The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion; largely derived from original sources and documents

Front matter

THE STORY OF THE Upper Canadian Rebellion. TORONTO PUBLISHED BY C.BLACKETT ROBINSON. 1885 THE STORY OF THE JOHN CHARLES DENT AUTHOR OF"THE LA5T FOBTV YEARs"eSC. You. THE STORY OF THE UPPER CANADIAN REBELLION; LARGELY DERIVED FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES AND DOCUMENTS. By JOHN CHARLES DENT, Author of "The Last Forty Years" etc. 4 Well, God be thanked for these rebels." — i Henry IV., Act iii. sc. 3. ' Truth is not always to be withheld because its expression may wound the feelings of public men, whose official acts have subjected them to public censure. If it were, history and biography would cease to be guiding stars, and, above all, would offer no wholesome restraint to the cruel, or corrupt, or incompetent exercise of authority." — Tapper's Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock.

"We rebelled neither against Her Majesty's person nor her Government, but against Colonial mis government. . • . We remonstrated ; we were derided. . . . We were goaded on to madness, and were compelled to show that we had the spirit of resistance to repel injuries, or to be deemed a captive, degraded and recreant people. We took up arms, not to attack others, but to defend ourselves." — Letter to Lord Durham from Dr. Wolfred Nelson and others, confined at Montreal, June ifith, 1838. Toronto: C. BLACKETT ROBINSON, 5 JORDAN STREET. 1885. Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada in the year 1885, by C. Blacjsett Robinson, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture. I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY ESTEEMED FRIEND, GEORGE STEWART, JUN'R, OF QUEBEC: WHOSE RESEARCHES IN A KINDRED DIRECTION WILL ENABLE HIM TO DO FULL JUSTICE TO WHATEVER IS MERITORIOUS IN IT ; WHILE HIS GENEROUS APPRECIATION OF THE EFFORTS OF HIS LITERARY BRETHREN WILL RENDER HIM INDULGENT TO ITS DEFECTS. JOHN CHARLES DENT. Toronto, 1885. CONTENTS. Page.

The Forging of the Pikes THE STORY OF THE UPPER CANADIAN REBELLION.

Chapter I. The Banished Briton

KvlTfr^ the afternoon of a warm and sultry day, towards the close i$Ml Wffil °f one °f the warmest and most sultry summers which Upper fjpjJLsSJy Canada has ever known, an extraordinary trial took place at €IM1i|l® the court-house in the old town of Niagara. The time was more than threescore years ago, when York was a place of insignificant proportions ; when Hamilton could barely be said to have an existence ; and when the sites of most of the other towns of the Province whose names are now familiar to us still formed part of the hunting-grounds of the native Indian. The little town on the frontier was relatively a place of much greater importance than it is at present; though its fortunes, even at that early period, were decidedly on the wane, and such glory as it could ever boast of possessing, as the Provincial capital, had departed from it long before.

To speak with absolute precision, the date was Friday, the 20th of August, 1819: so long ago that, as far as I have been able to learn, there are only two persons now living who were present on the occasion. The court-room, which was the largest in the Province, was packed to the doors, and though every window was thrown open for purposes of ventilation, the atmosphere was almost stifling. Even a stranger, had any such been present, could not have failed to perceive that the trial was one in which a keen interest was felt by the spectators, many of whom were restless and irritable, insomuch that they found it impossible to keep perfectly still, and from time to time shifted uneasily in their places. Whispers, "not loud, but deep," occasionally reverberated from the back benches to the quadrangular space in front assigned to gentlemen of the long robe, and ascended thence to the august presence upon the judgment seat.

Ever and anon the stentorian voice of the crier proclaimed silence, in a tone which plainly signified that endurance had well-nigh reached its limits, and that he would really be compelled to proceed to extremities if his mandate were any longer disobeyed. The court-room was of the old conventional pattern. At the upper end was the large elevated desk, or throne, extending nearly half way across the chamber, with spacious cushioned chairs, and other suitable accommodation for the presiding judge and his associates. To right and left were the enclosed jury boxes, with seats raised consid erably above the level of the floor, but not so high as those provided for the justices. Directly opposite the throne of justice, and about six yards distant therefrom, was the prisoners' dock, into which five or six persons might have been thrust, at a pinch.

