Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  By 1842, the Moodies had settled into a pleasant house on the corner of Bridge and Sinclair streets, on the western edge of Belleville. Built seven years earlier of local limestone, with a verandah across the front and a spacious and separate kitchen wing to the rear, it boasted the kind of features that have come to be known as “wilderness Georgian”—a graceful staircase curling upwards with a narrow banister, and a front door with sidelights and a deep cornice supported by four gently tapered pilasters. It was light-years away from the squalid log cabin in the backwoods, and it brought back happy memories to Susanna of the little clifftop Regency cottage in Southwold that she and John had lived in during their first year of marriage. It was the wrong side of town—the haute bourgeoisie of Belleville lived on the east side of the Moira, preferably on Church Street or John Street, at the top of the hill. But Susanna didn’t care too much for gradations of status among small-town merchants She still regarded her refined English origins as all the rank she needed.

  In later years, Susanna would look back on these years as being the most prosperous she and John ever enjoyed. They had (as she wrote to a friend in England) “many of the luxuries of life or such as are considered so in the Provinces,” and the house was “a grand and comfortable home.” She had at least two servants—a maid and a handyman—which allowed her to establish a household routine that included as much reading and writing as possible. She rose at six o’clock, hurriedly read some prayers with her children, organized breakfast, made whatever bread and pies were required for the day, then sat down to write. She wrote steadily until dinnertime, turning a deaf ear to interruptions from the maid or children. After an early evening meal, she took a walk, then made or mended clothes until the light was too dim for her to sew any longer. Once the lamps were lit, she returned to whatever manuscript she was working on.

  The worst tragedy of her life struck the family a couple of years after they had moved into the Bridge Street house. One night in June 1844, Susanna awoke to find her pillow drenched in tears. In her dream she had taken Johnnie, then five, to England, to visit her mother at Reydon Hall. Her older sister Jane had appeared and told Susanna that their mother had died years earlier, but that Susanna had never been told because her English relatives felt she already had so many sorrows of her own. Susanna was badly shaken by the dream and spent the following day wracked with homesickness and a strange sorrow.

  A memorial tablet for Susanna’s two lost sons: “hope has faded from my heart.”

  She was so preoccupied that she scarcely noticed that little Johnnie, who had been watching his two elder brothers fishing in the Moira, was late home. Suddenly an older child rushed into the kitchen, shouting that Johnnie was missing. John Moodie rushed along Bridge Street to the river and pounded up and down the bank, calling his son’s name into the deepening twilight. The child had been washing all the brook trout that his brothers had caught and had lost his balance as he leaned over the wooden wharf. Dunbar and Donald had been busy rewinding their lines and hadn’t seen him leave them. Nobody had heard Johnnie’s cries above the roar of the river. His father finally found the limp little body caught in the wooden supports of the wharf.

  Susanna was devastated. The loss of her “lovely, laughing, rosy, dimpled child” was the “saddest and darkest [hour] in my sad eventful life.” Johnnie’s death plunged her into a despair deeper than she had ever known; she never entirely recovered her mirth and spontaneity. She brooded inconsolably for months and wrote heartfelt poetry about her loss.

  But hope has faded from my heart—and joy

  Lies buried in thy grave, my darling boy!

  The tragedy had a profound impact on Susanna. It rooted her more firmly in her adopted land than any other experience. Johnnie was buried next to his infant brother George. Their mother visited their graves regularly. She grieved that these two sons would never see their mother’s homeland. Her love for her lost little boys made Susanna begin to think of herself as the mother of Canadian children rather than the daughter of English gentry.

  Against this backdrop of family misfortune, John had to contend with unending political sabotage. But Belleville’s political battles brought an unexpected dividend when the Moodies met a politician for whom they would develop a lifelong admiration. This was Robert Baldwin, the Toronto lawyer who led the Reform Party.

