by Conrad Black
Like many long-apprehended events, the revolts, when they came, were an absurd anticlimax, despite 175 years of unstinting effort since to recreate them as high drama and patriotic heroism. Papineau and his fellow Patriote, Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan (1797–1880), leader of the Irish malcontents and editor of the Vindicator, on the advice of a priest who told Papineau his continued presence in Montreal was “a cause of disorder,”18 departed to Saint-Hyacinthe. This was reported to the authorities, who were aware that Papineau and Mackenzie had been setting up secret groups around both colonies, Papineau borrowing some of the terminology of the French Revolution, and Mackenzie from Jefferson’s correspondence committees and the American militiamen. Papineau and O’Callaghan striking out for the Maskoutain country was too much for Sir John Colborne, still smarting from having been fired as civil governor for his bigoted high-handedness, and he effectively took charge as commander of the armed forces of Canada, such as they were, and issued warrants for the arrest of the two wayfarers and several of their more prominent collaborators. A company of the Montreal Volunteer Cavalry was conducting two arrested Patriotes, Dr. Joseph-François Davignon (1807–1867) and Pierre-Paul Démaray (1798–1854), a notary, back from Chambly to Longueuil when they were overwhelmed by a detachment of the Fils de la Liberté led by Bonaventure Viger (1804–1877). Wolfred Nelson (1791–1863) and Thomas Storrow Brown (1803–1888), the co-generals of the Patriotes, gathered several hundred Patriotes at Saint-Denis and Saint-Charles to begin resistance. Civil order was becoming tenuous in various parts of the province, but the execution of arrest warrants was the first sign of a response from the British and Canadian authorities, and, once roused, Colborne showed a commendable aptitude for the reimposition of order. Colonel Charles Gore, another Waterloo veteran, was instructed by Colborne to arrest the leaders of the rebellion and disperse the malcontents. He was to proceed to Sorel and then along the bank of the Richelieu River to Saint-Denis with five companies and a howitzer. Saint-Denis would be approached from the opposite direction via Saint-Charles by six infantry companies with a couple of field pieces led by Colonel (later General) George Augustus Wetherall (1788–1868), another well-travelled colonial officer (who had served in Africa and India). The soldiers floundered through mud and torrential rain that turned to heavy snow, and Gore was forced to withdraw from Saint-Denis. The Patriotes signalled one another with church bells and did a creditable job of blowing up bridges on the British route of march, though the British officers were familiar with this kind of harassment and made their way fairly well, given the weather and terrain. The British only withdrew a few hundred yards, but had to spike their howitzer after it became mired in the mud. Weatherall’s force fared better, and he arrived at Saint-Charles on November 25, shelled the palisade there that sheltered the approximately 110 Patriotes, and then assaulted the position. The Patriotes fought respectably for an improvised force but were put to flight by the British and Canadian regulars. “General” Storrow Brown, accused of deserting his men before the action began, claimed, fourteen years later, that he had gone forward to reconnoitre, was forced to retreat with his men, whom he tried unsuccessfully to control, but, “finding after a long trial, my strength and authority insufficient, I considered my command gone, turned my horse and rode” to Saint-Denis.19 The truth was never established, but was unheroic and is not entirely material. Gore arrived at Saint-Denis on December 1, where his men found the mangled corpse of one of their comrades, murdered by the Patriotes, and defied Gore’s orders for professional discipline and torched the town.