The intervening space enclosed by this quadrangle — throne, prisoners' dock, and jury boxes — was mainly appropriated to the use of barristers and attorneys, and their clients. A large portion of the space so appropriated was occupied by a table, around which were distributed a few chairs, every one of which was occupied ; and at the end directly below the judicial throne was a small enclosure provided for the clerk of the court, set apart by a low railing, and containing a desk of diminutive size. Between the clerk's desk and the left-hand jury box was the witness stall, raised to a level with the highest seats provided for the jurors. A seat for the sheriff was placed a short distance to the right of the throne of justice, and on a slightly lower level. All these arrangements occupied perhaps one-third of the entire court room.

The rest of the space, extending from the rear of the prisoners' dock to the lower end of the chamber, was occupied by seats rising tier behind tier, with a passage down the middle. Between each of the ends of these seats and the walls of the chamber were passages of about three feet in width, leading to the doors, for purposes of "ingress, egress and regress." Such was the plan of the conventional Upper Canadian court room in the olden time ; and such, with a few inconsiderable modifica tions, many of them remain down to the present day. The sole occupant of the judgment seat, on this sultry afternoon, was a gentleman of somewhat diminutive size, but withal of handsome and imposing appearance. Though he had reached advanced middle life, he presented none of the signs of age, and evidently retained all his vigour unimpaired.

His eyes were bright and keen, and his small but firm and clearly cut features were lighted up with the consciousness of mental power. No one, looking upon that countenance, could doubt that its owner had all his faculties under strict and thorough control, or that his faculties were considerably above those of average humanity. The face was not one for a child to fall in love with, for it was a perfect index to the character, and was firm and strong rather than amiable or kind. Evidently a man who, should the occasion for doing so arise, would deal out the utmost rigour of the law, if not with indifference, at least without a qualm. He was the Honourable William Dummer Powell, and he occupied the high office of Chief Justice of the Province. In conjunction with the Reverend Doctor Strachan, Rector of York, he had for several years practically directed the administration of affairs in Upper Canada.

Francis Gore and Sir Peregrine Maitland might successively posture as figure-heads under the title of Lieutenant-Governors, but the real deposi taries of power were the Rector and the Chief Justice. Ominous combination ! which falsified the aphorism of a great writer — now, unhappily, lost to us — about the inevitable incompatibility of law and gospel. Both of them had seats in the Executive Council, and, under the then-existing state of things, were official but irresponsible advisers of the Crown's representative. More than one would-be innovator of those days had been made to feel the weight of their hands, without in the least knowing, or even suspecting, whence the blow proceeded. They were the head and front of the junto of oligarchs who formed the Vehmgericht known as the Family Compact, and for all practical purposes their judgment in matters relating to the dispensing of patronage and the disposal of Crown property was final and conclusive.

The counsel for the prosecution was a handsome young man of twenty-eight, who for some years past had been steadily fitting himself for the important part he was destined to play — that of Mr. Powell's judicial* and political successor in the colony. The time was only ten years distant when he, in his turn, was to become Chief Justice of Upper Canada. The time was still less remote when he was to succeed Chief Justice Powell as Dr. Strachan' s most active colleague — as the chief lay spokesman of his party, and the chief lay adviser of successive Lieutenant-Governors. His name was John Beverley Robinson, and his destiny was doubtless sufficiently clear before him on this 20th of August, 1819. He had strong claims upon his party, for he was the son of a United Empire Loyalist, and during the late war with the United States had proved that he was no degenerate scion of the stock whence he had sprung.

