'Union Is Strength' : W. L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace and the Emergence of Joint Stock Democracy in Upper Canada [1 ed.] 9781442689558, 9780802099273

Citation preview

‘UNION IS STRENGTH’: W.L. MACKENZIE, THE CHILDREN OF PEACE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF JOINT STOCK DEMOCRACY IN UPPER CANADA

This page intentionally left blank

ALBERT SCHRAUWERS

‘Union Is Strength’ W.L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace, and the Emergence of Joint Stock Democracy in Upper Canada

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9927-3

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Schrauwers, Albert Union is strength : W.L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace, and the emergence of joint stock democracy in Upper Canada / Albert Schrauwers. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9927-3 1. Mackenzie, William Lyon, 1795–1861. 2. Children of Peace – History. 3. Canadian Alliance Society – History. 4. Stock companies – Ontario – History – 19th century. 5. Business and politics – Ontario – History – 19th century. 6. Christianity and politics – Ontario – History – 19th century. 7. Ontario – Politics and government – 1791–1841. I. Title. FC3071.2.S35 2009

971.3c02

C2008-907705-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

3

1 Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry 2 The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt

35 66

3 The Economics of Respectability: The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 98 4 Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 5 The Bank Wars 6 The Constitution

125

151 176

7 The Promise of Responsible Government

211

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 245 Notes 261 References 299 Index

313

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This book has been slowly percolating over the considerable period of my association with the Sharon Temple National Historic Site. In that time I’ve passed through a series of roles – neighbour, volunteer, student, board member – and received the encouragement and support of the many others inspired by this remarkable building and the group that built it. As an economic anthropologist, I was out of my depth in many ways. I would thus like to thank those who spent a great deal of time initiating me in the mysteries of its fascinating history. I owe a great debt to former site director Ruth Haines, who originally sparked my interest in the democratic legacy of the group. Equal support was received from her successors, Jan Emonson and John McIntyre (himself a scholar of note on the group). Museum president Jenny Carver’s enthusiasm has reinforced the need for a history of this kind. Professor Bill Westfall, as editor of Ontario History, encouraged my first article on the group, and he has since been a knowledgeable mentor and a great supporter of the site. Mark Fram – my occasional co-author – has always graciously shared his own research, and steered me outside of other people’s boxes. Jane Zavitz Bond has remained an exemplary f/Friend as archivist for the Canadian Yearly Meeting, where the records of the Children of Peace are stored. I am unable to thank all of the other volunteers individually who have contributed in their own ways to this book, although one, David McFall, deserves a note. David shared his own family records of the Hughes family, and was an inspiration for his service to the site. I also need to thank the nameless volunteers, the peer reviewers of the University of Toronto Press, whose probing questions and helpful advice

viii Acknowledgments

have made this a much stronger manuscript; hopefully one deserving of the legacy of the Children of Peace. Lastly, I would like to thank my spouse, Andrew, for his patience with the actual process of writing, and his encouragement to see it through to the end. Albert Schrauwers Toronto, December 2008

‘UNION IS STRENGTH’: W.L. MACKENZIE, THE CHILDREN OF PEACE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF JOINT STOCK DEMOCRACY IN UPPER CANADA

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

Yonge Street, a thin ribbon of unsurfaced road, stretched between ‘Muddy York,’ Upper Canada’s capital, and the shores of Lake Simcoe and the village of Hope. By 1832 York was an oversized village of six thousand people, notable for only two buildings of any size: the market buildings, then under construction, and the legislative buildings. It was home to many of the colony’s elite, drawn by profit to one or the other building, sometimes both. At the centre of the village stood the district courthouse and gaol; the final leg of the local establishment, the new St James Anglican Church, was under construction across the street. This last was home to the Venerable John Strachan, the archdeacon, who was also a member of the Executive and Legislative councils, a founder of the Bank of Upper Canada, and chairman of the Clergy Corporation – which owned one-seventh of the colony’s land. Anna Jameson, the disgruntled wife of the attorney general, was to describe York as ‘a little ill-built town on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay, with one very ugly church, without tower or steeple; some government offices, built of staring red brick, in the most tasteless vulgar style imaginable; three feet of snow all around.’1 At the other end of Yonge Street lay Hope, a village of no more than three hundred and fifty souls. Hope had been settled by followers of a Quaker schismatic, David Willson, who in the midst of the War of 1812 had formed a group, the Children of Peace. Called by a vision to ‘ornament the Christian Church with all the glory of Israel,’ the Children of Peace rebuilt Solomon’s temple, the seat of their ‘New Jerusalem.’ This three-tiered building, sixty feet square and seventy-five feet high, was ‘calculated to inspire the beholder with astonishment; its dimensions – its architecture – its situation – are all so extraordinary.’2 The Children

4

‘Union Is Strength’

of Peace, having fled a cruel and uncaring Pharaoh, viewed themselves as the new Israelites lost in the wilderness of Upper Canada. Yet, they remained tethered to the old order by Yonge Street, a military road and the road to market.3 This book is about the radically different visions of political order that motivated Archdeacon Strachan and David Willson to build their respective communities, a tale of two kingdoms. Both men appeared to invoke the language of constitutional monarchy. Upper Canada had been granted, it was said, ‘the very image and transcript’ of the British constitution based on a balanced mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. But by the 1830s it was clear to all that no such simple transposition of the constitution was possible. The lieutenant governor was an appointee of the British cabinet, and no monarch. The members of the Legislative Council were appointees of the lieutenant governor, and not aristocrats. The House of Assembly was hamstrung by limited control of government revenues, and its legislation was disallowed regularly by the unelected Legislative Council.4 By the 1830s the struggle for political reform erupted as violently in the colony as it had in England itself. It is important to underscore the universal recognition of this constitutional crisis at the time, given the ideological importance of ‘loyalty’ in this, the era of the paramilitary Orange Order’s violent cries of ‘King and Constitution.’5 As historian William Westfall has pointed out, ‘Strachan’s attachment to social hierarchy, episcopacy and a religious establishment must not be interpreted simply as Canadian expressions of aristocratic conservativism. In early Upper Canada, there was little to conserve. For Strachan the present order of society was one of his worst enemies. He was surrounded by the wilderness of man’s fallen nature. He had to be creative and build a social order before he could defend it.’6 What marked Strachan as a social conservative was that, given the failings of the Upper Canadian incarnation of mixed monarchy, it was an ‘aristocracy,’ not a democracy, that he sought to found. David Willson similarly envisaged a mixed monarchy, but his he called the Kingdom of God. A radical democrat, he sought to protect the weak; the temple that the Children of Peace constructed was used just once a month to collect alms for the poor. It was built four-square, symmetrical on each side, to symbolize the equality of all who entered. To encourage the ‘priesthood of all believers’ there was no pulpit, and Willson refused to enter the building to preach. The Children of Peace were avid supporters of newspaper publisher and reform leader Wil-

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

5

liam Lyon Mackenzie. Willson and other members, such as Samuel Hughes, were key organizers of the Canadian Alliance Society, the reform political organization. They were also central to the building of ‘radical hall,’ a meeting place for reformers in Toronto, where they frequently held meetings for worship. There, according to the Tories, Willson preached of ‘the injustice practiced towards the world by all those who possess an abundant share of the good things of life. That they are all usurpers and tyrants; that there ought neither to be masters nor servants; that all mankind are equal; and that it is the duty of the poor to pull down the rich.’7 The roots of democracy in Upper Canada may lie in the British constitution, and its limited conceptions of an elective assembly. However, it is important to stress the underlying fallacy of Simcoe’s assertion that that constitution’s blessings ever applied to Upper Canada. As Jeffrey McNairn notes, ‘incessant reference to the British (or occasionally just the English) constitution lends a cramped and derivative tone to constitutional thinking in Upper Canada.’8 Upper Canada was created as a reaction to the American and French revolutions, and every effort was taken to limit the power and scope of elective institutions in the new colony. Power was centralized in the hands of the lieutenant governor, whose revenues were in large part independent of legislative control. He appointed the magistrates in the Courts of Quarter Sessions, the basic unit of civil administration, as well as the Legislative and Executive councils.9 Effective power thus lay in the executive, with few elective checks. Political reformers viewed this as despotism, not mixed monarchy. Given the general absence of effective democratic institutions in the colony, it is important to ask how democratic skills and values were fostered such that the reform movement could plausibly enlist public support in the face of widespread violent opposition. Why should more democracy – and not an aristocracy as Strachan wished – seem the answer to the colony’s woes? In his sweeping study of deliberative democracy in Upper Canada, McNairn has drawn our attention to the role of voluntary associations of all types in the creation of a viable public sphere – the sphere of public discussion required for democratic debate and the formation of ‘public opinion’: ‘They brought people together to pursue common projects, instructing them in the public use of their reason.’ McNairn points to the role of voluntary associations as ‘experiments in democratic sociability’ in which ‘Upper Canadians grew accustomed to coming together to further common goals; to

6

‘Union Is Strength’

working with others of different social, occupational, religious or national backgrounds; to devising and abiding by mutually agreed upon rules; to discussing topics of common concern; to speaking in front of others; to listening to others with opposing views; and to disagreeing without attacking the speaker, offending others, or trying to mandate uniformity. In voluntary associations people learned and practiced the norms of reasoned discussion and mutual respect vital to sustained public deliberation.’10 McNairn carefully documents the roles of a variety of these voluntary associations in the formation of a culture of ‘deliberative democracy,’ including literary clubs, reading rooms, Freemason lodges, mechanics institutes, agricultural societies, and benevolent associations. McNairn has little to say, however, about the role of voluntary economic associations, thereby implicitly agreeing with Colin Read’s assertion that ‘historians argue that shifts in Upper Canada’s political culture stemmed from a deep structural change, the development of capitalism. Oddly, none really explore that key notion.’11 This book, in contrast, looks specifically at the contribution of a specific kind of economic institution to the creation of deliberative democracy in Upper Canada. The transition to a capitalist market economy in North America is viewed too frequently as the product of the entrepreneurial action of individuals; its corporate aspect remains relatively undocumented.12 But some corporations, as collectivities of shareholders, were equally ‘experiments in democratic sociability’ and contributed to the development of the public sphere and deliberative democracy. As the province experienced the ‘transition to capitalism’ in the early nineteenth century, the number and scope of these companies increased exponentially. This was a revolutionary period in which a host of new economic institutions such as banks and insurance companies first made their broad mark, in effect, defining the coming shape of the capitalist order for the first time. Joint stock companies, like the Farmers’ Storehouse and the Bank of the People, also played a critical role in fomenting the reform movement in the Home District of Upper Canada. Although these joint stock companies were ostensibly economic – and more specifically, capitalist – in nature, they were also political organizations in a number of senses. For example, unlike current registration processes, they had to petition the House of Assembly for incorporation, an established political process involving long-standing political alliances. These companies could also be political in the sense that they sponsored political activity, as when the Bank of the People funded Wil-

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

7

liam Lyon Mackenzie’s newspaper, the Constitution. But most importantly, joint stock companies were ‘also mini-republics. Typically, each was a self-governing body composed of members of equal standing who had freely consented to join. Members created an association, devised its rules and policies, and elected officers from among their ranks to carry out their wishes.’13 In this sense, joint stock companies were like the host of other voluntary associations documented by McNairn in the creation of deliberative democracy in Upper Canada. This book has a twofold purpose. First, it quite narrowly examines the role of the Children of Peace in fostering the reform movement in the Home District. Their participation in the political union movement, the grand convention, the creation of the Canadian Alliance Society, and the elections of Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine has not been documented. Second, it traces more broadly the related structural transition of Upper Canada’s economy to capitalism, and to a vibrant democratic culture, as this was fostered by joint stock companies sponsored by the Children of Peace such as the Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the Bank of the People. By linking these economic endeavours to their political outcomes, this book hopes to underscore the political consequences of the province’s transition to capitalism. The Transition[s] to Capitalism[s] Debate14 The silence with which historians of Ontario’s economy have greeted the sustained debate on the transition to capitalism in rural America would seem to indicate a scholarly consensus that the province’s economy emerged in the firm embrace of laissez-faire principles. The unasked question appears to be a transition from what to capitalism?15 The province’s flirtation with the seigniorial regime was brief and abortive. Although Douglas McCalla’s omnibus study of widespread commercial activity has supplanted the earlier prevailing consensus on the subsistence orientation of pioneer agriculture, it perhaps too readily assumes a capitalist mentalité of those who engaged in commercial exchange while ignoring the idiosyncratic social and economic dynamics of subsistence agriculture. McCalla acknowledges that, although increasingly wellintegrated markets developed throughout nineteenth-century Ontario, by mid-century ‘only a small fraction of farms was producing a marketable surplus great enough to provide for more than just the local nonagricultural population.’16 Upper Canada’s economic history is surely more complex than a history of the triumph of the market might reveal.

8

‘Union Is Strength’

David Willson’s utopian village of Hope, through its rich history, gives us a window on these more complex and frequently obscure economic processes. The economic strategy of early Upper Canadian farmers like the Children of Peace can easily be characterized as subsistence-surplus: they grew crops for their own subsistence and sold only small surpluses to meet cash needs, not unlike the yeoman society to the south from which many of them originated.17 Given the minor role of the market in the household economy, should we expect the farmer to behave as a merchant would? Similar conditions in the United States have brought the American debate to the point where the fact of market exchange itself is not at issue, just the degree of local self-sufficiency and the extent and implications of market exchange.18 Rather than narrowly defining farmers as either market- or subsistenceoriented, we should see where they fall on the scale between the two, and ask what social dynamics emerge out of the often-contradictory demands that result. This renewed emphasis on subsistence production for use rather than its exchange value, however, does not in itself answer the larger structural question of a transition from what to capitalism. This question separates the northeastern American case from the Quebec and European debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.19 If the very foundation of the northeast’s economy was based on agrarian capitalism, in what way can we speak of a transition? And within this agrarian capitalist regime, what role does direct production-consumption play in the economic, political, cultural, and religious movements of the nineteenth century? In particular, what role does subsistencesurplus production play in the creation of new kinds of joint stock companies, and in the struggle for democratic reform? Christopher Clark has characterized the earlier period in terms of a ‘moral economy,’ in which local communities regulated the economic activity of their members according to community standards, and so muted the individualizing effect of the market.20 First elaborated by English historian E.P. Thompson, the concept of a moral economy was developed further in anthropological studies of other peasant economies.21 Thompson wrote of the moral economy of the poor in the context of widespread food riots in the English countryside. These riots, he argued, were well-orchestrated and generally peaceable acts that demonstrated a common political culture rooted in feudal rights to set the price of essential goods in the market; moral economists held that a traditional fair price was more important to the community than a

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

9

free market price. The poor punished large farmers who sold their surpluses at higher prices outside the village while there were still those in need within the village. The notion of a non-capitalist mentalité using the market for its own ends has been linked by others (with Thompson’s approval) to subsistence agriculture and the need for subsistence insurance in hard times.22 Clark is thus calling for the re-examination of the transition to capitalism in the rural United States as a shift from a moral economy rooted in subsistence production to a capitalist economy rooted in the production of goods for market exchange. He views the moral economy, and the subsistence agriculture of rural America, as something supplanted by a cash-cropping free market farm economy. The difficulty with this argument lies not in the notion of a moral economy linked to subsistence production but, still, in the notion of a transition. Moral economies are characterized as a persistence of earlier traditions, as a somehow more natural antecedent to the market, increasingly attenuated over time as they become crushed by market forces. I would argue, in contrast, for an approach that examines the mutualistic logic that tied the two types of economy together from the inception of the North American colonies. Numerous studies have shown that the first half of the nineteenth century was not necessarily characterized by grand changes in the degree of market participation by farmers, but by increasingly well-integrated national and international markets regulated by elites using laissez-faire principles.23 That is, farmers did not change their mix of subsistence and market production to any great degree, but the market that they sold in became increasingly well organized and international in scope, bolstered by a host of new financial service institutions such as banks and insurance companies. This global trend towards a market economy can be contrasted with a second related phenomenon, the increasingly well-organized moral economies of the backwoods utopias or ‘Patent Office Models of the Good Society’ such as the village of Hope.24 Just as laissez-faire capitalism was developing towards its mature ideological and institutional form, it was contested by an alternative form of ‘communitarian’ or ‘associational’ economy predicated on increasingly well-articulated alternative principles of exchange. The growth of this ‘associational’ economy has been extensively traced for the Jacksonian period in the United States, as local producers organized, economically and politically, to protect themselves from the implications of debt. Their ‘chief enemy was the “paper aristocracy,” including banks and other corporations, capitalist speculators, and those with inherited wealth.’25 The

10

‘Union Is Strength’

Children of Peace are a remarkable example of this same process. By 1832 they had transformed themselves into a joint stock company, engaged in co-operative marketing, formed a credit union, and instituted a land-sharing agreement in an attempt to protect their members from Upper Canada’s ‘economy of debt.’ Their similarity with other communal groups such as the Shakers and the Owenite New Harmonists has been noted frequently. But rather than highlighting their uncommon degree of community organization, we need to understand these groups as but one pole of the spectrum between the market and selfsubsistence; they pushed the common resistance of subsistence farmers to a free market to extremes. Rather than simply document the triumphal progress of the market, we need to examine more carefully these alternate forms of economic organization and the role they played in the politics of the era. This newly fashioned moral economy, like those of other nineteenth-century backwoods utopias, continued to engage in and depend on market exchange while espousing alternative economic values (based on charity) within the community.26 Moral and market economies should not be viewed as necessarily oppositional, but as mutualistic, the one making the other possible; the capitalism of the era was more complex than the prescriptive models of liberal economists would suggest. Significantly, the Children of Peace organized their charitable and co-operative ventures into joint stock companies; even their extraordinary temple, a symbolic assertion of the importance of charity, was held as joint property in this way. Utopian communities like the village of Hope draw our attention to the idioms and expressions that characterize the now silent moral economies of the rural landscape, which transformed both the shape of the broader capitalist economy and the broader political order. The Nature and Structure of Commerce in York Why did farmers such as the Children of Peace resist integration in a free market economy, creating their own moral economy in its stead? The debate on the transition to capitalism in North America draws our attention to the differing economic rationality of individual economic actors who engage in subsistence-surplus agriculture; it is a debate on mentalité, on the degree – or lack of it – of entrepreneurial spirit driving farmers in backwoods communities. The moral economists argue that farmers, for the most part, lacked the profit orientation of merchants.

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

11

The bitterness with which farmers reproached merchants exposed a raw nerve, an unequal power, and a perception that the strong took advantage of the weak. Citing what he calls the ‘liberal illusion’ of the ‘equability’ of market exchange, historian William Reddy points out the divergent outlooks of merchant and farmer in the late eighteenth century: ‘The poor had to live and work with what they bought while the rich soon sold it again or rented it out. A question to the rich of figures, balances, letters of credit, deeds, and bonds, property was for the poor a question of highly particular and peculiar utensils, four specific walls, one single piece of bottomland that had a tendency to flood in wet years, one address on a narrow street. By the eighteenth century, price could appear as a mere mathematical entity to one, a proper subject of scientific formulas and abstract theories; to the other it was a dangerous and unpredictable thing, a destroyer of lives and bringer of blessings, a capricious god, probably manipulated by unseen conspirators.’27 Merchants, who had an abundance of property, for whom no one market exchange had life-altering implications, for whom an economic choice could thus be abstract and impersonal, thereby held a power that the poor did not: ‘a landowner who leased out twenty farms could afford to make a few mistakes, to suffer a few setbacks, without feeling the pinch.’28 The equality of merchant and farmer in the marketplace must not be taken for granted. What for one was an exchangeable commodity purchased on long credit to be stored until resold at a profit, was an absolute need, was both food and the year’s income to repay pressing debts for the other. The different degrees of desperation with which they entered an exchange gave the merchant a powerful advantage over the farmer. This emphasis on individual economic rationality may, however, be misplaced. Historian Naomi Lamoreaux has pointed out that merchants were no more capable of calculating profit accurately than were farmers. Drawing on the account books from shopkeepers in the Boston area, she argues that ‘there is, in fact, little evidence that merchants and manufacturers were much interested in using their account books to figure their rate or even the magnitude of their profits.’29 Even if merchants were more economically rational, more profit oriented than farmers, they lacked the critical accounting information they needed to act accordingly. Merchants, no less than farmers, remained embedded in the kin, community, and religious ties that prevented them from acting as opportunistically, as entrepreneurially as the ‘maximizing individualist’ of laissez-faire economic texts of the period might suggest.

12

‘Union Is Strength’

We need not look for a laissez-faire capitalist market rationality at the level of the individual, whether farmer or merchant. If we are to understand the antagonism between farmer and merchant, to understand the farmer’s resistance to the market, we need to understand the different structural positions they held in the economy. Historian T.W. Acheson summarizes this difference in position between merchant and farmer in York during the 1820s by highlighting what differences in the price of wheat meant for each. The farmer, he points out, produced flour at a fixed cost of 13 shillings per barrel, and his standard of living depended on the sheer size of the price he received: ‘the difference between 13s. and 27s. represented the margin of prosperity to the established farmer.’30 The merchant, in contrast, made his profits by balancing the difference between his cost price and his selling price, generally aiming to make 15 per cent profit; it was the relative difference in the two prices that determined how successful he became. ‘It was quite irrelevant to him whether he bought for 14s. and sold for 22s., or bought for 27s. and sold for 35s. In point of fact he would prefer the former situation because it almost eliminated the element of risk in the whole transaction.’31 Fourteen shillings a barrel spelled a disaster for the farmer, yet offered a risk-free investment for the merchant, who as a result seemed to prosper in periods of depression. ‘The difference between the agrarian and commercial viewpoints – summarized as 20s. a barrel versus 15 per cent a barrel – is most significant.’32 Upper Canada’s Economy of Debt This book focuses on this difference in structural position and its implications for the economic strategies pursued by merchants and farmers in an economy structured by debt. Their antagonism was less the product of some ingrained economic motive, a reified capitalist mentalité, than of the situational conflicts that arose from their place in the chain of debts that led back to Britain. Upper Canada was a perennially cash-poor colony, and in the absence of a circulating medium, the economy operated through the extension of credit by merchants, repaid in kind with wheat by the farmer; cash rarely traded hands. All farmers were always in debt, and thus bound to particular merchants in multilayered patronage relationships. Credit was a blunt weapon in an era marked by draconian laws for imprisonment for debt, which offered the creditor advantages that trite references to ‘market competition’ ignore. Historian Douglas McCalla notes that these economic complaints,

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

13

focused on the pervasive problem of debt, have ‘led some to depict provincial commerce as exploitative. Usually, the issue is defined as one of unequal exchange, in which merchants used credit to trap ordinary farmers and craftsmen into inescapable indebtedness that allowed the merchants to pay below-market prices for farm produce and charge above-market prices for imported goods that were essential to the pioneer’s survival.’33 It is, in retrospect, easy to dismiss – as does McCalla – these concerns by lionizing competition in a perfectly functioning, abstract ‘market’ (rather than the merchant’s shop) and to see in credit a necessary and beneficial role in the economic development of a specie-poor province without its own currency. McCalla argues: ‘As is now widely recognized, this vision of the credit system ignores competition among merchants at every level, from the British market to the village, the ability of farmers and craftsmen to communicate and travel to avoid periodic efforts by local merchants to fix prices, commercial credit’s importance in sustaining the investment process by which Upper Canada was made, and above all, the merchants’ interest in their customers’ success, which alone would ensure that the merchant eventually received payment of debts due.’34 But one searches in vain through these neo-liberal economic histories lionizing the benefits of credit for any mention of the Courts of Request, the Court of King’s Bench, the ‘debtors’ gaol,’ or ‘living on the limits.’ McCalla’s own data are drawn from after 1850, by which time the laws for the collection of debt had been fundamentally altered.35 In the 1830s, however, debt was an economic and political weapon, a blunt-edged sword in the hands of merchants and lawyers, and a contentious political issue at the centre of reform politics. As ‘a farmer’ pointed out, the threat of court action offered the merchant a power that could not be ignored: ‘It is not uncommon if a farmer goes to market with a load of produce and happens to owe a shopkeeper two pounds or more, unless this farmer sells his produce to this shopkeeper at his own price, he immediately without any notice issues a writ in the district court for these two pounds, and puts the farmer to about five pounds cost.’36 Countless numbers of indebted farmers were jailed for indefinite periods in this way, filling a third of the Toronto gaol’s cells. It is difficult to document the motives of a merchant who launched a suit to collect a debt in the courts at a particular time, let alone establish whether he did so ‘maliciously’ (as was so often claimed), since, after all, almost all farmers were almost always in debt and could be legally sued at any time. Yet, the antagonism of farmers to merchants

14

‘Union Is Strength’

was based on this undocumentable perception. Even if we recognize our inability to assess whether merchants used the courts to enforce advantageous terms of trade, we must recognize that the farmers’ fear of malicious arrest itself was an economic and political motivator. This fear expressed itself countless times through political appeals for revising the laws for the collection of debt. In the United States, for example, producers in the ‘associational’ or ‘moral economy’ consistently fought for an extension rather than limiting of debtors’ credit, given the scarcity of cash in the period.37 One illustrative case does stand out. A man arrested for debt, Joseph Turton, had the resources to challenge the judgment and thereby draws our attention to these issues. In May 1835 Turton advertised the sale of his house, a foundry, and a four-storey office block.38 This sale was apparently prompted by his failure to be re-elected to city council, and the Legislative Council’s refusal to pay him for part of his contract to build the Parliament buildings. Turton was then ‘maliciously’ jailed by a merchant, who was ‘apprehensive [Turton] would leave this province without satisfying the debt due.’ Turton challenged the arrest showing the merchant’s fear was ‘contrary to evidence,’ countersued for malicious arrest, and was awarded one shilling in damages. However, proving ‘malicious arrest’ then, as now, turned out to be more difficult still. The merchant challenged even this token award, and appealed the decision, arguing ‘it was incompetent for a court or jury to dive into a man’s mind to ascertain his apprehension.’ Proving that a suit for debt was maliciously motivated when it was legal to jail any debtor at any time proved an expensive endeavour – beyond the capabilities of most farmers – as even Turton had to argue his case in the courts twice, and wait over a year as the courts pondered the question of their competence in the matter, just to obtain his paltry one shilling in damages.39 The local merchant, however, was equally entrapped in lines of credit and debt that stretched back to Britain, and it is these longer credit chains that underscore the more general problem of international trade in a society structured by debt relations. McCalla’s study of the Toronto wholesale firm of Isaac Buchanan & Co. provides a well-documented example of the implications of these lines of debt for merchants and their dependent shopkeepers. Isaac Buchanan was a Scots merchant in Toronto, in partnership with his brother Peter, who remained in Glasgow to manage the British end of the firm. They established their business in Toronto in 1835, having bought out Isaac’s previous partners,

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

15

William Guild and Co., who had established themselves in Toronto in 1832. As a wholesale firm, the Buchanans were near the top of the credit chain, having invested more than £10,000 in their business. The Buchanans did attempt to establish their own branch retail operation in Hamilton, but quickly found that leaving its operations in the hands of employees resulted in near disaster; they were impossible to manage at a distance. The Buchanans retreated back into their wholesale operation in Toronto precisely because debt offered them greater disciplinary power than an employer-employee relationship ever could: ‘the wholesaler’s position was more flexible if he could retreat from unprofitable retailing operations simply by cutting off the customer’s credit, and he had no need to intervene extensively in the management of successful accounts.’40 The same was true down the credit chain; local retailers didn’t need to intervene in the management of farms. Halting credit and threatening court collection were enough to keep customers in line, producing as much saleable wheat for as low a price as possible. Impersonal market competition was thus far less important than is claimed by McCalla, its effects mitigated by long-term personal ties between debtors and creditors. The Buchanans, for example, more than doubled their investment in four years of trade during one of the worst of the periodic downturns in the Upper Canadian economy, despite not having ‘the name of being cheap sellers.’41 Their success came from offering long-term credit and not from offering the cheapest prices. Their ability to offer credit, in turn, gave them incredible control over their customers: ‘The partners did not hesitate to demand to see the customer’s books, aiming to judge his assets and liabilities, his sales and managerial abilities. They inspected his stocks and assessed the strengths and weaknesses of his employees … the partners sought above all to judge a man’s character and integrity.’42 In an economy regulated by the availability of credit, not impersonal and anonymous market competition, a customer’s respectability was key. When a man’s respectability, or credit worthiness, was challenged by one creditor, other creditors quickly descended and multiple court cases ensued. At the bottom of the credit chain, respectability was even more important. Respectability encompassed both economic and political dimensions, and was not simply an expression of ‘middle-class values.’ At an economic level, it signified someone with a ‘competence,’ a secure source of income without the need to resort to charity; the need

16

‘Union Is Strength’

for charity – the ‘poison of the gift’ – was such that it made public one’s lack of independence. So wary were most recipients of charity, for example, that the elders of the Children of Peace were instructed to themselves secretly appoint two other men and two other women who were themselves to distribute in secret the alms dispensed by the group, ‘so as to spare the feelings of the necessitous.’43 Reputation was of such importance that the Children of Peace, like the Quakers, had a standing committee on ‘mechanic shops … to see that all our business is conducted with truth and soberness.’ The sanction of respectability offered by group membership entailed opening one’s personal business to group inspection and intervention. Their, to us, jarring expressions of ‘manly independence’ are thus rooted in the economy of debt and the importance of reputation to maintain that independence in the face of an oppressive legal system for debt collection.44 The economic independence signified by respectability was expressed politically also, as each farmer, each ‘freeholder,’ was therefore entitled to a vote. As historian S.J.R. Noel argues, ‘For many electors, it would appear, a vote was no more than a minor asset to be sold to the highest bidder or traded for a jug of whisky; for others it was a part of their reciprocal relationship with the local patron, and to vote as he directed was simply to show a small courtesy to a man who had earned their trust in political as in commercial matters.’45 Yet, such a patron-client relationship, based in unequal power, can only be construed as ‘reciprocal’ if we ignore the coercive power of the debt relationship. Merchants could demand votes for their candidate, and effectively monitor their clients’ compliance, since voting was open at the hustings. Universal suffrage was denied and property qualifications to vote imposed precisely because, it was argued, only a man of property had the independence to vote according to his conscience; women, as dependents of their husbands, were denied the vote for the same reason. The struggle between merchant and farmer was thus one for independence. For farmers in particular it was the struggle for independence from those debts that allowed merchants to demand sole rights to surpluses and to dictate the price paid for that surplus. Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe had recognized this fact as early as 1792: ‘At present the Farmer has no other means of obtaining such necessaries as he may want, but by bartering the produce of his Land for them with the petty Merchant, who by this means sets his own price on both commodities.’46 A similar situation in Newfoundland, where fish replaced wheat as the staple export, has been described as a form

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

17

of ‘truck system.’ Gerald Sider has documented how the fishermen of Newfoundland were ‘constrained to produce an exchangeable commodity, generally in as large a quantity as possible’ not out of a profit motivation, but because of debt. Fishermen, like the farmers of Upper Canada, appeared to be independent actors, since they controlled their own productive enterprises. But both ‘were dominated at the point of exchange, rather than production.’47 In truck systems, apparently independent farmers and fishermen were reduced to dependent status through debt; they were forced to accept payment for their crops at lower prices and to accept payment in kind with store goods at inflated prices. The long-term debt of customers allowed the merchant to adjust his prices so that he could maintain his 15 per cent profit margin. It was credit (and debt) that allowed the Buchanans to double their investment in a depression by forcing dependent debtors to accept highpriced goods. The truck system was found widely in Great Britain, the Caribbean, Newfoundland, and Australia in the same period.48 It was one of the causes of the Newport Uprising in 1839 in Wales, an uprising that I will later show had striking similarities with the Rebellion of 1837. Its existence in Upper Canada needs to be explored, given the similarities in trade and credit facilities. This economy of debt explains why farmers such as the Children of Peace pursued a subsistence-surplus economic strategy and why they moved to create moral economies. In pursuit of their independence from merchants, they followed a subsistence-surplus strategy that allowed them to maintain their autonomy: they prioritized their subsistence production, stayed out of debt, and sold only their surpluses for cash. This is not to claim that they never engaged in market exchanges. However, as far as they could, they produced their own food, and met their other needs for land, labour, and credit through recourse to their local communities, not merchants. Local sources of credit, as opposed to the international lines of credit operating through merchants, offered political independence, respectability, and protection from economic recessions in the newly forming international financial system. Because it is so well documented, the economic philosophy of David Willson and the elders of the Children of Peace is an excellent illustration of the strategy, although it does not differ greatly from the widespread associational or ‘producers’ economy characteristic of Jacksonian America.49 The moral economy of the Children of Peace was predicated on smallholder subsistence production, an economic regime that fit the radical egalitarianism they inherited from the Society of Friends. Their con-

18

‘Union Is Strength’

cern for the poor, their emphasis on equality, their physical similarity in ‘plain dress,’ and their ethic of mutual aid may have led many visitors to conclude that the Children of Peace were religious communists similar to the Shakers or the Rappites. The Children of Peace, however, were never communal; their moral economy was based on co-operation between independent farm households as a means of escaping dependence on the market, and hence on credit. Merchants were not, however, the only – or principal – creditors in the province. During the 1830s the purchase of land was the largest single cost in establishing a new farm and frequently involved large debts; members of the Children of Peace spent at least a third of their total yearly income on land purchases.50 Yet, this financial burden fell with disproportionate weight on the ‘young heads of families.’ The elders had larger land holdings, more cleared land, more domestic (unpaid) labour, and, hence, larger surpluses. These larger surpluses gave them the leeway to leave their fields for community projects (and, we shall see, to offer subsistence insurance to those in need). The young heads of families, in contrast, had smaller landholdings, less cleared land, less domestic labour, smaller surpluses, and higher debt loads, which meant that they had to prioritize the production of cash crops over community projects. Because of the instability of the British market for wheat, these young farmers could never be sure how much of a surplus would be needed to pay their debts. These young farmers were ‘poor community members’ in two senses: they had the highest debts and, since they prioritized their farm productivity, they participated less in ‘community building.’ The joint stock co-operative ventures that the sect’s elders developed were a means of helping new farmers avoid dependence on the market so they could participate in community projects, such as the construction of the temple and meeting houses. The temple, in particular, then became a symbol of ‘charity,’ the means by which they could resist falling in debt in the market, and hence under the merchants’ control. These younger market-oriented farmers, trapped in debt, were most in need of relief. The Children of Peace responded as a community to their debt crisis by prioritizing subsistence production, on the one hand, and subsidizing the farm production of their younger members, on the other. Their system of mutual aid was based on labour exchanges (work bees), co-operative marketing, a credit union, and for a short time, a land-sharing agreement. For those in immediate crisis, alms and a shelter for the homeless served as a stopgap. So successful was this co-oper-

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

19

ative regime of mutual aid that by 1851 Hope was the most prosperous agricultural community in the province.51 Lest we interpret this moral economy as the product of a communal sect, a radical departure from the cultural and economic norm, I would like to underscore how their co-operative marketing was part of a larger social movement involving farmers from across the Home District (and ultimately, in England itself). The problem of debt was not just that of the Children of Peace. The farmers of the Home District organized the Farmers’ Storehouse Company in 1825, the first producers’ co-operative in Canada, and the Bank of the People in 1835. These were creative, and so far undocumented, examples of the kinds of resistance farmers offered to the economic and political exploitation of the day and of the means by which they sought to protect their respectability. These joint stock companies serve to link the broader transition to capitalism in the province to the political reform movement, and the parallel emergence of deliberative democracy. As joint stock companies with multiple shareholders – each of whom received yearly dividends – they had to adhere to a higher accounting standard, and ironically, may be considered the first ‘maximizing individualists’ driving the capitalist transformation, albeit through co-operative endeavour. But these joint stock companies were also experiments in democratic sociability. They were voluntary associations organized according to democratic principles, and thus fostered the cultural and political values critical to the development of a viable democratic movement. Corporate Capitalism and the Joint Stock Company As useful as the debate on the transition to capitalism in North America has been, it remains focused on questions of individual economic rationality. If, however, neither merchants nor farmers were the engine of capitalist transformation, if neither was the ‘rational maximizer’ of laissez-faire economic theory, how do we account for this structural transformation in the economy of the age? The difficulty with the debate to date is that it remains focused on individual actors and ignores the innovative corporate actors such as banks, insurance companies, and land companies just then beginning to stride the economic stage. Chartered and joint stock companies, due to the number of shareholders and the need to issue dividends annually, adhered to more rigorous accounting standards. Such rigour did not ensure that they were successful rational maximizers but did make it distinctly possible for

20

‘Union Is Strength’

them to be. Corporations, as collective ‘individuals,’ were a new and important form of social organization that transformed not only the economic, but also the political landscape of Upper Canada. In the 1830s there were two types of corporate actors at work in the Upper Canadian economy: the legislatively chartered companies, such as the Bank of Upper Canada, and the unregulated joint stock companies, such as the Farmers’ Storehouse. These two business forms were different in legal standing. Chartered corporations were deemed to have a ‘separate personality … [they were] a [legal] person quite distinct from its members or shareholders,’52 a legal fiction that protected those shareholders with limited liability. In contrast, joint stock companies had been made illegal by the English Bubble Act of 1720. Joint stock companies were little more than extensive partnerships under common law, although the English legislation had limited these to a maximum of six partners. Without incorporation, the company was not considered a ‘separate personality.’ It could not hold property; this was held by trustees, who usually had to provide a bond or security. Without incorporation, the company could neither sue nor be sued at law. And without incorporation, shareholders were personally responsible for the debts of the company to the full extent of their personal property; shareholders were not protected by limited liability. There were, then, significant legal hurdles that made the joint stock company an unwieldy form of partnership.53 Despite these difficulties, the unincorporated joint stock company became increasingly popular in the late eighteenth century in Britain as the economic form through which public works were carried out.54 Subsequent to the Bubble Act, there was a strong sense that all corporations, chartered or otherwise, should only be founded for the general public benefit. Although a limited number of companies were formed for the purpose of for-profit trade, others were simply a way of controlling forms of common property. Sally Griffith notes the importance of non-partisan public meetings ‘called in response to a current problem or an economic opportunity … [that] often led to the founding of new institutions deemed essential to the improvement of the community, ranging from schools and libraries to banks and railroads.’55 It is also important to underscore the ways in which both chartered and joint stock companies were not only economic, but political in nature. Pauline Maier, for example, highlights that among the scores of chartered corporations that came to fruition in the aftermath of the American Revolution were a number of municipal corporations, that is, city

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

21

governments. Indeed, a central critique of the anti-charter sentiment in the post-revolutionary period was that chartered companies formed a ‘government within a government.’56 One reason for the popularity of the joint stock form was that public works, which should be for general public benefit, would otherwise be sacrificed to ‘legislated monopolies’ with ‘exclusive privileges’ such as the Bank of Upper Canada. As late as 1849 even the ‘moderate’ reform politician Robert Baldwin was (reasonably) to complain that ‘unless a stop were made to it, there would be nothing but corporations from one end of the country to the other.’57 Radical reformers, like William Lyon Mackenzie, who opposed all such ‘legislated monopolies,’ saw joint stock associations as the only protection against ‘the whole property of the country … being tied up as an irredeemable appendage to incorporated institutions, and put beyond the reach of individual possession.’58 It is important, however, to underscore the broad definition of the ways in which these companies were ‘economic.’ Although some like the Farmers’ Storehouse were formed for the purpose of for-profit trade, others were simply a way of controlling access to forms of common property. In Upper Canada, for example, schools and even some church buildings, like the temple of the Children of Peace, were organized in this manner: they were community-sponsored public works in areas abdicated by the state. ‘Friendly societies’ were early social welfare associations designed to alleviate the tragedies arising from accident, sickness, and old age; they could be formed on a number of principles, whether neighbourhood, ethnicity, or trade.59 In return for regular subscriptions, they provided relief in case of accident, illness, or death – and in the case of the trade associations – in case of strike. Their organization was democratic, with regular meetings under an elected chairman, usually in a public house. The Carpenters and Joiners’ Friendly Society of Toronto is a case in point: in 1830 they advertised ‘a Meeting … will take place on Tuesday 12th instant at the Tavern of Mr Matthews, corner of Church St and Market Lane in order to forward the objects of the society.’ By 21 December 1833 this friendly society had over £25 on deposit at the ‘Home District Savings Bank, for the earnings of Journeymen Tradesmen, Mechanics, Servants, Labourers, &c.’60 The cordwainers (shoemakers) and tailors similarly held accounts at the same bank. I underscore the ‘public’ nature of the joint stock company as a way of emphasizing the political aspects of this primarily economic form of organization. Joint stock companies were political in a number of sens-

22

‘Union Is Strength’

es. The Farmers’ Storehouse, for example, had to petition the House of Assembly for incorporation, a political process involving established political alliances. Carol Wilton’s seminal work on popular politics in Upper Canada emphasizes that petitioning the Assembly was the primary political activity of the period. The companies could also be political in the same sense as in the Bank of Upper Canada, where economic gains funded particular political figures. In the case of the Farmers’ Storehouse, it helped maintain the ‘respectability’ of the farmers by providing credit, and hence their ‘independent votes’ in elections. The Bank of the People funded William Lyon Mackenzie’s newspaper. However, voluntary associations were political in the more important sense that they were ‘also mini-republics’: self-governing bodies, whose members had equal standing, having freely consented to join an association that devised its own rules and policies, and elected from among their ranks officers who were to carry out their wishes.61 In linking the joint stock company to its public purposes and the rise of the democratic reform movement, I am placing it firmly in the context of the British eighteenth-century Country Party, whose ideology of ‘public virtue’ and opposition to the commercial ideology of the Court Party is said to have influenced radical reformers such as William Lyon Mackenzie, and to a lesser extent, Robert Baldwin.62 The Country Party, as it developed, sought to preserve an independent Parliament from encroachments by the new liberal capitalist state under the control of the Crown. They emphasized the value of selfless political participation for the public good, and the need to protect Parliament from the corruption produced through the pursuit of self-interest. They distrusted the vast expansion of state administration, public credit, and the financial and commercial revolutions that strengthened the power of the state over Parliament. The impact of the Scots on this tradition of civic humanism is central on the formation of both joint stock banking and politicians such as Mackenzie. The Country Party is also said to have had broad influence on the American Revolution and on the Jacksonian Democrats, with whom Mackenzie shared much of his political platform. Here I also underscore its impact on the Owenite socialist movement in Britain. In the Upper Canadian context, the joint stock company is a particularly interesting example of the voluntary association mini-parliament for the way in which it inculcated notions of ‘responsible government’ through its separation of ownership and management.63 Responsible government as it emerged historically in Upper Canada has been taken

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

23

to mean cabinet responsibility to the elected House of Assembly, at their pleasure; in alternate terms, it can apply to the relation of management to stockholders. However, responsible government had a second sense in the case of joint stock companies. Since joint stock companies differed from their chartered counterparts specifically in their lack of limited liability, stockholders were also responsible for all the company’s debts to the full extent of their personal property. It is for this reason that the joint stock company was an incubator of stakeholder democracy. The joint stock company required an unusually high level of vigilance from its members, a word borrowed from the ‘committees of vigilance’ later established by the reformers; they remained ultimately responsible for the actions taken by their representatives on the board of management. This book traces the interconnections between a number of joint stock companies and the reform movement in the 1830s in the Home District.64 These interconnections are people – men like David Willson, Joseph Shepard, Samuel Hughes, and James Lesslie, who served on overlapping boards of management in both economic and political endeavours. They served as the glue for a widely disparate movement of religious dissenters, farmers, urban professionals, and ‘mechanics.’ Hughes, for example, was an elder in the Children of Peace, chairman of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and chairman of most of the reform meetings in the northern half of the Home District. It is their overlapping participation in these multiple economic and political spheres that created a social movement, a wide cross-section of society that came to tolerate differences, as McNairn notes, in pursuit of common goals. It is this focus on the political aspects of the joint stock company that helps clarify how specific ties between the educated professionals of York (Toronto), such as Dr Morrison or lawyers J.H. Price and Robert Baldwin, and the farmers and mechanics of the Home District were forged. Chartered Corporations and the State It is important to underscore the technical illegality and the subversive aspects of the unincorporated joint stock company at the time. Although the joint stock company appeared to share many of the same features as the chartered companies, the lack of separate personality and limited liability made for radically different kinds of relationships between shareholders, directors, and management. The closed oligarchic form of the chartered companies stands in marked contrast to the

24

‘Union Is Strength’

open, democratic form of the joint stock company. Since the chartered company had a ‘separate personality’ from its shareholders, ownership of the concern was divorced from its management. Dr Baldwin, the prominent reform leader, could complain, for example, that despite being a shareholder in the Bank of Upper Canada, he had no idea who his co-owners were.65 This basic lack of transparency in the management of the chartered company granted extraordinary power to its boards of directors, the only shareholders with privileged information about the workings of the concern. If, indeed, we can point to the joint stock company as the crucible for the formation of a democratic culture in Upper Canada, we can similarly underscore the political role of the chartered companies in cementing the political and economic fortunes of the Family Compact. Reformers of the day were quick to paint these chartered companies as ‘licensed monopolies,’ and to underscore their role as ‘political engines,’ as fonts of political patronage. Before 1841 the Upper Canadian legislature created about sixty chartered corporations in all, with forty-two of these created between 1831 and 1838.66 The exact number of joint stock companies cannot be known, since they had no legal existence. The creation of the chartered corporations was a delegation of public power to private organizations on a case-by-case basis to undertake functions that the state would not or could not; no general legislation for incorporation existed. This made the incorporation process difficult and subject to a great deal of political meddling. The Legislative Council, for example, was quick to reserve the bills of incorporation for companies like the Farmers’ Storehouse, created by reformers. The three most critical of these licensed monopolies were the Clergy Corporation, the Bank of Upper Canada, and the Canada Company. These three companies formed the financial backbone of the colonial state, and formed the basis of political power for the Family Compact, the local oligarchy so ably led by the aristocratically minded Archdeacon Strachan. As pointed out above, this ‘aristocracy,’ the Court Party, was at the lead in the development of the liberal capitalist state, and in no way sought to revive some romantic agrarian idyll. These aristocrats were at the forefront of the nascent financial revolution, including the development of banks and paper money. According to historians P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, the ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ that resulted was the driving force of British imperialism.67 The Clergy Corporation was incorporated in 1819 to manage the clergy reserves, and is illustrative of these concerns. The clergy reserves, one-seventh of all lands granted in the province, were created ‘for the

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

25

support and maintenance of a Protestant clergy,’ in lieu of tithes. The revenue from the lease of these lands was claimed by Strachan on behalf of the Church of England. These reserves were directly administered by the Crown, which, in turn, came under increasing political pressure from other Protestant bodies. However, Strachan was appointed to the Executive Council, the advisory body to the lieutenant governor, in 1815. From this position of influence, he began to push for the Church of England’s autonomous control of the clergy reserves on the model of the Clergy Corporation created in Lower Canada in 1817.68 Strachan called, in other words, for a delegation of the state’s role in administering the reserves and their revenues to an incorporated body whose membership was composed of the clergymen of the Church of England alone. Although all clergymen in the Church of England were members of the body corporate, the act prepared in 1819 by Strachan’s former student, Attorney General John Beverley Robinson, made a quorum of three for meetings and also appointed the inspector general and the surveyor general to the board; these two public officers also sat on the Legislative Council with Strachan. Given the poor road conditions and the heavy workload of most clergy, their attendance at the quarterly meetings of the corporation at York was bound to be sparse. This arrangement thus allowed Strachan to conduct the business of the corporation with the aid of the two public officers, and it played a substantial role in unifying the interests of church and state, under his direction. Between 1819 and 1827 the board met thirty-seven times, and Strachan and the public officers held the balance of power on twenty-seven of those occasions. In the phrases of the reformers, Strachan had acquired a ‘licensed monopoly’ from the state for the clergy reserves, and this corporation was largely under his oligarchic control. Significantly, the corporation’s officers received substantial salaries. A similar pattern emerges in the chartering of the Canada Company, in England, which served the same function with the Crown reserves that the Clergy Corporation served with the clergy reserves. William Allan, the local co-commissioner (manager) of the company, was a close friend of Strachan, active in St James Church, a local magistrate in the Court of Quarter Sessions (which administered local government), an associate judge in the Court of King’s Bench, and a member of the Legislative and Executive councils. Allan’s positions thus transgressed the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government espoused by republicans of the period. Allan was also, from

26

‘Union Is Strength’

1822, president of the Bank of Upper Canada, the third of the chartered corporations that dominated the province’s economy.69 The Crown Reserves, also one-seventh of all lands granted, were to provide the provincial executive with an independent source of revenue not under the control of the elected assembly. Few chose to lease the reserves, however, as long as free grants of land were still available. The lieutenant governor increasingly found himself depending on the customs duties shared with, but collected in Lower Canada. After a dispute with the lower province on the relative proportions to be allocated to each, these duties were withheld, forcing the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada to search for new sources of revenue. It is important to note that the Canada Company was created as a means of generating government revenue that was not under the control of the elected assembly; it exploited the reserves in the same way as the Clergy Corporation did.70 The plan for the Canada Company was also promoted by the province’s attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, then studying law at Lincoln’s Inn in London. Robinson was a close friend of Undersecretary of State for the Colonies Robert Wilmot-Horton, who played a key role in formulating colonial policy. The lieutenant governor’s financial crisis and the influence of Wilmot-Horton in London led to a quick adoption of Robinson’s scheme to sell the Crown Reserves to a new land company that would provide the provincial government with annual payments of between £15,000 to £20,000. The Canada Company was chartered in London in 1826. After three years of mismanagement by John Galt, the company hired William Allan and Thomas Mercer Jones to manage the company’s Upper Canadian business. Jones was to manage the ‘Huron Tract,’ and Allan to sell the Crown Reserves already surveyed in other districts. As a commissioner of the Canada Company, president of the Bank of Upper Canada, and an executive and legislative councillor, Allan, like Strachan, played a key role in solidifying the Family Compact and ensuring its influence within the colonial state. Their overlapping membership on the boards of these licensed monopolies and on the Executive and Legislative councils served to integrate the economic and political activities of church, state, and the financial sector.71 These overlapping memberships reinforced the oligarchic nature of power in the colony, and allowed the administration to operate without any effective elective check – a form of ‘state capitalism’ and associated ‘despotism’ whose abuses fomented a call for perestroika, if you will, and open rebellion.72

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

27

Allan also became president of the Bank of Upper Canada in 1822.73 The bank’s principal promoters were Strachan, and Allan. York was too small to warrant such an institution, as indicated by the inability of its promoters to raise even the minimal 10 per cent of the £200,000 authorized capital required for start-up. It succeeded where the Bank of Kingston had failed only because it had the political influence to have this minimum reduced by half, and because the provincial government subscribed for two thousand of its eight thousand shares. The government appointed four of the bank’s fifteen directors that, as with the Clergy Corporation, made for a tight bond between the nominally private company and the state. The Bank of Upper Canada was, quite literally, a licensed monopoly to print money. Paper currency, now ubiquitous, was then an innovation; the cultural assumptions on which it was based were still contested, as they are in many other places in the world today.74 Equally ubiquitous today is banking, although it also only emerged widely in this period. However, while ‘most basic textbooks on economic history abound with detail and description of the origins and operation of the technology of the industrial revolution … [providing] an extensive diet of steam engines with separate condensers and reciprocating motion; of water frames, spinning jennies and mules … when it comes to banking and finance, however, the treatment of the subject is much more patchy.’75 Paper currency differs from coinage in at least one crucial way: while both paper and specie could serve as a medium of exchange, enabling economic transactions, they did not both serve as a store of wealth in quite the same manner. Gold and silver have intrinsic value, whether coined or not, whereas paper does not. A paper currency must be backed by something else, its value assured by its convertibility into commodities with intrinsic value. And herein lies the basic question about the Bank of Upper Canada according to its critics: should banks be allowed to issue an unbacked currency, to ‘manufacture paper money’ with no intrinsic value to serve as a medium of exchange? We have now naturalized the alchemical ability of banks to create money and to bear interest. This Faustian art is our philosopher’s stone, seemingly transforming dross into gold. When Goethe completed the second part of his poetic tragedy, Faust, in 1831, the plot turned on this critical point: having made his pact with the devil, Faust learns the trick, and shows the emperor how to create money by issuing a paper currency. Goethe was not alone in his moral judgment of the banker’s art, the few experi-

28

‘Union Is Strength’

ments in paper currency in his time having ended in economic catastrophe. What then, is the trick of this philosopher’s stone? Banks are, in one sense, a store of wealth. Although few banks of the period accepted deposits, they did start with the combined capital contributed by their shareholders. This, however, is not what they loaned out. When a bank was approached for a loan, it would issue a promissory note, a banknote, promising to pay the bearer in specie on demand. Promissory notes of all kinds, including those of merchants and their customers, were taken regularly in payment as a medium of exchange, as a kind of currency. The acceptability of a note depended on the credit worthiness, or respectability of the issuer. Given the general scarcity of specie in the province, most local merchants also issued ‘bons’ to their customers in payment. As long as the respectability of the source remained unchallenged, a promissory note (like a cheque) could pass from hand to hand serving like money, that is, a circulating medium enabling economic exchanges, even though it was not legal tender. Most promissory notes had a due date; for a merchant’s bons it was usually in October. Customers were discouraged from cashing in the bon for specie at any other time by having to pay a 12.5 per cent discount, more than double the legally allowable interest rate.76 A bank such as the Bank of Upper Canada, however, issued far more promissory notes than it actually had specie to redeem, and it had to redeem those notes on demand. The bank’s notes were not, in fact, representative of wealth at all. Each note was a representation of a debt – of a promise to pay the bearer; and herein lies the irony. The payment of interest on this debt was reversed and paid to the bank by the individual who borrowed the bank’s promissory note. Banks, by issuing large amounts of unbacked paper notes – ‘empty promises’ – were among the largest of debtors, but in issuing these notes, they created credit, expanded the money supply, and eased the flow of economic transactions. The bank had an incentive to issue as many notes as possible: it earned 6 per cent interest on each note, even though each note represented its debt. The bank would face catastrophe if all its promissory notes were presented for payment in specie at once, if a ‘run’ were made on the bank. This was, in fact, one of the more potent weapons in the bank wars of the 1830s. Competing banks would collect their competitor’s notes until, having a sufficiently large number, they would present them all at once and demand payment in specie. Any bank that failed to redeem its promissory notes on demand had to close until it

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

29

could do so, and this closure was frequently permanent. The alchemical trick of a paper currency, then, was to find the balance between making interest on as large a debt as possible, without being caught short of enough specie to redeem those notes actually presented for payment. The longer a note stayed in circulation, the smaller a specie reserve the bank needed. Since Upper Canada had little specie in circulation, notes would circulate widely. As long as the Bank of Upper Canada remained a monopoly, it had little fear of overextending itself. Even Solicitor General Henry John Boulton, the author of the incorporation bill, admitted the bank was a ‘terrible engine in the hands of the provincial administration.’77 It was easy, he noted, for the bank to ‘acquire the most entire Controul [sic] or monopoly of the Merchantile transactions of the town … and then by a sudden refusal to accommodate the same persons any farther, which they can always find plausible reasons for doing, and by requiring prompt payment of all paper outstanding, may throw the whole Business of a flourishing town into disorder.’ The bank was clearly in the hands of the Family Compact; reformers such as Dr W.W. Baldwin and the Ridout family, who contested the bank’s highly speculative and inflationary note issues, were effectively blocked from positions of influence. Even the House of Assembly, which had chartered the bank, had little luck in breaking the veil of secrecy that enveloped the bank’s management. The bank was very much a closed corporation, even to its own shareholders. The Bank of Upper Canada, the Clergy Corporation, and the Canada Company served as the financial backbone of the colonial state, and of the small group, the Family Compact, that directed these closed institutions. The Canada Company provided the executive branch of government, the lieutenant governor, with revenues independent of elective control. The Bank of Upper Canada, as the largest creditor in the province, effectively controlled the colony’s economy of debt and through its note issues, enabled mercantile domination of trade, as well as the land speculations of the Family Compact. These three chartered corporations represent a delegation of state control to nonelective bodies that shielded their directors with separate identity and limited liability. A Tale of Two Kingdoms How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Luke 18:24

30

‘Union Is Strength’

The competing visions of a heavenly kingdom on earth promoted by David Willson and the Venerable John Strachan both had their economic roots in new forms of collective, corporate, action. The town of York, and the village of Hope, tethered by Yonge Street, a military road and the road to market, represented their field of dreams. The two settlements represent the spectrum of market participation. Viewed as the hinterland exploited by York’s merchants, the Home District was ensnared in an economy of debt, the chains of credit leading back to Britain. From the viewpoint of the new Israelites lost in the wilderness of Upper Canada, who established their kingdom of God at Hope, this ‘land of milk and honey’ allowed them to develop a moral economy. They entered the market at York collectively, co-operatively, to escape the debt bondage that had ensnared them. The competition between these alternate visions of what Upper Canada should become was not simply economic – a farmer’s respectability, his economic independence, was critical to his political independence as well. Those ensnared in debt found their votes reduced to yet another commodity, to be bought and sold. The co-operative moral economy of the Children of Peace was thus critical to their continued participation in the democratic reform politics of the era. However, as I have argued, the form of these collective, co-operative joint stock companies also served as a model for reform politics; it is the democratic form of their collective, economic endeavours that informed their fight for responsible government. Given the general lack of any but the most basic systematic economic or population records and statistics for the period, tracing the political impact of these alternate economic forms is difficult, and can only be suggestive rather than conclusive. In a number of other colonial contexts, the influence of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ has been traced through the analysis of overlapping membership of government and political officers and boards of directors. We need only look at the overlapping membership of Archdeacon Strachan on the boards of the Clergy Corporation, the Bank of Upper Canada, Upper Canada College, and the Executive and Legislative councils to see how interlocks between corporate boards serve to integrate the different forms of corporate capital and the state.78 Historian J.K. Johnson also analysed the influence of the Upper Canadian elite between 1837 and 1840 according to overlapping leadership roles on the boards of the main social, political, and economic institutions in the community. He concluded that the Family Compact ‘were not a political elite taking political decisions in a vacuum,

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

31

but an overlapping elite whose political and economic activities cannot be entirely separated from each other. They might even be called “entrepreneurs,” most of whose political views may have been highly conservative but whose economic outlook was clearly “developmental.”’79 This book, however, uniquely examines the similar interlocking board memberships that connect the unincorporated joint stock companies with the political reform movement. Here the problem is more complex. E.P. Thompson refers to the poorly documented and voiceless world of ‘mechanics,’ tradesmen, and labourers as the ‘opaque society.’80 The joint stock companies of the 1830s are poorly documented, and little has been written about either the companies themselves or their directors. Men such as David Willson, Samuel Hughes, and Joseph Shepard represent connective nodes in the more extensive networks of joint stock companies that they managed, and their broader impact in the reform movement signified their ability to link these networks into more complex wholes; yet, neither they nor these joint stock companies have entered into the standard historical narratives of the period. To trace these interconnections, I draw on the ‘microsociological’ methods of economic sociologist Michel Callon’s ‘actor network theory.’ Callon emphasizes that an actor’s ability to act depends on his or her participation in a network: ‘The notion of the actor and the idea of the network simply referred to different dimensions of the same thing. In effect, the formation of actor-networks generated specific worlds of actors. The identity, capacity and strength of an actor were relational.’81 By following actor-networks, we see how particular actors gained the influence they did. This kind of analysis, for example, underlies my discussion of the Types Riots in Toronto in 1826, during which William Lyon Mackenzie’s printing press was destroyed. By analysing the actor-networks of the rioters, the otherwise unnoted impact of the Bank of Upper Canada in the riots is disclosed. This approach can be characterized as a form of microsociology, as opposed to the macrosociology adopted by most social historians. This tentative economic exploration generally follows the actor-networks of the best-known reformer of the period, William Lyon Mackenzie. Mackenzie was one of the principal actors in the drama as it unfolded, but as a journalist he also provides us with the single largest documentary resource for the period. Mackenzie’s journalistic and political careers are drawn on to provide illustrations of the economic processes, the crisis, and the innovations that have generally escaped notice in our historical accounts of the period. In the following chap-

32

‘Union Is Strength’

ters, for example, this approach looks specifically at the well-known stories of the Types Riot, and Mackenzie’s expulsion from the House of Assembly, to explore the role of debt in the politics of the Home District. By examining the lesser-known stories of men such as Henry Ausman, a German farmer in Markham whose case was championed by Mackenzie, a stark picture of the Bank of Upper Canada’s role in the legal abuse of imprisonment for debt is revealed. This book’s structure is threefold. First it examines Upper Canada’s ‘economy of debt,’ the legal framework for economic transactions in the colony and their political implications. It does this by revisiting the standard historical narratives of the period, the Types Riot, and Mackenzie’s expulsion from the legislature, and in so doing, follows Mackenzie’s actor-networks into the ‘opaque society’ revealed in his writing and the parliamentary record. Chapter 1, on pauper immigration and the creation of Toronto’s House of Industry, highlights both the fears of pauperization of the farmers of the Home District, but also their politicization; it points to some early attempts to preserve their ‘independence’ and ‘respectability’ against the dangers of the economy of debt. Taken together, the first chapters lay bare the economic and political framework within which the poor in Upper Canada lived, and carefully document the nature of the threats to their ‘respectability.’ Then the book examines two of the joint stock companies formed by the farmers of the Home District in the face of this economic and political repression. Chapter 3 documents the emergence of the Farmers’ Storehouse and the role of the Children of Peace in its management. The Farmers’ Storehouse was the first co-operative in Canada; it sold farmers’ wheat, and also sold them their necessities at lower prices, thereby helping them escape dependence on merchants for credit. For a short period, the Farmers’ Storehouse also sought to establish itself as a bank, so that it could provide its members with further loans. The model was the charity fund of the Children of Peace. Chapter 5 examines the further history of this attempt to establish a joint stock bank in the context of the ‘bank wars’ of the period. Their only success was the Bank of the People. However, as farmers sought to preserve their independence and respectability through this new form of economic organization, the colony’s elite attempted to use their political and economic power to seize control of these innovative institutions. The remaining chapters examine the relationship between the leaders of this farmers’ co-operative and the emergent radical reform movement as it came to be organized as the Canadian Alliance Society and

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

33

the Toronto Political Union. Prominent local political leaders such as Joseph Shepard, a miller near York Mills, and Samuel Hughes, an elder of the Children of Peace, also served as presidents of the Farmers’ Storehouse. As reformers faced mounting political violence after Mackenzie’s expulsion from the legislature, they sought to create a safe haven in Toronto, Shepard’s Hall, where they could meet in safety, a hall in which the Children of Peace also preached. Their preaching, however, had political overtones, and their economic experiment, a credit union created in 1832, served as a model emulated more broadly in the petitioning movement for a provincial loan office, and eventually, in the Bank of the People. Shepard’s Hall itself moved on a number of occasions: from the Old Court House to the new market buildings, to its final home in Turton’s Building. The Old Court House was later transformed by reformers into a house of industry, a shelter for the homeless. Turton’s Building was, lastly, also home to Mackenzie’s newspaper, the Constitution, as well as to religious groups such as the Children of Peace. It is this overlap of political, economic, and religious activities that marks both the creativity and the complexity of this tale of the emergence of a culture of democratic deliberation in the decade before the rebellion. This microsociological approach is enhanced, and potential lacunae filled in, by placing these events in broader international context. Upper Canada was hardly unique, and the events that transpired there have their parallels in a variety of social movements in both Britain and the United States. The Reform movement in Upper Canada has thus been contextualized in terms of developments in British political culture, that is, the development of political unions, the Reform Act of 1832, and the Chartist petition of 1839. I have, however, been careful to link these political developments with growing economic transformations and the resistance they provoked. The increasing politicization of the English working classes, as reflected in the Chartist petitions, grew out of an alliance between radical democrats and Owenite socialists during the 1830s. The Owenites had long sought a communitybased alternative to the degradation of the English Poor Laws. As their communitarian movement collapsed, they became politicized by the betrayals of the Reform Act, which denied the working classes the vote, and the Poor Law reforms of 1834, which threatened the unemployed with imprisonment in ‘houses of industry.’ The Owenites joined with the radicals in the political union movement to push for more democratic reforms, the People’s Charter.

34

‘Union Is Strength’

By placing the Upper Canadian Reform movement in this broader context, the microsociological approach taken by this book is able to make its contribution. While the link between British Owenites and Chartists is just being recognized, its focus has been on the political program of the Owenites as they were enlisted in the Chartist movement. Given the smaller scale of the Upper Canadian Reform movement, its specifically economic agenda emerges far more clearly. This book thus contributes to the literature by documenting the ways by which Owenite co-operativism, broadly defined, contributed to the joint stock banking rage of the 1830s. Analysis of co-operativism in the period has been preoccupied with consumer co-operatives and labour exchanges, with little attention paid to the revolution in financial institutions, and the specific ways in which these socialists sought to create credit unions. By documenting the emergence of a credit union among the Children of Peace, its transformation through the consumer co-operative of the Farmers’ Storehouse to the creation of the Bank of the People, we can see how the Upper Canadian Reform movement, the Canadian Alliance Society, was knit together during the 1830s. It is a short walk, I would argue, from the Bank of the People to the People’s Charter, from efforts to shore up the economic respectability of the most vulnerable to their political organization to protect their independence.

1 Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

Of course, a proportion of the emigrants to our North American Colonies belong to that philanthropic class of men who, under the appellation of Socialistes, Communistes, or Liberals, are to be met with in every corner of the Old World. Their doctrine is, Community of goods: but they have no goods at all. They preach – Division of property: but they have no property to divide. So that their principle is; – not so much to give all they have (for they have nothing to give) to other people; – as that other people should give all they have to them. Sir Francis Bond Head, The Emigrant, 1846

In the decade ending in 1837, the population of Upper Canada doubled, to 397,489, increased in large part by erratic spurts of displaced paupers, the ‘surplus population’ of the British Isles. Historian Rainer Baehre estimates that between 1831 and 1835 a bare minimum of one-fifth of all emigrants to the province arrived totally destitute, forwarded by their parishes.1 These abjectly impoverished paupers were just the tip of the iceberg, and still larger numbers skated the thin line between just getting by and destitution. The line between the two represented debt, and potentially jail. All but a limited number of farmers and mechanics had significant debts, and it took little to strip them of their small ‘competence’ and their respectability. For those threatened by impoverishment, ‘friendly societies’ and charity played a critical, although underexamined by historians, social insurance role. The working poor treated charity as a form of insurance that would help them maintain their independence and respectability during periods of unemployment. In the words of Lieutenant Governor Sir Francis Bond Head, it

36

‘Union Is Strength’

was these farmers and mechanics, who had ‘no property to divide,’ who were the ones preaching ‘division of property.’ This conception of charity came under increasing attack throughout the 1830s by laissezfaire capitalists such as the new lieutenant governor, who was intent on creating a disciplined working class through the creation of new houses of industry, prisons for the poor. The pauper immigrants arriving in York, which became Toronto in 1834, were the redundant agricultural workers and artisans whose swelling ranks had sent the cost of parish-based poor relief in England spiralling – a financial crisis that generated frenetic public debate and the overhaul of the Poor Laws in 1834. Relief, it was declared, would henceforth be restricted to the ‘deserving poor.’ The ‘able bodied’ – although unemployed – would be excluded, unless they entered workhouses, whose Dickensian conditions are now legendary. ‘Assisted emigration,’ a second solution to the problem touted by the parliamentary undersecretary in the Colonial Office, Robert Wilmot-Horton, would remove them permanently from the parish poor rolls. Horton’s success in ‘shovelling out the paupers’ was acutely felt in Toronto, where a shantytown was fast forming on the beaches, and along the Don River.2 It was not cruelty that led the three thousand citizens of Toronto, in 1831, to drive away a steamboat filled with two hundred and fifty emigrants, described by Archdeacon Strachan as ‘of the lowest class of paupers, with small helpless children who exhibited an appearance of abject misery and want, such as we have never before witnessed in the English labouring class.’3 Although the English Poor Laws had never applied in Upper Canada, Strachan had been active in founding a voluntary charity, the Society for the Relief of Strangers, in 1817. This society changed its name to the Society for the Relief of the Sick and Destitute in 1828, when a surge of eight hundred paupers overtaxed its resources, forcing Strachan to open the leadership of the society to the ministers of other denominations.4 Although the society collected £170, its expenses topped £201, raising the concern it would be unable to meet continuing demands. It was in this context the society created an Emigrant Asylum with some state support (paid for by a 5 shilling tax on all immigrants), again managed by the resident clergy. This large barracks had room for fifty-four people – obviously inadequate for the two hundred and fifty paupers who arrived in just that one ship in June 1831. Between May and August 1831, a total of 582 men, women, and children had passed through the Emigrant Asylum, staying an average of two weeks;5 the Society for the Relief of the

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

37

Sick and Destitute offered rations to a further 773 between April and December. Lamenting their condition, Strachan appealed to Lieutenant Governor Colborne: ‘Many have died and the Town of York has been overwhelmed with Widows or Orphans and with families where Fathers in despair of bettering their situation have deserted so that in addition to the support of the Sick in Hospital the small population of York has the necessity of furnishing bread to upwards of four hundred mouths, a number nearly equal to those who are able to contribute.’6 These ‘assisted’ pauper emigrants arrived just as the colonial government changed its land-granting policies, thereby removing any hope they might be given frontier homesteads like the early assisted emigrants who settled in Peterborough and Perth. In order to increase its income, and curb the House of Assembly’s fight for control of all provincial revenues, the government had sold all of its Crown Reserves to the Canada Company; the Clergy Corporation was also given permission to sell one-fourth of the clergy reserves. The Crown Lands Department was also instructed to end free grants in newly surveyed townships.7 With the option of leasing a reserve, or obtaining a free grant effectively ended, the paupers arriving from Great Britain had little choice but to mortgage their futures or seek employment, however temporary or low paid. And here lies the irony of Britain’s assisted emigration solution to its unemployment problem: shovelling out the paupers simply transferred the problem of their support to Upper Canada. As Strachan noted, four hundred household heads in Toronto were supporting a further four hundred paupers. It was for these immigrants, having mortgaged themselves for land, that the province’s ‘economy of debt’ proved particularly burdensome. Baehre suggests that it was this recognized problem that accounts for the surprising choice of Sir Francis Bond Head, a former assistant Poor Law commissioner, as the province’s first civilian lieutenant governor in 1836. The Poor Law Amendment Act was the product of a lengthy and rancorous debate about the most appropriate means of relieving the English poor. The new Poor Law sought to create a disciplined working class of wage labourers. It outlawed the granting of relief as a form of wage subsidy (the ‘subsistence insurance’ sought by the underand unemployed), and decreed that relief could only be administered within the confines of a workhouse, or ‘house of industry.’ Sir Francis was a retired half-pay army officer when in 1834 he was named an assistant Poor Law commissioner in Kent, charged with implementing these reforms; he was to establish Poor Law Unions in Kent that were to

38

‘Union Is Strength’

take over the task of pauper relief from parochial authorities, eliminate outdoor relief, and establish workhouses. As a form of relief, however, the Poor Law Unions were an abandonment of attempts to ensure minimum wages or a minimum standard of living. In the early 1830s Kent had been subject to widespread riots by agricultural workers who sought to attain a living wage and end rural unemployment.8 The Captain Swing Riots, as they came to be known, involved little direct confrontation: clandestine acts of robbery, arson, assault, and machine breaking – the ‘weapons of the weak’9 – under the direction of the illusory Captain Swing were used to intimidate farmers to meet wage demands. These demands were frequently met only through subsidies from the parish poor rates; they are an example of the ‘moral economy’ documented by E.P. Thomson that offered ‘subsistence insurance’ to the unemployed. The Poor Law reforms were an attempt to suppress these riots and to end the subsidies that allowed the smallest, least efficient farmer to compete on equal terms with the largest, most efficient farms of the ‘improving’ gentry. In so doing, such reforms sought to destroy the moral economy of the countryside – and its social welfare functions. If, however, Head was appointed lieutenant governor to apply the principles of the 1834 Poor Law legislation in Upper Canada, and thus create a working class here, the proposed solution – the workhouse – was ill-fitted to a province with little capital to employ workers. In Kent, Head related, he was consistently met with one question in all of the meetings of parish officials that he organized: ‘Does the new proposed system offer us any means of employing the immense number of labourers, who, with every desire to seek employment, are now totally out of work? – for that is our sole evil.’10 The problem that the new Poor Law sought to ameliorate – the indolence of the pauper – was thus of lesser concern to them than unemployment and the riots that ensued. Head offered little to reassure them except faith in the dictums of ‘political economy’: ‘It would be for the Legislature, by other Acts, to provide for the alleviation of the evil of which these inquiries so naturally referred. Emigration to the colonies might and should be encouraged; the allotment system might and should be encouraged; but that even the Poor-Law Amendment Act, though it could not undertake directly to meet the evil, would, if it had fair play given to it, so operate as indirectly to diminish the evil to an enormous extent.’ The house of industry could not create jobs, leaving the initial problem of pauperism unresolved; the working class that it produced would remain unem-

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

39

ployed, further immiserated, and without independence, respectability, or political voice. The steamboat arriving with two hundred and fifty paupers aboard is iconic of this problem. Within the current debate on the nature of poor relief in Upper Canada, the assumption is made that the early citizens of the province shared the same values as Head and differed only in their interests.11 It is assumed that all Upper Canadians subscribed to the laissez-faire principles of the Poor Law reformers, and differed only on the question of who, the British or the local taxpayers, would meet the costs of pauper immigration to the province; it would be natural, then, for the citizens of Toronto to ‘shovel the poor’ a little farther, to burden someone else.12 Both state and private citizens are said to have administered relief to the poor along the guidelines set by the ‘principle of less eligibility’ introduced by the Poor Law Amendment Act. The principle is said to have been introduced to the province through the creation of the Toronto House of Industry in 1837, and through enabling legislation for a system of public poorhouses passed the same year.13 By introducing the institutionalized work test as a means of excluding the able-bodied unemployed, and hence the ‘undeserving poor,’ from receiving relief, the Toronto House of Industry is said to have ensured a ready supply of cheap, willing labourers for its philanthropic backers. This policy was ostensibly the work of Sir Francis Bond Head. Russell Smandych has criticized this state-centric model of the introduction of the poorhouses without, however, challenging the wider assumption of the laissez-faire principles lying behind them. He has argued that historians have failed to distinguish between the Toronto House of Industry, a private venture, and Head’s enabling legislation of 1837, under whose terms no house of industry was ever established in Upper Canada. He maintains that the privately organized house of industry reflects a continuity, rather than a radical break in relief policy, and calls for a re-examination of the ‘historical continuity in the manner in which Upper Canadians went about providing relief to the poor, and the broader macro-historical context within which Upper Canadian poor relief developments occurred.’14 Smandych’s re-examination, however, remains focused on the laissez-faire principles of the Tory usurpers of the Toronto House of Industry, which, I would argue, is not the best example of that continuity. The Toronto House of Industry was not, in fact, the initiative of Toronto’s Tory elite as Smandych suggests, but of a small group of reformers and dissenting ministers, led by James Lesslie and Dr W.W. Baldwin. Lesslie’s inspiration, in my view, was the same

40

‘Union Is Strength’

set of economic and cultural values, the ‘moral economy,’ that led the Children of Peace to establish the House of Affliction in Hope by 1832, which was most likely the first shelter for the homeless in the province. The reformers sought, successfully as Smandych demonstrates, to establish a house of industry on alternate principles: it continued to offer more outdoor than indoor relief, and placed its emphasis on employment creation. We can contrast this set of Tory-controlled institutions with an alternate model of ‘assisted emigration’ and charity that did not seek to create a labouring class, but sought instead to ‘preserve a man in his occupation,’ that is, to preserve his ‘respectability’ and independence as a ‘freeholder.’ It is this alternate model that moved the Children of Peace to build the House of Affliction in the village of Hope before 1832 and the Toronto reformers to start the Toronto House of Industry in 1837. If we are seeking a clearer vision of the continuity in early Upper Canadian poverty relief efforts, we might best turn to the House of Affliction of the Children of Peace. The Toronto House of Industry was started by the reformers in the unused courthouse on Richmond Street in January 1837; this was the same building in which the Children of Peace regularly preached their religious message to an audience of ‘servant-girls, working-lads, and apprentice boys about town’ during the early 1830s. This is also the same building where David Willson addressed the General Convention of Delegates in February 1834. This is the building that the reformers went on to use as their first meeting hall. Willson’s message was not far from that which Head derided: ‘the burden of his discourse seemed to be the injustice practiced towards the world by all those who possess an abundant share of the good things of life. That they are all usurpers and tyrants; that there ought neither to be masters nor servants; that all mankind are equal; and that it is the duty of the poor to pull down the rich.’15 Only by placing their economic system within its wider political and religious contexts can we come to understand why the Children of Peace devoted so much of their efforts to constructing their ornate and expensive temple. This ornate, three-tiered structure was not intended for regular worship, but for once-monthly alms services ‘to sacrifice to God, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked.’16 Under continual legal and political attack by the province’s elite, the Children of Peace justified their oppositional economic organization in religious terms. In building the temple they demonstrated to their neighbours that they were God’s chosen people, and that their alternative values had sacred

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

41

legitimacy. Giving to the poor was not a simple economic act to be regulated by poor laws, but a moral requirement mandated by God. It is this moral mandate, I would argue, that moved the reformers to circumvent Head’s enabling legislation and found the House of Industry on alternate principles, and to also create the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and the Bank of the People. In each case, reformers sought to create a specific kind of economic institution to address the problems of those whose respectability was being challenged. The poor thereby gained political independence, and found themselves participating in institutions that fostered oppositional democratic values and skills. The battle for control of the Toronto House of Industry must therefore be viewed in terms of these larger international debates on poverty relief. Despite its small size, and peripheral location, the new city of Toronto was a microcosm of the empire of which it was a part. It is only in attending to the larger metropolitan movements that the smaller ripples in Toronto are thrown into relief. In evaluating such parallels, we need to avoid the suggestion that these similarities are only a British cultural export. They are also more than mere (if telling) coincidences; rather, these parallels point to the similar structural tensions and social conflicts that existed in both societies, such that Owenite socialism flourished even in the periphery. These parallels all point to Toronto’s status as a frontier cutting edge, rather than a provincial backwater. A Moral Economy [Hope] is celebrated from some motley sect having fixed themselves in it, headed by a David Willson, a sort of Mohammed – who, although possessing an extensive harem is not quite so jealous of its houris, as his illustrious predecessor in concupiscence, ‘holding all things in common.’ It is not a little singular that that demi-semi-any-thing-arian, W.L. Mackenzie, should discover in this ranting, ravaging sect every thing in accordance with his views of religion and morality. What with the influence of music, and the still softer attractions – the founder of this new sect has managed to induce many farmers to dispose of their farms, to take an acre lot in this new village of Priapus. Alas! how melancholy to contemplate a man forming a religion on the wreck of morality, and increasing the number of his votaries by holding them out to the unrestrained indulgence of their libidinous appetites. Thomas Rolph (1836)17

42

‘Union Is Strength’

An alternative model of non-state directed ‘assisted emigration’ can be found in the village of Hope. The Children of Peace were neither promiscuous nor communists, although they did preach an equitable division of property. The village provides an example of a widespread early nineteenth-century phenomenon, the ‘backwoods utopia’ or ‘patent office model of the Good Society.’18 As will be discussed shortly, such communities were widely found in the United States, in Britain, and in its colonies where they are viewed as a case in point of Owenite socialism. This particular community assumed its shape in the early 1830s, when its members formed a ‘joint stock democracy,’ completed their temple, and began land sharing, co-operative marketing, and a credit union. ‘Relieving the poor among them’ was the primary impetus for this economic reorganization of the Children of Peace. Yet the delivery of relief to the poor – charity – has provided a curiously underexplored window on the process of communitarian development in the early nineteenth century, the ‘Socialistes, Communistes, or Liberals’ described by Head. One exception is Gregory Claeys’ study of Owenite Socialism. Claeys’ study carefully details the growth of Owen’s economic thought out of seventeenth-century English economic ideals of ‘fair exchange, just price, and the right to charity.’19 While analysis of the English moral economy has tended to focus on the ‘mob’ culture of fair exchange and just price, the right to charity was similarly challenged during the same period by Malthusian arguments, starting in 1798 and culminating with the introduction of the new Poor Law. ‘Utopian socialist’ economic thought such as Owen’s was a reaction to the laissez-faire impetus of Poor Law reform. Claeys notes that ‘Owen’s “Plan” began as a grandiose but otherwise not exceptionally unusual workhouse scheme to place the unemployed poor in newly built rural communities.’20 The spurt of nineteenth-century Owenite communal experiments in Britain and North America represents the ideological and institutional elaboration of ‘moral economy’ ideals. Upper Canada, at the extreme periphery of the European economy, was, I argue, similarly embroiled in such debates. Moral economies like that of the Children of Peace are ethically based on an assumed ‘right to subsistence,’ which they guarantee by providing ‘subsistence insurance,’ or charity. The American Quaker farmers from whom the Children of Peace came had learned that everyone faced real crisis, want, and need at one time or another, and that individuals could prosper only if the community as a whole protected its members through the principle ‘Do unto others as you would have

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

43

them do unto you.’21 Their economic culture was the product of a reformation in Quakerism in the late eighteenth century led by influential ministers such as John Woolman, who in his Plea for the Poor, called for a withdrawal from the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. For them, charity was a religiously motivated response to human need, a provisioning of subsistence insurance to maintain the autonomy or respectability of the farm household. Like the Mennonites, they argued that charity should be dispensed to the poor to help them ‘continue [their] occupation,’ and not when they ‘no longer had anything left.’22 The emergence of the moral economy of the Children of Peace out of this subsistence strategy is typical of the wider process through which so many backwoods utopias sprang into being. As Arthur Bestor notes of the newly settled states adjacent to Upper Canada: ‘During a period of precisely fifty years, beginning in 1805, when the first communitarian colony was planted in the Old Northwest, at least ninety-nine different experiments were actually commenced in the United States. Nearly half of these – forty-five to be exact – were in the Old Northwest, strictly defined. Another twenty-eight were in areas which belonged to the same general cultural region … Such a clear-cut localization of communitarian ideas in time and place can hardly be fortuitous. It is the kind of fact that cries aloud for explanation in terms of historical relationships.’23 The localization in time and place of communitarian groups like the Children of Peace can be rooted in the common dilemma of farmers and artisans being integrated into the newly opened regional and international markets in farm produce for the first time.24 These farmers were coerced into the market on unequal terms by their debts, their mortgages. Rising land prices forced new families either to move to the frontier where subsistence farming was possible or to engage in explicit market-oriented farming to meet their higher mortgage costs in settled areas.25 For many religious groups the new role of the market altered relations within their households and between households, resulting in ethical turmoil and conflicts. The Children of Peace were no exception to this general trend. By 1830 they were torn by disputes between their elders and the ‘profit-oriented’ (but poorer) young heads of families.26 Conflicts emerged within the Children of Peace when economic conditions changed in the wider society, reducing some members to dependency – poverty – a position in which they required ‘relief.’ No records survive as to which members required such help, although recent emigrants such as James Kavanagh and James Henderson are obvious candidates. They are among those Rolph described as being

44

‘Union Is Strength’

induced by the ‘softer attractions’ to ‘to take an acre lot in this new village of Priapus’; they were, in other words, poor emigrant artisans who married into the sect in the 1830s.27 They possessed little if any land, but are presented here primarily because they embody the dilemmas of assisted emigration. More importantly yet, they both took part in Mackenzie’s rebellion in 1837; James Kavanagh and James Henderson were two of the three rebels killed by Sheriff Jarvis’ picket. Like so many of the members of the ‘opaque society’ of artisans, little is known about these casualties, whose gravesites even are unknown. James Kavanagh was an eighteen-year-old Irish cobbler when he enlisted on 11 December 1811 in the 99th (100th) Regiment of Foot of the British Army, which had been raised in 1804, and shipped to Canada in 1805.28 As a replacement soldier, Kavanagh would have been well aware he would be joining the regiment here and would not be sent to fight in the Napoleonic Wars; joining the army may thus have been the way in which he obtained ‘assisted passage’ to North America, where he intended to emigrate permanently. He could not have known that the outbreak of the War of 1812 would quickly throw him into battle; his regiment was moved to the Niagara frontier, where it played an important role in the capture of Fort Niagara. The regiment was disbanded in July 1818 in Quebec City. The British Army decided to establish these demobilized soldiers in a series of military settlements as a defensive line along the Ottawa River. The 99th was settled in Richmond, and each private was granted a hundred acres. Kavanagh did not appear to take part in this settlement, since he applied for his military service grant only in 1830, when he was granted the north half of lot 11, concession 8, of Tecumseth Township, Simcoe County; land he never settled.29 At that time, he was a shoemaker in the village of Hope, living with his wife Elizabeth Darling, whom he had married in 1827. It is entirely possible that Kavanagh had never had any intention of taking up the land; he applied for the grant twelve years after his service, shortly after the lieutenant governor’s order-in-council allowed military claimants and loyalists to transfer and sell their ‘location rights’ (i.e., their right to settle a particular lot of land). Large land speculators like the Hon. John Elmsley had apparently purchased over thirty thousand acres of these location tickets at discount prices. James Kavanagh was a tenant on a one-acre plot in the centre of Hope, where he lived with his wife and four children, aged one to nine. They owned two cows. His probated will estimated his entire estate at

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

45

£150. In many ways Kavanagh was like his neighbour James Henderson, who was also a discharged soldier. By 1836 Henderson was working as a cooper in Hope. He joined the Children of Peace in May 1836 and married another member, Ellen Hughes, on 25 March 1837. She was a twenty-two-year-old orphan who shared her father’s house with another unmarried sister on the northern edge of the village, opposite the temple. Had Kavanagh and Henderson not been rebel casualties, they would no doubt be forgotten today. Kavanagh was shot in the groin by Sheriff Jarvis’ twenty-seven-man picket, on the property of the Hon. John Elmsley. James Henderson died immediately; Kavanagh was carried to Montgomery’s Tavern and then to hospital, where he died. Their bodies were never recovered, leaving their friends to believe that they were ‘handed over to the surgeons for dissection.’30 As pauper immigrants, these two men embody the inner tensions that led the Children of Peace to create their co-operative forms of ‘subsistence insurance,’ as well as the tensions with the wider economic and political systems that led them to rebel. Both were impoverished former soldiers in the British Army who took up arms against the very king they had pledged to defend, an incongruity that begs explanation. I would argue that these inner and outer tensions are connected. In his seminal study of the ‘great transformation’ wrought by capitalism in the nineteenth century, Karl Polanyi writes: Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable proportions, on the other hand a network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money. While the organization of world commodity markets, world capital markets and world currency markets under the aegis of the gold standard gave an unparalleled momentum to the mechanism of markets, a deep-seated movement sprang into being to resist the pernicious effects of a market-controlled economy. Society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating market system – this was the one comprehensive feature in the history of the age. 31

Numerous studies have confirmed that the first half of the nineteenth century was not necessarily characterized by grand changes in the

46

‘Union Is Strength’

degree of market participation by farmers, but by increasingly wellintegrated markets regulated by elites using laissez-faire principles.32 This global trend towards a market economy can be contrasted with a second, related phenomenon, the increasingly well-organized moral economies of the backwoods utopias established to protect society from the market’s ‘pernicious effects.’ Just as laissez-faire capitalism was developing towards its mature ideological and institutional form, it was contested by an alternate form of economy predicated on increasingly well-articulated alternate principles of exchange: charity. It was this contest that finally erupted in rebellion, in 1837.33 In the case of the Children of Peace, the elders temporarily held back the march of laissez-faire values across the rural landscape through their reorganization of their subsistence-oriented economy around an alternative principle of exchange – the ideal of Christian charity. Charity was the ideological focus of their millennial theology and the economic cornerstone of their developing moral economy. The outcome of their reorganization of the local economy was an ironic prosperity: as they sowed, so they reaped. By 1851 they were the most prosperous agricultural community in Ontario.34 Members equated their monthly collection of alms for the poor in their recreation of Solomon’s temple with earlier ‘Israelite sacrifices.’ Linking messianic prophecy with radical economic egalitarianism, Willson centred his critique of British rule, and of the Upper Canadian elite in particular, on their lack of concern for the poor: ‘[God] sent his Son to preach salvation to the poor in temporal and spiritual things. If a man has two coats, and gives one to his naked brother, the two extremes have met – the mountains and the valley has become equal; and he that hath most, says John, “let him do likewise,” loving our neighbours as ourselves, equalizes the world; and this is the prince that is wanting in England.’35 Upper Canada was not the tabula rasa that the absence of legislated poor relief would imply; Head’s comments on locals who preach ‘division of property’ would seem as if aimed specifically at David Willson. The new laissez-faire principles for the charitable relief of the poor were just as contentious in Upper Canada as they had proved to be in Kent. But the Upper Canadian experience was distinctive precisely because the colonial state had, over the preceding forty years, abdicated its role in the relief of the poor. The issue of poor relief thus served as a potent political critique; the debate in Upper Canada focused not only on what the best principles were for relieving the poor, but also on the very legitimacy of a state that, like Pharaoh, denied the poor their bread.

