Eustache, the inhabitants of St. Benoit turned out to meet Sir John, a white flag displayed from every window. At Ste. Scholastique they carried their emblems of submission in their hands, white 159 flags and lighted tapers, sinking on their knees in the roadway as they presented them. At Carillon they did the same. Like the three hundred men of Liége, “all in their white shirts and prostrate on their knees praying for grace,” the crowd through which Colborne passed presented the appearance of two distinct assortment of souls, “... of the elect and of the damned.” There were but few of the elect in this case. Arrests were made and the torch was applied, although Christie says “He dealt with much humanity, dismissing most of them.” Of Colborne it might be said, “Where he makes a desert, calls it peace.” The Glengarry Highlanders met the troops at St. Benoit, and in the succeeding burnings, according to Gore’s own words, “were in every case, I believe, the instruments of infliction;” such irregular troops were not to be controlled. “Many of those who served as volunteers,” says Christie, “were persons who had been exceedingly ill-treated by the patriots while in the ascendant.”

The ironical Bishop Lartigue now found it well to write another pastoral. After all the carnage was over the voices of the clergy generally were uplifted, this time thanking God that peace was restored. “How now about the fine promises made by the seditious of the wonderful things they would do for you?” asks this terrible bishop. “Was it the controlling spirit of a numerical majority of the people of this country, who, according to the insurgents, ought to have sway in all things, that directed their military operations? Did you find yourselves in a condition of greater freedom than before, while exposed to all sorts of vexations, threatened with fire-raisings, loss of goods, deprivation of life itself, if you did not submit to the frightful despotisms of these insurgents, who by violent, not persuasive means, caused more than a moiety of all the 160 dupes they had to take up arms against the victorious armies of our sovereign?”

No sooner had rebellion come to a head and French blood flowed than France remembered where Canada was, and quickly learned much about her. People were asking in wonderment what all the trouble could be. The Gallican remembered his cousin-several-times-removed, and set about helping him. One journal advised volunteers and auxiliaries, and another made the oft-repeated comparison between Canada and Ireland. Engraved copies of Papineau’s portrait adorned windows, and biographical sketches of him appeared in the newspapers. Le Journal des Débats did not confine itself to printed sympathy, but suggested that arms and ammunition should be smuggled into Canada and volunteers enlisted to go there to help.

This sympathy spread far afield in Europe. At the Russian Emperor’s birthday fête at New Archangel the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Naval Forces gave a splendid banquet, at the close of which “a collection was made for the unfortunate patriots of Canada.” Without exception, every one present contributed, with a result of 22,800 francs; and what is more, this sum was forwarded to its destination by the Admiral himself. We hope he had more definite geographical ideas than had the nearer French. Given a letter to post to Quebec, before rebellion had brought it and its people prominently forward, a post-office clerk in Paris gravely asked if it should go via Panama or Cape Horn.

And then France remembered that those who had returned at the time of the Conquest said “it was very cold over there.” 161

Gallows Hill.

“Up then, brave Canadians! Get your rifles and make short work of it.”

“Sir Francis Bond Head’s entire government of Upper Canada was one long, earnest, undeviating opposition to the instructions of H. M. colonial ministers.”—Blake.

The winter of 1837, in England, was so severe that the mails were conveyed in sleighs, even in the southern counties, a freak of nature no doubt meant to put her in sympathy with the many million arpents of snow by that time dyed in patches with good Canadian blood. In the colony it set in stormily; but as December lengthened it became mild and open throughout the country, until on the day of Gallows Hill that month of storm had almost turned to the brightness and healthy beauty of a Canadian June. The brilliant sunlight which was to burnish up the arms of the men of Gore had power to convert the blackest landscape into a thing of beauty—a scene peculiar to the land of shield of crystal, golden grain and Italian sky. Straight from the Laurentian Hills the sun turned his roses and purples on the bright tin spires of parish churches, blazed in small squares of white-curtained habitant windows, where weeping wives and mothers execrated the Dictator in voluble patois, and glared on the blackened drama of Le Grand Brûlé. The snow which made the 162 background of that Lower Canadian picture sparkled under the prismatic colours, and lit up the icy fragments like the lustres of a chandelier. The mysterious bell of St. Regis sounded its Angelus through the rosy atmosphere; the Caughnawagas, waiting but a word to come forward in defence of their new Great Mother, grew a deeper tint as, turned from the sunk sun, they knelt to their aves. Farther on it touched on the cabins of Glengarry, where ninety-nine out of every hundred men were variations of the name Macdonald, with only a nickname—Shortnose, Longnose, Redhead or Mucklemou’—to distinguish them; all busy furbishing up every available weapon, ready to follow where they might be called. If one record profanes not their memory some of them went out as infantry, to return as kilted cavalry; naught but intervention of stern discipline prevented Jean Baptiste’s herds being in front of the kilts on the return march; their genius as linguists had failed when their Gaelic fell on patois-accustomed ears.

We follow the sun through the Thousand Islands, where it touched each evergreen crest with glory to make a crown of isles for the great pirate king, Bill Johnston, who had a trick of posing, blunderbuss in hand, ready for attack; to the homes of the Bay of Quinte, where the descendants of Rogers’ Rangers were ready for defence; to the winter rainbows of the Niagara and the opaline ripples in La Traverse of the St. Clair. It tinged the spiral columns of smoke which singly rose from immigrant cabins and, mingling, turned to clouds of sweet-smelling incense. It sank to rest in Huron, and the vast country over which it had made its day’s journey lay behind it, angry, sullen, fearing, uncertain, where, of the two dispensations, one was in throes of birth and the other feared those of death. 163

Those scattered through this wide region who were in sympathy with Lower Canada—and they were many—felt the discouragement of the disaster of St. Charles. Yet they persevered, and read the results there as an object lesson in the importance of military leadership. The motto was, “The strength of the people is nothing without union, and union nothing without confidence and discipline.” Alas, discipline they had none; confidence was to fly as soon as the enemy appeared—what mattered that if the enemy fled, too, no one was there to see; and as for union, the recriminations of Rolph and Mackenzie, the coldness of the Baldwin wing, the fighting within camp and without, all told a tale of dissension. Sir Francis Bond Head’s own letter to Sir John Colborne, in answer to the commander’s request for troops, shows how completely that astute governor played into their hands had they been but united and ready to take advantage of him. He would give up even his sentry and orderlies, and by some political military Euclid of his own invention “prove to the people in England that this Province requires no troops at all, and, consequently, that it is perfectly tranquil.... I consider it of immense importance, practically, to show to the Canadas that loyalty produces tranquillity, and that disloyalty not only brings troops into the Province, but also produces civil war.” There is some key to his Euclid, all propositions not being fully demonstrated; for he says, “I cannot, of course, explain to you all the reasons I have for my conduct” (things equal to the same thing are equal to anything). “I know the arrangements I have made are somewhat irregular, but I feel confident the advantages arising from them will be much greater than the disadvantages.”

Charles XII. was called Demirbash by the Turks—a 164 man who fancies his head made of iron, who may run amuck without any fear for his skull. Sir Francis lost no opportunity to test the thickness and hardness of his.

His troops gone, the militia disorganized and never out but for one training day since 1815, he found his forces consisted of about three hundred men, and the work before him was to overcome a bad, bold plot, “which appears unequalled by any recorded in history since the great conspiracy of Cataline for the subversion of Rome!”

“Must I stand and crouch under thy testy humour!” might have cried Sir Francis; and quick as echo came the answer, “He’s but a mad lord, and naught but humour sways him.”

Search through his literary contemporaries, from Galt, who calls him the sly, downright author of the “Bubbles of the Brunnens,” to the somewhat bilious sketches of “those dealers in opinions, journalists,” confirms Lord Gosford’s saying that one of the essential elements of fitness for office is to be acceptable to the great body of the people. Sir Francis had a great reputation for literary smartness; he was on excellent terms with himself, and there are a few other writers of his time who have recorded things to his credit which are hard to believe in the after-light of condensed history. But most people never tired of either abusing or ridiculing him.

“‘Where are you from?’ asked a worthy but inquisitive landlord of a distinguished traveller, evidently just from Downing Street, who arrived in Canada at this solemn juncture. The testy Englishman made a laconic reply, that he had come from a very hot place. ‘And where are you going?’ continued Boniface. ‘To the devil,’ roared the traveller. And then they knew he was going to dine with Sir Francis Bond Head.” 165

Phrenology was a popular study then, and it afforded opportunities to those who never tired of punning in doggerel and skits on this Head. The cranium must have presented a remarkable assemblage of bumps; for, according to his many detractors and his few admirers, Sir Francis was a remarkable man. Not that he required a Boswell or Anthony Hamilton to say for him that which he was unequal to say for himself. There are no blushes on the pages of either “Narrative” or “Emigrant.”

Friends and detractors alike agreed that he had a wonderful faculty for sleep. According to himself, he was one of those felines who wait for their prey, apparently soundly off, but in reality with one eye open. When he came out it was thought the Whig ministry had let loose a tiger upon the colony. All sorts of stories were rife about him; he was placarded as a tried Reformer, much to his own surprise and amusement, for he tells us himself his emotions on seeing the piece of news which looked down on him from the posters, as he rode to Government House on his arrival. Was he a Radical? was he really the “Galloping Head”? had he ridden six thousand miles of the South American pampas, one thousand of them at a stretch in eight days, and without the comfort of galligaskins? He himself was at a loss to know why he had ever received his appointment; but these questioners at the recital of his adventures began to think that the post of lieutenant-governor in Upper Canada was a prize of sufficient size to attract persons of first-rate abilities. They required a man of statesmanlike sagacity and diplomatic shrewdness for a position which was no sinecure, and Lord Glenelg had sent them a rough rider. “Who shall we send out as lieutenant-governor to conciliate the discontented inhabitants of Upper Canada?” asked the Cabinet. 166 The Canadians wanted a governor, and they were sent a political Puck. They thought it hard to have been given in Sir John Colborne’s place but a Captain of Engineers. “Captains of Engineers,” said one belonging to the same order, “are sometimes devilish clever fellows.”

And so, in a sense, Head proved himself to be. He contrived to compress into the two years of his Canadian life more mischief than could have been accomplished by ten ordinary men. Rash, impetuous, inordinately vain and self-conscious, dramatic, he was not only an actor who took the world for his stage, but he was his own playwright, star, support, claquer and critic; the stirring up of a rebellion was a mere curtain-lifter to him; but, fortunately, if the vehicle of disaster to the Province, he made his exit from it ignominiously. This was the man who, at twelve o’clock on the night of December 4th, was awakened and told for the third time that the enemy had really arrived and was knocking at the door.

At one of the stopping-places of his former travels he had “felt his patriotism gain force upon the plains of Marathon.” It now took the persistent efforts of three messengers to oust him from a feather bed. Colonel Moodie had lost his life trying to ride through the rebel ranks to do this same service, and Colonel FitzGibbon lost no time in warning all, governor and citizens alike. When Sir Francis was inquired for at Government House at ten o’clock, Mrs. Dalrymple, his sister-in-law, reported that the Governor was fatigued and already asleep. FitzGibbon, restless and disturbed, feeling that he could never sleep again, insisted; and the hero of active service in Spain, the spectator of Waterloo and Quatre Bras, appeared in his dressing-gown, concealed his irritation as best he might, and got back to bed as quickly as possible. “What is all 167 this noise about,” asked Judge Jonas Jones, who also did not like disturbance; “who desired you to call me? Colonel FitzGibbon? The zeal of that man is giving us a great deal of unnecessary trouble.”

About an hour earlier, John Powell, a magistrate who had been busy swearing in special constables, went on horseback with some other volunteers to patrol the northern approaches to the city. At the rise of the Blue Hill Mackenzie and two others were met, the first armed with a large horse pistol, the others with rifles. Powell was not only taken prisoner, but was told “they would let Bond Head know something before long,” that “they had borne tyranny and oppression too long, and were now determined to have a government of their own.” A fellow-prisoner told Powell of the death of Colonel Moodie, put spurs to his horse and managed to escape. Confident that the city’s safety now depended on his own ability to elude his captors, Powell essayed to do the same, but was told by one of them, Anderson, he “would drive a ball through” him. Then followed the incident which has been described as Anderson’s fall from his horse and picked up with neck broken, as “an atrocious murder,” “a victim to Powell’s treachery,” and as a self-deliverance from those whom he believed to be common assassins. When questioned as to his arms he had replied that he had none, a denial refuted shortly afterwards when he drew the pistols given him by a bailiff on leaving the City Hall. Mackenzie had doubted his word, but the statement was repeated. He replied, “Then, gentlemen, as you are my townsmen and men of honour, I should be ashamed to show that I question your word by ordering you to be searched.” Powell, in his account, allows no such quixotic courtesy, and says he heard nothing but mutterings of dissatisfaction. 168 Then, not two feet from Anderson, Powell suddenly reined back his horse, drew a pistol and fired. The shot struck Anderson in the back of his neck; he fell like a sack—the spinal cord was severed and death must have been instantaneous. To wheel about, ride at a breakneck pace, pass Mackenzie himself, hear the latter’s bullet whistle past him, turn in his saddle and snap a pistol at Mackenzie’s face, dismount when he heard the clatter of following hoofs, to hide behind a log, while the pursuer passed, to run down the College Avenue, hugging the shadows as he went, until Government House was reached, brought him where FitzGibbon and others, discomfited, had failed to rouse this phenomenal sleeper. An hour before there had been a moment’s consciousness with the ringing of the Upper Canada College bell by the energetic hand of a youth named John Hillyard Cameron; but on hearing that it was rung by Colonel FitzGibbon’s command, the sleeper, like a marmot, turned over and went to sleep again. Unceremoniously shaking majesty in its nightcap, Powell managed to perform what Sir Francis, in his own account of the affair, calls a sudden awakening. Months before, the Governor had said he awaited the moment when Mackenzie should have “advanced within the short, clumsy clutches of the law,” asking Attorney-General Hagerman to advise him of the moment; he desired to wait until, in the name of law and justice, he could “seize his victim.” A warrant of arrest for Mackenzie on the charge of high treason had so far proved innocuous; now the mountain was obliging enough to come to Mahomet, and Mahomet did not seem inclined to hurry. Next to Bidwell, Mackenzie had most incurred his enmity, they, with “other nameless demagogues,” being the branches of “that plant of cancerous growth, revolution,” to which he would most 169 willingly apply his pruning-knife. And apply it unsparingly he did; but for every twig lopped off he beheld a dozen hardy shoots springing from the wound. Truly the colonial tree was a stubborn growth; no yew or box-clipped fancy, its shaping was beyond his skill.

“Up, then, brave Canadians, get ready your rifles and make short work of it,” had been the legend on Mackenzie’s hand-bills; and here he was within a mile of the Governor and capital.

After a leisurely toilet, Sir Francis entrusted the care of his family to faithful friends, who put them on board a boat lying in the bay. Late as it was, navigation was not closed, and there was no sign of the seals of winter upon the lake. Yet the air was intensely cold, and the stars shone like diamonds as the Governor made his way over the creaking, lightly snow-covered planks from Government House to the City Hall. Every bell in the city was ringing with all its might. “Though cracked and crazy I have mettle still,
And burst with anger at such treatment ill.”
The most monotonous and the shrillest note of the Carillon, in Head’s own words, proclaimed “... Murder, murder, murder, and much worse!” “What’s amiss?” “You are, and you do not know it;” or Lady Macbeth might have been heard calling, “What’s the business, that such a hideous trumpet calls to parley the sleeper of the house.”

The bells were distinctly heard at Gallows Hill. An occasional shot, fired at random yet startling, pierced these impromptu chimes. The rumours of the streets condensed at rallying points, where people told of the rattle of Powell’s horse’s hoofs as he made his mad gallop from 170 Mackenzie to Head; of how hundreds, soon thousands, were at Gallows Hill, ready to descend upon them; of how the city was defenceless, and would the speaker and his friend enrol for its defence or not; how the generally staid persons of the Chief-Justice and Judges Macaulay and McLean, unusually excited, were seen with muskets on their shoulders; how the third judge, Jonas Jones, was losing not a moment to get some thirty volunteers to remain on guard at the toll gate on Yonge Street for the night; how such young fellows as Henry Sherwood, James Strachan, John Beverley Robinson, jun., were galloping about as aides, appointed in a moment and eager in their master’s service; all were on the alert, keeping vigil to a day of uproar and excitement.

At the market-house the Governor found assembled the force on which he had to depend. It was not long before he was aware that one, at least, was armed. A ball whistled through the room where he was closeted in earnest talk with Judge Jones, and stuck in the wall close beside them. Men, brimful of loyalty and agitation, were seen parading hurriedly in front of the City Hall, a musket on either shoulder, hungering for an enemy and afraid that he might come.

At sunrise Colonel FitzGibbon rode out to reconnoitre the position of the invaders, and reported that they numbered some five hundred men, a half-armed rabble without competent leader or discipline—a fit sequel to that “volume of shreds and patches,” the grievance book; a set of stragglers in an unfortified position. At eight, Sir Francis and his comrades at the City Hall, after a nap taken on the floor, rose to inspect and to be inspected, a group almost as sorry in military appearance as the one reported on by FitzGibbon. The Governor had a short 171 double-barrelled gun in his belt and another on his shoulder; as a kind of twin or complement to him, the Chief-Justice was armed with thirty rounds of ball cartridge. Sir Francis made a brief but animated address, to which the assemblage returned three cheers. A few days before he had “requested an officer” to strengthen the fort lying west of the city; accordingly, its earthworks were surrounded by a double line of palisades, the barracks were loopholed, the magazine stockaded, and a company of Toronto militia lodged there. But as “a commander without troops,” the market-house—full of men, with its two six-pounders “completely filled with grape shot,” furnished with four thousand stand of arms, bayonets, belts and ball cartridge, brought from the depot at Kingston shortly before—was more to Sir Francis’ mind than the empty fort would have been. Besides which, he states in his own account, in the moral combat in which he was about to engage, he would have been out of his proper element in a fort. “The truth is,” he concludes, after disposing of many ill-natured remarks made about him by persons unversed in even the rudiments of war, “if Mr. Mackenzie had conducted his gang within pistol-shot of the market-house, the whole of the surprise would have belonged to him.”

The “officer” who was “requested” to strengthen the fort was no doubt Colonel Foster, Assistant Adjutant-General and Commander of the Forces for some years before the Rebellion broke out. His name unaccountably has been omitted from many of the chronicles of those times. He began his military career in the 52nd Oxfordshire Regiment of Foot, and during his colonial service he enjoyed the confidence of Lord Dalhousie and Sir John Colborne. When the latter sent his celebrated 172 request for troops, Foster remonstrated, as it was well known to him, at any rate, that a rebellion in Upper Canada was imminent. Foster was then left in command “of the sentries, sick soldiers, and women and children remaining in the fort.” A captain in the 96th at Lundy’s Lane, he was no novice in Canadian requirements, and the letter quoted from Sir John Colborne shows how he fulfilled his duty:

“Montreal, May 18, 1838.

“My Dear Colonel Foster,—I cannot quit Canada without bidding you adieu and requesting that you will accept my sincere thanks for your constant attention in the discharge of the duties of your Department during the seven years which you passed at my military right hand in Upper Canada. I assure you that the little trouble experienced by me in my military command I attribute to your arrangements and punctuality.

“With every wish for your happiness,
“Believe me, my dear Colonel Foster,
“Sincerely yours,
“J. Colborne.”

Colley Lyons Lucas Foster is described as a fine-looking man, of commanding presence and thoroughbred manner, a true gentleman and a thorough soldier of the Wellington type. His very cordial intercourse with his beau ideal of a general was attested by many letters to him in the Great Duke’s own handwriting.

But whatever Mackenzie’s wishes were, his “gang” had no notion of getting anywhere so uncomfortably near. Yet, if there was to be a fight, what was to be done; for it was hard indeed, after such preparation, if the enemy would not come. “I will not fight them on 173 their ground,” said the Governor; “they must fight me on mine.” He would not even allow the picket guard, withdrawn by Judge Jones at daylight, to be replaced by Colonel FitzGibbon. “Do not send out a man—we have not men enough to defend the city. Let us defend our posts; and it is my positive order that you do not leave this building yourself.” Notwithstanding which a picket of twenty-seven, under the command of Sheriff Jarvis, was placed a short distance up Yonge Street. Prior to taking position there, it was suggested that a flag of truce should be sent—some accounts say from a humane desire on the part of the Governor to prevent the shedding of blood; others say to give time in which to allow answers to be returned to the expresses which he promptly had sent to MacNab in Hamilton and Bonnycastle in Kingston. In the faulty despatch sent to Glenelg relating the episode he represents himself by that white ensign as “parentally calling upon them to avoid the effusion of human blood,” having “the greatest possible reluctance at the idea of entering upon a civil war;” while in his after justification, “The Emigrant,” he says “The sun set without our receiving succour or any intimation of its approach.” He was no believer in “the fewer men the greater share of honour.”

The Sheriff had thought to ride out with the flag, but he had many sins laid against him in the rebel repository of grievance, such as standing at the polls, riding-whip in hand, to expedite the votes he approved and discountenance others, and it was thought imprudent to allow him to take the rôle of mediator. Mr. Robert Baldwin, not long returned from a prolonged visit to Great Britain, at all times above suspicion as to loyalty, a Reformer to the core, but as far removed from rebellion as the Chief-Justice himself, together with Dr. Rolph—about whom there were 174 diverse opinions—were the final choice. Adjured by the Sheriff, in the name of God, to go out to try “to stop the proceedings of these men who are going to attack us,” the first man who was appealed to had refused; the act would lay him open to suspicion. Rolph considered that the Constitution was virtually suspended, and that Sir Francis had no authority to send out the flag. As soon as it became known that anything so novel was on the tapis excitement in the town merged into curiosity, and all, from the smallest urchin up, crowded to see the two start forth on their mission. A question which bids fair to remain as unsolved as “The Lady or the Tiger” now had its beginning. We can fancy the doctor pondering as he rode, “Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?” Rather should he have remembered the late counsel of the Keeper of the Great Seal, that the councillors should leave simulation and dissimulation at the porter’s lodge. The dying testimony of Lount, “He gave me a wink to walk on one side,” that the message should not be heeded, the counter testimony of others that this took place at the second visit of the bearers, have furnished theme for pages, the outcome of which is to mar or make whiter the character of one of the most prominent, certainly the ablest, of the dramatis personæ in that entr’acte of the rebellion, the Flag of Truce.

The point of the question is not, Did Dr. Rolph wink, but, When did he wink. If after his ambassadorial function was over, the act, according to the rules which govern flags of truce, could not be taken exception to. If whilst an ambassador, the case becomes one not of ordinary manners and morals, but shows him as a double traitor.

Arrived at Gallows Hill—ominous title, a fitting one, thought the Loyalists—the three on horseback, “in solid 175 phalanx” Hugh Carmichael, the bearer, in the middle, Dr. Rolph, as spokesman, asked what the insurgents wanted, said the Governor deprecated the effusion of blood, and offered an amnesty if they would return to their homes. The result of the conference which ensued was that no reliance was to be felt in the bare word of Sir Francis; it must be in writing, that no act of hostility would be committed in the time allowed for an answer; that they demanded “independence and a convention to arrange details.” Moreover, he was given until two o’clock only to decide.

The answer of these “infatuated creatures” had a curious effect. For once Sir Francis declined to taunt with the license of ink. His nerves were much steadied by the report of undisciplined, unarmed hundreds, instead of thousands eager for carnage, brought back by the truce party; and letters stating that volunteers bound for his aid were on the way enabled him to disregard what in courtesy would be due to his agents. He curtly told them his refusal, and they made a third trip to report him to his enemy. Baldwin then returned to his wonted retirement, and Rolph busied himself in preparation for the result of his advice—“Wend your way into the city as soon as possible at my heels”—by at once seeing the Radicals in town and instructing them to arm themselves, as Mackenzie was on the road. “Why do you stand here with your hands in your breeches pockets? Go, arm yourselves how you can; Mackenzie will be in immediately!”—an event for which he did not wait. Some time before, Judge Jonas Jones had said that Dr. Rolph had a vile democratic heart, and ought to be sent out of the Province. Mr. Baldwin, riding away, heard cheers, but did not know the cause. Four weeks later, writing of the event, he says: “Whether under the 176 circumstances I acted judiciously in undertaking the mission, I know not. One thing I know, that what I did I did for the best, and with the sincerest desire of preventing as far as possible the destruction of life and property.”

But Mackenzie was busy setting fire to Dr. Horne’s house. Its only guard was a very large and handsome Newfoundland dog which formerly had been patrol for Bonnycastle on the beach which skirted his isolated cottage on the bay, a beach much frequented by smugglers and other idlers. The brute valiantly defended his new beat, but without avail. After a series of capers which caused some of his followers to say that little Mac. was out of his head and unfit to be left at large, an end was made of the dog, and the fire was lighted.

A messenger was now sent after the dilatory general by Rolph, who, like the mother of Sisera, was sick at heart to know what hindered the wheels of his chariot. The messenger was a young fellow named Henry Hover Wright, one of Rolph’s students, just arrived from Niagara and full of wonder at being met on the wharf by armed men. The only guard he encountered on Yonge Street was one man—rebel—armed with a fusil. Wright passed him, asking why they did not come. The answer was, “We cannot go until General Mackenzie is ready.” The latter at that moment was busy ordering away a new-comer, saying, “I don’t know you, and there are too many friends,” and particularly busy in his endeavour to get dinner and supper for the men. Mounted on a small white horse, from which vantage he incessantly harangued his followers, he told them he would be commander-in-chief as Colonel Van Egmond had not arrived. Van Egmond did not arrive until the Thursday, when Mackenzie, after breakfasting with him, threatened to shoot him. 177

Expostulating with those who would not advance upon the city in daylight, and exhorting those who had equal objections to the dark, the leader has been variously described: “Storming and swearing like a lunatic, and many of us felt certain he was not in his right senses. He abused and insulted several of the men without any shadow of cause, and Lount had to go round and pacify them by telling them not to pay any attention to him”—(the commander-in-chief)—“as he was not responsible for his actions.” “If we had locked him up in a room at the tavern,” says the naïve chronicler, “and could then have induced Lount to lead us into the city, we should have overturned the government without any fighting worth talking about.” “Once or twice,” says another, “I thought he was going to have a fit.”

No help from outside had as yet arrived in Toronto. After refreshment to the inner rebel had been successfully accomplished by the united efforts of Lount and Mackenzie, the latter’s white mount was exchanged for a big horse taken from some loyalist prisoner. At that juncture had the movement been persevered in, with Lount prominently directing it, there is every reason to suppose that the arms, ammunition and money in the town would have been theirs—also that they would have captured Sir Francis himself, “unless,” indeed, as the London and Westminster Review said, “he had run away.” “All who will reflect on the nature of civil war,” it said, “must see the fearful odds which a day’s success and the possession of the capital and its resources would have given the rebels. For their not obtaining it we have no reason to thank Sir Francis Head.”

“I told them,” (the men) says Mackenzie in his own account of his brief harangue, “that I was certain there 178 could be no difficulty in taking Toronto, that both in town and country the people stood aloof from Sir Francis, that not one hundred men and boys could be got to defend him, that he was alarmed and had got his family on board a steamer, that six hundred Reformers were ready waiting to join us in the city, and that all we had to do was to be firm, and with the city would so at once go down every vestige of foreign government of Upper Canada.”

“If your honour will but give us arms,” cried a voice from the ranks before Sir Francis, “sure the rebels will find the legs.”

In the next hour both sides were to find they had their full complement of these useful limbs.

“To fight and to be beaten,” says Dafoe, “is a casualty common to all soldiers.... But to run away at the sight of an enemy, and neither strike nor be stricken, this is the very shame of the profession.” About sundown the rebels, between seven and eight hundred strong, began their march, half of them armed with green cudgels, cut on the way, the riflemen in the van followed by two hundred of the pikemen. A score or so had old and rusty muskets and shot-guns. Most of them wore a white badge on the sleeve. Three abreast they went, Lount at their head, “Mackenzie here, there and everywhere.” They moved steadily and without mishap, taking prisoner some chance wayfarers and an officer of loyalist artillery, until the head of the column neared a garden, where Sheriff Jarvis and his picket of twenty-seven lay in wait for them. The sheriff gave the word to fire. This his men remained to do, then speedily stood not upon the order of their going, but went at once in haste, and ran into the city. The sheriff called to them to stop, but they were beyond his 179 voice and control; whereupon he probably thought “I’ faith, I’ll not stay a jot longer,” and followed them.

It was a random volley, but it spread consternation. Lount ordered it to be returned, which was done, but in such fear and trepidation that had the others waited to receive it they might have been still safe. Lount and the men in front fell flat on their faces to allow those behind them an opportunity to fire. But this the latter had no mind to do, thinking the fall due to the bullets of the picket. “We shall all be killed,” cried the Lloydtown pikemen, throwing down their rude weapons. In Mackenzie’s words, “They took to their heels with a speed and steadiness of purpose that would have baffled pursuit on foot.” In a short twenty minutes not one of either side was to be found within range of the toll-bar or of each other. The one man killed in the affair was a rebel, done to death from the rear by a nervous and too willing comrade. Mackenzie implored, he coaxed and he threatened, and in such strong language did he treat this retreat that one man from the north, provoked beyond endurance, raised his gun to shoot the commander-in-chief, when a third prevented him.

“I was enabled by strong pickets,” wrote Sir Francis after this, “to prevent Mr. Mackenzie from carrying into effect his diabolical intention to burn the city.”

It was now time to look for some support in answer to the appeals for help sent by special messengers on the Monday evening. One messenger went by land; while another, to make certain, took the water route.

Bonnycastle, indiscriminately dubbed captain or major, was sitting quietly in his home in Kingston, tired after an afternoon spent at the new fort in providing against fire or surprise, when some one, in a state of great excitement, 180 ran into his study to say the steamboat Traveller had arrived from Toronto with Sir Francis Head and all who had been able to escape from that city on board; Toronto was taken by Mackenzie and burnt. Bonnycastle says he “buckled on his armour” and went to consult the commandant of their little garrison—eleven or twelve artillerymen—as to what was best to be done in such a dreadful emergency. Not two steps on his way he was met by a second breathless messenger, followed by a crowd of eager neighbours, who took advantage of the open hall door to come in to hear the news. This second express was to say that the only cargo on board was a letter for Bonnycastle, but that a serious outbreak had occurred. The letter was an order to send stores to Toronto, to arm all loyal persons in Kingston, and to preserve intact the depot and fortress—a work which he did so well that it earned him his knighthood.

The bearer of the duplicate despatch by land had a more difficult journey. He was narrowly searched and examined by the rebels en route, but while his companion was being taken prisoner he sewed his despatch in his sleeve, and by his activity arrived at his destination the same night as, but later than, the Traveller. It was two o’clock on the Monday when Colonel MacNab, in Hamilton, received Sir Francis’ statement, that he, with a few followers, was in the market place of his capital, threatened by Mackenzie and his band of rebels. MacNab lost no time in answering this appeal for help in a way quite consistent with every other detail of that gentleman’s life given to the public. He mounted his horse, rode to the wharf, seized the first steamer he found lying there, put a guard on board her, sent messengers off to the farmers and yeomen on whom he felt he could rely, and by five o’clock was 181 sailing with his sixty men of Gore; a thousand of them had but lately gathered before Sir John Colborne to testify to their sentiments on Mr. Hume’s baneful domination letter. That letter, calculated to further excite those already discontented, was a blessing in disguise, since it had stirred into active life half dormant sentiments of loyalty, and made brighter those already bright.

But of the thousands then preparing for a tramp to converge at Toronto, through dark forest and over corduroy and half frozen swale, the market-place and Sir Francis himself were not, as his writings assert, the objective points. Many who left wives, families and farms and who found themselves in the loyalist ranks at Gallows Hill, had no such loyal intention when they left home.