He had been present at the surrender of Detroit, and had borne himself gallantly at the battle of Queenston Heights. Nor had his party shown any disposition to ignore his claims. On the contrary, they had pushed him forward with a rapidity which would have turned any head with a natural tendency to giddiness. He had been appointed Attorney-General of the Province before he had been called to the bar, and when he was only twenty-one years of age — a special Act of Parliament being subsequently passed to confirm the proceeding. In 1815 he had been appointed Solicitor-General, chiefly in order that he might draw the salary incidental to that office during a two years' visit to England. Soon after his return he had again been appointed Attorney-General, and had early signalized his re-accession to office by his manner of prosecuting certain criminals from the Red River country, who had been placed on trial at York.

Those proceedings do not fall within the purview of this work, but it may be said with reference to the young Attorney- General's connection with them that he had proved himself an exceedingly narrow partisan and a docile pupil of Dr. Strachan. He now presented *Not, however, hia immediate judicial successor. Mr.— afterwards Sir William— Campbell became Chief Justice in 1825, and Mr. Robinson's succession did not take place until four years later. himself to take a leading part in one of the most shameless and iniquitous prosecutions that ever disgraced a court of justice. His personal appear ance was decidedly prepossessing. His figure, clad in well-fitting garments of the fashionable cut of the period, was light, agile and compact, and his face, rather inclining to narrowness, was surmounted by a high and smoothly-finished brow, beneath which looked out a pair of steel-grey eyes, the usual expression of which was eager and firm, but on the whole not unkindly.

His mouth was finely formed, and when he was in a pleasant humour — as indeed he not unfrequently was — his smile was sweet and ingratiating. In intellectual capacity he waB considerably in advance of most of his professional brethren of that day, and he had cultivated his natural abilities by constant watchfulness and study. His features, one and all, were well and sharply defined, and he was probably the handsomest man at the Provincial bar. Several other members of the legal profession, all of them more or less widely known in the forensic, judicial or political annals of the Province, were present. Conspicuous among them was the brilliant but unscrupulous Christoper Alexander Hagerman, who had already taken high rank at the bar, and was destined to be one of the most active and intolerant directors of the oligarchical policy.

Archibald McLean, tall and lithe of limb, had then been more than four years at the bar, and he had already given evidence of the high abilities which were to gain for him an honoured seat upon the judicial bench. He had been retained to defend two prisoners at the Niagara assizes, and his presence in the court-room was due to this fact. Another figure at the barristers' table was Samuel Peters Jarvis, his hands yet red with the blood of young John Ridout, ruthlessly shed by him in a duel two years before, and never to be effaced from the tablets of his memory. There, too, sat Henry John Boulton, a young man of much pretension but mediocre intellect, who had been appointed acting Solicitor-General during the previous year, and who united in his own person all the bigotry and narrow selfishness of the faction to which he belonged.

He, also, had been concerned in the shedding of young Ridout's blood, having acted as second to the surviving principal in that affair. With this exception his past life had been uneventful, but his future was fated to be marked by THE UPPER CANADLAN REBELLION. considerable variety of incident, and by actions which even the moat favourable judgment cannot regard with unmixed complacency. The twelve jurymen sat in their places, in the jury-box to the left of the judge. The witnesses summoned on behalf of the Crown were the Honourable William Dickson and the Honourable William Claus, both of whom were members of the Legislative Council of Upper Canada. The former gentleman was an enterprising Scotchman who had settled in Niagara while it was yet known as Newark, where he had first kept a general store, and afterwards practised law and speculation with great pecuniary success.

Like the Jarvis above mentioned, he was disfigured by a red right hand, having shot his man in a duel fought in the autumn of 1808 behind the United States fort on the oppo site bank of the river. It is fair to Mr. Dickson, however, to say that he was the challenged party, and that the duel was in a measure forced upon him by the barbarous usages of society in those (happily) far-off days. The other witness, Mr. Claus, was at the head of the Indian. department at Niagara, the abuses in the administration whereof were notorious. It was well understood throughout the district that Dickson and Claus between them had contrived to make a tolerably good thing out of the Indians, and that they had been concerned in some decidedly shady transactions. If it be true that Heaven helps those who help themselves, certainly both those gentlemen were entitled to look for divine assistance.

