The Day Canada Became A Democracy

Lord Elgin, looking like a badass

This is the eighth in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here. Part two here. Part three here. Part four here. Part five here. Part six here. Part seven here.

Yup, here it is. A really really really really really big deal. People in Toronto had been living under authoritarian British rule since the day the city was founded — Canadians in older parts of the country even longer than that. Lieutenant Governors and Governors General had acted like puppet dictators with the power to ignore our elected legislatures. And they did. But now, Toronto's Robert Baldwin and Montreal's Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine had banded together to win an overwhelming majority on a platform demanding real democracy. They had a new idea: Responsible Government. The Prime Minister and his cabinet wouldn't answer to the Governor General, but to parliament itself. To the Canadian people.

Meanwhile, in England, the liberal Whig Party was back in power yet again. And this time, it looked like they might finally be ready to give in. They sent a new, liberal Governor General to the Canadian capital in Montreal: Lord Elgin. He was the son-in-law of Lord Durham — author of the super-important Durham Report, which had famously recommended that the British embrace Baldwin and LaFontaine's idea. Even better: Elgin realized just how much support Responsible Government had with ordinary Canadians. "I am presiding over one of the most democratic communities that ever existed," he wrote in a letter back home to his bosses in London, "[Canada's] constitution is most popular in character". Momentum was building. Over in Nova Scotia, liberals had just won their own battle for Responsible Government. And as Baldwin and LaFontaine's Reform Party began to pass bills dismantling our British-style class system in favour of diversity and inclusion, Elgin signed them all into law.

But the real test was still to come. Would Elgin sign a bill that conservatives vehemently disagreed with? Would he turn his back on the Protestant, monarchy-loving, democracy-hating Tories, who had always had British support? Did the Family Compact and the Chateau Clique still run the country? Or was Canada now a true democracy?

We wouldn't have to wait long to find out. In February, Baldwin and LaFontaine introduced the Rebellion Losses Bill. This was it.

Really, the bill shouldn't have been controversial at all. It was just going to help pay people in Lower Canada whose property had been damaged during the Rebellions of 1837. That seemed fair. When the Tories were in power, they'd already done the same thing for Upper Canadians. Thing is, in Upper Canada, most people were anglophones; in Lower Canada, they spoke French. And since French-Canadians weren't loyal to the British Crown or to the Church of England, as far as the racist Tory Party was concerned, French-Canadians weren't really Canadians at all. Paying them for damages was as good as paying the rebels themselves.

And so, the Tories were outraged. As the bill was debated in parliament, things got vicious. The payments would be "an open encouragement to rebellion," the conservatives claimed. The Reform Party was "under the dominion of French masters". They were "dangerous, criminal and subversive of order". If Baldwin and LaFontaine had their way, Canada would be "ruled by foreigners". (By which, of course, they meant: the wrong kind of foreigners.)

Inside parliament in old Montreal

And if hurling insults wasn't going to do the trick, the Tories were more than willing to hurl fists. When one important Reformer, William Hume Blake, got up in parliament and denounced the conservatives by calling them the true rebels, the Tory leader, Allan McNab, lost it. He'd fought in 1837, marched up Yonge Street against William Lyon Mackenzie and then, after the rebel leader escaped to the States, took a couple thousand men down across the border to continue the fight. Once he got back, he put down another small rebellion outside London. He'd been knighted for it. And he did not bloody well appreciate being called a rebel himself. He and Blake had to be restrained from attacking each other on the floor of parliament. Fighting broke out in the galleries. Women had to be lifted down out of the balconies to safety. And when the debate resumed the next day, Blake was in thick of things again. This time he faced off against John A. Macdonald. Our future Prime Minister was a Tory backbencher back then, so insulted by Blake's arguments that he challenged the man to a duel. He'd already headed outside, ready to fight,  by the time others managed to calm him down.

It was that same month, as tempers flared, that William Lyon Mackenzie was allowed to come home for the first time in more than ten years. Baldwin and LaFontaine's government had granted amnesty to the exiled rebel, who had continued his work as a newspaperman in the United States. He showed up in old Montreal, in parliament, watching the debates from the gallery. He was so loathed by the conservatives that when a Tory ran into him in the library, it nearly caused a riot. When he travelled to Upper Canada, there was a riot in Belleville. They burned him in effigy in Kingston. In Toronto, they burned him in effigy again and attacked the house where he was staying, pelting it with rocks. Fearing for his safety, Mackenzie asked city council for protection. They answered by passing a motion in support of the rioters. One councilor said that the law against murder was the only reason he didn't kill Mackenzie himself.

After nine days in Toronto, it was clear to our city's first mayor that things weren't safe for him here. Mackenzie abandoned his plan to move his family home to Canada and headed back south. He would wait for things to calm down — for a time when he could live in Toronto without fearing for his life.

Meanwhile, back in Montreal, the debate over the Rebellion Losses Bill raged on for the rest of the month and into March. The Tories filibustered their asses off. Every hour of every day, they were on the floor of the legislature, denouncing the bill, killing time while right-wing newspapers printed inflammatory headlines. Anger among Tory supporters grew. They called on Lord Elgin to do what the appointed Governors had always done when they were backed into a corner: step in on the side of the conservatives and dissolve parliament, snuffing out the bill — and with it, our democracy. "The Tory party," Elgin wrote in another letter home to England, "are doing what they can by menace, intimidation and appeals of passions to drive me to a coup d'etat."

But Elgin did nothing. On March 9th, the Rebellion Losses Bill passed. Now all it needed was his signature.

For nearly two whole months after that, it wasn't clear what Elgin would do next. He literally just stayed home, at the Governor General's residence outside Montreal. While Baldwin and LaFontaine waited for his signature, Tories and their supporters begged and pleaded and threatened, demanding that Elgin not sign the bill. It would doom the country, they claimed. But in the meantime, dozens of other laws had been passed by parliament. They needed signatures, too. One way or another, the Governor General was going to have to decide.

Elgin gets into his carriage

It was on a Wednesday – on April 25th – that Lord Elgin stepped outside his home, climbed into his carriage and headed into the capital. He pulled up to the parliament buildings around four o'clock in the afternoon. He was escorted upstairs, where he signed every single one of the bills that was waiting for him. Including the Rebellion Losses Bill.

The fight had taken nearly fifty years. Canadians had died for democracy. They had been hanged for it, rotted in jail for it, been banished from the country they loved. But now, Baldwin and LaFontaine and the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of English- and French-speaking Canadians united behind them had won. The head of the British government in Canada had just acknowledged the people of Canada as the true rulers of our country.

Canada was a democracy.

The exact timing came as a bit of a surprise; it seems Elgin hadn't told anyone he was coming. But news travelled fast. By the time the Governor General got back outside, an angry mob of conservatives was already waiting for him. He climbed into his carriage under a rain of insults, boos, eggs and tomatoes. He was drenched. But that was just a faint hint of things to come. Tories were pissed the fuck off. They weren't ready to give up – they were ready to get violent. The fight wasn't quite over yet, and the next stage of the struggle would begin that very night, as the parliament buildings burned.

I'll tell that part of the story in my next post in this series. 

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A whole heck of a lot of this comes from John Raulston Saul's amazing Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin book, which, if you're at interested in this stuff, you should absolutely totally definitely check out. You can buy it here, or get it from the library here. I also got some of the info about Mackenzie's brief trip home from here. 

Kind of an interesting footnote on the Rebellion Losses Bill: the Reformers did compromise with the Tories a bit. Originally, the bill paid damages to any Lower Canadians, regardless of their involvement in the Rebellions. But eventually, the Reformers agreed to deny funds to anyone who was convicted in the wake of the violence. That was controversial since the courts that convicted them weren't impartial – they were headed by John Colborne, the very same Governor General who had laid the government troops against the rebels. Not exactly the most unbiased jurist. So guys like the amnestied Lower Canadian rebel, Louis-Joesph Papineau were outraged by the compromise and caused real trouble for Baldwin and LaFontaine as they tried to the pass the bill.

And, finally, as I mention briefly in the body of the post, Responsible Government, actually came to Nova Scotia before it came to the Province of Canada. There, the fight was led by a reformer by the name of Joseph Howe. There, the British government began to relent by the end of 1847. The Colonial Secretary, John Grey (sort of the liaison between the English government and the colonies – who also happened to be Lord Elgin's uncle-in-law (is that a thing?)) wrote to the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia in November of that year: "It is neither possible nor desirable, to govern any of the British provinces of North America in opposition to the opinion of its inhabitants."

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

Like Washington And Jefferson Only Better

The Durham Report

This is the seventh in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here. Part two here. Part three here. Part four here. Part five here. Part six here.

So where was I? Right, the Durham Report! After the rebellions, sick of all the turmoil in Canada, the British had sent Radical Jack Durham here as Governor General to see what could be done. By the time he returned to England a few months later, he'd been convinced by Canadian liberals like Robert Baldwin and his father William Warren Baldwin that we should have Responsible Government. Democracy. Power over own own affairs. But the British Prime Minister thought it was a crazy idea. "A logical absurdity," he called it. 

There was, however, one thing about the Durham Report that the British government did like: the racism.

Durham thought French people sucked — French Canadians included. In his report, he famously claimed that Canada was really "two nations warring within the bosom of a single state". So in addition to the whole Responsible Government thing, Radical Jack suggested that the British should try to stamp out the French influence in Canada. He recommended an overwhelming flood of English-speaking immigrants. That Francophone rights should be limited. That some of them should be taken away entirely. And that Lower Canada (Québec) should be forced to join with Upper Canada (Ontario) so that anglophones could out-vote francophones on everything. 

The British might have thought the democracy part of the Durham Report was ridiculous, but they were all over this anti-French stuff. In 1840, they passed the Act Of Union. This was a big deal. Upper and Lower Canada were combined as the Province Of Canada and renamed Canada West and Canada East. Both new provinces were given the exact same number of seats in the legislature — even though there were waaaay more people in Québec. The French were getting screwed. And it didn't stop there.

New provinces meant new elections. And the British weren't about to let French Canadians just go ahead and vote. Not without making it as difficult as humanly possible. Polls were set up in English neighbourhoods instead of French ones. Sometimes they were in completely different towns. And when francophone voters travelled those long distances in order to cast their vote, they found organized mobs of violent Tory anglophones waiting for them. If violence broke out, the army was ready to step in to protect the people who spoke English and voted conservative. A lot of people would get beaten up during this election. Eight people would die.

One of those screwed-over francophones was Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. LaFontaine was born just outside Montreal and grew up to become one of the leading voices in the Parti Patriote, the left-leaning, democracy-loving party in Lower Canada. (He was also a dead ringer for Napoleon — they say even Napoleon's own guardsmen once mistook him for a taller reincarnation of the diminutive dictator.) But he wasn't as radical as some of the other big name Québecois reformers. He hadn't supported the violence of the rebellions — arguing instead in favour of passive resistance and the boycotting of British goods. And while that didn't stop the Tories from driving him into exile and then throwing him in jail for a while — without a warrant or any proper charges — he was eventually released. Since the more radical Patriotes were still in prison or in exile or hanged, the job of leading the party in the new elections was left to him.

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine

But not even LaFontaine was going to be allowed to vote. His poll was on the far side of his riding, in a town called New Glasgow — not exactly the most francophone place in the province. When LaFontaine and hundreds of his supporters marched the ten kilometers across his riding to record their votes, one of those angry mobs of Tory anglophones was there to block the way. Some of the reformers carried clubs for protection. Some of the Tories had rifles. On the walk over, there were skirmishes. Blood in the snow. And at New Glasgow it became obvious: if LaFontaine and his supporters wanted to vote, they were going to have to fight their way through.

This, they say, was one of the defining moments in the history of our country. Electoral violence was the norm back in those days. People used to hire gangs of thugs to clear the way through the mobs in order to record their votes. And LaFontaine had hundreds of men at his side ready to do just that. But he hadn't supported violence before the rebellions and he sure as hell didn't believe in it now. He chose not to fight. Instead, he calmed his supporters down and they left without any further bloodshed, avoiding what would have been, in his words, "a massacre". Unwilling to kill for it, LaFontaine lost his seat. One of the most important supporters of Responsible Government had no voice in the new legislature.

That's when Robert Baldwin came up with a plan.

See, in those days, you were weirdly allowed to run in two ridings at the same time. It was apparently supposed to be an insurance policy for party leaders, just in case they happened to lose one. If you won both of the ridings, you could pick the one you wanted to represent; there was a by-election in the other one. And in that election, Robert Baldwin had ended up with two seats in Upper Canada. The plan was for his father, William Warren Baldwin, to run in the by-election in the extra riding, which was just north of Toronto. It had a strong base of Reform supporters — having been held by William Lyon Mackenzie back before the Baldwins ran there. But Robert Baldwin had an idea. He wrote to his father and asked him to stand aside so that LaFontaine could run there instead. His father agreed. A francophone was going to try to win an election in rural, Protestant, anglophone Ontario.

To prepare, LaFontaine moved to Toronto, into the Baldwins' house on Front Street (on the north-east corner of Bay, diagonally across from where Union Station is now). Before long, he was like a member of the family. Together, he and William Warren travelled the riding giving speeches. They argued for Responsible Government. For democracy. Against the old European idea that loyalty should mean loyalty to your race, your religion, and your Crown. The Tories and our British overlords were still fighting for that belief, but Baldwin and LaFontaine argued that our ultimate loyalty should be to be to the greater good — to our fellow human beings regardless of what language they spoke or what god they worshiped. They believed that whether you spoke English or French, you were first and foremost Canadian. And that we were all going to have to work together in order to win our freedom, our democracy and our nation away from one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen

The voters agreed. LaFontaine won in a landslide. And Baldwin insisted that his new BFF become the leader of the new government. LaFontaine's official title would be Premier of Canada. But people called him Prime Minister.

Together, the two men set to work. The march toward democracy would be a slow one. They spent much of the next eight years building the trust between English- and French-speaking Canadians. The government was made bilingual. Baldwin sent his children to school in Québec City. Later, when the Tories pulled the same election mob bullshit with him that they had pulled with LaFontaine, Baldwin would run for election in Rimouski, in eastern Québec — and win.

Still, it wouldn't be easy. Canadian conservatives hated them — even burned Baldwin in effigy outside his home on Front Street. And in England, the liberal Whig party had just lost their election to the conservative British Tories, who hated the idea of Canadian democracy even more. When they sent a new Governor General to Canada, he had clear orders to ignore any demands for Responsible Government.

Robert Baldwin

Even worse, Robert Baldwin had begun a slow spiral into a severe, crippling depression.

He had always seemed a strange politician. He was quiet and reserved. An introvert. He mumbled his way through speeches. His skin was pale. His eyes were described as dull and expressionless. He was tall and stooped over.  They say he had "a funereal bearing". When he was young, he had fallen head over heels in love with his fifteen year-old cousin, Eliza, and their families — or, um, family — had been appalled. They sent her away for two years, but the young lovers waited and were married when she got back. For nine years, they lived a happy, love-filled life. But then Eliza died, slowwwly and painnnfully after childbirth. Baldwin was devastated. He became obsessed with her death. For the rest of his life, he carried her letters with him wherever he went. Every day, he would spend time alone in her room, which no one else was allowed to enter. Every year, around the anniversaries of their wedding and of her death, he could barely function, sorrowfully wandering the streets of Toronto, visiting the places they had shared special moments together, from their home on Front Street up to their estate, Spadina House, where she lay waiting for him in the family tomb. And now, just as Baldwin and LaFontaine were beginning to make progress, his father William Warren died too. Baldwin got worse. There were headaches. He was known to burst into tears in public. Soon, he was thinking about quitting politics altogether.

