* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

This eBook was produced by: John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

One hundred and fifty prisoners from Upper and Lower Canada were sent to the British penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land following the uprisings and border troubles of the years 1837-38. Fifty-eight from the French-Canadian province had been arrested and sentenced following the outbreaks of violence, while the ninety-two from Upper Canada had been implicated in border attacks by Patriot invaders from the United States.

Apart from a number who died in exile, most of these men eventually made their way back to Canada or to the United States, and nine of them later wrote or dictated narratives of their experiences. Eight of these narratives appeared between 1843 and 1850, and one other, written by a French-Canadian exile, in 1864.

Copies of these little books, produced for the most part in obscure printing offices, are now scarce and have become collectors’ items. Interest in the stories they told has not been confined to America, but has developed in Australia and Tasmania, where copies have gone into large libraries and into private hands. Further indication of this Australian interest is shown by the fact that two of the narratives (both by French-Canadian exiles) have been translated and edited by an Australian historian and reprinted in limited editions. None has ever been reprinted in Canada or the United States, nor has any new narrative heretofore appeared. The story of Elijah Woodman is, therefore, the first of such accounts to appear in almost one hundred years and is, probably, the last that will be added to the records of the Canadian exiles of 1837-38.

The Elijah Woodman story is based primarily upon letters written to his family and relatives from Van Diemen’s Land, together with some copies made long ago of extracts from diaries which have unfortunately disappeared since they were brought back to America in 1848.

Earlier narratives written by exiles from Upper Canada frequently display violent hatred of England and give detailed accounts of indignities suffered by prisoners, but little of this is to be found in Woodman’s letters. His restraint from invective or exaggeration of his sufferings is, perhaps, the best guarantee of the authenticity of his story.

In the preparation of this work the author has been much indebted to many people. First of all his thanks should be tendered to Colonel Ibbotson Leonard, of London, great-grandson of the exile, who made the documents gathered by his father available and supplemented them with personal information. Thanks should also be extended to Dr. W. Kaye Lamb, Public Archivist at Ottawa; to Dr. J. J. Talman of the University of Western Ontario at London and to Dr. James Gibson of Carleton University, Ottawa, both of whom read the manuscript and made helpful criticisms and suggestions; to the staff of the library of the University of Western Ontario, the staff of the London Public Library, and the librarian of Laval University at Quebec; to Miss Lillian R. Benson, former president of the Ontario Historical Society; and particularly to my wife, Margaret Landon, who typed the manuscript and assisted in the reading of the proofs.

This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Humanities Research Council of Canada out of funds provided by the Canada Council.

FRED LANDON

An American Farmer Goes West

Elijah Crocker Woodman, born in Buxton, Maine, September 22, 1797, farmer and lumberman by occupation, travelled to Upper Canada in the year 1830, one of the numberless Americans of his time who were “moving west”. The migration in which he shared, the largest that the republic has ever known, had begun at the close of the War of 1812. Families who for generations had lived in the New England states joined in this breaking up of old ties. Elijah Woodman was himself of the seventh generation of his family in America, a descendant of Edward C. Woodman, who, with his wife Joanna and a brother, Archelaus, came to Newbury, Mass., in 1635, the year in which that town was incorporated. Archelaus came from Christian Milford, a Wiltshire parish in the north-west part of that county, and Edward probably came from Corsham, about eleven miles distant. Of the ninety-one grantees who settled Newbury, fifteen were entitled to the appellation “Mr.” One of these was Edward Woodman, who was described as “a man of talents, influence, firmness and decision”. He is recorded as holding various offices in the community and was evidently a person of some importance. He resided in Newbury until his death some time prior to 1694. His age is not known. His son, Joshua, who died May 30, 1703, aged 67, was, as his gravestone records, the first child born in Newbury.^[1]

The first migration of the Woodman family in America came early in the eighteenth century when three brothers, Joseph, Joshua and Nathan, great-grandsons of Edward, moved with their families to the northern portion of Massachusetts (later to become the State of Maine) and were granted land in the vicinity of the present Buxton. Joseph had a son of the same name whose dates are not known; and a grandson, Edmund, born July 16, 1773, was the father of Elijah, the man with whose story we are concerned. His mother’s name was Lydia Crocker.

When Elijah Woodman set his face westward in 1830, the migration out of the older eastern states had been under way for more than a decade and was to continue for many years more, as state after state in the West was constituted and welcomed population. “Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward,” wrote Morris Birkbeck, an English visitor in 1817, as he found himself in the stream of people headed for the West. Between 1812 and 1820 six new states had been admitted to the Union, and to each of these people continued to flock in succeeding years. Standing directly in the path of many of these people was the British province of Upper Canada, the capture of which had been one of the aims of the “War Hawks”, that militant group of young Congressmen from the West who helped bring on hostilities in 1812. Their war aims had not been realized, due to the stout defence put up by the Canadians; but the Upper Canada lands, fertile, well watered and close at hand, seemed as desirable as ever.

Three years of war, with its losses and privations, left a deep suspicion of all things American in the minds of British and Canadian officials. Indeed, the British Government in January, 1815, had authorized the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada to refuse grants of land to persons of American nationality and to prevent them from even entering its bounds. Henceforth the province was to be peopled by British stock, uncontaminated by American republican ideas.

Almost at once there came a challenge to this policy of exclusion. Canadian business men, particularly those holding tracts of land for speculative purposes, could foresee no likelihood of increased trade or sales of land if future settlement of the province was to be by discharged veterans of the Napoleonic wars or by assisted emigration of British paupers. Such people would have no money to buy land. They would rather expect to receive it without payment of any kind, and if conditions in the province did not please them they would probably pass quickly into the United States.

The question of American immigration became one of the chief issues of the post-war period in Upper Canada, was discussed heatedly in the Assembly, and finally led to the passing of a Bill providing that all persons who had received grants of land, held public office, or taken the oath of allegiance, and had settled in the province in or before 1820, were to be recognized as British citizens without qualification of any kind. Others might be admitted to citizenship at the end of seven years’ residence. The Assembly’s action was grudgingly approved by the Colonial Office at Westminster, but Canadian officialdom continued to maintain an unfriendly attitude.

As late as 1831, just a year after Woodman entered the province, Sir John Colborne was still writing to London in alarm over the influx of American settlers, and in 1833 appears to have had in mind a possible division of the province, with London, Governor Simcoe’s earlier choice, as the capital of the more westerly section. Here he hoped to settle large numbers of British immigrants and thereby counteract “the influence of Yankeeism so prevalent about St. Thomas and along the lake shore”. Such were the plans that he outlined to Rev. Benjamin Cronyn, rector at London, whose church, then being built, was to be completed with government funds, a further guard against “republicanism”.

Woodman entered the province at a time when it was experiencing its earliest industrial development, and to this development American immigrants were making important contributions. Men with capital and technical knowledge were exploiting new sources of wealth and providing employment in lines other than agriculture. It was in this period that a group of young Americans from New York State took over the development of considerable deposits of bog iron along the north shore of Lake Erie. With this natural resource they built up an industry that not only gave employment to many people but provided iron for the making of kettles, stoves and implements needed by the pioneer settlers. To this Long Point enterprise came in 1829 one Elijah Leonard from New York State. The family name Leonard will appear later in this narrative; and the iron industry that Elijah Leonard himself founded in 1834 at St. Thomas, and removed to London in 1838, had a continuous family ownership of over 120 years.

Elijah Leonard, Sr., born at Taunton, Massachusetts, in May of 1787, belonged to a family that came to Massachusetts from Wales about 1650 and for generations had been workers in iron. The Leonard Forge near Taunton was in operation for over two hundred years, and Samuel Leonard, the father of Elijah, is credited with having rolled the first shovel ever done in America, an invention that reduced the price one-half. Elijah Leonard died at London Dec. 18, 1855. His son, Elijah Leonard, Jr., born near Syracuse, New York, September 10, 1814, was associated with his father in business.

In Canada the elder Elijah Leonard was also associated with other Americans whose enterprises extended widely. One of them, George Tillson, established a forge on Otter Creek, which flows into Lake Erie, and later began a milling business at what is now the site of the Town of Tillsonburg. Another of the group, Hiram Capron, developed the gypsum beds on the Grand River and was so active in various enterprises that he was designated “King Capron” by the countryside. His early development of gypsum expanded until it is today one of the great industries of Western Ontario.

While William Hamilton Merritt, who was born in New York State but grew up in Upper Canada to become the chief promoter of the Welland Canal, would scarcely be called an American, it was another American, J. B. Yates, also from New York State, who was most prominent in the financing of the Canal enterprise. These were followed later by others from the United States. James Miller Williams, born in 1817 at Camden, New Jersey, dug the first commercially successful oil well and built the first Canadian oil refinery. To mention but one other name, Samuel Zimmerman, is to present an American who was one of the most active figures of his day in the railway projects that were changing the whole character of the province. Elijah Woodman had come to Upper Canada at a time when his fellow-countrymen formed one of the most enterprising and aggressive groups in the business community.

It was in lumbering rather than in agriculture that Woodman sought to better himself. He established himself on the Otter Creek not far from the present town of Tillsonburg, and floated the product of his mill in rafts to Port Burwell at the creek’s mouth. He was associated in this enterprise with one Reuben W. Lamb, and there is among the Woodman papers a note signed by Woodman on April 23, 1836, promising delivery to his partner, Lamb, on January 1, 1837, of twenty thousand feet of common pine lumber.

Woodman’s mill was located in the very heart of one of the richest stands of timber in the province. Henry C. Woodman, a son, recalled in later years that the mill at one time ran night and day, cutting up the abundant pine, chestnut, and black walnut. He recalled as a boy riding for miles on the rafts as they moved toward the lake port where the lumber was loaded on schooners. Otter Creek was the only outlet from this heavily timbered district, and Port Burwell its shipping point. Hundreds of vessel loads passed annually out of this port, where as early as 1836 a harbour company had been formed by Colonel Mahlon Burwell, the founder of the place. Port Burwell has had continued marine importance through the years, and today has car ferry connections with American ports across the lake by which immense quantities of coal are brought in for industrial purposes and for railway consumption.

Woodman brought his family into Canada in 1832. He had been married in February, 1819, to Apphia Elden, of Buxton, aged twenty-one, and six of his seven children, three boys and three girls, were born in the United States. A seventh child, a daughter, was born in Bayham Township in the Otter Creek country in 1832.

Woodman’s religion and his politics might be known in part by the names of his children—for to one son he gave the name Balfour, to whose theology he subscribed, and to another Henry Clay, whose policies he supported. Both the Woodman and the Elden families were adherents of the Universalist faith, believers in “the Grace of God that bringeth salvation to all men”. Of Elijah Woodman himself it was probably true, as was said at a memorial sermon preached after his death, that “the doctrine of his church had not entered his heart until that heart was made soft by affliction, and then it did enter to sanctify and cheer it.”

Woodman had reached the age of thirty-three when he entered the British province. He was active and ambitious, he knew the technique of lumbering from his experience in Maine, and he had high expectations of success. It was with much satisfaction that he found his family joined with him and he wrote later to his relatives that he wanted no child of his “to go back to Maine and plant himself or herself in that cold, barren country.” If another movement were to be made it would be to the new western state of Wisconsin; and it is of interest to note that his three sons all went to that state in later years.

In migrating to Upper Canada, Woodman was leaving behind an ancient English colony but an only recently admitted state of the American Union. Its history went back to the early seventeenth century, when the coastal area between the Kennebec and Merrimac Rivers was granted to two Englishmen, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and George Mason. To this grant was given the name of Maine, and Gorges established his capital at York in 1639. In 1677 Massachusetts bought out the heirs of Gorges, and in 1691 a new charter for the state incorporated everything between Plymouth on the south and French Acadia to the north. Maine then continued as a part of Massachusetts until 1820, when it was separated and made into a new state, retaining its original name. The circumstances under which it came into the Union were peculiar and are of special interest in American history, involving as they do the great issue of slavery, which was to agitate the country for the next forty years and then divide it into two armed camps in the greatest civil war of the nineteenth century.

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson negotiated with the Emperor Napoleon the purchase of the great central area, once the property of Spain, lying between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes region and known as Louisiana. Into this huge accession there was immediate westward migration from the older states. The area across the Mississippi lying to the westward of Illinois and known as Missouri, drew many people from Kentucky and Tennessee, some of whom took their slaves with them. In 1818 they petitioned Congress for admission as a state and asked that they might retain slavery within its borders. Though slavery had been prohibited in the old Northwest Territory by the Ordinance of 1787, no such restriction applied to the Louisiana Purchase, and it was at once recognized that an important precedent would be set by the admission of Missouri. In the House of Representatives an amendment by James Tallmadge of New York would have prohibited the entry of slaves and would have freed all children of slaves at the age of twenty-five. This amendment passed the House but failed in the Senate.

The situation was delicate and was made increasingly so by the fact that there was in 1818 an equal number of free and of slave states, eleven of each, with a like proportion of members of the Senate. The admission of Missouri as a slave state would at once overturn this balance, something which the North could not but view with fear. How to meet this situation was the problem, and it was solved by the admission of Maine along with Missouri, thus preserving the balance. Had this circumstance not arisen it is quite possible that Maine might not have been separated from its parent state. This was the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820, whose really vital clause was that which prohibited for the future the admission of slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30′, being the southern boundary of the new slave state of Missouri. This compromise, arrived at in 1820, lasted until 1854, when it was repealed in a further dispute over the extension of slavery in the territories. The agitation that resulted hastened the coming of the war.

The North Shore of Lake Erie

There were marked contrasts between the land that Elijah Woodman quitted in 1830 and that to which he then journeyed. Maine, with its rugged and broken coast-line looking out to the Atlantic Ocean, had an interior dotted with small lakes—sixteen hundred in all, so it was said, though so small were most of them that the entire water area was but 2,300 square miles. The region in Canada to which he was migrating had almost no small lakes, but its whole climate and character were influenced by the presence of one great lake having an area more than four times that of all the lakes of Maine combined.

The region to the north of Lake Erie was one of the most pleasant in all Canada, and continues to this day to be regarded as the garden of the Dominion. In the Niagara area and in the region about the Detroit River, at opposite ends of the Lake Erie shore-line, fruits and vegetables of all kinds grow luxuriantly and ripen early, while in the area between, grains of all kinds, and tobacco of high quality are produced. Here lie several of the most productive agricultural counties in all Canada. These are, of course, developments that have come through later years, for when Woodman first came the whole area was but emerging from dense forest, and it was with a lumberman’s eye that he had fixed upon this destination. Here were almost unlimited forest resources, with a ready market for the lumber in the American communities across the lake.

It is an anomaly in the history of the exploration of the Great Lakes that their discovery began at the centre. Champlain in late July, 1615, almost unexpectedly found himself emerging from the French River upon the broad waters of Georgian Bay, which he described as the “fresh-water sea”. Thence exploration extended northward to Lake Superior, westward to Lake Huron proper and Lake Michigan, with Lake Ontario gradually becoming known, chiefly through missionary activity. Last of all to be visited was Lake Erie. It was more than fifty years after Champlain had discovered the great arm of Lake Huron before Lake Erie could be set down, even in the crudest form, on any chart.

The first white man to see Lake Erie was Louis Jolliet, a young native-born Canadian who had been educated at the Seminary of Quebec and in France and was then employed in various capacities by the administration of the colony. He is chiefly remembered today as the associate of Father Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionary, in the discovery and exploration of the great Mississippi River. In 1669, however, the Intendant of the French colony, Jean Talon, had sent him on a mission to Sault Ste. Marie with supplies for one Jean Peré, who had gone there a year earlier to investigate the copper deposits of Lake Superior. These had become known through trade with the Indians.

Jolliet failed in his mission to the Sault, since he was unable to find any trace of Peré; but the setback turned in the end to good account. While there he saved a young Iroquois prisoner from death by torture, and planned to take him back to Quebec. The young prisoner made a startling suggestion. Instead of retracing the course to Montreal by Georgian Bay, the French River, Lake Nipissing and the Ottawa River, with all the difficulties that this route presented, why not go directly south on Lake Huron? The upper portion of this lake was, of course, well known by 1669, voyagers having crossed it repeatedly to enter the straits of Mackinac and Lake Michigan. Always the lake seemed to beckon southward, but no white man had attempted it before. Jolliet and his savage companion paddled away from the mouth of the St. Mary’s River and the Straits, following day after day the wooded shores of Lake Huron, until the lake narrowed and they were carried by the swift current into the St. Clair River. Continuing their journey, ever southward, they crossed Lake St. Clair, entered the Detroit River, and soon found themselves on yet another large lake—Lake Erie.

Jolliet and his companion did not journey the entire length of Lake Erie, though they might easily have done so. The Indian was afraid of enemies, so they landed on the north shore when about half-way to Niagara, hid their canoe, and continued their journey overland.

They were quite unaware that as they journeyed eastward, another French party from Montreal was approaching; and the meeting between these two is one of the dramatic incidents in the history of Great Lakes exploration. The second expedition, numbering more than a score of persons, was headed by the great explorer La Salle. It included two Sulpician priests from Montreal, Dollier de Casson and René Bréhant de Galinée. The meeting of the two parties took place on September 24, 1669, on the Indian trail between Burlington Bay and the Grand River; and one group was doubtless as surprised as the other at this encounter in the wilderness.

Jolliet greatly stirred the interest and curiosity of La Salle and the priests when he showed them a map which he had made of those portions of the upper lakes that he had visited. He also told the two priests of the great need of further missionary work among the Indians of the north country. Intrigued by the prospect of spreading the faith, the fathers indicated their readiness to follow the route to the north which he had just traversed, but to this La Salle was quite opposed. He had other plans in mind. The Ohio River country was his destination and he had no intention of being diverted from it. Consequently, on the last day of September, the party that had started out from Montreal broke up after Father Dollier de Casson had celebrated mass and all had received the sacrament.

La Salle was quite ready to separate from his clerical friends, and gave out that because of illness he would return to Montreal. Actually what he did was to secure a guide from the Onondaga Indians and make his way by a small tributary to the Ohio River. This he descended at least as far as the rapids at present-day Louisville. There his men abandoned him and he was forced to make his way back to Montreal alone. This is an obscure period in his career and it is difficult to follow his travels. As Francis Parkman remarks: “That he was busied in active exploration, and that he made important discoveries is certain; but the extent and character of his discoveries remain wrapped in doubt.”^[2]

No such doubt remains as to the further activities of the two Sulpicians after they had separated from La Salle. Father Galinée had kept a detailed journal of the expedition from the departure from Montreal on July 6, 1669, and this journal he continued until his arrival back in Montreal on June 18, 1670. More than that, he produced a map, the first to be made of the upper lakes at first hand. A copy of this was at once sent by the Intendant to the King in France and was deposited in the royal archives.

So far as the priests knew, La Salle was returning to Montreal; but they planned to find out more of the region that Jolliet had described. Accordingly they set off with three of the canoes and with ten men, the same number that remained with La Salle. They planned to secure Jolliet’s canoe, which had been hidden along the lake shore, and three of the party were sent ahead to find it. They were never heard of again and may have deserted to La Salle. The priests, with the other seven men, meanwhile made their way through the forests to the Grand River, descended it with great difficulty because of its shallowness, and came at last upon the shore of Lake Erie. This was about the first week of October, a period of autumn gales. The lake, says Galinée, “appeared at first to us like a great sea, because there was a great south wind blowing at the time.”

Journeying for three days westward along the shore of the lake, they found the entrance to a little river that appeared so beautiful and had such an abundance of game that it seemed in every way desirable as a wintering-place. It was the little river Lynn, which empties into Lake Erie where the village of Port Dover is today. Further examination, however, showed that the place was too exposed to the lake’s winds, and it was decided to build a cabin somewhat farther back from the lake. So here, in October, 1669, they erected the first dwelling on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. Historical investigation made more than sixty years ago determined the exact spot where this cabin stood. The location was just above the forks where Black Creek joins the River Lynn, otherwise known as Patterson’s Creek. Slight elevations indicated the outlines of the early building, and trenches for drainage were quite distinct. Deposits of ashes indicated where the hearth had been placed, and a slight depression in an embankment showed where the door stood, near the little rivulet from which they got their water.

While the cabin was under construction, Galinée records that they hunted and killed a considerable number of deer and smoked the meat, so that they no longer had any fear of want during the winter. In addition they gathered a stock of walnuts and chestnuts, as well as apples, plums, grapes, and cranberries, all of which were in abundance in the fall season. Vines that were found growing in the sand produced grapes described as being as large and sweet as the finest of France. So abundant were they that, by Galinée’s estimate, they might have made twenty-five or thirty hogsheads of heavy dark wine “as good as vin de grave”.

Such were the pleasant conditions under which the two priests and their seven men spent somewhat more than five months of the winter of 1669-70. “I leave it to you,” says Galinée, “whether we suffered in the midst of this abundance in this earthly Paradise of Canada. I call it so because there is assuredly no more beautiful region in Canada.” They had erected an altar at the end of the cabin, and mass was said three times a week, with prayers morning and evening “and every other Christian exercise”.

For the first three months they saw no one, but after that time Iroquois hunters looking for beaver occasionally came to the cabin and were fascinated by the structure and its furnishings. They were not, however, hostile. On Passion Sunday, March 23, 1670, the whole party proceeded to the lake shore and there erected a large cross in memory of their sojourn in this pleasant land. At the same time they placed at the foot of the cross the arms of the King of France, with a formal inscription setting forth that the two Sulpicians with their seven men had been the first of all Europeans to winter on the lake and had taken possession of it in the name of King Louis XIV by attaching his arms to the cross. In recent years the Canadian Government has erected an imposing marble cross bearing a suitable inscription to record this act of the Sulpicians. Because of erosion on the lake shore the new cross has already had to be moved once, and the site of the original wooden cross of 1670 is probably today far out in the lake.

Three days later the Sulpicians resumed their journey westward. Galinée’s journal tells of many misadventures, the most serious being the loss of their altar service near Point Pelee by a sudden rise of the waters during the night. Without this precious property their missionary efforts would be greatly handicapped. However, setting steadily northward and following the Canadian shore on Lake Huron, they paddled day after day until they arrived at the Sault on May 25, 1670. They were not too cordially received by the Jesuit fathers, who doubtless regarded them as interlopers, but they were happy to receive communion for the first time in a month and a half. Recognizing that they had no present resources to undertake missionary effort, their stay at the Sault was brief. They began the journey back to Montreal on May 28 and accomplished it in three weeks. They had been absent almost a year, and on their return were looked upon by their associates almost like dead men who had come to life again.

The visitor to Montreal today may see on the wall of the old Seminary of St. Sulpice, immediately adjacent to the Church of Notre Dame, a tablet that reads: “François Dollier de Casson, first historian of Montreal, captain under Marshal de Turenne, then priest of St. Sulpice during thirty-five years. He died in 1701, curé of the parish.” We know further that he was a native of Brittany and came of a noble family. Galinée was also of a noble Breton family, had received a mathematical training, and was a skilful map-maker. The map he made for Talon was a definite contribution to the knowledge of the Great Lakes.

The events we have just reviewed took place 160 years before Elijah Woodman came into Galinée’s “earthly Paradise of Canada”, distant not more than thirty miles from Woodman’s timber lands and sawmill. Yet we very confidently assert that he never knew anything of this early history of the region. Nor is it at all likely that any person of his time in the whole area between Niagara and Detroit ever heard of these men and their adventures. It remained for historians of a later date, and particularly for the great Francis Parkman, to unravel the details from ancient manuscripts and maps, many of them preserved in the archives and libraries of France, and to set the whole down for future generations. The little wooden cross on the shore of Lake Erie soon fell before winds and weather, the little cabin on Black Creek rotted back into earth, and the men who had erected both eventually finished their days. Paper and ink alone preserved the story that we know today.

France made no impression in her day upon the region that Galinée so poetically described as an earthly Paradise. No colonists came from the mother country or from the St. Lawrence region to profit by cultivation of the rich soil, to exploit the timber resources, or to enjoy the pleasant climate. It had been a forest wilderness when Galinée and De Casson came there in 1669; it was still a forest wilderness when the future of half the continent was decided in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham; and it remained a forest wilderness until the close of the eighteenth century.

Upper Canada Society in the Thirties

On entering Upper Canada in 1830, Woodman found himself not only in a different climate and environment but also in a different society. He had come from a long-settled region that grew in population chiefly by its natural increase rather than through the arrival of new-comers from older states or from abroad. This slowly increasing population tended to be conservative in outlook and in habits. In Upper Canada Woodman found himself in a new society made up of several different elements, all of which had but recently arrived. It would require years of amalgamation to bring any definite pattern, and at the time of his arrival the region was passing through a period in which the differences in outlook were much more in evidence than any common likeness.

When the British took over the French possessions in America by conquest in 1760, and by treaty three years later, the area north of Lake Erie was, as we have seen, almost uninhabited. Only at Niagara and Detroit was there any population, and this was French. After 1763 it was conquered territory, and being far distant from the military centres of Quebec and Montreal, attracted little interest. It was the American Revolution that altered its character and gave it the first accession of population in the migration of Loyalists.

It is recognized today that the American people during the course of the Revolution were not a unit, but were divided into three groups, approximately equal in size: extreme radicals who sought independence, extreme Loyalists who wished to retain the connection with Britain, and neutrals who had either not made up their minds or were waiting to see which way the agitation would develop. Thus, the Revolution was carried through by about one-third of the population, the chief centres of the independence movement being in New England and Virginia. Loyalists were most numerous in the middle states, where they probably constituted a majority; and it was from these states, New York particularly, that Upper Canada drew new population in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Many of these people had actively supported the British cause, even to the point of enlisting in the British army or in Loyalist companies under local leaders.

That these supporters of the British cause should arouse the bitter hatred of those moving for independence was but to be expected; and their hostile feelings were often expressed in ballads, of which a sample may be quoted:

The feelings so harshly expressed in time of war persisted long into the next century, and only in recent times have American historians given justice to the attitude of the Loyalists. On the other hand, from the time of their arrival in Canada the migratory Loyalists have been held up to an uncritical veneration which one Canadian historian has described as having in it “something of the spirit of primitive ancestor-worship”.^[3]

Loyalists began to leave the States early in the revolutionary movement, some returning to England, others going to the West Indies or to Canada. This latter exodus was of great importance to the country so recently acquired by conquest from France. The Tories or Loyalists who entered Canada brought with them a tradition of freehold tenure of land, acquaintance with English laws, and experience with representative institutions in the shape of popularly elected assemblies. These they expected to find in the land to which they were migrating; and when they did not, they immediately demanded a change, which was eventually provided in 1791 through the Canada Act of the British Parliament. This legislation was clearly due to the coming of the American element that had supported the British cause.

An analysis of the Loyalists who came to Canada shows many office-holders; several large land-holders, chiefly from New York State; a few professional men, such as lawyers, ministers, and doctors; and some merchants, with the largest group of all made up of plain, humble farming folk. This latter group comprised most of the Loyalists who came after 1791 into Upper Canada, the present-day Ontario. In their American homes they had been farmers, and many had early joined the British forces. Of all Loyalists they would be the least disturbed by a transfer of residence, and would most easily fit into a new environment. It was such people, “mostly farmers from the back parts of New York Province”, who became Upper Canada’s pioneers.

Of the Loyalists who settled in Upper Canada, about three hundred families located near Niagara and Detroit. Scattered families were later to be found along the lake shore, particularly in the Long Point country a little to the east of where Woodman was located. He probably had some contact with them during the years that he was operating his sawmill.

Woodman was himself a representative of the second largest group in the area’s population—plain American immigrants. The Loyalists had come to Canada because their attitude or words had made it impossible for them to remain in their pre-revolutionary homes. Later American emigrants to Canada had no such reason for migrating. They went to Canada because it was to their advantage to do so. They could secure cheap land and, in general, better their condition. No other motive was needed.

Patrick Shirreff, an Irish visitor to Upper Canada in 1833, wrote that most of the enterprising business people in the province had come from the United States. He also noted that nine out of ten of the hotel-keepers and stage-drivers whom he encountered were Americans. The south-western part of Upper Canada had a steady flow of people entering and crossing from east to west, and by 1830 a stage-coach ran regularly three times a week to Detroit. At intervals there were inns where meals were provided and where lodging could be had at night.

British travellers in Upper Canada never failed to notice the likeness between the two neighbouring peoples in their habits of life and even in their language. “I shall renounce all pretensions to discernment,” wrote Shirreff, “if the inhabitants of Upper Canada are not the most accomplished Yankees on this side of the Atlantic.”^[4] He thought, however, that there was a lack in Upper Canada of the little refinements that softened the picture in the United States. He found Upper Canada barrooms filled with “swearing tipsy people” and the inns themselves badly conducted “from the stage-coach to the presenting of butter which, instead of being, as in the States, hardened by means of ice, was an unclean fluid.”

Persistent curiosity about other people’s business, another American characteristic, was also wide-spread in Upper Canada. It was really friendliness, but it annoyed visitors, particularly British. Shirreff says that he found himself quickly falling into the American habit of nodding to strangers whom he met on the street. Many visitors noted the contrast between the youthfulness and unceasing activity of American communities and the apparent spirit of apathy in the Canadian province. John Howison had noted this even a decade before Shirreff. “There,” he wrote, “bustle, improvement and animation fill every street; here dulness, decay and apathy discourage enterprise and repress exertion.”

American emigration to Upper Canada had received its initial stimulus in the seventeen-nineties when Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of the province, invited new-comers to his domain, offering land to reputable settlers. He believed that in the newly created republic there were still many people who, despite the success of the independence movement, would prefer to live under the British flag. His invitation brought in numerous land-seekers, but the motives of some who came could be questioned, as could also their loyalty. When war came with the United States in 1812 it found the province with a dangerously disloyal element in its midst. Some of these had to be expelled, while others simply disappeared over the border. The war checked American immigration for a time, but when it was again permitted the great westward movement was under way and Upper Canada drew in many who had originally headed for some western state. Woodman himself was one of this later group. He had probably left Maine with the intention of going to Wisconsin, and Wisconsin did not disappear from his mind during the years that he spent in Upper Canada.

A third element in Upper Canada’s population—not large in number, but influential—was made up of half-pay officers retired after the close of the Napoleonic wars and well-to-do folk from the British Isles who were attracted by the prospects of a new land. The outdoor life, with ample opportunity for sport and hunting, was coveted by these people, who also sometimes looked forward to building up an estate. Some of them brought capital from the old land. Thus they could pay for the clearing and improving of the lands that they received as grants.

Alfred Domett, friend of the poet Robert Browning, was in Canada in the early thirties and spent several months in Woodstock and its vicinity, not far from the region where Woodman was engaged in lumbering. There is no evidence that they ever met, though Domett in his journal makes several references to the forest wealth of the district. Domett’s association was chiefly with the colourful group of half-pay officers of the British army and navy who were conspicuous in the Woodstock community. Their background and mode of life differed considerably from that of the average settler in the community and their experience equipped them to take leading roles in the community’s activities. As a group they made a definite contribution to the political and business life of Oxford County, several of them being justices of the peace and officers in the local militia. Domett makes reference in his journal to the abundance of game, a condition that was general along the north shore of Lake Erie and was noted by all early travellers. The Long Point area was renowned, as it still is today, for the abundance of its ducks, which congregated in the wild-rice swamps along the shore. Deer were also plentiful inland and furnished fresh meat for many households, always available and at a very low price.

There remains to be mentioned one other group, most numerous of all and scattered all over the south-western section of the province. These were the ordinary emigrants from the British Isles, depressed people who looked to the United States and Canada as a promised land. They began to come in the twenties, at a time when there was abundance of land available for settlement and much of it accessible. In the area north of Lake Erie the disposal of the land was largely in the hands of Colonel Thomas Talbot, who, at his home at Talbot Creek, devoted himself to the acquisition of a great estate and the settlement of parts of townships lying north of Lake Erie.

Talbot was an eighteenth-century figure and remained so to the end of his days. As a younger member of a titled Irish family, he entered the army at an early age and, as a youthful officer, came to Upper Canada in 1792 with Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe. He fell in love at once with the country and decided to make it his home and build up an estate. He received his first grant of land in 1803, five thousand acres in Dunwich Township, and so added to it that by 1830 he had become the largest individual landowner in the western part of the province. A second and even more important activity was the settlement of the townships north of Lake Erie, some of them north of the Thames River. Over this region, extending from Long Point in the east to the Detroit River, his power was as absolute as that of a feudal baron. To facilitate settlement, he successfully urged upon the Government the necessity of constructing proper roads, with the result that the Talbot roads became at an early date the best in the western part of the province.

Visitors to the home of the Colonel at Port Talbot have left us interesting glimpses of the man and of the life that he led. Land-seekers came day by day to make known their requests, and were received by him from behind a shuttered window which he did not hesitate to close in the face of the applicant if not pleased with his appearance or manner.

Mrs. Anna Jameson, the English writer, was there in the summer of 1837. She arrived at night and was most comfortably lodged in the “chateau”, as she romantically termed the dwelling. It was, she says, a long wooden building, chiefly of rough logs, with a covered porch running along the south side. Here were suspended implements of husbandry, while in the vestibule or hall were sacks of wheat and piles of sheep-skins. In the living-room in front of a capacious chimney was a long wooden table flanked with two wooden chairs cut from the forest round about. Her bedroom was comfortable and well furnished, “a fire blazed cheerfully, where female hands had evidently presided to arrange my toilet and where female aid awaited me.” The morning brought more surprises.

“On leaving my apartment in the morning,” she writes, “I used to find groups of strange figures lounging round the door, ragged, black-bearded, gaunt, travel-worn and toil-worn emigrants, Irish, Scotch and American, come to offer themselves as settlers. These he used to call his land-pirates; and curious, and characteristic, and dramatic beyond description, were the scenes which used to take place between this grand bashaw of the wilderness and his hungry, importunate clients and petitioners.”

Talbot was in his sixty-sixth year when Mrs. Jameson was his guest. She thought that he looked younger than that, and found in his features, air and deportment something that stamped him as a gentleman despite the rudeness of his dwelling. She thought also that there was a striking resemblance to the King (William the Fourth). He told her that the area under his management on behalf of the Government then contained about 650,000 acres of land, of which nearly 100,000 was cleared and cultivated. Within this area was a population that amounted to about 50,000. His own holdings he had amassed by receiving from the Government additional land (200 acres) for every settler to whom he allotted a farm of 50 acres. “You see,” he said gaily, “I may boast, like the Irishman of the farce, of having peopled a whole country with my own hands.” Actually some 528,000 acres, north of Lake Erie, were settled under his direction. That is the Talbot Settlement.

Colonel Talbot’s political views were decidedly conservative. He believed that the advancing democracy must ultimately lead to the separation of Canada from the British Empire. He had his own remedy for such a disaster. This he outlined in the forties in a letter to his friend, Lord Wharncliffe. Let all the North American provinces be united in a vice-royalty, with the creation of a peerage to give it respectability. He even favoured the appointment of the Duke of Cambridge as viceroy and as ruler if independence ever came.

No other section of Upper Canada was more systematically peopled than this Talbot country, and no other had a better system of roads to facilitate settlement. Woodman must have heard much of the progress of this area, and at a little later date he was to see something of the influence of Talbot himself in the politics of the day.^[5]

Quite as marked as were the racial origins of the people of Upper Canada was the character of their religious beliefs. “There is nothing which surprises a tourist in America more than the variety of religious sects and persuasions that exist and flourish over this vast continent” was an observation made by David Wilkie, an English visitor in 1835, which applied to Upper Canada quite as much as it did to the American states. The War of 1812 had checked all American influence for a time, but by 1830 it was as marked as ever, and conspicuously so in the field of religion. Even the Church of England, which sought to dominate the religion and control education in Upper Canada, had to change its policy in the thirties. In earlier years it had depended upon aid from England for its support. In 1831, however, it was announced that this aid would be gradually withdrawn and the church must assume part of its own support. Therefore, it adopted some of the methods of its rivals, and we find travelling Anglican itinerants, similar to those of the Methodists, holding services in barns, school-houses, and even the meeting-houses of rival sects.

The largest religious body was the Methodists, who, originally of American origin, had become organized as a Canadian body following the War of 1812. Their work was widely recognized for its effectiveness. T. W. Magrath, an Irish settler living in Erindale, near Toronto, feared that the time had passed when his own church, the Anglican, could recover the ground it had lost to the Methodists. “The Methodist dissenters,” he wrote, “have obtained an ascendancy over our infant population. Their habits of domiciliary visitation, their acquaintance with the tastes and peculiarities of the Canadians, their readiness to take long and fatiguing rides in the discharge of their self-imposed labours, render them formidable rivals to our more easy-going clergy.”

Magrath noted that the simple service of the dissenting groups—a hymn, a prayer, and a sermon—was preferred by the common folk of Upper Canada to the long prayers and frequent change of posture in the Church of England. The camp meeting and the revival were the more typical forms of religious expression in the province. Most noticeable, however, was the variety of minor sects, all seeking to advance their particular beliefs. The authorities at times became suspicious over some of these sects, American in origin and in Canada tending to belong to the Reform party.

One such was Universalism, to which Woodman and his family adhered. This particular sect was strongest in the Niagara Peninsula, in the London District, and in an area of which Brantford was the centre. These were districts where the Methodists and Baptists had long laboured, and apparently the Universalist doctrine of the final salvation of all men found a ready acceptance.

Pennsylvania contributed extensive Mennonite and Quaker groups, who formed settlements in York and Waterloo Counties, while Brethren in Christ (Tunkers) came into the Niagara District. Even Mormons were to be found in Lambton County near the St. Clair River, and the Millerite movement found adherents in the eastern part of the province. The Quakers or Friends who came to Canada were not Loyalists, as has often been stated, though their migration was mixed with the movement of Loyalist relatives and friends.^[6]

Roman Catholics were not numerous in these Western counties of Upper Canada save at Niagara and Detroit, where French influence lingered for many years. Detroit in particular retained a French character well into the nineteenth century. Missionary activity, however, was general in the area and priests travelled about, systematically visiting and counselling individual families or gathering them together for the celebration of the mass. As communities became embryo towns, parishes were established and churches were built. Elsewhere in Upper Canada, particularly in the east on the border of Lower Canada (Quebec), Roman Catholics were much more numerous.

Upper Canada Politics in the Thirties

The decade of the thirties brought to the United States the most severe collapse of its economy that the republic had yet known, and its effects were widely noticeable throughout the States and even in Upper Canada. There had been earlier American financial crises in 1819 and 1829, but the impact of these upon the British province had been almost negligible. While the majority of the people were earning their livelihood by tilling the soil the influence of any such dislocating force was widely scattered. However, the American crisis of 1837 was so wide-spread in its influence that not even Upper Canada was spared from a measure of disaster.

The Canadian economy had been slowing up even before 1837. When Rev. William Proudfoot, minister to the Presbyterians in London village, visited Toronto in July, 1835, he entered in his diary: “Toronto is exceedingly dull. There have been scarcely any immigrants arrive and consequently little money has been brought into the country, and what shows the dullness of the times, there comes up to the city little merchandise. The streets are almost deserted.”

The next year saw an even more marked depression existing. The St. Catharines Journal in December, 1836, quoted from William Lyon Mackenzie’s newspaper, The Constitution, that there were more than two hundred stores and houses standing idle in Toronto. It reported also, on its own authority, that announced drawings for several lotteries had been cancelled. Hundreds of settlers, this newspaper declared, were losing all they had, their land and such improvements as they had put upon it.

Elijah Woodman was among the many who suffered misfortune at this time. Forced by the depression in trade to leave his property holdings on Otter Creek, he removed with his family to the village of London. When the depression came he had 100,000 feet of cut lumber at his mill and twice that amount at Port Burwell, all of it unsaleable because no one had any money with which to buy. We have no knowledge of how he was making a living in the village, but we do know that he was there by 1836.

Woodman had been in Upper Canada only a little more than five years, but in that time he had observed the disturbed and restless political situation existing in the province. This development was quite clearly influenced by the new democracy then arising in the United States. Of this democracy Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828 to the presidency, was the symbol rather than either the creator or the voice. His election had broken the long line of presidents hailing from Virginia or Massachusetts, and for the first time a western man had been seated in the White House.

Jackson represented the aspirations of the common man and his election was hailed by his supporters as the “triumph of an honest man over a gang of corrupt politicians”. Supporters of the old régime, on the other hand, could see in it only “the triumph of anarchy over order”. Nevertheless, the popular decision of 1828 was to influence the republic for generations to come, and its repercussions in Upper Canada were to be much in evidence in the next quarter century.

Woodman, living in Maine at the time of Jackson’s triumph, had probably participated in the election. His own political hero was Henry Clay, but Clay’s “American System”, which called for protective tariffs and internal improvements, made far less appeal to the people of the West than did the primitive prejudices to which Jackson and his orators catered after 1824. Their cry amounted to: “The East is bad, the West is good, turn the rascals out.” When the returns of the election of 1828 were in, Jackson had carried the West and most of the South, and had received substantial support in the Middle States. In New England, however, he received only one single electoral vote, and that came from Maine, Woodman’s own state. Change was in the air in the twenties, even in conservative Maine; and now Woodman was to encounter more of it during the thirties in the British colony to which he had come.

As a resident of Upper Canada after 1830, Woodman had opportunity to see Canadian politics in action. Upper Canada was, in essence, still a royal colony administered under the Constitutional Act of 1791. A lieutenant-governor represented the Crown, and actually exercised some royal rights that had ceased even in England. He was advised by an appointed Executive Council, while an elected Assembly and an appointed Legislative Council completed the machinery of government. There was, however, a serious weakness in the system in that both Councils, Executive and Legislative, were immune from any check by the Assembly and could override its decisions. This grave weakness had been evident from an early date, though protests against it appeared first after the close of the War of 1812. These protests, coming chiefly from sections of the province where American settlers were numerous, were viewed with deep suspicion by the administration.

After 1824 there was an opposition group of protesting Reformers in the elected Assembly, and a Reform majority was obtained when another election was held in 1828. Having a majority, however, meant little. The members of the Legislative Council simply threw out any Assembly bills which they disliked. Finally in 1829, when this humiliation had been suffered for years, the Reformers appealed for a ruling by the British Government that the Executive be required to maintain a majority in the Assembly or resign. But that degree of self-government in a colony seemed revolutionary to the home Government, and received no consideration.

Another election came in 1830 on the death of the sovereign, George IV, and by vigorous flag-waving the administration brought about a reversal of the verdict of 1828. Made bold by their victory, the Tory group proceeded to carry on a senseless persecution of William Lyon Mackenzie, the Reform leader. Five times expelled from the Assembly by the votes of his opponents, he was as many times promptly re-elected by his constituents. His triumph came when in 1834 he was elected as the first mayor of the city of Toronto.

Elijah Woodman was probably not already settled in the province when the election of 1830 took place, and he may not have known enough of the issues to participate in any way in the election of 1834, which again gave the Reformers a majority in the Assembly. But during the next two years he must have heard much of the bitter struggle that was being waged in the little Parliament at Toronto. The newspapers of the day were full of it and the issues were heatedly debated by the roadside or in the tavern or country store. Salaries and pensions for officials and their friends, clergy reserves and the special privileges claimed by the Church of England, abuses in the granting or sale of the public lands—these were but a few of the questions of the day, and the ordinary man was ever ready to talk about them with his neighbours. There was a general demand for a curb on the power of the Legislative Council.

Woodman must have been well aware also of the wide-spread restless feeling in the province, much of it connected with the politics of the time. Behind all the discontent was the realization that political power and privilege lay in the hands of a small, select group, known since in history as the Family Compact. Some were United Empire Loyalists, regarding themselves as entitled by their record to reward and recognition. Others were British born and recipients of offices or land for their military service. Most of them were members of the Church of England and all were Tories. Chiefly they were in Toronto, the seat of government, but elsewhere in the province were smaller local Family Compacts, made up chiefly of office-holders. These people dominated the politics in their community and profited by their defence of every action of the government clique at the capital. London village, as Woodman was to find later, was dominated by one of these petty Family Compacts.

The two years that followed the election of 1834 gave the Reformers under Mackenzie an opportunity to make fresh and even more vigorous attacks on the administration. Abuses of all kinds were brought to public attention in the debates and by discussion in the press. Many of the policies advocated by the Reform group were plainly influenced by Jacksonian democracy, and these policies the Tories termed “American” or “republican”, affecting to believe that they were the work of “atheists” and “deists”.

Sir John Colborne, a veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular campaign and a hero of Waterloo, was the Lieutenant-Governor and head of the Upper Canada administration when Elijah Woodman entered the province in 1830; but when Woodman removed with his family to London in 1836 a change had already taken place. Sir John Colborne had been transferred to Montreal as commander of the troops and had been succeeded by Sir Francis Bond Head.

This appointment has been quite truthfully described as “one of the most extraordinary and unfortunate ever made to a Canadian office by the British Government”. It was for long believed by writers on the period that it had been the intention to name another man of the same family name and that Sir Francis received the office quite by mistake. Recent research has dismissed this assumption, but it emphasizes the lack of wisdom shown by the British authorities in sending such a man to Canada. He was almost without the military experience that might have been of value in a restless and contentious community. Nor had he had any civil experience, his only previous public office being that of Assistant Poor Law Commissioner. Moreover, he was entirely unfitted by temperament for dealing with a frontier community or with an Assembly that was demanding self-government.

Misled by information that had come from England with regard to the appointment, Bond Head was hailed by the radical element on his arrival in the little provincial capital as “a tried reformer”, and there were hopes that a new era was about to open in Upper Canada politics. But in this the Reformers were quickly disillusioned. Bond Head was convinced in his own mind that a governor should govern, that he alone should be responsible for all that was done. Assembly and Councils might tender advice and make recommendations, but he would make the decisions. His political opinions were soon manifest. To him responsible government, which the Reformers advocated, was but another name for republicanism. Democracy was something hateful and those who advocated it were disloyal subjects.

Reformers saw some hope when the Governor, in his first few weeks of office, offered seats in the Executive Council to Robert Baldwin and two of his colleagues. But their stay was brief. Bond Head refused their advice and they promptly resigned. When Baldwin went to England to voice his protest he was not even received by Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary. Bond Head had anticipated his arrival by a letter which described the Upper Canada Reformer as a revolutionary agent.

When the Assembly met in April, 1836, the attacks by the Reformers on the Governor’s policies grew in bitterness day by day, but the Tories gave Bond Head their full support. Solicitor-General Hagerman threatened his opponents with the vengeance of “150,000 men, loyal and true”; while Bond Head himself, dreaming up some alien interference in the affairs of Upper Canada, proclaimed: “In the name of every regiment of militia in Upper Canada I publicly promulgate, ‘Let them come if they dare.’ ”

Finally the Reformers’ attack took a form never before exercised by the Assembly, the refusal of supply. With this weapon applied, no money would be available for salaries or pensions apart from the civil list. Bond Head promptly countered by reserving all the money bills which had been sent up to him during the session for such purposes as schools, roads and public works. The result was an immediate slump in prosperity accompanied by unemployment and considerable emigration. The Governor further met the challenge of the Reformers by dissolving the Assembly and bringing on an election. This election of 1836 came on the very eve of the great financial crisis in the United States.

Voting in the village of London began on June 27 and continued throughout the week. Voting was open, and Reformers were subjected to abuse and indignities as they came one by one to the clerk’s place to have their votes recorded. This was the first provincial election in which London received separate representation in the Assembly. Hitherto it had been part of Middlesex County, with two members, Thomas Parke and Elias Moore, both Reformers. Parke was a resident of the village, while Moore was a Quaker from South Yarmouth. Both had been elected by a wide margin in the election of 1834, and they were again successful in 1836.

The government candidate in London in 1836 was Colonel Mahlon Burwell, a close associate of Colonel Thomas Talbot and an out-and-out Tory. The Reform candidate was John Scatcherd, an Englishman who had come to Canada in 1831. He was a man of high character and had been made a magistrate, but his appointment was revoked when he appeared as a Reform candidate. The contest in the village was close—thirty-seven votes for Burwell and twenty-seven for Scatcherd. One might wonder how so much excitement could be aroused over such a small vote, but probably there were many outsiders in town to see the fun and help drive Reformers from the polls, for there was no secrecy to the balloting.

Elijah Woodman was resident in the village when the election took place and has left us this graphic record of the violence that prevailed:

Others beside Woodman have left us record of the disorder. Rev. William Proudfoot, the local Presbyterian minister, spoke of the whole election in the village as “a scene”. W. H. Merritt, of Welland Canal fame, wrote in after years: “The election (in London) occurred on the first of July, 1836, and the author, who was present, has for remembrance a gathering which for riot and drunkenness, though his own village could get up no mean display, exceeded everything he had ever seen before.”^[7] Robert Davis, a Middlesex farmer who had visited the United States looking into public-school education, wrote in a pamphlet printed at Buffalo in 1837:

Elsewhere in the province, though there was less violence, there was considerable intimidation and fraud. Charges of illegal voting were widely made and were later brought to the attention of the British Government. The Lieutenant-Governor participated openly in the election, shouting the loyalty cry and denouncing American influence in Canadian affairs. When the election returns were all in, Bond Head could boast that he had a “loyal” assembly; but he had sowed the seeds of greater trouble to come. Hitherto the agitation that had been carried on had been of a constitutional character and waged chiefly on the floor of the Assembly; but from this time Reformers were convinced that sterner measures were required. William Lyon Mackenzie, the Reform leader, began publication of a new journal, The Constitution, on July 4 (note the date), 1836, and it was at once observed that it sounded a revolutionary note.

The political bitterness that had shown itself during the election in London soon affected the social life of the community. Rev. Mr. Proudfoot noted a lessening of interest in the work of the church, and wrote in his diary on August 25th:

A little later he wrote:

A year later and almost in the very week of the uprising in Toronto, he could write:

The reader may already have noted the extent to which religion entered into Upper Canada politics in the decade of the thirties. Much of this developed through the activities of Rev. John Strachan, rector at York, who ceaselessly fought to have the Church of England dominate the provincial scene. He aimed to have the Anglican organization made the established church of the province and to place in its hands the control of public education. Until 1830 Anglican clergy had held almost a monopoly of the right to perform the marriage ceremony; and in irritating fashion the work of other denominations was belittled and misrepresented.

Methodism, the most numerous religious group, eventually found its advocate in a young clergyman, the Reverend Egerton Ryerson. He, by his writings, made Methodism a powerful political force, and its official organ, the Christian Guardian, became an advocate of reform. When Strachan made an outrageous attack upon Methodism in a sermon preached in 1825 on the occasion of the death of Bishop Mountain, of Montreal, Ryerson answered him in a devastating editorial that appeared in pamphlet form a few days later. Strachan, when faced by Ryerson, could no longer deceive the authorities in London by such misrepresentation as appeared in his “Ecclesiastical Chart”, where he computed the number of Anglicans by simply adding up the known adherents of other denominations, subtracting the total from the census figures, and claiming all others for his denomination.

In 1825 the Methodists were a force to be reckoned with in every political contest. For a time they and Mackenzie seemed to have a common purpose, but a break came in 1833 when Ryerson charged that some of Mackenzie’s radical supporters in England held atheistic views. From that time Methodism became more conservative, notably in the crucial election of 1836.

There was much public discussion during the election of 1836, and even earlier, of the system of land grants, which affected a majority of the inhabitants of the province, and was full of inequities and even fraud. A high official of the Surveyor-General’s department declared before an investigating committee in 1838 that the system of granting land in Upper Canada had been “the greatest prostitution of the Sovereign’s bounty ever practiced in any country”. Land had been granted, he said, in the names of dead parents as well as of infants who never lived to leave their cradles.

One who signed himself “A Half-Pay Officer”, writing in the United Service Journal in January, 1839, charged that it was notorious that clerks in every government office were speculating in public lands in the name of some friend. This, he claimed, was the reason there was so little land available for the ordinary settler. Some of this frenzy could probably be attributed to the contemporary orgy of land speculation in the United States.

Pertinent comments on Upper Canada politics were made by Mrs. Anna Jameson, who arrived in Toronto in December, 1836, to join her husband who was expecting appointment to a judicial office. She quickly observed the effects of party strife on the life of the little provincial capital. She found the community divided into three classes. First were the Tory Loyalists, contemptuous of the United States and firm in their belief that the slightest tinge of democratic or liberal principles in politics was a stain on the character of those holding such ideas. Second were what she termed the “Whigs” of Upper Canada, also anti-American but jealous and scornful of the old Loyalist families and insisting on the need of reform in the colonial government. Finally there were the Radicals, whom she found generally described by the others as “those scoundrels”, or “those rascals”, or some like epithet expressive of utmost contempt and disgust. She was probably echoing what she had heard or been told when she described them as “those who wish to see this country erected into a republic like the United States”.

All in all she found a “hateful, factious spirit” in political matters with “no recognition of general or generous principles of policy”. Upper Canada was “a colony, not a country; an adopted, not a real mother”. After a dinner party which she attended, and which was graced by the attendance of the Lieutenant-Governor and other notables, she wrote to her father: “The cold narrow minds, the confused ideas, the by-gone prejudices of the society are hardly conceivable.” The province of Upper Canada was clearly in an unhealthy state, both politically and in an economic way, as the year 1836 drew to a close.^[9]

The Assembly, which had been elected in July, met at the capital in November and demonstrated its “loyalty” by readily voting both supply and money for various public improvements throughout the province. Indeed, so ready were the Tory members to vote money for roads, bridges and other purposes that they were to a considerable degree responsible for the financial stringency that developed in Upper Canada in the spring of 1837, a part of the general depression on the continent. This, in turn, furnished William Lyon Mackenzie with abundant ammunition for attacks upon the administration in his newspaper.

During the winter of 1836-37 Mackenzie, bitter over his recent defeat in the election of 1836, was actively campaigning in the western part of the province, with the idea of an armed uprising central in his thinking. He industriously encouraged the formation of political unions and travelled about the country meeting the discontented groups. His adherents meanwhile hammered out pike heads in rural blacksmith shops or moulded bullets in farm kitchens.

Reports of these activities constantly reached the capital, but they were, for the most part, discounted by the authorities. Sir Francis Bond Head, confident of his judgment after the recent election, rejected the reports as fiction or exaggerated. So confident was he that all was well in his little kingdom that in October he ordered all the regular troops at Toronto and Kingston to be moved to Montreal, where he apparently thought Sir John Colborne might need them to quiet the French Canadians. As for Upper Canada, had it not shown its attitude by the support it had given him in the latest election? A large stock of arms and ammunition, left behind by the regular troops, was deposited in the city hall under guard of two constables. Some of it mysteriously disappeared in the next few months.

It has already been pointed out that the political troubles of the thirties in Upper and Lower Canada coincided in point of time with the disastrous economic depression which in that decade overtook the United States. There it developed from an inflation of money and credit and an accompanying wide-spread speculation in land. President Andrew Jackson’s crude handling of public finance had stimulated a boom that spread widely over the country. Internal improvements such as the building of canals had become an obsession, cotton planting had over-expanded since the invention of Whitney’s cotton gin, and manufacturing in the North-east had gone beyond current needs. The crash came when the president’s “Specie Circular” called for all payments to the Government for public lands to be made in gold or silver. By May, 1837, every bank in the United States had suspended specie payment. Notes of failed or failing banks became worthless and the public took enormous losses. It was years before the country recovered. By the spring of 1837 Upper Canada was feeling the effects of its own recent financial extravagance as well as the contagion of the American financial situation.

When the Assembly was called together in special session in June, 1837, there was talk of suspending specie payments. This Bond Head denounced as a “levelling, anti-commercial republican system”. The depressed condition of the back areas was shown by the request for an appropriation of two thousand pounds to supply food to indigent settlers. The St. Thomas Liberal in August, 1837, reported that there were sixteen sheriff’s sales advertised in the latest number of the London Gazette and that the Bank of Upper Canada in London had received within a week twenty-seven protested notes upon which proceedings were to be taken. There had been no cessation of the wide-spread emigration to the United States. Mechanics by the hundreds had left the province during the winter months of 1836-37 for Rochester, Buffalo, and other nearby American cities.

“The mercantile world has undergone a great revolution,” wrote Mr. Proudfoot on July 7, 1837. “Poverty has come upon thousands and many a tale of heartrending distress I have heard.” Money was scarce and Mr. Proudfoot records in his diary that when he went into the village on July 10 to discount a bill of fifteen pounds, the bank “would give no more than 5 per cent,” which he would not take. “The tree is indeed girdled,” was his comment.

Mention has already been made of the charges of intimidation and fraud in the election of 1836. The select committee of the Assembly that formally investigated these charges, found that nearly fifteen hundred patents for land had been issued between the dissolution of the Legislature and the close of the elections. The report made no comment, however, on the violation of the regulation that called for holding a deed for three months before voting. Nor did it pronounce upon the irregularities of local officials in certifying falsely to the completion of settlement duties. Governor Bond Head and his supporters had apparently done nothing wrong, in the opinion of the investigating committee. The results of the election were apparently regarded as a complete vindication of the improper methods used to secure a victory for British connection. That would doubtless be the Governor’s point of view.

Bond Head exulted in what he regarded as his personal triumph, and the pride he felt in his success was increased when there came to him through Lord Glenelg the personal congratulations of his sovereign. King William, it is said, had once so admired his skill with the lasso, an accomplishment picked up in South America, that he had granted him the knighthood which he carried on his arrival in Upper Canada.

Sir Francis took occasion after the election to dismiss some officials who had attended a meeting of the Constitutional Reform Society held at about the time of the election and from which had come a circular critical of his régime. One of those so dismissed, Judge George Ridout, complained vigorously to the Colonial Secretary at London, protested that he had taken no part in approving the circular, and asked that he be reinstated. Lord Glenelg was impressed by his statement and at once ordered that he should be restored to office. Head stoutly refused, and also ignored Glenelg’s suggestion that Marshall Spring Bidwell, defeated in the recent election, should receive a judgeship, for which his abilities well qualified him. On this issue Bond Head wrote to Lord Glenelg stating that he felt it his duty to resign his office. On several previous occasions he had tentatively threatened to resign, but this time he was taken at his word. Glenelg’s reply on November 24 advised that the resignation had been accepted; but before this despatch reached Toronto armed rebellion had broken out.

The Days of the Rebellion

The armed uprisings in Upper and Lower Canada in December, 1837, have been recorded and described in both their military and political aspects by many writers, contemporary and of later date. It is not the intention here to repeat the general story. The Rebellion of 1837, as it is commonly termed, was the climax of an unpleasant era in Upper Canada and for that very reason it is not a subject that can be narrated with any satisfaction. Indeed there is today a wide-spread feeling among English-speaking Canadians that the events of December, 1837, may well be forgotten. One good reason for such feeling is that the suppression of the uprising in Upper Canada was carried through with a bitterness and venom on the part of the triumphant “loyal” party that shocks us as we read of it today.

The political importance of the Rebellion of 1837, both in Upper and Lower Canada, is that it finally awakened the British Government to the fact that there was something grievously wrong with the existing system of colonial administration. When this conviction came home, the Government was wise enough to seek out the sources of discontent, to accept suggested changes, and to carry these changes through. In the end there developed an entirely new conception of the rights of British citizens overseas. Self-government was granted, first of all in Canada, then progressively through British possessions all over the world, even down to our own time when we see other powers also granting it as a human right.

The name of William Lyon Mackenzie stands closely associated with the events of 1837 in Upper Canada, as does that of Louis Joseph Papineau in Lower Canada. Mackenzie has been the subject of several biographies. Earlier ones were extremely bitter in their attacks upon his motives and actions. This was a reflection of the public feeling in the province, which as late as 1849 saw a howling mob ready to lynch him when he returned from exile under an amnesty. But he was soon back in the Assembly, (from a south-western constituency, as might be expected), equally troublesome to Tories and Reformers, though quite ineffectual in any constructive way. Yet the eventual judgment on Mackenzie must be something like that expressed by one of Canada’s leading historians:

The uprising at the provincial capital was really a pitiable affair and ended in a rout. We have glimpses of Mackenzie among his followers at Montgomery’s Tavern, on the outskirts of the town, losing all control of himself and acting like a crazy man. He had looked for three thousand or more armed men to assemble ready to march on the capital, seize the Governor, occupy the city hall with its store of arms, and proclaim a provisional government. Less than one-third that number actually assembled.

There were, perhaps, one or two moments during the week when a prompt move might have succeeded; but there were always delays and changes of plan that prevented action. We have glimpses of Mackenzie on his white horse, at the head of his poorly armed force, finally moving down Yonge Street that December morning to meet the loyal militia headed by old Colonel James Fitzgibbon, veteran of the War of 1812. Our final glimpse is of Mackenzie and his followers, scattered by the first volleys and in flight across the fields, fugitives from a threatened justice, with Mackenzie himself headed for the international border.

Mackenzie was able to elude capture by the numerous parties that sought him, all stimulated in their chase by the Governor’s proclaimed offer of a thousand pounds for his apprehension. As his followers began to scatter before the fire of Colonel Fitzgibbon’s men, Mackenzie galloped north on Yonge Street. His intention was to reach the Niagara frontier and there cross into the United States. For a time he travelled boldly and openly along the main highway to Dundas, where he arrived on Saturday night. He crossed the length of the Niagara Peninsula on Sunday and was at the Niagara River by Monday morning. There he was ferried over the river by a Captain McAfee, an American, while a group of dragoons watching for him were held in conversation by members of the McAfee family. Mackenzie was landed on Grand Island within the hour, the climax of a most adventurous escape. This in later days was to provide the south-western counties with a rich store of folklore concerning the shelter provided and the aid given to the fugitive during the days of his flight.

What of the Governor during this week of the uprising? We have glimpses of him also. “I do not apprehend rebellion in Upper Canada,” was his reply to the early warnings of old Colonel Fitzgibbon, who urged upon him prompt defensive measures. This confident air Sir Francis maintained despite repeated warnings, until word came to him of actual bloodshed. His chief advisers seemed equally blind to what was going on within a few miles of the Council chamber. Attorney-General Hagerman openly declared that Mackenzie could not stir fifty men to take up arms against the Government.

When finally forced to accept the fact of rebellion in the province, Sir Francis at last gave the order for advance against the rebels, and himself joined the force that moved out to maintain the sacred cause of British connection and the honour of the sovereign queen. It was his last big public appearance, and he aimed to make the most of it. Riding on a stallion, he had in his company Archdeacon Strachan, wearing a big black cloak. Two bands blared out music for the advancing force, whose courage was probably strengthened by the presence of two small cannon under Major Carfrae, a retired artillery officer.

The fighting around Montgomery’s Tavern lasted only a few minutes. The rebellion was broken and its leaders put to flight. Sir Francis, it is recorded, at once ordered the tavern building to be burned, thereby to mark, as he put it, “the death of that perfidious enemy, responsible government”. He little knew that responsible government would rise phoenix-like from those very ashes.

The events that have here been briefly sketched took place in the area about the provincial capital, the chief centre of unrest in the troubled thirties. But there was a second area in Upper Canada that showed an equal degree of restless feeling. This was the London District, and particularly Middlesex County, in which Elijah Woodman was now resident. From an early date the London District had included in its population a considerable number of American settlers, and had lacked the more steadying influence of the Loyalist element to be found elsewhere. It was a restless area even before 1837, and it continued to be so long after the uprising of that year. In the fifties the Hon. John Macdonald described its population as made up of “Yankees and Covenanters, the most yeasty and unsafe of population”.^[11] The word “Covenanters” referred to the Scottish settlers, long Macdonald’s political opponents.

Lying close to the border of the American Midwest, Upper Canada was bound to be influenced by the democratic ideas of the newer American states. Families on either side of the border were likely to have relatives or friends in the other, and in addition to correspondence there was occasional visiting back and forth. American newspapers were also eagerly read. The new western states had as yet an unshaken faith in the wisdom of their elected legislatures and a deep suspicion of the executive function, upon which the electorate from time to time placed limitations. Reformers in Upper Canada were prone to think of American practices as applicable to their problems and to see in them solutions for their ills.

The village of London, Woodman’s home after 1836, was a microcosm of the western section of the province, and its altered social life after the violence of 1836 serves to illustrate the changes that took place in the larger area. The village had importance as the judicial centre of the District. Its imposing court-house, set on an elevation, seemed to frown down upon the more humble dwellings and shops that housed the residents of the place or met the needs of local trade. The population was curiously mixed. As early as 1832 an American Quaker abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, had visited the place and in his diary noted the variety of its inhabitants and their occupations. He found signs of progress in the erection of churches and the establishment of a weekly newspaper. Many of the inhabitants, he says, were American immigrants. He also found between twenty-five and thirty Negroes, refugees from slavery who had made their way to freedom in Canada. Two physicians and two lawyers had already taken up residence in the little village, then only six years in existence but growing rapidly. Hotels and stores were open for business and there was a general air of activity in the place.

By the time Woodman moved to London, the population had probably reached one thousand. When the village was officially made the capital of the London District in 1826, the various district officers—the judge, the treasurer and the clerk of the court—had removed with their families from the obscure hamlet of Vittoria in the Long Point country where they had formerly lived. On coming to London they soon acquired land and built spacious homes, far above the average of the time and locality in both size and style.

One of these more stately dwellings, that erected by John Harris, the treasurer of the London District, still stands, and as late as 1959 was occupied by a descendant of the original builder and owner of more than a century and a quarter ago. Mrs. John Harris, born February 19, 1798, was the only daughter of Colonel Samuel Ryerse, a Loyalist, and was married to John Harris, an English naval officer, on June 27, 1815. When they came to London Village their home became the social centre of the community. Here were entertained almost all distinguished visitors to London over the next half century.

The little group of officials, together with some professional and business men, comprised what might be termed the aristocracy of the village. At the other extreme were the labourers, most of them immigrants, while in between was a middle group of small storekeepers and artisans. The office-holders were all supporters of the Tory administration at Toronto, as were also the professional men and those who had prospered in business. Those with less of this world’s goods tended to be critical of the local aristocracy, and there was a substantial group of out-and-out Reformers in London by 1837. These, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, had fared rather badly in the election of the previous year. Woodman’s description of the violence that attended the polling would indicate that he then had Reform sympathies. These were to become more marked in the following year.

In addition to the social and political divisions within the community, there was also division in matters of religion. The Tory element—office-holders, professional men, and those who regarded themselves as “the best people”—were almost all members of the Church of England. Their rector, Rev. Benjamin Cronyn, whose name already has been mentioned, was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. He had arrived in Canada from Ireland in 1832, expecting to take up missionary duties among well-to-do Irish settlers in Adelaide Township, west of London, but had been prevailed upon to change his plans and settle in London village. There he became rector of the Anglican parish.

“Parson” Cronyn, as he was familiarly called in those early days, was a man of great energy, aggressive in the interests of his church, conservative in politics and in full sympathy with the policies of the Tory Family Compact at Toronto. He was a man of medium stature, well built, with a dark complexion and strong features. He was a lover of outdoor life and outdoor activities. He was quite ready at any time to take his part in religious controversies, and for this reason was not popular in Toronto. His sermons were remembered as practical, “more impressive than eloquent”. He was evangelical in doctrine and his influence with other clergy gave them a tendency in the same direction.

In the fifties, when the parishes in the thirteen western counties of the province were separated from the Diocese of Toronto and made a new Diocese of Huron, Mr. Cronyn was chosen by a large majority as the first bishop. He thereupon went to England and was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the first bishop in Canada to be chosen through an election, and he was almost the last from Canada to be installed in office by the ecclesiastical authorities in England. In 1863 he established a theological college in London to provide men for the many new parishes which were set up under his direction in ensuing years. His own early parish, St. Paul’s, was one of the forty-four parishes that had been given an endowment or 77,000 acres of public land by Sir John Colborne before he vacated the lieutenant-governorship of the province in 1836. St. John’s parish, a few miles to the north in London Township, was also endowed, the only instance of two parishes in one township being so favoured.

After the Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians were probably the most prominent group in the village. At the head of London’s Presbyterian flock was Rev. William Proudfoot, a graduate of Edinburgh University, who had arrived at London as a missionary just a few days before the arrival of Mr. Cronyn. No two men could be more unlike politically. Cronyn was a stout Tory, while Proudfoot was a Scottish radical, critical of much that he saw in the affairs of the province, decided in his opinions and frankly outspoken. He regarded government aid for the church as a repudiation of the voluntary system.

Those Presbyterian ministers who felt as he did united later to form an independent presbytery, erect a synod, and establish in London a Divinity Hall of which Mr. Proudfoot was the first professor. Thus both these pioneer London clergymen were founders of theological schools, that of the Anglican faith continuing to this day as Huron College, while the Presbyterian Divinity Hall was later absorbed in another school of the denomination. Before leaving Scotland Mr. Proudfoot, in addition to his clerical duties, had conducted a classical and mathematical school at the town of Pitrodie in Perthshire. He, therefore, had some experience in the conduct of an educational institution.

Reference has already been made to the diary that Mr. Proudfoot began when he left Scotland for Canada, and kept for many years. Observant of all that was going on about him, he made caustic comments on government affairs, and sometimes equally caustic comments on rival denominations and their ministers. He was particularly critical of Methodists and Baptists, whose evangelistic practices he regarded as a menace to true religion.

“Mr. Donaldson from the 10th concession told me that the Methodists and Baptists have exceedingly increased in that township,” he wrote in 1833. “God only knows, I hope in His mercy so to bless my labours that they and all who hold errors will not increase.” On another occasion he wrote: “I deeply lament the ascendancy which Methodists have acquired in this country. Their doctrines are frightfully in opposition to the grand, the glorious doctrines of the gospel. . . . The country will never become Christian till these fellows be dislodged.”

Cronyn and Proudfoot were both keen politicians. The Presbyterian clergyman noted in his diary during the election campaign of 1836 that his brother clergyman “has been all over the township electioneering”. He himself, he quite candidly recorded, had been writing editorials for the St. Thomas Liberal, the only Reform newspaper in the London District. Its editor was John Talbot, an Irishman by birth who had come to Upper Canada with other members of the Talbot family in 1818 and after engaging in farming and school teaching had entered the newspaper field. Talbot was one of the three sons of Richard Talbot, who had brought a party of forty Irish families to Canada. A majority of these came with him into Upper Canada and to London Township in Middlesex County. There they obtained land through Colonel Thomas Talbot, fourteen hundred acres in all, and were almost the first settlers in the township. Though the family of Richard Talbot was in no way related to Colonel Thomas Talbot, they received particularly favoured treatment, probably because they were Irish. Part of the area they received was a solid block, a thousand acres in extent, being made up of five lots of two hundred acres each.

Though they began life in Canada as pioneer settlers, clearing bush land, erecting homes and barns, and sowing grain amid blackened stumps, all three sons of Richard Talbot—John, Edward Allen, and Freeman—eventually became newspaper men. John was editor of the radical St. Thomas Liberal; Edward Allen founded The Sun, London’s first newspaper, in 1831; and Freeman was editor of a later newspaper, The London Prototype and Middlesex County Railway Advocate. For a time, however, their life was that of ordinary settlers, and Edward Allen in 1824 embodied his experiences and observations in a two-volume work that had considerable circulation in England and was later translated and published in a separate edition in Germany.^[12]

It would be interesting to know who were Woodman’s friends in the village during that rebellion year. We know almost nothing of his activities at this time, not even how he was making a living for himself and his family. Much of his capital had probably disappeared in the collapse of the lumbering business on Otter Creek, and he may actually have been in debt, though in this he would have plenty of company. The Woodmans were Universalists in religion and would have friends among the members of the Society, which had been organized in the village on September 10, 1831. Alvaro Ladd was clerk of the Society, and other members who were trustees were Benjamin Bartlett, Bray Willey, John Phillips, John Chase, Henry Heart, and Charles Avery. Some of these resided in neighbouring townships. There were about twenty Universalists in the village itself, and they operated a small circulating library.^[13]

The steadily growing discontent following the election of 1836 was accompanied by the continued organization among the Reformers of local bodies known as political unions. These gave opportunity for the discussion of grievances; but it was noted that as the months went by the members were manifesting a threatening determination to have their grievances rectified. In yet later months their attitude came to have a distinctly revolutionary character, and the unions began to be viewed by the authorities with deep suspicion. They found a particularly bitter antagonist in Colonel the Honourable Thomas Talbot. Talbot was a member of the powerful Legislative Council, though he seldom graced its meetings at Toronto by his presence. Through the years he continued to add to the great estate he was building up; and whenever his fellow-members on the Council showed signs of checking up on his methods, he would at once appeal to powerful friends in England, who would promptly back his claims and his policies. This went on for many years, to the great indignation of the settlers.

The discontent in the Talbot settlement was so openly displayed by the spring of 1832 that Talbot made plans to offset it by a rally of his supporters at St. Thomas on St. George’s Day. The chief feature of this rally was a speech by Talbot himself that began with the military command, “Silence and attention.” It was a coarse tirade against Reformers, Americans, and temperance societies, “damned cold-water-drinking societies”, he termed the latter. The speech was a plain incitement to violence against Reformers, and closed with a benediction imploring the Deity to bless and preserve “all you that are true British subjects”. Divine care was apparently not extended to others.

The day ended with a dinner at the King’s Arms Hotel at which the Colonel was guest of honour. Loyal toasts were drunk with the utmost hilarity, and a week later Talbot wrote to Sir John Colborne: “I had a splendid turn-out on St. George’s Day, when the rebels were all silent and quiet, and I gave my children some wholesome advice. The disaffected are but few, considering all the noise that has been made.” There were wide echoes of the Talbot tirades in the press of the province, Tory papers assuring their readers that the rebellious element had received a stunning blow. Reform comment stressed the abusive and vulgar features of the St. George’s Day rally.

Though Talbot was cheered by his supporters at St. Thomas, the rally did nothing to lessen the spreading discontent. Activities of the political unions were later recorded week by week by John Talbot in the St. Thomas Liberal, as were also the efforts of the Tory group to break up the Reform meetings. In its issue of January 10, 1833, The Liberal reprinted a Tory broadside, probably originally printed in London, calling for volunteers to disperse a Reform meeting scheduled for January 17 at St. Thomas. The opening paragraph of the broadside will give an idea of the temper of the times. It read:

The insinuation that Reformers were all Yankees was further emphasized in the next paragraph which, like the first, plainly suggested violence to combat reform ideas:

The Liberal, when printing this document, advised Reformers so to conduct themselves that if their opponents disturbed the peace, on their heads would fall the disgrace. In its issue of February 14, 1833, The Liberal reported a political meeting in Yarmouth Township where Tory partisans broke windows and committed excesses which “would have disgraced a band of Sioux Indians”.

John Talbot regarded the redoubtable Colonel Talbot as the chief enemy of reform in the western area. “We assert,” he wrote in an issue of the summer of 1833, “that the Hon. Colonel Talbot rules with a more absolute sway, and his power is more to be dreaded than that of the King of Great Britain.” Mr. Proudfoot summed up Talbot’s methods when he wrote in his diary in the same year: “Colonel Talbot’s plan with the Liberals is to trample them down.” But the Liberals, as he termed them, refused to be trampled down, and by late 1837 political unions were being organized in the London District almost as widely as in York District north of Toronto. John Talbot, writing in November, 1837, to William Lyon Mackenzie at Toronto, asked for printed documents, blank lists, and advice generally on how to proceed “decently and in order” in the organization that was going on. He closed his letter with this interesting statement: “The Tories in this part of the parish are beginning to think that something must be done to satisfy the Reformers or—they must be put down at the point of the bayonet—or revolution will take place. What think you?”

Reformers in the village of London were meeting quietly from time to time, but were evidently somewhat fearful of their political opponents. In the Public Archives at Ottawa may be seen the statements that several of these Reformers made when they were arrested and interrogated on the outbreak of trouble at the capital. Brought before two local magistrates, Harry Cook and Lawrence Lawrason—Tories, of course—they told their story. At a meeting held on December 8 in Flanagan’s Hotel in the village, the local situation was discussed and fears were expressed that there might be an attack made by the Tory Orangemen from London Township to the north of the village. Those present agreed that in case of an attack upon any one of them they would meet armed at Mr. Proudfoot’s “Scotch Church”, and that the signal for assembling would be the firing of two guns followed immediately by the blowing of a bugle. It was evidently expected that there would be an attack on the following Monday night, when the Orange lodge would be meeting.

The Reformers’ plan of defence had, however, evidently come to the ears of Colonel John B. Askin, the clerk of the court, who, in his usual excited manner, construed it as a plan to seize control of the village. In a letter to Judge Jones at Toronto on December 22, he says that intelligence came to him on the morning of December 11 that an attack was to be made on the town that evening, and that at ten o’clock that night he received word “which I had reason to believe could be relied on, to prepare and to be on the alert, at the same time giving me the signal intended to be used by the attacking party for assembling, which was the firing of two guns and to be immediately followed by the blowing of a Bugle, and their place of rendezvous the Scotch Church.”

Stirred to action by this intelligence, which was plainly mistaken, Colonel Askin proceeded to arouse “all the inhabitants that could be relied upon”, who at once assembled at the Court House “with all the Arms and Ammunition within their reach”, about two hundred in number, “who soon put that building in a state of defence, capable of resistance for a period”. As for the Reformers who had met at Flanagan’s Hotel, they never had occasion to fire their guns or blow the bugle, for within the next day or two they were in custody for examination. We know the names of those who were at the meeting when the defence plans were made. They included John Talbot, from St. Thomas; his brother Edward Allen Talbot, William and Joshua Putnam, William Niles, James Little, Thomas Gibbins, William Hale, John O’Neil, Hugh O’Beirne, David O. Marsh, William L. Harrison, John H. Carre, and Charles Latimer. Edward Allen Talbot acted as secretary. William Niles was the chairman.

There is no mention in the depositions by these men of Elijah Woodman being present or being connected in any way with this group. David O. Marsh was, we know, a friend of Woodman and of his family, but none of the others could be so described. Charles Latimer was an Englishman, a lawyer, who on arrival in Canada had been refused permission to practice his profession because of a residence requirement. He had thereupon opened a store. At the meeting on December 8 he informed the group present that he could supply them with powder for their weapons.^[15]

The arrival of the first news of the collapse of the Mackenzie uprising at Toronto gave the Tory oligarchy in the village an opportunity to arrest their political opponents and critics. A party went to St. Thomas to seize John Talbot, but they were too late—he was already over the border and in the United States, from which he never returned to Canada. The arrested London radicals, with the exception of Charles Latimer, previously mentioned, were most of them freed after being censured and warned. But in the months that followed, the cells in the basement of the London court-house were crowded with persons held on charges based chiefly on mere suspicion. The old statute of misprision had been evoked, under which it was judged an offence to have withheld from the authorities information as to treasonable actions.

When word came of the exciting events at Toronto, plans had already been developed and were being carried out for aid to the uprising from the Western counties, where Reformers were numerous. Although this effort to co-operate with Mackenzie never succeeded in its aim—indeed, it collapsed even more quickly than the uprising at the capital—it was an indication of the measure of unrest in such counties as Middlesex and Oxford. It has received too little attention at the hands of writers on the period, but it is clear that if several hundred men in the west were willing to risk their reputations, and that of their families, and even their lives, by entering into an armed expedition, there must have been many times that number who were disturbed and angry but hesitated at taking extreme measures. The leader of the western uprising was Dr. Charles Duncombe, and it has since been known as Duncombe’s Rebellion. It is a well-remembered part of Western Ontario’s history.

Charles Duncombe, born in Connecticut, was one of three brothers, all doctors, graduates of a New York State medical school, who came to Upper Canada after the War of 1812 and settled in the western district, practising their profession. Dr. Charles soon became a supporter of the Reform party, and in 1830 was elected to the Assembly from Oxford County, being re-elected in 1834 and 1836. After the 1836 election he was so indignant at the course followed by Sir Francis Bond Head that he went with Robert Baldwin to England to protest, feeling that the Lieutenant-Governor had fallen entirely into the hands of the Family Compact. But they were not even received by the Colonial Secretary, and Bond Head was exonerated. This increased Duncombe’s radical tendencies, and when rebellion threatened in 1837, shortly after his return to Canada, he decided to support Mackenzie by enlisting the help of the Reformers in the west. Meetings were held in Burford Township, where he resided, with Isaac and Eliakim Malcolm also as speakers. Small armed groups soon began to gather and drill, Jacob Beemer’s tavern at the village of Scotland becoming the central rallying-place of this western revolt. The general plan was to assemble a force that would move via Brantford and Hamilton to link up with Mackenzie’s force, which, it was confidently expected, would capture Toronto.

By the 12th and 13th of December a considerable force of Reformers, or Patriots as they now called themselves, were assembled at the village of Scotland. However, when word came that Mackenzie’s followers had been scattered by the Government’s forces at Montgomery’s Tavern, the majority of the western insurgent force assembled at Scotland disappeared.

Colonel Allan MacNab, of Hamilton, on hearing of the projected uprising, had at once set out for Brantford with his Loyalist force. On the morning of December 14 this body moved toward Scotland in two columns, one by the direct road from Brantford and the other by a back settlement road. Neither column encountered any organized resistance, but fifteen Patriots were captured and three others shot as they sought shelter in the woods.

Dr. Duncombe escaped, despite a reward for his capture, and made his way to the St. Clair River, where he crossed on the ice to the United States. He was pardoned in 1843 and permitted to return to Upper Canada. However, he did not remain, but went to California, where he died at Sacramento October 1, 1867, at the age of seventy-five. Duncombe was a man of remarkable talents, and while a member of the Assembly had visited the United States and produced valuable reports on education, prisons, and the care of the insane. Had he been in Canada in the period of the later governors, after the union of the provinces, he doubtless would have played an important part in Canadian affairs. His departure was a loss to Canada. He was highly esteemed as a physician and stood high in the Masonic order.

Fresh arrests followed the collapse of the Duncombe uprising, and many who had had no connection whatever with the affair found themselves in the cells of London court-house. The merest suspicion of having even sympathized with the western revolt was enough to bring denunciation and imprisonment.

The Duncombe uprising, despite its quick collapse, came much nearer to the minds of the people in the west than did the larger revolt at the provincial capital. It was several days after the defeat of Mackenzie before people in London village heard any particulars of what had happened, and in the meantime they knew much of what was being planned by Dr. Duncombe and his associates. It is not known that there were any Reformers from London in the force that assembled at Scotland, though there were doubtless some from the village of St. Thomas, twenty miles to the south, as well as others from Middlesex County.

MacNab wreaked vengeance on the Reformers by sending his men into the Oxford County Quaker settlement of Norwich where, as described in a later satire, the leaders of the MacNab force were to be found “swearing and swaggering in front of raw recruits” and leading raids “in which some scores of Quaker farmyards were reduced, as many pigpens carried by storm, and bleaching yards sacked and rased”. Writing in the Oxford Star in December, 1848, one who described himself as “An old Settler” said: “When that part of the rebellion which was more intimately connected with our county comes to be written and well understood, the name of Duncombe himself will lie under lighter and less general execration than some who made themselves hoarse with cursing the rebels and crying God save the Queen.”^[16]

Equally unsavoury was the use of armed bands of Indians from the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, who, with painted faces, were sent into the woods to round up fugitives. When this phase of the campaign was brought to the attention of the Colonial Secretary at London, it received a stiff rebuke. “If it were really designed,” he wrote, “to bring these people into active service as auxiliaries of H.M. forces I must express entire repugnance to such a measure. It is scarcely possible to conceive any necessity which would justify it and nothing would in my opinion tend more to alienate the inhabitants of Upper Canada and to irritate the people of the United States than the attempt to let loose on the assailants of the Government the horrors of savage warfare.”

Upper Canada’s New Governor

The rebellion of 1837 brought an important administrative change in the province, and was followed in the next decade by even more important constitutional changes. Sir Francis Bond Head, who had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor in 1835 and had been sworn in in January, 1836, participated actively in the election of 1836, as we have seen, and by his general policy and actions must bear a part of the responsibility for the tragic events that followed. In September of 1837, as the result of a conflict of opinion with the Colonial Secretary, he tendered his resignation to the British Government. His resignation being accepted, he returned to England in 1838. He had already been made a baronet, and another honour came much later and after much solicitation on his part when, in 1867, he was made a Privy Councillor. But of his relation to affairs in Canada it must be said that it is an unhappy memory.

Bond Head’s appointment in 1835 has already been described as “one of the most extraordinary and unfortunate appointments ever made to a Canadian office by the British Government”. But scarcely less extraordinary in some respects was the appointment of his successor, Sir George Arthur, who came in March, 1838, from Van Diemen’s Land, one of England’s great penal colonies, over which he had presided since May, 1824. A biographer has thus described his appearance:

“A strong, keen face, devoid of superfluous flesh, with dark hair retreating from a high forehead and allowed to grow in front of the ears in the mutton-chop whiskers of the day, dark and slightly frowning brows, dark intent eyes, aquiline nose, large firm lips and resolute chin, both clean shaven, gave him an expression at once masterful, exacting, and somewhat repellent.”^[17]

Arthur had both military and administrative experience. He had entered the army in 1804, and within ten years rose from ensign to colonel. His administrative experience began when he was appointed military secretary to the Governor of Jersey. In 1812 he went to Jamaica as Assistant Quartermaster-General, and in 1814 to Honduras as Lieutenant-Governor. He remained in Honduras until 1822, during that time quelling a slave insurrection. In 1823 he was commissioned Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, and was there for twelve years. Upper Canada was, therefore, his third appointment as a Lieutenant-Governor of a British possession.

Arthur was brusque and energetic in manner, and his efficiency won him both the confidence of the Government and the respect of his colleagues. Lord Goderich said of him on one occasion that he had “never received a rebuke from his superiors in England”; but the very efficiency of his administrative methods prevented him from being a popular governor in any colony over which he presided. He was cold and reserved in manner, and his regulated habits of life prevented easy access by those associated with him. His biographer speaks of the qualities acquired or developed during a military career being carried into the conduct of public affairs, implicit obedience being demanded from his officials. Absolutism was his conception of good government.

Border incidents in the western part of the province were keeping the administration in a constant state of alarm when Arthur entered Upper Canada. The jails of the province were crowded with arrested Reformers, so much so that at times some of the accused had to be freed for lack of evidence to present at a formal trial. But the new Governor had one particular problem facing him immediately on his arrival. This had to do with the verdict of death already passed upon two of Mackenzie’s leaders in the rebellion, Samuel Lount and Captain Peter Matthews. They were due to be hanged for high treason. Should he exercise clemency? Chief Justice Robinson had presided over their trials and it had appeared as if Christopher Alexander Hagerman, the Solicitor-General, was determined to have some Reformers’ blood as the penalty for the December events. Opposed to him at the trial and seeking to defend the two men was Robert Baldwin.

Samuel Lount, born in 1791 in Pennsylvania, came to Upper Canada in 1811 with his father, Gabriel Lount, a land surveyor. Samuel was an expert woodsman and assisted his brother in the survey of three townships in Simcoe County. He was also a proficient blacksmith. He became widely known in Simcoe County and was elected to the Assembly in 1834, but was defeated in the election of 1836. The upset was secured in some degree by issuing land patents to settlers on condition that they vote for the government candidate. In the 1836 pre-election period, more than a hundred such patents were issued in Nottawasaga Township alone.

Union meetings were now being held in many parts of the province, and as autumn advanced secret military training was begun. In Lount’s blacksmith shop at Holland Landing the manufacture of pikeheads was carried on from morning to night. Lount was in constant touch with Mackenzie and was present at Montgomery’s Tavern when the encounter between the rebels and a loyal force took place. He came within an ace of escaping. After hiding for some weeks in the south-western part of the province, he tried to cross Lake Erie in an open boat, but was blown to shore by a storm and was arrested near the mouth of the Grand River. He was arraigned before a magistrate at Dunnville and then sent to Toronto for trial.

Peter Matthews, arrested on his East York farm, was brought to trial with Lount on March 26. Matthews was of Loyalist stock, his father having fought on the British side in the Revolution and at its close having settled with his family in Upper Canada, on the site of the present town of Pickering. The son served in Brock’s volunteers during the War of 1812 and fought in several of the battles. He was an honest and prosperous farmer, but he had committed the great offence—he was a stout Reformer and had been associated with Mackenzie’s enterprise.

Arthur had been counselled by Lord Glenelg before his arrival in Canada to prevent if possible the adoption of extreme measures in dealing with those implicated in the recent political uprising. However, Arthur’s inclination was to permit the law to take its course and provide a public example of justice applied to those who were traitors to their country. Samuel Lount’s wife carried a petition bearing five thousand signatures asking mercy for her husband, and on her knees pleaded with the Governor to save his life. But it was in vain. The two men were taken from their cells on April 12 and hanged, then buried together in the potter’s field just outside the town limits. At a much later date, 1903, there was erected in the Necropolis, Toronto, a granite monument, surmounted by a broken column, and bearing a suitable inscription to the memory of the two men. Lount left a family of eight children, while Matthews left a widow and fifteen children. There is good reason to believe that Lount could have purchased his life if he would give evidence implicating others. This he resolutely declined to do; instead to the very last he expressed his hope that the cause of political freedom would ultimately succeed. For this he was quite ready to give his life.

The execution of these two men, the only capital punishments inflicted, caused a sensation when word of it spread throughout the province. Coming so early in Arthur’s régime, it did seem to many that Van Diemen’s Land’s disciplinary measures were to be put in force in Upper Canada. Ill will toward Arthur developed at once, and to this day his reputation as a British governor bears the stain of the Lount-Matthews executions.

The military operations in Upper Canada, at Toronto and in the west, had covered only a brief period; but the disturbing effects continued into the next year and even into 1839. Mackenzie, the chief figure in the 1837 uprising, fled, as we have seen, immediately after the collapse of his march on Toronto, and, successfully eluding capture, made his way into the United States. A reward of a thousand pounds had been offered for his capture, but no one claimed it. In the United States he continued his agitation, engaging in virulent journalism against his own country and fomenting border troubles that cost many lives. When he returned to Canada in 1849 he no longer had any influence. He died in 1861, a poor and disappointed man.

Rewards had also been offered after the collapse of the Duncombe uprising, five hundred pounds for the leader himself and smaller amounts for five others who were regarded as similarly implicated. These were Eliakim and Finlay Malcolm, Robert Alway, one Anderson (first name not given), and Joshua Doan. Alway was Dr. Duncombe’s fellow member from Oxford County. He had taken no part whatever in the uprising; nevertheless, he was arrested and confined in jail at Hamilton for three months. His wife was detained for two weeks. In March, 1839, an attempt was made in the Assembly to declare Alway’s seat vacant; but on April 8, 1839, he was reported to be in his place and the motion to declare the seat vacant was withdrawn. Later he removed with his family to Texas, but before he became established in any business he and his youngest daughter died of yellow fever. The widow and her seven children returned to Upper Canada in 1844 and settled in Norfolk County.

Joshua Doan, whose name will recur in this narrative, also made his way to the United States, and there engaged in treasonable enterprises against his own country. Executions following the events of 1837 in Upper Canada numbered only two, as we have seen, but vengeance was taken in other ways upon hundreds of persons who were innocent of any part in the uprising. It seemed as if an hysteria had gripped the province. Persons were brought before the magistrates whose only offence had been the utterance of some criticism of the Government. Old grudges of neighbour against neighbour sometimes served as a basis for making accusations. Men were seized on their farms and taken to the nearest town, leaving wives and children behind to look after cattle and other stock during the winter weather. Supporters of the Government were loud in their protestations of loyalty, while others whose attitude in the past might be questioned now sought to ensure their safety by fervent commendation of the Government. Yet there were pockets of popular opinion that did not bow the knee to Baal. Quakers in Yarmouth township and Scottish settlers in Waterloo county had much sympathy with Mackenzie, and they were not alone.

A glimpse of conditions in London during that winter of 1837-38 is found in a letter written in May, 1838, by Mrs. Dennis O’Brien, wife of the principal merchant in the place: “London since December last has been one continual scene of confusion, crowded with soldiers and large numbers were billeted on each house for want of barracks, and it has been but recently since we got rid of them; and arrests of persons suspected of being implicated in the rebellion were going on through the winter. . . . Great dissatisfaction and excitement prevails in the country and many are daily leaving.”

Mrs. O’Brien had been touched personally by the excess zeal of the Government supporters. A relative, Alvaro Ladd, a resident of Delaware Township, and a Universalist as already noted, had been arrested on a flimsy charge in the excitement of the uprising. After a hasty trial he had been condemned to death. He was removed to Toronto and lay in prison for several months with the death warrant hanging over him before he was released. His health was badly affected by the trying experience.

The published correspondence of Sir George Arthur shows that he received copious gratuitous advice during the early months of his régime. Much of this had to do with the course he should pursue in his official capacity as Governor of the province. His more immediate task, however, was to deal with the post-rebellion situation, and of this he wrote to Sir John Colborne at Montreal: “With such a body of Prisoners in jail, and such numbers out on bail—the strong desire of many that the severest punishment should be inflicted, and the wish of others that it should be mitigated—you may imagine that the commencement of my campaign here is at least troublesome and anxious.”

Arthur was deeply apprehensive of the future of the province if American aggressive movements continued. “Sir Francis Head,” he wrote to Colborne, “had persuaded himself that there was a general loyal feeling here—certainly there was a gratifying exhibition of Loyalty at the moment to put down that worthless creature McKenzie [sic], and, no doubt there is a very considerable body of excellent persons well affected toward the Constitution—but what has become of the Numbers who for years have been known as Reformers, and very disaffected ones too? Where are the persons who returned a Majority of Reformers to the House of Assembly, and elected McKenzie Mayor of Toronto? Depend upon it, if we ever get the worst of it with the Americans many a Reformer will resuscitate.”^[18]

Arthur had abundant evidence that while the rebellion itself had been suppressed, unrest was still wide-spread in the western counties. A settler from Erindale, near Toronto, Thomas W. Magrath, who had offered his services to Colonel Maitland at London, had been sent into Norfolk County with a small force; and on May 1 he made a report, a copy of which was at once sent on to Arthur.

Magrath left his command for a day, expecting new orders from Colonel Maitland, and reported that on his return he found the people even more insolent and abusive than before. One of his command was attacked by four men and would have fared badly but for some timely help. Magrath did not anticipate invasion in this area by American aggressors; “but did they do so,” he added, “they have plenty of fellows from this part of the country with them and would be joined by hundreds on their arrival here which perhaps would only be for the purpose of burning the property of those who are obnoxious to them.”^[19]

Arthur had indeed a wide variety of problems with which to deal in the early months of his régime. The militia, who had been called out in December, 1837, were restive and dissatisfied with the payments for their services. An inventory of the stocks of arms available had shown mysterious disappearances here and there, although those active in the recent revolt seemed to be well supplied with arms. In June the province had to face actual invasion in the Niagara area. Writing to Sir John Colborne, Arthur announced his intention of trying the prisoners taken in the Short Hills affair by a general militia court martial. He quoted Colonel Maitland as saying that the disaffected in every direction had received great encouragement by reports of the invasion “and are only kept back from rushing to open violence and renewed rebellion by the presence of the Troops”.

“I could not have supposed it possible,” Arthur added, “that such a panic could have been so universally felt. This will be prevented for the future if the arms were sent into the Province which you have authorized for the various Stations, and a respectable body of Militia kept up for at least twelve months.”^[20]

But there were matters to be dealt with quite apart from those of defence against invaders. The Clergy Reserves, which had provoked much of the unrest leading up to the events of 1837 in Upper Canada, remained a troublesome issue. The Reserves irritated the ordinary settler in Upper Canada, hindering as they did the economic development, and they furnished a ground for complaint by the non-Anglican bodies who were opposed to the idea of a state-supported church. This was a question which had never faced Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land.

Another religious question was raised by Rev. John Strachan, Archdeacon of York, who on May 4, 1838, sent to Arthur a fifteen-hundred-word letter setting forth the reasons why, in his opinion, it was desirable that Upper Canada should become a separate diocese of the Church of England, and the further reasons why, if such a diocese were created, he should be the first Bishop:

Strachan had been appointed an Archdeacon in 1829, subject to the See of Quebec, and as such had exercised virtual episcopal functions. Further advancement to episcopal rank had doubtless been in his mind since that date. In May, 1835, Chief Justice Robinson had written to the Colonial Office recommending that Strachan be appointed a suffragan bishop to the failing Bishop Stewart of Quebec. At the same time Strachan had written urging the appointment of two suffragans, George Mountain for Montreal and himself for Upper Canada. Mountain received the appointment, Strachan was passed by; and when Bishop Stewart died, Mountain succeeded him.

Sir Francis Bond Head, in his brief period in Canada, had urged Strachan’s appointment to an Upper Canada diocese, but received only a promise that the matter would be borne in mind. The British Government was quite prepared to see the Diocese of Quebec divided, but would provide no salary for another bishop. This was the reason for Strachan’s offer to Arthur to forego a state salary, and in the end this was accepted by the British Government.

Governor Arthur would himself have preferred to see an Englishman appointed. Writing later to Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, he said: “One of the most unhappy, among the many unhappy occurrences in this Province, appears to me to have been the elevation of a native of Scotland over the Church of England.” If the church could not hope for an English import, since no salary was available, then Dr. Strachan was the most deserving and the most able of the local clergy. This he would admit. Thus in the end John Strachan achieved his goal and was consecrated in London on August 4, 1839, by the Right Reverend William Hawley, Archbishop of Canterbury.

A Reformer Becomes a Rebel

Despite the fact that he was an American and probably known to the local authorities to have Reform sympathies, Woodman came through the Rebellion year with no charges of any kind laid against him—this at a time when charges were being made in reckless fashion and upon the most flimsy evidence. Many Reformers were less fortunate. Jail cells in London were so crowded by January, 1838, that the magistrates had to release some of those under arrest, bail being taken for their appearance in March when a special court would be held. W. H. Draper, the Solicitor-General of the province, reporting upon the arrests in the London area, found that as late as April, 1838, there were still seventy prisoners detained in London, while 130 others had been admitted to bail. The crowded conditions in London jail he attributed to the zeal of local loyalists, whose charges against their fellows were based chiefly on suspicion or enmity.

Woodman tells us that he interested himself in the welfare of some of the prisoners, securing permission to visit them and look after their needs. The permission was later withdrawn, but he was still able to communicate with them through the turnkey. One of his services was to arrange for the appearance of witnesses, something that the men locked up could not do for themselves. But in so doing he incurred the suspicion of being himself a disloyal person.

When the trials began in March Woodman appears to have been present, for he mentions various incidents in connection with the cases that came before the court. There were several death sentences imposed, though these were never carried out. In the late summer of 1838 Enoch Moore, one of those ordered to be hanged, was still in jail in Toronto, as was also Ebenezer Wilcox, under a like sentence. Woodman says that Moore when on trial accused Magistrate Askin and another magistrate of swearing falsely against him. Charles Latimer, a local merchant, made the same charge against Magistrate Lawrason.

“Long before the court was over,” says Woodman, “any one could see that the court was backed by packed juries, all combined to spread alarm through the country.”

The two local magistrates whose names have been mentioned were well-known figures in the early days of London. Colonel John B. Askin, the clerk of the court, born at Detroit, had an Irish father and a mother of Indian blood. An early local historian who knew the man says that he showed some of the characteristics of both the Celt and the Indian, but they did not harmonize. “The volatile nature of the one had to contend the cold impassivity of the other.” He was a difficult man to have dealings with, because he took all matters seriously, even if of minor consequence. He could not understand levity and was frequently the butt of practical jokes by the young men of the village.

Askin could be properly regarded as a member of the village’s little Family Compact. Other members of that Compact, if it could be so termed, were John Harris, the district treasurer; James Mitchell, the district judge; and James Hamilton, the sheriff, who was appointed in 1837. Minor local law officials were John O’Neil, the high constable; Samuel Park, the jailor; and William King Cornish, deputy clerk of the court. Needless to say, all were Tories and members of Rev. Mr. Cronyn’s church. O’Neil, the high constable, was prominent in the Orange order and one of the most active politicians in the village.

Lawrence Lawrason was a less picturesque figure than his fellow magistrate. His gravestone and that of his wife may still be seen in St. Paul’s churchyard at London, from which all other stones were long ago removed. Lawrason was born at Ancaster in 1803, his father being a Loyalist from New Jersey. After some earlier business experience he came to London in 1832 and joined George J. Goodhue, an American, in business and in the conduct of the post office. He was an ardent supporter of the Family Compact and for a short time sat in the Assembly. He became wealthy but subsequently lost much of his property. In 1865 he became London’s first police magistrate.

These two men were typical justices of the peace in Upper Canada, owing their appointments to the Family Compact at Toronto and jealous of its interests. Neither had any training in the law, and Askin particularly lacked the calm approach that a judge might be expected to make to a case coming before him. Preservation of the existing order was a basic consideration in the exercise of their powers when examining Reformers.

The trivial nature of many of the charges at the time of the Mackenzie uprising is well shown by the records of the courts of examination. Charles Lindsey, the biographer of William Lyon Mackenzie, lists the names of 885 persons who were arrested or absconded in 1837-38. About half of these, 422 to be exact, were from the Home District, at the centre of government. The second largest number, 163, came from the London District. No less than ninety of the latter were freed by the magistrates when placed on trial, presumably for lack of evidence.

Shortly after the sittings of the court Woodman was warned by Edward Talbot, the former editor of the London Sun, that he was in danger and would be well advised to leave the province. A similar warning came from another friend, McFadden by name. Woodman remained in London, however, and says that only once was any violence shown toward him; and he was quite prepared for his enemies on that occasion.

Woodman was clearly risking his freedom in acting on behalf of the prisoners in London jail; but not until June 9 was any action taken against him. On that date he was placed under arrest and lodged in the jail with those whom he had been assisting. The charge against him was that he had been furnishing prisoners with knives and files to enable them to break out of their cells, a rather unlikely story in view of the fact that their guards consisted of British regulars then on duty in the village.

Woodman made an immediate appeal for release to the two local magistrates, Lawrence Lawrason and Colonel John B. Askin, sending his wife and daughter to make representations on his behalf. Neither magistrate responded to the plea, nor did Sheriff Hamilton when he was approached. Like many others, Woodman lay in the underground cells during the hot summer days of 1838. “The cells were very much crowded,” he recalled later, “which, with the hot weather, came nearly suffocating us. At night we took turns at a hole called a window, eight inches square, to get a little air.”

There were others besides Woodman who recorded the hardships of confinement in London jail. Lewis A. Norton, a Yarmouth Township youth, who in the fall of 1837 joined a rebel group known as the Spartan Rangers, was arrested after the Duncombe uprising and imprisoned for several months. “Every hall was crowded full,” he says in his narrative, “and there were no blankets or other covering save what the prisoners had on.” In this condition he remained for a month, when finally a blanket was provided. His was a winter experience.

Colonel E. A. Theller, one of the Patriot leaders who was captured at Amherstburg at the taking of the schooner Ann in January, 1838, wrote of his jail experience in London:

Close confinement, poor food and extremes of heat or cold, together with the worry caused by separation from home, wives and children, brought ill-health and even death to some of those who suffered imprisonment for their political views during this troubled period. One example may suffice. John Grieve, a Scottish farmer living in Westminster Township to the south of London and an active member of Rev. Mr. Proudfoot’s Presbyterian congregation, was arrested on December 20, 1837, at his home and was lodged in jail. It was never charged that he had taken any part whatever in the recent Duncombe uprising. His only offence was that he was a Reformer and was said to have spoken of political reform in the province. With dozens of others, he was lodged in the cold, damp cells of London court-house and was kept there until April 10, when he was dismissed, no charge having been made or proven against him. He came out of the local prison with broken health, and was dead within a few months at the age of thirty.

During those summer days of 1838 when Woodman was in jail, there came frequent reports of hostile actions along the border of the province. On June 25 he recorded: “News reached London of the outbreak at the Short Hills in the Niagara District about fifteen miles north-west of the Falls. The Patriots were successful in defeating a company of regulars and capturing the village, with some prisoners and $1,000 in specie; but they were subsequently all taken prisoners and locked up in Niagara jail.”

Two days later there was another alarm, of which he says: “News has just arrived that the western frontier was attacked on Lake St. Clair and that their front guard was fifteen hundred strong. All the militia were called out and great excitement prevailed in town.”

More alarming was the word that came the next day, June 28: “News arrived that the rebel army was coming and would be in London on the 5th July to take dinner. Of course, all was confusion and bustle. Families began to move goods and all. The Jailer’s wife left and went to her relations in the country.”

These rumours of border troubles greatly alarmed the local authorities, who ordered both the militia and the regulars to assemble and be reviewed in readiness for any attack. The excitement continued for a week as new and conflicting rumours of invasion continued to come. On July 1 Woodman says that the village market square was covered with the assembled troops, all under arms. The bridges leading into town were guarded and orders were to destroy them if necessary.

On the evening of the first of July a fresh detachment of civilian prisoners arrived, sixteen waggon loads in all, and further crowded the cells. Examinations took place during the next few days. Many were released, no actual charge being made against them. Others were admitted to bail, while a few were held in custody for later examination. These prisoners were from Kent County, and were probably those described in a letter written by one Alexander Ledbeater which appeared in the Toronto Mirror of October 26, 1838. The writer stated that he and twenty-five of his neighbours had been arrested in the previous June and taken to London. There they were examined and detained for three weeks. At the end of this time they were freed without even being informed of the charges made against them. In the meantime, however, the women and children left behind had been terrorized by being informed that the men were to be executed.

This may have been the incident to which Mr. Proudfoot had reference when he wrote in his diary on November 28, 1838: “Mr. Jennings brought accounts of the insolent tyrannical doings of the magistrates about Chatham. How richly these deserve a recompense for their conduct.”

Woodman was in jail during all of the summer of 1838. On August 20 he wrote to his wife, then greatly exercised by the wild rumours floating about, advising her to remain at home with the children. If there were an invasion and it became necessary to leave the home, she should consult with two friends whom he named, a Mr. Whittiman and a Mr. Van Buskirk. These two and Mr. D. O. Marsh, previously mentioned, are the only ones whom we know of definitely as friends of Woodman when he lived in London. The letter addressed to his wife Woodman placed between two plates when his son brought his dinner, a practice by which he had been communicating with his family. On this occasion, however, the turnkey was suspicious and seized the letter, which was shown to the officials. Whittiman and Van Buskirk were at once threatened with arrest and Woodman himself was watched more closely.

Woodman does not record when he was released from jail or what manner of trial, if any, he underwent; but he does tell us that after four days of freedom he was again arrested and lodged in the cells.

“These rascally proceedings made me a rebel,” he says; and thereupon he decided to leave the country as hundreds of others were doing. Emigration to the United States, which had been continuous during the troubled thirties, was greatly increased by the uprisings. Both Canadian and American newspapers commented at the time upon the extensive movement of people out of the provinces. The Detroit Free Press of June 7, 1838, said of the incoming Canadians: “The emigration to the new states from the neighboring province of Upper Canada in the present season is immense. A large number of families, well provided with money, teams and farming utensils, have crossed over to this place within the last few weeks.” The Toronto Mirror thought that “if matters go on at the present rate, one half of Canada will be in Illinois and the Far West before long.”

There were, no doubt, many Canadian families leaving the province; but the descriptions which have come down of waggon loads of people crossing the southern peninsula at this time do not as a rule distinguish between Canadians who were emigrating and Americans who were merely taking a short cut through from New York State to the West. The Lewiston Telegraph, for instance, in March, 1837, computed that not less than two hundred teams had crossed into Upper Canada at that place in the last month destined for the far West. These were, obviously, Americans moving from one state to another.

One of those who left Upper Canada at this time was Samuel Edison, the father of Thomas Edison, the distinguished inventor. The family, of American origin, had crossed into Canada in 1783 at the time of the American Revolution, settling with other Loyalists near Digby, Nova Scotia. There they remained until 1811, when they came to Upper Canada, to Bayham Township in what is now Elgin County. Samuel Edison was but a child when the family moved from Nova Scotia, but as a youth he saw some of the abuses prevalent in the province. He detested the selfishness of the Family Compact and openly spoke against it.

When the Rebellion came he, with others in the vicinity of the little village of Vienna, was on the Tory blacklist, and a search was made for him. Warned of likely arrest, he made his way to Port Burwell, where he boarded a schooner loaded with lumber and was concealed by the crew. They landed him at a point some miles distant and he made his way to the border. Thus was lost to Canada a man whose son stands high in the ranks of the world’s great scientists. There were many such potential losses to Canada at this time.

In the months immediately after the Mackenzie uprising, an organization was formed to promote systematic emigration to the American Midwest. The Mississippi Emigration Society, organized at Toronto in the spring of 1838, set forth in its prospectus that as many people were dissatisfied with conditions in the province, it was planned to purchase a large tract of land in the American West where Canadians might settle as a community. The president of the organization, Peter Perry, and Thomas Parke, one of the directors, were both former members of the Assembly. Parke had been a member from Middlesex County, which included the village of London. The enterprise never accomplished much. There was general opposition to it in official circles and the Toronto Patriot branded the whole emigration idea as a swindle, suggesting that those who left Canada should write after their name the letters “I. O. A.” interpreted as meaning “I owe a great many debts which I cannot pay.”

During those summer months of 1838, while Woodman and hundreds of others lay in crowded jails, and while others were leaving the disturbed province, the Tories both in the capital and elsewhere seemed to be triumphant. Incidents along the border, giving rise to wild rumours and alarms, gave occasion for fervent protestations of loyalty. With suspicion clinging about them, there were many who hastened to avoid possible arrest by a loyalty of lip, if not of heart. Newspapers supporting the administration—and there were bound to be few taking the other side after December, 1837—described with an abundance of adjectives the loyalty of Upper Canadians to their rulers and their general abhorrence of Reform principles.

But in this same period Canadian history was being made elsewhere. The British Government, brought up suddenly by the realization that in the very first year of the young Queen Victoria’s reign two of her provinces overseas were in armed revolt, at last decided that something must be done about it. For years complaints had come to the Colonial Office from Canada, but for the most part they received little or no attention. Now it was determined that to these sick colonies there should go a political physician who would diagnose the disease and, if possible, prescribe a remedy. The man chosen was a young radical, Lord Durham, the son-in-law of Lord Grey, the former Prime Minister. Durham was immensely rich and an aristocrat of the aristocrats. When offered the post of Canadian conciliator he at first refused, but changed his mind at the earnest entreaty of the young Queen.^[21]

The report that he ultimately submitted became the corner-stone of later British colonial policy. Its reception at the time, however, both in England and in Canada, was mixed. Tories everywhere abhorred and denounced its findings and its recommendations. These were declared to be merely rewards to the late rebels and betrayal of the loyal supporters of the Government. Durham was repudiated by the weak Melbourne administration at home; but within two years the first steps were being taken that were to lead to greater changes in the constitution of the Canadas than had ever been dreamed of by the men of 1837.

Durham arrived in Canada at the end of May, 1838 and was back in England by the end of November. One may doubt whether Elijah Woodman in the village of London ever heard of his activities. Woodman had been confined in London jail, within ten days after Durham’s arrival at Quebec, and had left the province by the end of August. He took his eldest son, Francis, with him when he went to Detroit, and the boy found work while the father went on to Wisconsin to inquire into conditions and opportunities there.

The Black Hawk War, in which Abraham Lincoln served, had brought about the opening of the southern part of Wisconsin to settlement in 1832, and three years later the first houses were being built at the mouth of the Milwaukee River. This was the beginning of a hectic rush of immigrants and a wide-spread speculation in land. In the next decade Wisconsin’s population grew from 30,000 to beyond 300,000. Lake steamers from Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit gave ready access to this new territory, and soon the vessels were crowded with families headed west. Decks were piled high with household furniture and farm implements, while waggon wheels were lined against the bulkheads or lashed to the shrouds above. Steamers were leaving daily for the western country, and Woodman, aboard any one of these vessels, would find himself in a confusion of tongues as he journeyed with people from the eastern states and from half the countries of Europe. All had one end in view, to obtain land.

How long Woodman remained in Wisconsin we do not know, as he has left no account of his stay. His interest in the American West was not entirely due to his dissatisfaction with conditions in Upper Canada. It will be recalled that he had earlier written to his relatives in Maine expressing his intention of going farther west should Upper Canada not come up to his expectations. All that we know is that he was back in Detroit in the fall months of 1838, and that he then had in mind to remove at once with his family to the new western country. It was to be the great misfortune of his own life, and that also of his family, that he did not do so. Instead he became involved in the activities of the “Patriot” movement that by now was in full swing in Michigan, planning the invasion and capture of Upper Canada.

Woodman had shown Reform sympathies in 1836. These are indicated in his comments upon the Tory excesses that accompanied the election of 1836 in London, but there is no evidence that he was connected with the militant Reform group in the village during 1837. He was not out with the Duncombe force at the end of the year, or included in the wholesale arrests that followed the uprising.

His efforts to assist prisoners in the London jail during their trials in early 1838 again indicate Reform sympathies; but these activities were, for a time at least, permitted by the Tory authorities. However, as an American who had not taken the oath of allegiance, he was likely, sooner or later, to come under suspicion of wrong motives in giving assistance to prisoners. In due time he was taken up and suffered the indignities of prison life. That he was later freed indicates that no charge was laid against him; but a second arrest and confinement, for what reason we do not know, brought him to the point of no return. He revolted against this treatment and, as he says, became a rebel. He must have been freed a second time, again an indication that no serious charge was pressed against him; and thereupon he decided to leave the country and start life anew elsewhere. When his family saw him again, it was as a prisoner brought to London to be tried for his life as an invader of the country.

We may quite properly speculate on the reasons that induced Woodman to turn upon the country that for seven years had been his home and the home of his family. By 1837 he had probably completed the residence requirements for naturalization, but there is no evidence that he had ever applied for citizenship papers. It was not a favourable time for an American to make such application, and in view of the happenings in London in the later months of the year 1837 it is very doubtful if his application would have been granted. Americans were rather generally looked upon with suspicion by the authorities, and Woodman’s efforts to assist the prisoners in London jail would probably have been regarded as good reason for denying the plea. With the authorities busily examining the persons charged with disloyalty there would be little thought of bringing others with questionable records into citizenship.

Moreover, we have no reason to believe that Woodman himself desired naturalization. He may have thought of his stay in Canada as only temporary. His experiences in Upper Canada had not all been of a character that would make him desire permanent residence. There is evidence that for a time he prospered; we have his son’s testimony of the mill on Otter Creek running day and night and of the large rafts of lumber floated down to Port Burwell. But all this had collapsed, and in 1836 he was bankrupt—this at the age of thirty-nine, when he might have hoped that he would have attained success. How long the depression would continue none could tell. Disappointment must have had much to do with the course that Woodman followed in the autumn of 1838.

At Detroit he learned the plans of the Patriot leaders and probably came upon some former acquaintances—William Putnam, for example—who had already enlisted in the movement directed against Canada. He was in a jingoistic atmosphere, with a general assumption that Canadians were oppressed by England and were but awaiting an early opportunity to attain the independence of their American neighbours. There was a sad lack of understanding by Americans in the thirties of Canada and of its connection with England. To ardent American patriots it seemed hard to believe that Canadians could still maintain a relationship with a monarchical country.

In London village the wife and family awaited word from the husband and father. He had left London with the intention of visiting Wisconsin, a geographical name with which they had become familiar. None of Woodman’s letters written during the months that he was absent have been preserved, and we do not know how far the family was prepared for the decision Woodman had made, which was to have such serious consequences.

The Border Troubles of 1838

American public opinion on the Canadian political difficulties of 1837 differed widely as between the seaboard states and the frontier West. Newspapers in the East expected that the uprisings would be quickly quelled; but in the West, the home of Jacksonian democracy, a combination of economic depression, crop failures and unemployment made it easy for agitators to stir up anti-British feeling. Soon there was a demand that assistance be given to the “oppressed Canadians” and that they be “freed from the British yoke”. Here lay the prospect of adventure, glory and booty. Recruiting was soon under way in Vermont, Michigan and New York. Impetus was given to the movement by migrating Canadians, many of them Americans by birth, and their stories found ready listeners. With the arrival in New York State of William Lyon Mackenzie, a fugitive from Upper Canada, efforts were begun to raise financial aid and to enlist volunteers to maintain the struggle. The name “Patriots” was soon being applied to Mackenzie’s followers.

The first threat came in mid-December, 1837, when Navy Island in the Niagara River was occupied by a force numbering between eight hundred and a thousand under the command of one Rensselaer Van Rensselaer, a dissolute young man with no knowledge whatever of military matters. A provisional government of Upper Canada was established and a proclamation issued offering three hundred acres of land and one hundred dollars in silver to each volunteer joining the Patriot force before May 1. The prospect of personal gain was probably a greater incentive to recruiting than the lure of adventure or glory.

The Canadian authorities were quick to meet the challenge. On the night of December 29 a naval expedition cut out the small steamboat Caroline connecting the island with the mainland and sent it down the Niagara River. It stranded before reaching the Falls. One man was killed in the affair, arousing intense excitement and demands for reparation. Major-General Winfield Scott was at once sent from Washington to take charge of the situation. He promptly ordered all steamboat connection with the island to cease. By mid-January the place had been abandoned and quiet restored locally.

Hostility toward Canada now took on a new form in the organization of secret societies, whose activities kept the border in turmoil during the whole of 1838 and even into the following year. The first of these new organizations was the Canadian Refugee Relief Association, set up in March at Lockport, N.Y. It was responsible for the burning on May 28 in American waters of the Canadian steamer Sir Robert Peel and for the invasion in June of Canadian territory in the Short Hills in the Niagara district. The Upper Canada authorities took thirty-one prisoners in the Short Hills affair, including Benjamin Wait, Samuel Chandler, James Moreau and Donald McLeod, the last of these the chief organizer of the Refugee Relief Association. Moreau was hanged and thirteen of his companions were transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the following year.

The Sir Robert Peel was a small passenger steamboat of 350 tons, with Captain David Armstrong in command. On the evening of May 27, 1838, she was anchored at Wells Island in U.S. territory, across the St. Lawrence River above Prescott. Before daylight of the following morning she was boarded by some fifty men under command of Bill Johnson, self-styled “Admiral of the Thousand Islands”. Women passengers were put ashore; men passengers were herded into the cabins and kept under control by muskets poked through the cabin windows and doors. Later, crew and men passengers were hustled ashore, not being allowed to take their baggage with them. Then the steamer was set on fire. Hearing of the outrage, Governor Marcy of New York despatched troops to the scene and hurried there himself. The raiders dispersed through the woods of the countryside, only a few being caught. When brought to trial they were discharged through lack of evidence.

Johnson claimed he had fired the Sir Robert Peel in retaliation for the burning of the Caroline on the Niagara River in December 1837. His real objective and the objective of the Refugee Association was to embroil the United States and Great Britain in war. Of his followers in the attack made on the Sir Robert Peel, ten out of eleven who were captured were Canadians. The Peel affair brought in turn another retaliatory incident. At Brockville a few days later the American steamboat Telegraph was boarded and later fired upon by some Canadian militiamen. Each incident added to the excitement, stirred unfriendly feelings and brought demands in each country that large military forces should be sent to the border.

In June a second society appeared, bearing the name Sons of Liberty. Though there were some Canadians in its membership, the leaders were American and the objective was Canadian independence. Plans were made for extensive organization of sympathizers within Upper Canada, and July 4 was set as the date for an armed invasion. It was a rumour of this proposed invasion that caused the excitement and alarm in London reported by Woodman from his cell in the court-house. To secure arms and ammunition the conspirators had planned to raid the Dearborn arsenal, but the plot became known to the federal authorities and the whole scheme collapsed. The Society soon disbanded and many of its members were merged in the third and most important of the secret societies, the Patriot Hunters’ Lodges.

Originating in Vermont, this organization spread westward over the entire northern area of the United States, with wide-spread connections in Canada. Membership at its height in 1838 has been estimated at fifty thousand, drawn from all levels of society. Playing upon the love of the average American and Canadian for secret ritual, members were initiated through a number of degrees and with an elaborate system of signs, hand grips and methods of rapping in order to gain admittance to the lodges.

The movement incorporated in itself the deeply rooted suspicion of England which lingered on, nearly two generations after the Revolution, and could still be stirred by loud-mouthed demagogues. At a convention held in Cleveland in September, plans were made for the setting up in Canada of a republican form of government closely modelled upon that of the United States. To meet financial needs a bank was authorized that would have a capital of $7,500,000 and would issue paper money. Members of the Hunters’ Lodges were expected to buy shares in the bank, paying for them in small instalments. How the empty pockets of the out-of-work rabble that gathered to the ranks could produce even a fraction of the bank’s capital was never explained. It was all part of a wild dream.

By November plans for action were completed, and the town of Prescott on the St. Lawrence River was selected as the objective of the first attack. Prescott was immediately opposite Ogdensburg, N.Y., where there were many Patriot sympathizers. On the night of November 11, 1838, a landing was made about a mile and a half below the Canadian town, and the invaders took up position in and around a large stone windmill that still stands as a remainder of the incident. It had probably been planned to have this attack coincide with a second outbreak in Lower Canada. The French-Canadian uprising was quelled within a week, and there was fighting at Prescott for about the same length of time. Then the invaders surrendered.

Much of the later interest in this event has centred about the personality of the leader of the expedition, Nils Szoltevcky Von Schoultz, a former Polish officer and a man of education. Coming from Europe, with its incessant bloodletting, he had been deceived into thinking that the unrest in Canada was a struggle for freedom such as he had known in his native Poland. He pleaded guilty when arraigned before a court martial at Kingston, and newspapers of the day reported that he was “as unmoved as a rock” during the course of his trial. It was long a tradition in Canada that he had been defended by John A. Macdonald, later the first Prime Minister of Canada, but this is incorrect. Macdonald did, however, have contact with the Pole, “spending long and absorbing hours in his company” and drawing up his will.^[22] Von Schoultz was one of the first of the principals in the Prescott affair to suffer the death penalty. Ten of his followers were also hanged, and more than fifty others were transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the following year. Many of the prisoners were mere youths under twenty years of age, having neither trade nor employment. A merciful attitude was taken toward these young offenders and they were sent back to the United States.

The disastrous results of the Prescott attack discouraged the Patriots from further aggression in the St. Lawrence River region, but in the west the year 1838 saw a whole series of border incidents. These kept the area in such a state of constant alarm that it was deemed necessary to call in the help of two British regiments, the 32nd and the 83rd. These were placed under the command of Colonel the Hon. John Maitland, of the 32nd.

In January an expedition against Amherstburg (old Fort Malden of the War of 1812 days) was led by Dr. Edward Alexander Theller of Detroit, a native Irishman full of hatred for England. His force embarked on a little schooner, the Ann, but on nearing Amherstburg found a militia force waiting for it. While cruising about in the river the schooner went aground. Militia men waded into the icy water and seized the vessel, capturing Theller and his crew.

In February a Patriot force from Detroit, with reinforcements from Cleveland, occupied Fighting Island, below Sandwich, but was dislodged by the British regulars and dispersed on reaching the American shore by troops sent from Detroit by Brigadier-General Hugh Brady. Many Detroiters came down to see what was expected to be a battle, but they saw only a rout.

March saw the third Patriot effort when a force numbering over four hundred marched across the frozen surface of Lake Erie from Sandusky, Ohio, to Pelee Island, and proceeded to seize private property which they sent to the American shore. Colonel Maitland acted promptly. A force drawn from the British regiments at Amherstburg, with some militia and two six-pounder guns, set out across the ice and on March 3 fought it out with the Patriots. An official report of this strange “battle on the ice” says that two Patriot leaders, Bradley and Howdley, were killed and eleven prisoners taken, some of them wounded. The British loss was given as two killed and twenty-eight wounded. The defending force returned to Amherstburg on March 4, worn out and hungry after forty-eight hours’ activity during which they had had only four hours’ rest. A quaint old monument in a churchyard at Amherstburg bears the names of three of their wounded who died later.

The final episode on the Detroit River frontier came on December 4, when another attempt was made to invade Canada. Toward the end of November a force of about four hundred Patriots had assembled near the mouth of the Detroit River. On December 1 they were marched nearer to Detroit and were there joined by another party. Brigadier-General Hugh Brady was keeping a watchful eye on these activities and this, combined with the wintry weather, led to many desertions. The Patriot leaders recognized that immediate action was necessary before their followers all disappeared.

Detroit had grown accustomed to the ill-clothed, hungry men who lounged about the streets and crowded its barrooms. It was well known that some hostile action against the Canadian town across the river was contemplated, but just when this was to take place was kept secret.

On the evening of December 3 the Patriot force marched through Detroit’s streets to the water-front, accompanied by a throng of interested spectators. At the dock the force was ordered aboard a little steamer, the Champlain, which ran between Detroit and Buffalo in the summer months but which had been laid up for the winter. To make it available for use must have required some time and probably the help of Detroit sympathizers.

The force embarking on the expedition numbered about 150 and was under the command of “General” L. V. Bierce. The men were poorly armed and had no idea of what was ahead of them, and there is evidence that some of them resented being forced aboard the steamer. Crowds about the water-front watched the lines cast off as the vessel set out, and cheered when sparks and flames marked the arrival on the opposite shore in the early morning hours of December 4.

The party landed near the present Ford plant on the Windsor water-front, set fire to the small Canadian steamer Thames, and burned a guard-house near by. Two men of the guard perished in the flames. The invading force then moved down the river road toward Windsor village. They were divided into three detachments, commanded respectively by Cornelius Cunningham, William Putnam and “Colonel” S. S. Coffinbury. Cunningham and Putnam were residents of the London District, while Coffinbury was an American, the editor of a newspaper at Mansfield, Ohio. His detachment was a small reserve of about twenty-five men. The Patriot force took position in an apple orchard adjacent to the house of François Baby, a building that still exists and has recently become a historical museum. It stands on the water-front in the very heart of the present city of Windsor.

Defending militia at Sandwich, alarmed by the glare of the fires set by invaders, were quickly in motion and soon came in contact with the Patriots, who, finding themselves between a cross-fire, quickly began to scatter. “Colonel” Harvel, a man of great stature who bore the Patriot standard, was soon shot through the head. William Putnam also fell early in the fighting. There is no evidence that the leaders knew what ought to be done or what could be done. No provision had been made for a safe retreat if retreat became necessary. “General” Bierce was chiefly concerned for his own safety. When his men began to scatter he, with the bodyguard which he had provided before leaving Detroit, and with Editor Coffinbury by his side, headed back to the river bank where the Champlain had landed. The steamer had returned to Detroit as soon as the force landed, but Bierce and Coffinbury were able to find boats or canoes along the shore and made off.

The little steamer Erie was in mid-stream with a small American force aboard, but its crew would give no help. Some fugitives from the fighting in the Baby orchard fled up the river toward Lake St. Clair; but most of these were later picked up, Indians giving help in this mopping-up operation. Twenty-one of the invaders, including Harvel and William Putnam, were killed during the brief battle and twenty-four were made prisoners. Some are believed to have drowned attempting to recross the river, while others perished from exposure to cold during that December night.

There were atrocities on both sides during the brief engagement. Four Patriot prisoners were shot in cold blood by order of Colonel John Prince, who was in charge of the militia. Prince would probably have shot all the prisoners had he not been restrained by some of the officers with him. His grim action became a subject of bitter debate—not only in Upper Canada, where it was condoned by some, but even on the floor of the British Parliament at Westminster, where it was soundly condemned. The deed was matched in ferocity, however, by the killing and mutilation by the invaders of Surgeon John J. Hume, of Sandwich, who had come with the militia to offer his professional services. He was shot down as he approached the orchard, slugs were fired into his body, and he was stabbed in many places with Bowie knives. His grave may be seen today in St. John’s churchyard at Sandwich.

Of the several attempts at invasion during the year 1838, the raid on Windsor showed the least planning or foresight. It was in marked contrast to the Prescott affair, which had had the leadership of a trained military man, the unfortunate Von Schoultz. We look in vain for any evidence of either bravery or qualities of leadership on the part of “General” Bierce. He was a coward and, after the Windsor affair, quickly gave up command of the “Patriot Army of the West” to return to his law practice at Akron, Ohio. Though later brought before a federal jury, he went scot free. Bierce was later four times elected Mayor of Akron, became Grand Master of the Masonic order in Ohio, and at the outbreak of the Civil War was appointed by President Lincoln as an adjutant-general in the Union army.

Dr. E. A. Theller, who had led an attack on Amherstburg earlier in the year and had been captured, had later been imprisoned at Quebec but had made his escape. He arrived in Detroit on the day after the Windsor affair, and says in his narrative that large numbers of reinforcements came in that same day and were paraded fully armed through Detroit streets. By this time, however, the federal authorities were busily making arrests and the river was closely patrolled. The reinforcements came one day too late to be of any help. However, that evening an overflow meeting of Hunters in the city hall listened to inflammatory speeches in which the British, Canadian and American Governments were all vigorously denounced. This ended the Detroit River activities; the assembled force broke up and the men left for their homes.

Such leadership as did appear in the attack on Windsor came chiefly from William Putnam, the Canadian who was second-in-command. He had had militia training in Canada and some little experience in command. His home was but a few miles out of London and there is good reason to believe that Elijah Woodman had known him after coming to the village in 1836. The Putnam family was of American origin but had been in Upper Canada since before the turn of the century. They were not Loyalists but belonged to the second migration, which entered the province seeking good land. William Putnam was a Canadian volunteer in the War of 1812, later served as a captain in the Middlesex County Militia, and was also an officer in the Masonic lodge. At the close of the war he had petitioned for a grant of two hundred acres of land, supporting his claim by a testimonial from his Commander, Colonel Mahlon Burwell. On a technicality he received but half this acreage, and a biographer makes this comment: “William may then have registered his first grievance against the system of government in the province. The two Council members who, with the Chief Justice, heard and ruled on the petition were Rev. John Strachan, who had already been granted at least 1,300 acres in his own name, and John McGill, who had been granted over 5,500 acres, 2,000 of it in William’s own township of Dorchester.”

At the age of twenty-five Putnam had a sawmill in operation. This might have led to acquaintance with Elijah Woodman, who also had operated a sawmill. Later he added a distillery to his operations, then added to his holdings a tavern and a grist-mill. He was recognized for his business ability and showed his public spirit by his militia service, rising from ensign to adjutant. By the middle thirties he was recognized as a man of substance and of some importance in the community. He was known to be a Reformer, yet when 1837 came and William Lyon Mackenzie led his uprising at York, Putnam remained quietly at home. Even when Dr. Charles Duncombe, a personal friend, raised the banner of revolt in the London District and assembled a force at the little hamlet of Scotland, Putnam was not there.

The break came later at a militia dinner when, after the toasts to the Queen and the Royal Family had been honoured, a toast to Sir Francis Bond Head was offered and Putnam left his glass untouched. In violent language one of the company charged him with disloyalty. For answer Putnam slapped his face and challenged not only his critic but any in the group who doubted his loyalty. From that evening he was a marked man.^[23]

A few nights later, while at a Delaware hotel, he was arrested, bound hand and foot, and taken to London jail. On the day after Christmas he appeared before Magistrate Lawrason, a former militia comrade, and was questioned. A month later he was again questioned, this time about his presence at the meeting at Flanagan’s Hotel on December 8. He admitted being at the hotel on that date but denied that it had been a political meeting. His examiners knew otherwise, and he was sent back to his cell.

In February word was brought to Putnam that his house and farm buildings in Dorchester Township had been burned (apparently by an incendiary) and that his family was left homeless. The long winter of 1837-38, one of the severest on record, went by with no further examinations and no answer to an appeal that he had made for bail. Then, in May, without previous notice, a large number of the prisoners were freed. Officially, they were described as “acquitted”, but for most of them, Putnam included, there had been no formal trial. He was once more a free man, yet within a fortnight a warning came to him from Colonel Mahlon Burwell, the member for London in the Assembly, that he had better leave the country. A family conference decided that it would be wise to heed the warning, and on a Sunday Putnam and his younger brother Thomas left for Detroit. There he found the Hunters, some of them Canadians but most out-of-work Americans, assembling for the invasion of Upper Canada. Orators declared that Canadians would welcome such an invasion and join its ranks. But as the time approached for action there was a rapid drop in the number of men prepared to risk their lives in “freeing” Canada. Not more than 150 crossed the Detroit River in the early morning hours of December 4, and of these more than a score are known to have been killed in the fighting in the François Baby orchard, while others perished elsewhere.

More than forty prisoners were taken, either during the engagement or within the next two days, and were lodged in Sandwich jail. Among the captured prisoners was Elijah Crocker Woodman of London. He had been aboard the Champlain when it crossed the Detroit River, he had landed with the invading party, and within forty-eight hours he was a prisoner, fettered and soon to face trial for his life. His son, who had gone with him to Detroit some months earlier, had returned to London; but the family knew nothing of the father’s fate until he was brought to London a month after the invasion to face trial before a court martial.

What has been said above of William Putnam could with almost equal force be said of Elijah Woodman. Both were men with business ability, alert and energetic. In happier times they might have contributed much to their country and to their fellow-men. Influences of which they were often almost unaware gradually changed them from Reformers to rebels against the constituted authority.

The Court Martial at London

The military court set up by Lieutenant-Governor Sir George Arthur to examine the prisoners taken at Windsor began its sittings in London two days after Christmas of 1838. The work of the court concluded on Saturday, January 20. Within that period forty-three prisoners had received the death sentence and three had been publicly hanged even while the trials were in progress.

An earlier thought of holding the court martial at Amherstburg had been abandoned. It seemed prudent to withdraw the prisoners from the frontier, where their presence might excite Detroit hostility and perhaps stir up attempts at rescue. Furthermore, a court martial hastily assembled at Amherstburg would almost necessarily include local militia officers whose feelings would be far from judicial. If capital punishment were to be imposed, it had better be at a distance from the frontier.^[24]

A letter written from Government House, Toronto, to Colonel Richard Airey, then on duty at Amherstburg, had dealt with this question rather fully:

The trials took place in the London court-house, erected only eight years before. It was the most imposing building in the western part of the province and attracted the attention of every visitor to the community by its size and its unusual type of architecture. It was fashioned after Malahide Castle, near Dublin, Ireland, the ancestral home of the Talbot family. This was a compliment paid to Colonel Thomas Talbot, the local magnate, whose influence with the provincial government was considerable. The court-house was often referred to by early travellers as Gothic in style, but there is really little Gothic about it. It was built in 1830; and today, more than a century and a quarter later, it stands, little altered, as the judicial centre of the present County of Middlesex.

The jail cells in 1838 were in the basement of the building, and little thought of comfort or convenience for the inmates had ever entered the minds of the building’s planners. The cells were intended for such ordinary offenders as might be sentenced to confinement, never for such an unusual number of persons as were taken into custody during those exciting and troubled months of 1837 and 1838.

The court-room was a spacious chamber with desks for the judge, lawyers and clerk, a jury box, and a prisoners’ enclosure. Above the judge’s chair hung a large British coat-of-arms, painted by some itinerant artist. It is still there, more than a century later. Elsewhere in the building were offices for the sheriff and other officials; and during the trials in 1839 some prisoners appear to have been confined elsewhere than in the basement cells, for we read of prisoners being “brought down” as well as of those who were “brought up” for examination.

The court-house stood on a knoll which sloped gradually west and south toward the Thames River. It was a site which undoubtedly had caught the eye of Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of the province, when he visited “The Forks” on March 2, 1793. According to the record kept by his military secretary, Major E. B. Littlehales, Simcoe “judged it to be a situation eminently calculated for the metropolis of all Canada”. From its elevated situation there was a view for more than a mile of the broad main stream of the Thames River flowing westward in the direction of Chatham and Detroit. About the building was a public square where markets and meetings might be held; and it was also the scene of public executions, six of which took place in the early weeks of 1839. Dissections by the local doctors sometimes followed an execution—a practice permitted to the profession, which could not often come by necessary cadavers. To the north of the court-house was a large brick structure, recently erected by Dennis O’Brien, the pioneer local merchant, which became a temporary barracks for the 32nd Regiment when it came to the village in January, 1839. This arrival of British redcoats marked the beginning of London as a garrison town, a status which continued until the period of the Crimean War.

The members of the court that conducted the trials of the Windsor prisoners were drawn chiefly from militia officers of the London District. Probably not more than one or two had ever before sat on a court martial or had even witnessed the proceedings of such a court. Colonel John Bostwick, of the 3rd Middlesex Regiment, a resident of Port Stanley, acted as president while Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Sherwood, of the 2nd North York Regiment, the best qualified officer present, was judge advocate. The others were mostly drawn from Middlesex or Oxford militia regiments. Captain Julius Airey, of the 1st Middlesex, was a relative of Colonel Thomas Talbot and had been serving for several months with the 32nd Regiment in the Detroit River area during the border troubles. Captain Charles Perley was a relative of one of the prisoners on trial. He was a large landholder near Burford, east of London, where he lived in a mansion famous for its hospitality. Colonel John B. Askin, born at Detroit of mixed Irish and Indian parentage, held the office of clerk in the London District Court. All, it is almost needless to say, were stout supporters of the Government of the province. Some had profited well in the past by appointments to office or by receiving generous grants of public lands. It was no ordinary civil jury drawn from the farming community which was to try these invaders of the province.

The records of the trials at London are preserved in the Public Archives at Ottawa. Any student of the period who finds it necessary to read them would agree with the comment made at the time by the editor of the London Gazette:

The questions put by the Judge Advocate varied little as prisoner after prisoner appeared. Each in turn was asked for the names of the leaders in the Patriot invasion, the aims of the invasion, and the part played by the individual concerned. Answers to the first two of these questions were much alike but the third brought some variety. A few frankly admitted taking part in the fighting. Others claimed that they had deserted at the first opportunity. Only in relating the circumstances surrounding their capture was there much variety in the prisoners’ statements.

The fee paid to the officers sitting on the court varied with their rank. Seven colonels received 17 shillings a day each for their service. Three who ranked as majors received 16 shillings, while three captains were paid at the rate of 11 shillings 7 pence. Colonel Sherwood, the Judge Advocate, because of his more important duties, received 42 shillings a day; and since he also prepared the reports he was paid a total of £142 16s. The expenses of the trial, as set down in the printed Journals of the Assembly a year later, totalled just over £527. This sum included witness fees, the clerk’s allowance, and the cost of the record book, which today is preserved at Ottawa.

None of these payments were questioned by the authorities at Toronto; but when Sheriff James Hamilton sent in certain other accounts arising out of the court martial, several items were reduced. Dr. George Moore, the jail physician, had submitted a bill for £149 5s for medicine and attendance upon the prisoners. The authorities cut it in half and gave him £73 7s 4d. Teamsters who had conveyed the prisoners to London and special constables who had been employed had their wages cut by five shillings a day.

One of the accounts, however, was approved for payment without question. This was the fee for two hangmen, and it was quite a substantial amount. This is the way it reads in the Public Accounts: “Services, Wallace and Brearly, carrying writs into execution against H. B. Lynn, A. Clark, A. Perley, D. D. Bedford, C. Cunningham and J. H. Doan, at £12 10s each, £75.”

Sheriff James Hamilton at London had been able to find two men to perform the unpleasant duty which legally was his own, but poor Sheriff Alexander Hamilton in the Niagara District was less fortunate. He had a condemned invader on his hands in the summer of 1838, one James Moreau, taken in the Short Hills raid. The sheriff made two trips to Toronto in search of a hangman and, failing to find one, eventually had to perform the execution himself. To add insult to injury the provincial auditors refused to pay the expenses of his trips to Toronto, amounting to £2 10s. The poor sheriff died soon after the execution of Moreau, and the disputed account had been sent in by his executors on behalf of the estate.

Hiram Benjamin Lynn, a Michigan man aged twenty-six, was the first prisoner to come before the court at London when it began its work on December 27. He was quickly found guilty and was sentenced to be hanged. He was the first to go to the gallows. It was shown by the evidence that he had acted as an adjutant in the invading party and had received a wound in the fighting at Windsor. The London Gazette described his appearance as that of an ordinary American mechanic. During his trial he showed an uneasy manner, made no defence, and seemed glad to leave the court-room when the hearing was over. He was brought to the gallows, erected on the square outside the jail, early on the morning of January 7, 1839. The Gazette said that he appeared to be still weak from his wound. The death warrant was read and the Reverend Benjamin Cronyn, rector of the Church of England in the village, followed with a formal religious exercise. The drop fell, and after struggling for two or three minutes the man was pronounced dead. The body was cut down and was buried, it is believed, in the jail yard. “A horrid spectacle of wild ambition and lawless adventure,” was the comment of the Gazette.

An interesting reference to Lynn is to be found in the narrative of George N. Hazelton, printed in Vol. XXI of the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections. Hazelton, who was a resident of Ann Arbor, was acquainted with Lynn and tried to dissuade him from joining the Patriot force at Detroit. Says the narrative:

The reference to Lynn sleeping in his coffin on the night before his execution is doubtless a bit of folklore of the times. There is no item in the recorded expenditures of the court martial for coffins for the executed. The authorities of Upper Canada were not wasting public money on invaders. Six feet of earth in the jail yard sufficed.

The Reverend William Proudfoot recorded in his diary on January 5 that he saw some persons putting up the gallows on which executions were to take place in the following week. “The process,” he says, “attracted no notice; the people are perfectly indifferent; the Tory party gloating over blood; and the Reform party saying nothing, because speaking might expose them to trouble.”

Mr. Proudfoot was not in the village on the following Monday, but a day later wrote in his diary: “Heard that when Lynn was hanged yesterday there were not 200 persons present, and those chiefly women and children. The Tories, who were big with the hope that hanging rebels would be a very popular measure, expected 5,000 spectators. Lynn was attended by Mr. Cronyn, he made no speech; there was no demonstration of feeling. He has a wife and six children.”

Daniel Davis Bedford, twenty-seven years old, was the second to be hanged, the date being Friday, January 11. Bedford was a Canadian, a native of Norwich in Oxford County. He had been an active participant in the 1837 Duncombe uprising in support of Mackenzie’s activities at Toronto. Bedford was one of those arrested at the time. He was, however, allowed his freedom and went to the United States. There he fell in with the Patriots, took part in the invasion at Windsor and was among the prisoners sent to London. His trial took place on December 29 immediately after that of Lynn, and the death sentence was as quickly pronounced. There was little chance for a man who had been in arms both in 1837 and in 1838.

In the Friends Burying Ground on Quaker Street, North Norwich Township, there may be seen today a small memorial stone which has the following inscription:

The date of death recorded on the stone is incorrect, for Bedford was hanged on January 11. The circumstances under which his body was turned over to relatives for burial are not clear. Sir George Arthur, when in London exactly a week after the execution, commented upon this in a letter to Sir John Colborne at Quebec: “The Sheriff of this Place Mr. Hamilton most improperly gave up the Body of a man named ‘Bedford’ after his execution. The corpse was removed to Norwich & between two & three hundred Persons attended the Funeral—a pretty good proof of feeling in that part of the Country.”

The Gazette had little to say about the execution on January 14 of a third prisoner, Albert Clark, aged twenty-one, other than to record that the rope slipped and the man struggled for some time. “Not many attended to witness these executions,” said the Gazette, “owing doubtless to the early hour at which they took place.” But the Reverend Mr. Proudfoot wrote after this third hanging: “What a savage lot of beings these loyalists must be! Now what satisfaction can it give to any man to see a man hanged; who but a devil would derive any satisfaction from such a scene? It is necessary, forsooth, to satisfy their bloodthirsty souls by shedding blood. . . . God pity us if we be under the Tories—those ogres whose appetites for blood must be satisfied.”

Clark’s body, like that of Lynn, does not appear to have been claimed. Elijah Woodman hints in one of his letters that the body was turned over to the local doctors for dissection; and it probably still lies, like that of Lynn, in some corner of the court-house yard. Clark was described as a native of New Hampshire.

Examination of prisoners proceeded rapidly during those early January days. As many as five prisoners were questioned in a day, and the death penalty was uniformly pronounced except in one case. Abraham Tiffany, a native of New York State, was journeying westward to Detroit at the time of the invasion. Advised by a tavern keeper that he might be suspected of being connected with the Patriots, he turned back, but was picked up near Gosfield by one of the parties looking for escaped raiders. He was lodged in jail with the others and then brought to London. He came before the court near the end of its sittings and was set free. Tiffany told the court that he owned no property in the United States, but had property in Upper Canada which he had inherited. He was in the province solely on personal business.

The examination of the more than forty prisoners brought out a mass of contradictory information about the invasion of Windsor, but only a trifling amount of information with regard to the organization of the Patriot movement, its leaders and its aims. The majority of the accused were plainly wanderers or adventurers, many of them illiterate and only able to make their mark to any document they were asked to sign. There was evidence to indicate that what training the men had been given for the invasion had been accompanied by heavy drinking.

Daniel Sweetman, who gave evidence against Woodman and other prisoners, though admitting that he was himself one of the invading party, told a curious story of the financing of the Patriot cause. He said there was an association formed among the party called “The Bank of Upper Canada”, of which a man named Smith at Cleveland was president. Shares of a value of fifty dollars were sold, payment to be made at a rate of fifty cents a week. The proposed capital was seven millions and the proceeds of the sale of stock was to finance the invasion of Canada. The whole amount was ultimately to be paid by the people of Upper Canada. “Those who took stock,” said Sweetman in his testimony, “were considered as loaning so much to carry on the war and were ultimately to be repaid by the people of Canada.”

The evidence presented during the course of the trials showed clearly that few if any of the prisoners knew much about the plans of the leaders. The preparations had been of a hit-or-miss character, and there was evidence that many of those who crossed into Canada on the night of December 4, 1838, were befuddled by drink even before they left for the Canadian shore.

When making his report on the trials to Sir George Arthur, the Judge Advocate drew the attention of the Executive to two of the prisoners who had been condemned, James Peter Williams and Oliver Crandell, both American citizens. Williams, he said, was strongly suspected of being the murderer of Surgeon Hume, whose mutilated body had been found in the Baby orchard. His appearance resembled descriptions which had been given after the fighting. The murderer was said to have been wearing a light fustian overcoat. Williams, when arrested, was in his shirt sleeves, despite the cold weather, and was suspected of having thrown away his overcoat. When brought into court he acted in a strange manner, plainly endeavouring to conceal himself from the view of the witnesses and behaving “altogether in such a way as to attract the attention of almost everyone present”.

Of Crandell the judge advocate pointed out that he was subject to fits and was in a very delicate state of health. “Just at the close of his trial he fell down upon the floor in one of his fits,” the report continued. “I got Dr. Moore to examine him, who reported him to be in a bad state. If imbecility of body and to a certain extent of mind consequential upon it can be urged in favour of a person in this situation, I conscientiously feel that Crandell is entitled to Your Excellency’s consideration.” Crandell, aged forty-one, a native of New York State, was later freed. Williams, aged twenty-four and described as from Cleveland, was later sent to Van Diemen’s Land.

Woodman Placed on Trial

Elijah Woodman and Chauncey Sheldon, a Michigan man, were together brought before the court on January 18. At the close of the first day’s examination they were supplied with a copy of the evidence presented against them, so that overnight they might prepare a defence. On the second day they called witnesses from among their fellow-prisoners and made their personal pleas. The death sentences which followed were little more than a formality, already pronounced more than forty times since the court commenced its work.

Woodman, aged forty-two, and Sheldon, aged fifty-seven, were the oldest men in the roll of prisoners, and it had evidently been arranged that they would be the last to be dealt with. They had been among the later prisoners to be brought from Windsor to London, arriving in the village on January 4, 1839. This was just three days before the execution of Hiram Benjamin Lynn. Since that time two other men had gone from the cells in the early morning hours and had not returned.

Of Woodman’s first two weeks in London jail we have no record other than that his family brought him food to supplement the meagre prison rations, and also some needed clothing. His feet had been badly affected by the cold in the Sandwich jail and by the fetters which had bound him and eaten into his ankles. Remedies were brought for these afflictions.

At length the day came when Woodman and his companion were called from their cells and escorted by armed guards to the court-room above. They may have noticed a somewhat strained air as they took their places in the prisoners’ box. There had been a death that morning. Colonel the Honourable John Maitland, commander of the 32nd Regiment so recently come to London, had fallen a victim to the hardships he had endured in the task of guarding the Detroit River frontier against the Patriot forces.

Born March 5, 1789, Colonel Maitland was a son of the Scottish Earl of Lauderdale and had been with the 32nd Regiment for a long period. He was buried on January 28 in St. Paul’s churchyard in the village. His death, occurring while the trials were still in progress, was not likely to produce any favourable feelings in the court towards the men brought before it.

Woodman and Sheldon both pleaded not guilty when the charge, clothed in copious verbiage, was read. It declared that they had been “unlawfully and traitorously” in arms on December 4, and with others both of American and of Canadian nationality had “feloniously killed and slain divers of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided and against the peace of Our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity.” The witnesses called to give evidence against the two men included three of their fellow-prisoners, but the information given was somewhat vague. Daniel Sweetman, an informer, said he had seen Sheldon, armed, on the steamboat at Detroit and had seen Woodman on the Canadian side of the river, “standing near a man with a drum”. He had thought that they were musicians for the invading party.

David McDougall said that he had seen Woodman in the Patriot camp on the Detroit side of the river and thought that he had seen him on the steamboat crossing to Canada, but on this latter point he could not be positive. George Putnam testified that he had seen Woodman on the Canadian side with a fife in his hands and understood that there was also a drummer in the party. He had not, however, seen them together nor had he heard any music. Much interest was shown by the court in the question whether Woodman played a fife, but this he stoutly denied and it was not proven by any witness.

Woodman and Sheldon were permitted to call defence witnesses from among their fellow-prisoners. Woodman called Robert Marsh and Ezra Horton, while Sheldon asked for one Joseph Horton. The names of Robert Marsh and of the two Hortons appear in the official lists of the prisoners tried at London; but the name of Daniel Sweetman, who gave evidence against Woodman, is not there. Nor is there any indication that he was before the court at any time other than as a witness for the Crown, though he frankly admitted that he had landed with the invading party and had been an aide-de-camp to “General” Putnam.

Writing to the Lieutenant-Governor at Toronto on January 20, at the conclusion of the trials, Judge Advocate Sherwood said that there had been forty-seven prisoners in all confined at London, though only forty-four were placed on trial. William Grason and John Hickey remained untried “for lack of evidence”, and Daniel Sweetman had been “pardoned by your Excellency”.

Sweetman is the mystery man of the trial. Why was he pardoned by Sir George Arthur after being arrested and after admitting that he was aboard the Champlain when she crossed the Detroit River? His pardon had evidently been ordered while the trials were in progress and while other men, no more guilty than he, were going to the gallows. Were there influences brought to bear on his behalf? There appears to be no answer to this question.

Constant Gauthier, a settler in Maidstone Township, east of Windsor, told of arresting Woodman about thirteen miles from the border. Woodman, when taken, was alone and was apparently lame. He told Gauthier that he was bound for London or Chatham. Questioned by the court, Woodman gave an account of his arrest. He was ordered, he said, into a waggon which was later drawn off to one side. This, he understood, was in order that the prisoners it contained might be shot.

“When the waggon stopped,” Woodman related, “I jumped out and walked off 15 or 20 paces, wheeled around, unbottoned my coat and held down my hands.”

Robert Marsh said that he had heard Woodman speak of the enterprise in a discouraging way while in camp on the American side of the river, and had also heard Colonel Harvel, one of the Patriot leaders, abusing Woodman for his attitude which would encourage desertions. Both Hortons admitted that they were members of the landing party and said that they had been taken prisoner while in company with Sheldon.

Both Woodman and Sheldon had been examined by two local magistrates, Lawrence Lawrason and John Douglas, after their arrival in London on January 4, and the statements made by the two men at that time were next presented to the court. Woodman told the magistrates that he was a citizen of the United States and had been living in London District for about six years, though in that time he had not taken the oath of allegiance. He had left London on August 28 and gone to Detroit, where he had some machinery which he set in operation. He admitted having conversation with William Putnam, the Patriot leader, and having passed on to him a message from Joshua Putnam, a brother living in London District, warning against any attempt to invade Canada. He had also met other officers of the Patriot movement. The force, he said, numbered between 350 and four hundred in late November, the strongest they were at any time, as desertions were frequent and had continued up to the very eve of the attack on Windsor.

Woodman claimed that the Patriot officers had deceived the men on December 4 by stating that the boat was going to Black River to recruit. This, he said, was the reason he was aboard. He had some business to transact with a man named Benjamin Bartlett who lived at Black River. When the steamboat landed at Windsor all on board were ordered ashore and were threatened with death if they hesitated. Some of the last men to go ashore were without arms, he claimed.

Woodman had evidently spent a good part of the night in preparing his defence, which was read to the court on the second day. He repeated his denials that he had played a fife or had one in his possession. He claimed again that he had gone aboard the steamboat, believing, as he was told, that it was bound for Black River. In conclusion, he requested the court that if the death sentence were imposed he might be shot instead of hanged. “It will not only be gratifying to me,” he said, “but it will have a tendency to ameliorate the feelings of my dear wife and children as well as my relations and friends.”

As Woodman and Sheldon were the last prisoners to go on trial, this concluded the court martial. The members of the court deliberated over the evidence against the two men, and quickly agreed on the customary verdict and sentence—they were guilty and should be hanged. When he returned to his cell Woodman was convinced that he would soon go to the gallows. “I am as sure of it as though I saw the sentence set down,” he wrote on that Saturday evening.

On Sunday he was visited by his wife and his two older daughters. His son, Henry Clay Woodman, had been in the village when the sleighs bearing the prisoners and some wounded soldiers of the 32nd Regiment arrived on January 4. On the following day the son and his mother had visited the father in his cell. He told them at that time, as he told the court later, that he thought the steamer that he boarded at Detroit was going elsewhere than to Canada—to a place where he wanted to collect money for a machine.

On this Sunday morning, however, with the trial over and a sentence of death hanging over his head, there were important family matters to be discussed, among others what word should be sent to his own and his wife’s relatives in the State of Maine. Woodman records:

This letter to his parents, written on that Sunday evening, is not among the documents that have been preserved; but we can gain a good idea of its contents from a second letter to the parents written in July, when Woodman was confined in Fort Henry at Kingston. In this letter he reviews what he had written on January 20:

Nine years later, on February 13, 1848, when word of Woodman’s death had been received, a funeral sermon was preached at Knowlton, Maine, by the Rev. William A. Drew, the text chosen being Lamentations 3, verses 34, 35, and 36: “To crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth, to turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High, to subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not.”

Realization of the dangerous situation in which he now found himself had plainly awakened religious feelings that had been dormant. The early influences of the old Universalist meeting-house of boyhood days now became, and continued to be, a steadying influence in Woodman’s life.

With the trials ended, the jail was full of rumours. Three men had been executed in the first two weeks of January but none since. Was this the extent to which capital punishment would be carried, or were the authorities merely awaiting the culmination of the trials? Woodman heard one wild rumour a few days after his trial. It was that he and four others would be hanged on a Friday in a mass execution. The four named to go with him were Cornelius Cunningham, James M. Aitchison, Amos Perley, and Joshua Doan.

“God grant me firmness and fortitude of mind for the occasion,” he wrote. “What satisfaction it will give the party in power. Many songs and toasts will be given on the result of our execution for the good they suppose will result.” But when the Friday passed without incident and Saturday came, Woodman wrote: “I may perhaps be reserved for a worse fate, transportation to some outlandish place. Oh, how I have been abased and treated by those in power.”

On the following Sunday all the prisoners were brought into the court-room to listen to a sermon by the Reverend Benjamin Cronyn, who had accompanied three men to the scaffold during January.

Woodman has left no record of his feelings as further hangings took place. He had doubtless known Cunningham, Perley and Doan at Detroit, but he makes no mention of their end. For information as to these three executions, which came in early February, we must turn to the columns of the London Gazette as they were reprinted in the St. Catharines Journal of a later date.^[25] Editor Benjamin Hodgkinson, good Tory that he was or that his newspaper professed him to be, not only gave details of the executions on February 4 and 6 but also addressed some counsel to those disaffected persons who might question the righteousness and beneficence of Tory principles and Tory rule in the province.

Cunningham, who was hanged on February 4, was described by the Gazette as a colonel in the Patriot army. He was further identified as a waggon-maker who for several years had carried on his trade at Beachville, a small Oxford County village twenty-five miles east of London. He was a citizen of the United States, which the Gazette would regard in itself as bad; but he had also, the editor pointed out, “joined a certain political party who cloaked their treason under the delusive name of reform until step by step it resulted, as we frequently foretold it would, in the ruin of the victims.”

Of Cunningham’s execution the Gazette report said: “After service was performed he shook hands with the clergyman, and resigned himself to his fate—exhibiting proofs that his mind was highly agitated at his awful doom. So great was his excitement that he could not stand erect, his head falling upon his breast; but the drop soon falling relieved him from all earthly cares, after a struggle of a few minutes, in death.”

Governor Arthur had previously criticized Sheriff Hamilton for giving up the body of Bedford after execution and permitting it to be taken to Norwich for burial. Despite this, the sheriff now permitted Cunningham’s body to be taken to Beachville, and two days later permitted the bodies of both Perley and Doan to be taken to the Quaker settlement at Sparta. The grave of Cunningham has never been identified, though the location of the graves of the other two is known.

The executions on February 6 of Amos Perley and Joshua Doan have greater interest than any of the others. Perley was, as has already been noted, a relative of the Colonel Perley who had been a member of the court. Joshua Doan was a member of one of the most widely known families in London District.

Perley, we are told, was born at St. John, New Brunswick, but had lived in the United States for a number of years, his parents having moved to Maine. He had requested his officer relative to provide the articles necessary for a decent burial, and this was done; but the officer did not attend the funeral. “Perley,” said the Gazette, “met his fate with a good deal of composure, shaking hands with the clergyman, the Sheriff and his clerk, and with his companion on the drop—who also performed the same ceremony. At length the drop fell and they were both launched into eternity, without a struggle.”

There is no mention in the Gazette of an address being read by Perley at the time of execution, but it may have been disregarded by the editor or may have been crowded out of the columns of the small newspaper. A document, said to be a copy of such an address, has been preserved in the Sparta Quaker community for more than a century, together with two letters said to have been written by Perley during his imprisonment. The text of the address that has been preserved has a style that indicates that if it was written by Perley, he was a man of some education.

Of the six men who were executed at London, the name of Joshua Doan stands out most prominently. Whereas the others who suffered the death penalty were aliens or had been in the province but a short time, Doan came from the finest pioneer stock and was a man of high spirit and adventurous disposition. Exploits of the Doan family in Pennsylvania during the time of the Revolution are well recorded in the annals of their native state. One Jonathan Doan, of Quaker stock, entered the Niagara District as early as 1789 and migrated farther westward to Yarmouth township in 1813. Others from his state followed and their community eventually took the name Sparta. In the architectural style of houses and barns of the village, Pennsylvania influence may still be seen. The district soon became one of the most thriving in the province. A Friends’ Preparatory Meeting was established as early as 1819, the first minister being a remarkable woman, Sarah Haight.

Joshua Doan, the youngest son of Jonathan Doan, was born in January, 1811, at Sugar Loaf in the Niagara district, but spent his youth in the Yarmouth area. He was out with Dr. Duncombe’s rebel force in December, 1837, and when that force was scattered managed to escape to the United States. There he fell in with the Patriot leaders and was with the force that invaded Windsor. He was arrested after the fighting about eleven miles above Windsor, and was taken to Sandwich jail.

Doan’s trial took place on January 14. Eight witnesses were called, four of them fellow-prisoners. Their evidence was damaging and Doan’s only explanation was that he had boarded the boat for another purpose, had then been unable to leave, and had deserted the invading force at the first opportunity. The court had heard that plea from others and it was without effect. There was no hesitation in finding him guilty and ordering him to be hanged. Governor Arthur signed the order for execution on January 26, and Doan went to the scaffold with Amos Perley on the morning of February 6. It is the only double hanging in the history of the present city of London.

The Gazette did not report an address by Doan from the scaffold; but two days before his execution he had prepared a lengthy statement, which appeared in the next issue of the London newspaper. This statement, made before John Douglas, a local magistrate, and Lieutenant John Grogan, of the 32nd Regiment, the officer in charge of the jail guard, declared that the Patriots were supplied with rifles drawn from U.S. Government stores in Detroit by an officer named Fuller, from Ohio, who gave a receipt for them. Doan also named the Canadian leaders of the border troubles: Dr. John Rolph, Dr. Charles Duncombe, Dr. A. K. Mackenzie, Dr. James Hunter (note the number of doctors); William Lyon Mackenzie, George Laughton, of Yarmouth, and William Putnam, who was killed at Windsor.

Doan stated further that the invading party had been told by its leaders that a force of six hundred recruits would join them when they landed on the Canadian shore, and that a revolt at London had already resulted in the capture of more than half of the 32nd Regiment. “Such like stories were circulated,” he said, “for the purpose of misleading us.”

On the day before his execution Doan added a postscript, explaining that as he had been out of the country since December, 1837, when he fled to the United States, he was ignorant of all political developments in that period and was, therefore, the more easily deceived.

A letter supposedly written by Doan from his cell on the night following his sentence has been frequently quoted over the years. According to the tradition that has come down, one John Davidson, who lived in Port Stanley, was driving to London and on the way gave a ride to a woman who was bound for the same place. After she had left the sleigh in London a letter was found by the hostler at the tavern where Davidson had put up. It read as follows:

Why the name “Doan” should be changed to “Done” in this letter is strange, as the prisoner signed his name to documents during the trial with a clear “Joshua G. Doan”.

The bodies of Perley and Doan were given over by Sheriff Hamilton to Israel Doan, a brother of Joshua, and were taken by him in a sleigh to the Friends’ burial ground at Sparta. The funeral service took place in the frame meeting-house, the sermon being preached by Sarah Haight. During the service the brothers of Doan walked up and down the lane before the meeting-house, sorrowing for the tragedy that had come to their family. The bodies were carried by neighbours and laid side by side, where they rest to this day. Many older people in the area knew the location of the graves, and in 1934 Miss Ella N. Lewis, a descendant of Lyman Lewis, Elgin county pioneer and personal friend of Doan, placed a small monument to him that his name might be remembered. The inscription gives his age as 28.

Sarah Haight was the wife of Reuben Haight, who came to Canada with his nine children from Westchester County, N.Y., in 1819, settling first near Otterville in South Norwich Township, where he operated mills. When a depression came in 1820 he lost his holdings, and then removed to Yarmouth Township. In 1823, with his creditors still unsatisfied, he voluntarily surrendered and went to the old log jail in Vittoria. After about a year he was released and returned to his farm, where he finally cleared off his debts and became secure in his holdings. He died at the age of eighty-one, and was followed by his wife Sarah two years later. Sarah Haight, though the mother of twelve children, more than half of whom died before her, was a minister in the Quaker meetings and widely known among the members of the sect.^[26]

Yarmouth Township, where the Doan family settled about the time of the War of 1812, had numerous Quaker families in its early period, most of whom, as Americans, were suspected by the Tory officials of being tainted with republican feelings and therefore with disloyalty. Their refusal to serve in the militia, upon conscientious grounds, brought upon them frequent petty persecution, including fines—which were sometimes collected by bringing the offender before a magistrate, but not infrequently by pillaging the offender’s property. Such actions, sometimes creating a hardship, stirred discontent and were among the varied sources from which the general unrest of the south-western area grew into revolt.^[27]

Sir George Arthur—Benevolent Despot

Sir George Arthur, successor to Sir Francis Bond Head, was in the London and Detroit River areas during a part of the time that the trials were under way in London Court House. His visit to London was preceded by stops at St. Thomas and Amherstburg, where he received addresses from the inhabitants. Speaking in St. Thomas, he made a passing reference to the trials. “The brigands,” he said, “have been taught such a lesson of the character and loyalty of the people as, it may be hoped, will henceforth leave the province in undisturbed tranquility.”

At Amherstburg Arthur encountered a disturbing local situation. Instead of one address to be presented, there were two. The belligerent Colonel John Prince was the author of one, demanding immediate war with the United States. The second, presented by Colonel William Elliott, was of a much milder tone.

“A curious scene of mutual accusation and recrimination is said to have taken place between the opposition deputations,” said the Sandwich Western Herald. “Both addresses were in consequence declined, and Arthur censured the inhabitants for their want of harmony.”

The Herald was far from complimentary in its references to Arthur’s appearance: “His Excellency has nothing prepossessing,” it said. “He is as indifferent a looking personage as can be imagined.” A somewhat similar reference was made by the Reverend Mr. Proudfoot at London a few days later, when he noted in his diary: “The governor has nothing imposing about him. He is very much given to preaching and does not preach well. He is a plain man and will be seen, I think, to the greatest advantage at the fireside in a crack with a chum.”

Governor Arthur’s time was fully occupied during his stay in London village. He reviewed the 32nd Regiment, recently come from the Detroit River frontier. Its commander, Colonel the Honourable John Maitland, died on the 18th, the morning after Arthur’s arrival; but the Governor did not wait for the funeral, going on to Toronto by way of Brantford and Hamilton.

Among those who waited upon the Governor during his stay in London was the Reverend Mr. Proudfoot, who came to present a petition and make a plea for his nephew, James M. Aitchison, one of the Windsor prisoners already tried and under sentence of death.

“At the earliest moment,” says Mr. Proudfoot in his diary, “I sought admission and obtained it. I read to him the petition. He seemed struck with it, and though he did not pledge himself I saw very well that I had made an impression. . . . I left him with the impression that James should not be put to death.”

But as the clergyman left the audience chamber others came in: “Cronyn, Lawrason, Harris, Douglas and Capt. McCormick were admitted.” These men, members of the local Tory party, had something to say to Sir George about Mr. Proudfoot and his nephew.

The clergyman had a second interview with Arthur on the following morning. This was of a disturbing character. Proudfoot was told that he must remove from his mind any sanguine hopes built up by the earlier interview. Arthur charged him with being himself a disaffected person, and that he had preached against the continuance of the connection of Canada with England. Some of the London congregation, Sir George added, had left because of the preaching of such political doctrine. Proudfoot stoutly denied these charges, which evidently originated with those who had visited the Governor the day before.

“To all this,” wrote the minister in his diary, “I replied that I never introduced politics into the pulpit and never would; that my vocation was to preach the gospel, not politics; that when I saw the above named persons awaiting for admission I knew very well that they would poison his ear against me; that they were all personal enemies.”

At the first interview Arthur asked Proudfoot if he used his influence to make the people loyal. Now he raised this question anew and said that he considered it the duty of every minister to inculcate obedience to the laws. Then, says the diarist, he proceeded to dwell upon the want of religion among the Americans and alluded to the persons who made the attack on Prescott—“None of them were in connection with any church.”

The conversation had been far from pleasant, but it may have had some influence, for in the end Aitchison was not hanged but reserved for punishment of another kind.

On February 5, 1839, two weeks after his brief visit to London, Arthur could write to Sir John Colborne at Montreal to inform him that seventeen executions had been carried out at London and Kingston. This letter was written in the very midst of hangings, for Cornelius Cunningham had gone to the scaffold at London only the day before, and Amos Perley and Joshua Doan were to follow on the morrow. Apparently the Governor was including these in his count.

It was unfortunate that the Queen’s representative in the Province of Upper Canada was a man who had the reputation of having been “a wholesale hangman” in his earlier jurisdiction as Lieutenant-Governor of Britain’s penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land. The laws of England had, as we have seen, until recently prescribed the death penalty for a wide variety of crimes, some of a very minor character, though juries and judges were often hesitant about requiring the extreme penalty. Reform was steadily advancing in Parliament and the number of offences calling for the death penalty was being reduced. But to offset the fear that this would increase crime, the transportation system continued to carry thousands yearly into what was a virtual slavery. Arthur had himself seen more than twenty thousand convicts landed at Hobart Town during his twelve years as governor of the penal colony. While many of these were hardened criminals, there was a much greater number who had been guilty of quite minor offences, for which today a small fine or brief imprisonment would be considered adequate. All alike, however, came under Arthur’s harsh disciplinary measures and his fierce determination to reform each individual who was under his jurisdiction. His extreme efficiency lay in “extracting the last ounce of punishment” from the convicts.

“Arthur was not wantonly cruel,” says a recent writer on the period; “indeed, by the standards of his time he was a humane man. But he was a professional disciplinarian, a martinet by principle and by practice. Convicts were not human beings to him but numbers in a great ledger which it was his duty and pleasure to keep in impeccable order.”^[28]

Arthur was detested as much by the free settlers as by the convicts during his term of office in Van Diemen’s Land. His departure was hailed with joy throughout the colony and even today his name is held in low esteem in Tasmania. The black shadow that lay over the record of his administration of the penal colony was probably passed on to Canada by his critics when he came in 1838. This injured his reputation at the time and has ever since injured his reputation with Canadians.

Official records show that in the twelve years that Arthur spent in Van Diemen’s Land he signed the death warrant for 260 hangings, for such crimes as murder, bushranging, sheep stealing, and stealing in a dwelling. This was an average of more than 21 a year, but over half of these had been in the first four years of his term, when bushranging was at its height. There had been 38 in 1825, 53 in 1826, and 50 in 1827, but in the years from 1828 to 1836 the number had been much less, the figures in order of those years being 11, 19, 30, 4, 13, 12, 13, 12, and in his last year of office 5 only.^[29]

Arthur was not governing convicts in Upper Canada, but was dealing with a civil population exceedingly sensitive to feelings of its own rights and almost as democratic as its neighbouring American communities. The greater number of Upper Canadians in the thirties were of American birth or parentage, and many of the former had never troubled to take the oath of allegiance. Travellers visiting the province in the thirties invariably commented upon the prevalence of American customs and ways of doing business.

On the other hand there was, on the part of the civil and military authorities, great distrust of this American influence. Arthur was likely to share these fears and the possible threat to British power in the colony. When to this was added an actual invasion of the province by a force that was largely American in its rank and file, he was quite ready to use stern measures. If the extreme penalty was to be exacted against such invaders, he was quite prepared to sign the death warrants.

Yet we can detect in Arthur’s mind a certain reluctance in demanding men’s lives for their foolish deeds. He was really a man of deep religious feeling, a staunch supporter of the Church of England, but unlike many of those about him no bigot. He was tolerant of other sects, and in Van Diemen’s Land had set aside money for the building of Nonconformist chapels because he thought that the work of their ministers was more effectual than that of the appointed Church of England chaplains. In Upper Canada he showed deep concern when, shortly after his arrival, the parish church at Toronto was burned, and at once encouraged efforts for its rebuilding. He was on most friendly terms with the clergy of the Church of England; and the Reverend George Ryerson, a Methodist clergyman, recorded that when Arthur travelled about the province he often had “two and sometimes three Episcopal ministers with him . . . whom alone he seems inclined to hold any intercourse with”. This comment recalls Shakespeare’s picture of King Richard III: “ ‘See, where his Grace stands ’tween two clergymen!’ . . . ‘And, see, a book of prayer in his hand.’ ”

The hangings were not yet over when Arthur visited London, but in his mind there must have been serious thought as to the extent to which they should continue. Among the prisoners were mere youths, who had been enticed into what seemed like an adventure by promises of reward or expectations of booty. In London jail there was a prisoner fifteen years of age, another sixteen, and five others who were each under twenty years. A similar situation was to be found at Kingston. What was to be done with these youthful offenders? Arthur put the question to Sir John Colborne on February 5 in this fashion:

“The penitentiary at Kingston is the only prison we have for secondary punishments; and that, I grieve to say, is already full of inmates so that it is not possible to send these offenders there. To employ convicts of such a class upon the Roads, or Public Works is not possible, and to banish them would be absurd. . . . Transportation seems the only punishment open to us, and that is very expensive! After much painful reflection, it seems to me, and so it does to the Executive Council, that it will be better to give a free Pardon to all the Captives of 21 years of age or under, and to transport the remainder, about eighty.”^[30]

Arthur’s statement of the attitude of his Council toward punishment of the invaders was not precisely correct. The records show that the Council would have favoured a wider use of capital punishment, with pardons for those spared the death penalty. However, the course thus far followed had left a number whom it would be unsafe to pardon. Transportation to a penal colony appeared to be the only alternative to hanging for these men. The more youthful might then be ordered out of the country.

Arthur had been in correspondence with H. S. Fox, the British representative at Washington. Fox was quite opposed to the granting of any pardons, an opinion that Arthur said “haunted” him. “So many of these poor creatures,” he wrote, “were killed at Prescott—so many more at Windsor—besides those who suffered at the hands of the executioner that, I must say, I felt it a duty to extend Mercy to the younger culprits. . . . It has quite grieved me to differ with you upon any points & I shall not feel comfortable until you favour me with a quietus.”

There is evidence that Arthur’s mind had been troubled even as the courts martial were being set up at London and Kingston, as he thought of the death sentences that might be imposed by those courts, made up of local militia officers. On December 26, 1838, on the very eve of the trials at London, he wrote to Colonel W. H. Draper, Solicitor-General and the judge advocate at Kingston: “I now wish to say to you in the most perfect confidence that I should be glad to limit capital punishments to Fifteen! that is one for every life lost in the Prescott affair. . . . Will you favour me with your opinion upon this.”

On another occasion he expressed the opinion that every tenth invader of the province should be shot, though in this instance he may have been merely repeating the opinion set forth by some judge. This proposal was rebuked by Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary. “The rule of decimating,” he wrote, “is an arbitrary one, resting in truth on no sound principle. It excludes the exercise of that patient and mature deliberation which should in every case precede the execution of capital sentence and savours more of vindictiveness and passion than of a calm and enlightened regard for justice.”

Later Glenelg expressed the hope that Arthur would be spared “the distressing duty of making any considerable addition to the number of capital punishments”. In the autumn of 1839, when the prisoners sentenced to transportation were about to leave Canada for Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur wrote to the Marquis of Normanby, Glenelg’s successor: “Could I have ventured to follow the impulse of my personal feelings I should certainly have extended Her Majesty’s free pardon to several others of the brigands but in the present excited state of the community . . . a further extension of mercy would have been viewed with extreme disapprobation by a great majority of the people of Upper Canada.”

Normanby approved a policy of clemency, and this in the end prevailed. It was hastened by the decision of the British Government to make a first-hand inquiry into Canadian affairs, and by the coming to Canada of Lord Durham.

Today we can appreciate more adequately than could the men of his own time the difficult role that fell to Arthur in 1838-39. Extreme harshness on his part would have alienated American public opinion and perhaps have led to retaliatory measures by Patriots. Too great leniency, on the other hand, would have aroused deep protest in the province and would perhaps have encouraged further outrages along the border. The course that he did pursue, while not acceptable to the extreme Tory party in Upper Canada, did receive the approval of the Colonial Office in London and eventually was recognized in the United States as reasonable.

While executions were going on in the first weeks of 1839, there was vehement protest in some American journals. A quotation from the U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review of 1839 may be cited as an example of extreme hostile feeling toward the Canadian authorities:

The Patriot leaders were constantly ready with stories of hardships and bad treatment in Canadian jails that found ready acceptance in many newspaper offices. These charges led President Van Buren to send to Canada Aaron Vail, a former chargé d’affaires in London, to conduct an investigation. Vail was able to report that the arrangements for the prisoners were quite adequate and that conditions in Canadian jails were no worse than those to be found in jails in the United States.

Eventually there was evidence of a more thoughtful attitude in the comment of the American press upon Canadian questions. Influential journals such as the New York Journal of Commerce and the Washington National Intelligencer warned the country that Canadian rights must be respected. Said the Journal of Commerce: “The game of pirating upon our neighbors has been carried far enough; and a little too far. Neither Great Britain nor Canada can stand it much longer. The American people would not have borne it so long. . . . Let it be understood that any individuals who . . . shall commit crimes in Canada will be ferreted out if they return, and given up to the British authorities for punishment—and we ween the ‘Patriot’ operations will henceforth be very much curtailed in their proportions.”

Condemned to Transportation

Three executions had taken place in the first two weeks of January, 1839. Then there had been a stay of three weeks before Cornelius Cunningham went to the gallows on February 4, to be followed two days later by Amos Perley and Joshua Doan. That stay of three weeks had aroused hopes in the minds of the imprisoned men that a more merciful policy had been adopted; but when the hangings were resumed in early February a chill went over those still under sentence of death. Each day was awaited with anxiety and rumours of all kinds went from cell to cell. But when week followed week and no more calls came, the condemned men began to settle down to the dull routine of the jail. The cells were crowded, cold, and without ventilation. Food was of poor quality and meagre in amount. Strict discipline was enforced by the jail officials, and by guards drawn from the 32nd Regiment, in barracks near by. But while men were living they still had hope.

Woodman’s own record of his imprisonment in London is rather fragmentary, but on April 1, 1839, there comes this important entry: “Orders have arrived for us to be transported to Van Diemen’s Land.” The suspense in which he had been living since the last of the executions in February was ended, though the prospect that now lay before him was dark and grim. The orders to which he referred were in the form of a letter addressed to Sheriff James Hamilton, written from Government House, Toronto, on March 27. The letter listed eighteen of the prisoners “whom it is His Excellency’s wish that you should remove with all possible despatch to Toronto.” The names of five others were separately listed “to whom His Excellency has been induced to extend Her Majesty’s free pardon.” These five, who had been informers upon their fellows at the trials, were to be taken to Hamilton, from whence they would be sent into the United States and liberated.

There is some evidence that the liberation of these five had been decided upon even as the letter was being written. The original document uses the word “twenty-three” when setting down the number to be transported. This was struck out and “eighteen” substituted. The letter goes on to deal with the cases of fourteen younger men remaining in jail “to whom it is proposed to grant a free pardon at no distant date if the state of feeling on the opposite frontier shall render such a proceeding compatible with the security of the province.” Thus, all the remaining cases were being dealt with at one stroke.

The eighteen listed for transportation overseas were Samuel Snow, Elizur Stevens, John Chester Williams, John Burwell Tyrrell, John Seymour Gutridge, James Milnes Aitchison, John Sprague, Robert Marsh, Riley Monson Stewart, Henry Verrelon Barnum, Alvin Burroughs Sweet, James Peter Williams, William Nottage, John Henry Simmonds, Elijah Crocker Woodman, Chauncey Sheldon, James Dewitt Fero, and Michael Morin.

The five who were to be sent to Hamilton were David McDougall, George Putnam, William Bartlett, Sidney Barber, and Harrison Peter Goodrich.

Variations in the spelling of the names of some of these men will be noticed above and elsewhere.

There were a few details added. The commanding officer of the troops in London, Major Thomas Henry Wingfield, of the 32nd Regiment, would provide an escort between London and Toronto. Major Wingfield had recently assumed command of this British regiment following the death of Colonel the Honourable John Maitland. The Lieutenant-Governor expressed the hope that with the removal of the prisoners listed in his letter, the great inconvenience arising from the crowded state of the jail would be entirely remedied.

Woodman’s family learned quickly of the orders that had come from Toronto, and his wife visited him during the day. One important question that had to be faced was, would the wife and children remain in London after the father was sent away, or would they return to her parents’ home in Maine?

Woodman appears to have had a first feeling that it would be well for the wife and family to return to Maine. “I asked her this question,” he writes, “having heard that her father thought they were in destitute circumstances and would like to take them back to the United States.” But that was not the view of the wife. She thought that she would be better off if she remained in London. Later developments showed that she was right.

Preparations for the removal of the prisoners went on apace during the next two days. Teamsters and waggons had to be procured to take the men doomed to transportation on the first lap of the long journey that was ahead of them. Woodman was one of the few who would have relatives or friends to bid him farewell. Reverend Mr. Proudfoot might have been expected to attend to have a few words with his nephew, James Aitchison; but if he was there he makes no mention of it in his diary. As he did not actually live in the village but on a farm two miles to the north, he may not have known of the departure of the prisoners until after they were gone.

Woodman’s diary continues:

Woodman records nothing further of the journey to Toronto, which occupied the week, nor does he say anything about the jail conditions in the capital of the province. A fellow-prisoner, Robert Marsh, writing eight years later, after his return to America, painted a grim picture of crowded cells, alive with vermin, insufficient and filthy rations, and association with crazed persons who were, as usual at that period, confined in the jails. Marsh’s description of the food—“bullocks’ heads, boiled with a very few peas that the rats had been among”—may be one of the exaggerations that are common in these exile narratives; but there is other evidence that the conditions in Toronto jail were the worst experienced anywhere along the journey to Quebec. Two weeks after their arrival in Toronto a Methodist minister, Richardson by name,^[32] visited the jail, talked with the prisoners and, what was most welcome, brought with him a large basket of provisions.

Toward the end of May, Woodman and his fellow-prisoners were removed from the Toronto jail and taken by steamer to Kingston, where they were lodged in Fort Henry. This imposing stone fortress had been built by army engineers between 1832 and 1836, chiefly to guard the entrance to the Rideau Canal and Kingston harbour. The canal, by a lengthy and roundabout course, gave Kingston water connection with Montreal, otherwise hampered by the rapids on the St. Lawrence River. Originally it had been intended that there would be six such forts guarding Kingston harbour, but Fort Henry was the only one completed; and its sole military service through all its history was in connection with the domestic and border troubles of 1837-38, and as an internment camp during World War II.^[33]

At Fort Henry the prisoners found much better treatment than they had experienced elsewhere. Hitherto their guards had usually been jail officers or militia men, who treated their charges with open contempt and did not hesitate at times to insult them. At Fort Henry, however, their guards were disciplined British troops. The redcoats had no interest in Canadian politics, so performed their duties without feelings of any kind. Quarters and rations were in striking contrast to the bad conditions at London and Toronto. Prisoners were allowed daily exercise within the fort under the watchful eyes of their guards, and they were apparently not interfered with when on July 4, the American national holiday, they celebrated it with toasts and even contrived to make a “star spangled banner” out of several coloured handkerchiefs.

Woodman has left little record of the stay at Kingston. The prisoners, he says, were not allowed to have newspapers or to have verbal communication with anyone from outside the prison. However, he wrote several letters while there to his family and relatives and also received their letters. Frequently he refers to his good state of health. A letter to his brother says:

There is constant concern for his family in Woodman’s letters from Fort Henry. His wife, whom a fellow-prisoner once described as “a regular down easter, a Yankee”, had been resolute that she would not leave London to go back to the relatives in Maine, “all the world would not move her”.

Woodman’s last letters from Fort Henry, directed to his wife and his parents, were written on September 7. “I am well and in good spirits,” he wrote to his wife, “but there is no news of our liberation, but the season is so far advanced I think you may rest assured I shall not be transported this fall.” He had also a few words for the children. “I see my little Susan is six years old today. I do wish I could see her, I do want you all to be good to your mother as this will relieve her of a great burden. You are all old enough to know that my situation makes her feel bad enough without having disobedient children to deal with. I am not saying this to injure your feelings but only to put you in your guard.”

A letter to his parents, written on the same day, has a more marked tone of depression than appears in the letter to his wife and children.

After four months’ confinement in Fort Henry the prisoners from London, together with those who had been tried and convicted at Kingston, began another lap in their journey. On September 23 they were fettered to be removed to Quebec. This stage of the journey was to be made in Durham boats via the Rideau Canal. The Durham boat was a popular form of water transport in pioneer days. Designed for use in shallow water, the serviceable craft was propelled by sail or by being poled along the river bed. It was steered by a rudder with a long tiller.

Guarded by a detachment of the 83rd Regiment, the prisoners numbered eighty-three. The party was made of seventy-eight who had been in the Prescott and Windsor raids, four civil prisoners, and one other, Horace Cooley, who had been captured while taking part in a raid on the St. Clair River. Of the four civil offenders, three were convicted murderers and one was a deserter from the military. The Durham boats were towed by a steamer, first to Bytown—today Ottawa, the capital of Canada, but then only a small backwoods village. From Bytown they proceeded by the Ottawa River to Montreal. The journey was long, the Durham boats were crowded and uncomfortable, and there was in every prisoner’s mind the realization that each hour increased the distance from home and friends.

Sir John Colborne had written to Sir George Arthur on May 18, requesting that none of the Upper Canada prisoners should be sent to Lower Canada until such time as the transport ship would be ready to sail. Quebec City, he pointed out, had no jail accommodation for so large a number from Upper Canada as would board the transport. He suggested also that the prisoners be transferred at once from the steamer and not landed at Quebec at all. Accordingly, Arthur had sent Lieutenant T. W. Jones of the 43rd Regiment to Quebec with the necessary instructions regarding clothing and other supplies. Writing to Jones on May 28, Arthur said:

The steamer King William was awaiting the Upper Canada prisoners at Lake St. Peter, near Montreal, and they were soon aboard and on their way to Quebec.

François Xavier Prieur has left us an account of the preparations for placing the French-Canadian prisoners at Montreal aboard the steamer British America, which was to take them likewise to Quebec. They were shackled at the jail and, guarded by a detachment of cavalry, were marched to the wharf where the embarkation was to take place. There were crowds in the streets and masses of people at the wharf anxious to get a glimpse of the unfortunate men. They were made to go aboard the steamer and were confined below the fore-deck. Quickly lines were cast off and the boat headed up the river, dropping anchor in Lake St. Peter to await the arrival of the Upper Canada prisoners. When these came and had boarded the King William, no further stop was made at Montreal by either steamer. Both headed for Quebec, where they arrived on the following day, the British America at about noon and the King William a few hours later. From both boats the prisoners were quickly transferred to the transport that would be their home for the next several months. Canada would soon be left behind.

The Quebec Mercury, recording the transfer of the men from the steamers to the ocean-going ship, said:

It was almost six months since Woodman and his companions had left the jail in London. They had been in three prisons and had travelled in waggons, aboard steamers and in Durham boats. Before them now was a long sea voyage under conditions that would add further to their misery.

The Voyage to Van Diemen’s Land

Had Woodman and his companions been on deck on the morning of September 27 as they approached Quebec, they would have seen a large black hulk looming up in the river before them. It was the transport Buffalo, which was to be their marine prison for the next several months. It was one of England’s older naval vessels, dating from Nelson’s time but now engaged in duties much less exciting than during the lengthy struggle with Napoleon.

This was not the first voyage that the vessel had made to Van Diemen’s Land. The Reverend Robert Knopwood, the first chaplain at Hobart Town, recorded in his diary on November 5, 1805, that the hms Buffalo had arrived in port with a small quantity of needed supplies for the colonists, “the first ship of His Majesty’s navy which came to Hobart Town.” Now, in 1839, it was to carry to the island a shipload of human misery, and this at the expense of the English taxpayer. As early as May, 1839, Sir George Arthur had notified the Colonial Office that “no part of the expenses to be incurred had been provided by the House of Assembly who contended that the prisoners must be considered as offenders against Great Britain and not against the province in particular.”

The Colonial Office had informed Sir George that the Buffalo was under orders at Plymouth to proceed to Quebec with reinforcements for the troops in Canada, after which it would carry the prisoners sentenced to transportation to their destination. The Buffalo, which arrived at Quebec on August 14, 1839, was a three-decker, equipped with fifteen or twenty guns and carrying a crew of about 150. That it was still seaworthy was shown during the following months, when it came safely through some of the stormiest waters on the face of the globe. There were occasions, it is true, when leaks developed and prisoners were called to join the crew in manning the pumps; but leaks were not unusual in such older wooden vessels. The diary of Léon Ducharme (one of the French-Canadian prisoners) on the outward voyage makes frequent references to rough and stormy weather and tells of sails being carried away; but there does not appear to have been danger at any time of the loss of the ship. Ducharme, being a landsman, perhaps sensed danger when little existed.

We learn nothing from Woodman’s surviving papers of the quarters that he and his companions occupied during the long voyage, but we have good descriptions of life aboard the ship written by two of the French-Canadian prisoners, who were in company with the Upper Canadians as far as Hobart Town, and were then carried on to Sydney, New South Wales, for their years of exile.

These two diarists, François Xavier Prieur and Léon (Léandre) Ducharme, were both able to return to Canada, Ducharme arriving in January, 1845, and Prieur in September, 1846. Ducharme’s narrative was immediately published, but Prieur’s story did not appear until eighteen years later. This may explain some of the slight differences in detail between the two narratives. Of the two, Prieur’s account of his experiences may be regarded as the superior, being not only much more voluminous but more intimately detailed.

Prieur tells us that the prisoners, 144 in all when the civil offenders are included, were placed on the lowest of the three decks, “well below the water line”. Their quarters occupied a space about seventy-five feet in length, midway in the vessel. Here they slept, ate, and, except when allowed on deck in small groups, spent all other time. The space between decks was but four feet and a half, so that it was necessary to stoop when moving about. Along the centre of the deck, longitudionally, a partition had been made by piling up boxes of ship’s stores, thus dividing the area into two quite distinct parts and separating the prisoners into two groups. These groups were kept quite apart from one another and forbidden to have any communication, the French Canadians being together in one compartment. Prieur’s description may make clear the internal arrangements on the lowest level of the ship’s hold:

The small compartments deserve fuller explanation. Against the side of the ship in each of the two divisions were nine such sleeping-places, measuring a little over seven feet in width and with a depth of six feet. In each was what might be called an upper and lower berth. Each berth, Prieur tells us, held four persons, each compartment eight, and the nine compartments on one side thus held seventy-two men. There was one blanket for each two men, “already very dirty”, and for a pillow a little cushion, “very ill-made and terribly hard”. At eight o’clock in the evening a bell gave the signal to go to bed, and the hour for getting up was six o’clock. Absolute silence was ordered during the night and sleeping compartments could not be used during the day.

The food ration, according to Prieur, was as follows: breakfast, a pint of oatmeal, slightly sweetened; dinner, four ounces of salt beef, four ounces of suet pudding, and a few ounces of biscuit; or (on alternative days) a pint of pea soup, three ounces of bacon, and eleven ounces of biscuit; supper, a pint of cocoa, with whatever biscuit remained over from dinner, whenever any did remain over.

Ducharme’s description of the daily food allowance varies only slightly, but he adds some further details. The rations were brought down in pails, one pail serving twelve men; but there was only one tin plate, one knife, one fork, and one spoon for each twelve. As some of the men had not provided such utensils for themselves, they were forced to hold their food in their hands or wait a turn with the knife and fork. Some were able to fashion spoons by gumming together little pieces of wood. Water was provided only to the extent of one pint a day, an amount quite insufficient to allay the thirst that followed the eating of salty provisions.

For fresh air and exercise a daily period on the main deck was permitted. One-half of the prisoners—that is, seventy-two, half French and half Upper Canadian—were brought up at nine in the morning and stayed until half past eleven. The remainder were permitted on deck between two and five-thirty o’clock. Both periods were subject to weather conditions. There were days at sea when none were able to go on deck and long hours had to be spent in the dark, ill-ventilated quarters below. This, however, was but one of the numerous hardships and discomforts of the voyage, which Prieur discusses at some length in his narrative.

First of these discomforts was seasickness, which began as early as the fifth day at sea and promptly affected most of the prisoners. “The poor sick folk,” says Prieur, “were compelled to cling desperately to anything available in order to reach the narrow bench from which the plunging of the ship, and their own weakness, continually flung them down upon the deck which had become wet, slippery and stinking through the vomitings of those who were sick. Six were constantly cleaning up our footpath (the name that must be given to this deck). Scenes such as these were enough to upset one’s stomach. Not until the fourteenth day out was there weather that would permit the sick again to go on deck.”

Then came another source of suffering and distress. Access to fresh air after more than a week of enforced semi-abstinence from food so increased the appetites that the regulation ration was quite inadequate. Soon there were evidences of malnutrition, from which many prisoners were to suffer during the remainder of the voyage.

Another torment soon appeared, which grew to frightful proportions. Lice, which were already in the beds and blankets issued to the prisoners, rapidly multiplied in such conditions as existed on the lowest deck. Soon they were on every occupant of the compartments, a torment by day and by night. While the men were ordered to wash their clothes once a week, there was no general clean-up of the deck until October 15, when the quarters were washed out and whitewashed with lime in anticipation of arrival in the tropics. When the ship did enter that region, the heat added further sufferings. “For a whole month,” says Prieur, “we were burnt up by the heat of the torrid zone.”

One other species of torment is described by Prieur which will be well understood by men readers. This had to do with the difficulties of shaving during the long voyage. Twice a week, while they were on deck, the men had to shave one another. Their own razors had been confiscated, perhaps as a matter of safety, and those that were supplied were dull and rusty. Only cold sea water was available and there were no mirrors. Often the ship was rolling to a degree that made shaving almost impossible. “Certain of my countrymen,” says Prieur, “never returned from the operation in question without their faces bloody and their eyes streaming with tears.” Summing up the physical sufferings of the prisoners, he says:

The picture here drawn is probably not exaggerated. Narratives of others of the prisoners make it even blacker. But we must remember the times and the conditions. Humanitarian ideas of the twentieth century have no place in measurement of conditions in 1839. These men had been tried and condemned by proper courts and orders had gone out that they were to be removed from the country.

The officers of the transport, knowing nothing of Canadian politics or of the justice or injustice of the sentences, received them as ordinary criminals and carried out, as was their duty, the customary regulations as to food, clothing, exercise and conduct. These prisoners who had been brought aboard at Quebec were to be delivered to the authorities in Australia or Tasmania, as the case might be, and that was all there was to it.

The question might reasonably be asked, were the conditions aboard the transport Buffalo worse than the conditions that existed on the sailing ships that in that era were bearing poor Irish emigrants to America? Less than a decade later “pest ships”, as they were called, landed upward of 100,000 helpless people on the St. Lawrence. The immigrants died by the thousands and spread cholera into far corners of the Canada of the time, bringing death to many others. Aboard the “pest ships” hundreds of men, women and children were cheated out of food and water and received no medical attention, and the bodies of the dead were tossed into the Atlantic. But aboard the Buffalo, despite all the hardships and discomforts that Prieur and others enumerate, there was but one death during the long voyage from Quebec to Hobart Town.

Strange though it may seem, Woodman tells us almost nothing of the discomforts of the voyage. One might wonder how he could keep any sort of diary in the dark, crowded deck where he was confined; but it does appear that he made notes of some kind, and in his letters after arrival in Van Diemen’s Land he provides a few details. Thus he writes on February 17, 1840:

There is good reason to believe that Woodman had deliberately determined to conceal from his family in Canada the hardships he would encounter and the sufferings that were his lot. His letters say nothing of the bad conditions in the jail at Toronto, where he was confined for a time. Nor does he complain of anything while in Fort Henry at Kingston. His family knew from their visits to London jail how bad conditions were, and could judge that they would not be different elsewhere; but Woodman had evidently decided that they had suffered so much through him that he would add nothing further to disturb their troubled minds. Herein he differs from those who later described their experiences with bitterness towards all associated with their exile and punishment.

Woodman does tell us that when John Dugas, the pilot, left the Buffalo in the St. Lawrence on October 3, he took with him a letter from Woodman to his family in London, in care of Sir John Colborne. This letter may have been lost on the way or have disappeared since, as it is not among the surviving papers. That the pilot did bring back letters from the ship we know. Extracts from a number of them were printed in L’Ami du peuple (Montreal) on October 23. Le Canadien (Quebec) of the same date referred to letters it had seen:

The extracts that appeared in L’Ami du peuple are of a similar character. They express satisfaction with the ship, the captain, and the treatment the prisoners are receiving. The writer says in one letter that he shares an upper berth with A. Morin and F. X. Prieur, the latter being the man whose complaints have been noted. He speaks of three men sharing a berth, though Prieur says that there were four in each.

Here we find other men who are silent about the hardships upon which Prieur dwells. One explanation might be that when writing they were as yet not on the open sea and the conditions may have been, as the editor of Le Canadien suggested, better than those experienced in Montreal jail.

Returning to Woodman’s notes on the voyage, we read:

Woodman in his notes speaks well of Captain Wood, the commander of the Buffalo, and of the care taken by the surgeon and officers in matters of health. This was demonstrated by the fact that there was but the one death during the passage from Quebec to Hobart Town, that of Asa Priest, a Prescott prisoner from New York State. Robert Marsh described Priest as “a very quiet social man” and William Gates in his narrative says that he died of “a broken heart”. Woodman gives a most sympathetic account of his burial at sea, remarking on the respect paid by the crew of the Buffalo to an unfortunate prisoner:

Woodman’s letter concludes with a note of hope that the future, black as it appears, may yet have within it the possibility of reunion with his wife and family in Upper Canada:

On December 30, 1839, he writes: “Indian Ocean. We did not call at the Cape as we expected because a gale of wind which commenced on the 26th inst. prevented and we had to double the Cape on the 28th. I do not blame the sailors from dreading that place as we had a very rough time indeed.”

On January 15, 1840, comes this entry: “We have just discovered land, the islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam, 3,000 miles from the cape: we have 3,400 miles to sail to get to Hobart Town.”

Finally, on February 8, 1840: “We discovered the island of Van Diemen’s at ten o’clock A.M. The wind headed us and we did not get to Hobart Town till the 12th instant. On the 13th instant we were all landed here.”

The voyage had extended over 138 days, counting in the several days spent at Rio while water and supplies for the remainder of the voyage were being taken on. Hobart Town was the end of the voyage for Woodman and his fellow-prisoners from Upper Canada, but the French-Canadian prisoners were carried to Sydney, where in the penal colony of New South Wales they would work out their term of punishment. The Buffalo left for Sydney on the 19th and the French Canadians arrived at their destination on the 25th, though not until March 11 were they finally removed from the ship’s hold and taken ashore. In the interval they were visited by Bishop Polding and the Reverend John Brady, a priest, who celebrated mass and heard their confessions. Father Brady was afterwards the first Roman Catholic bishop of Perth.

Woodman tells us that the French-Canadian prisoners would have been happier if they could have been landed along with those from Upper Canada at Hobart Town. There had evidently been some intercourse between the two groups during the voyage despite the separation of their quarters on the lower deck of the ship. Woodman mentions that there were forty-eight men with families among the Lower Canada prisoners, including three brothers.

Of the fifty-eight French-Canadian prisoners who left Quebec aboard the Buffalo in September, 1839, all returned to Canada except three. Two died while in exile: Louis Doumouchelle, an inn-keeper in the parish of St. Martine, near Montreal, aged 42 at the time of his arrival; and Ignace Gabriel Chevrefils, a farmer from the same district, aged 43. Both were married men and each had six children. The third man, Joseph Marceau, married while in New South Wales and remained in Australia. He died there in 1883, leaving a typical French-Canadian family of eleven children. There are numerous descendants in New South Wales today.^[36]

Mention is made in one or more of the exile narratives of a plot among the prisoners to seize the vessel and sail it back to New York. Woodman makes no mention of this, but Prieur and Ducharme each give a lengthy description of an alarm being sounded, of the prisoners being herded between decks while their belongings were searched, and of much stricter regulations being imposed during the remainder of the voyage. Ducharme’s account reads:

Ducharme says that it was later discovered that John Tyrrell (“Tywell” he calls him), one of the Upper Canada prisoners, had spread the false report. He is bitter in his denunciation of Tyrrell and says that the greater severity that was enforced after the alarm continued until the prisoners were disembarked at Hobart Town. Prieur makes a similar accusation against Tyrrell, but includes the name of a man named Black as an accomplice. Black, he says, was working his way from Canada to Australia aboard the ship, and as one of his duties had charge of the provisions dealt out to the prisoners. His methods of handling the food were described as disgusting.

The story of a plot actually originated among the men, far down in the hold and there divided into two completely separated groups, sounds quite improbable; but that such a rumour might be carried to the officers by an informer is not impossible. Ducharme himself questions the possibility of such a plot succeeding. Officers and crew were as numerous as those they guarded, “all of them armed right down to the cook, who carried a sword and pistol”; and prisoners were always under lock and key. Also, there was probably not one prisoner who could have charted a course to New York or to any other port, even if the ship had been seized.

Tyrrell, the man whom Ducharme accuses of treachery, was one of the prisoners tried at London after the affray at Windsor. He received a pardon in 1844 and left Van Diemen’s Land in January, 1845, being one of the first of the exiles to return to Canada. There he took up his earlier occupation of dairy farmer and cheesemaker and died May 22, 1874. A gravestone in the old Claus burying ground, near Vienna in south-western Ontario, gives his age as fifty-nine years, eleven months. There is nothing on the stone to indicate that his life differed in any way from those who lie buried about him.

It is possible that family influence had something to do with his early release from the penal colony. R. A. Tucker, the Provincial Secretary, in sending to the Colonial Secretary of Van Diemen’s Land a list of the prisoners embarking on the Buffalo, recommended Tyrrell “for consideration” because “Mr. Burwell is his uncle”. Mahlon Burwell, the relative mentioned, was the member from London in the Legislative Assembly and close at all times to Colonel Thomas Talbot, who usually had the ear of the official group at Toronto. Elijah Woodman knew Tyrrell while they were in exile and mentions him more than once in his letters.

In addition to the prisoners who went to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Buffalo, there were thirteen others, who had been captured in the Short Hills raid, who arrived in the penal colony somewhat earlier. Their leader, James Moreau, had been hanged; and probably several others would have met the same fate but for the active efforts of Maria Wait, wife of one of the captured men. Her petitions secured a stay of execution, though all were later ordered to be transported. They were moved to Quebec and later in the year placed on the bark Captain Ross. A rough winter voyage on a sailing ship caused severe hardships, but a fairly rapid passage—just twenty-five days—brought them to Liverpool.

From their jail cells they were able to establish contact with Messrs. Hume and Roebuck, sympathetic members of the British Parliament, and with Lord Brougham, Durham’s critic and political opponent. Their cases were reviewed in the British courts without favourable result, and on March 17, 1840, nine of the condemned men were placed on the Marquis of Hastings, together with more than two hundred criminals being sent by British courts to the penal colony. Benjamin Wait gives a vivid description of the loathsome conditions amid this “mass of corruption and crime” during the long voyage to Van Diemen’s Land. Vermin and scurvy added to the torments of the unhappy men, and deaths, he says, were numerous among the criminals confined below deck.

Four others, whose cases had lingered in the British courts, left in September on the ship Canton. These four were Linus W. Miller, John Grant, Jacob Beemer, and Samuel Chandler. Their companions aboard ship were also ordinary British criminals, and Miller in his exile narrative gives a lengthy description of the bedlam below decks. Quarrelling and fighting were common, and loud and obscene talk was to be heard at all hours of the day.

Yet, disgusting as were such conditions for these exiles from Canada, Miller has a few good words for the ship. The health of the prisoners was good, he says, due to the habits of cleanliness which were strictly enforced, the not unwholesome diet, and the fact that the prisoners were kept much on deck. There were two deaths aboard the Canton, one from consumption and one from apoplexy. He gives a description of the burials at sea quite similar to that which Woodman recorded aboard the Buffalo. The burial service was read by the ship’s surgeon, with captain, officers and crew in attendance. The corpse was sewed up in a hammock weighted with two cannon balls and placed upon a wide board, one end of which extended over the side of the vessel. At the words of the burial service “we therefore commit his body to the deep”, the board was raised and the body dropped to the waters below.

The prisoners from Canada who went to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Buffalo had one advantage over those who preceded them on the Marquis of Hastings and the Canton. These latter vessels were carrying regular shipments of criminals sent from the country by the British courts, and the Canadians aboard had to mingle with them for the whole length of the voyage. On the Buffalo, in contrast, all except four were under sentence for participation in the uprisings in the provinces or armed invasion from the United States. They had a common background.

The further division on a racial basis aboard the Buffalo also gave to each group a certain unity. The French Canadians were all Roman Catholics, and Prieur tells us that on the first morning after leaving Quebec they went on their knees and engaged in prayer, “a practice that we faithfully observed morning and evening, throughout the whole length of the voyage”. The Upper Canada prisoners, on their side of the partition on that lowest deck, lacked this common source of consolation, but they were helpful to one another in their hardships and sufferings. Though there was but one death, there was a certain amount of sickness due to the close confinement, the poor food, and the general nervous anxiety over the fact that there was no knowledge of what fate awaited at the end of the voyage.

In the St. Catharines Journal of August 13, 1840, there appeared a letter written by an officer of hms Buffalo from Hobart Town under date of February 14, giving some details of the voyage to Van Diemen’s Land and the landing at Hobart Town of the prisoners from Upper Canada. He describes the outward voyage as having been “fair all the way” and adds these interesting details:

Van Diemen’s Land—England’s Overseas Jail

The Canadians who were landed at Hobart Town in February, 1840, after their five months’ voyage, had little knowledge of the island to which they had come or of the life that lay ahead of them. One thing they did understand was that the island was a prison, but why it should be a prison for men who had come from the other side of the world was still somewhat of a mystery. This and much else with regard to the colony and its administration they were to learn during the years ahead.

The very name of the island had an ominous sound. The word “Diemen’s” sounded like “demons”, and illiterate prisoners might easily confuse the two. During the years that followed, the harshness of the regulations, the cruel punishments, and the general crushing of men’s wills must often have seemed to them to be the work of demons going about in human form. From all this tyranny and cruelty there seemed no possibility of escape, and in later days there came to many a man the moment when he preferred death to a continuance of such existence.

Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as we know it today, was first seen by Europeans in November, 1642, when the great Dutch navigator and explorer, Abel Jansz Tasman, from his ship, the Heemskerck, sighted the west coast. He bestowed upon it the name of his superior, Anthony Van Diemen, Governor General of the Dutch East India Company, by whom the expedition had been sent out. As a further compliment to his chief, Tasman named a large island on the east coast after the Governor’s wife, Maria, and paid like honour to several members of the council of the company. As for himself, he was content to give the name Tasman to a rock rising eight hundred feet sheer in front of Cape Pillar. This today is crowned by a lighthouse. Tasman made a second voyage, somewhat less fruitful in results; but the death of Governor Van Diemen in 1645 put an end to further Dutch efforts in Australian exploration. The island that Tasman had sighted in 1642 returned to its former mystery. Trading companies and the governments behind them were not in that era passing out geographical information that might be of use to a competitor. It remained to a much later date to give to Tasman the credit for his discovery.

Not until 1771 was there further European contact with the island. In that year the French navigator, Marion du Fresne, anchored near the present Blackman’s Bay after rounding the southern coast. Two years later, during the second voyage of Captain James Cook, his second-in-command, Captain Tobias Furneaux, anchored in Adventure Bay and later sailed along the east coast. He was convinced that what was thought to be an island was really part of the Australian mainland, and he later convinced Cook that this was so. Furneaux appears to have been entirely unable to interpret correctly the geographical facts that lay before him.

Four years later, on his third voyage, Captain Cook himself reached Van Diemen’s Land and anchored in Adventure Bay. This was the first occasion when friendly relations were established between white men and the natives of the island. It was unfortunate that Cook’s stay was so brief and his observations so limited.

Thereafter other explorers visited the island or reported its position: Captain William Bligh, hms Bounty, in August, 1788, and again in February, 1792; Captain John Henry Cox, in the brig Mercury, in July, 1789; the French Rear Admiral, Bruny D’Entrecasteaux, in 1792 and again in 1793; Lieutenant John Hayes, of the Bombay Marine, in 1793; Captain Matthews Flinders and Surgeon George Bass, r.n., who by establishing the existence of Bass Strait became the first circumnavigators of Tasmania, in 1798-99; and, finally, Captain Nicholas Baudin, in command of a French scientific expedition, who visited the island and made some coastal surveys in 1802.

The arrival of this French expedition in Australian waters created misgivings in the mind of Captain Philip Gidley King, r.n., Governor of New South Wales. Although his concern was to some extent lessened by the frank explanations of Captain Baudin, King suggested to the home authorities that a settlement be undertaken on the southern coast at Port Phillip. Such a settlement had been thought of ever since the discovery of the great open waterway, Bass Strait, and King’s proposal found prompt and willing support from the Colonial Office. Out of it came the genesis of Tasmania as a colony. This took three stages.

The first of these was an Australian expedition headed by Lieutenant John Bowen, r.n. Initiated by Governor King in 1803, it was planned to found a settlement at Risdon Cove on the Derwent River. King’s motives were mixed. He aimed to anticipate any unfriendly move by France, he wished to split up the convicts who were under his charge in New South Wales, and he had also in mind to exploit the timber and agricultural resources of the island. He instructed Bowen to meet any foreign threat by a declaration of British claim to the whole island. The company sent to maintain this claim consisted of nine soldiers, four settlers, and thirty-five convicts, of whom at least three were women. Bad weather so delayed the expedition that not until his third attempt was Bowen successful in reaching the Derwent River. He finally arrived at the cove on September 11, 1803.

Meanwhile, the Colonial Office had conceived the idea of establishing a settlement at Port Phillip on the mainland and connecting it by an overland route with Sydney. This new settlement could receive a share of the convicts and also offered certain commercial possibilities. Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, who had retired in 1796 as Judge Advocate of New South Wales, was chosen to head this expedition, which would set up the new colony as a dependency of New South Wales, operating under its laws and regulations. hms Calcutta and the ship Ocean carried the members of the expedition, which included three hundred convicts, sixteen wives of well-conducted convicts, and their children. There were also eighteen settlers and their families. The two ships sailed from Spithead on April 24, 1803, and arrived within two days of each other in early October.

Port Phillip proved quite unsuitable for a settlement. Water was scarcely to be found, and the dearth of moisture made farming impossible. This information was sent to Governor King, who promptly authorized Collins to seek another location for the settlement, suggesting either the present Port Dalrymple on the island, or the Derwent River, where Lieutenant Bowen was already established. Collins was impressed with the Port Dalrymple site but expressed preference for the Derwent River. This choice Governor King approved. By February, 1804, the new location of the Collins enterprise had been fixed and a colony was in the making. Its centre was the site of the present city of Hobart, named after Lord Hobart, the Colonial Secretary.

One further and somewhat less important enterprise, initiated by Lord Hobart, had to do with the setting up of a settlement at Port Dalrymple. To this a part of the establishment on Norfolk Island and a proportion of its settlers and convicts were to be removed. Norfolk Island, discovered by Captain Cook in 1774, stood isolated in a wide expanse of the Pacific, difficult to approach and without a port or even a safe anchorage. Administration of the new settlement was to be the task of Colonel William Paterson, Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales. Arrangements were made for Paterson and an advance party to proceed to Port Dalrymple, but winter storms on the Bass Strait delayed the enterprise for months. When the expedition finally set sail for Sydney on October 15, 1804, it numbered 181 persons, of whom 74 were convicts. Paterson himself sailed aboard hms Buffalo, captained by Captain Kent, the same ship that thirty-six years later brought the prisoners from Canada to Van Diemen’s Land. It was a wild, stormy voyage, and when near its destination the Buffalo was driven aground and remained fast for four days. Eventually, after numerous delays and difficulties, His Majesty’s colours were raised on land on November 11, 1804, the troops firing three volleys and the Buffalo firing a royal salute. Paterson was not an able administrator and his choice of locations for his future settlers was unwise. The outcome, however, was the birth of the present city of Launceston, second only to Hobart in its importance on the island.

Let us now return to the expedition headed by Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, which after finding Port Phillip unsuitable for a settlement crossed the Bass Strait and entered the Derwent River. With Collins, to assist him in the enterprise, were six civilians, three medical men, a surveyor, a mineralogist, and a chaplain. Of the six only one is today at all remembered, the Reverend Robert Knopwood, the chaplain. Born some time after 1760, the son of a wealthy father from whom he is said to have inherited £90,000, he graduated from Caius College, Cambridge, took holy orders, and was for a time private chaplain to the Earl of Clermont. This connection brought association with the Prince Regent’s gay circle, and the fortune disappeared. The influence of the Prince Regent secured for Knopwood a naval post, and in 1803 he was appointed chaplain to the Collins expedition. His diaries,^[37] some portions of which have been published, give us the only personal record we have of the early social life of Hobart Town. He tells us that he preached the first sermon on the island on February 26, 1804, performed the first marriage ceremony on March 18, officiated at the first burial on April 28, and baptized the first child on May 11. Though in middle age himself when he came to the colony, he outlived all his old companions of the Calcutta. He continued as chaplain of the settlement until 1823, when he was supplanted by the Reverend William Bedford, commonly known as “Holy Willie”. After his last sermon on April 20 he wrote in his diary, “All who knew me were so much affected that they shed many a tear, knowing myself to be so ill-treated by the Government.” Not until fifteen years later did he join his Calcutta comrades in death.

Knopwood’s clerical duties were not onerous. An occasional sermon and attendance upon those about to be hanged demanded some time; otherwise he worked in his garden or engaged in fishing or hunting, of which he was fond. But he was also a magistrate, and from the bench he dispensed justice with a mind apparently quite untroubled by the harshness of the sentences that he imposed. In May, 1805, he records ordering five hundred lashes for a man who had broken into his house. In this case he acted, improperly, both as prosecutor and magistrate. Throughout his diary there are frequent references to floggings that he imposed, as well as the placing of men in irons in the work gangs. On January 12, 1807, three prisoners found guilty of stealing a goat were given five hundred lashes each, and two others received three hundred for absconding. Yet apart from his indifferences to the sufferings he thus imposed he appears to have been a man kindly in his general relations and popular with his associates.

Knopwood died in September, 1838. In his thirty-four years in the penal colony he served under four lieutenant-governors. Lieutenant-Colonel Collins, with whom he came to the colony in 1804, died in 1810. His successor, Colonel Thomas Davey, was commonly known as “Tipsy Tom”, and it was said of him that for carrying on “he required plenty of rum and rope”. Moral conditions on the island finally became so disgraceful that Governor Macquarie of New South Wales recommended his recall. Colonel William Sorell replaced him in 1817. Sorell was an able administrator and brought some order out of the chaos that had prevailed under Davey, but it has been said of him that “he lived in a glass house and left it perforce to his successor to stone into conventionality the free manners and morals of the colonists.” Sorell was himself not entirely a model for the community. J. T. Bigge, Commissioner to inquire into the affairs of the Australian colonies, commented in 1823 upon Sorell’s “culpable insensibility to the dignity of his public office” in living with the wife of a certain Lieutenant Kent. But the colonists were sincerely sorry to see him go and petitioned the British government to leave him at his post.

Sorell’s successor, Colonel George Arthur, arrived in 1824 just at the time when the island was given a status independent of New South Wales. In an early official utterance he spoke of his determination to combat the moral laxity prevalent in the colony. Replying to an address from the inhabitants of Hobart, he spoke of his desire for an “effectual reformation” in the moral character of “a very large class of the community”. A new and harsh regime was thus inaugurated. Early in December, 1826, seventy-one persons were arraigned in the criminal courts at Hobart on various charges and twenty-five received sentence of death. Most of these were convicts, but Arthur probably felt that a liberal exhibition of the gallows might also have a restraining influence upon ordinary citizens. Eight executions took place on January 6, 1826, and others followed on the 7th. Thereafter, during the next ten years, executions were a constant occurrence in the little capital. Chaplain Knopwood was often in attendance, either with condemned men in their cells or with them on the gallows, “a most melancholy sight to behold,” as he remarked in his diary.

Knopwood does not appear to have enjoyed in Arthur’s time the friendly and intimate relations that had been his during the terms of earlier governors. When Arthur was recalled in 1836 the cleric wrote in his diary: “This day a great dinner at the Macquarie Hotel on account of Sir George Arthur being recalled. The first dinner of the kind ever held in the colony for the Governor being called home.” When Arthur left Hobart Town on October 29, the diarist made this comment: “He was so much disliked by the inhabitants and settlers that he was obliged to have the soldiers two deep to guard him to the boat.” The editor of the diary remarks that this is almost the only instance he has found of an open expression of opinion on a contemporary.

Knopwood found official favour once again during the term of office of Sir John Franklin. He liked the Franklins and apparently they liked him. Soon after Sir John arrived Knopwood was invited to dine at Government House, and was afterward “offered a bed”. Next day he breakfasted there and then drove out in “the Governor’s chariot” to the Government Gardens. Later he attended a “rout” given by Lady Franklin that he found “very pleasant”. On other occasions also he received attentions from Government House.

Governors and lieutenant-governors for these Australian colonies might come and go, but through all the period the shadow of the transportation system hung like a pall over the life of the communities. Convicts began to arrive in New South Wales in 1787; and through the years down to 1841, when transportation to that colony was ended, a total of 83,290 had arrived. In Van Diemen’s Land, between the coming of Lieutenant Bowen’s first group of convicts brought over from the mainland, and the termination of the system on the island in 1852, a total of 67,655 were received. West Australia had shipments of England’s criminals to the number of 9,718 between 1850 and 1868. If we add these figures we find a total of 160,663 convicts, sent to the Australian colonies in the eighty years after 1787.^[38]

During the long sea journey to the island prison overseas, the convicts from England were often shamefully treated. Greedy contractors provided the minimum amount of food and water and made little provision against outbreaks of scurvy; and if deaths came, as they always did, the bodies were tossed overboard. Facilities for washing were limited and the sleeping-quarters were usually infested with lice. Many prisoners were afflicted with dysentery during the voyage, making the hold so foul that others were also afflicted. Other prisoners, deprived of liquor, became half crazed and bestialities went on under the very eyes of the guards.

The Reverend Richard Johnson, the first chaplain of New South Wales, relates the arrival at Sydney in July, 1790, of three convict ships, and begins his account with these statistics of the men on board:

Near five hundred sick were landed from these three ships, with hospital accommodation ready for less than one hundred. Chaplain Johnson visited the tents in which they were placed. He wrote:

This might be regarded as an early and extreme case of cruelty aboard the transports, but there was copious evidence presented in the thirties to the investigating committee of the British Parliament to show that in varying degree inhumanity persisted for nearly fifty years after the case cited by the Reverend Richard Johnson.

The prisoners from Canada who were landed at Hobart Town in February, 1840, formed but a small fragment of the great total and they were the last ever to go from Canada to England’s penal colonies overseas. Banishment for crime came to an end in Canada in 1842, when it was enacted that instead of transportation or banishment for crimes committed there should be imprisonment in the provincial penitentiary or other prison. This action taken may have been influenced by the agitation then under way in England to end the whole transportation system. It may also have come about as a result of the repudiation by the British Parliament of Lord Durham’s action in sending eight Lower Canada prisoners to Bermuda. It is less probable that the transportation of the Upper and Lower Canada prisoners in 1839 had in any way influenced the passing of the legislation.

Within an Island Prison

The Upper Canada prisoners had only a brief stay at Hobart Town. They were landed from the Buffalo on February 13 to be registered and measured, and have any marks of identification noted. This occupied two days, after which they were moved to the Sandy Bay Road Station, one of the centres of convict labour. From the deck of the ship on their arrival, or as they were marched through the streets to the prison offices, they may have gained some slight impressions of the country to which they had come. The shores of the harbour were grey-green with the rich foliage of the gum-trees, and in the background, looking down upon town and harbour, was beautiful Mount Wellington.

Government House, the official centre of the colony, was in 1840 described as “a confused, irregular pile of buildings, added to from time to time . . . devoid alike of beauty, convenience or comfort”. But it commanded charming prospects and was surrounded by grounds laid out with taste and judgment. Elsewhere in the town were St. David’s Anglican Church, the Supreme Court, the Colonial Hospital, the commissariat stores, and the extensive prisoners’ barracks to which the newly arrived prisoners from Canada were conducted. At night this was a sleeping-place for the chain gangs of the town.

Men working in chains were among the commonest sights of Hobart Town. More than one English visitor to the island capital recorded his shock at the sight of prisoners in grotesque convict costume hauling carts about the streets, while the chains and manacles on their ankles kept up a constant unpleasant clanking. Van Diemen’s Land was truly, as Sir George Arthur had once described it, “the gaol of the Empire”.

It was customary for the governor of the colony to meet incoming groups of prisoners, not in any sense to extend a welcome, but rather to impress upon them that the island they now entered was a prison and that their future welfare depended upon the readiness with which they accepted its regulations. Sir George Arthur had always performed this duty while he was governor, and on the arrival of the Buffalo at Hobart Town it fell to his successor to meet the group sent into his custody by the Canadian authorities. Arthur’s successor was Sir John Franklin.

Franklin is chiefly remembered today as an intrepid Arctic explorer who, after repeated voyages, lost his life in the northern regions in 1847. But he was also a skilful and resourceful naval officer with a fine record. He had entered the navy in 1800 at the age of fourteen, and between 1801 and 1803 accompanied Captain Matthew Flinders, the English hydrographer and discoverer, on a voyage to the coast of Australia. He was aboard the Bellerophon in 1805 at the battle of Trafalgar, having charge of signals on this vessel at the time of Nelson’s great victory. His arctic work began in 1819, and for this he was knighted in 1827. He later served for some years in the Mediterranean, and in 1836 received the appointment to Van Diemen’s Land. Thus he had been in office more than three years when the Upper Canada prisoners arrived. Franklin had passed through Upper Canada when journeying northward in 1825, but his knowledge of either the land or its people was probably meagre. He knew little of the political happenings of the thirties in the Canadian provinces, and the men who were landed from the Buffalo probably differed in no respect in his mind from the criminals arriving by shiploads from England. They would be subject to exactly the same regulations.

Woodman records his first meeting with the Governor in a letter addressed to his father. “On the 17th instant,” he wrote, “Sir John Franklin, the governor of the island, made a visit, accompanied with a number of gentlemen in authority under him. He addressed us in a very mild manner and also gave us good advice. I shall send you my wife’s letter in this and you can see in that about all that was said to us except we were ordered on that afternoon to go to work on the roads for the government which we did as soon as we got our dinner.” There was no delay in imposing the regulations upon newly arrived convicts.

Evidently Woodman was willing to inform his father regarding the nature of his punishment, but wished to conceal it from his family:

He closed the letter with some lines of verse, probably recalled from earlier days:

The transportation system under which Woodman and his companions came to the island dated back in English history to the time of James I. Its existence in the nineteenth century was due to the haphazard attempts by the British Parliament to check the increase of crime arising from the growth of population and poverty that had accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In the early nineteenth century English law still prescribed the death penalty for over two hundred crimes, the cutting down of a hop vine being legally punishable with the same penalty as a murder. This terrible severity brought a reaction that was described in Parliament as “a general confederacy of prosecutors, witnesses, counsel, juries and advisers of the Crown to prevent the execution of the harsh criminal laws”. The courts simply rebelled against the antiquated penalties that were imposed for minor crimes.

Thus transportation, already long in existence, came to be substituted for the gallows as punishment for trivial offences as well as for crimes of a more serious nature. Even juveniles and first offenders, in cases which today would receive but slight punishment, were now to be shipped out of the country. Women were to be dealt with, as well as men. The provisions of the new policy were embodied in the Transportation Act of 1824. Instead of locking up its offenders or hanging them, England now shipped them overseas by the thousands.

Those who were sentenced to terms in the penal colonies were gathered at intervals in shiploads of 200 to 250, and on the voyage out to Australia or Van Diemen’s Land were in charge of a surgeon-superintendent who was supposed to be responsible for their delivery in good health. But old ships were used to convey the prisoners, and the horrors of some of the early voyages are almost too terrible to describe. Hardened criminals and young boys, mere apprentices in crime, were thrown together in the holds for the five-month voyage. Vicious teachers found ready learners. The corrupting influences of the voyage wrecked hundreds of young lives.

On arrival at their destination, the disposal of this human wreckage was entirely at the will of the governor of the penal colony to which it was sent. Not until Franklin’s time was there any definite body of instructions issued as to the treatment and discipline of those transported. Earlier administrators formulated their own policies and practices, so that between colonies and governors there were marked differences.

Governor Arthur’s system, which Franklin inherited, provided for the gradual return to freedom of reformed convicts by steps carefully defined and rigorously supervised. The convict who, over a period of years, had shown satisfactory conduct and diligence might be considered for a ticket of leave. This was a reward, not a right. The ticket-of-leave man had greater (though not full) personal liberty, with permission to marry and, conditionally, to bring his wife and family from England. He might possess property, and engage in any form of work except such as was forbidden to convicts. Any money that had been taken from him on arrival was doled out to him sparingly and at long intervals.^[40]

The ticket of leave was the first taste of freedom, “a mere sip which might be withdrawn at the will of the governor”. It was granted only after the most careful perusal of the offender’s police record and upon reports from reputable persons who could testify to the worthiness of the applicant. Probation still continued; but when it appeared that the convict had reformed sufficiently to be advanced another step on his road to freedom, he was granted a conditional pardon. At this stage he could live, as any other non-convict, in the island, though he could not return to England. Finally, when the governor of the island prison was satisfied that complete freedom was due, he could recommend to the Crown that an unconditional pardon be issued, giving full liberty of trade and movement.

Arthur’s term as governor saw the gradual working out of this elaborate system which, during his twelve years of office, was applied to roughly twenty thousand convicts. It was continued by his successors during the next twelve years, when thirty thousand more arrived. But an important change came in 1840, when the system of “assignment” of convict labour that had prevailed under Arthur was done away with. Under this system the free settlers in the colony could secure labourers for their needs without having to pay them wages. Settlers profited by this free labour, but were expected in return to share the Governor’s aims of reformation.

In theory the assignment system seemed to be beneficial to all concerned. The employer obtained a plentiful supply of labour on exceptionally easy terms, the prisoner regained a limited measure of freedom, while the Government was saved the expense of the convict’s maintenance. All was guarded by the strictest regulations that Arthur could devise; but, nevertheless, abuses entered. There was frequent evasion of the regulations, sometimes actual fraud. Treatment of the convict labourer was sometimes cruel and unjust. He was almost as much a slave as a Negro on a southern plantation in the United States, save that he was not the actual property of the settler and could not be sold.

Abolition of the assignment system was one of the radical changes that followed the parliamentary investigation of the whole transportation system. Convicts henceforth were to be first employed on public works—roads, bridges, and like projects. They were to remain in a probationary period for one year, after which, if their conduct was satisfactory, they might receive tickets of leave and go into the settled portions of the island seeking work. Governor Franklin had received these instructions and announced them to his Legislative Council at about the time of the arrival of the prisoners from Canada. This was what Woodman had in mind when he wrote to his father:

The assignment system as it had operated under Arthur and, for a time, under his successor, Franklin, was a virtual slavery. A convict chaplain who appeared before the Molesworth Parliamentary Committee said of the system: “The convicts were abject slaves, subject to the whims, caprices and tempers of their masters, and were liable at any time, with or without cause, to be punished by the lash, chains or solitary confinement.”

In 1837 one in seventeen of the convicts, exclusive of those undergoing special punishment in the prison at Tasman’s Peninsula (Port Arthur), had been lashed with an average of thirty lashes to each man. At the Port Arthur prison itself, one in four had been punished with a general average of twenty-six lashes in each case. There was a prison for boys bearing the name Point Puer, and there every second boy had been similarly dealt with, receiving an average of twenty lashes. These figures appear in Franklin’s report forwarded to Lord Glenelg on July 30, 1838. A young Lieutenant Barclay boasted that miners who were working in mines under his charge were known widely as “Barclay’s Tigers” because their backs were striped by the whips in such a symmetrical manner. Punishment might be extended to hundreds of lashes.

One example of the transportation of a youth may be cited. William Pearson, of Nottingham, was sentenced in October, 1836, to transportation for seven years. He was then twelve years of age and his crime was petty stealing. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in May, 1837, and between that time and August, 1838, he was before a magistrate twenty-four times. For his first offence, cooking potatoes by a fire in the bush, he was sentenced to four days’ solitary confinement on bread and water. He was three times given corporal punishment, and for his other offences, such as “talking at muster”, he spent sixty-one days in the solitary cells in a little over a year.^[41]

Woodman and his fellow-prisoners were destined to follow the regular pattern applied to convicts sent out from England. Between 1832 and 1836, in Governor Arthur’s régime, an average of 2,078 convicts had been admitted annually. During Franklin’s term of office, when transportation to New South Wales ceased, this average increased to 3,559. At Arthur’s departure in 1836 to go to Upper Canada, the total convict population was over 17,000, while the free population numbered about 25,000, three-fifths of whom lived in Hobart Town, Launceston and their environs. Thus it will be seen that there were two convicts to every three freemen on the island, a large proportion and one that was bound to have grave social and economic effects.

When Governor Franklin first took office in 1836, about one-quarter of the convict population was retained upon the roads and other public works, which included bridges, public buildings, and even churches. More than half the convicts were with settlers as assigned servants, or as paid labourers holding a ticket of leave on good behaviour. The remainder were confined in the penal settlement at Port Arthur, were in hospital, had absconded, or were acting as police.

The men sent to the road gangs were kept steadily at hard labour and their conduct was under constant supervision. Superintendents reported weekly to the Governor’s office at Hobart Town. Clothing was supplied of a blue or grey tint, winter clothing being issued on the first of May and summer clothing on the first of November. The food was carefully regulated both as to variety and quantity, and would probably have been sufficient had there not been dishonesty on the part of those responsible for its distribution. Soap was provided so that the prisoners could wash their clothes, Saturday afternoon being set apart for this weekly job. Holidays from labour were limited to the King’s birthday, Good Friday, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Regulations forbade any work on Sunday. Observance of the Sabbath was insisted upon for all prisoners, and road gangs were regularly marched to church.

Arthur, himself a pious man, had hoped that religion might purify the hearts of some of the vicious and wicked under his charge. To this end he appointed catechists and chaplains, both of the established church and nonconformists as well; established schools and Sunday schools, distributed Bibles, and built churches. Compulsory church attendance, which continued under Franklin, was much disliked by many of the prisoners. William Gates, one of the Canadians, had this to say about the weekly parade:

The Reverend William Bedford, “Holy Willie” as he was called by his critics, was the chaplain of St. David’s Church in Hobart Town and sometimes preached to the convicts. Gates has indicated the effect of his preaching. An amusing incident is recorded when the parson accompanied Sir John and Lady Franklin on a visit to a women’s prison. The female convicts were lost in admiration of the governor’s handsome young aide-de-camp, resplendent in scarlet and gold, and listened respectfully to remarks by the Governor and his lady. But when Mr. Bedford attempted to address them they with one accord attempted to cough him down; and upon the warders shouting for silence, “they all with one impulse turned around, raised their clothes and smacked their posteriors with a loud report.” The narrator of this story says that the Governor was shocked, the parson horror-struck; the aide-de-camp laughed aloud, and even the ladies could not control their laughter.^[42]

The minimum period of road work for an incoming prisoner was one year, but Woodman and his companions served for two years. The letter that he finished on March 11, 1841, portions of which have been quoted, was in part written while he was on the road gang; but he says little about the conditions of this labour. He was evidently withholding the details from his family. There is, however, a document among the papers returned to America at a later date that reveals something of his sufferings of mind. This fragment of journal is dated April 3, 1840, the first anniversary of the day when he left London in Upper Canada to begin the long journey that ended at Hobart Town.

In this document, which his family saw only after his death, he tells of the discomforts of prison life, the lack of sufficient food, the poor clothing, the deprivation of tobacco, even the lack of socks to cover his feet. But constantly in his thoughts is the welfare of his family left behind in Upper Canada. “Where they are or how they are is ever clinging in my mind. All I can do is to pray the Chief Architect to preserve, protect and direct them.”

From another source we learn something of Woodman’s experiences during this probationary period. Linus W. Miller wrote a narrative of his exile which was published at Fredonia, New York, in 1846. He had been captured during the invasion of the Short Hills district near Niagara in 1838 and had arrived at Hobart Town aboard the Canton on January 12, 1840. He was first sent to the Brown’s River Station, seven miles from Hobart Town; but at a later date he asked to be transferred to the Sandy Bay Station, where the Upper Canada prisoners were then stationed. His request was granted. Bad as conditions were at Sandy Bay, Miller was at least with fellow-Americans. He gives this account:

Miller tells an interesting story of Woodman, whom he evidently admired for his courage:

“The Hunters of Kentucky”, a folk ballad inspired by the Battle of New Orleans, narrates that event in eight verses with special laudation of the intrepid Kentuckians. It is bombastic, as might be expected, but has a certain primitive backwoods humour. The first verse is as follows:

This was not the first time that Woodman had roused drooping hearts by his singing. It will be recalled that on the day when the prisoners left London on the first lap of their long journey, a day that tried all spirits, he stirred their minds by breaking into the old song “Pretty Susan”. Woodman was evidently fond of singing. In pathetic tone he wrote in one of his earliest letters from the island: “I miss my eldest daughter Emeline that used to sing those songs with me. Time and distance have closed those happy scenes.”

Soon after Miller joined the Canadian group of prisoners they were moved to another station bearing the name Lovely Banks. Here conditions were bad. The men were subjected to brutal treatment by those in charge, and the worst features of the convict system were constantly in evidence. They were denied proper clothing and portions of their rations were stolen by a dishonest storekeeper. Some, as Woodman related, were working in their bare feet through wintry weather, their boots being completely worn out. Sick men were driven out to work and were threatened with flogging if they complained. Miller declares that for seven weeks in succession his own clothing was never dry, and though he was not sick he became greatly emaciated.

The oppression drove men to thoughts of running away. Four had done so while the party was at Sandy Bay. These men disappeared in the dusk of an evening, and finding a boat tried to cross the strait between the island and the mainland of Australia. They were pursued, however, and were captured in the next fortnight. All four—William Reynolds, Jacob Paddock, Michael Morin, and Horace Cooley—were nearly starved when again taken into custody. They were immediately sent to Port Arthur, the place of horrors, for two years’ hard labour.

Despite this, Miller and a companion, Joseph Stewart, decided to make a try for freedom, and on an August night scaled the walls and took to the woods. They were no more fortunate than the four who had left Sandy Bay. Two weeks later they surrendered, and the same sentence awaited them, a term at Port Arthur. Thither they went, and experienced the worst that Van Diemen’s Land regulations permitted.

Any reader of Miller’s book will realize at once that there is much exaggeration in it. No one could possibly remember the lengthy conversations and interviews with officials that he relates so glibly. But his account of conditions at Port Arthur is probably well within the truth. There is abundant evidence, such as was presented before parliamentary investigations in England, to substantiate all that he says about its horrors. Bad as were the conditions under which Elijah Woodman spent those early years as a member of a road gang, he at least was spared the brutal treatment that was the lot of those who were sent to the place of extreme punishment.

Port Arthur, situated on the Tasman Peninsula, was really a prison within a prison. It was on an almost land-locked harbour and surrounded by heavily wooded mountains. The peninsula was joined to the mainland by a narrow neck of land guarded by ferocious dogs, with chains just short enough to prevent them fighting with one another. To pass through this canine barrier was practically impossible. In addition to the dogs, there was also a small military force on the landward side of the isthmus. To Port Arthur there went three classes of prisoners: those regarded in England as particularly dangerous, who were sent to Port Arthur on arrival; men who had committed crimes while in assignment; and free settlers who had been sentenced for crimes committed in the colony itself. It was a brutal place and intended to be such. It was here that the young lieutenant striped men’s backs with the lash until they bore the name of “tigers”. Lashings were carried out daily and executions were frequent. “An Earthly Hell” was the term applied to the place by one Hobart newspaper.

A Canadian who visited Tasmania in 1956 found that Port Arthur, once a place of brutal punishment, has today become a tourist attraction for visitors to the island, and such portions of it as remain are carefully preserved by the Government. It is sixty-five miles from Hobart and there is provision for transportation by bus. The geographical details are easily recognizable. The narrow isthmus, 150 feet wide, which was once guarded by dogs is unchanged. It is today called Eagle Hawk Neck, and there is a picture in the Art Museum at Hobart depicting Lady Franklin, wife of the governor, observing the dogs.

The village of Port Arthur is today in ruins, brought about by neglect and pillage and particularly by a grass fire that swept through the area in 1895. At that time all the old wooden barracks went up in smoke and the shingled roofs of the more substantial buildings were destroyed. The governor’s house is the first edifice met with. Here Sir John and Lady Franklin sometimes resided, but only the walls now remain. Nearby is the church, designed by a convict, who, as a reward, was pardoned and discharged. The masonry is an example of the builder’s art at its best. A green lawn three acres in extent stretches from the church to the water’s edge. What was once a marsh was filled in by convict labour. Nearby is what remains of the old penitentiary, which once housed two hundred prisoners behind its massive walls; and on adjacent high ground are the look-out and the powder magazine. A wall still stands to which prisoners were affixed for floggings.

Puer Prison, where youths from thirteen to twenty-one were confined, may also be visited. There is an adjacent promontory which bears the ominous name Suicide Rock. In the area known as the Isle of the Dead are the unmarked graves of sixteen hundred convicts and of soldiers who died while on service on the island. While these remain Van Diemen’s dark past can never become forgotten.^[43]

Woodman on Ticket of Leave

Woodman’s first two years of exile, during which he laboured with a road gang, ended in the summer of 1842. Under the earlier system of Sir George Arthur he might now have been assigned to some free settler, for whom he would work without wages. The assignment system had, however, been abolished in 1840 and a probation system set up by which convicts who had served a portion of their sentence might go on ticket of leave and seek work.

Woodman had undergone many trying experiences since landing on the island in February, 1840. In a letter written to his family on February 5, 1843, he makes a brief reference to his hardships: “You may think,” he says, “that many prisoners in different parts of America suffer much from prison discipline but you cannot begin to compare their sufferings with ours during two years probation on the roads on this island. That is all that I shall say to you on the subject.” He was evidently maintaining his decision not to add to the family’s worries and sufferings by dwelling on his own troubles. However, when writing again in September, 1844, he did reveal some of the details of his life while with a road gang:

Woodman, in common with other prisoners, was not permitted to remain long at any one work station. It was February when he landed and he was immediately sent to Sandy Bay. That was summertime in Van Diemen’s Land. In June, a winter month, he and his companions were moved to Lovely Banks. In cold, wet weather they dragged their heavy loads of stone hour after hour, urged on always by an overseer, and at night were returned to their unheated shelter to await the coming of another day of labour. Linus W. Miller has left us this account of life at Lovely Banks, as he and Woodman and their fellows experienced it:

Returning to Woodman’s account, we read:

When Woodman received his ticket of leave at the end of the two years’ probation, he obtained employment on the estate of the Honourable William Kermode, of Mona Vale, some distance north of Hobart Town. Kermode was a member of the Legislative Council of the colony and at an earlier date had been a severe critic of Sir George Arthur. He appears to have given Woodman decent treatment, and in February, 1844, he offered his good services in obtaining for him a general pass or any other indulgence which the Governor might be willing to grant. In a letter written at this time he speaks of Woodman’s general good conduct while on his estate.

In a letter of February 5, 1843, Woodman refers to the good reputation of the Upper Canadian prisoners among the island’s free population:

Woodman then proceeds to give some account of the Canadian prisoners on the island. These, he says, number eighty, made up of seventy-three who came on the Buffalo, three on the ship Canton, and four on the Marquis of Hastings. He lists six who have died: Asa Priest, whose death occurred on board the Buffalo during the outward voyage; William Nottage, who was accidentally killed while engaged in blasting; Lysander Curtis, Alson Owen, Andrew Leeper, and James P. Williams. Priest, Curtis and Nottage were, he says, men with families. Of the fifty-eight French-Canadian prisoners who were taken on to New South Wales aboard the Buffalo, two, he has learned, are dead.

In this letter Woodman also gives some information about the agricultural practices at the Kermode farm where he was a servant:

Then he adds in a postscript: “Copy nothing from this letter about our farming because it may seem silly to some as they might think I could fill up this letter with something of more consequence and I really have nothing to write. I am so closely confined I can get no news of consequence.”

Turning more directly to his own family affairs, Woodman speaks of the failure of any letters from Upper Canada to come to him. It is quite possible that delivery of mail to prisoners working on the road gangs might be irregular; but that no letters at all had come to him in three years indicated inefficiency or carelessness on the part of the post office on the island. He informs his wife that the latest word that he had received of her and the children was contained in a letter from his mother which had come in April, 1842. His pain of mind is very evident.

As in all his letters, he has messages about fellow-prisoners. Chauncey Sheldon, so often his companion in misery, is well and would like to have word conveyed to his brother in Michigan. James D. Fero, a Michigan man, and Henry V. Barnum, of Charlotteville, Upper Canada, are with him at Mona Vale and would be glad if word of their welfare could be conveyed to their relatives. John B. Tyrrell, another Upper Canadian, has, he says, just received a letter from his wife, but Woodman has not yet learned what news it contains.

From this time the hope of freedom and opportunity to return to America dominates his thoughts and runs through all his letters. On March 16, 1843, writing again to his parents and family, he says:

The usual budget of news regarding other prisoners appears in this letter. He has seen a letter from Captain Morin of the French group in New South Wales, who says that they have been abused but have stood their troubles well, though two have died since landing from the Buffalo. Three of the Upper Canada prisoners who were sent to Port Arthur after absconding, Michael Murray, Solomon Reynolds and Jacob Paddock, are to have their tickets of leave restored next month; but three others, Linus Miller, Horace Cooley and Joseph Stewart, are to be held for a time. He makes the comment that the French-Canadian prisoners who have obtained indulgence are better off than those from the Upper province and have more liberties.

He adds that he has seen in the American news that three Upper Canadian prisoners, Samuel Chandler, Benjamin Wait and James Gemmell, have arrived in the United States. These were the first of the Canadian prisoners to leave the island. They had been participants in the Short Hills affair and had been the first Canadians to arrive at Hobart Town, landing in July, 1839, from the Marquis of Hastings. They received milder treatment than those who followed, chiefly because of some uncertainty regarding their status. They received parole in two years and immediately entered into plans for escape. Chandler obtained a pass to go to Hobart Town and there negotiated a passage on an American ship. Wait joined him and in January, 1842, they made a bold break in an open boat. They were on the open water for two or three days before being picked up, and not until seven months later did they arrive in America. Gemmell also made his escape a month later aboard an American whaling vessel, and actually arrived home a month before his comrades. Woodman says that the successful escape of these three brought a tightening of the restrictions placed upon the others.

In this letter of March 16, Woodman gives some account of the deplorable social conditions in the colony:

The major portion of this letter, addressed to his wife and family, has a deeply religious tone.

Woodman’s Later Convict Days

Writing from Mona Vale on July 4, 1843, the national holiday of his countrymen, Woodman found his thoughts recurring to its observance as he had known it in the past:

Then his mind turned to the Canada that had exiled him:

This letter came to Woodman’s father in Maine through the hands of Aaron Dresser.^[45] He and Stephen Wright, another ticket-of-leave man, had been called out as constables in a mammoth hunt for criminal bushrangers in 1843. Murders and other outrages by these escaped convicts had become so numerous and ghastly in character that a general man-hunt was instituted. It was a long and arduous task to track down the criminals, but the two prisoners from Canada succeeded in capturing two of the men wanted. As a reward they received a pardon, a passage to England, and a share of the £200 that had been offered for the capture of these particular criminals. The two left Van Diemen’s Land in July, 1843, and on arrival in England, five months later, obtained a passage to New York. Within a year after his arrival in America Wright had a volume on the market detailing his experiences from the invasion of Canada to his return to his native land.

Less than two months after Woodman’s letter was written, there came an event that must have stirred in the minds of all the Canadian prisoners a hope that perhaps better days might be ahead. This was the appointment by the British Government of a new governor for the colony. Sir John Franklin’s term of office was brought to an abrupt and unhappy close by a communication from Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, which made it quite clear that the Governor had lost the confidence of the home Government. Behind the dismissal, however, was a story of deep intrigue on the part of one of the island officials.

Franklin’s successor was to be Sir John Eardley Wilmot, who has been described as a “worthy county squire and excellent chairman of quarter sessions . . . probably more distressed by the consequences of this gross departmental blundering than Franklin himself”. Sir Eardley arrived at Hobart Town on August 18, 1843, actually two days before Sir John received official notice that he had been superseded or knew the name of the man who was to take over his office. The unseemly haste attending this administrative change was made even more insulting by the fact that no conventional expression of the sovereign’s satisfaction accompanied the message of dismissal. At the end of October, 1843, Franklin left the island to return to England, and in the summer of 1845 set out on his last voyage to the Arctic regions, a voyage from which he never returned.

The arrival of the new Governor brought no immediate change in Woodman’s status as a prisoner, though it was Sir Eardley who eventually signed his pardon. During the later months of the year Woodman’s eyes became so seriously affected that he had to apply to go to Hobart Town for treatment. Before that, however, he had the great joy of receiving a letter from his family, the first to reach him since his arrival on the island. This letter, which has been preserved, was written from London by his elder daughter, Emeline, on February 14, 1843, and came to him on August 24, at a time when he had almost despaired of ever retaining the use of his eyes. So serious was his trouble that he was not able to reply for several months. When he did so, it was on another national American holiday, Washington’s Birthday, 1844, though he does not appear to have noticed the coincidence. The handwriting differs from earlier letters, the script being larger than that of previous correspondence when he may have been trying to save paper and cost of postage. This letter was addressed to his father at North Searsmont, Maine, and was sent home by a whaling ship that was leaving the island for America. In it Woodman tells something of his present condition and that of his fellow-prisoners.

He speaks in this letter of his great joy at hearing from his family:

The dream of escape from the island, always present in the minds of the exiles, is reflected from time to time in Woodman’s letters to his relatives. Discussing it briefly in his letter of February 22, he points out that the chief immediate obstacle to success lies in the fact that no merchant ships are arriving at Hobart Town because of the depressed price of grain, lower than he had ever known it in the United States. There is always the possibility, he adds, that a ship sent from America might be able to remove some of the exiles. He knows of a place to which a ship might be sent and where it might pick up some of them. “I may not be able to receive any benefit from such an occurrence,” he says, “but I leave it to others who are not as well calculated to obtain a passage as I.”

Writing again to his wife a month later, he recurs to the joy he experienced in hearing from his family, who apparently had had no word from him: “You say that two years had elapsed, and you had not heard from me. Something is wrong in the conveyance of my letters for I have made it a point to write often enough so that you would hear from me every three months, or at least every six months.”

Then follows another budget of news about his fellow-prisoners. James Fero and Henry V. Barnum are both in Hobart Town. So, too, are Robert Marsh and James M. Aitchison; the latter sends his respects to all his relatives and friends. Woodman again lists those who died since leaving Canada: Priest, Nottage, Curtis, Williams, Leeper, Owen, and Martin, and again notes that two of the French Canadians landed at Sydney are dead. John Simmonds has consumption and will probably not live. The others are well and twenty of them are in Hobart Town. Five that were sent to the penal settlement at Port Arthur have now received their tickets, but Horace Cooley is still there. Woodman suggests that the Government should be petitioned for his release, as his present condition is worse than that of any other prisoner.

In this letter Woodman describes again the menace of the bushrangers on the island:

In the earlier months of 1844 Woodman was in dire straits. He had been in hospital at Hobart Town for treatment of his eyes, and when released could obtain no work. As a former prisoner he was, like all others, under suspicion. Among his papers there is a copy of a letter that he addressed to John Price, the police magistrate, asking permission to accept an invitation he had received to meet with his Masonic brethren of Tasmanian Operative Lodge No. 345. In this letter Woodman refers to a charge that had apparently been made against him that he had broken regulations by attending a theatre performance. This he vigorously denies and cites the Honourable Mr. Kermode as a witness to his proper conduct.

Two days later he, along with Chauncey Sheldon and Samuel Snow, both Masons in good standing, addressed a joint letter to the master, wardens and brethren of the Hobart Town lodge, asking help in finding employment. They pointed out in this letter that they had served a probation of two years on the roads, after which they were granted tickets of leave confining them to six districts in the interior of the island. They had for the last two years been on the estate of the Honourable Mr. Kermode, and through his assistance and that of others had obtained the indulgence of choosing any district on the island where they could make a living. Accordingly they had made a written agreement with a Mr. James Sloane, of Hobart Town, to work for a term of six months near Peaches Bay. After they had entered into this contract they went to the authorities to secure a pass so that they might go to work, and were denied it. This brought them into a situation where they sought the help of their Masonic brethren:

Later, on May 7, Woodman and Sheldon forwarded an appeal to the Governor himself asking permission to work for Mr. Sloane, “that being the only opportunity which we have of gaining an honest livelihood.” There is no information as to whether this was granted or denied. It may never have reached the Governor’s desk.

Woodman’s next letter to his family, written on April 9, 1844, has again a deeply religious note running through its pages. “God has blessed me with such qualities,” he says, “that I can stand the troubles of this unnatural [existence] with every degree of firmness and fortitude. I have been able through the favour of God to surmount any and all troubles without a murmur and should His providence send me into trouble the world around and chasten me, yet in Him will I trust and have confidence.”

He informs his wife that since his last letter he has received some further indulgence. Henceforth he will have to report only three times a year, on the first Sunday in July, November and March. He also has more to say about the bushrangers, of whom he had written in the previous letter:

Woodman gives a dark picture of the prevailing economic conditions on the island.

He refers once again to his feeling that the people in Canada have been apathetic in regard to the prisoners. While the people of the United States have done all in their power to obtain release for the exiles, Canadians have neglected them.

Joseph Hume and J. A. Roebuck, radical Whigs in the British House of Commons, had been in correspondence with Mackenzie and the Reformers in Upper Canada during the earlier thirties and were the London agents of the Canadian Alliance Association, founded by Mackenzie in 1834. They had also interested themselves in the Canadians exiled after the Rebellion and the troubles of 1838. These English radicals were moved, partly by the general philanthropy of their thought and partly by a desire to use the colonial agitations against the Tory Government of the day.

Of general conditions on the island at this time, Woodman says: “The country is so crowded with prisoners that hundreds are out of employment and robberies are of daily occurrence. The mail was robbed last Friday night of sixteen mail-bags coming from Launceston.”

He once again includes a message from his comrade Sheldon and also asks his wife to write to Mrs. Mary Snow, of Strongsville, Ohio, to inform her that her husband, Samuel Snow, is well. Snow, like Woodman and Sheldon, was a Mason. He reached America in the spring of 1846 and in the same year his narrative, The Exile’s Return, was published in Cleveland. Snow had not heard from his family during his absence of more than seven years, but found them in good health on his return.

In this letter Woodman says that he may send home “some scraps” of his journal and urges that pains be taken for their preservation until his return. Whether these personal records ever reached America is not known. It does appear, however, that he had been keeping some form of diary during his exile.

In all his letters Woodman has a message for his children. Typical is the advice he offers in his letter of July 4, 1843, when addressing them as a family group.

The Pardon Comes

July 23, 1845, was a great day in Woodman’s life, for it brought him his pardon. The certificate of freedom recites that Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, having had certain circumstances represented to her with regard to Woodman’s crime, “feloniously invading the Province of Upper Canada”, for which action he was sentenced to death, has been pleased to grant him a free pardon. The warrant for the pardon was issued at Buckingham Palace on the first day of March, 1845, but had to travel many thousand miles to reach its recipient. The actual certificate of pardon was signed at Hobart Town on July 16 by the governor, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, and by the colonial secretary, J. E. Bicheno.

Woodman was ill when he received the news of his pardon. He was not only ill but destitute. In fragmentary entries from day to day he tells of going for as long as forty-eight hours without food, and of being so ragged that he could not leave his lodgings, his better clothes having been pawned to buy food. He was now but a released slave for whom no one took responsibility.

On July 8 he had made application for aid to his fellow Masons in Hobart Town, but the next day noted that, an objection being raised, he could not expect help from this source. He renewed his petition a few days later, being assisted this time by a Mr. Ridler, a brother Mason, to whom he set forth his difficulties. On July 18 a Mr. John Frost came to see him and gave him two shillings. A few days later he received from a Mr. John Johnston bread, tea, sugar, butter and meal “to the value of eight shillings and nine pence”. He was at this time never sure where the next meal would come from.

This was his state when on July 23 his landlady, a Mrs. Lockwood, came to his room to tell him that he was wanted below. “I went down,” he records, “and Joseph Stewart showed me yesterday’s Gazette with a notice in it that I was apprehended. How this can be when I had no knowledge of it. He then turned over two leaves and there was a free pardon for me, Riley Whitney, Samuel Washburn, Solomon Reynolds and Jas. Pearce. Solomon Reynolds took me to the Controller-General’s office and we got our free pardons and am once more a free man, thanks to the Wise Disposer of events.”

The official description of Woodman, written on the back of the pardon, gives us some idea of the personal appearance of the man in 1845. He was then forty-seven years of age. He is described as a “carpenter and millwright”, born in the State of Maine. He was five feet four and a half inches in height, of dark complexion, with black beard and hair. His head was long and forehead high. His eyes were hazel and were described as weak. Nose and mouth were both small but his chin was broad. His weight is not given. It is probable that at this time he was somewhat emaciated, due to illness and lack of proper food. He may have been already tubercular as a result of hardships.

It was more than six years since Woodman had left London on the first stage of his exile, and he sat down at once to pass on the good news to his wife and family in Canada. “I am once more free,” he wrote, “thanks to the Wise Disposer of events. I am in good health and high spirits excepting my eyes which are still weak.” There is no reference in the letter to his personal difficulties, his lack of food and proper clothing. His thoughts seemed to turn instinctively to the sad state of fellow-prisoners who were still awaiting pardon.

“There are 18 more of our men who are in bondage still, impatiently waiting their free pardon,” he wrote. “Forty of our men received their free pardons November 23, 1844. Twenty-eight of them left here on January 28 aboard the barque Steiglitz by way of the Sandwich Islands.”

The Buffalo Commercial Advertiser of September 1, 1845, contained the names of twenty-six men who were reported to have reached Honolulu aboard this whaling ship: Nelson Griggs, Jerry Griggs, Luther Darby, Daniel Heustis, Orrin Smith, John Thomas, Gideon Goodrich, Nathan Whiting, Bemis Woodbury, John Cronkhite, John G. Sawnberg, Ira Polly, Leonard Delano, Edward Wilson, Elon Fellows, John Gilman, Joseph Thompson, David House, Chauncey Sheldon, Henry Barnum, Samuel Snow, Alvin Sweet, James Fero, Robert Marsh, Elizur Stevens and John Grant. The first eighteen were Prescott prisoners, the next seven Windsor prisoners, while Grant had been captured in the Short Hills affair.^[47]

Four of those who left the island on the Steiglitz had been friends of Woodman, and he mentions them particularly: Chauncey Sheldon, Samuel Snow, Henry V. Barnum, and James Fero. He asked his family to write to the relatives of these men and inform them that they were on their way to America.

Those who left aboard the Steiglitz had been favoured by unusual circumstances. The Steiglitz was a whaling ship from Sag Harbor commanded by Captain Selah Young. The crew had performed their duties badly during the outward voyage from America, and when the ship put in at Hobart Town for repairs most of them were discharged. This provided an opportunity for a considerable number of pardoned prisoners to leave at one time, serving as crew. Three months’ sailing brought the Steiglitz on April 27, 1845, into Honolulu harbour. Here the group of former prisoners broke up, some remaining with Captain Young, some taking service with other whaling ships, and others waiting for a direct passage to America. Chauncey Sheldon obtained a passage on the American sloop-of-war Levant. Robert Marsh, also mentioned in Woodman’s letters, was one of six aboard the Samuel Robertson on the voyage from Honolulu to New Bedford, a journey that took from October 1 of 1845 to March 13, 1846. His narrative, bearing the title Seven Years of My Life, was published at Buffalo in 1847.

In addition to the large group aboard the Steiglitz, Woodman mentions the departure of three aboard the Eliza Ann, of Salem, Massachusetts, but does not give their names or the date of their departure. From other sources, however, we learn that the three were Emmanuel Garrison, Garret Hicks, and Daniel Liscombe, all originally from New York State and captured at the Prescott affair. The date of their sailing was January, 1845. Garrison and Hicks were working their passage to America. This, Woodman says, left “forty bond and free” still on the island, while twelve in all had died since their arrival in 1840.

The remainder of this letter is chiefly devoted to his children. As in all his letters, he is much concerned about their education and their moral training. It was not always easy for him to realize that in 1845 the children were now several years older than when he had last seen them. Sometimes he tried to visualize them, calling them by the little nicknames that they bore. Emeline, his eldest child, born at Buxton, Maine, in 1819, was twenty years of age when he left London; she was now twenty-six. As his first-born, she had been very close to him, and she had continued close to her mother during his exile. Abigail, born at Searsmont, in 1821, was now twenty-four. The other four children had all been quite young when he left—Susan only seven, Henry Clay nine, Edmund Balfour twelve, and Lydia Ann fourteen. Susan, the baby of the family, was the only one of the children of Canadian birth.

Emeline’s letter to her father, written on February 14, 1843, the first to come to him from his immediate family, had contained some interesting news about the second daughter, Abigail, who was soon to be married to a David Summers. He was an Englishman by birth and was described by the older sister as a man “pious, steady, industrious, with some little property”. Of herself and marriage Emeline said: “I think you will find me a faithful girl and unmarried if you come soon. It would be very hard for me to go from here and leave Ma until you come.” Then she adds further news about Abigail:

Woodman appears to have overlooked the two items of news about Abigail in his reply, and the mother later drew his attention to this omission. He replied:

Of Abigail’s departure from Universalism to Methodism he was critical.

Universalism, of American origin and holding the doctrine of the final holiness and happiness of all mankind, had been introduced in Upper Canada from New York State and, as we have seen, a congregation had been set up in London as early as 1831. Methodist clerical reaction to losses of members manifested itself in bitter denunciation of the liberal doctrines. Abigail’s critical remarks were quite in line with the current Methodist thought, but were naturally unpleasant to her father.

From the correspondence between Woodman and his daughter we learn something also of the family’s affairs after the departure of the father. The mother and children soon left the village and rented a small house in Westminster Township, to the south of London. Their landlord was a Mr. William Dyer. It was only a short distance from the village, and the place had the advantage of a good garden where some of the family’s food could be produced. The neighbours were kind, cordwood being brought in such supply that the family was well provided. The younger children went to school while the others found employment, Emeline and Abigail both working with neighbouring families.

One may easily surmise that the lot of the mother and children was not always pleasant after the father had been sent away. There is often a cruelty of children toward other children that can be harsh, and there were probably occasions after 1839 when the younger ones were subjected to taunts. However, the family did not lack friends; indeed there is evidence that the family had several good friends who stood loyally by them and gave all necessary aid in the earlier period of the father’s absence. The saddest aspect of their loneliness was the failure of Woodman’s letters from Van Diemen’s Land to reach the family. There may have been carelessness on the island in forwarding prisoners’ mail, or the letters may have miscarried. At any rate, the family waited more than two years before receiving a letter from the father. He, in turn, had waited a like period before a letter came from his immediate family to cheer his exile.

Always in the mind of mother and children, and constantly recurring in the letters, was the hope that the father would be pardoned and permitted to return to Canada. Time, however, alleviated many difficulties and troubles. The children received sound moral training from their mother and joined with her in holding the home together. London Village, too, was in a constant state of change—new-comers arriving, others moving elsewhere—so that within a short time there were fewer people in the community who knew anything about the Woodman family affairs. The village had both new people and new interests. The Woodmans kept to themselves and held their own counsel with regard to the father.

Once during the long wait for a letter from Van Diemen’s Land there came unexpected news. James Gemmell, one of the Short Hills prisoners who made his escape from the island and boarded a whaler in February, 1841, reached America in July after a five-month passage. He later visited Upper Canada and called at the Woodman home. Whether he gave them any account of the horrors of life on the penal island is not mentioned, but he was at least able to assure the family that the father was alive.

Emeline’s budget of family and London news reported a current belief that the father was at liberty and would be home soon. Mr. Norval, who had a news room in the village, had told the family that he had heard that the exiles from Canada would soon all be back.

There was one interesting message in Emeline’s first letter, evidently intended to be passed on to James Aitchison, Mr. Proudfoot’s nephew. The message was that the former Mary Proudfoot, Aitchison’s cousin, had been married three years, had two fine children and was living in St. Thomas, the wife of James Coyne.

Woodman had known Aitchison in London before the affair at Windsor and in the first letter that he wrote to his family he conveyed a message from Aitchison to his friends in London. One may well believe that this message was meant for “Miss Mary” first of all. When Aitchison was brought to London as a prisoner after the affair at Windsor, the girl visited him once in the jail but refused to come again, despite his entreaties. During his confinement in jail Aitchison wrote passionate love letters to her, and when these were intercepted wrote others in a notebook setting forth his love. He felt that the girl was angry with him but that she must love him. He believed that when he was free she would be waiting for him and they would go far away to live happily. The notebook and letters are preserved, with other records of the trial, in the Public Archives at Ottawa. Each lengthy letter in the notebook is addressed to “Dear Maid”, but the name of the girl appears on the envelope of one of the letters.

Emeline’s letter provided further details of the family group:

The Odell family, mentioned in this letter, migrated from New York State after the Revolution, settling near Montreal at a place which was later called Odelltown. A second generation came to the vicinity of London soon after 1800, locating on farms to the south of the present city.

D. O. Marsh, also mentioned in Emeline’s letter, was one of Woodman’s closest friends in London Village. He, like many others, had left the province in 1839, but later returned and continued to be a friend to the Woodman family.

Finally, the daughter has a word to say about the changed political situation in Canada. “We have an excellent governor now,” she writes, “Sir Charles Bagot. Now we have the right kind of administration and good laws. He is a fine man and much liked by us who know the need of good laws.” The provinces of Upper and Lower Canada had been united by an Act of the British Parliament in 1840. Sir Charles Bagot, an elderly diplomat, became the second Governor of the United Province of Canada, arriving in Canada in January, 1842. He died at Kingston in May, 1843.

There is much evidence in these letters of the fine character, unselfish devotion, and religious faith that marked the girl and were recorded of her in later years. She had profited by such schooling as was to be had in those days. Her handwriting was neat and legible and her spelling was almost faultless. Like her father, she had a deep love for music. Woodman refers to her singing in several of his letters, and in one letter she mentions that she is seeking a tune for some verses which he had quoted in a letter.

Waiting for a Passage Home

Woodman received his pardon on July 23, 1845, but he then had to face one of the most trying periods of his life. Now he waited day after day, week after week, month after month for an opportunity to leave the island and begin the journey that would reunite him with his family. Nearly twenty months elapsed. During that period he spent eight months in hospital at Hobart Town, was treated by various doctors for his eyes and for other distressing conditions, underwent repeated painful operations, and found himself at times with neither lodging, food, nor proper clothing.

His immediate thought on receiving his pardon was to seek a passage at the earliest possible date. Accordingly, on July 30, he wrote to his former employer, Mr. Kermode, asking his influence and assistance in obtaining a passage on the ship Sons of Commerce which was then in harbour. He makes no further reference to this application, or to any answer that he received, and we must conclude that it was fruitless. He then sought the help of Elisha Hathaway, the American consul at Hobart Town, asking his co-operation with Mr. Kermode in negotiating with the captain of the ship for a passage to England. This effort also proved fruitless.

However, Woodman had friends in humbler circles who, while unable to promote his efforts to leave the island, showed him such kindnesses as made these months less dreary. Two such friends were the Wallaces, man and wife, proprietors of the Prince of Wales Inn. There are repeated references to their goodness of heart toward the sick and disheartened man. A few days after he received his pardon Woodman, in company with James Aitchison, called at the inn, and the diary records that “Mrs. Wallace treated me to a fig of tobacco, a pipe and a sheet of writing paper”. The writing paper was used for the letter to the Honourable Mr. Kermode.

By the middle of October Woodman’s eyes were giving him such trouble that Mrs. Wallace paid a doctor to provide treatment. She gave further money for medicine a week later. The diary for that day reads: “For the first time since my troubles, this night I have no covering but the canopy of heaven, but went to the Prince of Wales and they received me with all kindness possible and gave me a bed.”

A few days later Mr. Wallace took Woodman to call on a Mr. Oliver Smith, described as “one of the Calcutta’s prisoners”.^[49] The old gentleman was very feeble but he showed them through his garden and gave them some refreshment. He was more than eighty-four years old. Before parting he gave Woodman “two and sixpence cash” for medicine. In November Woodman moved in with the old man, along with Riley Stewart, Solomon Reynolds, John C. Williams, and Joseph Lefore. Mrs. Wallace provided him, he says, with a bed, two shirts, two pairs of socks, and one pound sterling. She also engaged a doctor and advanced six shillings for board. This doctor, unfortunately, proved unreliable, taking the money to buy liquor and turning up at Woodman’s lodgings in a drunken state, thereafter neglecting him for more than a week.

Regularly the names of Mr. and Mrs. Wallace appear in the fragmentary entries, recording some act of kindness. Now it was a gift of money, sometimes food or tobacco, at other times dinner at the inn. The services of another doctor were secured and from his treatments Woodman’s eyes received some benefit. On New Year’s Day of 1846 he recorded that his eyes were much improved and that there was hope of a cure. He had dinner with the Wallaces on the holiday and spent the day with them. He was with them twice in the following week, on one occasion having a dinner of “brown lake goose” which he remarked was much like the black duck of America.

In January, 1846, Woodman made written application to Consul Hathaway for aid.

Solomon Reynolds, who roomed with him, took the letter to the consul. The reply he received was, “Tell Woodman I cannot do anything for him as I have no money to pay out and were I all the time paying out money for the men here for political offences I should have my hands full.” Then, says the entry, he put his hand in his pocket and gave Reynolds three shillings for his friend. The next day Woodman moved his lodgings to Melville Street, Riley Stewart, Robert Collins and Joseph Lefore going with him. Reynolds on that day engaged to go aboard the barque Harriet as carpenter. A day or so later George Cooley, one of the Short Hills prisoners, tried to escape on the barque Barbary but was caught by the constables before the ship left harbour. He was sentenced to one year hard labour and the loss of his ticket of leave.

The American consul evidently changed his mind about refusing aid to Woodman, for on January 22 he gave him five shillings and said that he would provide the same out of his own pocket weekly until Woodman left the island. Two days later the ship Navigator, from Boston, arrived in port and Woodman sought the aid of Hathaway to secure a passage. The consul said he could do nothing but would be willing to send him to Sydney, New South Wales.

“I told him,” says Woodman, “that it would make my condition worse in place of better, as I would be left there without a friend, poor and penniless. He made answer that beggars must not be choosers and that I need not call on him again. I then turned on my heel and left him for I never merited such conduct from him. My chance of leaving for home looks very dark at present. My eyes are getting better slowly; I am able to be about a little.”

It was extremely disappointing to see others leaving the island and remain behind, unable to secure a passage. On January 30 the Harriet set sail with Solomon Reynolds aboard. But there was another refugee also on this ship. “T. W. was put on board of her and stowed away,” says an entry in Woodman’s papers. “The police searched for him but found him not.” Curiously, Woodman had recorded just a day before the barque sailed: “T. W. gave me twenty shillings.” Was this the man who made his escape?

On February 3, 1846, a name appears in the diary for the first time, though it recurs often in the next six months. Mr. John Shick, a fellow Mason, brought Woodman a variety of clothing as well as bedding, towels and handkerchiefs. Thereafter this man (whose name Woodman sometimes spells Shake) called regularly, bringing a weekly allowance of four shillings from the Masonic lodge, which amount he sometimes supplemented from his own pocket. His death on November 25, 1846, was a sad loss to Woodman. “I am deprived of a near and dear friend at a time when I am destitute,” he wrote. A death certificate gives Shick’s age as forty-six and his occupation “gentleman”.

There are frequent references in Woodman’s diary to the ships constantly arriving at Hobart Town, commercial and whaling vessels and also the grim prison ships with their cargoes of criminal scum, gathered from the society of the old land. Woodman notes the arrival of a female prison ship on November 7, 1845, and three days later a male prison ship with 240 aboard. He records further shiploads of male prisoners arriving on December 29, 1845, on May 20 and June 10, 1846, and a shipment of female prisoners on June 5, 1846. On July 23, 1846, three ships bearing prisoners arrived in one day. Whether they brought male or female offenders is not mentioned. Public executions of condemned prisoners are recorded as taking place on December 31, 1845 and on February 20 and March 24, 1846.

There are occasional references to the whaling ships that from time to time entered the harbour for supplies. Whaling as an American industry reached its highest point in 1846, when there were over seven hundred whalers plying from American ports, most of them operating in Japanese, New Zealand and South Sea waters. Woodman mentions the presence of three whalers in port together on March 5, 1846, and on April 3 notes that the London Packet came in with fifteen hundred barrels of sperm oil and two hundred of black oil. She sailed for England three weeks later. Woodman pinned his chief hopes of returning to Canada on securing a passage aboard an American ship, which might make a New England port in a little more than three months. A passage to England would mean further delay at some English port while negotiating the second stage of the journey home.

That ship-masters were not always averse to aiding in the escape of prisoners was shown by an episode that Woodman records. The barque Stonington had lost an anchor at Brown’s River and sent out a boat to look for it. The boat brought aboard three persons seeking a passage, one of them a woman dressed in man’s attire. There were constables placed on the Stonington to watch for such attempts to escape, and they promptly seized the three and took them ashore. Two of the police were left on board. “They were rushed and put below,” Woodman tells, “and the captain slipped his cables and put to sea, but having met a vessel bound for Hobart Town sent the constables back in her.”

On March 15, 1846, Woodman had dinner aboard the ship Navigator, which had been in port since January. He had sought help from the consul at an earlier date, hoping to secure a passage on this vessel, but without success. He renewed his plea to the master. Captain Silver, but could obtain no promise of help. He made a like application to Captain Harris of the ship Phoebe, also without success. The Phoebe set sail on April 16. “Captain Harris was not generous enough to take me or answer my letter,” Woodman wrote on the sailing day. “Winter has set in and it is quite cold. Snow has fallen on Mount Wellington. This is the longest interval between prison ships since I came to the colony. My left eye is much better. I can powder it but my right is still closed in. Aitchison gave me one and sixpence and I bought two pairs of socks. John G. Morrison and Peter Russel gave woolen shirts to the value of four dollars which made me happy.”

The Navigator (Captain Silver) remained in port until May 15 and Aitchison made a further effort to secure a passage for Woodman to Manila, to which port the vessel was bound. The request was refused. Captain Silver telling Aitchison that Woodman had consumption. “I have got it as much as he has,” was the comment in the diary. However, he was able to send a letter to his parents by the Navigator. He notes that no vessel has arrived from England for six months, a situation he can not explain, as five were reported to have sailed in December.

An American ship, the Sarah Scott, came in on May 27, 1846, bringing word that relations between Great Britain and the United States had become greatly strained over the Oregon boundary question and that neither side appeared willing to yield. A British ship, the Rajah, anchored at Hobart Town on June 10, on the same day that saw a prison ship arrive.

Woodman records the freeing of three Canadian prisoners during these months spent in Hobart Town. Norman Mallory, pardoned in November, 1845, and John Vernon, in February, 1846, had been taken up during the Short Hills affair. Orlin Blodget, released in October, had been taken prisoner in the Prescott raid. The death of John Sprague, a Windsor prisoner, was noted on October 20, 1845.

Mention is also made of the departure from the island of several Canadian prisoners. Solomon Reynolds, who left as carpenter on the Harriet, has already been noted. A somewhat obscure entry on October 24, 1845, seems to indicate that Thomas Baker, another Prescott prisoner, had sailed on the whaler Herald. Norman Mallory and John Vernon, recently pardoned, left Hobart Town on March 9, 1846. This, says Woodman, left “fourteen free and fourteen bond” still on the island. In July, 1845, Woodman had noted that there were eighteen still awaiting pardon. The freeing of Mallory, Vernon and Blodget and the death of Sprague would bring the number still in bondage down to fourteen. On March 17, 1846, Hiram Loop, a Prescott prisoner, went to Sydney on the ship Longer, hoping to secure a passage from there to America. On April 23 of the same year, Joseph Lefore and another man, “Rob Parris, New York”, left on the whaler London Packet (Captain Rowland) for New London, Connecticut.

The departure of the Navigator on May 15 was a blow to Woodman’s hopes. “I am quite unwell today,” he wrote, “and what will be the result of my sickness I do not know but am quite down in spirits.” Two weeks later Aitchison called in the doctor, who performed a slight operation and bled the patient freely. Mr. John Shick was a regular visitor, bringing the weekly allowance from the Masonic lodge. On one occasion several brethren of the lodge called and asked to be shown Woodman’s certificate of freedom. “They also examined me,” he says, “to prove that I was a master mason which I did to their satisfaction.” They advised a further application for assistance and a few days later Mr. Shick brought word that the lodge had placed five pounds in his hands to be paid out in weekly doles for Woodman’s support. During the first week of July he was again sick and entered the Colonial Hospital where, in the next five months, he underwent successive operations. It was during this period in hospital that Woodman lost his good friend, Mr. Shick, but fortunately there were the Wallaces and others who were ever faithful in their services to him.

Woodman’s experiences in the Colonial Hospital at Hobart Town must have been particularly trying at a time when he was hoping to secure an early passage from the colony. There are contemporary accounts of this hospital which indicate that the treatment given was crude, even for those times. The building was of a somewhat rambling character, originally built in the twenties to look after one hundred patients; but by 1840 its capacity was over three hundred.

The hospital was under the supervision of the Colonial Assistant Surgeon, who came twice a day and made his rounds of inspection, which were usually of a rather perfunctory character. The attendants were largely convicts, men who held a pass or a ticket of leave. They received their meals and were paid sixpence a day in wages. In addition there were what were known as wardsmen, ailing convicts from the prisoners’ barracks, men too weak to be placed in the manual-labour gangs. These were marched from the barracks to the hospital each morning, and at night marched back to be locked up for the night. With such types of bedside attendants, it may easily be imagined what kind of service would be given. Of the Assistant Surgeon it was said: “The knife and the saw were his principal stock in trade and blood ran freely when he went to work.” Woodman could doubtless testify to this after the repeated surgical operations to which he was subjected in the periods that he was under treatment.

There was an important change in the government of the island colony during Woodman’s later days in Hobart Town. Sir Eardley Wilmot, Lieutenant-Governor since 1844, died on February 3, 1847, and was buried with full military honours a few days later. His administration had not satisfied either the colonists or the home Government and he had been superseded in October, 1846, on the grounds that he was indifferent to the morals of the convicts under his charge.

His successor was Sir William Thomas Denison (1804-71). Denison, an able engineer, had been employed between 1827-31 in the construction of the Rideau Canal in Upper Canada, and had held other posts before his appointment in June, 1846, to the Van Diemen’s Land office. He had very positive ideas with regard to the convict system and was entirely opposed to tickets of leave. He found the island’s finances in bad condition on his arrival at Hobart Town, and like his predecessors had trouble with his Council. In 1854 he was appointed governor of New South Wales, with the title of Governor General of Australia. Woodman apparently saw nothing of him and makes no mention of him at any time. Administrative changes had for him no further interest.

Death in the South Pacific

Confined as he was to hospital during the later months of 1846 and the early months of 1847, Woodman must often have despaired of ever being able to leave the penal colony. In his broken condition of health no shipmaster would engage him as a member of a crew, a bit of good fortune that had fallen to Solomon Reynolds and to others. It would soon be seven years since that February day of 1840 when he had landed from the Buffalo and had entered this British penal colony. There could hardly be other than bitterness in his soul as he lay on his pallet or moved about the corridors of the Colonial Hospital. “I am mending quite fast but my stomach is much out of order,” he wrote on New Year’s Day of 1847, and not until the last day of February was he able to leave hospital and take up temporary lodgings at the Black Swan Inn.

His friends in Hobart Town must have been active on his behalf, however, for suddenly, on February 8, there appears this entry in his diary: “Captain Lathrop of the whaler Young Eagle has agreed to take me with him to America.” There is no earlier mention of the arrival in port of this vessel, no mention of any negotiations with the master or of hopes expressed by friends that their help might bring this greatly desired boon. We may surmise that Mr. Hathaway, the American consul, had, perhaps, moved on behalf on his unfortunate countryman and that the brothers of the Masonic lodge would be ready to aid their stricken friend; but his benefactors in these last days are for the most part unrecorded.

The ship on which he was to sail, the Young Eagle, was not yet ready to leave port, so there was ample time to make the necessary arrangements for what would be a long sea voyage. One of Woodman’s first acts on leaving hospital was to call on his good friends, the Wallaces, at the Prince of Wales Inn where, he says, “they treat me with the same degree of Humanity as ever”. He found also that his Masonic brethren were actively gathering the warm clothes, medicines and comforts that he would need while at sea.

Woodman immediately wrote a letter to Captain Lathrop of the Young Eagle on behalf of Henry Shew, one of the Prescott prisoners, who was also seeking passage. Shew took the letter to the captain’s lodgings but failed to find him. Later in the day, however, he met the captain at the consul’s office and was given assurance that he too would be granted a passage to America. It was scarcely necessary for Woodman to record that this “brightened up Shew’s feelings and made him satisfied”. Henry Shew, hailing from New York State, was twenty-eight when he was transported. It has been stated that when he arrived at his home he found that his wife had remarried, having given him up as probably dead—a real Enoch Arden incident.

There were letters of thanks to be written before leaving Hobart Town. One was to his Masonic brethren. It was brief but heartfelt: “I return you my sincere thanks for your charitable kindness toward me in making me comfortable on my passage home. I do not know how to express myself in terms suitable for the occasion. My feeble pen fails and my feelings are better felt than described. . . . I now leave you praying God to protect our Institution and to overshadow the brethren with his tender care and protection.”

A second letter, addressed to his “affectionate friends in Hobart Town”, was probably pinned up in the post office. It conveyed sentiments similar to those directed to the Masonic brethren and then proceeded to deal at some length with the Canadian situation that brought him to Van Diemen’s Land as a prisoner. “On leaving here,” he wrote, “I have the consolation of having done my duty to my oppressed country and countrymen which through the exertions of my fellow patriots has brought to our shores peace, prosperity, happiness and a responsible government, the only one existing under the Crown of Great Britain. You will now see that it will flourish beyond any other British colony.”

It was a Sunday when he penned these letters in the parlour of his friends the Wallaces, with whom he had had dinner: “I parted with them in tears as I could not express my feelings in words. Brother Wallace has given me three new shirts and two pairs of woolen drawers. Mr. Oliver Smith [the Calcutta veteran] has given me a good vest and a pair of stockings. I am very grateful to them both.”

The next day, the last to be spent on the island, was chiefly occupied in calling on friends and saying farewell. Among these friends were Mr. and Mrs. Beach. The lady was sick and he could not see her, but Mr. Beach offered to collect and take his baggage aboard ship. A call was made at the office of Mr. Hathaway, the consul. He had a hard-weather coat for Woodman. A visit was made to the Macquarie House, where Mr. and Mrs. Hill, the proprietors, each gave him a shilling. Joseph Stewart, with whom he had lodged for a time in Hobart Town, was one of the last to whom he said good-bye. Stewart had attempted, with Linus W. Miller, to escape when at the Sandy Bay Station in the summer of 1840. They had been caught, lodged in jail, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour at Port Arthur, the place of severest punishment. Miller states that at the expiration of one year Stewart obtained a comfortable situation in the home of an officer, and soon after a post as a signal man, which gave him sufficient pay to live comfortably. When Sir John Franklin was recalled, Miller and Stewart each received a ticket of leave from his successor—“so that,” says Miller, “we lost but little through our attempt to escape.”

Woodman’s last letter to his family, written while preparing to go aboard the ship, was placed in the post office as he went to the harbour.

He concluded his letter with a reference to the prisoners from Canada still in bondage on the island:

This list, though probably incomplete, was the last to be compiled by a prisoner from Canada. The authors of the various exile narratives published in the United States in the forties had all left Van Diemen’s Land at an earlier date.

Woodman went aboard the Young Eagle on the first day of March, 1847, exactly two years to the day since the warrant for his pardon had been issued at Buckingham Palace. This ship of 377 tons, built at Rochester, Massachusetts, in 1832, had made three previous voyages from Nantucket to the Pacific—1832-35, 1836-40, and 1840-43. On this fourth voyage she was commanded by Benjamin Lathrop, with Thomas Burditt as first officer and Benjamin D. Chase as second officer.

These three men showed marked sympathy towards the sick and weakened Canadian, and by little attentions and courtesies made his days at sea bearable. When he came aboard ship, Woodman found that a little cabin had been made ready for him between decks. “I am very comfortable and in high spirits,” he wrote, “although I am weak and feeble. I went to bed at eight o’clock and slept like a log till morning which is something I have not done for eight months, while in the hospital. I feel quite refreshed.”

The captain and pilot came aboard the next morning and sounds soon indicated that the ship was about to set sail. At seven o’clock she was under way and with a favouring wind sailed down to Brown’s River, where anchor was cast for the night as the wind was changing. It was unfavourable all the next day, a head wind that delayed getting to sea. But on March 4, 1847, Woodman could record with great satisfaction: “Got clear out of that cursed land of Van Diemen.”

It was nearly eight years since as a chained prisoner he had waved good-bye to his wife and children as a procession of wagons bore him and his fellow-prisoners out of the village of London. It was more than seven years since he had landed on the shores of Van Diemen’s Land, where he had been subjected to inhuman conditions both of labour and of living. Though he was at last a free man and looking forward to reunion with his family, he must face a journey half-way around the world and through some of its stormiest waters. Moreover, his health had been badly affected by the labours he had undergone and the conditions under which he had lived. He was tubercular, his eyes were still giving trouble, and he still suffered from the surgical operations endured while in hospital. Perhaps Captain Lathrop and his officers realized that their passenger might not survive the passage to America, and for that reason were offering him such kindness as lay within their power. Only his gratitude and the gratitude that his family in Canada would feel could be their recompense.

Woodman’s diary entries give us only a partial record of the days that followed. There came a time when he was so weak that he could no longer set down even brief references to the weather and the day’s happenings. Then the second mate took over, and it is his pen that tells us of the end. Woodman was never to see Canada and the loved ones who were awaiting his return.

There were days when with fair weather he could spend much of the day on deck. There the captain had a chair rigged up for him and another chair was built in his cabin so that he might be comfortable when the weather was too rough to go on deck. He tells us also that the mate placed a bed curtain about his berth. “I am better treated here than in the hospital,” he says. “If there is anything aboard ship that I want the Captain says I shall have it. This kindness and attention gives me courage.” He makes frequent references to the officers’ visiting him in his cabin, to the cook’s providing him with some little delicacy, and to the attention given him by the Captain. “Captain gave me a glass of wine,” he writes on March 20. “I am indeed lucky in falling into the hands of this ship’s company. They do everything possible to make me comfortable. If he gets me home safe it will a feather in his cap.”

There was excitement on deck at times when a whale was sighted, when boats were lowered and the sailors set out in pursuit. But there is no mention of a whale being taken. In one such pursuit heavy weather settled down so suddenly that the crew had to hasten back to their vessel. Woodman’s notes indicate that weather conditions were extremely variable, a rough day being sometimes followed immediately by fair weather. But he was a landsman and perhaps but a poor judge of the elements about him. On May 24 a squall struck the Young Eagle and carried away some of the sails. There was some slight compensation in the fact that “the Lord sent a flying fish aboard which tasted very nice”. Next day the crew were busily employed repairing the damaged gear. Captain Lathrop was making every effort to hasten the passage to America; one reason, so Woodman tells us, was that he wished to see the son and heir born since he had left America on this voyage.

On April 6 the ship neared Sunday Island and on the following day a boat went ashore for potatoes. The officer in charge found two families residing on the island and on his way back caught two fish, a welcome change from the regular diet. One evening they spoke a ship but could not learn her name. This was the only vessel encountered on the vast waste of waters of the south Pacific with the exception of a barque spoken off the coast of New Zealand. Her name also was not learned.

On several occasions Woodman set down reflections on the fate that had overtaken him. He may have hoped that his diary would come to his loved ones in Canada and in Maine, even though he himself did not survive the long voyage. Thus on April 8, he writes:

On April 13, a day of fine weather and light breeze, he writes: “I am so afflicted that I have got Mr. Chase to write my journal and am dependent on others for everything: having to be waited upon like a child. What will be the final result is with my Creator. I am very low and weak at times and think it is almost impossible for me to recover.” There were other days later when he was still able to go on deck, though as the ship proceeded farther south gales and rough weather became more frequent and violent. During such weather he must remain below.

On April 22 Woodman dictated to Mr. Chase his will, a copy of which is with his papers. It reads:

On May 18 there comes an entry dictated to Mr. Chase: “I am feeling very low”; and two days later: “I feel myself failing very fast so that I think I shall not get to the coast.” Then on June 6 the mate wrote: “Mr. Woodman has ceased to dictate his diary. He is failing very fast so much so that he has nearly lost the power of speech.” From day to day the mate records the dying man’s condition:

Events that came after the death of Elijah Woodman are best told in the letter dated January 5, 1848, which Mr. Chase, the second mate, sent to Mrs. Woodman when eventually he reached America and the port of Nantucket:

With this letter from Mr. Chase came Woodman’s last letter, dictated to the officer less than a week before his death. Addressed to his parents, his wife and children, relatives and friends, it read:

At the foot of the letter the officer added these words: “By this time he had not strength to say more.” He then recorded the position of the ship when the letter was written. It was Latitude 31° 05′ South, Longitude 97° 10′ West. The date was June 6, 1847.

On that June afternoon of 1847, while the burial rites for Elijah Woodman were proceeding on the deck of the Young Eagle—just such rites as he had himself witnessed while aboard the transport Buffalo—a religious ceremony of quite another character was taking place in the village of London. Emeline, Woodman’s eldest daughter, she who had been so dear to the exiled man, was being married to Elijah Leonard, whose family name has already appeared in this narrative. The ceremony was being solemnized by Rev. William Proudfoot, whose name has also appeared frequently.

We have no record of the attachment between these two young people which finally brought about their marriage. It will be remembered that Emeline had told her father in one of her letters that if he returned to Canada he would find her with her mother. But by June of 1847 she was nearing her 28th birthday and two of her sisters were already married, Abigail in 1842 and Lydia in 1845. Elijah Leonard, then thirty-three years of age, was well established in business and it may well have seemed to the daughter that the father would fully approve the match.

Elijah Leonard had come to London from St. Thomas in 1838 and was probably in the village when Emeline’s father was brought to London for trial in the first week of 1839. He was certainly there when the father was taken away in April and may indeed have seen the waggons bearing those condemned to transportation. At that time his foundry and machine shop was in operation in the village. Whether he had ever met Woodman is not known.

The young couple set up housekeeping near the shops and, for a time, in accordance with the custom of the day, boarded the apprentices employed in the plant. Six years later, having prospered, Mr. Leonard built a pleasant home on the banks of the Thames River, giving it the name “Locust Mount” from a fine row of matured locust trees that graced its front. There three daughters were born; two sons had been born while the family lived adjacent to the business establishment. In “Locust Mount” Emeline resided until her death on August 2, 1895, in her seventy-sixth year. For some years before her death she had been in failing health.

How often, during the more than forty years that she spent at “Locust Mount”, must her mind have travelled back to those sad old days when, with her mother and her younger brothers and sisters, she had thought of the father far away in exile, doomed (though she knew it not) never to return. She could think of the day when she had visited him in London jail with a sentence of death hanging over him. She could recall that April morning in 1839 when for the last time she saw him and said her farewell, and then of the long wait for word of what was happening to him.

Memories would come to her of the weeks and months when the mother and children held together in the humble home just outside the village, and she would recall with gratitude good friends like Mr. Marsh who had stood by them in their adversity. Her mother, that staunch soul, so loyal and so practical in all that related to the family, had lived until May 31, 1871. Her three brothers, Francis, Edmund Balfour and Henry Clay, had all gone west to Wisconsin, a state to which the father had once thought of going, and were well settled there. Susan Elden, the baby of the family, born in Canada, had died July 9, 1851, the only unmarried one of the family.

There were many sorrows in the past that would inevitably come to mind, but what pride and satisfaction she must have had in the achievements of her husband! Coming to Canada with his father in 1829, he had first been connected with the Normandale iron furnaces, then in 1834 had gone on to St. Thomas and in 1838 to London. Here he prospered and was soon prominent in the life of the community. On January 2, 1850, he became a British subject, taking the oath of allegiance on that day along with several other Americans who were in business in London. In 1854 he was elected to the Town Council and a year later, when London was incorporated as a city, he was elected an alderman. In 1857 he was the unanimous choice of the city council for the office of mayor of the city. Earlier, in 1854, he had been an unsuccessful candidate on the Reform ticket as representative of London in the Assembly of the province, but in 1862 he was elected from the Malahide division to the Legislative Council of Canada, the upper House of that period. This seat he held until the union of the British North American provinces in 1867, when he was called by Royal Proclamation to the Senate of Canada. There he continued until his death on May 14, 1891, in his seventy-sixth year.

Descendants who remember the grandmother still speak the name Emeline with reverence and affection. Enough has appeared in this narrative to indicate the qualities that she possessed and that her father so often recognized. Life had brought harsh days in her youth when her father was taken away and she had to be the chief support of her mother; but life brought its recompense in later years when she was herself a wife and a mother. One of her sons later wrote of his father: “His was a life full of usefulness, full of example and full of fatherly care such as may well be copied.”

Epilogue

This is the story of Elijah Woodman, set down, it is hoped, with fairness toward the man and toward the powers that inflicted punishment upon him. The conditions and events in Upper Canada which in 1837 led to an armed uprising within the province and, later, to armed aggression from without, may seem of but minor importance to a generation that has lived through two world wars and constantly fears the coming of a third. Yet, even today, the more remote period may not be without its lessons. This generation enjoys a liberty for which men in Canada struggled, suffered and even died little more than a century ago. It should not, therefore, be too nice in its judgments upon those within the country whose endeavours to achieve that liberty went beyond approved bounds of political procedure.

For those who participated in the aggressive movements along the border after 1837 and disturbed the relations of the two countries there was harsh condemnation. Extreme punishment was inflicted upon those who were captured. “Brigands” and “pirates” were the terms used by Sir George Arthur in describing the men who invaded Upper Canada at Prescott and Windsor. Though there were undoubtedly many sympathizers with the Patriot movement in Canada, the leaders of the movement were quite mistaken in their idea that the British provinces were ripe for revolt and would join an invading force from the United States. On the contrary, the Canadian militia and British regulars defeated each attack and demonstrated, as they had done a quarter century earlier, their ability to keep invaders off Canadian soil.

We know much more today than did they of the past about the conditions, social, religious and political, that combined to bring about the uprisings in the two Canadian provinces in 1837. The uprising in Upper Canada was not a revolt against England—the interpretation that it received so widely in the United States. It was a protest against a form of government sadly outdated and stubbornly defended by people who profited by its continuance.

It was an unfortunate circumstance that the United States in this same period was passing through a great economic and political change that produced wide unemployment and social disturbance. Men out of work were easily enticed by unscrupulous leaders into an adventure against Canada that offered rich booty. Some Canadians also, resenting the injustice of political conditions, were likewise lured into the so-called Patriot movement. Elijah Woodman was one of these. He was an American immigrant from the State of Maine who had come to Upper Canada seeking to better his condition. He had settled in an area where dissatisfaction with the government of the day was wide-spread, and he doubtless shared the feelings of his Canadian neighbours.

In the mid-thirties Upper Canada’s earlier prosperity began to fade. Woodman lost his holdings and removed to the village of London, a Tory centre with its own little Family Compact of local officials. He was there during the election of 1836 and saw the indignities to which Reformers were subjected during that contest. He had already seen something of the more general abuses of which Reformers complained, particularly the wide-spread complaints over the system of land grants, so generous to friends of the administration, so niggardly and difficult for humble folk.

Woodman took no part in the rebellion of 1837, but when word reached London of the events at Toronto he saw the court-house cells quickly filled to overflowing with arrested Reformers. Soon he himself was taken up on a charge that he had been aiding prisoners in attempts to escape. His mind rebelling at what he regarded as sheer injustice, he determined to leave the province and go to the American West. In Detroit he found other Canadians like himself who had been subject to indignities. Like them, he was drawn into the Patriot movement and was with the party that invaded Windsor on December 4, 1838. He was in no mood to compromise with circumstances when he left London Village, and it was in that temper of mind that he made the unfortunate step that deprived him of his freedom and seriously affected the future of his family.

It is a different man that we see in the later years. His fate was not unlike that of more than a hundred others, sent like him from Canada to Van Diemen’s Land. Some of them died in penal captivity, worn out by excessive labour and the harsh regulations governing prison life. They were buried in prison graves and were quickly forgotten. Somehow, Elijah Woodman’s later years seem worth remembrance.

There are characteristics of the man that stand out so conspicuously they cannot be ignored. One such was his concern for those whom he had been forced to leave behind and whose welfare seemed never out of his mind. He had fellow-prisoners who in one way or other came back to America and there told grim stories of the horrors of convict life. Making full allowance for their desire to tell a good story to expectant listeners or readers, we know full well, even from the contents of dull government documents, how wretched was the life of those sent into penal servitude.

But little of this is to be found in the letters that came to Woodman’s wife and children back in Canada. The man had evidently determined that he would add nothing more to the worry and distress he had already occasioned. So he bore his burden alone and said little about it. Not until after his death did his family learn what his life had been. Through all his letters runs his one concern. To his wife he writes of the maintenance of the home and the bringing up of the children. Upon them he impresses their duties to their mother. His love for his family was equalled only by their love for him.

Among his fellow-prisoners he inspired courage. As the waggons bore those destined to transportation away from the village of London on that April morning of 1839, he roused their drooping spirits by bursting into a lively song. We have record of an occasion when, in a cold night shelter in Van Diemen’s Land, he aroused men who sat about in wet clothes and worn out by heavy labours as he sang verses of “The Hunters of Kentucky”.

He had qualities that brought him friends and held them. His employer when he was a ticket-of-leave man spoke well of him; and when he was sick and in the hospital in Hobart Town, friend after friend extended little kindnesses to him. In a community that had such close acquaintance with the transportation system and its victims, this was rather remarkable. When the time came for him to board the Young Eagle to seek return to America, friends brought him gifts that would serve him on the passage. The officers of the ship showed him every attention as with failing health his days began to be numbered. Later, they wrote to his relatives expressing their esteem for the man and telling of the reverent burial that he had received when death finally came.

Clearly both men and women who knew him, even in a merely casual way, were attracted to him and were ever ready to help him. Of those nearest to him, enough has been said to measure their love. Through later years his memory has been cherished by his descendants. It was a grandson in London who first assembled the letters and papers that have been the basic material of this book, and it was a great-grandson who later encouraged its writing. To the memory of another great-grandson, who gave his life in defence of Canada and of freedom and liberty for all men, the book has been dedicated.

We can see a spiritual development that came to this man amid his sufferings. When he was lying in jail in London, under sentence of death and expecting that at any moment he might be called to go to the gallows, his mind went back to the old Universalist meeting-house in Maine where earliest religious impressions had been received. From that time it seemed that he found consolation in whatever sufferings had to be endured, and to the last he clung to the Universalist faith. And he found more than consolation, he found resolution to endure all things and endure them bravely. He came to know the divine being—to know him as his director and protector.

If Woodman Had Returned

The old English two-letter word “if” has through all history influenced the destiny both of nations and of individuals. Men still speculate on what would have resulted if Nelson had failed at Trafalgar or if Lee had won the battle of Gettysburg or if Hitler had succeeded in invading England during World War II. These were great national “ifs”; but in the lives of all men, great or small, there are occasions when the whole of the future could be changed if some condition were fulfilled or not fulfilled. It may be of some little interest, then, to speculate on the possibility of Elijah Woodman having survived the voyage to America and having been reunited with his family after an absence of nine years.

That there was some chance of his safe return to America was in his own mind when he went aboard the Young Eagle on the first day of March, 1847. “I am very comfortable and in high spirits,” he wrote when he found the preparations that had been made for his passage by the officers of the ship. On April 8 he could still write, “I have a strong hope that I may yet survive through the merciful kindness of our Lord.” But less than a week later his condition had so deteriorated that in his own words he was “dependent on others for everything; having to be waited upon like a child”. To this he added, “I am very low and weak at times and think it almost impossible for me to recover.” On April 22 he made his will. It contains the ominous phrase “In case I should not recover”. On May 20 the mate wrote for him in his diary: “I feel myself failing very fast so that I shall not get to the coast”; and in the next three weeks his strength ebbed until death came on June 13. A week earlier, in his last letter to his family, which he dictated, was the admission, “I do not expect to live but a very few days at the longest.”

Had he lived a few days longer he would have undergone the further risk of death that came when the Young Eagle was lost at sea. Officers and crew survived and were picked up by some other vessel, eventually reaching America early in 1848. We may be sure that every effort would have been made to ensure the safety of the sick man and he might possibly have survived even this terrifying experience.

If Woodman had at last reached America we may feel sure that he would have lost no time in journeying to old Upper Canada to be reunited with his family. They would probably have already learned from relatives in New England of his safe arrival. What would he have found when he reached London?

First of all, there would be the changes that nine years had brought in the family itself. Apphia, his wife, who was twenty-one in 1819, when they were married, was now fifty years of age. The last ten years had been a harrowing experience and had taken their toll. The three older daughters, Emeline, Abigail and Lydia, were all married, as was also the older son, Francis. At home with the mother were Susan, born in Canada and now sixteen years of age, and the two younger boys, Edmund Balfour, aged twenty-one, and Henry Clay, now eighteen. Emeline, now Mrs. Elijah Leonard, lived in the town, while the other married daughters lived in Westminster Township to the south. The two younger boys might soon be leaving the family circle.

