The patriot war of 1837-1838: locofocoism with a gun?

Labour/Le Travail, Fall, 2003 by Andrew Bonthius

Indeed, so irksome was it that the Crown government took official action. Lieutenant Governor Sir John Colborne actually encouraged Irish and Scottish immigration to counteract the "tone of society in UC [which had] long remained deplorably 'Yankee' in many respects." (30) In a paternalistic, nascent industrial economy, control of land was the key to preservation of state power. Thus, to stem the alien tide of Yankee influence, the Crown placed severe limitations on the ability of American set-tiers to obtain land by enforcing anti-American laws that dated from the reign of King George II. Nevertheless, a Yankee-inspired republicanism persevered in the region and is seen by historian Colin Read as a direct cause of the appetite for rebellion. Read round that most of the sixteen rebel townships in UC were dominated by American settlers and their offspring, and summarized that the assembled data does "indeed suggest that the rebellion in the West was largely the work of American immigrants and native Upper Canadians although some inhabitants of other nationalities took up arms." (31)

Significant us presence in UC dated, at least, as far back as the development of the Talbot Road settlement along Lake Erie, which in 1809 was infused with "an influx of farmers from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, the Maritime Provinces, and England." (32) Emblematic of this heavy Yankee labouring-class presence north of the border was the America-born L.A. Norton whose father and grandfather had lived many years on both sides of the border. Thus, when the Patriot rebellion broke out in November 1837, Norton did not hesitate to take a break from his hardscrabble life as a sailor on Lake Ontario and as a transient labourer on the sylvan Canada-us frontier to muster into the Spartan Rangers, a Patriot company from the village of Sparta in Yarmouth Township. Sparta was one of those numerous small "Yankee villages" in western UC that produced a sizeable number of rebel contingents. Norton's involvement in Dr. Duncombe's western rising was a family affair in which he was joined by uncles and his father's sister, Mrs. Anna Burch, who gathered intelligence for the Patriot militias disguised as a "doctress." (33) The extant historiography, which establishes a great degree of cultural, socio-economic interpenetration between UC and the Great Lakes states, as represented by three generations of Nortons, is not disputed by scholars who have studied this region, and yet remains absent from most treatments of us Patriot activities. But what, aside from familial bonds and personal gain might have motivated so many labourers, such as Norton, to join in the rebellion? Did republican passions go beyond merely ridding the continent of the last vestiges of British monarchical rule?

A Counter-Theatre of Resistance and Egalitarianism

   Under a spreading chestnut-tree
   The village smithy stands;
   The smith, a mighty man is he,
   With large and sinewy hands.
   And the muscles of his brawny arms
   Are strong as iron bands.

   His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
   His face is like the tan;
   His brow is wet with honest sweat,
   He earns whate'er he can,
   And looks the whole world in the face,
   For he owes not any man. (34)