ON the annals of Upper
Canada the period covered by our last chapter is perhaps the least
interesting of any with which the historian has to deal. The era of
commotion and disorder which was to follow not only saw much
intellectual activity in Parliament and in the press, but saw even
considerable progress in their building up of the capital.
All places have their
local prejudices, and the infant Town of York was no exception to the
rule. Founded near the banks of the Don, its citizens hail determined
even thus early to get away from the place of its birth. The town was
now growing to the north and to the west. From Windmill Street, to the
east of Parliament, the place had extended westward as far as York, or
even Graves (now Simcoe), streets; while northward from Palace (now
Front), King, Duke, Duchess, and Lot (the modern Queen) streets had been
surveyed and in part opened out. West of Church Street ran Market (now
Wellington), King, Newgate (now Adelaide), and Hospital (now Richmond)
streets; while intersecting them, at right angles, were Jordan, Pay, and
York. Already, it will be seen, the town was beginning to assume some
proportions, and justify its selection as the capital city.
The year 1824 is
notable for the initiation of two enterprises which were fraught with
beneficent results to the Province. One of these was the proposal to
construct the Welland Canal, to cross the peninsula which lies between
Lake Ontario and Lake Erie; the other was the formation of the Canada
Land Company, under Imperial Charter. The Welland Canal project was the
conception of Mr. W. II. Merritt, a gentleman of U. E. Loyalist
parentage, who had been an officer of militia in the War of 1812. He was
engaged in large business operations, the importance of which led him
early to note the commercial value of an unbroken waterway between the
two lakes. Bringing his scheme before the Government, he, after some
delays, obtained the aid which justified lus forming a company and
proceeding with the work. In live years the enterprise was completed,
and it stands to-day a monument to his memory.
The Canada Company was
organized with the design of acquiring lands in the Province, and of
promoting its colonization. The original agreement was for the purchase
from the Imperial Government of tracts of the Crown and Clergy Reserves
in Upper Canada, to the extent of over two million acres, for which
three shillings and sixpence an acre was to be paid. Owing to objections
made to the sale of the Clergy Reserves by the Upper Canada Executive, a
block of one million acres of land in the Huron district was sold to the
Company in lieu thereof, one-third of the purchase money being allowed
the Company for the construction of public works and improvements in the
district. To the operations of the Company is due the settling of a
large portion of what is now Huron County. The Company was given sixteen
years to carry out its contract with the Government, and to pay over the
value of the lands in annual installments ranging from £i5,000 to
£20,000. Within ten years the Company paid into the Upper Canada
Exchequer £250,000, and, mainly through its operations, 5,000 people
were settled in the County of Huron.
It was in connection
with the Canada Company that York and the Province came to know John
Gait, the genial author of "Lawrie Todd," the much-prized contributor to
Blackwood, and the father of the present Sir Alexander and Mr. Justice
Thomas Gait. Mr. Gait came to the Province in 1826 as commissioner for
the Canada Company, and for a time had his home at "The Priory," Guelph,
where he and Dr. Dunlop, the witty and eccentric surgeon of the Company,
with other kindred spirits, held "high holiday," while at the same time
actively organizing Scotch settlements along the valley of the Grand
River and its tributary, the Speed.
In the capital, Gait
does not seem to have found congenial society, for the social circles of
York deemed him proud and reserved in his intercourse—the result,
perhaps, of failure to establish cordial relations with Sir Peregrine
Maitland and his little court. This want of harmony between him and the
Provincial Executive finally led to his recall to England, though at
headquarters he was deservedly held in high esteem for his probity.
While a resident of
York, notwithstanding his moods and his indifference to the people of
the capital, Gait, in the winter of 1827, gave an entertainment, which,
considering the prosaic times and the small number likely to be
available to take part in the proceedings, was of a rather unusual
character. Conjointly with Lady Mary, the wife of Mr. Willis, who had
recently been appointed to the Bench of Upper Canada, he gave a Fancy
Ball, "at which, for once," as Dr. Scadding tell us, "the potent, grave
and reverend seigniors of York, along with their sons and daughters,
indulged in a little insanity." The ball, as we learn from Toronto of
Old, was held in the assembly room in Frank's Hotel, on the corner of
Market Square, which is now known as Colborne Street. The hall used to
do duty for the citizens as a concert and ball-room, and was
occasionally of service as an extemporized theatre. For an account of
the ball, and a list of the characters presented, wre must refer the
reader to the work we have already quoted, where those who relish a mild
bit of scandal may learn of an incident which formed a denouement of the
ball, and of its remoter consequences.