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

47

The Children of Peace built the House of Affliction in Hope sometime before 1832,36 and it administered relief according to the principles of ‘Christian charity.’ This shelter must be viewed in the context of their local economic system, geared as it was to helping members maintain their independence and their respectability. All of the poor were housed and fed when in need, but those whom the authors of the Poor Law Amendment Act considered to be the ‘undeserving poor,’ the ablebodied unemployed, were then provided with the means of achieving their economic independence. Rather than being granted relief with the intent of maintaining a supply of cheap and landless labourers, the charity of the Children of Peace was intended to perpetuate a farm economy of equal producers where self-subsistence and independence from debt were priorities. They were not communal, but through land sharing, co-operative marketing, and their credit union, they spurred members to individual achievement. These economic innovations were developed to address poverty’s root cause, the economy of debt that made farmers dependent on the vagaries of the market, and hence on ‘sin’ (which prioritized mammon over religious obligation). Just before the Children of Peace consecrated their temple on 28 September 1832, the Children of Peace reorganized themselves as a joint stock company. The highly symbolic temple, intended solely as a place for their monthly alms sacrifice for the poor, ‘Israelite fashion,’ was an enormous capital investment; the group either had to assume some kind of corporate existence, or cede ownership of the buildings to David Willson, on whose land it was built. After their break with the Society of Friends, the Children of Peace had rejected Quaker corporate forms; they kept no membership lists, made no doctrinal demands, and eliminated all church offices. They did, however, maintain the Quaker tradition of monthly meetings to deliberate on their concerns and to reach consensual decisions on group issues. That changed on 9 August 1832, when they covenanted to form a Yearly Meeting of Committees ‘to transact the business of the Village of Hope.’37 Membership was based on financial contributions to the construction of the temple, not on shared beliefs, and the members were referred to as ‘builders’; those who wished to join after that date paid a £1 subscription, for men, and 10s for women. This amount was a non-transferable share, distinguished from the monthly alms contributions, and was refundable if the member left for whatever reason; these shares could only be purchased after a vote of approval by all shareholders. The builders elected members for eight committees of

48

‘Union Is Strength’

management from among the ‘twelve eldest brethren’38 (very loosely defined) to ‘transact the business of the village of Hope.’ Those committees, among other things, regulated their ‘House of Entertainment,’ their schools, their individual businesses, and the cemetery. Of great importance was the money raised in the monthly alms service in the temple; each elder, both men and women, was to dispense up to £5 a year in charity through two men and two women they secretly chose so as to ‘preserve the feelings of our necessitous brethren and sisters.’ If these committees could not reach a unanimous decision in regulating the group’s activities, they were to lay the matter before the whole assembly for consideration. The first matter on which the elders could not agree and for which they turned to the assembly for advice was the issue of lending out money from the charity fund.39 The reorganization of the Children of Peace on a joint stock model, and the creation of a credit union out of their charity fund were economic innovations developed to alleviate poverty and dependence within the sect by addressing its root cause. Charity, whether in secret alms, or in a loan, helped their members maintain their independence; the group now assumed a corporate responsibility for the supervision of their businesses to maintain their respectability. The ideal of charity served as a means of regulating the economic behaviour of the sect’s members; it was a means by which they could be isolated from laissez-faire market morality. It is this duality of their utopian conception of charity that made their public gifts such a potent critique of the merchant elite of the wider society. With a single act the Children of Peace not only underscored the deficiencies of a state that had abdicated its role in poor relief but simultaneously legitimized their alternative economic system, their moral economy. Casting themselves as the new Israelites and the king as Pharaoh, religious expressions of charity served a political function beyond the economic. The idiosyncratic theological idiom within which the Children of Peace couched their moral economy should not hide the fact that ‘all available data suggest that the Children of Peace strongly resembled other rural people of southern Ontario in most aspects of social structure.’40 Within the wider geographical area of the Old Northwest and the development of integrated national and international markets, a common dilemma, meeting debt obligations within a subsistence economy, was met through numerous experimental moral – or communal – economies. There is little evidence leading us to conclude that the more successful communal economies of the early nineteenth century

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

49

originated as clearly articulated economic experiments. Rather, like the Children of Peace, their economic reformation emerged haphazardly, using the idiom of charity to meet the needs of those impoverished by the emerging capitalist transformation of the rural economy. The Shakers, for example, had originally implemented a ‘joint interest’ at their colony at Watervliet, New York, so that ‘there should be a free table kept there, and other necessaries for the entertainment of those that went to see them – that the poor might have an equal privilege of the gospel with the rich.’41 Similarly, the communal house and twelve hundred acres of land of the Public Universal Friend, in Jerusalem Township, New York, was set aside for the use of the poor among them; the communal house, like the temple of the Children of Peace, served as a potent symbol of the need for ‘mutual aid.’42 However, this communal house was built only after a disastrous earlier migration had robbed the poorer members of the sect of their individual land grants. The richer members purchased their own farms in the surrounding countryside. In neither case was communal ownership a clearly articulated organizational principle; yet, in both cases, once constituted, the communal order proved a distinguishing feature, and a draw for new members seeking refuge from the alternative – the Dickensian poorhouse. By shifting the focus from communal groups – Head’s misnamed ‘Socialistes, Communistes, or Liberals’ – to the idiom of charity, which such groups shared with the wider society out of which they emerged, our attention is drawn away from the structural (i.e., ‘communal’) features of these groups once constituted, to the contingent processes by which they emerged, finally, as formal joint stock experiments in economic and democratic sociability. The theological idiom within which the Children of Peace expressed their alternative values was idiosyncratic, but this distinctiveness need not discount the assertion that they represent the ‘continuity in the manner in which Upper Canadians went about providing relief to the poor.’43 David Willson attracted large crowds wherever he preached, and obviously struck a responsive cord in his audience, whether recent British emigrants or those born in North America. When we document the ‘broader macro-historical context within which Upper Canadian poor relief developments occurred,’ we must be careful to search out these alternative and currently unfamiliar forms rooted in subsistence-oriented agriculture. Utopian communities like the village of Hope, through their very colour, draw our attention to the idioms and expressions that characterize the now silent moral economies of the rural landscape. These distinctive idioms, once

50

‘Union Is Strength’

identified, can be seen to resound with the larger British and American movements like Owenite socialism, which also played a part in cultivating this culture of charity in Upper Canada. A Scottish Intermezzo: The Reception of the Owenite Tradition in Upper Canada The roots of Owenite socialism lay in an insurrection of impoverished workers in Glasgow, where, unsurprisingly, we also find William Lyon Mackenzie, the eventual political representative of the Children of Peace in the village of Hope. We find the roots of Wilmot-Horton’s ‘assisted emigration’ policies in April 1820, amid a widespread revolutionary insurrection in and around Glasgow, where a young, already twice-bankrupted William Lyon Mackenzie was setting sail for Canada on a ship called Psyche. The outbreak had started with a general strike of weavers and colliers armed with pikes. After sporadic violence lasting about a week, the rebellion was easily crushed; the participants were driven less by disaffection than distress. In a city of 147,000 people without a regular parish system of poor relief, between ten and fifteen thousand were destitute, dependent on voluntary charity. Nearly a hundred participants in that rebellion were charged with high treason, and three were executed; those not executed were transported to Australia. Transportation of a different sort was Mackenzie’s lot. The uprising in Glasgow was significant not only as stage setting; in his biography of William Lyon Mackenzie, John Sewell has suggested that Mackenzie’s participation in the rebellion played a part in his hurried decision to join his friend, merchant John Lesslie, on the voyage to Upper Canada.44 The Scottish insurrection was significant, also, in changing British policy on ‘assisted emigration.’ The few experiments in assisted emigration that had occurred before then had been directed at those who did not require assistance; its aim was to attract independent, respectable settlers who had their own means to emigrate, but who might otherwise choose the United States. Spooked by the Scottish insurrection, however, a nervous prime minister agreed to provide free transportation from Quebec to Upper Canada, a hundred-acre land grant, and a year’s supply of provisions to any of the rebellious unemployed weavers who could pay their own way to Quebec. In all, in 1820 and 1821, a private charity helped 2,716 Lanarkshire and Glasgow emigrants follow Mackenzie to Upper Canada to take up their free grants.45 It is

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

51

striking that what had once been a form of criminal punishment for treason, transportation, was now held out as an inducement for the unruly pauper: assisted emigration. It is less surprising, though, given the general context of the criminalization of pauperism in the period with the introduction of workhouses, penitentiaries, and imprisonment for debt: prisons for the poor. The Glasgow Rebellion is significant for a third, related reason as well. In response to the labour unrest, a ‘committee of gentlemen’ from the Glasgow area commissioned the cotton manufacturer and philanthropist, Robert Owen, to produce a ‘Report to the County of Lanark’ in May 1820, which recommended a new form of form of pauper relief: the co-operative village, or what later would be called ‘home colonies,’ which were an entirely different form of workhouse.46 Owen’s report was to spark a widespread ‘socialist’ movement that established cooperatives, labour exchanges, and experimental communities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and – although not usually recognized – in Canada. Like the village of Hope, these communities were to be formed on a joint stock basis, collectively worked, and democratically governed. Owen’s work was itself part of a wider acrimonious debate on the reform of the English Poor Laws. Scotland had never practised the onerous system of parish relief characteristic of England. It thus addressed the new problems of ‘redundant population’ and unemployment from a different perspective, a variety of philanthropically assisted ‘self-help’ agricultural colonies. We can explore the interconnections in these themes through the life of Archibald James Hamilton, the radical laird of Dalzell and Orbiston, an estate eight miles outside of Glasgow. Hamilton was the member of Parliament for the riding of Lanark, and one of the organizers of the Committee for the Relief of the Industrious Poor that, shortly after the revolt, on 28 April 1820 petitioned Parliament for the assisted emigration of the impoverished weavers of Glasgow and Lanark. He met with the prime minister and the chancellor of the Exchequer, the Hon. Lord Bexley, and obtained their agreement to a plan of assisted emigration. As an organizer of the emigration committee, Hamilton helped raise the cost of passage to Quebec for the emigrants.47 However, it was also Hamilton who was one of the ‘committee of gentlemen’ who commissioned Robert Owen’s ‘Report to the County of Lanark’ in May 1820. In 1821 he and several other Owenite sympathizers formed the Edinburgh Practical Society, which operated a co-operative store and a school. In addition, Hamilton provided his 290-acre estate, Orbiston, for the first

52

‘Union Is Strength’

Owenite co-operative community in the United Kingdom, in 1825.48 When this community collapsed in 1827 on the death of its founder, most of the residents followed the earlier ‘assisted’ emigrants to Upper Canada, where they formed the equally short-lived Owenite community of Maxwell, near Sarnia.49 It should be clear, then, that this ‘colonial policy,’ whether at home or abroad, was closely interwoven with pauperism, ‘assisted emigration,’ and the development of the philanthropic ‘socialists’ whom Sir Francis Bond Head seemed to find in both the old and new worlds. Owenism, which Mackenzie was to abandon in fleeing Glasgow, was to again engage his interest through its American incarnation. Owen was to disseminate his ideas in person in continent-wide tours beginning in 1824. His ideas were most widely received in New York and Philadelphia, where he was greeted by nascent workingmen’s parties. The New York Workingmen’s Party was to spawn the radical wing of the Democratic Party, the Locofocos, who shared many of the same ideas as Mackenzie on chartered monopolies, banks, paper currency, high legal fees, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. Mackenzie regularly republished articles by an early Owenite booster in New York, George Henry Evans, editor of the Working Man’s Advocate and leader of the Locofocos.50 Upper Canadians were thus introduced to Owenite socialism through his less-known proselytites. That the transmission of Robert Owen’s ideas to Upper Canada was not as direct as in the United States indicates, perhaps, that Owen was more a highly visible icon of the opposition to laissez-faire liberalism, than its definitive theorist. Owen’s anti-clericism was to prove problematic for many, driving them to seek alternate models for their utopian communities. Owen’s ‘plan’ was itself derivative of (and ultimately popularized by) a number of English trade unionists, such as William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin, co-founder of the London Mechanics Institute. Hodgskin’s economic theories were no doubt introduced to Toronto’s working classes through Joseph Bates, an English immigrant who helped found the Toronto Mechanics Institute in 1830 based on his experience in London.51 There are, then, a series of other experiments in Upper Canada, like the Children of Peace at Hope, that fall under the rubric of ‘Owenite socialism’ without owing direct inspiration to Owen or his writings. All of these broad alternatives opposed the house of industry, proposed by laissez-faire political economists such as Lieutenant Governor Sir Francis Bond Head. The Reverend Thaddeus Osgood, a Montreal-based

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

53

evangelical minister, for example, helped organize the Society for Promoting Education and Industry in London, England, in 1825, with the support of the His Royal Highness, the Duke of Sussex (son of George III); the Hon. Lord Bexley (who had officially approved the first experiment in assisted emigration after the Glasgow Revolt in 1820); William Wilberforce, the MP leading the fight against slavery; and Edward ‘Bear’ Ellice, the MP behind the Reform Bill of 1832, among others.52 Osgood’s society was to promote a series of schools for natives and poor settlers ‘which would blend manual labour with elementary education in an atmosphere of “love rather than harsh discipline.”’53 Osgood’s planned institutions were a combination of Lancasterian monitorial school, and a house of industry as proposed by Count Rumford, an American-born inventor and philanthropist whose experimental settlement in Munich was frequently cited as a model of pauper relief – by Owen among others.54 Over £1,350 was subscribed. Osgood became the official agent of the Society for Promoting Education and Industry, and helped form auxiliaries in Dublin, Montreal, Quebec, Cornwall, Kingston, Brockville, and Toronto, with the high-profile support of Governor General Dalhousie. Osgood formed the relatively short-lived Toronto chapter, with separate men’s and women’s societies, in late December, 1826.55 Despite the high-profile support, the Canadian branch society’s achievements were modest, and relations with the London branch soon soured. In an unsuccessful effort to salve the wound, Osgood returned to London in 1829. Deep in debt, he was unable to return to Canada, and spent the succeeding five years preaching in London’s workhouses and prisons. It was in this working-class milieu that Osgood met and debated with Robert Owen. Although attracted by the ‘home colony’ model of poverty relief, Osgood was offended by Owen’s anti-religious rhetoric, and so turned to another of Owen’s inspirations, the Dutch social reformer, General Johannes van den Bosch, who had established a pauper colony at Frederiksoord in the ‘wastelands’ of the Netherlands in 1818. Van den Bosch had established his ‘benevolent society’ with support from the House of Orange. Its auxiliaries, in paying up their share capital, gained the right to send a pauper from their locality to the agricultural colony being set up on former communal village lands purchased at Frederiksoord. As Osgood explained this joint stock model, ‘thirty thousand, once paupers, are now living in comfort and paying four per cent. for what has been advanced in preparing their allotments’ rather than being a burden on the poor rates.56 Each of the paupers settled at

54

‘Union Is Strength’

Frederiksoord received a house and two hectares of land to farm; and, although settled on individual lots in an effort to spur them to individual responsibility, they remained part of a larger, near military disciplinary order. Adherence to the colony’s detailed regulations was ensured through field supervisors and the colony director, who reviewed the performance of a number of families each month, awarding gold, silver, and copper medals; good behaviour allowed the settler to leave the colony after church on Sunday. A silver medal was given when settlers were self-subsistent, and allowed them their freedom after stipulated work hours. A gold medal was given to those who achieved an annual income of £250 and signified that they were now simple renters of colony land. The aim of the settlement thus differed from Owen’s in that co-operative labour was not the permanent goal, the means of relieving paupers; rather, the colony was a penal institution for the poor meant to provide support while they learned to become independent, cash-cropping farmers.57 Van den Bosch’s experiment is important at a number of levels; first, as a penal colony for criminalized paupers. Like the houses of industry being introduced in England after the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, Frederiksoord was disciplinary in intent, a prison for the poor. It is indicative of a general sentiment that paupers should be criminalized since their poverty was the product of an inherent character flaw: indolence or intemperance. However, Frederiksoord is also interesting as an attempt at agricultural reform; it was part of a state plan to dismantle the feudal markes of the Dutch hinterlands, transforming peasants into cash croppers, and thus it sought altogether different ends from Owen’s settlements or the English houses of industry. It sought to instill a capitalist market discipline in ‘independent’ producers through a direct system of punishments and rewards, in an area where the ‘invisible hand of the market’ seemed inadequate to the task. Van den Bosch was no communitarian; his agricultural colonies sought to create an entrepreneurial spirit in their charges, although ironically, they did so through communitarian institutions. It is also important to emphasize that the Dutch general sought to produce cash-cropping farmers, not an industrial working class; it is here that his colony differed most from the English houses of industry, which simply offered relief at such a deplorable level that any outside employment would have seemed a better alternative. Lastly, Van den Bosch’s experiment is important because his ‘benevolent colony,’ Frederiksoord, served as a model for his colonial policy when he became the governor of the Netherlands East

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

55

Indies. Faced with ‘lazy natives’ and few marketable surpluses there, Van den Bosch transformed Java into the world’s largest producer of coffee by applying the same ‘colonial’ methods. Van den Bosch’s pauper colony thus also draws our attention to the necessary link between poverty amelioration efforts at home and abroad, and colonial policy. Each of these elements can be found in the relief unions that Thaddeus Osgood proposed when he finally returned to Montreal in 1835: ‘The proposed plan is, to invest property in land with all needful buildings; to form a colony or community, where all should be furnished with food, clothing and daily instruction, as a reward for their labour, while they may be disposed to continue in the institution.’58 Like Van den Bosch’s colony, the Relief Union would not only support the poor, but also train them; it was a ‘plan of uniting manual labour with mental cultivation.’ Every county was to form a union on the joint stock model; transferable shares would be subscribed for $40, or $5 annually for ten years, entitling the shareholder ‘to the privilege of voting in all meetings of this Union and directing the poor to the asylum, or refuge for relief.’59 Shareholders were also to receive dividends on their investment. Until the Relief Unions were incorporated by the legislature, Osgood proposed that a provisional committee be formed in each county of the ‘ministers of religion with one layman from each congregation.’ No doubt through Osgood’s influence, Robert Owen’s ideas were widely debated in Toronto.60 James Buchanan, the British consul for New York, had put forward a similar plan in 1834; he proposed a ‘Project for the Formation of a Depot in Upper Canada, with a view to receive the whole Pauper Population of England.’ Buchanan’s plan, again, draws the link between poverty relief and colonial policy, as England’s surplus poor would ultimately be transformed into Upper Canada’s agrarian backbone. Buchanan reacted against the spirit of the new Poor Law passed that year, arguing that relief should not be restricted to the ‘deserving poor’ (the old and disabled) but also extended to the able-bodied unemployed: ‘my creed as to charity is, that we are bound to relieve want and distress, without first waiting to inquire how it has arisen, and that too without regard to nation, color, sect, or view to reward.’61 As the Irish father of seventeen children, he rejected the Malthusian indifference to the poor typical of the age. His plan sought to resolve a domestic problem, pauperism, with a colonial solution ‘so as to place the rising generation of the working people in the sure road to independence’ through an agricultural ‘colony,’ or ‘emigrant depot.’62 The depot was to consist of a thousand

56

‘Union Is Strength’

acres of land, ‘buildings for the married and the single of both sexes,’ workshops, barns, and schools; and ‘all would be at liberty to depart as soon as employment offered.’ It was, however, Osgood’s proposal, not Buchanan’s, that elicited support from across Upper Canada in early 1836, and petitions for the Relief Union’s incorporation were sent to the House of Assembly and Legislative Council by such prominent Tory supporters as the Ven. George Okill Stuart, the Archdeacon of Kingston; the Rev. Thomas Phillips, of Toronto, chaplain of the House of Assembly; and the Rev. Robert McGill, a Presbyterian minister from Niagara-on-the-Lake.63 The release of a parliamentary report on the mistreatment of a large number of German and English pauper emigrants in 1834–5, in an experimental government settlement in Nottawasaga Township, Simcoe County, may have spurred their receptivity to Osgood’s plan.64 Some thirtythree pauper families had been induced to settle there by a promise of five free acres, tools, provisions for a year, and employment; ‘they were to have nothing gratis’ but, rather, to pay for their provisions and tools by working on government roads and shanties. The settlement was badly mismanaged by the government’s emigrant agent, H.C. Young, who left the area for lengthy periods, leaving the suffering emigrants to the elements without provisions or employment. Lieutenant Governor Colborne had originated the idea and strongly supported it; its failure reflected badly on his administration. Osgood’s plan, a privately organized ‘school’ for emigrants, which would teach the requisite skills for pioneering, seemed to offer the one element lacking in Colborne’s scheme. However, with Colborne’s removal, and the new British indifference to ‘assisted emigration’ plans, Osgood’s proposal proved too late to save the plan. The petitions were referred to select committees, but no bill was presented before the end of that session. Significantly, Osgood’s plan was first proposed at the same time as the new lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, was arriving in Toronto. The lack of legislative action may be directly related to Head’s own plans to introduce Houses of Industry on the English model to the province. The House of Industry I went to visit our friends at the village of Hope. I had not been long in conversation with Mr Willson before he asked me if I could give away a barrel of flour in my neighbourhood? – Yes, was the immediate reply. As many families were then in distress for the want of bread, especially in the

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

57

back townships, Mr Willson held a meeting for charitable purposes, when I attended to contribute my mite. Shortly after my return home, to my great astonishment, instead of a barrel of flour, two sleigh loads of grain, flour and some meat arrived under the charge of Mr Samuel Hughes. Captain William Johnson, 4 May 183765

Owenite utopian socialism forms the general cultural and economic context within which the Children of Peace founded their village of Hope and sought to relieve the poor. They sacralized their concern for the poor through the (re)construction of Solomon’s temple, a building which mandated charity as a moral requirement; and they critiqued a Crown that had abdicated pauper relief like Pharaoh had the Children of Israel. These conflicting approaches to the relief to poverty came to a head in 1836, as the colony greeted its new lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, the former assistant Poor Law commissioner. One of Head’s first moves was to encourage the creation of houses of industry on the English model. The bill to establish these houses of industry would have allowed any two magistrates to incarcerate the poor, and further criminalized poverty. His efforts were pre-empted by the reformers, who sought to establish a similarly named house of industry on alternate charitable principles, principles that would preserve the ‘respectability’ of the poor and hence their political voice. The parallels in their efforts with the Owenite socialist movement, and the similarly inspired moral economy of the Children of Peace, can be teased out by a careful analysis of the resources they brought to bear. Few looked forward to the approaching winter of 1836. The depression spawned by the bank wars, and the destitution resulting from a poor harvest, was worsened by Head’s stoppage of almost all provincial expenditures. An economic malaise paralysed trade. By early November, William Lyon Mackenzie lamented that ‘the appearance of scarcity already presents itself. Many families are debtors for their farms, others are owing money borrowed to pay for their Farms, others indebted to the Merchant, others far from Market, and many are prosecuted and harassed by the small Courts and the large Courts. We have sold at once a thousand summonses to one Court of Requests – six hundred to another – and so on.’66 Two hundred lawsuits were launched by the banks in the Home District alone in that fall’s assizes of the Court of King’s Bench.67 It is against that stark background that the Venerable John Strachan petitioned Dr Morrison, the mayor of Toronto, just before Christmas

58

‘Union Is Strength’

for a public meeting to address the problem. His congregation, he announced, could not meet the increased demands for relief being made on them; they had distributed an average of £10 to £12 every two weeks, a figure that had now risen to £10 a week. While Magistrate D’Arcy Boulton was speaking, ‘five or six persons attached to the Republican party’ entered, led by James Lesslie, an alderman, and one-time president of the Canadian Alliance Society, the reform political organization. After speeches by several prominent Tories, none of which offered a way out of the dilemma, Lesslie rose to offer a series of resolutions. George Gurnett, editor of the Courier, and about to be elected mayor a few weeks later, observed that ‘the three or four first resolutions were filled with canting expressions of regard for Religion and the Poor: which but rendered the latent mischief the more certain, for those who know the party. The plot to throw discord into the meeting was contained in the last resolution, which recommended “an appropriation of part of the Clergy Reserves for the relief of the Poor”!!!’68 Lesslie’s suggestion was not without context. The House of Assembly had been acrimoniously debating the disposition of the reserves that fall, and as Gurnett observed, ‘in a mixed meeting, made up of persons of every variety of opinion upon the Reserve question, such a plot was well calculated to succeed in defeating the benevolent objects of the meeting, particularly when the introduction of it was accompanied by remarks of a very offensive nature towards the Venerable Archdeacon.’ Whether it was intended or not, Lesslie’s resolution led to the withdrawal of Strachan and his party, leaving the room to the reformers. Lesslie then dropped the contentious issue of the clergy reserves, and proposed that a committee be appointed to enquire into the extent of the distress of the poor in the city, and to propose an appropriate solution. The committee was composed of the ministers of the dissenting churches, and a mix of reformers and Tories, including Lesslie, and Gurnett.69 This committee met on 29 December and concluded that ‘means should without delay be adopted to establish a House or Houses of Industry.’ A subcommittee composed entirely of reformers and two dissenting ministers was appointed to prepare a report on its implementation. This private joint stock effort to relieve the poor points to the influence of the Children of Peace and Osgood’s Relief Unions on the house of industry that they proposed. The day after the initial public meeting, Bernard Turquand, an employee in Receiver General John H. Dunn’s office, addressed a letter to the city council reminding them that Dunn had proposed ‘the establishment of a workhouse’ the sum-

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

59

mer before.70 Dunn was considered a moderate reformer, and he was one of three reformers briefly named by Head to the Executive Council in February 1836. Dunn, like Osgood, suggested that the churches buy the ground for a workhouse for ‘the needful support of the destitute – the employment and consequently, food and raiment of the industrious poor – the inculcating and encouraging of principles and habits of industry and moral virtue, whereby the temporal, as well as the future happiness of the “Child of Adversity” may be promoted.’ Dunn became the largest supporter of the new house of industry, donating £25 towards its erection, five times more than the next-highest donation.71 The timing of the reform proposal for a house of industry was also not without context. The month before, John Cartwright, a Kingston lawyer, and president of the Commercial Bank, had introduced Head’s bill in the House of Assembly to establish houses of industry in each district of the province.72 While apparently seeking the same ends, the bill allowed any two magistrates to commit any able-bodied, unemployed person, and ‘all such as spend their time and property in Public Houses, to the neglect of their lawful calling.’73 This draconian measure – the criminalization of poverty – allowed for the indefinite imprisonment of paupers in state institutions with no appeal, and no jury. Thomas Dalton, of the Patriot, thought this bill ‘so entirely free from every particle of the leaven of party strife … that it seemed impossible for faction to fix its slanderous tongue and venom fangs upon it, yet strange to say, the ingenuity of our virtuous Reformers, those great friends of the “poor oppressed people,” made it, during the late extraordinary session, the principal subject of their vituperation and abuse.’74 Lesslie’s astute manoeuvring thus allowed the reformers to establish the proposed house of industry on an alternate footing; by insulting Strachan, and having the relief measures referred to a citizens’ committee dominated by dissenting ministers, and the house of industry itself to a sub-committee of reformers, he subverted Cartwright’s legislation, which was not passed until 4 March 1837. The sub-committee, headed by Lesslie, reported on 2 January and recommended that a house of refuge with a soup kitchen, and a wood yard to provide employment, be established immediately.75 One of the last acts of the reform-dominated city council in 1836 was to grant the committee £40 so that they could rent the Old Court House, a building that had been used by the reformers and the Children of Peace as a political and religious meeting hall.76 By 19 January they started to prepare the ‘Rules and Regulations of the House of Refuge & Industry’ by which we can best see how their poor

60

‘Union Is Strength’

relief practices differed from those proposed by the advocates of the Poor Law Amendment Act, and Cartwright’s legislation. The ‘Rules and Regulations’ make clear that relief was being offered to maintain the independence of the pauper as long as possible, rather than incarcerating vagrants; like the charity dispensed by the Children of Peace, relief was granted to preserve workers’ respectability until they could once again obtain employment. During the entire time of its operations, the Toronto House of Industry offered far more outdoor than indoor relief. In its first month of operation, the house of industry offered relief, primarily provisions, to 138 families, one hundred of them permanently; five hundred and fifty people received help in all. Fifty-one of the 190 adults offered outdoor relief were unemployed men. By the end of its first year of operations, it had aided 1,344 people, including 310 able-bodied men and women who were sick and without employment, and 897 children in 377 families.77 Rather than forcing them into the house of industry, and breaking up their families, as the English precedent demanded, these men were maintained in their homes and employment was sought for them. The committee of management appealed as much for employment opportunities, as for contributions.78 In November 1837, for example, they had managed to procure work for twenty-nine men, and 338 men, women, and children were given outdoor relief that month. There were thirty-six inmates in the house itself: ten widows, two deserted women, nineteen children, and five men. Both indoor and outdoor pensioners were given a pound of bread a day, coffee or tea, plus a pint of soup ‘made of fresh beef, or pork, with peas, barley, or rice, (and vegetables).’ This ration, although hardly luxurious, would surely have sparked the ire of Head, who had castigated the poorhouses in Kent, which he replaced with houses of industry, because ‘the independent labourer is subsisting, in many localities, on little more than bread and water, almost everywhere the Kentish pauper has what are called three meat-days a week, in many cases four meat-days, and in some cases five.’79 His point was not that the independent labourer should be granted relief from his inadequate diet, but that the meals served within the houses of industry should always be inferior to that of the worst-off outside its walls; and that no relief should be granted, unless the pauper entered the workhouse. William Lyon Mackenzie republished an English article on Head’s ‘Kentish Dungeons’ in February 1837, reviling the ‘the Union Bastilles’ which ‘are, to all intents and purposes, places of punishment – of punishment worse than that which is

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

61

inflicted on felons in common gaols. We say that the wretched creatures who are compelled to seek refuge in a workhouse ought to be allowed enough to eat.’80 Although the reformers had managed to pre-empt Cartwright’s legislation in establishing an independent house of industry, their continued control of the institution became increasingly contested. Cartwright’s bill was passed on 4 March 1837, and it provided for any Court of Quarter Sessions to erect a house of industry in a district on the recommendation of three successive grand juries. The mayor and aldermen of the corporation could thus establish their own house of industry, and any two of them would have the power to indefinitely commit any unemployed person to it. George Gurnett, elected mayor of Toronto in January 1837, thus addressed his first grand jury on 6 March, lamenting that the number of people charged was ‘beyond all precedent in the Court, or that of any other Court, I believe.’ Petty larceny accounted for most of the increase in crime, and Gurnett suggested that a house of industry would substantially curb this problem; he lauded the existing effort, but called for an ‘institution of a more extensive and permanent description.’81 He may, perhaps, have had yet another institution in mind. In January the House of Assembly had passed an ‘Act to Abolish the distinction between Grand and Petit Larceny,’ which eliminated the category of petty theft and treated all theft under the rules of grand larceny. It allowed magistrates to sentence any thief (of whatever amount) to up to three years in Kingston Penitentiary, or up to seven years of banishment.82 The next week, the grand jury concurred with this general strategy of criminalizing poverty and called for a house of industry to be established according to the provincial legislation.83 In an effort to forestall this new development, on 20 March the reformers appealed to the mayor to call a public meeting to broaden the base of the committee of management. In all, eighteen men were added, including such prominent Tories as William Draper, the new member of the provincial parliament for Toronto, and Sheriff Jarvis, as well as such prominent reformers as Dr W.W. Baldwin, James H. Price, and William Ketchum. Baldwin had been president of the Constitutional Reform Society and of the Toronto Mechanics Institute, both organizations in which James Lesslie also held a prominent part; Jarvis and Draper were part of the executive committee of the British Constitutional Society. The high-stakes battle for control of the Toronto House of Industry, and by implication, Toronto’s working poor, is reflected by the prominence of the politicians skirmishing on its board. This became

62

‘Union Is Strength’

even clearer when Archdeacon Strachan responded positively to the now Tory-dominated city council’s request, in July, to preach a ‘charity sermon’ to benefit the house of industry, which raised £37. Strachan could no longer afford to ignore the institution and its founders, when almost half of the families relieved in the first year of operations were his congregants.84 The day-to-day operations of the house of industry were left to a three-member ‘weekly committee’ composed of Dr Baldwin, the Baptist preacher Alexander Stewart, and John Powell, an attorney. Under Baldwin’s leadership, the house of industry applied for, and was granted, four acres of land within the city, which it planned to cultivate with the help of its inmates.85 Although granted only four acres, the reformers had sought fifty, and they were obviously planning on implementing a ‘relief union’ on Osgood’s plan that combined ‘manual labour with mental cultivation.’ Establishing such an ‘agricultural colony’ for the poor – most of whom were pauper emigrants – was also in keeping with Buchanan’s call for an ‘emigrant depot’; Buchanan was related to Dr Baldwin by marriage, and cited him in the pamphlet proposing the depot.86 Despite the broadening of the committee of management, the Tories continued to press for the implementation of Cartwright’s legislation; having achieved the first grand jury presentment in its favour, they tried for the second of the three required at the October assizes of the Court of King’s Bench. On this occasion, however, they were not successful. The grand jury returned a report in which they expressed ‘with deep concern, the present attempt to fix upon this Province one of the greatest scourges which, in their opinion, could be inflicted upon any country.’87 They stated that they were not against establishing an ‘asylum for the aged, the orphan, or the lunatic.’ They felt called on, however, to ‘enter their solemn protest against the present Act, which empowers any two magistrates or Inspectors to seize, at their own caprice or prejudice, and without Judge or Jury, deprive the subject of his liberty, incarcerate him in a loathsome dungeon, or to be worked, starved, or flogged at the will of his task-master, without redress or relief.’88 Such a rebuff was all the more significant if it is remembered that most members of the grand jury were themselves Tory magistrates. Criminalizing the Poor I have already noted the ‘poison of the gift,’ the way in which charity

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

63

was an assault on a freeholder’s ‘respectability,’ on his economic and political independence. Accepting charity made a man’s dependency clear, and opened the door to suits for the recovery of debt. In Upper Canada’s ‘economy of debt,’ respectability was all that stood between a man and imprisonment for debt; and with the general collapse of credit in 1836 in the province, everyone’s respectability could be challenged. Herein lies the critical difference in the two ideologies of charity discussed here. For the reformers, charity was administered to help maintain that respectability, to prevent the assaults on a man’s ‘liberty.’ For the laissez-faire promoters of the new poor laws, in contrast, charity was reserved for the ‘deserving poor’: the old, sick, and handicapped unable to work. Paupers – the unemployed poor – would refuse to work if offered relief, they claimed, and hence deserved nothing unless they entered a house of industry, where conditions were worse than outside its walls. The house of industry was a new form of para-penal institution, part of the general criminalization of poverty that began with imprisonment for debt. It should be no surprise, then, that the bill to establish the Toronto House of Industry granted any two magistrates the power to indefinitely incarcerate any unemployed person, to arbitrarily deprive him of liberty without appeal. The Tory plan for a series of houses of industry thus needs to put side by side with other Tory institutions for the criminalized poor, the debtors’ gaol and the new penitentiary. The intent of the provincial penitentiary at Kingston, like the Toronto House of Industry, was to instil labour discipline.89 Convicts would be taught trades, and their labour used to produce goods to defray the cost of the institution. The artisans of Kingston, Toronto, and Dundas protested the use of prison labour immediately; these mechanics argued that these products would compete with their own, lowering prices, and impoverish them. They formed mechanics associations in 1836 in these three towns to petition the legislature to ban prison labour. With their own livelihoods destroyed, they argued, their only relief would be imprisonment for debt in the local gaol, a life of enforced indolence; or, ironically, to enter a ‘House of Industry,’ where their ‘indolence’ was to be combated by labour discipline. The unemployed who escaped their impoverishment by turning to theft and petty larceny were criminalized, sent to the penitentiary, where their labour would in turn impoverish others. The period is thus marked by plans for a series of carceral institutions, the district jail, the house of industry, and the penitentiary, which criminalized the poor. Unemployment, for whatever

64

‘Union Is Strength’

reason, would strip the poor of their independence, subject them to harsh discipline, and break up their families. The charity of the Children of Peace, and other reformers, in contrast, fashioned a ‘patent office model of the Good Society,’ a charitable culture that came to fruition in the Owenite movement in Britain and the United States, and I would argue, in Upper Canada as well. This movement was marked by the creation of co-operatives, such as the Farmers’ Storehouse, and by credit unions and joint stock banks that would offer small loans to protect farmers and artisans from the threat of lawsuits. They contested the criminalization of poverty, and the use of the house of industry, imprisonment for debt, and the penitentiary to incarcerate those whose only ‘crime’ was hunger. Highlighting the colonial state’s lack of charity, casting it as Pharaoh set to enslave them, proved a potent political critique. The reformers chose the Old Court House for their own house of industry. This was where their social movement coalesced: where David Willson preached his sermons on equality and charity and where the reformers staged their Grand Convention of Delegates to select their candidates. Although faced with the might of the ‘colonial leviathan,’ the reformers ensured that a house of industry under the terms of the 1837 enabling legislation was never established; the Toronto House of Industry remained a public joint stock venture without the police powers of the English Poor Law administration. This did not, however, eliminate the oppressive laws that allowed for indefinite imprisonment for debt. It is to these laws which we now turn. Few farmers in Upper Canada could escape debt, making the threat of imprisonment a potent political lever that undermined the nascent democratic culture they sought to encourage in the colony. William Lyon Mackenzie’s political career owed much to his crusade against these laws; indeed, he frequently stated he entered politics after hearing the case of Robert Randal, imprisoned for debt to none other than the Solicitor General Henry John Boulton, among others. In the next chapter, we trace Mackenzie’s campaign against Boulton through several vignettes such as the Types Riots and the Ausman letters, but do so through the economic lens of the Bank of Upper Canada, for whom Boulton was solicitor. The Bank of Upper Canada stood at the apex of Upper Canada’s debt pyramid, and hence was a potent ‘political engine’ in the hands of the province’s elite, including the extended Boulton-Robinson-Jones clan. The bank shielded its owners through its charter, which unfairly lent them limited liability, while its own directors impoverished others in the courts for similar

Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry

65

debts. It was on this injustice that the power and wealth of the Family Compact was built. This injustice inspired not only Mackenzie, but ultimately the Children of Peace and the reform movement as a whole, to fight for their unique brand of ‘joint stock democracy.’

2 The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt

Our situation is in some respects more appalling than a Criminal imprisoned for murder, he is allowed a straw bed, blankets, bread and fuel, and knows the termination of his imprisonment, we poor wretches are imprisoned, for a debt maybe of two pounds, and from four to seven pounds cost … we have not so much as a bench to sit on, a shelf or cupboard to place a loaf of bread upon, not even a straw bed to lay on, no blanket to cover us, no fire to warm us. John Woolstencroft, a debtor in the York Gaol1

The scope of the problem of debt in Upper Canada was conveyed in a series of parliamentary reports. As early as 1827 the eleven district jails in the province had a capacity of 298 cells, of which 264 were occupied, 159 by debtors. In the Home District, 379 of 943 prisoners between 1833 and 1835 were being held for debt.2 The number of debtors jailed bespeaks both widespread poverty and the relatively paltry amounts for which debtors could be indefinitely detained. Douglas McCalla points out that the province’s economy was predicated on credit, and in so doing ignores its bête noire, debt. He points out that reciprocal exchanges between parties could continue for years without cash exchanging hands, to be settled on occasion with a note of hand. He gives the example of ‘Alexander McMartin, a merchant and miller at Martintown, in the Eastern District, and Donald McNaught, a carpenter. In March 1852 they reckoned their mutual dealings for the past seven years. During that period, McNaught had earned £53 by his craft and run up £47 in charges at McMartin’s enterprises. Here an exchange of £6 could settle £100 worth of transactions.’3 What McCalla fails to

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 67

note is that the occasions on which such settlements were made tended to be during the periodic contractions in credit when larger creditors squeezed smaller ones, resulting in the sudden widespread need for cash. Poor farmers, whose income was seasonal, could face extraordinary difficulties in obtaining that £6, and might lose all in the end, as the case of Henry Ausman, to be discussed here, shows. McCalla gives the example of the firm of Barker and Stevenson in Picton, for whom, ‘by 1832, after two excellent years in the province’s wheat economy (in which customers might have been expected to reduce obligations), the debts exceeded the annual sales. A growing balance of overdue debts is indicated by the rising value of promissory notes, which represented a later stage in the merchant’s collection process, as he formalized his book debts in a way to permit lawsuits or the securing of bank credit. During 1832 no payments of any kind (even in the form of a promissory note) were made on over 20 per cent of Barker and Stevenson accounts.’4 Merchants could afford to carry debts during good years such as these; but in bad years such as 1835, those farmers who had been unable to reduce or resolve their debts could be sued and jailed by merchants trapped in a liquidity crisis. An 1830 list of judgments in the Middle Division of the Court of Requests of the Home District, which heard cases below £5, recorded 127 successful actions – some for as little as 5s 6d, and the majority below £2.5 The magistrates in these courts were frequently also merchants, the most prominent being William Allan, a Toronto merchant, magistrate, and president of the Bank of Upper Canada. The same list of judgments for the superior Home District Court recorded 156 successful actions, with a majority well below £20.6 And significantly, this list does not include the hundreds of cases heard before the Court of King’s Bench, the province’s high court, where the Bank of Upper Canada’s solicitor, Henry J. Boulton, took all of his suits, regardless of their size. Importantly, the losing debtor became liable for the court costs in the recovery of the debt, which frequently far exceeded the apparently inconsequential debt itself. Woolstencroft provided a list of six debtors then in the York jail whose court costs exceeded their debt. It is this issue which first drove William Lyon Mackenzie into politics, and formed the basis for his lifelong vendetta against the province’s solicitor general, Henry J. Boulton, scion of the Family Compact. Farmers like Jonah Brown, Henry Ausman, and Stillwell Willson, whose cases will be discussed below, could find their property sold at a sheriff’s auction far below its value, to pay the legal fees of lawyers like Henry

68

‘Union Is Strength’

J. Boulton, who then turned around and purchased that property at discounted prices with the very money he had recouped. What particularly galled those who were unable to afford recourse to the law was the threat of ‘malicious prosecution’ at the hands of the law officers of the province, the cabal of lawyers like Boulton, Jones, and Robinson, later dubbed the Family Compact, who controlled the Bank of Upper Canada. As speculators in land, they used such malicious arrests to obtain the property of others at a fraction of its value, yet protected their own speculations through the limited liability granted the chartered bank. It was for this reason that Mackenzie excoriated this group in the three documents to which we will turn, each of which focused on specific examples of the abuse of law. These documents, all relating to the Types Riot and Mackenzie’s expulsion from the assembly, have all been extensively analysed, although never in regard to the economic and political role of debt in the province. We begin with this discussion of Upper Canada’s economy of debt, however, not just because of its economic effects on the farmers of the Home District, but because these economic attacks deprived these farmers of their ‘respectability,’ and hence their political voice; the province’s nascent democracy depended on preserving this independence, a fact that Mackenzie seems to have clearly recognized. Mackenzie’s political career as the representative for the 2nd Riding of York (which included the village of Hope) was said to have been inspired by the case of Robert Randal, who had been impoverished and unjustly jailed by the Boulton family. Randal was an inept although industrious entrepreneur and politician. He had acquired a share in two valuable properties, one at Niagara Falls, the other in the Ottawa Valley, of which he had been defrauded. In debt to Montreal merchants, he was jailed in 1809, where he remained for six-and-a-half years. Randal had hired D’Arcy Boulton, Sr, the attorney general at the time, to defend his property rights in the Court of King’s Bench. When the senior Boulton was named to the bench in 1818, Henry John Boulton, his son, took over Randal’s case. Before he would do so, however, Henry John demanded a note of hand, an IOU, for £25, and a mortgage for the £100 in legal fees owed his father and himself. Only then did he go to court, a court presided over by his father. The elder Boulton refused to hear the case due to his prior involvement, and delayed the trial another year. Henry John, the solicitor general – and one would expect, a competent lawyer – claimed that he did not know that his father would refuse to hear the case.7

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 69

Before Randal’s case could come to trial in 1819, his note of hand to Boulton came due; when Randal was unable to pay it, Boulton sued in the Court of King’s Bench, and obtained judgment, all without Randal’s knowledge. After a one-year statutory delay (meaningless to Randal, who did not know of the judgment) his Ottawa property was auctioned at a sheriff’s sale for £449 – more than his debt, but also far less than the property’s value; the property was purchased by Levius Sherwood, a partner of Henry John Boulton (and the brother-in-law to his wife, Eliza Jones), and later replacement of Boulton, Sr, as judge in the Court of King’s Bench. Boulton excused his behaviour in suing his own client by stating he knew other creditors were about to do the same, and he wanted to be first in line in attaching Randal’s estate. He bluntly advised Randal, ‘Any further than my duty to my client prompts me, I do not care a farthing about you.’ Randall continued to attempt to regain his Ottawa property in the Court of King’s Bench, by having the decision of Boulton vs. Randal reopened. These attempts were stymied, however, because it was impossible to obtain a decision of the full court since judge D’Arcy Boulton, Sr, and his successor, Levius Sherwood, were interested parties. Randal’s persecution made him a popular hero, and he was elected to the House of Assembly in 1820 for the 4th Riding of Lincoln. When he sought re-election in 1824, he had to swear that he met the property qualification; he named the properties of which he had been robbed. John B. Robinson, the attorney general (and H.J. Boulton’s brother-inlaw), indicted Randal for perjury as a means of disqualifying his election. The case was to come to trial in the 1825 Niagara District assizes, and should have been prosecuted by Henry John Boulton, the solicitor general. Boulton rightly stood down, ‘owing to some private misunderstanding’ between Randal and himself, leaving James Buchanan Macaulay to serve as Crown counsel. James B. Macaulay had been a clerk in Henry John Boulton’s office, and had, six years earlier, acted as Boulton’s attorney in obtaining uncontested judgment in Boulton vs. Randal. These two were to be the butts in one of the three documents, the Patrick Swift satires, on which this chapter will focus. Randal’s case was no isolated incident, but rather, iconic of a persistent pattern of legal chicanery, as revealed in the three documents to be analysed here. Included in the Patrick Swift satires, published the week before the Types Riot, was a reprint of an earlier political satire about Jonah Brown, a man jailed for debt by H.J. Boulton, set in York’s district jail.8 And similarly, in the months before the 1830 elections, Mackenzie

70

‘Union Is Strength’

published a string of articles on a poor German farmer from Markham, Henry Ausman, who lost all through the courts at the hands of Henry Boulton, acting as the lawyer for the Bank of Upper Canada.9 In analysing these three documents, my concern is not to highlight a personal vendetta, to vilify (although justly) a single lawyer and his abuse of power, but rather it is to point to the systematic abuse of power that the laws for the collection of debt made possible by demonstrating how even the province’s solicitor general was corrupt, and to indicate how the problem of the legal persecution of debtors worsened after the Bank of Upper Canada was granted a banking monopoly under the guidance of William Allan, the Jarvises, and the Boultons. This economy of debt, and the legal mechanisms made available for their collection, provided the economic spur for political reform, as Ausman wrote: ‘It may be all legally right … but it is not so by the law of God.’ This discussion of the political economy of debt is thus meant to set the background for its alternative, the moral economy as put into practice by the Children of Peace through their shelter for the homeless, a credit union, and co-operative marketing. It is impossible to understand the shape and purpose of reform institutions such as the Farmers’ Storehouse Company – simultaneously producers’ co-operative and bank – without understanding the economic injustices that they faced at the hands of the officers of the Bank of Upper Canada. The Debtors’ Gaol Satire Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Thoughts on Various Subjects Atrocious Outrage! Total destruction of the Printing-Office of the Colonial Advocate. On Thursday last, a set of men holding high and honorable situations under the Colonial Government in this town – a set of men, not irritated by distress, disappointed hopes, or political degradation – but wallowing in ease and comfort – basking in the sun-shine of royal favour – enjoying every right and privilege of freemen – and chased by the toils of a loyal, peaceable, and industrious population – formed themselves into a conspiracy against the laws of the country – a conspiracy against the liberty of the press – a conspiracy against the public peace – and between the hours of six and seven o’clock in the evening, while the great enemy of guilt as yet lingered above the horizon to restrain the arm of the ordinary desperado – they attacked the Printing Office of the Colonial

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 71 Advocate – broke open the door, in the presence of several witnesses, and demolished Press, Types, Forms, Sticks, Cases, Frames, Gallies, Stands, &c, &c. until the whole materials, which were new and of the first quality, exhibited nothing but one heap of ruins. Lest the types might be picked up again and turned to some advantage, large quantities of them were carried down on the Merchants wharf and thrown into the Lake! All this, we are informed, was carried on in the presence of two magistrates, who viewed the work of destruction with silent complacency! Canadian Freeman, 15 June 1826

The cause of the Types Riot is frequently confused with its chronology; where one begins thereby becomes the first link in an inevitable narrative chain. We could start, then, with the dismissal of John Fenton, a lowly parish clerk and bank messenger, by James Buchanan Macaulay, which sparked an interchange of increasingly harsh jibs, the last of which saw Mackenzie’s type thrown over the fence into his neighbour’s garden. Alternately, we could start with Mackenzie’s financial woes, his belief that ‘persecution has never yet suppressed an obnoxious book; on the contrary, it has almost always increased its sale,’10 and hence his publication of series of scathing – libellous – satires under the nom de plume of ‘Patrick Swift,’ grand nephew of the renowned Irish wit Jonathan Swift. We could, lastly, see the Types Riot as itself but a first step, ‘the Germ of the Rebellion’ to occur over a decade later. It is this last opening which we will pursue; not because the Types Riot was the actual starting point of the rebellion, but because it is a particularly well-documented introduction to the endemic political and economic issues of the period, and thus sets the background for the political struggle for economic reform that emerged in the 1830s. The Types Riot will be used to structure a thematic exploration of a series of texts and how they relate to Mackenzie’s continuing vendetta against the Bank of Upper Canada and its attorney, Solicitor General Henry John Boulton. Mackenzie’s personal vendetta is but a telltale sign of the larger political struggle of the province’s farmers to free themselves from an oppressive legal system for the collection of debt that transformed the bank into a ‘political engine’ for the Family Compact. This chapter thus examines the economic complaints of the farmers and artisans of the Home District through a number of highly publicized case studies, and thus illustrates what was to drive them to politically and economically organize, and finally, to rebel. Paul Romney’s now-classic reappraisal of the Types Riot, like most

72

‘Union Is Strength’

commentators from the time of Francis Collins (editor of the Canadian Freeman), focuses on the civil rights aspects of the case, rather than its economic implications: the fundamental freedoms of speech, the press, and to property necessary under the rule of law. Romney’s careful archaeology of the ‘outrage’ highlighted ‘our collective oblivion from the climate of social discontent that gave it meaning.’11 He highlights three important points, which bear repeating. First, he argues that the riot is itself illustrative of an elite ideology that regularly skirted the rule of law it held out as its providential Loyalist mission. Second, he sought to show that the significant damages Mackenzie received in his civil lawsuit against the vandals in no way testified to the soundness of the criminal administration of justice in Upper Canada. And lastly, he sees in the Types Riot ‘the seed of the Rebellion’ in a deeper sense than those earlier writers who viewed it simply as the start of a highly personal feud between Mackenzie and the Family Compact. Romney emphasizes that Mackenzie’s personal harassment, the ‘outrage,’ served as a lightning rod of discontent because so many Upper Canadians had faced similar endemic abuses and hence identified their political fortunes with his. Here, in contrast, we turn to a series of documents, the ‘Patrick Swift satires,’ Mackenzie’s own account of the riot, and the Ausman letters, to trace the economic roots of the more general discontent for which Mackenzie was a lightning rod. While the narrative of the Types Riot is usually hung on the question of rule of law, and in particular, freedom of the press, here we focus on the specific economic complaints that Mackenzie lodged against Solicitor General Henry John Boulton, which seemed to underlie the latter’s role in both the Types Riot and Mackenzie’s expulsion from the House of Assembly in late 1831. Most analyses of the Patrick Swift satires, for example, have focused on the direct ‘orgy of slander and scurrility’ that Mackenzie directed at the familial origins of the provincial elite; the finer points of the satire – predicated on the common knowledge of life in a small village – have been lost from view. By excavating the now lost histories of people such as Jonah Brown, Stillwell Willson, and Henry Ausman, we can better understand why such scurrilous attacks on the Boultons, the Robinsons, and the Joneses drew such a wide and appreciative audience. These men were all directors of the much reviled Bank of Upper Canada, which stood at the apex of the province’s ‘economy of debt.’12 As will be illustrated here, this ‘economy of debt’ was a challenge to the independence and respectability of common farmers, and hindered their democratic participation.

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 73

On 4 May 1826 Mackenzie announced his imminent retirement as editor of the Colonial Advocate and two weeks later he published a radically expanded edition of his paper containing the first of two satirical roundtable discussions between a number of fictional characters, said to be regular contributors. In the first colloquy, they choose Mackenzie’s editorial successor, one Patrick Swift, grand-nephew of the Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame.13 Most of this first, and part of the second article a week later, were devoted to a highly offensive discussion of the familial origins and early penury of most of the province’s administrative elite: ‘It’s the upstart pride of these people that I wish to humble by relating plain truths.’ The insults he hurled took specific aim at the musty pseudo-aristocratic pretensions of the small colonial court clustered around Sir Peregrine Maitland, the lieutenant governor; by underscoring these pretensions, and the humble origins of the elite, he sought to emphasize the true source of their wealth. How many of you have fallen into the dreadful gulph of the law, rendered twice as deep as heretofore by the enormous amount of Attorney’s fees, Clerk of the Crown’s fees, Crier’s fees, Constable’s fees, Witnesses’ fees, Juror’s fees, Clerk of Assize and Marshall’s fees, Sheriff’s fees & Jailor’s fees, left by the late corrupt Parliament in the hands of Judges of the King’s Bench, to increase at their own pleasure. These judges are made and unmade at the mere pleasure of the Crown, receive their salaries from a foreign country, have their sons and nephews and relations practising law and depending on it alone (or on the hope of place) for subsistence, and they have accordingly established a scale of charges on actions in civil law, which frightens many an honest man from seeking to recover by that means his just and lawful debts, lest the defendant might for a debt of twenty or thirty dollars, incur costs to the amount of ninety or a hundred, and by an execution be thrown destitute with his wife and children upon the wide and weary world.14

Although none of this small elite escaped notice, the bulk of Swift’s spleen was vented on two York lawyers, Henry John Boulton, solicitor general, and James Buchanan Macaulay, his one-time student. Mackenzie’s protracted editorial tirade against Macaulay has been extensively discussed by Romney. Macaulay was a bencher in the Law Society of Upper Canada, a member of the Executive Council which advised the lieutenant governor in the administration of the province,

74

‘Union Is Strength’

and a warden of St James Church. Their dispute arose after John Fenton, a messenger for the Bank of Upper Canada and the parish clerk of St James, was dismissed from both posts for his political support of Charles Fothergill, who had been dismissed from his post as King’s printer for his opposition to the administration in the House of Assembly. Fenton, suitably cowed by the action, was later reinstated by Macaulay; the reinstatement was on the understanding that Fenton would publish a denial of Mackenzie’s claim that he had extorted his old jobs back with a threat to write an expose of ‘the state of the York congregation.’ Mackenzie refused to publish Fenton’s denial, writing he would have to add some contradictory material proving his earlier assertion which would further injure the poor parish clerk. And thus began an escalating war of words between Macaulay and Mackenzie that culminated in the Patrick Swift colloquies.15 Macaulay’s ‘teacher of righteousness,’ Henry John Boulton, received equal attention, for having ‘converted his hopeful pupil into the filthy domestic utensil, the dish-water funnel of the government.’16 The Patrick Swift colloquy dwells, in particular, on an earlier satire published in 1824 in response to Boulton’s bid for election in the riding of York-Simcoe. At the centre of this second satire, which was probably not written by Mackenzie, were a number of debtors, including Jonah Brown, Stillwell Willson, and Allan MacNab, whose property had been taken by Boulton through shady legal means. In the debtors’ gaol satire, these witnesses were called to a ‘public meeting’ in the jailhouse to discuss the case of one of their number, Jonah Brown, who had been placed in solitary confinement when H.J. Boulton discovered his ‘escape.’ Brown was a simple farmer living near Brockville who, having fallen in debt, was arrested by a bailiff on 5 November 1821, on a writ of capias ad satisfariendum. Seven years later, he still lay in the Home District jail in York, in close confinement, as the letter of the law dictated: ‘the confinement is the whole of the debtor’s punishment, and of the satisfaction made to the creditor.’17 Brown’s problems were compounded by his having resisted arrest: ‘A bailiff was employed to take me on a Ca. Sa. who was a stranger to me. The first thing he did was strike me on the head … he refused to show any authority, and I, not knowing him to be any kind of legal officer, refused to go with him.’18 He was ordered to York for trial for escape, where he was prosecuted by Solicitor General Boulton. He was fined £10 and costs. Unable to pay the fine, or costs, Brown was committed to the York jail, far from his family. In May 1824 Boulton, spying through the pickets of the jailyard fence,

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 75

saw Brown on his way to the privy. Boulton ‘immediately moved the Court … insisting that the prisoners for debt should be kept in close confinement, and not allowed to go out on any occasion whatsoever, or it would be an escape.’19 The cruelty of the motion, to confine Brown to a cell indefinitely because of his inability to pay the legal fees of Boulton, shocked ‘even the judges, [who] at all times grave, looked as if their native gravity changed into horror at the doctrine propounded to them with so much truth and learning.’20 Although the court refused to rule, the prisoners for debt were thereafter kept to their cells. Brown was eventually released after his farm, worth £500, was sold at a sheriff’s auction for £90 to Judge Sherwood, one of Boulton’s partners. The incident inspired an unnamed correspondent, ‘who holds a high situation in the country,’ to compose a satirical account of a public meeting of the debtors in the York jail ‘to take the conduct of that distinguished Patriot, Henry John Boulton Esq. into consideration,’ and timed to correspond with Boulton’s losing election bid in the riding of York-Simcoe in the spring of 1824.21 When the debtors’ gaol satire was first published in 1824, Boulton ‘pocketed the affront, pretended that an affidavit had been made by all the prisoners that no such meeting had existed, and fairly allowed the thing to drop.’22 He was to be less understanding when Patrick Swift reprinted the ‘libel’ in 1826. A series of Boulton’s victims were paraded before view to laud ‘his public spirit in behalf of the Liberty of the subject, manifested on this and all other occasions.’ By reprinting the satire on 1 June 1826 under the editorship of ‘Patrick Swift,’ Mackenzie not only repeated its charges of impropriety, but also rubbed the intemperate Boulton’s nose in his subsequent embarrassing electoral loss (in a riding Mackenzie was himself to shortly win), polling fifth, with a mere 116 of 2,307 votes cast.23 These are, then, the principal characters of the debtors’ gaol satire, which predates the Randal outrage by a year, and the Patrick Swift satires by two, although the narrative and players are eerily similar. Jonah Brown, the debtor and the first speaker, is made to say, that like Randal: ‘He did not wish to advert to the sale of a farm of his for this very debt, at the suit of Mr Downs alias L[eviu]s P. Sh[erw]ood, alias J[ona]’s-J[one]s, alias H.J.B[oulton] for £90, when it was confessed by all to be worth £500.’ The triumvirate of lawyers, Levius Sherwood, Jonas Jones, and Henry John Boulton, were linked by professional and business ties, and by marriage; both Sherwood and Boulton being married to Jones’ sisters. Collectively, their extended family (if we include the Robinsons, and James B. Macaulay, Boulton’s former clerk) comprise

76

‘Union Is Strength’

three-quarters of the Family Compact listed by Mackenzie in 1833. It is these same family and professional ties that linked the Types rioters together as we shall see. The first witness in the debtors’ gaol satire after Brown was Stillwell Willson, David Willson’s stepbrother.24 Stillwell Willson was a tavernkeeper and land speculator who had attempted to develop the much coveted land and mill site at what is now the village of Thornhill. However, he had fallen deeply into the debt of William Allan, and others, who in late 1821 launched suits in the Court of King’s Bench.25 Willson’s lawyer was none other than Henry John Boulton, whose legal bill had amounted to £12 10s 0d. Allan was granted trusteeship of all of Willson’s property; he auctioned off parts, and granted other parcels (on advantageous terms) to various creditors, including H.J. Boulton.26 Boulton, in turn, rapidly resold this property on 20 May 1824 for £100, within days of the setting of the debtors’ gaol satire: in the satire, Willson ‘would only observe, that the great liberality and public spirit of Henry J. Boulton were well known to him – he would not allude to the sale of a part of his own property on Yonge Street to satisfy a judgment against him, (originally about £12 10s 0d) at the suit of this Patriot – no – Mr Boulton had only got a piece of land worth £100, for £20 or £25.’27 This property was subsequently subdivided by the purchaser, Daniel Brooke, Jr, and formed the eventual nucleus of the village of Thornhill, adjacent to the mill property of Allan MacNab, a clerk first in D’Arcy Boulton, Sr’s law office and then in Henry John’s;28 Henry J. Boulton and MacNab were subdividing this property to form the hub of a new village they called Dundurn.29 Although the mill property was registered in MacNab’s name, it was sold by Boulton in the same purchase agreement to Daniel Brooke, Jr (a merchant who was also MacNab’s brother-in-law).30 MacNab, a law clerk, was an unlikely developer for such a capitalintensive business as constructing a mill. He had taken twice the average time to qualify for the bar (from 1816 to 1826), due to his inadequate education, and his ‘chronic impecuniosity.’31 Between 1817 and 1824 he was successfully sued twenty-five times in the Court of King’s Bench for failure to meet his financial obligations in land speculations.32 Pressed by debts, he was placed ‘on the limits.’ Those lucky few who had patrons who would post security for the debtor equal to the amount of the debt were, unlike Jonah Brown, allowed to roam sections of the city within the bounds of a series of blue posts: ‘His perambulations were thus restricted within a somewhat limited radius.’33

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 77

How then, could MacNab, a debtor on the limits, be the developer of the Dundurn mill site without that land being seized to pay his debts, as had Brown’s? Could it be that MacNab was a third character in the debtors’s gaol spoof, a ‘Mr ***’ who was ‘connected with H.J.B. by the closest and most intimate ties of friendship and nothing but the most unbounded love and confidence.’ MacNab was widely believed to be the agent of Boulton in the Dundurn land deals (the land taken from Stillwell Willson),34 and so could say, as did Mr ***, that he had ‘hunted bargains for him – have speculated for him – I have purchased farms and property of all descriptions, in my own name, tis true but yet for H.J.B.’ By using MacNab as agent, Boulton insulated himself from the financial and professional repercussions of his speculations; MacNab would be the one sued for their collective debts, but Boulton could, as he had done with Randal, preemptively ‘sue’ MacNab himself to secure title to the land MacNab had purchased (but was about to default on) before those other creditors could act. Boulton, in fact, sued his own law clerk twice, in 1820 and in 1823 (for £703 and £503). Daniel Brooke, Jr, MacNab’s brother-in-law, also sued him for £403 in 1821 – the year he married Brooke’s sister!35 Since Brooke was the ultimate purchaser of the lands, this series of sales and suits take on the characteristics of an elaborate shell game to protect the partners’ assets; Brooke subdivided these properties and sold them off in small lots in 1824–5.36 The game seemed to have worked so well that, despite the enormous debts he accrued, MacNab was able to build an ‘elegant and commodious’ threestorey mansion with running water on King Street in 1824, despite having been ‘sued’ by H.J. Boulton for £503 in 1823 (and for a total of £505 by others in 1823–4).37 The debtors’ gaol satire infers that acting as Boulton’s agent might have, in large part, been the reason MacNab was on the limits, as H.J. Boulton was himself insolvent: Mr *** is made to say, ‘These farms and properties are not yet paid for I own – but what of that? Sir, the public should not think of asking for payment, when I inform them that the property which I was supposed to have purchased, is the property of that truly indefatigable, upright and public spirited man H.J.B.; he who serves the public for nothing and spends all in their service.’38 Boulton had also borrowed £250 from the ‘pretended’ Kingston Bank at that time, which, when denied its charter by the legislature, he ‘set at defiance’ and ‘has never paid a farthing!!!’ This use of ‘bank paper’ was a speculative abuse Mackenzie was convinced could equally occur with the Bank of Upper Canada, of which Boulton was a director, and its

78

‘Union Is Strength’

solicitor. MacNab, clerk in Boulton’s office, his agent, and a debtor on the limits as a result, could justly say, as did Mr ***, ‘he will serve you all as he done me. (Cries of ‘what has he done to you?’) but Mr *** sat down and was silent.’ At the time the satire was written, May 1824, it appeared that MacNab had, like Stillwell Willson, been defrauded of his interest in Dundurn. By 1826, however, MacNab had finally been called to the bar, and moved to Hamilton where he began a rags-to-riches fairy tale that saw him establish his fortune, get elected to parliament, build his ‘castle’ and eventually acquire a knighthood; passing the bar allowed him to put in practice the same techniques he had learned from his able partner, Henry John Boulton, solicitor general. As his biographer notes, ‘Behind all his economic activity lay credit. If MacNab ever showed any element of genius, it was in his creative use of credit. He borrowed heavily from the Bank … he mortgaged property to individuals as well as institutions; he regularly used the promissory note and associated devices; he sought loans from relatives and friends; he made personal use of the money collected by his law firm on behalf of clients; he avoided paying bills whenever possible or necessary. In all, he made the maximum use of other people’s wealth to increase his own.’39 The only thing missing from this laundry list of suspect business practices is the specific evil of which the debtors’ gaol satire speaks with such bitterness, that of ‘confining to loathsome cells hundreds of his fellow subjects, and that for the crime of being in debt, and speculating, in which he himself is engaged every hour of his life … for he never sees a fine farm without thinking of a Judgment Bond, nor a good horse, without thinking of an execution.’40 The Patrick Swift colloquies, and the debtors’ gaol satire, were not simple personal attacks on a few favourites of the administration; nor were they the product of a minor dispute over a bank functionary. Mackenzie hit hard at the specific and widespread abuses of the legal system and the debt laws that allowed for these frequent cases of judicial robbery by a select coterie of lawyers, government officials, and businessmen he was later to dub the Family Compact. At the time he published these ‘libels’ Mackenzie was deeply in debt himself, and was in Buffalo, some claimed to escape arrest for debt. By personalizing his critique, by recounting the well-known cases of Randal, Brown, and Willson, Mackenzie was speaking to his known audience, the farmers of the Home District, with whom he faced a common problem in the province’s ‘economy of debt.’ Debt, they realized, was the single big-

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 79

gest threat to their property at the hands of lawyers like Boulton. It was their recognition of this fact that led them to elect Mackenzie, and snub Boulton. The Juvenile Advocate’s Society The second of the three texts by Mackenzie relating to his vendetta against the solicitor general, Henry J. Boulton, is his pointed account of the successful civil suit he brought against the perpetrators of the Types Riot: The History of the Destruction of the Colonial Advocate Press, by the Officers of the Provincial Government of Upper Canada and Law Students of the Attorney & Solicitor General … (1827). The text is of importance, as the title makes clear, as an unambiguous explanation of the riot’s significance – to him – and for succeeding generations of Canadian historians. This slim pamphlet highlights the role of members of the provincial administration in the riot; although the riot occurred at the hands of a few boisterous young men, their actions were abetted and sanctioned by the lieutenant governor, his chief legal officers, and members of the Executive and Legislative councils. And in implicating these men of power, Mackenzie underscored the role of the legal profession in particular, and their familial connections to state power, in this abrogation of the rule of law they had been delegated to defend. Although the pamphlet clearly spells out the connections between the riot and those whom he later dubbed the Family Compact, it says little about why these men should have attacked his press; an issue to which we now turn. The Canadian Freeman wrote at the time that the convicted rioters were ‘basking in the sun-shine of royal favour.’ Emerging from the War of 1812, these young men – eight of nine of whom had served as officers in the militia – drew on a revived Loyalist providential mission to rule the province. And as both Romney and Mackenzie emphasize, seven of the nine were in the legal profession: two as barristers and five as law students in the offices of Attorney General John B. Robinson or Solicitor General Henry J. Boulton. Four of them were former students of the Venerable John Strachan, rector of York, executive councillor, legislative councillor, and mentor to the province’s self-proclaimed elite. The nine were all closely related to men of power. In the absence – temporary although it might be – of a landed elite, these men believed that the law should be the basis of social pre-eminence; bound by the ideals of public service and a spirit of loyalty to king, church, and empire, solidified in the crucible of war, they used the Law Society as a means of regu-

80

‘Union Is Strength’

lating entry to elite positions of power.41 There is, however, a second lens through which to view the overlapping professional and familial ties between these men and those who held the reins of administrative power. Without detracting from the well-documented role of the Juvenile Advocate’s Society, the debating club for young lawyers who provided both the manpower and the ideological justification for the outrage, here the role of economic factors, the Bank of Upper Canada in particular, will be underscored. The judicial robbery cited by Mackenzie in his Patrick Swift satires grew worse after the creation of the bank in 1822, as the bank became one of the major creditors in the district. Henry John Boulton, the bank’s attorney, used the courts to have the bank’s debtors defrauded in the same way as he had personally defrauded Randal, Willson, and Brown. The leader of the Types Riot, Samuel Peters Jarvis, was a director of the Bank of Upper Canada, and part of the faction, including the Boultons, who had taken control of the bank board the previous year and implemented an ‘easy’ monetary policy that ‘exhibited signs of financial irresponsibility’ but favoured land speculators.42 As the actions of Henry J. Boulton demonstrate, the law was a potent economic lever, and hence the bank became a ‘terrible engine in the hands of the provincial administration.’43 Mackenzie’s attacks on the bank, and the bank directors, served as a spur to the Types Riot. The Bank of Upper Canada, ‘captured’ from the Kingston merchants by the York elite at the instigation of John Strachan in 1821, serves as a more parsimonious way of summing up both who – and why – these nine young men with pretensions to elite status attacked Mackenzie’s press. William Allan, the magistrate who watched the riot and did nothing, for example, was president of the bank. Samuel Peters Jarvis, the leader of the rioters, was a barrister as well as a director of the bank. The five law students who participated all worked in the offices of the attorney general and the solicitor general, both also bank directors. H.J. Boulton was also the bank’s solicitor. The Hon. James Baby, a merchant and executive councillor who was not the subject of the Patrick Swift satires, was linked to two rioters – his own son, one of the law students, and the otherwise anomalous merchant and land speculator, Peter McDougall, ‘who can scarcely read or write.’44 Colonel James Fitzgibbon, who collected the subscriptions to pay the court damages of the rioters, was a bank director. What emerges from this re-examination, then, is a cabal of bank directors – Jarvis, Robinson, Boulton, Allan, Baby, and Fitzgibbon – who had the previous year staged a bitter proxy war

