North America's First Valentine — When The Founder Of Toronto Fell In Love With A Rebel Spy

1779. The American Revolution was at its bloody height. John Graves Simcoe had already seen plenty of action. Years before he founded the city of Toronto, Simcoe was a young officer in the British army, fighting against the American rebels. And there, in the middle of that brutal war, he was about to fall in love.

That winter, Simcoe found himself living just outside New York City. The area was controlled by the British at the time, but there were still plenty of American rebels around. So Simcoe spent his days on patrol with his men, searching for revolutionaries, fighting terrible, bloody battles. Over the course of the war, he would gain a reputation as a hero on the British side — leading his Queen's Rangers on guerrilla-style raids, their green uniforms blending in with the forests, a white crescent moon on their hats in honour of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. Many of the American rebels, on the other hand, would come to see him as a particularly vicious foe, accused of massacres and remembered more than 200 years later as a psychopathic villain in an ahistorical Netflix show.

But at night, things were much more peaceful. Simcoe was billeted with an American family who lived in Oyster Bay, a small community on Long Island. The Townsends were slave-owning tobacco farmers: they enslaved eight people at their home and even more on their plantation. Simcoe would later earn a complicated reputation as a passionate abolitionist, but even so, he seems to have enjoyed his time living with the Townsends. In fact, it was there during those long winter nights on Long Island that he was destined to fall in love.

Sarah Townsend was 18 years old; the middle of the three Townsend girls. Sally to her friends. Simcoe was 27, but still a dashing young officer looking for a wife. They say his fellow soldiers were deeply jealous of the time he got to spend with Sally. "She was the toast of these young men," one account would later remember, "and Simcoe was regarded as a most fortunate being in basking in the daily sunshine of her charms." The two are said to have spent plenty of time flirting that winter, and by the time February 14th came around, the young Townsend had captured Simcoe's heart.

To prove the depth of his feelings, the young man turned to a relatively new English tradition. People had been sending Valentine's Day cards for centuries, but it was over the course of the 1700s that they really evolved into the popular romantic tradition we know today. And Simcoe seems to have fully embraced it — seeing it as a chance to show off his writing skills. He'd studied poetry at school and thoroughly enjoyed writing his own verse. So, to celebrate St. Valentine's Day in 1779, Simcoe penned an ode to Sally Townsend — and then gave it to her.

The poem is a fairly epic one by the standards of a Valentine — it’s thirteen stanzas long and more than 300 words — but it begins like this:

Fairest Maid where all is fair
Beauty’s pride and Nature’s care;
To you my heart I must resign
O choose me for your Valentine!

Later, it gets a bit more wordy:

Thou knows’t what powerful magick lies
Within the round of Sarah’s eyes,
Or darted thence like lightning fires,
And Heaven’s own joys around inspires;
 

And finally, it transforms into a prayer to the God of Love — a plea that there will be more to Simcoe's life than just endless war:

[God] bad'st me change the pastoral scene,
Forget my Crook; with haughty mien
To raise the iron Spear of War,
Victim of Grief and deep Despair:
Say, must I all my joys forego
And still maintain this outward show?
Say, shall this breast that's pained to feel
Be ever clad in horrid steel?
Nor swell to other joys than those
Of conquest o'er unworthy foes?
Shall no fair maid with equal fire
Awake the flames of soft desire[?]
[…]
"Fond Youth," the God of Love replies,
"Your answer take from Sarah's eyes."

But that wasn't all. Simcoe had more to offer than just his poetry. He also attached a sketch: two hearts, inscribed with both of their initials and joined together by Cupid's arrow.

Today, it's considered to be the very first Valentine in the history of North America.

You might be wondering how young Sally Townsend could resist such an historic overture. But the truth is that it didn't matter how much Simcoe felt for Townsend, how flattering his poetry, or romantic his art. The two could never be together. The founder of Toronto had fallen in love with the wrong woman. You see, Sally Townsend was a rebel spy.

Now that the British were in control of New York, the American general George Washington was desperate for information from inside the occupied city. So, he established a spy ring to feed him secrets from New York, as well as from Long Island and Connecticut. He called it The Culper Ring. Sally’s brother Robert was one of three men enlisted to run the scheme — and while the details are far from clear, many historians believe that he brought his sister on board as an informant.

The Culper Ring proved to be a huge success. It was in operation for five years and tipped Washington off to surprise attacks, a British counterfeiting scheme, and maybe even a plot on the general’s own life. It’s been called “the spy ring that saved America.”

But with his head firmly over his heels, Simcoe had no clue the young woman he’d fallen in love with was actually a secret rebel. Some historians suggest that while he was busy wooing the lovely young Townsend, she may have been spying on him the whole time.

One story in particular raises eyebrows. The British army’s Adjutant-General, John Andre, frequently met with Simcoe at the Townsend house. And since it was The Culper Ring who tipped Washington off to Andre’s plot with the rebel traitor Benedict Arnold — to hand the American fort at West Point over to the British — some believe that Sally must have overheard Andre telling Simcoe about the plan and then relayed that information to her brother. (Although the story wasn’t told until a century later, and it seems like the dates don’t quite match up.)

In any case, looking back on Simcoe's lovelorn winter on Long Island, it seems that Sally's interest in him may have been nothing more than a rebel ruse. As the daughter of a revolutionary family, she did have plenty of reason to hate the British officer who was making himself at home in her house. And it can't have helped that he chopped down her family's beloved apple orchard so he could use the wood to build defences for a nearby fort. In the end, as you might expect, Sally Townsend rejected Simcoe’s plea to take him as her Valentine. In fact, she would never marry — she died as a single woman at the ripe old age of eighty.

Simcoe wouldn't have to live with that rejection for long: his days with the Townsends were numbered. Later that same year, he was captured in an ambush and spent six months in a rebel prison. There in his dank cell, his health began to fail him. He was eventually released in a prisoner exchange so he could head home to England and recover. It was there, as he convalesced at this godfather's country home, that he met a new love interest.

His godfather's niece Elizabeth was young and smart and pretty and curious, a strong writer and a wonderful artist. The two fell in love as she nursed him back to health and as they enjoyed long walks and romantic horseback rides through the rolling green hills of Devon. By the time Simcoe was chosen to serve as the first governor of Upper Canada, they were married. They headed off to the frontier together, where they would found the city we call Toronto.

But there is still one physical trace of Simcoe's lost love affair that survives to this day. You'll find it on Long Island, in the old Townsend house in Oyster Bay — their home is now open to the public as the Raynham Hall Museum. There, in the house where Simcoe once fell in love with his rebel spy, they've preserved a pane of glass from her bedroom window. There's a wistful message scratched into its surface — a few longing words of love thought to have been inscribed by the besotted British officer John Graves Simcoe: to "the adorable Miss Sally Sarah Townsend."

---

If you're interested in stories about love and the history of Toronto, then you might be interest to know that my new book, The Toronto Book of Love, has been published by Dundurn Press. You can get it now from all the usual places — including the Dundurn site!

John Graves Simcoe's Weird Relationship With Slavery

Meet John Graves Simcoe. Founder of Toronto. British veteran of the American Revolution. And an avowed abolitionist with a very weird and complicated relationship to slavery.

Simcoe hated it. Back home in England as a Member of Parliament, he gave anti-slavery speeches in the House of Commons. And when he was picked to be the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he made it clear: he saw no place for the practice in his new province. "The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity condemns," he wrote before he officially took his post. "The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada, under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America or Europe." 

And indeed, one of the very first things Simcoe did when he got to Upper Canada was to introduce a bill to end slavery in the province forever. In July 1793, his "Act Against Slavery" became the very first slavery-abolishing law ever passed anywhere in the British Empire. To this day he's celebrated as the man who ended slavery in Upper Canada — more than 40 years before it was abolished across the Empire and 70 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States.

But things weren't quite as simple as that makes it seem.

For one thing, Simcoe's law wasn't nearly as groundbreaking as it sounds. By the time he came to Canada, there were no slaves in England — a court decision had freed them all fifteen years earlier. Compared to the Mother Country, the Canadian colonies were behind the times. Hundreds of slaves were "owned" by the colonists in Upper Canada, many of them brought north to the new province by Loyalist refugees as they fled the revolution in the United States. The British government had actually encouraged the practice, passing a law in Westminster that promised new Canadian settlers they would get to keep their slaves.

