Deborahs of ’37.
“Although our last toast, gentlemen,—Place aux dames, ‘The hand that rocks the cradle guides the State.’”
“‘Madame! Madame Cornelia, you are not worthy of the name you bear.’
“‘Sir, we do not live in the times of the Gracchi; I am not a Roman matron.’
“In truth, the poor lady was nothing more nor less than a good, tender mother and excellent wife, not very interesting, perhaps, to philosophers, but very acceptable in the eyes of heaven.”
During the Seven Years’ War the only tillers to be seen in the Prussian fields were women. Likewise, in 1812, it was a common sight in Upper Canada to see women at the plough in place of absent husbands and brothers. Small wonder, then, that the mothers of 1812, and the daughters to whom they gave birth under such circumstances, were what they were in ’37.
Small wonder, too, that their neighbours across the line, who were kin and should have been friends, continued obnoxious to them when the representatives of the Stars and Stripes were such men as Theller and Sutherland. Yet, allowing for all provocation, the period of first dentition in the Canadian Infant was unusually squally; full of whims, shy fits, small fisticuffs and wailings.
Like that pattern of all good housewives described by the prudent mother of King Lemuel, it could be said of the immigrant’s wife, “She layeth her hand to the spindle and her hands hold the distaff; she seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” And when Madame de Léry was presented at the Court of George III. her beauty forced the monarch to say, “If such are all my new Canadian subjects I have indeed made a conquest.”
The women of ’37 combined all these virtues with a few heroic ones. From the dark days of civil dissensions, when Canadians, like their sisters of Deborah’s time, saw their husbands obliged to travel by the by-paths because the high roads seemed to each to be occupied by his foes, “A company of ghosts steal out
And join their voiceless sobs and cries.”
And there is laughter, too; for when she forgot for a moment to cry—her tears dropping into her teacup—Deborah did not disdain to see the humorous side of affairs. If the survivor be the fittest, then Place aux dames of the Tory stripe.
“Nay, we would in the title glory,
For every honest man’s a Tory,”
is the burden of their song. It is a song which loses half its thrill without the pointed reply, the little electric sparkles which run through it. Those who have furnished the bulk of the following pages shall tell their own stories:
“I am just that kind of Tory that the only time I went to the United States I put Canadian earth in my shoes, so that I might not walk on Yankee soil.
“I do indeed remember ’37 and Mackenzie, and how angry we all were that he escaped in a woman’s clothes. ‘He need not have cheated the authorities by putting on our clothing,’ we said; it was hard to forgive him that.
“My father had a logic of his own. ‘Show me a Reformer,’ he used to say, ‘and I’ll show you a Radical; show me a Radical, and I’ll show you a rebel; show me a rebel, and I’ll show you a traitor to his country and his Queen; and a man who is untrue to his Queen is untrue to his God.’ He always declared he could smell a Radical in the next concession. A sword on one side of his bed and a gun on the other, and it was death to anyone who touched either. He always called my mother madame. ‘Madame, do you remember so and so?’ ‘Madame, is dinner ready?’ He was a volunteer in 1812, and, like many other loyal-hearted men, had to leave wife and family to look after themselves as best they might. He took part in all the chief battles then, and often was away for a month at a time. It was during one of these absences that McArthur’s freebooters, infamous marauders, plundered the country, pretending they were a branch of the United States army. When they got to our house they first of all removed a baking of bread, taking off the oven doors to do so; then they emptied the feather-beds on the brush-heap, and filled the ticks with cornstalks for fodder; they took our best blankets to cover their horses, and stole the silverware and valuables. They then destroyed what they could not carry away; one, more infamous than the rest, hurled a tomahawk through a large and valuable mirror. Some time afterwards, a Loyalist, when passing Colonel Talbot’s, saw a little copper tea-kettle hanging in a tree and a silver spoon with it, and Colonel Talbot recognized the crest on the spoon—a lamb encircled with a wreath—and the things were returned. My mother had buried what she could—her own clothes and whatever she could manage to secrete—and put brush over the place, and anything not lucky enough to be buried was taken. My father’s sister was alone when the marauders reached her house, so she called as loudly as she could, ‘John, Joe, Dick, all of you, make haste down—here they are!’ as if she was just waiting for them. She was a very resolute woman. Then she took down an old musket that always hung on two wooden hooks, rested it on the window-sill and fired at random; but random happened to be a good mark. The leader of the gang was at that moment riding towards the window, and the charge nearly carried off his horse’s leg; the animal fell, and remained there till it died. Then the whole party of these moss-troopers, who were alarmed as much by her shouts as by the shot, thought they had to encounter a number of men in the house, and made off as fast as they could. This was the time that Colonel Burwell’s place was burned and that Colonel Talbot made such a narrow escape from the same party. Colonel Burwell was ill with fever and ague; they took him prisoner and sent him to Chilicothe, where they left for him some time. They burnt his house, but his wife, after sending a message to Colonel Talbot to advise him of their coming, made her escape on her Indian pony. The marauders were all masked. She had recognized the leader, an American from across the border at Fort Erie, where she was born. She kept him interested while her messenger was on his way to Colonel Talbot—no new kind of work for Mrs. Burwell; in her old home she had had a similar experience, during which a small brother had improved the opportunity of the soldiers’ absence, while they ransacked the house, to make a visit to their stacked muskets, take a dipper and fill up every muzzle with water. When Mrs. Burwell arrived at our house, my mother dug up some of her wardrobe, and as the visitor often said afterwards, ‘Whatever should I have done if you had not given me something to wear!’ She remained with us till the next day, and Colonel Talbot in the meantime was lucky enough to look like a shepherd or labourer in his homespun smock. He was about to milk his cows, and would have made a queer figure to grace a triumph. The marauders had among them some Indians and scouts who figured at Tecumseh’s last battle, and an Indian was the first to enter on the scene. ‘You an officer?’ he said to Captain Patterson, Talbot’s friend and neighbor. ‘Oh, yes, big officer—captain.’ But this answer did not divert suspicion, and looking towards the ravine to which Colonel Talbot was directing his steps, the Indian continued, ‘Who that yonder—he big officer, too?’ ‘No, no,’ said Captain Patterson, ‘he is only the man who tends the sheep.’ Notwithstanding this assurance and the appearance which bore it out, two guns were levelled at the retreating figure. Twice they tried to cover him, but each time were diverted by the assurance repeated. The Colonel dropped into the ravine, and their chance was gone. They burned the mill, they plundered Castle Malahide, in the booty took some valuable horses, and they drove off the cattle; but two quart pots of gold and the plate, snug under the front wing of the house, escaped.
“The daughters of Joris Janson Rappelje went through much the same kind of thing. The father, a descendant of a Huguenot, had come here in 1810 with a detailed account of the family farming life, how the Dutch Governor of the New Netherlands had given a silver spoon to Sarah Rappelje, the first white child born in the colony—1635—and many other items of family interest, closely written in a fat manuscript volume. His American experiences had been stirring ones; at Lundy’s Lane it was no figure of speech to say they waded ankle deep in blood, and yet everybody said that the worst scourge of all was the raid of this band of McArthur’s marauders. They were one thousand strong, mounted, and unfortunately the camp was pitched at the Rappelje farm, where St. Andrew’s Market in St. Thomas now is. By night-time the place was in a glow of light from the fence-rails burning in heaps, the shadows of the overtopping trees making gloom above and beyond. By morning Rappelje’s sheep were all slaughtered, crops destroyed and the crib emptied of the corn. When Colonel Talbot tried to hide his valuables he gave Mrs. Rappelje a specially precious box, which was to be guarded at all hazards. It had so far been underneath a bed, a safe enough hiding in ordinary times, but she now took it out and put it between the beehives, sure that her lady bees would make good guards. Her young daughter Aletta would have fought the raiders herself had she been allowed, but she had to content herself by telling the commander that he was a thief and a scoundrel.[5]
“When the news of the uprising of ’37 reached us my father was off again, and my brothers too. One of the boys took down the big poker from the fireplace, the only weapon he could find, and I cried out to him by way of encouragement, ‘Mind you don’t get shot in the back!’ I and another girl, Margaret Caughill, sat up all night running bullets, and we had an apronful in the morning. I turned the grindstone, too, for one of the officers to sharpen his sword.
“It so happened that Dr. John Rolph was at my father’s place for three months. He poisoned the minds of a great many.”
In the house of a high Tory, who could smell a Radical in the next concession, the seditious doctor seemed to enjoy himself and showed a particular fondness for the blood-thirsty little Tory maid. “Come here, my fair child,” he would say, and when wanted and not to be found her mother would remark, “Oh, I suppose she is on Dr. Rolph’s knee.” She got at his quicksilver once, divided it with her finger to make it run, investigated the mysteries of his big watch, and helped him eat the johnnycake which he insisted her mother should bake in the ashes. The flaxen-haired, blue-eyed damsel was danced up and down by the light of the big fire— “Send them back to Yankeeland
To hoeing of their corn,
And we will eat a johnnycake
While it is good and warm,”
is the song associated with the man of whom his best biographer records there was no such thing as self-abandonment, never giving himself to frolicsomeness or fun. It is almost a relief to find him in this out-of-the-way corner of the wilderness in such homely and off-guard actions. “What do you think this little one wants—she wants my money-bags,” and up she was on his knee again to examine the leather money-belt where he kept his guineas.
“He once came to us for flour and lost his way after he left, got into a brush-heap where he had to remain all night, and was so tormented by mosquitoes that in a frenzy, to protect himself, he emptied the flour and drew the sack over his head. He presented himself at the breakfast table next morning—and my father said he never saw such a show as the man was when he reached the house,”—“covered, if not with glory, yet with meal.”
Another visitor, of very different calibre, was the famous Tiger Dunlop, who would ride the saucy child upon his massive shoulder—which, she said, ought to have a saddle. He pronounced his admiration of egg-nog as made under her father’s supervision, “Ah, your coo gives good milk!” There was the usual greed in this neighbourhood for the liquid which made the egg-nog so uncommonly good, and the expedients to get the desired article were sometimes ingenious. One toper, impecunious and resourceful, provided himself with a keg partitioned down the centre, each side seemingly tight; one contained water only. He would arrive at the general store with the water side half-full, get the whiskey side filled, and then say payment would be made on his next visit. If prompt payment were demanded he would wax indignant; “Well, if you won’t trust me, take your old whiskey.” Out would come the water cork and the water would gurgle into the whiskey barrel; the owner, showing outraged virtue, would then march home with the whiskey side comfortably full.
As to the oft-repeated slander that Methodist preachers were the root of disaffection, scattering the seed of gospel and rebellion together, these ultra-loyal ladies are dubious. One says, “It is seldom you find one of them a real staunch Tory and a good man”—a remark, by the way, which admits of two meanings. Three loyal dames, one of them a foreigner, once upon a time attended a revival; no doubt the three minds were prejudiced as to the politics of the preacher. The latter finally came down the aisle, addressing his questions right and left: “And now, my good woman,” to the foreigner, “what has the Lord done for you?” “By Job alive,” said the lady, “I do not tell my family affairs to everybody!”
