Pikes of Yonge Street: The Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and the Making of Responsible Government

The Pikes of Yonge Street: The Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and the Making of Responsible Government On a frozen December night in 1837, a farmers' picket on a road above Toronto shot a colonel from his saddle, and a colony built to be revolution-proof discovered it had bred a revolution of its own. This book tells the full story of the Upper Canada Rebellion: the counter-revolutionary constitution of 1791, the closed world of the Family Compact, the checkerboard wilderness of the Clergy Reserves, and the furious red-wigged editor who spent thirteen years auditing an oligarchy before marching against it with blacksmiths and Quakers carrying pikes. It follows the catastrophe through panic, battle, and betrayal to the scaffold where Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews died before a silent crowd, and beyond, to a burning steamer sent over Niagara Falls, a secret army of forty thousand sworn Hunters, chain gangs under the Southern Cross, and the quiet alliance of two grieving moderates that turned defeat into responsible government and, at last, a country. Drawing on trial records, exile memoirs, and the carved wooden boxes prisoners sent home to their families, it restores to Canadian memory the rebellion that failed as an uprising and triumphed as a diagnosis. Its ghosts built Confederation. Meet them.