Upper Canada Research Articles

Chief of this River

The narratives of European settlement in Canada have largely excluded the presence of Indigenous peoples on contested lands. This article offers an exploration of an Anishinaabeg community and a regional chief in early nineteenth century Upper Canada. The community known as the Chenail Ecarté land, and Chief Zhaawni-binesi, have become historically obscure. Through the use of primary documents the authors explore the community’s history, its relocation, and Chief Zhaawni-binesi’s role in the War of 1812 and in community life. Ultimately, the paper charts the relocation of the community in the face of mounting settler encroachment. The discussion attempts to increase knowledge and appreciation of Indigenous history in Southwestern Ontario.

Imagining institutions of man: Constructions of the human in the foundations of Ontario public schooling curriculum

In this essay, I analyse Egerton Ryerson’s proposed curriculum for the first state-led mass public educational system in Ontario. Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Schools in Upper Canada during the wide-scale proliferation of state schooling across Turtle Island, produced proposals for “universal” common schools, as well as proposals for residential schools for Indigenous students, segregated schooling for Black students and institutionalized schooling for disabled students and lower-class students. