Rise, Canadians!

‘Rise, Canadians!’

By

Margaret Bellasis

Contents

PRELUDE

I. Muddy York

II. The People’s Tribune

III. The Tried Reformer

IV. Pikes and Rifles

V. The Changed Date : Events of Sunday and Monday

VI. Murder, Murder, Murder …

VII. The Flag of Truce : Events of Tuesday

VIII. The Battle of Gallows Hill: Events of Wednes-day and Thursday

IX. The Hunted Men

X. Liberty and Navy Island

XI. Work for the Hangman

XII. Monkey War

XIII. The Lord High Seditioner

XIV. Victory to the Vanquished

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This true story has been told very much in the form of a novel, in order to make it clearer and more entertaining: but no detail of any consequence has been invented, nor any utterance, whether written or spoken.

M. B.

Prelude

Three men rode to Gallows Hill over the snow, and under a sky heavy with purple cloud, greatly darker than the pure bright earth. It was very silent weather; the riders also were silent; the hoofs of their horses made a soft uninterrupted tune.

There had been noise enough last night, there was noise enough now, in the little city a mile or two behind. The College bell had started ringing the alarm about midnight, stammering, catching its breath, hysterical with terror: and all the people had heard its tinny jangling, and woken up in their feather beds or started from their firesides: and then there were lights in every house, hurried messengers pounding upon doors, saddling of horses, forming of companies, giving out of arms: while the bell hammered into them that it was true, true, it had come, come: there were armed men marching on the city, men with rifles and pikes.

Toward the rifles and pikes rode these three men: one slightly in advance, bearing across his saddle something that looked, against the snow, like a dirty grey cloth wrapped about a staff: it was a white flag, a Flag of Truce.

They who had despatched this flag believed themselves to have good cause for fear. They were almost utterly defenceless. In anticipation, they saw rapine and massacre, their houses burnt, their goods despoiled, their allegiance subverted. Panic coloured their view of the persons assembled at Gallows Hill—rough, ignorant, desperate: with a fiery-tongued little rag of a red-haired leader, who was come much too close to the line dividing rash impulse from naked craziness, and who had suffered great outrage and wrong from the rulers of the place that now lay at his mercy.

The two emissaries who rode side by side did not choose to converse. Such words as they had exchanged had been formally courteous. They were now silently busied each with his thoughts.

Robert Baldwin had always a subdued and pondering face, the lids half dropped above quiet eyes, the mouth set to perseverance and control. He was of those who never spoke-without considering; and if he said nothing brilliant, he said much that was wise. Although not many years past thirty, he was of sedentary habit, with a body already thickened into stoutness. He sat in his saddle without much natural skill, uncomfortably jolting, his broad shoulders stooped and his chin in his neckcloth, pale, appearing to brood unhappily.

If he thought of himself, he must think of honour and the world’s good word: of a record that was stainless in a community where every man was more or less splashed with political mud: of constant conscientious work: of prosperity: but also of a grave. It was more than a year since that grave had been filled in; but to general observation, he had not yet got back some part of himself, as though some moiety of his heart and soul had been buried with the woman he loved. The years of wedlock must seem so short, after all, and she so young to die. Such is the pain that haunts strong human love, as sure as death is real; and such the pain that haunts strong love of country, of liberty, of justice, as sure as destroying greed is real, falsehood, violence and dishonour, each breeding their like. A man must go in grief and fear for his country and his ideals, who sees them stand in peril....

Dr. John Rolph—doctor of medicine, but acute, accomplished lawyer also—smiled a little as he rode: it was a habit that he had. But a smile upon those full clean-cut lips of his gave no particular indication of what was going on behind the big bland countenance. One could look in those handsome blue eyes, listen to that clear, metallic, entirely self-possessed voice, and be no nearer to forming conclusions. A shortish burly figure, well used to horseback, he rode on, between the distracted city and the armed men who threatened it: and there were few in either direction who could have said with absolute certainty to which camp John Rolph belonged, or how much he was committed to it.

There is the scene, snowy and desolate enough, trimmed with shaggy dark trees, and rough zigzag or snake fences of split logs: there are the little figures bobbing across it, as though in obedience to stage-directions. They believe themselves to be playing out a drama, if not a tragedy. An uncomprehending observer would think that they played a farce. For here is a small undeveloped and undeveloping colony, a slight encroachment upon the margin of a vast cold wilderness: an uncomfortable little byway and backwater. It takes weeks and months to carry the news of this community to an uncaring outer world—particularly in winter, when the waterways are frozen, and it is thought impossible to venture the spidery little paddle-steamers upon the great lakes. When this winter’s news reaches the seat of government, some four thousand miles away, it is not going to create any overpowering excitement. Armed rebellion in the Canadas? Indeed! And what matters? … It will be no vast surprise to those whose business it is to deal with those boring and far-away abstractions, the Colonies: the Canadas, both Upper and Lower, have been making a discontented nuisance of themselves for years. It seems they consider themselves ripe, not merely for Representative Government, which they have, but for some form of Responsible Government: and how that could possibly be contrived without total separation from the Mother Country, nobody can tell: and nobody, except the Canadians, very much cares.

Of what use are colonies, in any case?—particularly the Canadas, quelques arpents de neige, as King Louis said when he shrugged away Quebec. They are nothing but a nuisance and a burden, say the philosophers Bentham and Mill. They are merely accessories to our aristocratic government, says the rising politician Richard Cobden—ranging them rather sweepingly with the army, navy, established Church, and corn laws, as impurities of which John Bull must purge his house. The Tories also, though with a tinge of gentle regret, fear that it can be no long time before the Fourteenth Colony, so desperately loyal when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, fifty years back, will also be lost to the Crown. In the summer preceding that winter, they have hailed the accession of a young Queen of England … It does not look as though she would long be Queen of Canada.

But there are a few persons who happen to have noticed that England, having inadvertently lost one Empire, has in the intervening half-century inadvertently acquired another and a very much larger one: and they do not think this any matter for mourning. For the most part they are young men, and they have startling new ideas about colonization, emigration, the discovery and exploitation of immense unknown riches in the undeveloped waste places, the setting up of English civilization in howling wildernesses. They see enough to dazzle them: but they do not see, as yet, any definite bedrock principles of colonial policy. It is the man to whom they look as their leader who will be presently required to find these: the man to whom the Prime Minister will turn when he gets the news from Canada.

He has, indeed, already appealed to that brilliant mind: pointing out that the secession of British North America might possibly not be of material detriment to the interests of the Mother Country, but that it would look bad, and would certainly be fatal to his own government, daily growing unsteadier.

Two personalities less alike could hardly be found under one party-label than those of William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, at that time Prime Minister of England, and John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham: the urbane, trifling old eighteenth-century Whig, and the impatient, blazingly-sincere and still-young Radical. It was no wonder that the old man did not love the young one, who would, men said, be the next leader of the party, the coming man for the coming reign. The motto of the Lambtons, an ancient family, was much quoted: Le jour viendra. The Earl’s swarthy but extremely handsome face, and startling personality, were impressing the public imagination. His enemies had, however, one consolation: Durham suffered from very bad health, all the worse for his having been sent on a two-years’ mission to Russia. It was his reason for declining to investigate the state of the Canadas at the time of the Queen’s accession.

… But when it comes to the pinch, he will not refuse again, though knowing well enough that this heavy task must be his last, and in effect a death-sentence. … At one end of the cord which is to pull him across the Atlantic, with incalculable consequences, sits this agitated little settlement by the lake, this dull wintry landscape, with the little figures crossing it, bearing their white flag.

The meditations of those riders probably strayed little toward any remote future outcome; the outcome of the next few hours, the urgent and immediate present, must have possession of their minds: with a background of one other overmastering theme, the past. Each man as he followed the rough way, Baldwin looking straight between his horse’s ears, Rolph’s glance ranging, cool and active, must have been pursuing out the questions: How came they riding out from Toronto to treat with a rebel leader? What road had ended in this road to Gallows Hill?

I

Muddy York

1

On the shore of Lake Ontario, in the year 1790, General Simcoe, of the loyal American regiment, the Queen’s Rangers, and first Lieutenant-Governor of the new Province of Upper Canada, founded the city which became the provincial capital.

His reasons for choosing that particular site were no doubt excellent; but it had the disadvantage of being a swamp. When the trees were chopped down, there was a very flat view of mud and stumps, and everyone had ague.

However, Governor Simcoe, a brisk and active man, set his soldiers, in their dark-green uniform, busily to work; and ranging the adjacent forest, would indicate with his extended sword where he desired a highroad to be made. So they laid out Dundas Street and Yonge Street, named after pillars of Mr. Pitt’s government; the one road running east and west, the other straight north from Lake Ontario full fifty miles through the bush to Lake Simcoe.

In the muddy little clearing about the root of this great road, many houses, mostly of wood, arose among the stumps. They included a building to contain the Parliament of Upper Canada, which consisted of an elective popular Assembly, and of a Legislative Council appointed for life: the Lieutenant-Governor being advised by an Executive Council drawn from both Houses: the very image and transcript of the British Constitution, as Simcoe happily proclaimed. This, however, was not exactly the case, as the Governor was not constitutionally bound to take any of the advice tendered, and must indeed receive his orders from Downing Street.

But the colonists were a great deal too busy and too loyal to trouble about such details as yet. They arranged their affairs in their minikin parliament, sedulously after the British pattern; and relieved the monotony of the fight with the wilderness by occasional fighting among themselves, quarrels which arose in the course of debate being genteelly adjusted with sword or pistol.

The name of the town was changed from the sonorous Indian Toronto to the loyal York, after H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief: to be changed back again in the fullness of time. The population rapidly increased, until in ten years’ time there were as many as five hundred inhabitants. In a further ten years, all the stumps had been cleared from the principal parts of the city, although not until 1820 were hogs officially forbidden to wallow in the main thoroughfares. The wolf and the bear lurked upon the outskirts; and Indians, ceremoniously painted for city-visiting, came paddling to the canoe-landing.

Here was Little York—as it was commonly called, much though it disliked the diminutive—set between the lake and the pine-forest: in summer many inches deep in dust: in winter many feet deep in snow: in the between seasons a byword for its mud, so that it was quite as commonly called Muddy York. Though neither beautiful nor dignified, it had its moments during the turning year: as when the lake was a blue mirror for the whiteoaks and maples, thick with green, and big and little frogs sang in the swamps like a strange orchestra of pipes, guitars, and drums, and cicadas rustled through the heat of high summer: and when the glory of the fall set the trees blazing gold and pink and scarlet against a turquoise sky: and when the same deep and huge Canadian sky was hyacinth-colour fringed with jade and crowded with big white stars, while all below the smooth brightness of the snow loaded each stump with purity, and cancelled the meanness of the little wooden houses that huddled together among the silent shining.

The settlers of York mostly carried the proud letters U.E.L. after their names, standing for United Empire Loyalist. It signified that these families had left the thirteen American colonies at the time of the Revolution, in common with very many thousand others. Whether it was indeed a majority that had made the Revolution and called in French aid, or whether the scales had been more equally balanced, or whether it was a vigorous minority that had wrenched the Colonies away from the Crown, it was certainly the fact that an immense section of the population, including many of the highest standing, uprooted themselves in order to remain beneath the British flag, in whatever wilderness. Some forty thousand flowed into Nova Scotia and the Islands alone; some twenty thousand into Quebec. But the laws and the language in Quebec were French, and the religion Popish; many settlers were glad to push further into the unsettled woods to the westward. Government gave to each loyalist a free grant of unsettled land, and set up the western wilderness as the separate Province of Upper Canada.

The loss and suffering of many of the loyalist families had been great: some directly inflicted by their republican neighbours, and some the consequence of exchanging a civilized home in a land settled these many generations, for the hardships of the yet-barren forest. It was hardly wonderful that their loyalty should be admixed with an equal amount of bitterness against the late colonies now scrambling themselves into nationhood, and with a profound distaste for the doctine of Democracy as there preached. In this they did not differ much from many of the Founding Fathers; Alexander Hamilton, at Washington’s right hand, believed that power should not be given to the common people, uneducated and unstable: Your People, sir, is a great beast … and a very bloodthirsty beast, to judge by the appalling news from France. But it was the pro-French and anti-British Jefferson whose policy was to prevail in the new Republic; and the Upper Canadian settlers were proud to mark their opposition to it by every means in their power.

The humbler sort of loyalists had scant time for politics, isolated in their little clearings among the endless woods, painfully striving with axe and fire to clear and sow, and win a living, and build up once more some semblance of the thriving farms and villages which they had left. The task of also re-creating something like civilized society, learning and gentility, the formal manners of the age, was undertaken by such centres as Kingston and Niagara: most of all, by the new capital, Little York.

In a way, it was a gallant and pitiful spectacle, that of the settlers determined to be genteel among the stumps and swamps and overriding necessities of their situation. The usages of the larger world were laboriously copied; they stood upon precedence and punctilio; it was not admitted that gentlemen and ladies had sometimes to soil their hands with physical toil. Some had brought slaves with them from their old homes—Governor Russell advertised in the local paper one year: To be sold: a Black Woman named Peggy, aged forty years, and a Black Boy, her son named Jupiter, aged about fifteen years, both of them the property of the subscriber. Other help was in short supply, and must be scandalously overpaid; but the Upper Canadian gentlefolk declined to lower their standards. They kept their carriages, or rough apologies for them; they built pretentious houses; and it was understood that their toilsomely-cleared lands were to be hereditary estates. There was even a provision in the Constitution for Members of the Upper House to take hereditary titles: but this was a detail so remarkably remote from the realities of the scene that it became a dead letter.

The whole situation was remote enough from reality, and grew more so. A social attitude which had been calculated and significant, a brave gesture, must lose its significance as the years passed, and appear both false and mean: so that visitors from the outer world marvelled at the contrast between the largeness of the land and the smallness of the minds of its leading inhabitants: at such an embalming of extinct fashions and ancient formalities. From the first, as might have been expected, there was a deal too much jobbery and intrigue centring about the seat of government: and a cloud of gossip, bred from the inevitable boredom of a remote settlement, hung always buzzing in the air, like the summer swarms of mosquitoes.

The social season was in winter, commencing with the first of sleighing: the first day when the snow would bear a sleigh. The more old-fashioned spoke of carioling, a word that held some echo of the little silver bells strung thick upon the harness. Over the newly-smooth roads they would drive about, dressed in their best finery, to parties and balls; gathering to talk crops, clearing, lumber, deer-shooting, land-speculation, politics, and the last scandal—especially anything that industry could discover, or rumour could invent about the reigning Governor.

The military Simcoe, a loyalist of the best type, had been followed by Peter Russell, grave, portly and powdered: who made large grants of the best land in the Province to Peter Russell. His disapproving successor, Governor Hunter, considered him Helluo Agrorum, a glutton, a gobbler of land, but did fairly well out of his own term of office. Then there was Governor Gore, from Bermuda, a jolly three-bottle gentleman, who passed a bill through Parliament voting himself a service of plate; and then again a soldier, when the colony was in sore straits during the bitter little war of 1812. The brave General Isaac Brock—who did not live to hear that he had been knighted—got no gold out of his Acting-Lieutenant-Governorship of the Upper Province but was paid in lead: an American bullet in the breast, while leading the storming of Queenston Heights. With his pitifully few men, and rallying the Indians behind his magnetic leadership—he was said to have the Nelson touch—he had not only held off the whole might of the attacking Republic, but had bluffed the Americans into retreat and the surrender of Detroit. He had beaten them off again when they attacked across the Niagara, and fallen, like his great prototype, in the hour of victory.

Had he lived, it was generally thought that the Yankees could never have taken York, as they later did. As it was defenceless, and had surrendered, it was felt to be improper that the American commander, Dearborn, should have sacked it, and moreover burnt the Parliament House. This was the reason—since largely forgotten—why a British raiding-party was subsequently sent to Washington to burn the White House.