It is hard, even yet, to convince these dames of fixed feeling that good could come out of certain quarters. “They call them Reformers,—but what were they else? He” (a person above general suspicion) “may not have carried two heads in one hat, but he was not the true thing.”
“I would rather be killed by a good Tory bullet than be singed by rebel gunpowder,” said this fire-eating slip of a girl to a crying friend. “What are you crying for—because you have no more brothers to send?” “No, I’m afraid they’ll be brought back dead.” “I don’t care, provided mine are not shot in the back.”
Of the said brothers, one was in a troop of cavalry and another met his death, as many did, through the sudden change from home comforts to campaigning. “Getting up out of a down bed and sleeping under waggons or on frozen ground with a carpet-bag for a pillow was a great change, and he died before he could be got home.”
But another brother seems to have kept his health and spirits in a marked degree. The absences of the husband and father were now as long and trying as they had been in 1812, and the mother, whose name was the good old-fashioned Betsy, gave voluble tokens of her grief. This boy imitated his father’s handwriting and wrote a long and sympathetic letter, ending, “Do the best you can, Betsy, I don’t expect to be back till spring.” She threw down the letter,—“If you don’t come back till then, you need not come home at all.” The boys were delighted, but the mother discovered the forgery, and the scribe suffered severely. It was a custom with the father to give his daughter a birthday present of a roast of beef, every added year marked by an added pound of meat. In those days spinsterhood was not as fashionable a state of life as nowadays, and the father waxed annoyed: “Now, my dear,” he said, when the roast tipped considerably more than twenty pounds, “if you are not gone off within the year I shall have to drive in the whole beast.”
Arnold somewhere says that according as the New or Old Testament takes hold of a nation, so do what he terms the religious humours in it differ. It would be hard to determine from the data procurable just what the influence in this case was. Some had anxious thoughts as to how things had “sped” and the division of spoil which old and new dispensations always allow as lawful. One old lady sent off her son with a blessing to join his corps, but called him back again to give him a large shawl. “Now, Willie, take this with you, and when you get to Toronto be sure to get it filled with the best Young Hyson tea. Don’t forget now, and bring the best. By the time you get there you’ll find plenty of it for the taking.”
An old farmer ascribed the degeneracy of the times not to influences broad as Arnold’s, but to the “flattery” understood in the difference of manner toward farmers’ wives. “When ’twere dame and porridge, it were rale good times; when ’twere mistress and broth, ’twere worser a great deal; but when it comes to be ma’am and soup, it be werry bad indeed,” and no wonder the country went to the dogs. He preferred the days when U. E. Loyalist ladies speared salmon with pitchforks. If dress had aught to do with it, the change there was great indeed. In the early days to which he alluded many a U. E. Loyalist belle had only one garment to her name, a deerskin slip, and men’s buckskin trousers sometimes brought a dollar and a half after twelve years’ wear; by ’37 the following is a description of an evening dress, thought worthy to be sent to Canada—“Gros royale black ground with flowing pattern, wide flounces and short tight sleeves, long gloves of peau rosée, English lace cap with pompous (?) roses, English lace handkerchief, black satin shoes, and one bracelet.” During the good old days so bemoaned by the farmer, one U. E. Loyalist girl unfortunately made a neighbourly visit where she saw the mysteries of the laundry for the first time. The lesson sank deep in her mind, and at the first opportunity after her return home, when the rest of the family had left her in undisturbed possession of the house, she made her maiden attempt as blanchiseuse on her own deerskin garment. But as this adaptation from Godiva laboured, the garment grew less and less. Any woman who has attempted to wash a glove wrung into a wisp can appreciate her horror. There was no Peeping Tom, but the sounds of the returning family precipitated her into the generous shadow of the potato-hole, whence she interviewed them—if, indeed, the attenuated bit of chamois was not the more eloquent of the two. I’ll find a thousand shifts to get away, has been written; alas, she could find not one. She was packed in a barrel and conveyed upon an ox-sled to a neighbour’s where clothes were more common, and the distressed and shiftless maiden could truly have said she was in her right mind when again clothed. The last of the English and the first of the Canadians were in some points uncommonly alike.
“In our house in my childhood everything was dated by 1812—things had importance only as they were affected by that year and whether they were ‘before’ or ‘after’. My father was through the whole of ’12 and was with Brock at the taking of Detroit; Brock gave him a horse and all trappings for it and himself, and I very well remember the bearskin holsters and the pistols—enormous pistols that we often shot off when we were little.
“General Hull came through our district when he was on his way to Detroit, and every house was searched for arms of any kind or description that could be made use of by the Americans. My father was away from home with our own troops, and my mother received the American officer who came to search our house. He staid an unconscionable time, and mentioned that my father was fighting his own best friends, the friends who came to offer us liberty. ‘Liberty,’ said my mother; ‘liberty indeed—we want no more than we have; we are happy and have good laws, but your country is one of lawlessness.’ My little brother, who was very small and who thought that when Yankees were spoken of wild beast and fairy-book creatures were meant, quietly sidled up to the officer and felt his legs. ‘Why, mother, mother! The Yankees wear trousers just like papa!’
“All children had nightmarish notions about the Americans, but they rather enjoyed it all; saw the excitement and fuss, revelled in the occasional strange circumstances, and knew none of the dangers. Once there was a great scare about the Indians, they were coming to kill us and burn our goods, and many precautions were taken. A big hole was made in the ground in the woods and all our valuables were put in it, and to the same woods we children were taken to be left hidden there; we had some chairs and a few comforts, and we thought it great fun—a little disappointed when during the night it was decided there was no more cause for alarm, and we were taken home again.
“A Mrs. Perry, to whom I went to school, had two sons away fighting. One day some Indians arrived, several of them wearing extra long scalp-belts, and one had in his belt a scalp with long yellow hair. Mrs. Perry said she knew that was her son’s hair; and anyway the son was never heard of again, as far as I know.
“On the occasion that the officer came to search for arms his troop evidently thought he was staying a good while, for sometimes they would try to approach the house a little nearer, when he would go to the door and wave them back. On their tour through the country they burned every grist-mill, so that the people would be starved out, and then of course we had to pound our grain as best we could. My uncle had a grist-mill and a saw-mill. He also had a daughter of sixteen, a lovely girl. When they had demolished the grist-mill they turned their attention to the other, but the girl was determined to save it, and as fast as a man would set it alight in one place she would pour water on it, until at last they admired her courage and bravery so much that the officer in charge ordered a man to help her destroy everything which would mean the least danger from fire and that the saw-mill was to be let alone.
“My father was also all through ’37, and when the first troubles came and our streets were full of shouting mounted rebels he waited for no orders but got supplies on his own account, trusting that some day the authorities would repay him, and his regiment was equipped and sent off without delay; he was colonel of the 4th Middlesex. If I had had anything to do with those times there would have been no question of making prisoners—shoot the dogs and be done with it. What business had they coming over here to stir up peaceable people, first in 1812 and then in 1837. Father saw no real fighting in ’37, except that in connection with the taking of Theller and the Anne, but he was in Windsor at the time of the Hume tragedy. Hume was skinned, and they said they were going to make drumheads out of the skin. When the brigands left his body hanging on the posts they went to Prince’s place, cut the trees, destroyed the fences, and frightened Mrs. Prince out of her senses.
“I saw Sutherland and Theller when they passed through St. Thomas on their way to Toronto for trial. My father as Colonel was president of the court-martial, and at that time he received many threatening letters, scores of them, saying that if any American lives were taken he and all his race would be killed. He laughed at this, saying that they evidently knew very little about a court-martial, for as president he had really less to say than the youngest officer in the room.
“At the beginning of the troubles in St. Thomas the Loyalists one day took refuge in an upper room of a big building, thinking they were going to be surrounded by rebels below; they were surrounded, but I don’t remember that anything hostile was intended. One of those in the upper room threw an axe out of the window and it fell on a man’s head, splitting his face open, and he was carried home on a stretcher, covered with a white cloth. I suppose he died afterwards. My husband was away with the militia, and I was terrified at being left alone with a maid-servant and a servant boy. One day a lot of them came in front of the house, and furiously began to pull the palings of the fence down, one of them shouting, ‘A Tory lives here; we’ll not leave a stick for him to see! We’ll burn the house, too!’ A magistrate came along just then and caught the fellow by the throat, calling him a rebel, had him arrested, and the rest of them left my premises. I was afraid they would return to carry out their threat, and got a man to come and watch all night, but they did not reappear. A party of the rebels were somewhere near, and our men wanted to catch them, but we were poorly supplied with ammunition. I was in a shop and heard the proprietor of it talking to another man, lamenting the lack of bullets, so I said, ‘Give me the moulds, and give me all the lead you have, and to-morrow you shall have all the bullets you can carry.’ So they did, and I and my woman-servant sat up the whole of that night melting lead and running bullets, and when the men came for them next day there was nothing too much for them to say, and they went away cheering me. The thing got into the American papers, which said that even the Canadian ladies were so earnest in the war that they sat up all night running bullets. When my servant and I were making them we had two moulds, one cooling while we filled the other. After the bullets were emptied into the cold water of course they were not smooth, and we each had a knife to cut off the part adhering; so there we sat in silence that whole night, filling and cutting, the silly maid weeping steadily. She was a young Scotch girl just out, and she cried all through the night as she worked. I gave the men their balls, saying, ‘Every bullet should find a billet,’ but they did not catch their party of rebels.
“Talbot’s likeness to William IV. was specially commented on when someone in the neighbourhood received an English paper with William’s picture in it. Talbot might have sat for the portrait. His usual dinner was soup, always soup, a plain joint, usually leg of mutton, vegetables, pancakes—I never saw anything but pancakes by way of a course to follow the meats at any of the many times I was there—and the best port wine that ever was brought into Canada. He imported it for himself direct from the manufacturers, and often half of it was abstracted on the way. He was not the boor he was painted, but it is certain he could be fascinating. I dined there often, and he was a perfect host, always choosing after-dinner topics which he thought would be suited to the interests of his guests. For instance, one evening he told me much about his mother and sister, and many of the strange and interesting things his sister’s continental life opened to her. He also explained that same evening how ladies of fashion hire court dresses made in Paris, great news to us Canadians. From another man I heard that this sister, who had taken vows of celibacy, Colonel Talbot said, but not vows to relinquish the world, was a political spy in the pay of the French Government and the Spanish Government. The story accounted for her regular six months’ residence in Paris and the same in Madrid; but she must have been clever to be able to serve two such governments, the antagonist this six months of the one she had been spying for in the previous six.
“Once when I was dining there he talked of his mother and her life at Malahide Castle, and how she managed the servants. There were plenty of cows and many servants, but no butter. She asked why, and was told that the cows were bewitched, and that the butter would not come. The lady was equal to the emergency, and said that she gave them just one week to get the cows unbewitched, and if there was not plenty of the best butter forthcoming by that time the whole troop of servants would be replaced by others. The butter soon came and was of the best.