Woodman would be surprised at the changes that had come to London. When he was taken away in 1839 it was an uncouth village, with a frontier look and a population only slightly exceeding one thousand. Now it had five thousand people and had become a town, the most populous and fastest-growing community in the western counties. The most striking change was in the physical appearance of the place. Woodman would remember the huddle of log and frame buildings that made up the heart of the village in 1839. By 1848 all this had disappeared, and in its place were numerous substantial brick structures—lacking any architectural beauty, it is true, but having an air of permanence.

This change had come about as the result of a great fire on the afternoon of Sunday, April 11, 1845, when three hundred homes, stores, churches and hotels had disappeared in a few hours. It was one of the most disastrous fires recorded in early Western Ontario history, but the community rose phoenix-like from its ashes. The local authorities promptly decreed that henceforth no frame structures might be erected in the downtown area. This led to the erection of a whole new business section of solid brick buildings, some of which still stand. The court-house was not damaged, nor did the fire touch the section just to the north of the court-house where John Harris, the district treasurer, had built his pleasant home in 1834, and where a large brick block belonging to Dennis O’Brien, the pioneer merchant, had served in 1839 as quarters for the 32nd Regiment.

The 32nd had first come to London after the Rebellion of 1837, when the border was threatened by the Hunters’ Lodges. It saw service along the Detroit River frontier in 1838 and was then recalled to London, where it remained until 1841. London then continued to be a garrison town, and while Woodman was absent regiment or regiments stationed at London would change about every second year. Thus when the 32nd left in 1841, their place was taken by the 1st Royals and the 14th. Next came the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1843, followed by the 82nd in 1845, by the 81st in 1846, and by the 20th in 1847. This, then, would be the regiment in London if he had arrived home in 1848. Its commander was Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Horn.

The presence of crack British regiments since 1838 had greatly influenced the social and business life of the community and had changed the earlier frontier atmosphere into one of a more British character. Sports were now sponsored by the military, the officers formed part of the society of the place, and the public expenditures for the maintenance of the troops steadily increased the trade and general prosperity. By 1848 extensive barracks had been erected in the northern section of the town and the redcoats formed a definite part of the community, as they were to continue to do until the outbreak of the Crimean War led to their recall from Canada for service elsewhere. The better London homes, such as that of John Harris, were open to the young officers, some of them scions of upper-class English families; and from Eldon House, the Harris home, two daughters went forth as brides of officers of the 20th Regiment.

A jingling verse, said to have been written by an officer serving in London during the forties, sets forth the joys of London society of the time as viewed by one of the belles. One verse may suffice:

London had two well-remembered churches when Woodman went away in April, 1839—St. Paul’s Anglican, with Rev. Benjamin Cronyn as rector, and the “Scotch” Presbyterian Church, of which Rev. Mr. Proudfoot was the minister. St. Paul’s Church, opened in 1834, was a frame structure with a somewhat disproportioned square tower, not unlike other early Anglican churches in Western Ontario that were erected at about the same time. The tower contained a bell brought by Mr. Cronyn from Ireland. This church burned down on Ash Wednesday, February 21, 1844, while Woodman was in Van Diemen’s Land. It faced south and stands out quite clearly in an early drawing of the village. About it was a churchyard where many early residents had been buried. Here was the grave of Colonel Maitland of the 32nd Regiment, who died on January 18, 1839, and was buried with full military honours on the 28th. Unfortunately, when the church was burned the graves about were disturbed and the exact location of the Maitland grave was lost. Long years after, during some excavations, the gravestone was recovered, as was also the metal plate from the coffin. This gave his age as fifty years.

When the first church burned, steps were promptly taken for the building of a new edifice on the same site but facing west. The corner-stone of the second church, which still stands, was laid with Masonic and military honours on Saturday, June 24, 1844, four months after the loss of the earlier structure. Bishop Strachan, who officiated at the laying of the corner-stone, reported to ecclesiastical supporters in England when writing to them a few days later: “It was quite a holy day in the town.”

Mr. Proudfoot’s little church, the planned rendezvous of London Reformers in 1837 if they were attacked by the Orangemen, would still be found in use had Woodman returned in 1848, though another Presbyterian church had been erected in 1843 in another part of the town. Methodists had built their third church in London as membership increased, and in 1848 had an edifice in the very heart of the town. Roman Catholics were still using the rude log church, erected in 1834, that would burn down in 1851. Baptists in London had not yet built a church, and Universalists, the sect to which Woodman and his family adhered, had not provided themselves with a place of meeting.

One may surmise that Woodman, had he returned, would be anxious to learn about those he had known ten years earlier. Where were the Talbot brothers, for example, the sons of Richard Talbot of London Township? He would remember that John Talbot had fled to the United States in December, 1837, barely escaping Colonel Askin and other London Tories who sought to arrest him. Talbot went first to Detroit and soon after to Missouri. He was for some time in business in Ohio, and in 1862, during the Civil War, bought the equipment of the Bulletin, a Democratic newspaper at Robinson, Illinois, which he edited until 1872. He died in Illinois in 1874.

More pathetic was the death during Woodman’s absence of Edward Allen Talbot, one of the intellectuals among the London Reformers of 1837. He had founded the Sun, London’s first newspaper, in 1830, had later published his book on Canada, and in the middle thirties had established another newspaper, The Freeman’s Journal. He appears to have gone to the United States in 1838 and to have been associated for a time with the editorship of the Lewiston Telegraph. He died in February, 1839, and a notice that appeared in the Quebec Gazette on February 18 read as follows:

The tone of this notice is so plainly venomous that it must have been inserted by an enemy. But it is also confusing, inasmuch as Edward Allen Talbot almost certainly had no part in the rebellion. In the very year after the outbreak, while feelings were high and merest suspicions were likely to bring imprisonment, he was publishing The Freeman’s Journal. It is possible that he had been confused with John Talbot and that whoever inserted the notice thought it was John Talbot who had died.

Freeman Talbot, the third and most conservative of the three brothers, was still in London in 1848 and was to establish a little later a new weekly newspaper, Conservative in politics, The London Prototype, which was to have a longer life than most local journals of the time.

Woodman would have had pleasure in seeing again his friend, Mr. David Marsh, who had so much befriended his family during Woodman’s absence in Van Diemen’s Land. We may surmise also that he would seek out Rev. Mr. Proudfoot and give him such intelligence as he had of James Aitchison, the clergyman’s nephew, who, at last report, planned to go to Australia when freed. Mr. Proudfoot would be sixty years old by 1848. He had been greatly disturbed by the events of 1837, which had come so close to his own household; and he had been equally disturbed by Sir George Arthur’s insinuation that he himself was not entirely loyal. For a time he gave up entirely the keeping of his diary, and henceforth it was less detailed than in the past. A whole year elapsed on one occasion without an entry of any kind.

In September, 1842, he had established and published the first issue of The Presbyterian Magazine, designed as an organ of religious discussion; but receiving little help from other members of the Presbytery, and finding the venture unprofitable, he discontinued it in January, 1844. Later in that year the Theological Institute, over which Mr. Proudfoot presided, was opened, with John G. Carruthers as the first student. The salary paid to Mr. Proudfoot as professor was seventy pounds a year, and he was expected to board students for 7/6 a week, including lodging, food, washing, fire and light—“from which,” he commented in his diary, “without very great economy there will be a loss.” The Institute was a modest establishment, but while under Mr. Proudfoot’s direction it produced, among others, Rev. William Caven, who lived to be chosen Moderator of the General Assembly of the Canada Presbyterian Church, and was foremost in the negotiations that led to the formation of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

Though he had never had any contact with him in the past, Woodman would be curious to hear of Colonel Thomas Talbot, whose enmity to the Reformers had been so marked during the rebellion era. In 1848 Talbot would be seventy-seven years old, crotchety and disappointed. He had amassed an enormous estate, but to whom would it pass after his death? He doubtless had ideas of perpetuating the family name when in the fall of 1846 he wrote to his nephew, Colonel Richard Airey, in London, England, offering to make him his heir if he would come to Canada and live at Port Talbot. Airey was then the Assistant Adjutant-General of the Horse Guards, a position of much distinction; but he accepted and with his family arrived at Port Talbot late in 1847.

Colonel Airey’s first act was to build an extra habitation for the old Colonel, while he and his family took over the original dwelling, greatly altering both it and its surroundings. Talbot himself left for England in the spring of 1848 and was absent a year. Friction with the Aireys soon developed on his return to Canada, and a year later the Aireys returned to England. A signed agreement made before the departure conveyed to Colonel Airey about half of Talbot’s landed estate, amounting to almost 29,000 acres. This included the Port Talbot estate. When Talbot made his will in December, 1852, everything that he then possessed, estimated at about £50,000, was left to his young friend, George Macbeth, who had lived with him and been his confidential assistant since 1839. Talbot died in his eighty-third year on February 5, 1853, at the home of George Macbeth, in London, and was buried in the Church of England cemetery at Port Talbot.

We can be sure that Woodman would be interested in hearing of the fortunes of the Reform Party during his absence. His daughter Emeline had made some mention of political changes in the letters he received, and doubtless also in other letters that had never come to her father. Lord Durham had returned to England late in 1838 and had immediately compiled his report on conditions in Canada. In it he urged that there should be a single Province of Canada. The Act of Union was passed by the British Parliament in 1840, and Mr. Charles Poulett Thomson (later created Lord Sydenham), president of the Board of Trade, was sent out as the first Governor General. In place of a soldier, Canada now had a business man as representative of the Crown. Despite its Tory fears of French domination, the Upper Canada Assembly grudgingly approved union, and Lower Canada had no alternative but to accept the measure.

Thomson’s tenure in Canada was brief but important. He intended to be his own prime minister and to rule with the support of an Assembly majority, if he could get it, but without a majority if that became necessary. But suddenly his career was cut short by an accident while riding, and he died. He had made at least a beginning of real self-government. There were now regular departments with responsible ministers who made up the governor’s cabinet.

Sir Charles Bagot, his successor, advanced self-government yet further, calling Robert Baldwin and Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine, Reformers, into his cabinet, from which the Tory members retired. Canada at last had a government that was kept in power by a majority in the Assembly. But Bagot’s regime, like that of Sydenham, was also brief. He died at Kingston in May, 1843.

His successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, proved reactionary. He was prepared, he said, to respect the wishes of the Canadian Parliament, but he would make his own decisions. Baldwin and LaFontaine promptly resigned. The election that followed was as bitter as that of 1836. Baldwin and LaFontaine were described as dangerous demagogues. Even the Colonial Secretary, Lord Stanley, entered the controversy, declaring that the election was a conflict between rebels and honest men.

Metcalfe supporters won the election by a small majority, in part by the large Methodist vote in old Upper Canada. Metcalfe was raised to the peerage, but a malignant disease was already threatening death and he retired. His successor, the fourth Governor General since union, was Lord Elgin. He was young and had more insight into conditions than any previous governor. He recognized the French by calling to his cabinet LaFontaine, who promptly arranged to have his colleague, Robert Baldwin, associated with him.

The test of responsible self-government came over a bill designed to recompense those in old Lower Canada who had suffered property losses during the 1837-38 troubles. To the Tories it seemed to be rewarding rebels. Following almost riotous debate, the measure was approved and was signed by Lord Elgin. Parliament was now sitting in Montreal, and riots followed. Lord Elgin was attacked, and for a time had to remain a prisoner in his own dwelling. Prominent English-speaking leaders in Montreal issued a manifesto declaring for union with the United States. Elgin opposed the movement, as did Baldwin and LaFontaine and the more conservative of the French, and it soon died out. But by his action in signing the Rebellion Losses Bill Elgin had vindicated the principle that Canada must govern itself. This final chapter in the struggle of the forties would have come just after Woodman’s return, had his life been spared.

Woodman would be interested also in the cause of reform in London itself. Colonel Mahlon Burwell, a Tory, had been the member from London when Woodman was taken away in 1839, and held the seat until the union of the provinces. He never attained prominence in Parliament, and retired in 1841. He died in January, 1846.

In the election of 1841 the successful candidate in London was Hamilton H. Killaly, an Irish gentleman residing in London Township, best described as “somewhat inclined to Toryism”. His opponent was John Douglas, a merchant who claimed to be a Reformer. Killaly was elected by a small majority and was promptly called by the Governor General to be Commissioner of Public Works, where he performed excellent service, securing an appropriation of $400,000 for work on the roads in London District. More interesting, however, was the appointment by the new Governor General of George J. Goodhue, a London business man, to the Legislative Council. Goodhue was an American immigrant and a nominal Reformer.

In the election of 1844 under Sir Charles Metcalfe, London returned an old-time Tory in the person of Lawrence Lawrason; but he resigned a year later to provide a safe seat for W. H. Draper, Metcalfe’s chief adviser in the Council. Draper was the virtual head of the administration though not formally recognized as such, and had to have a seat in the popular branch. He was properly regarded as a Tory, but by Reformers he was viewed as insincere and unscrupulous. He held office for three years, but London received no special benefit.

When 1848 came Lord Elgin was the Governor General and was determined to carry out the principle of responsible government. London saw no contest in this 1848 election. Mr. John Wilson, by no means a rabid partisan, was elected by acclamation. Though he never actually thought of himself as a Reformer, he in general occupied an independent position in the Assembly. When the Rebellion Losses Bill came up his course aroused Tory criticism, and he promptly resigned so that his constituents might pronounce judgment. His popularity was shown by his success in the by-election, when he received not only the Reform vote but a large section of the Conservative vote as well. Though defeated in 1851, he was again elected in 1854, retiring from the Assembly at the dissolution of Parliament in 1857. In later years he was elected to the Legislative Council, but before he took his seat was appointed a judge. Reform sentiment had plainly not made marked gains in London during the forties.

If Woodman had returned to London in 1848 he would have been confused by the multitude of new faces. The village of 1838 had increased its population five-fold during the decade. He would first have had to meet the new members of his own family, the wife of his elder son and the husbands of his daughters. One can imagine that he would have had a natural hesitancy in meeting others than these. Though memory of the unhappy events of the thirties was fading in the minds even of older residents of London, and many of the new-comers knew little if anything of those events, there would, nevertheless, be no real pleasure on Woodman’s part in meeting strangers. He had little in common with them.

Had he returned, however, and in some way learned of it, there was a man resident in London Township who fourteen years before had been sentenced by an English court to seven years’ banishment to Van Diemen’s Land, and had spent almost three years there before being pardoned and returned to England. This was George Loveless, the most prominent of the six men concerned in the famed Dorsetshire labourers case. This is today regarded as a turning-point in labour laws and practice in the United Kingdom, and these men have since been widely known as the “Tolpuddle Martyrs”, being named for the village from which they came.

The offence with which these men, all Methodists, were charged was that they had organized a union of agricultural labourers. They were tried by a prejudiced judge and charged under a law that had been passed to prevent mutiny in the armed forces but had no real relation to their case. All six men left England in the ship William Metcalfe on March 25, 1834, and were landed at Hobart in September, though only Loveless remained in Van Diemen’s Land, the others going on to New South Wales. Loveless was placed with a road gang and his experiences would be quite well understood by Woodman.

Meanwhile, in England, an agitation of enormous proportions had developed, demanding that the Government should bring these men home. Eventually, though with marked reluctance, Lord Melbourne’s cabinet was forced to yield and the men were returned to England. Loveless arrived in London, England, on June 20, 1837, the only one of the six to arrive before the accession of Queen Victoria. The others reached the homeland in 1838.

For a time they remained in England, but in the forties Canada drew them and all but one came with their families to the area around London. They concealed their past, and not until just before the outbreak of World War I was it known that George Loveless, respectable Methodist farmer of London Township, had once been in penal servitude. He died May 6, 1874. His grave and that of his wife is in the quiet little Siloam cemetery within a mile of London. On the tombstone is inscribed: “These are they which came out of great tribulation.” To the grave come each year labour deputations paying tribute to this champion of human rights; and in April, 1959, a memorial tablet erected by the Government of Ontario was unveiled by the Prime Minister, the Honourable Leslie M. Frost.

There was yet another former Van Diemen’s Land prisoner living not far from London whom Woodman would probably wish to see. This was John Burwell Tyrrell, who had participated in the Windsor invasion, had been captured, tried at London, and sent in 1839 to Van Diemen’s Land, one of the party on the Buffalo. The name Burwell hints at a relationship of importance. Tyrrell was a nephew of Mahlon Burwell, who had surveyed a large part of London District under the direction of Colonel Talbot and in 1836 had been elected to represent London in the Assembly. Colonel Mahlon Burwell must have been rather humiliated when a relative appeared among the prisoners examined by the court martial at London, and like the others was sentenced to be hanged. When this sentence was changed to transportation, he apparently exerted some effort on Tyrrell’s behalf. With the official list of prisoners that was sent from Upper Canada to Hobart Town was a recommendation for “consideration” in the case of Tyrrell.

It will be recalled that on the voyage to Van Diemen’s Land someone informed the officers of the Buffalo that the prisoners were plotting a mutiny. This resulted in greater severity and the curtailment of some privileges heretofore allowed. Several of the narratives charge Tyrrell with having spread the report of the plot, though Woodman makes no mention of it. The recommendation that Tyrrell be given “consideration” seems to have worked to his benefit, for he was one of the first prisoners to receive a pardon, arriving home in 1845. There he resumed his occupation as a dairy farmer and died in May, 1874. The stone that marks his grave gives no indication that there was anything of an unusual character in his earlier years. One might perhaps find a suggestion of the past in the following rather awkward lines, which are carved beneath the details of the man’s age:

Woodman must have heard of the alleged treachery of Tyrrell. Whether he credited it we have no means of knowing. He, at least, never mentioned it in his letters or his notes.

There remains yet one other speculation with regard to Elijah Woodman. Had circumstances brought him back to the Canadian scene in 1848, would he have retained the idea of removing to one of the western states, perhaps to Wisconsin? This had once been much in his mind. It seems safe to say that he would have quickly put away any such idea if it had been suggested to him. He was in his fifty-first year by the spring of 1848 and, putting aside the question of his health, he would scarcely be capable of the hard labour of a new land. He would undoubtedly be ready to end his days in Canada.

It was indeed a different Canada to that which had sent him into exile in 1839. New men were in control of its affairs, new political ideas were being advanced while many old abuses were disappearing. Reform ideas, so bitterly denounced in the thirties, now were not only respectable but were becoming a part of the operating machinery of government. Reformers who once had been jailed or driven from the country now occupied posts of high responsibility. Governors of a new type were sent out from England, and the Assembly, once subject to the censorship of superior councils, could now exercise its own authority. The Canadian people were learning to govern themselves. “One man’s vote was now as good as another’s and the will of the majority was the ultimate sanction.” Woodman might sometimes feel that he had himself paid a little of the price of this new political freedom.

But a more compelling influence holding Woodman to Canada would be the thought of his family and of the nine years during which he had been separated from them. We have seen in his letters the concern that he constantly expressed, particularly for the children as they grew older during his absence. That they had turned out so well could be attributed to the influence of his faithful wife. Henceforth, whatever remained to him of life must be devoted to the welfare and happiness of the family.

“It is quite as much a trade to make a book as to make a clock,” wrote Jean la Bruyère, the French essayist and moralist, long ago. With his dictum most writers would agree. The author, like the clockmaker, assembles his materials, tests their reliability, checks their relations one to the other, and, if he is an honest workman, eventually puts them together in such a way as to produce an honest product. If the subject has to deal with life in another era, he must try to project himself into that time. Anyone, however ignorant, can discover the repulsive and absurd in standards differing from his own; but, as Hilaire Belloc has said, “The whole art of history consists in eliminating the shock of non-comprehension and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt.” The historian must select the facts that he wishes to present, study and arrange them, and then return them so that they not only shine by themselves but illuminate the period of which they form a part.

Knowledge of the existence of the letters and papers of Elijah Woodman first came to the writer through Mr. Frank E. Leonard, of the iron-working firm of E. Leonard & Sons, London, a grandson of the man exiled to Van Diemen’s Land. He had assembled the documents and had had them copied in the hope that some day they might be published. To this end he gathered collateral information and corresponded widely with relatives in the United States. The story of his maternal grandfather was very near to his heart and he showed deep emotion when he spoke of the man’s unhappy fate.

After Mr. Leonard’s death in 1923, the documents were placed in the Library of the University of Western Ontario by his son, Colonel Ibbotson Leonard. There were in all seventeen letters written by Woodman between 1839 and 1847, addressed to the family in London or to relatives in Maine. In addition there was his pardon, which he had received on July 23, 1845; his will, made at sea on April 22, 1847; some family letters, and various other papers. There was also a cloth bag that had contained the man’s letters and papers while he was in exile.

A bound volume of smaller size prepared by Mr. Leonard contained typewritten copies of many of the letters and also copies of what appeared to be portions of diaries kept in Upper Canada, in Van Diemen’s Land and, for a time, aboard the ship Young Eagle, at sea. There was no indication as to where or by whom these copies had been made, or as to where the originals were located. Subsequent inquiry has thrown little light on this.

A difficult task for the author was to determine what manuscript records of Woodman’s stay in Van Diemen’s Land came back at an earlier date to America. There is one single reference in his letters to the keeping of any diary or journal. Writing from Hobart Town on February 22, 1844, he says: “Should I conclude any scraps of my journal by this ship [a whaling ship that was leaving for America] I hope you will take good of it till I come or send for it. Do not spare any pains in the preservation of it.” There is no further mention of these “scraps of my journal” in his own or in his family’s letters.

Woodman’s will had specified that his journals were to go to his wife in London, but instead they were placed by Captain Lathrop, of the ship Young Eagle, in the hands of Rev. J. P. Weston, of Gardiner, Maine, a brother-in-law of Elijah Woodman, who, apparently, had in mind to edit and publish the contents. His wife, Eliza Elden Woodman, was a sister of Elijah Woodman. There is a letter from Captain Lathrop to Rev. Wm. Weston, dated at Barnstable, March 8, 1848, in which he says: “I was glad to hear from you and that you had received the two books in good order. You speak of having your brother’s journal copied and publish what is proper of it. . . . If you should come to Barnstable probably I could explain part of the journal.”

That Mr. Weston received the journals is further confirmed by a letter from Mrs. Weston to Woodman’s daughter, Emeline, at London, in which she says:

Mrs. Weston adds in her letter that Woodman’s spectacles came back with his papers, “nice ones, silver with white glasses in front and green ones at the sides”. She assures the family in London that proper care will be taken of the journals and papers.

At a memorial service for Elijah Woodman, held under Universalist auspices at Knowlton, Maine, on February 13, 1848, the speaker, Rev. William Drew, made reference to Woodman’s journal which he had recently seen, presumably at the home of Rev. Mr. Weston:

These are the latest known references to the existence of Woodman’s journals. They were, we know, in the possession of Rev. Mr. Weston in February, 1848, but there is no evidence that they were ever forwarded to the family in London or that they were ever published. Correspondence with Mr. Weston’s descendants has failed to reveal what became of them and inquiry at the leading libraries in Maine has proved equally fruitless. Copies of portions of the journal may have been sent to London, as had been promised; and if so, it is probably these that were preserved in typewritten form by Mr. Frank Leonard.

Verification of Woodman’s Masonic associations at Hobart Town proved an interesting side excursion in connection with his narrative. The man speaks gratefully of the aid given to him at a time when he was ill and almost destitute. He mentions by name several of the brethren who assisted him, particularly a Mr. John Shick. Would Tasmanian lodge records confirm these statements?

Investigation showed that as early as May 11, 1835, a warrant had been issued by the Grand Lodge of Ireland to Tasmanian Operative Lodge No. 345. This lodge continued as such until June 20, 1890, when, on the formation of the Grand Lodge of Tasmania, it became Tasmanian Operative No. 1. In the forties, therefore, when Woodman received help, it was still under the Grand Lodge of Ireland. Tasmanian Masonic officers were able to identify and verify several of the names appearing in Woodman’s letters and also provided a copy of the death certificate of Mr. Shick. Further inquiry made to officers of the Grand Lodge of Ireland at Dublin brought word that among the annual membership lists sent from Hobart in the forties were several names similar to those mentioned by Woodman.

Another inquiry related to the whaling ship Young Eagle, aboard which Woodman died. The information at once available was contained in the letters written by the ship’s officers after their return to America. Could this be verified? The whaling industry has long been a subject of research in New England, and several historical societies have assembled extensive collections of records of whaling ships and their cargoes. Inquiry made to several libraries brought only minor information about the ship Young Eagle; but a suggestion that Mr. Alexander Starbuck, of Waltham, Massachusetts, be consulted proved more productive. A letter addressed to Mr. Starbuck brought this reply from his son, Mr. G. F. Starbuck, under date of May 7, 1925:

In tabulated form was then set down in Mr. Starbuck’s own hand the record of the three earlier voyages and the incomplete record of the fourth, from which the ship did not return. The vessel was managed throughout its four voyages by one Simeon Starbuck (perhaps an ancestor of Alexander and G. F. Starbuck). It had had a different captain on each voyage: Benjamin A. Coleman in 1832, George Crocker (Crocker was Elijah Woodman’s second name) in 1836, Edmund C. Austin in 1840, and Benjamin Lathrop on the last and disastrous voyage.

All these voyages had been to the South Pacific, so that the ship may well have been at Hobart Town on occasions earlier than when Woodman embarked in March, 1847. The records set down by Mr. Starbuck showed that on its earlier voyages the ship had brought back substantial cargoes of sperm oil—2,625 barrels on the first, 2,440 on the second, and 2,544 on the third. Presumably it would have a cargo of like proportions when it was lost in 1847.

Photostat copies of the records of the court martial at London, and also copies of newspaper reports of the trial and executions, were provided by the Public Archives at Ottawa. The author is indebted to Rev. L. E. Nadeau, of the Seminary of Quebec, for copies of references in contemporary Quebec newspapers to the departure of the prisoners aboard the ship Buffalo in September, 1839, and to Mr. Charles S. Buck for permission to use material in his unpublished manuscript Old Sparta and Its Neighbours.

Sir George Arthur, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada at the time of the border troubles, has been the subject of recent volumes by two Australian historians: W. D. Forsyth, Governor Arthur’s Convict System (London, 1935), and M. C. I. Levy, Governor George Arthur: A Colonial Benevolent Despot (Melbourne, 1953). The Arthur Papers, relating to his régime in Canada, are in the Toronto Public Library, and have been published.

The manuscript diaries of Rev. William Proudfoot are in the library of the University of Western Ontario. Much of the text of the diaries has been published. The first three parts, covering the period 1832 to March 16, 1833, were published in Nos. VI, VIII and XI of the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Historical Society; the remaining seven parts were published in the Ontario Historical Society’s Papers and Records, XXVI-XXXIII (Toronto, 1930-36).

In an appendix to this volume will be found the titles of the nine exile narratives written a century ago, with some notes on their authors. Most of these are to be found today only in large libraries. Two were by French Canadians from Lower Canada, Léon Ducharme and F. X. Prieur. They had participated in the Lower Canada uprisings and were highly intelligent men. Two were written by men who had been captured in the Short Hills invasion, Benjamin Wait and Linus W. Miller. Three came from the pens of Prescott prisoners, Stephen S. Wright, D. D. Heustis, and William Gates; while two were by prisoners taken at Windsor, Robert Marsh and Samuel Snow. A list of these exile narratives by George Mackaness, an Australian historian, appeared in The Amateur Book Collector, Vol. XI, No. 6 (Chicago, February, 1952). An earlier and less complete list by John Davis Barnett was printed in the Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records, Vol. XVI (1918).

The most comprehensive work on the Patriot movement in its relation to Canada is by Edwin C. Guillet, a Canadian writer. His Lives and Times of the Patriots (Toronto, 1938) exhibits exhaustive research into every aspect of the movement. Mr. Guillet has aimed at presenting the human side of the story. He has not only covered all the border troubles of 1838, but has also followed the prisoners into their penal servitude in Van Diemen’s Land, and recounts the later return of survivors to Canada and the United States. A more recent study of the Patriot movement, stressing its American aspects, is Oscar A. Kinchen’s The Rise and Fall of the Patriot Hunters (New York, 1956).

The cases of the Lower Canada prisoners who were sent to New South Wales on the ship Buffalo are covered in the Report of the late trials before a court martial held at Montreal in 1838-39, exhibiting a complete history of the late rebellion in Lower Canada. 2 vols. (Montreal, 1839).

There is an extensive literature on the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada, of which Charles Lindsey’s Life and Times of William Lyon Mackenzie, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1862) and J. C. Dent, The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1885) represent earlier work. Lindsey’s work was entirely sympathetic and, in an abridged form and added to by G. G. S. Lindsey, was reprinted in 1909 as volume XI of The Makers of Canada. Dent’s work is of a more scholarly character, but his personal dislike of Mackenzie led to a rather unfair judgment. More recent is the excellent biography of Mackenzie, The Firebrand, by William Kilbourne (Toronto, 1956). Lindsey’s original work gives a list of the persons arrested in Upper Canada during 1837-38 and the disposition made of the cases.

OTHER PRINTED SOURCES

Backhouse, James, Extracts from the Letters of J. Backhouse, Now Engaged in a Religious Visit to Van Diemen’s Land, and New South Wales, Accompanied by George Washington Walker (London, 1838)

Campbell, Cl. T., Pioneer Days in London (London, Ontario, 1921)

Corey, Albert B., The Crisis of 1830-42 in Canadian-American Relations (New Haven, 1941)

Evans, G. W., History and Description of the Present State of Van Diemen’s Land; Containing Important Hints to Emigrants, with Abstracts from the General Muster Books for the Years 1819, 1820, 1821, and Lists of the Civil Establishment (London, 1824)

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, Sir John Franklin in Tasmania, 1837-43 (Melbourne, 1948)

Giblin, R. W., The Early History of Tasmania, the Geographical Era, 1642-1804 (London, 1928)

Hamil, Fred C., Lake Erie Baron: The Story of Colonel Thomas Talbot (Toronto, 1955)

Head, Sir Francis Bond, A Narrative (London, 1839)

Howison, John, Sketches of Upper Canada (Edinburgh, 1825)

Hudspeth, W. H., Early Van Diemen’s Land. The W. H. Hudspeth Memorial Volume, an Introduction to the Diaries of Rev. Robert Knopwood, A. M. and G. T. W. B. Boyes (Hobart, 1954)

Jameson, Anna, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. 2 vols. (New York, 1839)

Landon, Fred, Western Ontario and the American Frontier (Toronto, 1941)

Lempriere, Thomas J., The Penal Settlements of Early Van Diemen’s Land. A Sesquicentenary Production of the Royal Society of Tasmania Northern Branch (1954)

Leonard, the Hon. Elijah, A Memoir (Privately printed. London, Ontario, 1894)

Lloyd, G. T., Thirty-three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, Being the Actual Experiences of the Author (London, 1862)

Lower, A. R. M., Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (Toronto, 1946)

Magrath, T. W., Authentic Letters from Upper Canada; with an Account of Canadian Field Sports (Dublin, 1833)

Martin Cash, the Bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land in 1843-44. A personal Narrative of His Exploits in the Bush and His Experiences at Port Arthur and Norfolk Island (Hobart, 1954)

Meredith, Mrs. Charles, My Home in Tasmania During a Residence of Nine Years. 2 vols. (London, 1852)

New, C. W., Lord Durham (Oxford, 1927)

Parker, H. W., The Rise, Progress and Present State of Van Diemen’s Land with Advice to Emigrants. Also a Chapter on Convicts Showing the Efficacy of Transportation as a Secondary Punishment (London, 1833)

Prinseps, Mrs. A., The Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen’s Land: Comprising a Description of That Colony During a Six Months Residence (London, 1833)

Reid, T., Two Voyages to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land with a Description of the Present Condition of That Interesting Colony, Including Facts and Observations Relative to the State and Management of Convicts of Both Sexes (London, 1822)

Severance, F. H., Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier, 2nd edition (Cleveland, 1903)

Smith, W. L., Pioneers of Old Ontario (Toronto, 1923)

Starbuck, A., History of the American Whale Fishery, from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Washington, 1876)

Stoney, Capt. H. Butler, A Residence in Tasmania: With a Descriptive Tour Through the Island from Macquarie Harbour to Circular Head (London, 1856)

Syme, J., Nine Years in Van Diemen’s Land, an Account of Its Discovery, Settlement, Progress, etc., with an Essay on Prison Discipline (Dundee, 1848)

Talman, J. J., editor, Loyalist Narratives from Upper Canada (Toronto, The Champlain Society, 1946)

Theller, E. A., Canada in 1837-38, Showing by Historical Facts the Causes of the Late Attempted Revolution, and of Its Failure; the Present Condition of the People, and Their Future Prospects. Together with the Personal Adventures of the Author. 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1841)

Van Diemen’s Land Anniversary and Hobart Town Almanac for the Year 1831, with Embellishments (Hobart, 1831)

Villiers, A. J., Vanished Fleets (London, 1931)

Wallace, W. S., The Family Compact (Toronto, 1915)

Wheeler, C., Extracts from the Letters and Journal of Daniel Wheeler, in a Religious Visit to Inhabitants of the Islands of the Pacific, Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales (London, 1839)

Woodman, Cyrus, The Woodmans of Buxton, Maine (Boston, 1874)

ARTICLES

Creighton, D. G., “Economic Background to the Rebellion of 1837”, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Vol. III, No. 3 (1937)

Cruikshank, E. A., “Insurrection in the Short Hills in 1838”, Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records, VIII (1916)

Gibson, James, “The ‘persistent fallacy’ of the Governors Head”, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (1936)

Landon, Fred, “London and Its Vicinity, 1837-38”, Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records, XXIV (1927)

——“The Exiles of 1838”, Waterloo Historical Society, 13th Annual Report (1925)

——“Trial and Punishment of the Patriots Captured at Windsor, 1838”, Michigan History Magazine, XVIII (1934)

——“The Duncombe Uprising and Some of its Consequences”, Royal Society of Canada, Transactions, Section II (1931)

——“The Common Man in the Era of the Rebellion in Upper Canada”, Canadian Historical Association, Annual Report (1937)

Longley, R. S., “Emigration and the Crisis of 1837 in Upper Canada”, Canadian Historical Review, XIX (1936)

Mackay, R. A., “The Political Ideas of William Lyon Mackenzie”, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, III (1937)

Ross, Robert B., “The Patriot War”

Sage, W. N., “Sir George Arthur and His Administration of Upper Canada”, Bulletin of the Departments of History and Political and Economic Science, Queen’s University, No. 28 (Kingston, 1918)

Scott, Ernest, “The Canadian and United States Transported Prisoners of 1839”, Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings, XXI, Part 1 (Sydney, 1935)

Tiffany, O. E., “Relations of the United States to the Canadian Rebellion of 1837-38”, Buffalo Historical Society, Publications, Vol. VIII (1905)

Watt, R. C., “The Political Prisoners in Upper Canada, 1837-38”, English Historical Review, XLI (1926)

Below are the titles of the nine exile narratives that have appeared in the past and have all become scarce volumes, to be found today only in large libraries and in private collections in America, Great Britain and Australia. The titles are presented in the chronological order of their appearance, and with each title some details of the author are given. Only two narratives, those by Prieur and Ducharme, both French-Canadian prisoners, have ever been reprinted.

Benjamin Wait had been captured in the Short Hills affair in June, 1838. He escaped hanging and was sent to Van Diemen’s Land via England, arriving in the penal settlement aboard the Marquis of Hastings in July, 1839. Wait received his parole in August, 1841. About the end of the year he made his escape and reached America in the summer of 1842. He resided in later years at Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he engaged in lumbering and was one of the founders of the Northwestern Lumberman. His wife, who collaborated in the writing of this book, died in May, 1843. Her exertions on behalf of her husband were noteworthy. Their book, jointly written, was the first narrative to be published. Wait died at Grand Rapids, Michigan, November 9, 1895, aged eighty-two. He was buried in the Valley City cemetery.

Stephen S. Wright, captured at Prescott, went to Van Diemen’s Land on the Buffalo. He won his pardon and freedom by assisting in the capture of a notorious bushranger. He left the island in July, 1843, aboard the brig Areta, bound for England. Thence he took passage to New York on the Quebec. At New York he records meeting William Lyon Mackenzie. His book was written for him by Caleb Lyon and appeared in 1844.

Léon (Léandre) Ducharme was arrested in November, 1838, together with a large number of Lower Canada rebels, and lodged in the jail at Montreal. He was one of the first to undergo trial before the court martial and was one of a group of twelve prisoners, all of whom, with the exception of two, received the death sentence. He remained in prison, expecting to go to the gallows; but in September fifty-eight of the French-Canadian prisoners were placed on the Buffalo to be transported to New South Wales. They arrived at Hobart Town in February, 1840, and left on the last lap of their journey to New South Wales on the 19th of that month.

On June 24, 1844, he received word that his pardon had arrived; and on July 9 he, with thirty-seven others, boarded the ship Achilles. Fifteen men who were unable to pay their passage were left behind. Ducharme and his companions were carried to London, England. There, through the help of John A. Roebuck, M.P., they obtained funds to carry them to Canada, and on November 29 boarded the American ship Switzerland, bound for New York. They landed there, after a rough voyage, on January 13, 1845. Thence Ducharme proceeded to Lower Canada and was reunited with his family. The journey home had occupied six months and nine days.

Ducharme’s narrative, printed in Montreal, appeared in the same year that he arrived back in Canada. A translation, with introduction and notes by George Mackaness, was published in 1944 as Volume IX of the Australian Historical Monographs. Ducharme died in Montreal November 24, 1897, and was buried in the Côte des Neiges Cemetery at the foot of the monument to the Patriotes of 1837-38, near to the grave of his companion in exile, François Xavier Prieur. The original manuscript of Ducharme’s narrative is preserved in the Public Archives in Ottawa.

Samuel Snow, a Windsor prisoner, went to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Buffalo and left in January, 1845, with more than twenty others, aboard the whaler Steiglitz, which took them to Honolulu. There, after a wait of some months, he went aboard the whaler Canton and arrived in America in May, 1846. He was apparently still living in the 1860’s.

Linus W. Miller was captured in the Short Hills affair and received a death sentence, but this was reduced to transportation. Later he was sent to England, where his case, with that of two others captured in the Short Hills, was tested by a writ of habeas corpus. The English courts confirmed the sentence of transportation after several months’ deliberation, and he arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on the Canton in January, 1840. When he received his pardon in 1844 he worked in a lawyer’s office for a year, then left for England in September, 1845, aboard the Sons of Commerce. At Pernambuco he transferred to the American barque Globe bound for Philadelphia, but disembarked at Newcastle, Delaware, and then went to Stockton, New York, where he was met by relatives. He married in 1850 and settled on the old family farm, half a mile from the village of Delanti, New York, where he resided until his death in April, 1880, aged sixty-one years. Anyone who reads his narrative with its bombastic style and bitterness of utterance will feel that the man was not mentally well balanced. Yet his book is one of the most informative of all those published on the conditions of servitude in Van Diemen’s Land. His narrative appeared in 1846.

Daniel Heustis, captured at Prescott, was sent to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Buffalo. He left the island on the whaler Steiglitz in January, 1845, arriving at Honolulu in April. There he contracted to work on a cattle ranch in California, and in May set sail in the Fama. As the expected post did not materialize on his arrival, he set out to cross the continent to St. Louis, but later abandoned this idea and returned to the coast. In April, 1846, he took ship for Valparaiso, and from thence, aboard the Edward Everett, reached Boston in June. Guillet describes the Heustis book as “the most scholarly of the Patriot narratives”. A second edition is said to have been published in 1849.

Robert Marsh first joined the Mackenzie force on Navy Island in December, 1837. A year later he was with the Patriot force in the attack on Windsor, was captured and sentenced to death by the court martial at London. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Buffalo and left the island in January, 1845, aboard the whaler Steiglitz bound for Honolulu. There he went aboard the Samuel Robertson on October 1, 1845, and reached New Bedford on March 13, 1846. Going on to Buffalo he found his parents in good health. Marsh’s narrative is bitter in tone and he stresses the hard nature of the penal life. His narrative appeared one year after his return to America.

William Gates was captured at Prescott and transported to Van Diemen’s Land on the Buffalo. When he received his pardon he went to Australia to earn sufficient funds to carry him to America. After two years he had saved ninety pounds. He took ship at Sydney, N.S.W., and was landed at New Bedford on May 31, 1848. He found on arrival at his old home that his relatives had gone to Canada and were living in Aylmer, Canada West. He found his parents there and induced them to return to Wilson, in Niagara County, their former home.

Under this simple title, François Xavier Prieur’s narrative was first published at Quebec in 1864 by Brousseau Frères in Les Soirées Canadiennes (pp. 167-408). A new edition with continuous pagination appeared in 1884, published by Cadieux and Derome and containing a portrait of the author. In 1949 a translation by George Mackaness was published at Sydney, N.S.W. as No. XVIII of the series of Australian Historical Monographs in a limited edition, of which a hundred copies came to Canada. Prieur’s narrative is the best account existing of the experiences of the French-Canadian prisoners, and is of special interest in relation to the Upper Canada prisoners by reason of his excellent account of life on the Buffalo on the voyage to Van Diemen’s Land.

François Xavier Prieur (1814-1891) was taken prisoner during the Lower Canada troubles of 1838, was tried by court martial at Montreal in January, 1839, and received the death sentence. Twelve fellow-prisoners went to the gallows, but Prieur was spared death and was transported to New South Wales on the Buffalo in September, 1839. On receiving his pardon, he left Australia in February, 1846, aboard the ship Saint George, which, by way of Cape Horn and after a stormy voyage, made its way to London, England. There, after some delay, he sailed to Canada on July 13, 1846, aboard the Montreal, and on September 10 landed at Quebec. Soon he was reunited with his parents. He married on July 17, 1849, and for a time engaged in the crockery business. In 1860 he was appointed by Sir George Cartier superintendent of the Reformatory at Ile-aux-Noix, and in 1875 was appointed superintendent of all Canadian prisons. This required travels in the United States and even in Europe, investigating methods of prison administration. His wife died in 1876 and Prieur himself died on January 1, 1891, in his seventy-seventh year. He was buried in the Côte des Neiges Cemetery in Montreal.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Because of copyright considerations, the introduction by James A. Gibson (1912-2013) has been omitted from this etext.

Footnotes have been renumbered sequentially throughout the ebook.

When nested quoting was encountered, nested double quotes were changed to single quotes.

Index page references refer to the book’s original page order. Actual placement of the reference may be offset depending on the page and/or font size of your eBook reader.

[End of An Exile From Canada, by Fred Landon]