The Patriot War Along the New York-Canada Border

Author

Preface

The undeclared war between the United States and the Canadian colonies, mainly between December 1837 and December 1838—the so-called Patriot War—was a historical oddity. Not a war between nations, it was a war of ideals fought by like-minded people against the greatest military power of the time.

Rebellions in Lower Canada (now Quebec) and Upper Canada (now Ontario) flared up in November and December, respectively, in 1837. The British army and colonial militia quickly extinguished the uprisings. The ill-prepared rebels lacked the training and strength to prevail. The insurgency should have ended before Christmas. It did not.

The defeated rebels fled to the United States, where Americans of all social classes embraced them as heroes. Due to a unique confluence of American history and economics, tens of thousands of people offered money, provisions, arms and sometimes their lives in the pursuit of Canadian freedom. Many Americans regarded the English—still much despised—as despots to be driven from the continent once and for all.

The administration of President Martin Van Buren never endorsed or aided the conflict. American people, not the American government, declared war on Britain. The officers and men in the volunteer armies saw themselves as freedom fighters engaged in a just and noble cause. While land speculators infiltrated the senior ranks, the majority of men who fought, died and hanged acted on altruistic ideals, however misguided their mission may have been.

The Patriot War raged along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River from Michigan to Vermont. This book focuses on the contributions and sacrifices of key people in eastern Upper Canada and the border counties of New York State from Buffalo to Ogdensburg.

I collected the material in this book over years from sources too numerous to mention. A few stand out. I applaud the legion of New York historians and volunteers, such as those at the Thousand Islands Museum in Clayton, for compiling so much local history. I also owe a debt to the helpful people at the Mississippi Mills Public Library in Almonte, Ontario, for bringing in rare books I requested through interlibrary loan. Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa provided a wealth of material related to the Patriot War, including rare original copies of memoirs by American participants.

I am grateful to James Eagan and Roberta Calhoun-Eagan of Canandaigua, New York, for their help over the years compiling information on Bill Johnston’s life. And a big thank-you to my wife, Amelia Ah You, for her skillful preparation of digital images for this book.

Lastly, I thank Whitney Tarella, commissioning editor at The History Press, for her guidance during this project.

1

Setting the Scene

The fact that bands of Canadian colonists in Upper and Lower Canada took up arms in the pursuit of responsible government is not surprising given the political realities of 1837. That a legion of Americans took up their cause with force and vigor is, on the surface, puzzling.

A two-tiered government ran the colonies of Upper Canada (now Ontario) and Lower Canada (now Quebec). Each had a legislative assembly elected by voters. Both had an all-powerful executive council made up of prominent citizens, headed by a lieutenant governor appointed by the Crown. The executive council could and did disregard advice and legislation from the elected assembly.

By 1837, both colonial executive councils represented an oligarchy of wealthy men, judges and high-ranking military officers. Rife with nepotism and patronage, they ran the colonies often for their members’ profit. In Upper Canada, people called them the Family Compact. The Lower Canada equivalent was the Château Clique.

In Upper Canada, the Family Compact aligned with the Anglican Church, while the majority of residents belonged to other churches. In Lower Canada, the Anglican, English-speaking Château Clique had little in common with the Francophone and Catholic majority. Religious tension exacerbated the linguistic and political divide.

In both colonies, political parties arose to argue for democratic reform. More than once, these parties formed a majority in the legislative assemblies. The executive councils ignored them or, worse, passed laws that enflamed them. Eventually, a minority of reformers in both colonies counseled open rebellion as the only path to representative government. The mood in Canada matched the temper in America in 1775, when colonists fired the first shots of the Revolutionary War.

While Canadian politics fumed in 1837, the United States’ society seethed with its own discontent. Between 1780 and 1837, the U.S. population rose from 2,780,400 to over 16,000,000. The count of states doubled from thirteen to twenty-six. Settlement had pushed civilization from the coastal plains west past the Mississippi River.

After fifty-six years of growth and prosperity, America hit a wall in 1837. Rampant land speculation combined with a sudden distrust of banks and the new monetary innovation—paper money—led to the Panic of 1837. English banks called in loans made to U.S. banks. Those banks held little real money—their assets being notes based on landholdings—and failed. Fortunes disappeared. Unemployment spiked. A five-year recession began.

Besides financial upheaval, the 1830s saw a steady series of new social experiments and clashes of ideals. Organizations formed to better American society morally and socially. New ideals—temperance, trade unions, education reform, penal reform, asylums, abolition and female suffrage—threatened established ideas.

Following the Texas Revolution (1835–1836), many Americans, especially young men, envisioned themselves as new crusaders, gallant fighters for democracy. (That the Texas Revolution had much to do with Mexico’s prohibition of slavery was not well known then.)

