Peacemaker

History

Wounded and angry at what he considered an intolerable affront, Durham had placed the reins of government in the firm hands of that fine old soldier, Sir John Colborne, and had gone to speak with his enemies in the gate. Not only was the cause of Canada left bleeding; but as soon as Durham’s back was turned, rebellion broke out once more. This second outbreak arose from the support afforded the Canadian revolutionists by American ‘sympathizers.’ The full story of the ‘Hunters’ Lodges’ has never been told, and the sentiment animating that organization has been quite naturally misunderstood and misrepresented by Canadian historians. In the thirties of the nineteenth century western New York was the ‘frontier,’ and it was peopled by wild, illiterate frontiersmen, familiar with the use of the rifle and the bowie-knife, bred in the Revolutionary tradition and nourished on Fourth of July oratory to a hatred of everything British.

The memories of 1812 were fresh in every mind. These simple souls were told by their own leaders and by political refugees from Canada, such as William Lyon Mackenzie, that the two provinces were groaning under the yoke of the ‘bloody Queen of England,’ that they were seething with discontent, that all they needed was a little assistance from free, chivalrous Americans and the oppressed colonists would shake off British tyranny for ever. Appeal was made to less exalted sentiment. Each patriot was to receive a handsome grant of land in the newly gained territory. Accordingly, in the spring and summer of 1838, a large scheme to give armed support to the republicans of Canada was secretly organized all along the northern boundary of the United States.

It was a secret society of ‘Hunters’ Lodges,’ with ritual, passwords, degrees. Each ‘Lodge,’ was an independent local body, but a band of organizers kept control of the whole series from New York to Detroit. The ‘Hunters’ are uniformly called ‘brigands’ and ‘banditti’ by the British regular officers who fought them, and the terms have been handed on without critical examination by Canadian historians; but not with justice. Misled though they were, the ‘Hunters’ looked upon Canada only as Englishmen looked upon Greece, or Poland, or Italy struggling for political freedom: the sentiment, though misdirected, was anything but ignoble. Acting upon this sentiment, a Polish refugee, Von Shoultz, led a small force of ‘Hunters,’ boys and young men from New York State, in an attack on Prescott. (…)

All through the summer of 1838 the rebel leaders in the United States had been plotting for a new insurrection. They were by no means convinced that their cause was lost. Disaffection was kept alive in parts of Lower Canada and the habitants were fed with hopes that the armed assistance of American sympathizers would ensure success for a second attempt at independence. It may be the sheerest accident of dates; but Durham took ship at Quebec on the first of November, and Dr Robert Nelson was declared president of the Canadian republic at Napierville on the fourth. A copy of Nelson’s proclamation preserved in the Archives at Ottawa furnishes clear evidence of the aims and intentions of the Canadian radicals: they wanted nothing less than a separate, independent republic, and they solemnly renounced allegiance to Great Britain. At two points near the American boundary-line, Napierville and Odelltown, the loyal militia and regulars clashed with the rebels and dispersed them. Once more the jails were filled, which the mercy of Durham had emptied. Once more the cry was raised for rebel blood, and the winter sky was red with the flame of burning houses which had sheltered the insurgents.

Hundreds of French Canadians fled across the border; and from this year dates the immigration from Quebec into New England which has had such an influence on its manufacturing cities and such a reaction on the population which remained at home. Another fruit of this ill-starred rebellion was the haunting dirge of Gérin-Lajoie, Un Canadien errant. Twelve of the leaders were {30} tried for treason, were found guilty, and were hanged in Montreal. Some of these had been pardoned once for their part in the rising of the previous year; some were implicated in plain murder; all were guilty; but the chill deliberate formalities of the gallows, the sufferings of the wretched men, their bearing on the scaffold, the vain efforts to obtain reprieve, produced a strong revulsion of popular feeling in their favour. By the common law of nations they were traitors; but they are still named and accounted ‘patriots.’

At Toronto, Lount and Matthews, two of the rebel leaders of Upper Canada, were hanged in the jail-yard on April 12, 1839. A petition for mercy was set aside; Lount’s wife on her knees begged the lieutenant-governor to spare her husband’s life, but in vain. Here, too, public feeling was chiefly pity for the unfortunate. But these executions did not satisfy the extremists. The lieutenant-governor, Sir George Arthur, who had long been governor of the penal settlement in Tasmania, was avowedly in favour of further severities; and vengeful loyalists clamoured in support. All Durham’s work seemed undone. The political outlook of the Canadas in 1839 was, if anything, darker and more hopeless than it had been two years before.

