The Farmers' Revolt

I visited Toronto's Mackenzie House on Saturday. It included a tour of the house, a demonstration in the print shop, and a potted history of Mackenzie from his arrival in Canada (1828) until his death.

 

I was reminded of one of the real failings of the Ontario history curriculum. The two rebellions (Papineau's and Mackenzie's)[1] are always taught only in their local context.

 

The Mackenzie Rebellion (at least) has a significant ideological overlap with the Chartist movement, which began in England in 1838. The following decade would see a series of revolutions and rebellions throughout western Europe: France's Second Republic, uprisings throughout the German states, Chartist rebellions in the U.K. (as memorialized for SFF readers by Brust's and Bull's Freedom and Necessity). We were taught nothing about this in school.

 

Mackenzie himself was a product of Scotland, not Canada, and his views reflect Dundee far more than they do any local sources.

 

Indeed, it looks very little like a true grassroots revolt. The bulk of the opposition to Mackenzie was low-level, not high-level (not that the ruling classes were precisely friendly). The population was dominated by Loyalists (well, their children and grandchildren) and by Orangemen, who rallied around the established order. (The rebellion in Toronto was defeated by militia with a very small sprinkling of professional troops.)

 

The natural soil of the protests of the 1830s and 1840s was the new industrial classes and the cities (with a side of agricultural workers who were threatened by mechanization, as with the Swing riots - which has obvious linkages with other forms of unrest driven by technological change, and with Luddism): the Upper Canadian rebellions were based on independent farmers and tradesmen.

 

There was a true local context - still not covered much in the curriculum - which was the proximity of the United States. Mackenzie, before, during, and after the rebellion, was in favour, not of moderate reform of the colonial government and finances, but of the establishment of a Republic embodying many of the traits of Jacksonian democracy (Jackson finished his second term in 1837). As a second alternative he was willing to accept an American takeover. This had the tacit backing of the US - this was only a few years after the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine and only shortly before the US formulation of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny; there's a continuity between the networks fomenting rebellion and the Fenian raids of the 1860s.

 

In addition, the economic conditions for farmers were poor; the rebels who did come out were playing out the age-old script of trying to kill the King when the crops fail.

 

The response to the rebellions had a larger context as well: the Whigs took power under Lord Melbourne in the mid-1830s, and their response to the rebellion (aside from giving them an opportunity of shipping "Radical Jack" Lambton, Earl of Durham out to the colonies for a while to keep him out of their hair) reflects in part the fact that their views were more sympathetic with some of the issues raised than those of, say, Peel or Wellington would have been. (Even Bond Head's appointment, which had provided support for moderate reformers like Baldwin, was a result of the change in English government.) We weren't taught about that, either, despite the fact that Melbourne's background was far more interesting than anything in Canada (consider Lady Caroline Lamb, his (deceased) wife).

 

It does nobody any good to teach history in a deracinated, decontextualized manner. It renders it less interesting, less comprehensible, and more liable to gross oversimplification.

 

[1]Actually 3, given Duncombe's Rebellion, which I wouldn't even know about had my father not grown up in Scotland, Ontario.