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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
Upper Canadas rebellion was not far behind. In December 1837, almost a
thousand adherents followed leader William Lyon Mackenzie in a march on
Toronto. A Scottish immigrant, he had founded his own newspaper, The Co¬
lonial Advocate, in 1824. With this mouthpiece he advocated constitutional
reform. Throughout the 1820s, Mackenzie supported ‘responsible government,’
whereby the executive body acts pursuant to the will of the elected Assembly,
not the Crown. Having held a seat in the colonial assembly and served as To¬
ronto’s mayor, he had experienced first-hand some of the offending imperial
actions, such as when Lt. Governor Francis Bond Head interfered in the elec¬
tion of members to the assembly, establishing a conservative majority. An
enduring irritant was the ‘Family Compact,’ the cohesive bloc of governmen¬
tal officials connected by marriage, patronage, an arrangement assailed relent¬
lessly by Mackenzie. In addition, long-standing political support for the priv¬
ileged place of the Church of England resulted in its ownership of about
one-seventh of the colony’s land, creating resentment.
Mackenzie produced several documents in the latter 1830s which are mod¬
elled on, albeit not identical to, the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
His 1837 “Declaration of the Toronto Reformers” reads:
Government is founded on the authority, and is instituted for the benefit of the
people; when therefore, any Government long and systematically ceases to answer
the great ends of its foundation, the people have a natural right given them by their
Creator to seek and establish such institutions as will yield the greatest quantity of
happiness to the greatest number (McKay 18).
His was a republican vision. Mackenzie’s draft constitution for Upper Canada
resembled some of the newer state constitutions, such as Ohio’s and Kentucky’s,
and the United States Constitution. All political power, he stressed, lies with
the people, which they exercise through popularly elected representatives.
Delegated powers should be limited and separated. Rights, including those of
property, should be enumerated. The intent of its author to require official legal
equality could not have been made clearer than in his draft’s summative pro¬
vision that “in all laws made or to be made, every person shall be bound alike...”
(McKay 19).
This rebellion, though destabilizing, was foiled by local militia and British
troops. Mackenzie fled to the U.S. with his lieutenants hanged or banished.
For a while, he and other veterans of his failed army conducted raids from New
York and Vermont, gaining support from Americans who were members of
the ‘Hunters’ Lodges’ there. In 1840, they torched the steamship Robert Peel
in the Thousand Islands but their success was fleeting. Ironically, British mil¬
itary expenditures to suppress these revolts aided the late 1830s’ economic
recovery.
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