At the same time, LaFontaine was going through his own personal misery. William Warren's death had hit him hard too, but that was only the beginning. For years, he and his wife had longed for a child of their own but had never been able to conceive. They had been overjoyed when they finally adopted a daughter. But not long after William Warren died, she did too. So did LaFontaine's niece. The inflammatory rheumatism he had long been suffering from began acting up again. It kept him in bed with fevers and chest pains and excruciatingly swollen joints for weeks at a time. Sometimes months. At times, he said, he was surprised to still be alive.

But the two men carried on the fight. Even after they lost the next election. They dragged their tired bodies across the two provinces, meeting people, giving speeches, hand-writing letter after letter after letter. Baldwin outran an angry mob of club-wielding Orangemen one day; spent another being carried triumphantly through the streets of Rimouski. And it paid off. The election after that, in 1848, Baldwin and LaFontaine won a massive majority. The Tories were crushed. The time had finally come.

History remembers their government as The Great Ministry. In just a few short years, Baldwin and LaFontaine laid the groundwork for the Canada we know today. They brought in public education. An independent judiciary. Our jury system. A system for appeals. The made sure that everyone — not just the rich — had access to the courts. And that anyone — not just the rich friends of Tory politicians — could be appointed to  the civil service. They brought democracy to municipal governments. Opened our ports to ships from all over the world, instead of just British ones. They helped build our railways. Won amnesties for many of the rebels of 1837, including leaders like Wolfred Nelson and Louis-Joseph Papineau, who were finally allowed to come back home. And they took the religious King's College away from Bishop John Strachan and turned it into the secular University of Toronto.(Though they did, sadly, totally fuck up when it came to a woman's right to vote.) The impact these few years had on the history of Canada is hard to even imagine.

But none of that was as important as what they would pull off in the spring of 1849. That's when democracy finally came to Canada.

And I'll finally tell that part of the story in my next post.

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There are, I think, two more posts to go in this story of the birth of Canadian democracy, so I'll save some of my sources and added little tidbits for then. But a quick spoiler: though I hadn't read it until I'd written most of this post, John Ralston Saul's book on Baldwin and LaFontaine is absolutely freaking amazing and will have a deep influence on the rest of what I write about these guys. There are lots of copies of that book in the Toronto Public Library system and you can buy it right here. The fact that we don't all know this story by heart is absolutely dumbfounding. There's not even so much as a plaque at the site of Robert Baldwin's grave in St. James Cemetery. Or on the site of the house at Front & Bay. Yeesh.

I believe I shared this at the bottom of my last post, too, but you can read the full text of the Durham Report here.

The Bloody Aftermath Of The Bloody Rebellion

Mackenzie's ship, Caroline, burns at Niagara Falls

This is the sixth in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here. Part two here. Part three here. Part four here. Part five here.

Okay so, as I was saying at the end of my last post, Mackenzie's rebellion was a complete disaster. And so was the one in Quebec. The rebels in both provinces were completely routed by the Tories. The entire left-wing in Canada was in disarray. Rebel leaders across the country had been arrested, a few hanged, others exiled to Australia. Many of the rest had fled to the United States.

That's where Mackenzie was. After the rebellion was crushed, he escaped to Buffalo with a price on his head. There, he gave a rousing speech to the biggest public meeting that city had ever seen, convincing hundreds of volunteers to follow him to Navy Island in the Niagara River. He declared it the Republic of Canada, with a new flag and everything. An American ship, the SS Caroline, started ferrying them weapons and ammunition. They were going to invade Upper Canada and take another shot at the revolution.

The U.S. President, Martin Van Buren, threatened them with arrest but didn't really take any action. So the Tories in Canada took things into their own hands. Thousands of them — including Samuel Jarvis and a big famous loyalist guy from Hamilton, Allan McNab — headed south with British troops. They crossed the border into the States, bombarded Navy Island, set the Caroline on fire and left the pieces to drift over Niagara Falls. An American on board was shot and killed. The U.S. government was outraged.

The British claimed the attack was made in self-defense but the Americans were hardly convinced. Van Buren's Secretary of State wrote a famous letter to the Brits: a preemptive strike, he argued, was only okay when the threat was immediate and overwhelming, when there was no other choice and no time left to decide. In the end, the British agreed. They apologized for the attack. And the set of guidelines that would laid out in that letter, the "Caroline test", became the internationally-recognized standard for the use of preemptive force. It still is — at least, for people who aren't George W. Bush or Tony Blair. When the Nazis went on trial at Nuremberg, the court used the exact same words.

After the burning of the Caroline, Mackenzie's Navy Island scheme fell apart. He ended up being arrested by the Americans and spent months in prison. After his release, with his health failing, he resigned himself to life in the United States. He even got his American citizenship. During the next decade, as the battle over Canadian democracy raged towards a climax, he'd be on the sidelines, living in New York State, publishing newspapers that attacked President Van Buren for being too close to the British.

Mackenzie's failed invasion wasn't the only one. In the months after the botched revolution, there were clashes along both sides of the border all the way into Quebec. And they weren't going well for the surviving rebels. In the wake of the rebellions, it kind of looked like Canadian democracy was screwed.

But here's the thing: the British were getting sick of dealing with this shit. It had been nearly 400 years since Queen Elizabeth sent the first English colonists to the New World. They had spent centuries invading the First Nations, nearly bankrupted themselves fighting the Spanish, and waged another massive war to conquer the French in Quebec. Tiny British outposts had grown into thriving metropolises, major economies funneling money back to England. But times had changed. Democracy was getting more and more popular. First, their own American colonists had gotten all pissy about taxation and risen up against them, driven them and their supporters out of the country. Then, it struck closer to home: right across the channel, French liberals who had been inspired by the Americans went batshit bloodthristy and beheaded their king.

Now, there was even unrest in Canada. Canada! Canada was supposed to be run by staunch loyalists, guys who had personally fought wars against the Americans in the name of the British Crown. Oh sure, Reformers like William Lyon Mackenzie had been demanding democracy for decades, delivering fiery speeches, writing scathing articles and even winning elections. But now it seemed they were willing to fight in the streets for it if they had to. 

And in England, the liberals were in power. As far as the Whig Party was concerned, the rebellions were the last straw. They already believed in democracy a hell of a lot more than the conservatives did — and trouble in the colonies wasn't going to win them any votes in the next election. It was time for things to change.

So they did. The Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, was fired. The Whigs knew that hiring him had been a giant mistake. They thought he was a liberal reformer, but he turned out to be a super-conservative prick. He left Toronto a hated man. The surviving rebels put a $500 price on his head; he was forced to cancel his plans for a grand departure through Halifax and snuck out through the States instead. He went back to his life writing travel books in England. And when the Whigs named a new Governor General for the Canadas, they were going to be sure they didn't make the same mistake again. This time, they chose the most in-your-face liberal they could find: Lord Durham.

Lord Durham

Durham, they knew they could trust. Not only was he the son-in-law of the last Whig Prime Minister (Earl Grey, the guy the tea is named after), but just five years earlier he had helped lead the fight against the Tories during one of the most important political battles in British history — getting the Reform Act passed. He'd fought for public education. For better working conditions for miners. For the right of every man to vote, no matter his wealth. He was so left-leaning they called him "Radical Jack".  The Whigs were convinced he'd be perfect for the job.