So while slavery in England was already over, if Simcoe wanted to get rid of slavery in Upper Canada, he was going to have to pass a new law to actively abolish it. And that wasn't going to be easy.

Simcoe would need support. The bill would have to pass through the Legislative Assembly and then through the Legislative Council. Both of those bodies were full of slave owners. And that, in part, was thanks to none other than John Graves Simcoe.

Peter Russell tries to sell
Peggy & Jupiter Pompadour

The Legislative Assembly was an elected body. But the members of the Legislative Council were hand-picked by Simcoe himself — it worked a bit like the Senate does today. And Simcoe packed his Council full of slave-owners. At least five of the nine members were either slave-owners or from slave-owning families. They formed a majority. Simcoe, determined to abolish slavery in Upper Canada, had made it almost impossible to do.

But he was still going to try. It was the resistance of Chloe Cooley that gave him the opportunity he needed. Cooley was a Black woman living in slavery at Niagara. When her "master" sold her to someone on the American side of the river, he tied her up with rope and forced her into a boat to be taken across the border. Cooley, like many slaves, had long resisted her captivity: refusing work, stealing, disappearing for periods of time, generally trying to disrupt the life of her "master" and ensure her enslavement was as much of an inconvenience as possible. Now, she resisted again. As she was unloaded and handed over to her new "owner," Cooley screamed and put up a fight.

When Simcoe heard the tale, he was appalled — and he saw his chance. During the next session of the legislature, he pushed a bill to abolish slavery.

 
But with his government full of slave-owners, he was forced into a compromise — the exact thing he had promised never to do. The new law didn't abolish slavery immediately; instead, it would be gradually phased out. No new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, but any who were already here would spend the rest of their lives in slavery. Their children would be born into captivity, too; they wouldn't be free until they turned twenty-five. Finally, anyone who wanted to free a slave was discouraged from doing so: they would be forced to provide financial security to ensure the newly freed slave wouldn't be a drain on the resources of the state.

The bill was passed just a few weeks before Simcoe founded Toronto. And so, the foundations of our city were laid with the help of slave labour. During the early years of the new town, there were fifteen Black slaves within its borders — and another ten just across the Don Valley.

Some of Toronto's slave owners are still familiar names today. William Jarvis is remembered by Jarvis Street; James Baby's old estate on the Humber River is still called Baby Point. Peter Russell — a gambling-addict ex-con who Simcoe trusted as Receiver- and Auditor-General — enslaved a woman named Peggy Pompadour and her three children: Jupiter, Amy and Milly. Their acts of resistance were brutally punished by Russell: Jupiter was once bound and strung up in the window of a storehouse as a painful public humiliation. But Peter Russell is still remembered in the names of Peter Street and Russell Hill Road.

Simcoe's relationship with slavery only got weirder and more conflicted after he left Toronto. In 1796, ill-health forced him to sail home to England. Just a few months later — while still officially serving as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada — John Graves Simcoe was sent to Haiti. There, the avowed abolitionist was asked to put down the biggest slave uprising since Spartacus.

Haiti was a French colony back then; they called it Saint Domingue. The leaders of the French Revolution had abolished slavery, but French royalists still controlled Haiti — and they had no intention of giving up their half a million slaves.

Toussaint L'Ouverture

When the slaves rose up in a revolution led by François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, the French royalists asked the British for help. Thousands of British troops were sent to the island, hoping to crush the uprising, restore slavery, and secure the island's sugar riches for themselves. By the time Simcoe arrived, they'd been fighting for years without making any real progress. His job was to turn things around. He was appointed as commander of the British forces in Haiti — a man who hated slavery fighting a bloody war to preserve it.

The Haitian Revolution was a long and brutal struggle. It raged for thirteen years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Countless atrocities were committed. Simcoe's attempt to keep his own men in check — an order to halt all "cruelties and outrages" — was ignored. His army pushed Toussaint's forces back, but were stalled by a counterattack. His men were dying by the thousands: some in bloody battles, still more of yellow fever.

Simcoe only lasted a few months before he got sick of fighting for a cause he didn't believe in. He was sick of the war, sick of a lack of support from his superiors, sick of literally being sick. He left Haiti and sailed home to England, where he tried to convince the government to withdraw from the war; he was nearly arrested for desertion. The British kept fighting for a year after Simcoe left Haiti, and the French kept fighting long after that. In the end, the Haitian Revolution was successful — it led to the establishment of a new, independent, slave-free country in 1804.

But while slavery was now over in Haiti, it was still part of life in Toronto. It would take many years before it gradually dwindled out: one by one the city's slaves died or were freed by their "masters." There's no record of when the practice finally ended in Toronto, but there were no slaves left in the city by the time the British abolished slavery across the Empire on August 1, 1834.

By then, Toronto was beginning to gain a very different reputation. Black families like the Abbotts, the Blackburns and the Augustas — some of them former slaves themselves — worked with White allies like George Brown to make Toronto a relatively safe haven for those fleeing slavery in the United States. They organized anti-slavery societies, secured lodging for refugees, and raised funds to help the new arrivals get started in their new home. They struggled every day to make Toronto a more welcoming place for those fleeing racial persecution.

Half a century after Simcoe's chilling compromise, Toronto had become an important stop at the end of the Underground Railroad.

-----

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

This post was based in part on a Twitter essay I tweeted out on Simcoe day last year, which you can find here.

You can learn more about John Graves Simcoe from "John Graves Simcoe, 1752–1806: A Biography" by Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott (which is available from Amazon here or the Toronto Public Library here), from his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography here, and from his entry entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia here. And you can read his letters in "The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe" which you can find at the Toronto Public Library here.

Learn more about slavery and resistance in Upper Canada from Natasha Henry's "Talking About Freedom: Celebrating Emancipation Day in Canada" (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from Robin Winks' "The Blacks in Canada: A History" (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from "The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!" by Adrienna Shadd, Afua Cooper and Karolyn Smardz Frost (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from William Renwick Riddell's 1923 article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology here (that's a PDF), or from the Canadian Encyclopedia here. The Encyclopedia also has an entry about Chloe Cooley and Simcoe's law here. 

You'll find the Wikipedia entry for the Haitian Revolution here. And a timeline of the history of Haiti here.

Read some my previous posts about the Simcoes:
The story of John Graves Simcoe's vision for Toronto (a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution)
The story of Elizabeth Simcoe's 1794 nightmare 
The story of their dog, Jack Sharp 
The story of their cat 
The story of how they fell in love and the magical hills where it happened 
The story of their summer home in Budleigh Salterton 
The story of their connection to Samuel Coleridge and his family 
The story of the Simcoe family and Exeter and death

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 18 Russell Creek Peter Russell, 1799

Born in the Holocaust — Miriam Rosenthal & Her Miracle Baby

It's easy to miss the shop if you're not looking for it. It blends into the other storefronts, one of many Jewish businesses along that stretch of Bathurst Street. It's been standing there for more than 50 years, just two blocks south of Lawrence Avenue, on the corner of Caribou Road. A plain blue sign lists the wares inside — books, sephorim, gifts — and displays the name of the store itself: Miriam's Judaica. 

At a glance there doesn't seem to be anything particularly remarkable about it. It's a store like any other store. But the story behind that little Jewish shop on Bathurst Street is one of the most extraordinary stories you'll find in Toronto — or anywhere else for that matter.

~~~

Miriam & Bela on their wedding day

The Miriam in Miriam's Judaica is Miriam Rosenthal. Her story begins in the town of Komárno, where she was born. It stands on the banks of the Danube River, in what's now Slovakia, right on the border with Hungary. She had a good childhood, the youngest of more than a dozen children in an Orthodox Jewish family. "I was spoiled," she once remembered. "I had a beautiful life."

When she was 22 years old, her family allowed her to get married — something she'd long been looking forward to. She went to a matchmaker and picked her husband out of a catalogue: Bela Rosenthal was the handsome son of a cattle broker; he lived on the Hungarian side of the border. Before long, they were engaged to be married.

But this was April 1944. Darkness had descended on Europe. The Slovaks had been allied with the Nazis since the early days of the Second World War; the persecution of the country's Jewish population began immediately. Two years before Miriam and Bela got engaged, the first trainload of Jews had left Slovakia for Auschwitz. Komárno had been turned into a major military hub for the Germans; as the young couple planned their wedding, all of the Jews in Miriam's hometown — nearly three thousand of them — were being deported. Some of her brothers had already been sent off to labour camps.

Still, she was determined to go through with the wedding. She used false papers and wore a cross as she slipped across the border, taking a train to meet her fiance in Hungary. They were married just a few hours after she arrived. As the rabbi performed the ceremony, German bombs began to fall; the wedding party rushed underground, finishing the ceremony in the basement. "The rabbi insisted," Miriam explained years later, "bombs or no bombs." The young bride wore a red rose pinned to her lapel to cover her yellow star.

The newlyweds barely had any time to build their new life together. Just two weeks after the wedding, they were rounded up into a ghetto and separated. A few weeks after that, the Nazis came for them again. Bela was sent to a slave labour camp. Miriam was sent to Auschwitz.

More people would die at Auschwitz than at any other Nazi concentration camp: more than a million were killed in the four years the gas chambers and the ovens were in operation. As Rosenthal and the other new arrivals were herded off their trains, Dr. Joseph Mengele — "The Angel of Death" — was waiting for them. By then, they were already weakened by their journey: untold hours spent crammed together in cattle cars without room to sit or food to eat. Many died along the way. Now, Dr. Mengele scrutinized them, his eyes coldly assessing them from beneath the brim of his black cap, the skull and crossbones of the SS emblazoned on the front. He divided them into two groups, their fate determined by a wave of his gloved hand or a flick of his cane: left or right. Those he deemed unfit for work — more than 80% of them — were sent to the left: straight to the gas chambers. The others, to the right: to a life of slavery inside the concentration camp. Rosenthal watched as her mother, her sister, and her one year-old niece were all sent to the left, to death. But she made it through.

And it was there, just a few weeks later, trapped within the horrors of Auschwitz, that Miriam Rosenthal realized she was pregnant.

~~~

Children at Auschwitz, 1945

The Nazis didn't spare Jewish children. They killed more than a million of them during the Holocaust. The leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, repeatedly justified and defended the slaughter in chilling speeches to his fellow party members.

"I believe, gentlemen," he once told a group of generals, "that you know me well enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person... on the other hand, I have such good nerves and such a developed sense of duty... that when I recognise something as necessary I can implement it without compromise. I have not considered myself entitled... to allow the children to grow into the avengers who will then murder our children and our grandchildren. That would have been cowardly."

At Auschwitz, many children were immediately gassed, but a few were allowed to live. Some were kept as fodder for horrifying medical experiments carried out by Dr. Mengele and his staff. When he was done performing his bizarre tortures, he would kill some of them himself, injecting chloroform into their hearts and then dissecting them to study their organs. On other occasions, death came more casually: Mengele is said to have once drawn a line along the wall of the children's barracks about five feet from the ground; any child shorter than that line was promptly sent to the gas chambers. Sometimes children were thrown straight into the ovens, burned alive.

Pregnant women weren't given the chance to give birth. They, just like young mothers, were usually declared unfit for work and quickly murdered.

There was no question: Rosenthal would hide her pregnancy for as long as she could. "Not a word," one of her fellow prisoners advised her. "Not a single word. If not, you'll end up at the crematorium."

One day, the SS called for all the pregnant women to step forward. They were, the officers told them, going to be given double their usual ration of bread. But it was a lie: a trap.

"Can you imagine?" Rosenthal asked a reporter from the National Post just a few years ago. "Even women who were not pregnant stepped forward." But she stayed put. "Two hundred women stepped forward and 200 women went to the gas chamber. And I don’t know why I didn’t step forward... I have asked rabbis. I have asked some big people and no one can give me an answer... I have asked myself this question so many times as I lay in bed upstairs."

Declared fit for work, she was soon transferred out of Auschwitz and eventually sent to a factory in Augsberg where she was forced to make airplane parts for the Luftwaffe. Things there were slightly easier: the prisoners were given clean clothes and a little more food, allowed to grow their hair long for the first time since they'd arrived in the camps.

But all the while, Rosenthal's pregnancy was progressing. She was beginning to show. It was only a matter of time before the SS would notice.

The dreaded day came during the winter of 1944. Two SS officers arrived at the factory with angry German shepherds; they demanded that any woman who was pregnant immediately identify herself. This time, there was no hidding.

"I had to raise my hand," she explained. "I was showing, and if I didn’t put up my hand all those other women would be killed. How could I not put up my hand?"

The SS officers were furious. "You bitch!" they barked. "You're coming with us — to Auschwitz."

"I said goodbye to my friends," she remembered, "who were crying, but it was a relief for me. The suffering would be over, as well as the fear of what would happen to my baby." Rosenthal resigned herself to death.

She was taken out into the snow with nothing to protect her from the bitter cold but the dress she'd been wearing in the factory. The SS loaded her onto a train. This time, strangely, it wasn't a freight train packed full of prisoners, but a regular passenger train. There were civilians on board, seemingly oblivious to the genocide taking place all around them. One woman was shocked to see Rosenthal in her emaciated state. "Frau, what is with you?" she asked the prisoner. "You don’t have hair. The clothes you are wearing. What are you, from a mental hospital?"

"She didn’t have a dream, this German woman," Rosenthal remembered, "of all the horrible things the Germans were doing. I told her I am not from a mental hospital, I am going to Auschwitz — I am going to the gas. She looked at me like I was crazy, opened her purse and gave me some bread. I ate it so fast. I was so hungry."

She was 22 years old and seven months pregnant.

~~~

Mass grave, Kaufering III, 1945

Now that the Nazis knew Rosenthal was carrying a child, Auschwitz would mean almost certain death. But that's not where the SS took her. The Russians, they told her, had just bombed Auschwitz, so instead they were headed toward another one of the most notorious concentration camps: Dachau.

By then, the war was going very poorly for the Nazis. The Allies had landed at Normandy six months earlier and begun their push across Europe. That year, the British and the Americans dropped more bombs on Germany than in the entire rest of the war combined — hundreds of thousands of tons of them. In response, the Nazis were moving their facilities underground. Near Dachau, in a town called Kaufering, they established eleven smaller sub-camps and used the slave labour of the prisoners to build giant subterranean airplane factories. There, they were put to work making Hitler's new "miracle weapon": the Messerschmitt, the world's first fighter jet. 

Rosenthal was taken to one of those sub-camps: Kaufering I. It held thousands of prisoners, the vast majority of them Jewish, half of them doomed to die. The guards took her below ground and left her there in a dark room. It was hard to see. Only a single bulb cast dim light in the subterranean prison. But there were voices: other women, speaking Hungarian. "Where are you from?" they asked. "What happened to you?" There were six of them, they told her. And they were all pregnant.

"We started to cry and we just cried and cried," Rosenthal remembered. "It was like we were all sisters. We had no one else in the world. We hugged each other. We kissed each other."

With the end of the war approaching, it seemed as if some of the Nazis were beginning to realize there would be consequences for their war crimes. They were starting to worry. The killing was far from over, but it seemed as if some things were beginning, ever so slightly, to change — if only so the Nazis could save their own skins.

The seven pregnant women were eventually taken above ground, to a small wooden hut that would serve as meagre shelter against the most terrible winter Europe had seen in the last fifteen years. What little heat they had came from a stove smuggled in for them by a fellow prisoner — one of the "kapos" who agreed to help oversee the camps in return for special treatment. She had taken a great risk by getting it for them. When the guards discovered the stove, they took it away and beat the kapo bloody. The next day, she brought it right back. 

The SS officers brought them a doctor, too: one of the prisoners in the camp had been a gynecologist in Hungary before the war. But there was only so much Dr. Vadasz could do for them. He broke down in tears when he first saw the seven women, all of them now very far along in their pregnancies. He begged the Nazis to give him the equipment he would need for the deliveries. "I have no instruments! I need hot water! Towels! Soap!" But he would have to make do.

Within days, the first of the women went into labour. And in the weeks to come, the others would follow, one after another, suffering terribly as they gave birth on a hard, wooden bunk without anesthetic or the necessary medical equipment. Dr. Vadasz, terribly weakened himself, was given nothing but a bucket of hot water to use.

Still, one by one, the first six mothers did what seemed to be impossible: they gave birth in a concentration camp. Six new babies were brought into the world. Six new lives in the middle of all that death.

Eventually, it was just Miriam Rosenthal who had yet to give birth to her child. She finally went into labour during the last week of February. But as she struggled through the contractions, it was clear that her delivery wasn't going as smoothly as the others had. There were complications. She became frightened that she couldn't hear the baby's heartbeat. And she was growing weak.

Dr. Vadasz urged her on. "Miriam push, push, you must help me. I can't do it on my own. He's going to die." Her strength was failing her. "Miriam please try, try try try..."

"I couldn't keep going any longer," she later remembered, "but all of a sudden the baby is out... And what a beauty. With blond, beautiful hair; big, blue eyes. The other women were crying. Dr. Vadasz was crying. Everyone was crying."

On February 28, 1945, Leslie Rosenthal was born. 

~~~

The seven mothers & their babies, Dachau, 1945

It was a miracle. But they weren't safe yet. The Allies were still fighting their slow, bloody way across the continent. The war against Germany wouldn't end for another ten weeks.

And those ten weeks would be hard weeks. An outbreak of typhoid tore through the camp. Prisoners were still dying everywhere. And even as they recovered from the strain of childbirth, the new mothers were forced to keep working, washing prisoners' clothing and unloading dead bodies.

Rosenthal was in especially poor shape. After the delivery, her placenta had never emerged. It was another life-threatening complication. "After a week I started to bleed," she remembered. "The blood was flowing like water from a tap. Terrible. So much blood." Dr. Vadasz warned the others that Rosenthal wasn't going to make it. "If you die," one of them promised her, "I will take Leslie."

Rosenthal kept fighting, and eventually recovered. But death was still a constant threat. When Leslie was still just two weeks old, the camp's head physician signed an order to have all of the new mothers and their babies sent to Bergen-Belsen to be gassed. His order, for some unknown reason, was never carried out.

Meanwhile, the Allies were getting closer: by the end of March, they were across the Rhine, marching through Germany itself, pushing on toward victory. Soon, the Soviets were on the outskirts of Berlin, shelling the capital. Hitler had retreated into his bunker, never to emerge again. In just a few days, he would put his gun to his head and end his own life.

As the Third Reich collapsed, the SS officers at the Kaufering camps were debating what to do with their prisoners. Some were determined to kill as many Jews and destroy as much evidence as they could before the end. As the Americans approached, the Nazis set fire to some of the barracks. Hundreds of prisoners were too weak to escape the flames. They were burned alive.

Thousands of others — including the seven mothers and their babies — were evacuated, forced into a death march from the sub-camps of Kaufering toward Dachau itself, nearly sixty kilometers away. "Anyone who was unable to keep walking was shot on the spot," one of the other mothers remembered. "People were sick, weak and malnourished. We had to march without shoes."

Rosenthal could barely keep moving, but if she stopped she knew she would be killed — and Leslie with her. At one point, as she struggled to carry on, one of the Nazi officers offered to help. More than sixty years later, she was still moved to tears by the memory of that small, unexpected act of humanity. "I couldn't believe it: an SS man says, 'Let me carry your child.' You see, there are good people in this life. They were SS but this man had a heart. He took the child. I could hardly keep walking and he said, 'I'll carry him.'"

"Some Germans helped," she once told the Toronto Star, "maybe not enough, but there were some."

Rosenthal kept going, struggling on long enough to get loaded onto yet another train. But even the train wasn't safe. The American air force didn't realize it was filled with the people they had come to save — so they bombed it. As prisoners fled the wreckage into the surrounding woods, the SS opened fire. The forest was filled with bodies.

"I kept saying, 'Leslie, we're going home. God will help us... Please God, please God. Help me, help me.'"

In the end, it took two days for the prisoners and their guards to make the journey from Kaufering to the main camp. Thousands of prisoners died in death marches around Dachau in the final few days of the war. But Rosenthal, the six other mothers, and all seven of their babies survived.

The morning after they arrived, they were lined up for one last roll call. A few hours later, the Americans arrived.

It was over. They were free.

~~~

Bela, Leslie and Miriam

He was there, in the distance, running toward her. Somehow they had both survived — and they had both made their way back home to find each other. Bela was stunned to see Leslie in Miriam's arms. He couldn't believe she'd gotten pregnant so quickly, in those two brief weeks before the Nazis tore them apart. He was overjoyed. "I can’t describe that feeling of when he saw our baby," she remembered, "when he saw Leslie for the first time. We cried and cried and cried."

With the war over, they decided to leave Hungary behind and to set out in search of a new life: they travelled through Bratislava, Prague, Paris and Cuba before they finally reached Canada. For a while, Bela worked at a mattress factory. And then as a rabbi in Timmins and Sudbury. But in the end, they settled in Toronto, where they would spend the rest of their lives.

In 1965, they opened a shop on Bathurst Street at the corner of Caribou Road. They called it Miriam's Fine Judaica. They ran the store for more than 40 years, and raised their growing family: three children, and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They would both live into their 90s.

At first, Rosenthal didn't tell her story to very many people outside her own family. She was still haunted by nightmares of SS officers coming to steal her newborn child. But in her later years, she began to share her extraordinary tale. "I believe," she told the Star in 1997, "as I get older I think more and more about the Holocaust and my family... I feel my memories more, but still I am not bitter."

In 2010, she was interviewed for an award-winning German documentary about the seven mothers and their children called Born In A Concentration Camp. A couple of years after that, a journalist from the National Post interviewed her for an article about her remarkable life.

Leslie was there, too. By then, he was nearly 70 years old. As he arrived, Miriam proudly introduced her son: "Here is my miracle baby now."

"And here," Leslie answered, "is my miracle mother."

-----

You can watch the documentary, Born In A Concentration Camp, online here. And you can read the National Post interview here. And if you've got a Toronto Public Library card, I think you should be able to read the Toronto Star article here (Page E1, April 21, 1997). The website for Miriam's Fine Judaica shares Bela (William) Rosenthal's obituary from the Canadian Jewish News here.

Haaretz wrote about the mothers and their babies here. The Canadian Jewish News wrote about the Rosenthals here. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shares more information about the Kaufering camps here and Auschwitz here. The Guardian has some more information about Auschwitz here, as does the London Jewish Cultural Centre has some more information about Auschwitz on their "The Holocaust Explained" site for students here. 

You can learn more about the Jewish history of Komárno from the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center here. 

PHOTOS: Miram and Bela's wedding photo comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here, which also shares their story. The photo of the children in Auschwitz comes via the Globe and Mail, which shares the story of one of those children here. The photo of the mass grave at Kaufering III — and the German prisoners being forced to uncover it at the end of the war — comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here. The same site has the photo of the seven mothers and their babies here.  

John Graves Simcoe, Napoleon Bonaparte & The Politics of Horse Shit

This is a photo of horse shit. But it's not just any photo of horse shit. This horse shit is on Woodbury Common — a beautiful patch of heathland in the English countryside. And with horse shit on Woodbury Common, you can tell a story about the founder of Toronto — John Graves Simcoe — and about a man who challenged him to a duel over that dung.

This was a few years after Simcoe founded Toronto. He'd come back home to England by then, returning to his country in a deeply troubled time. England was at war with France.

The French Revolution had started many years earlier; it was already well underway by the time Simcoe and his family left home for Canada. But things had gotten even bloodier while they were gone: Simcoe founded Toronto in July of 1793; the Reign of Terror began just a couple of months after that, while the Simcoes were living in a pair of fancy tents pitched at the mouth of Garrison Creek. 

And even there — six thousand kilometers from the guillotines of Paris — news of the atrocities reached them. In August, the Simcoes were visited by a pair of fleeing French aristocrats hoping to settle in Upper Canada. They told a morbid story about King Louis' botched attempt to escape his captors. By the time they shared that anecdote, the French king had already lost his head.

A few months later, Marie Antoinette followed her husband to the guillotine. News of her death took many weeks to travel across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence to the Canadian frontier. When it did, Simcoe marked the occasion with solemn respect. That evening, the settlers of Toronto dressed all in black, postponing the dance they had planned for the night. They might hate the French, but they were staunch monarchists — many of them had already suffered through the horrors of the American Revolution and were deeply upset by the idea of yet another bloody, democratic uprising.

It was a frightening time. The French Revolution sparked decades of war between France and the monarchies of Europe, including Britain. At the very same time that Simcoe was busy planning the first few blocks of Toronto, he was also busy worrying that the war back home would spread to North America. Even now, French revolutionaries were stirring up trouble in the United States, trying to get the Americans to join the war and invade Canada. Some had even travelled into Québec, where they hoped to convince the French Canadians to rise up and launch their own revolution. As the Simcoes slept in their tents at night, they worried that at any moment an enemy ship might sail over the horizon — or enemy soldiers burst from the woods. Simcoe's wife, Elizabeth, had nightmares about it.

John Graves Simcoe

Things only got scarier when they began to head home for England. As the Simcoes sailed out of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, French warships were waiting. They chased them out into the Atlantic, seizing other English vessels who were sailing nearby. As the Simcoes' ship dodged icebergs off the coast of Labrador, Elizabeth and the children hid themselves in the cramped quarters below deck. They could hear guns in the distance. It took weeks to sail across the open ocean before the Simcoes finally reached the safety of home.

Even then, it wasn't over. The British would be at war with the French for most of the next twenty years. And things would only get worse. By the time the Simcoes got back to England, a new French general had begun to make a name for himself. Napoleon Bonaparte would prove to be one of the most brilliant and most power hungry dictators in history.

The wars against the French would dominate the rest of Simcoe's life. In the end, he would die fighting them.

But first, he had an important role to play. Simcoe didn't always get along with his superiors, but he did earn the respect of some of the most powerful men in England: Prime Minister Addington, Admiral Nelson, the Duke of York; he even spent time with "Mad" King George. His experience was especially respected when it came to military matters. He'd been one of the most celebrated heroes on the British side of the American Revolution. And as the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he'd been responsible for preparing the defences of the new province in case of an American invasion. And so, just a couple of years after his return to England, Simcoe was given a new job: preparing part of England in case of a French invasion.

At times, it seemed as if that invasion could happen at any moment — especially once Napoleon was in charge. Having already expanded his empire on the Continent, the French general began to assemble an army to bring England to its knees. Two hundred thousand men were being trained on the coast of France: the Armée d'Angleterre. A whole flotilla of barges was built to carry them across the English Channel. For a while, Napoleon was even toying with the idea of deploying the world's first air force: a fleet of hot air balloons to support the attack. There were rumours of a giant tunnel being dug beneath the Channel. And of a massive raft powered by windmills. To pay for it all, Napoleon had already sold the Louisiana Territory to the Americans. He was so sure his invasion was going to succeed that he built a triumphal arch to commemorate it before it had even happened.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel, Simcoe was getting ready for the invasion. The British government had put him in charge of the entire defence of the West Country. Devon, Cornwall and Somerset would be under his command. If the French landed there, Simcoe and his men would answer with a scorched earth campaign. They would evacuate all women and children, the elderly and the sick — and all the livestock, too. Everything they left behind would be destroyed. The French would find nothing to eat.

Instead, they would be met by the biggest military force Britain had ever assembled. More than six hundred thousand men were ready to fight — nearly 10% of the entire population of England. In the West Country alone, Simcoe was in command of twelve thousand men.

Woodbury Common

But they weren't all experienced soldiers. Professional troops were joined by volunteers and conscripted militia. They needed lots of training. And to do that training, Simcoe sometimes took them to Woodbury Common.

Woodbury Common is high in the gorgeous green hills of Devon. It's just a few kilometers from the Simcoes' summer home in the seaside town of Budleigh Salterton. And it's not too far from their country estate in the Blackdown Hills, either. It's a beautiful place: gently rolling hills covered with flowers, shrubs and short grass. It's typical heathland; in fact, if you look up "heath" on Wikipedia, the first photo you'll see is a photo of Woodbury Common. It's one of England's official Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

At the very highest point on the Common, you'll find a patch of trees. They're growing on the remains of massive earthworks. The big ditches are what's left of the ancient Woodbury Castle: an Iron Age hill fort built in the days of the druids; it's more than two thousand years old. From the lands around the castle, you can see for miles and miles in every direction — all the way back down to the sea. It's the perfect spot for a military base. In fact, the British army still trains there to this day.

And so about two hundred years ago, you could find thousands of Simcoe's troops camping on Woodbury Common as they awaited Napoleon's arrival — and with those camping men came hundreds of horses.

That, finally, bring us to the horse shit.

With all those horses trotting around, there was, of course, plenty of dung on Woodbury Common. And the question of who was ultimately responsible for it — Simcoe's troops or the local land owner — sparked a fight that nearly ended in a duel. But not for the reason you might think.

