Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars

“ He looked upon himself as the eminent man who makes enemies of all the bad men whose schemes he would not countenance; others looked upon him as having done more to alienate those whom he was sent to govern than any other person or set of persons. “If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-bred Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth who would dare insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him Francis Bond Head.” ”

“ Lloyd was the trusted messenger sent to convey that sympathy; but at first it was not a sympathy backed up by physical force. “Much may be done without blood” was the keynote of its temperate tone. Yet, as where Papineau’s own disclaimers of physical force were heard, in Upper Canada the meeting ended in drill; Brown Besses were furbished up, and the clink of the blacksmith’s hammer might be heard in any forest forge busy fashioning into shape the pikes which were made in such shape as to be equally happy in ripping or stabbing. ”

“ The least calm of these men who debated upon what we were worth, and just what should become of us, was Brougham. Like most who love to torment, he himself was easily tormented. How does this champion of liberty look as he rises to condemn the policy on the Canadian question as “vacillating, imbecile, and indolent;” as he puts his awkward questions to those whom he calls his “noble friends” or “the noble lords,” all looking marvellously uncomfortable when their names are in that merciless mouth. ”

“ In the colony it set in stormily; but as December lengthened it became mild and open throughout the country, until on the day of Gallows Hill that month of storm had almost turned to the brightness and healthy beauty of a Canadian June. The brilliant sunlight which was to burnish up the arms of the men of Gore had power to convert the blackest landscape into a thing of beauty—a scene peculiar to the land of shield of crystal, golden grain and Italian sky. ”

“ Between the time of looking into the barrel of the rifle pointed at him from behind the stump, and the crack of Boosie’s musket, which told of a life taken on his account, the seconds seemed long to the captain. He reformed his company, and on passing the dead man, Ludwig Wideman, the thrifty Boosie said, “Can I take his rifle, captain?” took it, and continued his victorious march to the inn with a gun on each shoulder, the proudest and happiest man, white or black, in the force—“not even exceeded by Sir Francis himself.” ”

“ With such a sight before them it is not wonderful that the Canadian people have imbibed the free spirit of America, and that they bear with impatience the insolence, the ignorance, the incapacity and the vice of the nest of official cormorants who, under the festering domination of England, have constituted themselves an aristocracy, with all the vices of such a body, without one of the redeeming qualities which are supposed to lessen the mischiefs which are the natural attendants of all aristocracies. ”

“ When the Canadian force landed not a soul was to be seen, and what had appeared formidable defence dwindled. Apparently a second Gibraltar, it was found in military parlance to be a bug-bear than which a greater never existed, a conglomeration of batteries and hovels masked with wood, a sickening spectacle of “looped and windowed” wretchedness. The vaunted blockhouse citadel, the barracks and the batteries, were but huts of trees and sods and ill-constructed embankments; the only reward for industry was an abattis of brushwood to prevent boat invasion. ”

“ Some months before this trying pedal performance, Theller on the dock at Windsor had taken upon himself to lecture the Colonel, his “blessed privilege as an American citizen” so to do, after Prince had been similarly engaged with a French-Canadian whom he suspected of disaffection. Theller knew, “by the restless brilliancy of his eye, dastardly flashing like the electricity of an approaching thunderstorm,” what he had to expect. He quietly enough stepped on the ferry ready to leave for Detroit, concluding, “Thus was I rescued for the first time from the cherished revenge of this man!” ”

“ My life and my property are my country’s, and I am willing cheerfully to lay either or both down when my Sovereign may require them, but my honour is unalienably my own, and I cannot submit to be made, as I lately unwittingly have been, the instrument of the most cruel and grinding oppression, to snatch, without remuneration, his pittance from the peasant or the bread from his children’s mouths. ”

“ One peer in the House of Lords, during a debate on the vexed Canadian question, demurred at the members of Colonial Assemblies being treated like froward children, forever tied to the Executive leading-strings. Canada was, in fact, bound to the Mother Country by bonds of red tape and nothing else. “Who made you?” catechized Great Britain. In the words of Mr. Henry Labouchere’s precocious young catechumen: “Let bygones be bygones; I intend to make myself,” replied the colony. ”

“ It had been said that Canadians were only a trifle less handy at scalping than the allies were, and there were still tales extant of scalping scenes at the time of the Conquest, and later. He managed to satisfy the Indians, however. The honest red countenances glowed, the feathers on their heads gently waved, as they communed among themselves, and presently a disconcerting warwhoop arose, at first like the single yelp of a wolf, but gathering in volume until every scalp upon the island must have quivered. ”

“ Steamers and schooners—containing not only the young and venturesome, but the advanced in years, as the Honourable William Dickson, then in his sixty-eighth year—now began to arrive, and the city, in spite of the motley appearance of some cargoes, seemed transformed at a stroke from an excited and frightened community into a vast barrack or camp. Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, there was no longer need into a thousand parts to divide one man and make imaginary puissance, for by that time they were so increased that it became imperative to make an attack. ”

“ A certain gentleman aired this idea in Canada, saying a governor and council was the only thing for that country. His Canadian listener looked at him fixedly for a moment, asking again if that were really his opinion,—“Then, sir, I pity your intellects.”
There was an ominous smoke from the fire in Canadian hearts over this question of class prejudices. Those were the days when a barrister would not shake hands with a solicitor, nor would a “dissenting” minister be allowed within the pale of society. Governor Maitland had been particularly hard upon this latter so-called shady lot of people. ”

