When Belfast Battles Were Fought On Toronto Streets

St. Patrick’s Day, 1858: a bloody day in the history of Toronto. Thomas D'Arcy McGee has come to town. He was once was an Irish revolutionary, but now he's one of Canada's leading politicians. He will go on to become a Father of Confederation and Sir John A. Macdonald's right-hand man. And thanks to his transformation from Irish freedom fighter to a loyal British subject, he's also a deeply controversial figure: on the fault line between Protestants and Irish-Catholics.

McGee has come to Toronto to attend a banquet and give a speech. On the surface, it doesn't seem like a particularly divisive itinerary. But this is a deeply Irish city. More than a third of its residents were born in Ireland — a higher percentage than any other North American city, even Boston or New York. McGee's mere presence is enough to help plunge the city into violence — the riot that is about to rock King Street is just one example of the sectarian battles that will earn Toronto the nickname, "The Belfast of North America".

Many of Toronto's Irish residents are relative newcomers, having arrived just a decade before McGee's fateful speech. During the summer of 1847, nearly 40,000 Irish refugees flooded into Toronto — twice the population of the entire city. They were driven out of Ireland by the Great Famine along with forced evictions by landlords who seized the opportunity to run them off their land.

The vast majority of the new arrivals were Catholic… and they didn’t exactly find themselves welcomed into the city with open arms. Seventy-five percent of Toronto residents were Protestants; many of them were members of the Orange Order, a deeply anti-Catholic organization founded in Northern Ireland during the late 1700s. Orangemen are still a major presence in Belfast to this day; even in the 21st century, their annual parades frequently descend into riots.

The Orange Order basically ran Toronto, keeping a stranglehold on municipal politics for a century. From the 1860s to the 1950s, nearly every Mayor of Toronto was a member of the Order. City councillors, too. And police. And firefighters. Just about all city employees. At the time that all those famine refugees were pouring into the city, there wasn’t a single Catholic who held municipal office in Toronto. For many decades to come, well into the 1900s, Catholics had trouble getting hired for any public job in the city.

Discrimination against Irish-Catholics became a defining feature of life in Toronto. “Irish beggars are to be met everywhere,” the Globe newspaper wrote, “and they are as ignorant and vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident, and unthankful; they fill our poorhouses and our prisons and are as brutish in their superstition as Hindoos." By 1864, the city’s Catholic bishop was actively discouraging Irish-Catholics from moving to Toronto, warning them off because of the Protestant domination of the city and the terrible discrimination Catholics faced there.

And it wasn’t just Toronto. Orange Lodges spread across Canada from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. At one point, there were more Orange Lodges in Canada than there were in Northern Ireland itself. At the time of Confederation, a third of all Protestant men in Canada were current or former members of the Orange Order — including Sir John A. Macdonald. Three future prime ministers would be, too; one of them, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, had been the Grandmaster of the Canadian lodge. It was said that any time they were in power, the federal Conservatives always reserved three seats in Cabinet for Orange MPs.

But no city in Canada was more Orange than Toronto. And some of the local Orangemen were willing to kill and be killed in order to maintain their grip on power.

In Toronto, just like in Belfast, the riots frequently started with a parade. Every year on the 12th of July, the Orange Order would hold a big march to commemorate the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over Catholics in Ireland in the 1600s. “The Twelfth” was practically an official holiday in Toronto: municipal employees even got the day off so they could attend — with pay. At its height, thousands of Torontonians marched in the annual parade while tens of thousands cheered them on.

Catholics would generally stay indoors that day, and keep their children close. But not all of them. The parades would occasionally erupt into violence between Orangemen and Irish-Catholics, the battles of Belfast being fought in Canadian streets. And it wasn’t just on the Twelfth. Protestant-Catholic riots became an almost annual occurrence: after political meetings and elections, on Guy Fawkes Day, when the Prince of Wales visited... religious processions attacked, St. Michael’s Cathedral under siege, the bishop pelted with stones... Once, the Orange Order even once attacked a circus: the clowns cut in front of some Orange Order firefighters waiting in line outside a brothel.

When an Irish revolutionary came to town to deliver a lecture, Orangemen rioted for two days, smashed the windows of St. Patrick's Hall, destroyed a tavern, and trashed stores on Queen Street.

When Catholics celebrated the Papal Jubilee, stones rained down from above. Shots were fired. Thousands battled in the streets. By the time it was over, a Catholic stable hand lay dead.