The year before these
frolics of the elders of the town took place, a frolic of another sort
had been indulged in by the younger blood of the capital, which was
attended with like unpleasant consequences. In the wrecking of
Mackenzie's Printing Office—the escapade to which we have reference—we
have a bit of history which, with the ball, somewhat relieves the dull
chronicle of those early times, but which, properly to introduce, it
will be necessary to go back to the first coming on the scene of him who
was thenceforth to fill a large section of the canvas of Upper Canadian
history.
William Lyon Mackenzie
was born at Dundee, Scotland, in 1795. and five years later, so poor was
his then widowed mother, that we are told she had to part with the
tartan plaid of the family clan, in exchange for a little coarse barley
meal, to tide over for a time the necessities of herself and her
youthful son. Humble as was his origin, and nurtured, as we have just
said, on the scant fare of a Scottish peasant, Mackenzie, like many a
sturdy Scot, determined at an early age to rise from the poverty of his
surroundings. Deficient as was his education, he made up for the lack of
schooling by a zealously pursued course of self-training and omnivorous
reading. Between the years 1806 and 1819, he himself tells us he read
nine hundred and fifty-eight volumes, in almost every department of
literature. His mother used to say of him that he would be found at his
books every evening till midnight, until she thought "the laddie vera Id
read hunsel' oot o his judgment." And what he read he remembered.
In 1820, he came to
Canada, though prior to this he had seen something of the world, in
England as well as in Scotland, and had even ventured upon a visit to
Paris. He possessed good business abilities, had a clear, and for his
age, well-stored brain, and was a shrewd critic of his fellowship and a
keen observer of the world. Mr. Charles Lindsey, his son irl-law and
biographer, thus describes his personal appearance. "He was of slight
build and scarcely of medium height, being only live feet six inches in
stature. His massive head, high and broad in the frontal region and
well-rounded, looked too large for the slight and wiry frame il
surmounted. He was already bald from the effects of a fever. His keen,
restless, piercing blue eye, which threatened to read your most inmost
thought, and the ceaseless and expressive activity of his fingers, which
unconsciously opened and closed, betrayed a temperament that could not
brook inaction. The chin was long and rather broad ; and the firm-set
mouth indicated a will which, however it might be baffled and thwarted,
could not be subdued."
For a time Mackenzie
was engaged in the combined business of druggist and bookseller, first
in York, then in Dundas, where he married, and, at a somewhat later
date, in Queenston. At the latter village he renounced trade and
espoused journalism, for which he was not unfitted, as he had the gifts
of a ready and forcible writer, and was not unfamiliar with politics and
political literature. At Queenston, on the 18th of May, 1824, appeared
the first number of the Colonial Advocate, Mackenzie's earliest effort
in journalism. The character of the publication may be judged from ts
editor's views of the state of the country at the time of its appearing.
It had not come into existence to add to the number of Government
bulletins or official gazettes. It was a new departure ;n journalism.
Previous to his taking up the pen of a journalist, he had never, as he
tells us, interfered hi the public concerns of the colony, until the day
on which I issued twelve hundred copies of a newspaper, without having
asked or received a single subscriber." In the first number of the paper
he adds:— "I stated my sentiments, and the objects I had m view, fully
and frankly. I had long seen the country in the hands of a few shrewd,
crafty, covetous men, under whose management one of the most lovely and
desirable sections of America remained a comparative desert. The most
obvious public improvements were stayed, dissension was created among
classes, citizens were banished and imprisoned in defiance of all law,
the people had been long forbidden, under severe pains and penalties,
from meeting anywhere to petition for justice, large estates were
wrested from their owners m utter contempt of even the forms of the
Courts ; the Church of England, the adherents of which were few,
monopolized as much of the lands of the colony as all the religious
houses and dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church had had control of
in Scotland at the era of the Reformation; other sects were treated with
contempt, and scarcely tolerated; a sordid band of land-jobbers grasped
the soil as their patrimony, and with a few leading officials, who
divided the public revenue among themselves, formed the 'Family
Compact,' and were the avowed enemies of common schools, of civil and
religious liberty, of all legislative or other checks to their own
will."