The principal owner of the lands around Woodbury Common was a man by the name of Lord Rolle. History would eventually remember him as the man who tripped during Queen Victoria's coronation and rolled down the steps to the throne. He and Simcoe didn't get along at all. Rolle was pretty pissed off by the inconvenience caused by all the men camping on the Common. And he was even more pissed off by the fact that they were cleaning up after themselves. Simcoe was making sure that all the horse shit was being collected and taken away. Rolle was furious. He wanted that horse shit for himself. It was valuable manure.

Rolle began a letter-writing campaign. He complained to the authorities, insisting that tradition dictated that any horse shit left by the military on common land belonged to the local lord of the manor: him. Simcoe was stealing his shit. And if Simcoe got away with it, it would set a dangerous precedent: any British general would be allowed to trample the rights of any lord. The question of the horse shit on Woodbury Common, Rolle argued, was a question of importance to every single subject in the British Empire.

Simcoe, for his part, sent a flurry of his own letters arguing the opposite. And as the letters flew back and forth, the fight escalated. Before long, Rolle was ordering his men to physically stop Simcoe's troops from removing the shit from the Common. The dispute was getting so serious that it was eventually forwarded all the way to the man in charge of the entire British military: the Duke of York (the son of "Mad" King George III and the guy who Simcoe had originally named Toronto after — back when it was still known as the town of York).
 

Woodbury Castle

In the end, Simcoe lost the battle of the Woodbury Common horse shit. His orders came directly from Whitehall — the heart of the British government at Westminster. The manure belonged to Rolle. He would be compensated for the shit that had already been taken away. And he would be allowed to keep any dung produced by Simcoe's horses in the future — as long as he sold it to the public at an appropriate discount.

But Rolle still wasn't satisfied. He was so angry with Simcoe that he challenged him to a duel. He wanted, he declared, to have a fist-fight with the founder of Toronto.

 
Simcoe was not impressed. Gentlemen, he replied, didn't fight with their fists. It was unseemly. If Rolle wanted to have a duel, they could have a duel: with pistols or with swords. It didn't count if there was no chance you might die.

Rolle backed down.

And so did Napoleon. The tiny French Emperor never did invade England. Instead, he marched his army east into the heart of Europe. But it wasn't the end of Simcoe's connection to the man. There was one sad chapter left to come.

It didn't take long for the French army to invade Spain and Portugal. The Peninsular War — as it was called — would rage for years on end. It was a bloody campaign. Tens of thousands were killed or wounded. Simcoe's own son, Francis, would die during the Siege of Badajoz in Portugal. (Just a toddler when Toronto was founded, his parents had jokingly named their log cabin in his honour: Castle Frank. We still remember it today in the name of a subway station.)

By then, John Graves Simcoe was already dead. He died during that same campaign. His preparations for Napoleon's invasion had earned him a promotion: Commander-in-Chief of the entire British army in India. But just before he left for his new post, he got new orders: his services were once again desperately needed in the fight against the French. Simcoe sailed to Portugal. But the ship he sailed on was damp and newly painted. He had always suffered from terrible respiratory problems — in fact, that's why he'd been forced to come home from Canada.

Simcoe was deathly ill by the time he made it to Lisbon. He would never recover. He was loaded back onto the same sickly ship and sent home across the Channel to England. He died in Exeter just a few days later.

As for Napoleon, well, he did finally make it to Devon one day. But it wasn't at the head of an invading army. Instead, he saw those rolling green hills from the deck of a British ship as it sailed by. It was all over; he'd lost the Battle of Waterloo and was now being held prisoner. Defeated for the final time, the French general asked if he could retire in England with a small parcel of land. His request was refused. The British didn't let him off that ship; he was never to set foot in Devon. Instead, they kept sailing, taking him far away to the isolated island of Saint Helena where he would live out the rest of his days in peace and frustrating quiet.

-----

More than two hundred years after Simcoe founded our city, Toronto is still wrestling with the question of who is responsible for our horse shit. You can read more about that on the CBC News website here.

Read more of my posts about the Simcoes: the story of John Graves Simcoe's vision for Toronto (a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution); the story of Elizabeth Simcoe's 1794 nightmare; the story of their dog, Jack Sharp; the story of their cat; the story of how they fell in love and the magical hills where it happened; the story of their summer home in Budleigh Salterton; the story of their connection to Samuel Coleridge and his family; the story of the Simcoe family and Exeter and death.

The first person to alert me to the story of Simcoe and the shit was Michael Downes at the Fairlynch Museum in Budleigh Salterton. You can find the museum at their website, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

Simcoe's biographers, Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott, cover the story in their book, which you borrow from the Toronto Public Library here or buy here.

You can learn more about Napoleon's brief stay in Devon in Devonshire Magazine here.

Photos of Woodbury Common and Woodbury Castle by me: Adam Bunch.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 30 The Conference of the Beasts Francis Simcoe, 1796

This post is related to dream 34 The Upper Canadian Ball Elizabeth Simcoe, 1793

Toronto's Rebel Mayor & His Pirate Admiral

William Lyon Mackenzie ran for his life. His rebellion had failed. It was a disaster. His rebel army was crushed on Yonge Street. His headquarters at Montgomery's Tavern were burned to the ground north of Eglinton. Some of his men were already dead. Others would soon be hanged for treason. Just a few years earlier, Mackenzie had been the first Mayor of Toronto. Now, he was the city's most wanted fugitive. The Lieutenant Governor was offering a £1000 reward for his capture. So Mackenzie was forced to flee the city he loved, smuggled through the countryside by his supporters as gangs of angry Loyalists searched for him. He ran all the way south to Niagara, getting rowed across the river just a few minutes ahead of the men who had come to arrest him. He was lucky to escape Canada with his life. He would spend the next decade living in exile.

But Mackenzie wasn't ready to give up. Not yet. His failed rebellion in Toronto was just the beginning. Now, he and his supporters would launch a war against the British government in Canada, hoping a series of bloody border raids would spark a full-scale democratic revolution. It would last a year — for pretty much all of 1838. We call it the Patriot War.

And the rebel's admiral in that war was a man by the name of Pirate Bill Johnston. He was a smuggler, a spy, a veteran of the War of 1812 on both sides and, weirdly, an IRS agent. The rebel mayor was the most wanted man on the western shore of Lake Ontario. But the pirate admiral Bill Johnston would soon be the most wanted man in the east. 

He'd been born in Trois Rivières, but he grew up just outside Kingston. And it was there that he would make his name as a young smuggler. By the time he was in his early 20s, Johnston was the captain of his own ship. He sailed his schooner through the labyrinth of islands at the spot where the St. Lawrence River meets Lake Ontario. We call them the Thousand Islands — but there are actually almost two thousand of them. It was the perfect spot to be a smuggler. Johnston would make runs through the confusing warren of islands, bringing contraband goods across the river from the United States. And he wasn't alone. Some estimates say that as much as 90% of all the tea in Upper Canada had been smuggled into the province to avoid paying taxes — and plenty of the rum, too.

The Thousand Islands by Elizabeth Simcoe

Still, while Johnston might have been a smuggler, he was also a loyal British subject and Canadian. That is, at least, until the War of 1812.

When the Americans first invaded, Johnston fought on the Canadian side. But he'd never been very good at following rules: he clashed with his superiors so much that he eventually beat one of them up and got tossed in jail for a time. Meanwhile, he'd also developed a soft spot for the ordinary American citizens who were being held in Canadian prisons during the war. He kept bailing them out and smuggling them back across the border so they could go home to their families. That landed him in jail again. The Canadians accused him of being a spy.

This time, he'd had it. Pirate Bill defected. Once upon a time, his own parents had fled from the United States — they were Loyalist Americans driven from their homes for taking the British side in the American Revolution. Now, their son headed in the other direction. He climbed into a canoe with a few American refugees and rowed himself all the way across the lake to the American naval base at Sackets Harbor. There, he found the man in charge of the United States' fleet on Lake Ontario — Commodore Isaac Chauncey — and pledged himself to the American cause. Now, Pirate Bill would fight for the stars and stripes.

Johnston spent most of the next two years fighting against the British and the Canadians in the Thousand Islands. He waged war in a big rowboat armed with a cannon, a vessel light enough that he and his men could slip through the islands more easily than the big warships, striking quick like lighting and then evading capture. Pirate Bill would witness some of the most famous moments in the entire war, including the Battle of Sackets Harbor and the failed American invasion of Montreal that ended in disaster at Crysler's Farm. By the end of the war, it seems that he had earned a reputation as a notorious pirate — at least as far as the British were concerned.

After the war, Johnston went back to his old job: smuggling tea and rum into Canada. But now, he did it from the American side. And he also worked for an early precursor of the Internal Revenue Service, spying on Canadian smugglers for the United States government. For the most part, the next twenty years were quiet ones for Pirate Bill. He grew into middle age, raising his family on the American banks of the St. Lawrence, just across the river from his old stomping grounds in Canada.

The burning of the SS Caroline

And then came Mackenzie's rebellion.