The scene of action moved to Saint-Eustache. Here, Amury Girod (1800–1837), another Swiss adventurer and veteran of wars in Mexico, and, according to Alfred De Celles, a self-styled general, “headed a band of excited and misguided peasants.”20 On the approach of Colborne himself, with artillery and cavalry, Girod fled and committed suicide. Colborne encountered the Patriotes holed up in the local church, set fire to the house beside the church to cover their investiture of it, and the Patriotes fired down form the choir. But when Colborne’s men fired the church as well, they fled out of it and surrendered. Colborne ordered that the Patriotes be treated honourably as prisoners of war, but some of his militiamen, still outraged at the apparent murder of one of their comrades at Saint-Denis, massacred a number of the rebels who had thrown down their arms. On December 5, the governor general, Lord Gosford, proclaimed martial law in Montreal and declared a reward for the capture of Papineau and a few of the other Patriotes. Papineau made good his escape to the United States. Colborne had the pleasure of a final mopping-up operation at Lacolle and Odelltown, and Wolfred Nelson, who had retired to and sallied forth from Vermont, in De Celles’s words, “returned to Vermont after the collapse of his unfortunate invasion, covered with the ridicule he had richly earned by his proclamation of a Canadian Republic and his own election as president, and loaded with the awful responsibility of having caused the loss of many lives, besides helping to hurry to the scaffold or into exile men who had been duped by his fallacious representations.”21
Colborne, still aroused by the outrage, as he considered it to be, of his dismissal from the gubernatorial chair of Upper Canada, and by the impudence of the ungrateful papist French rebels, marched about the countryside for some days burning down villages on slender pretexts and rounding up insurgents, of whom ninety-nine of the hundreds that were detained in Montreal were court-martialled and sentenced to death. Of these, only twelve were executed and the remainder transported to Australia. This was severe enough, but Colborne was denigrated as a virtual pantywaist and weakling by some of the outraged Montreal English merchant class. The Montreal Herald called for the summary execution of all the prisoners: “Why winter them over, why fatten them for the gibbet?” It was a revolt which in some ways presaged and prefigured the comedies of Gilbert and Sullivan (though there were certainly dark moments and the execution of a dozen men, and in those days the transportation of scores of others were not a risible consummation). None of this hyperbole, on one side or the other, prevented Nelson from returning from exile and becoming mayor of Montreal. Nor did any of it prevent Bonaventure Viger – after being exiled to Bermuda, returning, being imprisoned and escaping, and being pardoned – from becoming the proprietor of Montreal’s leading cheese shop; nor Storrow Brown, one of Quebec’s first Unitarians, after a stint in exile as a journalist in Florida, from returning to Quebec and entering the hardware business, in which he had previously gone bankrupt in one of the many personal dramas that led to his alienation from the colonial regime. Edmund O’Callaghan remained in New York and was for many years the state secretary and archivist. He served in this capacity through the latter stages of the Albany Regency (founded by eventual president Martin Van Buren, 1782–1862, and secretary of state William L. Marcy, 1786–1857) and through the succeeding ascendance of Lincoln’s early rival and secretary of state, William H. Seward, and New York governors and unsuccessful presidential candidates Horatio Seymour and Samuel Tilden. It was a well-deserved rout for Papineau and his coterie of scoundrels, gullible camp-followers, and misfits, and an unjust triumph for the racist swaggerer Colborne, but the consequences, as usual in the developing annals of Canadian fortune, were benign.
French Canada was not to endure unaccompanied the humiliation of its rebels. William Lyon Mackenzie, not to be denied his moment of demonstrative futility, and undeterred by the shambles in Lower Canada, strove fearlessly, not to say mindlessly, on into the thickets of revolt. Mackenzie realized that Head’s overconfident movement of the forces in Upper Canada to Kingston left Toronto unguarded by the regime, and he received a comradely message from Papineau inviting him to join the Patriotes in revolt. (The fact that Papineau was now an annexationist wasn’t mentioned, and to the extent that there was any real solidarity between the malcontents in the two provinces, it was minimal.) Mackenzie met with his senior collaborators, and it was agreed to issue a call for supporters, stopping just short of a call to arms, and a s
ummons to Toronto, where it was hoped that the arms of the absent forces and militia could be seized and used by the rebels. There was doubt and hesitation, and Mackenzie set out on a tour of inspection of his partisans. He returned to Toronto in a very purposeful condition after about ten days and scheduled an uprising in Toronto for December 7, although the kindred uprising in Quebec was already in serious difficulty. Mackenzie decreed the start, then departed to coordinate again in the rural districts, and the generalissimo of the rebels, one Anthony Van Egmond (1778–1838), who claimed to have been a Dutch officer in Napoleon’s forces, was ordered by Mackenzie’s skittish colleague Dr. Rolph to bring the date of the rebellion forward to December 4. The rebel forces gathered at Montgomery’s Tavern, three miles north of Toronto, and awaited the accumulation of numbers adequate to a serious assault on the government.
