Chapter VII: Part 7

Expostulating with those who would not advance upon the city in daylight, and exhorting those who had equal objections to the dark, the leader has been variously described: “Storming and swearing like a lunatic, and many of us felt certain he was not in his right senses. He abused and insulted several of the men without any shadow of cause, and Lount had to go round and pacify them by telling them not to pay any attention to him”--(the commander-in-chief)--“as he was not responsible for his actions.” “If we had locked him up in a room at the tavern,” says the naïve chronicler, “and could then have induced Lount to lead us into the city, we should have overturned the government without any fighting worth talking about.” “Once or twice,” says another, “I thought he was going to have a fit.”

No help from outside had as yet arrived in Toronto. After refreshment to the inner rebel had been successfully accomplished by the united efforts of Lount and Mackenzie, the latter’s white mount was exchanged for a big horse taken from some loyalist prisoner. At that juncture had the movement been persevered in, with Lount prominently directing it, there is every reason to suppose that the arms, ammunition and money in the town would have been theirs--also that they would have captured Sir Francis himself, “unless,” indeed, as the _London and Westminster Review_ said, “he had run away.” “All who will reflect on the nature of civil war,” it said, “must see the fearful odds which a day’s success and the possession of the capital and its resources would have given the rebels. For their not obtaining it we have no reason to thank Sir Francis Head.”

“I told them,” (the men) says Mackenzie in his own account of his brief harangue, “that I was certain there could be no difficulty in taking Toronto, that both in town and country the people stood aloof from Sir Francis, that not one hundred men and boys could be got to defend him, that he was alarmed and had got his family on board a steamer, that six hundred Reformers were ready waiting to join us in the city, and that all we had to do was to be firm, and with the city would so at once go down every vestige of foreign government of Upper Canada.”

“If your honour will but give us arms,” cried a voice from the ranks before Sir Francis, “sure the rebels will find the legs.”

In the next hour both sides were to find they had their full complement of these useful limbs.

“To fight and to be beaten,” says Dafoe, “is a casualty common to all soldiers.... But to run away at the sight of an enemy, and neither strike nor be stricken, this is the very shame of the profession.” About sundown the rebels, between seven and eight hundred strong, began their march, half of them armed with green cudgels, cut on the way, the riflemen in the van followed by two hundred of the pikemen. A score or so had old and rusty muskets and shot-guns. Most of them wore a white badge on the sleeve. Three abreast they went, Lount at their head, “Mackenzie here, there and everywhere.” They moved steadily and without mishap, taking prisoner some chance wayfarers and an officer of loyalist artillery, until the head of the column neared a garden, where Sheriff Jarvis and his picket of twenty-seven lay in wait for them. The sheriff gave the word to fire. This his men remained to do, then speedily stood not upon the order of their going, but went at once in haste, and ran into the city. The sheriff called to them to stop, but they were beyond his voice and control; whereupon he probably thought “I’ faith, I’ll not stay a jot longer,” and followed them.

It was a random volley, but it spread consternation. Lount ordered it to be returned, which was done, but in such fear and trepidation that had the others waited to receive it they might have been still safe. Lount and the men in front fell flat on their faces to allow those behind them an opportunity to fire. But this the latter had no mind to do, thinking the fall due to the bullets of the picket. “We shall all be killed,” cried the Lloydtown pikemen, throwing down their rude weapons. In Mackenzie’s words, “They took to their heels with a speed and steadiness of purpose that would have baffled pursuit on foot.” In a short twenty minutes not one of either side was to be found within range of the toll-bar or of each other. The one man killed in the affair was a rebel, done to death from the rear by a nervous and too willing comrade. Mackenzie implored, he coaxed and he threatened, and in such strong language did he treat this retreat that one man from the north, provoked beyond endurance, raised his gun to shoot the commander-in-chief, when a third prevented him.

“I was enabled by strong pickets,” wrote Sir Francis after this, “to prevent Mr. Mackenzie from carrying into effect his diabolical intention to burn the city.”

It was now time to look for some support in answer to the appeals for help sent by special messengers on the Monday evening. One messenger went by land; while another, to make certain, took the water route.

Bonnycastle, indiscriminately dubbed captain or major, was sitting quietly in his home in Kingston, tired after an afternoon spent at the new fort in providing against fire or surprise, when some one, in a state of great excitement, ran into his study to say the steamboat _Traveller_ had arrived from Toronto with Sir Francis Head and all who had been able to escape from that city on board; Toronto was taken by Mackenzie and burnt. Bonnycastle says he “buckled on his armour” and went to consult the commandant of their little garrison--eleven or twelve artillerymen--as to what was best to be done in such a dreadful emergency. Not two steps on his way he was met by a second breathless messenger, followed by a crowd of eager neighbours, who took advantage of the open hall door to come in to hear the news. This second express was to say that the only cargo on board was a letter for Bonnycastle, but that a serious outbreak had occurred. The letter was an order to send stores to Toronto, to arm all loyal persons in Kingston, and to preserve intact the depot and fortress--a work which he did so well that it earned him his knighthood.