“ It was now “Hurrah for Papineau” in every Upper Canadian inn where the two hundred meetings held in this year of ’37 might happen to rendezvous. And yet there were some who opined that Mackenzie’s bark was worse than his bite; who, with Lord Gosford and the Provincial Governor, did not apprehend a rebellion. The province was, in the words of its Governor—in his opinion—more tranquil than any part of England; and because there was a demand for Union Jack flags it was argued that if people loved that flag they would willingly die for the oligarchy. ”

“ Peter McGill had said at a loyalist meeting, “... the organization (to repel rebels) , that it may combine both moral determination and physical force, must be military as well as political. There must be an army as well as a congress, there must be pikes and rifles as well as men and tongues.” The answer to these wise words, useful to either side as containing solid truth for each, was a miserable attention, an exhibition of incompetence on the rebel side towards that necessary military wing, and on the Governor’s side the answer was the removal of all the troops in the province. ”

“ The most formidable part of the army consisted of the two cannon in charge of Major Carfrae of the militia artillery. At St. Eustache the French had thought “Le bon Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons;” here, also, the God of battles, to whose care “the bold diocesan” commended them, was on the side of those who had most artillery. The day before, a party of rebels on warfare bent had encountered a stranded load of firewood, which imagination and the uncertain light turned into a gun loaded to the muzzle with grape or canister. ”

“ The isolated farm-houses in the eastern part of Upper Canada and in Lower Canada suffered severely from the wanton attacks of rebels and sympathisers; and as for the terrors, the woes, the tears of the Lower Canadian women and children at the hands of the military, what pen can tell, what tongue describe them. On the island of Tanti a band of Bill Johnston’s marauders attacked the lonely farm occupied by a family named Preston. The mother, of truly heroic mould, regardless of numbers and the sentinels at her doors, contrived to get abroad to alarm her few neighbours. ”

“ Ogle R. Gowan, staunch Irish-Orange Tory as he was, was a herald of Responsible Government—and suffered for it—a prophet as to ’37, chief promoter in the first movement which resulted in Canadian volunteers, father and founder of Orangeism here, and although a strong supporter of Colborne was antagonistic to the methods of Francis Bond Head; in his military career he was chiefly conspicuous at Prescott, and carried the buckshot and bayonet record of that engagement to his grave. To such a man Mrs. Gowan, a womanly woman of great culture and heroic spirit, was a true helpmeet. ”

“ Men half-roasted, with bullets already lodged in their miserable bodies, women creeping from the crypt, found that what flame and bullet had spared the bayonet could finish. Chénier and the few remaining, mad with despair, leaped from the windows into the graveyard, and fought there anew with 156 all the desperation of a forlorn hope. A ball brought the leader down; but rallying his sinking strength he rose, to be again shot, until, with the fourth bullet, he rose no more—the blackened semblance of a man. ”

“ Ah, ye rebels to Christianity, ye detest the truth, ye shut your ears against that which is right. Your country is taxed, priest-ridden, sold to strangers and ruined ... Like the Iazzaroni of Italy, ye delight in cruelty and distress, and lamentation and woe.” He apostrophized the ruling Pact as false Canadians, Tories, pensioners, profligates, Orangemen, church-men, spies, informers, brokers, gamblers, parasites, knaves of every caste and description. It would be wonderful if each man’s grievance could not find an outlet with such a number and variety of scapegoats. ”

“ That letter, calculated to further excite those already discontented, was a blessing in disguise, since it had stirred into active life half dormant sentiments of loyalty, and made brighter those already bright.
But of the thousands then preparing for a tramp to converge at Toronto, through dark forest and over corduroy and half frozen swale, the market-place and Sir Francis himself were not, as his writings assert, the objective points. Many who left wives, families and farms and who found themselves in the loyalist ranks at Gallows Hill, had no such loyal intention when they left home. ”

“ The display of his power and the fertility of his mind amazes friend and foe; for the genius of his fervent intellect includes French cookery, Italian poetry, bees and cell building, and a host of subjects seemingly far removed from law and politics. This must have been knowledge gained at the cost of his profession, for an epigram has it that he knew a little of everything, even of law. “Brougham, though a Whig, is not a goose,” says the Noctes. ”

“ Politics were so bitter then that all Reformers were rebels. Hume’s letter of March 29th, 1834, in which he says, “Your cause is their cause, your defeat would be their subjection. Go on, therefore, I beseech you, and success, glorious success, must inevitably crown your joint efforts,” sounds as if Sir Francis might have had reason for his opinion. By 1839 a public dinner had been given this erstwhile Tory, in testimony of his eminent public services and constant advocacy in the cause of reform. Says North, “Why, a small matter will make a man who has once ratted rat again. ”

“ Someone says that a good and true woman is like a Cremona violin; age but increases the worth and sweetens the tone. In the words of Disraeli, this woman’s love had illumined the dark woof of poverty; fate had it in store that that love should “lighten the fetters of the slave” before she died.
The way in which Canadian rebels were treated in prison is to the reader of their experiences a continual reproach to the powers which made them thus suffer. But the American Bastille, according to the records left by Mackenzie, out-did the Canadian. ”

“ Under these circumstances military life naturally gave scope for much originality in uniform, accoutrement, and deportment. At one drill three or four hundred men were marshalled, or rather scattered in a picturesque fashion hither and thither. A few well-mounted ones, dressed as lancers, in uniforms which were anything but uniform, flourished back and forth over the greensward to the great peril of spectators, they and their horses equally wild, disorderly, spirited and undisciplined. ”

“ But he was not banished, nor his pen and pencil confiscated, nor yet did his influence stop at this point in the long journey from Glengarry to Windsor. And why should such a pen be confiscated? While the Family Compact were expelling Mackenzie, imprisoning Collins, and hunting to death any poor stray printer who dared put his want of admiration of them in type, no less great a person than their King was feign to be out of his wits because he was not only libelled but had no redress. ”