Almost as grave as the political condition of the country was the financial situation. The rebellions of ’37 coincided with a wide-spread financial crisis in the United States, which had its inevitable reaction upon all business in Canada, and matters had gone from bad to worse. By the summer of 1839 Upper Canada—the present rich and prosperous Ontario—was on the verge of bankruptcy. (…)

No inconsiderable part of the governor-general’s task was a campaign of education in the ABC of responsible government. Those elementary ideas of party government now regarded as axiomatic had to be taught painfully to our rude forefathers in legislation. That the government should have a definite head or leader in the Assembly, who should speak for the government, introduce and defend its measures; that the officials of the government other than those holding permanent posts should form one body—a ministry—which should automatically relinquish office and power when it could no longer command a majority in the legislature, were practically new and by no means welcome ideas to the old-time law-makers of Canada. The natural corollary that the opposition also should be organized under a definite leader, who, on defeating the government, should assume the responsibility of forming a cabinet, was equally novel.

Such a check on reckless criticism was sadly needed. Of the process by which Thomson achieved his ends even his fullest biography gives little information. There must have been endless conferences of homespun, honest farmers like Willson, men of breeding like Robinson, brilliant lawyers like Sullivan, plain soldiers like MacNab, with the little, sickly, understanding governor of the brilliant eyes, the charming manner, and the persuasive tongue. Of all the varied explaining, discussing, initiating, little record remains. But the work was done and the results are manifest to the world. The persuasive little man succeeded in persuading the law-makers of Upper Canada that the way out of their difficulties lay not through division but through union. He persuaded them to a change of status which was a reversal to the old status prior to the Constitutional Act, and also a prelude to that larger union of the British colonies in North America which was destined to embrace half the continent.

Having succeeded almost beyond belief in the first part of his mission, Thomson turned his attention to the next vexed question. This was the question of the Clergy Reserves. On this subject much ink had been spilt and much hard feeling engendered; and it still provokes not a little ill-directed sarcasm. The whole matter is in danger of being misunderstood, and eighteenth-century lawmakers are blamed for not possessing ideas a hundred years ahead of their times.

By the terms of the Constitutional Act of 1791 one-seventh of the public lands thereafter to be granted were devoted to ‘the Support and Maintenance of a Protestant Clergy.’ The provision was due, it seems, to the king himself, pious, homely ‘Farmer George’; and to men of his mind no provision could have seemed more natural or right. ‘Establishment’ had been the rule from time immemorial. The Church of England was ‘established,’ that is, provided by law with an income in England, in Wales, and in Ireland. The ‘Kirk’ was similarly ‘established’ in Scotland. In British America itself the Church of Rome was ‘established’ very firmly in Lower Canada. What could be more natural for a Protestant monarch than to make provision for a ‘Protestant Clergy’ in a British colony settled by British immigrants, and purchased with such outpouring of British blood and British treasure? And what more ready and easy way could be found of providing for that ‘clergy’ than by endowing it with waste lands which taxed no one and which would increase in value as the country became settled? In its essence this endowment was a recognition of the value of the Christian religion in preserving the state.

But trouble arose almost at once in the interpretation of the terms ‘Protestant’ and ‘clergy.’ Was not the Church of Scotland ‘Protestant’ as well as the Church of England? Were not the various species of ‘Dissenters’ also the most vigorous of ‘Protestants’? On the other side it was asked, Was not the term ‘clergy’ applied exclusively to the ministers of the Church of England? It could not apply to any religious teachers outside the pale; those outside the pale never dreamed of applying it to themselves. Naturally other denominations wished to share in this most generous endowment; and quite as naturally the Church of England desired to stand by the letter of the law and hold what it had of legal right. Some extremists opposed any and all establishments, holding that the church should be independent of the state. Let the endowment be used for the sorely pinched cause of education, and let the ministers of all denominations depend solely on the Christian liberality of their people. (…)