In 1837, Americans along the border from Maine to Wisconsin still harbored enmity for the British government. Though fifty-six years had passed since fighting ceased in the American Revolution and twenty-three years since the War of 1812 ended, people in those states wanted the continent purged of any vestige of English despotism. And people blamed the English banks for causing the Panic of 1837.

Americans had no quarrel with Canadian colonists, who were kith and often kin. Immigration controls being rudimentary, citizens flowed between the nations at will. Cross-border business connections and marriages were commonplace.

When you add the Texas Revolution’s romanticism to a nation awash in new ideas and combine that with the destabilizing effects of a recession and a deep-seated grudge against the British, it is easy to understand why Americans took up the Canadian rebels’ cause. Brothers in difficult times, the Canadian rebellion offered an opportunity for young men to be heroes and old men to kick out the monarchists.

2

The Rebellion Begins

October–December 1837

Heated debate over democratic reforms morphed into armed rebellion first in Lower Canada. While Americans had little involvement in that conflict, the bloody reprisals by the British army, exaggerated by the American press, awakened the Spirit of ’76 in the border states.

The principal agitator for political reform in Lower Canada was Louis-Joseph Papineau, fifty-one, an elected assembly member since 1808 (at just twenty-two). His continued insistence that government must be controlled by elected representatives, not appointees, alienated him from the English elite but made him the darling of discontented colonists. Papineau and his supporters, who called themselves les Patriotes, began to organize paramilitary cells in 1837.

Dr. Wolfred Nelson, forty-six, and Dr. Robert Nelson, forty-four, acted as his generals. As Anglophones advocating for the rights of the Francophone majority, the Nelson brothers were a rarity in Lower Canada.

The rebellion started as civil disobedience, not an act of war.

On October 23, 1837, five thousand Patriotes from six counties assembled near St. Charles, south of Montreal, in a peaceful protest against English political restrictions, despite a law forbidding such gatherings. Talk of reform, not war, filled the two-day event. The assembly adopted a set of American-style republican resolutions and dispersed peacefully.

In response, the colonial government overreacted and charged Papineau, Wolfred Nelson and two dozen regional leaders with treason on November 16, 1837, issuing arrest warrants.

L’Assemblée des six-comtés, by Charles Alexander Smith (1890), depicts the meeting in 1837 that caused Britain to arrest Patriote leaders, thus sparking the Patriot War.

Patriote leaders took refuge in the rebel-held village of Saint-Denis, southeast of Montreal, and prepared for a fight. The British obliged by sending Colonel Charles Gore, forty-four, and three hundred regulars to subdue them. Gore marched his force through mud, cold and freezing rain and confronted eight hundred dry and determined rebel fighters early on November 23, 1837.

The British force had the option to back off. No one had yet fired a shot. No one had died. Had the colonial establishment chosen diplomacy instead of brute force and compromise instead of intolerance, there may not have been a Patriot War. Demonstrating typical English colonial arrogance, Colonel Gore ordered his men forward and ignited a shooting war. After a day of fighting, with ammunition running low and his men weather-weary, Gore ordered a retreat.

The Patriotes won the first round, but victory proved ethereal. They lacked the means to sustain a defense of Saint-Denis. Papineau and many followers fled to Vermont.

Two days later, Colonel George Wetherall, forty-nine, with 420 regulars, attacked Saint-Charles. The Patriote defenders consisted of just 60 to 80 armed men. Wetherall’s troops charged and quickly overran the defenses, setting buildings afire. Some rebels retreated, while a few raised their hands. As the infantry walked toward the surrendering Patriotes, rebel snipers opened fire, killing three soldiers. This treachery enraged the British, who then slaughtered every Patriote fighter they found—56 in all.

On November 30, 1837, Colonel Gore returned to Saint-Denis. The Patriotes had dispersed. The town surrendered without a fight. Out of spite, the English sacked the town and set fifty homes aflame.

On December 14, 1837, General John Colborne, First Baron Seaton, forty-nine, commander in chief of British armed forces in North America, led an army of 1,500 to the village of Saint-Eustache, west of Montreal. The redcoats faced 800 mostly unarmed Patriotes.

Most rebels dispersed. Jean-Olivier Chénier, thirty-one, a local physician, mustered a core of determined fighters and barricaded a convent, church, rectory and manor in the village center. Colborne, with his vastly superior force and artillery, systematically overran each building occupied by Chénier’s men until only the church remained in rebel hands.