Toronto was in an alarmed state, but sixty men led by Colonel Allan MacNab arrived from Hamilton, followed by more reinforcements, and the volunteer militia formed up and marched north on December 7, in quite passable field formation, with drums beating and a couple of field pieces and chased the rebels out of Montgomery’s Tavern and scattered them in all directions. This was the end of it. Governor Head had asked to see Baldwin, who, like Hincks, had had nothing to do with the rebellion, and Rolph, who had. Baldwin and Rolph carried a message to Mackenzie, now back at Montgomery’s Tavern, and were informed that if the governor wished to deal with Mackenzie he would have to do it in writing. Baldwin dutifully carried Mackenzie’s message back to Head and then returned to Mackenzie to tell him that the governor refused. Mackenzie fled to the United States and for a time occupied Navy Island in the Niagara River and organized several unsuccessful expeditions into Canada. Commodore Andrew Drew and Colonel MacNab cut loose Mackenzie’s supply ship, the Caroline, and towed her away and burned her, and the British government successfully urged the government of the United States to desist from tolerating the aggressive supply of Mackenzie’ fugitives and sympathizers.
Mackenzie returned to Canada on an amnesty Baldwin and LaFontaine promulgated in 1849, but found that he no longer commanded any support, and died, grumpily as he had lived, in 1861, aged sixty-six. Rolph returned in 1843, founded a medical school, and became a member of the Legislature and commissioner of Crown lands and died in 1870, aged seventy-three. Papineau was sheltered by friends along the route he furtively followed toward the U.S. border, which he crossed on November 25, 1837, going on to France, where he failed to rouse much support for his cause and published a rather bowdlerized version of the insurrection. He returned to Canada and to his splendid seigneurial house at Montebello in 1845, where he lived on, a subject of quaint and generally respectful curiosity, until his death in 1871, two weeks short of his eighty-fifth birthday.
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine had been close to Papineau but had always eschewed violence and rebellion; LaFontaine had importuned the governor, Lord Gosford, to call the Legislature when violence impended, and on his refusal had embarked for England, moved on to France, and returned to Canada in May 1838. He was briefly arrested in November 1838 as the rampaging Colborne lay about him in a nirvana of suspended habeas corpus and filled the places of confinement in Lower Canada with anyone he took against, but was released after a few weeks without any charges having been laid.
It had been a perfect episode for the Canadian idea, as the War of 1812 had been a perfect war. The revolutionaries had alarmed and got the attention of the colonial power, but their failure and the performance of Baldwin, Hincks, and LaFontaine, and the population as a whole, had impressed the British that they were appreciated and had reasonable moderates to work with.
The United States was relatively immobilized and couldn’t exploit conditions. It had surmounted the Nullification Crisis (as described in Chapter 2), but there continued a delicate balance between the slave and free states, and the country wanted no part of a quarrel with the mighty British Empire, especially over Canada, which, French and English, had spurned American blandishments and successfully resisted its military advances at every opportunity from 1774 on. When the dust settled, the British recognized that reform was necessary. They were inexplicably, excruciatingly, slow, as in Ireland (where the Great Famine was just beginning, which would starve to death or force out half the population), and as they had been in America, India, and later Africa and the Middle East, and even in Britain itself. But at their own stately tempo, the British began to be more confident that Canada was viable, worthy of effort, and a doughty offspring. And Canada, in its manner, soon celebrated its rebels, while reaping the benefit of the placatory policy they induced, after the brief interregnum of overreaction. Papineau and Mackenzie had begun the process of Anglo-French political cooperation in Canada, had accelerated the stalled march to responsible government, and have become modest heroes in the thin canon of Canadian revolt. The Canadian pattern of inexorable progress along a path of rarely perturbed moderation, almost noiseless and always tortuous, and always navigating between and well within extremes, was steadily emerging.
