The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855

Toronto in the 1850s, with edge of the Fair Green bottom-centre

These weren't the kind of clowns you want to mess with. They were, by all accounts, a pretty rough crew. They were in town for just a couple of days — part of a touring show from the U.S. called S.B. Howes' Star Troupe Menagerie & Circus. Along with the clowns, there were acrobats and equestrian trick riders and a bunch of exotic animals: big cats, elephants, even a giraffe. The circus had already performed a few sold out shows that day — it was a rare big draw in a city that was just starting to come into its own.

This was the summer of 1855. And Toronto was growing very, very quickly. Forty thousand people lived in the city now — and new immigrants were flooding in all the time. With the very first railroads starting up, the population would double over the next 20 years.

But in a lot of ways, it was still a rough, pioneer town. It would be a long while before we got our reputation for being Toronto The Good. If anything, we were the opposite. There were 68 taverns along Yonge Street — an average of one every 1200 meters between here and Barrie. In the city itself, there were 152 of them. Plus 203 beers shops on top of that. And then, there were the brothels. We had a lot of brothels.

The circus was done for the day and the clowns had the rest of the night off, so they decided to take advantage of the local nightlife. They picked a brothel near the corner of King & Jarvis and settled in to have some fun. But the rest of the night wouldn't go as planned.

It seems the clowns picked the wrong brothel. This one was a hangout for some of the men in a local volunteer fire brigade: The Hook & Ladder Firefighting Company. And these weren't the kind of firemen you wanted to mess with either. In those days, there was no central, public, government-run fire department. When a fire broke out, all the companies who were nearby rushed to the scene with their horse-drawn engines to get there first and call dibs. Just a couple of weeks earlier, the Hook & Ladders had arrived at a fire on Church Street at the same time as another brigade. A fight broke out. As the building burned, the firemen rioted in the street. And when the police showed up, they got pulled into the brawl too. In the end, the firemen were charged with assault. And the battle became known as the Firemen's Riot. The Hook & Ladders were no strangers to violence.

S.B. Howes' Star Troupe Menagerie & Circus

No one seems to agree on exactly how the fight at the brothel got started. Some blame a particularly loudmouthed clown. Some say the clowns cut in line — or knocked the hat off a fireman's head. But this much is clear: that night, the clowns kicked some firefighting ass. At least two of the firemen were seriously injury, dragged out of the brothel to safety as the Hook & Ladder crew retreated. For the rest of the night, the clowns could drink and screw in peace.

But it wasn't over yet. Those firemen had a lot of friends. In those days, Toronto was still pretty much entirely run by a small group of Protestant, Tory elites. They were all members of the Orange Order, hung out together at the Orange Lodge, and made sure that other Orangemen got all the important jobs in the city. The police were pretty much all Orangemen. And the firefighters were too. Usually, they focused on beating up Catholics. But they were willing to make an occasional exception.

The day after the fight at the brothel — a Friday the 13th, no less — a crowd began to gather around S.B. Howes' Star Troupe Menagerie & Circus. An angry, Orange crowd. The troupe had pitched their tents at the Fair Green, a big grassy space on the waterfront, just a few blocks east of the St. Lawrence Market. (Now, it's the south-east corner of Front & Berkeley, near the Toronto Sun building.) The farmers and merchants who had set up stalls nearby were told to clear out. There was trouble brewing.

They say word reached the police before violence broke out. But of course the Chief of Police, Samuel Sherwood, was an Orangeman. That's how he got to be Chief of Police. In fact, years earlier he'd helped to organize a conservative Tory attack on a liberal Reform Party parade. One of the Reformers had been shot and killed. So when Chief Sherwood heard about the trouble down at the Fair Green, he dragged his feet for as long as he could. And then, eventually, he sent a few men to check it out.

By the time they got there, it had started. People were throwing stones. And while the circus performers and the carnies were apparently able to hold the mob off for a while, it couldn't last. Eventually, the crowd overwhelmed them. And when the Hook & Ladders arrived, all hell broke loose. They stormed the circus with pikes and axes, overturned wagons, pulled down the tents and the Big Top and set them on fire. They beat clowns to a pulp. Circus folk ran for their lives. Some dove into the lake for safety. It was mayhem.