The bearer of the duplicate despatch by land had a more difficult journey. He was narrowly searched and examined by the rebels en route, but while his companion was being taken prisoner he sewed his despatch in his sleeve, and by his activity arrived at his destination the same night as, but later than, the _Traveller_. It was two o’clock on the Monday when Colonel MacNab, in Hamilton, received Sir Francis’ statement, that he, with a few followers, was in the market place of his capital, threatened by Mackenzie and his band of rebels. MacNab lost no time in answering this appeal for help in a way quite consistent with every other detail of that gentleman’s life given to the public. He mounted his horse, rode to the wharf, seized the first steamer he found lying there, put a guard on board her, sent messengers off to the farmers and yeomen on whom he felt he could rely, and by five o’clock was sailing with his sixty men of Gore; a thousand of them had but lately gathered before Sir John Colborne to testify to their sentiments on Mr. Hume’s baneful domination letter. That letter, calculated to further excite those already discontented, was a blessing in disguise, since it had stirred into active life half dormant sentiments of loyalty, and made brighter those already bright.

But of the thousands then preparing for a tramp to converge at Toronto, through dark forest and over corduroy and half frozen swale, the market-place and Sir Francis himself were not, as his writings assert, the objective points. Many who left wives, families and farms and who found themselves in the loyalist ranks at Gallows Hill, had no such loyal intention when they left home.

Sir Francis, sitting forlorn enough in his market-place, was with his admirers discussing the situation by the light of a tallow candle,--a Rembrandt picture, from the shadows of which stand forth many familiar faces, when, as with Bonnycastle and King Richard III., two or three breathless messengers burst in upon them to announce the men of Gore. Steamers and schooners--containing not only the young and venturesome, but the advanced in years, as the Honourable William Dickson, then in his sixty-eighth year--now began to arrive, and the city, in spite of the motley appearance of some cargoes, seemed transformed at a stroke from an excited and frightened community into a vast barrack or camp. Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, there was no longer need into a thousand parts to divide one man and make imaginary puissance, for by that time they were so increased that it became imperative to make an attack. Their number embarrassed those in command, and it was difficult to find accommodation for them. At midnight Sir Francis put MacNab in charge; by the following sunset more than twelve hundred armed men were at his service. A council was held at Archdeacon Strachan’s, at which it was resolved to attack the rebels on Thursday morning. Evidently with changed circumstances and advisers Sir Francis had changed his mind; he was no longer averse to seeking his enemy on the latter’s ground. Four days before this, Attorney-General Hagerman had declared his belief that not fifty men in the province would attack the Government; now he announced that everything depended on the Government’s power of attack.

But the council was not held without its own storm. FitzGibbon, much MacNab’s superior in military knowledge and experience, his senior in every way, heard, for the first time, of the other gentleman’s midnight promotion, and advanced his own superior claims with no uncertain voice. MacNab wanted to make the attack at three in the morning; FitzGibbon contended it was impossible “to organize the confused mass of human beings then congregated in the city during night-time,” that such an attempt would ruin them, for the “many rebels then in the city (were) only waiting the turn of affairs to declare themselves.” The meeting over, another and semi-secret conclave arranged that MacNab should be relieved and that FitzGibbon should take his place. “It was now broad daylight, and I had to commence an organization of the most difficult nature I had ever known. I had to ride to the Town Hall and to the garrison and back again, repeatedly; I found few of the officers present who were wanted for the attack. Vast numbers of volunteers were constantly coming in from the country without arms or appointments of any kind, who were crowding in all directions in my way. My mind was burning with indignation at the idea of Colonel MacNab, or any other militia officer, being thought of by his Excellency for the command, after all I had hitherto done for him. My difficulties multiplied upon me. Time, of all things the most precious, was wasting for want of officers, and for the want of most of my men from the Town Hall, whose commander was yet absent, till at length the organization appeared impossible. I became overwhelmed with the intensity and contrariety of my feelings. I walked to and fro without object until I found the eyes of many fixed upon me, when I fled to my room and locked my door, exclaiming audibly that the province was lost and that I was ruined, fallen. For let it not be forgotten that it was admitted at the conference at the Archdeacon’s the evening before that if the attack of the next day should fail the province would be lost. This, however, was not then my opinion, but I thought of my present failure after the efforts I had made to obtain the command, and the evil consequences likely to flow from that failure; and I did then despair. In this extremity I fell upon my knees and earnestly and vehemently prayed to the Almighty for strength to sustain me through the trial before me. I arose and hurried to the multitude, and finding one company formed, as I then thought providentially, I ordered it to be marched to the road in front of the Archdeacon’s house, where I had previously intended to arrange the force to be employed. Having once begun, I sent company after company, and gun after gun, until the whole stood in order.”

The Governor moved his headquarters from the market-place to the Parliament buildings, and issued his orders from there. Colonel MacNab, in recompense for his withdrawal, was given command of the main body.

The force, drawn up “in order of battle” on the street and esplanade by the Archdeacon’s house, only numbered some eleven hundred men, and those whom they were about to attack were considerably less. But the interests at stake, the results involved, their historical significance, remove from the affair that ludicrous view attached to it by unthinking persons as a kind of mimic battle, in keeping with “the mimic king,” the Governor, and “the mimic Privy Council,” the Executive.