  In his time, Robert Baldwin was recognized as a giant amongst the young colony’s statesmen. Today, his name is invariably invoked as “the father of Responsible Government,” because he helped establish real democracy in Canada. (He is also remembered for a connection that would have surprised him: he was the grandfather of Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s first male lover.) Born in Toronto in 1804, Baldwin inherited from his father, the Irish born and immensely debonair Dr. William Baldwin, a large fortune, the extensive Spadina estate in the middle of Toronto and a sturdy belief that the government in Canada should be answerable to Canadian voters as well as to the government in London. In the aftermath of the 1837 Rebellion, the two Baldwins had made a forceful case for responsible government in the colony to Lord Durham, the Whig grandee sent out by the British government to investigate the troubled state of British North America. In the report that Lord Durham presented in 1839, the Baldwins were delighted to see that, alongside its recommendation for the union of Upper and Lower Canada (roughly, present-day Ontario and Quebec) into the United Provinces of Canada, it also proposed that the executive wing of government should be accountable to the elected legislature.

  Robert Baldwin (1804–1858) was the father of Responsible Government and a close friend of the Moodies.

  At first, Westminster refused this move to strengthen the colonial government, arguing that such a step would compromise British sovereignty. So Robert Baldwin spent the next twenty years championing responsible government in his native land. He also dedicated himself to implementing the kind of progressive policies that were only just beginning to be understood within the scattered settlements of the colony: linguistic and religious freedoms; a strong and non-denominational education system; and a firm partnership between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the United Provinces. Much of today’s Canadian political culture has its origins in the measured tolerance and broad-minded idealism of Robert Baldwin. He practised what he preached: he sent his four children to be educated in francophone schools in Lower Canada, and he forged a durable political partnership with Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, leader of the moderate reformers in Montreal. The two men served as joint premiers of the United Provinces between 1842 and 1843, and again between 1848 and 1851.

  Yet Robert Baldwin was a reluctant politician who cut a poor figure on the hustings. A stilted orator, he was heavy and stooping, and he always had an unhealthy pallor. His opponents mocked (as historian Donald Creighton put it) his “solemn, slightly Pecksniffian air of conscious rectitude.” Lord Sydenham, appointed Governor-General of British North America in 1839, described Baldwin as “such an ass!” Nevertheless, the public Baldwin personified the gentlemanly virtues to which John Moodie aspired—devotion to honour, duty and principle, and a fierce integrity in public office.

  There was, however, another side to Robert Baldwin that appealed particularly to Susanna’s fascination with darker, more complicated human emotions. The private Baldwin was intensely sensitive and had already suffered a painful epiphany by the time he met the Moodies. In 1836, his beloved wife Eliza, mother of his four children, had died after only nine years of marriage. Baldwin’s grief was Gothic in its fervor, putting him in the galaxy of Canadian politicians whose private lives are as bizarre as their professional lives are bland. Robert Baldwin’s determination to be reunited with his dead wife and share her pain was quite as weird as, a century later, Mackenzie King’s determination to contact the spirit of his dead mother.

  After Eliza Baldwin’s death, her husband was subject to crippling bouts of depression that paralyzed him for weeks, even while he was co-premier of the United Provinces. He insi
sted that, at his death, his coffin should be chained to Eliza’s. Most important, he asked that his body be operated on: “Let an incision be made into the cavity of the abdomen extending through the two upper thirds of the linea alba.” It was a simulation of the primitive Caesarean section that Eliza had undergone for the birth of her fourth child, which had ultimately led to her death. When Robert Baldwin finally passed away, his daughter Maria ignored this gruesome instruction, but a month after the funeral (the largest ever seen in the colony), his son discovered the instruction in a pocket of one of his father’s old jackets. In morbid obedience, he insisted that the corpse be exhumed so the ghastly procedure could be performed.