Sir Francis, sitting forlorn enough in his market-place, was with his admirers discussing the situation by the light of a tallow candle,—a Rembrandt picture, from the shadows of which stand forth many familiar faces, when, as with Bonnycastle and King Richard III., two or three breathless messengers burst in upon them to announce the men of Gore. Steamers and schooners—containing not only the young and venturesome, but the advanced in years, as the Honourable William Dickson, then in his sixty-eighth year—now began to arrive, and the city, in spite of the motley appearance of some cargoes, seemed transformed at a stroke from an excited and frightened community into a vast barrack or camp. Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, there was no longer need into a thousand parts to divide one man and make imaginary puissance, for by that time they were so increased that it became imperative to make an attack. Their number embarrassed those in command, and it was difficult to find accommodation for them. At midnight 182 Sir Francis put MacNab in charge; by the following sunset more than twelve hundred armed men were at his service. A council was held at Archdeacon Strachan’s, at which it was resolved to attack the rebels on Thursday morning. Evidently with changed circumstances and advisers Sir Francis had changed his mind; he was no longer averse to seeking his enemy on the latter’s ground. Four days before this, Attorney-General Hagerman had declared his belief that not fifty men in the province would attack the Government; now he announced that everything depended on the Government’s power of attack.

But the council was not held without its own storm. FitzGibbon, much 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 183 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. 184

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 185 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. 186

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 187 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, 188 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 189 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 190 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 191 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 192 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 193 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. 194 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 195 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. 196 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.”

He himself was now the one flying, and the lion’s talons left off 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 197 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 198 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 199 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, 200 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, 201 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. 202

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 203 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, 204 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 205 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: 206

“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 207 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 208 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.

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 209 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, 210 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.
211 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.”

Sir Francis, in the account he has given us, seems to have been so taken up with the moral lesson of the panorama before him, making a book out of the running brook of Niagara and a moral out of everything, showing his chemical analysis of the comparative advantages of monarchical and republican institutions, speculating on the mutating effect of hard shot on the latter and the thickness of the hide of the American conscience and the thinness of skin which covered American vanity, that he forgot to fight. “Waiting calmly on the defensive,” he called it, emulating a commander at Fontenoy, nicknamed The Confectioner, who, when asked why he did not move to the front, replied, “I am preserving my men.” The usually alert and active Canadian volunteer was occasionally balanced by one more likely to damage himself or his comrades than the enemy. A young clergyman, newly ordained, arrived in Canada about the time of the Rebellion. As he had as yet no charge he thought it only proper to take part in the fray, of course on the loyalist side. A musket was placed in his hands, but he had to apply to someone wiser than himself to know what should go in first. He was stationed on the Niagara frontier in mid-winter, where the beauties of nature made him forgetful of all else. Instead of keeping “eyes front” he used them in star-gazing, fell into the hands of the rebels, and 212 narrowly escaped being shot as a spy. He escaped by the intervention of a person who happened to know him.

A central blockhouse, several batteries, and most imposing earthworks could be seen through the telescope; but as the island was for the most part covered with wood it was hard to approximate its strength. The main camp of huts was on the other side and on Grand Island—a large island some ten miles long, belonging to the United States, and on which a certain Major Noah, of New York, years before had laid the foundations of the city of Ararat, intending to raise there an altar. Across the channel was a portion of the army of sympathisers and the general hospital, the latter transformed into an ark of refuge. From this island, United States property, the loyalist reconnoitering parties sent out in small boats were fired upon, as minutely recorded by Lieutenant Elmsley, who also states, “On our coming abreast of Fort Schlosser I distinctly saw two discharges of heavy ordnance from a point on the main shore on the American side, not far from that fort. As soon as our boats had passed the firing ceased.” The two vantage points of the lesser island and Canadian mainland were near enough for threat or challenge to be thrown across, and from the Battle Ground Inn, just opposite Navy Island, such encouraging sentences as “We’ll be over at you one of these days,” were wafted over. An idle threat so far. Chases after the balls of the enemy as they bounded along, laughter and cheers, made the place more like a playground than a battle-field, a state of inaction which continued for a fortnight.

Part of Sir Francis’ “moral” inward conflict was through the very evident desire on the part of his black militia, many of them scarred and mutilated from their slave-life, to be up and doing on the land from which they 213 had made their escape. They were a formidable looking set of men, powerful, athletic; and as they stood about him, yellow eyes, red gums and clenched ivory teeth making a fine combination of colour, terrible possibilities seem to have crossed his mind. So also with the Indian contingent. They did not like the Long Knives across the water—a name not originally Kentuckian, but straight from the time of good King Arthur. But there was what Sir Francis calls an unwholesome opinion in Downing Street that it would be barbarous to use them as allies against American citizens. It had been said that Canadians were only a trifle less handy at scalping than the allies were, and there were still tales extant of scalping scenes at the time of the Conquest, and later. He managed to satisfy the Indians, however. The honest red countenances glowed, the feathers on their heads gently waved, as they communed among themselves, and presently a disconcerting warwhoop arose, at first like the single yelp of a wolf, but gathering in volume until every scalp upon the island must have quivered.

The following extracts from letters sent from Chippewa by Captain Battersby to his home show how slowly matters progressed:

“Pavilion Hotel, 26th December, 1837.—MacNab arrived yesterday with a large accession of force. Boats have been brought up from Niagara and preparations are making for an attack, which if made at all will, I think, take place in a day or two....

“Chippewa, 28th December.—No attack has yet been made, but the preparations are going on. We are procuring boats from Dunnville, St. Catharines and Niagara, forty or fifty seamen have arrived, and there are two captains in the navy and four lieutenants, ... so that you 214 see our means are augmenting fast. We are most deficient in artillery, but I believe some heavy guns are on their way. There was some firing yesterday from the island, but no effect except wounding a horse. It is said that the Governor has sent up orders not to attack the island by boats, but to dislodge the enemy by artillery and bombardment. At any rate I am glad to see that our leaders are going on cautiously and do not intend making an attack until they have sufficient force. A part of the 24th Regiment is said to be on its way here, and I shall be very glad to see them—they will be invaluable as a support and rallying point to our raw militia.... I will write again when I can, but such is the hurry and confusion that it is difficult to find time and place.

“30th December, 9 p.m.—You will hear before this reaches you of the burning of the steamboat on the American side of the river. It took place about midnight, and was a very gallant enterprise, as those who achieved it were mostly young, inexperienced lads, gentlemen volunteers from the militia; very few of them could even row decently, and many of the small boats employed had not even rudders.... I was in one of the boats, but owing to not having men who could row, and the boat being heavy, I lost sight of the others in the dark ... and obliged to return. I have no doubt that this affair will make a great noise in the United States; in fact I know it already has at Buffalo.... I don’t think that an immediate attack is contemplated, though we are going on with our preparations and shall have boats enough fitted and ready in two or three days. One company of the 24th Regiment came in on the morning of the day I last wrote you.... To give you an idea of the way we go on, yesterday night when the boats were manning for the 215 attack a whole squad of people I knew nothing about came down armed to the teeth, and I really thought at first they would have attempted to take possession of my boat by force that they might go themselves.

“January 4, 1838.—The Lieut.-Governor is here and preparations are still going on for the attack. I have now, however, no fear for the result, as several heavy guns have been brought up, two mortars and a large quantity of Congreve rockets. Our boat force is also increasing rapidly and will soon be equal to whatever is required.... I believe two or three companies of the 32nd will take part in the attack whenever it is made. We are going to move to-night with the boats two or three miles above the island, for the purpose of dropping down with the current when the attack is made.

“January 8th.—The time of attack is as doubtful as ever. We are going on still with our preparations, but owing to the paucity of materials and the terrible state of confusion in which we are, our progress is very slow. There has been a constant thaw here and some rain for the last fourteen days, and the roads are in a state absolutely indescribable. I can safely say that I am floundering in six inches of mud and water from morning till night. I cannot ask for leave of absence for a day, for numbers of the seamen are already discontented and would willingly seize such a pretext for leaving us. We are living in the utmost filth and discomfort.

“January 11th.—Here we are still in the same degree of uncertainty as when I last wrote.... More artillery and troops are expected.... I think myself that no attack will take place for two or three weeks, but it is very likely that we shall endeavour to check their communications with the United States, by means of armed boats, 216 in which case my services would be as necessary as if the island were attacked.... It is now more than a fortnight since I have had my clothes off, night or day. More or less firing takes place between our batteries and those of the enemy every day, and though there are always crowds of gazers on our side, yet to my astonishment only two men have as yet been hurt, although the shot fall a good quarter of a mile past our batteries. I think the commanding officer very much to blame for allowing such crowds to put themselves in danger merely to gratify an idle curiosity. The Buffalo papers state the loss on the island to have been eleven men since the batteries first opened. Great numbers of the militia have left and are leaving this place, at which I am not sorry, as they are entirely undisciplined and many of them disorderly.”

But Sir John Colborne to the rescue. His artillery, officers, guns, mortars, Congreve rockets and stores arrived, and a great stir went through the dissatisfied lines.

The guard standing at Black Creek bridge had a very bad toothache the night of December 29th, so bad that he thankfully retired to the barracks at Chippewa, an old, evacuated tavern, whose big cavernous fire-place, well filled with blazing logs, gave much comfort to his aching jaw. The men were lying about on straw, two and two under a blanket, when in came Nick Thorne to ask if any one of them would help him load up wood from the barrack yard. Some great doings were on hand; he had the countersign; the wood loads were to be used for a beacon light. Reed, whose father, a U. E. Loyalist of 1796, had followed Brock at Queenston, forgot his toothache.

The Caroline was a copper-bottomed craft, originally constructed by the man known afterwards as Commodore 217 Vanderbilt, was intended to sail in the waters off South Carolina, and her timbers were of live oak from that State. She was converted into a steamer and brought up the canals to Lake Ontario, had been used as a ferry at Ogdensburg, and was then taken through the Welland Canal for similar ferry purposes at Buffalo. She was hired by the patriots on Navy Island to convey stores to them from Fort Schlosser, an old military position of French times, where neither fort nor village remained; there was nothing but a tavern, which was the rendezvous of the “pirate force” in coming and going. “Where are you going?” queried someone similar to the gentle general.

“To Dunkirk,” answered the Caroline’s master, Appleby.

“You mean eastward to Navy Island?” But this skipper answered never a word, and a scornful laugh laughed he.

The three lake schooners, each fitted with a gun and intended to carry troops to the island when the long deferred attack should be made, were still inactive. A loyalist reconnoitering party was sent out to report upon what proved to be the Caroline’s last trip. She had landed a cannon and several armed men, and had dropped her anchor east of the island. Expecting to find her still there it was decided to “cut her out” that night. The process technically known as cutting out is a naval one, conducted with great secrecy and muffled oars, men and cutlasses, pistols and boarding pikes, black night and plenty of blood, after the manner of Marryat; always a dangerous business, but in these circumstances, where their chart reported irresistible currents and not half a mile above the Falls, a most perilous enterprise. Luckily there was the right kind of 218 material at hand and to spare for it. They had but a few small boats of about twelve feet in length, each pulling four oars; it would be necessary to keep uncomfortably close to the rapids in order to avoid observation from Navy Island; the difficulties, did the men once quail, were so great that the shortest way was to put them out of mind. At four o’clock that afternoon Colonel MacNab and Capt. Drew, R.N., stood on the lookout discussing the situation. They saw the Caroline performing her duty of conveyance, the telescope revealing the field-pieces and men.

“This won’t do,” said MacNab. “I say, Drew, do you think you can cut that vessel out!”

“Oh, yes,” was the ready answer; “nothing easier. But it must be done at night.”

“Well, then,” was the laconic order, “go and do it.” That order “nearly fired the continent as well as the Caroline.”

To quote the patriot chronicle, it was now that “an insult, the most reckless, cowardly, and unwarranted that was ever offered to a sovereign people, was given.”

Captain Drew was a commander on half pay, “elderly, shortish, and stout,” who had settled in Woodstock in 1834 upon a beautiful farm, where he fondly hoped to end his days in peaceful occupations of wheat-growing and tree-planting. The Duke of Northumberland, who visited him there, thought it the prettiest place he had seen in Canada; and indeed Captain Drew and Major James Barwick may be termed the pioneers of those—the Vansittarts, Lights, De Blaquières, Deedes and others—who formed the far-known aristocratic settlement of Oxford. The midlands of England held nothing lovelier than these homes scattered along the Thames, farms separated by beautiful ravines, studded and fringed with elms and 219 noble maples, well built picturesque houses, wherein the owners entertained after the manner of their class and kind and spent much money. The stress of war in very few years was to wipe out this community of blood, manners and culture; but Captain Drew’s tenure, owing to the cutting out of the Caroline, was to be shorter still.

The first thing to be done was to call for volunteers. “Here we are, sir,” cried a hundred voices, “what are we to do?” some of them from the contingent in the Methodist chapel at Chippewa. “Follow me,” was the only answer, for it was of first importance that no word could possibly be conveyed to the island, and Drew says the men did not know their errand until seated in the boats and off from shore, taking their way via the little canal just above the rapids. Rumours of any kind were quickly transmitted to either side; one of the most ludicrous which had recently come to the ears of the troops was that Mackenzie’s people said the Tories of Toronto had managed to smuggle a black cook into the patriot stronghold opposite, and that presently all patriots would therefore die of poison.

Each man of the boats’ crews had to be able to pull a good oar, a condition not strictly carried out, as we see from Captain Battersby’s letters, but there were some experts, such as young Mewburn, who writes that he was doubly manning a bow oar. Each man was furnished with a cutlass and pistol. Most of them were young fellows, some from that corps organized in King Street in Hamilton by MacNab and called by him his “Elegant Extracts.” One, young Woods, a curly-headed laddie, U.E.L. to the heart’s core, good-naturedly gave up his seat to a friend, Dr. Askin, and then found himself likely to be left on shore. He appealed to his chief. 220 “Why, you d—d young scamp, if you want to be shot give my compliments to Captain Beer and tell him to take you in.” More easily said than done; but through influence, and by being able to hide under a seat, he got into a boat and lay on a pile of wet sand, with knees up to his chin, palpitating with excitement, until the final moment of departure. For time dragged tediously; they had to give the Caroline an hour or two to settle herself for the night, and they heartily wished that the moon would do the same. “Hadn’t you better give me another,” said our curly-headed laddie, referring to his pistol. “When you have used that, you will find that you won’t want another,” said his officer.

MacNab wished the Caroline to be brought to Chippewa; Drew wanted her burnt and done for. By half after eleven they had started, sent off with three hearty cheers from those left behind, Thorne, Reed and the others ready to light the fire which was to answer to the blaze they intended to make, and, unnecessary precaution, which would also serve as beacon to guide them back. Once out, the men were told the service they were bent on and offered the chance to return, the danger not being burked. But no one took advantage of the offer. Some, however, nearly had their course altered in spite of themselves: “Robert Sullivan, one of the crew, called out, ‘Stop rowing, boys, for God’s sake—do you see where we are—we are going straight over the Falls!’ ‘Silence!’ responded Lieutenant Graham, ‘or I will blow your brains out. It is for me, not you, to give orders.’ ‘Oh, very well,’ replied Sullivan, drawing his oar into the boat, ‘if I am to go over the Falls, I may as well go without brains as with them.’ Here we all joined in, and after hurriedly representing to Graham the danger of our position we 221 began to pull up stream. A little longer and it would have been too late.” The roar of the mighty cataract, which awed and somewhat terrified them, had been previously described by a patriot writer as the peal of the funeral dirge of royalty in Canada.

Shots from Navy Island made the heart beat; and do their best they were forced to cross the river diagonally. “We are going astern, sir; we shall be over the Falls;” but reassured by the light from the doomed steamer, by which they could determine the drop down stream, they at length all got together. The moon was yet too bright, and they rested on their oars, dipping them enough to stem the current. At last it was dark enough, and they were alongside. “Boat, ahoy! boat, ahoy!—give us the countersign!” “Silence!” said Drew, in a confidential tone, “silence! don’t make a noise, and we’ll give you the countersign when we get on board.” Once on deck, he drew his sword, saying to the three men who were lounging on the starboard gangway, “I want this vessel, and you must go ashore at once.” Thinking he was alone they took up their arms and fired at him, not a yard off. A swing and a cut of the sword, and one patriot dropped at the captain’s feet. Another trigger was pulled, the only result a flash in the pan; there was a sabre-cut dealt on the inside of the man’s arm, and the pistol fell. The captain confesses to expediting this man and another over the boat’s side with an inch of the point of his weapon.

Meantime, three of the boats had boarded forward, and a good deal of firing followed, the latter checked at once by the captain, as he feared that in the dark friend might be mistaken for foe, a fear soon realized. Returning, he thought it wise to reconnoitre about the gangway between 222 the bulwark and the raised cabin. Here he was met by a man who aimed at him a slashing cut, which he parried and successfully pinned the cutlass against the cabin bulk-head. “Holloa, Zealand,” said he, recognizing one of his own men, a fine specimen of an old British tar, “what are you about?” “Oh, I beg pardon, sir, I didn’t know it was you!” said the zealous sailor, who, released, went to seek legitimate prey. There was a good deal of cursing, clashing of swords and shouting, and (it is said) a cry of “Show the rebels no quarter.” On the contrary, as the men fussed over the lamp, the window sashes and the forgotten “carcass,” trying to coax a fire, one American heard them say of himself, “What shall we do with this fellow?” “Kill him!” suggested one; “No, take him prisoner!” said a third; but their officer’s decision was that they did not want prisoners, and the man was to be put ashore. And the only person killed in the whole affair, Durfee, lay on the dock, shot by a bullet which came from the land side. Wells, the owner of the vessel, finding himself on solid ground, made some good running, in spite of his assertion that he was almost cut to pieces.

One tale of the day has it that another life was lost; a volunteer was fired at by a patriot, and in retaliation beat his assailant’s brains out; his own condition and that of the butt of his pistol corroborated his story on his return to the Canadian side. The matter for the extraordinarily sensational accounts given by the American press was chiefly furnished by Mackenzie.

Lieutenant Elmsley officered a guard on shore while the vessel was cut from her moorings—not an easy thing to accomplish, as she was made fast by chains frozen in the ice; but a young fellow named Sullivan seized an axe, cleared the chains, and set her free. This, Commander 223 Drew’s own story, is denied by a survivor, one of his lieutenants. A lamp was placed in a basket used for carrying Indian corn, cross-bars from the windows were torn off and added to it, and the vessel was set alight in four different places. The material especially brought for this purpose, and known as a carcass, was at first quite forgotten. Care had been taken to rouse all sleepers, had any been able to sleep through such a scene; the invaders were ordered to their boats; the flames shot out fore and aft; and by this time Captain Drew found his stand on the paddle-box too uncomfortable, as those driven ashore had recovered from their surprise and the discharge of their muskets was disagreeably close. It was equally uncomfortably hot, and his gallant wish to be the last on board nearly left him there as she drifted down the current. He found a companion in a man emerging from below who declared it too hot to live in there, and together they got into the boat sent back for them, Drew’s shouts fortunately having risen above the din. So far there was no need for the beacon from the opposite shore; the Caroline herself, like a great torch, glided beside them, or rather they kept in the wake of her gold-dust covered ripples, a fine target for the island guns; but the days of bull’s-eyes were not yet. In spite of wounds the men rose superior to fear of shot, content with the result of their mission, and anxious to rejoin the cheering multitude that waited for them on the Canadian shore. The illumination made by burning vessel and beacon light threw every pebble on the shore-line into bright relief. Drew’s account states that no human ingenuity could have accomplished what the Caroline so easily did for herself. When free from the wharf at Fort Schlosser her natural course would have been to follow the stream, which would have taken 224 her along the American shore and over the American Fall; but she behaved as if aware she had changed owners and navigated herself across the river, clearing the rapids above Goat Island; she went fairly over the British Fall of Niagara.4

An extract from one of the songs sung by the Canadian volunteers will give an idea of the sentiments of the singers:

The Lewiston Telegraph on Saturday set this in type at 6 a.m.:

“Horrible! Most Horrible!!

“We stop the press to announce the following horrible intelligence which has just been communicated by two gentlemen direct from the bloody scene:

“The steamer Caroline, which was lying at the landing at Porter’s storehouse, was boarded this morning between the hours of twelve and one by about eighty men, who came in boats from the Canada side. The Caroline had on board from fifteen to twenty of our sleeping and defenceless citizens, who had lodgings on board. They are believed to have been mostly citizens of Buffalo, who came as lookers-on, with the expectation of witnessing the attack 225 upon the island. Every individual was butchered except four, and three of these severely wounded. The engineer, who was thrust through and put on shore, says that after the bloody work was executed a small boy was found in a closet, who begged for mercy but found none. The Caroline was then towed out into the stream and sent over Niagara Falls. Three cheers were given, and at the same time beacon lights were raised at Chippewa. Our informant saw the lifeless body of one person who was shot upon the shore.”

For five years the question hung upon a thread whether England and the United States should go to war or not. It is always fair to give two sides of a question, but in the one given by Clio and Melpomene it will be seen their poetic license degenerates into something more than the flowery taradiddle of the average verse-maker:

A careful computation from pages of prose, almost as flowery as the foregoing lines and oftentimes breaking into rhyme from a very luxuriousness of idea and rhythm, puts the lives aboard the Caroline at about ninety-nine in number. Thirty-three were killed and missing; thirty-three were towed into the middle of the stream when the boat was fired, and with her went over the ledge; there were also thrilling cries from “the living souls” on board, plus “wails of the dying,” presumably thirty-three 227 cries and thirty-three wails, all gliding down the resistless rapids to perish by “the double horror of a fate inevitable.”

On the day following the cutting out five hundred men were told off to complete the work by driving the filibusters off the island, the three schooners, with boats and barges, being sufficient transport. “But what shall we do if a shot strikes our boat—we must either drown or go over the Falls,” was a query which sent Captain Drew off on another hazard. He pulled up stream in a four-oared gig, within pistol shot of the island, to see if the enemy’s field-piece was equal to hitting a boat which moved fast through the water. So far the casualties from the red-hot shot sent skipping along the Canadian shore were the death of young Smith of Hamilton, who, lying in a barn on some hay, had part of his thigh carried away and some ribs broken, and an old sailor named Millar who served Captain Luard’s guns, and had his leg taken off. Millar asked to see his leg, gave three cheers for the Queen, and died.

A twenty-four pounder, mounted on a scow, battered the point where the guns of Van Rensselaer were most active. Drew’s expedition brought upon themselves both musketry and field-pieces, at first innocent of all aim, but suddenly so improved that one shot made ducks and drakes on the water, just clearing the gunwale, and passing between Drew and his strokesman. This was from no amateur, but owed its precision to the hand of a young West Pointer—possibly of the “empty hand, stout heart, of fair military tactics” letter. Van Rensselaer has left it on record that the only moments of excitement to him in this episode were when the first gun was fired from the island, and when this boat’s crew, at early 228 dawn, made its way in safety round them; so that Drew’s temerity was not without reward. These patriots had “kissed their rusty muskets” and vowed they would never lay them down until “the redemption of Canada was accomplished.” A “sympathetic” account tells us that the men so determined to do or die, in order to protect themselves from temptation had taken the pins out of the screws of the scows and burned their oars, resolved,

The outcome was a hurried departure by night after they heard of the arrival of the 24th Regiment. The brisk cannonade of about four hundred rounds from heavy guns and mortars, and the armed schooners which effectually kept them within their breastworks, were almost enough without the rumour of the 24th.

When the Canadian force landed not a soul was to be seen, and what had appeared formidable defence dwindled. Apparently a second Gibraltar, it was found in military parlance to be a bug-bear than which a greater never existed, a conglomeration of batteries and hovels masked with wood, a sickening spectacle of “looped and windowed” wretchedness. The vaunted blockhouse citadel, the barracks and the batteries, were but huts of trees and sods and ill-constructed embankments; the only reward for industry was an abattis of brushwood to prevent boat invasion.

A man concealed in the woods now came out, white flag in hand, and from him and two women found in a hut did the Canadians get an account of life on “the fatal isle” 229 during the biting storms and pitiless rain of December, ’37, and January, ’38. “Peas and beans dank as a dog,” varied by feasts, the bones of which lay about with remains of bread and barrels of beans yet untouched, had been their food; the bushes about were eloquent, with bits of rag sticking to them, of the quality of clothing; these patriots, herded together like swine and sheep, left behind them evidences of some stores, boots and shoes, plenty of reading matter of the most virulent kind, all mixed up with burst shells, splintered wood and dirty straw. Some boots had the legs cut open, apparently to strip wounded limbs, some were stained with blood; and “a huge pile of unpicked bones, ... on a rough board used as a table,” and the remains of beds made of pine branches, gave further evidence.

Sir Francis paid the site a visit on the 17th, a wild and boisterous day. He had the body of one man exhumed—shot by a rifle, but his arms were pinioned. He had been suspected as a spy. The susceptible Sir Francis, light as his heart generally was, saddened at the sight of him.

Songs abounded for every part of the event, dates sometimes making way for rhyme:

On the night of evacuation the soi-disant patriot army surrendered their arms to the United States authorities and disbanded their forces. The cannon belonging to the State were returned in a scow to Fort Schlosser, and in transit with the men on board came near following the fate of the Caroline. The scow had fallen far down the 230 current and the men had given up their case as hopeless, when a gale from the north-west sprang up, and, aided by their blankets extemporized into sails, they were wafted ashore.

A month before, when they had received these ill-gotten guns, they slaughtered the oxen which drew them, and paid for the beef and work by a due-bill on the future Canadian Republic.

“No sooner was the Caroline in flames than a sudden excitement prevailed; but it was the excitement of fear. The women fled from the villages on the coast, people who had fancied themselves bedridden decamped, and the citizens of Buffalo evinced the greatest possible consternation for the safety of their town.”

Captain Drew almost distanced Sir Francis in unpopularity in certain quarters; but like him, among his own was at once a hero. At St. George’s Day dinner in Toronto, Captain Marryat, an old comrade of Drew’s, gave the toast: “Captain Drew and his brave comrades who cut out the Caroline.” The day after the cutting-out, Drew, with MacNab, was burnt in effigy on the ice at Detroit, and he saw himself advertised for in a Buffalo newspaper at a reward of $500. He was hanged in effigy—a compliment kept up on the anniversary for several years; active attempts were made to assassinate him, of so determined a nature that in the end the pleasant Woodstock home was forsaken, and heroism was forgotten when, forced to leave the country to preserve life to wife and family, he found himself in England, where the preservation of Canada was of interest on a large scale but the reward of her preservers a matter of no moment. Captain Marryat’s toast brought upon him, too, attentions similar to those bestowed upon the subject of it. He was 231 burned in effigy in every town in the United States through which his journey took him; his writings were made into a bonfire in Lewiston, and in St. Louis his effigy was decorated with a halter round the neck. Cincinnati was the first place which dared to assert a difference. The captain, whose mother was an American, had so far looked on at his own cremation and at that of his child-literary with calmness, smoking a cigar the while; but in Cincinnati, at the dinner tendered him, he spoke out like a man, a gentleman, and a person of force and humour, giving his reasons for his opinions and actions and ashamed of neither. He said that his motive in refusing private hospitality was that he might leave himself freedom of speech; and he finishes his deliverance, “If we are to burn all those who differ with us in opinion, consider, gentlemen, what a glorious bonfire would be made of the whole United States.”

What touched him most deeply was part of his mail matter,—five hundred anonymous letters which cost him on an average fifty cents each to redeem from the post, and of which he makes bitter though humorous complaint in a long, published letter, supposed to answer his five hundred correspondents in one coup-de-main and also his well-wishers, whose missives followed him so persistently from place to place, that he began to think it a combined attack upon his purse from Van Buren and the Postmaster-General.

The destruction of the Caroline surprised everyone, Americans, Canadians, even the chief actors; it let loose the tongues of ministers and diplomats, and it gave a great impulse to the outside movement of sympathisers or patriots. The success of Drew’s action made 232 the last wary; but the howl of indignation, which for a time was allowed to have some show of reason, served as a cloak under which to add retaliation to what before had been dubbed patriotism alone. Sugar Island, Bois Blanc, and the schooner Anne followed in quick succession; but the most direct outrage as result of it was that against the Sir Robert Peel under the management of an autocrat on the other side of the warfare, handsome and distinguished looking as MacNab himself, determined as Drew, uncompromising as Prince, with an air and halo of romance over all his actions arising partly from his personality, partly from the romantic beauty of his surroundings—the redoubtable Bill Johnston, king of the Thousand Islands.

General Van Rensselaer, in sash and epaulets, with his encampment on Navy Island, backed by two or three hundred vagabonds, making war upon Great Britain, was a ridiculous person. But Bill Johnston, the buccaneer, armed to the teeth, actuated by revenge for real injuries, carrying out his threat to be a thorn in Great Britain’s side, flying from island to island, a price set upon his head, determined to sell his life at desperate cost, devoted to his daughter and adored by his children, has a touch of poetry about him which almost justified what he devoutly believed himself—that it was a glorious thing to be a pirate king. It is a come-down to have to admit that one of his occupations was robbing the Canadian mails, when he would take the clothes off the occupants of the coach and beat whoever refused him, tie the coachman to a tree—as he did between Gananoque and Kingston—and leave the man there. He once captured a dragoon carrying despatches, took the man and his horse to the lake shore, shot the horse, put the despatch-bag in his boat, and let 233 the man find his way on foot to report himself to his captain.

This was the personage concerning whom Silas Fletcher, one of the refugees from Gallows Hill, wrote from Watertown to Navy Island, that he was a man in whom it was perfectly safe to confide, “a gentleman of intelligence, equal to fifty ordinary men,” recommended for a commission because he could “greatly annoy the Kingstonians,” his influence so great that he could raise two hundred as bold volunteers as ever drew trigger. Some of the sympathizers had a faculty for arousing admiration; for about this time a lady in Rochester, who kept a private school where some Toronto girls were sent, allowed her pupils to work a silken flag to be presented to the pirate force.

Johnston and his followers had many disguises. In their attacks on isolated farm-houses it was their pleasure to adopt the dress of ordinary sailors, and in their expedition to the island of Tanti—a Canadian possession of Lord Mountcashel, from which they took much plunder, and where they left one farmer with three fingers and part of a hand shot off—the whole mise-en-scène is absurdly like “H. M. S. Pinafore.” From island to island, from rock to the hidden fastness, keeping in the narrower channels where inclined planes were cleverly constructed by which to draw up their fast boats, the only clue to their haunts was a surprise shot from some ambush or the expiring embers of a lately deserted bivouac fire, or perhaps a couple of barrels moored in the narrowest part of Fiddler’s Elbow, innocent-looking infernal machines left ready for the unwary.

French Creek—A-ten-ha-ra-kweh-ta-re, the place where the wall fell down—Abel’s Island and some other points, were his favourites; but Fort Wallace, a small islet at the 234 head of Wells’ Island, was his fastness, where, with a dozen men, he boasted he could withstand two hundred. The number of boats scattered up and down the islands was popularly supposed to be one hundred, and the population of this world of islets some thousand souls, all under the sway of Johnston. Rinaldo, Robert Kidd and Robert le Diable seemed centred in him. He could land at Queenston unarmed and get the guard tipsy, and with a few companions take off seventy stand of arms. But his experience as smuggler and trader, and his exploits when in the employment of the American Government during the war of 1812, when he roamed all the lakes and rivers, intercepting despatches, and when, his boat driven in by a gale on the Canadian shore and his crew captured, he could cross Ontario—at that point thirty-six miles wide—in a bark canoe after a fortnight’s dodging of British vessels, made such affairs as came to his hand in ’37 seem bagatelles. In the early days he had at his command a six-oared barge; now he and his four sons, the latter all partaking of his own nature, powers and daring, did their work in four row-boats of extraordinary speed, each boat with a crew of eight or ten men and all armed to the teeth. The boat used by Johnston himself was twelve-oared, the swiftest of the fleet, twenty-eight feet by four and a half, clinker-built and gay with paint. Black bottom, white above, with a yellow streak six inches wide below the gunwale, inside red, so light in weight that two men could carry her with ease, but capable of accommodating twenty armed men, this gay-looking craft flew his own colours.