It took the mayor to settle things down. He came to the Fair Green in person, kept a fireman from killing a clown with an axe by grabbing it out of his hands, and called in the militia to take control of the situation. Once things had calmed down, the circus performers came back for their belongings and then ran like hell.

Council's inquest into the Circus Riot

The police had done pretty much nothing. They just watched. Even Chief Sherwood himself had eventually shown up, but could only claim to have stopped the rioters from setting fire to the cages of the animals. Of the 17 people who were charged in the riot, only one was ever convicted. All of the police who were at the scene claimed they couldn't remember any of the Orangemen who had been there. Just like they had a few weeks earlier, after the Fireman's Riot on Church.

That, as far as most people were concerned, was bullshit. And it would keep on coming. A few months later, there was another Protestant vs. Catholic riot — and Chief Sherwood's memory was again suspiciously fuzzy as far as Orangemen were concerned. A few months after that, he was under fire again after freeing a suspect who had been accused of robbing a bank.

But by then, there had been another mayoral election. And for the first time in more than 20 years — since William Lyon Mackenzie's rebellion — a liberal Reform Party candidate had won. City council called for deep reforms to the way Toronto's police force was run. The government of Canada West (essentially what they called Ontario back then) agreed. An inquest was launched, and in the end, the whole old system was overthrown. Every single police officer in the city was fired and a new force was created from scratch. Half of the old constables would end up being re-hired and it took nearly 100 years before the Orange stranglehold on power in Toronto was finally broken. But the foundations of our current, modern police force had finally been laid.

-----

You can read more about the riot and the history of the police here. And the riot in general here. They're both awesome sources.

I got Toronto's tavern stats from this piece, about a rivalry between Tory and Reform-minded doctors (most notably John Rolph, who'd played a huge role in Mackenzie's rebellion). It's a pretty neat read for anyone interested in the politics of medicine in the city in the 1800s (which I'm sure you all are).

There's a list of Toronto riots thanks to Google Books here.

And You Don't Even Want To Wear Pants In This Heat

You know how in old-timey novels people are always fainting all the time? Well when you see what people used to wear to the beach, it's not exactly surprising. This is Sunnyside in about 1914 or so, back when people were very clearly out of their minds. In the early 1900s, it wasn't just considered improper to show a little bit of skin at the beach in Toronto. It was totally illegal. A law passed in 1904 said that only people "wearing a proper bathing dress, covering the body from the neck to the knees may bathe at any time in the public waters within the city limits." And while people did try to fudge it a bit, if they fudged it too far they would run afoul of the Toronto Police Morality Department. (Yup, that was a thing.)

It wasn't until the 1930s that things loosened up a bit. But only a bit. The law was changed to say a bathing suit was required to "prevent indecent exposure", but no one was quite sure what that meant. The Morality Department and even the Mayor took it to mean that men had to wear tops. Hundreds of "filthy" "ape-men" were arrested for taking off their shirts at the beach, sparking legal and political battles over what exactly people were and were not allowed not to wear. (Kevin Plummer's got the lowdown over at Torontoist here.)

By 1953, a teenaged Brigitte Bardot was wearing a bikini on the beach in Cannes and things were about to get a whoooooooooole lot less stuffy. Fifty years after that, Toronto would get our very first nude beach. Hanlan's Point was officially declared "clothing optional" in 2002.

Canada's First Race Riot

Slavery didn't last very long in Toronto. The man who founded our city, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, wanted it banned from the beginning. But since some of the men he'd chosen to help him rule Upper Canada were slave owners, he was forced to compromise.

Slaves who had already been brought into the new province would live the rest of their lives as property. But no new slaves would be allowed on our soil and any new children born into slavery would be freed when they turned 25. They say it was the very first law to limit slavery in the history of the British Empire.

So when the English finally abolished it altogether in the 1830s, Toronto was already slave-free. By then, Canada had become a beacon of hope for Black Americans escaping to freedom along the Underground Railroad. And there are stories of slave hunters – men who came north to capture former slaves and take them back – being violently run out of town.

But there was still a shitload of racism in this city. And some of it came from the most powerful people in Upper Canada. Like, say, the man who the British had chosen to be the new Lieutenant Governor of the province: Sir Francis Bond Head.