Johnston was in his late 50s by the time Toronto's rebel mayor marched his army down Yonge Street. But Pirate Bill followed news of the events from far on the other side of Lake Ontario. He heard of the rebellion and of Mackenzie's escape to the United States. There, the rebel mayor immediately set to work rallying supporters, giving speeches, raising money, collecting guns and ammunition, getting ready to launch his new war in the name of democracy.

Just a few days after his harrowing escape across the border, William Lyon Mackenzie and his supporters seized an island on the Canadian side of the Niagara River — Navy Island, just above Niagara Falls — and declared themselves to be the provisional government of the new Republic of Canada. They even had their own flag and currency. The Patriot War had begun.

The first major incident happened just a couple of weeks after that. The rebels on Navy Island were being supplied by an American steamship called the SS Caroline. One winter night, a band of Loyalists snuck across the river, attacked the ship, forced her crew off the boat, set her on fire, and watched as she floated down the river, sinking as she burned. Charred chunks of the vessel plunged over Niagara Falls.

The burning of the Caroline sparked a diplomatic crisis. It was, for many Americans, an absolute outrage — reason enough to declare war on Canada. The Caroline was an American ship in American territory. One of the crew members — a Black man by the name of Amos Durfee — had been shot dead, his body left on the dock. His corpse would be carried to Buffalo and displayed outside the Eagle Tavern as a recruiting tool for Mackenzie's new war. Durfee's body, one reporter wrote, "was held up — with its pale forehead, mangled by the pistol ball, and his locks matted with his blood! His friends and fellow citizens looked on the ghastly spectacle, and thirsted for an opportunity to revenge him." Newspaper accounts of the battle, grossly inflating the death toll, made things even worse.

"The loyalist troops," the New York Herald cried, "have made an assault upon our territory. They have murdered in cold blood our citizens. They cannot escape our vengeance... Niagara's eternal thunders are sounding their requiem! and from the depths of that mighty flood come the wails of their spirits, calling for the blood of their murderers!"

The body of Amos Durfee

Few were as angry as Pirate Bill Johnston. Soon, he was in Buffalo himself, meeting with Mackenzie and other rebel leaders at the Eagle Tavern. He was joining their war. Mackenzie named him the Admiral of the Patriot Navy in the east. Of course, they didn't actually have a navy, but they weren't about to let that stop them.

They would start with an attack on Fort Henry in Kingston. It seems to have been Pirate Bill's idea. It would be a huge victory if they could pull it off, seizing the biggest military base in the province. But it would be difficult. One force would attack Windsor as a distraction in the west. Another, led by Pirate Bill, would head to the Thousand Islands and attack Gananoque as a distraction in the east. The main force would gather on Hickory Island, not far from Kingston, ready to march across the ice of the frozen St. Lawrence and launch the final attack.

The day they picked to begin their operation was February 22 — George Washington's birthday. They spent the next few weeks getting ready. In towns across upstate New York, American volunteers and exiled Canadians trained to fight. Pirate Bill and the Patriots broke into military depots and stole thousands of guns — sympathetic American guards simply melted away. Some of the weapons were smuggled into Canada, into the countryside around Kingston, where hundreds of rebel supporters secretly waited to join the attack once the invasion had begun. At least one spy inside Kingston fed the Patriots information and was ready to act on the fateful day.

But things didn't get off to a very good start. The attack on Windsor quickly failed. And in the Thousand Islands, the Patriot rebels were having trouble keeping their plans a secret. A young teacher from Gananoque — Elizabeth Barnett, hailed as the Laura Secord of the Patriot War — caught wind of the invasion while she was visiting family on the American side of the St. Lawrence. She rushed back home to Canada to warn the authorities. And by then, the authorities already had their own suspicions. They were building defences. Holes were being cut in the ice. Mohawk reinforcements were called in. The spy was unmasked and sent into exile. Suspected rebel sympathizers were warned: they would be killed if they so much as left their houses.

Still, it was the name "Pirate Bill" that sparked the most fear. "When [Elizabeth Barnett] mentioned Bill Johnston's involvement," the historian Shaun J. McLaughlin writes on his great Pirate Bill Johnston blog, "the townsfolk had fits. Women and children fled to the country for safety. Men gathered their weapons. Couriers rode at a gallop to‎‎ Kingston, Brockville, and other towns to spread the warning."

Fort Henry, 1839

Meanwhile, on Hickory Island, the rebels were gathering. But it wasn't going well there, either. It was the dead of the Canadian winter. The temperature had plummeted to -33ºC. And the Patriot General in charge of the attack — the awesomely named Rensselaer Van Rensselaer — was a drunk who doesn't seem to have inspired much confidence in his men. More than a thousand began the trip, but only a few hundred ever made it to Hickory Island. In the end, Van Rensselaer turned around and went home. He never even started his attack.

It was a devastating blow to the rebels. And things only got worse from there. By now, the Patriot leaders were beginning to turn on each other.

Mackenzie blamed the failure at Hickory Island on Van Rensselaer's alcoholism and incompetence. Pirate Bill agreed. "If Mackenzie or any other decent man had been at the head," he said, "they would have taken... Kingston." And Van Rensselaer was no fan of Mackenzie's either. He called the rebel mayor a "meddling craven" and "a cruel, reckless, selfish madman... the greatest curse of the cause he pretends to espouse..."

But their disagreement was about more than just personal hatred. It was a symptom of a growing split in the movement — between the Canadian Patriots and their American allies. Van Rensselaer was an American. (He was from one of the most powerful families in New York State: his grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence; his uncle was one of the richest Americans ever.) And the Americans were having more and more influence over the Patriot War. They even created a secret society — the Hunters' Lodge — to support it. Tens of thousands of Americans joined; some estimates put the number as high as two hundred thousand. They were all promised free farmland in Canada once the war was won. Many of the soldiers who volunteered to fight with the rebel mayor and his pirate admiral were members of the Hunters' Lodge. It made Mackenzie uneasy. What had begun as a Canadian rebellion against their British overlords was beginning to look more and more like an American invasion of Canada.

It was also beginning to look more and more like a failed invasion. A couple of weeks after Hickory Island, Van Rensselaer launched another attack: this time his men seized Pelee Island in Lake Erie. But the Loyalists fought back. By the time the dust had settled, the rebels were defeated and Van Rensselaer was dead.

The Battle of St. Eustache in Québec

Meanwhile, things weren't going any better on the war's other front. Mackenzie's rebellion wasn't the only democratic uprising in the Canadian colonies that winter. At the same time he'd been marching his army down Yonge Street, his allies in Québec had been fighting their own battles against the British government there. They too had been driven into exile in the United States; Mackenzie had been coordinating with them as they launched their own border raids into Canada. But they didn't seem to be having any more success than the rebel mayor was.

Mackenzie was finally losing faith. War didn't seem to be getting him anywhere. Over the spring and summer of 1838, the rebel mayor's thoughts began to turn to peace. He moved to New York City where he launched a newspaper called Mackenzie's Gazette. At first, he used it to support the Patriot violence. "One short war well managed might give this continent perpetual peace," he argued. "Until Canada is freed the revolution in America will not be complete." But by the end of the summer his tone had changed. Now, Mackenzie was arguing in favour of a bloodless, political solution to the problems in Canada.

Johnston felt betrayed. But even with Mackenzie gone and Van Ransselaer dead, Pirate Bill fought on.

His next move: he would finally find himself a navy.

Late one stormy May night, a Canadian steamship carried her passengers through the Thousand Islands on her way west to Toronto. But the Sir Robert Peel wasn't alone in those choppy waters. She was quietly being followed by a pair of rowboats. It was Pirate Bill. He was in command of at least twenty Patriots, some of them — just like the American rebels at the Boston Tea Party — were disguised in a crude parody of First Nations clothing. They had come to steal the Peel and then use her to steal a second ship. Between them, the two vessels would be the beginning of Pirate Bill's rebel fleet.

It wasn't a random attack: the ship was owned by members of the Family Compact. They were the powerful, pro-British, Tory elites whose anti-democratic policies had sparked Mackenzie's rebellion in the first place. They were the enemy. 

When the Peel finally pulled into port to pick up more wood for her boilers, Pirate Bill and his men were ready. They landed a few hundred meters away and crept through the dark forest, getting ever closer to the Canadian ship. Finally, letting their war cries fly, they rushed from the darkness, raced across a clearing, and charged up the gangplank onto the decks. They quickly seized the vessel, forcing the crew and the groggy passengers back onto land at gunpoint. It was easy. Almost no one put up any resistance — there was one fistfight and that was it. The ship was theirs.

The burning of the Sir Robert Peel

Johnston was now expecting more rebels to arrive. In fact, he was counting on them — none of his men knew how to run the boilers on a steamship. So he waited. And waited. But they never came. In the end, he had to abandon his original plan. Instead, he ordered his men to set the Peel ablaze.

As the rebels lit the flames, they cried out: "Remember the Caroline!"

Pirate Bill finally had his revenge. But now, he had really pissed people off. And not just his enemies. As Johnston hid in a cave in the maze of the Thousand Islands, both the Canadian and American authorities launched massive manhunts.

Still, even in hiding, Pirate Bill was a thorn in the side of the Family Compact. He published a proclamation of war from his island hideout. "The object of my movement is the independence of the Canadas," he declared. And all the while, he kept trying to raise money and find guns for his men. "I will warrant," he promised one potential supporter, "that they shall kill four times their number of Tories and give you their scalps if you shoud whant them."

Once, when Johnston was spotted by a passing ship, he couldn't resist chatting with some of the starstruck passengers. "One thing you may rest assured of," he told them, "I will never be taken alive... Whoever comes after me must bring his own coffin..." As the ship sailed off into the distance, one of the passengers saluted the rebel by flying a handkerchief in the breeze. Pirate Bill responded by unfurling the flag of the Sir Robert Peel.

