A brilliant demagogue, William Lyon Mackenzie (1795–1861) was a hero in the backwoods, but a thorn in the flesh of Toronto’s Family Compact.
By now, the diminutive and hot-tempered Scottish-born journalist William Lyon Mackenzie had emerged as the backwoodsman’s champion. Part hustler, part prophet, “Little Mac” had been galvanizing opposition to the Family Compact since the early 1820s, first as the outspoken editor of The Colonial Advocate and then as an elected member of the legislature of Upper Canada. In more recent Canadian history, only Newfoundland’s Joey Smallwood can match Mackenzie for populist wizardry—demonic fluency, fierce energy, fearlessness against the odds and an ability to fill the air with honey and gall. By the time the Traills and Moodies were settled in Douro Township, Mackenzie was busy inflaming the ragged (and often illiterate) backwoodsmen with his passionate Tory-bashing and his stinging criticism of the Toronto nabobs. Speaking from schoolhouse steps or the back of farm carts, he ranted about dishonest officials, corrupt clergy and lace-cuffed place-seekers. He pointed out that Upper Canada was a stagnant backwater compared to the United States, where newcomers had a say in their country’s future and easy access to land. On the main streets of every small town in Toronto’s hinterland, he accused the Family Compact of ruling Upper Canada “according to its own pleasure” and committing “acts of tyranny and oppression.” His voice shrill with indignation, and his red wig repeatedly sliding off his bald head, he made personal attacks on his political enemies. He insisted that people like Henry Boulton, the Attorney-General of Upper Canada, and John Beverley Robinson, Chief Justice, “surround the Lieutenant-Governor, and mould him like wax to their will.”
The Traills and Moodies had plenty of reasons to agree with the substance of Little Mac’s tirades. They had firsthand experience of the sluggish development of the backwoods. But they were so blinded by their social prejudices and eagerness to cling to “establishment” values that they failed to see that Little Mac was talking about their own plight. They couldn’t see that the colonial administration was impervious to problems faced by families like theirs. They didn’t understand that their own community would never thrive, or their own land rise in value, unless the colonial government stepped in to encourage settlement and invest in better transportation systems—measures the Family Compact had no desire to initiate.
To people like Traill and Moodie, William Lyon Mackenzie was a dangerous radical and a troublemaker who challenged all their most dearly held principles of social order. Another gentleman farmer in the Peterborough region, John Langton, spoke for his ilk when he dismissed Mackenzie as a “little factious wretch…. He is a little red-haired man about five foot nothing, and extremely like a baboon.” Mackenzie’s followers, in the considered opinion of John Moodie, were “under the influence of the most odious selfishness.” Moodie was too busy detecting a strain of republicanism in the Radicals’ demand for representative government to appreciate Mackenzie’s diagnosis of the colony’s problems. Little Mac’s followers were, in Susanna’s words, “a set of monsters,” traitors to the British flag and “enemies of my beloved country.” And the agitation of the Radicals meant a further drop in immigration to Upper Canada from the mid-1830s, with jarring consequences for life around Peterborough.
The legacies to Susanna and Catharine had been substantial, yet the money ran like sand through the fingers of John Moodie and Thomas Traill. The tranquillity of the “halcyon days of the bush,” as Susanna had described her first months on Lake Katchewanooka, began to evaporate as the two men exhausted their capital and ran out of cash. Part of the problem was that neither the Moodie nor the Traill property yielded enough wheat or lumber to sell at market. Their crops were so scanty that there was barely enough wheat to last them until Christmas, let alone to leave a bag of flour with the miller in payment for his services. But even better harvests would not have saved the families from the consequences of a major depression throughout North America in the mid1830s, which brought economic stagnation to the backwoods. By the fall of 1835, Susanna had sold most of her own clothes (with the exception of her wedding dress and the handmade baby clothes Mrs. Strickland had sent from England) so that she could pay her servants. Soon the only servants who remained were ones who had nowhere else to go and stayed on without wages. The hired men disappeared; the ambitious plans for outbuildings were shelved; each family began to retrench. Hunger and want hovered like harpies over the little cabins in the woods. And all four adults—Thomas and Catharine, John and Susanna—began to look around for other ways to make money. At first it was a quiet search. It rapidly became desperate.
