SIR JOHN COLBORNE, GOVERNOR OF CANADA, 1838-1841
And still worse fared the fortunes of war with the patriots north of Montreal. Their defense and defeat were almost pitiable in childish ignorance of what war might mean. Boys' marbles had been gathered together for bullets. Scythes were carried as swords, and old flintlocks that had not seen service for twenty years were taken down from the chimney places. With their bonnets blue hanging down their backs, rusty firearms over their shoulders, and the village fiddler leading the march, one thousand "Sons of Liberty" had paraded the streets of St. Eustache, singing, rollicking, speechifying, unconscious as children playing war that they were dancing to ruin above a volcano. Chenier, the beloved country doctor, is their leader. Girod, the Swiss, has come up to show them how to drill. They take possession of a newly built convent. Then on Sunday, the 3d of December, comes word of the defeat down on the Richelieu. The moderate men plead with Chenier to stop now before it is too late; but Chenier will not listen. He knows the cause is right, and with the credulity or faith of a simple child hopes some mad miracle will win the day. Still he is much moved; tears stream down his face. Then on December 14 the church bells ring a crazy alarm. The troops are coming, two thousand of them from Montreal under Sir John Colborne, the governor. The insurgent army melts like frost before the sun. Less than one hundred men stand by poor Chenier. At eleven-thirty the troops sweep in at both ends of the village at once, Girod, the Swiss commander, suicides in panic flight. Cooped up in the church steeple with the flames mounting closer round them and the troopers whooping jubilantly outside, Chenier and his eighty followers call out: "We are done! We are sold! Let us jump!" Chenier jumps from the steeple, is hit by the flying bullets, and perishes as he falls. His men cower back in the flaming steeple till it falls with a crash into the burning ruins. Amid the ash heap are afterwards found the corpses of seventy-two patriots. The troopers take one hundred prisoners in the region, then set fire to all houses where loyalist flags are not waved from the windows.
Matters have now come to such an outrageous pass that the British government can no longer ignore the fact that the colony has been goaded to desperation by the misgovernment of the ruling clique. Lord Durham is appointed special commissioner with extraordinary powers to proceed to Canada and investigate the whole subject of colonial government. One may guess that the ruling clique were prepared to take possession of the new commissioner and prime him with facts favorable to their side; but Durham was not a man to be monopolized by any faction. When he arrived, in May of 1838, he quickly gave proof that he would follow his own counsels and choose his own councilors. His first official declaration was practically an act of amnesty to the rebels, eight only of the leading prisoners, among them Dr. Nelson, being punished by banishment to Bermuda, the rest being simply expelled from Canada.
This act was tantamount to a declaration that the rebels possessed some rights and had suffered real grievances, and the governing rings in both Toronto and Quebec took furious offense. Complaints against Durham poured into the English colonial office,—complaints, oddly enough, that he had violated the spirit of the English Constitution by sentencing subjects of the Crown without trial. Though every one knew that in Canada's turbulent condition trial by jury was impossible, Durham's political foes in England took up the cry. In addition to political complaints were grudges against Durham for personal slight; and it must be confessed the haughty earl had ridden roughshod over all the petty prejudices and little dignities of the colonial magnates. The upshot was, Durham resigned in high dudgeon and sailed for England in November of 1838.
LORD DURHAM, SPECIAL COMMISSIONER TO CANADA, 1838
On his way home he dictated to his secretary, Charles Buller, the famous report which is to Canada what the Magna Charta is to England or the Declaration of Independence to the United States. Without going into detail, it may be said that it recommended complete self-government for the colonies. As disorders had again broken out in Canada, the English government hastened to embody the main recommendations of Durham's report in the Union Act of 1840, which came into force a year later. By it Upper and Lower Canada were united on a basis of equal representation each, though Quebec's population was six hundred thousand to Ontario's five hundred thousand. The colonies were to have the entire management of their revenues and civil lists. The government was to consist of an Upper Chamber appointed by the Crown for life, a representative assembly, and the governor with a cabinet of advisers responsible to the assembly.
In all, more than seven hundred arrests had been made in Quebec Province. Of these all were released but some one hundred and thirty, and the state trials resulted in sentence of banishment against fifty, death to twelve. In modern days it is almost impossible to realize the degree of fanatical hatred generated by this half century of misgovernment. Declared one of the governing clique's official newspapers in Montreal: "Peace must be maintained, even if we make the country a solitude. French Canadians must be swept from the face of the earth.… The empire must be respected, even at the cost of the entire French Canadian people." With such sentiments openly uttered, one may surely say that the Constitutional Act of 1791 turned back the pendulum of Canada's progress fifty years, and it certainly took fifty more years to eradicate the bitterness generated by the era of misgovernment.
With the Upper and Lower Canadas united in a federation of two provinces, it was a foregone conclusion that all parts of British North America must sooner or later come into the fold. It would be hard to say from whom the idea of confederation of all the provinces first sprang. Purely as a theory the idea may be traced back as early as 1791. The truth is, Destiny, Providence, or whatever we like to call that great stream of concurrent events which carries men and nations out to the ocean highway of a larger life, forced British North America into the Confederation of 1867.