Bond Head was one of the crappiest rulers our city has ever known. He was sent to Toronto (the capital of Upper Canada) from England to make progressive reforms, but turned out to be a die-hard conservative whose incompetence and corruption helped push liberals into full-blown rebellion. And just a few months before his army clashed with William Lyon Mackenzie's rebels on Yonge Street, he was behind a particularly shameful moment in the history of Canadian government.

In the spring of 1837, a man by the name of Solomon Moseby escaped from slavery in Kentucky. His "master", David Castleman, was a rich and well-connected horse breeder. (His nephew would one day lose a presidential election to Abraham Lincoln.) That May, Moseby took off on one of his master's horses and rode north. It took him two long, dangerous months to make it to Canada, but he did eventually escape across the border and into Niagara-on-the-Lake. There, it seemed like he was finally free.

But his owner wasn't ready to give up. Back in Kentucky, Castleman had the courts charge Moseby with theft – for having taken the horse. And then he followed him to Canada with an arrest warrant. Our government had already made it perfectly clear that we wouldn't return former slaves back to the United States to live a life of servitude. But we did return criminal fugitives to face American justice. When Castleman showed up in Niagara-on-the-Lake with the warrant, Moseby was immediately arrested and thrown into jail. It would be up to Bond Head to decide whether or not he'd be sent back south, where Castleman promised to make an example out of him.

Niagara-on-the-Lake rose up in protest. The town, so close to the American border, was home to lots of escaped slaves. They say a full tenth of the population was Black. Many of the town's leading citizens, including the mayor, signed a petition demanding that Bond Head release the escaped slave. Hundreds of supporters spent weeks camped outside the court house where Moseby was being held, promising that if the authorities tried to move him, they would be there to stand in the way. They even offered Castleman $1,000 to cover the cost of the horse and his travel expenses. He, of course, refused. This wasn't about the horse; this was about making sure slaves couldn't get away.

Sir Francis Bond Head

It was September by the time Bond Head announced his decision: "this land of liberty," he declared, "cannot be made an Asylum for the guilty of any colour." He ordered that Moseby be extradited back to the United States.

But it wouldn't easy. The crowd of supporters gathered outside the courthouse made sure of that. Moseby was led out of the court house in handcuffs by constables and soldiers with bayonets drawn. They loaded him into a carriage, but before it could move it was surrounded by hundreds of Black Canadians. A throng of women blocked the entrance to the bridge the carriage needed to cross, singing hymns and standing their ground. The local preacher who had been leading the protests, Herbert Holmes, got in front of the horses. Another man, Jacob Green, stuck a fence post in the spokes of the carriage's wheels.

That's when the sheriff ordered his men to open fire. Holmes was shot through the heart. Green was run through with a bayonet. They both died. Others in the crowd were slashed and bloodied. Some threw stones. Dozens were arrested. But it worked. In the confusion, Moseby slipped out of the carriage and out of his handcuffs (at least one witness claimed that his guard had left them loose on purpose; another that the blacksmith had intentionally forged them to be weak). In the days that followed, the government would put a price on his head, but years later, he'd travel to England and successfully win his legal freedom. In the end, he was allowed back to Niagara to live the rest of his life in peace.

Still, the extradition of former slaves would be an issue in Canada for decades to come. The last case wasn't heard until the 1860s, just before slavery was finally abolished in the United States. It seems that even in Canada, an escaped slave couldn't feel entirely safe.

That same autumn Solomon Moseby was fighting for his freedom, an English feminist and writer, Anna Brownwell Jameson, happened to be staying in Toronto. On a trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake, she met Sally Carter, one of the leaders of the protests. And then wrote about it:

"She was a fine creature, apparently about five-and-twenty, with a kindly animated countenance; but the feelings of exasperation and indignation had evidently not yet subsided. She told us, in answer to my close questioning, that she had formerly been a slave in Virginia; that, so far from being ill treated, she had been regarded with especial kindness by the family on whose estate she was born. When she was about sixteen her master died, and it was said that all the slaves on the estate would be sold, and therefore she ran away. 'Were you not attached to your mistress?' I asked. 'Yes,' said she, 'I liked my mistress, but I did not like to be sold.' I asked her if she was happy here in Canada? She hesitated a moment, and then replied, on my repeating the question, 'Yes—that is, I was happy here—but now—I don't know—I thought we were safe here—I thought nothing could touch us here, on your British ground, but it seems I was mistaken, and if so, I won't stay here—I won't—I won't! I'll go and find some country where they cannot reach us! I'll go to the end of the world, I will!' And as she spoke, her black eyes flashing, she extended her arms, and folded them across her bosom, with an attitude and expression of resolute dignity, which a painter might have studied; and truly the fairest white face I ever looked on never beamed with more of soul and high resolve than hers at that moment." 

----- 

The main image is a photo of the court house where the riot happened.

Anna Brownwell Jameson, while progressive for her time, could still be more than a bit condescendingly ethnocentric (as you can tell a bit from that excerpt). Her book, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, is full of interesting stuff from her travels here in 1836-37 though, so I'm thinking I'll be posting lots of quotes from it over the next while. You can read a volume of highlights from it in the much more terribly-titled Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men here.

The Solomon Moseby riot happened just a few years after the first race riot in Detroit's history, which was a similar story. In that case, it was Thornton Blackburn and his wife who escaped from slavery in Kentucky and ended up settling Toronto, where he founded our city's first cab company. You can read that story here.

I wrote about Bond Head's role in the Rebellions of 1837 in a post called "Bond Head The Bonehead" here.

And you can read more information about Solomon Moseby and the riot in places I've pieced all of this together from: here and here and here and this PDF here. 

The photo of the court house I found here. 

Update: Ooh cool. Mackenzie House tweeted some related William Lyon Mackenzie quotes from his paper, The Constitution, on September 27, 1837:  "Moseby was doomed by law to perpetual slavery in Kentucky – his master might buy and sell and torture him...not because he was a criminal, but because his complexion was dark...they say he mounted his tyrant's horse and sought a home and freedom in Upper Canada. This is his crime with Sir Francis!" Mackenzie, as I briefly mentioned in the post, was in a huge political battle with Sir Francis Bond Head in 1837 that would culminate in outright rebellion that December.

Photo: A Dapper Traffic Cop in 1912

I don't have much to say about this photo taken at Yonge and King sometime around 1912, other than to wonder when our cops lost their sense of style. And to mention that you could not pay me enough money to stand in the middle of the intersection at Yonge and King with nothing for protection other than a little hat, some white gloves and a thin pole thingy.

It was Agatha Barc over at blogTO who posted this as part of an article about the Toronto Police Force's old "Morality Department". You can read it here. And all of her "Nostalgia Tripping" columns here. (There are a few other great photos in there, too.)

And, as always, if you'd like see more old Toronto photos that I like, you can check out my Toronto Dreams Project Historical Photostream here.

The T Dot's First Hanging

It seems that sometime around the turn of the 1800s, when our city was still just a town only a few years old, John Sullivan and Michael Flannery went out one night and got drunk together. Sullivan was an Irish tailor and they called Flannery "Latin Mike" because he liked to recite Latin proverbs, which I guess was a thing back then. At some point their drunk asses must have run out of money, because Latin Mike decided to forge a bank note worth about three shillings so that Sullivan could use it to buy more booze. Shockingly, their plan backfired and while Latin Mike managed to escape and fled to the States, Humphrey Sullivan landed in Toronto's first jail, sentenced to death. Which, you know, seems a little harsh.

The jail was brand new, built on the orders of the slave-owning gambling addict/politician, Peter Russell, who was running the young town while Lieutenant Governor John Simcoe (the dude who founded Toronto) was back in England, slowly dying. The "gaol" was built on King Street, where the King Edward hotel is now (there's a plaque) and as you may have guessed from the drawing above, it was a little wooden building with a log fence. Inside, there was just enough room for three prisoners and it seems that while Sullivan was there it was filled to capacity. Next door to him was John Small, on trial for having recently killed the Attorney-General in the city's first duel. And in the other cell was a Mr. McKnight. When the officials running Sullivan's execution ran into trouble finding someone willing to do the actual executing, it was McKnight they convinced to do it in return for $100 and a pardon.