But for special use in deceiving British vessels a Stars and Stripes lay ready to hand. Not that he was under the protection of the latter; he was harried equally by 235 United States authorities and Canadian, his capture being finally made by the former. The most interesting member of his domestic group was his daughter, whom his ambition was to make Queen of the Thousand Isles, a handsome girl of nineteen, possessed of courage enough to manage her boat alone, armed like her brothers, and skilful enough to keep her father supplied with provisions on those exciting occasions when he had to hide.

Bill Johnston and his followers were of more consequence than all the men, Provisional Government, generals and staff, on Navy Island; in the words of an American newspaper, “This chap seems now to be conducting war on his own hook.” Wells’ Island was the scene of his reprisal for the burning of the Caroline; for all his own grievance, such as the confiscation of his property on the British side in 1812, he felt himself more than avenged. The island, part of Jefferson county, had not more than an acre of cleared land upon it, with a wharf used for wooding the vessels which called there for fuel; the sole building was one log shanty. When the Sir Robert Peel drew in on the evening so important to her, May 29th, 1838, the woodman warned the captain that suspicious-looking characters were inland. But the warning was made light of, and the usual fueling programme followed. All on board went to bed, and about ten o’clock thirteen of the erstwhile sailors of the island of Tanti appeared in their new scene as Indians, looking the part to perfection in black, red and yellow paint. Their number had been twenty-eight, but they had dropped down the river from their camp on Abel’s Island, on the opposite side to the wood station, and in crossing fifteen of the band had been temporarily lost in a swamp. The debate whether this left too small a number for the attack led to delay, but 236 Johnston decided that a baker’s dozen was a lucky number, and that if this opportunity were lost another as favourable might not offer itself. So the warwhoop, as good an imitation as their painted semi-nudeness, was raised. One discrepancy was the absence of tomahawks, replaced by guns, and bayonets. The woods re-echoed to their howls, and it was not long until captain, crew and passengers were on deck.

Colonel Fraser, Mr. Holditch of Port Robinson, and several others, had enjoyed their evening; they took wine together, and then went to bed, their berths in a row. Soon they heard a noise which they imagined to be a scuffle among the crew; but in a twinkling five men stood by the berths where they still lay, four armed with bayonets and muskets and the fifth with a sword. At the command to get up at once Mr. Holditch laid his hand upon Colonel Fraser’s military coat, and the ruffian with the sword, seeing the colour, called out, “He is a British officer—run him through!” A general disowning of Her Majesty’s uniform ensued, but a lively fight took place for possession of the pocket-book, which contained a large sum of money. After much kicking and knocking down most of the men were forced into a small cabin, lighted by a skylight through which muskets were pointed at them, keeping them quiet until a panel was broken out of the door and one by one they were allowed to leave. The women were all driven on deck in their night-clothes; their cries were distressing, but Captain Bullock, formerly of the St. George, and the stewardess, contrived to mitigate circumstances for them. The dramatic Sea-King was not going to allow such an opportunity for the tragic to escape him. As he knocked at the ladies’ cabin door a courageous female tried to stop his further entrance, begging time to 237 dress. “Come with me,” said Bombastes, “come with me and I will save you—THE NATIONS ARE AT WAR.”

It was a most inclement night, and they took refuge in the shanty. There one of the brigands remarked that the occupants of the Peel had got their deserts, whereupon Captain Bullock knocked him down and dragged him out by the throat. The amount of booty was not inconsiderable, and as soon as the vessel was rifled of it she was set on fire and allowed to drift. The mate must have been a sound sleeper, as he knew none of the happenings until rescue was nearly past. His shrieks for help came after the pirates had departed and the passengers dispersed, but some of the latter managed to reach him in a skiff. They were barely in time, for he had to jump into the water so badly burned that he had to be tended by the half-dressed passengers all night.

It was supposed to be the intention to thus serve all British steamers, so that Johnston’s whaleboats should have no interference in St. Lawrence waters thereabouts in piracy and invasion. In this particular instance, one of the passengers, an Irishman, vigorously protested from the island:

“The divil saze the likes of ye, ye’re worse than the Connaught Rangers, wid yer injun naygur faces.”

“Remember the Caroline, Pat,” retorted a pirate.

“Is it Caroline Mahoney, ye mane?—sure it’s not at the likes of you she’d be after lookin’.”

They essayed to get Pat on board, telling him to “come and get his duds.” “Do ye think I’ll go aboard and see myself kilt?” he asked. They then tried to get near him, but with “Bad luck to ye, there’s two can play at that, me darlin’,” he sped into the woods. One of the party was a prisoner from Abel’s Island, and he was left to look after 238 Scanlan, one of the crew, who had been badly wounded in the scuffle. By sunrise, while the Robert Peel still burned, the pirates were back at Abel’s Island, washed and clothed. The passengers were taken off Wells’ Island by the U. S. steamer Oneida and left at Kingston. After this the pirate boats were mounted with two and three-pounders, while Johnston and his followers played hide-and-seek with his pursuers, managing to elude two steamboats, one schooner and a number of gunboats which were doubling and cross-cutting in his wake.

When Governor Marcy, of New York, received information of this act, which Johnston himself allowed to be piracy, he went to the frontier and took active measures to guard his own border from the retaliation which he dreaded, and also to combine with the Canadians in offering a reward for Johnston’s arrest. Such banditti, like the cowboys of the Revolution, argued that it mattered not who was plundered, provided there was booty to be found. In the grandiloquent words of their own chronicle, the Sir Robert Peel was “a burnt-offering to the shades of the Caroline.” As to Canadian reprisals, there was much talk of firing upon United States vessels wherever found, an unjust opinion existing that they were at one with “Admiral” Johnston’s crafts. But better sense prevailed, and as one newspaper says, “Let their steamboats depart from our shores in peace.” Such a Nunc Dimittis, opening with an exhortation to high-mindedness, “Men of Chatham! the eyes of Europe are upon you!” was penned at Chatham, where the burning of an American vessel was insisted upon as retaliation for a local act of outrage.

The action taken by Sir George Arthur concerning the indictment of similar outlaws elsewhere after they were 239 caught, treating them as prisoners of war, exasperated the Loyalists; they claimed it was establishing a precedent for all the Bill Johnstons and marauders, who were either rebels in their own country or filibusters from the one opposite: “This is, in fact, a bounty upon invasion, and taken in connection with Mackenzie’s reward of 300 acres of land, made it easy for a man to hedge with tolerable assurance of not coming to grief either way.” “These be indeed Liberal times.” What Bill Johnston thought of it all may be seen from his proclamation, issued immediately, after he had first openly paraded the streets of Ogdensburg with his belt stuck full of pistols, dirks and bowie knives:

“To all whom it may concern:

“I, William Johnston, a native-born citizen of Upper Canada, certify that I hold a commission in the Patriot service of Upper Canada as commander-in-chief of the naval forces and flotilla. I commanded the expedition that captured and destroyed the steamer Sir Robert Peel. The men under my command in that expedition were nearly all natural-born English subjects; the exceptions were volunteers for the expedition. My head-quarters was on an island in the St. Lawrence, without the jurisdiction of the United States, at a place named by me Fort Wallace. I am well acquainted with the boundary line, and know which of the islands do and do not belong to the United States; and in the selection of the island I wished to be positive, and not locate within the jurisdiction of the United States, and had reference to the decision of the Commissioners under the sixth article of the Treaty of Ghent, done at Utica, in the State of New York, 13th June, 1822. I know the number of the island, 240 and by that decision it was British territory. I yet hold possession of that station, and we also occupy a station some twenty or more miles from the boundary line of the United States, in what was Her Majesty’s dominions until it was occupied by us. I act under orders. The object of my movement is the independence of Canada. I am not at war with the commerce or property of the people of the United States.

“Signed, this tenth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight.

“William Johnston.”

The result of the proclamation, which was published in the American newspapers, was a reward offered by Governor Marcy of $500 for the author’s arrest, $250 each for that of D. M’Leod and two others, and $100 each for the rest. The Canadian Government offered £1000 for the conviction of any of them.

But it is a long lane that has no turning. The defeat at Prescott once more sent the Johnstons and their followers to the same retreats of the river intricacies. An old soldier of the 79th was given the hazardous mission to search them out; but the only result was a shot or two from an unseen and vanishing enemy, and a specimen of the finest tourmalin to add to his geological cabinet. Bonnycastle put some of his staff with a band on board a small steamer, ostensibly to visit the militia garrisons of Gananoque, Brockville and Prescott, returning by night in the hope that Johnston would attack them. With excellent steering they escaped the infernal machines moored for them, but saw naught of the enemy.

Sir John Colborne, with his one notion of government, had a large body of sailors and marines forwarded from 241 Quebec harbour, then full of men-of-war, steamboats and merchantmen drawn there by the arrival of Lord Durham. A company of the 1st Frontenac Militia went to the island of Tanti, and the border-town garrisons were strongly reinforced with picked men. But Johnston only laughed at them all, and scudded along in his mysterious boat. About eight feet of the after-part of this craft was decked, and on this he sat while he steered with an oar, a red carpet-bag for his cushion seat. In the sight of one party of pursuers from the steamboat Oswego they openly pulled for the wreck of the Sir Robert Peel; when the pursuers were within fifteen rods a white handkerchief was waved and Johnston majestically rose from his carpet-bag, drew from it the colours of the Sir Robert Peel, which he let wave in the breeze and then gravely returned to the bag. Another craft, evidently one of the fleet, darted up a bay; the dark blue boat was made fast, and in a moment the crew could be seen walking through the bushes, Indian file, each with a large pistol in his right hand. In an interview held at a few boat’s lengths with a deputation of two, who were old acquaintances of his, Johnston said there was one thing of which they might rest assured—he would never be taken alive; that he was a fair mark to shoot at, but not to dangle in the air. He might have quoted, “To die for treason is a common evil,
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.”

He announced that at that moment he had two other boats well manned and armed within signal view; that he sat upon the colours of the Sir Robert Peel, and that he meant to continue sitting on them “till they rotted.” The interviewers could see for themselves that his boat was well stored with muskets and small arms. When told that his 242 son’s wharf at French Creek was then patronized for wood by one of the steamers, “he seemed much affected,” replying, “I am glad to hear of it, or of anything else that can benefit my family.”

At this time Johnston appeared a robust, athletic man, absolutely fearless, about sixty years of age, a gray-headed, hardy veteran, “a good friend and a terror to his enemies.” He stated that whoever attacked him must bring his own coffin, as he himself had no leisure for cabinet-making.

A simultaneous movement was made on him by a party of British soldiers, and some of the 1st Regiment of American Infantry under Captain Gwynn of the American army. The men were conveyed in two steamboats, the Experiment and the Telegraph, and in a gunboat under Lieutenant Leary, R.N., the Bullfrog. They found two of the bandits fast asleep in the cave, but on account of the roughness of the surrounding country the attack was not well concerted, and the rest of the band, including Johnston, escaped. A quantity of arms and ammunition was found in the cave, but a thorough search by the soldiers, eighty in number and cutlasses in hand, revealed no trace of them.

At another time, General MacNab with some fifty United States soldiers, cruising about in search of this will-o’-the-wisp, found the home but its occupant gone. It proved to be a spacious cavern, into which they penetrated about thirty feet, part natural cavity, part excavated by labour, fit for dwelling-place for a large body of men, and in the several rooms which it contained there were signs of recent occupation.

Mr. James, an artillery officer of Ogdensburg, had met with the loss of a brass six-pounder, pressed into the patriot service during the excitement of the battle of the 243 Windmill. At the end of that affair, so disastrous to the sympathisers, Bill Johnston suddenly disappeared from the streets of Ogdensburg. Not long after this Mr. James’ wife was doing her marketing as usual, being one of the few ladies who were not intimidated by the scare at the waterfront. While chatting with friends whom she met in the course of her morning’s walk, one said, “If you knew where your husband is you would not be so full of laughter.” Word had been brought into town that Bill Johnston was in hiding in the woods near by, and two parties, hurriedly got together, had gone off in search. One party was composed of Charles T. Burwell and James, on horseback, the other of United States soldiers who were to meet the first at a given rendezvous. On arriving at the place the two horsemen found young Johnston sitting by the shore waiting for his father. After some resistance young Johnston was taken, his boat seized and the oars hidden. The capture of the father was not so easy. When he caught sight of the three he rushed to where he expected to find the boat, warning the townsmen to keep off. Had he thought of it in time it would have been like him to exclaim, “A boat! a boat! my kingdom for a boat!” He had a pistol in each hand, but demurred to use them, as his pursuers were “fellow-Americans.” After considerable parley, when he realized that the second party, momentarily expected by boat, would put him beyond hope, he surrendered. But he stipulated that his son should receive his arms, he himself to retain only four small pistols and his bowie knife; he then quietly fell in with James and Burwell for the return to Ogdensburg. A very short walk brought them to the other party just arrived, United States soldiers, a sheriff and deputy marshall, to whom Bill Johnston was delivered. In spite 244 of the large sums offered as reward for his capture, the testimony is that James’ share no more than reimbursed the latter for the loss of the brass six-pounder, for the safe custody of which he had been responsible. They placed Johnston on a steamboat in government employ under Colonel Worth, and so he disappears.

It was an epoch in the history of the peninsula of Essex and Kent when Mr. Prince arrived in Canada. Formerly these counties, “together with as much of this province as is not included within any other district,” extended northward to the boundary line of Hudson Bay. Neighbourhoods were not then congested. Prince was the first man of fortune who came to the district, which he did in ’33, accompanied by wife, family and servants. A man of fine presence and most genial manners, an eloquent speaker, a sportsman and lover of agriculture, he took to farming like the average Englishman, full of good intentions and enthusiasm. He imported thoroughbred stock and kept the finest of dogs. Although much opposed to the stringent game laws of England he introduced a bill for the preservation of game; it passed, but came back amended, one of the additions being that at no time should any animal be killed on the Lord’s Day. Later, alluding to the discussions induced by his summary proceedings with rebels and the hot debates on the battle of Windsor, he never doubted but that the shooting of such rancorous animals as wolves and Yankee pirates on the Lord’s Day could be justified; whereat there was laughter. For Sabbath-keeping in those exciting times was more after the manner of Gwirzi, whose allowance was a male and female daily, but who on Saturday night killed two of each so that he might not profane the Sabbath. 245

Prince had the true patriarchal spirit; was born to be a leader of men, if withal, like Bottom, he could say, “My chief humour is for a tyrant.” It was a time when a tyrant or two did not come amiss on the Canadian border, however unworthily at the metropolis th’ oppressor ruled tyrannic when he durst. Prince came not long after the time when the Western District gave sentence for manslaughter, “to be burned in the hand and accordingly put in execution before the court.” If this was justice in times of peace there was not much room for the animadversions with which he was covered—but not overwhelmed—when, the Constitution suspended, revolutionary crimes could scarce be put down save by revolutionary methods. “MacNab and Drew, Arthur, Prince, Hagerman and Robinson, are still alive,” said the press; each one of them agreed with Blackstone that obedience is an empty word if every man may decide how far he shall obey. There is no doubt that the Sandwich-Windsor locality was in ’37-38 a seething caldron of unrest, distrust and dissatisfaction; but above it all rides this overpowering personality: “For the brave Prince still lives, and so do his men,
Who triumphed before and can do it again.”
“(Toast) ‘That brave, intrepid officer whose promptitude of action turned the revelry of Yankee pirates in the western frontier into a post mortem examination. May the sad lesson prove a caution to the followers of Blue Beard.’ (Tune—‘The Brave Old English Gentleman’).”

“Of politics,” said he himself in one of the hundreds of speeches which did much towards making his fame, “of politics I shall say but little here. Mine have been before you and the people of Upper Canada for the last five sessions. I am in the true sense of the word a Constitutional 246 Reformer.” How far Brougham and others of his old country critics agreed with him shall be seen hereafter. His record in the Canadian House shows that he was never amenable to party discipline himself, was classed as “doubtful” by both parties, had hot fits of Liberalism and Conservatism by turns; like a stiff old Englishman, said he was prepared, as the barons at Runnymede, to maintain his rights at all risks; with John Henry Boulton came out as Independent, was a veritable Thorough in his opposition to the Rebellion Losses Bill, and capped the climax of his many-sided character by printing a petition signed by “many respectable Canadians” to move an address to Her Majesty praying that Canada might be relieved from her “dependent state and allowed to become an independent sovereignty.” By the time the last transpired it behooved Robert Baldwin to stigmatize the petition borne by the hero of ’37 as “quasi treasonable.”

In the neighbourhood of his home, the Park Farm, lay, for some thirty or forty miles, the French village form of settlement—the decent church, the pious priest, the civil habitant; the French windmill, where habitant and U. E. Loyalist took their grist in amity, still stood; the river road had on its fringed border the pear trees of the Jesuit fathers, standing like sentinels, to remind of Hennepin and La Salle, and to keep alive the first explorer’s saying, “Those who in the future will have the good fortune to own this lovely and fruitful strait will feel very thankful to those who have shown them the way.”

Every one knows how a carpenter, with foot each side of a log, brings his adze down, first on one side with an emphatic “Hah!” then on the other, with a second emphasis, each stroke on alternate sides getting the same syllabic ejaculation. In Lower Canada, tight in a box, most 247 precious of relics, some of the habitants—it is said—had this most emphemeral of saintly leavings. Whether the habitant of the Detroit and St. Clair brought with him from the St. Lawrence the Hah of St. Joseph we do not know; but he did bring with him most of the attributes which make him the pleasant, interesting fellow he is, on each river; good Catholic, good friend; true to his title, for he came “habiter le pays,” no transient dweller he. Nor does the spirit of “noblesse oblige” ever die. Long after ’37 a court dignitary found himself in a remote St. Clair neighbourhood where tavern accommodation was not; his host for the night was advised of the arrival, and the dignitary drew up at the door of an unpretending house whose owner was apparently a small farmer of simple habit. The hall-door, opened wide in welcome, disclosed an old man in antique jacket, small clothes and buckles, whose fine white hair, lying on his collar, was stirred by the night breeze. The dark hall-way made a fading background for the old man and his ancient silver candlesticks, as, with a light in either hand, he bowed profoundly, walking backwards as his guest entered. The latter remonstrated at the attention so shown him, but the courteously spoken answer, in refined French, was, “Sir, I but follow the custom of my fathers.”

Can the people in any part of Canada object to those who remind them that this country has a history. Mr. Prince was one of those who thanked Providence the land was large enough for both. Almost without exception the St. Clair French were Loyalist, and as sign of their good faith were upholders of him. “What will the Government think of us,” says Baptiste, in a skit issued during an election contest, when Prince, an English Protestant, was opposed by a Canadian Catholic, “when it will be known 248 in Toronto that we preferred any to Prince!!! We shall all be looked upon as asses, who have selected one of their own species in preference to any other.” When he voted for Cuvillier as Speaker of the House, Prince trusted the members of Lower Canada to hold out the hand of friendship; and in perusing the records of many years’ proceedings one finds continually that he seconds or is seconded by the French members. He had a firm hold on the affections of the people, the pleasant voice, smooth accent and manly, handsome presence of more weight as an opponent than any uniqueness in principle; his speeches owed as much to their melody as to their matter.

He was a law unto himself when he came to be a constitutional Reformer in military tactics—not unlike a Lower Canadian legal contemporary who, told by the presiding judge to refer to Pigéon, returned, “I do not need to refer to Pigéon, Perrault” (himself) “is worth Pigéon any day.” Perhaps, to take even higher comparisons, Prince had a touch of Durham, and more than a touch of Colborne, in him.

In the little town of Sandwich, since fitly named by a local Rip Van Winkle the “City of the Dead,” an oldest inhabitant will point out an unpretentious flat stone raised from the ground by a few bricks. Underneath it lie the mangled remains of the man over whose death and the avenging of it a stir only second to the Caroline was made.

“Sacred to the memory,” says the stone, “of Jno. James Hume, Esq., staff assistant surgeon, who was inhumanly murdered and his body afterwards brutally mangled by a gang of armed ruffians from the United States, styling themselves Patriots, who committed this cowardly and shameful outrage on the morning of the 4th December, 249 1838, having intercepted the deceased while proceeding to render professional assistance to Her Majesty’s gallant militia engaged at Windsor, U.C., in repelling the invasions of this rebel crew more properly styled Pirates.”

During the first year of the rebellion the dwellers on the St. Clair frontier felt themselves aggrieved, as not of sufficient interest at military headquarters. They were particularly open to attacks from those who were called pirates, brigands, outlaws and robbers, from across the border, while singularly free from “rebels” among themselves. They were so convinced that the punishments meted out to offenders were not heavy or frequent enough that they emphasized the opinion in meetings called for the purpose of recording them, en passant displaying a rich sense of their own heavy sufferings “both by day and night, which can scarcely be described and perhaps never be surpassed,” and they were incensed at the respite accorded Theller and Sutherland, the two aggressors at whose hands they had suffered most. They were not to be conciliated by Sir George Arthur’s answer, giving legal reasons for the kind of justice dealt to such prisoners. That Lord Glenelg cautioned that every precaution should be taken against any semblance of retaliation upon the people who by their deeds were brought within the operation of martial law; that in courts-martial regular and not militia officers should preside; and that great circumspection be exercised in regard to capital punishment, had no weight with them. They deemed their own “the circumstances of peculiar and pressing urgency” which alone justified extreme measures, in Lord Glenelg’s opinion, and differed from him heartily in “the extent of punishment to which it may be necessary to subject them, will be more safely estimated at a distance 250 from the scene of action.” They did entirely concur with him in that “it was impossible for him at that distance to give specific instructions.” Nor could they agree with Sir George Arthur, that in spite of prearranged plunder, and spontaneous outrages committed, the rebellion had political motives only for its raison d’être. Those who had been the plundered and were victims of outrage were for shooting first and trying after; and at a public meeting called to denounce past action of the patriots and lay down rules for the future it was decided that all invaders—ruffians who had not even the alleged right of being Canadians who were rebelling for what seemed to them good reason, but who came to murder, pillage and burn, under pretence of “liberating” a country unwilling to be liberated—should be treated as pirates; no quarter should be given, and any commander who found himself in such a position would be more than justified in acting on the publicly expressed opinion of that meeting. When occasion occurred and the right man for such work was on the spot a certain portion of those who previously represented public opinion found they could not endorse their own words. Attorney-General Hagerman approved; but then Lord Brougham said that although he might be a good soldier the Attorney-General could not have been much of a lawyer, or he never would have dared to say so.

The truly patriotic citizens of Windsor and Sandwich recognized that God helps those who help themselves. When Sir Francis sent all the forces out of the country they began a good local militia organization, in which Col. Prince took the lead. No portion of country could have been more self-helpful and more patriotic than this section found itself throughout. At the first meeting of magistrates called, Mr. William Anderton, Collector of Customs, 251 was appointed commissary, and to James Dougall was assigned the supervision of ferries. For arms and stores there were no public moneys, but Mr. Dougall providentially had a large sum put by in the Bank of Michigan to make English purchase of goods for his next year’s trade. This he freely placed at the public disposal, and flour and pork, and all the arms available from Detroit friends, were brought across, as secretly as might be, but the transport was discovered just in time to allow Theller and one hundred followers to see the boats move off. Cordwood sticks were the only weapons available, and these were thrown freely after the boats, which, however, they failed to strike.

By December 3rd, ’38, the people on the Canadian side had been for many nights in constant fear of another invasion; horses were kept harnessed and saddled, arms lay conveniently near those who dared go to bed, and some prepared to turn night into day and made it their most watchful time. The attitude of the whole place was that of a modern fire-station, alert, ready, apprehensive. The place was full of the usual internecine squabbles and jealousies, only kept down by sense of a common danger; Colonel Airey had been applied to for a company of regulars, Major Reid of the 32nd had been sent to London, and Colonel Prince in command, while on the alert himself, thought that too many applications for assistance savoured of cowardice, and contented himself with night patrols and sentinels. The watch-fires of the patriots could be seen at the bivouacs on the farms below Detroit; friends, two of whom were to be among the killed, came across to warn them, and watchfulness was redoubled.

That night was cold and dark, no moon, the very time for the enemy’s purpose, and word was passed from tavern 252 to tavern on the American side to rendezvous at the wharf—with arms and ammunition, “but to take no heed to provisions.” They expected to find food in plenty. The captain and crew of the Champlain did not care to violate the neutrality laws, and kept out of the way; so a crew selected from the patriots took the vessel across the river, through many patches of drift ice, to a point about four miles above Windsor. The command on landing was that no noise should be made, the farmers were not to be wakened, and to make for the barracks, which were guarded by only a small force. Patriotic Mr. Dougall, bank manager as well as trader, writes that he was roused from his not too sound sleep by the sound of shots, saw the flames of already burning barracks, hurried his wife and family to a place of safety, and made his way to the safe, where $20,000 was locked up. The old-fashioned receptacle bristled with knobs, three of which had to be shoved aside before the keyhole could be uncovered. He shoved every knob on its entire surface and the keyhole was lost; but eventually he got the money, secured it about him, seized his gun, and went off towards Sandwich. Those who were the dupes among the invaders believed that once the protection of their presence was announced the people would rise up to meet their deliverers half-way in the effort to overthrow an obnoxious form of government. The first man they saw in the early morning light was hastening towards the barracks, evidently someone from Detroit who had rowed over to give the alarm. They fired and he fell, but the shot alarmed the sleeping town, and there was an end to the intended surprise. After that the old nine-pounder in the barrack square, opposite St. John’s Church, gave a resounding alarm, and as usual shattered the glass in the church and 253 Court House windows. In a short time a gallant resistance had been made, and ammunition had given out; burning brands were thrust inside the torn siding of the wooden barracks by the brigands, who served themselves materially by getting under the eaves of the building and so out of range from the guns at the loopholes. Many within made escape by a door at the back unknown to the invaders, and those whom the heat forced to the other entrance sold their lives dearly; some, shot or wounded, were thrust back into the fire—in all a work of carnage and atrocity. Four brigands were told off to take burning brands from the barracks to set fire to the steamboat Thames, which lay at the wharf. They did so, to the slogan of “Remember the Caroline.” Never was there so much trouble in lighting a fire. She was more obstinate than the Caroline herself, but from bow to stern the flames shot up, and the four incendiaries ran back to the barracks to take their stand in the line, which prepared to place itself in an orchard hard by, under Captains Putnam and Harvell. Putnam, six feet four and hailing from Middlesex, was said to be a grandson of the old general, Israel Putnam; Harvell was known as the Big Kentuckian, a man six feet two in height, weighing over two hundred pounds, and with hair long on his collar; he was a remarkable figure as he bore an enormous flag adorned with “a large white star in a blue field—the lone star of Canada.” The “lone star” is evidently poetic license; the flag bore the ordinary two stars and crescent, as described by those of each side. Those who had chief honour in routing this band were Captain Sparkes and his company, who, uniformed in scarlet, were little inferior to regulars. The patriots aimed at the bits of bright colour, but in their trepidation fired too high, and the balls went whistling 254 overhead; in a moment their own ranks were broken, and the hundred under the pear trees dispersed in disorder, as Captain Sparkes and his men came over an intervening fence to let them taste the bayonet. The huge figure of the lone star standard-bearer made surprising time considering his own weight and the cumbersome colours, which trailed behind him on the ground. “A hundred dollars to whoever shoots the standard-bearer,” shouted Mr. Jimmy Dougall in great excitement, and more than one bullet tried for the reward.

Nothing but the gift of second sight can let one account for the difference between the patriots’ tale of the Windsor affair and the somewhat less hysterical loyalist one. The latter chronicle says Harvell died at once, as indeed he had every right to do; the former, which credits him with being a veritable Davy Crockett, brave, honest, impulsive and kind-hearted—very probably all true—says that he dropped on one knee and fired at his pursuers; that the fire was not returned, as no doubt they were anxious to secure alive so handsome and formidable a foe. When his ammunition was exhausted he drew a bowie knife, “or more properly speaking, tremendous butcher cleaver,” from his collar, which he brandished menacingly. This act brought the order to fire; he was far too formidable in appearance to be allowed to live, and he fell retaining his hold on his staff. The enemy approached, says the patriot historian, and demanded surrender. “Never!” said this modern Fitz-James; “I have sworn never to fly mine enemy, and never to surrender my neck to be broke upon the scaffold. Come on—come one, come all!” At any rate, to Ensign Rankin belonged the honour of capturing the flag; that seems the one point upon which there is unanimity of opinion. Many of the actors in this tragicomedy 255 of invasion and war shed their stage properties as they fled, parting company with arms, accoutrements, ammunition, even clothing.

Colonel Prince, who had been on the watch at the Park Farm, passing an anxious night with a terrified and ailing wife, had by now got word of what was happening. He made his appearance in fustian shooting-jacket and wolf-skin cap, no bad dress for the work before him, as he had not time to assume his ordinary uniform. He at once ordered the pursuit discontinued, upon which one shamming dead man got up and ran into the woods. Some stragglers in the militia fired at and killed him, and one of them, a negro of a thrifty turn like the Scotchman in Galt, pulled off the brigand’s boots and slung them over his gun; the negro, in his turn, was to be taken by straggling pirates, and again rescued. The retreat did not stop until the place where the Champlain had been left was reached; she had disappeared, and the heroes of the orchard were constrained to drift about in canoes without paddles like so many Mrs. Aleshines. They used the stocks of their guns to sweep themselves ashore on Hog Island. But the river was full of drifting ice, and Lieutenant Airey and Captain Broderick, who had arrived from Amherstburg with some of the 34th, a field-piece and twenty mounted Indians from the Reserve, soon had the gun trained on the canoes. Airey himself took aim; the first ball plunged at the stern of a canoe, the second took off a man’s arm, and the arm could be seen spinning over the water. One patriot was killed outright; his comrades threw themselves flat, with the exception of the steersman, who, bending as low as he could, poled the unlucky canoe to shore. They imagined that the third shot shattered the last canoe, but its load was destined to illustrate the value of a 256 neutrality law. The men in it were captured by the Brady Guards; were hailed, fired at and surrounded, in due order; dropped their guns overboard and were found unarmed; were taken on board the Guards’ vessel, dried themselves, and were questioned by the officer as to what they did in Canada, who set fire to the Thames—questions easily evaded; went through the farce of a second interrogation, were threatened with confinement, were called some hard names, answered boldly, were cheered by the onlookers; in a stern tone were ordered ashore, where they were met by “amazingly cordial” shouts; were escorted to public places of refreshment by an ex-Senator, and, in a word, received the freedom of the city of Detroit. Happy men to be there; for there was a terrible retribution going on while their exciting canoe race and triumphant entry were transpiring.