That was from the only time a life was lost to the violence between Toronto's Protestants and Irish Catholics. And one of those lives would be lost on St. Patrick's Day, 1858: the day Thomas D'Arcy McGee gave his speech in Toronto. With the controversial politician in town, tensions were high. It was no surprise when the annual St. Patrick's Day parade descended into violence. An Orangemen drove a horse and cart into the procession, trying to disrupt it. Catholics fought back, chasing him into a nearby alley where a violence struggle ended with an Irish-Catholic man murdered: stabbed to death.

The incident would lead Toronto's Irish-Catholics to create a new organization that would eventually evolve into the Fenian Brotherhood: a revolutionary group dedicated to the cause of Irish independence from Britain. A decade later, American Fenians would march across the border to launch an invasion of Canada in the hope that it would help put pressure on the British to leave Ireland. The attack was doomed to fail, but dozens died and even more were wounded. Toronto's very first war memorial was dedicated to the memory of the students from the University of Toronto who died fighting against those Fenian invaders.

By then, even Thomas D'Arcy McGee himself was dead. The Father of Confederation was gunned down in the streets of Ottawa in 1868, assassinated as he returned home from a late night session of parliament. A man suspected of being a Fenian agent, Patrick Whelan, was hanged for the murder (though even today, it's unclear whether he was the real murderer).

Before long, the situation had gotten so out of hand that Toronto decided to take drastic action: beginning in the 1870s, the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade was banned. And it would remain that way for more than 100 years. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the Orange stranglehold on Toronto was broken. After the Second World War, Toronto was becoming more and more multicultural. For the first time in 118 years the city elected a mayor who wasn’t Protestant: the Jewish Nathan Phillips. And the tensions between Protestants and Catholics began to fade away.

And so in the 1980s, Toronto decided it was finally safe enough for another St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The sectarian violence that had once rocked the city on a regular basis was now nothing more than a distant memory of a long-ago time. Today, St. Patrick's Day is a cherished tradition in Toronto, just as it in so many other cities across Canada and the rest of the world. As the streets fill with people wearing their shamrock hats and bars sell gallons of green beer, it feels as if the whole city celebrates the holiday — without a hint of the violence that once spilled blood in its streets.

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Want to know more about the assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee and the mystery of who shot him? We reopen the country's most notorious cold case in a recent episode of Canadiana — the Canadian history web series I host: 




I wrote more about the summer the Irish Famine refugees arrived in Toronto and the power of the Orange Order in The Toronto Book of the Dead, which you can find at the favourite local Toronto bookstore or order from Amazon or Indigo.

Image: The Jubillee Riots of 1876 via Wikimedia Commons.

A Thought About Stephen Harper from 1849

The day Canada became a democracy, a mob of angry Tories burned the Parliament Buildings down. They were mad because the Governor General — Lord Elgin — had just signed a new bill into law. The Tories opposed the new law, but that wasn't the worst part: the worst part was that Elgin had plenty of his own reservations about it, but he still signed it anyway. He could have vetoed the bill, but he didn't. That was a huge, nation-changing decision: it signalled the end of the British veto over laws passed by the Canadian parliament. It was the beginning of Responsible Government. From now on, when it came to domestic politics, Canadians ruled themselves. Parliament held the ultimate power.

The Tories and their supporters freaked out. To them, democracy was a dangerous thing: the stuff of blood-soaked rebellions, revolutions and guillotines. They'd spent decades opposing it. But the outrage wasn't only about the Tories' fear of democracy. It was also about fear-mongering and racism.

The bill was called the Rebellion Losses Bill. It paid compensation to people in Québec (called Canada East back then) who had suffered property damage during the rebellions in 1837. The previous Tory government had already done the same thing for the anglophone region of Ontario (Canada West), so it shouldn't have been controversial — but it was: the conservatives hated it.

To many Tory supporters, francophones weren't real Canadians. They couldn't be: they were Catholic; they spoke French. Real Canadians were British: they were Protestant; they spoke English. Anyone else couldn't possibly be a loyal subject. They were all automatically rebels.

The liberal Reform party had recently been elected in a landslide. But their government was an alliance between English- and French-speaking Canadians led by Robert Baldwin (a Protestant anglophone from Toronto) and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine (a Catholic francophone from Montreal). Conservatives didn't trust that alliance.

The Tories saw an opportunity. If they could stoke enough fear among their supporters — if they could threaten enough violence and unrest — they might be able to keep the Governor General from ever signing the bill. And by doing that, they might keep Responsible Government from ever becoming a reality in Canada.