  The Moodies first met Robert Baldwin when he was thirty-six, soon after their arrival in Belleville. Baldwin had come to Belleville because he wanted to represent Victoria District (renamed Hastings County in 1843) in the new United Provinces assembly. The Moodies were instantly drawn to someone who, like themselves, was furious to find himself squeezed between those who had taken up arms against legitimate authority and the blinkered upholders of British tradition and privilege. They were entirely in accord with a man who symbolized the landholding class, yet advocated gradual change. The Moodies’ views were shifting. The tremendous adjustments they had made to survive in the backwoods and their newfound ability to hold their own in the New World had made them question the wisdom of decisions about the colony being made five thousand miles away in London, by strangers for whom Canada was just another British possession, along with India, Bermuda and New Zealand.

  Along with Baldwin, the Moodies began to think that British North America would only flourish if its elected representatives, who knew the rural areas as well as the cities, had some say in how the colony should develop. But such cautious thoughts as these branded the Moodies as “traitors and rebels” within Belleville’s professional circles, and no better than the malcontents who had marched down Yonge Street in 1837. Belleville’s Loyalists, such as the Bensons and Dougalls, “arrogated the whole loyalty of the colony to themselves,” noted a disgusted Susanna.

  Baldwin often dropped by the Moodies’ cottage during his campaigns. “If you have any regard for me, Mrs. Moodie,” he said to Susanna one evening, “pray don’t ask me to eat. I am sick of the sight of food.” The custom throughout rural Canada was to ply any visitors with huge meals, and to take offence if they didn’t stuff themselves. In the run-up to an election, Baldwin had daily been invited to dinners that featured ham, roast and boiled meat and fowl, puddings, custards and cakes, cheese and apple pie. Susanna thought it was hilarious that Baldwin’s principal political supporters “literally almost killed him with kindness,” and she was flattered that he treated her as someone who knew that such excess was unnecessary. At the Moodies’ home, the distinguished Toronto lawyer preferred to bounce their children on his knee and talk earnestly about his vision of Canada as a bicultural nation. John valued Baldwin’s “calm and forbearing spirit,” and Susanna could never resist a clever, sentimental man who wrote poetry, repeatedly told her how much he admired her work and read her children’s stories aloud to his own children. Baldwin made Susanna and John feel they had soul-mates beyond Belleville: enlightened and educated people who weren’t mired in petty parochial disputes, and who believed Canada would one day be a major nation. Although John continued to insist that, as sheriff, he was above politics, in practice both he and Susanna were drawn into the Reformers’ fold. Baldwin convinced them that responsible government was not synonymous with such nineteenth-century Canadian nightmares as mob rule or Washington-style republicanism.

  John Moodie had a direct role to play in the elections in which Robert Baldwin was running because he was the returning officer, responsible for ensuring that voting was free and fair. This was a tough job in the early 1840s. Intimidation and bribery were rife. Each candidate had his own ballot box, and a voter would cast his ballot in full public view. Everyone could see who voted for whom. Rival candidates marched their supporters to the hustings “like the men-at-arms of two medieval private armies,” in the words of Donald Creighton. John had to oversee two elections within his first two years in Belleville: one in March and April, 1841, and the next in October 1842. In both, Baldwin ran against Edmund Murney, a local lawyer. Anyone who ran into Murney on the street would have thought he was a pleasant and civilized fellow, but on a soapbox he was a fiend. He ranted against responsible government as a revolutionary plot, and he accused mild-mannered Robert Baldwin of being a Papist and a rebel.

  Murney had the serried ranks of Tory Belleville behind him, including Thomas Parker, all the members of Belleville’s Orange Lodge and George Benjamin, outspoken editor of the local newspaper, the Intelligencer. Both elections verged on riots. Baldwin was accused by his enemies of hiring a “large body of armed shanty-men, bullies and ruffians, armed with bludgeons, clubs and sticks” who prevented Murney supporters from reaching the hustings by their “threatening language and gestures.” It is not clear whose supporters screamed the loudest and rudest insults, but there is no doubt that many voters on both sides were too scared to cast their votes at all. Baldwin was acknowledged to be the victor in 1841, and Murney in 1842. But the person most damaged by the turmoil and tension each time was Sheriff Moodie, who had failed to keep the peace. He was also accused by the Murney gang of showing bias towards Baldwin. George Benjamin charged him with “intimidation, perjury and partiality.” He was summarily removed from the position of returning officer.