On the evening before this 3rd of December, a Dr. Hume, assistant staff-surgeon—only child of Dr. John Hume, of Almada Hill, Lanark, Scotland, in whose family the medical profession was hereditary, the father being in Egypt under Abercrombie, and a cousin-german surgeon to the Duke of Wellington—dined at the house of a friend in Sandwich. He wore his undress uniform, and during the evening went to the Park Farm, partly to see the Colonel, as times were exciting; partly to give professional advice for Mrs. Prince, who was ill to distraction from nervous fever; partly to prescribe for the Colonel himself, who “was extremely ill and worn out by fatigue both night and day;” and chiefly to see the third ill person in this afflicted family, Miss Rudyard. Hume was a fair-complexioned fellow, of easy and gentlemanly manner, with a look and countenance peculiarly mild; altogether a pleasing personality, handsome and distinguished-looking. On the morning 257 of the attack, he and Commissary Morse directed their steps from the Park Tavern to where the sounds of firing came, the former to tender his professional services. They rode, the staff-surgeon still in uniform, and the horse in its usual military trappings. Someone suggested that to be in plain clothes might be safer, but he laughingly replied that no one would touch a doctor. As the incendiaries returned from burning the Thames they met the two. Hume mistook them for Loyalists. A woman came out from her house and warned him that they were a detachment of patriots, but she was too late. The patriot account is that their captain demanded Hume’s surrender. To his question, “To whom shall I surrender?” came the answer, “To the Patriots.” He then quickly dismounted, with the uncomplimentary rejoinder, “Never, to a —— set of rebels!” Then a dozen bullets pierced him. “Only part of our force fired—the rest, among whom I was one, thinking it quite unnecessary to go to extremes with so brave a man.” The surgeon’s body told a different story. Colonel Prince’s official despatch says that, not content with firing several balls into him, the savages stabbed him in many places with their bowie knives and mangled his body with an axe. Another Loyalist appears to have been near enough to call out, “Don’t shoot that man—he is the doctor!” This interruption and their absurd query, “Then why does he not surrender?” enabled him to slip past the corner of a house under cover of which he tried to reach a friend’s. The first man who fired must have been satisfied with his aim, for he turned to a companion and said, “You may go and take the sword, he won’t run farther.” At any rate, he retreated, pistol in hand, facing his enemies. The legends of the time say he was barbarously mutilated, dismembered, and his heart cut out, and preparations made 258 to skin him, with a view to drumheads. It was said that these barbarities were committed under the impression that he was the dreaded Prince himself; this is now contradicted by many, as are also some of the details of the atrocities. There are those still alive who say they saw his quarters hung on the fence pickets by these human shrikes, and yet others who saw his body intact, as it lay in Mrs. Hawkins’ store. Hume’s companion fared better; he was shot at, but the balls passed through his hair.

Again to quote from the despatch: “Of the brigands and pirates, 21 were killed, besides 4 who were brought in just at the close and immediately after the engagement, all of whom I ordered to be shot upon the spot, and which was done accordingly.” Over the last thirteen words were innumerable articles written, controversies begun which nearly ended in bloodshed; they led to twelve challenges to the duello from Colonel Prince to his detractors; to debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords, where Pakington, Labouchere, Brougham, the Duke of Wellington, Melbourne and Normanby were to fight over again the famous battle of Windsor; a reward was offered on the other side of the river, for Prince’s body $800, for him alive $1,000; the much beset Colonel had notices displayed on his farm that none should venture there after dark, as he had spring-guns and man-traps set to protect himself; and lastly there was the court-martial.

Naturally such a story, horrible at first, grew as it travelled and as time progressed. “John Bishop of St. Albans, in a fit of jealousy, shot his wife and then himself,” once wrote a French newspaper. “Jean, évêque de St. Albans, dans un accès de jalousie a tué sa femme,” said the first exchange; the next editor supposed that a married bishop must be an Episcopalian—and next “The Protestant 259 bishop of St. Albans has killed his wife and then himself.” In like manner ran the prisoner stories. One unfortunate was commanded by an onlooker to run for his life, the order to shoot having been already given. He did so, with results that are sickening in detail. Before long the four prisoners had developed into nine, who were represented as running the gauntlet, Indian fashion, with additions of further horror.

A prisoner of war is one captured in the course of acknowledged and honourable warfare, and the legality or illegality of the contest makes him a hero or a ruffian. Previous to the fourth of December, ’38, in connection with recent affairs a subject of frequent debate in the Sandwich-Windsor neighbourhood was the hanging on the spot, without the slightest form of trial, of a gang of pirates, by Sir Thomas Maitland, in the island of Malta. However, this summary proceeding on the marooners took place a couple of days after the battle with them, and what was sought for by the Canadians was a precedent for shooting on the field without allowing time for justice to mellow.

As the “Curiæ Canadenses” tells us, formerly “These legal seats of divers ranks
Have limit to St. Laurent’s banks;”
by ’37, “... all beyond, down to Detroit,
Becomes new ground for fresh exploit.”

The exploit of which these debaters, and Colonel Prince in particular, complained was the decision made under the “discouraging shade cast by Whig conciliation;” for at the last court held in Sandwich, when he was prepared to prosecute nine prisoners for murder, he found they, through some 260 point of law which he never could be brought to understand, had become dignified as prisoners of war. As to American citizenship and neutrality laws, it was asked “What avail the speeches, messages, proclamations and paper measures of the President, when unprovoked aggressions of his people remain unpunished.” It was small satisfaction to hear their friends in the neighbouring Republic term the invaders but the roughscuffs of their people; people—they had no people, they were the repudiated of either shore. To term them prisoners of war legalized the cause of the marauders and added hundreds to their ranks. The Tories upheld Prince in his action anent the Pelee Island prisoners “who escaped their just deserts under the nickname of prisoners of war.” Never had he appeared to better advantage than in his address to the court as he declaimed, “I deny also the right of any person of the Executive Council, the right of the Lieutenant-Governor, the right of even Majesty itself, to step between the accuser and those accused of murder, and to prevent the incipient proceeding of an inquiry into the matter by the grand inquest of the country.” But a few hours before his eyes had been filled with the horror of Hume’s body the young surgeon had been in his house, in full possession of youth, health, strength and intelligence; he turned over in the barracks the smoking remains of what he believed to be his fellow-townsmen; he saw the murdered negro; he was distracted with thoughts of one very dear to him whose reason he feared would be unhinged; arson and murder, rifle and torch, the bowie-knife and axe of those whom he considered barbarians, “a cowardly and scampering set of pirates,” merited but one reward. He was in command, and he set about putting his ideas into effect. The details of the 261 “shooting” are so shocking that it is better to omit them here; and shocking or entirely justifiable, the tale as told by historian or eye-witness differs throughout. If more brutality than the case demanded was exercised, it was rebuked by the mounted Indians who soon afterwards brought in seven prisoners from the woods where an escape had been attempted. The first cry was, “Bayonet them!” “No,” said Martin, the Indian leader, “we are Christians, we will not murder them—we will deliver them to our officers to be treated as they think proper.” When Prince saw them he ordered the waggon in which they sat to be wheeled off the road, and as soon as it reached an open spot in rear of the barracks, which still smoked, he ordered that the prisoners should be shot. “For God’s sake, don’t let a white man murder what an Indian has spared!” was the entreaty, and Colonel Prince yielded to it.

Head, once controverting the British idea that Indian warfare was inadmissible in Canada, gave a supposititious reply: “Our Indians never scalp us, never scalp each other; and they have only scalped you because, in defiance of the laws of nations, you invaded their territory to rob them of their lands. If you think their habits of war barbarous, learn in future to leave them in the placid enjoyment of peace.” But the Indians were wiser than Sir Francis in his rounded periods. The Hurons of Detroit had seen the ships of Jacques Cartier, and reported great dark animals with broad white wings spitting out fire and uttering thunder—their first experience of cannon. The cross planted at Gaspé had sent its lesson far inland by 1837, and the warrior in feathers and wampum could teach the controllers of gunpowder by example.

Harvell, the tall Kentuckian, and twelve others were 262 buried in one grave in the lower corner of Colonel Baby’s orchard; the body of General Putnam found a grave until his wife and daughter came, had it exhumed, and took it away.

Of the survivors who scattered themselves in the woods some were discovered frozen, sitting at the roots of trees and evidently famished ere they froze; some were found round the miserable remains of a camp-fire, remnants of potatoes, their only food, scattered about. Many had been wounded, suffering tortures beyond hunger and cold. Of those taken alive most were sent to Van Diemen’s Land, among them a farmer who had joined the expedition haphazard at the last moment when he was both drunk and reckless. His wife and family could not trace what became of him; but after the lapse of twenty years he made his escape to the South Sea Islands, whence he returned to his former home, to find his wife again married, his children grown up, and his estate in due course of law divided among them. Hardship and old age had so told on him there was small fear of recognition; he obtained some small appointment, never troubled his family, and worked an Enoch Arden end to an existence spoiled by the sad freak of having been a pirate for a day.

Some found shelter with the Irish and French peasants, for although on the whole Loyalist both these nationalities had quickly-moved sympathies. One of the escaping “officers” threw himself on the protection of a big Irish woman. “Are yez a Patriarch?” He told her he was a Patriot. “Thin it’s yourself is safe enough; just hide in the cellar and kape aisy.” It is said her husband was in Prince’s employ to deliver all such up; “but bad luck to me if ivvir he sets his eye on wan o’ thim.” This peasant is said to have kept four such refugees for six weeks, so 263 well cared for that when they arrived in Detroit they were “hale, fat and hearty as porkers.” “Now, my lads,” he remarked to his guests, “you have a taste of how the English use us poor Irish.” “Bad luck to thim,” chimed in his wife; “my own dear fader was twelve years hid in a rock for the fear av thim after the battle of Vinegar Hill, and it’s meself carried his vittles till he died.” As for Baptiste, his fine address was equal to the occasion. One hunted creature, some troopers in hot pursuit, burst into a neat little cabin where the Frenchman had risen but madame had not. Taking in the situation at a glance, he clapped a night-cap on the patriot’s head, popped him into bed beside the astonished wife, and when the soldiers entered, with elbows well in and palms extended he shrugged his ignorance of any rebels—no one but his two women-kind, les voilà! He gave the searchers directions towards the bush, and in a short time had his patriot in a canoe, well out in the river, bound for Detroit.

Next morning a large concourse of people, the officers of the militia, Captain Sparkes’ company and a division of Captain Bell’s under Ensign Powell, all in full uniform and with arms reversed, preceded the corpse of the murdered Hume to the churchyard. The Grenadier company of the 34th, drawn up before the Court House, presented arms, so remaining until the procession had passed. The moaning of the wind, the naked branches of the trees above the open grave, the falling snow, were in unison with the sadness of the onlookers; “Suffer us not for any pain of death to fall away from Thee” came with a new meaning to the hearers’ hearts; the words of the ever beautiful ritual for the burial of the dead rose and fell from the rector’s lips on the wintry atmosphere; “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” a volley of musketry, and the family 264 name of Hume was extinct. His fortune of some £20,000, derived from his mother, passed to distant relatives.

The uproar which ensued after this series of tragedies was not by any means all Loyalist-Rebel, nor yet pure righteous indignation; party feeling, private spleen, and the complexity of motives good and bad which enter into any similar demonstration where the actors are human, all had place. A man of extraordinary popularity is generally a mark for jealousy. Across the river hatred of him culminated in the action of “the waddling, twaddling Theller,” who announced that he was coming over at the head of two thousand men and would wash his hands in the blood of John Prince. The patriots who had been saved in the canoes told crowds of “Detroit’s most intelligent citizens” the details of their truly thrilling escape, not only by canoe, but from “the Indian and negro volunteers in the Royal service, or from the more brutal Orangemen.” After he was taken prisoner on the Anne, this Theller had experienced the weight of Colonel Prince’s foot and knew the measure of his speech. In the middle of what he terms a refreshing and invigorating sleep he was waked by a kick from “an individual of the name of John Prince, who had run away from London, England, with plenty of golden means to secure himself a retreat in the western wilds of Canada,” where he strove to “imitate the manners of the artificial nobility of his native land.” This individual Prince “was thirsting for knighthood,” was dark, mysterious, cruel, vindictive, plausible but to deceive, and—herein lay his greatest crime and was the only item of truth in Theller’s impeachment—spared no time, money, act, to crush the hopes of the friends of Canadian rebellion. “His friendly salute aroused me,” writes Theller; “he was armed to the teeth. A brace of pistols and a tomahawk 265 graced his girdle; on his back was slung a double-barrelled gun; a long cavalry sword dangled at his side, a wide-mouthed blunderbuss in his right hand. His whole appearance betokened malignity and determined vengeance.”

Under these circumstances Colonel Prince must be excused for using his foot; clearly it was the only free part of his anatomy. Some months before this trying pedal performance, Theller on the dock at Windsor had taken upon himself to lecture the Colonel, his “blessed privilege as an American citizen” so to do, after Prince had been similarly engaged with a French-Canadian whom he suspected of disaffection. Theller knew, “by the restless brilliancy of his eye, dastardly flashing like the electricity of an approaching thunderstorm,” what he had to expect. He quietly enough stepped on the ferry ready to leave for Detroit, concluding, “Thus was I rescued for the first time from the cherished revenge of this man!”

Between their last meeting and the battle of Windsor Theller had made his wonderful leap for life from the citadel at Quebec and was back in Detroit, ready to inaugurate more mischief just when the attack was the theme of every tongue there.

Perhaps the unkindest mention of the battle was the report given, as the events progressed, by the Detroit Morning Post, fresh from the wonderful spy-glass of the reporter: “The infantry are evidently citizens and, as near as we can judge by means of a spy-glass, are like men employed in an unwilling service. They move at the rate of two miles an hour, and have several times stopped, as though irresolute about proceeding.”

In his own country Colonel Prince was more of a hero than ever. His journeys were ovations. Hamilton, Oakville, Chatham, and London testified to a general 266 appreciation. In Chatham “the incorporated companies saluted him not only with arms, but with hearty cheers;” at London the Union Jack was run up on his hotel, and fire balls were thrown about to make the night brilliant; the volunteers, under Colonel Burwell, came out to do him honour, drawing from him a short, pithy address in which he announced that should a similar opportunity occur a similar result would follow, and his only regret was he had given the much-talked-of prisoners a soldier’s death; addresses, signed by hundreds of the District’s best residents, testified to approval and continued respect; and by the time he reached the House of Assembly he was greeted with a burst of enthusiasm which was supposed to and did represent the feelings of the majority of constituents as well as of members.

“Let the journalists who can in their consciences vindicate the conduct of Colonel Prince ... come out boldly and say so,” was the challenge of those who did not approve. It was taken up. The approval became more emphatic, the friendly sheets were only sorry that he had not shot “every single miscreant of the batch,” and it was proposed to raise £50 to present him with a sword. The Park Farm had a New Year visitation from Captain Leslie and the officers of the Colonel’s battalion, Mr. Ross carrying the ensign; healths were drunk, and Prince’s came second only to Her Majesty in fervour, and continued three times three. In his response the Colonel told them that the disposition of those who were against him was resolving itself into a conspiracy upon his fame, but he meant to treat them as Sir Francis Bond Head had treated the rebels—allow them to go the whole length of their vain, inglorious and ungrateful measures, and “then he would destroy them.” 267

Prince promised not a whit more than it turned out he was able to perform.

About this time his Excellency Sir George Arthur took the Erie border towns in one of his tours. Prior to his arrival in Sandwich it was said that he was one of those who disapproved of Prince. To fire the first shot, the Colonel drew up the address which it was proposed to present, and, assuming the possibility of fresh trouble, foreshadowed results: “Certain, instant and inevitable death at our hands will be their fate, without any recognition of them as prisoners of war, or as any other sort of prisoners.” Some delay occurred in the time of arrival, and the address was sent to Toronto. When the Governor did arrive, another, expressing very different sentiments, was presented—which he demurred at receiving. The people found he had nothing prepossessing in appearance, “indeed, he is as indifferent a looking person as can be imagined,” and all waited to see the result of the interview with their beloved Colonel.

Immediately afterwards there appeared in Detroit papers, and in large, closely printed hand-bills, an anonymous and detailed narrative called “The Battle of Windsor,” written on this side and printed across the river. A copy signed by a militia colonel and twelve others was sent to the Governor in Toronto, accompanied by affidavits vouching for the truth of the charges therein contained. At once a court-martial or court of inquiry was instituted, composed of Lieutenant-Colonel Airey, Major French of the 85th, and Major Deedes, of the 34th. Never did people more speedily occupy a pit which they had digged for others. The militia colonel had been proud to preside at the meeting where summary measures and no quarter were proposed and ratified; he was now proved to 268 have made bad feeling in the service by his literary composition; to have exaggerated, and thereby lowered the character of the service; to have aggravated the feelings of hostility already rampant on either border—and he was relieved of his commission. A meeting at once took place between Prince and one of his late libellers, at “A gentlemanly distance, but not too near,
If you have got your former friend for foe;”
shots were exchanged, the Colonel’s bullet lodged in his adversary’s cheek, the latter’s weapon was discharged in the air; and some dozen other challenges ensued. There was also the duello by correspondence, when sharp things were penned. Prince shook off his quondam friends, and one of them smartly replied, “You are at perfect liberty to cast off your quondam friends, as it may save them the unpleasant trouble of doing the same by you.”

The huzzas of the triumphant after all this may be easily imagined. His former townsmen in England set about getting up a testimonial; he was dined in Toronto, and made his usual triumphal progress home. The 85th were ready to draw him to the Park Farm, substituting themselves for his horses, and immediate preparation was made to dine and wine him in Sandwich. A carriage with the Dinner Committee was despatched to the Park Farm, preceded by another carriage containing a band of music, all under escort of the brave and loyal 2nd Essex Cavalry. The “flag of our country” and the green and gold colours of the Windsor volunteers floated over them; and on their return with the guest the carriage was brought up by a peremptory “Halt!” the cheering 85th set the horses free, and in the midst of the shouting populace, and to the inspiriting sounds of “See the Conquering Hero Comes,” 269 took him to the officers’ quarters. Here “God Save the Queen” was struck up; and from the officers’ quarters the way was led to the dinner, set in an arbour of oak boughs.

Then—the Queen, God bless her, nine times nine; the Queen Dowager, Lord Hill of the army, and Lord Minto of the navy, all lesser fry who had to be content with three times three. The President called upon a hundred guests “to fill to the very brim—which was done accordingly;” John Prince, may long life and prosperity attend him—nineteen times nine, and one cheer more.

So far so good; from Halifax to Amherstburg every newspaper exploited him, every mail recorded fresh triumphs; he had only to show himself to be cheered to the echo. But he had yet to pass through the hands of Lord Brougham.

The ex-Chancellor was ready to fight any number of duels, rhetorical or conversational, of black-letter law or black-mouthed insinuation, upon any conceivable occasion. He now pounced upon the word outlaw and twisted it through all the maze of meaning. The “mealy-mouthed” Sir George Arthur’s opinion and the exculpation by court-martial availed not; nothing but insanity could excuse Colonel Prince. In his opinion he, Prince, was guilty of murder; he had made assurance doubly sure by anticipation of legal proceedings and results. That there was great support given Colonel Prince throughout Canada, advanced as a mitigating circumstance by Lord Ellenborough, seemed but to justify the ex-Chancellor in his sweeping condemnation. The Duke of Wellington drew attention to the fact that it was not Colonel Prince’s commission that was involved, or even his life alone, but the conduct of the Upper Canadian government; that if all alleged were true, another gallant friend of his, Sir John 270 Colbome, whose duty it was to have brought Colonel Prince at once to court-martial and punish him, would have been remiss, and (evidently) warming to his subject, his Grace predicted that a system of retaliation would be followed, that if Her Majesty had not the power to protect her Canadian subjects the colony ought to be abandoned. “Is there a single spot,” he asks, “except that on which a soldier stands, in which Her Majesty’s authority is enforced?”

Brougham’s reputation when travelling was that at Inverness he was Conservative, but, changing his opinions as often as his horses, he was downright revolutionary by the time he reached Dundee; there at the full, at Edinburgh he waned. By the time the Duke of Wellington had finished Brougham’s sympathies were modified, and he ends with an opinion that if the Government of the United States had not power to repress such warfare they could hardly be called a civilized nation.

Upheld by the Duke, with the approval of the Imperial Parliament, rewarded by a commission in the 71st for his son—a gift straight from the hand of the great man himself—Colonel Prince held his head high for the rest of his life, took good care to keep out of Detroit, fought his remaining enemies to the last, and might well have said, “Honour and policy, like unsevered friends, i’ the war do grow together.” Always manly, he was ready to meet his former vilifiers half-way in a reconciliation in which Sir Allen MacNab, the Rector of Sandwich, Major Lachlan and John Hillyard Cameron undertook the rôle of mediators. All reflections contained in the skit upon the colonel’s valour were withdrawn, and on his side he expressed, in writing, his regret for his many hasty expressions. It was, in fact, a true amnesty, in which each 271 party had to pay its own costs, for more than one bit of litigation had begun.

Well might a temperate New York newspaper say, “With all our hearts we wish those who feel themselves oppressed in Canada might have the liberty they seek, if they could get it without resorting to measures endangering the peace of the whole Anglo-Saxon race.”

272

Huron’s Age Heroic.

“Huron, distinguished by its lake,
Where Manitoulin’s spirits wake,”
before ’37 had but one central point, which, to use a Paddyism, was on the very confines of the still primeval forest. The mysterious wilderness had a few spots between Goderich and the other limit of the Canada Company, Guelph, in which woodmen, thinking solely of the grain and roots to be grown in the cleared spaces, were unconsciously ameliorating the climate of their continent by the patches of sunlight their axes were letting in through the green gothic above.

At the one end Galt, “churning an inarticulate melody,” with shoulders straight and upright, caught his foot in a tree root. Pryor, his right-hand man, said, “Look after your feet, man, and keep your head out of the stars.” In a moment Pryor hit his head against a branch. “Man, keep your eyes frae your feet,” rejoined Galt, “or else you’ll damage all the brains you’ve got.”

They jested; but they made the way of the pioneer. And the pioneer is the Canadian man of destiny. He is in a thousand valleys and on a thousand hillsides, sometimes cold and hungry, but he swims on the crest of the wave, and sees the beginning of a new thing. The spirit of adventure which bore Columbus, Cabot, Cartier, and Champlain into untrodden paths, sustains him and makes 273 him brother to them, even if his scope is but the patch cleared by his own axe.

The British distinction between Whig and Tory, like the London fog, was supposed not to cross the ocean with these pioneers. But in the wilderness of Huron they throve by ’37 with a vigour derived from transplanting. After the Gourlay affair men learned to put bridles on their tongues; but if, as in Governor Maitland’s opinion, all Reformers were deluded, unprincipled and designing, there were men in Dumfries, Guelph, and from the Wilmot Line westward, who could differ from that opinion and yet sing, “Far from our Fatherland,
Nobly we’ll fall or stand,
For England’s Queen.
In town and forest free,
Britons unconquered, we
Sing with true loyalty,
God save the Queen.”

Dumfries and all about Galt was largely settled by shepherds from the neighbourhood of the Ettrick Shepherd, Galashiels, Abbotsford, and thereabouts. If any of the good Tory sentiments recorded at Ambrose’s are to be believed, the Ettrick Shepherd would have been dismayed had he known what manner of opinion some of his fellow-shepherds held in Canada. Walter Cowan, bailiff to Sir Walter, told his master he wanted to emigrate. “Well, Walter, if you think it best to go,” said his genial employer, “I’ll assist you; but if you ever need to give it up, let me know, and I’ll help bring you back to Scotland.”

But did any ever wish to return? “I have never been home again,” says one, “although I have often wished to see the place, and I don’t think my sons or other Canadians 274 appreciate it half enough; but I never heard of any emigrant wanting to go back to live. If you have thriven here, you are too high to have aught to do with them you left; and those above you, no matter how you have thriven, are too high to have aught to do with you.”

“I was born at Yarrow,” continues a mellow old Radical, bedridden, but bright as the proverbial shilling, “and I was naught but a poor shepherd lad; now, at ninety-three, I am one of the most fortunate men alive. I am sinking down to the grave, bedridden, but I have all my faculties, and I do not use spectacles by day or night. I came out in ’34, and that journey across the Atlantic was my wedding jaunt, for I was married on my way to the ship, sixty-three years ago the 26th of May it was; and there at the foot of my bed they have put the picture of my good lady, where I can see it all day long. In ’35 I felt I must have books, so I said, ‘Is there anyone in this place will help me get some together?’ Then three men, all cobblers, came forward, and among us we started what is now the Mechanics’ Institute—three cobblers and a former shepherd lad; and that was the first public work I put my hand to here. When I was naught but a callant at home I mind how my heart nearly broke because there were no shillings to buy the books I longed for, and when Mr. Chambers brought out that journal for the people and we could buy it for three baubees, I thocht he was the noblest man that ever lived. On the way out there was a lady who listened to our talk, and I said I should never be content without a volume of Pollok, on which I had set all my desires. So when we came through Rochester she bought the book for a shilling, and made me a present of what I had so long wanted; and I thought this must be a fine country where books could be got for a shilling!” 275

After the arrival of Sir Francis, Judge Jones and Colonel FitzGibbon had their conversation about the bags of pikes and pike-handles and signs of their immediate use. Said the Judge, “You do not mean to say these people are going to rebel?” The Colonel was no Thomas; he firmly did believe. “Pooh-pooh,” said Jones, turning to Sir Francis, who wearied for his pillow. So Sir Francis, humane man, addressed by what he called “the industrious classes,” expressed himself in “plain and homely language,” with as much care as if intended for “either branches of the Legislature:” “The grievances of this Province must be corrected; impartial justice must be administered. The people have asked for it; their Sovereign has ordained it; I am here to execute his gracious commands.” Nor did these industrious classes, one time shepherd laddies and the like, feel more than the Governor himself allowed.

“I was a Scotch Radical, and would have helped Mackenzie all I could—until he drew the sword. That proved to me he was not constitutional, and I wouldna any such doings. I do know that if by my own puny arm, young and without influence as I was, I could have got rid of the Family Compact, I would have done it right willingly. A few days before the outbreak a neighbour told me of the great doings likely to be in Toronto, and I joked wi’ him. But he said, ‘Mind, man, it’s no joking matter, and it’s sure ye’ll see Mackenzie’s men through this way;’ and as I was a Scotch Radical he seemed to think it would be short whiles before I was in gaol. So I laughed, and said, ‘Well, if Mackenzie comes this way I’ll treat him well, for I have eight hogs hung in a row, and he shall have the best.’ I would have fed him and his people, for I would have rid the country of the Family Compact; but he didna mend matters to draw the sword.” Even such meritorious 276 work must not be done in opposition to the Queen and country.

“I count only the hours that are serene,” is the motto on an old Venetian sun-dial. All the Canadian clocks must have stopped and the sun hasted not for a space of years in these exciting days when Canadians, but one remove in complexion from aborigines, allowed not toil, heat, sun, nor isolation to abate the vigour, ingenuity and resolution born of circumstances.

“William Lyon Mackenzie, hot-tempered and impulsive,” says another old Reformer, “had a keen eye for detection of a flaw in an argument; he lived by complaining, and had no thought beyond formulating and promoting grievances. So many years of such a tone of mind totally unfitted him for political life. When a practical question was put before him for a practical answer, the man was utterly at sea; his faculty of constructiveness was obliterated.”

Evidently, he who cannot live happily anywhere will live happily nowhere, and Mackenzie, “yellow and somewhat dwarfish,” bore out the supposed likeness to the Yellow Dwarf, a violent weekly journal published in London by an ultra Radical in 1819 and afterwards. Its editor, Wooler, set it up without copy, mind and composing-stick working together.

The Colonial Advocate and Mackenzie’s pamphlets did their work in the country side. Lords Brougham, Melbourne and Glenelg were gibbeted in Toronto and afterwards burnt on the night of October 22nd, ’37, and the Advocate informed them of it. It also kept up excitement about the “Kentish drillmaster,” corporals MacNab and Robinson, and the general system of rack rent; it stated that a pound loaf was at a shilling Halifax; that woe and wailing, pauperism and crime, were rife in a land never 277 meant for the first three; that many in the new settlements seldom tasted a morsel of bread, and were glad to gnaw the bark off the trees. “But why are want and misery come among us? Ah, ye rebels to Christianity, ye detest the truth, ye shut your ears against that which is right. Your country is taxed, priest-ridden, sold to strangers and ruined ... Like the Iazzaroni of Italy, ye delight in cruelty and distress, and lamentation and woe.” He apostrophized the ruling Pact as false Canadians, Tories, pensioners, profligates, Orangemen, church-men, spies, informers, brokers, gamblers, parasites, knaves of every caste and description. It would be wonderful if each man’s grievance could not find an outlet with such a number and variety of scapegoats. “Never was a vagabond race more prosperous,” he writes, “never did successful villainy rejoice in brighter visions of the future. Ye may plunder, rob with impunity, your feet are on the people’s necks, they are transformed into tame, crouching slaves, ready to be trampled on. Erect your Juggernaut—the people are ready to be sacrificed under the wheel of the idol.” It is strange that he did not quote Culpepper: “They dip in our dish, they sit by our fire; we find them in the dye-fat, the wash-bowls and the powdering tub. They share with the cutler in his box; they have marked and sealed us from head to foot.”

When Mackenzie made his appearance in Galt in ’33 a very partial local critic calls him somewhat of a political firebrand; he certainly was full of what in Lower Canada just then was called “fusées de la rhétorique.” He spoke from the south window of the village inn, with the usual results. One “Whose rhetoric could rouse the Olympian host,
And scare into fits poor Demosthenes’ ghost,”
278 was no commonplace figure. Set on steel springs, the hands opening and shutting, the light-blue eyes sending keen and piercing glances through the ranks of “these people” before him, who were already in the best of training from the local agitator Mr. Bennett, the master of Liberty Cottage, “this fellow” spoke in a way direct and easy to understand. His writing was sometimes verbose, unequal and amateurish; but in speech “the superlative littleness of the man” was lightened by gleams of humour, facial expression and gesture which would not commit themselves to paper, nor did they hinder the deadly earnestness that carried conviction to any wavering mind. Now as he spoke a great clatter arose from an incoming crowd which bore a blackened, bedizened and hideous effigy of himself; the likeness was so good that the sight of it provoked a smile from the original. He paused in his speech and looked on in silent and grim amusement. Had he but known it, the lay figure held almost an allegory of the real. It was stuffed with gunpowder and other combustibles, and, as its original was destined to do, went off prematurely; it knocked down a man or two, but did no great harm. The figure wore a pair of very good boots, which someone in the crowd, not so well furnished, begrudged. The man worked his way through, seized the burnt brogues, and made off with them as fast as his legs could carry him.

It is marvellous the bandit was not arrested as a suspect; it took very small evidence to make a case. One Irish Loyalist, John McCrea, was sent a summons to join the company then forming in Guelph for the front; he considered his farm and home duties of more importance, and was at once reported as “disaffected.” Shortly afterwards he went to the general store kept by Captain 279 Lamphrey, a retired English officer, and was asked, as was the usual custom, into the parlour for a glass of wine. To his surprise he there found three others, a bench of magistrates, who without further ado began to try him. Why had he not responded to the command to join the corps? Because he had private and important domestic concerns on hand. He asked for the name of his accuser and the specific accusation, but in reply was told he must give a bond for his good behaviour. This was surely the Star Chamber, Scroggs and Jeffreys, the secret-service principle of Mackenzie’s written and spoken diatribes, and Mr. McCrea’s justified Irish obstinacy rose as a wall against the combination. One of the trio offered to become the bondsman, but the accused contended its acceptance would be an admission of guilt. Mr. McCrea insisted upon knowing their authority; they could not furnish it, and there was an end of the matter.

Captain Lamphrey’s treats were full of unexpected results. One of the loyal, who carried despatches to Hamilton, went to him one early morning with signs of too many glasses already apparent and asked for more. The captain could not refuse, knew the despatch must go, and saw its safety was already endangered. He took H. M.’s special messenger to the cellar and drew a glass of vinegar. “Drink it, man; down with it! down with it!” which was done, and the lately demoralized special messenger was “as sober as a clock.”

It was a joke to the Wellington neighbourhood that one company should be headed by a Captain Poore and another by a Captain Rich. A brusque Yorkshireman, William Day, volunteered in Poore’s company. The roads were very bad, food was scarce, and as Day got hungry his loyalty waned. At last he demanded something to eat. 280 This was flat rebellion; Poore called it insubordination, and said that instead of comforts Day should have night guard, and stand upon his feet until the small hours lengthened.

“So you won’t give me anything to eat?”

“No.”

“Then I know where I can get it, and that’s at Guelph. And I’d like to see the man that’d stand between me and that door.”

No one offered to do so, and he walked back twenty-six miles, “got his victuals,” and so ended his active military service.