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 81

to gain control of the bank and institute a new ‘easy’ monetary policy more amenable to their speculative needs, and who, in the wake of the reprinting of the debtors’ gaol satire by Mackenzie, had faced serious reverses in the election of the bank’s board of directors on 5 June 1826.45 The struggles for control of the bank had emerged out of differences between William Allan, the president and only director with real commercial experience, and Thomas Gibbs Ridout, the cashier (manager). Ridout’s brother, John, had been killed in a duel in 1818 by Samuel P. Jarvis, who had never been prosecuted for the death; his second had been Henry J. Boulton. Both were, as noted, bank directors. This feud between the Ridout and Jarvis families was to have long-simmering implications, as we shall see. Ridout was an advocate of a hard monetary policy, or what was known as the ‘real bills doctrine.’46 The Bank of Upper Canada’s charter had been approved by the Colonial Office on the understanding that the bank would be able to back its notes with sufficient specie reserves of gold and silver to cover outstanding debts. The convertibility of notes for specie was thought to prevent excessive speculation; insofar as convertibility inspired public confidence in the bank’s notes, the note’s use and reuse was encouraged, and few actually redeemed the notes for specie except in those periodic economic crises when there might be a run on the bank. Ridout was an adherent of the ‘real bills doctrine’ and sought to restrict the issuance of banknotes to the amount of the bank’s capital resources. In 1823 and 1824 Ridout had allied with the Baldwin family to stack the bank’s board with ‘hard’ money advocates.47 Mackenzie was also a hard money advocate. Ridout was opposed by a clique composed of the interrelated Jarvis, Robinson, Boulton, and Strachan families, who favoured an ‘easy’ money policy: an easy money policy allowed for the expansion of the money supply, hence credit, and thus was potentially inflationary.48 Here, a priority was placed on bank profits rather than on the stability of the note as a financial medium for international trade. In 1825 the Ridout party were ousted from the board: ‘instead of attempting to compensate for their lack of capital resources, the directors proceeded to extend loans and to print notes at an excessive rate. By 1828 the Bank of Upper Canada was the most heavily committed bank of issue in the Canadian colonies. Its resources were, in fact, dangerously overextended. It was not a bank of deposit, yet the directors had issued a quantity of currency which totaled nearly twice the value of their capital stock. The bank’s note-specie ratio was 6:1 (i.e. it was capable of redeeming only one-sixth of its own notes on demand) as opposed to the Bank of

82

‘Union Is Strength’

Montreal’s 2:1 ratio.’49 Throughout the 1820s the bank offered yearly dividends of 8 per cent, compared with the Bank of England’s dividend of 5 per cent, or the Bank of New York’s 6 per cent. High dividends were frequently supplemented by bonuses on paid-up capital; in 1827, for example, they received 14 per cent, and in 1832, 26 per cent. Given that the legally fixed maximum rate of interest in the province was 6 per cent (an interest rate that the bank itself charged on its loans), these returns were exceptional. The bank, however, did more than generate enormous profits for its stockholders; they benefited in a number of other ways. The bank had been established for mercantile purposes, the ‘real bills’ doctrine holding that the only ‘real bill’ was one drawn on a commercial transaction between reputable merchants.50 Loans were for short periods of ninety days (sometimes renewable) and could not be secured by land. However, throughout the 1820s, the Bank of Upper Canada’s stockholders were able to take loans secured by their own stock.51 They could thus ‘borrow’ their own investment in the bank at 6 per cent interest, while still being paid a profit on that investment at 14 per cent, as in 1827. While there is no indication that this was (or could be) a widespread practice, it does indicate that the bank preferentially favoured its stockholders over others. That had, in fact, been the purpose of ‘capturing’ the bank from Kingston, and situating it in York. Henry John Boulton was clear about this danger in a report on the bank to R.W. Horton, the undersecretary of state for war and the colonies, dated 15 December 1825.52 Boulton had assisted in drawing up the bank’s charter, and was defending the strong state presence on the bank’s board. As he himself noted, banking ‘should not be permitted to be enterprised in a situation when the Commercial transactions of the neighbourhood did not require the Facilities which such Institutions afford.’ Such was the case in York, which had lacked enough mercantile wealth to meet the bank’s extremely low capital requirements, thereby making the investment of the government necessary. But Boulton rationalized that this investment lent the bank ‘additional confidence with the public’ since the administration appointed four of the bank’s fifteen directors so that no ‘private views can insinuate themselves to obstruct the proper and liberal application of the Funds of the Corporation.’ Boulton underscored that any bank monopoly was a political and commercial tool: A Bank is a tremendous Engine in the hands of persons entrusted with

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 83 its direction and if they are actuated by personal considerations of selfish interest they can acquire the most entire Controul or monopoly of the Merchantile transactions of the town in which it is placed. They may by liberal conduct at first induce people to get large Discounts (loans) under an expectation of their being continued and then by a sudden refusal to accommodate the same persons any farther, which they can always find plausible reasons for doing, and by requiring prompt payment of all paper outstanding, may throw the whole Business of a flourishing town into disorder, of which every one will more or less feel the Inconvenience excepting those who have caused it & who will take care to be provided with plenty of capital against the appointed time, to take advantage of the dismay they have created.53

Boulton argued that the only protection against this danger was the integrity of the governmental officers appointed to the board, which, as the Types Riot was to show, was a slim defence indeed. Patrick Swift, in the first of his editorials, had also addressed the issue of the preferential treatment given some borrowers. He repeated Boulton’s own admission that the bank was ‘a terrible engine in the hands of the provincial administration,’ and drew attention to the system by which loans were approved by the board: ‘Two black balls put into the ballot box by two of the representatives of the administration will prevent [a person of the greatest stability from] getting accommodated, even if 10 other directors declare in his favour.’54 He viewed the bank as ‘entirely under the thumb of parson Strachan and his pupils, to wield at their discretion.’ It is this attack, and the attacks on Boulton, the bank’s solicitor, that were carefully timed to coincide with the election for the bank’s directors on 5 June 1826. The bank was in serious difficulty – near bankruptcy – due to the speculative policies pursued by the Boulton-Jarvis clique; Ridout, Baldwin, and other backers of a hard money policy, were, as in 1825, attempting to take over the bank’s board. The cause of the near bankruptcy lies in the limited market for Upper Canada’s primary export, wheat. Upper Canada’s wheat exports depended on a British market, which was largely closed out in 1825–6, resulting in a diminished supply of sterling in the province and a commercial crisis.55 To attract sterling, the colonial government devalued the provincial currency by 8 per cent in 1826. Merchants, however, were the major exporters of sterling, which they needed to pay for their imports. They wished to use the bank as an agency to transfer currency outside the province. This spelled disaster for the bank, which was

84

‘Union Is Strength’

expanding the supply of provincial notes with little specie to back it. Consequently, the bank, in direct contravention of its charter, would frequently refuse to transfer money outside the province for merchants if those merchants paid for the draft with Bank of Upper Canada notes. A bank war was provoked when the Bank of Upper Canada refused to honour its own notes in Montreal and then refused to draw drafts payable to the Bank of Montreal, in April 1826. The Bank of Upper Canada was thus of little commercial use. It had decided to favour an ‘easy money’ policy to meet the local need for expanded credit. In the midst of a recession, this contributed to rising prices and speculation. This made the elections to the board of directors on 5 June 1826 particularly contentious, as the bank was close to insolvency. Mackenzie’s Patrick Swift satires occurred in the midst of these contentious elections: he attacked the bank’s loan policies in his first article on 18 May, republished the debtors’ gaol satire on 1 June, and the riot took place on 8 June. The combination of economic crisis, bad management, and Mackenzie’s public attacks took its toll on the Jarvis-Boulton-Robinson majority, as four of their number were temporarily replaced with merchants. This erosion of their power no doubt contributed to the decision by Jarvis, Boulton, Robinson, and Baby to rid themselves of Mackenzie’s goads for good. At the time of the Types Riot, Mackenzie was heavily in debt, and in Buffalo; Macaulay suggested that he had left to escape prosecution for debt, and that the rioters had acted too hastily.56 Their actions certainly backfired, cementing public sympathy behind Mackenzie. What shocked the public about the riots was the impunity with which these men acted: Allan and Heward, magistrates, looked on with approval; the solicitor and attorney generals failed to reprimand their students; and Robinson, the attorney general, failed to prosecute the rioters. It was left to Mackenzie to file a civil suit for damages, thereby having his own lawyer, rather than an implicated Attorney General Robinson, prosecute the rioters. As a result of his civil suit Mackenzie, in October 1826, was awarded £650 by the grand jury. Mackenzie’s impotent jabs, his biting satire, ultimately had little effect on the Bank of Upper Canada, or the Jarvis-Boulton-Robinson clique at its helm. But as his pamphlet, The History of the Destruction of the Colonial Advocate Press, by the Officers of the Provincial Government of Upper Canada and Law Students of the Attorney & Solicitor General… made clear, the Types Riot demonstrated that the province’s political and economic elite were perfectly prepared to abrogate the very law

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 85

they had sworn to defend, and on which they based their providential Loyalist right to rule. One of their most potent weapons against their enemies was prosecution for debt. It was, after all, Randal’s experience at the hands of Boulton which politicized him, transforming him into a political leader for the nascent reform movement. So, too, for William Lyon Mackenzie. This punitive award, and the public celebrity that came with it, restored Mackenzie’s economic prospects; the money was used to reestablish the Colonial Advocate in 1827, and to ironically fund his first election bid in July 1828 in the County of York, where he was to meet the Children of Peace for the first time. After a visit to their community, Mackenzie was to laud the group in a lengthy series of articles, and begin the practice of publishing David Willson’s sermons.57 This was the start of their long-term relationship that came to fruition in the Grand Convention of Delegates and the formation of the Canadian Alliance Society. At a later election Mackenzie would laud them, as ‘since ever he had known them they had been on the side of the yeomanry – they had always attended the elections at their own cost, had always voted right, had signed liberal petitions and had supported them with their purses.’58 Even the Tories recognized this intimate tie, noting that the ‘demi-semi-any-thing-arian, W.L. Mackenzie’ had discovered ‘in this ranting, ravaging sect every thing in accordance with his views of religion and morality.’59 This election cost Mackenzie £500, money he would not have otherwise had.60 He seemed clear on the relationship between debt and political representation: ‘I am now again an unencumbered freeholder of Upper Canada … Being therefore easy in my circumstances, entirely freed from the terrors of litigation, prosperous in my business, in good health, and owing very few debts, I have applied to the people of the most populous county in Upper Canada, for the highest honor in their gift, the surest token of their esteem and confidence.’61 From this new parliamentary platform, Mackenzie immediately launched an investigation into the Bank of Upper Canada, an investigation to which we will now turn. The bank had, ironically, funded Mackenzie’s election, and thereby provided him with a platform that proved a significant obstacle to its plans for expansion. Henry Ausman and the Bill for the General Regulation of Banking Allan MacNab’s early history as Boulton’s agent, living ‘on the limits’

86

‘Union Is Strength’

to protect Boulton’s land speculations, illustrates the wider problems faced by York’s entrepreneurial elite. As Mackenzie’s successful prosecution of the Types rioters was to show, the legal system could work both ways, and even speculators of substantial power, like Henry John Boulton, could be sued. Boulton found it necessary to engage in complicated legal manoeuvres to protect his investments. It is for this reason that the York elite sought a degree of protection through the limited liability offered through the incorporation of the Bank of Upper Canada; as shareholders, their liability was only to the extent of their share capital, and their personal property was shielded from the courts in a way that did not extend to the bank’s customers, as the case of Henry Ausman will show. This limited liability was critical, given the highly speculative nature of the bank’s business, as we have just seen. Farmers like Henry Ausman, who lacked the protection of limited liability, could find themselves harassed, and the machinery of the courts used to strip them of their property, their political voice, their ‘respectability,’ and their credit worthiness. What angered Mackenzie most about the case was Boulton’s rather calm admission that the ‘outrage’ committed against Ausman was for him the normal course of affairs. It was this injustice that Mackenzie sought to publicize through his investigation of the Bank of Upper Canada in the Select Committee on Currency. The bank was a legislated monopoly, able to manufacture ‘paper rags’ that it loaned out and charged interest on; and this fictive capital, if not repaid, allowed the bank to seize real property for sale at a sheriff’s auction at cut rates. The entire legal apparatus for the recovery of debt was placed in the hands of the bank to recover ‘money’ that it loaned out, which, in fact, had no specie to back it. Mackenzie challenged the bank on each point: its legislated monopoly, the limited liability of stockholders, and the legal system for the collection of debt that impoverished farmers of long standing for relatively small debts. The dryness of the parliamentary record was enlivened for his readers by personalizing the issues through the example of a Markham farmer, Henry Ausman, prosecuted by the bank and its agent, Attorney General Henry J. Boulton. The strategy of personalizing his critiques to engage his readers should not hide the structural abuses the case was meant to illustrate. Henry Ausman was a Hanoverian German who moved to Markham in 1802 as part of William Berczy’s failed ‘German Mills’ settlement. He leased lot 10 on the 4th concession of Markham, a Crown reserve lot, seven years later. In 1830 his twenty-one-year lease came due, but he

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 87

was in arrears on his rent. ‘Being anxious to take out a new lease, lest some other person would apply for his lot, and also desirous to finish a sawmill he had begun to build on the premises, he borrowed £25 from the Bank of Upper Canada.’62 He was able to renew his lease, but unable to repay the loan at the end of the standard ninety-day term, having an outstanding balance of £21 3s. The bank’s president, William Allan – also the manager of the Canada Company that now owned the Crown reserve – instructed their solicitor, Henry John Boulton, to seek redress. Boulton instituted proceedings against Ausman, as well as Ausman’s guarantor, Henry Tiele, also of Markham, in the Court of King’s Bench. Ausman was called to Boulton’s office, where he signed a confession (cognovit) which left the case uncontested, and would hence lower the court costs involved. Boulton told Ausman ‘to tell Tiel [sic] to come in and give another cognovit for the same debt, but he being an old man (about three score years of age) and not considering that it was a matter of much importance, as they had his name and my confession of judgment, omitted to attend.’63 In the standard course of such a claim, the court would render a verdict in favour of the bank, assess court costs, and authorize the sheriff to seize property for public auction to pay the debt. Ausman, and Mackenzie, never contested the legitimacy of the debt, or its repayment. Rather, they focused on the escalating legal fees and Boulton’s abuse of the law to Ausman’s enormous loss. Ausman’s original unpaid debt was for £21; with legal fees, it rose to £41. As Ausman complained, the sheriff’s bailiff came and seized and sold a yoke of six-year old oxen and a yoke of handsome steers, which brought in all about sixty dollars. In a week or so afterwards he sold a waggon and potash kettle, and refused to give any statement of sales or receipts thereon. He refused to levy upon the new lease though offered him for that purpose, but sold the mare from under your petitioner for $16.50. On the 2nd day of April, Underhill came to your petitioner’s house in Markham and sold his other horse together with the harness and a potash kettle which had cost $90 in York, two large six-pail kettles, a yoke of four year old bulls, a three year old heifer almost ready to calve, ten sheep with the wool, and ten lambs. Of these sales he refused to give your petitioner any account or receipt, although the property sacrificed was of the value of at least one hundred pounds.64

As Ausman pointed out, the interest on the £21 for a year would have

88

‘Union Is Strength’

amounted to only a little more than a pound. As Mackenzie was to make public the next year, there was only £4 10s of specie (a 4.7:1 note to specie ratio) to back the £21 of banknotes that had been loaned.65 Mackenzie publicized Ausman’s case not because it was unusual, but rather, for its representing the normal course of affairs. Relatively small debts loaned for very short periods by the bank could impoverish and bankrupt a farmer who had worked twenty-one years to build up his farm. Once sued, other creditors quickly followed suit while Ausman still had property left to seize; his ‘respectability’ or credit worthiness was challenged.66 A parliamentary report showed that in 1830 the Home District Court recorded 156 successful actions for an average debt of £21, and average costs of £3 19s.67 In 1834 the Bank of Upper Canada launched 278 suits in the Court of King’s Bench in the Home District; and all banks combined, 427 suits. Mackenzie estimated another 173 suits were heard in the District Court that year. Given an average cost of £6 per suit, he estimated the legal costs at ‘£6,000, or $24,000, or the price of nearly fifty thousand bushels of wheat.’68 As Mackenzie reported in an article published in 1836, the Bank of Upper Canada had launched thirty-five of 183 suits that year (and all banks combined, fifty-seven suits) which were heard before the chief justice, assisted by none other than the president of the Bank of Upper Canada as associate judge. ‘In addition to the above, we are informed that 140 suits have been commenced in one day, last week, by the Bank of Upper Canada alone.’69 The District Court was a lower court with lower costs; the average debt for 1830 was £21 (the same as Ausman’s debt to the Bank of Upper Canada, and the average loaned out by the Children of Peace’s charity fund). The average court costs there were £3 19s, in contrast to the £19 in costs resulting from Boulton’s actions in the Court of King’s Bench. It was this difference that was the basis of Ausman’s complaint against Boulton, who had taken the actions in the more expensive court and had launched two suits for the recovery of one debt – thereby more than doubling his fees. ‘Had the Crown Officer, Boulton, taken the demand of the Bank against Ausman into the proper court the expense on the Cognovit would have been £2 2 6, in place of £4 13 8. Had he prosecuted Henry Tiel [sic] the endorser in the proper court, the expense instead of £14 3 4, would have been £4 19 2. Of course the sheriff’s fees are also higher in the King’s Bench than in the District Court.’70 Sheriff’s auctions rarely obtained the market price of the goods they took, resulting in a loss of £100 of real property for Ausman to repay £21 of bank paper backed by less than £5 of specie.

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 89

Mackenzie’s publication of Ausman’s case was thus intended to drive home a larger political agenda for court and bank reforms; an anti-bank agenda that drew on the Jacksonian Democrats (see Chapter 4). At the same time as he publicized Ausman’s case, Mackenzie was also publishing the report of the Select Committee on the Administration of Justice71 (of which he was a member) established by the House of Assembly to inquire into how court costs could be reduced. He simultaneously published the ‘Minutes of Evidence’ of the Select Committee on the State of the Currency (of which he was chair), which was investigating whether the Bank of Upper Canada should be allowed to increase its capital, or a second bank chartered.72 Ausman’s case clearly illustrated the problems before each committee: a bank which unjustly impoverished the farmers of the district to the profit of the Family Compact, and a faulty and expensive legal system which enabled them to do so. Mackenzie included verbatim transcripts of the evidence presented by members of the Assembly, judges, and lawyers. Of interest is the testimony of Henry John Boulton, who argued that the reduction in court costs would penalize those who launched suits: ‘If the emoluments of the profession are lessened between party and party, that is, if the taxable costs are materially diminished, the only difference to the public will be that the plaintiffs will be obliged to bear a proportionable part of the pecuniary burthen of prosecuting their claims, because a man of education and science cannot be expected to expend his time and talents without adequate return.’73 Boulton thus reassured the committee that the reduction in court costs would not affect his own income. This sustained campaign in press and parliament was intended to open the bank’s business to public inspection. As early as 14 January Mackenzie had criticized the administration for only appointing legislative councillors, rather than members of the House of Assembly, as its directors to the bank board; and the Select Committee on Currency complained of the bank’s secrecy, including its refusal to release even so much as a list of its stockholders. In this, they had been questionably abetted by bank solicitor H.J. Boulton in his role as solicitor general.74 They objected to the legislated limited liability granted to the stockholders, which prevented their property from being sold to meet the bank’s debts, unlike what the bank did to its own debtors, such as Ausman. The Select Committee on Currency unsuccessfully sought to have one of its own members appointed a director in that June’s bank elections.75 When the House of Assembly proved unable to accomplish

90

‘Union Is Strength’

even this, Mackenzie turned to the public in an attempt to influence the election of bank directors as he had in 1826. The first of Ausman’s letters to appear in the Colonial Advocate was thus a copy of his address to the stockholders. After he stated his case, he pleaded with them: Mr Boulton’s name certainly does not stand very high in the country, I shall neither call him a robber nor a swindler nor say any thing harsh of him. He no doubt goes the full length the law allows him, in increasing his fortune out of unfortunate persons who like Mr Tiel [sic] and myself come under his gripe. It may be all legally right that he should do so by our law, but it is not so by the law of God; and when you meet together in a few days to divide your profits, think for a moment that they may have been wrung out of the industrious farmer and mechanic; by law unmixed with mercy, and sit down and see if some more christian [sic] plan cannot be devised to collect your debts than that pursued with me.76

Although he had failed in his legislative attempt to have a ‘responsible’ reformer appointed to the bank’s board of directors from among the members of the House of Assembly, Mackenzie attended the bank’s annual meeting as ‘Patrick Swift,’ ‘in the capacity of attorney to two respectable stockholders,’ so that he could both report on its proceedings and make a motion to ‘require Henry J. Boulton to refund in favor of Henry Ausman.’77 But the shareholders demanded the proxies leave the room while business was being discussed, and the election ‘was terminated in favor of the official faction.’ Mackenzie’s only victory was that the bank finally released the names and holdings of its stockholders, which he promptly published, repeating the list the following year, showing that the government, its officers, and legislative councillors (but not members of the Assembly) owned 5,381 of the bank’s 8,000 shares.78 It was now demonstrably clear to the public that the Bank of Upper Canada was firmly in control of the Family Compact. With the bank having successfully protected itself from Mackenzie’s end runs on the board, Ausman had no further recourse than an appeal to the lieutenant governor, Sir John Colborne. The petition and accompanying article make clear that Ausman’s appeal, although aimed at Boulton, saw him as merely symptomatic of the legal profession of which he, now as attorney general, stood at the head. To ensure that the legitimacy of his claims were well known, Mackenzie published the text of the 1818 ‘Act to Regulate the Costs in Certain Cases in the Court

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 91

of King’s Bench’ which made it mandatory, in cases below £40, to sue in the district courts. He publicized the law because of its systematic neglect in the courts: ‘what use are the rule and the law, in nine cases out of ten, where the defendants are ignorant people residing in the new settlements. They are horror struck at the idea of going to another lawyer to defend their case.’79 In response to the petition, the lieutenant governor routinely requested an explanation from Boulton, which was provided on 10 July. Boulton’s response pointed out the general laxity with which he, personally, had prosecuted Ausman: he had been instructed by the bank to sue Ausman three months after his loan was due, but he left the matter in the hands of a clerk to seek a cognovit from both Ausman and Tiele ‘as the Bank had instructed the prosecution of both.’ It was not until three weeks after he had received his instructions from the bank that he proceeded to court, after repeated failed attempts to get a response from Tiele. However, ‘Tiele never came or took any notice whatever of the proceeding, and in the ordinary course of the court my clerk entered up the judgment, and the proper officer taxed the costs, which I never enquired about, and when Ausman asked me for a statement of the costs, I could not tell him any thing about it, but referred him to my clerk, who had managed the business, for such statement, which he accordingly gave him.’80 He similarly claimed no personal knowledge or interest in the actions of the sheriff’s bailiff in collecting the debt. This ‘outrage,’ to him, was merely the normal course of action, as the earlier cases against Randal, Willson, and Brown attest. Boulton also defended his right to take the action in the Court of King’s Bench, since there were legal remedies to this abuse. He did not practise in the district courts, and declared no knowledge of its costs; when in the spring of 1830 several defendants complained of the costs of the higher court to the bank, Boulton requested the bank to clarify its policy. He explained to them that if the bank initiated proceedings in the superior court that should have been heard in the lower court, he would be paid the lower court’s costs only if the defendant countersued. As Mackenzie had already noted, most debtors were ‘horror struck’ at the thought of hiring another lawyer for such a countersuit. And if the defendant had signed a confession, they thereby became liable to any costs of any court to which the action was taken; if they refused to sign the confession, they could force the matter to the lower court, but then had to defend their case, again at higher cost. Since Boulton stated he thought the costs of the two courts were roughly similar (whereas the

92

‘Union Is Strength’

superior courts costs were almost double), he wished further instructions ‘without any reference either to my convenience or other personal benefit.’ The bank left the matter to Boulton’s discretion. But Boulton could not let the matter rest on legal merit alone; he, like the Tory press, sought to smear Ausman’s reputation. George Gurnett, of the Courier, had published ‘gross and infamous slanders’ against Ausman. But when Ausman sought legal recourse, he found that Gurnett did not own his press; rather, it was owned by his ‘employers.’ Gurnett already faced several uncollectable writs against him, making recourse to the law irrelevant.81 Yet, Ausman’s recourse to the law was itself used by Boulton – who was Ausman’s own lawyer! – to castigate him: ‘a more litigious or troublesome person is scarcely to be met with, [he] having been always at law with some one or another.’ Boulton, who represented the Bank of Upper Canada against his own client, Ausman, set himself up as Ausman’s protector: ‘if he felt at the time that he was harshly used is it not reasonable that he would have then complained of the usage to some one if not to me? At that time I was conducting an intricate and troublesome law suit for Ausman which is still pending and I have not to this hour received from him any thing like the disbursements I have paid for him, and while he was making up the money for the Bank I forebore pressing him for the money due to me which he has not paid yet and probably never will.’ The intemperate Boulton did not stop there, however, but went on to cast Ausman as a criminal, a danger to the public: ‘Indeed it is owing to the clemency of His Majesty that Ausman now exists again to put forth those malicious and vindictive passions which not many years ago, pushed him on to the commission of a crime, that of malicious shooting at one of his neighbours, which forfeited his life to the Laws of his Country.’82 Ausman and Mackenzie waited six months for a reply from the lieutenant governor, which did not come. On 30 December 1830, a disillusioned Mackenzie finally ‘advised the petitioner not to expect relief from further applications to His Excellency, and to forbear to complain where complaints could serve no good purpose.’ His belated rebuttal of Boulton was a bitter rumination on the year’s failed efforts against the Bank of Upper Canada and the legal profession. He carefully revisited each of the injustices against Ausman: of the case being taken to the higher court at higher costs; of two suits being launched to recover one debt; of Boulton’s suing his own client on behalf of the bank; of the selective inequity of prosecutions by a bank that favoured ‘greater defaulters of a certain stamp’ and ‘has waxed fat and powerful in idleness

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 93

upon the patient industry of the community’ as a result; of Boulton’s fatuous defence that had Ausman felt aggrieved, he could have countersued for the lower costs of the district courts: ‘After executions and sheriff and bailiffs have stript a man almost to the very skin by such courses as we have described, the poor fellow is consoled by being informed that with an empty pocket he may commence a lawsuit in the supreme court, against the King’s Attorney General, his own lawyer too, conducting an intricate case still pending, almost gratuitously! The Judges of the Court being the said Attorney General’s brother-in-law and former law apprentice! a delightful prospect truly!’83 But Mackenzie reserved his greatest ire for the personal attacks that had been made against Ausman. He said Ausman may be a ‘litigious, passionate, cruel and vindictive’ man, but this was irrelevant before the law, where all men are equal. A man of the power and stature of the attorney general of the province should ‘show an upright example with mildness and moderation to bad men, as it may tend to their reformation.’ No, ‘if Mr Ausman is really that monster in human shape which it has pleased the Attorney General thus most unnecessarily to represent him, why is it that he, the Attorney General, exhibits himself as his (Ausman’s) regular man of business; as administering to his litigiousness, and conducting intricate and troublesome civil lawsuits for him; suits still pending; and even making advances for him (as he insinuates, beyond common) to enable him to carry those suits to a favorable termination?’84 It was Boulton’s dredging up Ausman’s conviction for malicious shooting, however, that allowed Mackenzie to compare the ‘men of character,’ the provincial elite who shared the governance of state, bank, and legal system, with this ‘monster.’ Had Boulton, he asked, already forgotten his own belated trial in 1828 for his part in the dueling death of John Ridout at the hands of Samuel P. Jarvis in 1817? Although acquitted, could he cease to remember the distance – eight paces – between an experienced marksman and a young and foolish lad altogether ignorant of the science of dueling? If he felt, and said, ‘it was too close,’ did he insist upon a change in the distance? Did he, the oldest person on that fatal field, exert himself to calm the unholy wrath of two of his erring fellow mortals? When the pistol of him who fell, went off before the time, by accident, did the Attorney General manfully protest against allowing an angry and experienced marksman to stand at eight paces distance from the boy he slew

94

‘Union Is Strength’ – not with the fear of death before his eyes from his youthful antagonist’s inexperienced hand – but with the certain knowledge that that antagonist, against whom he was about to take a deliberate and fatal aim was not also taking aim at him? Who was it that was depended upon by the parties, as to the law of dueling? Who carried the challenge? Who gave the word to fire? … And finally – What was the Attorney General’s conduct, when the victim of passion and folly lay bleeding in death? Did he humanely stop to soothe his dying moments? Did the workings of a kindly heart induce him to remain to ask forgiveness, and to smooth the grassy pillow of him who was about to be cut off from among the children of men? Or, did he, like a coward and a poltroon, take to his heels, saying ‘it would be an awkward circumstance to be found in a court of justice, with a dead man in his hand – he should take care of himself?’85

It should be no surprise that having reached this level of acrimonious exchange, Allan MacNab, Boulton’s former law student and partner, and now the member for Wentworth County, should act on behalf of the attorney general to have Mackenzie expelled from the House of Assembly in January 1831. Mackenzie was accused of breach of privilege for having distributed 168 copies of the Journal of the House to constituents. The motion was defeated twenty to fifteen, although both the attorney general and the solicitor general voted to expel Mackenzie.86 Even though Mackenzie had failed in his attempt to gain direct access to the Bank of Upper Canada in 1830, he continued his attempts to rein in its abuses. In February 1831 the Select Committee on Currency, chaired by Mackenzie, presented its report, and read a bill for the general regulation of banking. The committee proposed to safeguard the public from a degraded paper currency by placing limits on banks’ ability to issue notes (to no more than three times their capital), to limit the issue of banknotes under $5, and to dissolve any bank’s charter if they failed to redeem their notes in specie. But importantly, the bill also provided several provisions to ensure their open management: each bank’s books were to be open to investigation by both houses; lists of the stockholders should be made available to all stockholders before bank elections; and those stockholders living within the bank’s district should not be allowed to vote by proxy.87 Mackenzie’s bill did not pass.88 Mackenzie’s bill for the general regulation of banking was a response to the petitions of Kingston merchants to establish the ‘Commercial Bank of the Midland District’ there in 1830, and 1831. The Kingston

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 95

group had sufficient legislative support to have their charter passed on 4 February 1831, the week before the Committee on Currency reported; the bill was passed by the Legislative Council on 2 January 1832 only because a rider had been attached doubling the Bank of Upper Canada’s capital. Although the general bill to regulate banking was defeated, the petitioners for the Commercial Bank had effectively broken the Bank of Upper Canada’s monopoly. The competition provided little consolation for Mackenzie, who saw the introduction of a second chartered bank with limited liability as a multiplication of evil, rather than its diminution; without some form of public accountability, it would simply replicate the abuses found in the Bank of Upper Canada. Although Mackenzie had not been successful in achieving his legal reforms, or in significantly altering the Bank of Upper Canada’s monopoly, he had managed to stymie the bank’s application to double its capital.89 This appears to have been the final straw for the bank’s directors, who successfully moved to have Mackenzie expelled from the House of Assembly. As Mackenzie recounted the sequence of events, ‘I was accused of being the author of an article in a newspaper which they called a libel – I admitted the authorship – refused all apology – was expelled – unanimously reelected – again accused of libel – condemned by the Legislative Council – again expelled – and then, the bank-stock bill so much desired by the government and its officers, passed through committee, clauses for securing the public from risk being first negatived in a full house by the Speaker’s casting voice.’90 With hindsight, Mackenzie seems to have clearly understood that it was his opposition to the Bank of Upper Canada, and its petition to have its capital stock doubled, which lay behind his expulsion from the House; had he not been ejected, the bank would have again lost its petition through his deciding vote. William Lyon Mackenzie was not one to take such matters lying down; and so, bolstered by public support in the form of a ‘Central Committee’ of the electors of the Home District, he embarked on a journey to London to appeal his expulsion from the House of Assembly to the Colonial Office. He also took aim at the charters of the two banks, founded he said, ‘upon the same visionary basis of two shillings in the pound and no real responsibility. Had [British] ministers assented to these acts, we should have had nearly four millions of paper money afloat next year in Upper Canada; and the farmers, labourers, and mechanics, exchanging their wheat, labour, and industry for paper rags which, in the event of a bad harvest, or other casualty, would, “Like

96

‘Union Is Strength’

the baseless fabric of a vision, / Leave not a wreck behind.”’91 Mackenzie’s presence in London evidently so worried the bankers in York and Kingston that Attorney General Boulton and Solicitor General Hagerman (promoter of the Kingston Bank Bill) also travelled to London to defend their charters. It seemed here – momentarily at least – that Mackenzie achieved his greatest success. Not only was his expulsion from the House of Assembly overturned, but Boulton and Hagerman were dismissed for their part in it. And as a windfall, the bills for the two bank charters were reserved. A Report on Grievances In recounting the stories of Randal, Brown, Willson, and Ausman, the bitter feud between Boulton and Mackenzie can too easily be reduced to personalities. Their consistent, vindictive diatribes against each other too easily hide the wider issues that the parliamentary records reveal to more thorough inquiry. William Lyon Mackenzie was a masterful storyteller; in personifying the wider issues of debt, abuse of the law, and the ‘political engine’ that the bank monopoly had become, he gained a readership who understood those issues through personal experience. The independence and respectability of farmers was difficult to maintain when all were in debt, and hence potentially subject to legal abuses like those documented here. This economic insecurity also had its political repercussions, as economic independence ensured a political voice at the hustings. The province’s fragile democratic institutions were thus always threatened by the problem of dependency and patronage. Lacking personal experience of these abuses, we are only left with the obvious antipathy of these two men. The vindictiveness of their feud, however, is reflective of deeper economic and political conflicts; the red thread linking the debtors’ gaol satire, the Types Riot, the Ausman articles, and Mackenzie’s expulsions, is the Bank of Upper Canada. The bank was, as all admitted, a ‘political engine’ that tied the Family Compact together, and gave it its economic strength. In an economy where no one could escape the chains of debt that tied the colony to the mother country, an institution like the Bank of Upper Canada provided an unfair shield of limited liability to a select few; it was, as Mackenzie continually claimed, a ‘licensed monopoly.’ Those who controlled the Bank of Upper Canada also controlled the province’s principal money and credit supply, yet they were not accountable to the public. These same men controlled the province’s legal system,

The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 97

by which those in debt could be sued and incarcerated. Farmers such as Henry Ausman and Jonah Brown found debt a blunt weapon used to deprive them of their economic ‘respectability’ and political independence; sued by the bank, Ausman lost property worth five times its value, and was opened to other suits. Without ratable property, he had no political voice. Mackenzie’s expulsion from the House of Assembly similarly points to the power of this group to silence its democratic opponents. It is out of this dilemma that the radical reform movement was born, as the subsequent career of William Lyon Mackenzie illustrates. It is important to underscore, however, that political action – obviously impotent – was not the only form of reform pursued. Attempts to reform the banking and legal systems of the province in the legislature proved largely ineffective, pushing the farmers of the Home District to pursue politics through alternate means. Creative economic experiments were tried, in an effort to subvert the ties of political and economic dependency produced by indebtedness. It was to address this problem of debt that economic experiments like the Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the Bank of the People were formed, on the model, I would argue, of the developing moral economy of the Children of Peace at Hope. Indeed, the Children of Peace were to take a generally unrecognized leadership role in all of these experiments; as Mackenzie was to note in his first article on the group, ‘they afford ample proofs, both in their village and in their chapels, that comparatively, great achievements may be accomplished by a few when united in their efforts and persevering in their habits.’92

3 The Economics of Respectability: The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company

Corporations. Two great abuses are the fruit of the present system – one consists in the restraint on the liberty of association, and the other is the excessive powers with which corporate bodies are often clothed. By the first the citizen is dependent on the arbitrary favour of a legislature for permission to pursue a given enterprise in combination with others; and by the second, if legislatures go on, in the various states, for a century to come as they have done within a few years past, the whole property of the country is in danger of being tied up as an irredeemable appendage to incorporated institutions, and put beyond the reach of individual possession. Constitution, 16 November 1836

In 1833 Patrick Shirreff, a Scots farmer, set out on a tour of North America with the aim of evaluating its prospects for emigrants, and more particularly, for his younger brother. He travelled widely within Upper Canada, including taking a side trip to Lake Simcoe, and the village of Hope where he visited the just completed temple of the Children of Peace.1 Shirreff was a keen observer, and as a practical farmer, particularly concerned with agricultural pursuits. After extensive inquiries, he put the lie to the common propaganda of the emigrant guides of the Canada Company which claimed that ‘the price of the land, too, is still so low, and may yet be had on terms so easy that the poorest individual can here procure for himself and family a valuable tract; which, with a little labour, he can soon convert into a comfortable home, such as he could probably never attain in any other country – all his own!’2 He contested neither the quality of the land, nor its availability on cred-

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 99

it; rather, contrasting the situation with the earlier period of free land grants, he pointed out that ‘the system of selling land on credit, and contracting debt at stores, hath proved ruinous of later years to settlers without capital, who have no other means of extricating themselves than selling their properties.’3 The shift from free government grants of land to land sales by the Canada Company enmeshed the new settler in the commercial lines of credit that extended from Great Britain, through Montreal factors to Toronto wholesalers and their rural customers: The greater portion of British emigrants, arriving in Canada without funds and the most exalted ideas of the value and productiveness of land, purchase extensively on credit … Everything goes on well for a short time. A log-house is erected with the assistance of old settlers, and the clearing of forest is commenced. Credit is obtained at a neighbouring store … During this period he has led a life of toil and privation … On the arrival of the fourth harvest, he is reminded by the storekeeper to pay his account with cash, or discharge part of it with his disposable produce, for which he gets a very small price. He is also informed that the purchase money of the land has been accumulating with interest … he finds himself poorer than when he commenced operation. Disappointment preys on his spirit … the land ultimately reverts to the former proprietor, or a new purchaser is found.4

More recent studies have suggested that a minimum of £100 to £200 plus the cost of land was required to start a new farm in the bush.5 As Henry Ausman’s case demonstrates, loans of this size would be difficult to pay off, even for a farmer who had been improving his farm for twenty-one years. The reform political organization, the Canadian Alliance Society, in its first ‘Appeal to the People,’ hammered the same point home: ‘Now that wheat is down to half a dollar a bushel, no one denies the existence of great distress among the industrious classes. But even when it was at a dollar, it may be remembered that 700,000 acres of land, granted under deeds, were sold by the sheriff to a few persons who had credit at the banks, or small capital, or were in office, at about 5 pence in acre, and this too for arrears of taxes so trifling that in eight years they had amounted to but little over 30s on a 100 acres. The inability to pay so small a sum, clearly shows that the banks are of little service to the farmer, and that the system of draining the country of its specie is ruinous to the landowner and mechanic.’6 In this 1830 auc-

100

‘Union Is Strength’

tion, five well-off speculators, including Hamilton merchant William Dickson and Attorney General H.J. Boulton, purchased 42,300 acres of land in the Home District that had belonged to hundreds of tax defaulters. This was the equivalent of an entire township purchased at auction from debtors to the government for pennies an acre. Managing the problem of debt – both for mortgages and for provisions – was a concern for both old and new settlers. For the vast majority of those who settled in rural areas, debt could largely be resolved only through the sale of wheat and flour. Yet, throughout much of the 1820s, the price of wheat went through periodic cycles of boom and bust depending on the British markets that ultimately provided the credit on which the farmer lived. It cost the average farmer 13s to produce a barrel of flour; 20s was considered a good price, and in exceptional circumstances, up to 27s could be had.7 But, even if prices rose, most farmers produced only small surpluses: ‘For the entire decade 1830–9, exports averaged less than £1 per person a year (less than £6 per household) in the producing region, and in the 1820s the figure was just half that.’8 Although farmers derived income from other sources as well, it should be evident that the debt levels of most farmers placed them in an exceptionally difficult position. Merchants frequently resorted to the courts and threats of gaol to recover their advances. Successful farmers creatively responded to these dilemmas by reducing, wherever possible, their dependence on credit, and the providers of credit: the chain of merchants, wholesalers, and trading houses leading back to Britain. There were two principal means by which they could do so. On the one hand, farmers could adopt an increasingly problematic ‘subsistence-oriented strategy’ where they simply avoided purchases of any goods they could not produce themselves or obtain from local sources through non-market exchanges.9 On the other hand, farmers could create alternate sources of credit and co-operatively market their crops to avoid mercantile debt; this second path of resistance is relatively undocumented in Ontario’s early history. Groups like the Children of Peace, through their visibility, draw our attention to these joint stock strategies, although we need to remind ourselves that from an economic perspective, they were indistinguishable from other farmers in the Home District. Here we trace these activities specifically among the Children of Peace as an exemplar of these wider processes, before turning to other nearby experiments such as the Newcastle District Accommodation Company. Many early first-hand accounts of the Children of Peace mention, for

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 101

example, their co-operative marketing of wheat. In touring the temple with David Willson, Shirreff showed him a copy of the book, ‘“Canada as it is” wherein he was mentioned.’ The book’s author, George Henry, had written, ‘David keeps the store: the general produce of the community is deposited with him, and is conveyed to York, for sale, regularly twice a-week; and he accounts to the different members for the amount of produce sent to market.’ What Henry and Shirreff took to be a distinctive aspect of the sect that set it off from its neighbours – cooperative marketing – was instead, part of a much wider co-operative movement organized as a joint stock company in which the Children of Peace participated. In York, Henry had himself approvingly noted that: ‘A large body of the farmers in Yonge-street, and in the townships in the vicinity of York, have adopted the plan of storing their own wheat; they have formed themselves into an association, and have built a very large storage at York, on the margin of the lake, where they store it in the winter, while the roads are good, and transport it down in the Spring, – thus securing to themselves the best prices. They have their secretary in York to see to the storage, and keep the account of deposits, &c.’10 The Children of Peace were shareholders in this co-operative venture, the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, founded in 1824. The Farmers’ Storehouse was one of those means by which the farmers of the Home District creatively sought to evade the problem of debt through novel joint stock companies. Although Willson made regular trips to York to deliver loads of wheat – and to preach – it was an elder in the group, Samuel Hughes, who was most active in the organization of the Farmers’ Storehouse. The Farmers’ Storehouse Company stood at the centre of a broad economic and political movement that, in its essentials, was not greatly different from much later co-operative movements such as the United Farmers of Alberta in the early twentieth century, as well as contemporary movements, such as the Owenite socialists in Britain, and the Workingmen’s Party in the United States. The United Farmers transformed the political landscape of the prairies: ‘Alberta radicals, drawing on British and North American radical traditions, castigated monopolies and opposed “special privileges” for corporations. Following the labour theory of value – that labour creates and should retain all value – they saw themselves and workers as fellow producers. This belief led them to call for a farmer-labour political alliance to implement their program of radical monetary reform and state ownership to redistribute wealth.’11

102

‘Union Is Strength’

In this chapter we closely examine how these same programs and values motivated the farmers of the Home District to organize, economically as the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and politically as the reform organization, the Canadian Alliance Society. These two organizations were linked by men such as Joseph Shepard and Samuel Hughes. In tracing the history of this social movement, I underscore its organizational form – as a joint stock company – with an eye to tracing its political implications. The Constitution newspaper complained of the special privileges granted incorporated companies, such as the Bank of Upper Canada, the Clergy Corporation, and the Canada Company, as legislated monopolies. It was the Upper Canadian state’s favouritism towards its legislated monopolies, and ‘the restraint on the liberty of association’ it placed in the way of joint stock companies, that pushed the founders of such democratically organized joint stock companies to engage in the struggle for political reform in the 1830s. The story of the joint stock Farmers’ Storehouse Company is thus, of necessity, also the story of political struggle. I argue that the alternate form of economic organization these farmers pursued, the joint stock company, was both the crucible within which democratic values were fostered and an early precursor of co-operative ‘public works.’ These farmers, the radical wing of the ‘Country Party,’ stood opposed to the emerging financial oligarchy, the ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ of the Court Party, who were increasingly obtaining a stranglehold on the political and economic life of Upper Canada. The Farmers’ Storehouse Company The Farmers’ Storehouse was organized as an unincorporated joint stock company on 7 February 1824. It was in many ways similar to a large number of consumer-owned community flour and ‘bread societies’ that flourished in England from 1759 to the 1860s. Like these English examples, the Farmers’ Storehouse was organized on a joint stock basis to engage in trade on behalf of the poor; they were early co-operatives. The Farmers’ Storehouse was founded during one of the periodic downturns in the wheat trade, when colonial exports were barred from English markets and local trade stagnated. These co-operatives are an example of the developing ‘moral economies’ that came to fruition in the Owenite socialist movement in the 1830s, as described in Chapter 1.12 Whereas most ‘social and economic historians have tended to emphasize the role of riot and protest in asserting the older values of the

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 103

“moral economy” against the capitalist market’ these joint stock companies represent ‘non-conflict based approaches [that] would not necessarily, of course, have been reported.’13 Their purpose was like that of the reform-inspired houses of industry: an attempt to preserve the respectability of the poor. The Farmers’ Storehouse ensured that farmers obtained the best price for their wheat, and offered them merchandise at a reduced rate in return. Over time, it also became a source of credit, a bank. In these ways, it helped farmers maintain their economic respectability, and hence, their ability to act politically as ‘freeholders.’ The bread societies that developed in England during the Napoleonic Wars were largely extensions of existing ‘friendly societies.’14 Friendly societies were democratically organized self-help community insurance organizations designed to alleviate tragedies arising from accident, sickness, and old age. Regular contributions to a common fund entitled the society member to relief under prescribed circumstances, thereby preserving that member’s respectability in the face of calamity. The rise in the price of flour during the Napoleonic Wars led many friendly societies to form ‘flour clubs,’ which purchased and ground wheat for members, selling it to them at prime cost; and by 1800 an increasingly large number of flour clubs were collectively erecting their own mills to grind grain at cost. As their organization became more complex, these consumer co-operatives began to sell shares to the public, assuming a ‘joint stock form.’15 One of the largest was the Birmingham Union Mill, a three-storey mill built in 1797, which had 1,360 shareholders.16 Although the Bubble Act was increasingly enforced after 1808, and the Birmingham Mill charged in 1811, it was tolerated in a landmark case on the grounds that its public benefits excluded it from the terms of the act.17 These consumer co-operatives offered the poor unadulterated bread at reduced prices. They were able to do so through their large-scale operation and technically advanced milling operations, making them a formidable competitor for many local millers. This competition and the tension that it provoked soon focused on their technically illegal joint stock form. To avoid drawing attention to their illegal status, many continued to refer to themselves as ‘societies’ rather than ‘companies.’ Legislation had been passed in 1793 giving the friendly societies legal standing while confirming the illegality of other forms of popular organization.18 By claiming the status of friendly societies, they sought to underscore the general public benefits derived from the joint stock form. This defence was strengthened by the use of the joint stock form

104

‘Union Is Strength’

in the organization of schools and churches, as well as economic associations. The case for friendly societies’ apparent public benefit was weakened, according to the Crown, by its use as a cover for trade union organization after the Combination Act of 1800 made them illegal. This link between the labour movement and the friendly societies was clearly evident in the formation of the joint stock mills, which tended to be built ‘in areas where there was a significant labour aristocracy element in the working population.’19 The act legalizing friendly societies came in a period of great public unease and economic distress, with the French Revolution as backdrop. On the one hand, those ‘labour aristocrats’ organizing friendly societies, and demanding their legal recognition, were deeply suspicious of similar government-led schemes. The emergent middle classes, in turn, sought a reduction in Poor Law expenditures that could be offset by the self-help contributions of working-class friendly societies. The friendly societies also criticized the system of poor relief because ‘the laws punished the distressed rather than alleviated distress, carried a stigma of failure, and even where paupers retained their pride, the actual subsidies were less than the cost of living.’20 The emergence of friendly societies, and their joint stock progeny in this period, is thus intimately connected to the more general concerns about ‘charity’ and the most appropriate way of relieving the poor, as discussed in Chapter 1. These co-operative ventures were increasingly organized under the banner of Owenite socialism during the 1820s. Following Gregory Claeys, I have argued that too narrow a focus on communitarian organization as the core feature of Owenism ignores its roots in seventeenthcentury English economic ideals of ‘fair exchange, just price, and the right to charity.’21 Even the first of the Owenite community experiments, at Orbiston, was organized as a joint stock endeavour similar to the bread societies, and was preceded by the Edinburgh Practical Society, which operated a co-operative store to raise the capital for the community. Abram Combe, the leader of that community, was to author the pamphlet The Sphere for Joint Stock Companies (1825), which made clear that Orbiston was not to be a self-subsistent commune, but a co-operative trading endeavour. Increasingly, after the failure of Owen’s community at New Harmony, the Owenite movement was defined by its encouragement of co-operative trade. The Community Friendly Society formed by London Owenites in 1836, for example, was ‘to live together in cooperative enterprise [rather than a community] and their friendly society would offer sickness and death benefits.’22

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 105

This radical wing of the British political spectrum increasingly adopted the rhetoric of the nebulous Country Party, which stood opposed to the liberal or laissez-faire commercial ideology of the Court Party. The Owenites organized a series of eight congresses between 1831 and 1835 in which delegates from co-operative societies, labour exchanges, and labour unions were brought together to define the ‘New Moral World.’ Betrayed by the Reform Bill of 1832, working-class reformers coalesced around Robert Owen, who appeared to offer a ‘solution to problems which hitherto proved intractable. What those problems were is apparent from the radical reform journals: universal suffrage, the taxes on knowledge, factory reform, inadequate wages, unemployment – and above all a vast resentment against that combination of wealth, power and privilege which Cobbett had dubbed “the Thing.”’23 These working-class Owenites were also instrumental to the formation of the National Union of Working Classes and threw their weight behind the political union movement, to be discussed in Chapter 4. By 1834 they had formed the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which had a million members within a few weeks.24 It is difficult to assess the direct impact of the British co-operative movement on the farmers of the Home District, although there are a few tantalizing clues. As we saw in Chapter 1, men such as the Rev. Thaddeus Osgood had organized the Society for Promoting Education and Industry with a branch in Toronto as early as 1826; this organization drew on the same models of pauper relief as did Owen. Owenite socialist ideas continued to be debated in Toronto newspapers throughout the 1830s. An immigrant such as Joseph Bates, who helped found the Toronto Mechanics Institute in 1830 based on his experience in London, was no doubt exposed to the lectures of Owenite pamphleteer Thomas Hodgskin, co-founder of the London institution.25 George Henry explicitly compared the Children of Peace with the British Owenites: ‘The principle of the Davidites appears to be, a mutual assistance to each other. They are not absolutely embodied in one and the same society, as is the case with Mr Owen’s establishments.’ Willson told Shirreff that he was familiar with Owen’s early writings (although ignorant of his American experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana). Despite its small size, and peripheral location, the new city of Toronto was a microcosm of the empire of which it was a part. Since the British Owenite movement was not a homogeneous intellectual tradition, it may be sufficient to merely point to the overlap in institutions and political and economic agendas of British and Upper Canadian co-

106

‘Union Is Strength’

operativists as they emerged around the theme of charity. The workingclass Owenite tradition in Britain was composed of three overlapping institutions, ‘the cooperative store, the labour exchange and the trade union.’26 We need not view British Owenism as the direct organizational inspiration of the Upper Canadian experiments, but as one incarnation of a similar movement occurring in similar societies based on similar cultural precedents. The Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the co-operative marketing of wheat by the Children of Peace thus need to be interpreted in the light of Owenism. Labour exchanges were not unlike the neighbourhood work bees by which the farmers of the Home District shared labour for difficult or tedious tasks; few farmers could afford to pay for labour, and the labour exchange mechanism became a key means of defining community.27 Politically radical friendly societies for carpenters, masons, shoemakers, tailors, and printers were well organized in Toronto in the 1830s.28 Soon before the British trade union formed the national Operative Builders Union (or, Builders’ Parliament) and issued a ‘friendly declaration’ in September of 1833 that it intended to ‘erect all manner of dwellings and other architectural designs for the public more expeditiously, substantially and economically than any Masters can build them under the individual system of competition,’29 the journeymen carpenters of Toronto similarly came ‘to the determination of taking work on our own account, and we are confident in asserting that we can execute work committed to our care with credit to ourselves and satisfaction to those who employ us.’30 Humble Beginnings Abram Combe’s Edinburgh Practical Society was formed in 1821, and soon thereafter it opened a co-operative store; however, within a year, it ‘languished.’31 The Farmers’ Storehouse was formed in February 1824, but it was to be considerably longer lived. The Farmers’ Storehouse took advantage of a new economic niche developing in the colonial wheat trade. The company was formed in the midst of one of the regular downturns in the flour trade with Britain, whose market remained closed to Upper Canadian wheat between 1820 and 1823.32 Flour, traded in barter, remained the primary way in which most farmers tried to resolve their debts to merchants; however, these merchants were themselves unable to sell their accumulated stocks profitably in Montreal. They thus made their profits from their retail sales, if not the flour trade, by purchasing their goods directly – and more cheaply – from Britain.

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 107

After the Napoleonic Wars, as industrial production in Britain took off, English manufacturers began dumping cheap goods in Montreal. This allowed an increasing number of shopkeepers in York to obtain their goods competitively from Montreal wholesalers. It was during this period that the three largest pre-war merchants retired from business as a result: Quetton St George in 1815, Alexander Wood in 1821, and William Allan in 1822. And subsequently, there was a boom in the number of increasingly specialized shops in York that, after 1827, could take advantage of the change in grain tariffs, which expanded the market for Upper Canadian wheat. It was in this context, with the consolidation of both the flour and wholesale trades in Montreal, that a group of Home District millers and farmers formed the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, to circumvent the control of these new York merchants. The first board of directors, elected in June 1824, were Ely and George Playter, Joseph Pearson, Silas Fletcher, Jacob Wintersteen, and Joseph Shepard. Little is known of the membership of the concern as a whole, other than the Children of Peace. In January 1825 they added Abraham Stouffer, James Farr, and George W. Port to the board.33 Details about these men remain sparse, although they share certain key characteristics. They were all among the earliest settlers of the Home District, and a substantial number of them were millers. Millers counted among the ‘labour aristocracy’ of the colony. They were more highly capitalized than most farmers (and only the largest specialized in milling alone). As an integral part of the grain trade, they were more likely to use the York merchants as commission agents for the transport of their grain to Montreal, rather than selling directly to those merchants. By co-operatively banding together, these millers could transport their own flour, and that of the district’s farmers, to Montreal, and purchase goods directly from Montreal wholesalers, thus saving on commissions and the mark-up on retail goods. This attempt to subvert the York merchants was to be a key source of tension between the two. Ely Playter, the chairman, and Joseph Shepard, were among the first settlers of the town. Playter was elected a member of the House of Assembly for York-Simcoe in 1824; his brother George was the sheriff’s deputy. By 1824 Ely was operating George’s sawmill on Yonge Street just north of Finch Avenue.34 Joseph Shepard also operated a saw and grist mill on Yonge, just north of Sheppard Avenue. James Farr leased the government mill on the west side of the Humber River at Weston. Abraham Stouffer operated a grist mill in the community now named after him on the border of Markham and Whitchurch townships. Pear-

108

‘Union Is Strength’

son and Fletcher were substantial farmers from the north end of the district, in Whitchurch and East Gwillimbury townships. They were all from among the earliest of immigrant families from across the settled areas of York’s hinterland; none of them came from York itself. Ely and George Playter were appointed to petition the lieutenant governor for a ‘water lot’ on the beach on which to build the storehouse; they received the lot where the St Lawrence Market building now stands (and immediately south of the original market buildings). This land had been declared public beachfront in 1818, but the Farmers’ Storehouse Company was specifically exempted ‘this being for a public purpose.’35 There they built a warehouse a hundred feet long by twenty feet wide, and twenty feet high. However, Ely Playter fled the country after being charged with forgery in the beginning of 1826, and the early, quick start was lost. The Farmers’ Store did not really seem to take off until 1827, by which time Joseph Shepard had become the chairman. The Children of Peace had a long-standing relationship with Joseph Shepard. He, Seneca Ketchum, and John Willson were the trustees of a church built at York Mills on the joint stock (non-denominational) model (much like the temple of the Children of Peace themselves, which was beginning construction that year). John Willson was David Willson’s stepfather, and the father of Stillwell Willson. John Willson was a Loyalist, and ‘a person of considerable reading and somewhat democratic ideas.’36 He and Shepard ensured the Children of Peace had access to this church built by the people of the neighbourhood ‘as a place of worship [for] preachers of various denominations of Christians.’ This church, sixty by thirty feet in size, was built in 1817 on a joint stock plan: it was a non-denominational neighbourhood place of worship owned and managed on behalf of its ‘shareholders’ by its elected trustees, not the clergy. There is no doubt it was used by the Children of Peace soon thereafter, since a church built in Richmond Hill four years later on the same non-denominational joint stock plan under Seneca Ketchum’s leadership specifically excluded the Roman Catholics and the Children of Peace.37 William Lyon Mackenzie recorded his impressions of David Willson preaching there in 1829 to an audience of two to three hundred.38 The Venerable John Strachan complained, in contrast, that he preached in the same building ‘once a month to their great annoyance.’39 Shepard’s connection with the Children of Peace was strengthened by their mutual participation in the Farmers’ Storehouse Company.40 Joseph Shepard’s political career to this point was not outstanding, al-

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 109

though he had clear reform tendencies. He had, for example, run unsuccessfully for election in 1812, on a platform against the repeal of habeas corpus, which Lieutenant Governor Brock had proposed to help deal with ‘disloyal’ settlers during the war. It was not until he had become president of the Farmers’ Storehouse (and of the church at York Mills), that the pace of his political participation increased. Jesse Ketchum, the reform incumbent elected with Ely Playter to represent the rural riding of York-Simcoe, and Robert Randal organized a public meeting on 21 February 1827 to protest the Alien Bill, which had been passed by the legislature. It would have stripped many of the American-born settlers, the so-called Late Loyalists, of their citizenship. As Carol Wilton has noted, this oppositional petitioning has ‘all but escaped the notice of historians,’ yet ‘one important result was the fusion of a number of different strands of opposition into a common movement.’41 This meeting appointed a group later known as the central committee composed of Ketchum, Thomas Stoyell, Alexander Burnside, and Joseph Shepard.42 The unseen link between the members of this central committee is the now absent Ely Playter. Having rented an inn from Dr Stoyell in York,43 Playter had sat in the legislature with Ketchum and on the board of the Farmers’ Storehouse with Shepard. The central committee was to become a semi-permanent fixture in reform politics in the Home District over the succeeding five years, when it was eventually transformed into the Canadian Alliance Society. Under Ketchum’s leadership, the central committee organized a highly successful province-wide petition that obtained over fourteen thousand signatures (at a time when there were only sixteen thousand voters in the province). The committee appointed William Lyon Mackenzie their secretary, at Ketchum’s insistence,44 and Robert Randal as their agent to bring the petition to London. Ketchum had organized public meetings the year before in support of his fellow reform member of the House of Assembly, solidifying the bond between them. Randal’s trip was successful beyond their dreams, and the British government instructed the lieutenant governor to pass a bill meeting all of the central committee’s objections.45 The victorious Randal returned to Upper Canada in December of 1827. The central committee did not dissolve itself, but took on a new petition campaign on the issue of the clergy reserves, in which Shepard continued as treasurer.46 The committee was also quick to utilize Randal’s prestige in the 1828 elections in which William Lyon Mackenzie gained his first seat. Mackenzie sought nomination for one of the two seats for York

110

‘Union Is Strength’

County in a series of public meetings early in the year. His candidacy had not been widely supported; despite doing well at a large meeting in Markham, he polled last with three votes at separate meetings held both north and south of the Oak Ridges.47 He responded he would attend no more meetings until the hustings. But the subsequent week, Silas Fletcher, a board member of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, moved that a public meeting in Markham solicit the opinion of Robert Randal on the best candidates for the riding. Randal’s unsurprising response, published in the Colonial Advocate, was that ‘I have taken a deep and lively interest in [Mackenzie’s] election, and would feel pleased and gratified at seeing him advocate the rights of the people, with the same zeal, perseverance and success, within the walls of parliament, should he be elected, which have hitherto marked his conduct as a public journalist.’48 Ketchum and Mackenzie issued a joint handbill before the election, and Mackenzie was nominated at the hustings by Joseph Shepard. Ketchum and Mackenzie won with an easy majority. Francis Collins, editor of the Canadian Freeman, and supporter of the petition against the Alien Bill, if not of Mackenzie, was quick to point out that ‘the Alien Bill has been the chief cause of putting Mr Ketchum into Parliament – the Anglo Americans have elected him.’49 And he was equally quick to point out the role of the central committee in soliciting support for Mackenzie by encouraging the withdrawal of merchant William Roe, of Newmarket, from the election. He might have also, as easily, pointed to the support of the Farmers’ Storehouse board members, Joseph Shepard and Silas Fletcher. The Politics of a Joint Stock Company While it is difficult to assess the economic impact of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company from the sparse records that survive, its political influence is much easier to measure, as we have just seen. As a joint stock ‘experiment in democratic sociability,’ the Farmers’ Storehouse was political in a number of different senses in this critical period. As the constitution of the company shows, it was a formal ‘mini-parliament,’ with elected representatives who themselves took decisions by majority vote. The constitution laid out clear articles of association for the regulation of relations between shareholders, directors, and their storekeeper. 50 It established the share price at £2 10s and limited the number of shares of any one partner to a maximum of twenty, ensuring a broad and equitable ownership of the concern. The clerk of the company gave

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 111

its initial capitalization as $3,000.51 These shareholders were to elect annually a board of directors of five or more to manage the company. As will be documented shortly, these annual meetings were frequently raucous affairs where directors were brought to account. The Farmers’ Storehouse Company was also political in a larger sense, intimately connected with the first. To achieve it ends it had to engage in the process of petitioning both the administration and the elected assembly for the land on which to build their storehouse. Petitioning was the dominant form of popular political activity of the period.52 This petitioning inevitably involved the organizers of the company in evolving political alliances. The company soon became one of the crucibles within which the political reform movement took shape. It produced leaders who also assumed prominent positions in the larger reform movement. The company, in fact, became a critical means by which many aspiring politicians achieved local prominence. The reform movement’s local leadership, including men like Ely Playter, Joseph Shepard, and Samuel Hughes, were all drawn from the Farmers’ Storehouse Company; and in turn, they introduced the concerns of the company into reform politics in the House of Assembly. The economic side of the concern, in contrast, was managed by a storekeeper who was to provide a bond equal to the value of the property entrusted to him. This storekeeper was to conduct the general business of the company, taking the farmers’ wheat, transporting it to Montreal, and purchasing goods for sale at the company store; it was a retail concern like so many others in York. Importantly, the members of the company were allowed to take goods and cash to the value of their stock from the store (much like the stockholders of the Bank of Upper Canada). The Farmers’ Storehouse Company thus became a loan office of first resort for the farmers of the district who needed to borrow small sums. It is this telling innovation that in large part explains the draw of the company; not only did members earn their own profits from the wheat trade, circumventing the York merchants to whom they would otherwise fall in debt, but they also, in fact, established a bank of their own without encountering the monopolistic risks of the Bank of Upper Canada. This aspect of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company became much more pronounced as the company developed over the next decade. By 1836, it was the credit-creating potential of the Farmers’ Storehouse that led to its emulation in Cobourg, Peterborough, and Bath (Kingston). John Goessman was a quirky, problematic candidate for the job of

112

‘Union Is Strength’

storekeeper, and quickly at odds with the political leanings of the company’s board, with Joseph Shepard in particular. Goessman was born in 1786 in Hanover, Germany, through which he claimed British citizenship, George IV being monarch of both kingdoms. After studying surveying and drafting at the military academy there, he immigrated to Upper Canada in 1819, and after a probationary period, was licensed as a deputy surveyor in 1821; he conducted surveys for both the government and the Canada Company thereafter. In 1824 he was appointed superintendent of highways of the Home District, a job he lost less than a year later due to chronic alcoholism. He was also appointed emigration agent for German-speaking settlers, around 1828, helping to draft their petitions for land grants and handling other business related to their settlement duties.53 Although Goessman had no business experience, his role as German agent made him a natural intermediary with the largely German settlers of Markham Township. The actual business of the Farmers’ Storehouse was left in Goessman’s hands. The manner in which the company served as an incubator for aspiring politicians can be clearly seen in the political activity of both Joseph Shepard, as we have seen, and John Goessman. Although his personal politics stood at odds with those of the company’s board and shareholders, Goessman sought to transform his intermediary role as manager of the company into a political one. His aspirations had begun before he became the company’s clerk, in March 1824, when he declared himself a candidate for the riding of York-Simcoe, against Ely Playter (the eventual winner) and Henry John Boulton among others, despite never having seen ‘a hustings in my life, either as Candidate, Voter, or Spectator.’ His lack of experience in the democratic process is clear from his writing. He said he would not ‘keep an House of Free Entertainment for Voters, nor [would] he buy or sell any Votes, but implicitly rely on the interest and good will of his Friends’; he apparently had few of those, and resigned on the second day of polling, after receiving only two votes to Playter’s 126.54 Playter’s early role in the Farmers’ Storehouse Company was key to his electoral victory. After he fled in 1826, Goessman sought to repeat that formula for electoral success in 1828.55 That year, Goessman again proposed himself a candidate, this time citing his role in the Farmers’ Store: ‘When I received the books of the Farmers Store House that institution was at the brink of dissolution, and now after one year current its prospects are undoubtedly favorable.’ Goessman’s candidacy may have been negatively affected by reports of his role as German agent for

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 113

the Amish and Mennonite settlers of Wilmot Township, which he had surveyed in 1824. These settlers had occupied their lands on a verbal agreement with the government that was conveniently forgotten when some of the land was declared a clergy reserve in 1828. Significantly, Goessman’s candidacy in 1828 did not gain the support of the chairman of the board of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, Joseph Shepard, who nominated William Lyon Mackenzie.56 Mackenzie’s subsequent win (and Goessman’s bitter loss) resulted in a long-term tension between Goessman and the board of the Farmers’ Storehouse, which ultimately led to his ouster, and the transfer of management to the village of Hope. After the 1828 election, the board of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company decided to petition the House of Assembly for incorporation in December, ‘to enable them to apply for and receive His Majesty’s Patent for the Water Lot depending thereon.’57 They called a shareholders’ meeting on 2 February 1829, and a week later Charles Fothergill presented the petition of ‘Joseph Shepard and 36 others’ to the Assembly.58 With at least thirty-six shareholders, the Farmers’ Storehouse was of the same size as the Bank of Upper Canada. A select committee of the House of Assembly was formed and reported a bill on 3 March. It did not receive second reading in that session, and Fothergill reintroduced the bill in the next session, on 11 January 1830. It passed third reading on 26 January, and was named ‘An Act to incorporate certain persons by the style and title of the “Associated Farmers” Company of the Home District and Parts Adjacent.’ The bill was then referred to the Legislative Council, where it was disallowed with no reason given.59 Undaunted, the company petitioned again in the next session of the House of Assembly. The petition was again referred to a select committee, this time chaired by William B. Jarvis, Home District sheriff, and newly elected member for the town of York.60 Although Jarvis claimed, on 20 January 1831, that he had a bill similar to the one passed in the previous session ready for the House to consider, by the middle of February Goessman advertised, ‘The bill of incorporation of the Farmers’ Store House Company probably will not pass the Lower House this session. The reason is such, that I hesitate not to describe it here. The chairman, a Town member, of course for the merchants, has not yet presented the bill. But these circumstances by no means can obstruct the steady progress of your concern, since you are sure of the especial protection of the Lieutenant Governor.’61 Goessman’s faith in the lieutenant governor’s intervention was misfounded; the bill was never read. It

114

‘Union Is Strength’

is clear that the merchants of York had the upper hand, and were doing what they could to thwart the bill. Their third attempt at incorporation stymied, the board of directors adopted a new tack, advertising in July 1831 (for a full year) that in the next session, they would petition for ‘a charter for a Farmer’s Store House Bank, &c.’62 This apparently incongruous change reflects both the original purpose of the Farmers’ Storehouse, as well as the radically different nature of banking in that era. The Farmers’ Storehouse allowed its members to borrow against their stock in the same way as the Bank of Upper Canada; the company served as the creditor of choice for farmers precisely because it loaned money or goods against payment in flour, for which they received a higher price. And, as made clear by the Select Committee on the State of the Currency, chaired by William Lyon Mackenzie (and whose report he published in the Colonial Advocate), the ‘Scottish System’ of joint stock banking offered many advantages over limited liability monopolies on the English model such as the Bank of Upper Canada.63 Joint stock banks were not protected by limited liability, and their shareholders’ property could be taken to pay bank debts; they therefore tended to follow the hard currency policies of the ‘real bills’ doctrine, and ensured they had capital reserves to back up their banknotes. It was, then, a relatively small step for the Farmers’ Storehouse to recast itself as a bank, which would issue promissory notes instead of specie, backed by its own mercantile (or ‘real’) bills to its own customers/shareholders above and beyond the capital they had invested. However, no petition was ever presented, due to the expulsion of Mackenzie from the House of Assembly as punishment for his attacks on the Bank of Upper Canada. Mackenzie was expelled from the Assembly on 12 December, and a new election was called for York County on 2 January. The annual meeting of the Farmers’ Storehouse had been scheduled for 3 January 1832.64 The shareholders’ meeting was thus postponed until 7 February – after that session of the Assembly was over. Although Mackenzie was overwhelmingly re-elected, the Torydominated Assembly again ejected him and called for the third byelection of that seat on 30 January. And here, again, we see how the Farmers’ Storehouse Company helped produce leaders within the reform movement. On 19 January, a large public meeting was held in York, at which Joseph Shepard was appointed chairman of an eightyfive-member committee to organize a provincial petition to the British House of Commons; he also penned the draft address and petition. The

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 115

meeting appointed Mackenzie their agent, and took up a subscription to defray the expenses of his trip to London.65 Given Mackenzie’s plans to travel to London, his by-election reelection would have seemed moot. It was at this point that Goessman again thrust himself into the electoral fray and offered himself up as a candidate in place of Mackenzie. In his address to the electors of York County, Goessman singled out the German settlers, reminding them that they were ‘Free and Independent – a term under which you have so often been addressed by gentlemen learned at least to confound, if not to expound that which they call law, and wherewith they have so often flagellated you by merchants, who sell you every article at an extravagant price, and tell you it is cheap.’66 He again offered his candidacy on the basis of his role in the Farmers’ Storehouse, which had ‘cost [him] an enormous trouble and expense,’ and his post as German agent. He received the endorsement of Francis Collins, of the Canadian Freeman, who was ‘glad to see him coming forward as a sort of mediator to save the character of the Dutch farmers of this County, who have never meddled in politics until dragged into it by little McKenzie’s [sic] duplicity.’ Goessman had little other support, however, and did not even show up at the hustings; Mackenzie was again nominated by Joseph Shepard, and again won handily, despite his ongoing preparations to travel to London. An irrevocable gulf had now opened between Goessman and Shepard. The postponed shareholders’ meeting was finally held in the village of Hope in East Gwillimbury on 14 April 1832. There, Goessman charged Shepard and other directors with embezzlement, claiming that he had submitted the case to an independent arbitrator, James Miles of Richmond Hill, who had decided in his favour.67 The charges did their damage, and ‘John Goessman, John Rodgers and Titus Willson were appointed to act in consequence thereof.’ There is, of course, no way of establishing why Shepard had embezzled the money; one can only point to a series of plausible coincidences. Mackenzie had just been appointed the agent of the ‘Central Committee of the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty,’ which Joseph Shepard chaired. Given Shepard’s heavy involvement in organizing Mackenzie’s journey, Goessman’s bitterness at his continued electoral losses to Mackenzie (in spite of his later claim to ‘not meddle with politicks’68), and the pressing need for a quick and large source of ready cash, it is easy to imagine that Shepard might have used funds from the Farmers’ Storehouse to pay for the trip or fund the activities of the central committee. Whether this was ‘em-

116

‘Union Is Strength’

bezzlement’ (a word Goessman bandied about quite loosely) or a loan against his stock will never be known. Goessman, however, continued to make accusations against Shepard throughout 1833. Shepard was, for example, a key player in the formation of the Upper Canada Central Political Union, the petitioning organization that grew out of the central committee in January 1833 (to be discussed in Chapter 4). In a lengthy, tortured, ‘memorandum’ in the Canadian Freeman, Goessman attacked this reform organization for ‘I. Its Menacing Attitude, II. Its Tyrannical Despotism, III. Its Hostile Disposition.’69 He referred to its membership dues as ‘embezzlement’ and cited ‘an instance of a subsigny respecting the last winters insurgency, which came under my observations, and which I think was somewhat about £15, and to my suspicion has been embezzled. If any should expect of me to make any reference in respect to the farmers store, I beg leave to state that in my humble opinion it does not belong to a memorandum of this kind.’ The charge was repeated in an ‘exposition’ in September 1833, where Goessman engaged in rather creative accounting to publicly critique that year’s Farmers’ Storehouse dividend of $275 on $3,000 share capital (or, approximately $1.15 per share, a 9 per cent return on capital). Goessman’s point (if it can be ascertained with any accuracy) is that this rate of return ignores a ground rent the directors should be paying for the use of the water lot (‘which was never granted for the embezzlement of the combination, but surely for the general use of the farmers of the Home District.’) In other words, the water lot, according to Goessman, was granted to the farmers of the Home District, not the Farmers’ Storehouse Company. The company therefore had to pay them ground rent, an annual fee for its use (there was, in fact, no such stipulation in the original grant from the Crown). Goessman creatively claimed that $5,325 was missing from the coffers, and pointedly asserted the directors ‘think to have feathered their own nest.’70 Two days after Goessman published his ‘exposition’ in the Canadian Freeman, an advertisement again appeared in the Colonial Advocate ‘that the Farmers and Mechanics of the County of York intend to apply to the Legislature at its next session for an Act to incorporate a Joint Stock Banking Company’ called the Bank of York. This bank was ‘intended to assist in relieving the petitioners from the evil impending over the country in consequence of a widely circulating unsound paper currency similar to that which has proved so ruinous to the Farmers and Mechanics, and so profitable to the speculators and adventurers of the United States.’ The notice was dated Markham, where Goessman made his home.71

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 117

Goessman called a second meeting at Hope to ‘depose $500 at a proper treasurer’ and then authorize the issuance of ‘promissory printed drafts’ or banknotes on that account, putting the Farmers’ Storehouse Bank plan into action even without legislated incorporation. The same meeting, he declared, would also discuss his accusations against Shepard.72 That the meeting was again called for Hope, and that it proposed to issue promissory notes at that particular time, was not coincidental. It marks a shift in the leadership of the Farmers’ Storehouse from Joseph Shepard and John Goessman to Samuel Hughes, an elder of the Children of Peace, and another central committee organizer. Hughes, like Shepard, was a prominent reform politician, who chaired many reform meetings north of Oak Ridges, just as Shepard did in York Township. Hughes was to play a central role in both the political union movement, as well as the Canadian Alliance Society that grew out of it. The Farmers’ Storehouse, in other words, seems to be the crucible within which a broader political movement took root, encouraging local leaders and preparing them for a larger stage. As a training ground in ‘democratic sociability,’ it taught important lessons in representational politics and in the pragmatics of petitioning. The plan Goessman proposed was similar to that implemented by the Children of Peace the year before, at the time they completed the temple. Their charity fund, composed of alms collected in the temple, had rapidly expanded beyond their charitable needs, making ‘money useless like the misers store, to the dissatisfaction of the brethren.’ Just as the Farmers’ Storehouse issued loans against share capital to its members, some of the elders proposed that the surplus in the charity fund be loaned at interest to members. Although the elders could not unanimously agree, the assembly as a whole appointed John Doan and Murdoch McLeod, on 3 November 1832, to give security and serve as loan officers.73 Since they controlled the loan process themselves, they could ensure that terms were manageable, that no one was denied credit, and that the repayment of the principal remained flexible in difficult times; as a joint stock ‘bank’ they certainly could not legally sue. The only existing records for the charity fund begin in 1845, at which time the fund was worth £226 4s 5d and of which £132 12s 11d had been loaned out.74 Most of these loans were for sums less than £25. Of sixty-one loans made between 1845 and 1854, the average was £19 5s – or about the amount of the average debt of those sued in the Home District Court in 1830. The controversial and erratic Goessman, however, disappears from the picture at this point. Samuel Hughes and the Children of Peace

118

‘Union Is Strength’

now rose to prominence in the management of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, as noted by Sheriff in his visit in 1833. The Colonial Advocate sarcastically wrote the next month, ‘A report has been very generally circulated that Mr Goessman the Deputy Surveyor has been torn in pieces by the wolves.’75 The wolves, apparently, were his employers. He died 20 January 1841 in the home of Seneca Ketchum, Shepard’s co-trustee of the York Mills joint stock church, and the man who had arranged for the Church of England to assume its control after John Willson died. Without a storekeeper, and with three previous attempts to obtain a patent for their land failed, management of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company became increasingly difficult. On 10 July 1834 its committee of management placed an advertisement in the Colonial Advocate announcing the issuance of a dividend and that the storehouse would be let at auction for five years. The Farmers’ Storehouse was now clearly moving towards becoming just the Farmers’ Bank (as, indeed, is demonstrated by reform participation in the creation of a bank specifically with that name in May 1835; see Chapter 5). On 25 January 1835, the trustees for the storehouse, led by Hughes, again petitioned for incorporation. Although their petition was referred to a select committee composed of William Lyon Mackenzie, Samuel Lount, and David Gibson, who drafted a bill, it was not presented until the next session, on 11 February 1836. In its second reading, however, hostile amendments appear to have been added, on the instigation of a petition by John Goessman, that specifically banned the company from banking.76 Gibson subsequently moved that the bill be referred back to a committee led by George Rykert, the moderate reform member from St Catharines and chair of the Select Committee on Banking. The bill never reappeared, as reformers lost control of the House of Assembly. With all legislative avenues stymied, the Farmers’ Storehouse Company largely disappears from public view. It continued to hold its annual meetings in 1836 and 1837, and to distribute its dividends, thereby indicating that it continued a limited operation as a joint stock bank.77 It was at this point we should remember William Lyon Mackenzie’s complaint that ‘the citizen is dependent on the arbitrary favour of a legislature for permission to pursue a given enterprise in combination with others.’78 Spreading the Movement Despite the difficulties facing the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, a

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 119

cross-fertilization of ideas was occurring across the province. For example, the Newcastle District Accommodation Company had been proposed in March 1835 in the Patriot, by a ‘private in the Northumberland Militia’ who claimed its originality; in fact, it was similar to the proposed Farmers’ Storehouse Bank, whose last petition was then under consideration in the Assembly.79 Given the legislative obstacles that the Farmers’ Storehouse faced, it is not surprising that the ironically named William Bancks should try to distance his proposed accommodation company from the Farmers’ Storehouse despite these similarities. This new joint stock bank would issue notes and make loans on the security of land (to half its value) or any staple produce (to two-thirds its value at Montreal) deposited in the company’s storehouse. Land thus provided the security for the notes, and the sale of produce would provide a specie reserve. Since the company was selling the produce in the Montreal markets, it would acquire enough specie and banknotes to cover any of its own note issue that was redeemed. The plan had apparently received the blessings of five hundred freeholders in the Newcastle District, who agreed to take the new company’s notes as a local currency. By 1 March 1836, the bank was set to open, with 187 shareholders.80 Sister institutions on the same principle, the Newcastle District Loan Company, in Peterborough, and the Bath Freeholders’ Bank in Bath and Kingston, were formed at about the same time.81 The Newcastle District Accommodation Company was the brainchild of William Bancks, founder of the community of Bewdley Mills at the west end of Rice Lake, north of Cobourg. Bancks immigrated from Bewdley, in the English Midlands, about 1820.82 Bancks was a currency reformer who opposed the gold standard, advocating instead for an expansion in the use of paper currency to encourage investment and allow higher wages.83 His plan for an ‘accommodation’ (loan) company was first proposed on 7 April 1835, after five hundred residents of the Newcastle District agreed publicly to accept its novel banknotes.84 Although the bank was to have 250 shareholders, each holding a single share worth £2, its banknotes were not to be based on this small capital reserve. The notes were similar to the ‘bons’ issued by merchants in payment to their customers. These ‘IOUs’ functioned as a medium of exchange, locally, but could not be converted to cash until their due date, usually in October, unless a steep 12 per cent discount was charged on its face value. Bancks thus proposed a note based on ‘time’ rather than specie. The credibility of these notes would depend on their security. Bancks proposed that notes would be issued only on the security of land (up

120

‘Union Is Strength’

to half its value) or produce deposited at the company’s warehouse. This allowed farmers to translate their capital assets into a circulating medium for an unlimited time, as long as interest payments continued to be paid, and the deed to the property remained with the company as security – had such a system been in place for Henry Ausman, he might have been able to retain his farm. Since the borrowers would be paying interest (largely in the notes of other banks), the accommodation company would quickly acquire a specie reserve large enough to pay for the occasional redeemed note. This joint stock bank faced significant competition. The Bank of Upper Canada had established a short-lived branch in Cobourg in 1833, in an effort to stave off regional criticism and the establishment of regional banks. Cobourg merchants had first petitioned for a bank in 1833; the bill died in the Legislative Council. A second Cobourg Bank Bill was passed in 1836 by the reform-dominated House of Assembly, which had chartered regional banks close to each of the new branches established by the Bank of Upper Canada in 1833; this bill also died in the Legislative Council. It was not until the Tory-dominated Assembly of late 1836 that a charter for the Cobourg Bank or ‘Bank of the Newcastle District’ passed both houses; this bill was presented by Henry Ruttan. It was the promoters of this bank, not the Bank of Upper Canada, who ultimately dealt the death blow to the Newcastle District Accommodation Company. During this period, the Newcastle District Accommodation Company (now calling itself the Newcastle Banking Company) sought a temporary home at the offices of its treasurers, the Hon. Zacheus Burnham, and Henry Ruttan, in Amherst (now part of Cobourg). Burnham, a local land speculator and magistrate, had been appointed to the Legislative Council in 1831. Ruttan, a merchant, was appointed sheriff of the Newcastle District in 1827. He had been elected in 1820, and again in the Tory-dominated House of Assembly in 1836. The Newcastle Banking Company’s general manager, William Bancks, was at pains to announce shortly thereafter, ‘some misapprehension having arisen on the part of the public, I beg leave to say that Messrs. Burnham and Ruttan are not partners in the Newcastle Banking Company; but have, on account of the safety vault and other accommodation in their charge, consented to become its treasurers merely pro tempore, & it is therefore requested that in future all communications shall be made to me.’85 The confusion over Burnham and Ruttan’s role was understandable, given their legislative role in establishing the Cobourg Bank / Bank of the

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 121

Newcastle District, and the similarities in name. However, the Cobourg Bank / Bank of the Newcastle District Bill was reserved, like all the others passed in late 1836, for royal assent. The Newcastle District Accommodation Company / Newcastle Banking Company, in contrast, had been established as a joint stock bank and so was able to continue in operation – at least for a while. But on 3 March 1837, both Houses passed a bill ‘to protect the Public against injury from Private Banks,’ which made it illegal for any private bank not chartered by the legislature to issue banknotes. It specifically exempted only four joint stock banks by name, including the Farmers’ Bank and the Bank of the People.86 The only existing joint stock bank not named was the Newcastle Banking Company, which is surprising (or not) given that the Hon. Zacheus Burnham, in whose vault this bank kept its money, chaired the committee of the Legislative Council that was considering the bill. The Newcastle Banking Company’s operation was to be illegal as of 1 July. A second bill was passed on 11 July, which allowed the Newcastle Banking Company to appoint three commissioners to wind down its affairs.87 A livid Bancks castigated Ruttan in the Cobourg Star, pointing to a variety of conflicts of interest that shaped the sheriff’s new-found faith in chartered banks. In the debates in the Assembly, Ruttan had argued ‘that with regard to the comparative security of Chartered Banks and Joint Stock Companies, he gave the preference to the former. It was highly necessary to protect the public and he thought the sooner those associations were put down the better.’ Bancks castigated Ruttan’s hypocrisy since a few months before, ‘he with hundreds of other respectable persons signed a document (now extent)’ giving unqualified support to the Newcastle District Accommodation Company. And he also pointed out that as sheriff, he materially benefited from the ejectments that followed the chartered banks’ court proceedings. But most damning of all was Ruttan’s involvement in the chartered Bank of the Newcastle District: but ‘to suppose this hon. gentleman’s intimate connection with a Chartered Bank to influence his opinion would be preposterous.’88 Stakeholder Democracy and the Joint Stock Company In this chapter, I have tried to underscore the interconnections between a number of disparate themes, events, institutions, and personages stretching from the village of Hope to the Newcastle District Accom-

122

‘Union Is Strength’

modation Company. It is, for example, only by recognizing the threat that debt signified both to individual farmers, and to the community as a whole, that we can understand the commitment of the Children of Peace to building such an economically irrational structure as the temple. The temple was, after all, a consecration of the value of charity, its sole purpose to raise money to ‘sacrifice to God, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked.’89 Some may question whether any place of worship could be called economically rational; yet, this temple, the second place of worship for a group of 350, was used only once a month to collect alms. It was not a replacement for their earlier church building, which continued to be used weekly. Given the building’s ostensible purpose, it is not overly cynical to ask, would not the money that the temple cost have been better spent on the poor themselves? It is only by appreciating this central irony that we can come to understand how members felt their values were under attack from York’s merchant elite, and hence required sacred validation. The open political and economic conflict between farmers and that elite heavily favoured those of whom David Willson had written: ‘The law is in your hands, so also is the lands, so also is the religion … ye are the rulers in the earth, and the poor is your servants.’ Their inability to incorporate the Farmers’ Storehouse Company is an example of this inequality. Debt was an assault on a farmer’s independence and respectability. The Farmers’ Storehouse Company was an early attempt to circumvent this debt. Merchants could determine both the price they paid for wheat, and the price of the goods they bartered for it, keeping the farmer in perpetual debt, and hence a political dependent. The Farmers’ Storehouse and the Newcastle District Accommodation Company, by allowing their members to borrow either cash or goods, reduced farmers’ dependence on merchants and hence enabled them to retain their political independence. I have argued that the Farmers’ Storehouse Company was, as well, a crucible for stakeholder democracy. This experiment in democratic sociability was organized as a joint stock company without limited liability. This lack of limited liability gives an important twist on the notion of ‘responsible government.’ An elective management was responsible to the members; but, in turn, without limited liability, the members were responsible to the full extent of their property for the debts of the company. This was a radically new way of collectively acting to resolve the problem of debt, of poverty, although it had parallels in the emerging Owenite socialist movement in Britain and the United States. In a province without a welfare system (such as

The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 123

the houses of industry in England), this collective response took the form of a joint stock company specifically because it was for public benefit. Recognizing this as a public benefit was the original reason the Farmers’ Storehouse Company had been granted the beach lot reserved for public use next to the market buildings. Independence and respectability thus had their economic implications, but so too, their public or political side. Only independent freeholders could vote according to their conscience when voting was open and the support of a particular candidate visible to all. The co-operative movement granted that independence of conscience, but also, as I have just argued, served as the crucible for the development of a democratic sensibility, one rooted in serving the public, and of public vigilance in the supervision of elected public figures. And lastly, the co-operative movement had its explicitly legislative aspect, as it worked through the loose network of political reformers to fashion a more permanent solution to the systematic economic and political oppression they faced. Like the agrarian democrats of a century later, the reformers castigated the ‘special privileges’ granted to legislated limited liability monopolies like the Bank of Upper Canada, advocated a labour theory of value that undercut merchants’ control of economic policy, and tried to implement a program of radical monetary reform and state measures to redistribute wealth. Over the course of a decade, as their attempts to incorporate (without limited liability) were stymied by the province’s merchant elite, reformers increasingly came to argue that the state should impartially serve all of its people. This ran counter to the Loyalist vision of the state as an extension of the Crown, of benefit ‘only to a few tax gathers, officeholders, pensioners, bank monopolists, petty magistrates, state paid patrons, incorporated law pleaders and plan jobbers, government contractors, canal directors, military officers in commission, and persons directly dependent on these privileged classes.’90 The political vision of the responsible governance of a joint stock company became, over time, the demand for responsible government of the state – an economic model of good governance. The term ‘responsible government’ had meant many different things at different times to different people. We need to turn away, however, from the purely constitutional sense in which it was discussed by lawyers and the political elites, and focus instead on its interpretation by the more radical reformers. The phrase ‘responsible government’ resonated with the farmers in this cooperative movement precisely because it conformed to their experience

124

‘Union Is Strength’

in running the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and in politically organizing for its recognition. It is particularly important to highlight the individuals who served to link this movement together. Joseph Shepard, a key figure in the Farmers’ Storehouse, was also a key figure in the developing reform movement in the Home District. As with Ely Playter, his activity in the Farmers’ Storehouse was one reason he achieved the political prominence that he did. The same was true of Samuel Hughes, who became increasingly important in the Canadian Alliance Society. The Alliance Society’s first major petitioning movement (sparked by a plan originating in the political union at Hope) was to implement a provincial loan office to serve the public, as the charity fund of the Children of Peace served their own members. And, lastly, there is the shift of management of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company to the village of Hope, where the Children of Peace had just reorganized themselves as a joint stock company. Here, we again find an experiment in democratic sociability predicated on mutual aid, of unlimited liability for the debts of one’s community members. The radical ideology that the Children of Peace developed around the theme of charity, and the economic strategies they implemented in their moral economy, served as a model for the broader political movement of which they were taking a leadership role.