John Ralston Saul writes about the Tory strategy in his biography of Baldwin and LaFontaine. He argues that the Tory leader, Allan MacNab, realized that "his party would have to create a crisis of loyalty. Loyalty in populist rhetoric is always about patriotism... In this case, loyalty would be about the Crown, Britain, the Anglo-Saxon race... [The Tories] believed they could undermine democratic sympathies by simply setting anglophones and francophones at each other's throats."

And so, during the debate over the bill, the Tories used lies, misleading half-truths and racially-coded language to build fear in their supporters. The Tory leader called francophone Canadians "foreigners." His party claimed the Reformers were "dangerous, criminal and subversive of order... under the dominion of French masters... You laugh to see the Anglo-Saxons under your feet." One up-and-coming young Tory — John A. Macdonald — got so worked up that he challenged a Reformer to a duel by passing him note in parliament during the debate.

Elgin & two of the rocks thrown at his carriage

When Elgin finally did sign the bill, all that fear and hatred spilled over into violence. The conservative mobs began to gather before the ink was even dry; they were already waiting outside when the Governor General left the building, ready to pelt his carriage with rocks and rotten eggs. That evening, the Montreal Gazette — the city's big Tory newspaper — ran a special edition. "THE DISGRACE OF GREAT BRITAIN ACCOMPLISHED, CANADA SOLD AND GIVEN AWAY!" the editors raged. "Rebellion is the Law of the Land!" The paper openly called for violence: "ANGLO-SAXONS TO THE STRUGGLE NOW IS YOUR TIME."

That night, another torch-wielding mob of angry Tory supporters stormed the Parliament Buildings in old Montreal, burning them to the ground. They rioted in the streets and attacked the homes of leading Reformers. Guns were fired. "The city," according to Baldwin biographer Michael S. Cross, "was on the verge of civil war." And the unrest reached far beyond the borders of Montreal. As news of Elgin's decision spread, there were protests, riots, death threats, and Reformers being burnt in effigy all over the Province of Canada.

In Toronto, the Reform-friendly editors of the Globe published their own take on the events. "The Toryism of Canada," they wrote, "has ever founded its tactics on panics. To get up a good panic, and work it well has been the point of perfect in their political system... Let the panic be connected with a national crusade against the French Canadians, and the day might be won."

More than a hundred and fifty years later, those tactics still sound awfully familiar. Today, of course, the fear of francophones has been replaced by a fear of Muslims. Instead of rebellion, Stephen Harper talks about terrorism. Instead of Catholicism, it's Islamic extremists. Instead of the Anglo-Saxon race, it's the Anglosphere. Still, just like the Tories of 1849, today's Tory leader plays up the Canadian connection to the British Crown. He still glorifies the Loyalist exploits in the War of 1812. His ministers still talk about "demonstrating loyalty." And during the current election campaign, he's even hired an Australian political consultant famous for using racially-coded language to stoke fear among conservative supporters.

"Fear is not a policy. It is not an election platform," Stephen Lewis, the former NDP leader, recently declared during a campaign speech. "Using fear to get power suggests a deep and abiding cynicism."

It does. But it can also be an effective strategy. It has been for centuries. It distracts. The current federal election campaign has seen time spent talking about the niqab and "old stock Canadians" that could have been spent talking about other issues instead — like, for instance, the Harper government's efforts to undermine the supremacy of parliament and the foundations of Responsible Government.

"For Harper's Conservatives, playing the terror card is crucial," Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom argued back in May. "The more that terrorism can be made top-of-mind, the better the Conservatives will do."

Back in 1849, fear wasn't enough. The Rebellion Losses Bill was signed into law and Responsible Government was embraced by the vast majority. Canadians believed in democracy and diversity more than they believed in fear. On October 19, we'll find out if that's still true.

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You can borrow John Ralston Saul's biography of Baldwin and LaFontaine from the Toronto Public Library here. Or you can buy it here. You'll find Michael S. Cross' Baldwin biography to borrow here and buy here.

Steven Paikin wrote about Stephen Lewis' speech — calling it "the best speech of the federal election campaign so far" — here. And Thomas Walkom's column is here.

Main image: "L'incendie du Parlement à Montréal" ("The Burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal") by Joseph Légaré (via the Wikmedia Commons here).

Second image: Elgin's wife kept the rocks hurled at the carriage and carefully labelled them; they are now at the Canadian Museum History in Gatineau. Photo by me.

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.

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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.

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." 

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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.

William Lyon Mackenzie Vs. The World

William Lyon Mackenzie

This is the first in a series of posts about the battle for Canadian democracy.