With this severe
indictment of the then rulers of Upper Canada, Mackenzie set out as a
public censor, and bravely began the agitation for those reforms which,
after years of unparalleled toil and wrecked happiness, he was yet to
see secured to the country. But for a time Reform was to accomplish
little. What, indeed, could it accomplish, with so radically defective a
system of administration? To attack abuses in detail was only to court
annoyance, and in the end to sutfer defeat. And for long this was the
fate of Mackenzie, as it had been that of Gourlay. The Executive was
supreme and impregnable, and hardly less so was the Crown-nominated
Upper Chamber. The popular Assembly, even when it really represented the
people, was powerless against the ruling party. The latter could snap
its fingers at the polls, and reject every bill the Assembly saw fit to
pass. As Mackenzie's biographer remarks: "The difficulty was that these
representative Assemblies were mocked with the semblance of that
legislative power, with the substantial possession of which they were
never endowed."
Against Mackenzie and
his journal there was now directed unceasing malevolence, which, when
both were transferred from Queenston to the capital—which transfer
shortly took place—was to find expression in a thousand acts of
hostility and petty annoyance. Two instances of this hostile feeling may
be cited. The first is connected with the re-interring of the remains of
Sir Isaac Brock at Queenston Heights; the second, with the wrecking of
his printing office and the throw ing of the type into Toronto Bay. At
the ceremony of laying the remains of General Brock finally to rest,
under the column which the country had erected to his memory, it seems
that some friend of Mackenzie had clandestinely deposited a copy of his
journal, the Colonial Advocate, in the cavity where the customary coins
and official journals were placed. This fact was presently bruited
about, and, coining to the ears of the authorities, the foundation-stone
of the structure was ordered to be removed, and the contaminating paper
cast forth from its place of honour.
The other incident took
place on a summer evening, im June, 1826, and shows how deeply Mackenzie
had cut nto the personal susceptibilities of the "Family Compact" by his
freelance criticism in the Colonial Advocate.
Two years before this
period, the general elections of 1824 had returned a large Reform
majority to the House. Seriously affected by this circumstance, and much
exasperated by the crusade Mackenzie had actively entered upon in his
journal, the position of the ruling powers was beginning to be
exceedingly uncomfortable. The fact was patent, the high-handed,
unrighteous stewards of the Upper Canada vineyard were now having an
uneasy time of it. Nor could the troubles of the precious junto be
concealed. The younger generation, sons of the placemen and pensioners
who were mis-ruling the country, had got to know pretty well the facts,
and the quarrel was taken up by the hot-bloods among them. Mackenzie
they held responsible, and he it was who was to suffer. Taking advantage
of the latter's temporary absence from the town, a band of these lawless
youths effected an entrance into his office, broke up his "forms,"
scattered his type—much of it they threw into the bay—demolished his
printing press, and generally wrecked his establishment. This act of
valour on the part of the young chivalry of York, if not actually
encouraged, was at least winked at, by two magistrates who were said to
be close by the scene of the outrage at the time of its occurring. To
these representatives of Justice blindfold, as well as to all the
members of the "Family Compact, the summer evening's escapade was,
doubtless, a joyful one, though the young rioters, or their fathers for
them, had, after process of law, to indemnify Mackenzie for the loss
sustained by him. The amount he recovered, after a good deal of
haggling, wras £625, a sum which enabled him to make good his loss, and
to equip his office more efficiently. But beyond the legal satisfaction
he was fortunate enough to obtain in Court, Mackenzie had a more
substantial solatum in the sympathy of the people, who were greatly
incensed at the affair, and whose denunciations of the act, and of those
high an authority who connived at it, were both loud and deep. The
hostility of the party in power against their critic and censor woefully
miscarried, and the effort to crush Mackenzie and his journal only
recoiled upon those who had instigated the foul act.