4 Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society

Total Overthrow, and utter prostration of the Ryersonian Revolutionists in York – and ‘last dying speech and confession’ of Wm. L. Mackenzie – The great meeting took place yesterday, and has resulted in the most signal and unequivocal defeat of the Yankee Republican party. The British constitutionalists carried every thing before them, and Mackenzie and his abettors are put down now and for ever. Patriot, 3 April 1832

The reform movement in the Home District came to fruition in late 1834 as an embattled coalition, as proclaimed by the name they chose for their new political union, the Canadian Alliance Society. This alliance was composed of disparate elements quite similar to the overlapping Owenite institutions, ‘the cooperative store, the labour exchange and the trade union.’ It included religious dissenters such as the Children of Peace, who strenuously objected to the role of the Church of England and a ‘hireling clergy’ in the Upper Canadian State, and who had organized a co-operative economy based on Christian charity. It included ‘mechanics,’ who had organized that year for a ten-hour work day, and a ‘lien’ law that would guarantee their pay, as well as farmers seeking a weakening of the laws for the collection of debt and a ‘provincial loan office.’ It also included political radicals, the ‘Yankee Republican party,’ who sought a democratic government responsible to the people. One might argue that these groups were brought together by their common enemy – the Family Compact – and the political violence that was used to silence them and their leaders. The York Riots of 23 March 1832, in particular, were a pivotal moment; buoyed by his by-election win, Mac-

126

‘Union Is Strength’

kenzie and Ketchum called for a public meeting in York, only to be met with well-organized and violent opposition. Mackenzie was burned in effigy, and his print shop once again threatened with destruction. ‘Mobocracy’ ruled the city’s streets that night and a special guard had to be posted around Mackenzie’s house. After the York Riots of 1832, violence became an endemic feature of political gatherings. Yet, a more positive aspect of the alliance should surely be emphasized. Carol Wilton emphasizes that this violence occurred solely at the instigation of government supporters. Mackenzie had, she notes, ‘a remarkable record of conducting proceedings free of violence.’ Such reasoned, one-sided attribution of culpability to the Tories is not limited to just this case. It is well documented that, throughout the 1830s, government forces increasingly turned to violence – frequently by the Orange Order – to suppress and disrupt reform meetings.1 After the Sedition Act of 1804 was repealed in 1829, the administration had few tools other than violence to quell the increasing tide of discontent. Wilton points out that the use of violence was condoned at the highest levels of the administration, as the Types Riot also showed. The violence of 23 March 1832, the York Riots, was to have an inordinate effect on the succeeding shape of reform politics. Mackenzie was to flee to England shortly thereafter, to appeal his expulsion from the House of Assembly to the Colonial Office. In his absence, the reform movement solidified, and took on a new organizational form. Silenced by violence at public meetings throughout 1832, the loosely organized committees that had previously gathered signatures for petitions in public meetings were reorganized as political unions in 1833. These political unions were based on British models; the political union movement played a critical role in the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, by which many British electoral abuses were mitigated.2 The British genealogy of the political unions – as organizations – is not, however, without its bastard progeny: we cannot assume that they were ‘democratic reform’ reform movements. For example, the largest of the British unions, the Birmingham Political Union, was as oligarchic an organization as the political system of ‘rotten boroughs’ against which it set itself. It was created by a Tory banker, Thomas Attwood, who mobilized broad public support behind parliamentary reform as a means of building a political movement to achieve his own personal goal of currency reform. The BPU was run by a thirty-six-member council; this council was selected by Attwood, not elected by the membership. Attwood and his friends could direct the organization as they

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 127

saw fit; including throwing its support behind his cherished financial reforms.3 A second differing organizational model was the London-based Metropolitan Political Union formed by members of the London Radical Reform Organization. The MPU was radically democratic and depended on its members’ input to function. It not only advocated parliamentary reform, but embodied these reforms in the way in which it was organized; it was committed to universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and vote by ballot, all eventually incorporated in the Chartist platform. The organizational form proposed by Dr Thomas Morrison at the York election hustings in late 1832 took the form of the Metropolitan Political Union, and wedded to it the more radical demands of the extreme Owenite National Union of Working Classes.4 It was not an electoral organization per se, but, like its British model, a voluntary political organization devoted towards electoral reform. It, like its successor, the Canadian Alliance Society, was formed immediately after an election, not before, since their aim was to influence the legislature rather than elect candidates. The Upper Canada Central Political Union was to prove ephemeral. It was an almost invisible organization; it called no meetings and made few public appeals. It achieved its one goal through the private circulation of a petition to the British House of Commons before it disappeared, on Mackenzie’s return in August 1833. Its rebirth as the Canadian Alliance Society, in December 1834, came only after the Grand Convention of Delegates organized to nominate ‘fit candidates’ for the four ridings of York County specifically repudiated a motion by Samuel Hughes to become a ‘permanent convention,’ or political party. Given this firm rejection of a permanent reform organization, as either a political union or a political party, why, we must ask, was the Canadian Alliance Society formed so quickly, immediately after the elections of 1834? The answer to this conundrum lies in the same domain as the reorganization of the Children of Peace as a joint stock company in 1832. The Upper Canada Central Political Union had sought to achieve its ends in private – it abandoned the public sphere to the endemic political violence of the period. On Mackenzie’s return, the reform movement altered its course, and sought to build its own hall, Shepard’s Hall (named after Joseph Shepard), where the reformers could meet in private without threat of riot. The plans for Shepard’s Hall were touted in late 1833. By late 1834, just after the elections, and just as the Canadian Alliance Society was founded, Turton’s Building (i.e., the proposed

128

‘Union Is Strength’

Shepard’s Hall) was completed; a building that eventually housed the Canadian Alliance Society, the Children of Peace, and Mackenzie’s new newspaper, the Constitution. The Children of Peace reorganized as a joint stock company only after they had completed their temple; this substantial asset prompted their taking corporate form. Similarly, Shepard’s Hall reinvigorated the defunct political unions, now reorganized as the Canadian Alliance Society. However, there were two organizational models for the political unions, just as there were for banks and ‘civic’ corporations (municipal governments): a ‘closed’ oligarchic model and an open, democratic form. One might argue that it is of little surprise that the Canadian Alliance Society assumed an open, democratic character, given its political objectives; yet, the Birmingham Political Union provides a striking counter-example of patrician co-optation of a political union. The first president of the Upper Canada Central Political Union was Charles Thompson, a wealthy stage coach line operator and land speculator with ties to members of the Family Compact like Sheriff Jarvis and D’Arcy Boulton;5 the risk of patrician co-optation was real. The joint stock company, itself an ‘experiment in democratic sociability,’ served as a model for the political objectives of the Canadian Alliance Society, that is, in the absence of an ideal democratic electoral system, the ‘miniparliament’ of joint stock companies fostered the very democratic skills that the political unions sought to inculcate in the general public. And, as I emphasized, in regards to the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, the lack of limited liability fostered a dual sense of ‘responsible government’: of representatives to their constituencies and of constituencies for the decisions of their representatives (i.e., a political platform). The kind of ‘stakeholder democracy’ this fostered was predicated upon public ‘vigilance,’ engagement, and debate, rather than an abdication of responsibility to elected representatives. What is striking about the reform movement in Upper Canada, then, is the overlap in leadership in the strictly ‘economic’ joint stock endeavours and the political reform movement itself as they were drawn together by the political struggle to protect their ‘respectability’ and independence. For this reason I focus on Joseph Shepard, and Samuel Hughes in particular, and the link they formed between the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, Shepard’s Hall, and the reform movement. It is a connection that became even stronger when, in subsequent years, the reform movement’s efforts to establish the Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the Provincial Loan Office came to fruition in the Bank of the

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 129

People, whose directors were almost synonymous with the directors of the Canadian Alliance Society. The Upper Canada Central Political Union On 26 November 1832, an absent William Lyon Mackenzie was acclaimed a member of the parliament of Upper Canada in a third by-election in the County of York, the most populated riding in the province. The riding had been unrepresented since his first expulsion from the House of Assembly on 12 December 1831. He was again nominated at the hustings by Joseph Shepard. No more potent symbol could have expressed the empty formality that elections had become, as well as the degree to which the absent Mackenzie had become the figurehead for the reform movement. It was, therefore, a perfect occasion on which to launch a major new effort at electoral reform, borrowing from the political toolkit of the reform movement in Great Britain. As the polls closed, Dr Thomas D. Morrison, corresponding secretary of the central committee that had sent Mackenzie to London, addressed the crowd and called on those assembled to join him in establishing a political union like the ones that had helped pass the Reform Bill that year in England and Scotland. Sixty-six of those present signed up for the Upper Canada Central Political Union on the spot.6 As Wilton points out, although inspired by British examples, the Upper Canada Central Political Union was infused with a radicalism different from the dominant British constitutionalism of most reform publications of the period.7 The union’s objects began with the usual invocation of Upper Canada having been ‘singularly blessed with a Constitution the very image and transcript of that of Great Britain,’ but continued with a list of the ways in which that constitution had been abridged, before concluding on a radical democratic note. They aimed ‘to concentrate public opinion, in order that it may be brought to act upon the political arena of this Province in such a manner as to obtain and retain the proper constitutional check to misrule, or mal-administration, in the hands of the representative branch of our government.’ This aim would be achieved by public education in the ‘just rights of man, and the objects for which governments were instituted,’ phraseology borrowed from the French and American revolutions. These ‘natural Rights of Man consist in Liberty, equality, security of person and property and the full enjoyment of the produce of his labour,’ as well as a demand (later dropped) that ‘every adult male member of a com-

130

‘Union Is Strength’

munity should have an equal right, and in fact has a natural right, to elect those who are to legislate for him.’ It stated clearly the democratic nature of all law, which ‘should be based upon the free and decided expression of the public will, subject to the rules and ends of public justice.’ When that public will, and the justice it demanded, was thwarted, ‘when any government violates the just rights of the people, constitutional resistance becomes the imperative and indispensable duty’ of the aggrieved. The means the constitution granted them for seeking redress was the political union.8 The tenor of this document is strikingly similar to that of the London-based, Owenite-inspired National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC) formed in the wake of working-class disappointment in their exclusion from the 1832 Reform Bill. They were organizing an oppositional constitutional convention to challenge the British Parliament in the spring of 1833. 9 The elaborate constitution for the union laid out by Morrison certainly indicated that a great deal of planning and forethought had gone into this symbolic moment. Morrison called for an executive composed of a president, five vice-presidents, corresponding and recording secretaries, a treasurer, and a committee of twenty-five members, all elected annually. He called a public meeting, on 21 January 1833, at Montgomery’s Inn for the first election of its officers. Charles Thompson, who ran the stage line between York and Holland Landing, was named president, and Dr Tims, Joseph Turton, John Montgomery, John Klyne, and Jesse Lloyd were elected the vice-presidents. Morrison became the corresponding secretary, E.T. Henderson the recording secretary, and Thomas Elliot, an innkeeper, became the treasurer; they were all from York. The executive of the Upper Canada Central Political Union was thus predominantly from York town and township, with the addition of Klyne and Lloyd from Vaughan and King townships. This geographical concentration of the executive seemed purposeful, since the only other political unions established in the Home District were established in the more northerly townships of the new 4th Riding of York a few months later, under the presidency of Samuel Hughes, of the village of Hope, and in Simcoe County under Samuel Lount.10 The membership of the wider committee of twenty-five remained unnamed, probably out of fear of intimidation. Although the bare bones of the organizational structure of the political unions are evident from newspaper reports, very little of their activities were made public; this absence from the public stage may give the erroneous impression of inactivity. Other than this initial organiza-

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 131

tional gathering, they called no public meetings, nor did they announce the nature of the petition that was to become their major contribution to Mackenzie’s lobbying with the Colonial Office in London; a petition that ultimately collected 19,930 signatures by May. This silence is indicative of a widespread fear of violence in the wake of the York Riots of 23 April 1832. Increasing outbreaks of Orange Order rioting throughout the province were having their intended effect of silencing opposition and suppressing demonstrations in favour of reform. Rather than meetings in public, reform petitions were circulated privately. The object of the Upper Canada Central Political Union’s petition was to thank the king for ‘inquir[ing] into our grievances and giv[ing] us assurance of redress.’11 The petition was started as news of Lord Goderich’s dispatch of November 1832, which announced the dismissal of the solicitor and attorney generals for their role in Mackenzie’s expulsions, was first circulating. So sure was Mackenzie of true reform at this point that he recommended in March that the political unions be discontinued.12 The sense of optimism that the dispatch created in the general public, however, simply led to the appointment of public meetings in Newmarket, Stouffville, and West Gwillimbury: ‘Surely’ Wixson was to write in the Colonial Advocate, ‘the reign of terror and mobocracy in Upper Canada is ended?’13 A public meeting was called on 5 June in Newmarket to establish a second branch of the Upper Canada Central Political Union – for the townships of Whitchurch, East Gwillimbury, and Brock, the newly established 4th Riding of the County of York.14 A similar meeting was called for Stouffville the next day to confirm the Newmarket meeting’s resolutions, and in West Gwillimbury, Simcoe County, on the 15th.15 Samuel Hughes chaired the Newmarket meeting, and William Reid was secretary; both were elders of the Children of Peace. This meeting, on a motion from Hughes, established ‘committees of vigilance’ for each township in the riding, ‘to secure the return of an independent Member to the ensuing Parliament.’16 The use of committees of reformers to nominate candidates, rather than open non-partisan public meetings, was a means to forestall violent opposition as had occurred during the York Riots. It was innovative, and led in short order to the proposal for a district-wide convention. Importantly, one of the committee members for Brock Township was Randal Wixson, editor of the Colonial Advocate in Mackenzie’s absence. These committee members met in Hope the next month to elect an executive for the riding as a whole, and to act in unison with the York central committee. This ten-member executive

132

‘Union Is Strength’

contained five members of the Children of Peace: Samuel Hughes was unanimously elected president, William Reid, secretary. Importantly, they set a quorum at any five members including the president.17 The Children of Peace thus dominated the nomination process for the riding in the ensuing election. This was the period in which the Children of Peace, and Hughes in particular, were also coming to the fore in the management of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company. This was the critical time in which, having established their own credit union, the Children of Peace led the way in transforming the Farmers’ Storehouse into a bank. This was the period in which the Children of Peace adopted new regulations ‘for settling the village of Hope,’ which provided for land-sharing among members; Hughes purchased (as trustee?) a 200-acre clergy reserve lot in the village in 1833 to dispense land to members ‘according to his necessity, according to the goodness of the Lord to his people in the land of Egypt in the time of their distress.’18 Hughes, now the dominant reform politician in the north half of the county, was critical to introducing these economic concerns to the reform movement as a whole. It was, after all, at this point that Wixson, a member of the Hope branch of the Upper Canada Central Political Union, published the letter from ‘A Poor Farmer in E. Gwillimbury’ calling for the provincial loan office that became the object of a reform petitioning campaign in 1835. Reform optimism, however, proved premature. The moderate Goderich was replaced at the Colonial Office in March 1833 by the conservative Edward Stanley, Lord Derby; and Mackenzie’s biggest success, the removal of Henry James Boulton from office, was reversed. Boulton was promoted to chief justice of Newfoundland. Hagerman was reinstated as solicitor general. Personnel aside, there had been no real change in colonial policy on any reform issue. Upper Canada was just too far, and the otherwise well-intentioned Whig government in Britain just too ill-informed, for any hope of substantial change. Joseph Hume, the British radical who had been so supportive of Mackenzie in London, and in whom the greatest of hopes had been placed, sent word in August to a homebound Mackenzie that no reforms could be expected from the British Parliament.19 .

Shepard’s Hall Mackenzie returned to York from his London trip in the last week of August 1833, to find his appeals to the British Parliament had been ul-

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 133

timately ineffective. A meeting of the central committee was immediately called for, at Elliot’s Hotel on 2 September, to plan on the future direction of the political unions in the wake of their disappointment.20 At this critical meeting, the central committee hammered out a plan of action. They called, on the one hand, for the construction of a meeting hall where reformers could meet without threat of violence – a building they called ‘Shepard’s Hall,’21 and, on the other hand, they planned for a Grand Convention of Delegates from the Home District to select reform candidates, and a uniform platform, for the ensuing elections. The members of the central committee announced their plan to build a meeting hall in the next issue of the Colonial Advocate, on 7 September, two days after the libellous attack of John Goessman on Joseph Shepard’s ‘embezzlement’ from the Farmers’ Storehouse Company: ‘As a token of the high sense of approbation with which the principles and public conduct of that veteran friend of reform, Mr Joseph Shepard, are regarded, it is proposed to honour a building intended as an aid to civil and religious freedom by calling it by his name.’ The proposed ‘Shepard’s Hall’ was to be forty by fifty feet in size, and able to seat between seven and eight hundred people. The building would be used for two purposes: first, ‘on Sundays, as a place of worship by the Quakers, Mennonists, Children of Peace, or any other religious denomination, from time to time, as occasion may require,’ and second, ‘as a hall for holding political meetings of the people of this town, county or district, and for the use of a Constitutional Association, on week days, at the discretion of a majority of the trustees.’ That the proposed building was intended to further both ‘civil and religious freedom’ is unsurprising, given the roots of the central committee in the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty. The trustees, seven in number, remained unnamed, like the committee members of the Upper Canada Central Political Union.22 Further details of the proposed building, and its purpose, were published the next month after a public meeting held in York had solicited £150 in subscriptions. The trustees now proposed something more grandiose yet, ‘a brick building 40 feet by 60, capable, with the galleries and platform, of containing 1500 persons … for use this fall.’ Besides the political and religious usages just described, the building would also be used ‘as a Hall for scientific lectures and the Mechanics Institute.’ The article clarified the impetus behind the building’s construction; the electoral violence of 23 March 1832 had resulted in the Tory-dominated House of Assembly attempting to pass ‘laws to declare riot a Capital felony punishable with a violent death, and defining what

134

‘Union Is Strength’

riot is.’ The week before, the ‘Gazette of the Political Union’ (published in the Colonial Advocate) had reviewed the suspension of habeas corpus in 1815, and compared this declaration of martial law to similar calls in the House of Assembly in 1832. It also reviewed the ‘gagging bill’ or Sedition Act of 1804, under which Robert Gourlay had been prosecuted for convening public meetings; that act was repealed only in 1829.23 Knowing the biases of the magistrates in applying such laws, the reformers proposed to avoid the potential for arrest or violence in public meetings by building their own hall ‘in which those who are, in truth and sincerity, the friends of civil and religious liberty, may meet and consult together, and inform each other upon matters of general interest. If following the example of Christian churches, those only were asked or admitted into a political association who professed to agree with it on fundamental principles of government, such disturbances as once disgraced York could never again occur.’24 This step away from general public meetings to private partisan gatherings gave the reformers greater scope to hammer out a consistent district- and provincewide political platform against which candidates could be evaluated. This was the aim of the grand convention to take place in this hall the following February. In a meeting in the Old Court House a few days later, on 6 October, $1,000 was subscribed, and a site selected for the building.25 The Canadian Freeman, considering the project little but a fraud to dupe a credulous public, suggested that this site was ‘on the premises of King Jesse [Ketchum], just in the spot where the Yankees hid the property which was stolen from the British Commis’t stores after the battle of York. It could not, we think, be erected upon a more fit and becoming foundation.’26 By November, Mackenzie announced that $1,500 had been subscribed but that the proposed building would not be started until the following spring.27 The builder of the hall was undoubtedly Joseph Turton, a vice-president of the Upper Canada Central Political Union, who advertised the construction of a building, forty by sixty feet, on the northeast corner of King and York streets at this time.28 While Shepard’s Hall was under construction, the reformers leased the Old Court House on Richmond Street, just east of Yonge, from its owner, Alexander Montgomery, the father of innkeeper John Montgomery. The building was a stone’s throw from Thomas Elliot’s Sun Tavern, at the northwest corner of Queen and Yonge, where the reformers had been meeting. Shepard’s Hall was the embodiment of the various legs of the reform

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 135

movement: the political unions, religious dissenters such as the Children of Peace, the joint stock companies like the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and the Toronto Mechanics Institute. Overlapping boards of directors helped coordinate these different organizations, such that they could all eventually come together in a single setting. Subscriptions for Shepard’s Hall could be left with James Lesslie, Malcolm McLellan, William Arthurs, Monis Lawrence, Thomas Elliot, William Jackes, and William Lyon Mackenzie, a list probably coincident with the seven unnamed trustees.29 Lesslie was also the leading promoter of the mechanics institute, and was to become the first president of the Canadian Alliance Society, the Bank of the People, and the promoter of the Toronto House of Industry. McLellan was the Canadian Alliance Society’s treasurer. The degree to which these men were known to work together is perhaps best reflected in a biting satirical broadside by the Tories for the 1834 legislative election in Toronto,30 which allegedly described a meeting for the reform candidate James E. Small ‘at the Old Court House,’ whose cast of characters included: ‘Joseph Turton (who is fond of a lark),’ Jacob Latham, master builder, ‘Malcolm McLellan the tailor,’ David Willson (leader of the Children of Peace) ‘who is fond of things in common,’ ‘William Murphy (town bell-man),’ James ‘Beatty, the Shoemaker,’ and Mackenzie the mayor. At the same time as Shepard’s Hall was being touted in the Colonial Advocate, Mackenzie was putting together ‘a New Almanack for the Canadian True Blues, with which is incorporated the Constitutional Reformer’s Text Book,’ ostensibly edited by his alter-ego, Patrick Swift.31 The pamphlet appeared early in October, and was in its second edition by the end of the month. Buried within this twenty-four-page pamphlet was a single page in small, dense type, obviously originally set as a handbill that had circulated much earlier. The handbill called for the establishment of a regular system of nominations for political candidates, as was practised in the United States, and by the Catholic Association of Ireland, through which Daniel O’Connell had promoted the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. The handbill called on the reformers of each town and township to hold a meeting to select three delegates to attend a county convention in the Old Court House to nominate appropriate candidates for the next election, and to establish a common platform. Although the handbill was signed ‘Patrick Swift,’ David Willson was later to claim that the idea of the convention had been his (a claim not contradicted by Mackenzie who published it).32 Willson offered further fatherly advice on how to conduct such a new and innovative insti-

136

‘Union Is Strength’

tution, emphasizing the importance of establishing a permanent and regular convention; advice not immediately taken. This claim is substantiated by the report of the earlier public meeting to establish a second branch of the Upper Canada Central Political Union in Newmarket that was called on 5 June 1833 (before Mackenzie had returned from England), despite Mackenzie’s request that the unions be disbanded. The meeting, chaired by Samuel Hughes, was called for the newly established 4th Riding of the County of York, and on a motion from Hughes, established committees of vigilance for each township in the riding, ‘to secure the return of an independent Member to the ensuing Parliament.’33 The Grand Convention of Delegates was simply an extension of this process to the district level for coordination of the four ridings of York. A small notice in the Advocate of 17 October announced that the Old Court House, the temporary reform meeting hall, could now comfortably seat four hundred people; and in the same issue, the Children of Peace announced that they would hold a meeting for worship there the next Sunday, ironically noting that this ‘was the Hall in which, for many years, judges judged and Doctor Strachan preached ex tempore or Presbyterian sermons.’ This sense of having reclaimed a public space from the legal and religious systems that oppressed them added a sense of triumphalism to the project.34 The Children of Peace collectively declared in the Advocate soon thereafter that ‘we are ever ready to stand forth for our constitutional rights as having part in the care of the province, and to use our humble exertions to appoint just men to government, and without an influenced vote choose for ourselves who shall rule over us.’35 This was followed by an announcement by David Willson in December, that he would, ‘by permission of the peaceable inhabitants of York, appoint a Meeting in the Old Court House, at one o’clock on Saturday the 14th inst. for the purpose of promoting Civil and Religious Government, to which Ministers of Law and Gospel are respectfully invited, with other civil inhabitants of York, for the solemn purpose of correcting errors, enlightening the mind, and giving speech to the dumb, with every other good purpose that time and opportunity will afford.’36 This meeting was timed two days before the by-election for Mackenzie’s riding in York County on 16 December. The ‘Grand Procession of the Children of Peace’ and the meeting in the Old Court House that followed were so well attended that ‘every corner, nook, and space of the court house and avenues leading to it were filled.’ Mackenzie, with rare humility, reported that ‘Mr Willson

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 137

then delivered a sensible and well-connected address upon the state of the colony and the duty of a Christian people to guard their political privileges … Mr Willson was loudly and repeatedly cheered. Mr Mackenzie also spoke for some time, but he was very dull and tedious, more so then we ever saw him before.’ In the same issue of the Advocate, Mackenzie also reprinted a list of the contributions by the Children of Peace towards his expenses for the London voyage; a list that included three women.37 The same day, the Canadian Correspondent published Willson’s address in its entirety. As Mackenzie was to note early the next year, ‘since ever he had known them they had been on the side of the yeomanry – they had always attended the elections at their own cost, had always voted right, had signed liberal petitions and had supported them with their purses.’38 Given the general fear within reform circles of the day, the Children of Peace collectively stand out as courageous advocates for William Lyon Mackenzie. The Children of Peace continued to share the Old Court House with the Toronto reformers for the rest of 1834. It was here that David Wilkie, a British traveller, came across them: ‘the place was nearly filled when I entered, apparently with servant-girls, working-lads, and apprenticeboys about town.’ Wilkie found little to laud in Willson’s sermon: ‘the burden of his discourse seemed to be the injustice practiced towards the world by all those who possess an abundant share of the good things of life. That they are all usurpers and tyrants; that there ought neither to be masters nor servants; that all mankind are equal; and that it is the duty of the poor to pull down the rich.’39 Wilkie was dismissive of the message: the ‘rambling rhapsody … could not have drawn its perverted spirit from any part of the apostle’s inspired writings.’ But he was not far off in his description of the content. Willson was, at this time, composing a book, ‘A Friend to Britain,’ and in an entry dated 12 December, a few days before the Grand Procession to the Old Court House, he wrote: ‘The poor are rising and the mountains will do well to bend, or be assured they will be overthrown, not by revolt, but by the power of reason, the principles of truth and justice – the issues of an understanding mind.’40 The Grand Convention of Delegates Mackenzie’s re-election on 16 December 1833 did not, however, immediately insure him a seat in the House of Assembly, despite the Colonial Office’s specific instructions to the lieutenant governor. Mackenzie was

138

‘Union Is Strength’

again ejected from the Assembly, and was unable – and unwilling – to assume his seat until 19 February. During that two-month period, he helped organize the Grand Convention of Delegates, which met in the Old Court House on 27 February 1834. The grand convention was little more than a centralization of the local process for nominating candidates described by Hughes; local delegates were to be chosen to attend the convention, and select candidates, who would then be confirmed in public meetings in their local constituencies. Only the delegates from within a riding played a role in selecting a candidate for that riding at the convention, and their selection required local public meetings to confirm the choice. Given the continued emphasis on local control of the nomination process, it is not unreasonable to wonder about the need for a central meeting, or convention; the emphasis on local control of its representative was balanced, however, by the collective process of defining a platform to which the local candidates had to agree. It is thus within this convention that we see the germs of a reform ‘party,’ a ‘permanent convention.’ The first of the township meetings to report was East Gwillimbury, which met in the village of Hope on 30 November; the early participation of the Children of Peace certainly adds credence to David Willson’s claim to have been the convention’s initiator. This was followed by Albion Township, which held a meeting on 9 December,41 and King Township on the 14th.42 The handbill from ‘A New Almanack for the Canadian True Blues’ was reprinted in the Advocate on 14 December, a few days before Mackenzie’s last ejection from the House of Assembly. In a public meeting held at the hustings just after the election, a series of resolutions were passed, one of which was to continue the central committee appointed on 19 January 1832, with the aim of promoting the district and provincial conventions for the selection of reform candidates; the Upper Canada Central Political Union was indeed defunct. Despite continuing fears of violence, the expulsion of Mackenzie from the legislature seemed to have galvanized public support, and more township meetings quickly followed to confirm these resolutions, select delegates for the convention, and prepare supportive addresses for Mackenzie. Since the addresses contain the names of the petitioners, delegates, and township organizers, the reform organization for much of the Home District becomes clear. Significantly, the reformers held no public meetings in York, selecting their town delegates at the York Township meeting at Montgomery’s Inn rather than at the Old Court House.

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 139

The convention was convened for 27 February. On the 20th, the Advocate published a letter from Willson addressed to the delegates in which he offered advice on its future direction. He strongly advocated a province-wide convention. He also ‘pray[ed] for a standing convention,’ a party organization, so that they could ‘do all your business with closed doors until your plans are well concerted, and then bring them to the light, far and wide as your care extends. In so doing, you will hide yourself from the battle till you are armed, and save your heads from public censure, and your weakness from the archers eye.’43 The day before the convention, the Children of Peace again held a grand procession to the Old Court House: ‘They will be accompanied by music and banners, as on the occasion of the late County election, and they request the friends of freedom, truth, justice and constitutional right to take part in the procession.’ There, David Willson again ‘addressed the meeting with great force and effect.’44 The members of the convention were not, however, so easily swayed by Willson’s call for a ‘permanent convention.’ After the delegates had selected their candidates and prepared a ten-point platform to which those candidates had to pledge themselves, Samuel Hughes ‘proposed that the convention should resolve to continue its sittings from time to time during the continuance of the next ensuing parliament, and proposed a Constitution for its adoption.’ Although the original call for the convention had emphasized that, once assembled, its members should assume the responsibility of nominating an executive to reconvene the convention for the next year, a majority of the delegates reacted negatively to Hughes’ proposed constitution, because they ‘had not been appointed for any such purpose, and that their power should [sic] cease immediately after the next general election.’45 The main purpose of the convention had been to select candidates for the four ridings of York County. The delegates from each riding absented themselves from the convention to settle on a candidate, who was then confirmed by the convention as a whole. The delegates from the 1st Riding (York, Etobicoke, Vaughan, and King townships) nominated Joseph Shepard, who declined on account of age; and then David Gibson, a surveyor, who was also appointed chairman of the York Constitutional Tract Society. The 2nd Riding (Caledon, Chinguacousy, Toronto, Toronto Gore, and Albion townships) nominated Mackenzie himself. The 3rd Riding (Scarborough, Markham, Pickering, and Whitby townships) nominated Dr Thomas David Morrison, the corresponding secretary of the Upper Canada Central Political Union, and of the

140

‘Union Is Strength’

central committee. The 4th Riding (East and North Gwillimbury, Scott, Georgina, Brock, Reach, Whitchurch, and Uxbridge townships) nominated John MacIntosh, Mackenzie’s brother-in-law and chairman of the central committee. These four candidates were all from within the inner coterie of the central committee, and all lived near Toronto. The remainder of the year was spent preparing for the ensuing elections in October. Within days of the convention, Willson enjoined the central committee to ‘count the cost’ and begin the process of courting public support for the candidates: ‘your whole strength lieth in a union of sentiment,’ he argued, so ‘let us obtain a universal concurrence in all things we do as much as possible. If we offend the voters, the strength, pride and glory of the convention is lost.’ He added that he would ‘use my small endeavors to promote those you have appointed.’46 When a public meeting was held in Markham to confirm Dr Morrison’s candidacy, for example, ‘the fine band of the Children of Peace cheered the hearts of the Markhamese with a grand variety of lively airs.’47 Willson’s participation and advice, however, soon came under attack. Prior to a meeting in Hope, on 16 May, ‘evil and false reports’ circulated in the area of a rupture between Willson and Mackenzie, leading Willson to publicly proclaim, ‘I am so far from being at variance with William L. Mackenzie, that I can say that my friendship and affection have been increasing for years, to him and his cause; and when things were at the lowest ebb, I lent him and others my feeble hand of assistance at home, in York, and in Markham.’48 Willson blamed the stories on Tory electioneering. The stories started when Frances Hamilton, a Methodist schoolteacher in Hope who had been fired by the Children of Peace, charged Willson, Hughes, McLeod, and Reid with assault and battery at the Court of Quarter Sessions. The court issued a warrant for these men to appear on 6 May, a day on which they had appointed a public meeting in Markham. Willson and the others chose not to contest the charges – ‘no cause being known to us for such prosecution by this said Hamilton’ – and they attended the Markham meeting, which was interpreted by many as an admission of guilt.49 In an effort to control the damage, the Children of Peace issued a public appeal denying Hamilton’s charge in the Canadian Correspondent, and Willson himself contested the story of a breach with Mackenzie in the Advocate. But the matter was not so easily put to rest, and at the ‘Grand Reform Meeting’ for the 4th Riding in Hope, on 16 May, the crowd was split, ‘one party being violently opposed to the Children of Peace and another friendly to them.’ A similar split occurred in a

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 141

meeting in Newmarket on the 24th, when Silas Fletcher, the only East Gwillimbury delegate to the grand convention who was not a member of the Children of Peace, again raked up the issue. The other reformers – Mackenzie included – blamed William Robinson from nearby Holland Landing (brother of Attorney General John Robinson, and himself a Tory candidate in Simcoe County), with using the same strategy as ‘Mr Pitt took to divide the Irish in 1792 – he brought the Protestants and Catholics to hate each other, and ruled of them with a rod of iron, gaining strength by their animosities.’ Fletcher was not calmed until Mackenzie came out strongly on the side of the Children of Peace. Mackenzie’s intercession evidently healed the acrimonious divide within the reform movement. The campaign was interrupted by a severe outbreak of cholera in York, in July and August, which precluded large public meetings. Despite the inner divisions, and the lack of further campaigning, all four candidates nominated at the grand convention were swept to victory in the October election. A similar reform victory occurred elsewhere in the province, and a reform majority was returned to the House of Assembly, ending the threat of any further expulsions of Mackenzie. The Market Buildings The grand convention and subsequent election win did not end the organizational efforts of the reform movement. The wheels had been set in motion to build Shepard’s Hall. The election’s outcome had been by no means certain, and the need for a safe public space within which to hold their meetings remained a priority. Given the shortage of labour resulting from the cholera outbreak, the completion of the hall was postponed; it was eventually finished in early January 1835. In the meantime, however, the reformers took advantage of the completion of the new market buildings to do what they had done when they triumphally reclaimed the Old Court House from the Family Compact. The new market building had been initiated in 1831 by the Tory magistrates of the Court of Quarter Sessions, and several large rooms in it were put up for rent in 1834, shortly after its completion. When Mackenzie became Toronto’s first mayor in early 1834, he made the market building his city hall, and the reform movement and the Advocate moved into quarters in the south wing. Looking out of their windows south across Palace Street, the reformers would see the Farmers’ Storehouse Company.

142

‘Union Is Strength’

The Market Square Building was a large rectangular structure seventy-seven feet wide and 160 feet long, with a central, open courtyard, filling the block bounded by King, New (Jarvis), Palace (Front), and West Market streets.50 An arcade joined King Street to the inner square; a smaller entrance on the south side gave access to Palace Street. Storefronts faced King Street on the north, and Palace Street on the south, but all of the butchers’, egg, and cheese stalls faced inwards towards the open courtyard where farmers’ wagons sold their produce. A large building, the Town Hall, was erected above the King Street arcade, which was used as the first city hall. The remaining three sides of the building were two-storeys high, the second floor above the butchers’ stalls being used for warehouses and granaries; the second floor of the south side of the square contained a single large room, sixty by twentyseven feet. A gallery ran around the inner courtyard, giving access to the second-storey warehouses, and providing a viewing area for the many public meetings that took place in the square below. The untenanted sections of the market square buildings, consisting of nine large rooms, were let at auction on 16 June 1834.51 The large room, sixty by twenty-seven feet in size, on the second floor of the south side, was taken by Mackenzie for the Advocate office; Mackenzie himself had the mayor’s office in the Town Hall at the north end of the market square. The Canadian Correspondent, a reform newspaper edited by Dr William O’Grady, a defrocked priest, took the room facing Palace Street on the southwest corner. Mackenzie had, however, put the Advocate up for sale on 17 April, having found that little effort had been put into collecting its accounts in his absence, and the burden of debt was too large and onerous to make it worth continuing; he would devote himself to his new role as mayor of Toronto instead. The Advocate continued under the editorship of Peter Baxter, Mackenzie’s brother-in-law, until after the October elections for the provincial assembly. The Advocate was purchased by O’Grady shortly after the move to the market building; he sold off its presses and merged the two papers into the Correspondent and Advocate on 30 October. The disappearance of the Advocate left the large room on the second floor of the south building empty. The Old Court House was leased out, and the reformers – still only loosely organized as the central committee – took over the room.52 It was only now, after the election, that they reorganized as the Canadian Alliance Society, with James Lesslie, now a city alderman, as interim president. By January 1835 the Children of Peace were preaching in the same room every other Sunday,53

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 143

and by the end of February the Toronto Mechanics Institute had also moved into the same space.54 Lesslie was treasurer of the institute, and Timothy Parsons, the Canadian Alliance Society’s secretary, was also the secretary of the institute. The old office of the Advocate in the market buildings thus became the second temporary home for Shepard’s Hall, finally providing a space for the three legs of the reform movement, as called for in their prospectus: what the Courier scathingly called the ‘Holy Alliance Hay Loft.’55 The room overlooked the Farmers’ Storehouse Company across Palace Street; however, on July 30 1834, shortly after the Advocate had acquired the space in the market building, Joseph Shepard and Samuel Hughes had been forced to rent the warehouse out. It is, perhaps, that irony – looking over the now defunct Farmers’ Storehouse at every reform meeting – that spurred the reformers on to make a provincial loan office their first petitioning effort that spring. The Provincial Loan Office The first of the petition movements initiated by the Canadian Alliance Society was a call to form a provincial loan office. In August 1833, shortly after the Children of Peace established their credit union, and the Farmers’ Storehouse Company proposed something similar, a ‘poor farmer of East Gwillimbury’ (where the village of Hope lay) renewed the call for a loan bank on a joint stock basis, and suggested ‘let us exert ourselves, and see if we cannot get a loan office established in this wealthy part of the country. This we can obtain in spite of the House of Parliament, for we need no charter from them. A poor man has no chance in their bank, for what reason? Because he cannot get less than £25 or £50; when our loan office could lend a sum as low as they see fit, perhaps £1: 0: 0; such would give the poor man a chance as well as the rich man. This would be placing the rich and the poor more on an equal footing. If we don’t assert ourselves in pleading the poor man’s cause, depend upon it crushed down we are; for the more they can tyrannize over us the better their glory.’56 This call for a joint stock bank was met with a number of innovative schemes, all based on the recognition of land as an asset on which a currency could be based and loans drawn. A province-wide ‘loan office’ had been discussed in the colony for more than a decade. This provincially sponsored bank would lend farmers small sums of £1 or £2 against the security of their farms. A bill confusingly establishing such a bank as the Bank of Upper Canada had been passed in 1821; however,

144

‘Union Is Strength’

when the York-captured Bank of Upper Canada Bill returned two days later with royal assent, this bill was annulled and the project dropped.57 This provincial loan office was to become the first petition campaign of the new Canadian Alliance Society, the reform political organization formed in 1835 as the petitions from the Farmers’ Storehouse Company to form a joint stock bank with unlimited liability were rebuffed. A letter by Randal Wixson, a member of the political union organized at Hope and the editor of the Advocate in Mackenzie’s absence, was published in the Correspondent and Advocate on 1 January 1835. He advocated ‘a plan to help everybody, injure no body, and pay off the whole provincial debt in fifteen years by establishing provincial loan offices.’ Wixson’s plan, like the Children of Peace’s credit union, would provide small loans on flexible terms to farmers, rather than merchants. Wixson attributed the plan to William Cunningham, a Quaker from Hallowell Township in Prince Edward County, where the original loan bank had been proposed in 1821. Most of the petitions came from areas with a heavy concentration of Quaker settlers. The heavy Quaker participation points to Pennsylvania’s highly successful General Loan Office (or Land Bank) of the pre-Revolutionary period as the probable inspiration.58 Wixson asked: ‘How are people to be relieved from the pressure of these hard times? Produce fetches almost nothing, and every body are in debt. From what has fallen under my own observation, and from every other means which I have taken to inform myself, I am decidedly of opinion, that, at least one fourth part of the people in this province are so deeply involved in debt, that their personal property sold to the best advantage, at the present prices, would be totally insufficient to pay their honest debts … The consequence will be, that an immense quantity of property, both real and personal, will be brought into market at Sheriff’s sale, with few purchasers.’59 The plan that Wixson proposed called on the provincial parliament to establish loan offices in each district associated with the registry office; these offices would issue ‘provincial loan notes’ equal to twice the provincial debt and would be legal tender. These notes would be loaned in small amounts to farmers on security of their property, due in fifteen years, at 6 per cent simple interest. The plan offered long-term credit, as opposed to the ninety-day loans of the Bank of Upper Canada, and loans would be repaid yearly rather than quarterly, since farmers had but one crop a year to sell. As these farmers paid their yearly instalments, this money would be reloaned to others, on a shorter period, so that at the end of fifteen years, the original pool of notes would provide compound inter-

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 145

est; the profits from this compound interest would be sufficient, after expenses, to pay off the provincial debt at the end of fifteen years. Basing banknotes on land, rather than on specie or a legitimate commercial transaction, was anathema, however, to merchants who needed notes that could be trafficked outside the province. The reformers held this out as an advantage; notes based on land, which could not be converted into gold, would not fall into the continual snare of the Bank of Upper Canada, which found its specie reserves constantly drained outside the province. But for merchants, this lack of convertibility would allow the ‘Province of Upper Canada to turn swindler upon a grand scale.’60 The critique seems less telling when it is recognized that frequently even the Bank of Upper Canada would not honour local merchants’ foreign drafts if they paid for them with the bank’s own notes; it demanded specie in payment of such international transfers. If the Bank of Upper Canada’s notes had no international currency, why should the Provincial Loan Office’s notes? These alternate conceptions on what was (or should be) the real basis for money reflected the differing mentalité of merchants and farmers. In the same issue as Wixson defended his plan from the Toronto merchants’ critiques, David Willson clearly articulated an agrarian sensibility that labour – not trade – was the source of all value: ‘What do you think of our legislating powers, have they acquainted themselves with our necessities. No!! they never hold the plough, nor drive the cart – manure the soil, nor reap the harvest; but we by spoonsful, fill up their treasures, and they receive with shovels or wholesale our hard earned bread.’ He highlighted the importance of the petitioning movement of the newly formed Canadian Alliance Society: ‘We have good men far and near who have taken up our cause … Behold how beautiful the line is drawn – thro’ friends and agents a way is opened for the farthest inhabitant of the wood, to the throne of our king. It is not with us as in days past, when we had no mass of influence to plead our cause, and public matters were whispered over in the closet.’61 The Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the organization of the Children of Peace on joint stock lines seem to have been the crucible within which the reformers learned how to garner public support, and to petition the House of Assembly for equitable treatment. The petitioning movement for the provincial loan office emerged directly out of the newly formed rural branches of the Canadian Alliance Society, the reform political organization formed in 1835, and not its urban headquarters. The Lloydtown branch, for example, was formed

146

‘Union Is Strength’

on 17 January 1835, and its ninth resolution called for the implementation of the loan office scheme; their petition, from Joseph Watson and thirty-nine others, was read in the House of Assembly on 11 February. The Albion branch was formed on 12 January, and its second resolution called for the adoption of the plan; their petition, signed by eighty-nine members was presented on 21 March. In all, eleven petitions, signed by 1,012 freeholders, including George Hollingshead, a member of the Children of Peace and sixty-eight others, and Silas Fletcher, former director of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and ninety-six others, were presented. 62 These petitions were referred first to the Select Committee on Trade, and then to a select committee composed of Samuel Lount, Charles Duncombe, and Dr Thomas D. Morrison; they drafted a bill, which received first reading on 6 April 1835. Although ultimately little was accomplished by this campaign, it clearly indicates the economic concerns of farmers, as well as the political means they were adopting to address them. Radical Hall The formation of the Canadian Alliance Society signifies more than a change in name, although its objects, organization, and officers show clear continuities with the Upper Canada Central Political Union. The formation of the society after the elections requires some explanation. It can, in part, be explained by the fact that the central committee, under John McIntosh’s chairmanship, had been appointed only until those elections; something new, of necessity, had to eventually replace it. But the central committee had been narrowly conceived as an election vehicle – a task with which it had been enormously successful, with reform candidates sweeping the seats for Toronto and the Home District: nothing need immediately replace it just after the elections. It was those five newly elected reform representatives who were largely responsible for the founding of the Canadian Alliance Society, making its non-electoral focus all the more surprising as made evident with the subject of its first petition campaign, the provincial loan office. The Alliance was a political union, a lobbying organization, formed in the wake of the central committee’s inability to constitute itself as a ‘permanent convention,’ a political party. Why, then, was so much effort poured into creating this new political union at a time when, as Mackenzie later noted, a ‘society of this sort could not be extensively useful,’ given reformers continued hopes ‘on the justice of the English Government’?63

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 147

To account for this innovation, we need to consider the institutional momentum of the reform movement, as a movement. The reform movement was not a political party – it had repudiated that – but was, rather, a gradual coalescing of a number of disparate groups with disparate goals that only slowly hammered out a common agenda. Galvanized by Mackenzie’s expulsions from the House of Assembly, and goaded by political violence and the threat of a ‘gagging bill,’ the political union movement, promoters of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, the Bank of the People, the Toronto Mechanics Institute, and religious dissenters like the Children of Peace had come to share both leaders and a home: Shepard’s Hall. Given the length of time, and the number of temporary homes they occupied, it is easy to lose sight of the reformers’ plans for a ‘people’s hall.’ The little publicized plan, formulated in late 1833, first came to fruition when these three organizations came to share the same leased space in 1834. By late 1834 their proposed hall, now called Turton’s Building, was taking physical shape. It was this asset that proved to be the immediate impetus for the nebulous ‘Reform Society of Toronto’ to adopt a constitution and establish itself on a more formal basis.64 Turton’s Building was only completed in January of 1835. It was three storeys high, sixty by forty feet. It had space for two large stores, sixty by twenty feet, and above them, a public hall of the same size. The stores were eventually occupied by the printing establishments of the reform newspapers, the Correspondent and Advocate, and W.L. Mackenzie’s Constitution. The public hall was used for the meetings of the Canadian Alliance Society, as they fought to save the Farmers’ Storehouse Company and create a ‘Bank of the People.’ The same hall was used by groups of religious dissenters such as the Children of Peace, Methodists, Irvingites, and the Mormons.65 Turton’s Building was the fruition of the long struggle by the reformers to build Shepard’s Hall, and was completed as the reformers reached their apogee, having swept the elections to the House of Assembly in late 1834. The builder, Joseph Turton, was a master mason, entrepreneur, and reluctant reform politician. As is the case of so many members of the ‘operative’ classes, or ‘mechanics,’ little is known of his origins, or of his demise; he represents, however, the old order of ‘master builders.’ He was briefly thrust to local prominence when he took part in the Grand Convention of Delegates, and became one of the city’s first common councilmen in 1834. The Tory elite considered him a ‘sport’ (a joke), ‘because he rose to a comfortable independence by means of his own

148

‘Union Is Strength’

industry, as an honest respectable mechanic; – they tell us that he is disreputable, because he has been at one period, a working Brick-layer, and laugh … of [our] presumption, in dabbing him an Esquire.’66 Turton’s rise to public notice began when he became sub-contractor for the new parliament buildings, completed in 1831, and was refused payment for a large part of the work. This injustice stoked his personal reform political sympathies. He was a vice-president of the Upper Canada Political Union, and was also appointed to the committee of management of the Canadian Alliance Society. When the Upper Canada Central Political Union first proposed Shepard’s Hall, in September 1833, they expected to start construction in the spring of 1834.67 By November 1833, Turton was already advertising the construction of two three-storey buildings on the site, to be available 1 May 1834. The buildings were, however, only completed in December 1834; instead of two separate three-storey buildings, he built a single building with similarly sized stores, and an additional ‘large room, 60 by 20 feet, for Public purposes, for which it will be kept’ above.68 The buildings were constructed on land belonging to Dr William Warren Baldwin, who was to become the president of the Canadian Alliance Society in May 1836. 69 Once the Alliance and reform newspapers moved in, it clearly fulfilled the society’s original vision: Our proposition is by no means new. The lawyers have combined and built their Hall; the Legislative Council have theirs; the governor and his executive council theirs; the district magistracy theirs; the pensioned priesthood theirs; the bank monopolists theirs; the college council theirs; and the House of Assembly theirs. All these ‘political unions’ are upheld at the proper cost and charges of the good people of Upper Canada – the people it was who paid for all these halls. But what have they gained by them? Are these political bodies, as now constituted, or are they not, so many organized combinations carried on for the private advantage of their several members, at the continual sacrifice of the public good? Are they, or are they not? Is it not time that the people should come forward and subscribe their money, materials, and labor, to build their hall, a place in which they, for whom alone governments are, or ought to be established, may quietly and peaceably assemble and meet together to concert measures in favor of cheap law, cheap religion, cheap government, and encouragement and spread of all useful knowledge throughout Upper Canada?70

Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 149

The prospectus for Shepard’s Hall draws clear parallels between ‘combinations’ (‘trade’ unions), such as the Law Society, the Court of Quarter Sessions, and the Executive Council, each of which, like their own ‘political union,’ had its hall. Whereas the ‘combinations’ of the Family Compact were closed corporations with legislated monopolies over law, government, and banking, they proposed an alternate model, a democratic speculation based on the joint stock model. Their objects were, they declared: responsible government, a written constitution, prevention of legislative union of Upper and Lower Canada, and ‘the abolition or gradual extinction of all licensed monopolies.’71 The Canadian Alliance Society In this chapter, we have examined the economic factors that both brought these disparate actors together but that also gave them the corporate form through which they organized. By 1835 the province was in economic crisis, and the economic ills that had pushed the farmers of the Home District to form the Farmers’ Storehouse Company had become acute. The opposition they faced from the provincial elite politicized them as they joined together to petition for incorporation. In fighting for economic justice, their leaders – men like Joseph Shepard, Joseph Turton, and Samuel Hughes – simultaneously became political leaders in the nascent political union movement that had formed in Mackenzie’s absence in England. These political unions fomented democratic ideals, and developed democratic skills, by adopting the form of joint stock mini-parliaments, true ‘experiments in democratic sociability.’ The links between the nascent capitalism of the era and democracy in the province are clear; the radical democrats were also demanding economic justice, and the form in which this took place was the joint stock company. It is by highlighting the overlapping directorships of the disparate groups brought into this coalescing of interests that we see how these democratic ideals and skills were transferred to the Canadian Alliance Society. The Children of Peace played a critical role in the creation of the Canadian Alliance Society that has not been noted. As key players in the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and as instigators of a ‘permanent convention,’ they helped pull the movement together in its new home, Shepard’s Hall, where they continued to hold meetings for worship. Teasing out these linkages requires us to follow an intricate trail: from the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple in Hope by these ‘lost Israelites’

150

‘Union Is Strength’

fleeing their pharaoh, to the creation of a credit union from the alms they collected there; from building a shelter for the homeless, to the creation of the Toronto House of Industry in the Old Court House, their first Shepard’s Hall; from their co-operative sale of wheat, to the formation of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company; from Children of Peace subject to political violence, to building a safe home for free speech; and from preaching in Shepard’s Hall, to becoming political proselytizers of a democratic Upper Canada. Given the political power of the closed corporations ruling Upper Canada, it is no surprise that Joseph Turton the man, and Turton’s Building, should be so systematically erased from the city of Toronto’s history. I draw attention to the site’s current usage, for the Toronto Stock Exchange Tower, to underscore the total erasure of both Turton, and the alternative economic vision that he and the radical reformers upheld, from the historical record. No heritage plaque commemorating Radical Hall graces the side of the TSE tower. Turton ran as an alderman in St Patrick’s ward, in January 1835, and lost like most other reform candidates in Toronto; Lesslie claimed out of complacency.72 Although he was the builder of Turton’s Building, the building was not, in fact, Turton’s at all; it was named for him after his election loss as an honour now forgotten. On 15 April 1835, the reform-dominated House of Assembly voted to grant Turton the £290 he claimed was owed him for the completion of the Parliament building within which that Assembly met; but the bill was rejected by the Legislative Council three days later. In frustration, Turton placed all his property (although not Turton’s Building) for sale on 15 May;73 a (threatened) move that had him ‘maliciously’ arrested and jailed by a local merchant (ironically, a hatter also named David Willson) who feared he would abscond without paying his debt. Here, then, in a single figure, we see how debts were created through the abuse of judicial and parliamentary ‘conspiracies’ and how the same systems were used to harass debtors who organized politically to oppose them. We see in Joseph Turton a man inspired by his mechanic’s traditions: open, democratic, joint stock benevolent societies organized for the public good. Turton literally helped build the reform movement its home, the ‘Toronto Chambers,’ in the building that bore his name. That alternate social vision, however, now lies buried under the Toronto Stock Exchange.

5 The Bank Wars

No other President of the United States was ever able to act with that decision and firmness for the public good, which has thus far distinguished the career of President Jackson … He is opposed to imprisonment for debt, and has strongly and earnestly recommended to Congress the freeing of the United States debtors. He is in favour of no legislation in religion, being unwilling that what constitutes our duty to our God should be made a stalking horse by modern Pharisees on which to ride into political power. And his veto message on the Bank question stands forth a splendid and imperishable monument of his hatred to oppression under the form of ‘licensed monopolies.’ William Lyon Mackenzie, 18331

On 10 July 1832, President – General – Andrew Jackson fired the opening salvo in the ‘bank war’ against the Second Bank of the United States by vetoing the bill for its recharter. The Second Bank of the United States was a private, federally chartered bank serving as the government’s bank of deposit; the U.S. government named a fifth of the directors. Jackson’s complaints against the bank mirrored those of Mackenzie against the Bank of Upper Canada: the bank was a ‘political engine’ utilized by a ‘moneyed aristocracy’ to oppress the common man. In an effort to curb the power of its directors, and their attacks on his party, Jackson took the radical step of removing the government’s reserves, and refusing to sign the bill for its recharter. Jackson ultimately won his war, and the Second Bank of the United States was dismantled, but doing so caused an enormous economic contraction – a ‘bank revulsion’ – that plunged the Anglo-American world into a severe depression in

152

‘Union Is Strength’

1835.2 Ironically, by attacking the Second Bank of the United States, Jackson worsened the debt crisis of common farmers caught up in the resulting international contraction in credit. It was in the midst of this developing international financial crisis that the Children of Peace, the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and the Canadian Alliance Society all proposed their novel solutions to the now compounded problem of debt. The bank wars to the south served them as a radical democratic political movement on which they could draw for inspiration. For example, in his first parliamentary report on the currency, in June 1830, William Lyon Mackenzie had published excerpts of a pamphlet by a trade union organizer, James Ronaldson of Philadelphia, entitled ‘Consequences of Excessive Issues of Paper Money’ (1829).’3 And in April 1834, just after the Tory committee on banking had issued its report supportive of the two Upper Canadian chartered banks, Mackenzie began printing extensive selections from William Gouge’s ‘A Short History of Paper-Money and Banking in the United States …’ in the Advocate. Gouge was the editor of the Philadelphia Gazette. His book was a Jacksonian economic primer, explaining the nature of paper money, and underscoring the economic and political threat posed by banks. It was the most widely read work on economics in America, and widely serialized in those newspapers enlisted in Jackson’s war on the Second Bank of the United States. Gouge argued that the excessive issue of notes by speculative bankers was inflationary, depreciating the value of all currency, and hence raising the prices of store goods, land, and only lastly, labour – it was the common ‘mechanic’ who suffered most, his depreciated wages unable to purchase the necessities of life.4 Unable to repay his loans, whatever property he possessed passed to the ‘moneyed aristocracy,’ in the same process as it had to H.J. Boulton in Upper Canada. The laws for the recovery of debt in the United States were not greatly different from those in Upper Canada. Gouge thus found a responsive audience in the new workingmen’s (‘mechanics’) movement in the cities, and the agrarians in the countryside.5 His book went through five editions in the United States by 1840, and was reprinted in England by the radical populist William Cobbett, as ‘The Curse of Banking in the United States.’6 Both of these authors were part of a labour movement in Philadelphia not unlike that which emerged in Toronto in 1834. The Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, formed in Philadelphia between 1827 and 1831, spawned a ‘labour for labour’ association that operated three

The Bank Wars

153

co-operative barter stores, similar to the Farmers’ Storehouse Company. They also printed their own newspaper, the Mechanics’ Free Press, helped organize benefit (‘friendly’) societies, and operated a library for workingmen, not unlike the Mechanics Institute in Toronto. And, as in Toronto in 1834, a crippling builders’ strike in Philadelphia in 1827 served as a catalyst for their entry into city and national politics in 1828; they also fought for a lien law and for the abolition of imprisonment for debt.7 In 1829 they appointed a committee to study the banking system, of which both Ronaldson and Gouge were members. This committee concluded that ‘if the present system of banking and paper money be extended and perpetuated, the great body of the working people must give over all hopes of ever acquiring any prosperity.’8 Lillian Gates also notes that Mackenzie drew on the publications of the ‘Locofocos,’ the radical wing of the Democratic Party in New York, described by historians as ‘Urban Agrarians.’9 The Locofocos grew out of the Owenite Workingmen’s Party in New York in the early 1830s, a labour movement similar to that emerging in Toronto and Philadelphia. They shared many of the same ideas as Mackenzie on chartered monopolies, banks, paper currency, high legal fees, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. While it is true that Mackenzie regularly reprinted articles from George Henry Evans’ Working Man’s Advocate, it is important not to overemphasize the factional differences between the Locofocos and the Jacksonian Democrats; the hard money, anti-banking rhetoric most ably expressed by Evans, and William Leggett, of the New York Evening Post, was generally in keeping with the Jackson administration’s policies.10 By underscoring the broader context of the bank wars, by pointing to the intersections of the Owenite socialist movement in England and the related workingmen’s movement in the United States, I hope to place Upper Canada and its reform movement firmly at the centre of the economic debates of the era. In 1834, the year it became ‘Toronto,’ the small settlement of nine thousand souls on the shores of Lake Ontario was in the midst of ‘revolutionary’ social change. While seemingly apt in describing both ‘industrial revolution’ and ‘French Revolution,’ the word’s connotations make ‘revolution’ seem out of place in describing the small rural entrepôt, the county town, the seat of government for Great Britain’s most isolated of North American colonies. It is, however, by juxtaposing both senses of these revolutionary changes, their economic and political impact, that we can come to appreciate the seismic shifts occurring below the placid surface of what E.P. Thompson

154

‘Union Is Strength’

has called the ‘opaque society,’ the poorly documented world of voiceless ‘mechanics,’ the tradesmen and farmers who provided the muscle for the reform movement.11 An analytical vocabulary of class born in an industrial setting – Britain – appears poorly fitted to an agrarian colony, where production took place in small workshops of journeymen and apprentices under the supervision of master craftsmen, who as often as not farmed on the side. It is thus important to underscore that capitalism created its class antagonisms not through the technological centralization of production per se, the factory, but through the introduction of a new labour discipline, a discipline that deskilled, impoverished, and stripped the worker of his independence and ‘respectability.’ The ironic result of Jackson’s victory in the bank wars to the south was an international contraction in credit and widespread economic depression. Faced by an unprecedented debt crisis, these mechanics movements pushed to create new forms of credit to prevent the total loss of their property to the ‘moneyed aristocracy.’ It is in this light that we need to interpret the transformation of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the Newcastle District Accommodation Company into joint stock banks. Indeed, as William Lyon Mackenzie made quite clear, the ‘curse’ of banking extended only as far as the chartered banks. Joint stock banks lacked the special monopolistic privileges that made the chartered banks such a danger. In July 1835, as the reformers were organizing the joint stock Bank of the People, Mackenzie was to boast: ‘Archdeacon Strachan’s bank (the old one) and his pupil, John Solomon Cartwright’s bank (the new one) serve the double purpose of keeping the merchants in chains of debt and bonds to the bank manager, and the Farmer’s acres under the harrow of the storekeeper. You will be shewn how to break this degraded yoke of mortgages, ejectments, judgements and bonds. Money bound you – money shall loose you.’12 The joint stock banks were a means of ensuring the availability of credit, which was critical to the preservation of individual liberty in an ‘economy of debt.’ The formation of new banks blossomed in 1835 in the aftermath of a parliamentary report by Dr Charles Duncombe, which established their legality here.13 Duncombe’s report drew in large part on an increasingly dominant banking orthodoxy in the United Kingdom that challenged the English system of chartered banks. An English parliamentary inquiry had been established in 1825 to investigate note issues in Scotland and Ireland in the wake of a widespread commercial crisis. This, in combination with an influential 1822 pamphlet on the Scottish joint stock banking

The Bank Wars

155

system, by Thomas Joplin, were critical to the repeal in 1826 of the 1708 Bubble Act, which limited partnerships to a six-partner maximum in England.14 Ireland had done the same in 1821, but Scotland had always been exempt from the legislation. This opened the door to establishing banks on the Scottish system throughout the United Kingdom, peaking in 1836, despite the dogged resistance of the chartered banks. The difference between the chartered banks and the joint stock banks lay almost entirely on the issue of liability and its implications for the issuance of banknotes. The joint stock banks lacked limited liability; hence every partner in the bank was responsible for the bank’s debts to the full extent of his or her personal property. Thomas Ridout, manager of the Bank of Upper Canada, had argued that no one would be interested in bank stock with even double liability, which was certainly true if the bank engaged in highly speculative note issues like the Bank of Upper Canada did. But the very lack of protection ensured that joint stock banks would adhere to a hard money policy, never issuing more notes then they could redeem: their shareholders would exert ‘responsible vigilance’ over bank managers to ensure this because of their personal liability for over-issues. Hard money was also considered a means of avoiding the rapid expansion and contraction of the money supply, held to be responsible for periodic economic crises like the one that gripped the Anglo-American world in 1835. Duncombe’s Select Committee on Currency offered a template for the creation of joint stock banks based on several successful British banks.15 The report’s conclusion was taken up within weeks by two brash Devonshire businessmen, Captain George Truscott and John Cleveland Green, whose private partnership had established the Agricultural Bank at Toronto the year before. They issued a circular calling for shareholders in a new (competing) ‘Farmers’ Bank,’ with Charles Duncombe as its president.16 Truscott and Green turned to those opposed to the Bank of Upper Canada for financial support, and thereby provided them with an opportunity to put the ‘Farmers Store House Bank’ into operation on a joint stock basis. Reform enthusiasm was significant – if short-lived. It turned out that this offer was a Trojan Horse, and that the first Upper Canadian salvo in the bank wars had been fired. But here the terms of the war were different. In the United States, President Jackson was in a position to dismantle a banking system that provided the economic might of the ‘moneyed aristocracy.’ In Upper Canada, the reformers were considerably weaker, and all attempts to dismantle the Bank of

156

‘Union Is Strength’

Upper Canada had failed. Their only hope was to compete with the Bank of Upper Canada with a joint stock alternative. It was for this reason they enthusiastically supported the Farmers’ Bank and others. Democratically organized joint stock banks would fund the fight for democratic reform, as when the Bank of the People provided Mackenzie the loan to found a new newspaper, the Constitution. But as this synopsis of the Farmers’ Bank shows, even here they were at a disadvantage. In the ‘banking mania’ that followed, we can see a clear and systematic abuse of power by the province’s elite, and by specific legislative councillors such as John Elmsley, George Markland, and Zacheus Burnham, in particular. They sought to commandeer the resources of others by making them shareholders without a voice in a closed, chartered corporation, just like Truscott and Green. These legislative councillors utilized their political and economic might to crush the nascent joint stock reform banks. The only survivor was the Bank of the People, established in Toronto, which was the ultimate outcome of the reform petitions for a provincial loan office. The bank wars were thus an extension of old political battles in an alternate, economic sphere. The Bank Wars Part I: The Farmers’ Bank Truscott and Green had first established a successful county bank in Devonshire, England, in 1831, after lengthy military careers. Truscott, the son of a rear-admiral, had risen to the rank of captain before his retirement after thirty years of service. Green had extensive experience in the Canadas, having served in the commissariat here from 1811 to 1818. This experience no doubt provided the spark, and the connections, to lure them to Toronto. After an initial recognizance in 1833, the two established the Agricultural Bank in June of 1834 and quickly began an aggressive expansion.17 Truscott and Green had not, however, anticipated the hostility of the Bank of Upper Canada to their operation. The wound was to a large part self-inflicted, since Truscott drew on the Bank of Upper Canada for £30,000 to form the Agricultural Bank’s own specie reserve. A protracted specie battle between the two banks failed to crush the Agricultural Bank, but left its credit worthiness in doubt – ‘respectability’ and a reputation of credit worthiness was just as important for banks, as for individuals. Truscott responded by petitioning the House of Assembly to investigate its books and publicly affirm its stability in March 1835.18 Truscott and Green’s move to create a potential rival, the Farmers’ Bank in June 1835, was most likely an attempt

The Bank Wars

157

to establish their banking endeavour on a wider footing, with enough resources to compete with the Bank of Upper Canada. They began this attempt just as the international contraction in credit was imperilling all banks, thus heightening the stakes. Truscott and Green initially sought a local partner, ‘a gentleman of large property in this country, who is expected to join the firm.’19 No third partner did, in fact, join. Instead, Truscott and Green attempted to spread their risks – and liabilities – by creating the Farmers’ Joint Stock Bank. They had done the same at their branch in Buffalo, New York, in December 1834, where they had taken their nineteen-year-old clerk, John W. Buckland, and a Buffalo druggist, Russell Searle Brown, into partnership to form an exchange and discount brokerage firm, Brown, Buckland & Co., advancing it $30,000 at 6 per cent interest since none of the other partners had capital to invest.20 The Farmers’ Bank followed this pattern. Mackenzie noted, shortly after the investigation into the Agricultural Bank’s finances, that ‘it soon became evident that Messers. Truscott & Co. possessed but a very limited capital, for they made great exertions to set on foot a joint stock bank.’ Why, he asked, would they establish a rival bank, unless they planned on winding down their own riskier Agricultural Bank?21 Mackenzie further noted that ‘it is also a fair inference to be drawn from their conduct, that they meant to keep the new bank on leading strings.’ Although Truscott and Green had touted Charles Duncombe as president of the new bank to solicit reform support, the chairman of the general meeting of subscribers, on 16 June, was the Hon. John Elmsley, legislative councillor.22 Elmsley might have been the ‘gentleman of large property in this country, who is expected to join the firm’: he was a retired naval officer, a legislative councillor and former executive councillor, the son of a former chief justice from whom he inherited a large estate, the son-in-law of Judge Levius Sherwood, and a director and one of the largest shareholders in the Bank of Upper Canada. His extensive land holdings further expanded when he began speculating in United Empire Loyalist location rights after an 1830 order-in-council made their transfer legal. When Lieutenant Governor Colborne sought to curb this traffic, in the Executive Council in 1833, Elmsley resigned.23 The breach with the Family Compact widened in 1834 when Elmsley converted to Catholicism and publicly quarrelled with the Venerable John Strachan. Jubilant reformers had some hope he would join their ranks.24 They had, however, taken the bait and allowed a Trojan Horse within the city gates.