2. The Beginning of Canadian Unity and Democracy, 1839–1846
The failed rebellions and the effective official response eventually produced the logical and almost inexorable compromise: the elevation in the eyes of the disconcerted population, and legitimacy in the eyes of the colonial authorities, of those who had called for reform but had eschewed violence. Both sides stepped back, and the hour of Robert Baldwin, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, and Francis Hincks impended. But there was an elaborate and often exasperating ritual still to come as the British political class sorted out its Imperial policy.
The phrase “responsible government” arose from a letter written by Dr. William W. Baldwin, Robert Baldwin’s father, to the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, in 1828 in which Baldwin urged “a provincial ministry … responsible to the provincial Parliament, and removable from office by His Majesty’s representatives at his pleasure and especially when they lose the confidence of the people as expressed by the voice of their representatives in the Assembly; and that all acts of the King’s representative should have the character of local responsibility.”22 This was not only an English-Canadian ambition. In 1833, Étienne Parent (1802–1874), editor of Le Canadien, spoke of “the formation of a provincial ministry on the model of the imperial ministry which might give unity, coherence, consistency and finish to our legislation.”23 The middle way that would be the key to the identity and survival and development of Canada was emerging: subordinate in international matters to Britain to retain its protection and avoid the assimilation of the French and annexation of all Canada to the United States; and democratic parliamentary government in all local affairs to assure, other than in national sovereignty for the practical reasons mentioned, Canadians civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the citizens of Great Britain and the United States. (France, lurching syncopatedly from regime to regime, was no longer a presentable constitutional model for emulation, and would not be until the founding of the Fifth Republic 120 years later.) The practical problem was the reflex in official British circles that cabinet government responsible to an elected parliament would immediately bring sovereignty, as governmental authority was assumed to be indivisible, a nonsensical view in fact, and doubly so because Canadian self-interest required the British connection to protect the country from the Americans, who by this time were trying to distract themselves from the fissure of slavery by waving about the intermittently bloody shirt of “manifest destiny”* (that is, the ordained mission of America to rule the whole continent).
The Maritime colonies navigated toward responsible government less convulsively than did the Canadas. The cause in Nova Scotia was led by Joseph Howe (1804–1873), editor of the Novascotian from 1827 and member of the Legislature from 1836. He secured his acquittal on a charge of seditious libel in 1835 with a six-hour address to the jury substantiating his claims of official corruption in a landmark case in the history of the legal protection of a fr
ee press. He was a passionate Nova Scotian and Briton, and the cause of responsible government in his hands in that province could never be mistaken for republicanism. The Newfoundland House of Assembly asked for a responsible system in 1838, though it did not immediately achieve it, and in New Brunswick the concept became identified with control of Crown land and the attribution of timber rights, and the appetite for democracy was temporarily sated by the removal of Thomas Baillie in 1837.
In London, the well-travelled cynic Prime Minister Melbourne (1835–1841, following Peel’s first ministry) and Glenelg concluded that reform was necessary and justified; Gosford and Colborne were recalled and Head’s resignation tendered and accepted before he could be uprooted, and a very substantial politician, John George Lambton, Earl of Durham (1792–1840), was appointed with practically unlimited powers to recommend a resolution of Canadian difficulties. Durham was immensely wealthy, from inherited coal-mining interests, very liberal (he was widely known as “Radical Jack”), and very influential, as the son-in-law of former prime minister Earl Grey, whom he had served as lord privy seal, in which capacity he had helped write the seminal First Reform Act of 1832. He served Melbourne in the important office of ambassador to Russia (then the world’s second greatest power after Great Britain) from 1835 to 1837, and his nomination to Canada showed the success of the Canadian rebels in getting the attention of the British and their preparedness to be more flexible. But if the rebellions had had their farcical aspects, the Imperial response would not be entirely above that either.