The infantry smashed in a door and set a fire to drive the Patriotes out. As rebels jumped from the burning church, soldiers picked them off, including Chénier. The battle left seventy Patriotes and three British men dead. For days following, militia units looted and burned homes in Saint-Eustache and neighboring villages, while the troops torched property of known rebel leaders.

UPPER CANADA IGNITES

The Upper Canada raiders and rebels who transformed the Canada–United States border into a war zone in 1838 can credit one diminutive Scotsman for starting the fight: William Lyon Mackenzie.

Drawing of William Lyon Mackenzie, circa 1850.

Driven by uncompromising political principles and a hatred of elitism, William Lyon spent his adult life trying to bring political reform to Upper Canada.

Mackenzie rose to prominence among reformers through his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate. Unlike newspapers of today, it served largely to get his opinions into circulation. (If alive today, he’d be a political blogger or talk show host.)

In January 1829, he won a seat in the colonial assembly. Because of his continued Family Compact criticism, the loyalist-dominated assembly voted three times to expel him, and each time he returned in the next election.

He became the first mayor of the new city of Toronto on March 27, 1834, but lost the 1835 election. In the pages of a second publication, the Constitution, Mackenzie continued to advocate for reform. But he grew increasingly impatient and uncompromising. He toured the rural country around Toronto organizing groups of potential rebels. His views on democracy found favor among farmers of American origin.

When Mackenzie learned the rebellion in Lower Canada had started, he commanded his troops to gather north of Toronto for a march on that city. With no armed forces in the local barracks, William Lyon felt his men could beat any militia assembled against them, especially in a surprise attack.

From counties surrounding Toronto, rebel captains and lieutenants marched bands of ill-equipped and poorly trained recruits toward the city. A second regiment of three hundred rebels under command of American-born Dr. Charles Duncombe, forty-five, gathered near Brantford, southwest of Toronto, and marched to join Mackenzie.

By December 4, between seven and eight hundred of Mackenzie’s rebels, dubbed the Patriots, gathered on Toronto’s outskirts by a tavern owned by John Montgomery. (While a reform sympathizer, Montgomery was no rebel—at least not then.) Though the rebels temporarily had the upper hand, they did not make a decisive early move.

TORONTO SLOW TO REACT

Spies kept the lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, forty-four, informed of Mackenzie’s activities. Bond Head considered Mackenzie no more dangerous than a squawking parrot and did nothing to prepare for Upper Canada’s defense. He even sent his one regiment of regulars to Lower Canada to help restore order there.

Not everyone shared the lieutenant governor’s optimism. Colonel James FitzGibbon, fifty-seven, a veteran of the War of 1812 and Toronto militia commander, knew a rebel assault on Toronto was inevitable. Bond Head refused to let FitzGibbon prepare a defense, but he would not back down.

FitzGibbon contacted 126 men he could trust who had militia training and implored them to gather at the Parliament House should they hear the college bell ring. He told Bond Head of this plan and advised him that he would go ahead whether Bond Head consented or not. Bond Head weakly relented.

Image of Sir Francis Bond Head.

Drawing by Adrian Sharp depicting the shooting of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Moodie at Montgomery’s Tavern, December 4, 1837.

Drawing depicting John Powell escaping from the rebels at Montgomery’s Tavern, December 5, 1837.

On December 4, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Moodie, fifty-nine, rode from Toronto to the tavern to investigate. He foolishly fired his pistol at a group of sentries, who shot him dead on the spot. Witnesses spread the alarming news.

A city alderman, John Powell, twenty-eight, rode north on December 5 to investigate. Mackenzie, armed with a pistol, took Powell and a second man prisoner. Powell surrendered peacefully and assured Mackenzie, when asked, that he carried no weapons. Being a novice rebel, Mackenzie accepted a gentleman’s word and handed Powell over to his chief military officer, Anthony Anderson.

Like many 1837 rebels, Anderson, forty-one, had loyalist roots. Born in New Brunswick, he came to Upper Canada in 1809 with his parents. He joined the army as a teenager during the War of 1812 and fought at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane in 1814. Given one hundred acres for his service, he began farming. He married Elizabeth Taylor in 1816 and sired eleven children. Mackenzie appointed him captain for his military experience.

Powell, acting passive and non-threatening, took a moment to size up the rebels’ strength and then drew two loaded pistols from his coat. He shot Anderson in the back, killing him instantly. The second pistol, fired inches from William Lyon’s chest, misfired. Powell galloped to Toronto and informed Colonel FitzGibbon of what had transpired, thus ending any Patriot hopes of a surprise. (Powell’s heroics gained him the post of city mayor at the next election.)

THE SHOOTING STARTS

At dusk on December 5, Mackenzie rode a white pony at