"Bill Johnson [sic]," said one of his greatest enemies, "laughed at the efforts of the Governor and all the authorities." The pirate admiral made narrow escapes: racing through island forests under a hail of musket balls, slipping out of Loyalist traps, flaunting his nerve by throwing a huge party just before abandoning one hideout for another. His daughter Kate, who smuggled him supplies, became a celebrity in her own right. She was famous for her uncanny ability to evade the authorities. People started calling her the Queen of the Thousand Islands.

But the Patriot War wasn't over. And Johnston was still the rebel admiral. He had one more big battle to fight.

It would happen in November, a few dozen kilometers east down the St. Lawrence. The Patriots were planning an attack on Prescott. They hoped to capture Fort Wellington. Pirate Bill would play an important role.

The Battle of the Windmill

Things, yet again, got off to a rocky start. This time, quite literally. As the battle got underway early that morning and church bells rang the alarm on the Canadian shore, two of the ships that the rebels had stolen ran aground near the battlefield. Johnston was forced to come rescue them — and even he could only get one of them free. As a third Patriot ship tried to rescue the other stranded vessel, an American boat turned her cannons loose. The pilot of the Patriot ship had his head blown off by a cannonball; the new Patriot general, terrified, suddenly claimed he was sick, ordered the ship back to shore, and spent the rest of the battle hiding in his cabin.

Meanwhile, Pirate Bill had begun to ferry hundreds of soldiers across the river, taking them from the American side over to fight on the Canadian shore. Their first assault on Prescott fell short: the Canadian authorities, once again, knew the attack was coming. But by the end of that morning, the rebels had seized control of a big windmill outside town. (It's still there nearly two hundred years later; it's a lighthouse today and a National Historic Site.) The battle would become known as the Battle of the Windmill.

It lasted for days. The Loyalists attacked the windmill the very next morning, but it made for a pretty good fort. It had thick, stone walls and a commanding view of the St. Lawrence. Rebel snipers peered from the windows. It wouldn't be easy to drive them out. More than a dozen Loyalists died in that first attack; dozens more were wounded. It seemed as if things had reached a stalemate.

But then, the Americans arrived.

Many ordinary American citizens supported the rebel cause. But the American government was a different story. The Patriots had long hoped that President Van Buren would come to their rescue — or that the bloody battles on the border would eventually spark another full-scale war between Britain and the United States, which might end in a new, democratic Canada. At the very least, the rebels hoped the American government would look the other way — allowing them to use the United States as a safe haven from which they could launch their attacks. The United States, after all, was still no fan of the British. It had only been a couple of decades since the War of 1812. And indeed, it didn't seem as if the American authorities were in a rush to prosecute the rebels or their supporters.

But there was a limit. And the rebels had finally reached it. Van Buren wasn't going to allow them to drag his entire nation into war. He was going to put a stop to it. He was going to close the border. And he was going to do it right in the middle of the battle.

As the fight between the Patriots and the Loyalists raged, suddenly there was a new arrival: the United States Navy. The Americans seized the big Patriot ships. And an American vessel took their place, patrolling the water in the middle of the St. Lawrence, cutting off the rebel supply line and making it nearly impossible for Pirate Bill to ferry any more soldiers across the watery border.

The windmill, now a lighthouse

That night, the pirate admiral roamed the port on the American side, desperately trying to convince his troops to hazard the short journey across the river. Some agreed and he rowed them over himself, sneaking by the American patrol. He spent the next two days trying to convince more men to join the fight — and watching the battle at the windmill from across the river. He barely ate and he barely slept. He watched his dream crumble from the roofs of the American town. Now, the Royal Navy was moving in. Big guns were beginning to arrive. The rebels had run out of ammunition, reduced to firing door hinges and whatever other scraps of metal they could find. The end was drawing near.

On the final day of the battle, the Loyalists bombarded the windmill with artillery. The rebels were doomed. And with all their escape routes cut off, there was nowhere for them to go. Dozens would be killed or wounded. The rest, finally, surrendered.

The Patriot War was now pretty much over. The Pariotes rebels in Québec had finally been crushed just a few days earlier. There would be one more attack on Windsor, but that was crushed too. A year after William Lyon Mackenzie led his army down Yonge Street, the Canadian revolution was finally over. It had failed.

Many of the Patriots would be hanged. Some didn't even get a trial. Nearly a dozen men from the Battle of the Windmill were executed. Dozens more would be sent into exile in Australia — some of those would die there from the poor treatment and harsh conditions of the prison camps.

But times were changing in Canada. The days of the Family Compact were numbered. With the most radical Canadian democrats dead or exiled, the moderates took over. Just ten years after the end of the Patriot War, they were able to win at the ballot box what Mackenzie and his rebels had been unable to win at the end of a rifle. The supporters of Toronto's Robert Baldwin and Montreal's Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine joined forces to bring Responsible Government to Canada. Democracy had finally arrived.

And with it came pardons for those who had fought in its name. The exiled Patriots were finally allowed to come home. Even the rebel mayor was officially forgiven. William Lyon Mackenzie returned to Toronto, where he would live out the rest of his days. He was even re-elected to parliament.

As for Pirate Bill Johnston, well, at the Battle of the Windmill he'd narrowly evaded capture yet again. But with the war over, he soon turned himself in to the American authorities so his son could collect the reward. He had always said there was no prison in the world that could hold him. And over the following months, he proved that to be true: over and over again, he would get caught or turn himself in, only to escape when the mood struck him. Eventually, they just stopped trying to find him at all.

Pirate Bill returned to his quiet life in the Thousand Islands. And once President Van Buren had been tossed out of office — thanks in no small part to his wildly unpopular intervention in the Battle of the Windmill — the American government even gave Johnston a plum post as the lightkeeper of the Rock Island Lighthouse. The man who would be remembered by history as a pirate, spent his later years watching over the treacherous waters he knew so well — making sure others could travel them safely.

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Shaun J. McLaughlin's great Pirate Bill Johnston blog is here. His "Raiders and Rebels" blog, about the history of raiders, rebels, and pirates in the Thousand Islands is here. He also has an entire book about the Patriot War which you can buy here.

Lilian F. Gates wrote a whole book about William Lyon Mackenzie after the Rebellion of 1837. You can buy it here, borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here, or read it online with a Toronto Public Library card here.

The village of Alexandria Bay, on the American side of the Thousand Islands, still hosts a Bill Johnston's Pirate Days festival every year. It's apparently ridiculously inaccurate, historically-speaking.

Shaun J. McLaughlin discusses that festival and the many myths that have grown up around the story of Pirate Bill on the Thousand Islands Life website here. They've also got more about the burning of the Sir Robert Peel here (which is also where I found the image of it). And a whole page of reference material for the Patriot War here (which is where I found the image of Fort Henry). 

Mark Totten writes about the Caroline affair in his book, "First Strike: America, Terrorism, and Moral Tradition" on Google Books here. Meanwhile, Lieutenant-commander Paul Rutkus discusses the Battle of the Windmill and its influence on the Canadian laws around the issue of "unlawful combatants" in a PDF here.

The photo of the windmill turned lighthouse is from Flickr user Dennis Jarvis. You'll find it here. The portrait of Pirate Bill Johnston comes from Wikipedia here. And the image of Amos Durfee's corpse does too, from here. And the image of the Battle of the Windmill here.

I also made this rough timeline to help wrap my head around the order of events. So I supposed I might as well share it just in case anyone ever finds it useful:

 
PATRIOT WAR TIMELINE

Dec 11, 1837: Mackenzie reaches US
Dec 12: Mackenzie gives speech in Buffalo.
Dec. 13: London Rebellion fails
Dec. 14: Republic of Canada proclamation goes to the printers
Dec. 14 or 15: They take Navy Island
Dec. 19: the Governor of NY speaks out against sympathy leading to the breaking of the law
Dec. 19: second proclamation adds $100 silver.
Dec. 21: third proclamation
Dec. 26: Rolph visits Navy Island; won't have further involvement
Dec. 29: Caroline burns
Jan. 5, 1838: Van Buren doubles down rhetoric — plus a marshal gets sent to block supplies to Navy Island
Jan. 10: Navy Island has gone days without supplies, running out of money
Jan. 14: Abandon island
Jan 16ish: Mackenzie meets Pirate Bill and the other guys for the plan
Feb. 22: date they want to attack; Washington's birthday
Feb. 24: Fighting Island/Detroit failed attack
Feb. 28: Hickory Island/non-attack
Feb. 28: Lower Canadian Patriotes cross the border
Late Feb/Early March: Mackenzie & Van R have split. Mackenzie will head toward peace.
Mar. 3: Pelee Island: rebels capture and are quickly driven from Lake Erie island
Mar. 29-30: Sir Robert Peel burns — in the wee hours of the 30th.
June 10: Pirate Bill's Proclamation of War
June 11: Pirate Bill spotted, waves flag
June 21-23: Short Hills Raid; McLeod & other cross at Niagara, failed to rile up trouble
July 4: Fort Wallace party
July 21: Mackenzie preaching peace now (in NYC I think)
Nov. 3-10: Second Lower Canadian Rebellion
Nov. 12-16: Battle of the Windmill ***CLIMAX!***
Nov. 28: Pirate Bill is custody by now; escapes on this day
Dec. 4: Battle of Windsor
Jan. 29, 1839: Pirate Bill, in custody, still gets to attend a benefit for himself (and will attend other stuff too)
Apr. 12: Toronto rebels Lount & Matthews hang
June: Mackenzie's trial begins
August 19: Pirate Bill arrested yet another time
1841: Pirate Bill asks Van Buren for a pardon. Doesn't get it.

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