“The mother was Roman Catholic and the father a Protestant, the family to be divided in the way of the sons following the father and the daughters the mother. Colonel Talbot was nothing in particular, but when he was away visiting he would go to whatever church his hosts went to. I think it was in Toronto once he was at the Roman Catholic, when the priest spoke to him after the service and said he was glad to see him returning to the true faith.
“Another time he was at church, somewhere in the country, with Sir Peregrine Maitland’s party, and was wearing the celebrated sheepskin coat which had for a hood the head of the beast, to be worn in bad weather, the wearer’s face covered and the eyes looking through the eyeholes. On this occasion the head was turned over the back of the collar part, in its usual place in fine weather or under cover. The text was that in which we were told to beware of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and as the words were said Talbot got up, gravely shook himself, turned round so that the sheep’s head was in full view, and equally gravely sat down again.
“His household furniture could not be called furniture at all; enough wooden chairs to sit on, and a table made of a couple of planks nailed to ‘sawhorses’ made the dining-room equipment when I knew him; but when the dinner was served the boards were covered with the finest damask, a white dinner service, good glass and silver. Geoffrey was as peculiar as his master, and once I heard Colonel Talbot ask him a question as he waited at table, and Geoffrey went to the cupboard, got what he wanted, put it on the table, went to the kitchen and returned again before answering his master’s question.
“His nephew, Julius Airey, was disgusted with the place and his anomalous position in it, brought there as the heir and no definite understanding arrived at, and he was kicking his heels in idleness and uncertainty between nineteen and twenty-four. In one of his letters home he drew a picture, a dreadful caricature of the colonel, which afterwards in some inexplicable manner found its way back to Talbot and decided him not to make Julius his heir; it showed the dining-room in its bareness, a wooden hook on the wall bearing a bridle, and his uncle in a chair by the fire, choosing the moment to depict him just after a coal had hopped into his uncle’s big gaping pocket and set it afire. Colonel Talbot was very unfair to Julius, inasmuch as he kept him there all those years and never told him that he had better look for his own way in the world, as he was not to be the heir after all.
“My husband dined with Colonel Talbot once in every three weeks, and he never saw a badly served or badly cooked dinner, and only once did he see salt meat on the table, and that was put on on purpose. Sheriff Parkins, of London, famous for his championship of Queen Caroline, came as he said two thousand miles to visit Talbot, but Talbot could not be bothered with him, hence the salt meat. At dinner Parkins began to abuse Sir George Arthur; ‘Sir George is a friend of mine,’ said Talbot, but Parkins paid no attention to that—went on. ‘Sir George is a friend of mine,’ again said Talbot, and Parkins desisted for a while, but soon returned to the charge. ‘Sir George is a friend of mine,’ said Talbot for the third time, ‘and I will not have him so spoken of at my table.’ ‘Call it a table?’ said Parkins as he lifted the damask. ‘In my house, then,’ said Talbot. ‘Call it a house? It is nothing but a dog-kennel, and as for your table, I have seen nothing but salt junk.’ ‘Geoffrey,’ said Talbot, ‘this gentleman is ready to go, bring him his horse,’ and Parkins went off in a rage, such a rage that when he reached the inn he kicked a panel of his bedroom door through with one blow from his heavily booted foot. The sheriff had time to tell one good story, that Caroline was so fond of Sydney Smith, who also befriended her, that she had a large portrait of him hung on her walls; when he next came to see her, her broken English announced that she had put him among her ‘household dogs.’
“Geoffrey was a great character, but he and his master understood each other thoroughly. They came together in a characteristic way. One day when Talbot was visiting somewhere in the Old Country the host found fault with the footman for bringing in cold plates; next day the plates were so red hot that the host first jumped, then swore, and then dismissed the man. ‘That’s the man for me,’ said Colonel Talbot, ‘I like him for that hot plate business,’ and he engaged Geoffrey on the spot. Whatever eccentricity his master chose to perpetrate Geoffrey would second it, and they made a formidable pair. Talbot hated the Scotch, and once when he saw someone approach who turned out to be a friend, he excused his first coldness by saying, ‘Oh, I thought you were one of those abominable Scotch.’ Although Irish himself, he had no trace of any nationality but English. He was English in speech and prejudice. How he got on so well with Dunlop was hard to understand, unless it was on the score of mutual eccentricity. And Dunlop was desperately rude. Once in Toronto a member of Parliament invited my husband and me to dine at the members’ mess, and it happened that in that big roomful of men I was the only woman. I sat near one end, at the right hand of our host, and Dr. Dunlop was at the extreme end of the table, too far off to speak to. He began to talk at the top of his voice, so that the whole long table could hear him, and he stated that he had been in the Talbot settlement, where there was not such a thing as a gate; when you came to a fence you had to straddle it, and that’s what they all did, men and women alike. Now was not that rude, with me at the table! If I had been near him I would have given him some of my mind, I assure you. And besides, it was a great falsehood.”
One story told in extenuation of Talbot’s business methods is that a local Deborah undertook to overcome the great colonel of whom everyone else was afraid. He went to her homestead to adjust some land dispute; their words waxed high, until she, unable to dispose of him in any other way, knocked him down, made shafts of the legs of this descendant of the Kings of Connaught, and dragged him to the roadside while his back performed the part of a Canadian summer sled. In his own words, this lady was a true Scotch virago. One day as he sat at dinner her counterpart entered the dining-room, Geoffrey as usual serving. She announced that she had come for a horse, to get provisions from the blockhouse. The latter had been built in the early days at a point midway between Port Talbot and Long Point, the two extremes of the infant settlement, where flour, pork, and other provisions might be imported by boat and then distributed according to the Czar’s judgment. She was told she might have Bob, a quiet, strong horse; but she had set her heart on Jane, the beast kept for the Colonel’s own use and ridden by none else. Most emphatically she was told she should not have Jane. She seized the carving-fork and threatened “to run it through him;” so, in his own words as he told the story to a friend, “I had to holloa to Geoffrey to give the Scotch devil the mare.”
To protect himself as much as possible from intrusion he had a window adjusted on the primeval post-office system, the pane arranged so that it would open and shut from within. During the audiences Geoffrey stood behind him to hand down the maps, and the intending purchaser was left on the path outside. The inevitable query was, “Well, what do you want?” The trembling applicant made an answer, the land was given or refused as the case might be, and to speed the parting guest the equally inevitable concluding remark, “Geoffrey, turn on the dogs,” followed. It was destined that his third downfall should be accomplished by a Highlander. The latter had several glasses of brandy at the inn near by, and when the landlord demurred at giving more, “You must let me have it,” said the other, “for I am going to see that old Irish devil, Colonel Talbot, who took my land from me, and if he will not give it back I’ll give him the soundest thrashing a man ever got, for I will smash every bone in his body.” He was given the desired extra glass, and somewhat exhilarated reached the historic pane, through which justice, land, curses and kindness were dispensed according to the humour of the hour. An Englishman is always supposed to be in his best mood after dinner; with the Colonel time after that function was sacred, and all business had to be transacted before it. Up came the truculent Highlander this day, and out came the usual “Well, and what do you want?” The grievance was explained; he wanted his land back again. The refusal was prompt, and as prompt the blow that was aimed in return. That ended the affair for the day; but on the next, as the Colonel walked down his avenue, he saw the Highlander waiting for him. Shaking his fist at him, he cried, “Clear yourself off, you——Heeland rascal—did you not yesterday threaten to break every bone in my skin!” But pupil of the Duke of York, comrade of Arthur Wellesley as he was, the Colonel thought it wise to seek the seclusion of his own room. A week from that time his closest friend smilingly said, “Our friend the Port Talbot Chief has at last met his match in the person of this Scotchman.” The ladies were not counted. Instead of taking himself off as commanded, the Highlander had gone into the kitchen and sat himself down with the Colonel’s men at dinner. He did the same at supper, and following the men to their long bedroom, jumped into bed. The next morning he was the first at breakfast, the same at dinner and supper. This went on for two days. Geoffrey complained, the Highlander was ordered to the window, and the Colonel demanded what he meant by such behaviour. “I mean to live and die with you, you old devil, if you do not give me back my land.” He was in return commanded to take his land, and commended to a climate less arctic than the one of their mutual choice. “Never let me see your face again” was the final adjuration from the window. Two Amazons and a Highlander had conquered the Lion of Port Talbot.
It is certain that one of the Deborahs of ’37 was Anna Jameson the Ennuyée, for if her husband was not quite like the cypher Lapidoth her memory somewhat overshadows his. If we accept her opinions of Toronto as qualified by the unfortunate circumstances and mishaps attending her arrival, we still have no wish to alter her descriptions and impressions elsewhere in Canada. She was one of the many distinguished visitors to Port Talbot, and she has left us her view of its master and by inference his view of her. But those who knew him better contend that he did not like or admire her. In the first place she committed the unpardonable sin of borrowing money, which was not replaced. During her visit he was not too polite to her, and he did not hesitate to express his opinion after she had gone.
Of course, a dozen love stories clung round the Colonel’s early days; there were speculations as to what could have induced such a self-burial, but they were all of the hearsay order. One was that he was jilted at the altar, set sail, and we know the rest. Another, that in the sylvan court of George III. the young princesses, aides, equerries and courtiers made hay together, and, in spite of the Royal Marriage Act, also fell in love. One of the princesses—the name does not transpire—it was said cared for the dapper little lieutenant. Among the never-ending romances, heartbreaks and silent partings which haunt the walls of royal palaces and the pathways of royal parks, may be the love story which resulted in the determination—“Here, General Simcoe, will I rest and will soon make the forest tremble under the wings of the flock which I shall invite by my warblings around me.”
However, “I never saw but one woman I ever really cared anything about,” was his own admission, “and she wouldn’t have me; and, to use an old joke, those who would have me, the devil wouldn’t have them.” The one lady was no princess, but owned to the name of Johnstone. Whatever his ideal had been, Mrs. Jameson, wandering about the country without a maid and in a lumber-waggon, as he called it, was not to his taste. She on her part was very proud of her contrivances, and unstrapped her mattress to show him how comfortable she could be at all times when beds were not forthcoming; but he gruffly turned his back and muttered something he would not say aloud.
Mrs. Jameson’s observations on Canadian society, as it was then, are by no means bad, and it is easy to believe them; but when she allows such distaste or her own painful position to overshadow her cheerfulness and express nothing but regret at seeing Niagara—she would have preferred it a Yarrow unvisited—she need not be taken altogether at her own valuation as a prophetess. We can sympathise with her “By the end of the year I hope, by God’s mercy, to be in England,” but no further. But, generally speaking, she must have been a fascinating woman; plain at first sight, her mind, manners and accomplishments obliterated the impression, and the charm was heightened by beautiful hands, a sweet voice, and fair hair of a reddish tinge. The voice she used with great effect in singing, but the hair she allowed to be seen in curl papers when she received her callers in the new Canadian London in the year ’37, when en route from the Colonel’s to the omega of her “wild journey,” Mackinaw.