Captain Poore had been endeavouring for two or three years to form a volunteer rifle company. There was little time, and less inclination, to play at soldiering; but by ’35, when agitation among the progressive begot anxiety in the less progressive, he succeeded in forming a company sixty strong, which drilled every Saturday in a corner of his own farm. Many of the settlers were not gushing in their loyalty to the powers that were, and, while not allying themselves with Mackenzie, “had the governing party been drowned in the depths of the sea not a solitary cry would have gone up for them.” Even the schoolboys were keen politicians, and regarded those who dwelt in the shadow of the Pact as very poor types of humanity. Those who were of the required age and ordered to meet for drill every two weeks at the cross-roads, but who had not sufficient courage of their convictions to refuse service, performed it in a half-hearted manner. The most regular attendants were the schoolboys. They snowballed the men and snowballed the captain, made game of the execution of the various military movements and of Mr. Hiscock. The latter was the drill-instructor, an old 281 soldier, who dressed partly in military uniform and carried a cane. Pompously he walked back and forth, contemptuous of the roll-call. One little Englishman, when going through the required answers, was asked, “Married or single?” “Single, sir, but under promise,” was the reply.

Great, then, was the excitement when the news came that “Toronto had fallen.” On the day of the engagement at Montgomery’s Captain Poore and his men left Guelph, and Lamphrey, by now a colonel, with Colonel Young was left in charge of the portion which was to protect Guelph. The knowledge that Galt and Eramosa were strongly disaffected did not tend to reassure the home-guard. It was feared that Guelph, too, might “fall.” For days men busied themselves running bullets, and it was soothing to know that a quantity of powder lay in the octagon house should they keep possession of it—such stores, no doubt, would be seized by the rebelliously inclined once they were in action. In the town of Guelph itself it was proudly claimed that only one man was disloyal, and that he, poor fellow, was only driven so by too long and silent study of grievances, “an honest, decent man otherwise.” As the chief evidence against him was that he went through Preston and other outlying hamlets to buy up all the lead he could find, it seems rather hard that when this was reported he should be apprehended, taken to Hamilton, and lie there in gaol for six or eight months without trial. Mr. James Peters, maliciously termed Captain Peters and said to be at the head of fifty men who were on their way to burn Guelph, was awakened before daylight on the morning of December 13th by the entry of sixteen armed men; the leader drew his glittering sword by Mr. Peters’ bedside and ordered him to get at once into one of the sleighs waiting at the door. After 282 leaving the Peters’ farm these valiant special constables stopped at the house of a farmer magistrate, who not only bade them welcome, put up their horses, and gave the entire party a good breakfast, but delivered an encouraging homily to the magistrate in charge—an officiously zealous Irishman—saying he was glad to see the latter perform his duty so faithfully. When they were well refreshed and ready for the balance of the journey they took their departure, after arresting the host’s son. After that this farmer was not quite so loyal, nor had he such exalted views of a magistrate’s duty; moreover, he wished that he had saved that breakfast. The document upon which the arrests were founded set forth: “That (those enumerated) not having the fear of God in their hearts, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, and entirely withdrawing the love, and true and due obedience, which every subject of our said lady the Queen should, and of right ought to, bear towards our said present lady the Queen, and wickedly devising and intending to disturb the peace and public tranquillity of this Province ... on divers other days and times, with force and arms at the township of Eramosa, in the said district, unlawfully, maliciously and traitorously, did compass, imagine, and intend to bring and put our said lady the Queen to death.” In spite of efforts of judge and Crown, a jury took eight minutes to return a verdict of “Not guilty.” But in the meantime the building in which the prisoners were confined at Hamilton had been used by Government to store fifty kegs of gunpowder, protected by sand. Early in the morning the seven men, asleep in their two narrow cells, were roused to the fact that the tinder-wood building was on fire. They shouted until they were hoarse, pounded with all their strength, but failed to wake 283 the sleeping guards. Exhausted, they threw themselves on the floor to await the horrible fate which seemed inevitable. But an alarm from without at last roused the guards, who at once set about saving the gunpowder, and gave no thought to the anxiety and terror of those within the cells. For long there was a popular idea that the fire was malicious incendiarism, but there appears to be no definite ground for such a belief.

To ensure safety, a night-watch was set on the Eramosa bridge, as well as at one other point. One night a son of the too well-fed Irish magistrate was on duty. It so happened that at the witching hour a Scotch miller came across the bridge with a wee drap in his ’ee—a strong, muscular fellow, and muscular in his language. His answer to whither was he going and what his errand, was, without preliminary words, to seize the guard by his coat collar and a convenient handful of his trousers, remove him from his path, and, with some oaths, declare that if interfered with he would pitch him into the river.

It did not take much to frighten either guard or pedestrian at such times. Not far from the Galt bridge an old Highlander, who was a bit of a character, successfully tried for a few “treats” from the regulars whom he saw one night in the cosy brightness of the village inn. He also made away with a regular’s red coat. Some of the home corps were on guard that night, and as in the clear atmosphere they saw him coming toward the bridge they guessed his double sin. They demanded his business and the countersign, and fired into the air. He fell flat, vowing he was killed, and never afterwards had he peace in the streets of Galt.

There are some ludicrous magistrate stories in all districts. As in the first days of Franco-Anglo-Canada it had not 284 been thought requisite that officials should know both languages, so in these early provincial days it was not a sine qua non that magistrates should read and write. A “dockyment” was brought before one, a blacksmith by trade. He sat down on his anvil to “execute,” looking ineffably wise while he held the paper head down. “But, your worship, the document is upside down,” said the humble bailiff. “By the virtue of my office, I hold it whichever way I d—- please,” said his worship, stamping his foot, and convinced he was as well in his wits as any man in Middlesex. On the other hand, one western bailiff never lost a chance to display his knowledge of whatever language, dead or living, he might opportunely happen to think. When questioned by his magistrate as to the non-appearance of an expected prisoner, the bailiff proudly replied, “Non est comeatibus, c’est in an awful mess, parceque cum swampibus.”

In Huron proper, while the people were devising means to secure recognition of what they deemed their rights locally, not one man rebel to his country was to be found; indeed, no one who knew his circumstances will apply that term even to the unfortunate Van Egmond. “Blame Van Egmond? I blame the Family Compact a devilish sight more than I blame him,” says one. Sir Francis Bond Head ought to be considered an authority, and he affirms the Queen to be the head of this Family. “And what are we going to fight for?” asked one western man, with his draft-slip in his hand. “Against Mackenzie? Never!—the only man who dared to speak for us—never!” These true reformers considered that they were most loyal to their Queen when loyal to her and themselves too, and the remembrance of the day which called them to arms carries with it a regretful thought for Van Egmond. 285

In Goderich the arms consisted mainly of pitchforks, scythes and pikes, the latter made for the occasion by George Vivian, of that place. Each had a cruel crosspiece, with all points sharpened, to be used either as bayonet or battle-axe. A few lucky warriors had flintlocks.

One great source of complaint was the class of firearms supplied. Some relics of one lot of “useless lumber” sent up under the charge of the present Mr. Justice Robertson’s father are still about the Goderich gaol, and the specimens extant show the complaint to have been a just one.

There was also “a plentiful crop of captains and colonels.” Drill was held in the large room at Read’s hotel, and the boys who looked on were much edified by such display of valour and clanking of metal. This regiment has been handed down to local fame as “The Invincibles,” “Huron’s True Blues,” “The Huron Braves” and “The Bloody Useless.” When the call to arms came all turned out with good-will, and the fact that lone fishermen, pigs and ponies proved to be their only visible enemies can cast no discredit on the valour of their intention. Their hardships were many, and the complaints heard few.

Somewhere on the lake border, where the juniper and tamarack made the best undergrowth, wandered Ryan, a fugitive from Gallows Hill, the man made famous by the death of Colonel Moodie. Many miseries were his until the opening of navigation, and by the time he was taken off by a friendly American schooner he was reduced to a skeleton.

It was on Christmas Day, in the rain, that Captain Hyndman and his followers set out for Walpole Island, a journey which meant the extreme of roughing it. Captain Gooding and his Rifles left on the 7th of January, and were fortunate in being able to return all together 286 when their service was over; but those who were with Captain Luard at Navy Island had to get back just as their strength would allow. Captain Lizars and Lieutenant Bescoby took their men to Rattenbury’s Corners, where they spent most of the winter, thus being saved many hardships suffered by their townsmen. Edouard Van Egmond was a most unwilling volunteer, for his ill-advised father, brave soldier and good pioneer as he had been proved, was by that time with Mackenzie in Toronto. Edouard resisted the press; but his horses were pressed into service, and their young owner said that wherever they were he must follow. The Invincibles were evidently at liberty to display individual taste in uniform, and Major Pryor took his way to the frontier picturesque in blanket-coat, sugar-loaf toque and sword; nor was the line drawn at the combination of blanket-coat, epaulets and spurs. The regulars among them did not disdain to be gorgeous, too, and one tall, handsome Irishman looked particularly magnificent in a uniform specially procured from England. He was a truly warlike and awe-inspiring sight, and having served through the Spanish campaign, and at Waterloo, had the usual regular’s contempt for militia. His charge was the commissariat from Niagara to Hamilton and London, and on one occasion, at a certain point on the Governor’s Road, was challenged by a guard, Private McFadden. His Magnificence merely vouchsafed, “Get out of my way, you young whippersnapper!” disgust and indignation making a strong brogue stronger. McFadden lifted his musket and was just about to fire, when a mutual acquaintance opportunely arrived to save the regular from the volunteer.

Some of the distressing events which centred in the Windsor neighbourhood had a direct or indirect connection 287 with Huron names. Peter Green, of Goderich, the garrison tailor, who lived in a house almost adjoining the barracks, with his family was shut up in it by the patriots, who intended to roast them to death. Green, a staunch Mason, but who nevertheless had given up his Goderich lodge through his distaste towards a brother Mason (Thomas Mercer Jones, the Huron exponent of the Family Compact), put his trust in Providence, and thrusting out his hand made a Masonic sign. He was understood by one of the enemy and allowed to leave his burning house. As he went he was carrying his youngest child; in spite of masonry a stab was made at his burden, which Green warded off at the expense of his own hand. Bad as matters were, his membership saved him and his from death. Ronald MacGregor and his family, who had moved from Goderich to Windsor in ’36, were burned out at the same time, escaping in their night-clothes.

When the Bloody Useless were at the front they saw no active service; but their sufferings were not inconsiderable. Some of them had quarters in a church, where the narrowness of the pews and benches and the scantiness of the blankets led to much discomfort. But the real hardship fell to those whose lot took them to some deserted Indian shanties where filth of all kinds and melted snow on a clay floor were poor inducements to rest. The snow shovelled out to the depth of a foot still left enough behind to be melted by the warmth of the wearied bodies, which, stretched side by side, were by morning held fast by the snow-water again frozen. The hearty, cheery spirit of Dunlop, who doubled the rations, was better than medicine, or even than his liberal allowance of grog. When they moped he would order them out for a march, leading them in his homespun checkered dress and Tam o’ Shanter, 288 closely followed by the Fords (“the sons of Anak,” because they were all six feet six), the Youngs, the Annands, and other stalwart township pioneers, not forgetting some sailors who had been pressed into the service, each man shouldering a pike ten feet in length. “Ah me, what perils do environ the man that meddles with cold iron,” quoted the Doctor; “in the British army it was understood that the only use of a musket was supposed to be that it could carry a bayonet at the end of it.” But his own armament was chiefly that supplied by George Vivian. The Doctor’s hardy frame knew nothing of the sufferings of his men. On one occasion when he took a company of sixty from Bayfield, he expected to make Brewster’s Mills easily; but the men were half tired, and he appropriated for their rest two shanties by the way. Next day they went on to the Sable, but the men were completely done by the time Kettle Point (Ipperwash) was reached. Get on they must, as many as might; so the Doctor proposed, “All of you as are fit, come with me.” Of the sixty, twenty-six went on with him, and one survivor tells that that march was the hardest work he ever did; “but the Doctor stood it finely.” About the same time Dunlop and his men found themselves dependent for shelter on two women who had no comforts to offer such a company. Some of the men grumbled, but the Doctor asked for whiskey. The women showed him a barrel newly opened; whereupon he put a man in charge, and ordered horns all round. The hostesses were anxious to give a bed to the Doctor, but he would have nothing that his men had not. Calling to Jim Young to bring him a beech log, he disposed himself in his blanket on the floor; when the log came he put one end of his blanket over it for a pillow and slept soundly until morning. “Our fathers ... have 289 lain full oft ... with a good round under their heads instead of a pillow. Pillows, said they, were thought meet only for women.”

The hopes and the fears, the occasional feasts and many involuntary fasts, hardened all consciences when a search for supplies was on hand. In these times even the future first sheriff of Huron did not consider house-breaking criminal nor a raid upon a potato-pit larceny. Once Colonel Hyndman and some others had three-weeks’ leave and started on their homeward trip by the lake-shore, some seventy-five miles at the least, and unnecessarily added to by a false calculation which caused them to retrace their steps and increase their already long walk by ten miles. Sergeant Healy was twice nearly lost on the way; first by falling in a creek, and afterwards through exposure to cold—for their tramp led them through a country covered with two feet of snow. Healy begged them to leave him to his fate, saying that although he was an old soldier, and had served his sovereign in all parts of the world for twenty-one years, he had never suffered as he was suffering then. Needless to say they did not desert him, and they got him to Goderich as best they could; but he served no more on the Canadian frontier.

The men were much interested in the droves of half-wild cattle and horses to be seen on both sides of the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers. The horses were so numerous that it is said strings of them could be seen each way as far as the eye could reach, and as late as ’46 fifty dollars would buy a good one. In various “Legends of the Detroit” many interesting stories are told of these hardy, clever little animals, the direct descendants of one of the most celebrated of the stock of 1665—the French horses called by the Indians the Moose Deer of Europe. 290 The French river settlers cut their fodder in the summer, stacked it, and turned it over to the ponies in the winter for them to feed from at will. Water-holes in the ice were made for the wise little animals, and beyond these two items they received little attention from their owners. One of the Invincibles thus describes a raid on our men by the enemy:

“Skimmings, of Goderich, was on guard, and reported that he heard the rebels galloping through the bush. Young told him that that was an impossibility, as they would have to come from the opposite direction. Skimmings was sure he heard the tread and gallop, and was loaded to the muzzle to receive them. Presently a drove of ponies appeared, making for their water-holes—and there was another scare over, and Skimmings never heard the last of it.”

At Colonel Hyndman’s quarters on Walpole Island a challenge was given to three of these inoffensive Indian ponies, by a sentry who had an infirmity of stuttering. Fearing that he had not been understood, he repeated his challenge; and still once again, unwilling that any should perish through his poor speech. Determined to be merciful in spite of this contemptuous silence he called out the guard, who were some time in arriving at a knowledge of the matter, for between the sentry’s fright and his stutter he was unintelligible. The lanterns of the guard revealed the homeless trio, supplementing their scanty supper by picking up stray bits of fodder which lay about the camp.

Of the practical jokes most of them were played on officers, either by their subordinates or brother officers. Major Pryor was at Sarnia with Colonel Hyndman, and the latter was very anxious indeed to break the monotony of the times. His chance came one evening when there 291 was exchange of sentries, and Pryor had gone off to spend a convivial hour. Hyndman gave very strict orders as to the enforcing of the password, and then waited results. Major Pryor staggered back to the line, very drunk indeed. When challenged he stuttered that he was the f-f-fellow’s major.

“I don’t care who you are—what’s the password?”

“Don’t know, b-b-but I’m your Major!”

“Into the guardhouse with you then, if you don’t know the pass,” and the major was ignominiously hurried off. When he got there he was clear enough to see that the men knew him.

“Very well, then,” said one; “if you give us an order on the Commissary for a gallon of grog we’ll let you go.”

“Give me a p-p-pen then,” said Pryor, “and you can have your g-g-grog.”

He duly wrote the order, which one of the men altered from one to two gallons, and was thereupon set at liberty.

There was little ceremony spent on the furnishing of the commissariat. When a beast was noticed by an officer it was decided that that animal must at once be annexed; but as far as can be learned now there was always a fair remuneration made to the owner. It was claimed by the rival messes that equal fairness was not observed in the distribution of a suddenly acquired dainty. Dunlop had become possessed of a sheep, and great was the rage of Pryor when it was found that the former had requisitioned for the whole animal, for they had all been living on pork for weeks. The Doctor could not resist such opportunity for jokes, and mutton versus pork caused Pryor many an irritation. Nicknames, too, grew from the work and doings of ’37 as easily as they were coined by Dunlop at other times. “Toddy Tam” was the head of the Commissariat, 292 and Robert Young, of Glasgow, who was butcher to the Huron militia, was in consequence called Killit-and-Curit. Thereafter he was best known as Killie Young.

A grand dinner had been the cause of Major Pryor’s guard-house experience. A baker and a butcher had been sent to ransack the countryside for provisions for it, and extraordinary success had crowned their efforts. Colonel Hyndman asked “Toddy Tam” not to serve the major with any of the new-gotten delicacies until he, Hyndman, had entertained his fellow-officers at a dinner. And such a dinner, to men who had been half starved! Mutton and turkey boiled and roast, fowls, and pastry of all sorts and descriptions. “Good God, Hyndman!” exclaimed Pryor, “where did you get all that?”

Hyndman gravely replied that these were his rations. Toddy Tam arrived at the head of the stairway just in time to hear Pryor heaping abuse upon him, saying that “that d—— fellow, the Commissary, had served him with nothing but salt pork ever since he came to Sarnia.” The irate major just then caught sight of the offender, and would have thrown him down the stairway but for the interference of Captains Gooding and Lizars. Careful management and pre-arrangement on the part of his tormentors lodged the gallant and stuttering major in guard-house.

On another occasion, when Hyndman was in advance of Pryor by a day’s march, the former halted his men for rest at Mrs. Westlake’s, where comforts and food were in plenty. Reckoning on the major’s usual blustering manner to bear him out, Colonel Hyndman advised Mrs. Westlake that Major Pryor would arrive next day, and that she had best be on her guard. When Pryor and his men arrived he at once ordered this and shouted for that, desiring the 293 household to bring him every thing at once. To his amazement in marched Mrs. Westlake, a huge pistol in her hand, who without more ado began the work of converting a bully into the most civil and astonished of officers. But with all his faults of manner Pryor had his good points, and only two days previous to this had sent home his man-servant and horses, determined to march with his men and share their hardships.

Doctor Dunlop, “who commanded six hundred and fifty fine fellows at the front,” was much distressed at the lack of money to pay his men. He was advised that a line of express horses had been established between London and Sarnia, and he accordingly detailed Captain Kydd as messenger with a despatch to Colonel John Askin. Captain Kydd tried to evade the commission, as his regimentals were in no trim for appearance at headquarters. His brown moleskin shooting-jacket had seen three sousings in the Maitland, besides much other hard usage as pillow or blanket on mud floors; his Black Hawk cap was too small and sat awkwardly on his head, and the rest of his attire was in keeping. However, he went. After many adventures he reached a station where a retired naval officer and his young and pretty wife were domiciled in a log hut some eight feet high, which was roofed with bass-wood troughs and contained but one room. The kitchen was a bark shanty, a few feet away. There were no signs of cattle about, but the frequent ringing of a cow-bell gave the impression that one must be stabled in the kitchen. Not so, however. A rope connected the “parlour” with the second building, the bell in use being an old cow-bell, the ringing of which was the work of the pretty young wife, who in her own apartment tried, poor soul, to forget her surroundings by keeping up what semblance she could 294 of her former state. The bush in those days was full of such anomalies. When the express equine was brought to the door he had neither saddle nor bridle, a hair halter, perhaps provided by his own tail, his only garnishing. Nothing but the bell-rope could be found to assist in improvising a harness. Captain Kydd had not the heart to deprive the lady of that, and he continued his journey caparisoned with hair halter alone. His tale of danger and discomfort, through what seemed an interminable swamp, can well be believed,—wet, cold and hungry, without sight of another soul until he reached the next station, where he was received and kindly treated by the women relatives of our own Edward Blake. These ladies looked at the half-drowned horse and mud-bespattered man; and full of pity for a supposed backwoodsman in dire distress, were ready to offer him their best hospitality. When he put into their hands his passport as “Captain Kydd of the First Hurons, abroad on special service,” they did not attempt to disguise their amusement, but laughed long and heartily. After a rest of an hour or two, a bath, a rubbing down which deprived him of his coat of mud, and a hearty appreciation from himself and his beast of the good fare set before them, he was ready to pursue his journey. At length London was reached, and the precious despatch put into Colonel Askin’s hands—but with no result, for there was neither official money nor credit. Instead of coin, Colonel Askin gave the messenger a packet addressed to Captain James Strachan, Military Secretary at Government House, Toronto. In vain did Kydd bring forward his coat and Black Hawk cap as sufficient reason for not undertaking a further trip; nor yet were his sufferings from hunger and fatigue on his recent journey allowed to stand in the way of his undergoing fresh distress. The 295 best mode of conveyance obtainable was a common farm-waggon, in which he made his way at a foot pace. He met many people en route, most of them as shabby as himself, and all talking war to the knife. He arrived in Toronto late at night on the third day, but waited until morning to present his despatches at Government House. There the much befogged Secretary not unreasonably looked with disdain at the coat and cap of the special messenger; the despatch was taken within for Sir Francis’ perusal, with the result that another packet, of large size and said to contain the necessary money, was put into Captain Kydd’s hands, and an order given him to return to London by express. Express meant a dirty farm-sleigh with a torn canvas cover. His only travelling companion was a Brant Indian returning to the Reserve, an intelligent, well-educated man and a most pleasant companion. Together they were upset from the sleigh, and together they righted it and its sail-like cover, to resume the weary journey. Upon presentation to Colonel Askin, the important-looking packet was found to be worthless, for the document bore no signature. Captain Kydd was given his original Rosinante, with the same hair halter, and sent back to Sarnia, while another special messenger was despatched to Toronto for the necessary signatures.

The despatch and its bearer had variations. When Black Willie Wallace, of Dunlop’s Scouts, was sent with one from Clinton to Goderich it took nine days to travel the twelve miles and pass the various taverns on the way. The importance of the despatch entered even the childish mind, and one small daughter, whose father was a bearer, cried out as the latter rode up to the gate in full regimentals, “Here’s father with another dampatch.” Always warlike and politicians, these small babes sometimes dealt 296 unpleasant truths to the untrue. One Tory atom when questioned “Where’s your father?” replied, “Father gone to fight the dirty rebels, and brother Dan’el gone to fight the dirty rebels, too.”

Colonel Dunlop swore not a little when Kydd reported himself empty-handed, but tried to keep up his own hopes as well as those of his men. Weeks and months went by, and no money came; privations were great, and the mental trial was added of the knowledge of farms at home going to ruin, families unprovided for, and no prospect for the future. In March the order for return came; but there was no word of any money. The companies were told off for the homeward trip, one day apart, and the record is of a terrible journey in the broken March weather, with roads at their very worst. Dunlop remained behind with others of the officers, for, as he wrote Government in terms not to be mistaken, he had become personally liable to the local stores for clothing and necessaries, and would not leave the place with such indebtedness unpaid.

“Glory is not a very productive appanage, it is true, but in the absence of everything else it is better than nothing”—but these impoverished lads had little or no glory, and they returned without having seen what was technically known as active service. Dunlop’s illustration of the ne plus ultra of bad pay was Waterloo, where each private there performed the hardest day’s work ever done for a shilling. Now he thought the brave Hurons in a still worse plight. By the time pay day did arrive they were not few who expressed the opinion that the Canadian rebellion was due to the machinations of a “parcel of poor rogues and a few, a very few, rich fools, one party deserving accommodation in the penitentiary and the other 297 lodgings in bedlam.” Dunlop did not allow himself such free speech in regard to the policy of the Colonial Office, which let numbers be brought to the scaffold or to the foot of it; but he used no circumspection in words when he dealt with local mismanagement.

“As syllabubs without a head,
As jokes not laughed at when they’re said,
As needles used without a thread,
Such are Bachelors,”
says an old song. Now Tiger Dunlop might have said, “And when I fell into some fits of love I was soon cured.” But bachelor as he was, the well-springs of fraternal love were not dried up in him; nor were his syllabubs wont to be without a head, nor his jokes unlaughed at. When he spoke others listened, and his dissatisfaction ended in his resignation, upon which he addressed the following letter to his brave Hurons:

“Comrades,—When I resigned the command of the St. Clair frontier in March last I endeavoured to express to you in my farewell Order my gratitude for the generous confidence you had reposed in me, and my thanks for the steady soldier-like conduct with which you had borne every privation and met every difficulty. I have now to explain to you the reason why I voluntarily abandoned a situation in every respect gratifying to my feelings as the honourable command I then held.

“From the day that I resigned the command to the present hour I have, at great expense and total neglect of my own personal affairs, been travelling from one commissariat station to another in order to get something like justice done you. To the superior military officers my best thanks are due—Sir John Colborne, Sir F. B. Head, and 298 latterly Sir G. Arthur, Colonel Foster, and our immediate commanding officer, the Hon. Colonel Maitland, have treated me with the greatest kindness and you with the greatest consideration. From men of their rank we might possibly have submitted to a little hauteur; on the contrary we have met with the most courteous condescension. The Commissariat, on the other hand, men infinitely inferior to many of us in birth, rank, and education, have treated us with the most overweening arrogance and the most cruel neglect. They have never personally insulted me, for I am six feet high and proportionately broad across the shoulders; but the poor farmers have to a man complained to me of their treatment by these Very magnificent three-tailed Bashaws
of Beef and Biscuit. I grudge none of the labour I have spent, nor any of the pecuniary sacrifices I have made in your service. My life and my property are my country’s, and I am willing cheerfully to lay either or both down when my Sovereign may require them, but my honour is unalienably my own, and I cannot submit to be made, as I lately unwittingly have been, the instrument of the most cruel and grinding oppression, to snatch, without remuneration, his pittance from the peasant or the bread from his children’s mouths. I have therefore submitted my resignation, but with no intention of leaving you; I shall stand with you in all danger, shoulder to shoulder, but it shall be in the ranks.

“I have to warn you not to judge of a government by the meanest of its servants, nor let the upstart insolence of a body so contemptible alienate your affections from your Queen and country; the people of England are both liberal and just, and were your case fairly represented to them there is not the slightest doubt immediate steps 299 would be taken to redress your grievances. The Queen, like other people, has dirty work to do, and must have dirty fellows do it. The royal chimney-sweepers who exercise their professional functions in Buckingham Palace and St. James’s may be very pleasant fellows in their way, but I doubt much if they are the kind of people that either you or I would borrow money to drink with, as Shakespeare’s fat Knight says.

“Some little excuse must be had for the poor fellows after all. That the Commissariat are ‘saucy dogs’ we all must allow, have felt it; but that they are not too saucy to eat dirty puddings we know, for cursed dirty puddings they are obliged to bolt, without even daring to make a wry face at them. Witness the correspondence which the House of Assembly last winter elicited between the arrogant, insolent, empty-headed coxcomb at the head of that department and the Commissaries at Toronto and Penetanguishene. To this the poor devils are obliged to submit for their piece of silver or morsel of bread. It is natural, therefore, that the people who have studied so long in the school of arrogant ill-breeding should be anxious to exhibit the proficiency they have attained when their turn comes; and it is possible they may suppose that a Canadian yeoman, who is afraid of losing all that has been taken from him by offending their High Mightinesses, may for a time submit to it.

“A broken head or two might remove this delusion and convince them that a man is still a man though clad in a homespun coat, and that to get rid of their redundant bile safely they must make it go as hereditary property does by law, downwards, and alight on the heads of clerks and issuers, who, living in the hope of one day having it in their power to abuse their inferiors, will probably submit with more equanimity. 300

“In applying to the British Parliament for redress, I give you warning that the Commissariat is the most powerful body you can well attack. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Grey, Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Daniel O’Connell may talk, and all, when in their turn of power, have provided for the sons of faithful butlers and respectable valets in the Commissariat—a department particularly favourable for the offspring of the lower orders (the pay being good and the work little or nothing), the attainments necessary for its duties being easily acquired in any parish school, they being comprised in writing a legible hand and a tolerable acquaintance with the first four rules of arithmetic. The experiment, however, is well worth trying, and I trust will be successful.

“With best wishes for your prosperity and hope that you may henceforward, under the protecting arm of a just Government, cultivate your fields in peace, I subscribe myself, my comrades and fellow-soldiers,

“W. Dunlop,
“Your late Colonel,
“Commanding the St. Clair Frontier.”

This letter found its way into all the provincial journals, and made no little talk. The Kingston Whig says, “Among many other endearing epithets he calls Mr. Commissary-General Routh an empty-headed, arrogant, insolent coxcomb. Now the gallant ex-Colonel, according to his own confession, stands six feet high and is proportionately broad across the shoulders, and Mr. Commissary is an aged and feeble man, altogether past the prime of life; would a duel therefore be fair between the parties? We think not; and yet according to the absurd notions of modern honour what else can Mr. Commissary do than 301 fight, unless, indeed, one of his younger and subordinate officers equally insulted by the gallant ex-Colonel takes up the cudgels in his own and his chief’s behalf.” But there was no duel. Dunlop had a sovereign contempt for what he called a lobster-coated puppy, and took his grievances straight to Colonel Maitland, Commandant at London. There are always wheels within wheels. The Doctor’s requisitions for food and drink had been on a generous scale; an assistant commissary had peremptorily brought things under different conditions, with an amount of unnecessary red tape which aggravated the Doctor beyond endurance. A stop was put to the whiskey in toto, not on temperance but on military principles, and that he could not thole. He reached London at night. Next morning, instead of reporting himself in an ordinary way, he arrived at morning parade of the 32nd, and there accosted the Colonel on horseback. Dressed in his usual homespun shepherd’s plaid and blue bonnet, the Doctor is reported to have delivered himself thus:

“Good-mornin’ to ye, Maitland. Hoo air ye this mornin’?’

“Why, Dunlop, is this you?”

“Yes, ’tis I myself. I’ve just come over from Port Sarnia to lay a wee mather before ye. I was in command of the volunteers from my own neighbourhood, farmers and farmers’ sons, who are in the habit of being well fed and well found in their ain hames, and I generally supplied them in all they needed at Sarnia, and tried to make things comfortable for them by givin’ them plenty to eat and plenty to drink; when a Commissary fellow by the name of Robinson came there, took the mather in hand, cut off pairt o’ the supplies and disregarded my orders when I gave requisitions. Now, Maitland, I am here an old army 302 officer, and I know what it is to feed men, and I’ve come to lay this mather before you that you may set it right, because I’ve never been in the habit, and I never will be subjected, to take my orders from a dom pork-barrel.” Upon which the Colonel nearly fell off his horse. He knew the Doctor, and enjoyed the originality of the whole complaint.

Why should the good Tiger’s memory be too heavily assailed for his fondness and capacity for liquids. Maréchal Saxe, in his hale youth, could toss off a gallon of wine at a draught; and when Wolfe’s men reached the crest of the hill he had grog served out to them, while he spoke kind and encouraging words after their terrible climb. Why should not Goderich and the Tiger appear in these tales oscillating between history and myth? It was called a Goderich custom to conceal the glass in the hand while the liquid was poured in; but Whiskey Read, teamster and trader, earned his sobriquet because his load to Goderich was so many barrels of the terrible liquid.

In time Dunlop was advised that ten thousand dollars lay to his credit at the Bank of Upper Canada in Amherstburg. Thus were unnecessary miles added to a journey already delayed and cruelly long. Doctor and aides made their way there—that place renowned for loyalty, rattle-snakes and turkeys—astonishing all Windsor on his way through it by the display of a half-crown piece which had turned out from some forgotten pocket corner. So much specie had not been seen there for a long time; they knew no money but the wild cat shin-plaster. From Windsor they proceeded by water; and after further adventures, immersions and escapes, there was the final discovery of Jamie Dougall in a little low-ceilinged shop, manager of the Bank of Upper Canada. But there was no money yet 303 for Huron, and they must wait some days for its possible arrival. So, with as much patience as might be, they established themselves at Bullock’s Hotel, and after five days’ waiting the money did arrive. The Doctor in the meantime had intended to divert an hour by calling upon the officers at Fort Malden; but the dress suit of claret-coloured cloth, the coat tails lined with pink silk, with which he had provided himself, was now all too small, and when arrayed in it he looked and felt so much like the letter T, that he called lustily, “Kydd, Kydd, come and let me out.” In his dirty homespun and Tam the visit had to be made, and the straight-jacket was never seen again.

