The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada

series.

PREFACE

To tell a story and to interpret a character have been the two principal objects in writing this book. The reason for binding both purposes together into a single history will become more apparent, it is hoped, during the course of the reading. Mackenzie’s character, in any case, and the story of how the rebellion came about, now seem to the author to be bound up with each other more closely than he would previously have guessed. As Henry James once remarked in speaking of the novel, those vivid glimpses one sometimes has of a person as subject seem to require one to select and piece out and imagine the situations and subsidiary characters most capable of bringing out all the subject’s possibilities. Since the writing of history is a more intuitively and even arbitrarily selective affair than one usually likes to admit, perhaps I may be forgiven the temerity of using Henry James’s observation as some sort of excuse for the kind of history-writing attempted here; specifically, for the attempt to bring a subject to life by involving him rather more completely in the context of a selective account of the events and the characters of his times than would be tolerable if this book were offered as a full-scale legitimate biography.

My interest in Mackenzie began as part of a general study of the role of the editor-politician in Canadian history. Surprisingly enough, in the case of Mackenzie, one of the most important of them all, there was no modern study or biography available, and indeed, the only biography published to date was that written by Mackenzie’s son-in-law in 1862. By the time I had finished reading the relevant source material, I felt impelled to attempt a short study of Mackenzie’s life. It is as a sketch of my subject, evoked and worked out in the context of an historical narrative, that The Firebrand has been written.

I should like to thank Colonel Charles Lindsey for his helpful suggestions and for permission to use the Lindsey Papers, which contain the principal collection of unprinted material relating to Mackenzie. I am most grateful to Mrs. H.M. Lay, Mackenzie’s granddaughter, for telling me a number of lively and illuminating stories from the Mackenzie family history. For their kind assistance in finding material, I should like to thank Dr. G.W. Spragge and Dr. Margaret Banks of the Ontario Archives, Mr. P.C. Band, the staff of Mackenzie House, Miss Violet Taylor and the staff of the University of Toronto Library, and Miss Olive Newcombe of the Dundas Historical Society Museum. Dr. W. Stewart Wallace provided me with some excellent advice and guidance at the beginning of my labours; Professor G.S. French of McMaster University has advised me on a great many matters and was good enough to furnish me with some unpublished material that bears on the conflict between Mackenzie and Ryerson; Professor Sydney Jackman of Bates College, who has been preparing a study of Sir Francis Head, has put at my disposal his solution to the problem of Head’s appointment to Upper Canada; the Reverend P.A. Sawyer, rector of Thorold, and Professors Gerald Craig and James Eayrs of the University of Toronto, have read the manuscript in its earlier stages and offered much useful criticism; Professor D.G. Creighton kindly undertook to read the manuscript in its next-to-final form, at short notice, but at a stage when certain of his suggestions for improvement could still be acted upon; my colleague Dr. C.M. Johnston was good enough to read the manuscript in proof and offer a number of suggestions. For these several kind services, as well as for the less specifiable but not less welcome help of friends, and for the inspiration of my former masters in Canadian history, I wish to offer my sincere, if inadequate, thanks.

I should like further to record a debt of gratitude to McMaster University for a research grant that enabled me to complete the book, and in particular to the head of the Department of History, Professor E.T. Salmon, for undertaking a portion of my own teaching duties during the final stages of the book’s production. One of my former students, Miss Nancy Nablo, has assisted me with the proofreading, and undertook the preparation of the index, for which I am most grateful.

My sister and I wish to acknowledge our use of the John Ross Robertson Collection in the Toronto Public Library, which afforded an invaluable preparation for the sketches for the wood engravings on her part, and on mine for the setting of certain scenes in the narrative. I have also used a number of selections from Landmarks of Toronto, for which permission I am indebted to the executors of the John Ross Robertson Estate.

I am obliged to J.M. Dent & Sons (Canada) Limited for permission to quote an extract from Building the Canadian Nation by George W. Brown.

My wife has provided me with the advantage of her knowledge and research in the history of Upper Canada and, more particularly, with the use of several small unpublished studies she did in 1953 of certain episodes in Mackenzie’s career. She has both inspired and criticized my work at every stage of the writing. And, not least of her labours of love, she has decoded my hieroglyphic pencillings and typed them into fair copy.