The Canadian name for that last scuffle between the neighbours was the War of Defence; and the loyalists, particularly the York Volunteers, could be rightly proud of the manner in which they acquitted themselves, fantastically outnumbered as they were. Whatever else the invaders had burnt, they had burnt their fingers; yet who could tell when they might make another attempt? … Apprehension and bitter memories smouldered long; and over the Canadian Nectar, the crude local whisky, the ex-militiamen would be apt to strike up the wartime songs …

Our sires took the country when Wolfe did command: Though Brock you have murder’d, we will keep all our land! We will make you repent of so heinous a deed: The Royal Canadians will make your hearts bleed! We will cook in molasses your punkin and pork, For the booty of Dearborn, and the plunder of York! We will conquer our foes and tread on their toes, With God Save the King, and bad luck to his foes!

2

Peace: and the Province settled down under another military Governor, that handsome cavalry officer, Sir Peregrine Maitland: a romantic figure, for he had made a runaway match, after Waterloo, with the Duke of Richmond’s daughter. The Duke being then made Governor-General of the Cañadas, Sir Peregrine had been given the Lieutenant-Governorship; and with his lovely Lady Sarah passed his time between the new-built Government House at York and an elegant country villa near Niagara, their progress by lake from the one seat to the other being formally greeted with salute of cannon.

Sir Peregrine’s power was practically despotic, but he was not called upon to do much actual governing: there were certain provincial gentlemen who saw to all that. Powell, Robinson, Boulton, Sherwood, Jarvis, Jones: the names all stood for families holding land, office, and sway. There were not many of them, even considering the small-ness of the colony as a whole.

There were even fewer persons who made any open objections to this small group doing exactly as it chose: but one of them was Dr. William Warren Baldwin. Although his opposition politics excluded him from the highest circles—opposition had for so long, in the peculiar circumstances of the colony, been almost tantamount to treason, that it still seemed far from respectable—Dr. Baldwin was a worthy, clever, and very busy gentleman, coming of a good Irish family. As was not uncommon in the settlement, he practised law and physic side by side: being frequently called out of court to assist at some lady’s confinement, or hurried from the side of a sickbed to conduct one of those endless cases about land, not uncomplicated by jobbing and perjury, which formed a main amusement of the colonists. Also he found time to keep a Classical School, limited to twelve boys: the terms being eight guineas per annum, with one guinea entrance-fee, plus a cord of wood to help feed the hungry stove when the white glare of snow looked in at the schoolroom window.

One day in May of 1804 the scholars were called from their Caesar or Horace to view a new addition to their master’s family. They must have stood around awkwardly enough, while the baby, in its smiling nurse’s arms, uttered the short breathless wails of the newly-born. But there was nothing awkward about the head-boy, John Beverley Robinson, a handsome promising lad of thirteen: he stepped forward and pronounced a graceful felicitation in Latin, a welcome to young Robert Baldwin. Thus there met for the first time two persons who as grown men were to stand for opposite principles, were to fight each other unceasingly over a series of years, and were each cast for a part in the bloody little drama in which those years culminated.

There was soon no occasion for Dr. Baldwin’s services as a classical tutor. A young Scotsman, the Reverend John Strachan, had started a school in the township of Cornwall to which all persons of consequence were sending their sons. We have three or four new scholars. All of them are bigger than Mr. Strachan, a youngster wrote home to York; but before the little square strong figure of this dominie, with the Aberdeen rasp to his voice, and face of Aberdeen granite, the gawkiest lad stood sweating and stammering or took a flogging meekly. He was a driver, and could keep them at their books till midnight was overpast; he could be merry, with a hearty roar of laughter; but no tumbling granite block could be more impetuous than his anger.

Out of a granite quarry he had come; his humble parents, in the manner of their nation, having spared and stinted that the lad might have learning enough to be a minister. No farther toward this than dominie of a village in Fifeshire, young Strachan had taken a chance and emigrated: had found Dissent unpopular in Upper Canada; had become an Episcopalian parson: and thenceforth had proceeded without pause or let on a highly successful career. Strong force of character in a small community, cast on the dominant side, made his fortune. He married well, a prosperous widow who presently brought him eight or ten children. There was, however, something other than money to be desired and obtained in Upper Canada: and that was power, which was as needful as bread or breath to John Strachan.

During the wartime he had removed to York, being offered the