They possessed and exercised a wide influence throughout the settlements in the Niagara peninsula, as well as at the Provincial capital, and were commonly regarded as being on the high road to great wealth. Two years before the date of the trial forming the subject o*f the present chapter, Dickson had purchased the whole of the splendid township of Dumfries, comprising 94,305 acres, at a trifle over a dollar an acre; and he had already begun to realize upon his investment. Claus and he occupied seats at the barristers' table, in close proximity to the Attorney- General. The spectators included pretty nearly every prominent resident of the town of Niagara and its immediate neighbourhood. But the most conspicuous figure in that crowded court-room yet remains to be considered. It has been mentioned that the prisoners' dock was large enough to hold five or six persons.

On this occasion it held but a single, solitary prisoner. A man large and bony, who, when in his ordinary state of health, must have weighed not less than fifteen stone. Just at present he was very far from being in ordinary health, for during the preceding twelvemonth he had undergone sufficient worry and suffering to destroy the life of any man of average vitality. After having successfully defended himself through two criminal trials, he had been cast into prison, where he had languished for more than seven months. During his long confinement he had been subjected to a course of treatment which would have been highly culpable if meted out to a convicted criminal, and which was marked by a malignant cruelty hardly to be comprehended when the nature of the offence charged against him is considered.

His own account of the matter is a plain and simple narration of facts, the truth whereof rests upon the clearest and most indisputable evidence. "After two months' close confinement," he writes, " in one of the cells of the jail, my health had begun to suffer, and, on complaint of this, the liberty of walking through the passages and sitting at the door was granted. This liberty prevented my getting worse the four succeed ing months, although I never enjoyed a day's health, but by the power of medicine. At the end of this period I was again locked up in the cell, cut off from all conversation with my friends, but through a hole in the door, while the jailor or under-sheriff watched what was said, and for some time both my attorney and magistrates of my acquaintance were denied admission to me.

The quarter sessions were held soon after this severe and unconstitutional treatment commenced, and on these occa sions it was the custom and duty of the grand jury to perambulate the jail, and see that all was right with the prisoners. I prepared a memorial for their consideration, but on this occasion was not visited. I com plained to a magistrate through the door, who promised to mention my case to the chairman of the sessions, but the chairman happened to be brother of one of those who had signed my commitment, and the court broke up without my obtaining the smallest relief. Exasperation of mind, now joined to the heat of the weather, which was excessive, rapidly wasted my health and impaired my faculties. I felt my memory sensibly affected, and could not connect my ideas through any length of reasoning, but by writing, which many days I was wholly unfitted for by the violence of continual headache."

There is a pathos about this plain, unvarnished story that appeals to every heart. ' That a man, no matter what his crimes, should have his nervous system thus cruelly undermined ; that his physical and mental faculties should be slowly but surely filched from him in this deliberate fashion, is an idea not to be borne with composure by anyone whose breast is susceptible to human impulses. But Robert Gourlay was no great criminal. He had engaged in no plot to blow up King, Lords and Commons. He had been guilty of no treason or felony. He had threatened no man's life, and taken no man's purse upon the highway. He was by no means the stuff of which great criminals are made. He was not even a vicious or immoral man. He was an affectionate husband, a fond and indulgent father. His story, from beginning to end, even when subjected to the fiercest light that can be thrown upon it, discloses nothing cruel or revengeful, nothing vile or outrageously wicked, nothing grovelling or base, nothing sordid or mean.

On the other hand, it discloses a man of many noble and generous impulses ; a man with a great heart in his bosom which could warmly sympathize with the wrongs of his fellow creatures ; a man in whom was no selfishness or greed ; a man of decided principles and stainless morals ; who was incapable of dishonesty or cruelty; who had a high sense of human responsibility; who feared his God and honoured his King. When we compare his virtuous and hon ourable, albeit turbulent and much misguided life, with that of any one of his immediate persecutors, the contrast is mournfully suggestive of Mr. Lowell's antithesis about " Truth forever on the scaffold ; wrong forever on the throne. To what, then, was his long and bitter persecution to be attributed ? Why had he been deprived of his liberty; thrust into a dark and unwhole some dungeon ; refused the benefit of the Habeas Corpus Act ; denied his enlargement upon bail or mainprize ; branded as a malefactor of the most dangerous kind; badgered and tortured to the ruin of his health and his reason ?