William Kilbourn

Dundas, Ontario, Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, 1956

PREFACE TO THE

1964 EDITION

Since this book first appeared some new studies of certain aspects of Mackenzie’s career and of the history of Upper Canada have been published. While these would not cause me, if I were rewriting this book, to change its general interpretation and point of view, I should place a slightly different emphasis on several points and add some things I have not said here. Except for the addition of the Epilogue, written for the London edition of 1958 and included in the second Canadian printing in 1960, the text of the original edition has been changed and corrected in only minor ways, however, though I have revised the bibliography and the bibliographical note.

William Kilbourn

Toronto, 1964

INTRODUCTION

There was a time when Canadians found politics the most exciting thing in the world, and, next to religion and clearing land, the most important. The reader’s father or grandfather, if he was born in Canada, will remember neighbouring Grits and Tories who crossed the street to avoid speaking to each other. He will perhaps recall a day in the schoolyard when his family’s support of a particular party cost him a face-wash in the snow. Indeed, it is not wholly impossible that his grandfather was one of the gentlemen called from his bed by the church bells one winter morning to defend Toronto from rebellion, or one of the farm lads who shouldered musket or pitchfork to march against the city from the villages and farms of York and Simcoe and the counties to the west. For there was a rebellion once, and even something of a battle, on a country slope near what is now the northern terminal of the Toronto subway. Politics came to that, even in Canada.

The affair ended, of course, in comic ignominy. The battle itself was something that even the most ardent Canadian nationalist had best try to forget. As for the permanent effect of the rebels’ downfall, it appears to have left the country without a strong radical tradition. It seems possible, a century later, that the lack of a successful revolution has some connection with the unimaginative and sober caution in which Canadian politics have become becalmed. The political issues of 1837 — real ones despite their dénouement — have been exchanged for a permanent gloat over the gross national product. The old passions have given way to a compulsive self-congratulation on the achievement of a nationhood of whose existence there is still some cause for doubt. The failure of the rebellion may even have deprived Canada of a political folklore; the Laurentian shield, with due respect to the mining prospectors and the Group of Seven, is no substitute for a race of gods and heroes.

Considerations of the sequel to 1837, however, need not much disturb our purposes here. The path of this story does not lead to the four-lane highway of Canadian national development. Its protagonist represents a way we did not take. He is the sort of character we most emphatically did not become. Canadians are a people of the law rather than the prophets, and those few of them who are genuinely seized with the spirit could do worse than prepare to pay the penalty of ostracism or exile or madness. William Lyon Mackenzie, for a lifetime of passionate unselfishness and outspoken denunciation of public wrong, was rewarded in some measure with all three.

As for Mackenzie’s opponents, the other principals of our story, it is doubtful whether they, any more than he, made a truly creative and positive political contribution to the building of the Canadian nation. Their lives have little connection with those later achievements by which a great trinity of Sam Smiles-ian Liberal prime ministers have given us a title deed to the twentieth century. The members of the old Family Compact did little but dig their heels in against the day when Canada should achieve that solid wealth and solid worth of which the distillers, like the rest of us, are so justly proud.

What, after all, of Bishop Strachan and the young Tories he schooled, what else of Strachan the politician can one say than that it is the most difficult thing in the world to imagine there ever was such a man. Politically he believed (as Walter Bagehot said of Lord Eldon) in everything it is impossible to believe in.

The political ideals and practice of a Mackenzie or a Strachan have not shaped the last hundred years in Canadian history. These men are not really among the makers of Canada, nor are they entirely fitting subjects for Parliamentary pedestals and tourist piety and the rigid bronze company of the civic park. If we are to plot Mackenzie and his enemies on the main graph of Canadian history, it is largely as useful challenges who have long since met their responses. Or perhaps we may choose to remember them as ancient bogeymen, whose ambitions to turn us into a North American Chile or Peru were once and for all strangled by the strong clean hands of Lord Durham and Robert Baldwin.