158

‘Union Is Strength’

Several meetings were called in June and July to enlist potential investors, and revise the deed of settlement by which the bank would be formed. A list of thirty-four investors who had subscribed to fifty shares, and therefore qualified as directors, was circulated, and immediately elicited concern.25 Although all those qualified as directors came from within the Home District, Mackenzie had never heard of fourteen of them, and feared that they were simply agents for Truscott and Green. Mackenzie also worried that the list of shareholders was being withheld by Truscott and Green and that they would use this knowledge to rig the elections, a fear that proved well founded. A committee of stockholders who asked to see the list were denied. The election of officers was further open to abuse through the use of proxies; the reformers had insisted on the use of ballots only and had the deed of settlement revised to reflect that. These ballots had been mailed to each shareholder, who was to vote for a slate of twelve directors and sign the ballot.26 The election for officers was held on 25 July at Thomas Elliot’s tavern. Elliot’s Tavern was owned by John McIntosh, Mackenzie’s brother-inlaw, and the reform member of the legislative assembly for the 4th Riding of York. Elliot was himself a prominent reformer, and was serving as scrutinizer for the bank elections. Here, Truscott first revealed his political leanings, and ‘declared himself the open enemy of the reformers … he would permit no man to sit at the Board (if he could help it) who would vote for Mr Speaker Bidwell to be the Bank Solicitor.’27 Truscott’s Agricultural Bank had launched no less than fifty-three suits in the Court of King’s Bench in its short life in 1834.28 Bidwell, a lawyer and the reform speaker in the Hosue of Assembly, was opposed to imprisonment for debt. In the elections that followed, Truscott’s agents submitted a large number of proxy votes, which the deed of settlement had forbidden, marginalizing the reform candidates. As a result, the chairman of the meeting, the Hon. John Elmsley, was unsurprisingly elected the new president of the bank. The bank’s solicitor was Henry Sherwood, Elmsley’s brother-in-law, who had articled in his uncle Henry John Boulton’s office, and who also served as the solicitor for the Bank of Upper Canada in Brockville. These two men evidently came to dominate the board. Another board member stated that Sherwood, ‘in strict league with Mr Elmsley, his brotherin-law … bore down all before them; the debates in which the voices of these two persons predominated; the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd days were so loud and violent as to arrest the attention of passers by in the streets and coming from persons sworn to secrecy were rather amusing.’29

The Bank Wars

159

The reformers dismissed the elections as a fraud, and on 27 July they hired a lawyer, J.H. Price, to sue Truscott.30 They cited a number of irregularities. Elliot, one of the scrutinizers, had found two ballots from his own brother, one forged. One of the candidates, Charles Thompson, the former president of the Upper Canada Central Political Union, had been listed on the ballot as a valid candidate, and was elected by the shareholders, but was then eliminated in his absence by the Torydominated board since he had not yet signed the deed of settlement.31 And Dr O’Grady, editor of the Correspondent and Advocate, pointed out that the day before the election at a meeting chaired by Elmsley, ‘Captain Truscott’s agents … were in possession of some hundreds of proxies.’ When O’Grady insisted proxies were forbidden by the deed of settlement, Elmsley rebutted that they would be valid if converted into ballots by the next day; a physical impossibility that would require a visit to each and every shareholder who had given a proxy. Yet, these converted ballots were accepted the next day, since the scrutiny of the vote took place in private after the shareholders had left.32 Truscott had evidently boasted that ‘he himself had actually put in eleven of the twelve in the bank direction.’ Another of the scrutinizers later attested that Elmsley approved the altering of ballots marked for J.H. Price to Sherwood.33 Truscott’s bravado was to be short-lived, however, as he quickly lost control of the bank to Elmsley. On 27 July, when the board decided to remove Charles Thompson as a director, Elmsley and Sherwood managed to have a crony, James Saxon, appointed in his stead. According to the rules George Duggan, the man with the next highest number of votes, should have been selected. As another director stated, ‘this step was important to them, as only by adding another person to their party, could they hope to obtain that preponderance at the Board which has allowed them since to pursue their dishonourable measures, and has at last driven from it one of the most honourable, and efficient of the Directors, Captain Stewart.’ Elmsley needed this majority in order to ensure that his own candidate for manager was selected. Elmsley and Sherwood had apparently agreed to vote for W.H. Fryer, Truscott’s candidate for manager. Fryer had been brought by Truscott from England and was an accountant for Truscott, Green & Co. Elmsley, however, solicited an application from Henry Dupuy, who had worked in the Bank of Montreal for sixteen years, and the Bank of Upper Canada for two.34 Having gained control of the board and manager, Elmsley now sought to eliminate Truscott: he ‘shewed the most marked neglect, treated him

160

‘Union Is Strength’

with undeserved contempt, and insulted him through his Board by frivolous and vexatious demands.’ More importantly, he attempted to create a run on Truscott’s Agricultural Bank by paying out more than £400 in that bank’s notes.35 Elmsley was ultimately successful, gaining total control of the Farmers’ Bank when Truscott withdrew. In this opening salvo of the bank wars, the attempt of reformers to establish a joint stock bank fell squarely in the hands of one of Toronto’s richest ‘gentleman capitalists.’ The Bank Wars Part II: ‘Banking Mania’ Before moving on to the distinctive features of the Bank of the People created by the reformers after their loss of the Farmers’ Bank, its formation needs to be set against the ‘banking mania’ that followed in 1836. If Elmsley’s takeover of the Farmers’ Bank were an individual incident, it would remain a minor footnote. It is, however, more significant as an illustration of a broader pattern of abuse of privilege by members of Upper Canada’s social and financial elite. The Legislative Council had refused to incorporate any joint stock bank arising from the reform-dominated House of Assembly in early 1836.36 But in the Tory-dominated Assembly a few months later, no less than eleven new banks were proposed and approved although many more, like the Provincial Bank, were not. This sudden legislative turnabout was not the product of Duncombe’s report on the legality of joint stock banks. All of these new banks sought limited liability and charters. Since these bank bills were ultimately reserved by the Colonial Office, there has been little investigation of their promoters, and their significance has been discounted; and indeed, in many cases, information is sparse, limited to little more than the name of the bank itself. In five of the eleven cases, however, more extensive evidence is available, showing a consistent pattern of executive and legislative councillors, like Elmsley, using their political and economic influence to promote new banks. What is significant, then, is that the ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ of Upper Canada consistently sought to utilize their control of the Legislative Council to create ‘closed’ chartered corporations that used others’ resources under their own control, and to their own profit, while shielding their speculative note issues with limited liability but denying it to their debtors. The proposed Provincial Bank was, in fact, a reformed Bank of Upper Canada. The idea of a provincial bank (not to be confused with the provincial loan office) was first touted in February 1834 by Thomas

The Bank Wars

161

Ridout, manager of the Bank of Upper Canada. He made his suggestion to a Tory-dominated parliamentary committee on banking appointed in the wake of the British government’s threat to disallow the act increasing the capital stock of the Bank of Upper Canada, and the new charter of the Commercial Bank of Kingston.37 The threat – the product of Mackenzie’s lobbying in London – was never acted on by the British government, but was enough to cause a severe contraction in credit in the province. The Treasury Board, however, did send a dispatch to the lieutenant governor containing new instructions for the regulation of banks in the province, which included double liability for shareholders (i.e., liability to double the worth of their stock), and the demand that notes issued by branches of the banks should be redeemable in specie there. Mackenzie lauded the recommendations, comparing them with the bank war occurring to the south: ‘The amendments are excellent and it is a remarkable coincidence to see the King of Great Britain waging war with irresponsible banking monopolists in Canada while the president of the United States is disallowing the charters of equally corrupt and dangerous institutions in the Union.’38 The Tory-dominated House of Assembly, on the other hand, memorialized the Crown with ‘extreme apprehension and regret’ on its interference in matters ‘purely internal in their nature, and which cannot be correctly judged of, in all their bearings, without the advantages of experience and observation within the Province.’39 The greatest surprise in the committee’s report is Ridout’s response to the proposed new regulations, and in particular, to the Treasury Board’s demand that the Bank of Upper Canada shareholders face double liability. The Treasury Board had specifically forbidden the bank from holding land, as opposed to specie, as security for its notes. Ridout suggested that the bank’s capital stock be raised fivefold, to £1,000,000 (with the government taking a large part of that), and that this money be used to purchase a tract of land from the government next to the Canada Company’s Huron Tract. Like the Canada Company, the bank would pay for the land in instalments, and in the meantime, the government would resell the land at a higher price to immigrants (presumably enough to cover its instalment payments). The bank would then agree to loan the money from the resale to the government at 6 per cent interest. This elaborate scheme, in other words, sought to relay the foundations of a vastly expanded Bank of Upper Canada on land speculation, rather than commercial transactions; because the bank’s note issues would be backed by land, the double liability proposed by the

162

‘Union Is Strength’

Treasury Board would not be required. The bank would profit from the accrued value of the land, as well as from its loans to the government. The greatest advantages to the government would be in the vastly enlarged supply of banknotes the scheme allowed, and by the limitation on the proliferation of small banks that might over-issue notes without backing. This was the role that the Second Bank of the United States had played. Benjamin Thorne, also interviewed by the committee, argued that this expanded Bank of Upper Canada should be the only bank of issue, and that the other banks should be required to use its notes, thus allowing the Bank of Upper Canada to regulate and control the money supply.40 The Tories lost control of the House of Assembly in October 1834, before they could act on the select committee’s recommendations. It thus fell to William Merritt, the Hamilton entrepreneur behind the Welland Canal, to move for a select committee to investigate the idea on 19 January 1835, in a reform-dominated House of Assembly.41 This committee reported a bill the next week, on the 27th, amending Ridout’s plan to accord with the new regulations issued by the Treasury Board.42 This bill called for the establishment of a provincial bank with £500,000 share capital. Rather than pursue the questionable land scheme as security for the note issue, £300,000 was to be raised through debentures issued in London on the security of the province. It also made the provincial bank the bank of deposit for the government – which the colonially appointed receiver general, John Dunn, had always refused to do with the Bank of Upper Canada. This diluted version of the scheme drew attacks from all parties, including Thomas Dalton of the Patriot, who had been one of the provincial bank’s greatest supporters, eulogizing it in a series of articles entitled ‘Money Is Power.’ Dalton pointed out that the bill provided no security for the bank’s notes beyond its share capital. Without the explicit security pledged by the province itself, this bank would be no more safe than the two established chartered banks. ‘It would be,’ he added, ‘decidedly more prudent to augment the Capital of the two present Banks, than to create one huge monster of fraud and corruption, one frightful engine of remorseless persecution such as this Bill would engender.’43 The reform press could hardly have been harsher in its evaluation. Although much discussed, no further action was taken on the provincial bank in that session of the House of Assembly, though a new lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, would eventually try to shepherd it through the Colonial Office.

The Bank Wars

163

The second and related chartered bank proposed by the province’s elite was the Freeholders’ Bank. It was promoted by Captain James McGill Strachan, the eldest son of executive and legislative councillor, the Venerable John Strachan. Captain Strachan, having resigned his army post, was then serving as a law clerk in Toronto. The Freeholders’ Bank was to be founded on the same principle of land as security for banknotes as with the provincial bank and the provincial loan office, although its profits would not be used to resolve the province’s debt. The provincial bank, sponsored by Merritt, proposed to fund transportation improvements with bank profits. As Thomas Dalton later noted, the provincial bank differed from the freeholders’ bank primarily in having ‘more prejudices to surmount on the score of Government patronage.’44 In the plan originally laid out in the Patriot, in May 1836, freeholders would mortgage their estates (to half their value) to the provincial government (this becoming their stock). The province would use the land as security to borrow £2,000,000 in England at 5 per cent, which would form the bank’s capital. Shareholders could then borrow up to half the value of their stock. Since the bank could operate like any other bank, issuing notes up to three times its capital, it could repay the borrowed English capital and still issue dividends to stockholders. The Freeholders’ Bank would solve the ‘deficiency’ of the Provincial Bank proposed by Ridout – having notes secured by land – by having the government serve as guarantor for a loan floated on the English market on the security of shareholders’ land, mortgaged to the government, which would serve as the bank’s share capital.45 These government connections are important to underscore. The Freeholders’ Bank was touted as an alternative to the provincial bank, which was then being attacked as a ‘political engine’ due to the government’s influence on its board of directors. Mackenzie had opposed the provincial loan office for the same reason, favouring a system of joint stock banks with no state connection. The Freeholders’ Bank, although founded on the same principle of land as security for banknotes, was to be an entirely private bank, and hence, presumably, less objectionable – no different from the Bank of the People. However, the proposed bank had other connections than Strachan to the Tories, and to the newly revived British Constitutional Society, in particular. The British Constitutional Society was organized in April 1836 as a Tory election vehicle. Its executive committee was composed of William B. Jarvis, John S. Macaulay, William H. Draper, Charles Hagerman, and Clarke Gamble.46 William Draper was to be their successful candidate

164

‘Union Is Strength’

for the Toronto riding, and the presenter of the Freeholders’ Bank Bill on 7 December; he was also named to the Executive Council that same month. William Jarvis and John Macaulay were named two of the five commissioners of the bank. The Freeholders’ Bank should be viewed as the Tory’s response to the Bank of the People then being organized by their political rival, the Canadian Alliance Society. Given the powerful connections that this group had within the Torydominated House of Assembly, as well as the legislative and executive councils, it is surprising how poorly the bill initially faired in the Assembly. This was largely because of the factional infighting between the promoters of the Provincial and Freeholders’ banks; if the province was to serve as a loan guarantor, it was felt it could do so for only one bank. The advocates for the Provincial Bank slammed the Freeholders’ Bank for utilizing the province’s credit, without returning anything to the provincial revenues, as the Provincial Bank promised to do. The promoters of the Freeholders’ Bank attacked the Provincial Bank as a ‘political engine.’47 In the fairly evenly matched battle, the Provincial Bank Bill ‘yielded up the ghost,’ and the Freeholders’ Bank Bill, ‘the soundest and most effective scheme for a Bank that has ever been devised, [was] sustained in the house on a second reading by a majority of only three.’48 The bill passed by a majority of thirty-five in its third reading only by dropping all connection to the provincial government.49 The bill apparently had little difficulty in the Legislative Council, despite fears ‘that the Bill will meet with opposition in that branch of the Legislature from self-interested motives’ since they were all, apparently, busy promoting their own banks. ‘But if the matter be fairly looked into, it will be clearly seen that self-interest should lead the opposite way; for all the members of that honourable body are great landholders, and what though some of them be proprietors and directors of other Banks, what can be their interest in those institutions compared with what it must be to render their vast landed possessions at all times marketable at a remunerating price?’50 The support of the Legislative Council could be counted upon precisely because the Freeholders’ Bank became the means by which these large landholders could convert their holdings into liquid capital. Just as the Bank of Upper Canada had allowed its shareholders to borrow against the security of their shares, in the Freeholders’ Bank, they could borrow a ‘cash credit’ equal to half their stock, stock that was composed entirely of pledged land but that remained in their possession.51 The biggest beneficiaries of the scheme

The Bank Wars

165

were not to be the farmers, to whom the scheme was ostensibly directed, but these large land speculators. In fact, none of the petitioners or commissioners was a farmer. The share structure of the bank also made this clear: investors had to pledge property worth £200 for a minimum of four shares at £25 each; this meant pledging between one and two hundred acres of otherwise unencumbered land. But most new farmers – those most in need of loans – already had existing mortgages on their land. Only ‘gentry farmers,’ the long-established early grantees who also tended to be magistrates, and government supporters, would have been qualified given this high investment threshold. Ordinary farmers were critical to the bank’s success, however, since they would have to circulate the notes of the Freeholders’ Bank. Their support was solicited: ‘The entire farming and estated community would feel themselves deeply interested in giving a preference to the notes of this, which would indeed be their bank.’ In currying this favour, the Patriot’s correspondent explicitly equated the Freeholders’ Bank with the People’s Bank in Lower Canada.52 Ensuring the wide circulation of the Freeholders’ banknotes was critical, particularly at this point, because Jarvis went ahead and started the bank in the midst of a widespread depression, despite the fact that the bill establishing it had not yet received royal assent.53 It, like all the other bank bills of this session of the House of Assembly, had been reserved by the lieutenant governor.54 The Freeholders’ Bank was, however, little but another Tory-controlled ‘political engine.’ Another example of the banking mania that erupted in 1836, the Upper Canada Life Insurance and Trust Company, was clearly the pet project of Executive and Legislative Councillor George H. Markland. The son of a Kingston merchant, Markland had served in a number of government posts, ultimately being appointed inspector general of public accounts in 1833. Markland owed much of his promotion to the zeal with which he supported the policies of his former teacher, and fellow executive and legislative councillor, the Venerable John Strachan. The petition for the life insurance and trust company originally came from Daniel Jones and forty-nine others from Brockville, and was read in the House of Assembly on 20 January 1835; a bill incorporating the company to issue insurance, serve as a trust, and to confer banking privileges, was passed on 7 April. Although the bill passed the Legislative Council, J.B. Robinson, William Dickson, William Allan, and Alexander McDonell felt called upon to officially register their dissent: ‘we consider it still decidedly objectionable.’55 A ‘citizen of Toronto’

166

‘Union Is Strength’

complained of the right granted the company to foreclose on defaulted mortgages through the sale of property; that ‘an immense quantity of the landed property of the country would pass into the hands of the company, and as numerous cases of non-payment of interest and principal would infallibly occur – a power of sale ruinous to the mortgagers, destructive of the peace and welfare of families, and ultimately to that of the community at large, would produce a reaction hostile to the system, and fatal to its existence.’56 The bill was subsequently reserved by the lieutenant governor. Daniel Jones was to travel to London himself to argue the bill’s merits, during which trip he was knighted as the ‘first United Empire Loyalist presented to his majesty.’57 It is only at this point that Markland’s interest and influence becomes clear: the only way that this ‘objectionable’ bill passed through the Legislative Council in the first place was with his aid. He made his involvement quite clear before the next session of the House of Assembly in a letter to Thomas Dalton, editor of the Patriot, asking that the lengthy bill be published in its entirety.58 The bill had to be resubmitted to the Assembly for reconsideration on the demand of the secretary of state.59 In what was to become a common theme in several of the proposed bank bills, Markland claimed the bank’s note issues would be safe because it was ‘restricted to one half the capital, which is secured by real estate worth double the amount’ thereby meeting the Treasury Board’s demand for double liability for shareholders. This formula was first suggested by Ridout for the Provincial Bank, and was also part of the Freeholders’ Bank and the Newcastle District Accommodation Company. Markland’s bill was again passed by both the House of Assembly and the Legislative Council, on 31 January 1837, but once again reserved by the lieutenant governor, this time because the Colonial Office had stipulated that all banking legislation was to be reserved for royal assent. Less is known of the Upper Canada Loan and Trust Company. A petition from John H. Dunn, the province’s receiver general, and a legislative councillor, was read to the House on 24 November 1836. Dunn had been a director of the Bank of Upper Canada since its inception, and was also a director of the British America Fire and Life Assurance Company. He had unsuccessfully sought, with the help of the government party, to gain the presidency of the Bank of Upper Canada after William Allan’s resignation in 1835.60 Denied the Bank of Upper Canada, Dunn evidently decided to found his own bank that he, as receiver general, could use to do the government’s banking to his personal profit.61 The

The Bank Wars

167

Legislative Council imposed several restrictions on Dunn’s company in the same areas of concern as Markland’s: the company was restricted from selling the estate of mortgagees if the mortgage was for less than half its value. The bank was restricted from purchasing the estate itself if a private bidder offered enough at public auction to pay the debt; and if the bank did purchase the estate, it had to sell the same at public auction within a year if the land was not redeemed by the mortgagee. The amended bill was passed by both houses on 7 February 1837. Dunn was sworn into the Executive Council on the 20th, though this could have played little role in the company’s incorporation, since he resigned three weeks later with the other executive councillors, in protest of Lieutenant Governor Head’s refusal to consult them on all matters of state. The bill chartering Dunn’s company was also reserved by Head at the Colonial Office’s instigation. The Cobourg Bank (Bank of the Newcastle District) was briefly mentioned in the last chapter. It was formed by a legislative councillor, the Hon. Zacheus Burnham, and his partner, Henry Ruttan, the sheriff of the Newcastle District. Burnham, a local land speculator and magistrate, was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1831. Ruttan, a merchant, was appointed sheriff of the Newcastle District in 1827 and was elected to the legislature in 1820, and again in the Tory-dominated House in 1836. The bill to charter the Cobourg Bank or ‘Bank of the Newcastle District’ was presented in 1836 by Ruttan. During this period, Ruttan and Burnham had also been serving as treasurers for the Newcastle District Accommodation Company (now calling itself the Newcastle Banking Company). Although the reform-dominated Assembly of 1835 had established the legality of joint stock banks, the Tories continued a legislative assault against them. To eliminate their local competition, Ruttan and Burnham took advantage of a bill passed on 3 March 1837 ‘to protect the Public against injury from Private Banks,’ which made it illegal for any private bank not chartered by the Legislature to issue banknotes; the Hon. Zacheus Burnham chaired the committee of the Legislative Council which proposed the bill, and specifically exempted only four joint stock banks by name, including the Farmers’ Bank and the Bank of the People, but not the Newcastle District Accommodation Company.62 The Newcastle District Accommodation Company’s operation was made illegal as of 1 July. A second bill was passed on 11 July that allowed the Newcastle Banking Company to appoint three commissioners to wind down its affairs.63 A livid Bancks asked, ‘Can it be supposed

168

‘Union Is Strength’

the Bank Directors, the Bank Agents, the Bank Stockholders, that form a great part of this tribunal, had any eye to their own private interest in voting down an institution they were aware would prove a powerful rival in their commercial field? – Dare I insinuate the Lawyers and the Sheriffs, independent of their direct interest in the present Banks, could have any other inducement in supporting an institution that has showered its benefits on them and its blessings on the country in the shape of fifty seven executions in one week, in one District?’64 What these last four examples show is that joint stock banks were not the simple panacea to the evils of chartered banking that reformers like Duncombe and Mackenzie thought they might be. Although Duncombe had argued that the creation of joint stock banks did not require the Assembly’s or the Legislative Council’s approval, they nonetheless faced significant economic and political hurdles as those with wealth and influence used their power to gain and retain control of the province’s financial system. Although the monopoly of the Bank of Upper Canada had been broken, the newly chartered banks were to remain closed corporations under the heavy-handed control of the province’s social and political elite. The more democratically organized joint stock banks, which had enjoyed only a brief window of opportunity, were now made illegal by the law ‘to protect the Public against injury from Private Banks’ originating in the Legislative Council and passed in 1837 by the Tory-dominated House of Assembly. Of the numerous joint stock banks founded and chartered in 1835–6, only the Bank of the People fulfilled Duncombe’s vision. The Bank Wars Part III: The Bank(s) of the People Within days of the contested elections for directors of the Farmers’ Bank, a ‘committee of the principal reformers’ decided to form their own joint stock bank, the Bank of the People, ‘founded in a manner which shall insure unanimity among its friends and stability in its concerns.’ Citing voting irregularities, the reformers withdrew from the Farmers’ Bank, selling their stock at a discount to Elmsley. Others simply refused to pay the second instalment, thus forfeiting their stock. The chairman of this new committee was James Lesslie, president of the Canadian Alliance Society, with J.H. Price, the reform lawyer, as secretary. They invited potential investors to subscribe for five shares at £100 each, of which 10 per cent would have to be paid before the bank went into operation.65 This significant investment, combined with the unlimited

The Bank Wars

169

liability assumed by the shareholders – in the aftermath of the Farmers’ Bank debacle – surely took a leap of faith. William Lyon Mackenzie immediately threw his support behind the project: The people of this country, degraded by the tory misrule of nearly half a century, are cursed with a Banking system which heaps up wealth in the hands of a few while the many are getting into greater difficulties, begin to ask one another whether they too cannot have banks? Banks for the direct and indirect profit and advantage of the community, instead of the alternative of paying for the filthy rags of the very meanest men in the country. I am decidedly of opinion that they can have such Banks, and that as we must have paper, whether we will or not, that we may as well have the paper of the people’s Banks as that of the aristocracy, and I intend to use every energy I possess in getting such Banks established forthwith … I think we can match them with paper, and beat them too.66

Little further was publicly said of the bank until after its election of a board on 4 November 1835 when John Rolph was elected president, and James Lesslie the cashier. Although he had sat as a reform member of the House of Assembly, Rolph was not actively engaged in politics at the time; he was, however, serving as president of the Toronto Mechanics Institute, with Lesslie as treasurer. Three of the bank directors, M.S. Bidwell, David Gibson, and T.D. Morrison, were members of the Assembly; T.D. Morrison and John Harper were Toronto aldermen; John Doel, James Hervey Price, and James Beaty were Toronto city councillors. Two of the remaining directors, John Montgomery and Thomas Elliot, were innkeepers on whose premises reform meetings regularly took place. The name selected by the reformers, the Bank of the People, reflects their emerging strong ties and shared strategies with reformers in Lower Canada, who were founding a similarly named bank in Montreal at the same time, in an effort to break the Bank of Montreal’s monopoly there. The Banque du Peuple was formed under the title of DeWitt, Viger & Co., organized as a société en commandite, the French form of joint stock company, which was significantly less democratic in form. In this form of organization, the directors, or principal partners, once elected, stood for life. The directors were the only partners with unlimited liability; the shareholders could lose no more than their share capital. The Montreal bank’s founders were Louis-Michel Viger, a Montreal lawyer

170

‘Union Is Strength’

and popular Patriote politician, and Jacob DeWitt, a wealthy Americanborn hardware merchant, ship owner, and reform politician. They drew their clientele from among the French farmers and artisans.67 The new bank was lucky in that it was soon able to enlist the aid of an able manager, Francis Hincks. Although elected a director of the Farmers’ Bank, and hired as its cashier, Hincks decided to throw his lot in with the reformers instead. Hincks operated a wholesale business in dry goods, wine, and liquor, in premises rented from Dr W.W. and Robert Baldwin. The Hincks and Baldwin families, both of Irish Protestant stock, soon became fast friends, their political fortunes intertwined; both Robert Baldwin and Hincks were to eventually serve as premiers of Canada West. Hincks had apprenticed to a prominent Belfast shipping company before he moved to Upper Canada in 1832. His wholesale business had quickly run into the problem of having to fund long-term debt, however, which led him to promote the Farmers’ Bank. He had sold a large amount of goods on commission for Truscott, and Robert Baldwin had been one of the Agricultural Bank’s lawyers. He soon fell out with Elmsley, and played a prominent part in running the Bank of the People after it opened in mid-November 1835.68 The only list of shareholders was not made public until 4 November 1837, when the Select Committee on Banking investigated the five private joint stock banks in the wake of the general suspension of specie payments.69 At that time, the bank had fifty-six shareholders, of which slightly more than half, thirty-one, lived in the city of Toronto, and included the directors listed above. Only six were merchants. The remaining known shareholders were primarily artisans (eleven) and professionals (four). A further twenty shareholders were from across York County, with clusters of investors in York Township (six) and East Gwillimbury (six). The investors in East Gwillimbury included David Willson, his sons John D. and Israel, and his son-in-law Charles Doan. Given that Willson received no salary as minister of the Children of Peace and both his sons were small-scale farmers on their father’s land, it is probable that these shares were being held in trust on behalf of the Children of Peace as a whole. Silas Fletcher, of East Gwillimbury and a former director of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, was also a shareholder. The new bank was soon to prove its distinctiveness. Despite offering 5 per cent interest on deposits, it was able to deliver a 6 per cent dividend in 1837, in spite of paying off £1,200 in start-up costs.70 It managed

The Bank Wars

171

to do this despite the general economic downturn, and without resorting to widespread litigation – in the October 1836 assizes of the Court of King’s Bench, sixty-three suits had been launched by the banks. The Bank of the People proudly proclaimed it had sued no one, compared with the thirty-five suits by the Bank of Upper Canada, fourteen by the Agricultural Bank, nine by the Commercial Bank, and five by the Farmers’ Bank: ‘In addition to the above we are informed that 140 suits have been commenced in one day, last week, by the Bank of Upper Canada alone.’71 The Bank of the People thus followed the same philosophy as the Toronto House of Industry, then also being formed with Lesslie’s help, to maintain the respectability of those in debt, rather than stripping them of their property. While the different banks varied vastly in size and resources, the much smaller Bank of the People chose to renew its loans, rather than sue for failure to repay. By January 1837 most of its loans were in arrears.72 Their loan policy was ‘when we take a merchant’s account, to discount all the paper he brings [i.e., loan the amount at interest]. We are anxious to confine our business pretty much to regular Customers, and do not encourage Persons keeping accounts at other banks, or when the Paper does not represent a bona fide transfer of property.’73 In other words, the bank stuck to the ‘real bills’ doctrine and followed a hard money policy in which it restricted its note issues to its capital resources. In its organization, the Bank of the People was an example of a joint stock ‘mini-parliament.’ However, it also directly funded the broader growth of a culture of deliberative democracy, as demonstrated by two important cases. The only loan made by the bank for which any details exist is one for £275 to William Lyon Mackenzie to start his new newspaper, the Constitution, in July 1836. The constitutional vision proclaimed in this newspaper is, I would argue, closely tied to the struggle to found the Bank of the People, for Mackenzie’s ‘popular constitution,’ published on 15 November 1837, started from the premise that ‘labour is the only means of creating wealth’ and placed severe restrictions on the chartering of corporations. The loan was endorsed by John Doel, James H. Price, Edward Wright, David Gibson, and John Montgomery, four of whom were bank directors. Details of this loan are known only because Mackenzie defaulted on it after fleeing to the United States after the rebellion, and they were all called upon to redeem his note.74 Newspapers were, of course, an important factor in the development of public opinion through their reports of public meetings, and through their reports and analyses of parliamentary debate. The Constitution was the

172

‘Union Is Strength’

means by which the reform movement’s momentum was maintained in the lead-up to the rebellion. The bank itself was located in a house on New (Jarvis) Street owned by James Beaty, a reform city councillor. By June 1837 the reformers had also opened the City News Room over the bank to compete with the commercial news room in the market buildings where the Toronto Board of Trade met under its president, William Allan. This points, like the history of the formation of the Bank of the People, to the longstanding struggle between the city’s elite, who controlled the dominant economic and political institutions of the province, and their radical opposition seeking to carve out for themselves an alternate space for their radical, egalitarian constitutional vision. The City News Room made available ‘the leading liberal Journals published in the two provinces, London, Dublin and Edinburgh.’75 As McNairn notes, such newsrooms ‘were probably quite utilitarian: a room with chairs, lamps, a table for the most recent newspapers and journals, and shelves for earlier issues.’76 The newsrooms were usually extensions of local newspapers, and provided an opportunity for subscribers to meet and discuss news from a wide variety of sources. By stocking these journals, the reformers were being kept well aware of the broader ‘bank wars’ taking place in the United States, which were about to plunge the province into economic chaos. The Bill to Protect the Public against Injury from Private Banks The onslaught of new banks generating worthless ‘paper rags’ did little to alleviate the misery experienced throughout Upper Canada in 1836–7 following the general contraction of credit throughout the Anglo-American world as the Second Bank of the United States was dismembered. They did much in the end to solidify the economic and political power of Upper Canada’s elite. Crop failures struck both American and Upper Canadian farmers in 1836. The resulting increase in wheat prices thus did little to ease this want. Upper Canada, which had always experienced a trade deficit, and a constant siphoning off of its specie reserves, was ill prepared to withstand the general continental collapse of the infant financial sector. The Bank of Upper Canada, in particular, was seriously overextended, having expanded its note issue by 27 per cent between January 1835 and February 1836. Although this made for record-breaking profits in 1836, the sudden contraction of its note issue by 60 per cent after June of 1837 caused widespread deprivation and discontent.77

The Bank Wars

173

The banks of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore suspended specie payments in May 1837, leading Mackenzie to advise the farmers of York County to immediately exchange their Upper Canadian banknotes for gold and silver as soon as possible. He pointed out that Joseph Cawthra, a prominent Toronto merchant, had already exchanged his bills for gold and silver, and predicted that a run would soon be made on the Upper Canadian banks – if not by local merchants like Cawthra, then by New York speculators, who had collected large amounts of Upper Canadian paper notes.78 Mackenzie’s warning was by no means hyperbolic. William Proudfoot, the bank’s president, reported to Head that the bank had just had to pay out £10,000 sterling of its £50,000 specie reserve the day before Mackenzie’s story was printed.79 Once they were unable to redeem their notes, the banks would legally have to suspend operations, making their notes worthless since the bank’s shareholders were protected by limited liability from having to personally pay the bank’s debts. Mackenzie also pointed out that the only exception to this was the joint stock Bank of the People, as any shareholder could be personally sued in the Court of Requests for the value of each of the bank’s notes. The difficulties of the Bank of Upper Canada were compounded when, in June, Thomas Wilson & Co., its London financial agent, suspended operations – owing the bank £15,000. This put enormous pressure on the Upper Canadian banks to follow suit with the American banks and suspend specie payments. In response to pleas from the Upper Canadian banks for protection, the House of Assembly passed a bill in July permitting this suspension and allowing the banks to continue to operate, subject to the lieutenant governor’s consent. Head resolutely refused to offer this consent, arguing it was ‘inconsistent with Commercial integrity,’ until late July.80 The Commercial Bank of Kingston was the first to avail itself of the legislation in September. The Bank of Upper Canada was only able to weather the storm by taking advantage of its increasingly close ties with the government. For example, Head called on the receiver general to make his deposits in the bank (a move Dunn had always resisted), and Head used the bank for the government’s exchange on its London loans. Thus, despite a deep curtailment of its regular business, the bank’s profits dipped only 25 per cent from the record yield in 1836.81 Despite this aid, and its continuing profitability, the two remaining chartered banks, the Bank of Upper Canada and the Gore Bank, were forced to suspend specie payments in March 1838. The only bank that did not suspend specie payments was the Bank of

174

‘Union Is Strength’

the People, despite considerable obstacles. Like the Bank of Upper Canada, it was confronted by merchants like Joseph Cawthra, who sought to exchange some £640 of its notes for silver.82 And by June, the Bank of Upper Canada and the Commercial Bank had refused to accept the notes of the Bank of the People or the Farmers’ Bank, and had told their agents to charge a 2 per cent premium for exchanging these notes.83 This had the effect of increasing the differential in the number of Bank of Upper Canada notes held by the joint stock banks, until they held, at various times, £5,000 to £15,000 in notes for which they demanded specie in return. This resulted in yet more hostility from the besieged Bank of Upper Canada. The Bank of the People petitioned the Legislative Council to reject any bill that simply legalized the suspension of cash payments by the banks. A legalization of suspension would allow the banks to radically expand their speculative note issues during the crisis, while protecting their shareholders with limited liability. They pointed out that in the United States, where this had occurred, paper currency had considerably depreciated in value relative to specie as a result. Debtors found that creditors would refuse to accept payment in depreciated paper currency and that this left them subject to legal prosecution for debt. The only alternative, argued the Bank of the People, was to make the paper notes of the chartered banks legal tender, with legislative control of their issues to prevent bank speculation: ‘The plan we recommend is a desperate remedy for the existing disease, and if adopted, will require every guard that can be thought of to restrain the Bank issues within bounds, so as to enable them to return to cash payments as soon as possible.’84 The biggest victim of simply legalizing suspension would be the joint stock banks, which had outstanding loans of almost £100,000. These loans would be repaid in the depreciated paper of the suspended banks, for which the joint stock banks had no use, yet they would still be obliged to redeem their own paper in specie. The pamphlet appeared to have some influence; when the Commercial Bank suspended payment in September, its note issue was limited to its paid-up capital. This put it in the same position as the Bank of the People, who also had to limit their note issues, because of their shareholders’ unlimited liability. Significantly, when the Bank of Upper Canada suspended its specie payments the following March, it was allowed to issue double its paid-up capital in notes. The Bank of the People was the only bank not to suspend specie payments, and thereby put the lie to the stated intent of the law ‘To protect

The Bank Wars

175

the Public against injury from Private Banks.’ The intent of the law was less to protect the public than to eliminate joint stock banking and the considerable challenge it mounted to the social, economic, and political dominance of Upper Canada’s elite. As William Lyon Mackenzie had promised, joint stock banks would break the farmers’ ‘degraded yoke of mortgages, ejectments, judgments and bonds. Money bound you – money shall loose you.’85 The ‘moneyed aristocracy’ systematically utilized their political power to take command of the money supply and shield their investments with limited liability, while exploiting the debt of others as a weapon using the very same legal tools as Attorney General H.J. Boulton had against Henry Ausman.

6 The Constitution

To crown the whole farce, we have from [Mackenzie’s] erudite mind, in the last number of the Mash Tub, a tremendous heap of trash and twaddle, in the shape of a report of a popular Constitution for the Farmers, Mechanics, Laborers, and other inhabitants of Toronto! … I may be permitted to observe that it is evidently intended, by its unhappy projector, to develop and demonstrate what is empirically termed by persons in his melancholy state of mind, ‘The greatest happiness system’… I remember, some years ago, the nation rang with the merits of a scheme put forth by a well meaning enthusiast, Mr Owen, of Lanark. His object was to collect and stuff a certain number of persons in square, brick buildings, formed in oblongs and parallelograms; where, as soon as the parties entered, they were to become sober, honest, industrious and happy, all care and anxiety were forthwith removed … Rank, property, gradations of society, national, and every other worship, – for Mr Owen had the misfortune to be an infidel, – were to be swept entirely away … But it is useless to carry out further the utter absurdity, the Utopian humbug and nonsense, of such distempered imaginings; nor is it more necessary to discuss with gravity the effects which such a reckless system of spoliation and revolution would produce … The mere existence of what is called Pure Democracy is not indeed impossible; but its power of duration has been proved to be as evanescent as the early cloud or the morning dew. P.Q.R.1 The Patriot, 24 November 1837

The day that Lieutenant Governor Sir Francis Bond Head prematurely prorogued the reform-dominated House of Assembly, 16 April 1836, William Lyon Mackenzie announced that he would launch a new news-

The Constitution 177

paper, the Constitution.2 The Constitution began publication on 4 July, a sign of its republican aspirations. The journal was funded by a loan of £275 from the Bank of the People, a loan personally guaranteed by four of the bank’s directors.3 Shortly before he began publication, Dr W.W. Baldwin also adopted the language of loyalty, and transformed the Canadian Alliance Society into the Constitutional Reform Society.4 Both the Constitution and the Constitutional Reform Society found their home in ‘Radical Hall,’ Turton’s Building (in fact, owned by Baldwin), along with Dr O’Grady’s Correspondent and Advocate, and numerous religious groups like the Children of Peace. This was the joint stock alliance that years of careful work had created. However, although both newspaper and political association proudly proclaimed a renewed constitutionalism, their visions sat uneasily together in their new home; Mackenzie’s overt, radical democratic ideals went much further than Dr Baldwin’s more restricted call for a limited ‘responsible government.’ This radical democratic vision was captured in a draft constitution published by Mackenzie just weeks before the Rebellion of 1837. The Tories viewed the document as ‘Utopian humbug and nonsense,’ and concluded that ‘the mere existence of what is called Pure Democracy is not indeed impossible; but its power of duration has been proved to be as evanescent as the early cloud or the morning dew.’5 The proposed constitution was ostensibly published as a response to a Patriot article a few weeks before, ‘A Conference on Government for the Instruction of Radical Reformers,’ which recorded a hypothetical debate between Cromwell and his advisers in the Glorious Revolution on the relative benefits of mixed monarchy and republicanism. The gist of the article was that ‘the too great authority of the people destroys the government most calculated to make them happy; and that a nation bewildered by popular government, must inevitably be lost in the abyss of despotism.’ It especially fulminated against those republicans who ‘by exaggerating the evils which they do not feel, the abuses by which they seek to profit; feigning an affection which they never knew, impose upon the credulity of the multitude; excite their passions, and use them as instruments for removing their rivals, and obtaining those honours to which their guilty ambition aspires.’6 Mackenzie responded by composing another of his Patrick Swift satires, a round-table discussion by such luminaries as John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Pitt, and others. The discussion allegedly took place in the Long Room of the Royal Oak Hotel, in Churchville, where a public meeting that

178

‘Union Is Strength’

summer had been disrupted by Orange violence, and an attempt made on Mackenzie’s life.7 These discussions were said to be part of a ‘convention sitting in this township for the purpose of circulating political information, weighing opinions as to the best means of improving the civil institutions of the country, and endeavoring to determine whether the British Constitution, Sir F. Bond Head’s government or Independence would be the most likely to prove advantageous to the people.’8 There is every indication that the farmers and mechanics of the Home District were conducting similar debates on the relative merits of mixed monarchy in their political unions; the Constitution regularly published the resolutions of individual unions such as that of Whitchurch, which viewed ‘with alarm the inroads made on the constitution by Sir F.B. Head, in establishing a dominant Church, contrary to the often expressed wish of a great majority of the inhabitants of the province, and farther, that he, together with his bread and butter Parliament, have thought proper to dispense with a new election, contrary to the established British Constitution.’9 The hypothetical product of the convention in the Long Room of the Royal Oak was a ‘popular Constitution.’ This constitution closely resembled the objectives spelled out in the constitution of the Canadian Alliance Society in 1834;10 it called for an elected governor, legislative council (senate), House of Assembly, and magistracy, all by secret ballot. It was egalitarian, prohibiting both slavery and the granting of ‘hereditary emoluments, privileges, or honors.’ It also called for a separation of church and state, and barred the clergy from seeking election, or serving in any civil or military office. It guaranteed the rights to personal property, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. But tied to these rights to personal property and egalitarian democracy were severe restrictions on chartering corporations; starting from the premise that ‘Labour is the only means of creating wealth’ it placed a constitutional prohibition on chartering either banks or trading companies. It also required that any bill to incorporate a body politic be passed by the governor and three-quarters of each elected house. In other words, without contesting the right to the accumulation of personal property, it combined radical democracy with radical economic egalitarianism. In contrast, it placed no blocks on joint stock companies with unlimited liability. This constitution embodies the argument of this book: that the radical politicians of this province were ‘joint stock democrats.’ The Patriot’s correspondent, P.Q.R., was not far from the mark in comparing Mackenzie’s ‘Utopian humbug’ with the Owenite movement in

The Constitution 179

Britain (or its American progeny, the Workingmen’s Party in New York, whose circle Mackenzie was ultimately to join). Mackenzie’s contention that labour was the source of all value echoed the Owenite’s use of ‘labour notes’ in labour exchanges rather than banknotes; by the mid1830s, the Owenites had formed clear ties with emergent working-class organizations to create a broad co-operative movement across Britain, organized as joint stock companies not unlike the Farmers’ Storehouse Company. They staunchly opposed the Established Church of England. And these working-class co-operators threw their weight behind the political unions fighting for the great Reform Act of 1832, and the Chartist agitation for universal male suffrage thereafter. By 1839 they held an annual congress composed of delegates from sixty-one branches and operated meeting halls like Turton’s Building in many large towns.11 The utopian socialism preached by their ‘social missionaries’ spoke of a ‘New Moral World,’ and of millennial – revolutionary – change. It is this sense of millennial change – rather than violent rebellion – that enthused Mackenzie in late July 1837: Canadians! It has been said that we are on the verge of a revolution. We are in the midst of one; a bloodless one, I hope … Calm as society may seem to a superficial spectator, I know that it is moved to its very foundations, and is in universal agitation … The question today is not between one reigning family and another, between one people and another, between one form of government and another, but a question between privilege and equal rights, between law sanctioned, law fenced in privilege, age consecrated privilege, and a hitherto unheard-of power, a new power just started from the darkness in which it has slumbered since creation day, the Power of Honest Industry. The contest is now between the privileged and the unprivileged, and a terrible one it is.12

Yet, we have lost sight of this radical democratic constitutional vision, and of the broad alliance that backed it, in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1837. Historian Allan Greer has argued that ‘though the “Progress of Liberty” was a favourite theme of history for earlier generations, it is difficult today to get anyone interested in the history of democracy … Canadians in particular, taught in school to see their national past as a story dominated by transcontinental railways and Fathers of Confederation, have trouble imagining the struggle for democracy as an important historical theme. The history of democracy, we tend to believe, happened somewhere else.’13 Paul Romney explains this failure of his-

180

‘Union Is Strength’

torical imagination as the outcome of an explicit strategy adopted by reformers in the face of charges of disloyalty to Britain; in recounting the ‘myths of responsible government’ Romney emphasizes that after the ascendancy of Loyalism as the dominant political ideology of Upper Canada, any demand for democracy or for responsible government became a challenge to colonial sovereignty. The linkage of the ‘fight for responsible government’ with disloyalty was solidified by the Rebellion of 1837, as reformers took up arms to finally break the ‘baneful domination’ of the mother country. Struggling to avoid the charge of sedition, reformers later purposefully obscured their true aims of independence from Britain and focused on their grievances against the Family Compact: responsible government thus became a ‘pragmatic’ policy of alleviating local abuses, rather than a revolutionary anticolonial moment.14 The rebellion – a ‘fact that every school child knows’ – has overshadowed all else in our narratives on the struggle for democracy and responsible government. But as Greer has forcefully argued, ‘we should pause in the search for causes and effects and concentrate first on identifying more clearly the phenomenon that is to be explained. Surely the “what” question is prior to the “why” question. We can best approach this definitional problem, I would argue, by looking more closely at the crisis of 1837–38 as a complex series of events, one involving the actions and interactions of several parties, not just those identified as rebels. Rather than focusing on a one-dimensional act of revolt, we should recognize the contingency of events.’15 Following Greer’s cue, I would like to ask, how would we intepret the broader events of 1837 if we used a different lens, one that did not selectively prioritize those events that teleologically lead us to this act of violence? How would we interpret the organization of the ‘constitutional convention’ of 1837 if we were not held spellbound by the rebellion which lies, chronologically at least, at its end? Greer points out that one obstacle that stands in the way to a synthetic interpretation of this sort is ‘the comparative isolation of Canadian historiography from larger international currents … What is surprising is the failure of Rebellion specialists to make fuller use of the enormous literature, empirical and theoretical, on revolutionary episodes in Europe and the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’16 Here then, I interweave the familiar narratives of the Upper Canadian Rebellion with one such international current, the convergence of the Owenite and early Chartist movements in the United Kingdom in the 1830s. It was in this period that Owenism shed its early

The Constitution 181

communitarianism, becoming at once more co-operativist, as well as more overtly political. Many of the early leaders of the Chartist movement were Owenites, and as the Patriot’s correspondent, P.Q.R., seemed to recognize, they were equally enamoured of the utopian possibilities of ‘pure democracy.’ Easy parallels can be found between the creation of the Toronto Political Union in 1837, its organization of a constitutional convention, and subsequent rebellion, and the British General Convention of the Industrious Classes organized by the allies of the London Working Men’s Association to prepare the first Chartist petition to Parliament, leading to the infamous Newport Uprising in 1839. The rebels of Newport complained most loudly about the truck system, and the introduction of the new Poor Law; ironically, the assistant Poor Law commissioner of Newport during the uprising was Sir Francis Bond Head’s cousin, Sir Edmund Walker Head.17 John Frost, leader of the uprising, like Mackenzie, was the radical ex-mayor of the town he was eventually to attack. Political Unions, Petitioning, and Chartism The Canadian Alliance Society was a loose association of rural co-operators and urban radical republicans much like the London Working Men’s Association, which was to author the ‘People’s Charter’ in 1838. Many have viewed Owenite socialism and Chartism as mutually hostile. They view Chartism as having roots in the disappointed workingclass members of the political union movement and the petitioning campaign for the great Reform Bill of 1832; the petitioning campaign for the People’s Charter in 1839 adopted the same language and strategies in an attempt to obtain universal male suffrage.18 They also confuse Owenism with the resolutely apolitical Robert Owen. However, between 1829 and 1835, Owenite socialism was politicized through two organizations: the British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge (founded in 1829), and its successor, the National Union of the Working Classes (founded in 1831, and abandoned in 1835).19 By 1833 Owen was an acknowledged leader of the British trade union movement, and he helped form Britain’s first national labour organization, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.20 It was from this heady mix of working-class trade unionism, co-operativism, and political radicalism in the disappointed wake of the 1832 Reform Bill and the 1834 new Poor Law that a number of prominent Owenite leaders such as William Lovett, John Cleave, and Henry Hetherington helped form

182

‘Union Is Strength’

the London Working Men’s Association in 1836. Chartists and Owenites were ‘many parts but one body’ in this initial stage.21 Although the Six Points of the People’s Charter were not published as such until 8 May 1838, they have a much longer history, going back to at least 1831 when the London National Union of the Working Classes (among other organizations) had published William Lovett’s call for the same measures.22 These organizations called for adult male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections, and equally sized electoral districts, as well as for salaries and the elimination of property qualifications for members of Parliament. Mackenzie’s constitution was clearly in keeping with their radical rhetoric when measured against these demands. While Mackenzie’s constitution did not prescribe yearly elections, he did advocate biannual sessions of the lower house, and the yearly election of one-quarter of the members of the upper house, who would sit for a four-year term. The chosen methods of the Chartists were also no different from that of the political union movement, which had put the emphasis on petitioning Parliament. To implement this plan, they called a series of mass meetings across the country in the summer of 1838 to select delegates to a General Convention of the Industrious Classes. As Dorothy Thompson has indicated, ‘British parliamentary reform has been organized around the idea of an alternative Parliament since the middle of the eighteenth century.’23 The ‘Declaration of the Reformers of the City of Toronto,’ adopted on 31 July 1837, predated the first Chartist petition by a year, but Mackenzie’s advocacy of a ‘constitutional convention’ drew on this same radical tradition. Although it harkened back to the American and French revolutions, the convention was convened in terms of the limited constitutional right to petition Parliament. The Chartist movement drew its strength from those rural districts most severely affected by the new Poor Law of 1834, which was a potent symbol of the failure of the 1832 Reform Act to live up to workingclass expectations. The middle-class beneficiaries of the Reform Act of 1832 had supported the new Poor Law, which promised to reduce welfare rates, but at the expense of the working poor whose families would be split up in the new houses of industry. These working-class fears were accentuated by the general economic crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in 1836. We can similarly point to the same economic malaise in Upper Canada, and the similar concerns over Head’s enabling legislation for houses of industry here.24 And although not an official part of the six points of the charter, Chartist rhetoric was quick to utilize

The Constitution 183

the standard motifs of the Country Party and its critique of ‘Old Corruption.’ The Chartists critiqued the Church of England, advocated the nationalization of church property, and the abolition of church tithes.25 Mackenzie’s constitution was to also demand a separation of church and state, and a prohibition on ministers serving in either civil or military positions. Perhaps the most telling of the unsettling similarities between the two movements, however, was the division between what would eventually be known as the ‘physical force’ and the ‘moral force’ chartists. When the General Convention of the Industrious Classes met, in May 1839, they were faced with the possibility their Charter petition would be rejected. Their response was to publish a ‘Manifesto of Ulterior Measures’ that listed a series of tactics culminating in a monthlong national strike to bring the economy to its knees. The poor would prevail against their oppressors, ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must.’ The Owenite wing of the London Working Men’s Association, in contrast, advocated a more gradualist, educational process should the petition fail.26 These distinctions would become clearer in the aftermath of the first petition’s failure in 1839; but before the submission of the petition, even William Lovett, leader of the LWCA, shared in the rhetoric of threatened violence. This threat of violence caused the bulk of the remaining middle-class members to withdraw, and increased the government’s already heavy policing of the movement’s leaders. We find a similar dynamic in the Upper Canadian case, where the robust language of political dissent utilized the implied threat of violence as a means applying political pressure. The London Working Men’s Association was not unaware of the unrest in the Canadas in early 1837, and themselves petitioned the British Parliament after a public meeting to protest the ‘base proposals of the Whigs to destroy the principle of Universal Suffrage in the Canadas.’ That petition was republished in the Correspondent and Advocate on 3 May 1837, shortly after the imposition of Lord Russell’s ‘ten resolutions’ on Lower Canada. ‘This conduct,’ they wrote, appears ‘to be highly tyrannical – involving the question of liberty for the many, or despotic rule for the few, and which injustice, we feel satisfied, will never be tamely submitted to by the Canadian people, especially when they have the history of the past, the bright example of the present democracy of America to refer to of what can be effected by a united people, when free from the mercenary grasp of aristocratic or kingly dominion.’ This assessment was little different from Mackenzie’s own conclusion two

184

‘Union Is Strength’

months later that ‘the contest is now between the privileged and the unprivileged, and a terrible one it is.’27 Irresponsible Government Who, then, were these privileged? It is important to underscore the political context within which the radical reformers struggled to assert their constitutional vision in Upper Canada. Colonial Secretary Lord John Russell’s plan for resolving the crisis in Lower Canada, the infamous ‘ten resolutions,’ clearly spelled out the nature of repressive British rule in Lower Canada. Among other things, the resolutions allowed the colonial executive to utilize tax revenues without the Assembly’s approval, a move that provoked broadly revolutionary sentiments among the Patriots. However, a similar, but less frequently documented flurry of legislative activity was also taking place in the Tory-dominated Upper Canadian House of Assembly, which similarly limited long-established civil rights here; it, too, evoked a passionate response. These bills pre-empted elections and promoted ‘irresponsible government.’ The Tories either utilized the overt political violence of the Orange Order to maintain rule, or utilized the indirect violence of imprisonment for debt, the Toronto House of Industry, and the penitentiary as threats against those whose ‘crime’ was democratic dissent from arbitrary rule. The Royal Standard, a short-lived conservative daily edited by James Cull, clearly spelled out the need for these repressive measures in its first issue: The contest to be waged in this province is between Monarchy and a Republic. There are of course men professing all shades of opinion, but the time draws nearer every day, when they must either declare their attachment to the British Constitution, or venture on the bold and dangerous step of signing a Declaration of Independence. A party already exists, in a state of organization, ready to hazard this extreme length, at the first favourable opportunity; Toronto, their local habitation, and the Political Union their name. – At the head of this faction stands the name of Dr Baldwin; and tho’ he, and a very few others of his associates, may possibly deem that they are to Canada what the whigs are to England – the bulk of the members composing this Union are undisguised and ripe for rebellion. Proofs are superfluous, when facts are admitted.28

The phrase ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition,’ which made party

The Constitution 185

politics a possibility in the United Kingdom, had not yet gained currency in Upper Canada.29 The Tory press had bandied the ‘rebel’ epithet against reformers for years before the rebellion. Attorney General John B. Robinson, for example, repeatedly asserted in court that ‘“those who criticized existing political arrangements could be viewed as seeking to destroy the colony’s legal and constitutional arrangements – that they were little better than criminals.” Not surprisingly, this approach placed such critics in an impossible position, or at any rate, an illegitimate one … As an exercise in delegitimizing an opposition, it was a powerful and effective technique.’30 As if in direct reply, David Willson published an address ‘to the Administrators of the British Constitution’ such as Robinson, complaining that ‘the ministers of the crown, with an unrestricted dividing hand, have seen meet to grant the [Church of England] partial favours. But if others cry or pray for an equal division of the spoil which we have all fought for against a rugged wilderness, the reply is, you are rebels or reformers … I would sell my vote forever for a snuff box! It is not worth a mess of pottage; it doth a man no good when he is hungry for improvement.’31 Such charges of disloyalty were used to justify the increasing degree of Orange Order electoral violence in the wake of the repeal of the Sedition Act in 1829. These charges and the Orange Order were used to remarkable effect by Head in the elections of 1836, in which the reformers, including Mackenzie, were routed.32 Given the pivotal role of the Orange Order in political violence in the period, we should pause to look at their perplexing and contradictory role, comparing them specifically with the Children of Peace. The similarities between the Children of Peace and the Orange Order are striking. Both could be found parading down Toronto’s King Street bearing banners with similar iconography drawn from the imagery of Solomon’s Temple. Both groups were largely working-class organizations with a religious focus, as well as ‘benevolent societies’ that offered various forms of social welfare to their members. Yet, throughout the 1840s, these two groups stood at loggerheads. The Children of Peace repudiated electoral violence and championed the cause of reform and responsible government by ‘moral force.’ The Orange Order, in contrast, rallied to the Loyalist cause, and systematically employed ‘physical force’ and violence to rig elections. Although ‘Orangeism and Toryism were philosophically complementary, [they were] socially incompatible. Nevertheless, the order provided for Tory candidates a measure of voting power and public obstructionism at the polls.’33 How can we

186

‘Union Is Strength’

explain how such otherwise similar groups were bent to such divergent political programs? The answer no doubt lies with the link between the Orangemen and the ‘Civic Corporation’ of Toronto. Although Children of Peace and Orangemen shared a similar membership and benevolent aims, the Orangemen’s economic and political aspirations became entangled in the Tory-controlled ‘licensed monopoly’ of city governance against which reformers such as Mackenzie and the Children of Peace systematically struggled. Historian Hereward Senior has noted that the Orange Order’s political ideal was expressed in the word ‘ascendancy’: ‘This meant, in effect, control of the volunteer militia, of much of the machinery of local government, and substantial influence with the Dublin administration. Above all, it meant the ability to exert pressure on magistrates and juries which gave Orangemen a degree of immunity from the law. Their means of securing ascendancy had been the Orange lodges which provided links between Irish Protestants of all classes. This ascendancy often meant political power for Protestant gentlemen and a special status for Protestant peasants.’34 In the context of Toronto, such ascendancy was sought through the corporation of the city. By 1844 six of Toronto’s ten aldermen were Orangemen, and over the rest of the nineteenth century twenty of twenty-three mayors would be as well.35 As a parliamentary committee reporting on the 1841 Orange Riot in Toronto concluded, the powers granted the corporation made it ripe for Orange abuse: The Corporation combines within itself, Legislative, Judicial and Executive functions. It appoints its own officers, remunerates them at discretion, and discharges them at will. It makes its own by-laws, enforces the same by its own Police, and executes them through its own tribunals. All offences beneath the ordinary jurisdiction of the Assizes, committed within the City, are tried either summarily before the Police Court, composed of the Mayor and Magistrates, or before the Mayor’s Court which is the Civic Court of Quarter Sessions. In the latter case, the Grand and Petty Juries are summoned by the City High Bailiff, under precept signed by the mayor. Penal informations under Provincial statutes and civic ordinances are laid by the City Inspector and decided before the same tribunal. In all these cases, the City Police or the City Officers appear to be so closely identified with the Magistrates on the Bench, and the whole machinery of Justice so completely monopolized in the same hands, that it would be impossible for the most immaculate body of men in the capacity of Magistrates, to

The Constitution 187 avoid imputations engendered by the doubts, the cavils, and the want of confidence which such a system must infallibly entail.36

‘Ascendancy,’ or control of this legal and political machinery, gave the Orange Order a monopoly on the use of ‘legitimate’ violence. Between 1839 and 1866 the Orange Order was involved in twenty-nine riots in Toronto, of which sixteen had direct political inspiration.37 As historian Gregory Kealey concludes, ‘Following the delegitimation of Reform after the Rebellions were suppressed, the Corporation [of Toronto] developed into an impenetrable bastion of Orange-Tory strength.’38 Orange influence dominated the emerging police force, giving it a ‘monopoly of legal violence, and the power to choose when to enforce the law.’39 Orange Order violence at elections and other political meetings was a staple of the period. Tory strategies of control of the corporation, and of legitimate violence, stood in stark contrast to the democratic emphasis of the reformers. The patronage relationship between the Tory elite and the workingclass Orange Order points to the larger strategies those elites pursued to solidify their rule and explains why the Orangemen but not the Children of Peace were incorporated in the larger pattern of Tory ascendancy. For example, Captain R.G. Dunlop, who by 1838 was sitting on the provincial executive of the Orange Order, introduced a bill ‘to amend representation and give property its due weight’ in late 1836. The bill apparently had the strong support of Lieutenant Governor Head.40 The bill would grant the franchise to those who ‘held land on location tickets from the government, from the Canada Company, or on twentyyear-lease from either source,’ while raising the property qualification for eligibility for election to the House of Assembly.41 Reform objections to the bill reflected the clear link they made between the need to preserve individual political and economic independence, as well as the independence of the elected House of Assembly from the influence of the Crown. Debt created patronage ties that could be exploited in elections where compliance could be easily assessed; so, too, granting the franchise to lease and location ticket holders opened the doors to political manipulation. Mackenzie contested the independence of ticket holders who could be ejected ‘like so many cotters,’ ‘turned off with the least possible ceremony, or increased at a proper time before an Election to any desired quantity’; they, and leaseholders ‘are in a state of most miserable dependence on their Landlords.’ Representatives in the Assembly would be elected by tenants-at-will of the Crown, thus allowing

188

‘Union Is Strength’

the lieutenant governor to nominate appointed legislative councillors as electoral candidates, ‘who could then do the business, 1st in the one end of the Parliament Buildings and then in the other!’42 William Warren Baldwin protested the bill directly to the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, whose influence may explain why the bill was ultimately dropped after second reading, despite passing by a 47–8 vote. These fears that corrupt practices in the Land Granting Department could be used to influence future elections were compounded by the refusal of the colonial secretary to receive Charles Duncombe’s petition on abuses in the 1836 elections by which the reformers were routed. The colonial secretary referred the petition back to the new Tory-dominated Assembly, where it was read the same day as Dunlop’s bill passed second reading. Their report reserved special attention for the defeat of both Mackenzie and Samuel Lount, which had, in particular, been ascribed to the last-minute issuing of land patents that allowed recent immigrants to vote. Despite Dunlop’s bill being ultimately abandoned, Tory ascendancy in the House of Assembly was maintained – at least in the short term – by the ‘Bill to prevent dissolution of parliament on the demise of the Crown.’ This bill allowed the Assembly to continue to sit without calling an election on the death of the king, thus abridging the right to an elected assembly.43 This bill was important because of the ill health of William IV, who was eventually to die on 20 June 1837. According to precedent, the Assembly should have been prorogued and an election called within six months of the death of the monarch; such had occurred after the death of George IV on 26 June 1830. Fearing yet another fracas so soon after the highly contentious elections the year before, the Tory-dominated Assembly passed this bill so that they could continue to sit for the normal length of a four-year term. The clearest indication of Tory tactics, however, was the ‘Act better to secure the independence of the Commons House of Assembly of this province and for other purposes.’ This short act promoted what could ironically be called ‘irresponsible government.’ Its aim was to legislate against the very principle of an executive council accountable to the legislature. Robert Baldwin had made the principle of responsible government the basis of his accepting a position on the Executive Council in early 1836; when that council resigned in March 1836 on the issue, it sparked a constitutional crisis between the reform Assembly and Lieutenant Governor Head. Allan McNab’s bill ‘to secure the independence of the Commons’ required anyone appointed to the Executive Council

The Constitution 189

to resign his seat in the Assembly. The bill was presented as a means of preventing executive influence on the Assembly, although its real purpose was the reverse, to preclude the accountability of executive councillors to the elected Assembly. Executive councillors could not serve two masters and Lieutenant Governor Head, through his proxy Allan McNab, sought to legislate their explicit responsibility to the Crown alone by preventing sitting Assembly members from accepting such a position.44 When William Draper, the newly elected Tory member for Toronto, was appointed to the Executive Council in late 1836, he promptly vacated his seat according to the terms of this law. The Economic Roots of Discontent The political rout of the reformers from the House of Assembly was compounded by economic crisis. By December 1836, a deep depression had gripped the province (and the wider Atlantic world): ‘The winter has set in, cold, gloomy and cheerless … Empty Houses are Stores are to be met with by the score.’45 The Bank of Upper Canada had launched over 175 suits against its debtors in the Court of King’s Bench;46 one of those suits was against Sheldon, Dutcher & Co., the city of Toronto’s largest employer, which had employed about eighty ironworkers in 1833.47 The sheriff auctioned off a steam engine, and most of the blacksmithing and foundry tools and patterns, throwing most of the men out of work.48 The Toronto Typographical Society struck in late October, and a few weeks later, some eighty tailors also went on strike against the city’s ten master tailors.49 It is in the context of this widespread unemployment that we must interpret the battle to create the Toronto House of Industry. The proposed legislation then under consideration in the House of Assembly to criminalize poverty struck directly at these workers, who were now desperately in need of relief. Cartwright’s bill to establish district houses of industry had passed on 4 March 1837. The ‘Act to Abolish the distinction between Grand and Petit Larceny’ eliminated the category of petty theft, and treated all theft under the rules of grand larceny; it broadened the magistrates’ powers by granting them the authority to sentence any thief (of whatever amount) to up to three years in Kingston Penitentiary, or up to seven years of banishment.50 The bill had been introduced in 1835 by Attorney General John B. Robinson, and repeatedly stalled in the reform-dominated assemblies of 1835–6. The final passing of the bill by the Tory-held Assembly led Dr O’Grady, editor of the Correspondent and Advocate, to compare it to the

190

‘Union Is Strength’

Irish Coercion Act of 1833, which similarly granted appointed magistrates broadly oppressive powers.51 These laws were supplemented by a number of other bills that hit specifically at the economic interests of reformers. For example, the Tories passed an amendment to the Court of Requests Bill that allowed ‘any proud, vindictive or harsh creditor in Toronto, to bring his debtor, or any person he may choose to say he has a claim upon, for eighteen pence, from Caledon, Georgina, Brock, Whitchurch, or any distant township in this district, in the middle of harvest, to answer at the Request Court in this city.’52 Anyone who failed to respond to the summons would summarily forfeit, and would be subject to the claim and court costs. The ‘Act to protect the public against banks’ made any new joint stock bank like the Bank of the People illegal, while the same session had passed bills to charter the Freeholders’ Bank, among others. Although assent for the Freeholders’ Bank Bill, like all new bank bills, was withheld by Head pending the British Treasury Board’s review, Sheriff Jarvis nonetheless immediately proceeded to start up the bank.53 In an emergency session in June, the banks were given permission to suspend payment on their banknotes, thereby protecting them from bankruptcy; yet, no such protection was granted to the banks’ debtors, who continued to be sued in record numbers. McCalla has rightly argued ‘for the autonomy of politics from reductionist views on the role played by economics, such as many interpretations assert or imply. In what seem to have been similar economic circumstances, rural Upper Canadians could, and often did in 1837, arrive at very different conclusions about where their economic and their overall interests lay, as made clear by the differing choices of the Orange Order and the Children of Peace.’54 Indeed, ‘relative deprivation’ theories of peasant rebellions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which assert a direct correlation between the experience of economic crisis and revolt, have long been discounted.55 However, in rejecting such crude reductionism, we must be careful to neither underplay the impact of such crisis, nor the more complex issue of how such a crisis is interpreted through differences in economic ideology, class position, and class identity. McCalla, for example, discounts Donald G. Creighton’s now classic argument that ‘in one important sense the rebellions were simply the final expression of the conflict between agrarianism and commercialism, between feudal and frontier agriculture and the commercial state; and when Mackenzie in the Draft Constitution for the state of Upper Canada outlawed incorporated trading companies

The Constitution 191

and declared that labour was the only means of creating wealth, he expressed, in final theoretical form, the old attack upon the institutions, powers, and privileges of the commercial state.’56 McCalla rejects Creighton’s argument on the ground that there are no economic characteristics that can be ‘particularly or exclusively’ associated with the areas or groups that actually rebelled as opposed to those who did not.57 In contrast, I draw on Marx’s distinction between a structural ‘class in itself’ and a ‘class for itself.’ A class in itself is a class strictly defined by its economic characteristics (such as the infamous reference to the French peasantry, as being like a ‘sack of potatoes,’ atomized, and held together only by exterior forces); a ‘class for itself,’ in contrast, is an organized economic group with a subjective sense of itself as a political agent. We need to emphasize the role of the political organization of those farmers in the committees of vigilance who stood behind Mackenzie’s economic charter for the rebellion; these farmers, no matter their degree of economic independence, had been fighting for this agrarian vision for more than a decade in the broad alliance that came together in Shepard’s Hall. The reformers’ fight to establish the Toronto House of Industry on alternate principles in December 1836, to shore up these workers’ ‘respectability’ and hence independence, was a strike against Tory paternalism, which used debt, the threat of imprisonment for debt, and the penitentiary as a means of social control of its recalcitrant working – and middle – classes. The Tory press excoriated the reformers for having disrupted the town meeting to raise subscriptions for the poor. Strachan, in particular, blamed the reform mayor, T.D. Morrison, and councillors Price and Beaty for having driven him from the meeting ‘by political violence’ and concluded ‘should the poor and destitute of this City suffer more than usual during the winter they may justly attribute their increased misery to Mr James Lesslie and his supporters.’58 These charges helped solidify the hold that the Tories had on the working poor of the city of Toronto. The Tories similarly threatened to withhold their business from those merchants and tradesmen who refused to vote for their candidate, William Draper, in the House of Assembly elections in June 1836.59 In the ensuing municipal election, on 10 January 1837, the reformers were similarly shut out.60 The list of reformers who lost seats included J.H. Price, John Doel, and Edward Wright, three of the men who had guaranteed Mackenzie’s loan from the Bank of the People to launch the Constitution. Clearly, that constitutional vision had met an impasse.

192

‘Union Is Strength’

The Toronto Political Union It is against the backdrop of a broad economic crisis and the increasingly tight grip of the Tories on the political and economic levers of the state that the reformers again sought to reorganize themselves. It would seem that one of the difficulties with the Constitutional Reform Society was its lack of public participation; it appears to have held only one public meeting.61 The Constitutional Reform Society was unlike its predecessor, the Canadian Alliance Society, precisely in its lack of democratic participation by a broad and informed public. The stillborn Constitutional Reform Society was thus reborn in more radical form as the Toronto Political Union, on 10 October, again under William Baldwin’s leadership. The Toronto Political Union’s ‘deliberations are open to the people; two hundred persons may generally obtain convenient seats … It is, we presume, understood that the rules and usages of the House of Assembly, when in debate, will be enforced.’62 The political union’s public meetings were clearly an attempt to instil a democratic culture in the general population. This political union was, as in its first incarnation, an attempt to influence government policy through petitions. However, a general frustration was expressed with the effectiveness of petitioning the home government; a public address by the people of Hope concluded that ‘praying to England has been like angling in deep water where nothing is taken.’63 Symbolic, perhaps, of the economic and political crisis facing reformers was the death of Joseph Shepard and the coincident closing of Shepard’s Hall. The combination of repressive legislation, the Colonial Office’s rejection of Duncombe’s petition, and the self-serving abrogation of the constitutional precedent for calling an election on the death of the monarch led the more moderate reformers such as Dr Baldwin, Robert Baldwin, Dr O’Grady, and Marshall Spring Bidwell to withdraw from politics altogether, leaving a political vacuum filled by the more radical reformers such as William Lyon Mackenzie. In March 1837, Dr Baldwin appears to have resigned from the chairmanship of the Toronto Political Union as he took up the onerous job of managing the new Toronto House of Industry to which he was more suited.64 The Toronto Political Union ceased to meet in Turton’s Building, the land for which was still owned by Baldwin. Mackenzie moved the Constitution office out of the building by late May.65 John Montgomery sold his hotel on Yonge Street.66 The dream of a ‘radical hall’ as the home to a broad reform alliance seemed dead; Shepard’s own death, at age seventy, in early May seemed to simply confirm this.67

The Constitution 193

However, such melancholic symbolism ignores the renewed vigour with which the radical reformers sought to reorganize the largely moribund Toronto Political Union. The ides of March, 1837, was truly a transitional period, as the union turned once more to its historically strong base, the farmers of the Home District. In a meeting at the end of March, the Toronto Political Union resolved to petition the now dying king.68 In that petition they complained of the ‘undue influences and infractions to which our liberties have been lately most deplorably subjected[;] we will not enlarge on our firm and unalterable resolution, never while we live, to recognize the present Assembly as our free and independent Representatives, or to consider their acts as justly binding upon us or our children.’ The illegitimacy of the Assembly led them to warn the king ‘that the Province has arrived at that crisis when it behooves the people in defense of their indefeasible rights to meet together in general conviction [sic] of Delegates, to consider of such changes in their Provincial Constitution as may be likely to obviate the various evils of which they have so long complained in vain.’69 Mackenzie expanded on the petition’s call for a ‘convention of the people of the two provinces’ in an appeal ‘to the people of the County of York’ in May.70 Here, he explicitly linked the need for the convention with the economic disaster facing farmers, focusing in particular on the ‘paper dollar lords’ and ‘colonial despotism.’ The appeal was a lengthy dissertation on the thesis ‘Labour is the true source of wealth.’ The appeal echoed a pamphlet by David Willson published just before the 1836 elections, ‘The Principles of Civil Government,’ which Mackenzie republished in the Constitution in February: ‘The laborious orders of life merit the favor of monarchs and councils in preference to others; because their sweat is the oil of both church and state institutions, without which they would be as the wilderness or the uncultivated field, producing nothing.’71 Mackenzie reassured the farmers that ‘you would be richer and happier, more wealthy and more contented and prosperous, were these vile Banking Associations swept from among you. They encourage and promote litigation, tax labour, cheat and defraud you out of the fruit of your industry, and are the infamous means of preventing your government from confining itself to its appropriate functions.’72 The appeal was issued at the height of the bank wars, as news of the collapse of the American banking system was just breaking, and as the House of Assembly simultaneously chartered the pet banks of the Tory elite, while banning any new joint stock banks. The only solution to these economic woes, Mackenzie asserted, was a convention of the people ‘to devise means to rescue the country from its present distressed

194

‘Union Is Strength’

state.’ The reformers were clear about the economic roots of their political organization. It was not, however, until after the death of William IV, on 20 June, that the Toronto Political Union proceeded to organize this convention, now clearly a ‘constitutional convention.’ In July, Mackenzie published a plan for a ‘Political Union, for the establishment of the Constitution on the broad basis of civil and religious liberty and equal right.’73 Establishing such an extra-parliamentary association for the purpose of ‘channeling discontent, disseminating propaganda, petitioning parliament, and, as a last resort, organizing a revolution’ had a long history in Britain, stretching back to the 1770s radicals Obadiah Hulme, James Burgh, and Major John Cartwright.74 The Continental Congress was exemplary of the process, but such conventions were organized within Britain as well; the Irish convention movement emerged in 1791–2 on the issue of Catholic emancipation, the Scottish Friends of the People in 1792–3, and the London Corresponding Society in 1794. But perhaps the most pertinent example was the attempt to organize a constitutional convention by the National Union of the Working Classes in the wake of working-class disappointment in their exclusion from the 1832 Reform Bill. The NUWC was organized by those Owenite socialists who would later reorganize as the London Working Men’s Association to arrange the Chartist convention in 1839. The NUWC called for a national convention in the spring of 1833 in London and organized a mass meeting at Cold Bath Fields (near King’s Cross) to elect delegates on 13 May, in defiance of a government proclamation against it. Several hundred police charged the meeting without warning, injuring scores of civilians who they beat with truncheons.75 It is inconceivable that Mackenzie, who was in London and moving in radical circles at the time, was unaware of this mass meeting a mere twelve-minute walk from his lodgings, or of the constitutional arguments that supported it, and, more importantly yet, of the tragic consequences that resulted. The Colonial Advocate devoted half of its front page to a report of the riot.76 Mackenzie’s proposed plan to implement the convention consisted of neighbourhood branch unions of no more than twelve people, with the secretaries of five of these forming a township committee. Ten Township committees, each electing one member, would form a county committee; and each county committee would elect two or three members to form one of four district committees. The district committees would, lastly, elect an executive of three people. Much has been made of the

The Constitution 195

fact that Mackenzie recognized that the plan ‘could be easily transferred without change of its structure to military purposes,’ suggesting that he was already contemplating rebellion; but Mackenzie raised the spectre of physical force only to dismiss the threat of Orange Order violence. Such protective measures would seem only common sense, given the experience of the Cold Bath Fields Riots, and the 1836 Upper Canadian elections. The union was, he said, ‘of a purely civil nature, and confined to the embodying and expression of public opinion, in the 1st instances.’77 Mackenzie noted that he would be attending a series of public meetings throughout the Home District that summer. The first of these meetings to select delegates to the constitutional convention was held at Doel’s Brewery in Toronto on 28 and 31 July; the reformers struck a committee to prepare a ‘Declaration of the Reformers of the City of Toronto to their Fellow Reformers in Upper Canada’ that called for the implementation of Mackenzie’s plan.78 The declaration contained provocative references to the American Revolution, including a direct attack on the monarch who was held personally responsible for the unrepresentative government and partial administration of the colony. Such references were hard to miss, since Mackenzie began serializing Thomas Paine’s revolutionary tract, Common Sense, in the Constitution, and handed out copies in these public meetings.79 The reformers expressed their frustration that ‘in every stage of these proceedings we have petitioned for redress in most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injuries.’ They lastly named Rolph, Bidwell, Morrison, Lesslie, Price, Tims, and Robert McKay as their delegates to the proposed convention; Bidwell refused to accept the nomination. The second meeting of the renewed Toronto Political Union was called to order by Samuel Hughes three days later, on 3 August in Newmarket; it was chaired by John Bogart, Sr, with William Reid as secretary. Mackenzie regaled the crowd for more than an hour, reviewing the complaints listed in the declaration of the Toronto reformers. Samuel Hughes proposed a motion that castigated ‘the conduct of Sir Francis Bond Head … for he has tampered with our rights at elections – disposed of many thousands of pounds of our revenue without our consent – and governed us by the strong hand of arbitrary and unconstitutional power – depreciating our currency, and pretending to maintain cash payments, while the Bank, immediately connected with his government, was flooding the colony with the notes of a Bankrupt Bank in another province.’ The meeting appointed Hughes, Samuel Lount,

196

‘Union Is Strength’

Nelson Gorham, Silas Fletcher, Jeremiah Graham, and John McIntosh, member of the House of Assembly, as delegates to the convention (and all, with the exception of Hughes and MacIntosh, leaders in the Rebellion of 1837); they also appointed twenty-three men to a ‘Committee of vigilance’ to organize local political unions. David Willson then addressed the crowd, similarly attacking the ‘gross obstructions in the way of political improvement, or the administration of good government, equality, justice and peace.’ The first of these obstructions was no less than the ‘principal magistrate, the King,’ who was ‘not possessed of that freedom and liberality of sentiment and expression, with which every impartial monarch or magistrate ought to be endued.’80 A further eight public meetings across the Home District were scheduled over the next three weeks; each of these public meetings named a local committee of vigilance to organize reform support, prepare a registry of valid electors, and name their delegates to the proposed convention. The timing of these meetings coincided with the formation of the ‘Sons of Liberty’ in Montreal in August, a group inspired by the American revolutionaries, which similarly assumed a paramilitary character by October.81 Although the meetings in the Home District met with an increasing amount of Orange Order violence, they persisted as the reformers began to protect themselves and resort to arms to do so.82 Mackenzie was accompanied by fifty young farmers from the Lloydtown meeting, for example, after they heard that an Orange riot was planned for Albion. The Tories claimed that ‘no sooner had little Mackenzie mounted the fatal cart, with his chairman and secretary, than in the twinkling of a bed-post, with the well known shout of “Faugh a Rallagh,” (anglice “clear the way!”) the whole concern was shoved into the Humber.’ They proudly proclaimed ‘their enemies were left weltering in their blood.’83 The reformers, for their part, also maintained that they met violence with violence, and that a ‘more terrible infliction was never given to men than these unfortunate Tories there received. With rails, sticks, and their heavy fists, they made the blood flow very freely.’84 It is important to underscore that, from this point, reformers recommended that those attending the meetings come armed.85 Any armed, ‘seditious’ meeting, however, could easily be construed ‘rebellion’; yet, no peaceful means of achieving reform remained.86 As Carol Wilton notes, ‘By the fall of 1837, then, it had become virtually impossible for reformers to hold lawful political meetings in the province’; in the absence of a building like Shepard’s Hall, they were once more victimized by political violence. Their range of options had narrowed almost to the

The Constitution 197

vanishing point. The peaceable reform meetings tapered off in October, to be replaced by instances of men drilling for battle.’87 Lount suggested that reformers from across the province be called to a ‘monster demonstration’ like those that had accompanied Mackenzie to reclaim his seat in the Assembly a few years before; such a show of numbers would enable them to exact concessions from the government. Mackenzie, however, demurred and pointed to the very lack of success of those earlier demonstrations.88 With reform meetings facing concerted Orange violence, no demonstration could occur without a resort to arms; it was, then, but a short step from the ‘monster demonstration’ to armed resistance. It was at the beginning of November that Mackenzie called a meeting of fifteen prominent reformers at John Doel’s house, in which he first broached the topic of armed rebellion. Mackenzie ‘stated that there were two ways of effecting a revolution: one of them by organizing the farmers, who were quite prepared for resistance, and bringing them to Toronto, to unite with the Toronto people, and the other, by immediate action.’89 Mackenzie’s ‘judgment was that we should instantly send for Dutcher’s foundry-men and Armstrong’s axe-makers, all of whom could be depended on, and, with them, go promptly to the Government House, seize Sir Francis, carry him to the City Hall, a fortress in itself, seize the arms and ammunition there … [and] proclaim a provisional government.’ Dutcher’s men, now unemployed, Dutcher, who had just been bankrupted by the Bank of Upper Canada, and Armstrong, who had just lost the municipal election for common councilman, could evidently be counted on. The meeting broke up without adopting the plan after Morrison rebuked Mackenzie for promoting treason. The next day, Mackenzie was able to personally sway Dr Rolph, the president of the Bank of the People, who had not been at the meeting to consider the plan; the two of them convinced Morrison to reconsider. Mackenzie proposed Rolph as the president of the new state. However, neither Rolph nor Morrison was yet won over, and both rejected Mackenzie’s plan for immediate action; they decided to send Mackenzie north to investigate public sentiment. In this first trip north, Mackenzie called a secret meeting in the home of Silas Fletcher in East Gwillimbury, just north of Hope, and it was attended by Samuel Lount, Peter Matthews of Pickering, Nelson Gorham from Newmarket, James Bolton of Albion Township, and Jesse Lloyd of Lloydtown, in King Township.90 These were all delegates to the planned convention, and organizers and speakers at the series of

198

‘Union Is Strength’

public meetings that had been held that summer. Lloyd had personally just returned from Montreal with news of the revolt in Lower Canada. Whereas the Toronto reformers had been equivocal in their support, the plan for the rebellion was settled at this meeting. The date was set for 7 December; the farmers of the Home District, in their thousands, would collect at Montgomery’s Inn, where they would then march on the city under the command of Lount and Anthony Anderson of Lloydtown, seize the arms stored in the city hall, arrest Head and his advisers, and declare a provisional government with Rolph at its head. Although revolution was planned, there was great concern to establish the constitutional legitimacy of the action as the setting of the date for the proposed convention was to demonstrate. As late as 25 October, Mackenzie had rebuffed the Lloydtown committee of vigilance’s request to assemble the convention delegates, arguing that it was not yet expedient.91 However, on 8 November, Mackenzie printed a challenge to Head, who, according to the Patriot, felt that ‘an attempt will be made “by the rebelliously disposed,” to take the city of Toronto.’ If Head harboured such fears, wrote Mackenzie, ‘one course yet he might take, and thereby avert much evil – he might dissolve the Assembly, call a free parliament … and simply tell the freeholders that if it should be their wish through their representatives, he would agree to regulate our local affairs, dismissals and appointments, by and with the advice of an executive council possessed of the public confidence. Moderate men would see in this, the fulfillment of Simcoe’s promise to give us the British constitution, as far as a colony can have it, and he would neither need to act the tyrant nor the coward.’92 Head could, in other words, prevent a revolution through the recognition of the principle of responsible government. Mackenzie’s offer was disingenuous, however, as he well knew that responsible government of the sort he envisioned had just been made explicitly illegal. The next week, after his meeting in East Gwillimbury, Mackenzie published his draft constitution for the consideration of the convention ‘in case the British system of government shall be positively denied us’; the comment refers to the constitutional precedent that an election be called within six months of the death of the monarch.93 And two weeks after that, Mackenzie finally set the date for the convention of delegates on 21 December; the symbolic date precisely six months after the death of William IV.94 By the mere fact that Sir Francis Bond Head had not called an election, the House of Assembly could be deemed unconstitutional. The radical reformers would have been perfectly legitimate in utilizing