About eleven o’clock, his Excellency, surrounded by his staff, galloped up, and was received with three hearty British cheers. Immovable in his saddle, he looked with pride, not unmixed with relief, at the picture before him, wondering why, now they were so well got together, they did not proceed, when an officer galloped up and said it was the wish of the militia that the Governor himself should give the word of command. He did so, and in the bright summer-like sunshine, not a cloud in the blue sky above them, the two bands playing, arms and accoutrements flashing unpleasant signals to those awaiting them on Gallows Hills, people in windows and on housetops cheering them and waving small flags and those not in sympathy remaining discreetly silent, they went off at his bidding.

“This,” says Colonel FitzGibbon, “was the only command he (Sir Francis) gave till the action was over.”

By now the name rebel was almost as odious as some others, very high in dignity, had recently been. There is not a doubt that much of the cheering came from that ignorance of the point at issue which made Solicitor-General Blake in after years say, “I confess I have no sympathy with the would-be loyalty ... which, while it at all times affects peculiar zeal for the prerogative of the Crown, is ever ready to sacrifice the liberty of the subject. That is not British loyalty. It is the spurious loyalty which at all periods of the world’s history has lashed humanity into rebellion.”

The curious, and those who were anxious to see the result of the fight as the turning point to decide which side of their coat of two colours should be displayed, followed, like the tail of a comet, the vanishing point of splendour. One militia colonel came prepared to contribute two fat oxen to the rebel cause; they made equally good beef for the loyalists. Another colonel presented the patriots with a sword, pistol and ammunition--a much worse kind of soldier than the man who wears a uniform and will not fight. There were the actively loyal, the actively rebellious, and the connecting link of such as were passively either or both.

All went merry as a marriage bell, and indeed the chronicle says one might fancy they were all bound for a wedding. To what Sir Francis calls “this universal grin” was added the solemn face of many a minister of religion, headed by the Archdeacon himself, a man as well fitted by nature to wear the sword as the mitre.

“Our men are with thee,” said the Reverend Egerton Ryerson; “the prayers of our women attend thee.” The clergymen withdrew at the first exchange of shots. “They would willingly have continued their course, but with becoming dignity they deemed it their duty to refrain.”

This was all very real, very serious to us. Yet a Scottish paper said that Canada was still more wonderful than the Roman state; that the latter was saved by the cackling of a flock of geese, the former by the cackling of one. Who that one was it were unkind to say. The anger of the Scotch editor is divided between Head, MacNab and FitzGibbon. “Men eaten up of vanity are they all,” he finishes.

At the rebel camp the morning had been frittered away like the preceding day--desertions, hopes of reinforcements disappointed, Mackenzie’s plans called stark madness by Van Egmond, Van Egmond threatened to be shot by Mackenzie, the Tories reported by friends from town as ensconced behind feather beds from behind which they would fire and make terrible slaughter if the Reformers once got into the streets, new officers appointed--one of whom was to leave his post the moment he caught sight of the enemy--false alarms brought in by scouts, until at last Silas Fletcher rushed up to say that the cry of “wolf” had ceased, and the wolf had arrived.

“Seize your arms, men! The enemy’s coming, and no mistake! No false alarm this time!” Van Egmond and Mackenzie mounted their chargers, and soon saw what seemed an overwhelming force passing the brow of Gallows Hill. The strains of “Rule Britannia” and “The British Grenadiers” came wafted in unpleasant bursts of melody.

The bell had rung and the curtain was about to go up.

The most formidable part of the army consisted of the two cannon in charge of Major Carfrae of the militia artillery. At St. Eustache the French had thought “Le bon Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons;” here, also, the God of battles, to whose care “the bold diocesan” commended them, was on the side of those who had most artillery. The day before, a party of rebels on warfare bent had encountered a stranded load of firewood, which imagination and the uncertain light turned into a gun loaded to the muzzle with grape or canister. The sight of it caused them to skip fences, like squirrels, to right and left, a dispersion which no effort of their officers could withstand. Now the real thing began to play, and the woods rang to its reverberations. The fringe of pine trees on the western side of the road suffered if nothing else did; huge splinters were torn from them and hurled here and there, as destructive as any missile. The hidden men were protected by bushes and brush heaps, but the rushing of balls and crashing of trees made enough uproar to cause death by fright. The cannon were then moved farther up the roadway, their muzzles directed to the inn; two round shot, and like bees from a hive the rebels came pouring out, “flying in all directions into the deep, welcome recesses of the forest.” Their prisoners, until then kept in the inn, fortunately had been conducted out by the back door some moments before and given their liberty. It now became a question to preserve their own.

The right wing of the loyalist force, under command of Colonel S. P. Jarvis, had meanwhile been moving by by-ways and fields half a mile eastward, the left, under Colonel Chisholm, Judge McLean and Colonel O’Hara, moving westward to converge at Montgomery’s.

