A disaster that gifted an Empire
175 years ago, a mob of men and boys tackled Family Compact and lost
You just know a fight ends badly when one of the participants, in this case my great-great-great-great uncle, later recounts the preparations as follows:
“Mike and I then lived at the mill back of Lansing, up Yonge Street. We would take our muskets and join the other Reformers who were drilled by an old soldier who worked, I think, in Mackenzie’s printing office. We drilled at Uncle Jake Fischer’s Farm in Vaughan. Mackenzie used to ride from the city (with his brace of pocket pistols under his belt) to watch the old soldier put the farmers through their facings.”
This is Thomas Shepard (sometimes Sheppard, as in the avenue, Victorian spelling being notoriously inconsistent) and he’s recalling the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, the Mackenzie in question being that troubled and contradictory firebrand William Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto’s first mayor.
But if Shepard had a musket, many others drilled with walking sticks, umbrellas, even carving knives attached to wooden poles. The whole scene, in the words of one observer, was not so much a display of military determination as “three or four hundred men and boys marshalled or rather scattered in picturesque fashion hither and thither.”
The shorthand caricature of their failed rebellion, played out 175 years ago this week, is that it pitted rebels against tories, farmers versus the Family Com- pact, democrats against autocrats. The revolt was a disaster, yet it helped pave the way for so-called responsible government, Upper Canada’s great constitutional gift to the British Empire.
There is just one problem with this neat narrative: Only the final bit is really true. Responsible government — the principle that a government’s executive branch is responsible to a legislative assembly and removable if it falls from favour — does owe its roots to the early 19th-century politics of Upper Canada.
But the rest is far more complicated than the caricature suggests.
The likes of Mackenzie might rail against the Family Compact, but what that term originally described — a tightknit group of people, related by marriage, who held the most important government jobs — was already weakening in the 1830s.
By the end of that decade, most of the senior positions in government, education and the courts were held not by the family members of United Empire Loyalists, but by more recent British and Irish immigrants.
“The real basis of the compact was wealth, education and social standing,” historian Aileen Dunham notes in Political Unrest in Upper Canada, 1815-1836.
As the colony grew, so did the number of public officials, but by then what really connected those in positions of power was not so much intermarriage as grave suspicions about the republicans to the south. Almost by definition, they were tory in outlook, so the term “Family Compact” by then “stood for a tendency of society rather than for a definite organization,” writes Dunham.
But the province’s elite wasn’t alone in fearing anything that smacked of mob rule, American-style, since that view was shared by great swathes of the population.
They had no desire to break the British connection, which was problematic for aradical like Mackenzie, especially as he grew increasingly pro-American. The people might want democratic reform, but they didn’t want to be Americans.
“Republicanism and democracy were at cross purposes in Upper Canada.”
AILEEN DUNHAM
HISTORIAN
“Republicanism and democracy were at cross purposes in Upper Canada,” writes Dunham. “A desire for democratic institutions led the public to support the reformers; fear of republicanism led the people to neglect them.”
Little wonder that control of Upper Canada’s House of Assembly kept alternating violently between conservatives and reformers in the decades leading up to the rebellion.
Some reformers were undoubtedly republican, but their backgrounds reveal just how widespread the desire for democratic reform had become. The most radical House of Assembly ever elected, in 1828, was made up of people born in Canada (13), England (7), Scotland (6), Ireland (4), and other British colonies (3), as well as the United States (15).
AS IT HAPPENS, those same complexities seem to have coalesced in the figure of Thomas Shepard’s father, Joseph, my great-great-great-great grandfather.
Born in 1767 in New Hampshire, he seems to have decamped for Quebec’s eastern townships with the rest of his immediate family after the American Revolution, and spent part of the 1780s as a fur trader.
By 1793, he was moving from the Loyalist heartland on the Bay of Quinte to York, now Toronto, before starting to amass land around today’s Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave.
He fought in the War of 1812 as a member of the York militia, first at Queenston Heights and later at the Battle of York, in which he was severely wounded.