Merely this : he had imbibed, in advance, the spirit of Mr. Arthur Clennam, and had "wanted to know."* He had displayed a persistent determination to let in the light of day upon the iniquities and *"Upon my soul, you mustn't come into the place saying you want to know, you know ! You have no right to come this sort of move ! " — Little Dorrit. rascalities of public officials. He had denounced the system of patronage and favouritism in the disposal of the Crown Lands. He had inveighed against some of the human bloodsuckers of that day, in language which certainly was not gracious or parliamentary, but which as certainly was both forcible and true. He had even ventured to speak in contume lious terms of the reverend Rector of York himself, whom he had stigmatized as " a lying little fool of a renegade Presbyterian."

Nay, he had advised the sending of commissioners to England to entreat Imperial attention to colonial grievances. He had been the one man in Upper Canada possessed of sufficient courage to do and to dare : to lift the thin and flimsy veil which only half concealed the corruption whereby a score of greedy vampires were rapidly enriching themselves at the public cost. He had dared to hold up to general inspection the baneful effects of an irresponsible Executive, and of a dominating clique whose one hope lay in preserving the existing order of things undisturbed. It was for this that the Inquisition had wreaked its vengeance upon him; for this that the vials of Executive wrath had been poured upon his head ; for this that his body had been subjugated and his nerves lacerated by more than seven months' close imprisonment ; for this that he had been " ruined in his fortune and overwhelmed in his mind."

And all these things took place in " this Canada of ours," in the year of grace eighteen hundred and nineteen — barely sixty-six years ago — while the Duke of Richmond was Governor-General, and his hand some scapegrace of a son-in-law nominally administered the government of the Upper Province. With a view to a clearer understanding of the circumstances which led to this most villainous of Canadian State prosecutions, it will be well to glance at some details of the prisoner's past life.* Robert Gourlay was the son of a gentleman of considerable fortune — a retired Writer to the Signet — and was born in the parish of Ceres, Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1778. He received an education suitable to his social position, and while at the University of St. Andrews was the fellow- * For a much more comprehensive account of Mr. Gourlay's life than the one here given, the reader is referred to a sketch by the author of this work in The Canadian Portrait Gallery, Vol. III., pp. 210-256. student and personal friend of young Thomas Chalmers, who after wards became one of the most eloquent pulpit orators of modern times.* Robert was the eldest son of his parents, and, being heir to the paternal estates, he grew up to manhood with the expectation of one day succeed ing to wealth and station in society.

He was put to no profession, and after leaving college, devoted himself to no settled pursuit. He was on visiting terms with the resident gentry of his native shire, and took some interest in local military matters. In 1806 he offered to take charge of an expedition for the invasion of Paris, being probably impelled thereto by the mad attempt of Lord Camelford several years before. He was full of energy and robust health, bountiful and generous to the poor of the parish, a practical philanthropist, possessed of great intelligence and a genuine love for his kind ; but withal somewhat flighty and erratic, of impetuous temper, deficient in tact and discretion, and given to revery and theorizing. He was, in short, a bundle of contradictions, some of his idiosyncrasies being doubtless inherited from his father, who was a generous and high-minded but unpractical man.