Young Captain Clarke Gamble, of the latter wing, felt sure his directions “to proceed until beyond the tavern, wheel to the right and take it while the column attacked in front,” had been complied with; he did so turn, and felt his way through several clearings, examining every building and shelter himself. He reached a grove of second-growth pine and other wood when the sound of the first gun, trained on the doomed tavern, greeted him. The company had now reached the high rail fence which bounded Montgomery’s property on that side, fencing a field full of stumps, one of them very large. The young captain climbed the dividing line, calling on his men to follow. They were in time to see rebels in front and right and left of them running from the house just struck, some of them stopping to discharge their rifles at the men so singularly well displayed for their benefit upon the fence. From three or four between the rails the fire was returned, but the shots on each side fell harmless. A man then ran from Yonge Street, and as he passed the large stump, squatted behind it, took what seemed to be a very deliberate aim at Captain Gamble, his eyes and a line of forehead all that could be seen between the stump and the top of his cap. One of Gamble’s company, a coloured man named Boosie, sprang forward, saying, “Shall I shoot him, captain!” Without waiting for a reply he did so, reloaded, and called out to a fellow-soldier, young Gowan, a student-at-law, to bear him out that he “had shot that rebel.” Judge McLean, hearing shots from his position nearer the tavern, came up with another company at the double quick, his heightened colour, flashing eye and cool, erect bearing becoming him better in his soldier dress than even in his robes of office. “Oh, Gamble, that’s you, is it? All right,” was all he permitted himself, and disappeared. Between the time of looking into the barrel of the rifle pointed at him from behind the stump, and the crack of Boosie’s musket, which told of a life taken on his account, the seconds seemed long to the captain. He reformed his company, and on passing the dead man, Ludwig Wideman, the thrifty Boosie said, “Can I take his rifle, captain?” took it, and continued his victorious march to the inn with a gun on each shoulder, the proudest and happiest man, white or black, in the force--“not even exceeded by Sir Francis himself.” In the centre of the dead man’s forehead was a pink record of Boosie’s good aim. To the captain’s surprise he recognized in Wideman a client who had but lately been in his office and from whom he had parted with a firm shake of the hand. It is more than likely that when Wideman was taking his aim he had recognized Captain Gamble, and in the hesitation following had given the minute which lost him his own life and saved his legal adviser’s. The proud negro constituted himself his captain’s body-guard for the rest of that day. “I believe we must leave the killing out when all is done;” and this, according to Dent, was the “death roll” of Montgomery’s or Gallows Hill battle.

The full force was too much for the insurgents. The whole affair was of not more than a half hour’s duration, and after some perfunctory firing, a number of the “embattled farmers” standing about inactively and wishing themselves anywhere but at Thermopylæ, the outcome was confusion to the one side and a well followed-up victory on the other. The wounded were tenderly picked up and carried off in carts to the hospital; and Sir Francis, followed by the flower of his army, went in pursuit of his flying subjects, to give his second word of command. Before he could do so, Judge Jones, by now as full of “over-zeal” as FitzGibbon himself, with a comrade who was noted as a splendid officer and was known as handsome Charlie Heath, was trying to ride in at the open door of the tavern. MacNab, thinking Jones was some prominent rebel, promptly gave the word to “shoot me that man.” But some one in the ranks, not so zealous, cried, “Don’t fire, it’s Judge Jones,” and so saved the Judge’s life.

Two prisoners were now brought before his Excellency, who sat upon his horse by the raised platform at the inn door. By his account, they were arrantly frightened and gazed at the adjacent trees wondering which ones they might be sent to decorate. But the dramatic Sir Francis was fond of strong contrasts, he was a masterhand at light and shade. These two were all that remained of Mackenzie’s army. So, after a little homily, he pardoned them “in their sovereign’s name.” The unhappy men nearly fainted, unable at once to take advantage of their freedom.

The Governor next deemed it expedient to mark by some stern “act of vengeance the important victory which had been achieved.” He forthwith took a leaf out of his enemy’s book of tactics, and burned what his detractors call the “houses of private citizens,” what he calls the place “long the rendezvous of the disaffected;” the floors of one “stained with the blood of Colonel Moodie,” “the fortress” from which Her Majesty’s subjects had been fired upon.

He gave the order to fire the premises. “The heaps of dirty straw on which he (Mackenzie) and his gang had been sleeping” acted as good kindling; the furniture of the house, piled with it, soon set fire to the great structure of timber and planks. The deep black smoke poured from the windows, and the “long red tongues sometimes darted horizontally, as if revengefully to consume those who had created them, then flared high above the roof.” The heat was intense, but to those “gallant spirits that immediately surrounded it,” seated on their horses, was a “subject of joy and triumph, and ... a lurid telegraph which intimated to many an aching heart in Toronto the joyful intelligence that the yeomen and farmers of Upper Canada had triumphed over their perfidious enemy ‘responsible government.’” But it was only scotched.