Over time, Joseph Shepard became increasingly wealthy, with sawmills and gristmills on the Don River. As a devout Anglican who’d donated the land for St. John’s church in York Mills, he scarcely seems like a radical from central casting.
But he had a keen sense of justice, and had fought Maj.-Gen. Isaac Brock’s plan to suspend habeas corpus during the war. He was also part of the so-called “Central Committee of the Inhabitants of Upper Canada,” formed in 1826 to fight moves that, at one point, could have stripped anyone who’d come to the province after 1783 of their rights as British subjects to own land and run for public office.
It was a complex legal issue, occasioned by the election of a former U.S. politician and convicted embezzler to the Upper Canada assembly, but it first brought Shepard into contact with Mackenzie.
Like many of those wanting democratic reform, however, Shepard was leery of Mackenzie’s fanaticism, even as he nominated Mackenzie in successive elections to the assembly. It was as if, despite their reservations about the man, the reform-minded recognized the utility of Mackenzie’s oratorical skills, his ability to galvanize a crowd.
When Shepard died in1836 after a long illness, Mackenzie penned a front-page obituary in The Constitution newspaper, calling him “The Father of Reform in Upper Canada,” with views identical to Mackenzie’s.
It’s unclear how much Mackenzie, for obvious political reasons, was making Shepard out to be more radical than his record might suggest. But two of Shepard’s sons, Thomas and Michael, were soon enough enlisting in the demagogue’s ragtag army.
AS REBELLIONS GO, it was in truth an almost laughable affair. On Dec. 5, about 800 rebels set out from around what is now Eglinton Ave. for the long march down Yonge St., aiming to take control of the city. At first blush, the moment seemed ripe, since all the British army regulars had been sent to Lower Canada (Quebec) to deal with the rebellion that first broke out there in October.
But there was such bickering within the rebel leadership that the rank-andfile were “uncertain of their leaders and of themselves,” and guided only by their “stubborn intent” to go into battle and be “numbered among those who were not merely for themselves but for righteousness,” in the words of historian William Kilbourn.
As they approached the city near present-day Maple Leaf Gardens, about two dozen militiamen arrayed behind a split-rail fence opened fire on them. The front row of rebels, having fired their muskets, hit the ground to let those behind take their shots.
But in the misty, December twilight, the others instead presumed the front row to have been shot dead, prompting a running retreat back up Yonge St.
Two days later, the remaining rebels were easily routed at Montgomery’s tavern by a force of more than 1,000 government loyalists, and Mackenzie made his escape to the United States.
The other leading rebels were soon rounded up, a couple of them hanged for treason. Many of the rest, including Thomas and Michael Shepard, were kept in jail until June 1838, when they were marched in chains to the Yonge St. wharf.
“The mothers and wives of the rebels crowded around to see the last of us as they thought,” Thomas recalled. “I tell you it was a hard parting with the old folks, who stood there on the wharf looking after the steamer until we were out of sight.” THEY WERE HEADED to Fort Henry to await the ships that would take them to a penal colony in Australia.
But it never happened. The Shepard brothers and13 others managed to loosen some of the masonry in the wall of their cell and tunnel to the outside, making their escape into a raging thunderstorm.
The Shepards eventually borrowed boats to take them across the St. Lawrence River to safety in the United States. But they weren’t happy about staying there, and soon petitioned the government for the right to return to Upper Canada, with the signed support of 17 prominent citizens, among them five justices of the peace and the brewer, Joseph Bloor.
The province’s Legislative Council agreed in early 1839, noting how their pleas for pardon had come “at the recommendation of so many respectable Loyalists.”
Another irony came later that year with the publication of Lord Durham’s “Report of the Affairs of British North America,” commissioned in the wake of the Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada.
One of its chief recommendations, responsible government, had first been fully articulated more than a decade earlier by a prominent reformer, Dr. William Warren Baldwin.
And it would be his more famous politician son, Robert, who would help make it a Canadian reality in the 1840s.