The Dufferin County Museum is sponsoring a series of Saturday afternoon talks that feature memorabilia from the 1837 Rebellion in Upper Canada (now Southern Ontario). The announcement in this newspaper said that it would display the kind of wooden boxes made by prisoners who had “joined in rebellion against British rule”. That needs some clarification.

My Phillips ancestors were witnesses in West Gwillimbury of that time in Canadian history. The colony was still divided into Lower Canada where the Governor General, the Earl of Gosford, lived in Québec City and Upper Canada where Sir Francis Bond Head, the lieutenant governor, was stationed in Toronto. He was a professional soldier with little experience in government and, too often, less diplomacy.

In both the lower and upper provinces the demand for legislative reform was growing. After the revolt in the old American colonies the government of ‘the Canadas’ was patterned on the still aristocratic constitution of the United Kingdom. By the 1830s the winds of change were blowing both in Britain where the Reform Bill was enacted and in the North American provinces where a wide degree of social and economic equality already existed and made reform urgent.

In neither part of Canada, however, could the elected Assembly control the governor nor could he effectively limit debate in the legislature. Recurring stalemate resulted. Both the American colonial and the French revolutions were still recent memories and Canada’s military governors were always tempted to bring charges of sedition against rabble rousers.

Any rebellious sentiment was not against the British connection as such. The Loyalists were refugees from persecution and violence in what is still a militaristic and politically polarised country. There were republican and Sinn Fein (‘Fenian’) agitators in Canada and cross-border traders who harboured ‘annexationist’ sentiments, espousing Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the republic’s ‘manifest destiny’ to include the whole continent. The Phillips and other Quaker families of North York, U.C., ‘late Loyalists’ from Pennsylvania and elsewhere, were content to again be citizens of the British Empire.

In Toronto, the capital of Upper Canada which in the War of 1812 had been attacked three times and burned by invaders from across Lake Ontario, the “baleful domination of the Mother Country” was a phrase used chiefly by those who objected to the fact that senior government officials saw themselves to be responsible to the Colonial Office in London rather than to the elected legislative assembly. Independence from Britain would have meant vulnerability to the Washington-based politicians and capitalists who coveted the whole of North America.

In both Upper and Lower Canada there was also objection to the ‘entitlement’ attitudes of the Family Compact and the Château Clique, respectively. They were pseudoaristocrats in an essentially frontier society who were closely linked by both marital and financial bonds. Their members held appointments in the governors’ appointed executive councils which paid scant attention to the rising demand for ‘responsible government’.

Although the volatile Scots firebrand, William Lyon Mackenzie, first mayor of Toronto in 1834, favoured an essentially congressional form of government rather the British parliamentary system, the moderate Upper Canada reformers, Dr W.W. Baldwin, his son Robert and their colleagues, said that the royal governors must have agreement from the legislatures before levying taxes or signing bills into law. That is responsible government.

1837 was a year of economic recession and cholera epidemic. It was also an election year in which radical candidates were defeated. Lieutenant Governor Bond Head had appointed some reformers to his executive council but Mackenzie’s supporters charged him with manipulating the vote. Except for a pocket of dissidents down near London there was little support for open rebellion other than in the farm lands north of Toronto where my ancestors from Pennsylvania farmed lots 99/100 on Yonge Street opposite what is now Bristol Road.

Coming from families settled in Upper Canada only since 1801, great-great grandfather William Phillips and his wife Elizabeth Rogers were suspected by some to be sympathetic to radical reformist views. In the autumn of 1837 they gladly played hosts to a colonial official while he investigated potential subversive activity in the Newmarket neighbourhood.

The land rises behind where the Phillips homestead stood until 25 years ago and then falls away to the west. It is now covered with a scab of new housing. One October day in 1837, at first light, the family’s houseguest sensed suspicious activity around the crest of the nearby hill. Had a posse of Mackenzie’s roughnecks discovered his mission? Stepping outside, he fired warning shots then went up to take a closer look. There lay the body of a prize sow that had escaped custody and been on early morning forage. Apology was made and damages paid but more serious action was to follow in early December.

Mackenzie and some of the North York agrarian and mechanical hotheads planned a march on Toronto while the regular troops garrisoned there were in Montreal attending to trouble in Lower Canada. Armed with muskets, pikes and pitchforks they made their way down Yonge Street to a rendezvous at Montgomery’s tavern in the village of Eglinton. Marching south to Bloor Street, they were routed by militiamen and pursued northward. Some escaped to the Niagara frontier. Mackenzie spent ten years in New York then, pardoned, returned to the newly united Province of Canada in 1849. He died in 1861, the year in which a civil war began south of the border.

Mackenzie’s lieutenants Peter Matthews and Samuel Lount were hanged for treason in the spring of 1838. Others, like Jesse Lloyd of Lloydtown near present day Schomberg, died in exile.

No civil society can brook armed violence against constituted authority. It has happened twice in Britain in the 1641-9 Civil War and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and twice in the United States in 1776- 84 and 1861-65. Most Canadians no longer think of Britain as the Mother Country but neither, for all our personal and business connections, do we wish a political union with the United States. But many would welcome it back as an independent member, as Canada is, of a wider Commonwealth.