Sir Francis, by way of balancing aching hearts in Toronto with a few in the country, now carried the fire-brand farther afield. He commanded a detachment of forty men to ride up Yonge Street to fire the house of a farmer who was most objectionable to him. On the way they met Colonel FitzGibbon, Captain Halkett and others, returning after a fruitless pursuit of Mackenzie. The order did not please FitzGibbon, but he was forced to let them pass. Presently, Captain Strachan, eldest son of the Archdeacon, came in headlong haste to countermand the order; Sir Francis had had a qualm. It passed; and reining in his horse, the Governor sent for the Colonel himself, and reissued his directions. “Already,” writes the latter, “I had seen with displeasure the smoke arising from the burning of Montgomery’s house, which had been set on fire after I had advanced in pursuit of Mackenzie, and I desired to expostulate with his Excellency, but he quickly placed his right hand on my bridle arm, and said, ‘Hear me. Let Gibson’s house be burned immediately, and let the militia be kept here until it is done,’ exactly repeating his order; and then he set spurs to his horse, and galloped towards town.” “It was now late in the afternoon,” continues FitzGibbon, “and the house was nearly four miles distant. I then commanded Lieut.-Colonel Duggan to take command of a party which I wheeled out of the column and countermarched, and see the house burned; when he entreated me not to insist on his doing so, for that he had to pass along Yonge Street almost daily, and he probably would on some future day be shot from behind a fence. I said, ‘If you will not obey orders you had better go home, sir.’ Again he spoke, and I then ordered him to go home; but he continued to express his reasons for objecting, and I said, ‘Well, I will see the duty done myself,’ and I did so, for I had no other officer of high rank near me to whom I could safely entrust the performance of that duty; and with the party I advanced and had the house and barns burned at sunset.” Mrs. Gibson, the farmer’s wife, and her four young children, found shelter in the house of a neighbour, and from there she beheld the soldiers riding about with her precious poultry and porkers slung across their saddle bows, the walls of her happy home going up in smoke and flame to the rosy sunset sky above them, not knowing where her husband was. She was destined not to see him until she joined him in Rochester, to which town he, with so many others, escaped.

In his despatch which related his heroism Sir Francis tempered his own acts with words likely to cast odium, where any might arise, on the militia. “The militia advanced in pursuit of the rebels about four miles, till they reached the house of one of the principal ringleaders, Mr. Gibson; which residence it would have been impossible to save, and it was consequently burned to the ground.”

Sir Francis would have done better to stand by his acts or to have had the prudence to recall and destroy all his former writings before transcribing anew, since by his writings is he most condemned.

Meanwhile, more prisoners had been taken, and he was in time to see and exhort them, and also to see that proper care was taken of the wounded, insurgent as well as his own followers. They were placed in carts and taken to the hospital, and the body of Wideman given to his cousin for interment. Some of the Loyalists were galloping about, seated behind the living decorations of their saddle bows, and others bore the flags taken out of Montgomery’s burning house. One of these, a large red one, had on one side, “Victoria 1st and Reform,” and on the other, “Bidwell and the Glorious Minority, 1837 and a Good Beginning.”[3] It was supposed that this had been intended to take the place of the flag flying from Government House staff, which was not always the same one, for the latter was thriftily managed to reverse the proverb and temper the flag to the wind; large, when it hung motionless in the burning heat of summer, or was a flag poudré by drifting snows, and reduced to a British Jack no larger than a lady’s pockethandkerchief when there was a high blow. There were several others in the rebel group; one decorated with stars, another with stripes, and yet another of plain white, which was useless, since Sir Francis had supplied that article of signal.

Among the men admonished were some as loyal as the soldiers who arrested them, but the advance guard had assumed that all they met were rebels, and deprived them of liberty accordingly. One was a youth named William Macdougall, who, after the manner of boys, left his uncle’s farm-house, where he happened to be making a visit, so that he might see whatever was going on. The uncle tried to break through Sir Francis’ exordium with explanations, but that flow, like Iser running rapidly, was not easily stopped. Sir Francis was sorry to see such a respectable youth in such company, and directed uncle and nephew to return to their allegiance. This drew forth a spirited reply, and the Governor rode away.

Sir Francis tells of a woman whose screams came from the direction of the militia, where he quickly sought her. His intended kindness only hastened the catastrophe. “For some reason or other, probably, poor thing, because her husband, or brother, or son had just fled with the rebels, she was in a state of violent excitement, and she was addressing herself to me, and I was looking her straight in the face and listening to her with the utmost desire to understand, if possible, what she was very incoherently complaining of, when all of a sudden she gave a piercing scream. I saw her mind break, her reason burst, and no sooner were they thus relieved from the high pressure which had been giving them such excruciating pain than her countenance relaxed; then, beaming with frantic delight, her uplifted arms flew round her head, her feet jumped with joy, and she thus remained dancing before me--a raving maniac.” He had this sight, and the sinister blessing invoked on his head by Mrs. Gibson, to further cheer him.

He fought his battle, came home, and by four o’clock published his proclamation wherein, after giving much information on the definition of traitor and loyalist and bidding them leave punishment to the law, he offered a reward of £1000 to anyone who would apprehend and deliver William Lyon Mackenzie up to justice, and £500 each for Lount, Gibson, Jesse Lloyd and Silas Fletcher, with a free pardon to the one who should so deliver his man, provided he had not been guilty of murder or arson.

If the last should be punished by law, Sir Francis became outlaw by his own proclamation.

But Mackenzie, leaving behind him his carpet-bag of papers--calculated to assist in the hanging of many persons--was by that time seeking safety in flight. The “rolls of revolt,” and certain criminatory documents found with them, gave the address of every insurgent and incriminated many persons hitherto unsuspected.