Radical Jack was not so convinced. He didn't want to go to Canada. The new Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne (of having Melbourne named after him fame), couldn't talk him into it. But as luck would have it, there was somebody else who could: the brand new queen. Victoria was young and inexperienced, just 18 years old. She'd only been on the throne for a few months. But she had already made it perfectly clear: even if she was supposed to be neutral when it came to politics, she liked the Whig Party best. She was so close to Melbourne that Tories heckled her as "Mrs. Melbourne". And when Durham refused the post to Canada, she stepped in. Soon, Radical Jack was on a ship sailing for the Great White North. His Prime Minister told him he would have "free reign".

As it turned out, that was kind of bullshit. Melbourne screwed Durham on one of the very first things he tried to do. There were some jailed rebels who he knew would be sentenced to death if they ever went on trial — the judges tended to be the very same guys who had fought against them during the rebellions. So he ordered the prisoners exiled to Bermuda instead. The Canadian Tories were pissed. They denounced Durham as anti-democratic and nicknamed him "The Dictator". In the end, Lord Melbourne sided with them; he reversed Durham's decision from England. Canadian liberals burned Melbourne in effigy. Durham resigned in protest and sailed home, never to return. He'd gotten here in May and by the end of the fall, he was already gone.

But those few months were more than enough time for Radical Jack. His summer in Canada changed the course of our nation's history forever. The most radical Reformers — the ones who had supported the rebellions — might be dead, arrested or gone, but the more moderate liberals were still around. And Durham spent much of his time here talking to them, listening to their ideas about democracy and government and what they should mean for Canada.

There was one conversation in particular that people say was incredibly freaking important. It was with two of the most super insanely gigantically important Torontonians ever: William Warren Baldwin and his son Robert. Canadian historical figures do not get much bigger than this.

The Baldwins were among the very first people to ever to move to Toronto. William Warren Baldwin came here with his father all the way back around 1800, when the town of York was still just a few muddy blocks and a forbidding wilderness. He did well for himself: became a doctor and a lawyer; owned a bunch of land; got married. His son Robert was born in their house on Front Street, at Frederick, a couple of block east of the St. Lawrence Market. (Crazily, that very same house would later become William Lyon Mackenzie's print shop — the scene of the oh-so-important Types Riot.)

As York grew, the Baldwins took their place among the city's rich elite. On the hill above Davenport, right beside where Casa Loma is now, William built a grand house he called Spadina (from a native word for "sudden rise of land"). To be able to see the lake more clearly from his window, he had a road cut through the forest all the way down to the water. He called that road Spadina too. Baldwin Street, he named after himself. Phoebe Street, he named after his wife. He even helped to design the new law school: Osgoode Hall.

William Warren Baldwin

The Baldwin family was friends with some of the most powerful conservatives in the city. They were BFFs with Peter Russell, a corrupt, incompetent, racist, slave-owning asshole who ran Upper Canada for a while in York's earliest days. When he died, the Baldwins  inherited his crazy-rich estate and even moved into his old house, Russell Abbey, to take of his sister, who was losing her mind. And Peter Russell was far from the only conservative they had close ties to. When young Robert went to school, he was taught by John Strachan, the figurehead of the Family Compact. Just like all those Family Compact guys, William Warren Baldwin was a firm Protestant. And he was all about old school gentlemanly honour: when some dude mouthed off about him once, Baldwin challenged the guy to a duel. They met on the sandy strip of peninsula that is now the island. The other guy took it all back before Baldwin could shoot him.

But when it came to politics, the Baldwins and their Tory friends had pretty much nothing in common. By the time of the rebellion, both William Warren and Robert Baldwin had been leading figures in the Reform movement for years. They fought for minority rights. And for public education. And while they didn't support Mackenzie's violent revolution, they still firmly believed in the idea of Canadian democracy. When Durham asked them about it that fateful summer, they were very clear: the ultimate power in Canada should rest with the Canadian people, not with the British Governor General. Ministers in our government shouldn't be responsible to the British, but to our very own elected representatives in the legislature. To parliament. This is what they call Responsible Government.

Durham was convinced. When he got back home to England, he wrote one of the most important documents in all of Canadian history. It was officially titled "The Report on the Affairs of British North America", but we know it as the Durham Report. In it, he made his opinions pretty freaking clear. The current system, he said, was "defective... irresponsible government, an evil which no civilized community could bear. It was a question between a petty, corrupt, insolent Tory clique and the mass of the people." He openly called for Canadian democracy — for Responsible Government. The ideas the Baldwins had been fighting for were now being recommended to the British government by a British official specifically hired by the British government to give them recommendations. This was HUGE.

But the fight was far from over. When the Durham Report was released, Lord Melbourne screwed Radical Jack over yet again. He dismissed the idea of Responsible Government as "a logical absurdity". As far as he was concerned, Canada wasn't going to be getting real democracy any time soon.

The very next summer, Lord Durham died of tuberculosis. Fifty thousand people attended his funeral. His last words were saved for the country he hadn't even wanted to come to. "Canada," he said, "will one day do justice to my memory."

He was right. But it was going to take another ten years before we won the battle for control over our own affairs. And with Mackenzie exiled in the States, it was up to Robert Baldwin to lead the charge.

The next post in this series about William Lyon Mackenzie (and Robert Baldwin) and the birth of Canadian democracy is coming soon. I now have no idea how many there will be... they just keep going... and going... but we're getting there. Promise. And you're going to want to keep reading; Robert Baldwin is probably my favourite figure in the history of the city.

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Some interesting tidbits related to all of this. William Warren Baldwin, Robert Baldwin and Peter Russell all share the same headstone at the Baldwin family tomb in St. James Cemetery. Lord Durham had one of the first recording cases of synesthesia on his trip, a condition some people have where some sense get mixed up with other ones (like seeing letters and numbers as particular colours, which I have). And when Baldwin laid out Spadina Avenue, he included the roundabout island thingy that is still there, just north of College.

There's a chronology of the aftermath of the rebellions here. You can read the full text of the Durham Report here. You can read a bit about Tories rioting against Durham here.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

Revolution! ish!

John Rolph

This is the fifth in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here. Part two here. Part three here. Part four here.

It was only Saturday, but John Rolph was already worried. On Thursday, he was supposed become our very first President. William Lyon Mackenzie had personally asked him to do it. After the rebel army marched down Yonge Street and triumphantly seized power, they were going to "spontaneously" ask Rolph to lead them until they could hold elections. Rolph was a famous doctor, one of the leading figures of the Reform movement. He'd almost been picked over Mackenzie as our first mayor. And he — along with another Reformer, Robert Baldwin — had famously been picked by the dumbass conservative Lieutenant Governor, Bond Head, to sit on his Executive Council when he first got to Toronto. They only made it three weeks before they resigned in protest because he wasn't listening to them. It had been one of the most important moments in the build-up to the revolution. But now, with only five days left until the Reformers were supposed to seize power, Rolph felt like it might all be slipping away. As the rebel army gathered north of Toronto, he was still downtown. And he didn't like the look of things down there. It kind of looked like the government was finally starting to get organized.

Rolph knew about the emergency Executive Council meeting where Colonel FitzGibbon had burst in with news of the rebel preparations. He figured they were bound to have already seen Mackenzie's handbills calling for revolution; people had been coming in from the countryside to warn them. There were rumours that they were finally preparing the militia. And that the militia was going to be armed with the weapons stored at City Hall— the very same weapons the rebels were planning on stealing to use themselves. Worst of all, bad news from Quebec: the revolution in Lower Canada was falling apart. Two days after their first victory, the rebels had been overrun, massacred by British troops. Louis-Joseph Papineau and Wolfred Nelson had fled to the United States. Many of the other Patriotes were in prison. Rumour had it that a warrant for Mackenzie's arrest had been issued, too. The way things were going, it could all be over before Thursday.

