Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 458
Report of the Earl of Durham, (Ed. 1902) .
D. B. Read, Rebellion of 1837, .
14 Geo. III. c. 88, and later 3 Geo. IV. c. 119.
The appropriation of this revenue was surrendered in 1831.
With the advent of Lord Dalhousie as governor-general (1820) the quarrel between the two branches of the legislature and the conflict of races from which it had sprung, reached an acute stage. Dalhousie, one of Wellington’s veterans, was more fitted for the camp than the council chamber, a disciplinarian devoid of diplomacy who naturally upheld the side of the British party and discountenanced the financial claims of the assembly. Meantime the occasion had found the man, and a leader had appeared well-fitted to head the agitation in the province. Louis-Joseph Papineau, born in Montreal in 1789, had been elected to the assembly in 1812 and early distinguished himself by the brilliance of his oratory. In 1815 he was elected speaker of the House, a position which he filled with decorum until the trend of affairs under the Dalhousie administration aroused him to virulent and sustained opposition to the governing class. From now on, petitions and addresses for redress of grievances in Lower Canada poured in upon the imperial government. The French-Canadian press roused the simple farmers of the countryside with the cry of national rights; even a certain minority of the English residents, led by such men as Cuthbert of Berthier and Neilson of Quebec, in close alliance with Papineau, made common cause with the French for a reform of the government of the province. On the other hand, the adherents of the ruling powers openly expressed their desire to rid the country of every vestige of French control. “This province” the Quebec Mercury had said as long ago as 1810, “is far too French for a British colony. After forty-seven years’ possession it is now fitting that the province become truly British.” Such indeed had become the avowed policy of the dominant faction. Papineau, supported alike by the people, the clergy and the majority of the assembly, became emphatically the man of the hour and figured as the open adversary of the governor-general. A petition signed with eighty-seven thousand names was forwarded (1827) to the home government. Dalhousie, departing in 1828 to take command of the forces in India, was succeeded by Sir James Kempt whose efforts at conciliation proved unavailing. In vain the imperial government surrendered its control over the proceeds of its customs duties (1831). The assembly refused to grant a permanent civil list and the leaders of the popular party clamoured for the abolition of the nominated Upper House. Against such a measure of reform, which appeared out of harmony with monarchical institutions, the British ministry resolutely set its face. Stanley, the colonial secretary, hinted that the government might be forced to curtail even the existing privileges of its colonial subjects. Aroused to furious opposition the assembly adopted the famous “Ninety-two resolutions,” indicating a long catalogue of grievances and denouncing the existence of the Upper House (February 21st, 1834). The elections of 1834 were attended with riots and tumultuous gatherings. Revolutionary committees sprang into being. Votes of supplies since 1832 had come to a full stop and the governor, Lord Aylmer, (1831-5), had been driven to pay salaries by loans taken from the war chest. The malcontents of French Canada corresponded busily with the “patriot” party of the Upper Province. The current of the two movements ran side by side with increasing swiftness, approaching rapidly the vortex of insurrection.
See A. D. DeCelles, Papineau, (Makers of Canada Series) 1904. Ch. VI.
DeCelles, op. cit. .
CHAPTER II
THE MODERATE REFORMERS AND THE CANADIAN REBELLION
SUCH WAS THE environment in which Robert Baldwin and his future colleagues in the Reform ministry of Canada, entered upon political life. The Baldwins were sprung from an Irish family resident on a little property called Summer Hill, near Carragoline, in the county of Cork. The father of Robert Baldwin had come out to Canada with his father (himself a Robert Baldwin) in 1798. The family settled on a tract of land on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the present county of Durham, where Robert Baldwin (senior) set himself manfully to work to clear and cultivate a farm to which he gave the name of Annarva. His eldest son, William Warren Baldwin, did not, however, remain upon the homestead. He had already received at the University of Edinburgh a degree in medicine and, anxious to turn his professional training to account, he went to the little village of York. Here he took up his abode with a Mr. Wilcocks of Duke Street, an Irish friend of his family, who had indeed been instrumental in inducing the Baldwins to come to Canada. In a pioneer colony like the Upper Canada of that day, the health of the community is notoriously sound, and Dr. Baldwin soon saw that the profession of medicine at York could offer but a precarious livelihood. He determined, therefore, to supplement it with school-teaching and inserted in the Gazette an announcement of his intention to open a classical school:— “Dr. Baldwin, understanding that some gentlemen of this town have expressed an anxiety for the establishment of a classical school, begs leave to inform them and the public that he intends on Monday, the first of January next , to open a school in which he will instruct twelve boys in writing, reading, classics and arithmetic. The terms are, for each boy, eight guineas per annum, to be paid quarterly or half yearly; one guinea entrance and one cord of wood to be supplied by each of the boys on opening the school.” It is interesting to note that among the earliest of Dr. Baldwin’s pupils was John Robinson, distinguished later as a leading spirit in the Family Compact and chief-justice of the province.