The Constitution 199

violence in the face of illegal state repression to hold their constitutional convention after that date. Independence! A little more than a week after he had published his draft constitution, Mackenzie travelled north to elicit support from the farmers of the Home District. He took with him a small printing press, on which he printed a handbill declaring ‘Independence!’ He called on these farmers to join the reformers of Lower Canada in revolt – ‘not against “lawful” but against “unlawful authority”’; the legitimacy of the rebellion for him rested on the illegitimacy of the House of Assembly, and the ‘irresponsible government’ of the lieutenant governor and his Executive Council. These farmers had just reason for anger; the widespread depression and crisis in the banking sector had immiserated many of them, and the new powers granted magistrates threatened cherished civil liberties. To hammer that point home, Mackenzie concluded: ‘Fourteen armed men were sent out at the dead hour of night by the traitor [mayor] Gurnett to drag to a felon’s cell, the sons of our worthy and noble minded brother departed, Joseph Sheppard, on a simple and frivolous charge of trespass, brought by a tory fool; and though it ended in smoke, it showed too evidently Head’s feelings.’95 The injustice was clear in Lower Canada, which had already risen against the baneful domination of the mother country. Would Upper Canada as well? Mackenzie’s organizational abilities for such an undertaking have been questioned.96 It is clear, however, that Mackenzie felt that no more than six hundred men would be required to take the city of Toronto, and that he purposefully limited attempts to raise a broader rebel force. Rather, he seemed to work through the delegates of the constitutional convention who had attended the original organizational meeting at the home of Silas Fletcher in East Gwillimbury. Mackenzie himself enlisted support in Stouffville from the farmers of Whitchurch, Markham, and Uxbridge. Samuel Lount called a meeting in Hope for the 4th Riding. Jesse Lloyd organized support in Lloydtown, in King, and Peter Matthews in Pickering. Given these sparing attempts at organizing a military uprising, how do we account for those who responded? McCalla is right to emphasize that economics provides only one dimension of identity, and this complexity is reflected in the disparate nature of those who rebelled; this can be clearly seen through the varied participation of the Children of Peace, and more specifically, of Samuel

200

‘Union Is Strength’

Hughes and Samuel Lount, who were both delegates to the proposed constitutional convention. It is only with difficulty that we can characterize the diversity of the twenty-seven men in the sect who joined the rebellion from the other fifty-four men who did not. James Kavanagh and James Henderson were former soldiers to whom the Tory calls of ‘loyalty’ meant nothing; many others were former Quakers, religious pacifists who took up arms. Like the former military men, the Brammar brothers were recent immigrants; others were part of the older wave of immigration from the United States. They included among their number both farmers and artisans, as well as two shopkeepers. William Reid, who had served as the secretary at numerous reform meetings, was seventy-two; yet, most were young. The members of the Children of Peace who responded to Mackenzie’s call appear broadly similar to those who responded to Charles Duncombe in western Upper Canada. Colin Read characterizes them as ‘divided roughly into three occupations: an agrarian “proprietorial” group of farmers and farmers’ sons; a more or less skilled “middle class” of craftsmen, millers, professionals and so on; and a “lower class” of labourers and hired farm hands. Contemporary evidence suggests that the insurgents were not economically disadvantaged but were rather a reasonably mature, well-established body of men.’97 Lacking any more refined economic data, we can only conclude that the rebels were certainly not drawn from among the ‘gentry’ farmers nor the paupers, but that like the Children of Peace as a whole, they were in a structurally similar position to the farmers and artisans of the district as a whole. What distinguished them was not an idiosyncratic economic niche, a distinctive disadvantaged position, but the degree to which they had been politically organized ‘as a class’ by the political union movement to pursue their ‘respectability’ and independence as ‘freeholders.’ While their economic status is difficult to assess, a few tantalizing clues do exist. The account book of William H. Willson, one of the rebel shopkeepers, records the debts of forty-one members in the five months prior to the rebellion.98 Most debts were settled in October, as the harvest was taken in and sold. Twenty-two of these customers had debts larger than £2 in December, but of these only nine were rebels. Debt, in itself, is not the key. However, the date of marriage is known for seven of these rebels, and all had been married less than four years. The date of marriage is known for nine of the thirteen debtors who did not rebel; seven of the nine had been married for five years or more. The rebels, in other words, were the ‘young heads of families’ for whom

The Constitution 201

the Children of Peace had developed their moral economy; they were the members with the least resources, the highest debts, the ones most likely to lose all in the depression – we must be careful not to underemphasize the impact of the economic crisis of 1836. Their desperation was compounded by three successive bad harvests between 1835 and 1837. Wheat prices rose in 1836 through the summer of 1837, but given the poor yields, this was more a sign of scarcity than of a market rebound; in 1837–8 Upper Canada imported grain from England.99 With little to sell, farmers gained nothing from high prices. Combined with the scarcity of cash due to the contraction in credit after June, few small farmers like the young heads of families had the resources to wait out the year. It would be wrong to conclude that they joined the rebellion because they, as the poorest members, ‘had nothing to lose.’ For it was precisely they who had the most to lose: their respectability. With this loss of respectability they opened themselves to lawsuits, to imprisonment, to pauperism. It was precisely because they had the most to lose that they responded to Mackenzie’s call. No matter how acutely these injustices were felt, for many if not most of the farmers of York County, no violence was ever legitimate. The religious pacifism of the Quakers, Mennonites, and Children of Peace who had first settled the county has not been stressed enough. For these religious pacifists, a call to arms posed a hefty moral dilemma, no matter how illegitimate the state; many had suffered for decades for their refusal to take part in militia drillings and could not now easily reverse that stand. Samuel Hughes, for example, was on a Friends committee two years before the War of 1812, which recorded that Quakers on Yonge Street had lost £243 11s 7d in property taken by distraint of goods in lieu of military service, and that eight members had been jailed for one to three months. Two Friends died in jail during the War of 1812 rather than fight.100 The religious pacifism of these groups was grounded in a commitment to the political process, to reason: David Willson was to write in 1836 in his ‘Principles of Civil Government’ that ‘the sword destroys and conquers, but there is no convincing evidence in the power of the sword to convert the mind: it always leaves the conquered spirit in a capacity to arise and make use of the same means by which it was bound in subjection, retaliate, and conquer again – but reason saves, convinces, and converts, and satisfies the mind, and there is no cause remaining to revolt again.’101 We need only compare Samuel Hughes with Samuel Lount to understand how these complex moral issues influenced those who were

202

‘Union Is Strength’

to participate in the rebellion, and how truly contingent were their responses. The two men were surprisingly similar in many ways. Both were born in Catawissa (formerly Hughesville), Pennsylvania; Hughes, born in 1785, was the older by six years. In fact, Lount’s mother was Hughes’ cousin, and Lount’s younger brother Gabriel was married to Hughes’ stepdaughter by his third wife. Hughes’ father, however, was a Quaker minister; Lount’s mother lost her membership for marrying a non-Quaker, although Lount was evidently raised within the faith. Both men emigrated to the Yonge Street area before the War of 1812 with the extended Hughes family, although Lount was trapped south of the border during the War of 1812. Hughes became a member of the Children of Peace along with most of the extended Hughes family in 1812; Lount did not. By 1837 they lived in neighbouring communities, with Lount’s farm on the hill south of Holland Landing overlooking Hughes’ home across the Holland River valley in the village of Hope. Both men were prominent reform politicians; Lount in Simcoe County (whose seat was Holland Landing), and Hughes in York County. Both men were renowned for their charity; Hughes as an elder of the Children of Peace, and Lount among the immigrants to Simcoe County, including those English and Germans in Colborne’s ‘assisted immigration’ scheme in Nottawasaga Township.102 Both men sought to promote the Farmers’ Storehouse Company; Hughes as its president, and Lount, with Mackenzie and Gibson, on the legislative committee to incorporate it in 1835. Lount was also on the select committee to draft the bill for the provincial loan office, the precursor to the Bank of the People. Both men were delegates to the planned constitutional convention. The common set of economic values, politics, and history that these men shared would lead us to expect a similar response to Mackenzie’s call to arms. Yet, while Lount became a leader of the rebellion, Hughes is noticeable by his absence. Lount has become an historical footnote, an icon of the failure of the Rebellion of 1837; Hughes, like their common set of values, has been forgotten. Land and Citizenship The advantage of comparing William Lyon Mackenzie’s constitutional convention with the Chartist movement in Britain is that the Rebellion of 1837 is transformed from the teleological end point of our discussion, to simply one of many contingent events. It is, in fact, the limited clues provided by those who participated in the rebellion that help ex-

The Constitution 203

plain the subsequent common course of action pursued by the British Chartists, Mackenzie in New York, and the remaining reformers in Upper Canada. The rebels were, I argue, those most likely to lose their competence, their land, and ultimately their political independence in the economic crisis of 1837. The Chartists, disappointed by the failure of their first two petitions to Parliament in 1839 and 1842, responded much like the Upper Canadian reformers by forming a co-operative land company to distribute farms among their members. Mackenzie, having fled to New York City, was to join the radical remnants of the Workingmen’s Party there in forming the National Reform Association, whose principal goals were the provision of free public lands to actual settlers, a limitation on land ownership, and an exemption of the homestead from seizure for debt.103 Land reform took the place of political reform by placing the emphasis on land ownership as the basis of political action, and of citizenship. The Country Party’s democratic ideal was rooted in a rather limited conception of the citizen; a male ‘freeholder’ with an independent livelihood. Preserving this independence was thus paramount. All three of these examples cited can be usefully compared to the land-sharing agreement implemented by the Children of Peace in 1831, before they completed their temple. The Children of Peace dispensed charity to help members maintain their independence and respectability and used the language of charity to regulate their economic behaviour through collective concerns for meeting mutual needs. Their mutual aid and their corporate co-operative endeavours were specifically created to help those members most vulnerable in the market, those ultimately, to rebel. The irony of the transition to capitalism in this group, and to the democratic culture it fostered, thus lies in its corporate form, its cooperative nature and its retention of the freehold farm ideal. It has been clearly argued that the Chartist Co-operative Land Company and the National Reform Association shared an intellectual heritage rooted in that Country Party republican tradition that associated ‘land ownership with personal independence, public virtue, and with human improvement,’ and that the same republican tradition informed their organizational strategies, goals, and rhetoric.104 We need to underscore that Upper Canada was no exception. With prospects of political reform apparently extinguished, Upper Canadian reformers advocated voting with their feet and moving en masse to the United States to create a new democratic joint stock experiment in community living on the frontier. They formed the joint stock Mississippi Emigration Society,

204

‘Union Is Strength’

which proposed to purchase a large block of land at Davenport, Iowa, for the erection of a mill, other property to be held in common, and redistribution among shareholders.105 The Mississippi Emigration Society bears striking resemblance in organization and goals to the Chartist Land Company formed by Chartist leader Fergus O’Connor in April 1845, after many years of debate on land reform in Britain, beginning with Robert Owen’s advocacy of ‘Home Colonies’ in 1821. The timing of this co-operative land company coincides with the final collapse of Owen’s community of Greenwood (Harmony Hall) in 1844, and the failure of the 1842 Chartist petition. O’Connor abandoned Owen’s communal aims, and proposed the formation of a joint stock ‘Friendly Society’ that would purchase land for redistribution by lottery among its members.106 Shares were sold on instalments, and once a share was paid up, the shareholder was eligible for a ballot for a two- to four-acre holding with cottage and an advance of money. At its peak, the company had twenty thousand shareholders, seventy thousand weekly subscribers, six hundred local branches, and five estates, making it ‘among the most extraordinary organizations of the early-Victorian period.’107 William Lyon Mackenzie can easily be viewed as Upper Canada’s Fergus O’Connor. He had, for example, promised just before the Rebellion of 1837 that ‘it is the design of the Friends of Liberty to give several hundred acres to every Volunteer – to root up the unlawful Canada Company, and give free deeds to all settlers who live on their lands … so that the yeomanry may feel independent.’108 This promise spoke directly to Captain R.G. Dunlop’s bill ‘to give property its due weight,’ which would have ironically granted the vote to the economic, and hence political dependents of the Canada Company; after all, Dunlop’s brother was Dr Tiger Dunlop, the Canada Company’s general superintendent of the Huron Tract. Having fled to New York City after the Rebellion of 1837, Mackenzie joined with George Henry Evans and other New York Owenite-inspired radicals to found the National Reform Association. Evans advocated a plan quite similar to that of the Mississippi Emigration Society, with townships of almost a thousand people to be settled on fifty- to eighty-acre farms, with a central square mile consisting of a common public square and smaller plots for mechanics and tradesmen.109 ‘The NRA’s program, mingling the republican theme of independence and renewed attacks on banking and credit with the republican emphasis on political action, had found a slogan: ‘“Vote Yourself a Farm.”’110 The association rapidly expanded to other states, and

The Constitution 205

it has been credited with a partial victory, the Homestead Law of 1862, which offered free land to the landless.111 Although the Upper Canadian reformers shared the economic and democratic vision of their British and American compatriots, they were to have significantly less success in the wake of the Rebellion of 1837, and the subsequent repression that was to follow; if Upper Canada is an exception, it is in the severity and success of government repression. The organizers of the Mississippi Emigration Society included James Lesslie, Peter Perry, Francis Hincks, J. Hervey Price, and Thomas Parke. Lesslie, Hincks, and Price were all involved in the management of the Bank of the People, and were the designated agents for the company. These men had originally delegated Hincks to approach President van Buren in Washington, in March, to obtain a large grant in the Iowa Territory; Van Buren, although receptive, found his hands tied by a federal law that stated that land in the west could only be purchased at public auction. It was only after Hincks’ mission failed that that they formed a joint stock company to buy land in common. Like the Children of Peace, the company was marked by its corporate form, its co-operative and democratic nature, and its retention of the freehold farm ideal. Interest in the society was intense; five hundred shares at $100 each sold out in two months. After their first general meeting, on 21 May, Perry, Lesslie, and Parke were appointed a committee to travel to Iowa to purchase the land for a town site; they returned near the end of July, but did not report their findings until October, due to the illness of Parke.112 It was only then that it became clear how bleak the long-term prospects of the company were. The committee had found significant obstacles to purchasing a large contiguous block of land. Squatters’ had pre-emptive rights to the land they had settled, and competition from land sharks and speculators added to the problem.113 Even the few who did emigrate found the situation less than ideal. Joseph Turton moved to the east bank of the Mississippi River, near Dodgeville in Wisconsin. A decade later he was to write Mackenzie, ‘No county in this wide domain has been so afflicted and abominably cursed with land sharks and speculators as this mineral region. Here we are two counties in this part of the territories (Iowa and Grant) that teem with mineral wealth and a great portion of it is owned by those gentry.’114 Interest in the Mississippi Land Company slowly eroded throughout 1839, and those interested in emigration, like Turton, did so with their own resources. The failure of the Mississippi Land Company was followed by the final collapse of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, and the Bank of

206

‘Union Is Strength’

the People, leaving the entire corporate business and financial sector of Upper Canada in the hands of the Family Compact. Many of the shareholders of the Bank of the People had been participants in the rebellion and had fled. Others were in jail, leading a parliamentary committee on banking to conclude: ‘in case the property of these Traitors is confiscated, the security to the public for the Notes issued by the Bank will be materially lessened.’ The same committee noted that most of its loans were overdue; Mackenzie, for one, had defaulted.115 The bank had successfully weathered the depression of 1837–8 without suspending payment on its notes. But by March 1838, even the Bank of Upper Canada had done so despite extensive state support, leaving the Bank of the People as the only bank still redeeming its notes. This potentially disastrous drain on its capital compounded the problem for those shareholders left behind, who retained full responsibility for the debts of the bank. The situation became more desperate yet when the law allowing suspension was extended from May to November 1839. The bank could do little except slowly contract its business, retiring its notes. During this period, the Bank of Montreal had been seeking access to Upper Canada; ‘foreign’ banks not chartered in the province were not allowed to open branches since they could not be sued. The Bank of Montreal applied for a charter after finding itself gouged by banks in Upper Canada during the suspension, but was blocked politically. The Bank of Montreal, after consulting with W.H. Draper, the attorney general, took the more circuitous path of purchasing the ‘privilege’ of the Bank of the People, and establishing it as the Bank of Montreal’s agent in Upper Canada; in so doing it engineered the demise of the last bulwark of the reformers’ joint stock companies. On 19 May 1840 the Bank of Montreal purchased the entire stock of the Bank of the People, and publicly guaranteed all of its notes.116 With the capital of the Bank of Montreal behind it, the Bank of the People began an aggressive branch expansion, although it lost its original reform character. The largely defunct Farmers’ Storehouse Company was similarly wound up in this period. The civic corporation of Toronto began a protracted series of negotiations in late 1841 with the trustees to purchase the building and lot for a new city hall and market building: the current St Lawrence Market, built in 1844. While the Tory-dominated city council was willing to pay £200 for the storehouse, it argued that the lot had been granted to the farmers in trust, and since they were no longer using it, the land should revert to the government. The very lack of legal title, which the Farmers’ Storehouse Company had sought through

The Constitution 207

incorporation for more than a decade, now continued to haunt them. It took more than two years to resolve this murky legal issue before the sale was completed.117 With the completion of the deal, the ascendancy of the Family Compact would appear complete. A Kingdom Lost? It so happened that a political rebellion brook out in the country; and most of the yong men of that place took up arms against the government, and in the very first action, two [Kavanagh and Henderson] of their company fell, both being inhabitance of that place; and after a resistance of abought eight days, the insurgents ware all scattered; and fleeing to the wilderness they hid themselves, untill the government betrayed them by a pretended pardon, published by proclamation. Whereuon the insurgents returned to their homes; they however enjoyed their pardon but a short time; When to their great sirprise, on the fatal and memorabel night of the [15th] of December 1837 the government party having collected a strong millitery band, came upon them in the night when all ware asleep, and after placeing sentinels round the town in order to prevent any ascape, rushed into their houses and seased all the yong men, and binding them two and two together drove them all away to prison, Ware being kept in close confinement for many months during which time, two of their party were taken out from amongst them and hanged before their eyes. Samuel Hughes118 It was with difficulty that the militia could be restrained from destroying their temple. Captain Thomas Sibbald119

The Children of Peace took their myths seriously. Between the War of 1812 and the Rebellion of 1837, the Children of Peace had spent close to a quarter-century building their new Jerusalem, the village of Hope; the temple was the seat of their millennial kingdom. Having fled a pharaoh who denied the poor their bread, they worshipped in the temple ‘Israelite fashion,’ making their sacrifices, collecting their alms. Having invoked this allegorical history, they would have ruefully appreciated the irony of the temple’s near destruction; like the ancient Jews, who had risen against the Romans, they had struck at a colonial empire that spanned continents. The Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed in retribution, the Jews scattered. And indeed, in the aftermath of the Rebel-

208

‘Union Is Strength’

lion of 1837, much of what the Children of Peace had crafted in that quarter-century came apart at the seams. It was not the constitutional convention they helped plan but the ‘illegitimate’ House of Assembly that convened on 28 December 1837. The Assembly passed a law in early January that authorized the continued detention of all who had been accused of treason, and suspended the rights of habeas corpus for thirty days to all thereafter arrested.120 Mackenzie fled. Lount and Matthews were hanged. Samuel Hughes was to quit the Children of Peace. The Farmers’ Storehouse Company, the Bank of the People, the Toronto Political Union, and the Mississippi Emigration Society all ended ignobly. The virtual elimination of these reform-dominated institutions marks the post-rebellion period as an era of transition. The collapse of the rebellion seemingly spelled the end of the radical agrarian constitutional vision shared by these joint stock democrats. Following Greer, I would argue that our narratives of the events of 1837 have been too narrowly focused on those who dared to rebel rather than on the ways in which the very use of the epithet had long been used to establish the ascendancy of the Family Compact. We continue to ask ourselves the insoluble question why Samuel Lount should have taken up arms, and Samuel Hughes not, rather than ask what they rebelled against. Ascendancy meant control of the volunteer militia, of the machinery of local government, and substantial influence with imperial authority. This ascendancy was established through electoral violence by the Orange Order, and through a series of closed chartered corporations such as the Bank of Upper Canada, the Clergy Corporation, and the civic corporation of Toronto, each a delegation of state sovereignty to a small oligarchic elite. During the economic crisis of 1836, this elite protected itself behind the limited liability of bank charters, while it used debt as a weapon of political control. It similarly utilized its control of the legislature to pass measures that would cement ‘irresponsible government,’ an executive answerable to them, not the House of Assembly. With the suspension of habeas corpus and the hanging of Lount, their ascendancy would seem complete; as already noted, Lount himself has become an icon of failure, his actual democratic vision forgotten. Our narratives of 1837 are about the failure of a rebellion, not about the success of ‘irresponsible government’: the maintenance of the ‘British connection’ has come to play a larger role in our definitions of national identity than the fight for democracy. As a result, ‘the history of democracy, we tend to believe, happened somewhere else.’121 Paul Romney has emphasized that the ascendancy of Loyalism as

The Constitution 209

the dominant political ideology of Upper Canada made further voicing of any such radical constitutional challenges impossible. Unlike the Chartists, the Upper Canadian reformers would not be given their three strikes. Tarred with charges of treason and sedition, reformers later obscured their true aim of independence and instead focused on a ‘pragmatic’ policy of alleviating ‘local abuses’ through the achievement of ‘responsible government.’122 It is this ‘myth of responsible government,’ perpetuated by the reformers themselves, that would have us believe that the democratic constitutional vision laid bare in the Rebellion of 1837 was dead. Romney is right to challenge this myth. The same despair was heard, after all, in March 1837, when the alliance in Turton’s Building seemingly fell in pieces just before the spectacular rebirth of the Toronto Political Union. Romney’s critique of the myth of responsible government is also a critique of the Whig interpretation of history: ‘In assimilating their colonial constitutionalism to the British Orthodoxy, the Baldwinites infused the Canadian political culture with the myth that validated that orthodoxy: the myth we know today as the Whig interpretation of history. As applied to Upper Canadian history, that myth tended to highlight the Reformers’ resistance to colonial misrule rather than their challenge to imperial sovereignty and, in general, to stress constitutional issues rather than the tension between Upper Canadian and British identities.’123 The Whig interpretation of British history was the narrative of the gradual victory of Parliament over absolute monarchy, and it had no place for the struggle against imperial oppression of its colonies. Romney attributes the success of this Whiggish history in Canada to waves of British immigrants ‘who did not share in the history of struggle that animated the Reform tradition.’124 Romney does not go far enough: it is one thing to critique the Whig interpretation of history, yet another to affirm that the Whigs actually ‘wrote history.’ While, as James Cull stated, the Baldwins might have asserted that ‘they are to Canada what the Whigs are to England,’ they were not alone in the fight for responsible government. As Cull continued, ‘the bulk of the members composing this Union are undisguised and ripe for rebellion,’ a comment that might equally apply to the Owenite socialists and radical democrats who came together in the Chartist movement. These Upper Canadians, like the Chartists, were not republican because they were ‘Americans,’ but rather, they were infused with specifically British radical traditions as even Archdeacon Strachan acknowledged: ‘The truth is the vast

210

‘Union Is Strength’

emigration, which hath of late years poured into the Province will not contribute much to our tranquility. Many of them have no religion and more are inimical to regular government. Flying from the ranks of radicals at home they came here with increased assurance and think that in a Colony they may go to greater lengths than they durst at home.’125 In rebutting the Whig interpretation of history, the myth of responsible government, we must go further in acknowledging the ‘Canadian Alliance’ that came together in the reform movement, and underscore the connections that tied them to similar radical traditions in the metropole. The ‘opaque society’ of mechanics and farmers, the joint stock democrats like Samuel Hughes and David Willson, have been forgotten, their histories unwritten. Yet, it is precisely they who were ultimately to make responsible government possible. The Children of Peace, although ‘bleeding with the wounds’ of the Rebellion of 1837, would go on to help recreate that democratically inspired political union movement in the face of Loyalist ascendancy. We need to be careful of where we end our narratives. Two decades later, the Children of Peace could recount their role in the election of both ‘fathers of responsible government,’ Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine, in 1841. Or they might tell of the completion of their second meeting house in 1842, where in 1844, three thousand people attended a meeting of the Reform Association, helping end the Metcalfe crisis and paving the way for responsible government. Although necessarily phrased in the language of Loyalism and the maintenance of the British connection, their fight for responsible government continued to be driven by their conceptions of joint stock democracy as captured in William Lyon Mackenzie’s constitution.

7 The Promise of Responsible Government

The responsibility to the united legislature of all officers of the government, with the exception of the Governor and his secretary, should be secured by every means known to the British constitution. The Governor, as the representative of the Crown, should be instructed that he must carry on his government by heads of departments, in whom the united legislature shall repose confidence; and he must look for no support from home in any contest with the legislature, except on points involving strictly Imperial interests. Durham’s Report1

The Baldwins, father and son, are both frequently credited as the originators of this principle of democratic reform, ‘responsible government,’ or cabinet rule. One might question this doctrine on the basis that Dr William Warren Baldwin, in particular, was no radical democrat; although bankruptcy drove his Anglo-Irish gentry family to emigrate to Upper Canada, they quickly regained their fortunes through a fortuitous marriage into the Willcocks family. Baldwin senior retained his patrician sensibilities: ready to duel for his honour, to defend primogeniture, and to advocate a ‘balanced constitution’ for Upper Canada with a strong aristocratic element to offset the colonially appointed executive and elected House of Assembly.2 He had specifically repudiated William Lyon Mackenzie’s radical democratic constitution. Yet, despite these views, Baldwin became an early convert to political reform, and it was he who provided a home for the Canadian Alliance Society in Turton’s Building, and in 1836 transformed it into the Constitutional Reform Society.

212

‘Union Is Strength’

This perplexing conundrum can best be understood by placing Dr Baldwin’s political views in the context of the eighteenth-century British Country Party, whose influence was also felt in the American Revolution and subsequent Jacksonian politics. The Country Party embodied a civic humanism that drew on ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of citizenship, and the value of selfless political participation for the public good: those selfish few who placed their personal private interests before the public good threatened the moral commitment of all citizens to political participation. The ‘civic humanism’ of the Country Party rejected the commercial ideology of the royal Court Party that buttressed the development of the increasingly centralized liberal capitalist state. Hence, the Country Party had a republican emphasis that sought to preserve the power of a democratic Parliament from the encroachments of the Crown during the vast expansion of state administration, public credit, and the financial and commercial revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 It was this defence of the democratic elements of mixed monarchy that served as the basis for similar American conceptions of ‘civic republicanism’ as they developed after the revolution among Jacksonian Democrats, as well as in the Chartist movement in Britain.4 Radical reformers such as Mackenzie drew on both these political ideologies in their critique of finance capital and British rule in Upper Canada. It is also possible to place Dr Baldwin’s son, Robert, within this same civic humanist tradition.5 He opposed the new ‘liberal framework’ of the Court Party being imposed on Upper Canada in the period following the Rebellion of 1837 by politicians like Lord Durham, John B. Robinson, and Charles Edward Poulett Thomson, 1st Baron Sydenham, who was appointed governor of Upper Canada after the rebellion. In this book, I have sought to link particular forms of economic institution to these two political ideologies. The bourgeois proponents of the ‘liberal framework’ for the state have long emphasized its underlying economic idioms. As Michel Foucault has pointed out, their assertion ‘“that government is best which governs least” implied truly “economic” governance; that of a government that rules by the precepts of liberal economic theory, but also that of a government which economizes on its own costs: a greater effort of technique aimed at accomplishing more through a lesser exertion of force and authority.’6 This model of economic governance has its origins, I would argue, in the organization of the chartered corporation. The Benthamite emphasis on order and efficiency placed the emphasis on ‘good’ government, not on ‘democratic

The Promise of Responsible Government 213

government.’ The irony of such ‘economic’ good governance was the rapid expansion of the state under tight centralized control. The new Poor Law of 1834 in Britain, for example, was meant to relieve parishes of the intolerably high poor rates, and to free up labour markets, yet its primary effect was ‘a dramatic expansion of the state bureaucracy and centralized political control.’7 In this chapter, we end our preliminary reconnaissance of the civic humanist opponents of such liberal capitalist ‘economic governance.’ As historian Ian McKay has argued, ‘the book(s) we are missing on this theme of “The Canadian Liberal Revolution” would necessarily dwell on … the Rebellions of 1837, Lord Durham’s Report, and the Acts of Union of 1841 [which] taken together as one moment could be interpreted as the high point and defeat of liberalism’s civic humanist adversary.’8 As an historiographic method, McKay emphasizes that such a preliminary survey is ‘several steps down the ladder of comprehensiveness from a polished and final synthesis. Reconnaissance is a way of summing up a different way of thinking about the history of the left.’ The purpose of such a survey ‘is to awaken us to little-explored realities, in an age when, philosophically and politically, the quest for […] rock-solid foundations seems more and more quixotic.’9 In the Upper Canadian case, the rapid expansion of the state administration of municipalities, prisons, hospitals, schools, and public works after the rebellions accentuated, rather than muted, the issue of ‘responsible government’ between the civic humanists and their liberal opponents. As the state expanded and centralized power, the question of political accountability continued to be answered in two divergent ways; ‘accountability’ points, after all, both to questions of political responsibility and to root economic metaphors of good governance. In other words, the question asked at the time was whether ‘good government’ was to be measured by the standard of its economic efficiency or by its accountability to its citizens? Their differences in approach were foreshadowed by earlier debates on the incorporation of the municipal government of Toronto in 1834, in which similar economic rhetoric also played a part. It is important to underscore that the House of Assembly delegated municipal government to a chartered corporation; city government was referred to as ‘the’ corporation for decades. The struggle between the civic humanists and the liberals involved competing visions of how this ‘legislated monopoly’ was to be organized, and their visions differed in terms quite similar to their disagreements on banks. The civic humanists’

214

‘Union Is Strength’

approached government through their experience in a variety of joint stock democracies, as an open institution responsible to its citizens. The liberal capitalist vision, in contrast, was entirely consistent with then current British forms, a closed oligarchic, chartered corporation, a tool of governance, not of participation. Although they also sought to reform city charters in the name of good governance, those reforms were not democratically inspired. In their efforts to further their control of the state and its citizens, a series of liberal capitalist politicians and governors were as equally willing as their Tory predecessors to turn to extra-governmental tools of social control such as the Orange Order. The role of the state in the liberal vision, as it was implemented in Upper Canada, was a tutelary one, promoting individualism, efficiency, and order, if not democratic participation.10 Liberals such as the new governor, who oversaw the vast expansion of the Canadian state in the post-rebellion period, sought to limit the impact of populist governance through a strong and unresponsive executive drawn from among the class of large property owners. Sydenham had been one of the British parliamentarians appointed to a commission of inquiry into the governance of the 246 incorporated English cities in the wake of the reform agitation of 1832. They found city charters were generally ‘calculated to take away power from the community, and to render the governing class independent of the main body of the burgesses.’ The report concluded that ‘the most common and most striking defect of the Municipal Corporations of England and Wales is, that the corporate bodies exist independently of the communities in which they are found. The corporations look upon themselves, and are considered by the inhabitants, as separate and exclusive bodies; they have powers and privileges within the towns and cities from which they are named, but in most places, all identity of interest between the Corporation and the inhabitants disappeared.’11 It is the separation of the identity of the corporation from its inhabitants that led historian Engin Isin to call them ‘cities without citizens’: ‘liberal capitalist’ city administrations were tools of governance, not of democratic participation, civic rights, or citizenship. The introduction of district councils in Upper Canada, by Sydenham, has thus been interpreted as a triumph of unresponsive liberal capitalist state formation. Sydenham introduced these new ‘democratic’ institutions, but to do so resorted to ‘a sweeping gerrymander and intimidation at the polls on a scale that far outstripped even the standards of that era.’12 As Isin underscores, we should not see the incorporation of the city as the colo-

The Promise of Responsible Government 215

nial administration’s belated recognition of a degree of local autonomy simply because it added an elective principle; rather, the new system sought to preserve positions of power for those of property, and those with property continued to depend, like Sydenham himself, on Orange Order violence to maintain electoral and social control. The expansion of municipal government in Upper Canada was less an empowering democratic revolution as civic humanists like Robert Baldwin sought, and more an extension of a rationalized, hierarchical bureaucracy for ‘efficient rule’ by a ‘benevolent’ colonial state seeking to deprive the elected legislature of its capacity for local patronage. Such a state-centric view, however, accepts the pretensions of power of a nascent administration that had not yet grown to mature form. While the liberal capitalist roots of the Canadian state are unquestionable, we must not underestimate the impact of civic humanists like the Baldwins and the radical wing of the reform movement at this, their ‘high point’ and ‘defeat.’ Although the broad political and joint stock alliance that had come together in Turton’s Building lay shattered, their constitutional vision remained unchanged, if muted, by the ideology of loyalism. The democratic skills that the Children of Peace had gained in a decade’s participation in every reform joint stock ‘mini-parliament’ provided the model for a renewed political compact, one that reached beyond the colony of Upper Canada, and embraced reform across the ‘great divide’ of language and religion. As the British government planned a ‘legislative’ union of Upper and Lower Canada as a means of assimilating the French within a dominant English culture, the electors of the 4th Riding of York sought, and won, a real union of two peoples under the banner of responsible government: ‘Union is strength.’ The contributions of the civic humanists to the formation of the Canadian nation need to be underscored. Here, then, we provide a reconnaissance of the civic humanist response to the ‘colonial leviathan’ in the post-rebellion period as reformers contested Sydenham’s two major liberal capitalist administrative innovations: municipal government and cabinet rule. Many have viewed ‘responsible government,’ like the ‘gift’ of the ‘democratic’ district (municipal) councils, as the product of a change in colonial policy – having little to do with local circumstances, local demands, or local politics – that is, as the teleological unfolding of liberal capitalist principles of government with roots in Britain.13 But as with the Rebellion of 1837, the strength of the push behind these revolutionary changes came from the farmers of the Home and other districts, as they sought

216

‘Union Is Strength’

to protect their livelihoods and their civic rights. The Children of Peace, for example, organized yet another political union in the face of statesanctioned violence that saw one of their members murdered by Orange thugs under the direction of Sheriff William Jarvis himself. It was here, in the 4th Riding of York, that David Willson and the Children of Peace ensured the election of both ‘Fathers of Responsible Government,’ Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine, in the critical period in which the Canadian state was taking form. They envisioned a Canada that overcame differences of language, culture, religion, and distance to unite two nations under the principles of equal rights, the local nomination of representatives, and responsible government. The Durham Meetings and Municipal Reform The new governor, Charles Poulett Thomson, 1st Baron Sydenham, was an exemplary utilitarian, despite his aristocratic pretensions. His father was a partner in a prominent trading company in the Russian-Baltic lumber trade, but the family was unable to translate business success into a title; Sydenham’s stifled aristocratic aspirations led him to seek election as a radical Whig. His parliamentary patron, Viscount Althorp, had him appointed president of the Board of Trade, where he championed free trade and oversaw railway and banking legislation; it was his attempt to expand the purview of his office to include colonial banking legislation that had occasioned the new regulations on banking in Upper Canada. Importantly, Sydenham was also a member of the 1833 Select Committee Inquiring into the State of Municipal Corporations in Britain, and co-authored what was to eventually become the Municipal Corporations Act.14 He was appointed governor-in-chief of the British North American colonies on 6 September 1839, and promised a peerage if his administration was successful. This combination of ‘free trade’ boosterism and aristocratic pretensions needs to be underscored: although a liberal capitalist, Sydenham was no radical democrat. Indeed, his attempts to translate business acumen into gentlemanly status were little different from many Compact Tories such as William Allan, Henry Sherwood, or Henry John Boulton. Sydenham approached the task of implementing those aspects of Durham’s Report that the Colonial Office approved of, municipal reform, and the union of the Canadas, with a ‘campaign of state violence and coercive institutional innovation … empowered not just by the British state but also by his Benthamite certainties.’15 Economic progress and ‘good governance,’ he felt, would in

The Promise of Responsible Government 217

itself create the long-term solution to Canadian discontent. Like governors Francis Bond Head before him, and Charles Metcalfe after, Sydenham was to turn to the Orange Order for often-violent support. It was Sydenham who played a critical role in transforming Compact Tories into Conservatives. Sydenham, like Durham, had his own theories on the causes of the rebellions, although his proposed solution fit closely with Durham’s analysis. Durham had argued that the Assembly of Lower Canada had abrogated an unnatural degree of control of government revenues for a system of mixed monarchy; the Patriots of Lower Canada had gained a surprising level of control over government revenues, and had used this money to hire their own administrative officers independent of British colonial control. Durham clearly separated good governance from democratic accountability. British appointees would govern, and would only be financially accountable to local legislatures. Even in the ‘radical reform’ minded Lord Durham’s opinion, the Lower Canadian Assembly had ‘endeavoured to extend its authority in modes totally incompatible with the principles of constitutional liberty’ and had ‘transgressed our notions of the proper limits of Parliamentary interference.’16 Sydenham concurred, adding that this resulted in the Assembly assuming duties for which it was unfit, such as the building of roads, bridges, and canals, and that this resulted in jealous competition between regions for limited revenues. He bluntly ascribed the rebellions to a lack of local government: The people receive no training in those habits of self-government which are indispensable to enable them rightly to exercise the power of choosing representatives in Parliament. No field is open for the gratification of ambition in a narrow circle, and no opportunity given for testing the talents or integrity of those who are candidates for popular favour. The people acquire no habits of those self-dependence for the attainment of their own local objects. Whatever uneasiness they may feel – whatever little improvement in their respective neighbourhoods may appear to be neglected, affords grounds for complaint against the executive. All is charged directly upon the Government, and a host of discontented spirits are ever ready to excite these feelings. On the other hand while the Government is thus brought directly in contact with the people, it has neither any officer in its own confidence in the different parts of these extended provinces from whom it can seek information, nor is there any recognized body enjoying the public confidence with whom it can communicate, ei-

218

‘Union Is Strength’

ther to determine what are the real wants and wishes of the locality, or through whom it may afford explanation.17

Sydenham thus proposed a vast expansion of the state apparatus through the introduction of municipal government on a systematic basis throughout both provinces. Areas not already governed through civic corporations or police boards would be governed through centrally controlled district councils with authority over roads, schools, and local policing. A strengthened Executive Council would further usurp much of the elected assembly’s legislative role, leaving elected politicians to simply review the administration’s legislative program and budgets. It is important to stress that these new forms of local government ‘were not intended “to bring government to the people,” or at least not in the common interpretation of empowering them. Rather representative governmental institutions were to stand between “the people” and the “Government,” disciplining the former, habituating them to the limitation of their political power, to the containment of their “talents” in “a narrow circle,” situating the source of their potential complaints in their own activity.’18 Sydenham’s bill reflected his larger concerns for establishing mixed monarchy on a firmer basis, that is, limiting popular participation under the tutelage of a strong executive. His bill allowed for two elected councillors from each township, but the warden, clerk, and treasurer were to be appointed by the government. This thus allowed for strong administrative control and continued government patronage appointments. However, others, like Sydenham himself, have laid the emphasis on the councils as ‘little Parliaments … which may be the means of disciplining the yeomanry to habits of business necessary for local government, as well as bringing many from obscurity who may become useful on a larger scale.’19 Even current commentators have argued that the District Councils Act gave the local government system of Upper Canada ‘a more thoroughly responsible and representative democratic character than that of England and Wales before the 1890s.’20 It is this dual character, mixed monarchy on a smaller scale, which has allowed analysts to divergently claim that the councils were both ‘a means of furthering certain imperial objectives’21 (through appointments by the executive) and ‘democratic nurseries of demagogues’ at one and the same time.22 The district councils were not unlike the relatively closed civic cor-

The Promise of Responsible Government 219

poration granted Toronto in 1834, which had allowed the Tories almost undisputed control of local government. They differed primarily in the patronage positions opened up to government appointment. In both the corporation and the district councils, the mayor (or warden) was not directly elected; the mayor was elected by the city’s aldermen, whereas the warden was appointed by the provincial administration. The property qualification for councillors remained at £300, the same as it had been for the appointed magistrates, and for Toronto aldermen. These large property holders had always tended to have vested interests in the status quo. The elector qualification was, however, even broader than for Toronto, allowing any householder who paid taxes to vote. The district councils had authority over public property, roads, bridges, and schools, and could levy tolls and land taxes to cover these expenses.23 The district councillors also differed from Toronto aldermen (but not common councillors) in that they had civil administrative, but no judicial functions; the justices of the peace continued to serve as petty judges. The high property qualification for councillors and the central control of civil administration and the judicial system limited the effectiveness of this grant of ‘popular sovereignty,’ which was not to be ameliorated until the Baldwin Act for municipal reform was passed in 1849. Sydenham was to stake his administration – and his peerage – on achieving the union of the Canadas, and on these municipal reforms. Some historians have argued that the district councils were an ‘enforced implantation of democratic forms of government by the orders of the Colonial Office,’ yet ironically note their success in Upper Canada, and failure in Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and New South Wales.24 By focusing on the district councils as a colonial ‘gift,’ the effect of strong local opposition to what they replaced, the Courts of Quarter Sessions (and in Toronto, the Mayor’s Court), is ignored. Viewing the elective district councils as an unsought gift of the imperial government also ignores the ambivalence of the British Parliament in forcing this unwanted democratic reform on an unwilling colony. Powerful absentee landholders objected to granting land-taxing privileges to local authorities, and managed to have the measure excluded from the British legislation that united the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Sydenham was forced to seek the same measure through the more difficult route of local legislation. But here, opposition was also fierce. As Sydenham was to write, ‘One party hated the measure because it was to

220

‘Union Is Strength’

give power to the people; another because it placed that power under wholesome control by the Crown; a third because it deprived the members of the Assembly of all their past power of jobbing.’25 Politicians such as Robert Baldwin argued that the District Council Act did not go far enough, and he strenuously opposed it. Baldwin’s principled opposition to the bill would seem difficult to explain, as he even voted against its final passage after all his amendments had been defeated. The District Council Bill passed in this form due to the disarray among the Upper Canadian reform representatives in the postrebellion period; the bill, in fact, caused a major personal and political breach between Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks, the principal English Canadian reform strategists.26 Hincks maintained that an incremental policy of attainable reforms would achieve more than strict adherence to the principle of responsible government, and thus lent his legislative support to Sydenham; he did not perhaps understand Sydenham’s desperation to have the bill passed, and the leverage that this afforded. Hincks’s support was a critical factor in the bill passing without any of Baldwin’s amendments, and was the source of a bitter personal and newspaper feud between the two men.27 Hincks’s defection demonstrates the internal divisions among reformers in Upper Canada, many of whom were urban professionals who supported Sydenham’s liberal capitalist agenda. Baldwin, in contrast, resoundingly reflected the civic humanist and republican leanings of his farmer constituents in the Home District. These internal divisions within the Upper Canadian reformers led Baldwin to pursue an alliance with the numerically larger French Canadian reformers. It must be remembered that Robert Baldwin was not just a ‘principled politician’ in an abstract sense, but had been elected after a contentious electoral battle in the 4th Riding of York to represent those voters’ concerns. At the same time as the District Council Act passed, these electors were petitioning for an inquiry into the death of a young member of the Children of Peace, David Leppard, in a Durham meeting riot two years before.28 Baldwin’s objection to the bill as it passed was that it would not prevent a repetition of the Yonge Street Riot, nor ensure that those responsible would be brought to justice; while a small part of the administration of local government was made accountable to elected representatives, the judicial system remained in the hands of the appointive magistracy answerable only to the governor. This pivotal incident on which Robert Baldwin’s stand against the district councils was based began when his father, Dr William Baldwin,

The Promise of Responsible Government 221

and 222 inhabitants of the Home District petitioned Sheriff William Jarvis to call a public meeting to discuss Durham’s recommendation on responsible government in August 1839. Toronto’s Tories submitted an objection, disingenuously arguing that such a meeting would be disruptive. Jarvis was swayed by ‘the influential part of the inhabitants’ and refused the reformers; the petitioners therefore took it upon themselves to call a meeting of the ‘friends of Responsible Government’ for 15 October outside the city.29 James Reid, a young clerk in the Bank of the People, wrote to William Lyon Mackenzie in Rochester, describing the resulting carnage. Reid, like a later parliamentary inquiry, placed the blame squarely at the feet of Jarvis, who had led a large body of armed Orangemen from the city with the intent the ‘jail be again tenanted with political prisoners.’ When Dr Baldwin called the meeting to order, Jarvis called for a vote on who was to chair the meeting. Disgruntled by Jarvis’s favouritism, the reformers withdrew a short distance to hold their own meeting as they had before the York Riots of 1832. They were pursued by the Orange Tory mob, which tore a fence apart, and began beating the defenceless crowd. Jarvis led a charge on the wagon on which Baldwin and Hincks were perched, shouting ‘Down with them! Down with them!’30 The meeting broke up, but not before a nineteen-year-old member of the Children of Peace, David Leppard, was struck in the temple with a rock with such force that he was knocked from his wagon; he was to die soon after. Leppard’s death provoked a strong, sympathetic reaction from across the province. What particularly galled his family, the rest of the Children of Peace, and the reform community as a whole, was the complicity of the sheriff, ‘several of the City authorities, and others holding Office under the Crown, upon whom it is especially incumbent to preserve the public peace.’31 Their ire was compounded by the inaction of the authorities at all levels in the months following the riot: no arrests were made at the scene, no one was tried, and no inquiry was held until the boy’s father petitioned the House of Assembly in 1841. They could not appeal to the Criminal Court of Queen’s Bench because ‘the High Sheriff, by whom the Grand Jury is impaneled, being himself, as it is alleged, the head of the rioters; and therefore, that no justice could be expected from a jury summoned by himself to try himself.’32 Leppard’s family petitioned the lieutenant governor to complain of the conduct of Jarvis and the magistrates, but were rebuffed. As the parliamentary committee later reported, ‘the culpability of the rioters, is, in the opinion of Your Committee, lost, in the still higher guilt of the Law

222

‘Union Is Strength’

Officers of the Crown, and of the Executive Government, for the time being, who could not have been ignorant, but on the contrary it appears to Your Committee were well informed, of those lawless occurrences, yet took no notice of them.’33 Little had changed, apparently, since the Types Riot. This provoked widespread calls for the reform of the Court of Quarter Sessions, the body charged with the administration of local government, policing, and justice.34 Robert Baldwin’s principled objection to the District Council Bill was rooted in these calls for the reform of the Court of Quarter Sessions. The bill left the administration of the law in the hands of appointive magistrates who selectively applied the law to shield their own interests – and to protect their cronies in the Orange Order. The clearly established link between ‘the corporation’ of Toronto and the Orange Order during the Durham Riot hammered home that only reform of the court system would alleviate these injustices. The judiciary remained under the control of the ‘colonial leviathan’ that Sydenham was constructing. However, in their first contest with Sydenham, the reformers achieved exactly what Hincks had sought: incremental and attainable reforms. On the other hand, the death of David Leppard at the hands of Orangemen was to serve as spur for the more active participation of the Children of Peace in the pursuit of larger goals. Acts of Union: Representation While Durham had unabashedly called for government by an executive council responsible to the legislature, the Colonial Office equivocated, publicly promising only to work in ‘harmony’ with local legislatures. The colonial secretary, Lord Russell, rejected responsible government as incompatible with colonial ministers’ accountability to the imperial government. To ensure that this executive was able to work in harmony with the legislature, Sydenham thus laid the groundwork for a highly centralized administration where he, as the fount of all patronage, could ensure the efficient and ordered working of the machinery of state; the district councils were the first step in this direction. Sydenham placed his executive councillors in charge of government departments, and made them responsible for initiating the major legislative program of the session. He sought to confine the legislature to a review of government budgets. With much of their earlier role now taken over by the district councils under strong appointive leadership, the democratically elected legislature could be reduced to little but a debating club.

The Promise of Responsible Government 223

For Sydenham, the ‘accountability’ of the state to the legislature was narrowly circumscribed to just this economic sense. To ensure that this highly centralized imperial machinery worked in harmony with the local legislature, he actively intervened to ensure that his hand-chosen candidates were elected. This colonial administrator thus utilized all the patronage powers his position granted, as well as Orange Order violence, to ensure a ‘harmonious’ relationship with the legislature. However, in the aftermath of the rebellions, such ‘harmonious’ relations with the legislature proved hard to establish. In attempting to apply some of Durham’s other reforms, Sydenham had alienated both the French Canadians in Lower Canada and the Compact Tories in Upper Canada. To defeat this ‘unholy alliance,’ which threatened his program of administrative reform, he set about founding his own party. As he wrote, ‘I will take the moderates from both sides – reject the extremes – and govern as I think right, and not as they fancy … I can make a middle reforming party.’35 He utilized his considerable power and authority as governor general, chief electoral officer, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and head of the civil service to ensure the election of his carefully chosen candidates just as cynically as Head had done in the 1836 election. Sydenham’s candidates, such as Isaac Buchanan, a wholesale merchant in Toronto, were like himself, liberal capitalists with gentlemanly aspirations. Sydenham’s system involved the active intervention of the Crown’s representative in the electoral process; reformers, drawing on the traditional emphasis of the Country Party, sought to protect a democratic parliament from the encroachments of an autocratic Crown through an emphasis on the principle of local control of the nomination process of candidates. The reform newspapers complained that ‘the power of nomination which should exist in the people and be exercised by them alone is attempted to be usurped, and executive influence in all its seducing forms made use to procure the return not of those who are the choice of the people, but of those who will do his Excellency’s bidding. It is in this way he intends to redeem his pledge of carrying on his government in harmony with the wishes and views of the people.’36 The importance of this principle had been underscored in the 1834 Grand Convention of Delegates when only the local delegates from a riding sequestered themselves to nominate candidates. As both Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine, the ‘Fathers of Responsible Government,’ sought election to the unified legislatures of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, this principle was to prove of critical importance. It is here that the role of

224

‘Union Is Strength’

the Children of Peace, in opposition to the Orange Order, again needs to be stressed; to protect this principle they formed yet another political union, the Union Society, which successfully elected both Baldwin and LaFontaine in the 4th Riding of York despite the administration’s heavy-handed interference. Baldwin’s election slogan, ‘Union is strength,’ was predicated upon a representative’s obligation to bow to public opinion, that is, to be representative. The Union Society proved a powerful means of expressing that public opinion in the face of political gerrymandering. The means by which Sydenham sought to co-opt opposition and influence nominations through direct participation in the electoral process can be clearly seen in his approach to both the acknowledged leaders of the reform opposition. He reworked electoral boundaries and utilized state-sanctioned violence to ensure that the leader of the French Canadians, Louis LaFontaine, was not elected. To co-opt Baldwin, and draw radical reform support to his legislative program, Sydenham named him solicitor general for Upper Canada in February 1840, although he did not appoint him to the Executive Council. By September 1840, during Sydenham’s visit to the city, Baldwin had already declared himself a candidate for Toronto even though Sydenham remained adamantly, although discreetly, opposed to the implementation of responsible government. The governor’s appointment of Robert Baldwin as solicitor general – but not as member of the Executive Council – had been but one ploy to secure reform support for his other ‘moderate’ candidates. In August 1840, Sydenham began a tour of Upper Canada with the intention of promoting these candidates. He was careful to always keep them at his side, and took every opportunity to snub their opponents. Two stops in this whistle-stop tour are of interest, since they are tied by the one candidate, Robert Baldwin. At the instigation of Baldwin (and indicative of his growing relationship with the Children of Peace), Sydenham arrived in the village of Hope, his only stop in the 4th Riding of York, on 16 September, where he was joined in procession by the band of the Children of Peace and several hundred men and women who presented an address calling on him to ‘remedy partial evils, with impartial good.’ Sydenham’s reply was equivocal, stating his aim was ‘carrying out practical improvement.’ He assured them ‘that my best endeavours will be exerted to introduce and recommend what ever I think of advantage to the country, and I feel satisfied that if I am seconded by the Legislature they will not be unsuccessful.’ His personal appearance here, as elsewhere, seemed to have its desired effect, as David Willson

The Promise of Responsible Government 225

and the Children of Peace lauded Sydenham and declared we ‘must renounce the title of party, but not Reform.’37 They seemed to accede to Sydenham’s aim of a submissive legislature that would do his bidding, as the Mirror had complained.38 Shortly after making this complaint, the newspaper reported that ‘feelers’ had been made to have John McIntosh, the unopposed reform candidate for the riding, step down in favour of Sydenham’s close personal adviser, provincial secretary Samuel Harrison, who was running a poor second to arch-Tory Allan McNab in Hamilton.39 The 4th Riding of York was thus to prove a critical battleground in the fight to preserve the right of local citizens to nominate their own representatives, as Robert Baldwin was eventually to stake his own future political career on winning here. Sydenham’s visit to Toronto also demonstrated the limits of his ability to pre-emptively nominate candidates. Sydenham had appointed Baldwin solicitor general in February as a means of enticing reform support. Baldwin, in turn, had expected that appeals to loyally support Sydenham would bolster his chances of election in the Tory stronghold of Toronto. The Family Compact, however, remained adamantly opposed to Sydenham’s proposed reforms, and the Toronto council had initially refused to even present an address welcoming Sydenham to the city.40 The January 1841 civic elections proved a wake-up call for Baldwin. The Compact Tories remained in control of the corporation, and like Sydenham, they used their patronage powers and Orange Order violence to ensure a clean sweep in the city council elections.41 Within days, Baldwin resigned from the provincial race since the ‘events of the present week have sufficiently demonstrated that in this city, corruption and intimidation are at present paramount.’ It was these same city officials who remained unpunished for the murder of David Leppard at the Yonge Street Riot. Baldwin remained committed to seeking election, since ‘it would be my duty to resign into the hands of the Crown [the office of solicitor general] which the joint confidence of both Crown & people can alone enable me upon my own principles usefully to fill.’42 Within the month, he had been nominated in five ridings, and accepted the nominations of 4th York and Hastings.43 In view of the multiple opportunities available to him, Baldwin’s choice of the 4th Riding of York is puzzling given that the reform incumbent, John McIntosh, refused to step down. All recognized that McIntosh lacked charisma; in the 1836 elections, even his local supporters acknowledged that their successful candidate ‘was not favoured with the gift of fluently addressing a public assembly, or

226

‘Union Is Strength’

readily conveying his ideas in appropriate language.’44 McIntosh was, however, the long-term incumbent and faced no opposition at all; the riding was solidly reform. McIntosh rebuffed suggestions that he had withdrawn, and when asked to resign by a dissenting faction of the committee that had originally nominated him, in late January, he ‘answered them in the negative, leaving the question with the Electors to decide.’45 The movement to draft Baldwin grew, and by mid-February a deputation of reformers from the 4th Riding presented Baldwin with an address from 220 electors seeking his nomination, thus subverting the local committee of eight to ten who had sanctioned McIntosh.46 Indeed, many of this committee signed the requisition for Baldwin, further embittering the rivalry.47 They also noted that with Baldwin running under the reform banner, local Tories had migrated to McIntosh, leaving them in a win-win situation.48 Baldwin’s address to the electors boldly began ‘union is strength’ and on that basis he refused to run unless McIntosh resigned; but he also acknowledged ‘that it is not for either Mr McIntosh or myself to set our individual wishes against those of the great body of our mutual friends.’49 Baldwin’s candidacy was bolstered by the announcement that as solicitor general, he was about to be named to the Executive Council of the United Provinces following the new rule that heads of provincial departments serve as a cabinet.50 Baldwin’s supporters appointed a series of meetings at Hope and elsewhere in the riding where unanimous resolutions were made, lauding McIntosh for his past service, but calling on him to withdraw.51 David Willson published a lengthy letter of support for Baldwin about the same time, reminding his followers and others that ‘we too frequently say our votes are of no effect … We have now at our option the Solicitor General, the Executive advisor of our future administration, with a probability of his advancement in legislation to the upper house in Parliament. All these powerful appointments are depending on our sanction to admit him to the House of Commons, without which his appointments and talents must be lost.’52 The actual election proved anticlimactic, as Baldwin ‘walked over the course without a contest.’53 Francis Hincks described the poll: ‘About half ten o’clock, the Hon. Robert Baldwin appeared at the hustings in Newmarket, having been escorted from the village of Sharon [the newly renamed Hope] by about eighty sleighs loaded with his friends and preceded by the Sharon Band … No other candidate made his appearance, and after a show of hands which appeared to be unanimous

The Promise of Responsible Government 227

from the independent yeomanry of the Riding, the Solicitor General was proclaimed duly elected, the announcement of which was received with an enthusiastic cheer … The hon. and learned gentleman has had the honour of being the first member returned to the United Parliament.’54 Although Baldwin won this highly symbolic honour, the rest of the reform party had much less success. Through the widespread use of electoral violence and the rigging of riding boundaries, Sydenham’s candidates won thirty-five of forty-two seats in Upper Canada; the radical reformers under Baldwin, a mere six.55 Acts of Union: The Union of the Canadas, the Union Society, and Louis LaFontaine With his crushing defeat of both the radical reformers and Tories, Sydenham seemed well on his way to establishing his vision of a strengthened Executive Council, and a weakened elected legislature, much of whose former role was now usurped by the district councils under strong appointive leadership; for him, ‘responsible government’ entailed nothing more than the financial accountability of the state to the legislature. Sydenham’s vision of the governor’s role was not unlike that of the closed corporation of Toronto, where legislative, judicial, and executive functions converged in the figure of the mayor. Sydenham was opposed, however, by those with an alternate vision of responsible government, a vision infused with the civic humanism of the Country Party. For these radical reformers, two principles were at stake. As already argued, they sought to defend the rights of ridings to nominate candidates without the interference of the Crown, thus severing executive from legislative functions. However, they also sought to make the executive responsible to the legislature, and not just to the Crown. It was these conflicting visions of the Canadian state’s accountability that drove Baldwin, Louis LaFontaine, the leader of the Lower Canadian reformers, and the Children of Peace to form a political union against Sydenham’s planned union of the Canadas. The involvement of the Children of Peace in the election of LaFontaine stemmed from Baldwin’s double return in both the 4th Riding of York and Hastings County, which provoked continued unease; the unanimity with which Baldwin had been elected in the 4th Riding hid the painful divisions inflamed by the unmerited and unnecessary unseating of McIntosh. Early in April, Baldwin sounded out Willson’s opinion on his resigning his seat in favour of Hastings, thereby allowing the

228

‘Union Is Strength’

sure election of another reform candidate. Willson met with prominent reformers in the riding, who were unenthusiastic about a new election, if for no other reason than fear of violence. In an address to Sydenham at this time, Willson asked ‘what use can we make of cold blood that is lost, – the bludgeoning, wounds and death’ that resulted from endemic electoral violence? In a parallel address to the legislators, he demanded they save ‘principle at all times from the bleeding wounds of an enemy, or the flattering tongue of temptation … you will hear from our scrolling pen if you deviate from the foundation stone – the principles of the election – i.e. the due proportion of Responsibility which is due unto us that have elected you into your seats of honour.’56 Willson, in other words, emphasized the principle that responsible government begins with local control of the nomination process, and free elections. Willson met with the few local men he could convince to consider the options once more, and with Francis Hincks and J.H. Price, who had also just been elected; they, too, were cool to the prospect. Baldwin, however, forced the issue, and finally opted to sit for Hastings in hopes that another radical reformer would be elected in the York riding. Faced with a potentially painful and divisive battle within the riding, Willson founded a new political union movement to serve the same function as the Grand Convention of Delegates that he had suggested seven years before, in 1834. He convened the Union Society in Sharon on 1 May, ‘to promote the great and needful cause of good government in our unhappy and dissatisfied country by a social union and mutual correspondence with all other parts of the province.’ They were, they declared, ‘induced to pursue these measures to retrieve our franchise from violence and the ascendancy of parties which has produced revolution, execution, riots, and death.’ Their first action was to appoint a committee of sixty-one prominent reformers from across the riding to petition the governor and legislature for laws to better regulate the elections.57 This petition was forwarded to Robert Baldwin, who was to present a bill ‘to provide for the freedom of Elections’ to the House of Assembly with the intent of curbing Orange bloodshed. This committee authorized the publication of a letter by Willson to galvanize public support behind their right to nominate their own candidates without the threat of state interference or violence: ‘Now let us begin to feel our own strength and number our talents, and ask the highest councils, from the throne of our humble representatives, what can you do without us? Gentlemen of imaginary supreme power, weigh us in the balance, and you will come to more certain knowledge of yourselves, and

The Promise of Responsible Government 229

see where power lies. It is in the people and the enlightened measures of the mind … Choose our own representatives, men according to our own hearts, and place them before us in council, and follow close after them till we prove that we are men, not blocks without heads, nor dead bodies of clay to be buried in the grave of politics.’58 The more immediate purpose of the organization became clear in the next few weeks. The Union Society announced that their next meeting would be held in Sharon on 5 June, ‘for the purpose of taking into consideration, and discussing, the propriety of admitting Robert Baldwin, to represent Hastings, and if agreed upon, choose another Candidate to be elected in his place.’ The Mirror argued Baldwin should sit for Hastings, ‘as the Freeholders of the North Riding are, almost to a man, sincere Reformers, and can elect whom they please.’ 59 The meeting was scheduled to coincide with the biannual feast and illumination of the temple of the Children of Peace. The June feast and illumination, held in honour of David Willson’s birthday, had long been a popular local event for members and non-members alike. Holding the meeting coincident to the illumination was a masterstroke of electioneering, as those assembled were invited to first join for lunch, a ‘communion table set for the purpose of uniting religious sentiment.’ By establishing Sharon as the centre of the new political union, their new meeting house, completed in 1842, became a renewed ‘radical hall’ to replace Turton’s Building. The Union Society ultimately settled on Dr William Baldwin as Robert Baldwin’s replacement; Dr Baldwin, however, was reticent about accepting. The violence of the Yonge Street Durham meeting had led to strenuous objections from his wife, who was ‘quite terrified’ at the thought of his re-entering politics. He ultimately accepted only when Robert quieted his mother’s fears in early August.60 Larger events, however, were to complicate the nomination process. Although Robert Baldwin had been appointed solicitor general, he had not been appointed to the Executive Council, but that had changed on 13 February 1841, when he, along with a number of conservatives, was named to the Executive Council of the United Provinces. Baldwin had found himself in the same position in 1836, when Head also included him in a mixed council. Baldwin had provoked a constitutional crisis by resigning in 1836, and he faced similar pressure to do so in 1841. Baldwin’s role as leader of the reformers was compromised by Sydenham’s ‘mixed’ ministerial system; a mixed council could not expect to have the confidence of any party, and hence was antithetical to the principle of responsible government that Baldwin advocated. Although he

230

‘Union Is Strength’

clearly expressed his lack of confidence in the new council to Sydenham, Baldwin did not resign his post as solicitor general immediately, due to the elections. The opening of the first parliament of the United Canadas, on 13 June, forced the issue.61 Thus, as the Union Society was meeting in Sharon to decide on a new candidate for the 4th Riding of York, Baldwin was demanding that Sydenham include Louis LaFontaine, leader of the Lower Canadian reformers, in the Executive Council, or he would resign. Sydenham had sought to divide Upper and Lower Canadian reformers by totally shutting the French Canadians out of the Executive Council. Sydenham, of course, refused to accept the ultimatum; the election was now over, and with his commanding majority, he could dispense with Baldwin’s ‘ultras.’62 The inclusion of LaFontaine in a responsible cabinet was problematic in other senses as well. LaFontaine had lost the election in his home constituency of Terrebonne, the product of the ‘Sydenham system’ of electoral violence, and the careful redrawing of riding boundaries to include a small but significant English population to whom the polling place was granted; here, ‘union’ entailed the suppression of the French majority. Petitions contesting the fraudulent election were refused on a technicality; a bill to receive them won in the lower house despite the government’s opposition but was easily defeated in the Legislative Council. It was at this point, 10 August, that Baldwin wrote to his father, ‘I think it would be very desirable that you should even tho’ you may have already accepted the nomination for North York suggest to them the expediency of accepting your retirement and of returning Mr LaFontaine … I am satisfied that nothing could be done at this conjuncture would have a better effect upon the state of [the reform] parties in the House than his return just now for North York.’63 Dr Baldwin immediately sent his son’s letter to the Union Society, who agreed with ‘Mr David Willson [who] said that as justice had been refused to the Lower Canadians he will support Mr L.’ With this initial support, Baldwin informed LaFontaine of his actions, and asked if LaFontaine would accept the nomination, if offered. LaFontaine responded that ‘my election to Parliament, particularly by an Upper Canada constituency, might be considered as of some importance. Since you are of the opinion that my election may be useful to the Reform cause, I will cordially accede to your wishes and those of your friends.’ The decision to support LaFontaine’s nomination had been taken, however, by a small local coterie, the executive of the Union Society. The actual nomination proved more difficult to engineer.64

The Promise of Responsible Government 231

The committee of vigilance of the Union Society met in Sharon on 21 August with Dr Baldwin, their chosen candidate, attending to explain his son’s proposition. It was met with ‘an alarming pause.’ Discussion seemed to lead nowhere. Baldwin wrote his son, ‘it was impossible for me quite to understand the gravity of the whole. Mr Wilson [sic] seemed uneasy, and so did others of the committee. Some feeble efforts were made to put the question of nomination to a vote.’ The committee cleared the room of all non-members, including Baldwin, and after twenty minutes emerged to announce their unanimous support for LaFontaine: ‘Mr Wilson [sic] was the proposer of the resolution on the subject – had it ready.’ This resolution was later published in the Examiner, and declared, ‘Let us show the world our disapprobation to elections obtained by riot, and such parliamentary measures as refuse to grant equal justice to every representative of Canada.’65 LaFontaine was nominated precisely to defend the principle of the local riding to nominate its candidates without executive interference. Willson later informed Baldwin that, despite the apparent unanimity, there was a powerful local opposition to the nomination; the wounds of McIntosh’s loss had not yet healed.66 Jacob Aemilius Irving, a prominent and wealthy reformer in Newmarket, said ‘he will spend £1000 to keep [LaFontaine] out.’67 Joseph Cawthra, a Newmarket merchant, also supported McIntosh. Irving told Baldwin that ‘nothing would pain me more than a dissension between the reformers in the neighbourhood, but at the same time see nothing so inevitable if you persist in bringing Mr LaFontaine forward as a candidate for 4th Riding.’ He warned Robert Baldwin not to accept his father’s interpretation of the meeting the previous week in Sharon, as there was a strong opposition movement growing, and given the state of the ‘party feelings’ violence could result. He castigated Baldwin for encouraging this violence: ‘No one can condemn violence and outrage more than myself and would do all in my power to prevent it, and would not from threats be deterred. Yet would never thrust a stranger forward when I thought such would be the result.’68 It was probably he who wrote a broadside attacking Baldwin and the ‘French party’ for voting down money for local road improvements: ‘if you would lose all hope of seeing your internal improvements carried out – send Mr LaFontaine to parliament as the nominee of Mr Robert Baldwin.’69 Despite this considerable opposition, and the threats of violence, the Union Society invited LaFontaine to visit the riding, again choosing the biannual feast and illumination of the temple, on 3 September, as

232

‘Union Is Strength’

the occasion. Dr Baldwin and LaFontaine arrived at sunset, after a day of driving rain, to find the candlelit temple illuminated with a ‘very striking effect.’ The next morning they breakfasted with Willson, attended the church service, and the subsequent feast. Dr Baldwin wrote his son, ‘All was admirably well conducted, perfect order, discourse, and mutual respect and deference. After church the good men of the neighbourhood assembled at the school house and I introduced Mr LaFontaine.’70 A larger meeting was held the next day for the riding as a whole, at which the address of the committee of vigilance to the electors was read. The address lambasted those reformers who objected to LaFontaine because ‘he is guilty in their eyes of the unpardonable crime of being, as they please untruly to call him, a Frenchman. Another objection is that he is from a distance; another that we might find a man nearer home.’ The committee was unanimous in its recommendation of LaFontaine, and they ‘rejoice[d] to say that we have it in our power to show our impartial respect to the Canadian people of the Lower Province.’71 LaFontaine then began a series of similar thinly attended public meetings in the riding, each of which confirmed the resolution of support of the Sharon meeting.72 Despite the show of support, the election of LaFontaine was not a foregone conclusion. A self-inflicted wound threatened to invalidate the whole election. Robert Baldwin had introduced his bill ‘to provide for the freedom of Elections’ early in the parliamentary session, before inducing LaFontaine to run in 4th York. The bill was intended to protect those voting from armed violence by the Orange Order. The bill was passed by the Assembly on 27 August, and by the Legislative Council on 7 September.73 LaFontaine immediately flagged the issue, noting the irony that a reform bill to ensure freedom of elections would invalidate the already issued writ for LaFontaine’s by-election on 20 September in the 4th Riding of York: ‘the whole will turn out to be a farce. I will laugh at it as much as others.’74 Baldwin was aware of the problem, and sought to ameliorate it by ‘introducing into Mr Harrison’s [Voter] Registration Bill a clause excluding my act from operating in the North York election.’ Both these bills were under consideration by a select committee of which Baldwin was a part. Baldwin was, however, put in the uncomfortable position of excluding LaFontaine’s election from his own Act to Provide for the Freedom of Elections, which would open the doors to possible election violence. His solution to the dilemma, adding a rider to the Voter Registration Act, depended on that bill passing before the House of Assembly was prorogued. The bill passed the lower

The Promise of Responsible Government 233

house on the 16th only because the session was extended by several days; it was immediately sent up to the Legislative Council, but did not pass its third reading in time. Catastrophe was only averted when, on the 18th, Sydenham reserved Baldwin’s Freedom of Elections Act for royal assent, thereby leaving all the election laws untouched, and the by-election in 4th York valid, although under threat of Orange violence. Reserving the bill was to be one of Sydenham’s last official acts; he died the next day in agony from lockjaw. Few politicians have been so compellingly silenced. The day of the election was thus a tense one: the validity of the vote was not yet known, Orange violence was threatened at the polling place, and McIntosh had once again proclaimed himself a candidate. And unlike his contest against Baldwin, McIntosh attended the hustings against LaFontaine. The contest was, however, unequal. By the end of the second day of polling, LaFontaine had 186 votes to McIntosh’s fiftytwo, leading McIntosh to resign the contest. After the election a jubilant ‘Mr LaFontaine, accompanied by Mr Baldwin, and several of their friends, proceeded to Sharon, where they dined. From thence, after dinner, they were escorted by the Sharon Band, and a numerous body of Reformers in wagons and on horseback, and displaying appropriate banners, round by the Red Mills, down Yonge-street [and hence past “Bonshaw,” the estate of Aemelius Irving], and back to Newmarket.’75 The election of LaFontaine was a radical assertion of the right of local ridings to nominate their own candidates free from administrative interference or violent intimidation. Sydenham had bent the weight of his administration to excluding the leader of the French Canadian reformers from election, and from the Executive Council. However, as Baldwin had proclaimed, ‘Union is strength,’ the Union Society of the 4th Riding had successfully pursued its principles, and it now pushed their representatives to pursue the promise of responsible government in the united legislature with the new majority that LaFontaine’s election was to give them. The Orange Order The first stone of a new [University] college had been laid but a few days before, by the Governor General … It is a matter of deep regret that political differences should have run high in this place, and led to most discreditable and disgraceful results. It is not long since guns were discharged from a window in this town at the successful candidates in an election,

234

‘Union Is Strength’

and the coachman of one of them was actually shot in the body, though not dangerously wounded. But one man was killed on the same occasion; and from the very window whence he received his death, the very flag which shielded his murderer (not only in the commission of his crime, but from its consequences), was displayed again on the occasion of the public ceremony performed by the Governor General, to which I have just adverted. Of all the colours in the rainbow, there is but one which could be so employed: I need not say that flag was orange. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 1842

Robert Baldwin had resigned from the 1841 electoral contest in Toronto to run in the 4th Riding of York, based on a fear that a reform victory was impossible in the Compact Tory-controlled city of Toronto. Baldwin, whose own father had been assaulted by the city’s Orangemen in the 1839 Durham meeting, was all too aware of the strength of the Orange Order in Toronto. Although Sydenham’s policy of uniting moderate reformers with moderate Tories successfully undermined support for the Compact Tory candidates in Toronto in 1841, that victory was to be short-lived, as the subsequent Orange riot and murder recorded by Charles Dickens were to attest. However, Baldwin was also wrong to think that he would be safe from the Orange carnage outside the city, as that same Durham skirmish, and the still-unpunished murder of David Leppard confirmed. The Compact Tories and their Orange allies, under the leadership of Toronto Alderman George Duggan, Jr, were to prove the nemesis of Baldwin, LaFontaine, and the Union Society formed by the Children of Peace in 4th York. Sydenham had supported the candidacy of John H. Dunn, the receiver general, who like Baldwin now sat on the Executive Council; and prominent wholesaler Isaac Buchanan, the head of the Toronto Board of Trade, whose credentials ‘were so impeccable that the Tories had earlier asked him to serve’ as a candidate.76 Dunn and Buchanan were opposed by Toronto merchant and mayor George Munro, and by Henry Sherwood, whose role in the Types Riot and in the takeover of the Farmers’ Bank has already been noted. Despite the strong antagonisms between the candidates, they all shared a common mercantile background, as Buchanan’s acceptability to both moderate conservatives and Tories underscores. During the six days of polling, it initially appeared that Baldwin’s fears were well founded, as Munro and Sherwood used their control of

The Promise of Responsible Government 235

the corporation’s police and the Orange Order to block access to the hustings of reform voters for Sydenham candidates Dunn and Buchanan. It was not until almost three hundred Roman Catholics marched to the polls after mass that the moderates gained control, pushing them into the lead. The election in Toronto was ultimately a tame affair, perhaps due to the Tory lead for most of the polling; but elsewhere, electoral violence sparked by Orangemen led to riots and deaths in Streetsville, Halton West, Durham County, and the 1st Riding of York. The Orange Riot and murder in Toronto of which Charles Dickens wrote did not occur until several days after the election during the celebratory parade, or ‘chairing,’ of the victors. While loyalism was to provide the ideological link between Toronto’s Tory patrician order and this working-class organization, it was patronage that cemented the tie. The corporation of Toronto developed into an Orange-Tory bastion in the 1840s, as the Tory elite drew on the Orange Order for its often-violent electoral support; as a judiciary, they ignored Orange infractions of the law in return. The Tories were also able to draw on the corporation’s considerable economic resources to provide patronage positions to their largely working-class lodge members. The source of the corporation’s patronage power lay in its ability to appoint a number of officials, including the city works inspector and the police, as well as its power to license the city’s inns, taverns, carters, and cabmen. The corporation’s public works inspector, a ‘Mr Davis,’ served as a natural link between the city’s patrician elected officials such as Henry Sherwood, who became mayor in 1842 and member of Parliament for Toronto in 1843, and the host of Orange workingmen that the city employed. When Davis was finally fired after Sherwood left office, the Globe baldly stated that he was the man who ‘had bullied the inhabitants of the city for many years, who ruled the corporation with a rod of iron, who knows all the corporation rascalities from the beginning to the end, who controls the town elections as he thinks proper, the bosom friend and pitcher of Mr Henry Sherwood.’77 During the 1841 Orange Riot, for example, a citizen, John Maitland, ran to the mayor’s office to report the incidents, and there found Davis with then mayor Munro. When Munro told Maitland to ‘go to the Devil,’ Maitland responded in kind, and found himself thrown over the stove by Davis.78 This act of violence was witnessed by the city’s chief magistrate, and by two police constables, and demonstrates how the Orange Order came to command a monopoly on ‘legal’ violence. Francis Hincks noted several times in legislative debates that one of the Orange rioters

236

‘Union Is Strength’

that attacked him in the Yonge Street Durham Riot of 1839 was later promoted to a permanent position on the Toronto police. That force consisted of a high bailiff and five constables, reinforced as necessary (e.g., during polling) with specially appointed constables paid five shillings a day, most of whom were drawn from Orange Order ranks. The 1841 Toronto riding elections, where the mayor and Henry Sherwood were the Tory candidates, were held in a city-owned building. Tory supporters, reinforced by forty special constables, hid in the basement until needed to intimidate Buchanan’s and Dunn’s supporters. When Orangemen collected several days later to assault the Sydenham candidates’ victory parade, the mayor refused to send the police, even though the riot went on for twenty minutes only several hundred yards from city hall. Thomas Kelly, the Orangeman who had fired the shot that killed an innocent man, was the only rioter jailed; he was defended by Henry Sherwood and ultimately found innocent.79 The licensing of taverns was the last potent political weapon used to reward friends and punish enemies: the number of licences issued rose from thirty-six in 1836–7 to 140 (or one legal bar for every hundred citizens) by 1841. Since bars were meeting places for many political partisans, threats against tavernkeepers who supported opposition politicians were part of the Tory manipulation of licences to ensure support. This confluence of lodge, tavern, and election rigging was clearly demonstrated in the testimony of five tavernkeepers in the aftermath of the Sydenham election riot in Toronto. For example, one Irish barkeep, Peter Harkins, testified that he had acquired his licence in 1840 through a small bribe to a Tory alderman, who had charges against him for unlicensed selling remitted. He was later offered £30, or £5 a day, to keep an open house for Tory candidates in the 1841 election, an offer he refused. When he voted for the Sydenham candidates, the old charges and fines were executed. Similarly, John Lindsay, an Orangeman, a former city constable, and tavernkeeper, openly attributed his success to the Orange Order. However, in 1839 he attended the Durham meeting on Yonge Street (where David Leppard was murdered), at the instigation of the corporation, to oppose the reformers. Lindsay instead joined the reformers when the meeting divided, a fact noted by Sheriff Jarvis who told him he would pay later. And indeed, Lindsay’s licence was not renewed, and he was prosecuted when he continued to sell liquor. During the 1841 election both Tory candidates offered him a licence in return for support, and money for an open house. After he refused the offer, Lindsay was again charged with selling without a licence.80 Control of the corporation was thus a critical building block of both

The Promise of Responsible Government 237

continued Tory rule and Orange Order ascendancy in the closed corporation of the city of Toronto. The Orange Order, in turn, provided Toronto politicians with the muscle they needed to extend that control into the hinterland, and to intimidate voters in the rural ridings of the Home District, as the 1839 Yonge Street Durham Riot demonstrated. The absence of Orange lodges in the northern half of York County was notable even in the period. As part of its plans to expand into that hinterland, the order appointed its chaplain as a paid field organizer for the Home District. His lack of success was also notable; only two of the forty-six lodges created in Ontario between 1842 and 1843 were chartered there.81 Taking the lead in this expansionist drive was Toronto Alderman George Duggan, Jr, the master of Lodge 137 in the city, and district master by 1840. Duggan’s nemesis, Robert Baldwin, was not the only Toronto politician to seek election in the ridings of York. According to Hincks, Duggan played an organizational role in the Yonge Street Durham Riot of 1839;82 and in 1842 he was to defeat Baldwin himself in the 2nd Riding of York. Little attention has been focused on this contest between Baldwin and Duggan, which is so reflective of the larger struggles between ‘responsible government,’ on the one hand, and Loyalist/ Orange Order ascendancy, on the other. Baldwin’s success and the order’s failures in the northern half of the Home District are largely the responsibility of the Children of Peace, whose Union Society protected the local ridings’ rights to nominate and elect their own candidates despite intimidation. Union Is Strength Three weeks before Sydenham’s horrific death, the Whig ministry in Britain that had appointed him fell and was replaced by a Tory cabinet led by conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel. Whatever tolerance for reform that had existed now evaporated. The highly centralized edifice of state created by Sydenham proved to be extremely short-lived, allowing old political rivalries to re-emerge. Sydenham’s attempt to concentrate power in the hands of the Crown, and so cement the imperial connection, collapsed as quickly as his ‘middle party’; he had been the glue, and with his death, old party loyalties soon whittled away his majority in the House of Assembly. The reform camp had been strengthened by the by-election successes of three new members, including LaFontaine. The Compact Tories were increasingly less inclined to share power in a mixed cabinet, and equally resisted subordination to imperial whim that eroded their local power. The new governor was faced