On leaving the village with their precious load a sudden panic took the person to whose special keeping the sum had been given, and at the moment of departure he could nowhere be found. The Doctor could only suppose that both man and money had been kidnapped, and, as consolation, had recourse to horns with every friend he met. And the Doctor’s friends were many, and the horns were potent. At length Doctor, money and aides were all got together and a start was made for Sarnia. Then followed further adventures, impassable roads, frequent halts and scanty fare. Just as they were watching the manœuvres of the migrating fish, and admiring the dexterous way in which they helped their passage by hugging the shore, they came upon an old walnut dug-out, abandoned on account of a crack in its side. The bullion convoy was at this time enjoying the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland, from whom they procured rags instead of oakum, and with pitch made a good job of the canoe. Mrs. Sutherland provided them with what she called a week’s supply of provisions, and following the example of the fish they began their coasting journey. The provisions turned out 304 to be ample for double the time, fortunately for them, for it took them all of that to reach the brave Huron First, by then all at home and anxiously awaiting the pay so dearly earned on the frontier. At Sarnia the convoy debarked to pay outstanding dues. At Point Edward there was a further delay, where the rapids proved a barrier. Ben Young was left in the boat to fend it from the shore, while the Doctor, Captain Kydd and James Young, pulling on a stout rope, did tow work. No sooner were the rapids safely passed than an accumulation of half-rotten ice stopped the way, honeycombed and soft in the centre—“for all the world,” as the Doctor said, “like a woman’s baking of tea-tarts, with a spoonful of jelly in the middle.” They beached the boat as best they could, and soon had a roaring fire of drift-wood, the warmth of which made them forget many discomforts. This last delay was too much for the Doctor’s patience, and by morning it was found that he had struck off on his way home alone—no doubt feeling independent when on his feet in these pathless woods, even in the winter. James Young was sent after him, and the other three, with the money in their keeping, stuck by the canoe. Fresh accumulations of ice, storms, a rescue by a party of five or six men off Kettle Point, were next in the list of adventure, until, the water journey becoming impossible, they camped on shore and turned inland for help, the man with the money being left with the unhappy canoe and its load of their united belongings. A poor enough kit it was—dirty blankets and underwear. Mr. Sayers and his two sons entertained them with their best, and helped shoulder the load as far as Bayfield. There another stop was made; and the weary five, with their ten thousand dollars’ worth of pay money, reached Goderich the 305 following night. The Companies’ pay-lists were then compared, checked off, and approved by the Commanding Officer, and many hearts were made glad after another fortnight had been spent in settling all matters of detail.

Such delays and martyrdoms to red-tapeism read not unlike the record of the Crimean campaign. It is not unnatural that Captain Strachan, the Military Secretary, should be spoken of with severity by such as remember those days and hand down the tale, as he was the middleman through whom much was suffered.

Meantime, although Goderich had been written of “as more completely out of the world than any spot which it has been attempted to settle,” it found it incompatible with dignity and safety to be without a Home Guard. In the townships there was another class of home guard; for the old men and the lame, or lads under sixteen, were left in charge to cut the wood, water cattle and attend to the women’s chores. This help, such as it was, had to be spread over a large area, one man, lame or not, having to attend to several farms.

The remembrance of the Home Guard’s duty is that it was a peaceful performance, a sinecure as far as aggression or resistance went. Although Goderich was credited by several governors and military commanders as being a capital natural vantage for defence, the fortification of the Baron’s Hill never went on, for it was estimated the point was too far removed from the rest of the world ever to be attacked.

A Detroit newspaper of June 30th, ’38, tells how “on the night of Tuesday last some thirty of these heroes (patriots) stole a sloop and cruised to Goderich, in Canada. There they plundered the stores of everything valuable and came off. The steamboat Patriot was immediately 306 manned and sent in pursuit of them, and after a long chase found them in our waters. The persons on board the sloop were all armed, but being—as they are—a miserable lot of cowards, they ran the sloop on to the land, and everyone on board, with the exception of one man, made their escape. The sloop was captured and brought down in tow to this place.” Luckily, by July 12th the Detroit paper can say further, “The steamboat Governor Marcy, under command of Captain Jephson, has succeeded in capturing eight of the pirates who robbed the storehouses at Goderich, U. C. They were brought down from the St. Clair a week since, and on their arrival were taken before the U. S. judge. Four were discharged for want of sufficient evidence...; two were held to bail.... Since that time three others have been brought down ... and convicted. From the present appearance in this quarter, I am now of the opinion that the enlightened portion of the citizens of this section of the country have seen the error of their ways, and are now determined to set their faces against the Patriots. They find that the ‘Patriots’ are an unspeakable set of vagabonds, and that no dependence can be placed in them—a very wise conclusion, for I assure you that a more miserable set of beings never existed in any country. The commander-in-chief of the force in this section of the frontier I have been shown; and met him in a public bar-room. He stands five feet four inches in his shoes—that is, when he is fortunate enough to have a pair that can be so called—not lacking in impudence by any means, and a miserable, drunken vagabond, as his appearance plainly indicates.” This was Vreeland, who bore the unsavoury reputation of being “a Judas and a traitor.” He was found guilty of violation of the neutrality laws, and was sentenced by Judge Wilkins to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of $1,000. 307

Of his companion, Dr. McKinley, an unflattering silhouette is given by the Detroit editor, “The complete wreck of all that once constituted a man.” Also, “The Patriot force does not amount to anything like that number (one thousand), besides which they have not courage enough to cross the line.” The Indians took not a little pleasure in keeping these marauders on their own shore, and one of the former gives a spirited account of how “the savages drove the unfortunate fellows over again” from the St. Clair mission; he said they had to watch all night and sleep all day, wear feathers and tomahawks, “and if the pirates do not soon mend their ways the red-men will have to dress themselves so that the invaders will fall dead with fright, even before hearing the war-whoop and yells. We are in fear we shall get as savage as our fathers were in all the wars under the British flag.” Changed times these from those of the Indian proverb, “We will try the hatchet of our forefathers on the English, to see if it cuts well.” 308

Deborahs of ’37.

“Although our last toast, gentlemen,—Place aux dames, ‘The hand that rocks the cradle guides the State.’”

“‘Madame! Madame Cornelia, you are not worthy of the name you bear.’

“‘Sir, we do not live in the times of the Gracchi; I am not a Roman matron.’

“In truth, the poor lady was nothing more nor less than a good, tender mother and excellent wife, not very interesting, perhaps, to philosophers, but very acceptable in the eyes of heaven.”

During the Seven Years’ War the only tillers to be seen in the Prussian fields were women. Likewise, in 1812, it was a common sight in Upper Canada to see women at the plough in place of absent husbands and brothers. Small wonder, then, that the mothers of 1812, and the daughters to whom they gave birth under such circumstances, were what they were in ’37.

Small wonder, too, that their neighbours across the line, who were kin and should have been friends, continued obnoxious to them when the representatives of the Stars and Stripes were such men as Theller and Sutherland. Yet, allowing for all provocation, the period of first dentition in the Canadian Infant was unusually squally; full of whims, shy fits, small fisticuffs and wailings.

Like that pattern of all good housewives described by the prudent mother of King Lemuel, it could be said of the immigrant’s wife, “She layeth her hand to the spindle 309 and her hands hold the distaff; she seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” And when Madame de Léry was presented at the Court of George III. her beauty forced the monarch to say, “If such are all my new Canadian subjects I have indeed made a conquest.”

The women of ’37 combined all these virtues with a few heroic ones. From the dark days of civil dissensions, when Canadians, like their sisters of Deborah’s time, saw their husbands obliged to travel by the by-paths because the high roads seemed to each to be occupied by his foes, “A company of ghosts steal out
And join their voiceless sobs and cries.”
And there is laughter, too; for when she forgot for a moment to cry—her tears dropping into her teacup—Deborah did not disdain to see the humorous side of affairs. If the survivor be the fittest, then Place aux dames of the Tory stripe.

“Nay, we would in the title glory,
For every honest man’s a Tory,”
is the burden of their song. It is a song which loses half its thrill without the pointed reply, the little electric sparkles which run through it. Those who have furnished the bulk of the following pages shall tell their own stories:

“I am just that kind of Tory that the only time I went to the United States I put Canadian earth in my shoes, so that I might not walk on Yankee soil.

“I do indeed remember ’37 and Mackenzie, and how angry we all were that he escaped in a woman’s clothes. 310 ‘He need not have cheated the authorities by putting on our clothing,’ we said; it was hard to forgive him that.

“My father had a logic of his own. ‘Show me a Reformer,’ he used to say, ‘and I’ll show you a Radical; show me a Radical, and I’ll show you a rebel; show me a rebel, and I’ll show you a traitor to his country and his Queen; and a man who is untrue to his Queen is untrue to his God.’ He always declared he could smell a Radical in the next concession. A sword on one side of his bed and a gun on the other, and it was death to anyone who touched either. He always called my mother madame. ‘Madame, do you remember so and so?’ ‘Madame, is dinner ready?’ He was a volunteer in 1812, and, like many other loyal-hearted men, had to leave wife and family to look after themselves as best they might. He took part in all the chief battles then, and often was away for a month at a time. It was during one of these absences that McArthur’s freebooters, infamous marauders, plundered the country, pretending they were a branch of the United States army. When they got to our house they first of all removed a baking of bread, taking off the oven doors to do so; then they emptied the feather-beds on the brush-heap, and filled the ticks with cornstalks for fodder; they took our best blankets to cover their horses, and stole the silverware and valuables. They then destroyed what they could not carry away; one, more infamous than the rest, hurled a tomahawk through a large and valuable mirror. Some time afterwards, a Loyalist, when passing Colonel Talbot’s, saw a little copper tea-kettle hanging in a tree and a silver spoon with it, and Colonel Talbot recognized the crest on the spoon—a lamb encircled with a wreath—and the things were returned. My mother had buried what she could—her own clothes and whatever 311 she could manage to secrete—and put brush over the place, and anything not lucky enough to be buried was taken. My father’s sister was alone when the marauders reached her house, so she called as loudly as she could, ‘John, Joe, Dick, all of you, make haste down—here they are!’ as if she was just waiting for them. She was a very resolute woman. Then she took down an old musket that always hung on two wooden hooks, rested it on the window-sill and fired at random; but random happened to be a good mark. The leader of the gang was at that moment riding towards the window, and the charge nearly carried off his horse’s leg; the animal fell, and remained there till it died. Then the whole party of these moss-troopers, who were alarmed as much by her shouts as by the shot, thought they had to encounter a number of men in the house, and made off as fast as they could. This was the time that Colonel Burwell’s place was burned and that Colonel Talbot made such a narrow escape from the same party. Colonel Burwell was ill with fever and ague; they took him prisoner and sent him to Chilicothe, where they left for him some time. They burnt his house, but his wife, after sending a message to Colonel Talbot to advise him of their coming, made her escape on her Indian pony. The marauders were all masked. She had recognized the leader, an American from across the border at Fort Erie, where she was born. She kept him interested while her messenger was on his way to Colonel Talbot—no new kind of work for Mrs. Burwell; in her old home she had had a similar experience, during which a small brother had improved the opportunity of the soldiers’ absence, while they ransacked the house, to make a visit to their stacked muskets, take a dipper and fill up every muzzle with water. When Mrs. Burwell arrived at our house, my mother dug 312 up some of her wardrobe, and as the visitor often said afterwards, ‘Whatever should I have done if you had not given me something to wear!’ She remained with us till the next day, and Colonel Talbot in the meantime was lucky enough to look like a shepherd or labourer in his homespun smock. He was about to milk his cows, and would have made a queer figure to grace a triumph. The marauders had among them some Indians and scouts who figured at Tecumseh’s last battle, and an Indian was the first to enter on the scene. ‘You an officer?’ he said to Captain Patterson, Talbot’s friend and neighbor. ‘Oh, yes, big officer—captain.’ But this answer did not divert suspicion, and looking towards the ravine to which Colonel Talbot was directing his steps, the Indian continued, ‘Who that yonder—he big officer, too?’ ‘No, no,’ said Captain Patterson, ‘he is only the man who tends the sheep.’ Notwithstanding this assurance and the appearance which bore it out, two guns were levelled at the retreating figure. Twice they tried to cover him, but each time were diverted by the assurance repeated. The Colonel dropped into the ravine, and their chance was gone. They burned the mill, they plundered Castle Malahide, in the booty took some valuable horses, and they drove off the cattle; but two quart pots of gold and the plate, snug under the front wing of the house, escaped.

“The daughters of Joris Janson Rappelje went through much the same kind of thing. The father, a descendant of a Huguenot, had come here in 1810 with a detailed account of the family farming life, how the Dutch Governor of the New Netherlands had given a silver spoon to Sarah Rappelje, the first white child born in the colony—1635—and many other items of family interest, closely written in a fat manuscript volume. His American experiences had been stirring ones; at Lundy’s Lane it was 313 no figure of speech to say they waded ankle deep in blood, and yet everybody said that the worst scourge of all was the raid of this band of McArthur’s marauders. They were one thousand strong, mounted, and unfortunately the camp was pitched at the Rappelje farm, where St. Andrew’s Market in St. Thomas now is. By night-time the place was in a glow of light from the fence-rails burning in heaps, the shadows of the overtopping trees making gloom above and beyond. By morning Rappelje’s sheep were all slaughtered, crops destroyed and the crib emptied of the corn. When Colonel Talbot tried to hide his valuables he gave Mrs. Rappelje a specially precious box, which was to be guarded at all hazards. It had so far been underneath a bed, a safe enough hiding in ordinary times, but she now took it out and put it between the beehives, sure that her lady bees would make good guards. Her young daughter Aletta would have fought the raiders herself had she been allowed, but she had to content herself by telling the commander that he was a thief and a scoundrel.5

“When the news of the uprising of ’37 reached us my father was off again, and my brothers too. One of the boys took down the big poker from the fireplace, the only weapon he could find, and I cried out to him by way of encouragement, ‘Mind you don’t get shot in the back!’ I and another girl, Margaret Caughill, sat up all night running bullets, and we had an apronful in the morning. I turned the grindstone, too, for one of the officers to sharpen his sword.

“It so happened that Dr. John Rolph was at my father’s place for three months. He poisoned the minds of a great many.”

In the house of a high Tory, who could smell a Radical 314 in the next concession, the seditious doctor seemed to enjoy himself and showed a particular fondness for the blood-thirsty little Tory maid. “Come here, my fair child,” he would say, and when wanted and not to be found her mother would remark, “Oh, I suppose she is on Dr. Rolph’s knee.” She got at his quicksilver once, divided it with her finger to make it run, investigated the mysteries of his big watch, and helped him eat the johnnycake which he insisted her mother should bake in the ashes. The flaxen-haired, blue-eyed damsel was danced up and down by the light of the big fire— “Send them back to Yankeeland
To hoeing of their corn,
And we will eat a johnnycake
While it is good and warm,”
is the song associated with the man of whom his best biographer records there was no such thing as self-abandonment, never giving himself to frolicsomeness or fun. It is almost a relief to find him in this out-of-the-way corner of the wilderness in such homely and off-guard actions. “What do you think this little one wants—she wants my money-bags,” and up she was on his knee again to examine the leather money-belt where he kept his guineas.

“He once came to us for flour and lost his way after he left, got into a brush-heap where he had to remain all night, and was so tormented by mosquitoes that in a frenzy, to protect himself, he emptied the flour and drew the sack over his head. He presented himself at the breakfast table next morning—and my father said he never saw such a show as the man was when he reached the house,”—“covered, if not with glory, yet with meal.”

Another visitor, of very different calibre, was the 315 famous Tiger Dunlop, who would ride the saucy child upon his massive shoulder—which, she said, ought to have a saddle. He pronounced his admiration of egg-nog as made under her father’s supervision, “Ah, your coo gives good milk!” There was the usual greed in this neighbourhood for the liquid which made the egg-nog so uncommonly good, and the expedients to get the desired article were sometimes ingenious. One toper, impecunious and resourceful, provided himself with a keg partitioned down the centre, each side seemingly tight; one contained water only. He would arrive at the general store with the water side half-full, get the whiskey side filled, and then say payment would be made on his next visit. If prompt payment were demanded he would wax indignant; “Well, if you won’t trust me, take your old whiskey.” Out would come the water cork and the water would gurgle into the whiskey barrel; the owner, showing outraged virtue, would then march home with the whiskey side comfortably full.

As to the oft-repeated slander that Methodist preachers were the root of disaffection, scattering the seed of gospel and rebellion together, these ultra-loyal ladies are dubious. One says, “It is seldom you find one of them a real staunch Tory and a good man”—a remark, by the way, which admits of two meanings. Three loyal dames, one of them a foreigner, once upon a time attended a revival; no doubt the three minds were prejudiced as to the politics of the preacher. The latter finally came down the aisle, addressing his questions right and left: “And now, my good woman,” to the foreigner, “what has the Lord done for you?” “By Job alive,” said the lady, “I do not tell my family affairs to everybody!”

It is hard, even yet, to convince these dames of fixed feeling that good could come out of certain quarters. 316 “They call them Reformers,—but what were they else? He” (a person above general suspicion) “may not have carried two heads in one hat, but he was not the true thing.”

“I would rather be killed by a good Tory bullet than be singed by rebel gunpowder,” said this fire-eating slip of a girl to a crying friend. “What are you crying for—because you have no more brothers to send?” “No, I’m afraid they’ll be brought back dead.” “I don’t care, provided mine are not shot in the back.”

Of the said brothers, one was in a troop of cavalry and another met his death, as many did, through the sudden change from home comforts to campaigning. “Getting up out of a down bed and sleeping under waggons or on frozen ground with a carpet-bag for a pillow was a great change, and he died before he could be got home.”

But another brother seems to have kept his health and spirits in a marked degree. The absences of the husband and father were now as long and trying as they had been in 1812, and the mother, whose name was the good old-fashioned Betsy, gave voluble tokens of her grief. This boy imitated his father’s handwriting and wrote a long and sympathetic letter, ending, “Do the best you can, Betsy, I don’t expect to be back till spring.” She threw down the letter,—“If you don’t come back till then, you need not come home at all.” The boys were delighted, but the mother discovered the forgery, and the scribe suffered severely. It was a custom with the father to give his daughter a birthday present of a roast of beef, every added year marked by an added pound of meat. In those days spinsterhood was not as fashionable a state of life as nowadays, and the father waxed annoyed: “Now, my dear,” he said, when the roast tipped considerably more 317 than twenty pounds, “if you are not gone off within the year I shall have to drive in the whole beast.”

Arnold somewhere says that according as the New or Old Testament takes hold of a nation, so do what he terms the religious humours in it differ. It would be hard to determine from the data procurable just what the influence in this case was. Some had anxious thoughts as to how things had “sped” and the division of spoil which old and new dispensations always allow as lawful. One old lady sent off her son with a blessing to join his corps, but called him back again to give him a large shawl. “Now, Willie, take this with you, and when you get to Toronto be sure to get it filled with the best Young Hyson tea. Don’t forget now, and bring the best. By the time you get there you’ll find plenty of it for the taking.”

An old farmer ascribed the degeneracy of the times not to influences broad as Arnold’s, but to the “flattery” understood in the difference of manner toward farmers’ wives. “When ’twere dame and porridge, it were rale good times; when ’twere mistress and broth, ’twere worser a great deal; but when it comes to be ma’am and soup, it be werry bad indeed,” and no wonder the country went to the dogs. He preferred the days when U. E. Loyalist ladies speared salmon with pitchforks. If dress had aught to do with it, the change there was great indeed. In the early days to which he alluded many a U. E. Loyalist belle had only one garment to her name, a deerskin slip, and men’s buckskin trousers sometimes brought a dollar and a half after twelve years’ wear; by ’37 the following is a description of an evening dress, thought worthy to be sent to Canada—“Gros royale black ground with flowing pattern, wide flounces and short tight sleeves, long gloves of peau rosée, English lace cap with pompous (?) roses, English 318 lace handkerchief, black satin shoes, and one bracelet.” During the good old days so bemoaned by the farmer, one U. E. Loyalist girl unfortunately made a neighbourly visit where she saw the mysteries of the laundry for the first time. The lesson sank deep in her mind, and at the first opportunity after her return home, when the rest of the family had left her in undisturbed possession of the house, she made her maiden attempt as blanchiseuse on her own deerskin garment. But as this adaptation from Godiva laboured, the garment grew less and less. Any woman who has attempted to wash a glove wrung into a wisp can appreciate her horror. There was no Peeping Tom, but the sounds of the returning family precipitated her into the generous shadow of the potato-hole, whence she interviewed them—if, indeed, the attenuated bit of chamois was not the more eloquent of the two. I’ll find a thousand shifts to get away, has been written; alas, she could find not one. She was packed in a barrel and conveyed upon an ox-sled to a neighbour’s where clothes were more common, and the distressed and shiftless maiden could truly have said she was in her right mind when again clothed. The last of the English and the first of the Canadians were in some points uncommonly alike.

“In our house in my childhood everything was dated by 1812—things had importance only as they were affected by that year and whether they were ‘before’ or ‘after’. My father was through the whole of ’12 and was with Brock at the taking of Detroit; Brock gave him a horse and all trappings for it and himself, and I very well remember the bearskin holsters and the pistols—enormous pistols that we often shot off when we were little.

“General Hull came through our district when he was 319 on his way to Detroit, and every house was searched for arms of any kind or description that could be made use of by the Americans. My father was away from home with our own troops, and my mother received the American officer who came to search our house. He staid an unconscionable time, and mentioned that my father was fighting his own best friends, the friends who came to offer us liberty. ‘Liberty,’ said my mother; ‘liberty indeed—we want no more than we have; we are happy and have good laws, but your country is one of lawlessness.’ My little brother, who was very small and who thought that when Yankees were spoken of wild beast and fairy-book creatures were meant, quietly sidled up to the officer and felt his legs. ‘Why, mother, mother! The Yankees wear trousers just like papa!’

“All children had nightmarish notions about the Americans, but they rather enjoyed it all; saw the excitement and fuss, revelled in the occasional strange circumstances, and knew none of the dangers. Once there was a great scare about the Indians, they were coming to kill us and burn our goods, and many precautions were taken. A big hole was made in the ground in the woods and all our valuables were put in it, and to the same woods we children were taken to be left hidden there; we had some chairs and a few comforts, and we thought it great fun—a little disappointed when during the night it was decided there was no more cause for alarm, and we were taken home again.

“A Mrs. Perry, to whom I went to school, had two sons away fighting. One day some Indians arrived, several of them wearing extra long scalp-belts, and one had in his belt a scalp with long yellow hair. Mrs. Perry said she knew that was her son’s hair; and anyway the son was never heard of again, as far as I know. 320

“On the occasion that the officer came to search for arms his troop evidently thought he was staying a good while, for sometimes they would try to approach the house a little nearer, when he would go to the door and wave them back. On their tour through the country they burned every grist-mill, so that the people would be starved out, and then of course we had to pound our grain as best we could. My uncle had a grist-mill and a saw-mill. He also had a daughter of sixteen, a lovely girl. When they had demolished the grist-mill they turned their attention to the other, but the girl was determined to save it, and as fast as a man would set it alight in one place she would pour water on it, until at last they admired her courage and bravery so much that the officer in charge ordered a man to help her destroy everything which would mean the least danger from fire and that the saw-mill was to be let alone.

“My father was also all through ’37, and when the first troubles came and our streets were full of shouting mounted rebels he waited for no orders but got supplies on his own account, trusting that some day the authorities would repay him, and his regiment was equipped and sent off without delay; he was colonel of the 4th Middlesex. If I had had anything to do with those times there would have been no question of making prisoners—shoot the dogs and be done with it. What business had they coming over here to stir up peaceable people, first in 1812 and then in 1837. Father saw no real fighting in ’37, except that in connection with the taking of Theller and the Anne, but he was in Windsor at the time of the Hume tragedy. Hume was skinned, and they said they were going to make drumheads out of the skin. When the brigands left his body hanging on the posts they went to Prince’s place, cut the 321 trees, destroyed the fences, and frightened Mrs. Prince out of her senses.

“I saw Sutherland and Theller when they passed through St. Thomas on their way to Toronto for trial. My father as Colonel was president of the court-martial, and at that time he received many threatening letters, scores of them, saying that if any American lives were taken he and all his race would be killed. He laughed at this, saying that they evidently knew very little about a court-martial, for as president he had really less to say than the youngest officer in the room.

“At the beginning of the troubles in St. Thomas the Loyalists one day took refuge in an upper room of a big building, thinking they were going to be surrounded by rebels below; they were surrounded, but I don’t remember that anything hostile was intended. One of those in the upper room threw an axe out of the window and it fell on a man’s head, splitting his face open, and he was carried home on a stretcher, covered with a white cloth. I suppose he died afterwards. My husband was away with the militia, and I was terrified at being left alone with a maid-servant and a servant boy. One day a lot of them came in front of the house, and furiously began to pull the palings of the fence down, one of them shouting, ‘A Tory lives here; we’ll not leave a stick for him to see! We’ll burn the house, too!’ A magistrate came along just then and caught the fellow by the throat, calling him a rebel, had him arrested, and the rest of them left my premises. I was afraid they would return to carry out their threat, and got a man to come and watch all night, but they did not reappear. A party of the rebels were somewhere near, and our men wanted to catch them, but we were poorly supplied with ammunition. I was in a shop and 322 heard the proprietor of it talking to another man, lamenting the lack of bullets, so I said, ‘Give me the moulds, and give me all the lead you have, and to-morrow you shall have all the bullets you can carry.’ So they did, and I and my woman-servant sat up the whole of that night melting lead and running bullets, and when the men came for them next day there was nothing too much for them to say, and they went away cheering me. The thing got into the American papers, which said that even the Canadian ladies were so earnest in the war that they sat up all night running bullets. When my servant and I were making them we had two moulds, one cooling while we filled the other. After the bullets were emptied into the cold water of course they were not smooth, and we each had a knife to cut off the part adhering; so there we sat in silence that whole night, filling and cutting, the silly maid weeping steadily. She was a young Scotch girl just out, and she cried all through the night as she worked. I gave the men their balls, saying, ‘Every bullet should find a billet,’ but they did not catch their party of rebels.

“Talbot’s likeness to William IV. was specially commented on when someone in the neighbourhood received an English paper with William’s picture in it. Talbot might have sat for the portrait. His usual dinner was soup, always soup, a plain joint, usually leg of mutton, vegetables, pancakes—I never saw anything but pancakes by way of a course to follow the meats at any of the many times I was there—and the best port wine that ever was brought into Canada. He imported it for himself direct from the manufacturers, and often half of it was abstracted on the way. He was not the boor he was painted, but it is certain he could be fascinating. I dined there often, and he was a perfect host, always choosing after-dinner 323 topics which he thought would be suited to the interests of his guests. For instance, one evening he told me much about his mother and sister, and many of the strange and interesting things his sister’s continental life opened to her. He also explained that same evening how ladies of fashion hire court dresses made in Paris, great news to us Canadians. From another man I heard that this sister, who had taken vows of celibacy, Colonel Talbot said, but not vows to relinquish the world, was a political spy in the pay of the French Government and the Spanish Government. The story accounted for her regular six months’ residence in Paris and the same in Madrid; but she must have been clever to be able to serve two such governments, the antagonist this six months of the one she had been spying for in the previous six.

“Once when I was dining there he talked of his mother and her life at Malahide Castle, and how she managed the servants. There were plenty of cows and many servants, but no butter. She asked why, and was told that the cows were bewitched, and that the butter would not come. The lady was equal to the emergency, and said that she gave them just one week to get the cows unbewitched, and if there was not plenty of the best butter forthcoming by that time the whole troop of servants would be replaced by others. The butter soon came and was of the best.

“The mother was Roman Catholic and the father a Protestant, the family to be divided in the way of the sons following the father and the daughters the mother. Colonel Talbot was nothing in particular, but when he was away visiting he would go to whatever church his hosts went to. I think it was in Toronto once he was at the Roman Catholic, when the priest spoke to him after the service and said he was glad to see him returning to the true faith. 324

“Another time he was at church, somewhere in the country, with Sir Peregrine Maitland’s party, and was wearing the celebrated sheepskin coat which had for a hood the head of the beast, to be worn in bad weather, the wearer’s face covered and the eyes looking through the eyeholes. On this occasion the head was turned over the back of the collar part, in its usual place in fine weather or under cover. The text was that in which we were told to beware of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and as the words were said Talbot got up, gravely shook himself, turned round so that the sheep’s head was in full view, and equally gravely sat down again.

“His household furniture could not be called furniture at all; enough wooden chairs to sit on, and a table made of a couple of planks nailed to ‘sawhorses’ made the dining-room equipment when I knew him; but when the dinner was served the boards were covered with the finest damask, a white dinner service, good glass and silver. Geoffrey was as peculiar as his master, and once I heard Colonel Talbot ask him a question as he waited at table, and Geoffrey went to the cupboard, got what he wanted, put it on the table, went to the kitchen and returned again before answering his master’s question.

“His nephew, Julius Airey, was disgusted with the place and his anomalous position in it, brought there as the heir and no definite understanding arrived at, and he was kicking his heels in idleness and uncertainty between nineteen and twenty-four. In one of his letters home he drew a picture, a dreadful caricature of the colonel, which afterwards in some inexplicable manner found its way back to Talbot and decided him not to make Julius his heir; it showed the dining-room in its bareness, a wooden hook on the wall bearing a bridle, and his uncle 325 in a chair by the fire, choosing the moment to depict him just after a coal had hopped into his uncle’s big gaping pocket and set it afire. Colonel Talbot was very unfair to Julius, inasmuch as he kept him there all those years and never told him that he had better look for his own way in the world, as he was not to be the heir after all.

“My husband dined with Colonel Talbot once in every three weeks, and he never saw a badly served or badly cooked dinner, and only once did he see salt meat on the table, and that was put on on purpose. Sheriff Parkins, of London, famous for his championship of Queen Caroline, came as he said two thousand miles to visit Talbot, but Talbot could not be bothered with him, hence the salt meat. At dinner Parkins began to abuse Sir George Arthur; ‘Sir George is a friend of mine,’ said Talbot, but Parkins paid no attention to that—went on. ‘Sir George is a friend of mine,’ again said Talbot, and Parkins desisted for a while, but soon returned to the charge. ‘Sir George is a friend of mine,’ said Talbot for the third time, ‘and I will not have him so spoken of at my table.’ ‘Call it a table?’ said Parkins as he lifted the damask. ‘In my house, then,’ said Talbot. ‘Call it a house? It is nothing but a dog-kennel, and as for your table, I have seen nothing but salt junk.’ ‘Geoffrey,’ said Talbot, ‘this gentleman is ready to go, bring him his horse,’ and Parkins went off in a rage, such a rage that when he reached the inn he kicked a panel of his bedroom door through with one blow from his heavily booted foot. The sheriff had time to tell one good story, that Caroline was so fond of Sydney Smith, who also befriended her, that she had a large portrait of him hung on her walls; when he next came to see her, her broken English announced that she had put him among her ‘household dogs.’ 326

“Geoffrey was a great character, but he and his master understood each other thoroughly. They came together in a characteristic way. One day when Talbot was visiting somewhere in the Old Country the host found fault with the footman for bringing in cold plates; next day the plates were so red hot that the host first jumped, then swore, and then dismissed the man. ‘That’s the man for me,’ said Colonel Talbot, ‘I like him for that hot plate business,’ and he engaged Geoffrey on the spot. Whatever eccentricity his master chose to perpetrate Geoffrey would second it, and they made a formidable pair. Talbot hated the Scotch, and once when he saw someone approach who turned out to be a friend, he excused his first coldness by saying, ‘Oh, I thought you were one of those abominable Scotch.’ Although Irish himself, he had no trace of any nationality but English. He was English in speech and prejudice. How he got on so well with Dunlop was hard to understand, unless it was on the score of mutual eccentricity. And Dunlop was desperately rude. Once in Toronto a member of Parliament invited my husband and me to dine at the members’ mess, and it happened that in that big roomful of men I was the only woman. I sat near one end, at the right hand of our host, and Dr. Dunlop was at the extreme end of the table, too far off to speak to. He began to talk at the top of his voice, so that the whole long table could hear him, and he stated that he had been in the Talbot settlement, where there was not such a thing as a gate; when you came to a fence you had to straddle it, and that’s what they all did, men and women alike. Now was not that rude, with me at the table! If I had been near him I would have given him some of my mind, I assure you. And besides, it was a great falsehood.”