The details which follow are taken from the Memorial of the Baldwin Family, (Archives of Canada, M. 393) and from the Canadian Portrait Gallery, published at Toronto, 1881.
School-teaching with the ambitious Irishman was, however, only a means to an end. The legal profession, then in its infancy in the colony, offered a more lucrative and a more honourable field, and for this in his leisure hours Baldwin hastened to prepare himself. Indeed no very arduous preparation or profound knowledge was needed in those days for admission to the legal fraternity of “Muddy York.” A summary examination, conducted in person by the chief-justice of the province, was all that was required of Baldwin as a candidate for the bar, and on April 6th, 1803, he was admitted as a duly qualified practitioner. His entry upon his new profession was signalized by his marriage in the same year with Miss Phoebe Wilcocks, a daughter of the family friend with whom he had lived. The newly married couple took up their quarters in a new house on the corner of Frederick and Palace Streets, the latter a street running parallel with the shore of the bay and receiving its grandiloquent name from the expectation that it would presently become the site of a gubernatorial “palace.” In this house Robert Baldwin, eldest son of William Warren Baldwin was born on May 12th, 1804.
Palace Street is the present Front Street.
Little need be said of Robert Baldwin’s youth and school days. By no means a precocious child, he was distinguished at school rather for a painstaking diligence than for exceptional natural aptitude. He received his education at the Home District Grammar School, at the head of which was Dr. John Strachan, then rector of York and subsequently distinguished as Bishop of Toronto and champion of the Anglican interest. Baldwin’s conscientious industry presently made him “head boy” of the Grammar School, from whose walls he passed with credit to enter upon the study of the law (1819). After spending some years in his father’s office, he was called to the bar in Trinity Term, 1825, and became a partner in his father’s business under the firm name of “W. W. Baldwin and Son.” The fortunes of the elder Baldwin had in the meantime rapidly improved. Not only had he met with success in his dual profession, but he had the good fortune to fall heir to the property of a Miss Elizabeth Russell, a distant connection of the Baldwins, and sister to a certain Peter Russell, a bygone magnate of the little colony whose extensive estates she had herself inherited and now bequeathed to William Baldwin. Desirous to use his new found wealth for the foundation of a family estate, Dr. Baldwin purchased a considerable tract of land to the north of the little town on the summit of the hill overlooking the present city of Toronto. To this property the name “Spadina” was given, and the wide road opened by Dr. Baldwin southward through a part of the Russell estate was christened Spadina Avenue.
“His purpose was to establish in Canada a family whose head was to be maintained in opulence by the proceeds of an entailed estate. There was to be forever a Baldwin of Spadina.” H. Scadding, Toronto of Old, . The same work contains many interesting details in reference to the Baldwin residences and some account of the “closing exercises” of Dr. Strachan’s school (Aug. 11-12, 1819) at which Robert Baldwin delivered a “prologue.” Op. cit. Index. Art. Baldwin.
Both father and son were keenly interested in the political affairs of the province. The elder Baldwin was a Liberal and prominent among the Reformers who, even before the advent of William Lyon Mackenzie, denounced the oligarchical control of the Family Compact. But he was at the same time profoundly attached to the British connection and averse by temperament to measures of violence. While making common cause with the Mackenzie faction in the furtherance of better government, Dr. Baldwin and his associates were nevertheless separated from the extreme wing of the Reformers by all the difference that lies between the Whig and the Radical. The political aims were limited to converting the constitution of the colony into a real, and not merely a nominal, transcript of the British constitution. To effect this, it seemed only necessary to render the executive officers of the government responsible to the popular House of the legislature in the same way as the British cabinet stands responsible to the House of Commons. This one reform accomplished, the other grievances of the colonists would find a natural and immediate redress. Robert Baldwin sympathized entirely with the political views of his father. Moderate by nature, he had no sympathy with the desire of the Radical section of the party to abolish the legislative council, or to assimilate the institutions of the country to those of the United States. The Alpha and Omega of his programme of political reform lay in the demand for the introduction of responsible government. His opponents, even some of his fellow Reformers, taunted him with being a “man of one idea.” Viewed in the clearer light of retrospect it is no reproach to his political insight that his “one idea” proved to be that which ultimately saved the situation and which has since become the corner stone of the British colonial system.