“So unwilling was Mackenzie,” says one eye-witness, “to leave the field of battle, and so hot the chase after him, that he distanced the enemy’s horsemen only thirty or forty yards by his superior knowledge of the country, and reached Colonel Lount and his friends on the retreat just in time to save his neck.” He not only saved his own neck, but left behind him a directory in that padlocked carpet-bag to expedite the search for those whom he had deserted. Small wonder that many women cursed him as the cause of all their domestic unhappiness.

Standing by the belt of wood occupied by his own men, he heard the word pass that the day was lost. He ran across a ploughed field, encountering by the way a friend who inquired how things were going, and Mackenzie’s blanched face gave a direct denial to his hurried “all right.” At the side-line where young Macdougall happened to be when on his way to the seat of war, his footsteps hastened by the sound of cannonading, a horse stood saddled and bridled, evidently left there as a precaution for someone. Women and children, terrified enough at what they saw, more so at what they feared, were hurrying northward, filling the air with their cries. While Macdougall was trying to explain away their fears he saw a little man rush down a lane, mount and ride swiftly away. There was blood on the man’s hand, doubtless his own from a wound he had given himself on the Friday night, when trying to extract one of Sheriff Jarvis’ pistol bullets from the toe of a comrade. He had been so nervous that his shaking hand made him gash himself, and the cutting out had to be done by Judah Lundy. Probably the wound in the hand had reopened when he was scrambling over the intervening fences and bushes.

“Oh, God of my country! they turn now to fly--
Hark, the eagle of Liberty screams in the sky,”

says Mackenzie’s muse in one place, and before this,

“Yes, onward they come, like the mountain’s wild flood,
And the lion’s dark talons are dappled in blood.”

Again he says, “I am proud of my descent from a rebel race, who held borrowed chieftains, a scrip nobility, rag money and national debt in abomination.”

He himself was now the one flying, and the lion’s talons left off dappling in blood to try to get him within their clutches, while he showed the truth of the third quotation by returning to first principles and displaying another Highland indication--petticoats. Earlier in the day a lady on her way through Toronto to Cornwall had been in the stage when he stopped it to intercept the news of Duncombe’s rising, and to seize the general contents of the mail-bags. With a pistol at her head he had possessed himself of her portmanteau, and in the contents was enabled later to disguise himself. He was described in Sir Francis’ reward for his apprehension as a “short man, wears a sandy-coloured wig, has small twinkling eyes that can look no man in the face....” At the Golden Lion, about ten miles above the city, he overtook Colonel Anthony Van Egmond, and they agreed to make at once for the Niagara frontier. But the colonel was taken and only Mackenzie escaped. In those mail bags he had been made a sorry dupe by Mr. Isaac Buchanan, who anticipated that they would be so robbed. The mail contained two decoy letters from him, representing matters in the beleaguered city in a most flourishing condition, letters which were read by Mackenzie and no doubt helped to bring about the desired result.

The encouraging terms of the proclamation made many scour the country at breakneck speed, and it is a marvel that any escape should have taken place; Mackenzie’s own recital of it sounds like the tale of the magic ring. The word was given to save themselves, and in a twinkling the woods were full of the flying and the hiding; the beacon, intended for loyalist eyes in Toronto as one of victory, told all was lost to the rebels. The hunting parties did not return empty handed. Many respectable yeomen, some Reformers but not rebels, others neither of these, were unceremoniously taken from their farms and work. These rebels by coercion, and those who had been fugitives, were bound to a strong central rope and paraded along the highway amid the hootings and jeerings of the loyal, in all to the number of sixty. To keep them company there was a party, equally mixed, who arrived in Toronto the same day from the north, with the five hundred men who reached there too late for battle. The latter were reinforced by one hundred Indians, all in paint and native splendour, but burning with as much zeal as any Briton.

The records of the whole affair show that the disaffected were always of one colour, while the African and the native were unhesitatingly and to a man for the Queen.

The last-mentioned party, in their march, could see the flames from Montgomery’s and thought the city was on fire. They were met by many flying northward from there, who in a twinkling changed their politics and their route and returned to town among the guards over those unhappy ones who had been made look like a string of trout. Powder was taken from stores; cake-baking and bacon-frying were made the business of every house passed; they carried the usual medley of gun, pike and rusty sword; and each man, to distinguish him from his fellow-man who was prisoner, wore a pink ribbon on his arm.

Naturally, there was renewed sensation when the guards and prisoners marched to the gaol; sensation greater still when Dr. Morrison and three others, who were exceptionally important, were added, their march preceded by a loaded cannon pointed towards them. A concourse of citizens, anxious to see the whole event, followed. Happily a farmer, detained in town by the impressment of his horses and waggon in Government service, and who knew the city well, left the crowd and reached the northern gate of the market in time to perceive a gunner, with a lighted portfire in his hand, standing by a cannon which was loaded with grape. Thinking the approaching crowd was a body of rebels the gunner was about to apply his light, when the farmer, with great presence of mind, stopped him. Had the piece been fired more lives would have been thus sacrificed than were lost during the whole winter.