Perhaps at no one spot in Canada could there be found a larger gathering of Deborahs, than at what was called the Talbot anniversary, a yearly fête instituted by John Rolph in honour of the day when his friend, the Honourable Thomas Talbot, landed his canoe for good at the scene of his future life. On each 21st May the backwoodsman left his toil, the spinning wheels were silent, and arm-in-arm the settlers, men and wives, came in to enjoy themselves and see the faces which, as a rule, they had no other chance to see. The first fête was held at Yarmouth Heights, in the grounds and under the superintendence of Captain Rappelje. The tables were laid in a bower of cedar and other sweet woods, and the hepatica, anemone and violet were the decorations. The two hundred people who sat down to dinner had come long distances, some from Long Point and London. The board groaned under venison, wild turkey and many toothsome edibles, and when these were disposed of “The King,” “The day and all who honour it,” called forth shouts from lungs strong as the arms that raised the glasses high. Then the storm subsided, and the Colonel, still fair but “short, stout, and showing his hardships and years, rose and made a speech, short, neat and explicit, ending with ‘And may God bless you all.’” The upper story of the Rappelje house was in one large room, and here the ball was held when the pleasures of the dinner were concluded. Above the musicians’ seat was a large transparency, “Talbot Anniversary,” a tree with an axe laid at the root as an emblem. The “squirrel” was the Colonel’s favourite figure in the dance, and this night he “led off” Macdonell’s Reel with the mother of the fair-haired miss who had spoken up so boldly as to his woman-hating. He certainly now made good his rejoinder that he liked a pretty girl as well as anybody, for in the succeeding dances he managed to secure, not only the prettiest girls there, but the prettiest in the settlement. The room was of course lighted with tallow candles, but it needed no modern power of electricity to show the delight of the assembled youth in their version of the Spanish fandango.
In 1830 the anniversary was held in the St. Thomas Hotel, when “the prettiest girl in the district” led off with the Colonel. She was dressed “in a sky-blue poplin stripe”—a blue satin and a white stripe alternating—“embossed, trimmed with white satin and white blonde,” white flowers and white gloves; her shoes she made herself, getting Hyndman, the bootmaker, to add fine dancing soles to them. Any one to whom the Colonel paid his rare attentions at once became an object of interest and perhaps envy. His complexion won for him several inelegant comparisons, and the pretty girl was twitted about “that old turkey-cock,” and “folks said she would not leave till his health was drunk for the last time.” In the succeeding years, as ’37 troubles loomed and burned and settled into quiet again, the character of this entertainment changed. The regiment stationed in London and St. Thomas contributed to the gathering, and the red-coats only too successfully did by the home-spun as they had done previously by the “black-coated laity.” They even supplanted the original toast with “Here’s to red wine, red coats, red face and right royal memories.” The red face of the Colonel was the only relic of former times left. The peasant and lord of the manor element in the feast changed; the very celebration of it was removed from St. Thomas to London, where it soon died a natural death, the old zest gone, the raison d’être of its being destroyed.
For warlike times, these western Deborahs had an easy billet. Farther east and on the Niagara frontier the women knew more of what war really meant. There were short periods of anxiety, as in Galt, when the order came to muster, and great was the consternation among the wives. They met in congregation, all crying over the husbands they might see no more. But the husbands were returned to them that same night, whole and sound, and the rejoicing was proportionate. One company told off to make arrests at different points came across an Atalanta, who this time used her powers to save a husband. In the house of one of the suspects an assemblage was found talking over rebellion matters with great zest and with no marked admiration of the loyalist side of it. A private was sent to the barn where it was hoped the host might be found, and another was directed to hold this said wife while others should go over the fields to arrest her husband, who would be unprepared for them. She dodged the volunteer and took to flight, the man in pursuit, down the path-way, over scrub, through fields, through bush, through briar, over park, over pale—and the advantage lay in the fences. She, with skilful management of dress, vaulted the accustomed “snake” like a bird; he came to grief in a mixture of rail, ditchwater and mud. This gave her such a start that by the time he picked himself up she had reached her goal, and man and wife were so safely hidden that no sign of them could be seen. Of all the party then taken only one suffered. He was sentenced to be hanged, but that sentence was commuted to penal servitude, under which he died.
The isolated farm-houses in the eastern part of Upper Canada and in Lower Canada suffered severely from the wanton attacks of rebels and sympathisers; and as for the terrors, the woes, the tears of the Lower Canadian women and children at the hands of the military, what pen can tell, what tongue describe them. On the island of Tanti a band of Bill Johnston’s marauders attacked the lonely farm occupied by a family named Preston. The mother, of truly heroic mould, regardless of numbers and the sentinels at her doors, contrived to get abroad to alarm her few neighbours. All her worldly goods, money, provisions, arms, were taken, one son died of his wounds, and the husband barely escaped with his life. What could such islanders do? Hickory Island had as its tenant one lone widow.
On a night early in November, ’38, a rising took place in Lower Canada at Beauharnois and La Tortu. La Tortu was a small village near La Prairie; the chief sufferers were two farmers, Vitry and Walker. The outlying situations of the farms gave the marauders ample chance to have their own way, and one “voluntary” contribution to the patriot cause, at Pointe à la Mule, was made at the instance of a party of masked men who emptied the farmer’s savings-box, and comforted him by saying that he had helped on the Cause. Vitry and Walker were murdered. The wife of the latter arrived with her child in Montreal on the following Sunday, the day of the great illumination and the issue of Sir John’s proclamation, in which he announced his intention to destroy every town where rebels were gathered or where they might be taking shelter. The proclamation added that he would deal with cases of conspiracy or rebellion according to martial law, “either by death or otherwise, as to me shall seem right and expedient.” Like the dreaded Duke of Burgundy, the motto “I have undertaken it” might be seen in his eyes. Even the peaceable Lord Durham had just said, deprecating a renewal of the rebellion, that to those who should succeed in producing lamentable results like to the scenes of ’37 would the responsibility belong. The sight of Mrs. Walker, literally covered with her husband’s blood, and her description of what was evidently her heroic resistance, did not tend to allay the excitement.
Montreal had now a strong picket guard surrounding it, two thousand men besides the militia were under arms, and the times, instead of having a depressing effect, tended to exhilaration as well as illumination. Agreeably to orders, the inhabitants placed two lights in every window to assist the troops in case of attack. It is hard to credit that the soldiery then in Canada was close upon the number of the pith of the allied forces at Waterloo.
The rising at Beauharnois has an added interest through the seigneur, Mr. Ellice, Lord Durham’s brother-in-law, who reigned after the manner of Talbot and Dunlop, but not in such dictatorial fashion. He was a man in affluent circumstances, and while in Canada as one of Lord Durham’s suite had begun new roads, built bridges and made other improvements on his estate, using therefor several years’ back rents and the benefits which would be accruing for years to come. With his wife and son he arrived to receive the affectionate homage of his dependants, with whom he imagined an intercourse full of confidence was established. The family had been received with the customary respect, and were naturally surprised when, at dead of night, they recognized in the mob a good many of their tenants. A volley was poured in, the house invaded, one lady wounded, and the rest of the party carried off to be shut up with thirty prisoners from the Henry Brougham. From the tale recently told by an old rebel, himself but half willing, it appears that many of these tenants were brutally coerced into rising by the patriot body. Ellice’s house had been despoiled of fourteen guns and other arms, and eleven barrels of cartridges, but not before one servant at least had made a spirited resistance; he succeeded in tying up some of the rebels, for which he was treated severely later on.
The Brougham had been burnt at the wharf, and the passengers captured; but the despatches, the things on board most coveted, escaped. A lady passenger proved equal to the question as to where they and a large sum in bank bills which the captain had contrived to keep possession of but could not hide, should be concealed. “Honi soit qui mal y pense”—she rolled them into a bundle and converted herself into a Bustle-Queen-at-Arms.
That the whole party was not killed was probably owing to the dispersion of the main body of rebels at Napierville, another point of simultaneous attack. The household of a large landowner named Brown, who in himself and his circumstances was much like Ellice, was treated in the same way. Some of the Ellice servants escaped, fled to Montreal, and there told a tale of how the family was confined in a cellar, with other particulars not calculated to allay popular alarm. Ellice, Brown, and some others were now separated from the rest and taken to Chateauguay, where they were put in a room from which daylight was carefully excluded, but which was afterwards lighted by candles. In it they were well treated by the curé, M. Quintal, and nuns, who sent them such comforts from their larders and cellars as compel disbelief in a double Lent. The prisoners could also send to the village for whatever they wished to buy, but they were not allowed to send any letters unread by the rebels. Presently they were packed into carts to be conveyed to Napierville, no doubt with many memories of Jock Weir to discompose them; but by the time the seigniory of St. George was reached their escort heard that the patriots had not only evacuated Napierville, but in their haste had thrown away their arms and were now pursued by cavalry. The escort fled and the prisoners continued on their way, even advised by passing rebel habitants as to the best means to extricate themselves, and eventually reached Montreal, where their plight created a fresh sensation. But they retained warm memories of the curé’s kindness, and later presented him with a piece of plate with thanks for his hospitality.
Meantime an old Deborah, in the guise of a squaw, who hunted a lost cow in the woods at Caughnawaga, came into the church where the Indians were at their prayers with the alarming news that the woods were full of rebels and that a party was then surrounding the church. The braves turned out, and the chief’s flexible glottis turned from the plaintive melody of Indian hymns to a warwhoop, an example which was promptly followed by the rest. The nearest rebel was seized and disarmed, a panic took the patriot band, sixty-four were made prisoners, and they were taken into Montreal that same Sunday of great excitements. The lack of a cowbell, warwhoops and daring, had paralyzed a fair-sized, fairly armed force. The Indian appears no more, but one hopes he got what all Indians so dearly prize, a medal.
After this, fires were seen to break out almost simultaneously from the houses of the absent rebels, and soon Mr. Ellice’s flourishing little settlement was in ashes. For nights the atmosphere of Chateauguay district was red with reflected light from the “vast sheet of livid flame.” Portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and other republican heroes, were found in Dr. Côte’s house, and it is said they were committed by Sir John’s orders to a specially hot corner, with the customary “so perish all traitors.” The regulars, who had arrived to avenge the Beauharnois and other disturbances, came in the John Bull—an ominous name for the peace of poor Jean. This part of the expedition was under command of Sir James McDonell, a very different person from the next McDonell quoted. But after they had watched the lights on the enemy’s fast-deserted outposts die, they made a grand haul of curious literature, patriot documents describing a plan of Canada’s future government, with the names of ministers and heads of all departments told off—many details interesting to those who, doubtless, under the new régime would decorate gallows and occupy cells.
Colonel Angus McDonell of the Glengarries writes distressedly from Beauharnois: “We proceeded towards Beauharnois by a forced march, burning and laying waste the country as we went along, and it was a most distressing and heart-rending scene to see this fine settlement so completely destroyed, the houses burned and laid in ashes, and I understand the whole country to St. Charles experienced the same fate. The wailing and lamentation of the women and children on beholding their homes in flames and their property destroyed, their husbands, fathers, sons and relations, dragged along prisoners—women perishing in the snow, and children frozen stiff by their side or scattered in black spots upon the snow—half-grown children running frantic in the woods, frightened at the sight of friend or foe—and such of the habitants as did not appear, their houses were consigned to the flames, as they were supposed to be rebels.” One of the last had gone the day before to Montreal on business, and returned to find the above condition of things, his home in ashes, his wife and child missing. Passion and grief overcame fear; in a frenzy he rushed to an officer—“Ah, you burn my house, kill my wife—my dear wife—my little child—me always good subject—no rebel—sacre British—where ma femme—where mon enfant—oh, Jesu Marie—” and dropped senseless. He was sent to Montreal, where in a few days he died in prison, still calling on wife and child. When the former, who had taken refuge with a relative, heard he was a prisoner, she went on foot to Montreal, her child in her arms; she reached the prison the night before his death, but was refused admittance, and a few days’ further agony ended her troubles also.
It is popularly supposed that the humble habitant wife was the one who suffered most; but degree did not save a woman from gross insult and spoliation, nor was the gentlewoman lacking in ingenuity. On the morning of the battle of St. Denis brave Madame Pagé of that place made her husband a novel armour, a cuirass of a quire of paper. It saved his life, for in the mêlée a ball otherwise intended for his destruction got no farther than the fourth fold. Mesdames Dumouchel, Lemaire, Girouard and Masson were not exempt when the loyal, the volunteer and the regular arrived at their doors. The regulars forbade the habitants to succour any in distress, and when these women were left almost nude outside their desolated homes they showed wonderful nerve in surviving the vengeance of ce vieux brûlot and his followers. But Mdlles. Lemaire and Masson could not sustain the shock to mind and body, and one young two-days’ mother died from fright. Madame Mongrain barely escaped with life and children, and her handsome home was quickly a wreck under the hands of “ces sauvages,” who gambolled and skipped in the light of its blaze, to the playing of their own trumpets and uttering “les cries feroces.” Madame Masson, when adjuring her son, Dr. Hyacinth Masson, on the eve of his exile to Bermuda, to be brave in the future as in the past, delivered herself of Spartan sentiments worthy of any historic setting, concluding her address, “Sois courageux jusqu’ à la fin. Je suis fière de toi. Je me consolerai dans ton absence en pensant que Dieu m’ a donné des enfants aussi bon patriotes et dignes de moi.” No wonder men were staunch when their mothers exerted an influence which after the lapse of sixty odd years draws forth from a former Son of Liberty-Chasseur: “I was vigorous and strong in those days, and from my mother inherited an ardent love for the country in which I was born. Her letters so magnetized me with patriotism that I could willingly lay down my life for the cause.”
Sir John was no novice in dealing with the French after his governorship in the island of Guernsey. He made us a link between old and new by bestowing the name of Sarnia on the St. Clair border, a name written of as the old classical one of that moiety of England’s sole relic of the Dukedom of Normandy. There the language of debate and of the Legislature was French, and the patois of the islander as perverted a language as the Canadian’s.
At the present day there are probably not many Glengarries left to tell the tale of their share in that terrible week. One, an Englishman moreover, who became a Highlander through stress of circumstances, remembers very distinctly the work which he confesses he did faithfully but with many heartbreaks for the women and children. It is unnecessary to say that he is devoted still to the memory of Sir John Colborne. “We were at the Prescott windmill, but had only been at work there one day and one night when we were ordered to Beauharnois, five hundred of us. Sir John was there before us. There was a mistake in the time of the arrival of the troops he expected—trouble about a boat and difficulties with the current. We walked all the way to Beauharnois, and hadn’t bite or sup except half a snack at Cornwall, and the men were all worn out with excitement and work at Prescott. Sir John, on a little black pony, met us just by a small bay at the Cedar Rapids. ‘Now, boys,’ says he, ‘I’ll ride my pony on before you—where I go you can. Come on!’ So we broke step and spread, for fear of the ice breaking, and followed him in safety. When he saw us five hundred, and thinking of his disappointment about the regulars, he says, ‘We can face ‘em with that.’ Some of those nearest him objected that the Glengarries had no band, and a band would be indispensable in a fight. So a big strapping Highlander steps up and says, ‘We’ll make a band of our own.’ ‘Never mind a band,’ says Sir John. ‘But I’m a piper, and there are a lot more of us, and we can be a band,’ says the man. ‘All right,’ says Sir John, ‘but anyway those Glengarries would face anything.’ Then they got their pipes together and made their band, and the big fellow says, ‘What’ll we play, Governor?’ and Sir John says, ‘Play what you like, play what you like.’ So they did play,—‘The Campbells are comin’, ha—hah—ha—hah, and of course the Frenchmen couldn’t stand that. Losh, how the people did run!”
This informant’s tale was something after the fashion of that told of the piper who fell out of the retreating ranks at Corunna—where Major Colborne’s advancement had been included in Sir John Moore’s dying wishes—and sat on a log to rest. A bear came on the scene just as the Highlander was eating the remainder of his rations. He recognized the bear from its picture, and on the policy of conciliation so soon to become national propitiated him with bite about. The bread disappeared all too soon, and the Highlander cautiously reached for his pipes. At the first squeal the bear was astonished, at the full blast he fled. “Oh, ho,” said the piper, “if she’d known you liked music so well she would haf played pefore dinner.”
On the present occasion it was the ordinary Highland music before dinner, for the Glengarries were empty.
“Sir John now told us to lose no time in attending to fourteen small cannon that were looking down at us from the top of the incline where the priest’s house stood. Losh! if they’d fired their one wooden cannon it would have smothered the half of us. Yes, a wooden cannon it was, hooped in iron, and if you’d seen the stuff we took out of it afterwards at Montreal—for Sir John was bound to keep it and send it to England—horse-shoes, smoothing irons, nails, balls, and every kind of rubbish. It was a twelve-pounder, easily handled, and some of the men drew it to Montreal. Then we were told to feed ourselves. And we did. We stole right and left, and there wasn’t a chicken left alive; it was a turkey here and a duck there; hens, anything we could catch; fence-rails were piled and a camp-fire made. We covered the geese and fowls with clay, thrust them into the fire, and when the clay cracked they were ready, for feathers and skin came off with it. Some would snatch a wing, others a leg; and man, there was some could stand a whole bird, inside and out. But hungry as I was, I couldn’t stomach it. Three others and I went to a little store near by, where we got some brown bread and some cheese on the counter; we found a cupboard in the cellar, and in it a nice ham, a box of bottled ale turned up, and we took a bottle apiece. Then we went and sat behind the house, and had a good English supper of it; and it had to last us till we got to Montreal.
“‘Now, then,’ said Sir John, when we were all through, ‘set fire and burn it.’ And we did. He was still thirsting to revenge Jock Weir. It was Jock Weir here and Jock Weir there, but he told us to spare the priest’s house—which we did. We were young, and it was a kind of a frolic to us; but oh, those women and children! I wake in the night and think I hear them yet. Losh! I’ll never forget it—a woman with a child under each arm, others tugging at her skirts. But we did them no harm; we only burnt everything up. The Colonel told them they needn’t be afraid; but what was the good of stopping when their homes were to be burnt! They went off to the woods, and, man! it was terrible—terrible. We got to Beauharnois at two in the morning, and we had it afire by six; left at eight, and were in Montreal by noon. Here we had our barracks in the emigrant sheds. Sir John took a great notion to us. ‘I’ll drill you, you Glengarry men!’ And he did. We were devoted to him, and obeyed almost before he spoke—when there was anything to do. So he drilled us that day for about two hours on the ice, and you should have seen some of those poor kiltie regulars! You know, Sir John was a good man, but he was a rough ’un, and he wanted everything just as he said. But losh, man, it was a shame to drill them for two hours on the ice. The poor rogues threatened they would go home—the 93rd they were, afterwards in Toronto. They wore kilts, but we had trousers, blue with red stripe; we did have red coats, too, but it’s all true about the way we came home on horseback, and with plug hats, too, and in fact with anything we could lay our hands on. There was a great deal of talk about it, I believe; but Sir John made us return the things afterwards. One big fellow, at Beauharnois, saw a beautiful sofa going into the fire, so he seized it and said he would have it. He heaved it out, but losh, man, when the orders came to march on to Montreal he didn’t know what to do with it, and had to chuck it into the river. We were two weeks in Montreal, and we stood guard at the executions. It was a dreadful sight to see men hung up in a row, all dropped at once. Yes, there was a ‘movable gallows,’ and a very tidy thing it was. It was put up in an hour, and when the execution was over, the Colonel said, ‘Go drill those men;’ when we came back, in an hour, there was no sign of it left. An attempt at rescue was feared, and they said Papineau himself was there to see—a tall, middling stout man, a regular Frenchman, and they said it was Papineau. We were well treated, fed whenever there was anything to eat, and properly paid at the end. So Sir John came to the barracks one morning, and says he, ‘You Glengarries can go now, for all the good you are!’ And that was just what we wanted.”
“The ghost of a goose is a curious sight,
A strange enough phantom at best,”
but when it is that of a military goose, and history records not whether goose or gander, biography becomes delicate writing. In ’37, not only were men warlike and women sympathetic, but the very geese flew to arms. “Confoun’ a’ questions o’ dates,” says the Noctes; confoun’ a’ questions o’ sex—the goose of the Coldstream Guards must not be forgotten; the black-coated laity thought they possessed many such. This lineal descendant of the fabulous Roman bird was born and brought up in the citadel at Quebec, which may be the reason that it despised the estate of oie des moissons and aspired to that of anser ruficollis upon a battlefield. One day, in its morning walk on that historic ground, it left the flock forever, stepped up to the sentry, paced back and forth with him on his beat, gravely ducking at every arch, and when rain came on and he turned into the sentry-box goosie got in too, poked out her head, and kept at attention until the corporal came with the relief. The ensuing ceremony met with her approbation, as did the new guard; she gave one last look at the retreating figure, and began her walk up and down with the new. Thereafter, the sentry order always finished, “In case of fire alarm the guard, and take care of the goose.”
’Twould offend against taste in ordinary cases “To tell how poor goosie was put out of pain
(And the plucking and basting we need not explain);”
and how this innovation on Follow-the-Drum in after years made the voyage home with her regiment and continued her duties in Portman Street barracks, till a military funeral finished her course, belongs to the history of Her Majesty’s forces. That she was a goose is proved by record of her characteristics; anser canadensis is a clamorous bird, and armed humans underneath his flight are made aware of his presence by his noisy gabble—if silent he would never be discovered. It is said the prudent fair ones of the flock keep a chucky-stone in the mouth during travel, in order to guard against temptation. Therefore, as the Great Grey Goose of the West was a gander and gabbler, the silent sentry, the goose militant of the Coldstream Guards, must have been a goose, and is a Deborah.