By 1817 the grievance had become clamant; and when that inquisitive agitator, Robert Gourlay, asked the farmers of Upper Canada what hindered settlement, he received the answer—Clergy Reserves. Two years later the Assembly asked for a return of the lands leased and the revenue derived from them. Up to this time the annual revenue had not exceeded £700. In the same year, 1819, the ‘Kirk’ parish of Niagara applied for a grant of £100, and the law-officers of the Crown supported the claim. This decision stirred up the Anglicans. They formed themselves into a corporation in each province to oversee the administration of the Clergy Reserves. Ownership in the lands was to be obtained, if obtained at all, through the establishment and endowment of separate rectories, as provided for in the original act. Why the directing minds among the Anglicans did not adopt this ready and easy method of obtaining at least the bulk of the disputed land is something of a mystery. Apparently they adopted a policy of all or none. Only in 1836, just before the outbreak of the rebellions, when political feeling was at fever pitch, did Sir John Colborne, at the bidding of Bishop Strachan, sign patents for forty-four parishes to be erected in Upper Canada. The total amount of land devoted to this purpose was seventeen thousand acres. ‘This,’ declared Lord Durham, ‘is regarded by all other teachers of religion in the country as having at once degraded them to a position of legal inferiority to the clergy of the Church of England; and it has been most warmly resented. In the opinion of many persons, this was the chief predisposing cause of the recent insurrection, and it is an abiding and unabated cause of discontent. (…)

When the session was over Thomson posted back to Montreal, assembled his Special Council, and set to work, in the rôle of {50} benevolent despot, introducing many much-needed reforms. The wheels of government had been definitely blocked by racial hatred; the constitution was still suspended. ‘There is positively no machinery of government,’ Thomson wrote in a private letter. ‘Everything is to be done by the governor and his secretary.’ There were no heads of departments accessible. When a vacancy occurred, the practice was to appoint two men to fill it, one French and the other English. There were joint sheriffs, and joint crown surveyors, who worked against each other. Ably seconded by the chief justice Stuart, the energetic governor succeeded in reforming the procedure of the higher courts of judicature and in establishing district courts after the model of Upper Canada. Altogether, twenty-one ordinances were passed which had the force of law. They were indispensable, in Thomson’s opinion, in paving the way for the Union. He was under no illusions as to his methods. ‘Nothing but a despotism could have got them through. A House of Assembly, whether single or double, would have spent ten years at them,’ he writes, with perfect truth. (…)

Of Baldwin’s personal integrity there was no doubt; but the honest man had been used as a tool. If the intrigue had succeeded, all Sydenham’s labour must have been lost, the Union would have been wrecked in the launching, and the country thrown back into chaos. Fortunately the intrigue failed. Baldwin passed over to the opposition, but he was unable to lead the Reformers of Upper Canada into killing government measures such as extension of the main highways, reform of the usury laws, establishment of a comprehensive municipal system. They followed the sounder leadership of Hincks and supported Sydenham in his wise efforts to promote the country’s good.

The whole session was a series of crises. Sydenham stood pledged to the cardinal principle of democratic government, that the majority must rule. Parliamentary procedure, as they have it in England, was a new thing in Canada. In Great Britain the government does not always resign when defeated on a vote, nor does the opposition defeat the government when it has no power to form an alternative government. The only consistent opposition was Neilson’s band of French Canadians, and their policy was pure obstruction and their object to separate the two provinces once more. (…)

Critics found the first session of the new parliament of Canada a ‘do-nothing-but-talk’ session. There was indeed a flow of eloquence in various kinds during the first few weeks until the different parties found the proper relations and the serious work of legislation began. Constructive measures of the first importance became law in due course. Sydenham’s own words sum up his achievement. ‘With a most difficult opening, almost a minority, with passions at boiling heat, and prejudices such as I never saw, to contend with, I have brought the Assembly by degrees into perfect order ready to follow wherever I may lead; have carried all my measures, avoided or beaten off all disputed topics, and have got a ministry with an avowed and recognized majority, capable of doing what they think right, and not to be upset by my successor. I have now accomplished all that I set much value on; for whether the rest be done now, or some sessions hence, matters little. The five great works I aimed at have been got through: the establishment of a board of works with ample powers; the admission of aliens; the regulation of the public lands ceded by the Crown under the Union Act; and lastly this District Council Bill.’ The financial difficulties of the province had been met by guaranteed Imperial loan, and progress had been made in remedying the evils of pauper immigration. Not often does a constructive statesman live to see his labours so richly rewarded by success. (1)

Resources

Notes

1. Archibald MacMechan, “Popular Govrerment. A Chronicle of the Union of 1841” (1916), Toronto, Glasgow, Brook and Company

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Law is our Passion

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This entry was last updated: October 29, 2016