Susanna had continued to write poetry and sketches. She sent them off to two New York–based publications, the Albion and the North American Magazine, and several Toronto–based periodicals, including the Canadian Magazine and the Canadian Literary Magazine. They were well received by editors who appreciated the “former Susanna Strickland.” The American poet Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, editor of the North American Magazine, described Susanna as having “genius as lofty as her heart is pure.” Susanna’s relief at this recognition was almost craven. She replied to Fairfield in January 1835: “Though residing in a small log hut, in the backwoods of Upper Canada, and constantly engaged in the everyday cares of domestic life, I am not so wholly indifferent to praise, as not to feel highly gratified when the spontaneous outpourings of a mind, vividly alive to the beauties of Nature, meets with the approbation of men, of superior worth and genius.” But poetry did not put bread on the Moodie table. Fairfield’s payments did not even cover the cost of Susanna’s paper and pens.
Catharine was also finding that writing did not pay. The Backwoods of Canada was enthusiastically reviewed when it appeared in London early in 1836. The London Spectator praised the author’s elegance of mind, modesty and “sound practical views,” and declared that “it would be difficult to decide whether [the book] was more entertaining or useful.” The London Athenaeum was enchanted by the author, who “is obviously endowed with life’s best blessings—an observant eye, joined to a cheerful and thankful heart.” It recommended the book “for its spirit and truth.” The book was excerpted in several magazines and journals, and noted in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine as “written by a lady, who has set a stout heart to a steep hill,… and who by spirit, activity, and good humour, has surmounted her difficulties, or converted them into pleasantries.” It had immediately become required reading for any English gentlewoman considering emigration to British North America, and its sales helped to keep Mr. Charles Knight’s shaky publishing house afloat.
Yet the author received only 110 pounds for the copyright to the book, and no royalties on sales. Stuck in the remote depths of a colony, Catharine had little leverage on Charles Knight. The ingenuous optimism that saturates The Backwoods of Canada drained away, as the author realized that her bestseller was not going to rescue her from the woods.
By now, the sisters’ husbands were dismally discouraged. Both families were afflicted with malaria, which was rampant on the frontier, where settlers were struggling to drain mosquito-infested swamps. After a few days of sweating and shivers, most of the family members recovered fully. But the disease “threw a gloom” on Thomas’s spirits, according to Catharine, which he lacked the stamina to shake off. Both men had additional family responsibilities. The Moodies now had four children: Katie, Aggie, Dunbar, and Donald, who was born in May 1836. By 1837, Catharine was the mother of James, four; Katharine Agnes Strickland (Kate), one; and newborn Thomas Henry Strickland (Harry). There were a lot of mouths to feed on a few acres of wheat and potatoes.
Thomas Traill would willingly have sold his farm to the first bidder. Unfortunately, there were no takers. Thomas informed relatives in the Orkneys, in 1836, that “land has been nearly unsaleable for the last two years.” He described his predicament in ghastly detail, adding mournfully that he wished they had emigrated to the West Indies instead of Canada. Then he threw out a pathetic appeal for “anything
like a Consulship at some small Foreign Port [where I might live] a life more suitable to my tastes and habits.” The last sentence of his letter is suffused with despair: “But I must live and die, far from many of those that I love most dearly.”
John Dunbar Moodie was in an even worse predicament than his brother-in-law. He had fewer cleared acres and more debts. In yet another of his impetuous business decisions, he had sold his military commission back to his regiment (which would quickly sell it to another bidder), which meant that he no longer had his military half-pay, one hundred pounds a year, to help him scrape by. With the lump sum he had received in return, he’d bought stock in a Cobourg steamboat company. It was soon obvious that the steamboat stock was worthless, but by then John had used it as surety for various loans. John rarely revealed his anxieties; he knew that this would shake Susanna, who depended on his emotional stability. But he too began to explore other options for their future. First, he tried to interest publishers in the idea of a book about emigration to Upper Canada, similar to his recently published Ten Years in South Africa. Next, after seeing an advertisement from the Texas Land Company in the Albion, he considered abandoning Upper Canada and moving to Texas. A few months later, he tried a different tack. He wrote to Sir Francis Bond Head, the newly appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, describing his struggles with “embarrassments and difficulties of no ordinary description” and appealing to him for a government appointment that might shield his family from “distress or ruin.” But nothing came of any of these efforts.