One of the prisoners was now lying in hospital at the point of death from a grape-shot wound, and a small detachment under Captain Gamble was detailed to take a party of other prisoners from the gaol, to be led before him for recognition. Among them was Colonel Van Egmond. The dying man lay on his bed propped up with pillows, his mangled shoulder and arm slightly covered, his ghastly face telling his moments were numbered. It was night-time, and lights were held at the head and foot of the bed as his fellows were slowly marched before him. Some he knew, replied to questions, and mentioned them by name. When Van Egmond’s turn came, he must have intentionally touched the man’s foot for when the usual question was put, he said: “Why do you push my foot, Colonel Van Egmond? I am a dying man; I cannot die with a lie in my mouth. You were with us, and were to have commanded us at Montgomery’s tavern, but you did not arrive in time.”

It was a weird scene. The man died that night, and was followed by the Colonel himself, whose years could not endure the dampness and many other horrors of his cell, where the temperature was arctic. Inflammatory rheumatism and a complication of maladies brought him to a cot in the same hospital, where, with some of his unhappy companions, he closed his life.

* * * * *

The farce of rebellion, so far as Toronto was concerned, had been played; but the tragedy was to follow. Of the two men who had pitted themselves against each other, and who have left page upon page of their mutual opinions--let there be gall enough in the ink, though thou write with a goose pen, no matter--one was completely victorious, one completely vanquished. The progress of the first was attended with enthusiastic cheers; that of the other by hunger, cold, fatigue, and by much sympathy, which meant death to those showing it. Christmas Day of ’37, the year “of one thousand eight hundred and freeze-to-death,” saw the apostles of the “sacred dogma of equality” of either province, fugitive; and even Sir Francis himself recorded of the season, “I cannot deny that the winter of the past year was politically as well as physically severer than I expected.” “Several times,” he says, “while my mind was warmly occupied in writing my despatches, I found my pen full of a lump of stuff that appeared to be honey, but which proved to be frozen ink.” Sir Francis flatters the Canadian climate. Beautiful, vivifying, transforming as it is, it had no power to turn the gall in that compound to honey. He looked upon himself as the eminent man who makes enemies of all the bad men whose schemes he would not countenance; others looked upon him as having done more to alienate those whom he was sent to govern than any other person or set of persons. “If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-bred Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth who would dare insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him Francis Bond Head.”

When Sir Francis first arrived he was informed that his chief duty was to sit very still in a large scarlet chair and keep his hat on. The first was easy, but the second was repugnant to his feelings; and thinking the dignity of the head would lose nothing by being divided from the hat, he meditated holding the latter between his white gloved hands. His English attendants agreed with him in this idea of courtesy. But he quailed beneath the reproof of a wordless stare from a Canadian who thought this a bid to democracy; “What,” said the look, “what! to purchase five minutes’ loathsome popularity will you barter one of the few remaining prerogatives of the British crown?” And so he wore his hat.

Of deceptive stature, the governor’s presence did not tally with his militia register. He owed much to a wonderful personal magnetism; old and young alike loved him--when they did not hate him. Seated in that chair he is described by an eye-witness on his first appearance in it: “Although too small to fill it, his shoulders and the poise of his head did much to counterbalance the lack of nether proportions; his feet, unable to reach the floor, were not allowed to dangle, but were thrust out stiffly in front and kept in that position, apparently without effort, during the opening. One of two Americans, in the space near him reserved for visitors, plucked his friend’s sleeve. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is a man of determination, and will gain his point.’

“‘Why do you say so,’ said the other. ‘Because no other kind of man could or would hold his feet like that.’”

The Governor’s opinion of the unaccredited grievance-monger was more elaborate than the one he gravely records in his “Narrative” as given of himself--“proclaimed the d--dst liar and the d--dst rascal in the province.” Condensed, his opinions amount to a never-ending diatribe against that book bound in boards of five hundred and fifty-three closely-printed pages, in which it was calculated there were three times as many falsehoods as pages, penned by one who had been “an insignificant peddler-lad.” “Afraid to look me in the face, he sat with his feet not reaching the ground and with his face averted from me at an angle of about seventy degrees; while with the eccentricity, the volubility, and indeed the appearance of a madman, the tiny creature raved in all directions ... but nothing that I could say would induce the peddler to face his own report.”

Perhaps, after all, there was something in the management of legs which would not reach the floor.

Yet the aphorism that “Next to victor it is best to be victim” never had better exemplification.

Autocrats All.

“_It is in me and shall out._”

At about this period of her history Canada threatened to become that against which Washington had warned his countrymen, a slave to inveterate antipathies. The mass of the people were violently for or against each person, cause or abstract question, in turn; and naturally, the times being critical, weak men went to the wall and those who were by nature autocrats came to the front, and in their way did the best of work. Sir John Colborne, St. Eustache notwithstanding, was the right man in the right place; his severe acts were not committed either thoughtlessly or wantonly. Each was useful in his own way as circumstances and a narrow orbit permitted. After Sir John came Prince, MacNab and Drew. None of them hated in a small, toothy way; there was nothing of the schemer about any one of them. It was a word and a blow. And although at one time it seemed as if the most prominent of them, Prince and MacNab, had given force to the saying that the man who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy, the two events in which they figured--as criminals or heroes according to prejudice--and which nearly caused a great war, were the means of putting down the rebellion. The _Caroline_, and the prisoners who were “shot accordingly,” showed that the iron heel could stamp, that the iron hand was better without the glove.