Oh boy, okay, so this is a big one. William Lyon Mackenzie is one of the giant, towering, all-important figures in the history of Toronto. In fact, he's such a big deal that telling his story from start to finish — and with it the story of the birth of democracy in Canada — is going to take at least five long posts. They will span more than 25 years. There will be riots and arson, violent mobs and hangings and people beaten in the streets. There will be plagues and mass graves. For some of it, we'll have to travel all the way to England and the Ganges River delta. By the end of it, Toronto will have grown from a small, isolated backwater into a thriving metropolis of tens of thousands of people. It's going to be crazy. I'm kind of excited. And it all starts with the story of how Mackenzie went from being a struggling newspaperman to one of the most powerful politicians in the city.

So. Dude was born in Scotland, ran a store for a while, wrote for some newspapers, gambled a lot, fathered an illegitimate child, and eventually headed across the ocean to Upper Canada in search of a better life. He settled in Toronto in November of 1824. We were just a small town back then, only about 30 years old, still called York, with a population of about 1600 people.

The whole town — the whole colony, actually — was run by a small group of rich, conservative, mostly British and thoroughly Protestant elites. Fellows like Peter Russell, William Jarvis and John Strachan. Most of them were corrupt assholes. They hated Catholics, true democracy, and maybe more than anything else, the United States of America. Many of them had fought for the British against the Americans during the Revolution; some had seen their best friends killed at the hands of Americans, had their lives and families threatened by them, had been driven out of their homes by angry mobs of them. In fact, the whole point of creating York in the first place was to help guard the Canadas against an invasion from the south. And when Mackenzie arrived, it had only been a decade since their worst fears had been realized: an American army landed near where the Ex is now, marched across the waterfront and occupied York for a few days during the War of 1812.

The invasion had made John Strachan a hero. The way they tell the story, he pretty much just yelled at the Americans until they slunk back across the border. When they came back later that year, people say he made the invaders return the library books they'd stolen from us the first time. But to hold on to power and make sure that American-style democracy didn't spread north, Strachan's allies in the conservative elite seem to have been willing to do pretty much anything. They gave all the swanky government jobs to their friends and families. They seized enormous tracts of land for themselves, stole some of it from the very citizens who were helping them build the town. When people started publicly complaining, they banned public meetings. They blamed the unrest on Americans, banned young American-born Canadians from voting and American-born politicians from getting elected. And when political means didn't work, they attacked their opponents in the streets and beat them senseless. There was tarring and feathering. There were show trials. And hangings.

William Lyon Mackenzie was outraged. He was pro-democracy and pro-American and he hated the living fuck out of the Protestant elites. He'd come to town as the editor of his very own newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, which he used to berate them every chance he got. He called them jackals and hypocrites and demons and bigots and thieves and funguses. He even gave them the nickname people still use to this day: the Family Compact. In return, they called him vermin, a conceited, red-headed reptile, and tried to make his life as miserable as possible.

In those early days, Mackenzie didn't need much help with that. The Colonial Advocate only had 825 subscribers at the beginning of his first full year in town and he soon faced stiff competition for reform-minded readers from the Irish-Catholic Canadian Freeman. His debts mounted. His readership didn't. At one point, he was forced to temporarily stop publishing the paper altogether. Finally, in the Spring of 1826, he high-tailed it out of town, fleeing to the States to avoid his creditors.

Mackenzie's home/shop, Frederick and Front
Present day Google streetview here

That's when his luck finally changed.

His escape came at a moment when the Family Compact was particularly pissed off at him. Years earlier, Samuel Jarvis, the son of the über-corrupt, über-incompetent government official, William Jarvis, had killed a man in a duel. The circumstances were a bit sketchy — the other guy had fired too early and missed, then Jarvis shot him dead (it's kind of an awesome story; you can read about it in this post) — and Mackenzie didn't hesitate to openly accuse him of murder. Now, with Mackenzie in the States, Jarvis seized his opportunity for revenge. He rounded up a bunch of young conservatives, dressed them as natives and attacked the Colonial Advocate offices. They trashed the place, smashed the printing press and threw the typeface into the lake. Mackenzie's family, including his elderly mother, who all lived in the building, were terrorized. The Types Riot, as they call it, happened right smack dab in the middle of town — the offices were at Frederick and Front, a couple of blocks east of the St. Lawrence Market — and senior members of the Family Compact watched it all happen and did nothing.

It was one superdumbass PR move. Mackenzie rushed home to sue for damages. He came out of it looking like a martyr for the cause of reform, and was awarded more money than his equipment was worth. He used it to pay off his debts and expand his operation. The Colonial Advocate was back in circulation and Mackenzie's voice was stronger than ever.