Every few weeks, a letter would arrive for Susanna from Agnes Strickland, in England. Although she often enclosed some entirely inappropriate gift, such as silk stockings (“only worn once at court”), Agnes was acutely aware of her sisters’ deteriorating fortunes and dwindling hopes. She always tried to send her letters with someone travelling to the colony, since the Moodies’ could barely afford to pay for the letters she sent them through the mail. Carefully wrapped in the folded paper (envelopes were still not in use) were two or three silver coins for the children. John and Susanna were too close to starvation to do anything other than spend the precious coins on desperately needed essentials.
Susanna, like Catharine, was a resourceful, practical woman. She was a better cook than her sister, and just as accomplished at preserving cabbage, pickling cucumbers, smoking bacon and plucking wildfowl. When presented with dead squirrels, she could transform them into pies, stews or roasts without a twitch of distaste. When they could no longer afford tea or coffee, she recalled a recipe for dandelion-root coffee in the Albion and promptly went out to dig up some roots. “The coffee proved excellent”; a supply was sent over to the Traills. But things went from bad to worse, and during the bitterly severe winter of 1836, Susanna’s children were weak with hunger. Overcoming her kneejerk English sentimentality about pet animals, Susanna slaughtered her daughter Katie’s pet pig, Spot. She noted with remorse, however, that while her family fell on the pork, their dog Hector, who had been Spot’s boon companion, could not bring himself even to gnaw on one of Spot’s bones.
Susanna and Catharine clung to each other in hardship. When the Traills were afflicted with “the ague,” as settlers always called malaria, Catharine noted that, “but for the prompt assistance of … Susanna, I know not what would have become of us in our sore trouble.” In return, Catharine sent over bread and maple cakes for the Moodie family. Kitchen utensils and farming implements were shuttled between the two log houses.
Relations between the two brothers-in-law were less amicable. They were such different characters that, when things were going badly, it was almost inevitable that Thomas’s lugubrious pessimism would irritate easygoing John, while John’s consistently bad judgment about business matters would exasperate Thomas. Thomas was annoyed when the Moodies borrowed, and broke, the Traills’ sugar kettle (although they had it mended for him). For some time, there was a distinct chill between the two men. This pained their wives, who knew their kinship was too valuable to disrupt with petty squabbles. Eventually, Thomas apologized to his brother-in-law: “I again express my sincere and bitter regret at ever having given you any uneasiness, the more particularly at a time when you had more than enough to annoy you otherwise. I hope we shall hence forward live as friends and brothers.”
As the decade drew on and harvests failed, in damp little log cabins scattered through the bush, settlers were starving. Those from genteel backgrounds, like the Moodies and Traills, were the most vulnerable: unlike working-class immigrants, they didn’t have the manual skills to farm for themselves, and they no longer had any money to pay others to work in the fields. Despair drove many to drink. News of the most hopeless cases travelled quickly from settlement to settlement.