When we come to the details of Mackenzie’s life, his attitude towards wife and bairns and mother and theirs towards him would disarm even his political critic. There is the meeting of the two old schoolmates, Isabel Baxter and Mackenzie, without recognition, the brief courtship, and a life of mutual devotion. There is baby Joseph Hume, whose early death saddened the father’s life; and there is the pathetic entry in his diary, after his rebellion had entailed banishment: “My daughter Janet’s birthday, aged thirteen. When I came home in the evening we had no bread; took a cup of tea without it, and Helen, to comfort me, said it was no better on the evening of my own birthday.”
They drank the cup of poverty together, father, mother, grandmother and children. For twenty-four hours at a stretch there was no food, fire or light; and after such a fast the father would go forth shivering to collect a small due or meet a friend willing to share a sixpence. The younger children never ceased to cry for food; the others suffered in silence. We read of the servant, one of the true-hearted Irish, and she is content to starve with the rest. Despite poverty, the father continued to wear a watch, once the property of his eldest daughter, whom he sincerely mourned for twelve years with an almost superstitious veneration. We find him telling his son to cheer up, not to despond; that there are green spots in the desert of life; that after darkness comes light. And even in this dreadful plight there are moments when the tragic becomes serio-comic. There is a night when the plaintive sounds from the darkness about him urge him to make one more assault upon the cupboard that he knows is empty—no, not quite empty; there is a book, and by the embers of their dying fire he reads the title, “The Dark Ages,” and he and all indulge in a hearty laugh, and then go supperless—nay, breakfastless and dinnerless—to bed.
The family did not follow him into exile immediately, but his devoted wife reached Navy Island a few hours before the dramatic moment when Drew arrived and the Caroline became a torch. Like Deborah, she, too, might have said, “I will surely go with thee, notwithstanding the journey shall not be for thine honour.” The general belief is that, though loyal to him and a staunch Reformer, she by no means sympathised in his ultra opinions and combustive action. She remained for two weeks in that dreadful place, made flannel cartridge-bags, slept in a rough log shanty on a shelf covered with straw, where the walls were poor protection from wet and cold and but a thin partition from the unholy clamour of the desperate crowd about her, and tried to inspire her husband and his followers by an example of courage and freedom from fear. Then ill-health obliged her to leave, and when accompanying her to the house of a friend in Buffalo Mackenzie was arrested for breach of the neutrality laws. Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep sea, a dilemma with the orthodox number of horns, lose all strength as similes at this point of the small hero’s career.
The devotion of Mackenzie’s mother, like that of most mothers, begins at the date of his birth. She was her husband’s senior by nineteen years and old for a first experience of motherhood. The husband’s death followed soon after, and then came the vows which her Church prescribed for the orphaned infant’s baptism, a struggle with misfortune, and a determination to keep a roof over their two heads. Strange to say, both grandparents were Mackenzies,—one Black Colin, or Colin Dhu—and both Loyalists who fought for the Stuarts.
In 1801 there was a grievous famine, and one of the earliest memories of “the bright boy with yellow hair—wearing a blue short coat with yellow buttons,” is that of his mother taking the chief treasure of her kist, a plaid of her own clan tartan and spun with her own hands when a girl, to sell for bread. As he lay in his bed and watched her take it out—not with tears we may be sure, Mrs. Mackenzie was no crying woman—did this earnest of future days of want and care shadow the equally heroic spirit of the child. The priest-grey coat of his father had to follow. “Well may I love the poor, greatly may I esteem the humble and the lowly, for poverty and adversity were my nurses, and in my youth were want and misery my familiar friends,” he wrote later. Divine worship was held in that family of two, and it was a daily prayer that the rightful monarch might be set upon the throne, with the saving clause—prophetic glimpses of a Family Compact—that he might have able and wise counsellers, added.
Flesh and blood had revolted at the long tasks of memorizing Scripture, Westminster Catechism, Psalms and “Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted,” set him by his parent. The leader of men was first a leader of boys, and the rebel of after years began that career by rebelling against his mother at the ripe age of ten years, leaving home and setting up on his own account in the Grampians as a hermit. An old castle perched somewhere near where the clouds seemed to touch the crags was to have been the hermitage, but a most carnal need of bread and butter and a fear of fairies induced a return. Though longing to be a hermit, young Willie had no taste for the study of polemics; but he would read till midnight, and his mother feared that “the laddie would read himself out o’ his judgment.” The first school to which he went was held in an old Roman Catholic chapel, where the former Holy Water basin was made the seat of punishment. This very small boy was early a good arithmetician and made satisfactory general progress, but he managed to find time to decorate the backs of his fellows with caricatures in chalk, and to pin papers to their coat-tails. One day he went into that sanctum, the master’s closet, put on the fool’s cap, tied himself up with the taws, and with the birch for sceptre took his seat in the holy cup. There was the usual denouement of discovery, a master boiling with rage, the taws and birch in active use, and a sorrowful small boy.
The mother was extremely small in stature, brunette, and with dark brown hair which, when it turned white, remained as long and abundant as ever; her eyes were sharp and piercing, generally quiet in expression but under excitement flashed ominously. The cheek bones were high, and the small features unmistakably Celtic, the thin-lipped mouth telling of an unconquerable will which she bequeathed to her only child. The face under the broad high forehead was seldom allowed to relax into perfect placidity, the surface always showing more or less of the inward volcano; any repose there was due to religious feeling. In the son we have but a replica of the mother. She spoke Gaelic, but seldom used it; she did not reckon fairies among abolished myths, and she believed firmly in the Mackenzie death-warning which was always given by an invisible messenger. The strongest affection existed between mother and son, who lived together for the last seventeen years of the former’s life.
It was but little to the credit of one of his powerful enemies that, in an effort to equal the Advocate, jeering remarks upon Mackenzie’s aged mother were made in the public press. But so it was; and he was advised to mend his ways as an editor, if he expected to continue to support his mother and family. The inference, as his biographer gives it, is that it was not praiseworthy to support an aged mother. It drew from the son the boast that if he could keep his old mother, his wife and his family, and avoid debt, he cared not for wealth.
Speaking in his paper of the spirit of the “faction” towards the press, Mackenzie indulged in a prophecy of an event at which the same aged mother was a pained witness. In connection with the trials of a Canadian editor of a different political stripe, he says: “By the implied consent of King, Lords and Commons, he is doomed to speedy shipwreck, unless a merciful Providence should open his eyes in time, and his good genius prompt him to hurl press and types to the bottom of Lake Ontario.” Mackenzie lived quite close to the lake, and his evil wishers must have taken the hint. Every one knows the story of how noblesse oblige was construed into the necessity for an invasion of the printing office, at an hour when no man would be there; how the raiders, in age from thirty-four years downwards, were the flower of that “Canadian nobility” against which the editor never wearied hurling his radical sayings; and how Mrs. Mackenzie, then in her seventy-eighth year, stood trembling in a corner of the office—for the building was home as well—while she witnessed, with fear and indignation, the destruction of her son’s property and the means of her own livelihood. As if the tale could be improved upon, some romancers, telling of the rise of Canada from barbarism to civilization, have adorned it with gross maltreatment of the aged lady by these gentlemen who, with her only to stay them, were naturally sans peur. They should also be without this one reproach, for they were too intent upon pi-ing type and throwing the contents of the office into the bay to trouble about her.
Someone says that a good and true woman is like a Cremona violin; age but increases the worth and sweetens the tone. In the words of Disraeli, this woman’s love had illumined the dark woof of poverty; fate had it in store that that love should “lighten the fetters of the slave” before she died.
The way in which Canadian rebels were treated in prison is to the reader of their experiences a continual reproach to the powers which made them thus suffer. But the American Bastille, according to the records left by Mackenzie, out-did the Canadian. A steep staircase, a ladder and a trap-door fastened by bar and lock, led to a room wherein were the dangling rope and hideous apparatus of death ready waiting for the next unfortunate; beyond the room was Mackenzie’s cell. It was only through this passage-way that mother, children, wife or friends could reach him, where they had to run the gauntlet of coarse jests from brutalized men and the worse than brutal remarks of such women as were prisoners there. The gaoler in this place deserved to be immortalized by Dickens. Of low stature, with an exaggerated hook nose, fleshless and fallen-in cheeks on which nature had begrudged a sufficient skin covering; round, sunken, peering eyes, feline from long watching; nails filthy, like claws forever in the dirt—such was the gaoler. “You felt in regarding him that if cast into the sea he would have more power to pollute it than it would have to purify him.” A fee of thirty-six dollars for three months procured from him the occasional admittance of friends, although the iron doors were freely opened to those who wished to see a real live Canadian rebel. Close confinement and miasma broke Mackenzie’s health in a short time; he could no longer eat the food which his children carried him—it was feared he might be poisoned by the gaol fare—his wife was in delicate health, his mother had reached ninety years, and his mind was torn with anxiety over the illness of a beloved daughter. The other prisoners were allowed occasional days of freedom to visit taverns and roam the town, but no such liberty came to him. “My dear little girl grew worse and worse, she was wasted to a skeleton.... I had followed four of her sisters and a brother to the churchyard, but I might not look upon her. One fine day she was carried ... to the prison, and her mother and I watched her for forty-eight hours, but the gaoler vexed us so that she had to be taken home again, where she was soon in the utmost danger, and when her poor little sister comes to tell me how she is at dusk ... the gaoler will tell her to wait in the public place in the gaol, perhaps for an hour or more, till supper comes, as he can’t be put to the trouble of opening my cage twice.”
Then the poor old mother sickens, and he knows her time has come. He makes every effort to be allowed to see her, and when he has given up hope writes her a truly beautiful letter of farewell. In it he thanks her for all she had done for him, all she has been to him, and that if the wealth of the world were his he would give it to be at her side. “But wealth I have none, and of justice there is but little here.” He tells her of his hopes to put, with his coming liberty, the rest in comfort, but “sorrow fills my heart when I am told that you will not have your aged eyes comforted by the sight.” The majesty of the law, for offence against which he was suffering, was invoked to get him freedom for the desired interview. Under the shadow of a writ of Habeas Corpus ad respondendum, a court at which he was required to appear as a witness was held in his house, and accompanied by his gaoler he was allowed to attend. The magistrate was late in arriving, conveniently cold when he did come, and protracted his sitting so that the desired interview between the dying mother and distressed son might have no interruption, while the sheriff and gaoler waited in the room adjoining the bedroom. The mother summoned all her fortitude, pronounced her last farewell, bade him trust in God and fear not. She never spoke afterwards, and from the windows of the gaol the political prisoner, in an agony which any can understand, with which all can sympathize, saw her funeral pass.