So Rolph sent word to the rebels north of the city. They were gathering at Montgomery's Tavern on Yonge, a couple of blocks up from Eglinton. If they were going to do this thing, he told them, they needed to do it soon. Like on Monday. Otherwise, it might be too late.

But changing the date of the revolution was not such an easy thing to do. Things were already getting pretty confused up at the tavern. No one, for instance, had thought to tell John Montgomery, a big Reform guy, that they were going to use his place. And he'd leased it out to another guy who didn't give a crap about the revolution. He gave a crap about getting paid for all the food they wanted to eat. The rebels didn't have much money; so they didn't get much food. There weren't enough weapons either. And hell, until Sunday night, Mackenzie wasn't even there yet. He was still traveling around, telling people to show up on Thursday. When he finally did get there, he was furious. He wanted to stick with the original plan. He wanted to wait for more men. And he especially wanted to wait for Anthony Von Egmond, the Dutch dude who was going to lead the army, who had real experience, who had fought in the Napoleonic wars, and who was going to meet them there on Thursday.

Finally, on Monday night, John Rolph rode up from the city to convince Mackenzie in person. Eventually, all of the rebel leaders were on the same page. New plan: they would let the men rest overnight and then march in the morning. The Canadian Revolution was being moved up to Tuesday.

Robert Moodie gets shot

But they couldn't even wait that long to start killing each other.

The first to go was Robert Moodie. He was a retired army officer. And a conservative. He lived in Richmond Hill, where he'd heard all about Mackenzie's plans. And he was ballsy, too, so as far as he was concerned, he was going to go right ahead and warn Bond Head. That night, he and a couple of other guys rode straight down Yonge Street at the rebel barricades. They had blocked the road and were making prisoners out of anyone who might warn the city. But Robert Moodie wasn't going to be taken prisoner. He charged right at them screaming, "Who are you, who dare to stop me upon the Queen's highway?" He fired his pistol above their heads to drive them off.  They fired back.

People say that while he lay there bleeding on Yonge Street, he moaned, "I am shot—I am a dead man." He was right. The rebels lifted him up out of the road and into the tavern. It took him two hours to die.

Now, William Lyon Mackenzie wasn't there for that. He'd been all antsy and nervous; he couldn't just wait around all night without doing anything, so at about ten o'clock he'd left with a scouting party. He rode south with four other men: Captain Anthony Anderson (who was going to lead the troops in Von Egmond's absence),  Joseph Shepard (who I'm really only mentioning because his family owned a farm near  Yonge and Sheppard — the street is named after them with an accidental second "p") and two other dudes who we don't really care about.

Meanwhile, down in Toronto, FitzGibbon was also antsy and nervous. He didn't sleep at home that night, worried that the rebels would come kill him in his sleep. Instead, he set up shop at the Parliament Buildings on King Street and before calling it a night, he too led some men out on a scouting mission. A couple of them were sent on ahead. One of them was John Powell. He was a pretty famous judge and politician, a hardcore Tory. He was the one who let Samuel Jarvis off scot-free after Jarvis killed Jean Ridout in their famous duel. That was about a year before Jarvis married Powell's daughter. It was exactly the kind of conflict of interest bullshit that drove the Reformers crazy.

The second death of the night came when the two scouting parties ran into each other. Mackenzie's men caught Powell by surprise and took him prisoner. But the way that Mackenzie made sure that Powell wasn't carrying any weapons was by asking him politely if he was carrying any weapons and then taking his word as a gentleman. Powell lied. And then, once Mackenzie had turned him over to Captain Anderson to be taken back to the tavern, he pulled the pistols he was carrying, shot Anderson in the back and escaped. The bullet severed Anderson's spine. He died instantly. The rebels had lost their back-up commander.

Toronto was in chaos for the rest of the night. Powell rushed downtown to warn Bond Head; Bond Head rushed to get his family on a steamer out of town and then ran around like a lunatic for a while. While he was doing that, the students of Upper Canada College went to ring the school's bells in warning. But their headmaster told them to go back to bed. When FitzGibbon went to ring the bells of St. James Cathedral, no one could find the keys to the bell tower. He was about to break down the door with an axe when they finally found them. In the end, a couple hundred men answered the call, taking up arms and rushing to King Street to defend City Hall and the Parliament Buildings.

The March of the Rebels Upon Toronto

By morning, on what was supposed to be the dawn of their glorious revolution, the rebels were feeling more than a little discouraged. They could hear the bells ringing in the city below. They'd lost the element of surprise. Plus, they'd heard about what was happening in Quebec. That very day, martial law was declared in Montreal. Von Egmond wasn't showing up until Thursday, Anderson was dead, and Mackenzie's next pick for commander, Samuel Lount, was a blacksmith who didn't really feel up to the challenge of leading an entire army. So when the men — 500 strong now — finally did start marching down Yonge Street just before noon, it was Mackenzie who was at their head, riding a white horse and wearing as many jackets as he could possibly squeeze into, apparently trying to make himself bulletproof. A lot of the people who marched with him that day agreed: he was acting even crazier and more erratic than usual. Which was saying something. It seems Mackenzie might have been coming a bit unhinged.

It was a long, slow march. They'd only made it to St. Clair before Mackenzie had them stop for lunch. He went to the postmaster's house and forced the postmaster's terrified wife to make a meal for his troops. Some never bothered marching any further south than that — they just hung out on the lawn eating boiled beef and drinking whiskey. Then came the emissaries from Bond Head. The government was trying to stall the rebels by getting them to talk about a truce. But since they had to send men who the rebels wouldn't shoot, they chose Robert Baldwin and John Rolph. Not exactly the crown's most loyal subjects. Rolph warned the rebels to hurry the fuck up; the government was still disorganized. But Mackenzie didn't really listen: he paused again near Bloor to burn down the house of a Tory who had pissed him off once. And then he tried to burn down the house of the sheriff, who was yet another member of the Jarvis family: William Botsford Jarvis. His wife had named their flowery hillside estate Rosedale. Lount was barely able to talk Mackenzie out of it.

So with all of these delays, it was dusk by the time the army had gotten all the way down to College. And  it was there, for the very first time, that the rebels would face off against government troops. FitzGibbon had sent the sheriff and 26 other men there — against Bond Head's orders — to hide behind some shrubs and ambush the rebels. It worked. They fired a volley into the rebel ranks. They even hit a couple of them. And then, as the front line of rebels returned fire, the loyalists all ran away as fast as they could. Sheriff Jarvis called after them to stand and fight, but it was no use.

Sheriff Jarvis and his family

Luckily for the loyalists, the rebels were just as inexperienced. When the front line of their ranks dropped to one knee to reload their guns, the guys behind them figured they'd all been shot. So they ran away, too. Most people seem to think that if the rebels had kept marching south into the city, they'd have captured it that night. But they also seem to think that if they had, things might have gotten really bloody. Once the monarchy-loving army in Quebec was finished with the rebels there, they could have easily marched west to attack Mackenzie in Toronto. That could have been a horrifying mess. Not to mention that Mackenzie had already started vengefully burning things to the ground. But instead of marching south, most of the rebels headed back to the tavern to regroup. Some kept going all the way home.

And that brings us to Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the rebels didn't do very much. They decided to wait for Von Egmond after all. Mackenzie did lead some men out to rob a stagecoach and a tavern to help pay their bills. And John Rolph decided it was time to save his own skin. One of the other big-name Reformers in the city was arrested for treason that day. Rolph escaped. He made it to the States by pretending he was going to visit a patient. It be would another six years before he could come home to the city that had almost made him President.

But Wednesday went much, much, much, much better for the government. Their reinforcements arrived. They came from Hamilton and from Pickering and from Niagara and from Peel and from a host of other towns. By morning there were more than a thousand of them. Enough to go crush the rebels. So that's what they decided to do.

That Thursday was a clear, bright day in an unusually warm December. The army's muskets and cannons glinted in the sun. Bond Head climbed up on his white horse in his white uniform and led his army north. It was commanded by some of the richest, most powerful men in the history of our city. John Strachan, our first Anglican bishop, Toronto's great hero from the War of 1812, the guy who sort of founded U of T and was the figurehead of the Family Compact, rode at Bond Head's side. Samuel Jarvis, one of Strachan's former students, whose family had been here since allllll the way back in 1798, whose incompetence and corruption had been pissing Reformers off pretty much ever since, and who had even broken Mackenzie's newspaper press and thrown the typeface into the lake, well, he headed up a group on one of the flanks. Colonel FitzGibbon, the guy who had received Laura Secord's legendary warning in the War of 1812 and helped us defeat the Americans, who had once saved Mackenzie's life and had, until a couple days ago, been the lone voice calling for the government to take the threat of revolution seriously, led another group. Judge Jones, who had scoffed at FitzGibbon's warnings to the Executive Council, was there, too. Even Bond Head's aide-de-camp was a future mayor. And as the army marched up Yonge Street out of the city, loyalist citizens cheered them on. They leaned out their windows waving flags. A military band joined the troops, with the drone of bagpipes filling the air.

Up at Montgomery's Tavern, the rebels were just plain not ready. Von Egmond had finally arrived that morning, took one look at his men, and declared Mackenzie's plan to immediately attack the city  "stark madness". Mackenzie almost shot him for that. Instead, they sent a farmer, Peter Matthews, off with some men to burn a bridge over the Don as a decoy. It didn't work. Bond Head's army kept coming. Soon, the rebels could see the metallic gleam of their enemies' guns as they crested the hill down at St. Clair. At the spot where Mount Pleasant Cemetery is now, the government's cannons let loose with their first volley. The cannonballs crashed through the woods. They were still too far south. But soon, they were close enough.

The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern

The second volley smashed through the tavern's dinning room window and brought down three of the building's chimneys. Men scattered and poured of the building. The government troops surged forward and opened fire with their rifles and muskets. A few rebels were hit. A few would die. Mostly, they ran away. Fifteen or twenty minutes after it started, the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern was already over. The government had won. The rebels had lost. The Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 had failed. Democracy would have to wait.

As Bond Head's men began to loot the area, the Lieutenant Governor ordered the tavern burned to the ground. Some rebels were arrested. Others just got a stern lecture and were sent home.  As for Mackenzie, he was one of the leaders lucky enough to escape to the United States. With a price on his head, he slipped across the border and settled on Navy Island in the Niagara River. He declared a new Republic of Canada and led an irrelevant government in exile. It would be more than a decade before he could come home. 

The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern marked the beginning of a dark time for Torontonians who believed in democracy. Bond Head and the Tories cracked down. Even people who had never supported the rebels were denounced as traitors. Some were fired from their jobs. Some were arrested.  Some were deported to Australia. Von Egmond was captured and died of pneumonia in a shitty jail cell. Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were tried and convicted and sentenced to hang. Lount's wife personally delivered a petition with thousands of signatures and begged for her husband's life. Even Sheriff Jarvis was moved to tears. But she was ignored. "I'm not ashamed of anything I've done," Lount declared on the gallows just before the rope snapped his neck. And he was the fortunate one. Matthews kicked around for a good minute before the last of his life drained out of him.

The Reform movement was left in tatters. The next mayor of Toronto would be super-Tory John Powell — hailed as a hero for having shot Anthony Anderson in the back of the neck. It would be nearly ten years before another liberal ran the city. In just about every single way you could possibly imagine, the revolution had been a complete and total failure.

But here's the thing. The fight for democracy in Canada was far from over. And the Reformers were going to win it. Mackenzie's ridiculous, poorly-planned, poorly-executed disaster of a rebellion actually ended up being one of the major catalysts for change. After more than fifty years under dictatorial British rule, we were finally going to seize power over our own affairs. Canada, you see, was about to get responsible fucking government.


Continue reading with Part Six, The Bloody Aftermath of the Bloody Rebellion, here.

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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 a million great resources to learn about the events during the Rebellion of 1837. I leaned especially heavily on a few of them. There's a great book about it all, written in the late-1880s, that you can read online here. I also took a lot from The Toronto Story and Toronto: The Place of Meeting. There's also some information here and here and all over the Wikipedia pages of the people involved. You can see the poster offering a reward for Mackenzie's capture here.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

This post is related to dream 12 John Rolph's Beard John Rolph, 1867

Bond Head The Bonehead

The House of Commons, 1833 by Sir George Hayter

This is the third in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here and part two here.

This is a painting of one of the important moments in all of British history. It's in the House of Commons. On the right-hand side are the Duke of Wellington and his super-conservative, monarchy-loving Tory Party.  On the left are the reform-loving Whigs, led by the Earl of Grey, the guy the tea is named after. While the Canadian Tories and Reformers were battling over democracy down on Front Street, the British Tories and Whigs were having their own massive political brawl over in England.

The Whigs were determined to get rid of the "rotten boroughs". They were ridings left over from the dark ages that still had seats in parliament but nobody living in them anymore. The Tories controlled the land they were on. And they gave the land to friends so that they could vote Tory. The Tories, of course, loved this system; the public, not so much. When the Prime Minster, the Duke of Wellington, openly declared his support for the system, his government fell. The Whigs took over. And when the House of Lords — kinda like our Senate but waaaay worse — tried to stop the Whigs from getting rid of the rotten boroughs, things went all to hell. Prime Minister Grey resigned in protest. The English people rose up in an angry wave of strikes and riots they called the Days of May. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up at rallies. Angry mobs attacked the homes of the Lords. There was talk of revolution. The Queen was sure she was going to lose her head. In the end, the King was forced to convince the Tories to back down. The Whigs had won. This painting commemorates the moment they handed the Tories' asses to them and passed the Reform Act of 1832. The rotten boroughs were gone forever. The Tories were so thoroughly beaten that they would soon have to re-brand themselves as the Conservative Party. And for the first time in 25 years, since the days when Toronto was a tiny, tiny, tiny little town of a few hundred people, the Whigs were calling the shots in London.

So: this all meant that the Family Compact had lost one of their main sources of support. It looked liked William Lyon Mackenzie might finally get somewhere with the British government. And things started off pretty darn well, too. When the Family Compact tried to have Mackenzie tossed out of the Legislative Assembly, he travelled to London to meet with the Whigs. And they listened. A letter was sent to Canada ordering the Canadian Tories to back off. And then, a couple of years after the cholera crisis had passed, the Whigs went even further: they fired the Lieutenant Governor, John Colborne. He'd been appointed when the Tories were running England and the Whigs intended to replace him with someone with a reputation for reform. That's when Sir Francis Bond Head was sent to Toronto.

Sir Francis Bone Head

As the new Lieutenant Governor, Bond Head had a clear mandate to make concessions and find a solution. This, they told him, was the most important moment in the history of Upper Canada. On his month-long journey across the Atlantic, he studied the list of grievances they'd asked Mackenzie to write up. All 553 pages of them. When he rode in town, there were triumphant banners welcoming him as "FRANCIS BOND HEAD, A TRIED REFORMER". And his very first act was to appoint big-name Reform leaders to his Executive Council. He even included Robert Baldwin, son of the famous, liberal, cholera-fighting doctor, William Warren Baldwin. Things were looking up for Canadian democracy.

Except that actually, Sir Francis Bond Head was a super conservative and not a reformer at all and the Whigs had accidentally fucked everything up. 