That's when he got into politics. He ran for parliament on the Reform Party ticket and won. The election was a landslide: the party of the Family Compact, the Tory Party, lost their majority and the Reformers took over.

But that didn't really mean very much. Upper Canada was not a democracy. Oh sure, there was the Legislative Assembly to take care of the small stuff, but all of the real power still rested with the Lieutenant Governor. The Lieutenant Governor was appointed by the British government. And the British government was run by... waiiiiit for it... the British Tory Party. Their Prime Minister — the Napoleon-crushing Duke of Wellington himself — had given the post to one his conservative buddies, the awesomely-named Sir Peregrine Maitland. He was a hero of the Battle of Waterloo who also happened to play a kickass game of cricket and even gets a mention in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. More importantly, he was a hardcore supporter of the British crown and wasn't about to let Mackenzie and the Reformers do any reforming.

Since they couldn't get anything done, the Reform Party lost the next election. But Mackenzie didn't let that stop him. He'd been re-elected in his riding and he was determined to screw with the Tories every chance he got. He earned a reputation as a fierce debater, sometimes grabbing the red wig from off his own head and flinging it across the room at his opponents. He refused to join Tory-dominated committees and then showed up anyway to yell at them. He even got kicked out of his own church for trying to get them to cut their ties to the Family Compact. In short, he got all up in the Tories' faces pretty much all of the time.

Parliament/jail/court house, King west of Church, 1829

The Family Compact struck back. But dumbassedly yet again. They used their votes in the Legislative Assembly to kick him out of it. The result? The building (look left) was mobbed by hundreds of Mackenzie's supporters, the voters in his riding re-elected him in a staggering landslide, and then they threw a victory parade down Yonge Street complete with bagpipes and 134 sleighs. The Tories voted him out again; the voters voted him back in again. And again. And again. And again. Conservatives pelted him with garbage, rioted, attacked him in the street and nearly killed him, but were eventually forced to give up and let him stay (while refusing to let him actually vote on anything). The Family Compact was managing to avoid any real reforms, but it was coming at a price: Mackenzie and his ideas were getting more and more popular.

Ten years earlier, he'd been a poor newspaperman running a failing business with few readers. Now, he was one of the most powerful men in the city. He was helping to turn the tide: public opinion was steadily mounting against the Family Compact and in favour of true Canadian democracy.

And that's when the cholera hit.

Continue reading with, "Uh Oh, Everyone's Dying of Cholera, Parts I & II", here.

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You can read more about Mackenzie on his Wikipedia page here. And from the much drier Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online here. There's some info about early Toronto newspaper here. About the house where Mackenzie lived and worked up until the Types Riot here. There are some angry quotes here. And a plaque about the Types Riot here.
  

This post is related to dream 09 The Ghost of John Ridout Samuel Jarvis, 1826

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

The Yonge Street Riot of 1992

Queen Street during the G20

Lord knows there were plenty of ignorant things said during the G20 in 2010. Among them was the suggestion that Toronto had never seen violence like that before. Pfft! Anyone who bothered to check their Google would find that our city has had riots like that on a regular basis pretty much since the day Toronto was founded. We've had Protestants riot against Catholics. Nazis riot against Jews. Conservatives riot against liberals. We've had police riot against unions, against Communists, and against firemen. We've had firemen riot against firemen. We've even had firemen riot against circus clowns. We've seen riots that brought more than 10,000 people into the streets and we've seen riots where people died. In the mid-1800s, we were averaging more than one violent riot a year for twenty years.

But our riots aren't a thing of the distant past. In the late-1980s and early '90s, we'd riot every time the Ex closed for the year. We rioted on New Year's Eve to ring in 1992. And then, a few months later, when white cops beat a black man in Los Angeles and were acquitted, we rioted again. As South Central L.A. exploded into flames and destruction, a small group in Toronto protested the Rodney King case outside the U.S. consulate on University. Soon, the crowd had swelled and some turned violent. Something like a thousand people marched up Yonge Street, smashing windows, overturning hot dog carts and generally being destructive assholes. From the footage, it looks like some were even throwing molotov cocktails.

Somehow, that time, the police managed to handle the situation without completely ignoring due process or arresting more people than ever before in the entire history of the country. There were about 30 arrests, a few injuries, and—despite the usual warnings that "we might just see the face of downtown Toronto changing forever"—things got back to normally pretty quickly. So much so that  twenty years later most people seem to have forgotten it ever happened.

Here's the Citytv coverage from the day after, complete with painfully punny titles and an adorably young Ben Chin: