– N. Ribar –
In dealing with the topic of the Upper Canada Rebellion and two-star republic, one is immediately astounded at how modern the republican demands of the Upper Canada patriots were. In this period, they were dealing with establishing new relations and asserting new conceptions of power, and the British working class through its Chartist and Utopian Owenite movements also had its international influence.
In Canada, outside of Quebec, today is called “Victoria Day.” While in Quebec, the last Monday preceding May 25 is known as National Patriots’ Day. Last year, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) raised the issue of renaming Victoria Day Patriots’ Day and using the occasion to learn about and celebrate those the working class and people consider to be patriots across Canada, Quebec and around the world. In this we need to settle historical scores with the Durham Report which claimed Canada contained two warring factions based on language and culture and raise the historiography of the Upper Canada patriots as a political question. Thus the concern about the patriots of 1837-38 in Upper Canada in particular.
To give some historical, political and geographical background to the period of the early 19th century, in that period British colonial officials divided all of what was hitherto “claimed” by them in North America into four – Upper Canada, modern Ontario along the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes; Lower Canada, modern Quebec along the St. Lawrence; direct possessions of the British Empire, which included the modern Maritimes; and Rupert’s Land, which included much of the northern and western territory of today’s Canada under control of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In terms of governance, both Upper and Lower Canada had legislative assemblies with only a consultative role. Real power resided in the legislative council, modelled after the British House of Lords, the executive council (the cabinet in modern terms) and the lieutenant-governor. In other words, those who held power were all appointed by the Crown. The local cliques in support of this style of rule were called the Family Compact and the Château Clique in Upper and Lower Canada respectively. Those elected officials in the legislative assemblies who opposed monarchical dictate were called reformers and, later, republicans.
In 1837-38, rebellions broke out in Upper Canada and Lower Canada against the possession of power by the British monarchists and for the decision-making of the people. Often these rebellions are attributed personally to William Lyon Mackenzie (not to be confused with his grandson Prime Minister Mackenzie King) and Louis-Joseph Papineau who are considered “rabble-rousers” who liked to start trouble. This is the method of all those who describe life as the history of kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers. In this case, it is a means of discrediting the rebellions as serious historical and political events, and the republicans as contributing to the nation-building project of a two-star republic.
There is also a concerted effort made by the ruling class in Canada, including academia and ivory-tower professors, to wipe the rebellion of Upper Canada from history. It is often said from these circles that all the rights and freedoms we presently are said to enjoy in Canada are the result of a peaceful evolution of enlightened governments from John A. Macdonald to Wilfred Laurier and onwards, that in opposition to the U.S. rebels Canada evolved on the basis of loyalty to the British crown. This telling of history teaches the people not to speak in their own name, not to bring decision-making power into their own hands and to leave the initiative in the hands of the rulers so that we can allegedly enjoy the fruits of their wise rule. In fact, the history of Canada shows that it is not the rulers who are decisive but the people. This is what the long-suffering Palestinian people are also showing us at the present time.
Earlier the political disempowerment of the people in Upper Canada was mentioned. What they raised in that period was a basic demand – a government responsible to the people. What we find in later ruling accounts of this demand, such as in the 1908 book The Life and Times of William Lyon Mackenzie by Charles Lindsey, is merely that the government should be responsible to the party which forms the majority of the legislative assembly. This twists their actual demands – the patriots of Upper Canada also saw the corruption of the “Tory” party and Family Compact clique in power and, though they demanded that the government be responsible to the legislative assembly, what is left out is their opposition to all cliques ruling above the people regardless of their status in the legislature. In part, this can be attributed to the fact that unlike in Lower Canada, the emerging bourgeoisie in Upper Canada sided wholly with the British during the rebellion. The composition of the Upper Canadian rebellion was primarily workers and professionals, meaning in those days self-employed. Their opposition was thus aimed at the British monarchy, the Family Compact and their “Tory” party.
Prior to the rebellion, the reformers convened frequent mass meetings by the name of “town meetings” and “public meetings” all over Upper Canada where anyone could speak and get together to raise demands for their empowerment, as well as protest against monarchical despotism. These meetings were combined with organized societies for enlightenment and the spreading of political information. And when the Lower Canada rebellion broke out, 19 public meetings in Upper Canada were called in support of their uprising and demands.
These stands of the patriots of the Canadas concerned the British monarchy so deeply that after the rebellions were put down, they hurriedly imported their colonial ruler of New Zealand, Lord Durham, to the Canadas in the hopes that he could find a “solution” to quell any future disruptions. His solution on the point of the political process was a concession – that they would grant a government responsible to the legislative assembly, but they would not in any way alter the basis of power – that it derived from the king, that people covenanted to vest sovereignty in a person of state, and that those parties loyal to the king and the old order reserve all manner of means in elections.
Thus, the basic mechanism of elections in today’s Canada, despite the fact that their funding and media attention are only allotted to the cartel parties, can be directly attributed to the struggle of the patriots of Upper and Lower Canada, shattering the mystification that enlightened rulers bestowed this process upon us. In fact, within what were the tasks of the time, all of these demands were fought for. Even this advance we can find as a result of the struggle of past generations.
It is also said that Canada was founded on the basis of two nations – English and French , and that the Lower Canada rebellion was a result of enmity between these two nations. Keeping in mind that in terms used at that time, this referred to two cultures not nations constituted as such based on an inalienable right to self-determination, the fact is that the driving force of the patriots’ struggle was opposition to British monarchical despotism. When the patriots of Lower Canada began their rebellion, the patriots of Upper Canada congratulated them and sent well-wishes, and the decision to begin their own rebellion was inspired by it. The flag of the two-star republic, which flew everywhere and was the symbol of the Upper Canada rebellion, derives from the fraternal unity of these two peoples who both rose up in the same common struggle. The nation-building project of the two-star republic blossomed out of this unity.
Later on, this line of historiography concludes that the 1840 union was made between Upper and Lower Canada due to the two coming to an agreement – that is, there were two founding nations of Canada. This thesis typically has gone virtually unchallenged except by CPC(M-L) and the Marxist-Leninist Party of Quebec. Even those who believed that the union was “unequal” have refused to go so far as to call a spade a spade and recognize the British sovereign’s domination of the two Canadas, and especially Lower Canada.
In his report on the question of “resolving” the conflict between what he called the two “warring races,” Lord Durham wrote that his aim in uniting the two Canadas was to subordinate Lower Canada to Upper Canada and the British monarchy. He wrote of the rebellions as “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state” and “a struggle not of principles, but of races,” insisting that the “races had become enemies.” The patriots of Upper Canada were deemed “renegades from their race” and the patriots of Lower Canada of “no history, and no literature.” He joined Upper Canada and Lower Canada in the Act of Union 1840, by taking a portion of the Quebec territory and population and adding it to Upper Canada, hence providing the heritage of those today considered Franco Ontarians, and half the debt of Upper Canada and gave it to Quebec. This consummated the subjugation of Lower Canada to Upper Canada in the hopes that the people of Lower Canada would give up their republican and national aspirations. This view has remained the same position of the Anglo-Canadian ruling class to this day.
Just how advanced the project of a two-star republic was can be seen in the type of struggles they launched. One cannot discuss the 1837-38 rebellions without mentioning the hunter’s lodges, the secret societies and the role of the patriots’ operations in the United States. After the Upper Canadian patriots were defeated at Montgomery Tavern in Toronto, their forces moved southward into the Niagara Peninsula and, eventually, to Navy Island on the Niagara River. The support given by republicans living in the United States, first in Buffalo and other cities, despite the reactionary role of the U.S. government which attempted to halt the Canadian revolutionaries, was a significant aid. This struggle spread all along the border, to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, with Windsor and Kingston also significant sites of battles.
The two-star republic had in its essence many modern features. In December 1837, a Republic of Upper Canada was proclaimed on Navy Island with a provisional government. The first proclamation of this government stated: “For nearly fifty years has our country languished under the blighting influence of military despots, strangers from Europe, ruling us, not according to laws of our choice, but by the capricious dictates of their arbitrary power.
“They have taxed us at their pleasure, robbed our exchequer, and carried off the proceeds to other lands – they have bribed and corrupted ministers of the Gospel, with the wealth raised by our industry – they have, in place of religious liberty, given rectories and clergy reserves to a foreign priesthood, with spiritual power dangerous to our peace as a people – they have bestowed millions of our lands on a company of Europeans for a nominal consideration, and left them to fleece and impoverish our country – they have spurned our petitions, involved us in their wars, excited feelings of national and sectional animosity in counties, townships and neighbourhoods, and ruled us, as Ireland has been ruled, to the advantage of persons in other lands, and to the prostration of our energies as a people.
“We are wearied of these oppressions, and resolved to throw off the yoke. Rise, Canadians, rise as one man, and the glorious object of our wishes is accomplished.”
Just as today, in those days the demand of a republic was not simply an abstract slogan or aspiration, but a problem taken up for solution to end monarchical domination and all foreign oppression. This appeal directly targeted the British imperialist conception of sovereignty, that it rests in the sovereign monarch and all of its territories are its possessions. It is not for nothing that the struggle of the Irish patriots is mentioned, nor is the reference to the heroic rebellion of Lower Canada later in the proclamation that “between us and the ocean a population of 600,000 souls are now in arms, resolved to be free.”
The patriots of Upper Canada were also, in their day, the first in line to defend the rights of all. One of the most pressing questions for Upper Canada and Niagara specifically, which was positioned as a key refuge for slaves escaping their plight southward, was how these brave people would be treated. One of the darkest incidents in this direction took place in September 1837, when Sir Francis Bond Head, at the head of the British monarchist forces ruling Upper Canada (and who later lead the counter-revolutionary forces in suppressing the patriots), ordered an escaped slave by the name of Moseby back to his state of Kentucky. When these decrees were issued, a fury of indignation swept the local population regardless of national background, and when he ran from the authorities, two men by the names of Herbert Holmes and Jacob Green were shot and killed for aiding Moseby’s escape. The Constitution, the organ of the Upper Canada patriots at that time, wrote: “Moseby sighed after liberty, and they say he mounted his tyrant’s horse, and sought a home and freedom in Upper Canada. This is his crime with Sir Francis!… If this be guilt, then would we be guilty of a like offence, if under the circumstances Moseby was placed in.”
Another key question on which the patriots took a firm position was the colonial dispossession of the land of the Indigenous peoples. The patriotic Upper Canadian newspaper The Colonial Advocate reprinted in full the 1829 petition of the people of River Credit to the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada requesting that they stop the dispossession of their land and the plundering of their rivers and lakes, degrading the natural environment and depriving them of their fishing-based livelihoods. Their demand was clear: “Now, father, once all the fish in these rivers and these lakes, and all the deer in these woods, were ours; but your red children only ask you to cause laws to be made to keep these bad men away from our fishery at the River Credit, from Mr. Racey’s line to the mouth of the river, and along the lake shore one mile on each side of the river as far as our land extends, and to punish those who attempt to fish here.” This was the demand of the Indigenous peoples and the patriots of Upper Canada, whose struggles were the extensions of one another.
At this time, there are many forces that promote theories of settler-colonialism, that the struggle is not one of the new against the old, the modern against the anachronistic, the oppressed peoples against a racist state, but of some skin colour against another – this follows the rulers’ “blame the people” logic. How far back does the struggle of the peoples of the Canadas go to discredit these theories.
The flag of the rebellion of Upper Canada, that of the two-star republic, embodies the united nation-building project of the Canadas, joined with the heroic rebellion of Lower Canada. The poem The Stars of Canada expresses this outlook in this short excerpt:
“Two independent States are born,
Let freemen cheer their natal day;
Let music usher in the morn,
The spangled flag aloft display.”
On this Patriots’ Day, we must also note the perfidy in giving Queen Victoria, the monarch who came to rein precisely at the moment the rebellions of the Canadas broke out, the monarch responsible for stomping out the strivings of these peoples with impunity, a national holiday each year. In recognizing the struggle of the patriots of Upper Canada and the two-star republic, the workers and oppressed peoples of Canada must use the occasion to raise higher and higher their name and banner, because at this time nobody else will raise it, because in it they find their heroic national history and bring forward the best from their past.
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