Susanna heard about one half-pay officer in nearby Dummer Township, an epauletted and decorated veteran of military service in India, who was so depressed by the dreary cycle of isolation, poverty and crop failures that “the fatal whiskey-bottle became his refuge from gloomy thoughts.” Captain Frederick Lloyd finally deserted his wife Ella altogether and headed south. Susanna organized an expedition to take bread, gingerbread, sugar, tea and home-cured ham to the abandoned wife and her seven children. Since John was away, she asked Thomas, her brother-in-law, to accompany them. Thomas, Susanna and her friend Emilia Shairp, whose cabin was close to the Moodies’, walked for miles in the bitter January cold through the “tangled maze of closely-interwoven cedars, fallen trees and loose-scattered masses of rock.” When they finally arrived at their destination, Susanna saw a picture of utter desolation—a woman struggling to maintain her dignity while watching her children shiver and weep with hunger. They had exhausted their supply of potatoes, which was all they had eaten for weeks. Susanna stared at the wan, emaciated figure in a thin muslin gown (“the most inappropriate garment for the rigours of the season, but … the only decent one that she retained”). She looked at two little boys cowering under the coverings of a crudely made bed in the corner “to conceal their wants from the eyes of the stranger.” She stuttered out a formal greeting: “I hoped that, as I was the wife of an officer, and, like her, a resident in the bush, and well-acquainted with its trials and privations, she would look upon me as a friend.” The little family fell on the sackload of supplies with gratitude. As Susanna watched, she must have wondered whether this was what the future held for her.
Chapter 9
A Call to Arms
In early December 1837, Sam Strickland was too intent on keeping the heavy iron plough steady to notice the young lad racing over the hill towards him, waving a piece of paper. As dusk settled on the grey landscape, snowflakes began to swirl around the horns of the lumbering oxen. Sam urged Buck and Bright forward. He was late planting, and he knew that once he had finished his own field, he would have to help at his sister Susanna’s farm. John Moodie had broken his foot while sowing his winter wheat and was limping around on homemade crutches.
The excited cries of James Caddy, his neighbour’s son, finally caught Sam’s attention, and he grabbed the paper from the panting youth. It was a proclamation dated December 5, two days earlier, from the Lieutenant-Governor of the province, Sir Francis Bond Head. Rebellion had broken out in the colony. The Lieutenant-Governor called upon the loyal militia of Upper Canada to assist in putting down an armed uprising. Toronto was under siege, James blurted out between gasps for air. William Lyon Mackenzie was at the head of a ragtag army of rebels. Shod in clogs and armed with rifles, pikes and pitchforks, they were marching down Yonge Street. Little Mac was challenging the rule of law, the authority of the British crown and the power of the Westminster-appointed governor. There was even talk, young Caddy breathlessly added, that Toronto had already been burned to the ground, Bond Head killed and war declared between Upper Canadians and the Yankees.
This was shocking news. Douro Township’s gentlemen immigrants were too distant from Toronto to know that Bond Head was an arrogant fool who had misjudged the strength of popular feelin
g and had helped provoke the uprising by treating Mackenzie as nothing more than a raving madman. At the various harvest festivals and Strickland family celebrations along Lake Katchewanooka that fall, Little Mac had been regarded as a bit of a joke. “Mackenzie’s treason,” in Catharine’s words, “had been like the annoying buzz of a mosquito ever in the public ears.”
Now Mackenzie had co-ordinated his offensive with an uprising of the Patriotes in Lower Canada, led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, who were also demanding more control over the colonial government. Taking advantage of Bond Head’s ill-advised decision to send his troops to Montreal, to quell the Patriotes there, Little Mac had launched an attack on a defenceless Toronto.
Within hours, eager to support the Crown, Sam Strickland had said goodbye to his family and set off through the December night to Peterborough, to join the Peterborough Volunteers. By the following morning, Thomas Traill was marching alongside Sam down the rutted cart-track towards Port Hope. A day later, John Moodie had shouldered his knapsack and limped on his crutches the eleven miles to Peter-borough, where he borrowed a horse and rode on to Port Hope at the head of two hundred more loyal volunteers. For Thomas and John, the call to arms was thrilling. Soldiering was their business. Soldiering meant the jangle of harness, the bark of orders, the acknowledgment of their officer status—as well as regular meals and jovial male companionship. It meant an escape, albeit temporary, from the backwoods and suffocating poverty. Both men dearly loved their wives, but the opportunity to defend the interests of the motherland was irresistible. It had an extra piquancy in 1837, because Britain had a new monarch, Victoria. For the first time in their lives, the rallying cry for these soldiers was “God save the Queen!”
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