The year 1829 may be said to mark the commencement of Robert Baldwin’s public life. He had already taken part in election committees and was known as one of the rising young men among the moderate Reformers. He had, moreover, in the election of 1828, unsuccessfully offered himself as a candidate for the county of York. But in 1829 we find him figuring as the draftsman of the petition addressed to George IV in connection with the Willis affair. Willis, an English barrister of some prominence, had been appointed in 1827 to be one of the judges of the court of king’s bench in Upper Canada. While holding that office he had held aloof from the faction of the Family Compact and had thereby incurred the displeasure of the authorities, who had become accustomed to view the judges as among their necessary adherents. A technical pretext being found, Sir Peregrine Maitland dismissed Willis from office. The cause of the latter was at once espoused by the Reform party. A public meeting of protest was called at York under the chairmanship of Dr. Baldwin, and a petition drawn up addressed “to the king’s most excellent Majesty, and to the several other branches of the imperial and provincial legislatures.” The petition is said to have been drafted, at least in part, by Robert Baldwin. The occasion was considered a proper one, not only for protesting against the injustice done to Judge Willis, but for drawing the attention of the Crown to the numerous evils from which the colony was suffering. The list of grievances, arranged under eleven heads, included the already familiar protests against the obstructive action of the legislative council, the precarious tenure of the judicial offices, and the financial extravagance and favouritism of the executive government. Of especial importance is the eighth item of the list, which called attention to “the want of carrying into effect that rational and constitutional control over public functionaries, especially the advisers of your Majesty’s representative, which our fellow-subjects in England enjoy in that happy country.” Following the catalogue of grievances is a list of “humble suggestions” of adequate measures of reform. The essential contrast between the moderate Reformers of Upper Canada on the one hand, and the Radical wing of their party and the Papineau faction of the Lower Province on the other, is seen in the fact that no request is made for an elective legislative council. It is merely asked that only a “small proportion” of the council shall be allowed to hold other offices under the government, and that neither the legislative councillors nor the judges shall be permitted to hold places in the executive council. The sum and substance of the wishes of the petitioners appears in the sixth of their recommendations, in which they pray “that a legislative Act be made in the provincial parliament to facilitate the mode in which the present constitutional responsibility of the advisers of the local government may be carried practically into effect; not only by the removal of these advisers from office when they lose the confidence of the people, but also by impeachment for the heavier offenses chargeable against them.” The petition was forwarded for presentation to Viscount Goderich and the Hon. E. G. Stanley, from each of whom Dr. Baldwin duly received replies. A quotation from the letter sent by Stanley, who became shortly afterwards colonial secretary, may serve to show to how great an extent the British statesmen of the period failed to grasp the position of affairs in Upper Canada. “On the last and one of the most important topics,” wrote Stanley, “namely, the appointment of a local ministry subject to removal or impeachment when they lose the confidence of the people, I conceive there would be great difficulty in arranging such a plan, for in point of fact the remedy is not one of enactment but of practice — and a constitutional mode is open to the people, of addressing for a removal of advisers of the Crown and refusing supplies, if necessary to enforce their wishes.” From what has been said above it is clear that this was the very mode of redress which was not open to the people of the province.
Willis had refused to sit in term at Toronto on the ground that the court was not properly constituted.
The full text of the petition and of the letters from Stanley and Goderich to Dr. Baldwin is given in the Seventh Report of the Committee on Grievances already mentioned.