Mackenzie’s consideration towards women did not extend beyond the members of his own family. But an alert providence arranged that he should usually be well met. Some hours after Anderson had been shot, a rebel named Pool called at the house of Mr. James Scott Howard, in Yonge Street, to inquire the whereabouts of the body. Immediately after he left, the first detachment of the rebel army, about fifteen or twenty men, drew up on the lawn in front of the house, wheeled at the word of command, and went away in search of the dead man. The next to be seen were three or four Loyalists hurrying down the road, who said there were five hundred rebels behind them, and as the morning wore on more men were seen and the sound of firing was heard. At eleven o’clock, or thereabouts, another detachment of rebels appeared, headed by the afterwards well-known figure stuffed out with extra coats to be bullet-proof, on a small white horse. To enable the pony to enter the lawn the men wrenched off fence-boards, after which the stuffed man, Mackenzie, entered the house without knocking, took possession of the sitting-room, and ordered dinner for fifty. Mrs. Howard said she could not comply with such an order. Mackenzie took advantage of Mr. Howard’s absence in town to indulge in much abuse of the latter, saying it was high time someone else held the postmastership. Mrs. Howard at length referred him to the servant in the kitchen, and Mackenzie went to see about dinner himself. He and his men appropriated a sheep in process of cooking in a large sugar-kettle, a barrel of beef and a baking of bread. The tool house was made free use of to sharpen their weapons, which consisted of chisels and gouges on pole-ends, hatchets, knives and guns of all descriptions. At two o’clock the rebels took a disorderly departure, leaving a young West Highlander on guard. Mrs. Howard said she was sorry to see so fine a Scotchman turn against his Queen, to which the reply was, “Country first, Queen next.” The fifty rebels had evidently left on account of the flag of truce proceedings, and at half-past three they all returned, headed by Mackenzie. He demanded of Mrs. Howard “where the dinner was,” and her coolness of demeanour and temper exasperated him. He pulled her from her chair to the window, shook his whip over her, and told her to be thankful her house was not in the state in which she saw Dr. Horne’s. Lount privately told Mrs. Howard not to mind Mackenzie, as he was quite beside himself. After they had eaten the much-ordered dinner, the men had some barrels of whiskey on the lawn and their behaviour during the night naturally alarmed the family. The one man-servant had made his escape, saying he feared being taken prisoner by the rebels. The party remained there until Wednesday; the true defence of the place lay in Mrs. Howard’s intrepidity. Her troubles did not end with the departure of the rabble, for her husband, a true Loyalist of the best type, suffered much at the hands of either party. Such grinding between the upper and the nether millstone as he thereafter experienced is a matter of history.
Nathaniel Pearson, a Quaker, one of the most refined and gentle of the gentlest sect, an intelligent farmer and keenly interested in politics, lived in the Aurora district. Some of his Quaker principles were sacrificed to those of Reform, and he rode off to join the insurgents on their way south. He missed them, and to his Quaker mind there was but one honourable thing to do, and that was to give himself up to the Government. During his absence his wife, possessed of as many gifts and attractions as her husband, had to go to Aurora on business, with the result that she was marched to the guard-house between two Loyalist soldiers. She appealed for help to a man who was their neighbour, and who often had been kept in the necessities of life by the Quaker family; but he turned a deaf ear, even when she pleaded on the score of her young baby at home. Her case reached the ears of a man named King, from Orillia, who at once interested himself in her behalf. “Do you tell me you have a young baby at home needing you? Gad, if they had taken my wife that way, they wouldn’t know that the devil had ever been born before!” His interest resulted in her release, and on reaching home she found that Quaker principles were to be forfeited once more. The Loyalists were about, searching for food and arms, and the faithful maid, Betty, determined they should have neither at her employers’ expense. The one gun in the house was hidden in a brush-heap behind the barn, and Betty had barely straightened her back after doing so when she saw a Loyalist on the fence, watching her. A party entered the house, demanding food, and were on their way to the cellar, where a large stock of freshly-cooked provisions was stored, when the faithful Betty once more forswore her sect, declared the cellar empty, and saved her master’s property.
When Captain P. De Grasse left his home on that ever eventful night in December to join the Loyalists in the city he was accompanied by his two daughters, Charlotte and Cornelia, who wished to see him to the borders of the town, so that they could report his safety to their mother. The way lay through uncleared bush, and the time was late at night. They fell in with Matthews and his party, who were on their way to destroy the Don bridge, when Charlotte with great presence of mind suddenly wheeled to the left, made her pony stamp noisily through the mud, and thereby averted Matthew’s notice from her father and her sister. They all succeeded in reaching the city about one o’clock, an exciting ride for two girls under fifteen years of age. In spite of the commotion and signs of fear all about, the girls determined to go back to their mother. The first half of the return journey was in bright moon-light, but the second half contained all the terrors of darkness in a section infested by rebels. They reached their mother at four in the morning, and that same day returned to town with information of the proceedings of the rebels at the Don. Again, on the Wednesday, they crossed the bush to seek their father at the turnpike on Yonge Street; he was not there, and when Cornelia saw the general terror, consequent upon the report that the rebels were five thousand strong at Montgomery’s Tavern, she resolved to proceed there alone and find out the truth. As she passed the rebel lines all seemed amazed to see a little girl on a fiery pony come fearlessly among them, and she could hear them inquire of one another who she was. She reached the wheelwright’s by Montgomery’s without molestation, inquired in a casual manner as to the price of a sled of particular dimensions, promised to give him an answer the next day, turned her horse’s head towards town, when suddenly several men seized the bridle and said, “You are our prisoner.” They kept her nearly an hour while they waited for Mackenzie, who when he did come, amidst general huzzaing, announced “Glorious news! We have taken the Western Mail!” In the booty he had the historical feminine impedimenta which afterwards disguised him for escape, so capturing little girls was quite in the order of things. While the rebels congratulated him and crowded round the coachman and passengers, the doughty Cornelia saw her opportunity, whipped up her pony and made her escape, although fired at several times. After ridding herself of this party she was fired at from Watson’s and summoned to surrender. This but strengthened her nerve, and in time she reached the city, to give a true account of the robbery of the mail and the number and arms of the rebels.
Meantime the Loyalists were making use of Charlotte as a despatch bearer on the Kingston Road. She returned with the answer and then set out for her home. Near a corner of the bush she was fired at by a large party of rebels; both she and her pony were wounded, and the frightened beast jumped the fence; one of the rebels, not to be outwitted, ran across the angle of the bush, got in front of her and fired in her face.
The next day Cornelia, once more bent on seeing her father, reached the city in time to follow the troops up Yonge Street on their way to Gallows Hill. This daughter of the regiment was urged by the Chief-Justice to collect for him all the particulars of the engagement, which, cool and undaunted—oblivious of thundering of cannon—she undertook to do, and did.
Her adventures were not yet over, for on her way home she discovered that Matthews had by this time set the Don bridge on fire, and she at once returned to the city to give the alarm. While she was thus occupied another heroine, sometime cook to Sir Francis Bond Head, was engaged in putting the fire out, a work which she did not accomplish before receiving a bullet in her knee. As by this time the bridge was useless, Cornelia left her pony in town and set out on foot on her homeward way at eleven o’clock at night through a district filled with dispersed rebels. The story does not relate the final reunion of this mutually devoted family, but it is to be presumed Charlotte went on calmly cutting bread and butter and Cornelia continued worthy of the great name she bore.
One Deborah, who did not pose as such, tells a modest story of what she saw and omits much of what she did. “I remember that Monday before Montgomery’s. I had been in town for some days, and on that Monday there was great excitement—no one knew exactly what about. At first I thought I would go to the Mackenzies’ for safety, even if it was a long time since I had been there; but when I got half-way to the house it struck me that as my father and brothers had turned against him, since he had come back from England and was all for bloodshed, I had better leave the Mackenzies alone. So I went to a friend farther east, and found her half crazy with fright, swinging her baby above her head, and saying we would take a boat and row over to the island, as the rebels wouldn’t touch us there. But I thought if there was going to be trouble I had better be with my own people; so I started to walk up Yonge Street towards home. I met no one, but every now and then a horseman would rush past, or two or three armed men would be seen together, and by and by I saw a few farmers going in to offer their services to the Government. At Bloor Street I was tired and went into the Red Lion parlour to rest; everything was in great confusion, but nobody spoke to me. In a little while I went on; and at the toll-gate above the Davenport Road I saw the rebels coming over Blueberry Hill opposite. The toll-keeper swung the gates to and ran off to the woods, and I turned up Davenport Road a little way and watched the rebels; they were my friends and neighbours, and it was dreadful to see them. It is said that when they reached the house that Mackenzie set fire to it was deserted, but I know that it looked very ordinary when I passed it, smoke coming out of the chimney, no sign of disturbance. I was frightened and went on, but I heard that when Mackenzie set to work to build a fire in the cupboard of that house some of his supporters were angry, and said they did not come out to burn houses but to fight for their rights, and one, when he saw he was not listened to, threw down his gun and took himself and his sons off to the States.
“When I got home I found father had gone to offer himself to the Government, and everyone was busy preparing food and baking bread. We had once been supporters of Mackenzie, and everybody knew we had turned against him after he came back from England. Some people were, therefore, very bitter against us, and we thought it wise to fill the house with food, leave the place open, barn, grain, everything, so that they could get it all easily, and take the chance of the house therefore not being burned down. So we left everything ready for them, and went to stay at a relative’s farther back in the country.
“There are plenty to say that Moodie was not shot at all. Some declared that he was alive when taken to the tavern and that he would not give in, and it ended in his being trampled to death in the tavern.
“Sheriff Jarvis took the news of the rising coolly. When father was going down Yonge Street to offer himself he met the sheriff, who said, ‘Well, John, what’s the news with you to-day?’ And when father said, ‘There’s great news—Toronto will be taken and burnt, if you don’t stop it,’ the sheriff said, ‘You don’t say so!’ and only half believed him.
“For a long time before the rising I did not go very often to the Mackenzies, for they thought I would spy on them, and father thought I had better leave them alone anyway. We had supported Mackenzie strongly, like the rest of the farmers, before he went to England, and my father and his friends took their turn in watching him for fear the Compact people would spirit him away; but that was when he was all for reform and agitating for our rights. Whatever it was happened to him in England turned everything into fighting, and father wasn’t going to fight against his country. That Mackenzie was the craziest man you ever did see. He wore a wig, and when he got excited—he was always excited, for the matter of that—he would throw it on the floor, or throw it at you if he felt extra pleasant. You’ve heard of the time he was brought home with cheering and torches and great doings, and given the gold chain?[6] A fine chain it was, long and thick, and he was very pleased and worked up. He saw me standing by, laughing—for I was excited, too—and he cried at me, ‘Ah, Mary!’ and quick as lightning threw the chain at me and the wig on the floor, and then he flung his arms round his mother’s neck and kissed her.
“Every market day, when business was all done, and before the farmers went home, there would be a crowd round him as he talked from the top of a waggon. He made great speeches, I can tell you. I happened to be there once through a friend of his, who was staying in his house and wanted to hear him, and would not go alone. We turned down by the church, and waited at the market corner below King Street, where Mackenzie was standing in a waggon, talking, and you should have seen how the people listened. Perhaps you know that the Compact had a lot of hangers-on who would do anything they were told for the soup, clothes, and stuff that was given them, and we used to call them ‘soupets,’ like the bits of bread you put in soup to sop it up. As Mackenzie was talking, suddenly the vestry door was thrown open, and out rushed a crowd of soupets, caught hold of the tongue of Mackenzie’s waggon, and ran off with him towards the bay. He just stood there, waiting, I suppose, till the farmers got over their surprise. But the soupets nearly had him ducked in the bay before the farmers came to their senses.”