Following closely upon Gallows Hill came the occupation of Navy Island and the burning of the _Caroline_.

“What,” asked Canada, “is meant by Neutrality?” and Jonathan, smoothing the rough edges of his meaning in poesie, replied:

“Excite fresh men t’invade that monarch’s shore,
And fill a loyal country with alarms,
And give them men, with warlike stores and arms,
Encourage brigands and all aid supply;
I guess that’s _strict, downright Neutral-i-ty_!”

At the foot of the terrible three hundred and thirty-four feet of water-leaps taken in the last thirty-six miles of the river-bed of the Niagara, lay Navy Island, only a mile and a half above the cauldron, and within three-quarters of a mile of the worst of the mysterious strugglings and throes of the rapids. This, with several other small islands, forms a strait and two channels, and lies within a half-mile row of the Canadian shore. The Canadian boatman, intrepid as he is, knows the meaning of that sound, which is ocean at its maddest--a rolling sea heralding a coming storm that is born in the countless million tons of clear, deep green water and milk-white bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, which leap into the appalling confusion below.

Here, on December 13th, was run up the patriot flag, with its twin stars supposed to represent “the Canadas--two pretty provinces, like two pretty daughters kept in durance vile by an old and surly father; they will either soon elope, or be carried off _nolens volens_.”

The Provisional Government, set up on this Juan Fernandez, where Mackenzie hoped soon to be monarch of all he surveyed, had also its seal, which showed, besides the twin stars, a new moon breaking through the surrounding darkness--the Egyptian night of Canadian thraldom--with the legend, “Liberty--Equality.” Luckily, the third word from their French model was missing, for they did fall out and scratch and fight in a way to serve any local Watts with themes. At Gallows Hill nothing would satisfy Mackenzie but the Governor’s head. So now there was an issue of money, and a proclamation, the latter offering five hundred pounds for the apprehension of Sir Francis Bond Head, “so that he may be dealt with as appertains to justice.” “Would you as it were dethrone him and bring him to the block,” had queried Rolph some time before, in his well-known and clever serio-comic supposititious trial of that dignitary. The commissions issued were embellished with an eagle and other insignia of patriotism, the eagle lifting a lion in his claws and evidently about to fly away with him, the legend “Liberty or Death.”

It looked as if the would-be Cromwell, after he had

“Come in with a rout, kicked Parliament out,
Would finish by wearing the Crown.”

His coadjutor from the United States was Rensselaer van Rensselaer. Together, they were dubbed Tom Thumb and Jack-the-Giant-Killer. Van Rensselaer, a naturally handsome man, under thirty, looked much older from dissipation, “A lean and bloated dram-drinker, a spectacle his nose,” called by his countrymen Rip van Winkle the Second, who spent his time on Navy Island in the double occupation of drinking brandy, of which he always had a bottle under his head at night, and writing love-letters. By his own account he spent his days plodding “four weary miles through mud and water” round their little republic to dispose of recruits and to erect defences; was prostrate, haggard and careworn, and, when about to partake of a much-needed meal, would be called away to receive a boat-load of visitors and leave it untouched. By the account of others, he bade fair, like Lord Holland in his epitaph, to be drowned sitting in his elbow-chair, or properly speaking camp-stool, for furnishings were meagre on Navy Island. The New York _Courier and Enquirer_ had the honesty, in the recapitulatory articles which all border events called out, to say, “It is idle in this matter to affect concealment of the fact that the present Canadian rebellion receives its chief impulse and encouragement from the United States.” No wonder then that a Canadian sheet should say: “Marshals, governors and generals were on the look-out for patriots; but one such in charge met a number of the last en route to Navy Island hauling a piece of ordnance. ‘Where are you bound for?’ said the gentle general. ‘Oh, we are only going to shoot ducks,’ said they, and they were allowed to proceed.”

The Attorney-General said that the wording of Marcy’s and other messages deprecated the invasion of Canada in an “Oh-now-don’t” kind of appeal, which, read between the lines, meant “Go on like good fellows--do just as you like.”

“The doors were opened,” writes a patriot, “and the patriots told to help themselves.” Ten pieces of State artillery were given up on the strength of the following note, a fine compliment to General Winfield Scott’s literary reputation--than whom no finer military man in any service ever stepped:

“BUFFALO HEAD QR., Jan. 18, 1838.

“COL. H. B. RANSOM, Commander-in-chief, Tonawanda.

“Pleas sen on those pieces of Canon which are at your place; let the same teams come on with them.

“Your in hase,

“W SCOTT Commander in Chief on the
“Frontier of Niagara.”

There was no forgery, for the patriot guard was W. Scott, afterwards, by the way, a candidate for presidential honours.

New York papers could not see any similarity between the Rebellion and the Revolution; and as to comparing leaders, “why, it was likening barn door fowls to soaring eagles.” But in case of the pother ending in war, a correspondent of the _Toronto Palladium_ says, “There would not be a house left to smoke, nor a cock to crow day, within ten miles of the shore on the banks of navigable rivers--and a finger-post might be set up, ‘Here the United States was.’”