One story told in extenuation of Talbot’s business 327 methods is that a local Deborah undertook to overcome the great colonel of whom everyone else was afraid. He went to her homestead to adjust some land dispute; their words waxed high, until she, unable to dispose of him in any other way, knocked him down, made shafts of the legs of this descendant of the Kings of Connaught, and dragged him to the roadside while his back performed the part of a Canadian summer sled. In his own words, this lady was a true Scotch virago. One day as he sat at dinner her counterpart entered the dining-room, Geoffrey as usual serving. She announced that she had come for a horse, to get provisions from the blockhouse. The latter had been built in the early days at a point midway between Port Talbot and Long Point, the two extremes of the infant settlement, where flour, pork, and other provisions might be imported by boat and then distributed according to the Czar’s judgment. She was told she might have Bob, a quiet, strong horse; but she had set her heart on Jane, the beast kept for the Colonel’s own use and ridden by none else. Most emphatically she was told she should not have Jane. She seized the carving-fork and threatened “to run it through him;” so, in his own words as he told the story to a friend, “I had to holloa to Geoffrey to give the Scotch devil the mare.”

To protect himself as much as possible from intrusion he had a window adjusted on the primeval post-office system, the pane arranged so that it would open and shut from within. During the audiences Geoffrey stood behind him to hand down the maps, and the intending purchaser was left on the path outside. The inevitable query was, “Well, what do you want?” The trembling applicant made an answer, the land was given or refused as the case might be, and to speed the parting guest the equally 328 inevitable concluding remark, “Geoffrey, turn on the dogs,” followed. It was destined that his third downfall should be accomplished by a Highlander. The latter had several glasses of brandy at the inn near by, and when the landlord demurred at giving more, “You must let me have it,” said the other, “for I am going to see that old Irish devil, Colonel Talbot, who took my land from me, and if he will not give it back I’ll give him the soundest thrashing a man ever got, for I will smash every bone in his body.” He was given the desired extra glass, and somewhat exhilarated reached the historic pane, through which justice, land, curses and kindness were dispensed according to the humour of the hour. An Englishman is always supposed to be in his best mood after dinner; with the Colonel time after that function was sacred, and all business had to be transacted before it. Up came the truculent Highlander this day, and out came the usual “Well, and what do you want?” The grievance was explained; he wanted his land back again. The refusal was prompt, and as prompt the blow that was aimed in return. That ended the affair for the day; but on the next, as the Colonel walked down his avenue, he saw the Highlander waiting for him. Shaking his fist at him, he cried, “Clear yourself off, you——Heeland rascal—did you not yesterday threaten to break every bone in my skin!” But pupil of the Duke of York, comrade of Arthur Wellesley as he was, the Colonel thought it wise to seek the seclusion of his own room. A week from that time his closest friend smilingly said, “Our friend the Port Talbot Chief has at last met his match in the person of this Scotchman.” The ladies were not counted. Instead of taking himself off as commanded, the Highlander had gone into the kitchen and sat himself down with the Colonel’s men at dinner. He did the same at supper, and 329 following the men to their long bedroom, jumped into bed. The next morning he was the first at breakfast, the same at dinner and supper. This went on for two days. Geoffrey complained, the Highlander was ordered to the window, and the Colonel demanded what he meant by such behaviour. “I mean to live and die with you, you old devil, if you do not give me back my land.” He was in return commanded to take his land, and commended to a climate less arctic than the one of their mutual choice. “Never let me see your face again” was the final adjuration from the window. Two Amazons and a Highlander had conquered the Lion of Port Talbot.

It is certain that one of the Deborahs of ’37 was Anna Jameson the Ennuyée, for if her husband was not quite like the cypher Lapidoth her memory somewhat overshadows his. If we accept her opinions of Toronto as qualified by the unfortunate circumstances and mishaps attending her arrival, we still have no wish to alter her descriptions and impressions elsewhere in Canada. She was one of the many distinguished visitors to Port Talbot, and she has left us her view of its master and by inference his view of her. But those who knew him better contend that he did not like or admire her. In the first place she committed the unpardonable sin of borrowing money, which was not replaced. During her visit he was not too polite to her, and he did not hesitate to express his opinion after she had gone.

Of course, a dozen love stories clung round the Colonel’s early days; there were speculations as to what could have induced such a self-burial, but they were all of the hearsay order. One was that he was jilted at the altar, set sail, and we know the rest. Another, that in the sylvan court of George III. the young princesses, aides, equerries 330 and courtiers made hay together, and, in spite of the Royal Marriage Act, also fell in love. One of the princesses—the name does not transpire—it was said cared for the dapper little lieutenant. Among the never-ending romances, heartbreaks and silent partings which haunt the walls of royal palaces and the pathways of royal parks, may be the love story which resulted in the determination—“Here, General Simcoe, will I rest and will soon make the forest tremble under the wings of the flock which I shall invite by my warblings around me.”

However, “I never saw but one woman I ever really cared anything about,” was his own admission, “and she wouldn’t have me; and, to use an old joke, those who would have me, the devil wouldn’t have them.” The one lady was no princess, but owned to the name of Johnstone. Whatever his ideal had been, Mrs. Jameson, wandering about the country without a maid and in a lumber-waggon, as he called it, was not to his taste. She on her part was very proud of her contrivances, and unstrapped her mattress to show him how comfortable she could be at all times when beds were not forthcoming; but he gruffly turned his back and muttered something he would not say aloud.

Mrs. Jameson’s observations on Canadian society, as it was then, are by no means bad, and it is easy to believe them; but when she allows such distaste or her own painful position to overshadow her cheerfulness and express nothing but regret at seeing Niagara—she would have preferred it a Yarrow unvisited—she need not be taken altogether at her own valuation as a prophetess. We can sympathise with her “By the end of the year I hope, by God’s mercy, to be in England,” but no further. But, generally speaking, she must have been a fascinating woman; plain at first 331 sight, her mind, manners and accomplishments obliterated the impression, and the charm was heightened by beautiful hands, a sweet voice, and fair hair of a reddish tinge. The voice she used with great effect in singing, but the hair she allowed to be seen in curl papers when she received her callers in the new Canadian London in the year ’37, when en route from the Colonel’s to the omega of her “wild journey,” Mackinaw.

Perhaps at no one spot in Canada could there be found a larger gathering of Deborahs, than at what was called the Talbot anniversary, a yearly fête instituted by John Rolph in honour of the day when his friend, the Honourable Thomas Talbot, landed his canoe for good at the scene of his future life. On each 21st May the backwoodsman left his toil, the spinning wheels were silent, and arm-in-arm the settlers, men and wives, came in to enjoy themselves and see the faces which, as a rule, they had no other chance to see. The first fête was held at Yarmouth Heights, in the grounds and under the superintendence of Captain Rappelje. The tables were laid in a bower of cedar and other sweet woods, and the hepatica, anemone and violet were the decorations. The two hundred people who sat down to dinner had come long distances, some from Long Point and London. The board groaned under venison, wild turkey and many toothsome edibles, and when these were disposed of “The King,” “The day and all who honour it,” called forth shouts from lungs strong as the arms that raised the glasses high. Then the storm subsided, and the Colonel, still fair but “short, stout, and showing his hardships and years, rose and made a speech, short, neat and explicit, ending with ‘And may God bless you all.’” The upper story of the Rappelje house was in one large room, and here the ball was held when 332 the pleasures of the dinner were concluded. Above the musicians’ seat was a large transparency, “Talbot Anniversary,” a tree with an axe laid at the root as an emblem. The “squirrel” was the Colonel’s favourite figure in the dance, and this night he “led off” Macdonell’s Reel with the mother of the fair-haired miss who had spoken up so boldly as to his woman-hating. He certainly now made good his rejoinder that he liked a pretty girl as well as anybody, for in the succeeding dances he managed to secure, not only the prettiest girls there, but the prettiest in the settlement. The room was of course lighted with tallow candles, but it needed no modern power of electricity to show the delight of the assembled youth in their version of the Spanish fandango.

In 1830 the anniversary was held in the St. Thomas Hotel, when “the prettiest girl in the district” led off with the Colonel. She was dressed “in a sky-blue poplin stripe”—a blue satin and a white stripe alternating—“embossed, trimmed with white satin and white blonde,” white flowers and white gloves; her shoes she made herself, getting Hyndman, the bootmaker, to add fine dancing soles to them. Any one to whom the Colonel paid his rare attentions at once became an object of interest and perhaps envy. His complexion won for him several inelegant comparisons, and the pretty girl was twitted about “that old turkey-cock,” and “folks said she would not leave till his health was drunk for the last time.” In the succeeding years, as ’37 troubles loomed and burned and settled into quiet again, the character of this entertainment changed. The regiment stationed in London and St. Thomas contributed to the gathering, and the red-coats only too successfully did by the home-spun as they had done previously by the “black-coated laity.” They even supplanted 333 the original toast with “Here’s to red wine, red coats, red face and right royal memories.” The red face of the Colonel was the only relic of former times left. The peasant and lord of the manor element in the feast changed; the very celebration of it was removed from St. Thomas to London, where it soon died a natural death, the old zest gone, the raison d’être of its being destroyed.

For warlike times, these western Deborahs had an easy billet. Farther east and on the Niagara frontier the women knew more of what war really meant. There were short periods of anxiety, as in Galt, when the order came to muster, and great was the consternation among the wives. They met in congregation, all crying over the husbands they might see no more. But the husbands were returned to them that same night, whole and sound, and the rejoicing was proportionate. One company told off to make arrests at different points came across an Atalanta, who this time used her powers to save a husband. In the house of one of the suspects an assemblage was found talking over rebellion matters with great zest and with no marked admiration of the loyalist side of it. A private was sent to the barn where it was hoped the host might be found, and another was directed to hold this said wife while others should go over the fields to arrest her husband, who would be unprepared for them. She dodged the volunteer and took to flight, the man in pursuit, down the path-way, over scrub, through fields, through bush, through briar, over park, over pale—and the advantage lay in the fences. She, with skilful management of dress, vaulted the accustomed “snake” like a bird; he came to grief in a mixture of rail, ditchwater and mud. This gave her such a start that by the time he picked himself up she had 334 reached her goal, and man and wife were so safely hidden that no sign of them could be seen. Of all the party then taken only one suffered. He was sentenced to be hanged, but that sentence was commuted to penal servitude, under which he died.

The isolated farm-houses in the eastern part of Upper Canada and in Lower Canada suffered severely from the wanton attacks of rebels and sympathisers; and as for the terrors, the woes, the tears of the Lower Canadian women and children at the hands of the military, what pen can tell, what tongue describe them. On the island of Tanti a band of Bill Johnston’s marauders attacked the lonely farm occupied by a family named Preston. The mother, of truly heroic mould, regardless of numbers and the sentinels at her doors, contrived to get abroad to alarm her few neighbours. All her worldly goods, money, provisions, arms, were taken, one son died of his wounds, and the husband barely escaped with his life. What could such islanders do? Hickory Island had as its tenant one lone widow.

On a night early in November, ’38, a rising took place in Lower Canada at Beauharnois and La Tortu. La Tortu was a small village near La Prairie; the chief sufferers were two farmers, Vitry and Walker. The outlying situations of the farms gave the marauders ample chance to have their own way, and one “voluntary” contribution to the patriot cause, at Pointe à la Mule, was made at the instance of a party of masked men who emptied the farmer’s savings-box, and comforted him by saying that he had helped on the Cause. Vitry and Walker were murdered. The wife of the latter arrived with her child in Montreal on the following Sunday, the day of the great illumination and the issue of Sir John’s proclamation, in which he 335 announced his intention to destroy every town where rebels were gathered or where they might be taking shelter. The proclamation added that he would deal with cases of conspiracy or rebellion according to martial law, “either by death or otherwise, as to me shall seem right and expedient.” Like the dreaded Duke of Burgundy, the motto “I have undertaken it” might be seen in his eyes. Even the peaceable Lord Durham had just said, deprecating a renewal of the rebellion, that to those who should succeed in producing lamentable results like to the scenes of ’37 would the responsibility belong. The sight of Mrs. Walker, literally covered with her husband’s blood, and her description of what was evidently her heroic resistance, did not tend to allay the excitement.

Montreal had now a strong picket guard surrounding it, two thousand men besides the militia were under arms, and the times, instead of having a depressing effect, tended to exhilaration as well as illumination. Agreeably to orders, the inhabitants placed two lights in every window to assist the troops in case of attack. It is hard to credit that the soldiery then in Canada was close upon the number of the pith of the allied forces at Waterloo.

The rising at Beauharnois has an added interest through the seigneur, Mr. Ellice, Lord Durham’s brother-in-law, who reigned after the manner of Talbot and Dunlop, but not in such dictatorial fashion. He was a man in affluent circumstances, and while in Canada as one of Lord Durham’s suite had begun new roads, built bridges and made other improvements on his estate, using therefor several years’ back rents and the benefits which would be accruing for years to come. With his wife and son he arrived to receive the affectionate homage of his dependants, with whom he imagined an intercourse full of 336 confidence was established. The family had been received with the customary respect, and were naturally surprised when, at dead of night, they recognized in the mob a good many of their tenants. A volley was poured in, the house invaded, one lady wounded, and the rest of the party carried off to be shut up with thirty prisoners from the Henry Brougham. From the tale recently told by an old rebel, himself but half willing, it appears that many of these tenants were brutally coerced into rising by the patriot body. Ellice’s house had been despoiled of fourteen guns and other arms, and eleven barrels of cartridges, but not before one servant at least had made a spirited resistance; he succeeded in tying up some of the rebels, for which he was treated severely later on.

The Brougham had been burnt at the wharf, and the passengers captured; but the despatches, the things on board most coveted, escaped. A lady passenger proved equal to the question as to where they and a large sum in bank bills which the captain had contrived to keep possession of but could not hide, should be concealed. “Honi soit qui mal y pense”—she rolled them into a bundle and converted herself into a Bustle-Queen-at-Arms.

That the whole party was not killed was probably owing to the dispersion of the main body of rebels at Napierville, another point of simultaneous attack. The household of a large landowner named Brown, who in himself and his circumstances was much like Ellice, was treated in the same way. Some of the Ellice servants escaped, fled to Montreal, and there told a tale of how the family was confined in a cellar, with other particulars not calculated to allay popular alarm. Ellice, Brown, and some others were now separated from the rest and taken to Chateauguay, where they were put in a room from which daylight was 337 carefully excluded, but which was afterwards lighted by candles. In it they were well treated by the curé, M. Quintal, and nuns, who sent them such comforts from their larders and cellars as compel disbelief in a double Lent. The prisoners could also send to the village for whatever they wished to buy, but they were not allowed to send any letters unread by the rebels. Presently they were packed into carts to be conveyed to Napierville, no doubt with many memories of Jock Weir to discompose them; but by the time the seigniory of St. George was reached their escort heard that the patriots had not only evacuated Napierville, but in their haste had thrown away their arms and were now pursued by cavalry. The escort fled and the prisoners continued on their way, even advised by passing rebel habitants as to the best means to extricate themselves, and eventually reached Montreal, where their plight created a fresh sensation. But they retained warm memories of the curé’s kindness, and later presented him with a piece of plate with thanks for his hospitality.

Meantime an old Deborah, in the guise of a squaw, who hunted a lost cow in the woods at Caughnawaga, came into the church where the Indians were at their prayers with the alarming news that the woods were full of rebels and that a party was then surrounding the church. The braves turned out, and the chief’s flexible glottis turned from the plaintive melody of Indian hymns to a warwhoop, an example which was promptly followed by the rest. The nearest rebel was seized and disarmed, a panic took the patriot band, sixty-four were made prisoners, and they were taken into Montreal that same Sunday of great excitements. The lack of a cowbell, warwhoops and daring, had paralyzed a fair-sized, fairly armed force. The Indian appears no more, but one hopes he got what all Indians so dearly prize, a medal. 338

After this, fires were seen to break out almost simultaneously from the houses of the absent rebels, and soon Mr. Ellice’s flourishing little settlement was in ashes. For nights the atmosphere of Chateauguay district was red with reflected light from the “vast sheet of livid flame.” Portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and other republican heroes, were found in Dr. Côte’s house, and it is said they were committed by Sir John’s orders to a specially hot corner, with the customary “so perish all traitors.” The regulars, who had arrived to avenge the Beauharnois and other disturbances, came in the John Bull—an ominous name for the peace of poor Jean. This part of the expedition was under command of Sir James McDonell, a very different person from the next McDonell quoted. But after they had watched the lights on the enemy’s fast-deserted outposts die, they made a grand haul of curious literature, patriot documents describing a plan of Canada’s future government, with the names of ministers and heads of all departments told off—many details interesting to those who, doubtless, under the new régime would decorate gallows and occupy cells.

Colonel Angus McDonell of the Glengarries writes distressedly from Beauharnois: “We proceeded towards Beauharnois by a forced march, burning and laying waste the country as we went along, and it was a most distressing and heart-rending scene to see this fine settlement so completely destroyed, the houses burned and laid in ashes, and I understand the whole country to St. Charles experienced the same fate. The wailing and lamentation of the women and children on beholding their homes in flames and their property destroyed, their husbands, fathers, sons and relations, dragged along prisoners—women perishing in the snow, and children frozen stiff by 339 their side or scattered in black spots upon the snow—half-grown children running frantic in the woods, frightened at the sight of friend or foe—and such of the habitants as did not appear, their houses were consigned to the flames, as they were supposed to be rebels.” One of the last had gone the day before to Montreal on business, and returned to find the above condition of things, his home in ashes, his wife and child missing. Passion and grief overcame fear; in a frenzy he rushed to an officer—“Ah, you burn my house, kill my wife—my dear wife—my little child—me always good subject—no rebel—sacre British—where ma femme—where mon enfant—oh, Jesu Marie—” and dropped senseless. He was sent to Montreal, where in a few days he died in prison, still calling on wife and child. When the former, who had taken refuge with a relative, heard he was a prisoner, she went on foot to Montreal, her child in her arms; she reached the prison the night before his death, but was refused admittance, and a few days’ further agony ended her troubles also.

It is popularly supposed that the humble habitant wife was the one who suffered most; but degree did not save a woman from gross insult and spoliation, nor was the gentlewoman lacking in ingenuity. On the morning of the battle of St. Denis brave Madame Pagé of that place made her husband a novel armour, a cuirass of a quire of paper. It saved his life, for in the mêlée a ball otherwise intended for his destruction got no farther than the fourth fold. Mesdames Dumouchel, Lemaire, Girouard and Masson were not exempt when the loyal, the volunteer and the regular arrived at their doors. The regulars forbade the habitants to succour any in distress, and when these women were left almost nude outside their desolated homes they showed wonderful nerve in surviving the vengeance of ce vieux brûlot 340 and his followers. But Mdlles. Lemaire and Masson could not sustain the shock to mind and body, and one young two-days’ mother died from fright. Madame Mongrain barely escaped with life and children, and her handsome home was quickly a wreck under the hands of “ces sauvages,” who gambolled and skipped in the light of its blaze, to the playing of their own trumpets and uttering “les cries feroces.” Madame Masson, when adjuring her son, Dr. Hyacinth Masson, on the eve of his exile to Bermuda, to be brave in the future as in the past, delivered herself of Spartan sentiments worthy of any historic setting, concluding her address, “Sois courageux jusqu’ à la fin. Je suis fière de toi. Je me consolerai dans ton absence en pensant que Dieu m’ a donné des enfants aussi bon patriotes et dignes de moi.” No wonder men were staunch when their mothers exerted an influence which after the lapse of sixty odd years draws forth from a former Son of Liberty-Chasseur: “I was vigorous and strong in those days, and from my mother inherited an ardent love for the country in which I was born. Her letters so magnetized me with patriotism that I could willingly lay down my life for the cause.”

Sir John was no novice in dealing with the French after his governorship in the island of Guernsey. He made us a link between old and new by bestowing the name of Sarnia on the St. Clair border, a name written of as the old classical one of that moiety of England’s sole relic of the Dukedom of Normandy. There the language of debate and of the Legislature was French, and the patois of the islander as perverted a language as the Canadian’s.

At the present day there are probably not many Glengarries left to tell the tale of their share in that terrible 341 week. One, an Englishman moreover, who became a Highlander through stress of circumstances, remembers very distinctly the work which he confesses he did faithfully but with many heartbreaks for the women and children. It is unnecessary to say that he is devoted still to the memory of Sir John Colborne. “We were at the Prescott windmill, but had only been at work there one day and one night when we were ordered to Beauharnois, five hundred of us. Sir John was there before us. There was a mistake in the time of the arrival of the troops he expected—trouble about a boat and difficulties with the current. We walked all the way to Beauharnois, and hadn’t bite or sup except half a snack at Cornwall, and the men were all worn out with excitement and work at Prescott. Sir John, on a little black pony, met us just by a small bay at the Cedar Rapids. ‘Now, boys,’ says he, ‘I’ll ride my pony on before you—where I go you can. Come on!’ So we broke step and spread, for fear of the ice breaking, and followed him in safety. When he saw us five hundred, and thinking of his disappointment about the regulars, he says, ‘We can face ‘em with that.’ Some of those nearest him objected that the Glengarries had no band, and a band would be indispensable in a fight. So a big strapping Highlander steps up and says, ‘We’ll make a band of our own.’ ‘Never mind a band,’ says Sir John. ‘But I’m a piper, and there are a lot more of us, and we can be a band,’ says the man. ‘All right,’ says Sir John, ‘but anyway those Glengarries would face anything.’ Then they got their pipes together and made their band, and the big fellow says, ‘What’ll we play, Governor?’ and Sir John says, ‘Play what you like, play what you like.’ So they did play,—‘The Campbells are comin’, ha—hah—ha—hah, and of course the Frenchmen couldn’t stand that. Losh, how the people did run!” 342

This informant’s tale was something after the fashion of that told of the piper who fell out of the retreating ranks at Corunna—where Major Colborne’s advancement had been included in Sir John Moore’s dying wishes—and sat on a log to rest. A bear came on the scene just as the Highlander was eating the remainder of his rations. He recognized the bear from its picture, and on the policy of conciliation so soon to become national propitiated him with bite about. The bread disappeared all too soon, and the Highlander cautiously reached for his pipes. At the first squeal the bear was astonished, at the full blast he fled. “Oh, ho,” said the piper, “if she’d known you liked music so well she would haf played pefore dinner.”

On the present occasion it was the ordinary Highland music before dinner, for the Glengarries were empty.

“Sir John now told us to lose no time in attending to fourteen small cannon that were looking down at us from the top of the incline where the priest’s house stood. Losh! if they’d fired their one wooden cannon it would have smothered the half of us. Yes, a wooden cannon it was, hooped in iron, and if you’d seen the stuff we took out of it afterwards at Montreal—for Sir John was bound to keep it and send it to England—horse-shoes, smoothing irons, nails, balls, and every kind of rubbish. It was a twelve-pounder, easily handled, and some of the men drew it to Montreal. Then we were told to feed ourselves. And we did. We stole right and left, and there wasn’t a chicken left alive; it was a turkey here and a duck there; hens, anything we could catch; fence-rails were piled and a camp-fire made. We covered the geese and fowls with clay, thrust them into the fire, and when the clay cracked they were ready, for feathers and skin came off with it. Some would snatch a wing, 343 others a leg; and man, there was some could stand a whole bird, inside and out. But hungry as I was, I couldn’t stomach it. Three others and I went to a little store near by, where we got some brown bread and some cheese on the counter; we found a cupboard in the cellar, and in it a nice ham, a box of bottled ale turned up, and we took a bottle apiece. Then we went and sat behind the house, and had a good English supper of it; and it had to last us till we got to Montreal.

“‘Now, then,’ said Sir John, when we were all through, ‘set fire and burn it.’ And we did. He was still thirsting to revenge Jock Weir. It was Jock Weir here and Jock Weir there, but he told us to spare the priest’s house—which we did. We were young, and it was a kind of a frolic to us; but oh, those women and children! I wake in the night and think I hear them yet. Losh! I’ll never forget it—a woman with a child under each arm, others tugging at her skirts. But we did them no harm; we only burnt everything up. The Colonel told them they needn’t be afraid; but what was the good of stopping when their homes were to be burnt! They went off to the woods, and, man! it was terrible—terrible. We got to Beauharnois at two in the morning, and we had it afire by six; left at eight, and were in Montreal by noon. Here we had our barracks in the emigrant sheds. Sir John took a great notion to us. ‘I’ll drill you, you Glengarry men!’ And he did. We were devoted to him, and obeyed almost before he spoke—when there was anything to do. So he drilled us that day for about two hours on the ice, and you should have seen some of those poor kiltie regulars! You know, Sir John was a good man, but he was a rough ’un, and he wanted everything just as he said. But losh, man, it was a shame to drill them for two hours on the ice. 344 The poor rogues threatened they would go home—the 93rd they were, afterwards in Toronto. They wore kilts, but we had trousers, blue with red stripe; we did have red coats, too, but it’s all true about the way we came home on horseback, and with plug hats, too, and in fact with anything we could lay our hands on. There was a great deal of talk about it, I believe; but Sir John made us return the things afterwards. One big fellow, at Beauharnois, saw a beautiful sofa going into the fire, so he seized it and said he would have it. He heaved it out, but losh, man, when the orders came to march on to Montreal he didn’t know what to do with it, and had to chuck it into the river. We were two weeks in Montreal, and we stood guard at the executions. It was a dreadful sight to see men hung up in a row, all dropped at once. Yes, there was a ‘movable gallows,’ and a very tidy thing it was. It was put up in an hour, and when the execution was over, the Colonel said, ‘Go drill those men;’ when we came back, in an hour, there was no sign of it left. An attempt at rescue was feared, and they said Papineau himself was there to see—a tall, middling stout man, a regular Frenchman, and they said it was Papineau. We were well treated, fed whenever there was anything to eat, and properly paid at the end. So Sir John came to the barracks one morning, and says he, ‘You Glengarries can go now, for all the good you are!’ And that was just what we wanted.”

“The ghost of a goose is a curious sight,
A strange enough phantom at best,”
but when it is that of a military goose, and history records not whether goose or gander, biography becomes delicate writing. In ’37, not only were men warlike and women 345 sympathetic, but the very geese flew to arms. “Confoun’ a’ questions o’ dates,” says the Noctes; confoun’ a’ questions o’ sex—the goose of the Coldstream Guards must not be forgotten; the black-coated laity thought they possessed many such. This lineal descendant of the fabulous Roman bird was born and brought up in the citadel at Quebec, which may be the reason that it despised the estate of oie des moissons and aspired to that of anser ruficollis upon a battlefield. One day, in its morning walk on that historic ground, it left the flock forever, stepped up to the sentry, paced back and forth with him on his beat, gravely ducking at every arch, and when rain came on and he turned into the sentry-box goosie got in too, poked out her head, and kept at attention until the corporal came with the relief. The ensuing ceremony met with her approbation, as did the new guard; she gave one last look at the retreating figure, and began her walk up and down with the new. Thereafter, the sentry order always finished, “In case of fire alarm the guard, and take care of the goose.”

’Twould offend against taste in ordinary cases “To tell how poor goosie was put out of pain
(And the plucking and basting we need not explain);”
and how this innovation on Follow-the-Drum in after years made the voyage home with her regiment and continued her duties in Portman Street barracks, till a military funeral finished her course, belongs to the history of Her Majesty’s forces. That she was a goose is proved by record of her characteristics; anser canadensis is a clamorous bird, and armed humans underneath his flight are made aware of his presence by his noisy gabble—if silent he would never be discovered. It is said the prudent fair ones of the flock keep a chucky-stone in the mouth during travel, in order 346 to guard against temptation. Therefore, as the Great Grey Goose of the West was a gander and gabbler, the silent sentry, the goose militant of the Coldstream Guards, must have been a goose, and is a Deborah.

When we come to the details of Mackenzie’s life, his attitude towards wife and bairns and mother and theirs towards him would disarm even his political critic. There is the meeting of the two old schoolmates, Isabel Baxter and Mackenzie, without recognition, the brief courtship, and a life of mutual devotion. There is baby Joseph Hume, whose early death saddened the father’s life; and there is the pathetic entry in his diary, after his rebellion had entailed banishment: “My daughter Janet’s birthday, aged thirteen. When I came home in the evening we had no bread; took a cup of tea without it, and Helen, to comfort me, said it was no better on the evening of my own birthday.”

They drank the cup of poverty together, father, mother, grandmother and children. For twenty-four hours at a stretch there was no food, fire or light; and after such a fast the father would go forth shivering to collect a small due or meet a friend willing to share a sixpence. The younger children never ceased to cry for food; the others suffered in silence. We read of the servant, one of the true-hearted Irish, and she is content to starve with the rest. Despite poverty, the father continued to wear a watch, once the property of his eldest daughter, whom he sincerely mourned for twelve years with an almost superstitious veneration. We find him telling his son to cheer up, not to despond; that there are green spots in the desert of life; that after darkness comes light. And even in this dreadful plight there are moments when the tragic becomes 347 serio-comic. There is a night when the plaintive sounds from the darkness about him urge him to make one more assault upon the cupboard that he knows is empty—no, not quite empty; there is a book, and by the embers of their dying fire he reads the title, “The Dark Ages,” and he and all indulge in a hearty laugh, and then go supperless—nay, breakfastless and dinnerless—to bed.

The family did not follow him into exile immediately, but his devoted wife reached Navy Island a few hours before the dramatic moment when Drew arrived and the Caroline became a torch. Like Deborah, she, too, might have said, “I will surely go with thee, notwithstanding the journey shall not be for thine honour.” The general belief is that, though loyal to him and a staunch Reformer, she by no means sympathised in his ultra opinions and combustive action. She remained for two weeks in that dreadful place, made flannel cartridge-bags, slept in a rough log shanty on a shelf covered with straw, where the walls were poor protection from wet and cold and but a thin partition from the unholy clamour of the desperate crowd about her, and tried to inspire her husband and his followers by an example of courage and freedom from fear. Then ill-health obliged her to leave, and when accompanying her to the house of a friend in Buffalo Mackenzie was arrested for breach of the neutrality laws. Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep sea, a dilemma with the orthodox number of horns, lose all strength as similes at this point of the small hero’s career.

The devotion of Mackenzie’s mother, like that of most mothers, begins at the date of his birth. She was her husband’s senior by nineteen years and old for a first experience of motherhood. The husband’s death followed soon after, and then came the vows which her Church 348 prescribed for the orphaned infant’s baptism, a struggle with misfortune, and a determination to keep a roof over their two heads. Strange to say, both grandparents were Mackenzies,—one Black Colin, or Colin Dhu—and both Loyalists who fought for the Stuarts.