238

‘Union Is Strength’

with a significant challenge in reconstructing the Executive Council, since a new solicitor general of Upper Canada had not yet been appointed after Baldwin’s resignation. The prominent Compact Tory J.S. Cartwright refused the position outright if the cabinet was to include men like Francis Hincks as inspector general (minister of finance). Sydenham’s strategy of working with a pliable moderate ministry was no longer assured the confidence of the House of Assembly. The balance of power between the government party and its diverse opposition now lay with the French Canadians, under the leadership of the newly elected Louis LaFontaine, representing the 4th Riding of York. The strength of this union between Upper and Lower Canadian reformers was laid bare on the arrival of Sydenham’s replacement, Sir Charles Bagot, former British ambassador to the United States. Bagot arrived in Kingston, the new home of the Assembly of the United Canadas, in January 1842, to a political landscape as different as the changed ministry in England. Although Bagot had little sympathy for the national aspirations of French Canadians, he was intent on drawing them into the government as a means of breaking this alliance between the Lower and Upper Canadian reformers. Bagot thus veiled his assimilationist views, and sought to win the French Canadians over by offering them a role in a ‘mixed’ cabinet with conservatives, while excluding Baldwin and the Upper Canadian reformers. Bagot’s desperation to form an Executive Council increased as the summer wore on and the new session of Parliament was to open in Kingston in September 1842. He managed to draw both the reform ‘defector,’ Francis Hincks, and the Orange Tory stalwart and Toronto mayor, Henry Sherwood, into the council, but even they assured him that the council could not count on legislative support unless the French party was included. A year after Sydenham’s death, with a delayed session of Parliament about to open, Bagot sent for LaFontaine, to inform him that the French Canadians would be invited into the government, not as individuals, but as a party. LaFontaine shocked Bagot by demanding four places at the cabinet table, including Baldwin, thereby returning the favour of a year earlier, when Baldwin had resigned over the exclusion of the Canadiens from the Executive Council. The reform alliance between English and French that the by-election in the 4th Riding of York had established was now decisively confirmed. If Bagot wanted the Canadiens, he would have to include the advocate of responsible government, Robert Baldwin. On the first day of the session, LaFontaine addressed the Assembly

The Promise of Responsible Government 239

in French in violation of the rules, thereby emphasizing that the ‘union of the Canadas’ would take a radically different form than that envisioned by the imperial authorities. John Ralston Saul has declared that one paragraph in that speech ‘is one of the key paragraphs in the history of statesmanship in this country.’ LaFontaine was to say, echoing the words of the electors of Terrebonne to the electors of the 4th Riding of York: ‘Struggles of principle and political beliefs have been engaged in the separate legislatures of Lower and Upper Canada. Sympathies gradually formed between the men struggling in each place for the same cause, even if they had not yet physically met. Those sympathies began to grow, to become more present the moment that these men walked into this House, this Chamber, were able to shake each other’s hands. These relations created not only sympathies but far more than that. They created moral obligations to which our own sense of our honour imposes an absolute necessity for me in particular not to be found lacking. I have remained faithful to those obligations.’83 LaFontaine had, that day, refused a seat in the Executive Council unless Baldwin was included. Ralston Saul refers to this paragraph as an expression of ‘a great humanist pact’ between reformers by which responsible government was eventually to be obtained, and an authoritarian, colonial liberal capitalist state as envisioned by Sydenham defeated. This ‘union’ of the Canadas was henceforth to be founded on a civic humanist basis. Bagot bitterly resisted LaFontaine’s demands, but his own ministers threatened to resign unless he included the majority French party. Baldwin introduced a non-confidence motion in Parliament to increase the pressure. After a week of crisis and brinksmanship, and harried on all sides, Bagot finally conceded. Baldwin and LaFontaine entered a largely reform ministry, from which they began a productive legislative session; among other measures, Baldwin’s Freedom of Elections Bill finally passed. As Governor Bagot became ill, Baldwin and LaFontaine became the first real premiers of the province of Canada. Full Circle However, Baldwin’s victory was not yet assured; and here we come full circle to the 4th Riding of York, George Duggan, and Orange Order violence. As new ministers taking office, both Baldwin and LaFontaine had to face a by-election. While LaFontaine was easily re-elected in the 4th Riding of York, Baldwin was beaten in his constituency of Hast-

240

‘Union Is Strength’

ings by a conservative resurgence indignant at the surrender of British interests. The by-election was marred by such violence that troops had to be called out to quell the rioting. A subsequent nomination in a by-election in the 2nd Riding of York saw Baldwin decisively defeated by Toronto alderman and Orange Order District Master George Duggan, Jr. The new reform ministry was thus to depend on LaFontaine returning Baldwin’s favour of 1841. LaFontaine arranged for Baldwin to run for a Lower Canadian seat, and on 30 January 1843 Baldwin was returned by acclamation in a by-election in Rimouski, forging another link between east and west. Baldwin now represented a seat in Lower Canada, and LaFontaine in Upper Canada. The now seriously ill Governor Bagot was replaced in March 1843 with a new governor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, who was instructed to check the ‘radical’ government of Baldwin and LaFontaine. Metcalfe was convinced that only the Tories were loyal. The victory grasped from the ailing Bagot proved ephemeral, as the now staunchly Tory Colonial Office once again attempted to intervene in local elections and create a legislature with which they could work ‘harmoniously.’ Metcalfe refused to work with the reform ministers, who ultimately resigned in November 1843, and thus precipitated a year-long crisis that resulted in new elections only in November 1844. This year-long crisis, in which the legislature was prorogued, ‘was the final signpost on Upper Canada’s conceptual road to democracy. Lacking the scale of the American Revolution, it nonetheless forced a comparable articulation and rethinking of the basics of political dialogue in the province.’84 Normal politics was suspended for the year, as public debate raged. During the year-long crisis, Metcalfe was to champion the Sydenham system and its conceptions of a limited, liberal capitalist government accountable to the imperial state, not the local Assembly. The divided reformers, under the impetus of some new blood in Toronto, established a Reform Association there in February 1844, in an attempt to explain the reasons for Baldwin’s and LaFontaine’s resignation, and to disseminate their understanding of responsible government before the expected election. At least ten branches of the association were formed in Upper Canada. Willson wrote to Baldwin shortly thereafter seeking to have association members from across the province meet in Sharon.85 The Sharon branch was established in May, and soon after it announced another grand reform meeting to be held concurrently with the illumination of the temple in June. This grand meeting of the Reform Association in Sharon was ultimately to serve as the springboard for Baldwin’s successful candidacy

The Promise of Responsible Government 241

in 4th York. Baldwin had been at a loss about where to run after his loss in Hastings. Orange mobs continued to rule out any chance in Hastings, or in 2nd York, where he had lost to Orange leader George Duggan. LaFontaine, in yet another act of friendship, gave up his seat representing 4th York, thus allowing the desperate Baldwin to run there. David Willson, having arranged for a Reform Association rally during the illumination ceremony, now became Baldwin’s campaign manager. It was reported that over three thousand people attended this June rally for Baldwin.86 However, this grand show of support did not prevent other threats of violence. From Sharon, Baldwin had travelled to Bradford a few miles away in Simcoe County where he had planned a similar reform rally. Unlike the three thousand who attended in Sharon, barely fifteen showed up in Bradford, due to the circulation of a handbill several days before predicting a ‘second Durham races.’ The handbill invoked the spectre of the 1839 Durham Riot, and as predicted, over three hundred Orangemen armed with clubs and firearms under the leadership of George Duggan collected around the tavern where the meeting was to be held. Duggan and Henry Sherwood had been Baldwin’s primary parliamentary opposition when Baldwin had introduced the Secret Societies Bill, making the Orange Order illegal in the reform-dominated legislature in 1843; although the bill had been passed, Governor Metcalfe reserved the bill, and the Colonial Office disallowed it. Emboldened, Duggan began direct attacks on Baldwin. The Bradford meeting was abruptly cancelled and Baldwin fled, although it was only a fast horse that stood between him and life-threatening injury. One of his companions was seriously hurt in the succeeding riot by thrown stones.87 The attack confirmed information Baldwin had received of Governor Metcalfe’s complicity with the Orange Order.88 As the crisis continued to stretch into the summer while Metcalfe vainly attempted to rebuild his cabinet, Baldwin was forced to try to sustain the momentum of his supporters in the 4th Riding of York. Willson again organized a rally in Sharon timed to coincide with the fall illumination of the temple.89 In a repeat of the tactics used at the Bradford meeting, the Orange Order under Duggan’s leadership called on its members to attend this rally, a ‘third Durham races.’ Reformers warned that the Orangemen would ‘fall upon the persons peaceably attending the meeting, and with clubs and bludgeons disperse them – maiming many, and perhaps murdering others.’90 While seemingly melodramatic, we must remember that the warning was made to those who had already lost a member of their community in the first Durham

242

‘Union Is Strength’

Riot, and that one of the unpunished organizers of that riot was none other than Duggan. Many reform leaders originally scheduled to speak there evidently took the warning seriously, and did not show up. As if to signal their complete control over Toronto, and their aim to eliminate the joint stock democracy of the reformers, the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, its land taken by the corporation, issued its last dividend; the cornerstone for the new St Lawrence market building was laid on its foundation the very same week as the illumination.91 Duggan did arrive, uninvited, to the rally, as predicted, but not with the usual armed escort of Orangemen. There he was reminded ‘that the man that attempts to raise his hand with a weapon is an enemy to himself, to society, and to God.’ With many of the reform leaders absent, he arrogantly pushed his way to the podium to defend Metcalfe’s policies.92 That Duggan felt he could intrude on the gathering, alone and unarmed, is an indication that election violence in the riding was truly one-sided and that those who rejected such violence also respected free speech by all. The Children of Peace and their supporters were not easily intimidated, even as they faced stiffer and stiffer resistance. Baldwin’s win in the 4th Riding of York could not be taken for granted, any more than it could in the 2nd Riding of York, or the Riding of Hastings. Indeed, after the election, Baldwin was to write LaFontaine after returning from ‘a sumptuous dinner’ given in his honour in Sharon: ‘I returned late last evening from the 4th Riding which we carried by a majority of 169. Your majority at the last election [in the same riding] was 212 or 214 … the lessened majority may I think be principally attributed to more votes having been polled in Brock the strong Orange Township … Whitchurch and East Gwillembury [sic] however sustained us by increased majorities.’ Revolution with a Revolutionary Moment As noted earlier, Ian McKay has argued that ‘the book(s) we are missing on this theme of “The Canadian Liberal Revolution” would necessarily dwell on … the Rebellions of 1837, Lord Durham’s Report, and the Acts of Union of 1841 [which] taken together as one moment could be interpreted as the high point and defeat of liberalism’s civic humanist adversary.’93 The Metcalfe crisis would appear to confirm that ultimate defeat. Although Baldwin and LaFontaine won their individual seats, they did not immediately win the majority they needed to back their reform ministry. Metcalfe, with Orange Order complicity, seemingly

The Promise of Responsible Government 243

had the upper hand, and the ideology of Loyalism was successfully deployed to unite a broad coalition of conservative moderates to support the British connection over responsible government. Reform success did not conclusively arrive until 1849 with the passing of the Rebellion Losses Bill under Baldwin and LaFontaine’s leadership, the burning of the Parliament buildings by an Orange mob, and the repatriation of William Lyon Mackenzie. This final achievement, responsible government or ‘sovereignty by stealth,’ played out against the background of the republican revolutions in Europe. Baldwin and LaFontaine’s momentary electoral defeat hides the pivotal change in the basic terms of political organization won by the civic humanists during the Metcalfe crisis which made this later success possible. As historian J.M.S. Careless concludes: ‘Without intending it, the Governor had actually helped an incipient conservative party to take shape, as supporters rallied about him: one that was no longer the old tory Compact in essence, based on oligarchy; but which was based instead on the acceptance of at least a qualified form of responsible parliamentary government.’94 Historian Jeffrey McNairn has expanded on this signal victory, which ‘demonstrated the obsolescence of mixed monarchy and the necessity that its replacement be a form of government by discussion.’95 The real success of Baldwin and LaFontaine in 1844 was to decisively establish the primacy of democratic rule over royal prerogative, even if, in that democratic contest, they failed to achieve a majority. Sydenham had staked his peerage on achieving the dual goals of municipal government reform and uniting the Canadas; these goals were indeed achieved, though not in the form he proposed. Although Canada lacks a revolutionary moment where the yoke of colonial control was clearly overthrown, these civic humanists slowly took the reins, and through incremental victories transformed the very nature of the country we call Canada. These victories were not strictly parliamentary, for democracy, as they argued, was an open process of public participation and deliberation. In this book, following McNairn’s lead, we have traced the variety of economic and political vehicles that shaped that public discussion, ending with David Willson’s Union Society. That Union Society ensured the elections of Baldwin and LaFontaine; but more importantly, it imbued those elected representatives with a vision of a united Canada that transcended the violent and chauvinistic loyalist articles of faith of Tories, and their Orange Order allies. At the local level, the effort that had gone into the organization of the

244

‘Union Is Strength’

Union Society was to prove useful in the first election for district councillors. The election was held in the first week of January 1842, coincident with the annual election of township officers. In the Home District as a whole, reform candidates commanded a majority; but in the townships comprising the 4th Riding of York, they swept the elections.96 All of these councillors, including David Willson’s son, Hugh, had been members of the Union Society’s committee of vigilance. Hugh had marched on the city in 1837, and had apparently resisted his father’s entreaties at Montgomery’s Inn to return home; a mistake for which he was to dearly pay.97 Hugh was jailed, first in Toronto for seven months, and then in the Kingston Penitentiary until October 1838.98 The new district councils thus functioned as Sydenham had wanted, allowing a new generation of reform politicians the ‘gratification of ambition in a narrow circle,’ in a forum that tested ‘the talents or integrity of those who are candidates for popular favour’: the district councils took over where the now defunct joint stock mini-parliaments had left off. One of the first actions of the newly elected district councillors was to respond to the vote of thanks from the electors of Terrebonne to the electors of the 4th Riding. The election of LaFontaine in 4th York had the effect desired by Baldwin in uniting the French party under LaFontaine, and unifying them with the smaller group of radical reformers in Upper Canada. Critically, it was the electors of both the 4th Riding of York and of Terrebonne who sought to remind their representatives of the significance of their votes. The address from the electors of Terrebonne lauded the constituents of the 4th Riding for their lack of ‘national prejudice’ and for ‘having no view but one aim, the confraternity of both populations.’99 The district councillors for the 4th Riding responded that they had been ‘deeply impressed with horror at a perversion of authority, which employs might for the subversion of right.’ They were ‘impelled by a sense of duty, to mark, in the strongest manner, our disapprobation of the scenes of blood and disorder, which had been enacted at the Elections in Canada East.’ They hoped ‘to break down the partition wall of prejudice, by holding out to our fellow subjects of French origin, the right hand of friendship, in electing to represent us, one of their tried and ablest defenders.’100 Lord Durham’s supposed ‘deadly animosity’ between French and English had proven ephemeral, as they overcame differences of language, culture, religion, and distance to unite under the principles of equal rights, the local nomination of representatives, and responsible government.

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy

Yonge Street tied the pioneering communities of Toronto and Hope in each other’s opposing embrace: two disparate kingdoms, two incompatible experiments on the periphery, embodying all the contradictions of England itself. It is not new to say that the Rebellion of 1837 clearly marks the point of confrontation between these two political and economic visions: Mackenzie’s agrarian vision and anti-corporate rhetoric was itself a clear enough comment on Family Compact-owned institutions such as the Bank of Upper Canada. Throughout this book, I have pointed to the manner in which this local conflict reflected a larger, international movement – the transition to capitalism – with its attendant economic, social, and political strains. But where most studies of this transition have tended to focus on the entrepreneurial mentalité of individual capitalists, the attention here has been on capitalism’s corporate aspects and their political implications. The reformers drew on this international experience for skills, ideas, and support. Robert Owen’s struggle against the imposition of the new Poor Laws and the Jacksonian Democrats’ struggle against the ‘monster bank’ both provided fodder for local debates on the future of the Upper Canadian state and society. Drawing on the civic humanism of the Country Party, the reformers expressed concerns about the manner in which the state conferred special privileges – ‘licensed monopolies’ – to chartered companies, and on the way that the state itself was increasingly reconceptualized as a closed corporation operating according to liberal capitalist principles. Economics mattered. Yet, while scholars have been quick to invoke economic explanations of events such as the rebellions, they have been less quick to explore how economic norms, assumptions, and behav-

246

‘Union Is Strength’

iour were understood at the time, and the degree of economic and moral conflict about the consequences of change. McCalla’s authoritative study of the Upper Canadian economy, for example, asserts that ‘from the beginning of the economy farmers were directly involved in the marketplace and responsive to its demands and signals.’1 We cannot, however, read an economic actor’s assumptions and motivations from his or her simple presence in the marketplace. Feudal farmers and communal Hutterites, for example, both sold in the market, yet they were driven by non-capitalist goals. The economy, in other words, is embedded in cultural norms and expectations; the past ‘is a foreign country.’ As McNairn notes, economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘far from a narrow, technical science, was an integral part of moral philosophy and conjectural history. It encompassed broad questions about human needs and desires, the basis of social cooperation and progress, the promotion of virtuous behavior towards anonymous others, and the science of the legislator. Thus, Rev. John Strachan contemplated a single department of “Mental philosophy; moral and intellectual philosophy; Christian ethics; and political economy” at King’s College, Toronto.’2 The implications of these divergent cultural norms have been explored in this book. In particular, I have contested the idea that the transition to capitalism in this province was driven by individual economic actors – Adam Smith’s ‘rational maximizers’ – and emphasized, instead, the corporate nature of economic change. Chartered corporations such as the Bank of Upper Canada, the Canada Company, and the Clergy Corporation were all clearly tied to the political fortunes of the province’s small elite, the Family Compact. Similarly, the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, the Bank of the People, and less ‘economically’ focused joint stock companies such as Shepard’s Hall, the Toronto House of Industry, and the Children of Peace, tied economic interests to the political and religious aspirations of the reform community. It is important to underscore the alternate meanings of ‘economic activity’ that provided the rationale for these corporate endeavours. As McNairn indicates, economics was about ‘social cooperation and progress, [and] the promotion of virtuous behavior towards anonymous others,’ and hence included specific aspects of religion, education, and politics. The corporation was the only way in which common property – capital – could be organized, and the Court and Country parties differed in how they conceived of these corporations. The Court Party saw the corporation as a licensed monopoly to which the Crown delegated specific aspects of its sovereignty; the Country Party, in contrast, sought to limit

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 247

the encroachments by the new liberal capitalist state and its licensed monopolies under the control of the Crown by vesting this common property in democratically organized joint stock companies.3 Hence, I have argued that one implication of the corporate nature of economic change in this province was the development of a democratic culture. Joint stock companies, in particular, were ‘mini-parliaments,’ which were political in a number of senses. Their corporate organization itself was political, composed of a governing body elected from among its members to whom it was responsible. These were stakeholder democracies because of the lack of limited liability. Since every shareholder was responsible for collective decisions to the full extent of his or her personal property, shareholders exerted a high degree of vigilance over their elected boards. But these joint stock companies were also political in the sense that they engaged in political activities, such as petitioning the legislature, or sponsored political figures and organizations, such as William Lyon Mackenzie’s newspaper, the Constitution. I have also argued that the economic culture of these joint stock democracies was an outgrowth of ‘moral economy’ roots. Only those who were able to maintain their economic independence and respectability could retain their political right to vote, and this same respectability was all that preserved them from the legal system for the recovery of debt. The Country Party’s democratic ideal was thus rooted in a rather limited conception of the citizen: a male ‘freeholder’ with an independent livelihood. Preserving this independence was paramount. The Children of Peace dispensed charity to help members maintain their independence and respectability and used the language of charity to regulate their economic behaviour through collective concerns for meeting mutual needs. They drew on shared beliefs about the moral obligation of charity as an alternate economic language to the laissezfaire ideas of the dominant economic theorists of the day. Their utopian conception of charity was used to legitimate the political ideals of their new Jerusalem, the Kingdom of God on earth, and to call to account the Crown, the pharaoh who had abdicated his responsibilities to the poor. The irony of the transition to capitalism in Upper Canada, and to the democratic culture it fostered, thus lies in its corporate form and its co-operative nature. Gentlemanly Capitalism ‘The Upper Canada Club’ a first rate tory affair, [has been] set agoing in Mr Stanton’s large building corner of King and Bay Streets … the entrance

248

‘Union Is Strength’

money to which is £10, and after that $10 a year – and no games except chess, whist and draughts can be played. Such a club as this is for the very purpose of plotting and planning for pensions, power, place and plunder – and so is the executive council club, the legislative council club, the Bank of Upper Canada club, and the like of them. Constitution, 30 August 18374

In late August 1837, while in the throes of organizing public meetings for the Toronto Political Union, William Lyon Mackenzie noted the emergence of a ‘political union’ of a different sort, the Upper Canada Club. The creation of the club is an indication that Upper Canada’s elite were ambitious for more than mere wealth: they sought all the marks of gentility. It was this – rather than aristocratic birth – that set them apart within the hegemonic ideology of mixed monarchy on which the province’s constitution was based. Mackenzie was not far off in his estimation of the club’s purpose, or of the overlapping nature of this club with the Executive Council, the Legislative Council, and the Bank of Upper Canada. Historian J.K. Johnson’s analysis of the Upper Canadian elite between 1837 and 1840 measures influence according to overlapping leadership roles on the boards of the main social, political, and economic institutions in the community. For example, William Allan, one of the most powerful, ‘was an executive councilor, a legislative councilor, President of the Toronto and Lake Huron Railroad, Governor of the British American Fire and Life Assurance Company and President of the Board of Trade.’5 Johnson reports that twenty men served at least two leadership roles and that sixteen of these men were members of the Upper Canada Club. Johnson’s conclusion contests the common assertion that ‘none of the leading members of the Compact were business men, and … the system of values typical of the Compact accorded scant respect to business wealth as such.’6 The overlapping social, political, and economic leadership roles of club members demonstrates, Johnson argues, that ‘they were not a political elite taking political decisions in a vacuum, but an overlapping elite whose political and economic activities cannot be entirely separated from each other. They might even be called “entrepreneurs,” most of whose political views may have been highly conservative but whose economic outlook was clearly “developmental.”’7 Upper Canada’s elite, in other words, did not differ greatly from that of the United Kingdom itself. As Cain and Hopkins note of Eng-

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 249

land, ‘in 1790, no less than three-quarters of all agricultural land was owned by no more than 4,000–5,000 aristocrats and gentry … The control exercised by the peerage over the House of Commons remained undisturbed before 1832 and was only slowly eroded thereafter, while its dominance of the executive lasted well beyond 1850.’8 State, that is imperial, policy was clearly not determined by the increasing rhythm of the industrial revolution and the emergent middle class. This is not to claim, however, an unchanging rural conservatism. Whereas the impact of the industrial revolution is usually overstated for this period, innovations in the financial sector promoted by these aristocrats are taken for granted. Britain was almost a century ahead of France in developing the financial institutions that now dominate the economic stage. As this book has emphasized, this period was marked by important developments in banking, currency reform, and corporate organization. These innovations were dominated by the peerage, not the industrial bourgeoisie. New money, the financiers, rather than the industrial ‘barons,’ were gradually gentrified through the purchase of land, intermarriage, and the acquisition of titles. Cain and Hopkins refer to this alliance of peerage and financiers as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’: ‘a form of capitalism headed by improving landlords in association with improving financiers who served as their junior partners. This joint enterprise established a tradition of modernization and was itself the product of a modernization of tradition that both conserved gentlemanly values and carried them forward into a changing world.’9 As I have outlined, these new financial institutions were licensed monopolies, part of the vast expansion of state administration, public credit, and the financial and commercial revolutions that strengthened the power of the Crown over Parliament. The ‘political engine’ of the economy, to use the metaphor of the period, was not the industrial revolution, but the banks and chartered corporations. Gentlemanly capitalism was antagonistic to democracy, in both Canada and Britain. Throughout the nineteenth century even broad-minded liberals such as John Stuart Mill (who was, after all, an employee of the British East India Company) remained opposed to unrestrained democracy. While dismissing any property qualification for the vote, Mill argued that class domination by the majority should be avoided by offering managers and professionals a plurality of votes (and thereby ensured the continuing class domination by a minority).10 He similarly defended the East India Company’s non-representative rule in India. For Mill, ‘a despotic Company acted as a vaccine, a rela-

250

‘Union Is Strength’

tively painless infusion of absolutism that would preserve the general well-being of British democracy.’11 The preservation of gentlemanly capitalism entailed the preservation of the peerage, with all its privileges at home and absolutist colonial rule abroad. A perfect example of this emergent alliance in the creation of gentlemanly capitalism is none other than Sir Francis Bond Head, who was descended from a Spanish Jew, Dr Fernando Mendes, the personal physician of Catherine of Braganza, the Queen consort of Charles II. The Mendes family became London bankers and merchants, and they were ultimately able to transform their personal fortune into a peerage when Bond Head’s grandfather Moses married a Kentish heiress, Anna Gabriella Head, and his father adopted the Head patronym when he inherited his mother’s estate.12 Bond Head was educated in gentlemanly style, eventually graduating from the Royal Military Academy in 1811 as a military engineer. He served as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers until 1825, when he retired on half-pay to take up a position as mining supervisor for the Rio Plata Mining Association in Argentina. The company lost its concession, and Bond Head’s trip became a costly failure. Soon after Bond Head was restored to the active list of the army, and began a literary career. He gained a substantial reputation as author of such frothy works as ‘Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau, by an Old Man’ (1834). He was knighted in 1835, and created a baronet the following year in recognition of his work as assistant Poor Law commissioner in Kent. The history of Head’s family thus illustrates the alliance of peerage with finance capital typical of the period. Head himself was given a military education; the military was both custodian of gentlemanly values, as well as the means by which the imperialist expansion of empire was solidified. As an engineer, he served an equally pivotal role in the business of the Rio Plata Mining Association. As a peer with military experience, he was seconded into the civil administration to introduce the new laissez-faire Poor Laws. As a gentleman, a man of leisure, he pursued a literary career. The man was not a dilettante: these diverse activities fit naturally within the purview of the gentleman capitalist. A similar argument could be made about Charles Poulett Thomson, 1st Baron Sydenham, who sought to transform his family’s wealth from the Baltic timber trade into a peerage. Sydenham’s paradoxical business background, utilitarian political reforms, such as the imposition of democratic municipal government through autocratic means, and fanatical pursuit of a peerage can only be understood in the context

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 251

of gentlemanly capitalism. Like Mill, he sought to temper ‘democratic excess’ to ensure the state’s tutelary role, promoting individualism, efficiency, and order. Cain and Hopkins emphasize that ‘the empire created before the mid-nineteenth century represented the extension abroad of the institutions and principles entrenched at home.’13 Upper Canada, created in the very ‘image and transcript’ of the British constitution is but one example. While it is clear that Upper Canada had no peerage, the methods pursued to create one were the same as those that transformed the descendants of Dr Fernando Mendes, a Spanish Jew and banker, into landed aristocracy. The emergence of the Family Compact in the Legislative Council needs to be interpreted in the light of gentlemanly capitalism. Wealth created through the new financial service sector was gentrified through the pursuit of gentlemanly education, a military career, and the establishment of landed estates. This was not the slavish recreation of a ‘traditional peerage,’ but as Cain and Hopkins note, ‘a modernization of tradition that both conserved gentlemanly values and carried them forward into a changing world.’ It is the Family Compact, these gentlemanly capitalists, who sought to preserve mixed monarchy through the introduction of a modern financial sector. The life of the Venerable John Strachan illustrates this process. Strachan’s father was an overseer in a granite quarry in Aberdeen, Scotland. Strachan was the youngest of six children, and as the favourite, his mother proclaimed he ‘must be made a gentleman.’ He attended the local grammar school, and eventually graduated from Aberdeen University. Emigration to Upper Canada proved the only means by which this schoolteacher could hope of acquiring the gentility his mother had dreamed of. Once here, this Presbyterian applied to the bishop of Quebec for ordination in the Church of England. He was granted the parish of Cornwall, and then York, where he established a grammar school to train the province’s future elite in the gentlemanly values of love of country, respect for the constitution, and the importance of civic leadership. While this school set the bedrock for gentility, it is not the basis by which either Strachan or his students acquired their status. Strachan’s anti-democratic rhetoric as teacher and rector, combined with his service during the War of 1812, saw him appointed to the Executive Council in 1815 and the Legislative Council in 1820. It was from within this position of state power that Strachan succeeded in creating the economic institutions to gentrify himself and his pupils. The gentility born of education and established church was combined with

252

‘Union Is Strength’

the power of the financial revolution, and incorporation. The Clergy Corporation was established in 1819, and together with William Allan, Strachan helped found the Bank of Upper Canada in 1822. The Upper Canadian ‘aristocracy,’ the Family Compact, emerged through its oligarchic control of these corporate bodies that, through limited liability, preferentially shielded them from the risks of speculation. They clothed their new-found wealth in the robes of gentlemanly capitalism and the ideology of Loyalism and mixed monarchy. Strachan’s mother would no doubt have been proud of the owner of the ‘finest house in the town,’ popularly known as ‘the palace,’ although his own brother could not help but ask, ‘I hope it’s a’ come by honestly, John?’14 It is of no surprise that Archbishop Strachan’s eldest son should have sought further education at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and purchased a captaincy, and that subsequently he should study law, and co-found the Freeholders’ Bank. Strachan’s economic interests were by no means unusual for clergymen in the Church of England in the period. Boyd Hilton has pointed out that Christian political economy, an evangelical theological ‘science,’ played a far greater role in popularizing laissezfaire economic policies than the ‘scientific,’ or non-religious liberal capitalist political economists. They were the proponents of the Reverend Malthus’ pessimistic views on poor relief, at the core of Christian political economy, leading to the new Poor Law of 1834. The theological reasons for supporting these policies were often quite different from the economic rationale, yet they had greater popular impact.15 Despite William Lyon Mackenzie’s vicious stabs at their low origins in the first Patrick Swift satires, not all of the members of the Family Compact had such an onerous climb as Strachan. Many were of genteel, but recently impoverished birth, like the Boulton family. D’Arcy Boulton, Jr, named his estate on the western outskirts of Toronto the ‘Grange,’ after their ancestral home in Lincolnshire (now a bed and breakfast). Boulton’s grandfather was Sir John Strange, the master of the rolls and records of Chancery, the third most senior judge in England. Although Boulton’s father had studied law, he devoted most of his time to the Woolen Yarn Company by which the family was bankrupted in 1793. After regaining their fortunes through the practice of law in Upper Canada, the Boulton family lent its renewed gentility, through intermarriage, to the Loyalist Jones family of Brockville and the Robinson clan in Toronto. The Boultons also illustrate the means by which the Family Compact sought to establish their gentlemanly credentials through landed

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 253

estates, and ‘improving agriculture.’ The Grange and William Allan’s Moss Park were but two of a series of estates on park lots that ringed the city of Toronto. Boulton was also a magistrate, and for many years the chairman of the Court of Quarter Sessions for the Home District, the judicial body that served as the municipal government until the district councils were established. The Boulton family speculated extensively in land. For example, D’Arcy Boulton, the Grange’s owner, purchased over two thousand acres in York County in an 1830 auction of land sold for arrears in taxes, paying pennies an acre.16 Historian David Gagan’s analysis of Peel County’s absentee proprietors concludes that ‘whatever ideological and familial bonds held the “Family Compact” together, they shared at least one material interest – the profits to be made from the vacant lands on York’s frontier of economic development … The acreage under their control and the way in which they acquired it are remarkable even by contemporary standards; and when their unofficial activities are linked to the results of the land policies which were their official responsibility, their effect on the social landscape of colonial Upper Canada comes into sharp relief.’17 D’Arcy Boulton was not, however, a simple land speculator. Rather, such speculation was the means by which he could accumulate an estate that he could farm like the ‘improving gentry’ of England from which his family had originally sprung. Boulton was also behind the establishment of the Home District Agricultural Society, which he conceived of as a gentlemen’s club, no less than the Upper Canada Club.18 Agricultural societies of this sort sought to foster a form of capital-intensive mixed farming, incorporating the breeding of high-quality cattle. It was less profitable than wheat farming, and its capital requirements put it outside the reach of most farmers; it was, however, the gentlemanly pastime of half-pay officers and other squires who, like Boulton, tended to be appointed to the magistracy.19 The Upper Canada Club founded by these gentleman capitalists was, ironically, a joint stock company that promptly went bankrupt. Its passing is symbolic of the larger changes in the colony in this, the era of ‘union.’ When Thomas Wilson and Company, the province’s financial ‘agent’ in London, went bankrupt on 2 June 1837, the province lost access to £90,000 of its debentures. Without this money, it would have been unable to pay the interest on the public debt, which by then had swollen to £1.2 million cy. Upper Canada’s banks could provide no relief. One by one (with the ironic exception of the Bank of the People) they were forced to suspend redemption of their banknotes through

254

‘Union Is Strength’

the spring of 1838, in effect declaring bankruptcy. The Upper Canada Club’s bankruptcy can be taken metaphorically to represent what its elite members had done to the provincial economy. The club, which had operated at a loss for three years, went out of business in March 1840, its ‘superior furniture, plate and wines’ sold off to resolve its substantial debts20 – at about the same time as the Act of Union was passed, joining Upper and Lower Canada as a means of resolving Upper Canada’s crushing public debt. From Moral Economy to Joint Stock Democracy How do we reconcile the emergence of gentlemanly capitalism and the liberal state, with its antagonism to democracy, with the commonplace belief since the outbreak of the Cold War that only capitalism is compatible with democratic governance?21 Historian Allan Greer has aptly summarized this conundrum: By the late twentieth century, business corporations of staggering dimensions enjoy powers beyond anything even the paranoid imagination of W.L. Mackenzie could conceive. But what would shock an 1830s’ radical, magically brought back to life [today], even more than the scale of corporations, is the way they are treated in media discourse: not as privileged offspring of the state, but as its long-suffering, bill-paying parent. Now corporations are frequently treated as virtual citizens: they donate money to the symphony to gain recognition as a ‘good corporate citizen’; they convince courts that they have civil rights which entitle them to advertise cigarettes; they make common cause with non-corporate citizens in the fight to reduce taxes and cut welfare. Mackenzie held to the now quaint notion that only people could be citizens and that all citizens should be equal. Corporations were not analogous to citizens, they were analogous to government; they were in fact creatures of government.22

The joint stock democracies, the ‘little republics’ described in this book, provide one resolution to this irony. Like the chartered corporations with their licensed monopolies, the joint stock companies were political engines. They were bent to a number of different purposes, religious, economic, and political. The Children of Peace, for example, organized themselves as a joint stock company when they completed their temple in the village of Hope, a temple in which they collected alms for charitable – and banking – purposes. The Bank of the People

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 255

ostensibly served an economic function, although that included sponsoring Mackenzie’s newspaper, the Constitution. Shepard’s Hall was ostensibly for political purposes, a space where reformers could meet without threat of political violence; yet it was organized as a joint stock company and served as the home of both the Constitution and of religious groups such as the Children of Peace. The very form of all of these endeavours as joint stock democracies served as the crucible for fostering democratic ideals, skills, and political leaders. The overlapping boards of directors of these companies served as the glue that held together a disparate social movement with sometimes conflicting goals, allowing them to coordinate their efforts more effectively. Throughout this book, I have utilized the well-known story of William Lyon Mackenzie’s political career to serve as the narrative framework for examining such lesser-known contributors to the struggle for democracy as Samuel Hughes, a humble man who lacked Mackenzie’s skill at self-promotion. Hughes was a prominent member of the Children of Peace, a man whose charity was a public emblem of their moral economy. Hughes was also president of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, the producer and consumer co-operative whose goal was not far from his personal charity: to help farmers preserve their respectability. This respectability reflected both economic and political independence; only freeholders, men of property, were judged to have independent conscience enough to vote. Moreover, Hughes was also a prominent reform politician: as a delegate to the Grand Convention of Delegates, where he proposed the creation of a permanent reform party organization; as an organizer of the Canadian Alliance Society, where his ties with the Farmers’ Storehouse Company and the Children of Peace helped to bind the movement; and as a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1837, by which Upper Canada would have been declared a republic. I have pointed out how these concerns and strategies share much in common with the Owenite and Chartist movements in England, reflecting the similar structural inequalities that bedevilled both societies. There is a utopian quality to Hughes’ aspirations, as reflected in the village of Hope, the new Jerusalem. But as historian John Clarke notes, of a similar utopian community in Massachusetts, ‘the very identification of a community as “utopian” entails possibilities and also problems … We tend to see them either as repositories of an “alternative tradition” that continues to challenge our social structures and assumptions, or – with hindsight – as indications of potential “paths not taken”

256

‘Union Is Strength’

in the evolution of capitalist societies. But there are reasons to break out of this discourse and to ask different sorts of questions.’23 Reference to specifically ‘utopian’ ambitions sets these communities apart from the mainstream, rather than focusing on their engagement in the significant debates of the wider society of which they were a part. Rather than being significant as an isolated ‘path not taken,’ the Children of Peace contributed directly to the ‘progress of liberty,’ the emergence of a democracy compatible with capitalist development. Their support for the Farmers’ Storehouse Company, the Bank of the People, the Canadian Alliance Society, and Shepard’s Hall, for example, was critical to the development of the reform movement. Through their support of Baldwin and LaFontaine, they fundamentally shaped the nature of the ‘union’ of French- and English-speaking peoples in a united Canada. By 1851, after all, the ‘utopian’ village of Hope (now Sharon) had become the most prosperous farming community in the province. The evolution of the village of Hope has thus been used as emblematic of the development of joint stock democracy in the province, and alternately, of utopian socialism. Their very colour draws attention to the poorly documented history of the opaque society of farmers and mechanics whose contributions to Canadian state-making have been forgotten. The co-operative marketing that seemed to set the community apart to inquisitive visitors needs to be seen as part of the Home District-wide organization of the Farmers’ Storehouse Company. Their charity and the construction of a ‘house of affliction’ for paupers need to be viewed as part of the larger struggle on the nature of ‘assisted emigration,’ ‘relief unions,’ and the houses of industry. The use of their charity fund as a credit union needs to be interpreted in light of the long battle for a provincial loan office and the Bank of the People. Their ‘preaching’ in Shepard’s Hall needs to be viewed as part of their political participation in the reform movement and the demand for responsible government. This broader movement within the Home District itself needs to be placed in the larger context of emerging British socialist and chartist agitation and American Jacksonian agrarianism. Upper Canada’s immigrant population brought a wealth of skills, values, and institutions with them, from the most basic of voluntary benevolent societies, to joint stock co-operatives. Upper Canada’s political unions and joint stock banks emerged in tandem with those in Britain: the Metropolitan Political Union, which fought for the great Reform Bill of 1832, pre-

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 257

dated the Toronto Political Union by only two years. Joint stock banks were only made legal in England after 1826, with their formation peaking in 1836 – at the same time as the Bank of the People was formed. The Toronto House of Industry was the product of long, acrimonious debates on the new Poor Law of England. This political and economic movement in Upper Canada thus needs to be placed squarely in the context of the misleadingly named Owenite labour movement in the United Kingdom and the Workingmen’s Political Association in the United States, movements later to be dismissively dubbed ‘utopian socialist,’ the path not taken. The ultimate irony of this tale of the transition to capitalism is thus its ‘socialist’ roots – an anachronism that no less than ‘capitalism’ requires qualification. The reform movement did emerge, broadly speaking, in pace with the nascent labour movement: ‘labour is the source of all wealth.’ The movement sought to protect farmers and mechanics and to organize them in joint ventures. We need to keep in mind, however, that the ultimate goal of these collaborative undertakings was to preserve the autonomy of the producer’s household, which is where most production still occurred. Farmers sought to preserve an independent livelihood on the land as owners-producers. Journeymen, in turn, aspired to become masters, to themselves contract for work on their own terms. They ‘combined’ – illegally – as joint stock companies and as labour unions to preserve this, in one sense, entrepreneurial autonomy, to preserve their respectability. As George Henry noted of the Children of Peace, in Canada as It Is, ‘The principle of the Davidites appears to be, a mutual assistance to each other … yet, as to personal property, each individual is distinct … Each individual has his own immediate success at stake; which is a wholesome stimulus to every man’s exertion; although the whole body have a corresponding feeling for the success and prosperity of each other; for they are all well aware, that although each distinct member depends on himself, yet if the whole body be not prosperous, it must operate in some degree inimical to the interest of all.’24 This autonomy was threatened, we have seen, by the transition to gentlemanly capitalism and the emergence of the liberal state: it was the emergence of finance capital, not an industrial revolution, that threatened to reduce farmers to dependency. It was gentlemanly capitalism, in the form of the Bank of Upper Canada, the Clergy Corporation, and the Canada Company, that represented the ‘baneful domination of the mother country.’

258

‘Union Is Strength’

Children of Peace Given that Canada is the world’s second oldest continuous democracy without civil war or coup d’état, our tendency to see the history of democracy as occurring elsewhere is puzzling. This lack of violence, of a revolutionary moment, makes this democratic experiment unusual. As John Ralston Saul pointed out in the inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin symposium, ‘we have killed in political strife among ourselves less than a hundred citizens – most of them on a single day at Batoche,’ Saskatchewan, during the Riel Rebellion. ‘The first measure of any citizenbased culture,’ he adds, ‘must not be its rhetoric or myths or leaders or laws but how few of its own citizens it kills.’25 While this feature of our collective political life deserves commemoration, overt political violence must itself be measured against the second attribute of any citizen-based culture: the covert violence of social exclusion. As Ralston Saul asks at the beginning of his address, ‘why devote so much effort to the past, when tonight, in this city, there are four to five thousand homeless, a thousand of them children, half of them families with children.’ On this count, Canada has a much less sterling record. Social exclusion, as the Children of Peace so rightly understood, represents more than poverty; it also represents a denial of citizenship. Those without respectability are without a political voice. There is, perhaps, a direct connection between the lack of revolutionary violence in our democratic history and the degree of social inclusivity of our political institutions, an inclusivity ensured by the civil humanists and the responsible government they won. Part of the history of the democratic tradition in Canada is its origins in the moral economy of simple farmers opposed to the special privileges granted corporations. Social inclusiveness can perhaps be viewed as a form of ‘subsistence insurance’ that ensures active democratic participation, the Country Party ideal of selfless political participation for the public good and the need to protect Parliament from the corruption produced through the pursuit of self-interest. The temple of the Children of Peace is iconic of that moral economy. Built for the purpose of collecting alms, it sanctified the basic act of charity. The Children of Peace did not stigmatize the poor, but distributed their charity to preserve the respectability of recipients. That respectability had political as well as economic facets: a respectable freeholder was also entitled to a political vote. This charitableness, this ‘mutual assistance to each other,’ was a fundamentally political act, an

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 259

expression of equality, liberty, fraternity. It found expression in their house of affliction for immigrant paupers, as well as in their credit union and co-operative marketing. It also found expression in their support for the Toronto Political Union, for Shepard’s Hall, and ultimately, for spearheading the Union Society, which ensured the election of LaFontaine and the union of the Canadas. The Children of Peace, who never numbered more than 350 souls, have left as their legacy a symbol of social inclusion, democratic participation, and selfless leadership for the collective good.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction: A Tale of Two Kingdoms 1 Anna Brownell Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 17. 2 Colonial Advocate, 18 Sept. 1828. 3 Albert Schrauwers, Awaiting the Millennium: The Children of Peace and the Village of Hope 1812–1889 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 108–29. 4 Jeffrey McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada 1791-1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 23–62. 5 David Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 111–31. 6 William Westfall, ‘The Sacred and the Secular: Studies in the Cultural History of Protestant Ontario in the Victorian Period’ (Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, University of Toronto, 1976), 46. 7 D. Wilkie, Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas (Edinburgh, 1837), 203–5. 8 McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 23. 9 Gerald Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years 1784–1841 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), 42–65. 10 McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 63 11 Colin Read, cited in McNairn, Capacity to Judge, n16; see also Jeffrey McNairn, ‘Why We Need but Don’t Have an Intellectual History of the British North American Economy,’ in Damien-Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal, and Michel Ducharme, eds., Les idées en mouvement: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), 145–73.

262

Notes to pages 6–8

12 See Pauline Maier, ‘The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,’ William and Mary Quarterly 50/1 (1993): 51–84; and John Majewski, ‘Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800–1840,’ in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 294–315, for rare exceptions. 13 McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 68–9. 14 In a review essay of major new works on the ‘transition debate,’ Rebecca Emigh concluded that it was necessary to pluralize ‘capitalism’ to underscore the regional and historical specificity of the particular economic formations that resulted, none of which matches the ideal type of capitalism. Indeed, as I argue here, the emergence of an international finance market in the 1830s should be characterized as an example of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ precisely to distinguish it from the industrial capitalism(s) to follow. Rebecca Emigh, ‘[The] Transition[s] to Capitalism[s]? A Review Essay,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 46/1 (2004): 188–98. 15 For a review of the pertinent literature, see Allan Kulikoff, ‘The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,’ William and Mary Quarterly 46/1 (1989): 120–44; Christopher Clark, ‘Economics and Culture: Opening Up the Rural History of the Early American Northeast,’ American Quarterly 43/2 (1991): 279–301; and Charles Post, ‘The Agrarian Origins of U.S. Capitalism: The Transformation of the Northern Countryside before the Civil War,’ Journal of Peasant Studies 22/3 (1995): 389–445; Michael Merrill, ‘Putting “Capitalism” in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,’ William and Mary Quarterly 52/2 (1995): 315–26. 16 Douglas McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada 1784–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press / Ontario Historical Studies Series, 1993), 8. 17 Post, ‘Agrarian Origins,’ 403. 18 Kulikoff, ‘Transition to Capitalism,’ 127. 19 T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); for the Quebec case, see Gérald Bernier and Daniel Salée, The Shaping of Quebec Politics and Society: Colonialism, Power, and the Transition to Capitalism in the 19th Century (Washington: Crane Russak, 1992), and Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 20 Clark, ‘Economics and Culture,’ 292.

Notes to pages 8–13 263 21 Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991); James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and in the case of the Children of Peace, Schrauwers, Awaiting the Millennium, 87–107. 22 See Schrauwers, Awaiting the Millennium, 341, for his reading of Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 23 Winifred B. Rothenberg, ‘The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750– 1855,’ Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 283–314, and ‘The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy,’ Journal of Economic History 48 (1988): 537–66. Andrew H. Baker and Holly Izard Paterson, ‘“Farmers” Adaptations to Markets in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts,’ in Peter Benes, ed., The Farm, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 1986 (Boston: Annual Proceedings, 1988), 95–108. For Ontario, see McCalla, Planting the Province. 24 Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America 1663–1829, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 230–52. 25 Tony Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 39. 26 Compare Matthew Cooper, ‘Relations of Modes of Production in Nineteenth Century America: The Shakers and Oneida,’ Ethnology 26/1 (1987): 1–16. 27 William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65. 28 Ibid. 29 Naomi R. Lamoreaux, ‘Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,’ Journal of American History 90/2 (2003): 438. 30 T.W. Acheson, ‘The Nature and Structure of York Commerce in the 1820’s,’ Canadian Historical Review 50/4 (1969): 418. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 McCalla, Planting the Province, 144. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. Douglas McCalla, ‘Retailing in the Countryside: Upper Canadian General Stores in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,’ Business and Economic History 26/2 (1997): 393–403. 36 Colonial Advocate, 10 March 1831.

264

Notes to pages 14–19

37 Freyer, Producers vs Capitalists, 38. 38 Colonial Advocate, 15 May 1835. 39 Constitution, 10 Aug. 1836; the Correspondent and Advocate, 11 April 1836, also reported a second case heard in the same court the same day in which James Dunn sued Peter M’Dougal (a merchant, and one of the Types rioters) for malicious arrest and won. Dr O’Grady, the editor, commented that ‘it is generally believed that nine of such arrests [for debt] out of ten are founded upon perjury.’ 40 Douglas McCalla, The Upper Canada Trade 1834–1872: A Study of the Buchanans’ Business (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 28. 41 Ibid., 32. 42 Ibid., 39. 43 Sharon Temple Archives, 990.1.7, 92ff. 44 I.J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times (Folkestone, Kent: Wm Dawwson, 1979), 26; Donna Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 15, 17, 62–4. 45 S.J.R. Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics 1791–1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 77. 46 Cited in Noel, Patrons, 41. On patron-client relations in Upper Canada, see also John Clarke, Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Peter A. Russell, Attitudes to Social Structure and Mobility in Upper Canada 1815–1840: ‘Here We are Laird Ourselves’ (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990); and J.K. Johnson, Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791– 1841 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). 47 Gerald Sider, ‘The Ties that Bind: Culture and Agriculture, Property and Propiety in the Newfoundland Village Fishery,’ Social History 5/1 (1980): 15; cf. Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), 282ff. 48 George Hilton, The Truck System, Including a History of the British Truck Acts, 1465–1960 (London: W. Heffer, 1960); Howard Johnson, ‘“A Modified form of Slavery”: The Credit and Truck Systems in the Bahamas in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 28/4 (1986): 729–53; Simon Stevens, ‘A Social Tyranny: The Truck System in Colonial Western Australia, 1829–99,’ Labour History 80 (2001): 83–98. 49 Freyer, Producers vs Capitalists, 69–76. 50 Schrauwers, Millennium, 98. 51 Albert Schrauwers, ‘The Spirit of Capitalism and the Collapse of Com-

Notes to pages 20–6 265

52

53

54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64

65 66

67 68

69

munity: The Children of Peace in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,’ Canadian Quaker History Journal 63 (1998): 54–66. Paddy Ireland, ‘Capitalism without the Capitalist: The Joint Stock Company Share and the Emergence of the Modern Doctrine of Separate Corporate Personality,’ Legal History 17/1 (1996): 40. See Frederick H. Armstrong, Handbook of Upper Canadian Chronology, rev. ed. (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1985), Part VII, for a list of the joint stock companies incorporated during this period in Upper Canada. Alceste Santuari, ‘The Joint Stock Company in Nineteenth Century England and France: King v. Dodd and the Code de Commerce,’ Legal History 14/1 (1993): 40. Sally F. Griffith, ‘Rituals of Incorporation in Ante-bellum Civic Life,’ MidAmerica 82/1&2 (2000): 52. Maier, ‘American Corporation,’ 68ff. Globe, 24 March 1849. Constitution, 16 Nov. 1836. Prothero, Artisans and Politics, 28–30. Archives of Ontario, F135 MU 1383, Home District Savings Bank Papers. McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 68–9. Peter J. Smith, ‘The Ideological Origins of Canadian Confederation,’ in Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, eds., Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory or Republican? (Ottawa: Carleton University Press), 55–8. The classic discussion of the emergence of modern management in corporations remains Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). In the period under discussion, the Home district was composed of the counties of Durham, Northumberland, Simcoe, and York. Its population was 47,000 in 1833. The Home District was abolished in 1849. Appendix to the Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (hereafter, Appendix), 1830, 25. R.C.B. Risk, ‘The Nineteenth Century Foundations of the Business Corporation in Ontario,’ University of Toronto Law Journal 23 (1973): 271; for a list, see also Armstrong, Handbook, Part VII. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993). George Alan Wilson, ‘The Political and Administrative History of the Upper Canada Clergy Reserves, 1790–1855’ (Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, University of Toronto, 1959), 133ff. Robert C. Lee, The Canada Company and the Huron Tract, 1826–1853: Per-

266

70 71

72

73

74

75 76 77

78

79 80 81

Notes to pages 26–31

sonalities, Profits and Politics (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2004), 98–148. Ibid., 15–44. For a humorous critique of Allan’s multiple leadership roles see the Colonial Advocate, 19 Aug. 1824; also, J.K. Johnson, ‘The U.C. Club and the Upper Canadian Elite, 1837–1840,’ Ontario History 69 (1977): 151–68. See D.G. Creighton’s description of the ‘commercial state’ in ‘The Economic Background of the Rebellions of 1837,’ in W.T. Easterbrook and M.H. Watkins, eds., Approaches of Canadian Economic History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart / Carleton Library, 1967), 222–36. Peter Baskerville, ed., The Bank of Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: Champlain Society / Ontario Heritage Foundation, 1987), xxvii– lxxiii. Michael Taussig, ‘The Genesis of Capitalism among a South American Peasantry,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 19/2 (1977): 130–55; J. Parry and M. Bloch, eds., Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Charles Munn, ‘The Emergence of Joint-Stock Banking in the British Isles: A Comparative Approach,’ Business History 30/1 (1988): 69. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, xxiv. Colonial Advocate, 18 May, 1826; cf. Henry J. Boulton’s similar assessment to the British undersecretary for war and the colonies, 15 Dec. 1825, as ‘a machine [which] should not be entrusted in the hands of private Individuals,’ in Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 32. See William K. Carroll, Corporate Power in a Globalizing World: A Study of Elite Social Organization (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6ff, for a more detailed review of the sociological literature on interlocking directorates. On Gentlemanly Capitalism see Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism; and in the Dutch colonial literature on a similar ‘Regenten Capitalisme,’ see Maarten Kuitenbrouwer and Huibert Schijf, ‘The Dutch Colonial Business Elite at the Turn of the Century,’ Itinerario 22/1 (1998): 61–86; and Martin Bossenbroek, Holland op zijn Breedst: Indië en Zuid-Afrika in de Nederlandse Cultuur Omstreeks 1900 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996). Johnson, ‘The U.C. Club,’ 162. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Andrew Barry and Don Slater, ‘Introduction: The Technological Economy,’ Economy and Society 31/2 (2002): 177. For a fuller discussion of Callon’s theories see that special issue of Economy and Society, as well as Michel Callon, The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Notes to pages 35–9 267 1 Charity, Owenism, and the Toronto House of Industry 1 Rainer Baehre, ‘Pauper Emigration to Upper Canada in the 1830s,’ Histoire Sociale / Social History 14/28 (1981): 340. 2 Dr Charles Widmer stated in 1837 that ‘it is true that many cases of ague occur amongst the squatters in the park and neighbourhoods of the Don, but such instances must be frequent in any location where wretched huts, without floors, sadly secured from the weather, are the only protection at night, and the inmates of which have all the ills of poverty and bad habits in constant action to produce disease.’ More than 150 years later, I can see the same floorless huts along the Don from my office window as I write. See Baehre, Pauper Emigration, 357; H.J.M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1830: ‘Shovelling out Paupers’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 57–68. 3 Strachan to Colborne, 5 Sept. 1831, quoted in Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 350. 4 Colonial Advocate, 11 Dec. 1828. 5 Baehre, ‘Pauper Emigration,’ 354, gives the figure of 582 persons relieved between May and August, 1831, citing Archives of Ontario (AO), MU 2105, no. 7 ‘Emigrants, Temporary Houses, 1831’ (part of RG 775, Misc. Papers). Rainer Baehre, ‘Paupers and Poor Relief,’ 310, citing the same source, states this number was relieved between 1 May 1831 to 1 May 1832. This document is now missing. However, since the finding aid states the document is for 1831, I have cited the May to August 1831 period; it also gives a figure closer to the two-week average stay. 6 Public Archives of Canada (PAC), Colborne Papers, MG24 A40, 4/604–605, Strachan to Colborne, 5 Sept. 1831, cited in Baehre, ‘Pauper Emigration,’ 350. 7 Leo A. Johnson, ‘Land Policy, Population Growth and Social Structure in the Home District, 1793–1851,’ Ontario History 63 (1971): 58–9. 8 Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York: Norton, 1968), 196ff. 9 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 10 Sir Francis Bond Head, ‘English Charity,’ in Descriptive Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1857), 142ff. Emphasis in original. 11 See Russell C. Smandych, Upper Canadian Considerations about Rejecting the English Poor Law, 1817–1837: A Comparative Study of the Reception of Law (Winnipeg: Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba, 1991).

268

Notes to pages 39–43

12 See, e.g., Constitution, 21 June, 26 July 1837. 13 Baehre, ‘Paupers and Poor Relief’; Judith Fingard, ‘The Winter’s Tale: The Seasonal Contours of Pre-Industrial Poverty in British North America, 1815–1860,’ Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1974): 65–94; Allan Irving, ‘The Master Principle of Administering Relief: Jeremy Bentham, Sir Francis Bond Head and the Establishment of the Principle of Less Eligibility in Upper Canada,’ Canadian Review of Social Policy 23 (1989): 13–18; Smandych, Upper Canadian Considerations, and ‘Rethinking “The Master Principle of Administering Relief” in Upper Canada: A Response to Allan Irving,’ Canadian Review of Social Policy 27 (1991): 81–6. 14 Samndych, ‘Rethinking,’ 81. 15 D. Wilkie, Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas (Edinburgh, 1837), 203–5. 16 From an untitled pamphlet by David Willson, quoted in full in Patrick Shirreff, A Tour through North America: Together with a Comprehensive view of the Canadas and United States, as Adapted for Agricultural Emigration (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1835), 108–14. Also available in manuscript, AO Ms 188, 24 June 1831. 17 Thomas Rolph, A Brief Account Together with Observations Made during a Visit in the West Indies and a Tour Through the United States of America in Parts of the Year 1832–3, Together with a Statistical Account of Upper Canada (Dundas: G.H. Hackstaff, 1836), 183–4. 18 Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 230–52. 19 Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–60 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). 20 Ibid., xviii. 21 See ‘A Plea for the Poor,’ in Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1971), 241. Also Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation in American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1984). 22 Peter Toews, cited in Royden K. Loewen, Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 54. 23 Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 232. 24 It is important to underscore that Bestor’s definition of ‘communitarian groups’ signifies ‘a system of social reform based on small communities’ (ibid., viii) and not ‘communism,’ although many of the communities he discusses did institute a ‘community of property.’ The vast majority, how-

Notes to pages 43–7 269

25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36

ever, were like the Children of Peace – utopian reformers who sought to purify a sinning world through the formation of exemplary communities. See David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/OHSS, 1981), for a discussion of these processes in neighbouring Peel County. For a discussion of the same processes in New York, see Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18–59. Schrauwers, Awaiting, chaps. 5 and 6, has a detailed description of these disputes, their causes, and their resolution. Rolph, A Brief Account, 184. The 100th HRH Prince Regent’s County of Dublin Regiment of Foot was renumbered the 99th in 1816. See Ron Dale and Wes Cross, ‘The Regiments of the Richmond Military Settlement,’ available at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~crossroads/barry/99th_regiment.html, rev. 2 Jan. 2005. AO, RG01, Series C13, vol. 124, p. 055; Simcoe County Land Registry Records, Tecumseth Township, GSU 178929. J.C. Dent, The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion; Largely Derived from Original Sources and Documents, vol. 2 (Toronto, 1885), 101–3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 76. Winifred B. Rothenberg, ‘The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750– 1855,’ Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 283–314, and ‘The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and Their Transformation of the Rural Economy,’ Journal of Economic History 48 (1988): 537–66; Baker and Paterson, ‘Farmers’ Adaptations to Markets’; for Ontario, see McCalla, Planting the Province. Cf. Creighton ‘The Economic Background of the Rebellions,’ 222, where he wrote: ‘The discord between trade and agriculture, the disagreement between the organization of the commercial system and the demands of rural communities, had reached the last stages of their development. While the old trading system of the St Lawrence was expressed politically in the commercial state, the agricultural interest had become vociferously articulate in the reform parties of both provinces. And these economic contradictions and social conflicts were evidently nearing their climax at the very moment when the financial panic broke in England and the United States.’ Schrauwers, Spirit of Capitalism. David Willson, Impressions of the Mind (Toronto: J.H. Lawrence, 1835), 288. The building is first mentioned as the House of Affliction in the records of the ‘Yearly Meeting of Committees’ of the Children of Peace, in 1832

270

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52 53

Notes to pages 47–53

(AO, Ms 733, Series A, vol. 2). It was already in use at that time. It is also mentioned in the probated will of Amos Hughes (York Region Registry Office, Instrument No. EG 10998, 5 Aug. 1834), on whose property the house lay. He refers to it as the house currently occupied by sect member Joseph Terry, ‘for the sole benefit of the poor belonging amongst the Children of Peace.’ AO, Ms 733, Series A, vol. 2. This obscure reference seems to indicate that, at this point, the Children of Peace were reverting to the Quaker practice of appointing elders, a role they had elminated in 1819. Many were appointed to these committees who were not, in fact, among the sect’s oldest members. AO, Ms 733, Series A, vol. 2, 7ff. Matthew Cooper, ‘Living Together: How Communal Were the Children of Peace?’ Ontario History 79/1 (1987): 13. Edward Deming Andrews, The People Called Shakers (New York: Dover, 1963), 49. Herbert A. Wisbey, Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 12. Smandych, ‘Rethinking,’ 81. John Sewell, Mackenzie: A Political Biography of William Lyon Mackenzie (Toronto: Lorimer, 2002), 23–6. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 51–4. John C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 13ff. Robert Lamond, A Narrative of the Rise and Progress of Emigration, from the Counties of Lanark & Renfrew, to the New Settlements in Upper Canada on Government Grant… (Glasgow: Chalmers and Collins, 1821). Harrison, Quest, 26–32. John Morrison, ‘The Toon o’Maxwell – an Owenite Settlement in Lambton County, Ont.’ Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records 12 (1914): 5–12. Lillian Gates, ‘The Decided Policy of William Lyon Mackenzie,’ Canadian Historical Review 40/3 (1959): 185–203. Firth, Town of York, 324. David Stack, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) (London: Royal Historical Society / Boydell Press, 1998), 82ff. Harrison, New World Order, 66ff. Colonial Advocate, 11 May 1826. W.P.J. Millar, ‘The Remarkable Rev. Thaddeus Osgood: A Study in the Evangelical Spirit in the Canadas,’ Histoire Sociale / Social History 19 (May 1977): 68.

Notes to pages 53–9 271 54 Count Benjamin Rumford, Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical (London, 1796), 3 vols.; see esp. Essay 1. For Owen on Rumford, see his Mr Owen’s Proposed Arrangements for the Distressed Working Classes … consistent with … Political Economy, in three letters to Mr Ricardo (London, 1819), 34–5. 55 Colonial Advocate, 21, 18 Dec. 1826. 56 Thaddeus Osgood, A Brief Extract from the Journal of Thaddeus Osgood, Minister of the Gospel, with some anecdotes and remarks on men and occurrences, during a Residence of six years in England (Montreal: Herald Office, 1835), 7. 57 Albert Schrauwers, ‘The Benevolent Colonies of Johannes van den Bosch: Continuities in the Administration of Poverty in the Netherlands and Indonesia,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 43/2 (2001): 298–328. 58 Osgood, Brief Extract, 8. 59 Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, 6 Jan. 1836; Christian Guardian, 27 Jan. 1836. 60 Patriot, 24 Nov. 1837. 61 James Buchanan, Project for the Formation of a Depot in Upper Canada, with a view to receive the whole Pauper Population of England (New York: William Mercein, 1834), iii–iv. 62 Ibid., 8. 63 Journal of the Assembly, 19 and 20 Feb., 26 March 1836; Journal of the Legislative Council, 18 and 23 Feb., 20 March 1836. 64 Appendix, 1836, No. 110, ‘Report of the Select Committee on the petition of Edward Kennedy.’ 65 Constitution, 28 June 1837. 66 Ibid., 2 Nov. 1836. 67 Correspondent and Advocate, 19 Oct. 1836. 68 Patriot, 3 Jan. 1837. The resolutions are reproduced in the Constitution, 18 Jan. 1837. 69 Strachan was invited to participate a few days later by the mayor, but declined. Constitution, 18 Jan. 1837. 70 City of Toronto Archives (CTA), Council Papers, letter, Turquand to the city council, 24 Dec. 1836. 71 Christian Guardian, 19 Jan. 1837. The next highest donation was £5, subscribed by James Lesslie, George Gurnett, William H. Draper, and J.R. Armstrong. 72 Journal of the Assembly, 24 Nov. 1836. 73 Statutes, 7th William IV, 1837, 1st Session, Chap. XXV. 74 Patriot, 13 Oct. 1837. 75 Christian Guardian, 11 Jan. 1837. 76 Constitution, 25 Jan. 1837.

272

Notes to pages 60–9

77 Christian Guardian, 22 Nov. 1837. 78 Report of the Committee for the Relief of the Poor and Destitute of the City of Toronto: and Rules and Regulations of the House of Refuge & Industry established under their care, January, 1837 (Toronto: J.H. Lawrence, Guardian Office, 1837), 6, 14; Christian Guardian, 25 Jan. 1837. 79 Bond Head, ‘English Charity,’ 55. 80 Constitution, 1 Feb. 1837. 81 Patriot, 14 March 1837. 82 7th William IV, 1st Session, Chap. IV. 83 Patriot, 28 March 1837. 84 Christian Guardian, 22 Nov. 1837. 85 CTA, Council Papers, Petition of the House of Industry, 4 May 1837; 26 May; copy of a minute in Council from Bond Head, 17 Aug.; Petition to City Council by the House of Industry, 7 Oct.; copy of a minute in council by Bond Head, 19 Oct. 86 Baehre, ‘Poor Relief,’ 320. 87 Patriot, 8 Nov. 1837, ‘Grand Jury Room 11th October 1837.’ 88 Constitution, 8 Nov. 1837. 89 Peter Oliver, ‘Terror to Evil-Doers’: Prisons and Punishments in NineteenthCentury Ontario (Toronto: Osgoode Society / University of Toronto Press, 1998). 2 The Bank of Upper Canada and the Economy of Debt 1 Colonial Advocate, 22 Dec. 1831. 2 Chief Justice William Dummer Powell, DCB; Appendix to the Journal of the House of Assembly, 1836, no. 117, Gaol reports. 3 McCalla, Planting the Province, 146, and ‘Retailing in the Countryside.’ Note that this and most of McCalla’s examples showing the ‘competitive’ market environment are drawn from the second half of the nineteenth century, long after the laws for the collection of debt had been fundamentally altered. 4 McCalla, Planting the Province, 145. 5 Appendix, 1831–2, 60–4. 6 Ibid., 65–6. 7 Appendix, 1828, 123ff. The case is discussed extensively in Paul Romney, Mr Attorney: The Attorney General for Ontario in Court, Cabinet, and Legislature 1791–1899 (Toronto: Osgoode Society / University of Toronto Press, 1986). 8 Colonial Advocate, 1 June 1826.

Notes to pages 70–6 273 9 Ibid., 5 Aug. 1830. 10 Ibid., 25 May 1826. 11 Paul Romney, ‘From the Types Riot to the Rebellion: Elite Ideology, Antilegal Sentiment, Political Violence, and the Rule of Law in Upper Canada,’ Ontario History 79/2 (1987): 114. 12 Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, Appendix B, 321ff. 13 Colonial Advocate, 18 May 1826. 14 Ibid., ‘York Chips and Shavings.’ 15 Romney, ‘Types Riot,’ 115–18. 16 Colonial Advocate, 18 May 1831. 17 Ibid., 18 Dec. 1828, ‘Mr Rolph’s Argument in Favour of the Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt.’ 18 W.L. Mackenzie, Sketches of Canada and the United States (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833), 250 ff. 19 Colonial Advocate, 1 June 1826. 20 Ibid., 18 Dec. 1828. Original emphasis. 21 ‘Public Meeting,’ ibid., 1 June 1826. 22 ‘Congress of Contributors,’ ibid., 25 May 1826. 23 Upper Canada Gazette and Weekly Register, 15 July 1824. 24 Stillwell Willson was the son of John Willson, a United Empire Loyalist from New Brunswick, who settled in York Township; John Willson was the second husband of Catherine Willson, David Willson’s mother. 25 Archives of Ontario (AO), RG 22–131, Court of King’s Bench Judgment Docket Books, 1795–1837; Metro Toronto Reference Library (MTRL), Baldwin Room, William Allan Fonds S245, Ledger 1822–26, 15–l6. 26 Abstract Index to Deeds, York County, Vaughan Township, Conc. 1W, lot 30, and Markham Township, Conc. 1E, lot 30; instruments no. 4827. 27 Colonial Advocate, 1 June 1826. Original emphasis. 28 Donald R. Beer, Sir Allan Napier MacNab (Hamilton: Dictionary of Hamilton Biography, 1984), 9. 29 Scadding, Toronto of Old, 448. 30 Abstract Index to Deeds, York County, Vaughan Township, Conc. 1W, lot 30, and Markham Township, Conc. 1E, lot 30; instruments nos. 3322, 4337, 4559, 4694, 4827. Henry J. Morgan, Sketches of Celebrated Canadians, and Persons Connected with Canada… (Montreal: R. Worthington, 1865), 479. 31 John C. Dent, The Canadian Portrait Gallery, vol. 4 (Toronto: John B. Magurn, 1881), 78. 32 AO, RG 22–131, Court of King’s Bench Judgment Docket Books, 1795–1837. 33 Dent, Gallery, 78.

274

Notes to pages 77–85

34 Scadding, Toronto of Old, 448. 35 AO, RG 22–131, Court of King’s Bench Judgment Docket Books, 1795–1837. 36 Isabel Champion, ed., Markham 1793–1900 (Markham: Markham Historical Society, 1979), 297. 37 Upper Canada Gazette, 3 Feb. 1825. 38 Colonial Advocate, 1 June 1826. 39 Beer, MacNab, 136. 40 Colonial Advocate, 1 June 1826. 41 Romney, ‘Types Riot,’ 119; G. Blaine Baker, ‘The Juvenile Advocate Society, 1821–1826: Self-Proclaimed Schoolroom for Upper Canada’s Governing Class,’ Historical Papers / Communications Historiques 1985: 74–101. 42 Acheson, ‘York Commerce,’ 425. 43 Colonial Advocate, 18 May 1826. See Henry J. Boulton’s similar assessment to the British undersecretary for war and the colonies, 15 Dec. 1825, as ‘a machine [which] should not be entrusted in the hands of private Individuals,’ cited in Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 32. 44 Bidwell in Mackenzie, History of the Destruction, 18. 45 Acheson, ‘York Commerce,’ 188–9; Baskerville, Bank, 321. 46 Baskerville, Bank, xlii. 47 Acheson, ‘York Commerce,’ 423–5; Baskerville, Bank, xli. 48 Some have argued that an inflationary policy would benefit those in debt; hence there was a community of interest between farmers and the bank. However, given that Upper Canadian wheat had been shut out of British markets, leaving the farmers with no means to repay debt, and that merchants similarly lacked the means to repay their British wholesalers, the immediate liquidity crisis would only have increased the pressure to resort to the law for the collection of farmers’ debts before any inflationary benefit could have been experienced. 49 Acheson, ‘York Commerce,’ 424–5. 50 Baskerville, Bank, xlii. 51 Ibid., xlii–xliii. 52 Ibid., 31ff. 53 Cited in Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 31. 54 Colonial Advocate, 18 May 1826. 55 Acheson, ‘York Commerce,’ 426–7; Baskerville, Bank, liii–lvi. 56 AO, F-32, Macaulay Family Fonds; Lindsey, Life…, 122. 57 Colonial Advocate, 16 Oct. 1828. 58 Advocate, 29 May 1834. 59 Thomas Rolph, A Brief Account Together with Observations Made during a

Notes to pages 85–97 275

60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Visit in the West Indies and a Tour Through the United States of America in Parts of the Year 1832–3, Together with a Statistical Account of Upper Canada (Dundas: G.H. Hackstaff, 1836). Charles Lindsey, The Life and Times of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie, with an Account of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837, and the Subsequent Frontier Disturbances, Chiefly from Unpublished Documents, vol. 1 (Toronto: Coles, 1971), 146. Ibid., 147–8. Colonial Advocate, 5 Aug. 1830. Ibid., 27 May 1830. Ibid. Ibid., 10 March 1831. Appendix, 1831–2, 63. Ibid., 65–6. Correspondent and Advocate, 16 July 1835. Appendix, 1831–2, 63–4; Correspondent and Advocate, 19 Oct. 1836. Colonial Advocate, 10 June 1830. Beginning in ibid., 8, 15, 22, and 29 July 1830. Beginning in ibid., 20 and 27 May, 3 June 1830. Ibid., 29 July 1830. Lindsey, Mackenzie, vol. 1, 168. Vaughan, Bank of Upper Canada, 192; Appendix, 1830, 25. Colonial Advocate, 27 May 1830. Ibid., 10 June 1830. Ibid., 3 March 1831. Ibid., 4 Aug. 1830. Ibid. Ibid., 19 Aug. 1830. Ibid., 2 Sept. 1830; cf. Appendix [1826], 22, which records Ausman’s prosecution 4 Oct. 1825, for which he was fined £7 5s 6d. Colonial Advocate, 30 Dec. 1830. Ibid. Ibid. Lindsey, Life, 196–200. Lindsey, Mackenzie, vol. 1, 168. Appendix, 1831, 201–2. Colonial Advocate, 11 Feb. 1831. The bill was again submitted in Feb. 1836. Appendix, 1836, vol. 1, no. 5. Vaughan, Bank, 192–3. Mackenzie, Sketches, 457. Ibid., 458. Colonial Advocate, 18 Sept. 1828.

276

Notes to pages 98–103

3 The Economics of Respectability: The Farmers’ Storehouse (Banking) Company 1 Shirreff, Tour, 106–16. 2 Canadian Emigrant, 13 July 1833, cited in Peter A. Russell, ‘Upper Canada: A Poor Man’s Country? Some Statistical Evidence,’ Canadian Papers in Rural History 3 (1982): 129. 3 Shirreff, Tour, 364–5. 4 Ibid., 363. 5 Russell, ‘Upper Canada’; Robert E. Ankli and Kenneth J. Duncan, ‘Farm Making Costs in Early Ontario,’ Canadian Papers in Rural History 4 (1984): 33–49. 6 Correspondent and Advocate, 24 Dec. 1834. In the land auction referred to, just six men purchased 42,296 acres of land in the Home District, the equivalent of a full township. 7 Acheson, ‘York Commerce,’ 418. 8 McCalla, Planting the Province, 75. 9 See, e.g., Catherine Anne Wilson, ‘Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood,’ Canadian Historical Review 82/3 (2001): 431–64. 10 George Henry, The emigrant’s guide; or, Canada as it is; comprising details relating to the domestic policy, commerce and agriculture, of the Upper and Lower Provinces, comprising matter of general information and interest, especially intended for the use of settlers and emigrants (New York: Stodart, 1832), 103, 121–5. 11 Bradford James Rennie, The Rise of Agrarian Democracy: The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta 1909–1921 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 10. 12 R.G. Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 41–64; Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 197–216. 13 Joshua Bamfield, ‘Consumer-Owned Community Flour and Bread Societies in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,’ Business History 40/4 (1998): 22. 14 Jennifer Tann, ‘Co-operative Corn Milling: Self-help during the Grain Crises of the Napoleonic Wars,’ Agricultural History Review 28/1 (1980): 46–7. 15 Ibid., 49ff. 16 Ibid., 50. 17 Ron Harris, Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 239ff. 18 See Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914 (New York: Pal-

Notes to pages 104–9 277

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44

grave/Macmillan, 2003), 44ff, on the 1793 Act for the Relief and Encouragement of Friendly Societies. Tann, ‘Cooperative Corn Milling,’ 46. Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 52. Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium. Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 60. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 214. Ibid., 211. Firth, Town of York, 324; Stack, Nature and Artifice, 82ff; Harrison, New World Order, 66ff. Harrison, New Moral World, 214. Wilson, ‘Reciprocal Work Bees.’ Colonial Advocate, 10 March 1831; Canadian Correspondent, 23 Nov., 7 Dec. 1833; Patriot, 14 and 28 June, 10 and 13 Dec. 1833. R.W. Postgate, The Builders’ History (London: National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, 1923), 464. Patriot, 14 June 1833. Harrison, New Moral World, 103–4. Firth, Town of York, xxv. Ibid. Patricia Hart, Pioneering in North York: A History of the Borough (Toronto: General Publishing, 1968), 68. AO, Upper Canada Land Petitions, P14/39, 20 Oct. 1824. M. Audry Graham, 150 Years at St John’s, York Mills (Toronto: General Publishing, 1966), 31. F.R. Berchem, The Yonge Street Story (1793–1860) (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977), 119. Colonial Advocate, 3 Sept. 1829. Graham, York Mills, 30. John Willson died in July 1829, and Seneca Ketchum, an ardent supporter of the Church of England, somehow arranged ‘by some means or other, which have not yet been satisfactorily explained, [for] Dr Strachan … to secure exclusive possession of the church.’ British Colonist, 24 April 1839. Wilton, Carol, Popular Politics and Political Culture in Upper Canada, 1800– 1850 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 36. Colonial Advocate, 1 March 1827. This advertisement misspells Stoyell’s name as ‘Styles,’ and includes a fifth member, Jordan Post, a watchmaker in York, who does not appear in further reports. ‘Abner Miles,’ DCB. Canadian Freeman, 24 July 1828; Constitution, 10 May 1837.

278 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Notes to pages 109–18

Wilton, Popular Politics, 42ff. Colonial Advocate, 24 Jan. 1828. Ibid., 14 Feb., 6 March 1828. Ibid., 20 March 1828. Canadian Freeman, 31 July 1828. John Ross Robertson, Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto: a collection of historical sketches of the old town of York from 1792 until 1833, and of Toronto from 1834 to 1908 : also, three hundred and thirty engravings of places and scenes in Toronto or in connection with the city, vol. 1 (Toronto: J.R. Robertson, 1908), 218–19. Canadian Freeman, 5 Sept. 1833. Wilton, Popular Politics, 3–20. ‘John Goessman,’ DCB. See, e.g., his characterization of the Central Political Union, Canadian Freeman, 7 March 1833. Upper Canada Gazette and Weekly Register, 25 March, 15 July 1824; Colonial Advocate, 3 April 1828. Constitution, 4 Jan. 1837. Colonial Advocate, 11 Dec. 1828. Journal of the Legislative Council (JLC), 1829, 32–3, 46. JLC, 1830, 13, 25, 27; Christian Guardian, 13 March 1830. JLC, 1831, 4, 9, 16. Canadian Freeman, 17 Feb. 1831. Ibid., 18 July 1831. Colonial Advocate, 20 and 27 May, 3 June 1830. Canadian Freeman, 12 Dec. 1831, 5 Jan. 1832. Ibid., 2 Feb. 1832. Ibid., 26 Jan. 1832. Ibid., 17 May 1832. Ibid., 17 May 1832. Ibid., 7 March 1833. Ibid., 5 Sept. 1833. Colonial Advocate, 7 Sept. 1833. Canadian Freeman, 7 March 1833. AO, Ms 733, Series A, vol. 2, 7ff. Sharon Temple Archives, 973.33.2. Colonial Advocate, 5 Oct. 1833. ‘Scroll draft of the Farmers Storehouse Bill,’ Gibson House Museum, City of Toronto, Culture Division, 11–12; Journal of the Assembly, 11 Feb., 2 March 1836; Correspondent and Advocate, 30 Nov. 1836.