Apparently they got the impression that he was a big reform guy because he'd written some vaguely reformish-sounding things while he helped to oversee the implementation of the Whigs' totally-batshit right-wing plan to force people on welfare to live in "workhouses". They'd do manual labour there and live in conditions the Whigs made terrible on purpose in order to encourage them to stop being such lazy poor people and get jobs already. About 6.5% of the British population ended up living like this. Men and women and children were all separated. They got bread and gruel. This is the shit Dickens wrote Oliver Twist about. Bond Head had been good at that stuff. At being the kind of guy who would be a villain in a Dickens novel. And at having the army put down the riots that broke out when the Whigs started handing out welfare in coupons instead of real money.

Other than that, Bond Head had shown no interest in politics whatsoever. Before working on the poor law, he'd been a travel writer in South America. (He was the author of such hits as Rough notes taken during some rapid journeys across the pampas and among the Andes and Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau.) He'd gotten his knighthood because the King was impressed by his ability to do tricks with a lasso. He, like the most recent Lieutenant Governors before him, had fought at Waterloo. But he'd never joined a political party. He'd never gone to a political event. He'd never even voted. Ever.  He described his knowledge of what was going on in Toronto as "a gross ignorance of everything in any way related to the government of our colonies." And when he rode into town and saw those welcome banners, he was stunned. "I was no more connected with human politics than the horses that were drawing me," he wrote. To this day there are people who think the Whigs must have confused him with his cousin, Edward, and appointed the wrong guy.

Elmsley House, where Bond Head lived, years later

But here he was, living in the Lieutenant Governor's mansion at King and Simcoe (where Roy Thompson Hall is now). They'd sent him out across the ocean, so far away it took months to send messages back and forth, under the impression that he was the Government of Canada. And he wasn't about to do any reforming. This is a guy who wrote glowingly about the Family Compact. About their "abilities and character" and their "industry and intelligence". William Lyon Mackenzie, on the other hand, he called a "low-bred, vulgar man" and "an unprincipled, vagrant grievance-monger". Bond Head had put Reformers on his Executive Council, but he wasn't planning on listening to his Executive Council. And when they demanded that he consult with them on things, he just plain told them no. The whole Council resigned in protest. Even the Tories.

Bond Head had only been here for three weeks and things were already falling apart. Politicians in both parties were outraged. The Legislative Assembly demanded an explanation, denounced him as a despot and refused to pass any bills that had anything to do with money. In retaliation, he prorogued parliament like a punk. A month later, he dissolved it completely and called for new elections. And he was planning to do everything he could to make sure the Reform Party got crushed.

The Upper Canada elections of 1836 have been called one of the most corrupt in Canadian history. (Which, given how corrupt early Canadian elections were, is saying something.) Bond Head threw his entire weight behind the Tories. There were bribes. Threats. People got beat up. There were riots. Bond Head and the Tories made sure that all the returning officers were on their side. And that the polls were placed in Tory neighbourhoods. It was a choice, Bond Head said, between "the forces of loyalty, order, and prosperity" on one side and the "selfish and disloyal" on the other. Even worse, he claimed, Mackenzie and his friends were in league with the French Canadians and the Americans. They might very well invade if the Reformers won.

The results weren't even close. The Tories were back in power. Even Mackenzie had lost his seat. As far as Bond Head was concerned, he'd proven his point: "The people of Upper Canada detest democracy". The Whigs got another letter. "Nothing can be brighter than the moral and political state of the Canadas," he wrote them. "All is sunshine and colour of rose."

A year after he wrote that, he'd be fighting rebels in the streets of Toronto. William Lyon Mackenzie had had enough. He'd tried to bring democracy to Canada by working within the system. He'd tried reasoning with the English. But even with Whigs in power, it had failed. The time had come to try a new tactic. It was time to raise an army.

Continue reading with Part Four, An Army Gathers on Yonge Street, here.

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Bond Head wrote a few hundred pages about his experiences in Toronto, which you can read here. You can check out the declaration he released when he dissolve parliament because they didn't like him here. You can read about the riots in Kent, where he was helping bring in that dumbass poor law here. There's also a lot of information about him here, at Historical Narratives of Upper Canada, which tells lots of neat stories about our early pre-Ontario years. I've been visiting it a lot as I put together these Mackenzie posts.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

Uh Oh, Everyone's Dying Of Cholera, Parts I & II

Front and Simcoe, 1834

This is the second in a series of posts telling the story of William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. You can read the first part here.

York had changed a lot in the decade since William Lyon Mackenzie first set foot here. It was no longer a tiny little town alone in the middle of the woods. The population had skyrocketed from 1,600 to  nearly 10,000. The first few blocks around the St. Lawrence Market had spread all the way west to Bathurst Street. And  with a new Lieutenant Governor, John Colborne, aggressively encouraging immigration, there were more people arriving all the time.

What they found here was a disgusting mess. There was no sewer system or running water.  People dumped their garbage everywhere. They emptied their shit buckets into the street. King and Yonge and Queen were a muddy soup of excrement and filth. And there were no sidewalks, either; you'd just wade through it, track it into your homes. Francis Collins (who published one of the big liberal Reform newspapers, the Canadian Freeman) wrote about "[s]tagnant pools of water, green as a leek, and emitting deadly exhalations". He called the lake water, where people would just dump whatever gross crap they wanted get rid of, "carrion-broth". In the winter, he said, "[a]ll the filth of the town—dead horses, dogs, cats, manure, etc. [was] heaped up together on the ice, to drop down, in a few days, into the water". That was their drinking water. That watery pig corpse horse shit juice. Soon, it would kill Collins — one of the great Reform heroes, a man who'd spent months in jail for criticizing the Family Compact too harshly. It would kill his wife, too. And his brother. And hundreds more.

It had all started in India, five years earlier and more than 12,000 kilometers away. It came from the spot where the Ganges meets the Bay of Bengal, one of the most fertile places on earth. The river widens out into an endless expanse of swamps and streams, of lush mangrove and bamboo forests. There are tigers and elephants and leopards and pythons. And there's also cholera. It's been in the water for as long as anyone can remember. Millions upon millions of deadly bacteria lay dormant in the silt and come alive in the monsoon season when the conditions are right. But in 1826, of course, they didn't know that's what was happening. They just knew that people were dying. And that the cholera was beginning to spread.

Cholera strikes Paris

It was slow at first. People started to die further up the river. And then all across India, wherever the trade routes led. It took a year to get to China and another to get halfway across Russia. But when it hit Europe and the Middle East, things sped up. Three thousand Muslims died on their pilgrimage to Mecca in 1831. Thirty thousand deaths were announced in Cairo and Alexandria. There would be 100,000 dead in Hungary. And in France. Bodies piled up in all the cobblestoned capitals of the Old World. Death struck without warning. One survivor, who had suddenly fallen ill while walking down the street, said it was like being "knocked down with an ax. I had no premonition at all." Heinrich Heine, a German poet, was in Paris when the plague sweep through a masked ball: "suddenly the gayest of the harlequins collapsed, cold in the limbs, and underneath his mask, violet blue in the face. Laughter died out, dancing ceased and in a short while carriage-loads of people hurried from the Hotel Dieu to die".  The deaths came so quick, they ran out of coffins. All over the world, corpses were being tossed into mass graves by the thousands.

In England, they were shipping cholera back directly from the source. Their British East India Company had been gradually conquering India for more than a hundred years. And when they shipped tea back home, they'd scoop up bilge water from the Bay of Bengal, carry it halfway around the world and dump it into the Thames. More than six thousand people died in London. More than fifty thousand across the UK. Ireland was hardest hit. In places like Dublin and Limerick and Cork, terrified refugees packed into ships and set sail for the New World. They crowded together in squalor, sharing cholera-ridden water and cholera-ridden piss buckets for weeks on end. By the time they reached the Canadas, some ships had already lost dozens on board to the disease. Officials in Lower Canada, where they arrived first, did their best to screen passengers and quarantine anyone who showed signs of the sickness, but it didn't seem to do much good. Cholera would devastate Quebec City that summer, killing more than two thousand. In Montreal, doctors rushed through the streets all day and night. The apothecaries stayed open around the clock. The army fired blank artillery shells at nothing — a desperate attempt to drive the cholera out of the air. More than a thousand died in a single month.