McKnight, however, was not awesome at hanging people. He screwed up the first attempt. And then the second. By the third, even Sullivan was getting impatient, saying something along the lines of: "McKnight, I hope to goodness you've got the rope all right this time."

He did.

----

A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

There seems to be some confusion about a few of this story's details, like whether John Sullivan's real name might have been Humphrey, but I've mostly cobbled that all together from The Toronto Story and Jarvis Collegiate's startlingly informative website, which are both fantastic. They've also got lots more about Peter Russell and John Simcoe and the city's first duel, which are all so getting their own posts sometime. (Update: I've written the Peter Russell post here.)

"Formidable Engines of Oppression"

Toronto police constables around 1880

It's been more than a week since my last post, which, as you might imagine, has more than a little to do with what happened last weekend. Whatever you think of the events surrounding the G20, this has been a sad, upsetting week for anyone who loves this city. To be honest, it took more than a few days to remember how to find joy in the hidden nooks and crannies of Toronto's history. But with so many questions about the police force being raised, it seems like a good time to get back into the swing of things by taking a look at the force's origins as little more than Tory-appointed, political-dissent-smashing thugs and the reform movement that fought to turn them into something better.

There are very, very few cities in the English-speaking world with a police force older than Toronto's. It's even older than many of the most legendary and storied departments on earth: older than the New York City Police Department or the Boston Police Department; only five years younger than the oldest of them all, the London Metropolitan Police force, which was created in 1829.

But things didn't get off to a great start. In its earliest days, the Toronto Police Service was ridiculously corrupt. Tory politicians—who could hire and fire constables at will—used them to consolidate their power. Policemen violently crushed opposition party meetings, denied liquor licenses to anyone who didn't support the Tories and fought in the streets alongside Orange Order Protestants, brutalizing the city's Catholic minority in the more than two dozen riots that plagued Toronto in the 1840s and '50s.  In 1841, they stood by while Tory supporters attacked a victory parade for a Reform Party candidate and murdered one of his supporters—an event so shameful that even Charles Dickens would write about it disparagingly after a visit to the city the following year.

Things were so bad that only seven years after the police service was formed, the province launched the first public inquiry into their behaviour. The report was scathing. Toronto policemen, it declared, were "formidable engines of oppression". And it called for sweeping changes.

Toronto's Tory politicians ignored the report—even appointed one of the men who had attacked the parade to be the new chief of police. Their oppressive and violent behaviour continued unabated for years, eventually peaking in the two riots which would finally spark reform.

The first was the Firemen's Riot in the summer of 1855. Two rival companies of volunteer firefighters got into a brawl over who had the right to put out a blaze on Church Street. Police were called in to break up the fight, but instead the constables joined in the melee and later lied about it in court, looking to protect the firefighters who were also Protestant Orangemen.

A few weeks later came the Circus Riot—the most ridiculous riot in the history of the city.  It was the firefighters, again, who started the trouble when they—get this—burned down a visiting circus after some clowns cut in line at a King Street brothel. The police watched it all happen, did nothing, and again found their memories to be mysteriously unreliable when the time came to testify in court.

But by this time, things had changed. Immigration had begun to erode the Orange stranglehold on power. The growing middle class was looking for police to protect their property instead of picking fights. And Reform Party candidates were getting elected over their Tory opponents more and more often. Finally, in 1858, the provincial government was able to bring in the sweeping reforms that were needed. Most of the police force was fired along with their chief, and the Toronto Board of Commissioners was put in place to oversee the force. From then on, policemen would be subject to a set of strict new regulations dictating everything from where they should be during their shift to the limits placed on their use of physical force. Not to mention that they would now, for the first time, be expected to fight crime. When the policemen rose up against the reforms, they were all fired again; only those who agreed to follow the new rules were hired back.

It would hardly be the last time that the city's police force would be accused of abusing its power—the violent suppression of early unions, the anti-Communist Red Squad and the reign of Chief Dennis Draper in the '30s and '40s all deserve their own posts, not to mention what we saw last week during the G20. But it was an enormous step forward. That first decades-long fight for reform—from the public inquiry of 1841 to the formation of the Toronto Board of Commissioners—set the stage for all of the incredibly good work the Toronto police force would go on to do.