The year 1828 witnessed
a change in the administration of the affair of the Province. Sir
Peregrine Maitland was transferred to Nova Scotia, and Sir John Colborne
reigned in his stead. The latter, Lke his predecessor, was essentially a
military man, having been distinguished both in the Peninsula and at
Waterloo. His regime was, almost from the very outset, characterized by
stormy scenes in the Legislature, and may be regarded as the transition
period in the political history of the Province. The new Governor met
Lis first Parliament on the 9th of January, 1829, in the old brick
hospital on King Street West, which had been the scene of its
deliberations since the destruction of the old buildings by tire five
years before. During this session the attitude of the Reformers became
more aggressive than ever; the forces of the Compact were reduced in
numbers, and the tone of the debate on the Address .was a significant
warning as to the state of public feeling. Mr. Mackenzie was a member of
this House, having been elected for the County of York in 1828. The
House adjourned towards the end of March, and shortly afterwards the
editor of the Colonial Advocate once more came into prominence. In July
of this year Sir John Beverley Robinson, the Attorney-General, was
raised to the bench as Chief-Justice of Upper Canada. This created a
vacancy n the representation of York, for which Robert Baldwin, then
twenty-five years of age, presented himself as a candidate and was
elected. During the campaign he was vigorously supported by the Colonial
Advocate, which published a series of fierce attacks upon Mr. Small, Mr.
Baldwin's opponent, and upon the Compact, of which he was the nominee.
Mr. Small retaliated with an action for libel; and the increased
bitterness thus engendered culminated the following year in the
expulsion of Mr. Mackenzie from the House, by virtue of an obsolete rule
which prohibited the unauthorized publication of the Parliamentary
proceedings. This was followed by a popular demonstration in his favour
in the streets of York, and by his re-election and re-expulsion no less
than five times in succession. Finally the constituency was punished by
being deprived of one of its members, and Mr. Mackenzie disappeared for
a time from the scene of his struggles and triumphs, having embarked on
a mission to England as the bearer of petitions to the Home Government
in his favour.
It may not be out of
place here to quote a description by Mr. "Mackenzie himself, given in
his "Sketches," of the demonstration above alluded to, as giving an idea
of a scene in those days not unfrequently to be witnessed on the streets
of York: "A procession was formed at the Red Lion Inn on Yonge Street,
Price's or Tiers', where the hustings were in front of it was an immense
sleigh belonging to Mr. Montgomery "—on which stood the hero of the day,
wearing a gold chain and medal just presented to him by his
constituents—"which was drawn by four horses, and carried between twenty
and thirty men and two or three Highland pipers. From fifty to one
hundred sleighs followed, and between one and two thousand of the
inhabitants. The procession passed by the Government House, from thence
to the Parliament House, thence to Mr. Cawthra's and then to Mr.
Mackenzie's own house, giving cheers at each of these places. One of the
most sins. of curiosities of the day was a little printing-press, placed
in one of the sleighs, warmed by a furnace, on which a couple of boys
continued, while moving through the streets, to strike off their New
Year's Address and throw it to the people. Over the press was hoisted a
crimson flag, with the motto 'The Liberty of the Press.' The mottoes on
the other flags were: 'King William IV. and Reform'; 'Bidwell and the
Glorious Minority' '1832, a Good Beginning'; 'A Free Press, the Terror
of Sycophants.' "
The first two years of
Sir John Colborne's administration were marked, in so far as York was
specially concerned, by notable additions to its public buildings. In
1829 Upper Canada College—an institution on the model of the great
English public schools—was founded, and was formally opened in January
of the following year in the York Home District Grammar School, on
Adelaide Street, pending the completion of the embryo of the present
college buildings. The College Avenue, the Don tubular bridge and the
St. James' Church which was destroyed by fire in 1839, also date from
this period. In 1829, too, immediately after the close of the session,
advertisements appeared asking for tenders for the construction of
Legislative buildings on what was then known as "Simcoe Place." And,
finally, in the same year the construction of "Lawyers' Hall," the
original of the present Osgoode Hall, was commenced. Further and fuller
accounts of these and other public buildings and works will be found in
the chapter which treats of the institutions and industries of Toronto.
Among other noteworthy
events occurring during this period of the history of York, may be
mentioned the establishment, in 1829, of what is now the oldest journal
in the City of Toronto, viz., the Christian Guardian, which, whilst
pre-eminently the organ of a special religious body, at the same time
devoted considerable space to the publication of the current news and of
general reading. Another noteworthy event—as being rare in the society
annals of York, if it were not indeed the first of its kind—was the
opening, in 1832, of a fancy bazaar, the proceeds of which were intended
to be applied to the relief of the cholera sufferers. It was under the
patronage of Lady Colborne and was held on September 2nd, in one of the
Commissariat storehouses near the foot of John Street. The proceeds of
the sales amounted to £311. The cholera visitation paralyzed, for a
time, the business enterprise of York, but it had a good effect in
paving the way for much-needed sanitary reforms. |