As cholera marched west, York braced for the terror. Lieutenant Governor Colborne declared a day of "Public Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer" in an attempt to stave off the disaster. The government formed a Board of Health, led by the most famous doctor in town, the staunch Reformer William Warren Baldwin (the same guy who built the first Spadina House on the hill overlooking Davenport and had Spadina Road carved out of the woods south of it so that he'd have a clear view all the way to the lake). Baldwin's Board of Health had a doctor check all new arrivals before they left their ships. They washed buildings and outhouses with lime. They shut the bars at ten. But it was no use. Eleven thousand immigrants came to York in the spring and summer of 1832. And many of them were sick. By late June, it had begun.

Cholera victims

It was terrifying. Cholera fucks you up good. Those bacteria are resilient little bastards; they can survive the acids in your stomach and make it all the way to your small intestine. There, they swim over to the intestinal wall and start to produce a toxin. It sucks the water out of the rest of your body and forces you to expel it in an endless onslaught of watery diarrhea. You can shit out 20 or 30 litres in a day, clear liquid with chunks of your intestine in it. And you vomit, too. A lot. You lose so much fluid that your hands go wrinkly. Your eyes sink back into your head. Your skin changes colour. Then you die. And it happens fast. You can go from healthy to dead in just a few hours. And all of that excrement your loved ones have tossed into the street and into the drinking water is filled with the next generation of bacteria ready to do the same thing all over again.

For the rest of that summer, our city was filled with people dying sudden, grotesque deaths. Hundreds more got sick and thousands fled to the countryside in fear. The Board of Health tried to fight back, but they didn't really know what they were fighting. They asked everyone to burn tar and sulphur in their yards to drive it away. They told people to hide under blankets at night with the windows closed. To cut back on vegetables and drink lots of coffee. To switch from cotton socks to wool ones. And even the good advice — to get rid of standing water, take a bath every day, clean up the garbage, go to the hospital if you're sick — was being ignored. They couldn't force anyone to do anything, since the Board of Health had no real power. And Colborne, who wanted to protect his authority and make sure no one screwed with his open immigration policy, refused to give them any. They reported nine deaths in the first week of the outbreak. Twenty-four in the second. The numbers went up quickly from there. By the time the plague finally died out in the fall, they figure there were at least two hundred fresh corpses in town. One out of every twenty people who'd stayed in the city was dead. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in the town.

Strangely, those horrifying few months also brought us an important step closer to democracy. In the wake of the plague, people were terrified. Cholera was still wreaking havoc all over the world. And if there was a chance it might come back, even some Tories thought the Lieutenant Governor should share some his power. Scared and overwhelmed by the soaring population, the Tory-dominated,  Mackenzie-hating, democracy-bashing legislature voted to turn the Town of York into the City of Toronto. There would be a city council elected by the people. A mayor. A new Board of Health. And they'd all have real power. They could tax people. Pass bylaws and enforce them themselves. All without having to ask the Lieutenant Governor first. This was a Big Fucking Deal.

We had our first elections in the spring of 1834. The Reform Party won. They picked William Lyon Mackenzie to be the very first mayor of Toronto. And the head of the new Board of Health.

Mackenzie's year in power is best remembered for helping Toronto to establish its own new, Canadian identity. The old British name "York" was done away with in favour of the original, native "Toronto". (No more calling us "dirty little York" to avoid confusion with New York or the English York. Plus, "Toronto" just plain sounds cooler. As one Reform leader put it, "Toronto for poets — York for men of business".) Mackenzie also gave us our own coat of arms. And our own motto: "Industry, Intelligence, Integrity." More importantly, he and his Reformers started to clean up the city. They put in sidewalks. Made it illegal to let your pigs run free in the streets. You weren't allowed to toss your shit out into the road anymore. Or to throw your garbage anywhere where you liked. There'd be garbage pickup now. And new regulations about how to dispose of corpses.

Silly cholera preventive costume

But it wasn't enough. Toronto was still a pretty gross place. And all of those big, famous doctors really had no idea what they were doing. They didn't wash their instruments. They treated most sick people with bizarre cures: concoctions of charcoal, hog fat and maple sugar; crushed deer antler and red wine; leeches. They could do little to fight the wave of disease that arrived with the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of new Canadians who were still pouring off ships at the waterfront. Too many of those ships were pulling around the islands and into Toronto Bay flying a yellow flag from their mast — a warning that there were cholera victims on board.

The outbreak that summer would be even worse than the first one. Hundreds more died. Maybe as much as ten percent of the population. Most of the city's richest citizens fled to their park estates north of Queen and up onto the escarpment, but the greatest of Toronto's leaders — Reform and Tory alike — stayed behind to battle the disease. Some of them, like Francis Collins, would die. The garbage carts became ambulances, and then death carts. Mackenzie volunteered as an attendant. And so did John Strachan, the Anglican Archdeacon and leader of the conservative Family Compact. They would both tour the town, loading the dead onto their carts and burying them en mass in a pit beside Strachan's church, an earlier version of St. James Cathedral. They're still there, those victims, maybe as many as six thousand of them, buried together in the ground beneath the park at King and Church. It was dangerous work. Mackenzie fell sick, nearly died, and was lucky to survive.

The disease did peter out here eventually. But in some parts of the world, the pandemic raged on for years. Millions died. And it would take another worldwide outbreak before a doctor in London made the first major breakthrough: in 1854, he mapped out the cases in Soho and tracked the source to a water pump. For the first time, people realized that contaminated water was the problem. Still, there would be another four cholera pandemics after that one, the most recent in the 1970s. Cholera is easy to prevent: just don't drink any water with feces in it and you'll probably be okay. But more than a hundred thousand people still die from it every year because they just don't have that option.

Toronto would never suffer at cholera's hands like that again. To fight it, the Family Compact and the Reformers had found more common ground than you'd expect. The Tories had helped to create a new city with new, democratic powers. And the Reformers had shown that while they might not support the monarchy, they still believed in the power of good, strong government. But the two sides still hated each other's guts. And on the road to Canadian democracy, things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better. Our colonial overlords in England were about to name a new Lieutenant Governor for Upper Canada. And Sir Francis Bond Head would prove to be one of the biggest enemies of democracy Canada had ever seen.

Continue reading with part three in this series, "Bond Head The Bonehead", here.

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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

I pieced this together from a ton of articles, but some of the best ones are here (about cholera's impact on the founding of the city -- you need a free trial for that link, but you can find it other places too) and here (about the 1832 outbreak and the Board of Health). But they're both pretty dry. I also got lot of more fun and gross information from The Toronto Story, which is super-great kids book about our history. You can buy it here. And one of the coolest online sources is from the Toronto Public Library. Here they have a saaaaad letter from the son of one victim and other writings and images from those terrifying days.

The Star looks back at the outbreaks here. Toronto EMS looks back on their part of the history here. And there's more about how cholera swept through the rest of the world here and here and here.

Another interesting bit I didn't think I could cram into the main post: people were really suspicious of the hospital. It was at King and Peter, two-stories tall, and the precursor to Toronto General. The Board of Health begged them, but people preferred to die at home. And there was a rumour that the officials there had tried to bury at least one person alive. There was also a makeshift treatment centre in John Strachan's old blue grammar school at Jarvis and Lombard, a precursor to today's Jarvis Collegiate and Upper Canada College. I also thought it was kind of interesting that they tried to evacuated the area around Market Lane (now Market Square, where the Rainbow Cinema is). But none of that, of course, seemed to help much. As Strachan himself put it: "In short, York became one general hospital."

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837