In 1801 there was a grievous famine, and one of the earliest memories of “the bright boy with yellow hair—wearing a blue short coat with yellow buttons,” is that of his mother taking the chief treasure of her kist, a plaid of her own clan tartan and spun with her own hands when a girl, to sell for bread. As he lay in his bed and watched her take it out—not with tears we may be sure, Mrs. Mackenzie was no crying woman—did this earnest of future days of want and care shadow the equally heroic spirit of the child. The priest-grey coat of his father had to follow. “Well may I love the poor, greatly may I esteem the humble and the lowly, for poverty and adversity were my nurses, and in my youth were want and misery my familiar friends,” he wrote later. Divine worship was held in that family of two, and it was a daily prayer that the rightful monarch might be set upon the throne, with the saving clause—prophetic glimpses of a Family Compact—that he might have able and wise counsellers, added.

Flesh and blood had revolted at the long tasks of memorizing Scripture, Westminster Catechism, Psalms and “Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted,” set him by his parent. The leader of men was first a leader of boys, and the rebel of after years began that career by rebelling against his mother at the ripe age of ten years, leaving home and setting up on his own account in the Grampians as a hermit. An old castle perched somewhere near where the clouds seemed to touch the crags was to have been the hermitage, but a most carnal need of bread and butter and 349 a fear of fairies induced a return. Though longing to be a hermit, young Willie had no taste for the study of polemics; but he would read till midnight, and his mother feared that “the laddie would read himself out o’ his judgment.” The first school to which he went was held in an old Roman Catholic chapel, where the former Holy Water basin was made the seat of punishment. This very small boy was early a good arithmetician and made satisfactory general progress, but he managed to find time to decorate the backs of his fellows with caricatures in chalk, and to pin papers to their coat-tails. One day he went into that sanctum, the master’s closet, put on the fool’s cap, tied himself up with the taws, and with the birch for sceptre took his seat in the holy cup. There was the usual denouement of discovery, a master boiling with rage, the taws and birch in active use, and a sorrowful small boy.

The mother was extremely small in stature, brunette, and with dark brown hair which, when it turned white, remained as long and abundant as ever; her eyes were sharp and piercing, generally quiet in expression but under excitement flashed ominously. The cheek bones were high, and the small features unmistakably Celtic, the thin-lipped mouth telling of an unconquerable will which she bequeathed to her only child. The face under the broad high forehead was seldom allowed to relax into perfect placidity, the surface always showing more or less of the inward volcano; any repose there was due to religious feeling. In the son we have but a replica of the mother. She spoke Gaelic, but seldom used it; she did not reckon fairies among abolished myths, and she believed firmly in the Mackenzie death-warning which was always given by an invisible messenger. The strongest affection existed between mother and son, who lived together for the last seventeen years of the former’s life. 350

It was but little to the credit of one of his powerful enemies that, in an effort to equal the Advocate, jeering remarks upon Mackenzie’s aged mother were made in the public press. But so it was; and he was advised to mend his ways as an editor, if he expected to continue to support his mother and family. The inference, as his biographer gives it, is that it was not praiseworthy to support an aged mother. It drew from the son the boast that if he could keep his old mother, his wife and his family, and avoid debt, he cared not for wealth.

Speaking in his paper of the spirit of the “faction” towards the press, Mackenzie indulged in a prophecy of an event at which the same aged mother was a pained witness. In connection with the trials of a Canadian editor of a different political stripe, he says: “By the implied consent of King, Lords and Commons, he is doomed to speedy shipwreck, unless a merciful Providence should open his eyes in time, and his good genius prompt him to hurl press and types to the bottom of Lake Ontario.” Mackenzie lived quite close to the lake, and his evil wishers must have taken the hint. Every one knows the story of how noblesse oblige was construed into the necessity for an invasion of the printing office, at an hour when no man would be there; how the raiders, in age from thirty-four years downwards, were the flower of that “Canadian nobility” against which the editor never wearied hurling his radical sayings; and how Mrs. Mackenzie, then in her seventy-eighth year, stood trembling in a corner of the office—for the building was home as well—while she witnessed, with fear and indignation, the destruction of her son’s property and the means of her own livelihood. As if the tale could be improved upon, some romancers, telling of the rise of Canada from barbarism to civilization, have 351 adorned it with gross maltreatment of the aged lady by these gentlemen who, with her only to stay them, were naturally sans peur. They should also be without this one reproach, for they were too intent upon pi-ing type and throwing the contents of the office into the bay to trouble about her.

Someone says that a good and true woman is like a Cremona violin; age but increases the worth and sweetens the tone. In the words of Disraeli, this woman’s love had illumined the dark woof of poverty; fate had it in store that that love should “lighten the fetters of the slave” before she died.

The way in which Canadian rebels were treated in prison is to the reader of their experiences a continual reproach to the powers which made them thus suffer. But the American Bastille, according to the records left by Mackenzie, out-did the Canadian. A steep staircase, a ladder and a trap-door fastened by bar and lock, led to a room wherein were the dangling rope and hideous apparatus of death ready waiting for the next unfortunate; beyond the room was Mackenzie’s cell. It was only through this passage-way that mother, children, wife or friends could reach him, where they had to run the gauntlet of coarse jests from brutalized men and the worse than brutal remarks of such women as were prisoners there. The gaoler in this place deserved to be immortalized by Dickens. Of low stature, with an exaggerated hook nose, fleshless and fallen-in cheeks on which nature had begrudged a sufficient skin covering; round, sunken, peering eyes, feline from long watching; nails filthy, like claws forever in the dirt—such was the gaoler. “You felt in regarding him that if cast into the sea he would have more power to pollute it than it would have to purify him.” A fee of thirty-six dollars 352 for three months procured from him the occasional admittance of friends, although the iron doors were freely opened to those who wished to see a real live Canadian rebel. Close confinement and miasma broke Mackenzie’s health in a short time; he could no longer eat the food which his children carried him—it was feared he might be poisoned by the gaol fare—his wife was in delicate health, his mother had reached ninety years, and his mind was torn with anxiety over the illness of a beloved daughter. The other prisoners were allowed occasional days of freedom to visit taverns and roam the town, but no such liberty came to him. “My dear little girl grew worse and worse, she was wasted to a skeleton.... I had followed four of her sisters and a brother to the churchyard, but I might not look upon her. One fine day she was carried ... to the prison, and her mother and I watched her for forty-eight hours, but the gaoler vexed us so that she had to be taken home again, where she was soon in the utmost danger, and when her poor little sister comes to tell me how she is at dusk ... the gaoler will tell her to wait in the public place in the gaol, perhaps for an hour or more, till supper comes, as he can’t be put to the trouble of opening my cage twice.”

Then the poor old mother sickens, and he knows her time has come. He makes every effort to be allowed to see her, and when he has given up hope writes her a truly beautiful letter of farewell. In it he thanks her for all she had done for him, all she has been to him, and that if the wealth of the world were his he would give it to be at her side. “But wealth I have none, and of justice there is but little here.” He tells her of his hopes to put, with his coming liberty, the rest in comfort, but “sorrow fills my heart when I am told that you will not have your 353 aged eyes comforted by the sight.” The majesty of the law, for offence against which he was suffering, was invoked to get him freedom for the desired interview. Under the shadow of a writ of Habeas Corpus ad respondendum, a court at which he was required to appear as a witness was held in his house, and accompanied by his gaoler he was allowed to attend. The magistrate was late in arriving, conveniently cold when he did come, and protracted his sitting so that the desired interview between the dying mother and distressed son might have no interruption, while the sheriff and gaoler waited in the room adjoining the bedroom. The mother summoned all her fortitude, pronounced her last farewell, bade him trust in God and fear not. She never spoke afterwards, and from the windows of the gaol the political prisoner, in an agony which any can understand, with which all can sympathize, saw her funeral pass.

Mackenzie’s consideration towards women did not extend beyond the members of his own family. But an alert providence arranged that he should usually be well met. Some hours after Anderson had been shot, a rebel named Pool called at the house of Mr. James Scott Howard, in Yonge Street, to inquire the whereabouts of the body. Immediately after he left, the first detachment of the rebel army, about fifteen or twenty men, drew up on the lawn in front of the house, wheeled at the word of command, and went away in search of the dead man. The next to be seen were three or four Loyalists hurrying down the road, who said there were five hundred rebels behind them, and as the morning wore on more men were seen and the sound of firing was heard. At eleven o’clock, or thereabouts, another detachment of rebels appeared, headed by the afterwards well-known figure stuffed out 354 with extra coats to be bullet-proof, on a small white horse. To enable the pony to enter the lawn the men wrenched off fence-boards, after which the stuffed man, Mackenzie, entered the house without knocking, took possession of the sitting-room, and ordered dinner for fifty. Mrs. Howard said she could not comply with such an order. Mackenzie took advantage of Mr. Howard’s absence in town to indulge in much abuse of the latter, saying it was high time someone else held the postmastership. Mrs. Howard at length referred him to the servant in the kitchen, and Mackenzie went to see about dinner himself. He and his men appropriated a sheep in process of cooking in a large sugar-kettle, a barrel of beef and a baking of bread. The tool house was made free use of to sharpen their weapons, which consisted of chisels and gouges on pole-ends, hatchets, knives and guns of all descriptions. At two o’clock the rebels took a disorderly departure, leaving a young West Highlander on guard. Mrs. Howard said she was sorry to see so fine a Scotchman turn against his Queen, to which the reply was, “Country first, Queen next.” The fifty rebels had evidently left on account of the flag of truce proceedings, and at half-past three they all returned, headed by Mackenzie. He demanded of Mrs. Howard “where the dinner was,” and her coolness of demeanour and temper exasperated him. He pulled her from her chair to the window, shook his whip over her, and told her to be thankful her house was not in the state in which she saw Dr. Horne’s. Lount privately told Mrs. Howard not to mind Mackenzie, as he was quite beside himself. After they had eaten the much-ordered dinner, the men had some barrels of whiskey on the lawn and their behaviour during the night naturally alarmed the family. The one man-servant had made his escape, saying he feared being taken 355 prisoner by the rebels. The party remained there until Wednesday; the true defence of the place lay in Mrs. Howard’s intrepidity. Her troubles did not end with the departure of the rabble, for her husband, a true Loyalist of the best type, suffered much at the hands of either party. Such grinding between the upper and the nether millstone as he thereafter experienced is a matter of history.

Nathaniel Pearson, a Quaker, one of the most refined and gentle of the gentlest sect, an intelligent farmer and keenly interested in politics, lived in the Aurora district. Some of his Quaker principles were sacrificed to those of Reform, and he rode off to join the insurgents on their way south. He missed them, and to his Quaker mind there was but one honourable thing to do, and that was to give himself up to the Government. During his absence his wife, possessed of as many gifts and attractions as her husband, had to go to Aurora on business, with the result that she was marched to the guard-house between two Loyalist soldiers. She appealed for help to a man who was their neighbour, and who often had been kept in the necessities of life by the Quaker family; but he turned a deaf ear, even when she pleaded on the score of her young baby at home. Her case reached the ears of a man named King, from Orillia, who at once interested himself in her behalf. “Do you tell me you have a young baby at home needing you? Gad, if they had taken my wife that way, they wouldn’t know that the devil had ever been born before!” His interest resulted in her release, and on reaching home she found that Quaker principles were to be forfeited once more. The Loyalists were about, searching for food and arms, and the faithful maid, Betty, determined they should have neither 356 at her employers’ expense. The one gun in the house was hidden in a brush-heap behind the barn, and Betty had barely straightened her back after doing so when she saw a Loyalist on the fence, watching her. A party entered the house, demanding food, and were on their way to the cellar, where a large stock of freshly-cooked provisions was stored, when the faithful Betty once more forswore her sect, declared the cellar empty, and saved her master’s property.

When Captain P. De Grasse left his home on that ever eventful night in December to join the Loyalists in the city he was accompanied by his two daughters, Charlotte and Cornelia, who wished to see him to the borders of the town, so that they could report his safety to their mother. The way lay through uncleared bush, and the time was late at night. They fell in with Matthews and his party, who were on their way to destroy the Don bridge, when Charlotte with great presence of mind suddenly wheeled to the left, made her pony stamp noisily through the mud, and thereby averted Matthew’s notice from her father and her sister. They all succeeded in reaching the city about one o’clock, an exciting ride for two girls under fifteen years of age. In spite of the commotion and signs of fear all about, the girls determined to go back to their mother. The first half of the return journey was in bright moon-light, but the second half contained all the terrors of darkness in a section infested by rebels. They reached their mother at four in the morning, and that same day returned to town with information of the proceedings of the rebels at the Don. Again, on the Wednesday, they crossed the bush to seek their father at the turnpike on Yonge Street; he was not there, and when Cornelia saw the general terror, consequent upon the report that the rebels were five 357 thousand strong at Montgomery’s Tavern, she resolved to proceed there alone and find out the truth. As she passed the rebel lines all seemed amazed to see a little girl on a fiery pony come fearlessly among them, and she could hear them inquire of one another who she was. She reached the wheelwright’s by Montgomery’s without molestation, inquired in a casual manner as to the price of a sled of particular dimensions, promised to give him an answer the next day, turned her horse’s head towards town, when suddenly several men seized the bridle and said, “You are our prisoner.” They kept her nearly an hour while they waited for Mackenzie, who when he did come, amidst general huzzaing, announced “Glorious news! We have taken the Western Mail!” In the booty he had the historical feminine impedimenta which afterwards disguised him for escape, so capturing little girls was quite in the order of things. While the rebels congratulated him and crowded round the coachman and passengers, the doughty Cornelia saw her opportunity, whipped up her pony and made her escape, although fired at several times. After ridding herself of this party she was fired at from Watson’s and summoned to surrender. This but strengthened her nerve, and in time she reached the city, to give a true account of the robbery of the mail and the number and arms of the rebels.

Meantime the Loyalists were making use of Charlotte as a despatch bearer on the Kingston Road. She returned with the answer and then set out for her home. Near a corner of the bush she was fired at by a large party of rebels; both she and her pony were wounded, and the frightened beast jumped the fence; one of the rebels, not to be outwitted, ran across the angle of the bush, got in front of her and fired in her face. 358

The next day Cornelia, once more bent on seeing her father, reached the city in time to follow the troops up Yonge Street on their way to Gallows Hill. This daughter of the regiment was urged by the Chief-Justice to collect for him all the particulars of the engagement, which, cool and undaunted—oblivious of thundering of cannon—she undertook to do, and did.

Her adventures were not yet over, for on her way home she discovered that Matthews had by this time set the Don bridge on fire, and she at once returned to the city to give the alarm. While she was thus occupied another heroine, sometime cook to Sir Francis Bond Head, was engaged in putting the fire out, a work which she did not accomplish before receiving a bullet in her knee. As by this time the bridge was useless, Cornelia left her pony in town and set out on foot on her homeward way at eleven o’clock at night through a district filled with dispersed rebels. The story does not relate the final reunion of this mutually devoted family, but it is to be presumed Charlotte went on calmly cutting bread and butter and Cornelia continued worthy of the great name she bore.

One Deborah, who did not pose as such, tells a modest story of what she saw and omits much of what she did. “I remember that Monday before Montgomery’s. I had been in town for some days, and on that Monday there was great excitement—no one knew exactly what about. At first I thought I would go to the Mackenzies’ for safety, even if it was a long time since I had been there; but when I got half-way to the house it struck me that as my father and brothers had turned against him, since he had come back from England and was all for bloodshed, I had better leave the Mackenzies alone. So I went to a friend 359 farther east, and found her half crazy with fright, swinging her baby above her head, and saying we would take a boat and row over to the island, as the rebels wouldn’t touch us there. But I thought if there was going to be trouble I had better be with my own people; so I started to walk up Yonge Street towards home. I met no one, but every now and then a horseman would rush past, or two or three armed men would be seen together, and by and by I saw a few farmers going in to offer their services to the Government. At Bloor Street I was tired and went into the Red Lion parlour to rest; everything was in great confusion, but nobody spoke to me. In a little while I went on; and at the toll-gate above the Davenport Road I saw the rebels coming over Blueberry Hill opposite. The toll-keeper swung the gates to and ran off to the woods, and I turned up Davenport Road a little way and watched the rebels; they were my friends and neighbours, and it was dreadful to see them. It is said that when they reached the house that Mackenzie set fire to it was deserted, but I know that it looked very ordinary when I passed it, smoke coming out of the chimney, no sign of disturbance. I was frightened and went on, but I heard that when Mackenzie set to work to build a fire in the cupboard of that house some of his supporters were angry, and said they did not come out to burn houses but to fight for their rights, and one, when he saw he was not listened to, threw down his gun and took himself and his sons off to the States.

“When I got home I found father had gone to offer himself to the Government, and everyone was busy preparing food and baking bread. We had once been supporters of Mackenzie, and everybody knew we had turned against him after he came back from England. Some people were, therefore, very bitter against us, and we 360 thought it wise to fill the house with food, leave the place open, barn, grain, everything, so that they could get it all easily, and take the chance of the house therefore not being burned down. So we left everything ready for them, and went to stay at a relative’s farther back in the country.

“There are plenty to say that Moodie was not shot at all. Some declared that he was alive when taken to the tavern and that he would not give in, and it ended in his being trampled to death in the tavern.

“Sheriff Jarvis took the news of the rising coolly. When father was going down Yonge Street to offer himself he met the sheriff, who said, ‘Well, John, what’s the news with you to-day?’ And when father said, ‘There’s great news—Toronto will be taken and burnt, if you don’t stop it,’ the sheriff said, ‘You don’t say so!’ and only half believed him.

“For a long time before the rising I did not go very often to the Mackenzies, for they thought I would spy on them, and father thought I had better leave them alone anyway. We had supported Mackenzie strongly, like the rest of the farmers, before he went to England, and my father and his friends took their turn in watching him for fear the Compact people would spirit him away; but that was when he was all for reform and agitating for our rights. Whatever it was happened to him in England turned everything into fighting, and father wasn’t going to fight against his country. That Mackenzie was the craziest man you ever did see. He wore a wig, and when he got excited—he was always excited, for the matter of that—he would throw it on the floor, or throw it at you if he felt extra pleasant. You’ve heard of the time he was brought home with cheering and torches and great doings, and given the 361 gold chain?6 A fine chain it was, long and thick, and he was very pleased and worked up. He saw me standing by, laughing—for I was excited, too—and he cried at me, ‘Ah, Mary!’ and quick as lightning threw the chain at me and the wig on the floor, and then he flung his arms round his mother’s neck and kissed her.

“Every market day, when business was all done, and before the farmers went home, there would be a crowd round him as he talked from the top of a waggon. He made great speeches, I can tell you. I happened to be there once through a friend of his, who was staying in his house and wanted to hear him, and would not go alone. We turned down by the church, and waited at the market corner below King Street, where Mackenzie was standing in a waggon, talking, and you should have seen how the people listened. Perhaps you know that the Compact had a lot of hangers-on who would do anything they were told for the soup, clothes, and stuff that was given them, and we used to call them ‘soupets,’ like the bits of bread you put in soup to sop it up. As Mackenzie was talking, suddenly the vestry door was thrown open, and out rushed a crowd of soupets, caught hold of the tongue of Mackenzie’s waggon, and ran off with him towards the bay. He just stood there, waiting, I suppose, till the farmers got over their surprise. But the soupets nearly had him ducked in the bay before the farmers came to their senses.”

However, there were some whose principles were not changed by Mackenzie’s bloodthirstiness; we have one (Mrs. Dew, then Miss Betty Duffield) who is still proud to tell the tale of how she pinned on the white badges. “I was staying with the Leonard Watsons, who lived near Montgomery’s tavern, when the troubles came to a head, and 362 with my own hands I tied on the badges of white cotton worn by some of our fighting men. On that Wednesday morning I saw Mackenzie ride from the direction of the tavern just as the sound of music was heard coming from the city. Mackenzie halted near our house and exclaimed, ‘Are these our friends?’ meaning those whom he expected from the other districts; but he was soon convinced that the music belonged to the loyalist militia coming up Yonge Street. I am sorry to say that while Mackenzie never could be accused of cowardice in so far as his tongue was concerned, his fighting qualities were not so assured, for I myself saw him fling off his cloak and gallop away.7 Mr. Leonard Watson found it necessary to try to make his escape. Mrs. Watson and the daughters went to a neighbour’s, carrying some of their valuables with them, as they were afraid the militia would burn the house down. Peter Watson eventually reached the United States. But I stood by the house, and when the militia came up they riddled it with bullets; they ransacked everything, upset anything they touched, and broke nearly all the furniture. But part of this damage was probably done by ruffians who had taken the opportunity to follow the militia for the sake of plunder. Watson’s horses were appropriated, a tall dark man taking one, and a short red-headed man another. Someone proposed burning the house down, and very likely this would have been done had I not happened to notice an officer riding up. I accosted him, and he turned out to be one of the Governor’s aides. He drew the attention of his superior, who kindly asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted protection to the property. He immediately told me to get him paper, which 363 I did, and handed to him as he sat in his saddle. He wrote, “Do no further injury to this house,” signed his name, and told me to show it to anyone offering further molestation. A few days afterwards I went to Darlington in behalf of the Watson family, carrying money for Peter Watson to enable him to reach the States from there. I had to walk part of the way, and I remember when passing a large block of woods a man came out and timidly inquired if I had seen anyone on the road. He looked the picture of misery and nearly starved. The woods were being scoured on each side of the road by men on horseback, and I suppose that poor fellow was captured.

“While those taken were in prison they amused themselves by carving various articles in wood, and I have yet in my possession a small maple box, beautifully made and finished, presented to me by Leonard Watson. On the cover is my name, some verses are on the sides, and on the bottom ‘April 12th, 1838, alas for Lount and Matthews.’”

“When Sir John’s order came for all the troops to be sent east, Colonel Foster remonstrated; but the troops had to go, and he was left in command of the sentries, sick soldiers, women and children at the Fort. Under these circumstances the militia came to the front, did their best, fired anywhere, and we were more afraid of them than of the enemy. We were retiring for the night when a loud noise attracted my attention, and I looked out of the window to see Colonel FitzGibbon on horseback half-way up our steps.” FitzGibbon omitted no chance to warn and thus save life and property. “He called out, ‘The rebels are upon us, and this is one of the houses marked for burning,’ and clattered off again. My husband and his son were soon on their way to the Fort. Our household was 364 left undisturbed, but I had orders to answer the door myself should the rioters come; the servants were not to show themselves, and as I was young and fearless then I rather enjoyed the prospect of excitement. In fact, I was distinctly disappointed that nobody did come. For the next week my husband took what rest he could get on a gun-carriage at the Fort, and I was never in bed regularly myself during that period. He came to see us once, and I recall my amusement at watching him hungrily devour the leg of a goose, an utterly absurd sight when one remembers the style of man he was, and the many courses of his ordinary dinners. I was thankful we even had that leg to give him, as every bit of meat we could get might be seized for the hungry militia.

“I do not see why unpleasant remarks should have been made on the score of a boat having been provided for the safety of the Governor’s family. Lady Head seems to be mentioned very little in the history of her husband’s administration, no doubt owing to the quietness of the life she led. But she was extremely pleasant, and much liked by those who knew her.

“Mrs. Draper and I and some others declined to go on board the boat in the bay on which a good many families were hurried for safety. Another boat had been provided for some citizens’ families, but in the middle of the night despatches came down from Colonel Foster to be sent by boat to Sir John Colborne, and immediately everything was haste and dismay. The people and their boxes were unceremoniously bundled on the wharf, and all was confusion, while the boat went off on its errand. But those on the Government boat did not omit to make public the unpleasant predicament of their guard on board. The distinguished duty of protecting so many wives and 365 families of officials was given to one gentleman. Some one on board was not too frightened to have spirit left to play a practical joke. The poor man’s clothes were removed after he had gone to bed, and then the alarm was sounded—you may imagine his discomfort of mind and body.”

Articles of apparel were frequently pressed into active and public service then and later, and Mrs. Ogle Gowan, notable as a true Deborah, conspicuously contributed her share in connection with the Rebellion Losses’ Bill; her enthusiasm had not grown cold in years. Lord Elgin, equally misunderstood with Durham and Sydenham, made a futile attempt to land at Brockville; a black flag, bearing the inscription in white letters, “Down with Elgin and his rebel-paying ministry,” was hoisted on the dock, a banner known then and ever since as Mrs. Gowan’s petticoat, but it is likely that it merely earned its name because designed and made by her. The lady was unconsciously making a link in the much-discussed history of the jacques, and illustrated one meaning of her husband’s paper, The Antidote. It is said the paper had as motto, “The Antidote is set afloat to cure poisonous treason.” Ogle R. Gowan, staunch Irish-Orange Tory as he was, was a herald of Responsible Government—and suffered for it—a prophet as to ’37, chief promoter in the first movement which resulted in Canadian volunteers, father and founder of Orangeism here, and although a strong supporter of Colborne was antagonistic to the methods of Francis Bond Head; in his military career he was chiefly conspicuous at Prescott, and carried the buckshot and bayonet record of that engagement to his grave. To such a man Mrs. Gowan, a womanly woman of great culture and heroic spirit, was a true helpmeet. 366

The heroic spirit was patent in many ways. A colonel prominent in the Canadian service received the following: “Mrs. M. wishes to be remembered to you, and prays that the day may come when your hands will place the British standard on the top of the citadel of Washington, the capital of the democratic mob.”

Early in the century a handsome stranger was an honoured guest at Quebec mess dinners, so fraternally fond of the military and military life that the inference is if fighting were on the cards he too would be ready. But at one of the dinners the gentleman was convicted of being a lady in disguise. The heroines of Upper Canada in ’37 satisfied their warlike propensities by running their tea-chest lead into bullets, making a Canadian question de joupons, or firing a feu de joie at home. When one pretty girl did the last, on the return of father and brothers, Brown Bess unhandsomely kicked her flat and she found herself prone on that Sol Canadien, terre chérie, which she so dearly loved. Mothers in Israel! Could they have foreseen a certain date in ’97, the year next prominent to ’37 in the Canadian horoscope, they and Brown Besses in conjunction might have furnished material for a legend of the female Brutus. For a certain Tory child of those days who has since developed into a renowned statesman has said, “My earliest memory in life is of the women of my family casting bullets in the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837, I am afraid on the wrong side.”

Mixed politics in one family often led to strained relations: “When I went to my brother John’s to ask him to turn out he was not at home, and his wife said she did not intend him to be at home, and that he would not and should not go. I then asked her for his arms, for we were in great need of them, but Mrs. John said she knew 367 nothing about arms. I went into another room for his rifle, which I could not find, but I saw his sword hanging by the head of his bed. I took it down, but as I did so my sister-in-law caught hold of the hilt and jerked it partly away. To save myself from being stabbed I was obliged to pull her close to me, moving towards the door; I wished myself clear of her and the sword, but dared not let go until we got out the door, when I gave her a push and seized the hilt. I walked off with the sword, but instead of following me she ran into the house, calling for the rifle, the children after her. It was a truly ridiculous sight, to see one of Her Britannic Majesty’s officers, armed, running away from his sister-in-law. But run I did, and she told me afterwards that the only reason she did not fire was that I was in motion and she was so greatly excited she was afraid she might not kill me!”

The Canada Museum was a journal much quoted in its day by domestic and American newspapers; its editorials were considered, by editors of both sides of politics, to be temperate, patriotic and logical. Published in Berlin, chiefly in German, partly in English, it naturally was an important influence in Canada West, and its editor, Mr. H. W. Peterson, had an acknowledged and deservedly high standing. He was heartily in love with the Union Jack, as heartily opposed to the Stars and Stripes in Canadian connection, was a Conservative in the true sense of the word, and abominated Toronto rule as utterly as any so-called rebel. But it appears that the guiding hand of this influential paper belonged to a wife and mother, one who had made herself mistress of colonial politics and was eminently qualified to express herself. One to whom Mrs. Peterson was best known says: “She possessed literary 368 abilities of a fine order, with the soundest judgment in every matter. Mr. Peterson, a discreet editor, temperately supported the Government of the day, conceiving that wrongs should be constitutionally redressed by the people through their representatives, without force of arms. Mrs. Peterson concurred in all his views; but while she deprecated bloodshed and the resort to force, she had a woman’s heart added to the courage of her convictions. Her natural benevolence induced her to state, when discussing the question of Mackenzie’s flight and the reward offered for him, that if his journey took him through Waterloo and he called on her for aid and comfort she would undoubtedly give it, and not disclose the fact of his presence until he had had time to move on farther. Woman first, politician afterward, such action would have done no violence to her Conservative principles; but it would have been entirely on her own responsibility, as her husband was a magistrate and could countenance no charity of that kind.”

A much used saying is not necessarily trite. The gentle hand which rocked the cradle could guide the pen when danger threatened the state.

The Canadian Deborah of ’12 or ’37 was not learned in history, nor was she conscious of her part as tenon in that arc de triomphe in the history of nations, that mortised arch of Frank and Saxon whereof the pillars are Hastings and Quebec. She knew but little, perhaps never heard, of those countless hordes who swarmed over Apennines and Pyrenees, nor yet of Clovis, nor of Cedric. She was no seer and could not foretell the many who were destined, after conquest of forest, to crowd the valley of the Peace, make homes on the slopes of our statesman’s “sea of 369 mountains,” and be lost, an equally countless host, who can tell, in the as yet hidden recesses of the untamed remnant of a continent. “Mine all the past, and all the future mine.”

Canadian women, like their famous sisters of Liége, held, and hold, their distaff and their God; but, with few exceptions, unlike the wise ones there, they made no grand bakings of bread in order to be ready for the earliest comer, friend or foe, in the times when shadows spoiled the beauty of the Canadian day. No women of Saragossa they; but each has for record, “She hath done what she could.” 370

ERRATUM.

On page 171, 8th line from foot of page, for “Colonel Foster, Adjutant-General,” read “Colonel Foster, Assistant Adjutant-General.” 371

In the Days of the Canada Company
The Story of the Settlement of the Huron Tract, and a View of the Social Life of the Period.

By Robina and Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars
With an Introduction by Rev. Principal Grant, D.D., LL.D. In one volume, 494 pages, freely illustrated, price $2.00.

CONTENTS:—Spirit of the Times—The Father of the Company—Canada as the Company Found It—The Face of the Land—From Champlain to Gooding—The Kings of the Canada Company—The Colborne Clique—Gairbraid—Lunderston—Meadowlands—The Canada Company vs. The People—The People vs. The Canada Company—A Social Pot-Pourri—The Heart of Huron—The Bonnie Easthopes—The Cairn.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS

“Strong lights and shadows fill these pictures of the early settlers’ day, and the Misses Lizars, in handling large masses of material, have maintained the balance of their picture so well that it is something more than the most forcible and striking piece of word-painting in Canadian literature. The scenes portrayed in this book might be compared with some cinematographe views lately seen in the city, for not only are these flowery-waistcoated, or red-shirted, ancestors, as the case may be, vivid pieces of brush-work; they seem almost possessed of the miracle of movement. We fancy we hear them speak to us, and when Tiger Dunlop strides across the stage in his extraordinary regimentals—roomy grey homespun, with a large check, the big Scotch features surmounted by a shock of red hair, and guarded by the broadest of bonnets, one can almost hear his friendly roar.”—London Advertiser.

“No more entertaining book has ever been written about early life in British North America than ‘In the Days of the Canada Company,’ by Robina and Kathleen M. Lizars. No attempt, the authors tell us, has been made at historical writing; their work is certainly not a history book, but it most assuredly is history of a far more rare and precious kind than the chronological record of events which usually goes by that name. There will be many histories, and good histories too, given to the world before another series of such vivid pictures of the very lives of men and women who made history in a formative period of a country is presented.”—Montreal Daily Witness.

WILLIAM BRIGGS, - Publisher, - TORONTO, ONT. Montreal: C. W. Coates. Halifax: S. F. Huestis. 372

Canadian Historical Literature.
(PUBLISHED IN 1896-97.)

That the impulse of recent years to gather together and publish the historical records of the various localities has borne fruit, is amply attested in the following list of publications, all from our own presses. We commend to Public Libraries and to all intelligent readers the placing on their shelves of as many as possible of these valuable works:—

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publisher.

WILLIAM BRIGGS,
Richmond St. West, Toronto.
Montreal: C. W. COATES. Halifax: S. F. HUESTIS.

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