The sire would seem to have been conscious of his son's weaknesses. " Robert," he was wont to say, "will hurt himself, but do good to others." The son studied deeply the economical side of the pauper question, and his researches in this direction brought him into intimate relations with that eminent writer Mr. Arthur Young, t at whose suggestion he was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the condition of the poor in England. By virtue of this appointment he travelled, chiefly on foot, through the most important * More than half a century later the venerable Doctor thus wrote to his old school-fellow : " . . I received your interesting letter . . with no slight emotion of kindness and respect, having ever regarded you as one of the ablest of my fellow-students at St. Andrews ; and who, if human life had not been the lottery it is, would have earned by his talents, and merited by his friendly disposition, a place of high and honourable distinction in society." tThe following observations, written concerning Mr. Young by Mr. Gourlay many years afterwards, contain, so far as they go, a singularly accurate portraiture of the Banished Briton himself :— " He was an enthusiast, and of course honest : he was well educated, and a gentleman.

In all his voluminous writing?) a mean sentiment is not to be found. His habit of making free with people's names, and taking liberties with their writings, arose from an uncontrollable ardour in the cause of improvement. . . His inclination to accumulate crude and undigested information, sufficiently evinced in some of his tours, had their full scope : he then lost himself, and bewildered others, in the confusion of detail. I question if he ever had the power of correct abstract reasoning. His imagination was too busy for it : his eye was too ravenous, devouring all within its reach." — General Introduction to Statistical Account of Upper Canada; p. agricultural districts of the island, after which he was pronounced by competent authorities to be the best-informed man in the kingdom respecting the poor of Great Britain.

As I have said elsewhere : " He was consulted by members of Parliament, political economists, parish overseers, and even by members of the Cabinet, as to the best means for reforming the poor laws, and was always ready to spend himself and his substance for the public good."* Having married and settled down on one of his father's estates, he took upon himself various offices of public usefulness and philanthropy. His enterprise and public spirit caused him to be much looked up to by the yeomanry of Fifeshire, and he soon came to be recognized as the special champion of the smaller tenantry at agricultural meetings. At one of these meetings he conceived himself to have been discourteously treated by his neighbour, the Earl of Kellie. The discourtesy does not seem to have been of a serious nature, but Mr. Gourlay became irritated to a degree altogether disproportionate to the offence.

He wrote and published a pamphlet, in which Lord Kellie was handled with much severity. It was circulated by the author throughout Fifeshire, and widely read ; and from this time forward he was much given to taking the public into his confidence respecting his personal grievances. His attack on Lord Kellie, however, weakened bis popularity, and in 1809, partly owing to this cause, and partly to his being in temporary ill-health, he accepted a proposal from the Duke of Somerset to become the tenant of a farm belonging to his Grace, and situated in the parish of Wily, in Wiltshire. For a time all went well with him in his new abode. His farm was a model for the emulation of all the landholders in the parish, and his products gained prize after prize at successive agricultural exhibitions. But Mr. Gourlay was nothing if not critical, and certain of his surroundings afforded legitimate grounds for fault-finding.

There were many and serious defects in the system of administering the poor-laws of Great Britain in those days, and the administration in the parish of Wily was attended by some specially objectionable features. These erelong became painfully apparent to the keen eyes of Mr. Gourlay, who began to agitate for a reform. He went into the matter with characteristic * Canadian Portrait Gallery, Vol. III., p. 241. earnestness, and, by dint of constant speechifying and weekly letters addressed to the local newspapers, he soon began to produce an impression. His appetite for agitation grew by what it fed upon, insomuch that he became a confirmed grievance-monger and hunter-up of abuses. The magnates of the county began to look coldly upon him, and even, in some instances, to array themselves in open opposition to him.

This only tended still further to arouse the native pugnacity of his disposition, and his attacks upon local abuses and those who upheld them became more and more violent. Now, in all this there can be no doubt that Mr. Gourlay was from first to last chiefly actuated by genuine philanthropy. He certainly had no selfish or pecuniary purpose to serve; and indeed it is hard to conceive of a man less influenced by mercenary motives. His life was passed in a perpetual war against veritable and undoubted evils ; but unfortunately his hotheadedness and want of tact prevented him from doing justice to himself and his views. He lacked the calm intellect and patient temper necessary to the successful fighting of life's stern battle, and had the unhappy faculty of generally putting himself in the wrong, even when there could be no doubt that he had originally been in the right.