However, there were some whose principles were not changed by Mackenzie’s bloodthirstiness; we have one (Mrs. Dew, then Miss Betty Duffield) who is still proud to tell the tale of how she pinned on the white badges. “I was staying with the Leonard Watsons, who lived near Montgomery’s tavern, when the troubles came to a head, and with my own hands I tied on the badges of white cotton worn by some of our fighting men. On that Wednesday morning I saw Mackenzie ride from the direction of the tavern just as the sound of music was heard coming from the city. Mackenzie halted near our house and exclaimed, ‘Are these our friends?’ meaning those whom he expected from the other districts; but he was soon convinced that the music belonged to the loyalist militia coming up Yonge Street. I am sorry to say that while Mackenzie never could be accused of cowardice in so far as his tongue was concerned, his fighting qualities were not so assured, for I myself saw him fling off his cloak and gallop away.[7] Mr. Leonard Watson found it necessary to try to make his escape. Mrs. Watson and the daughters went to a neighbour’s, carrying some of their valuables with them, as they were afraid the militia would burn the house down. Peter Watson eventually reached the United States. But I stood by the house, and when the militia came up they riddled it with bullets; they ransacked everything, upset anything they touched, and broke nearly all the furniture. But part of this damage was probably done by ruffians who had taken the opportunity to follow the militia for the sake of plunder. Watson’s horses were appropriated, a tall dark man taking one, and a short red-headed man another. Someone proposed burning the house down, and very likely this would have been done had I not happened to notice an officer riding up. I accosted him, and he turned out to be one of the Governor’s aides. He drew the attention of his superior, who kindly asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted protection to the property. He immediately told me to get him paper, which I did, and handed to him as he sat in his saddle. He wrote, “Do no further injury to this house,” signed his name, and told me to show it to anyone offering further molestation. A few days afterwards I went to Darlington in behalf of the Watson family, carrying money for Peter Watson to enable him to reach the States from there. I had to walk part of the way, and I remember when passing a large block of woods a man came out and timidly inquired if I had seen anyone on the road. He looked the picture of misery and nearly starved. The woods were being scoured on each side of the road by men on horseback, and I suppose that poor fellow was captured.
“While those taken were in prison they amused themselves by carving various articles in wood, and I have yet in my possession a small maple box, beautifully made and finished, presented to me by Leonard Watson. On the cover is my name, some verses are on the sides, and on the bottom ‘April 12th, 1838, alas for Lount and Matthews.’”
“When Sir John’s order came for all the troops to be sent east, Colonel Foster remonstrated; but the troops had to go, and he was left in command of the sentries, sick soldiers, women and children at the Fort. Under these circumstances the militia came to the front, did their best, fired anywhere, and we were more afraid of them than of the enemy. We were retiring for the night when a loud noise attracted my attention, and I looked out of the window to see Colonel FitzGibbon on horseback half-way up our steps.” FitzGibbon omitted no chance to warn and thus save life and property. “He called out, ‘The rebels are upon us, and this is one of the houses marked for burning,’ and clattered off again. My husband and his son were soon on their way to the Fort. Our household was left undisturbed, but I had orders to answer the door myself should the rioters come; the servants were not to show themselves, and as I was young and fearless then I rather enjoyed the prospect of excitement. In fact, I was distinctly disappointed that nobody did come. For the next week my husband took what rest he could get on a gun-carriage at the Fort, and I was never in bed regularly myself during that period. He came to see us once, and I recall my amusement at watching him hungrily devour the leg of a goose, an utterly absurd sight when one remembers the style of man he was, and the many courses of his ordinary dinners. I was thankful we even had that leg to give him, as every bit of meat we could get might be seized for the hungry militia.
“I do not see why unpleasant remarks should have been made on the score of a boat having been provided for the safety of the Governor’s family. Lady Head seems to be mentioned very little in the history of her husband’s administration, no doubt owing to the quietness of the life she led. But she was extremely pleasant, and much liked by those who knew her.
“Mrs. Draper and I and some others declined to go on board the boat in the bay on which a good many families were hurried for safety. Another boat had been provided for some citizens’ families, but in the middle of the night despatches came down from Colonel Foster to be sent by boat to Sir John Colborne, and immediately everything was haste and dismay. The people and their boxes were unceremoniously bundled on the wharf, and all was confusion, while the boat went off on its errand. But those on the Government boat did not omit to make public the unpleasant predicament of their guard on board. The distinguished duty of protecting so many wives and families of officials was given to one gentleman. Some one on board was not too frightened to have spirit left to play a practical joke. The poor man’s clothes were removed after he had gone to bed, and then the alarm was sounded—you may imagine his discomfort of mind and body.”
Articles of apparel were frequently pressed into active and public service then and later, and Mrs. Ogle Gowan, notable as a true Deborah, conspicuously contributed her share in connection with the Rebellion Losses’ Bill; her enthusiasm had not grown cold in years. Lord Elgin, equally misunderstood with Durham and Sydenham, made a futile attempt to land at Brockville; a black flag, bearing the inscription in white letters, “Down with Elgin and his rebel-paying ministry,” was hoisted on the dock, a banner known then and ever since as Mrs. Gowan’s petticoat, but it is likely that it merely earned its name because designed and made by her. The lady was unconsciously making a link in the much-discussed history of the jacques, and illustrated one meaning of her husband’s paper, The Antidote. It is said the paper had as motto, “The Antidote is set afloat to cure poisonous treason.” Ogle R. Gowan, staunch Irish-Orange Tory as he was, was a herald of Responsible Government—and suffered for it—a prophet as to ’37, chief promoter in the first movement which resulted in Canadian volunteers, father and founder of Orangeism here, and although a strong supporter of Colborne was antagonistic to the methods of Francis Bond Head; in his military career he was chiefly conspicuous at Prescott, and carried the buckshot and bayonet record of that engagement to his grave. To such a man Mrs. Gowan, a womanly woman of great culture and heroic spirit, was a true helpmeet.
The heroic spirit was patent in many ways. A colonel prominent in the Canadian service received the following: “Mrs. M. wishes to be remembered to you, and prays that the day may come when your hands will place the British standard on the top of the citadel of Washington, the capital of the democratic mob.”
Early in the century a handsome stranger was an honoured guest at Quebec mess dinners, so fraternally fond of the military and military life that the inference is if fighting were on the cards he too would be ready. But at one of the dinners the gentleman was convicted of being a lady in disguise. The heroines of Upper Canada in ’37 satisfied their warlike propensities by running their tea-chest lead into bullets, making a Canadian question de joupons, or firing a feu de joie at home. When one pretty girl did the last, on the return of father and brothers, Brown Bess unhandsomely kicked her flat and she found herself prone on that Sol Canadien, terre chérie, which she so dearly loved. Mothers in Israel! Could they have foreseen a certain date in ’97, the year next prominent to ’37 in the Canadian horoscope, they and Brown Besses in conjunction might have furnished material for a legend of the female Brutus. For a certain Tory child of those days who has since developed into a renowned statesman has said, “My earliest memory in life is of the women of my family casting bullets in the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837, I am afraid on the wrong side.”
Mixed politics in one family often led to strained relations: “When I went to my brother John’s to ask him to turn out he was not at home, and his wife said she did not intend him to be at home, and that he would not and should not go. I then asked her for his arms, for we were in great need of them, but Mrs. John said she knew nothing about arms. I went into another room for his rifle, which I could not find, but I saw his sword hanging by the head of his bed. I took it down, but as I did so my sister-in-law caught hold of the hilt and jerked it partly away. To save myself from being stabbed I was obliged to pull her close to me, moving towards the door; I wished myself clear of her and the sword, but dared not let go until we got out the door, when I gave her a push and seized the hilt. I walked off with the sword, but instead of following me she ran into the house, calling for the rifle, the children after her. It was a truly ridiculous sight, to see one of Her Britannic Majesty’s officers, armed, running away from his sister-in-law. But run I did, and she told me afterwards that the only reason she did not fire was that I was in motion and she was so greatly excited she was afraid she might not kill me!”
The Canada Museum was a journal much quoted in its day by domestic and American newspapers; its editorials were considered, by editors of both sides of politics, to be temperate, patriotic and logical. Published in Berlin, chiefly in German, partly in English, it naturally was an important influence in Canada West, and its editor, Mr. H. W. Peterson, had an acknowledged and deservedly high standing. He was heartily in love with the Union Jack, as heartily opposed to the Stars and Stripes in Canadian connection, was a Conservative in the true sense of the word, and abominated Toronto rule as utterly as any so-called rebel. But it appears that the guiding hand of this influential paper belonged to a wife and mother, one who had made herself mistress of colonial politics and was eminently qualified to express herself. One to whom Mrs. Peterson was best known says: “She possessed literary abilities of a fine order, with the soundest judgment in every matter. Mr. Peterson, a discreet editor, temperately supported the Government of the day, conceiving that wrongs should be constitutionally redressed by the people through their representatives, without force of arms. Mrs. Peterson concurred in all his views; but while she deprecated bloodshed and the resort to force, she had a woman’s heart added to the courage of her convictions. Her natural benevolence induced her to state, when discussing the question of Mackenzie’s flight and the reward offered for him, that if his journey took him through Waterloo and he called on her for aid and comfort she would undoubtedly give it, and not disclose the fact of his presence until he had had time to move on farther. Woman first, politician afterward, such action would have done no violence to her Conservative principles; but it would have been entirely on her own responsibility, as her husband was a magistrate and could countenance no charity of that kind.”
A much used saying is not necessarily trite. The gentle hand which rocked the cradle could guide the pen when danger threatened the state.
The Canadian Deborah of ’12 or ’37 was not learned in history, nor was she conscious of her part as tenon in that arc de triomphe in the history of nations, that mortised arch of Frank and Saxon whereof the pillars are Hastings and Quebec. She knew but little, perhaps never heard, of those countless hordes who swarmed over Apennines and Pyrenees, nor yet of Clovis, nor of Cedric. She was no seer and could not foretell the many who were destined, after conquest of forest, to crowd the valley of the Peace, make homes on the slopes of our statesman’s “sea of mountains,” and be lost, an equally countless host, who can tell, in the as yet hidden recesses of the untamed remnant of a continent. “Mine all the past, and all the future mine.”
Canadian women, like their famous sisters of Liége, held, and hold, their distaff and their God; but, with few exceptions, unlike the wise ones there, they made no grand bakings of bread in order to be ready for the earliest comer, friend or foe, in the times when shadows spoiled the beauty of the Canadian day. No women of Saragossa they; but each has for record, “She hath done what she could.”