Notes to pages 118–28

279

77 Correspondent and Advocate, 18 May 1836. Public Archives of Canada (PAC), R6157–0-1-E (old MG 24-I68). Although the Farmers’ Store continued to hold its annual meetings in 1836 and 1837, it never petitioned for incorporation again. In 1841 the company attempted to sell the water lot to the city, the deal being completed only in 1844. In 1845 the city built the current St Lawrence market building on the site. 78 Constitution, 16 Nov. 1836. 79 Gibson House Archives, ‘Scroll draft of the Farmers Storehouse Bill’; JLC, 1 March 1836. 80 Patriot, 12 June 1835, 26 Jan., 9 Feb., 1 March, 5 and 12 April 1836; Cobourg Star, 24 Feb., 6 April 1836. 81 Cobourg Star, 23 March, 4 and 18 May 1836; 22 Feb. 1837. 82 Patriot, 26 Jan. 1836. 83 William Bancks, A Letter on the Proposed New Colonial Funding System (Toronto: Palladium Office, 1836). 84 Patriot, 7 April 1835. 85 Ibid., 26 April 1836 (ad dated 6 Jan.). 86 Statutes, 7th William IV 1837, Chap. XIII, An Act to protect the Public against Injury from Private Banks. 87 Statutes, 7th & 8th William IV 1837, 2nd Session, Chap. I, An Act to afford relief to certain Banking Institutions heretofore carrying on business in this province, by enabling them more conveniently to settle their affairs, and for protecting the interests of persons holding their notes. 88 Cobourg Star, 22 Feb. 1837. 89 From a pamphlet by David Willson quoted in full in Shirreff, Tour, 108–14. 90 Canadian Alliance Society, ‘Appeal to the People,’ Correspondent and Advocate, 24 Dec. 1834. 4 Shepard’s Hall and the Canadian Alliance Society 1 Gregory Kealey, ‘Orangemen and the Corporation: The Politics of Class during the Union of the Canadas,’ in Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto: Published for the Toronto Sesquicentennial Board by University of Toronto Press, 1984). 2 Wilton, Popular Politics, 144–67. 3 LoPatin, Political Unions, 106–7. 4 Harrison, New Moral World, 100–200; D.J. Rowe, ‘Class and Political Radicalism in London, 1831–2,’ Historical Journal 8/1 (1970): 31–47. 5 In the spring of 1830, thousands of acres of land that was in arrears for taxes were sold at public auction; in the Home District, the equivalent

280

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Notes to pages 129–34

of a whole township. Despite the low prices (less than what the Canada Company had paid for the Crown reserves), few could afford to buy. As a result, the auctions resulted in an enormous concentration of wild lands in the Home District in the hands of a few speculators: the major speculators were William Dickson, a Hamilton-based merchant, speculator, and legislative councillor, who purchased 15,582 acres or 29% of the total sold; Charles Thomson, chairman of the Central Political Union, who purchased 12,297 acres, or 23% of the total, mostly in the back townships; Francis T. Billings, the district treasurer, who purchased 8,475 acres, or 16%; Peter and Joseph McDougall, lumber merchants, who purchased 3,907 acres (7%); and D’Arcy Boulton, who purchased 2,035 acres (4%) in the most heavily settled areas. See Lillian Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983) ,148–51; Appendix to the Journal, 1831, 78–82. Colonial Advocate, 29 Nov. 1832. Wilton, Popular Politics, 146–7. Colonial Advocate, 13 Dec. 1832. T.M. Parssinen, ‘Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848,’ English Historical Review 88/348 (1973): 504–33. Colonial Advocate, 23 May, 13 and 27 June 1833. Quoted in Wilton, Popular Politics, 153. Mackenzie, Sketches, 411–13. Colonial Advocate, 27 June 1833. Established in Feb. 1833. Colonial Advocate, 13 June 1833. The Stouffville meeting passed the same resolutions as in Newmarket, but did not elect any new members to the committees of vigilance. Colonial Advocate, 13 June 1833. Ibid., 18 July 1833. Schrauwers, Awaiting the Millennium, 120–1. Craig, Upper Canada, 212ff. Colonial Advocate, 29 Aug. 1833. Ibid., 7 Sept. 1833. Ibid. Ibid., 19 Sept. 1833. Ibid. Ibid., 10 Oct. 1833. Canadian Freeman, 17 Oct. 1833. Advocate, 7 Nov. 1833. Patriot, 8 Nov. 1833.

Notes to pages 135–44 281 29 Colonial Advocate, 3 Oct. 1833. 30 ‘Public Notice is hereby given that an Election Meeting will take place at the old court house, On Saturday next, at 3 o’clock, when the following proceedings will take place.’ MTRL, Baldwin Room. 31 Patrick Swift, A New Almanack for the Canadian true blues with which is incorporated the Constitutional Reformer’s text book for... (York: Printed and published by P. Baxter, Colonial Advocate, 1833). 32 Advocate, 20 Feb. 1834. 33 Colonial Advocate, 13 June 1833. 34 Ibid., 17 Oct. 1833. 35 Advocate, 5 Dec. 1833. 36 Ibid., 14 Dec. 1833. 37 Ibid., 21 Dec. 1833. See Canadian Correspondent, 21 Dec. 1833, for a copy of Willson’s speech. 38 Advocate, 29 May 1834. 39 Wilkie, Sketches, 203–5. 40 Willson, Impressions of the Mind, 290. 41 Advocate, 14 Dec. 1833. 42 Ibid., 21 Dec. 1833. 43 Ibid., 20 Feb. 1834. 44 Ibid., 20 and 27 Feb. 1834. 45 Ibid., 13 March 1834. 46 Ibid., 27 March 1834, ‘Count the Cost,’ dated Hope, 2 March 1834. 47 Ibid., 24 April 1834. 48 Ibid., 8 May 1834. 49 Canadian Correspondent, 17 May 1834; General Court of Quarter Sessions of the Home District, Minutes, vol. 8, 1833–4, MTRL, Baldwin Room, S105. 50 George Walton, York Commercial Directory, Street Guide, and Register, 1833–4… (York: Thomas Dalton, 1833), 47; Isaac Fidler, Observations on Professions, Literature, Manner, and Emigration, in the United States and Canada, Made During a Residence There in 1832 (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1833), 263–4. 51 Canadian Correspondent, 14 June 1834; Colonial Advocate, 29 May 1834. 52 Correspondent and Advocate, 24 Dec. 1834; 8 and 15 Jan. 1835. 53 Ibid., 15 Jan. 1835. 54 Patriot, 10 March 1835. 55 Ibid., 13 Jan. 1835. 56 Colonial Advocate, 15 Aug. 1833. 57 Adam Shortt, The Early History of Canadian Banking: The First Banks in Upper Canada (Toronto: Journal of the Canadian Bankers’ Association, 1897), 17–18.

282

Notes to pages 144–52

58 Mary M. Schweitzer, Custom and Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 59 Correspondent and Advocate, 1 and 22 Jan. 1835. 60 Patriot, 6 Jan. 1835. 61 Correspondent and Advocate, 22 Jan. 1835. 62 Ibid., 2 Feb. 1835; Journal, 11, 13, 17–20, 25, 27 Feb. 1835. 63 Constitution, 16 Nov. 1836. 64 Correspondent and Advocate, 11 and 18 Dec. 1834; Patriot, 12 Dec. 1834. The Canadian Alliance Society adopted its constitution at a meeting on 9 Dec. 1834. 65 Constitution, 7 Sept. 1836; the Methodists were led by dissidents to Ryerson’s Union with the Wesleyan Methodists, including the Rev. James Richardson, and the Rev. Mr Turner. 66 Correspondent, 1 Jan. 1835. 67 Colonial Advocate, 7 Sept. 1833. 68 Correspondent and Advocate, 18 Dec. 1834. 69 City of Toronto Registry Office, Town Lot 8, instrument 11458, will of Susannah Maria Willcocks. 70 Colonial Advocate, 7 Sept. 1832. 71 Correspondent and Advocate, 18 Dec. 1834. 72 Dundas Museum, Dundas Ontario, Lesslie Papers, typescript of the Journals of James Lesslie, 51. 73 Colonial Advocate, 15 May 1835; Constitution, 10 Aug. 1836; Correspondent and Advocate, 11 April 1836. 5 The Bank Wars 1 Mackenzie, Sketches, 59. 2 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), 115–31; Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the the United States and the American Economy (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 121–39; Major L. Wilson, ‘The “Country” versus the “Court”: A Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,’ Journal of the Early Republic 15/4 (1995): 619–47. 3 Appendix, 1830, Appendix E, ‘Report on the State of the Currency.’ 4 Brian Harding, ‘Transatlantic Views of Speculation and Value, 1820–60,’ Historical Research 66/160 (1993): 209–21. 5 Paul K. Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 207–11. 6 William Gouge, A Short History of Paper-Money and Banking in the United

Notes to pages 153–8 283

7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

States Including an Account of Provincial and Continental Paper-Money to Which is Prefixed an Inquiry into the principles of the System with Consideration of Its Effects on Morals and Happiness (Philadelphia: Ustick, 1833); William Gouge, The Curse of Banking in the United States (London: Mills, Jowett, & Mills, 1835); Benj. G. Rader, ‘William Gouge: Jacksonian Economic Theorist,’ Pennsylvania History 30/4 (1963): 443–53. Louis H. Arky, ‘The Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations and the Formation of the Philadelphia Workingmen’s Movement,’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1952): 142–76; Anthony Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1978), 289–92. Schlesinger, Jackson, 79. Lillian Gates, ‘The Decided Policy of William Lyon Mackenzie,’ Canadian Historical Review 40/3 (1959): 185–203; Carl N. Degler, ‘The Locofocos: Urban “Agrarians,”’ Journal of Economic History 16/3 (1956): 322–33; Schlesinger, Jackson, 190–209. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824– 1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 21ff. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Correspondent and Advocate, 30 July 1835. Appendix, 1835, No. 31, ‘Report on Currency,’ Appendix. Charles Munn, ‘The Emergence of Joint-Stock Banking in the British Isles: A Comparative Approach,’ Business History 30/1 (1988): 70–4. Appendix, 1835, No. 31, ‘Report of Select Committee to which was referred the subject of the Currency.’ Correspondent and Advocate, 15 May 1835. Truscott, Green & Co., Statement of the Financial Transactions of the Banking Firm of Truscott, Green & Co. of Toronto, in connction with Green, Brown and Co. of New York, and Brown, Buckland & Co. of Buffalo (Buffalo, 1838), 3. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 97; Appendix, 1835, No. 54. Appendix, 1835, No. 54, ‘Report of the Select Committee on the Petition of George Truscott, Esquire,’ 7. Truscott, Statement, 5–6. Correspondent and Advocate, 16 July 1835. Ibid., 25 June 1835. Gates, Land Policies, 130–7. ‘John Elmsley,’ vol. 9, DCB, 239–42; Murray Nicholson, ‘John Elmsley and the Rise of Irish Catholic Social Action in Victorian Toronto,’ Study Sessions: Canadian Catholic Historical Association 51 (1984): 47–66. Correspondent and Advocate, 16 July 1835.

284 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

Notes to pages 158–66 Ibid., 20 Aug. 1835. Ibid., 30 July 1835. Ibid., 16 July 1835. Ibid., 1 Oct. 1835. Ibid., 30 July 1835. Ibid. Ibid., 20 Aug. 1835. Ibid., 10 Oct. 1835. Ibid., 10 Sept. 1835. Ibid., 10 Oct. 1835. The House had sent bills to incorporate the Farmers’ Bank, the Bank of the People (joint stock banks), and chartered banks in St Catharines, Niagara, Prescott, Cobourg, and Prince Edward. The legislative council amended the charters for St Catharines and Niagara in such a way that the House chose not to proceed further. Appendix, 1833–4 , ‘Report of the Select Committee on the Subject of Banking.’ Colonial Advocate, 11 Jan. 1834. Appendix, 1833–4, 174. Appendix, ‘Report … on … Banking.’ Correspondent and Advocate, 22 Jan. 1835. Patriot, 27 Jan. 1835. Ibid., 24 Feb. 1835. Ibid., 8 Nov. 1836. Ibid., 27 May, 30 Aug. 1836. Wilton, Popular Politics, 179. Parliamentary reports for 31 Jan., Patriot, 7 Feb. 1837. Ibid., 3 Feb. 1837. Journals, 9 Feb. 1837. Patriot, 31 Jan. 1837. Ibid., 16 Sept. 1836. Ibid., 14 April 1837. Ibid., 11 April 1837. It is unknown how successful the bank was; they did, however, reapply for a charter in 1839, although this time the bill did not pass the Legislative Council. Journal of the Legislative Council, 6 Feb. 1840. Journal of the Legislative Council, 7 April 1835. Patriot, 20 Sept. 1836. Appendix, 1835, No. 15, Correspondence between the Colonial Secretary and D. Jones, Esq., on the subject of the Bill to establish a Loan and Trust Company in Brockville; Cobourg Star, 18 May 1836.

Notes to pages 166–74 285 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Patriot, 16 Sept. 1836. Journal of the Legislative Council, 19 Dec. 1836. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 100–2. Dunn’s appointment as receiver general was by the Colonial Office, and he had complete freedom to utilize any banking institution he wished; this had always been a point of contention with the Bank of Upper Canada which had sought more of the government’s business. Chap. XIII, 7th William IV 1837, An Act to protect the Public against Injury from Private Banks. Chap. I, 7th & 8th William IV 1837, 2nd Session, An Act to afford relief to certain Banking Institutions heretofore carrying on business in this province, by enabling them more conveniently to settle their affairs, and for protecting the interests of persons holding their notes. Cobourg Star, 22 Feb. 1837. Broadside letter by James Lesslie, on behalf of the Bank of the People, 4 Aug. 1835; University of Toronto Rare Book Library, T-10 0064 no. 5. Correspondent and Advocate, 6 Aug. 1835. Ronald Rudin, Banking en francais. The French Banks of Québec 1835–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 25ff. Ronald Stewart Longley, Sir Francis Hincks: A Study of Canadian Politics, Railways, and Finance in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1943), 1–33. Appendix, 1837, ‘Report of the Select Committee to which was referred the subject of the Monetary System of the Province,’ 60. Ibid., 59. Correspondent and Advocate, 19 Oct. 1836. Appendix, 1837, ‘Report … Monetary System of the Province,’ 18, 54; Appendix, 1837–8, ‘Report … on … Banking,’ 212. Ibid., 20. AO, F-37, Mackenzie–Lindsey family fonds, 15 May 1846, 21 April 1850, 23 Feb. 1852. Constitution, 19 June 1837. McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 144. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, lxxiv–ix. Constitution, 17 May 1837. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 115. William Proudfoot to Sir F.B. Head, 18 May 1837. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 119. Ibid., lxxxii. Francis Hincks, testimony to the Select Committee on the Monetary System of the Province, Appendix, June 1837, 54.

286

Notes to pages 174–81

83 Anonymous, Thoughts on the Banking System of Upper Canada, and on the Present Crisis (Toronto: privately published, 1837), 11. This pamphlet was published by the Bank of the People in address to the Legislative Council, then about to consider the bill allowing the chartered banks to suspend specie payments. The author is most likely Francis Hincks, and matches his testimony to the Select Committee on the Monetary System of the Province, Appendix, June 1837. Angela Redish showed that this fear proved unfounded in the Upper Canadian case: ‘The Economic Crisis of 1837–1839 in Upper Canada: Case Study of a Temporary Suspension of Specie Payments,’ Explorations in Economic History 20/4 (1983): 402–17. 84 Ibid., 14. 85 Correspondent and Advocate, 30 July 1835. 6 The Constitution 1 P.Q.R. was a regular correspondent of the Patriot, living in Chinguacousy Township, Peel County. He was a clergyman of the Church of England. 2 Correspondent and Advocate, 16 April 1836. 3 Archives of Ontario (AO), F37 Mackenzie–Lindsey Papers, Hincks to Mackenzie, 21 April 1850. 4 Constitution, 15 Feb. 1837; ‘Extracts from Minutes of Proceedings of the Constitutional Reform Society,’ 30 May 1836. 5 Patriot, 24 Nov. 1837. 6 Ibid., 27 Oct. 1837. 7 Wilton, Popular Politics, 186. 8 Constitution, 15 Nov. 1837. 9 Ibid., 11 Oct. 1837. See also the resolution of the combined Political Unions of South Uxbridge, and the North-east and North-west corners of Pickering and Markham, 29 Nov. 1837. 10 Correspondent and Advocate, 18 Dec. 1834. 11 Harrison, New Moral World, 215–17. 12 Constitution, 26 July 1837. 13 Allan Greer, ‘Historical Roots of Canadian Democracy,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 34/1 (1999): 7–8. 14 Paul Romney, Getting It Wrong: How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperilled Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 57–8. 15 Allan Greer, ‘1837–38: Rebellion Reconsidered,’ Canadian Historical Review 76/1 (1995): 1–18. 16 Ibid., 7. 17 David J.V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford:

Notes to pages 181–7 287

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34

35 36 37

Clarendon Press, 1985), 32. ‘Edmund Walker Head,’ DCB. Some have claimed that Sir Francis’s surprising appointment as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada was the result of the Home Office’s confusion of the two men. The Newport Uprising would appear to suggest the mistake would have made little difference. Ironically, Sir Edmund was ultimately to become the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick, where he was instructed to oversee the introduction of responsible government in 1848. Paul A. Pickering, ‘“And your Petitioners &c”: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics 1838–48,’ English Historical Review 116/466 (2001): 368–88. Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 174–89. Harrison, New Moral World, 208–17. Edward Royle, ‘Chartists and Owenites – Many Parts but One Body,’ Labour History Review 65/1 (2000): 2–21. John K. Walton, Chartism (London: Routledge, 1999), 8. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (Aldershot, 1984), 63. Ibid., 120–51. Walton, Chartism, 43–5, 57. Claeys, Saints, 225ff. Constitution, 26 July 1837. Royal Standard, 9 Nov. 1836. Romney, Getting It Wrong, 59. Donald McMahon, ‘Law and Public Authority: Sir John Beverley Robinson and the Purposes of Criminal Law,’ University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review 46/2 (1988): 409. Constitution, 30 Aug. 1837. Sean T. Cadigan, ‘Paternalism and Politics: Sir Francis Bond Head, the Orange Order, and the Election of 1836,’ Canadian Historical Review 72/3 (1991): 319–47. Cecil J. Houston, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 147. Hereward Senior, ‘A Bid for Rural Ascendancy: The Upper Canadian Orangemen, 1836–1840,’ in Donald Akenson, ed., Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 5 (Gananoque: Langdale Press, 1982), 224. Houston, Sash, 157. Appendix, 1841, ‘Appendix S: Report of Commissioners to Investigate the Riots at Toronto,’ unpaginated. Gregory S. Kealey, ‘Orangemen and the Corporation: The Politics of Class during the Union of the Canadas,’ in Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging a

288

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

Notes to pages 187–91

Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto: Toronto Sesquicentennial Board by University of Toronto Press, 1984), 42. Gregory S. Kealey, ‘Orangemen and the Corporation,’ in Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging the Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto: Published for the Toronto Sesquicentennial Board by University of Toronto Press, 1984), 45. Ibid., 50. Constitution, 14 Dec. 1836. Lillian Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 189. Constitution, 14 Dec. 1836. Journal Legislative Council (JLC), 1837, 560, 25 Feb. 1837. Correspondent and Advocate, 23 Nov. 1836. The ‘Act better to secure the independence of the Commons House of Assembly of this province and for other purposes’ (7th William IV, Chap. CXIV) was passed 23 Jan. 1837 (JLC, 1837, 334) and received Royal Assent, 20 April 1838. Constitution, 2 Nov. 1836. Correspondent and Advocate, 19 Oct. 1836. Montreal Gazette, 7 May 1833. Royal Standard, 3 Dec. 1836. Patriot, 25 Oct. 1836; Correspondent and Advocate, 26 Oct. 1836; Constitution, 26 Oct. 1836; Patriot, 22 and 25 Nov. 1836. 7th William IV, 1st Session, Chap. IV. Correspondent and Advocate, 11 Jan. 1837. Constitution, 22 March 1837. For the merchant’s view, see the Patriot, 22 Nov. 1836. Patriot, 11 April 1837. McCalla, Planting the Province, 193. See the large anthropological literature that has sprung from the work of Eric Wolf, e.g., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), and James C. Scott, e.g., The Moral Economy of the Peasant Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Creighton, ‘Rebellion,’ 235. McCalla, Planting, 187–93. Patriot, 13 Jan. 1837. See, e.g., an election broadsheet criticizing ‘those Ladies who have been observed exerting themselves canvassing for Parson Draper’s son’: ‘The celebrated horse Simon Ebenezer will stand for six days only, at the Court House, in this city’ (University of Toronto Fisher Rare Book Library, T-10 00064, no. 1).

Notes to pages 191–8 289 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90

91

Christian Guardian, 11 Jan. 1837. Correspondent and Advocate, 22 June 1836. Constitution, Correspondent and Advocate, 12 Oct. 1836. Correspondent and Advocate, 16 Nov. 1836. Christian Guardian, 22 March 1837. Constitution, 3 May 1837. Ibid., 14 May 1837. Ibid., 10 May 1837. Ibid., 12 April 1837. Ibid., 17 May 1837. Ibid., 24 May 1837. Ibid., 1 Feb. 1837. Cf. David Willson, Moral and Religious Precepts, Church Ordinances, and the Principles of Civil Government (Toronto: W.J. Coates, 1836). Constitution, 24 May 1837. Ibid., 19 July 1837. T.M. Parssinen, ‘Association, Convention and Anti-parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848,’ English Historical Review 88/348 (1973): 504–33. Ibid., 521. Colonial Advocate, 22 Aug. 1833. Constitution, 19 July 1837. Ibid., 2 Aug. 1837. Ibid., 2 Aug. 1837; Patriot, 11 Aug. 1837. Constitution, 9 Aug. 1837. Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 295–6. Wilton, Popular Politics, 185ff. Patriot, 15 Aug. 1837. ‘Battle of Albion,’ Constitution, 16 Aug. 1837. Wilton, Popular Politics, 186; Constitution, 23 Aug. 1837. See the Tory report on the ‘seditious’ meeting of reformers at Albion, which called on Orangemen in other townships to attack Mackenzie in his ‘route of rebellion,’ and Patriot, 1 Sept. 1837. Wilton, Popular Politics, 187. Dent, Rebellion, vol. 1, 372–3. Lindsey, Mackenzie, vol. 2, 54. Ibid., 56; Ronald Stagg and Colin Read, eds., The Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents (Ottawa: Carleton University Press / Champlain Society, 1985), xxxviii; J. Barnett, ‘Silas Fletcher, Instigator of the Upper Canadian Rebellion,’ Ontario History 41 (1949): 7–35. Constitution, 25 Oct. 1837.

290 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100

101 102

103

104

105

Notes to pages 198–204 Ibid., 8 Nov. 1837. Ibid., 15 Nov. 1837. Ibid., 29 Nov. 1837. ‘Independence,’ broadside, Baldwin Room, MTPL, distributed about 27 Nov. 1837. Stagg and Read, Rebellion, xxxix. Colin Read, The Rising in Western Upper Canada, 1837–8: The Duncombe Revolt and After (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 178. Sharon Temple Archives, 986.15.1. Statements relative to the prices of wheat and flour and provisions in the United States and also in British North America: together with tables of the imports and exports of wheat and flour into and from the United States, and into and from British North America (London: T.R. Harrison / Command Papers, Great Britain, Parliament, C. 362, 1842), 11. See also Stagg and Read, Rebellion, 44–7. Samuel Hughes, uncatalogued manuscript, History of the Society of Friends in Canada, 33–4, Archives of Canada Yearly Meeting, Pickering College, Newmarket, Ontario. David Willson, Moral and Religious Precepts, Church Ordinances, and the Principles of Civil Government (Toronto: W.J. Coates, 1836), 14. See, e.g., the case of Moses Haylor, an English immigrant who faced starvation in 1832 when his first crop failed; he appealed to Lount for aid and received two barrels of flour. He was to return the favour after Lount was arrested, and an angry mob descended on his unprotected wife and children, threatening to burn their house around them. Haylor dispersed the mob, reminding them ‘he once saved my life and that of my family from starvation when that fate stared me and them in the face: and hundreds can testify that he has reached out a helping hand to those in great need. He saved my dear ones, and I shall save his!’ Terry Carter, ‘Samuel Lount: Rebel or Victim?’ York Pioneer 82 (1987): 44. Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 306–7; Lillian Gates, After the Rebellion: The Later Years of William Lyon Mackenzie (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1988), 112; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 339–40. Jamie Bronstein, ‘The Homestead and the Garden Plot: Cultural Pressures on Land Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the USA,’ European Legacy 6/2 (2001): 160. R.S. Longley, ‘Emigration and the Crisis of 1837 in Upper Canada,’ Canadian Historical Review 17 (1936): 29–40.

Notes to pages 204–12 291 106 Joy MacAskill, ‘The Chartist Land Plan,’ in Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1965), 304–41. 107 Malcolm Chase, ‘“Wholesome Object Lessons”: The Chartist Land Plan in Retrospect,’ English Historical Review 117/475 (2003): 59. 108 ‘Independence,’ broadside, Baldwin Room, MTPL. 109 Bronstein, ‘Homestead and the Garden Plot,’ 163. 110 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 340. 111 Gates, After the Rebellion, 112. 112 Mirror, 28 July 1838. 113 Longley, ‘Emigration,’ 38. 114 AO, Mackenzie–Lindsey Papers, F37, Joseph Turton to W.L. Mackenzie, 27 March 1848. 115 Appendix, 1838, ‘Report … on … Banking,’ 2 Feb., 213–14, 223–4. 116 Merrill Denison, Canada’s First Bank: A History of the Bank of Montreal, vol. 1 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 362–4. Examiner 10, 24 June 1840, 22 Dec. 1841, 5 Jan. 1842. 117 Toronto City Council Papers, AO, Ms 385, reel 3, correspondence dated 13 and 18 Oct. 1841, 28 Feb. 1842, 9 Oct. 1843, 29 Jan., 13 and 26 Feb., and 4 March 1844. 118 Ms journal of Samuel Hughes. The journal, unfortunately, begins in December 1837. 119 Captain Thomas Sibbald, ‘Extracts from: A Few Days in the United States and Canada with some Hints to Settlers,’ Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Toronto Transactions 16 (1916–17): 32. 120 Upper Canada Gazette, 18 Jan. 1838, ‘An act to authorize the apprehending and detention of persons suspected of high treason.’ 121 Greer, ‘Historical Roots,’ 7–8. 122 Romney, Getting It Wrong, 57–8. 123 Ibid., 68. 124 Ibid., 62. 125 Letter, John Strachan to John Macaulay, 18 Nov. 1821, Macaulay Papers F32, AO. 7 The Promise of Responsible Government 1 2 3 4

Durham, Report, 105. ‘William Warren Baldwin,’ DCB. Smith, ‘Ideological Origins of Canadian Confederation,’ 48–9. Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, ‘Liberal-Republicanism: The Revisionist Picture of Canada’s Founding,’ in Canada’s Origins, 2, summarizing

292

5 6

7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19

Notes to pages 212–18

the work of J.G.A. Pocock (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton, 1975]), and Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, Mass., 1969]). On the Chartist movement’s civic humanist past, see: Miles Taylor ‘The Six Points: Chartism and the Reform of Parliament,’ in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds., The Chartist Legacy (Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1999), 1–23; and Paul A. Pickering, ‘“The Hearts of the Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s,’ History 88/290 (2003): 227–48. Smith, ‘Ideological Origins,’ 55–8. Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,’ in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 24. Frances Gouda, Poverty and Political Culture: The Rhetoric of Social Welfare in the Netherlands and France, 1815–1854 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 155. Ian McKay, ‘The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,’ Canadian Historical Review 81/4 (2000): 624. Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005), 82–3. Ian Radforth, ‘Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform,’ in Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 66–7. ‘First Report on Municipal Corporations, 1835,’ cited in Engin F. Isin, Cities without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 48. Radforth, ‘Sydenham,’ 74. See, e.g., the summary statement by Stagg and Read, The Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada, xcix–c. C.F.J. Whebell, ‘The Upper Canada District Councils Act of 1841 and British Colonial Policy,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 17/2 (1989): 194. McKay, ‘Liberal Framework,’ 623. John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, Report on the affairs of British North America from the Earl of Durham, Her Majesty’s High Commissioner &c. &c. & (Toronto: R. Stanton, 1839), 280. CIHM 32374. Sydenham, cited in Isin, Cities, 132. Bruce Curtis, ‘Representation and State Formation in the Canadas, 1790–1850,’ Studies in Political Economy 8 (1989): 70. Mirror, 3 Dec. 1841.

Notes to pages 218–26 293 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 204. Whebell, ‘District Councils Act,’ 185. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 197–9. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 197–8, 200. J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions, 1841–1857 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 53–4. Whebell, ‘District Councils Act,’ 199. See, e.g., the township resolutions passed in East Gwillimbury and Whitchurch. Examiner, 8 Jan. 1840. Wilton, Popular Politics, 212–14; Examiner, 2 Oct. 1839. James Reid to Wm Lyon Mackenzie, 22 Oct. 1839, Archives of Ontario (AO), F-37, Mackenzie–Lindsey Papers; ‘Report from the Special Committee to which was referred the Petition of Peter Leppard,’ Journal Legislative Council (JLC), 1841, 635–7. Ibid., 637. Mirror, 15 Nov. 1839. JLC, 17 Sept. 1841, 637. See, e.g., Mirror, 18 Oct., 15 Nov., 8 and 13 Dec. 1839, 3 Jan. 1840, and Examiner, 8 and 15 Jan., 12 Feb. 1840. P. Scrope, Lord Sydenham (London, 1843), 172. Examiner, 11 Oct. 1840, quoting the Toronto Herald. Examiner, 3 March 1841; Mirror, 9 and 30 Oct. 1840. Mirror, 18 Sept. 1840; Examiner, 23 Sept. 1840. Examiner, 28 Oct. 1840. Ibid., 19 Aug. 1841. Ibid., 20 Jan. 1841. Ibid. Ibid., 24 Feb. 1841. Constitution, 24 Aug. 1836. Examiner, 8 Feb. 1841; Mirror, 12 Feb. 1841; copied in the Examiner, 24 Feb. Letter, John Evans et al. (Hope Village). To John McIntosh, 24 Feb. 1841, AO, F-37, Mackenzie–Lindsey Papers. Examiner, 24 Feb. 1841. Mirror, 19 Feb. 1841. Ibid., 26 Feb. 1841. Examiner, 17 Feb. 1841. Ibid., 3 March 1841. Ibid.

294 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78

Notes to pages 226–35

Mirror, 12 March 1841. Examiner, 10 March 1841. Abella, ‘Sydenham Election,’ 341. Mirror, 23 April 1841. Ibid., 14 May 1841; Examiner, 12 May 1841. Examiner, 19 May 1841. Mirror, 28 May 1841. Wilson, Robert Baldwin, 131ff. Ibid., 96ff. Careless, Union of the Canadas, 47ff. Yolande Stewart, ed., My Dear Friend: Letters of Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine & Robert Baldwin (Whitby: Plum Hollow Books, 1978), 8. Ibid., 8–12; letters, 1841: Robert Baldwin (hereafter R. Baldwin) to Dr Baldwin, 10 Aug.; Dr Baldwin to R. Baldwin, 12 Aug.; Dr Baldwin to B.W. Smith, 13 Aug.; R. Baldwin to L.H. LaFontaine, 15 Aug.; L.H. LaFontaine to R. Baldwin, 19 Aug. Examiner, 25 Aug. 1841; the meeting minutes confirm Dr Baldwin’s interpretation in his letter to his son, 22 Aug. 1841. Stewart, My Dear Friend, 14–16; letter, Dr Baldwin to R. Baldwin, 22 Aug. 1841. Letter, L. Heyden to R. Baldwin, 27 Aug. 1841, Baldwin correspondence, L5, A50–41, Baldwin Room, Metro Toronto Reference Library (MTRL). Letter, J. Irving to R. Baldwin, 29 Aug. 1841, Baldwin correspondence, L5, A53–72. Undated broadside, ‘To the Freeholders of the Fourth Riding of York by a “Freeholder,”’ Baldwin Room, MTRL. Stewart, My Dear Friend, 24–6; letter, Dr Baldwin to R. Baldwin, 5 Sept. 1841. Mirror, 10 Sept. 1841. Examiner, 15 Sept. 1841. See also Dr Baldwin’s estimation of the meetings, Stewart, My Dear Friend, 27; letter, Dr Baldwin to R. Baldwin, 11 Sept. 1841. JLC, 1841, 441, 512. Stewart, My Dear Friend, 26; letter, LaFontaine to R. Baldwin, 11 Sept. 1841. Mirror, 24 Sept. 1841. Peter Way, ‘Street Politics: Orangemen, Tories and the 1841 Election Riot in Toronto,’ British Journal of Canadian Studies 6/2 (1991): 285. Globe, 9 Dec. 1845. Appendix, 1841, ‘Appendix S: Report of Commissioners to Investigate the Riots at Toronto,’ ‘No. 6’ Testimony of John Maitland.

Notes to pages 236–47 295 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97

98 99 100

Way, ‘Street Politics,’ 289–90. Kealey, ‘Orangemen,’ 48–9. Houston, Sash, 31–4. Elizabeth Gibbs, ed., Debates of the Legislative Assembly, 1843, 442. LaFontaine, quoted in John Ralston Saul, ‘Across the Great Divide,’ Queen’s Quarterly 104/1 (1997): 11. McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 237. Letter, David Willson to R. Baldwin, 7 March 1844, Baldwin Papers, Baldwin Room, MTRL. Mirror, 7 June 1844. Ibid., 14 and 21 June 1844. Stewart, My Dear Friend, 137, letter, Baldwin to LaFontaine, 14 June 1844. Ibid., 123ff, letter, Baldwin to LaFontaine, 22 May 1844. Mirror, 8 Aug. 1844. Ibid., 6 Sept. 1844. Ibid., 12 May, 13 Sept. 1844. Ibid., 20 Sept. 1844; British Colonist, 13 Sept. 1844. Ian McKay, ‘The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,’ Canadian Historical Review 81/4 (2000): 624. Careless, The Union of the Canadas, 95. McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 272ff. Home District Municipal Council, Minutes of the Home District Municipal Council, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Quarterly Meetings, Fifth and Sixth Victoria, 1842 (Toronto: James Cleland, 1842). Brothers John D. Willson and Hugh joined the march on the city. ‘During the day on Wednesday David Willson came down and took his son John David Willson.’ David Willson apparently had no luck in inducing Hugh to also return home. Charles Doan quoted in Stagg and Read, Rebellion, 115. Examiner, 12 Sept. 1838. Mirror, 31 Dec. 1841. Ibid., 18 Feb. 1842.

Conclusion: The Economic Roots of Joint Stock Democracy 1 McCalla, Planting the Province, 9. 2 McNairn, ‘Why We Need but Don’t Have an Intellectual History,’ 144–5. 3 Harris, Industrializing English Law, 270ff. Harris notes that the repeal of the Bubble Act in 1825 was followed by the Trading Companies Act of 1834 introduced by the then president of the Board of Trade, Charles Poulett

296

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18

Notes to pages 248–53

Thomson, later 1st Baron Sydenham, governor of the United Canadas. Sydenham was exemplary of the gentlemanly capitalists who introduced the ‘Liberal Order Framework’; see below. See Ian McKay, ‘The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,’ Canadian Historical Review 81/4 (2000): 617–45; Albert Schrauwers, ‘Revolutions without a Revolutionary Moment: Joint Stock Democracy and the Transition to Capitalism in Upper Canada,’ Canadian Historical Review 89/2: 223–55; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 71–84; Major L. Wilson, ‘The “Country” versus the “Court”: A Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,’ Journal of the Early Republic 15/4 (1995): 619–47. Cf. Johnson, ‘The U.C. Club and the Upper Canadian Elite,’ 151–68. Johnson, ‘The U.C. Club.’ See also Graeme Patterson, ‘Early Compact Groups in the Politics of York,’ in David Keane and Colin Read, eds., Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J.M.S. Careless (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1989), 174–91. H.G.J. Aitken, ‘The Family Compact and the Welland Canal Company,’ Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 17 (1952): 76, cited in Johnson, ‘U.C. Club,’ 162. Johnson, ‘U.C. Club,’ 162. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 58–9. Ibid., 101. J.S. Mill, ‘Chapter VIII, Of the Extension of the Suffrage,’ in On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946 [originally published 1861]), 209. Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 1998), 46. Sydney Jackman, Galloping Head: The Life of The Right Honourable Sir Francis Bond Head, BART., P.C., 1793–1875, Late Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (London: Phoenix House, 1952), 10. Ibid., 84. Eric Arthur, Toronto: No Mean City, 3rd rev. ed. by Stephen A. Otto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 44. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Appendix to the Journal, 1831, 78–82. David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in MidVictorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 29–30. Ross D. Fair, ‘Gentlemen, Farmers, and Gentlemen Half-Farmers: The De-

Notes to pages 253–8 297

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

velopment of Agricultural Societies in Upper Canada, 1792–1846’ (Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, Queen’s University, 1998). Kenneth Kelly, ‘Notes on a Type of Mixed Farming Practised in Ontario during the Early Nineteenth Century,’ Canadian Geographer 17/3 (1973): 205–29; ‘The Transfer of British Ideas on Improved Farming to Ontario during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,’ Ontario History 63/2 (1971): 103–20. Johnson, ‘U.C. Club,’ 157. Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,’ 3–41. Greer, ‘Historical Roots,’ 22. Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 5. Henry, Canada as It Is, 123–5. John Ralston Saul, ‘Inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture,’ in Rudyard Griffiths, ed., Dialogue on Democracy: The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures 2000–2005 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006), 10.

This page intentionally left blank

References

Abella, Irving Martin. (1966). The Sydenham Election of 1841. Canadian Historical Review 47/4: 326–43. Acheson, T.W. (1969). The Nature and Structure of York Commerce in the 1820’s. Canadian Historical Review 50/4: 406–28. Ajzenstat, Janet. (1985). Modern Mixed Government: A Liberal Defense of Inequality. Canadian Journal of Political Science 18/1: 119–34. Alborn, Timothy L. (1998). Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England. London: Routledge. Andrews, Edward Deming. (1963). The People Called Shakers. New York: Dover. Ankli, Robert E., and Kenneth J. Duncan. (1984). Farm Making Costs in Early Ontario. Canadian Papers in Rural History 4: 33–49. Anonymous (Bank of the People). (1837). Thoughts on the Banking System of Upper Canada during the Present Crisis. Toronto: printed for the author. Excerpts were reprinted in the Constitution, 21 June 1837. Arky, Louis H. (1952). The Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations and the Formation of the Philadelphia Workingmen’s Movement. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 76: 142–76. Armstrong, Frederick H. (1985). Handbook of Upper Canadian Chronology, rev. ed. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Arthur, Eric. (2003). Toronto: No Mean City, 3rd rev. ed. by Stephen A. Otto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Aston T.H., and C.H.E. Philpin, eds. (1985). The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baehre, Rainer. (1981). Pauper Emigration to Upper Canada in the 1830s. Histoire Sociale / Social History 14/28: 339–67.

300

References

– (1984). Paupers and Poor Relief in Upper Canada. In Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, 305–39. Toronto: Published for the Toronto Sesquicentennial Board by University of Toronto Press. Baker, Andrew H., and Holly Izard Paterson. (1988). Farmers’ Adaptations to Markets in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts. In Peter Benes, ed., The Farm, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 1986, 95–108. Boston: Annual Proceedings. Baker, G. Blaine. (1985). The Juvenile Advocate Society, 1821–1826; Self-Proclaimed Schoolroom for Upper Canada’s Governing Class. Historical Papers / Communications Historiques 20/1: 74–101. Bamfield, Joshua. (1998). Consumer-Owned Community Flour and Bread Societies in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Business History 40/4: 16–36. Bancks, William. (1836). A Letter on the Proposed New Colonial Funding System. Toronto: Palladium Office. Barnett, J. (1949). Silas Fletcher, Instigator of the Upper Canadian Rebellion. Ontario History 41/4: 7–35. Barry, Andrew, and Don Slater. (2002). Introduction: The Technological Economy. Economy and Society 31/2: 175–93. Baskerville, Peter, ed. (1987). The Bank of Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents. Toronto: Champlain Society / Ontario Heritage Foundation. Beer, D.R. (1981). Sir Allan Napier MacNab. In Thomas M. Bailey, ed., Dictionary of Hamilton Biography, vol. 1, 47–8. Hamilton: Dictionary of Hamilton Biography. Berchem, F.R. (1977). The Yonge Street Story (1793–1860). Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Bernier, Gérald, and Daniel Salée. (1992). The Shaping of Quebec Politics and Society: Colonialism, Power, and the Transition to Capitalism in the 19th Century. Washington: Crane Russak. Bestor, Arthur. (1970). Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America 1663–1829, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bossenbroek, Martin. (1996). Holland op zijn Breedst: Indië en Zuid-Afrika in de Nederlandse Cultuur Omstreeks 1900. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Buchanan, James. (1834). Project for the Formation of a Depot in Upper Canada, with a view to receive the whole Pauper Population of England. New York: William Mercein. Cadigan, Sean T. (1991). Paternalism and Politics: Sir Francis Bond Head, the Orange Order, and the Election of 1836. Canadian Historical Review 72/3: 319–47.

References 301 Cain, P.J., and A.G. Hopkins. (1993). British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914. London: Longman. Callon, Michel. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Careless, J.M.S. (1968). The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions, 1841–1857. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Carroll, William K. (2004). Corporate Power in a Globalizing World: A Study of Elite Social Organization. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Carter, Terry. (1987). Samuel Lount: Rebel or Victim? York Pioneer 82: 44–5. Champion, Isabel, ed. (1979). Markham 1793–1900. Markham: Markham Historical Society. Chandler, Alfred D. (1977). The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Claeys, Gregory. (1987). Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–60. Cambridge: Polity Press. – (1989). Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Christopher. (1990). The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. – (1991). Economics and Culture: Opening Up the Rural History of the Early American Northeast. American Quarterly 43/2: 279–301. – (1995). The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Clarke, John. (2001). Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Committee for the Relief of the Poor and Destitute of the City of Toronto. (1837). Report of the Committee for the Relief of the Poor and Destitute of the City of Toronto: and Rules and Regulations of the House of Refuge & Industry established under their care, January, 1837. Toronto: J.H. Lawrence, Guardian Office. Cooper, Matthew. (1987a). Relations of Modes of Production in Nineteenth Century America: The Shakers and Oneida. Ethnology 26/1: 1–16. – (1987b). Living Together: How Communal Were the Children of Peace? Ontario History 79/1: 3–17. Cordery, Simon. (2003). British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Craig, Gerald. (1963). Upper Canada: The Formative Years 1784–1841. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Creighton, D.G. (1967). The Economic Background of the Rebellions of 1837. In W.T. Easterbrook and M.H. Watkins, eds., Approaches of Canadian Economic History, 222–36. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart / Carleton Library.

302

References

Degler, Carl N. (1956). The Locofocos: Urban ‘Agrarians.’ Journal of Economic History 16/3: 322–33. Dent, J.C. (1881). The Canadian Portrait Gallery, vol. 4. Toronto: John B. Magurn. – (1885). The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion; Largely Derived from Original Sources and Documents, 2 vols. Toronto: C.B. Robinson. Duncumb, Thomas. (1837). The British Emigrant’s Advocate. London: Simpking & Marshall. Dunlop, Dr. (1832). An Address Delivered to the York Mechanics’ Institution, March, 1832. York: Guardian Office. Durham, John George Lambton, Earl of. (1839). Report on the affairs of British North America from the Earl of Durham, Her Majesty’s High Commissioner &c. &c. &. Toronto: R. Stanton. Earle, Jonathan H. (2004). Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Emigh, Rebecca. (2004). [The] Transition[s] to Capitalism[s]? A Review Essay. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46/1: 188–98. Fidler, Isaac. (1833). Observations on Professions, Literature, Manner, and Emigration, in the United States and Canada, Made During a Residence There in 1832. London: Whittaker, Treacher. Fingard, Judith. (1974). The Winter’s Tale: The Seasonal Contours of PreIndustrial Poverty in British North America, 1815–1860. Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers 5: 65–94. Firth, Edith. (1966). The Town of York, 1815–1834: A Further Collection of Documents of Early Toronto. Toronto: Champlain Society for the Government of Ontario, University of Toronto Press. Freyer, Tony. (1994). Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gagan, David. (1981). Hopeful Travellers: Familes, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press / Ontario Historical Studies Series. Garnett, R.G. (1972). Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gates, Lillian. (1959). The Decided Policy of William Lyon Mackenzie. Canadian Historical Review 40/3: 185–208. – (1983). Land Policies of Upper Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gouge, William. (1833). A Short History of Paper-Money and Banking in the United States Including an Account of Provincial and Continental Paper-Money to Which is Prefixed an Inquiry into the principles of the System with Consideration of Its Effects on Morals and Happiness. Philadelphia: T.W. Ustick. – (1835). Reprinted as The Curse of Banking in the United States. London: Mills, Jowett, & Mills.

References 303 Graham, M. Audry. (1966). 150 Years at St John’s, York Mills. Toronto: General Publishing. Greer, Allan. (1993). The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – (1999). Historical Roots of Canadian Democracy. Journal of Canadian Studies 34/1: 7–25. Griffith, Sally F. (2000). Rituals of Incorporation in Ante-bellum Civic Life. Mid-America 82/1& 2: 51–70. Harding, Brian. (1993). Transatlantic Views of Speculation and Value, 1820–60. Historical Research [Great Britain] 66/160: 209–21. Harris, Ron. (2000). Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, John. (1969). Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. New York: Scribner’s. Hart, Patricia W. (1968). Pioneering in North York: A History of the Borough. Toronto: General Publishing. Head, Francis Bond. (1846). The Emigrant. London: J. Murray. – (1857). Descriptive Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, vol. 1. London: John Murray. Henderson, James P. (1986). Agency or Alienation? Smith, Mill and Marx on the Joint-Stock Company. History of Political Economy 18/1: 111–31. Henry, George. (1832). The emigrant’s guide; or, Canada as it is; comprising details relating to the domestic policy, commerce and agriculture, of the Upper and Lower Provinces, comprising matter of general information and interest, especially intended for the use of settlers and emigrants. New York: Stodart. Higgins, W.H. (1972). The Life and Times of Joseph Gould. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside. Hilton, George W. (1960). The Truck System, Including a History of the British Truck Acts, 1465–1960. Cambridge: W. Heffer. Hobsbawm, Eric, and George Rudé. (1968). Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830. New York: Norton. Hunter, Andrew. (1909). A History of Simcoe County. Barrie, Ont.: County Council. Innis, Harold. (1956). The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ireland, Paddy. (1996). Capitalism without the Capitalist: The Joint Stock Company Share and the Emergence of the Modern Doctrine of Separate Corporate Personality. Legal History 17/1: 41–73. Irving, Allan. (1989). The Master Principle of Administering Relief: Jeremy Bentham, Sir Francis Bond Head and the Establishment of the Principle of Less Eligibility in Upper Canada. Canadian Review of Social Policy 23: 13–18.

304

References

Isin, Engin F. (1992). Cities without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Jackman, Sydney. (1952). Galloping Head: The Life of The Right Honourable Sir Francis Bond Head, BART., P.C., 1793–1875, Late Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. London: Phoenix House. Jameson, Anna Brownell. (1965). Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Johnson, Howard. (1986). ‘A Modified form of Slavery’: The Credit and Truck Systems in the Bahamas in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28/4: 729–53. Johnson, J.K. (1977). The U.C. Club and the Upper Canadian Elite, 1837–1840. Ontario History 69: 151–68. – (1989). Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791–1841. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Johnson, Leo A. (1971). Land Policy, Population Growth and Social Structure in the Home District, 1793–1851. Ontario History 63. Johnston, H.J.M. (1972). British Emigration Policy 1815–1830: ‘Shovelling Out Paupers.’ Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kaplan, Edward S. (1999). The Bank of the the United States and the American Economy. Contributions in Economics and History No. 214. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Kealey, Gregory S. (1984). Orangemen and the Corporation: The Politics of Class during the Union of the Canadas. In Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, 41–60. Toronto: Published for the Toronto Sesquicentennial Board by University of Toronto Press. Keele, W.C. (1835). The Provincial Justice, or Magistrate’s Manual … compiled and inscribed by permission, to His Majesty’s Attorney General. Toronto: Upper Canada Gazette. Kuitenbrouwer, Maarten, and Huibert Schijf. (1998). The Dutch Colonial Business Elite at the Turn of the Century. Itinerario 22/1: 61–86. Kulikoff, Allan. (1989). The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America. William and Mary Quarterly 46/1: 120–44. Lamond, Robert. (1821). A Narrative of the Rise and Progress of Emigration, from the Counties of Lanark & Renfrew, to the New Settlements in Upper Canada on Government Grant… Glasgow: Chalmers & Collins. Lamoreaux, Naomi. (2003). Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast. Journal of American History 90/2: 437–61. Lee, Robert C. (2004). The Canada Company and the Huron Tract, 1826–1853: Personalities, Profits and Politics. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books. Lindsey, Charles. (1971). The Life and Times of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie, with an

References 305 Account of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837, and the Subsequent Frontier Disturbances, Chiefly from Unpublished Documents. Toronto: Coles. Loewen, Royden K. (1993). Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Longley, Ronald Stewart. (1936). Emigration and the Crisis of 1837 in Upper Canada. Canadian Historical Review 17: 29–40. – (1943). Sir Francis Hincks: A Study of Canadian Politics, Railways, and Finance in the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. LoPatin, Nancy D. (1999). Political Unions, Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832. London: Macmillan. Mackenzie, William L. (1827). The history of the destruction of the Colonial Advocate Press by officers of the provincial government of Upper Canada and law students of the Attorney & Solicitor General… Toronto: Colonial Advocate Press. – (1833). Sketches of Canada and the United States. London: Effingham Wilson. Maier, Pauline. (1993). The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation. William and Mary Quarterly 50/1: 51–84. Majewski, John. (2006). Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800–1840. In Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, 294–315. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Marietta, Jack D. (1984). The Reformation in American Quakerism, 1748–1783. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McCalla, Douglas. (1979). The Upper Canada Trade 1834–1872: A Study of the Buchanans’ Business. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – (1993). Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada 1784–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Ontario Historical Studies Series. – (1997). Retailing in the Countryside: Upper Canadian General Stores in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Business and Economic History 26/2: 393–403. McKay, Ian. (2000). The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History. Canadian Historical Review 81/4: 617–45. McMahon, Donald. (1988). Law and Public Authority: Sir John Beverley Robinson and the Purposes of Criminal Law. University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review 46/2: 390–423. McNairn, Jeffrey. (2000). The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada 1791–1854. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – (2004). Why We Need but Don’t Have an Intellectual History of the British North American Economy. In Damien-Claude Bélanger, Sophie Coupal, and Michel Ducharme, eds., Les idées en mouvement: perspectives en histoire intellectuelle et culturelle du Canada, 145–73. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval.

306

References

Merrill, Michael. (1995). Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature. William and Mary Quarterly 52/2: 315–26. Mill, J.S. (1946). On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millar, W.P.J. (1977). The Remarkable Rev. Thaddeus Osgood: A Study in the Evangelical Spirit in the Canadas. Histoire Sociale / Social History 10/19: 59–76. Mills, David. (1988). The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Morgan, Henry J. (1865). Sketches of Celebrated Canadians, and Persons Connected with Canada… Montreal: R. Worthington. Morrison, John. (1914). The Toon o’Maxwell – an Owenite Settlement in Lambton County, Ont. Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records 12: 5–12. Morriss, Shirley, ed. (1980). The Journal of John George Howard 1833–49: Book 1, vol. 1, 1833–34. Toronto: Ontario Heritage Foundation. Moulton, Phillips P., ed. (1971). The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman. Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press. Munn, Charles. (1988). The Emergence of Joint-Stock Banking in the British Isles: A Comparative Approach. Business History [Great Britain] 30/1: 69–83. Noel, S.J.R. (1990). Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics 1791– 1896. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oliver, Peter. (1998). ‘Terror to Evil-Doers’: Prisons and Punishments in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: Osgoode Society/University of Toronto Press. Osgood, Thaddeus. (1835). A Brief Extract from the Journal of Thaddeus Osgood, Minister of the Gospel, with some anecdotes and remarks on men and occurances, during a Residence of six years in England. Montreal: Herald Office. Owen, Robert. (1819). Mr Owen’s Proposed Arrangements for the Distressed Working Classes … consistent with … Political Economy, in three letters to Mr Ricardo. London. Palmer, Bryan D. (1980). Kingston Mechanics and the Rise of the Penitentiary, 1833–1836. Histoire Sociale / Social History 13/25: 7–32. – (1992). Working Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991, 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Parry, J., and M. Bloch, eds. (1989). Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Graeme. (1989). Early Compact Groups in the Politics of York. In David Keane and Colin Read, eds., Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J.M.S. Careless, 174–91. Toronto: Dundurn Press.

References 307 Peers, Laura. (2004–5). The Not So Peaceable Kingdom: Quakers Took Up Arms in the Rebellion of 1837. Reprinted in Canadian Quaker History Journal 69–70: 17–24. Pickering, Paul A. (2001). ‘And your Petitioners &c’: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics 1838–48. English Historical Review 116/466: 368–88. Piva, Michael J. (1990–1). Financing the Union: The Upper Canadian Debt and Financial Administration in the Canadas, 1837–1845. Journal of Canadian Studies 25/4: 82–98. Polanyi, Karl. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Post, Charles. (1995). The Agrarian Origins of U.S. Capitalism: The Transformation of the Northern Countryside before the Civil War. Journal of Peasant Studies 22/3: 389–445. Postgate, R.W. (1923). The Builders’ History. London: National Federation of Building Trade Operatives. Price, Richard. (1980). Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prothero, I.J. (1979). Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times. Folkestone, Kent: Wm Dawson. Rader, Benj. G. (1963). William Gouge: Jacksonian Economic Theorist. Pennsylvania History 30/4: 443–53. Reddy, William M. (1987). Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redish, Angela. (1983). The Economic Crisis of 1837–1839 in Upper Canada: Case Study of a Temporary Suspension of Specie Payments. Explorations in Economic History 20/4: 402–17. Rennie, Bradford James. (2000). The Rise of Agrarian Democracy: The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta 1909–1921. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rilling, Donna J. (2001). Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Risk, R.C.B. (1973). The Nineteenth Century Foundations of the Business Corporation in Ontario. University of Toronto Law Journal 23: 270–303. Robertson, John Ross. (1908). Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto: a collection of historical sketches of the old town of York from 1792 until 1833, and of Toronto from 1834 to 1908 : also, three hundred and thirty engravings of places and scenes in Toronto or in connection with the city, vol. 1. Toronto: J.R. Robertson. Rolph, Thomas. (1836). A Brief Account Together with Observations Made during a Visit in the West Indies and a Tour Through the United States of America in Parts

308

References

of the Year 1832–3, Together with a Statistical Account of Upper Canada. Dundas: G.H. Hackstaff. Romney, Paul. (1984). A Struggle for Authority: Toronto Society and Politics in 1834. In Victor L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto, 9–40. Toronto: Published for the Toronto Sesquicentennial Board by University of Toronto Press. – (1986). Mr Attorney: The Attorney General for Ontario in Court, Cabinet, and Legislature, 1791–1899. Toronto: Osgoode Society / University of Toronto Press. – (1987). From the Types Riot to the Rebellion: Elite Ideology, Anti-legal Sentiment, Political Violence, and the Rule of Law in Upper Canada. Ontario History 74/2: 113–44. – (1990). On the Eve of the Rebellion: Nationality, Religion and Class in the Toronto Election of 1836. In David Keane and Colin Read, eds., Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J.M.S. Careless, 192–216. Toronto: Dundurn Press. – (1999). Getting It Wrong: How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperilled Confederation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rothenberg, Winifred B. (1981). The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855. Journal of Economic History 41/2: 283–314. – (1988). The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy. Journal of Economic History 48/3: 537–66. Rowe, D.J. (1970). Class and Political Radicalism in London, 1831–2. Historical Journal 8/1: 31–47. Royle, Edward. (2000). Chartists and Owenites – Many Parts but One Body. Labour History Review 65/1: 2–21. Rudin, Ronald. (1985). Banking en francais: The French Banks of Québec 1835– 1925. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rumford, Benjamin, Count. (1796). Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, 3 vols. London. Russell, Peter A. (1982). Upper Canada: A Poor Man’s Country? Some Statistical Evidence. Canadian Papers in Rural History 3: 129–47. – (1990). Attitudes to Social Structure and Mobility in Upper Canada 1815–1840: ‘Here We Are Laird Ourselves.’ Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Ryan, Mary P. (1981). Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santuari, Alceste. (1993). The Joint Stock Company in Nineteenth Century England and France: King v. Dodd and the Code de Commerce. Legal History 14/1: 39–52 Saul, John Ralston. (1997). Across the Great Divide. Queen’s Quarterly 104/1: 8–28.

References 309 – (2006). Inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture. In Rudyard Griffiths, ed., Dialogue on Democracy: The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures 2000–2005, 1–24. Toronto: Penguin Canada. Scadding, Henry. (1873). Toronto of Old. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. (1949). The Age of Jackson. Boston: Little Brown. Schrauwers, Albert. (1993). Awaiting the Millennium: The Children of Peace and the Village of Hope, 1812–1889. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – (1998). The Spirit of Capitalism and the Collapse of Community: The Children of Peace in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Canadian Quaker History Journal 63: 54–66. – (1999). ‘I was a Stranger, and ye took me in …’: Charity, Moral Economy and the Children of Peace. Canadian Historical Review 80/4: 624–40. – (2001). The Benevolent Colonies of Johannes van den Bosch: Continuities in the Administration of Poverty in the Netherlands and Indonesia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43/2: 298–328. Schweitzer, Mary M. (1987). Custom and Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, James. (1976). The Moral Economy of the Peasant. New Haven: Yale University Press. – (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scrope, P. (1843). Lord Sydenham. London. Sewell, John. (2002). Mackenzie: A Political Biography of William Lyon Mackenzie. Toronto: Lorimer. Shirreff, Patrick. (1835). A tour through North America: together with a comprehensive view of the Canadas and United States, as adapted for agricultural emigration. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Shortt, Adam. (1897). The Early History of Canadian Banking: The First Banks in Upper Canada. Toronto: Journal of the Canadian Bankers’ Association. Sibbald, Captain Thomas. (1916–17). Extracts from: A Few Days in the United States and Canada with some Hints to Settlers. Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Toronto Transactions 16: 28–34. Sider, Gerald. (1980). The Ties that Bind: Culture and Agriculture, Property and Propriety in the Newfoundland Village Fishery. Social History [Great Britain] 5/1: 1–39. Smandych, Russell C. (1991a). Upper Canadian Considerations about Rejecting the English Poor Law, 1817–1837: A Comparative Study of the Reception of Law. Working Paper Series, Canadian Legal History Project. Winnipeg: Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba. – (1991b). Rethinking ‘The Master Principle of Administering Relief’ in Up-

310

References

per Canada: A Response to Allan Irving. Canadian Review of Social Policy 27: 81–6. Smith, Peter J. (1995). The Ideological Origins of Canadian Confederation. In Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, eds., Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory or Republican?, 47–77. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Stack, David. (1998). Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869). Rochester: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press. Stagg, Ronald, and Colin Read, eds. (1985). The Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada. Ottawa: Champlain Society / Carleton University Press. Stevens, Simon. (2001). A Social Tyranny: The Truck System in Colonial Western Australia, 1829–99. Labour History [Australia] 80: 83–98. Stewart, Yolande, ed. (1978). My Dear Friend; Letters of Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine & Robert Baldwin. Whitby: Plum Hollow Books. Tann, Jennifer. (1980). Co-operative Corn Milling: Self-help during the Grain Crises of the Napoleonic Wars. Agricultural History Review 28/1: 45–57. Taussig, Michael. (1977). The Genesis of Capitalism among a South American Peasantry. Comparative Studies in Society and History 19/2: 130–55. Taylor, Miles. (1999). The Six Points: Chartism and the Reform of Parliament. In Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds., The Chartist Legacy, 1–23. Suffolk: Merlin Press. Therborn, Göran. (1977). The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy. New Left Review 103: 3–41. Thompson, E.P. (1991a). The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin. – (1991b). Customs in Common. New York: New Press. Truscott, Green & Co. (1838). Statement of the Financial Transactions of the Banking Firm of Truscott, Green & Co. of Toronto, in connection with Green, Brown and Co. of New York, and Brown, Buckland & Co. of Buffalo. Buffalo. Tucker, Eric. (1991). ‘That Indefinite Area of Toleration’: Criminal Conspiracy and Trade Unions in Ontario, 1837–77. Labour/Le Travail 27 (Spring): 15–54. Vaughan, Laurie C. (1968). The Bank of Upper Canada in Politics 1817–1840. Ontario History 60/4: 185–204. Wallace, Anthony. (1972). Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution. New York: Knopf. Walton, George. (1833). York Commercial Directory, Street Guide, and Register, 1833–4. York: Thomas Dalton. Westfall, William. (1976). The Sacred and the Secular: Studies in the Cultural History of Protestant Ontario in the Victorian Period. Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, University of Toronto.

References

311

Whebell, C.F.J. (1989). The Upper Canada District Councils Act of 1841 and British Colonial Policy. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 17/2: 185–209. Wilkie, D. (1837). Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas. Edinburgh: J. Anderson, Jr & A. Hill. Willson, David. (1835). Impressions of the Mind. Toronto: J.H. Lawrence. – (1836). Moral and Religious Precepts, Church Ordinances, and the Principles of Civil Government. Toronto: W.J. Coates. Wilson, Catherine Anne. (2001). Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood. Canadian Historical Review 82/3: 431–64. Wilson, George Alan. (1959). The Political and Administrative History of the Upper Canada Clergy Reserves, 1790–1855. Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, University of Toronto. Wilson, George E. (1933). The Life of Robert Baldwin: A Study in the Struggle for Responsible Government. Toronto: Ryerson Press. Wilson, Major L. (1995). The ‘Country’ versus the ‘Court’: A Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War. Journal of the Early Republic 15/4: 619–47. Wilton, Carol. (2000). Popular Politics and Political Culture in Upper Canada, 1800–1850. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wisbey, Herbert A. (1964). Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

actor network theory 31–2 Agricultural Bank 156, 170 Albion 145 Alien Bill 109–10 Allan, William 25–7, 67, 81, 84, 87, 107, 165, 216, 248, 252–3 Ausman, Henry 32, 67, 85–94 Baby, James 80 Bagot, Charles 238–9, 240 Baldwin, Robert 21–3, 170, 188, 210– 44 passim, 256 Baldwin, William W. 24, 29, 38, 61–2, 148, 170, 177, 188, 192, 211, 221, 229–32 Bancks, William 119–21, 167–8 Bank of Montreal 82, 84, 206 Bank of the Newcastle District 120, 167 Bank of the People 32, 41, 97, 129, 147–9, 167–72, 174–5, 190, 202, 205–6, 208, 221, 246, 253–4, 256; Lower Canada 165, 169 Bank of the United States, second 151–2, 161–2, 172 Bank of Upper Canada 24–9, 68, 87–90, 111, 144, 257; bank wars

156–7, 160–3, 190; Cobourg 120–1; directors 80, 89–90, 166, 248, 252; lawsuits 86–90, 158, 171, 189, 201; note issue 81–2, 155, 173–5, 206; politics 82–3, 101, 114, 246; Types Riot 72, 77, 80–5 bank wars 151–75 passim, 193, 208 Baxter, Peter 142 Beaty, James 169, 173, 191 Bidwell, Marshal 169, 192, 195 Bill to Regulate Banking 94; private banking 121, 167 Birmingham Political Union 126–7 Bosch, Gen. Johannes 53–5 Boulton, D’Arcy 58, 68, 76, 252 Boulton, Henry J. 29, 64, 67, 71, 73– 97 passim, 100, 111, 132, 152, 158, 216; and Robert Randal 68–9 British Constitutional Society 61, 163 Brooke, Daniel, Jr 76 Brown, Buckland & Co. 157 Brown, Jonah 67, 74–5 Buchanan, Isaac 14–15, 234 Buchanan, James 55–6, 62, 223 Burnham, Zacheus 120, 156, 167–8 Burnside, Alexander 109

314

Index

cabinet rule 215, 222–3. See also responsible government Canada Company 24–6, 37, 87, 98–9, 101, 111, 161–2, 246, 257 Canadian Alliance Society 5, 32–3, 58, 85, 99, 101, 109, 124, 125–50 passim, 178, 181, 192, 211, 255–6 Canadian Correspondent 142 Capitalism: gentlemanly 24, 30, 247– 54, 257 (see also debt); transition to 6–12, 46, 245–6 Captain Swing Riots 38 Cartwright, John 59, 61–2, 238 Catholic Association of Ireland 135 Cawthra, Joseph 173–4, 231 central committee 95, 109, 115–16, 131, 133, 138–9, 146 charity 16, 35ff, 46, 62–3, 247, 258–9; fund 38, 40–9, 59–60, 88, 117, 143– 4, 254. See also Children of Peace Chartism 33, 180–4, 194, 202–5, 209, 212, 255 Children of Peace 8–10, 16, 32–3, 85, 142; Bank of the People 170, 256; joint stock company 47–8, 127, 205, 246, 254–8; moral economy 100, 107, 122–5, 132, 150, 201, 203, 247, 254–8; Orange Order 185–7, 220, 224–5, 237; politics 128, 131–2, 135–8, 177, 200, 207–8, 215–16, 220–2, 224–5, 227–33, 256 church, joint stock 108, 118, 133. See also temple (Sharon) City News Room 172 civic humanism 212–13, 239, 243, 245, 258–9 class 153–4 Clergy Corporation 24–5, 37, 101, 208, 246, 252 Cobbett, William 152

Cobourg 111, 119–21 Colborne, Lt. Gov. 37, 56, 91–2, 157, 202 Collins, Francis 72, 110 Colonial Advocate 72, 85, 116, 118, 131, 134, 142 Colonial Office 131–2, 137, 160, 162, 166, 192, 216, 218, 222, 241 Combe, Abram 106 Commercial Bank 94–5, 161, 173–4 committee of vigilance 131 communities, utopian 43, 48–9, 51–5, 176, 178–9, 204, 255–6 Constitution 101, 128, 171, 191–2, 247, 255 constitution: Upper Canadian 5, 176, 178–9, 182, 190–1, 198, 209–11, 251 Constitutional Reform Society 61, 177, 192, 211 convention of delegates 40, 85, 127, 131, 133, 135–41, 147, 223, 228, 255; as alternate parliament 182–3, 193–5 Co-operative Land Company 203–4 Co-operatives 100–2, 106, 152–3, 179, 259. See also moral economy, Farmers’ Storehouse corporation 19–20; chartered 23–9, 155, 163–4, 214; joint stock 6, 18, 20–3, 102–4, 154–5; municipal 20– 1, 185–7, 208, 213–15, 218–19, 227, 233–7; politics 6–7, 22–9, 110–11, 121–5, 245–7 Correspondent & Advocate 144, 159, 189 Country Party 22, 105, 183, 203, 212, 223, 227, 245–7, 258 Courier 92 courthouse 40, 59–60, 64 Court Party 212, 246–7, 249

Index courts: abuse of 87–9, 190; costs 67–8, 73, 92; reform 219 credit. See debt, economy of Cunningham, William 144 Dalton, Timothy 59, 162, 166 debt: banks 28–9, 86–90, 158, 171, 189, 201; economy of 12–17, 32; imprisonment for 13, 57, 62–6, 74–9, 96, 150, 184; land 99–101; politics 13, 96, 122, 143–8, 154, 187–8, 200–1 debtors’ gaol satire 70–9 democracy 5ff; deliberative 5–7, 19, 172, 192, 212–13, 243, 249–50, 258– 9; joint stock 65, 121–5, 128, 170, 177–80, 190–1, 203, 245–7, 254–8; municipal 216–22 Democrats (Jacksonian) 22, 89, 212, 245, 256. See also workingmen’s party depression (1835–6) 149–2, 154, 172–5, 182, 189–91, 203 Dewitt, Jacob 169–70 Dickson, William 100, 165 District Council 218–22, 244 District Court 88, 91 Doan, Charles 170 Doel, John 171, 191, 195, 197 Draper, William 61, 163–4, 191, 206 Duel, Ridout–Jarvis 81, 92–4 Duggan, George 159, 237, 239–42 Duncombe, Charles 146, 154–5, 157, 188, 200 Dundurn mill 76–7 Dunn, John H. 58–9, 166–7, 234 Durham, Lord 211; meeting 216, 220–2, 234, 236–7; ‘races’ 241–2 economics 246, 252

315

Election, Bill for Free 232–3; 4th York 131, 224–6, 227–33, 239–42, 244; York-Simcoe 75, 85, 107, 109, 111, 114–15, 125–6, 129 Elliot, Thomas 134, 135, 158, 169 Elmsley, John 156–60, 168 emigration, assisted 35–7, 42, 50–2, 202 Evans, George Henry 52, 153, 204 Executive Council 188–9, 218, 224, 227, 229, 233, 238–9, 248 Family Compact 26–31, 125, 141, 149, 157, 207–8, 225, 233–7, 248–54; and Bank of Upper Canada 64–5, 68, 71, 75–6, 90, 96–7, 245 Farmers’ Bank 155–60, 167–8, 170, 174 Farmers’ Storehouse 21, 23, 32–3, 41, 97–124 passim, 128, 143, 202, 241, 255; as bank 111, 113, 116–17, 132, 155, 206–8; politics 135, 141, 147–9, 154, 179, 246 Farr, James 107 Fenton, John 74 Fitzgibbon, Col. James 80–1 Fletcher, Silas 107–8, 110, 141, 146, 170, 196, 197, 199 Fothergill, Charles 74 Freeholders’ Bank 163–4, 190, 252 friendly societies 21, 35, 102–4, 153, 185, 204 Gibson, David 118, 139, 169, 171 Glasgow 50–2 Goessman, John 111–18, 133 Gorham, Nelson 196–7 Gouge, William 152 Grand National Consolidated Trades Union 181

316

Index

Green, John C. 155–60 Greer, Allan 179–80, 208, 254 Gurnett, George 58, 61, 92 Hagerman, Christopher 96, 132 Hamilton, Archibald J. 51–2 Hamilton, Frances 140 Harper, John 169 Head, Sir Francis Bond 35–9, 56–7, 60–2, 167, 173, 176, 178, 187, 190, 195, 198, 216, 250–1 Henderson, James 43–5, 200 Hincks, Francis 170–1, 205, 220, 226, 228, 235–8 Hollingshead, Joseph 146 Hope (Sharon) 3, 19, 40–9, 56–7, 98, 115, 117, 124, 130, 138, 140, 143, 199, 202, 207, 224–6, 230, 240–1, 245, 254, 256–7 House of Affliction 47, 256, 259 House of Assembly 90, 94, 111, 133; banks 150, 156, 160, 164, 208 House of Industry, Toronto 39, 41, 56–65, 103, 184, 189, 191–2, 246, 256 Hughes, Samuel 5, 23, 31, 33, 255; Farmers’ Storehouse 101, 111, 117, 143; politics 124, 127–8, 131–2, 136, 138, 140, 149, 210; rebellion 195–6, 200–2, 207–8 illumination (of temple) 229, 231–2, 241 Irving, Jacob 231, 233 Jackson, Andrew 151, 155. See also Democrats Jarvis, Samuel Peters 80 Jarvis, Sheriff William 61, 113, 163, 189–90, 216, 221, 236

joint stock companies 6, 18, 20–3, 102–4, 204; banks 114, 143–8, 154, 157–60, 168–72, 256–7; church 108, 118, 133 (see also temple); politics 6–7, 22–9, 110–11, 128–9, 135, 156, 171, 210, 246–7, 254–8 Jones, Jonas 75, 252 Juvenile Advocates Club 79 Kavanagh, James 43–5, 200 Ketchum, Jesse 109–10, 126 Ketchum, Seneca 108, 118 king, death of 188, 192–4, 198 Kingston 111 Klyne, John 130 labour 144, 152–3, 193 labour exchange 106, 179 LaFontaine, Louis 210, 223, 227–33, 238–9, 241–2, 244, 256, 259 land and citizenship 202–5, 255; as security 120–1, 161–8; speculation 76, 86, 99–100, 164–5, 253 Leggett, William 153 Legislative Council 24, 150; banks 160–8, 174–5 Leppard, David 220, 225, 234, 236 Lesslie, James 23, 38, 58–9, 61, 135, 142–3, 150, 168–72, 191, 195, 205 liberal framework 212–13, 242–3, 245, 247, 257 limited liability 20, 23, 86, 89, 94, 122–3, 155, 161, 247 limits, living on 76, 85–6 Lloyd, Jesse 130, 197–8, 199 Locofocos 52, 153. See also workingmen’s party London 115, 131 London Working Men’s Association 182–3

Index Lount, Samuel 130, 146, 188, 195– 202, 208 Lovett, William 181–3 Lower Canada 184, 199, 216, 219, 240 Loyalism 72, 79–80, 85, 123, 180, 184–5, 208–10, 243, 252 Macaulay, James Buchanan 73 Macaulay, John 163 MacIntosh, John 140, 146, 158, 196, 225–7, 231, 233 Mackenzie, William Lyon 21–2, 31–2, 50, 60, 67–8, 221, 243, 245, 255; banking 85–95, 152–4, 161, 169, 171–2, 254; Chartism 194, 203–5, 212; election 109–10, 113–15, 125, 136–9, 188; expulsion 71, 95–6, 114, 126, 129, 138, 147; mayor 135, 141, 248; Patrick Swift 70–9, 135, 177–8, 252; political unions 129, 131, 133–5, 179; rebellion 192–202; Types Riot 70–2, 79–85 MacNab, Allan 74, 76–8, 85, 94, 188–9, 225 Maitland, Sir Peregrine 73 market economy 7–13 market square 141–3 Markham 139, 140 Markland, George 156, 165–6 Matthews, Peter 197, 199, 208 McCalla, Douglas 12–14, 190–1, 199–200, 246 McDougall, Peter 80 McLellan, Malcolm 135 McLeod, Murdoch 140 Mechanics Institute 52, 61, 105, 133, 135, 143, 147–9, 153 Mechanics Union (Philadelphia) 152–3

317

merchants 10–12, 106–7, 111, 119, 123, 144 Metcalfe, Charles 216, 241; crisis 210, 240, 242–3 Metropolitan Political Union 127, 256 Mississippi Emigration Society 203–5, 208 mixed monarchy 4ff, 211–12, 218, 251. See also constitution money 12, 27–8, 94, 119–21, 144–5, 152, 165–6, 172–5 Montgomery, John 130, 134, 169, 171, 192 Montgomery’s Inn 130, 138, 192, 198, 244 moral economy 8–9, 30, 38, 102–3, 254–9; Children of Peace 41–50, 97, 100–1, 201, 203, 247 Morrison, Dr Timothy 23, 57, 129, 139–40, 146, 169, 191, 195, 197 municipal reform 216–22. See also corporation Munro, George 234–5 National Reform Association 203–5 National Union of the Working Classes 105, 127, 129, 181–2, 194 Newcastle District Accommodation Company 100, 119–21, 154, 166–8 Newmarket 110, 136, 141 Newport uprising (Wales) 17 nominations, political 138, 223–5, 227–9, 233 O’Connor, Fergus 204–5 Old Court House 39, 41, 56–65, 103, 134, 135–7, 142. See also Shepard’s Hall, House of Industry

318

Index

Orange Order 126, 131; Children of Peace 185–7, 216, 220–2, 224–5, 237, 239–42; city government 186–7, 222, 225, 233–7, 242–3; violence 178, 184, 195–6, 214, 216, 228, 232–3 Orbiston 51–2, 104–5 Osgood, Thaddeus 52–6, 105 Owenite socialism 22, 33, 41–2, 50–6, 104, 122–3, 125, 153–4, 176, 245; Chartism 179–84, 194, 255, 257 pacifism 201 Parsons, Timothy 143 party, political 139 patronage 16, 24 pauperism 35ff Pearson, Joseph 107 penitentiary 63, 189, 244 Peterborough 111 petitioning 22; Alien Bill 109; Farmers’ Store 111, 113–15, 118; political unions 126, 130–1, 143–6, 192 Playter, Ely 107–8, 111, 124 Playter, George 107–8 political union movement 105, 126, 256–7; Birmingham 126; Metropolitan 127; Toronto 33, 181–4, 192–9, 208–9, 248, 257, 259; Upper Canada Central 115, 127, 129–32, 134, 136, 138, 147; Union Society 224, 227–33, 243–4, 259 Poor Law 37ff, 181–2, 213, 245, 250, 257 Port, George 107 Price, James H. 23, 61, 159, 168–72, 191, 195, 205, 228 Proudfoot, William 173 Provincial Bank 160–3

Provincial Loan Office 124, 128, 132, 143–6, 202, 256 Randal, Robert 67–9, 85, 109–10 real bills doctrine 81–2, 114 Rebellion (1837) 176–210 passim, 245; Riel 258 Reform Act (1832) 105, 126–7, 129, 179, 181, 194, 256 Reform Association 210, 240 reform movement 22, 33, 97, 111, 128–9, 146–9, 152, 208–10, 227, 238, 246, 255–7 Reid, William 131, 140, 195, 200 relief unions 55, 58, 62, 256 republicanism 129–30, 177, 183, 184–5, 195, 203, 209–10. See also Democrats (Jacksonian), Country Party respectability 15ff, 35, 41, 63, 87–8, 96, 122, 201, 247, 255, 258–9 responsible government 22–3, 122–3, 180, 187–8, 199, 208, 211–44 passim Ridout, John 81 Ridout, Thomas G. 81, 155, 160–1 riot, Durham 216, 220–2, 234, 236–7; Orange 134–5, 178, 184, 195–6, 214, 216, 228, 232–3; Types 31ff, 70–2, 79–85, 222; York 125–6, 131, 134 Robinson, John Beverley 25, 79, 83–4, 141, 165, 212, 252 Robinson, William 141, 252 Roe, William 110 Rolph, John 169, 195, 197 Romney, Paul 71–2, 179–80, 208–9 Ronaldson, James 152 Russell, John 183–4, 222 Ruttan, Henry 120–1, 167–8 St George, Quetton 107

Index St Lawrence market 107–8, 141–3 Saxon, James 159 Sedition Act 126, 134, 180, 185 Select Committee on Banking 119, 170 Select Committee on Currency 86, 89, 94, 152, 155 Select Committee on Justice 89 separate personality 20 Sharon. See Hope Shepard, Joseph 23, 31, 33, 192; Farmers’ Store 107–8, 133, 143; politics 109, 111–18, 124, 128, 139, 149, 199 Shepard’s Hall 33, 125–50 passim, 177, 192–3, 229, 246, 255–6 sheriff’s auctions 87–8, 91 Sherwood, Henry 158–60, 216, 234–6, 238, 241 Sherwood, Judge Levius 75, 157 Shirreff, Patrick 98–9, 101, 105, 118 Small, James E. 135 Society for Promoting Education and Industry 53–4, 105 Stewart, Alexander 62 Stouffer, Abraham 107 Stoyell, Thomas 109 Strachan, James 163, 252 Strachan, John 3ff, 24–7, 30, 36–7, 57, 62, 79, 83, 136, 157, 165, 191, 209, 246, 251–2 subsistence-surplus strategy 7–8, 17–19, 45–6, 100 Swift, Patrick. See Mackenzie, William Lyon temple (Sharon) 3–4, 18–19, 40–1, 47, 57, 122, 149–50, 207, 254, 258–9 Terrebonne 230, 239, 244 theft 61

319

Thompson, Charles 130, 159 Thomson, Charles Poulett, Baron Sydenham 212–16, 250–1 Thornhill 76 Tiele, Henry 87, 91 Tims, Dr 130, 195 Toronto (York) 3, 105, 153–4, 245 Toronto Political Union. See political union movement trade unions 104, 106, 189 Treasury Board 161, 190 truck system 16–17 Truscott, George 155–60 TSE tower 150 Turton, Joseph 14, 130, 134–5, 147–9, 205 Turton’s Building. See Shepard’s Hall Types Riot. See riot union of the Canadas 149, 215, 223, 227–33, 239, 254, 256, 259 Union Society 224, 227–33, 243–4, 259 universal suffrage 105, 181 Upper Canada Central Political Union 115, 127, 129–32, 134, 136, 138, 147, 159 Upper Canada Club 247–8, 253–4 Upper Canada Life Insurance and Trust 165–6 Upper Canada Loan & Trust 166–7 Utopia. See communities Viger, Louis-Michel 169–70 voter registration bill 232–3 voting 16, 111, 138, 182–3, 258–9 wheat trade 12, 100, 102, 106–7, 111, 172, 201 Willson, David 3ff, 23, 30–1, 38, 46,

320

Index

85, 108; politics 135–41, 185, 193, 196, 201, 210, 224–5, 226, 227–33, 240–1, 243 Willson, Hugh 170, 244 Willson, John 108 Willson, John D. 170 Willson, Stillwell 67, 74, 75–7, 108 Willson, William H. 200–1 Wintersteen, Jacob 107 Wixson, Randal 131, 144–5

Wood, Alexander 107 workingmen’s party 52, 152, 179, 203 Wright, Edward 171, 191 York: 1st riding 139, 235; 2nd riding 68, 136, 139, 241; 3rd riding 139; 4th riding 130–1, 136, 140, 158, 215, 220, 224–33, 238–42, 244. See also Toronto York Mills 108, 118