In this same year (1829) Robert Baldwin first entered the legislature of the province. John Beverley Robinson, the member for York and attorney-general, had been promoted to the office of chief-justice of the court of king’s bench, his seat in the assembly being thereby vacated. Baldwin contested the seat and was successful in his canvass, being strongly aided by the influence of William Lyon Mackenzie. A petition against his election, on the ground of an irregularity in the writ, caused him to be temporarily unseated, but in the second election Baldwin was again successful and entered the legislature on January 8th, 1830. In the ensuing session he appears to have played no very conspicuous part, his membership being brought to a premature termination by the death of George IV. The demise of the Crown necessitating a dissolution of the House. Baldwin again presented himself to the electors of York. In this election the adherents of the Family Compact contrived to carry the day, and Baldwin was among the number of Reformers who lost their seats in consequence. During the year that ensued he had no active share in the government of the country but continued to be prominent among the ranks of the moderate Reformers of York with whom his influence was constantly on the increase. To his professional career also he devoted an assiduous attention. He had, in 1827, married Augusta Elizabeth Sullivan, whose mother was a sister of Dr. William Baldwin. He now (1829) entered into partnership with his wife’s brother, Robert Baldwin Sullivan, who had been his fellow-student in his father’s law office, a young man whose showy intellectual brilliance and lack of conviction contrasted with the conscientious application of his painstaking cousin. Of Baldwin’s public life there is, however, during this period, nothing to record until the advent of Sir Francis Bond Head brought him for the first time into public office.
Among the intimate associates of the Baldwins in the year preceding the rebellion, there was no one who sympathized more entirely with their political views than Francis Hincks. Hincks came to Canada in the year 1830. He was born at Cork on December 14th, 1807, and descended from an old Cheshire family which for two generations had been resident in Ireland, in which country he spent his youth. He received at the Royal Belfast Institution a sound classical training. He had early conceived a wish to embark in commercial life, which his father, the Rev. T. D. Hincks, a minister of the Irish Presbyterian Church, did not see fit to combat. He entered as an articled clerk in the business house of John Martin & Co., Belfast, where he spent five years. On the termination of his period of apprenticeship Hincks resolved to see something of the world and sailed for the West Indies (1830), visiting Barbadoes, Demerara and Trinidad. At Barbadoes, he accidentally fell in with a Mr. George Ross of Quebec, by whom he was persuaded to sail for Canada. After spending some time in Montreal he determined to visit Upper Canada and set out for the town of York, travelling after the arduous fashion of those days “by stage and schooner,” a journey which occupied ten days. Hincks spent the winter of 1830-1 at York, conceived a most favourable idea of the commercial possibilities of the little capital, and interested himself at once in the threatening political crisis. He was a frequent visitor at the Parliament House, a brick structure at the foot of Berkeley Street, intended presently “to be adorned with a portico and an entablature,” whose gallery was open to the public. Here, and in the hall of the legislative council, which, in the words of an enthusiastic writer, “corresponded to the House of Lords” (being “richly carpeted, while the floor of the House is bare,”) Hincks listened to the exciting debates of the session in which Mackenzie was denounced as a “reptile” and a “spaniel dog,” and expelled by the indignant majority of the Tory faction. Early in 1831 he left Canada for Belfast to “fulfil a matrimonial engagement” which he had already contracted. The matrimonial engagement being duly fulfilled (July, 1832), Hincks returned to Canada to settle in York. Here he became one of the promoters and a director of the Farmers’ Joint Stock Banking Company; from this institution Hincks very shortly seceded, on account of its connection with the Family Compact. In company with two or three other seceding directors he joined the Bank of the People, which was established in the interests of the Reform party. Of this bank Hincks was manager during the troubled period of the rebellion. With Robert Baldwin and his father the young banker had already formed an intimate connection. Hincks’s house at No. 21 Yonge Street was next door to the house occupied at this time by the Baldwins, to whom both houses belonged. The acquaintance thus formed between the families ripened into a close friendship from the time of his arrival at York. Hincks’s practical good sense had led him to sympathize with the moderate party of Reform, and he now found in Robert Baldwin an associate whose political views harmonized entirely with his own. In addition to his management of the Bank of the People, Hincks was active in other commercial enterprises. He became the secretary of the Mutual Assurance Company, founded at Toronto shortly after his coming, and appears also to have carried on a general warehouse business at his premises on Yonge Street. That his eminent financial abilities met with ready recognition, is seen from the fact that he was appointed, in 1833, one of the examiners to inspect the accounts of the Welland Canal, at that time the subject of a parliamentary investigation. The practical experience and insight into the commercial life of the colony which Hincks thus early acquired, enabled him presently to bring to the financial affairs of Canada the trained capacity of an expert.