  John and Susanna churned with outrage at the way they were being treated. John’s letters to Robert Baldwin are littered with indignant references to the “low cunning and artful misrepresentations” of local enemies. He fulminated against Edmund Murney in 1842, and commented that, “Anything like fairness or straight forwardness with him is out of the question.” But John and Susanna saved their most savage remarks for “the little Jew,” as John referred to George Benjamin. Benjamin was probably no more hostile to Sheriff Moodie than most of Belleville’s Tory establishment, but his criticisms had greater impact because he promoted them in the Intelligencer. There, according to John, he regularly “opined a lot in fine style” against the sheriff. Every Saturday, John’s heart was in his mouth as he picked up the paper, wondering what slanders against him were contained in the weekly “smut machine” (as it was characterized by its rival, Kingston’s British Whig). The editor of the British Whig had already noted that Benjamin did not tolerate any dissenting views on Belleville politics in his newspaper or his community “as he regards that field as entirely his own.”

  George Benjamin was one of the more intriguing characters in nineteenth-century Canada. He was born in Brighton, England, where his father, Emanuel Cohen, was the leading member of the town’s Jewish community. The Cohens had twelve children: George’s eldest brother, Levy, was founder and editor of the Brighton Guardian; two brothers emigrated to Australia; and one brother went to New York and became a physician. It is not clear why Moses Cohen, the second son, changed his first name to George and adopted his mother’s maiden name as his surname, but it is clear that he was an ambitious lad, with a taste for adventure. He worked for a time on his brother’s newspaper, but he quickly moved to Liverpool to engage in “commercial pursuits.” By the time he stepped off a lake steamer onto the Toronto wharf in April 1834, the thirty-four-year-old Benjamin was widely travelled, spoke half a dozen languages and was accompanied by a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl whom he had married in New Orleans. Benjamin never advertised his Jewish background—he even managed to get himself elected grand master of the Orange Order of British North America in 1846—but there was a Hebrew prayer book in the little leather satchel he carried.

  George Benjamin (1799-1864), Canada’s first Jewish Member of Parliament, was cruelly caricatured in Susanna’s writing

  Why did George Benjamin come to Canada? It was a surprising choice, given that Jewish immigrants were few and far between, and a British colony dominated by the An
glican Church tolerated less religious diversity than the United States. Yet the stocky and determined Benjamin must have heard about the colony’s potential for a man with newspaper experience. Within five months of his arrival in Upper Canada, he and his wife Isabella were living in Belleville and Benjamin was about to open a new business. In September he published a prospectus announcing that he had “taken possession of the Press at Belleville” and was to be the editor and publisher of a newspaper under the name of the Belleville Intelligencer and Hastings General Advertiser. Some of Belleville’s residents were aware that the paper’s editor was Jewish, and Benjamin became the target of anti-Semitism in his own community. One sunny Friday in April 1836, he arrived at his office to discover that he had been hung in effigy in front of his own front door. The following week, Kingston’s British Whig carried a poem that began:

  Oh ladies all and gentlemen,

  While I’ve nothing else to do,

  I’ll just sit down and sing a song,

  About the Belleville Jew.

  Both Benjamin and his newspaper were well established by the time the Moodies moved to town. In 1842, John could only wince at Benjamin’s relentless attacks on him in the Intelligencer. But Susanna, far too spirited to turn the other cheek, decided to reply in kind. By now, Lovell’s Literary Garland was selling well throughout the province, and Mrs. Moodie was one of its most prolific and popular contributors. She had an outlet for her anger. In 1843, she set to work on a manuscript that was to be her own sweet revenge on George Benjamin.