It will even be possible, in most of this story, to ignore the graph that plots the growth of nationhood and responsible government. There are other things in history besides the main chance (or what the present has decided the main chance to be). The historian has other jobs besides tracking down and making posthumous awards to the men who turn out to have done most for their descendants. People, after all, are ultimately more interesting for what they are, than for what they cause. A person is to be valued, finally, for the quantity and quality of being in him, rather than for what he does or does not lead to. And the same can be said of the shapes and sense of the places that he has inhabited.

It can be said without apology, then, that this story does not lead anywhere. It is cut off from the present by a break in the chain of consequence, as well as by the gulf of time. It must suffice that its actors, along with their buildings and their homely treasures and their very landscapes, are as earth-sunk and dust-stopped as the liveliest subject that ever caught Krieghoff’s eye or brush. They are quite vanished with all the early American crinolines and winters and Indians of Currier and Ives. They are gone the way of the coopers’ and dressmakers’ and children’s hoops, the buggies and broughams and sheds in the churchyard. Like the hunters of passenger pigeon, they are extinct. The splendid isolation of the single colonial colonnade once shone luminous and white from each prominence along the Niagara frontier; but, like the four quarters of the moon in the old calendars, the tall mansions and their light have long since set forever.

It must suffice that a world and its people are utterly gone from the face of things — and that we shall try for a time to recall a part of it. We shall try to see its people alive and spontaneous in their acting and responding, free as they once really were to make other choices than the single one in which the passing of time has frozen them.

Particularly it is in their politics that we are to watch them. If we are to make abstractions at all, it will not be for the graph, but in search of man the political species. We pretend, in fact, to nothing less than a scrutiny of politics. The pretence of anyone to do anything of the kind is, of course, a vast one. Politics is one of the oldest and subtlest of all the arts, and both the noblest and most soiled of the professions. It runs the whole scale of human seriousness from Thucydidean tragedy to fifth-rate light opera. It bears the marks both of the back-room poker game and the quest for the good life. And it is the only fit calling for the philosopher kings of Utopia.

Thoughts of this sort might more often give the professional political scientist cause to hesitate as he confidently plies his calipers and his computing machinery; might well stagger the amateur historian a little from the smooth path of his style and his slim volumes. But there is a still more humbling consideration. It is one that must move any student of public affairs to awe, and also perhaps the one that most tempts him on. The pursuit and direction of power to desirable ends is an occupation to which Lenin, St. Louis, and Lorenzo the Magnificent each devoted a lifetime. It is that concern which binds into a single company Gladstone, Sam Gompers, and the Patriarch of Constantinople; Solomon, Gandhi, and the pupil of Aristotle; Genghis Khan, Queen Victoria, Boss Tweed, and Mackenzie King; and, possessed of more of the Old Nick than most and more than their share of unsuccess, Wat Tyler, Tiberius Gracchus, Sam Adams, and William Cobbett. Somewhere among the crankier and shabbier ranks of this last contingent, we shall discover the rebel of 1837.

Real people, and political types, we shall be looking for. But, of course, we shall eventually have to come to terms with the graph too. We shall have to follow what there is of the line that leads from William Lyon Mackenzie and his rivals down to us, and back again beyond them to the distances of their own past. Deciding a man’s place on the graph may be secondary to a study of the man himself, but it is not unimportant.

Meanwhile, however, there are our several characters from early Canadian history at hand, and in search of an author. There is a world now scattered in the archives and the dust, waiting for whoever wants to try putting it together again. With a reminder that Everyman is ultimately his own historian, the reader is invited, by means of such help as his own imagination and this bookful of incidents can give him, to make a whole past come to life again, and to tell himself in as lively a manner as he knows how, the story of William Lyon Mackenzie, and the Patriots and Loyalists of 1837.

CHAPTER ONE

It happened in York, most of it, over a hundred years ago. York was the capital of the British colony of Upper Canada and one of its chief military posts. It was the biggest market centre for the farmers and merchants of the colony. It had as many schools and churches as Kingston, its only serious rival. Such was its progress, indeed, that by 1825 the population of York had attained the grand total of two thousand souls.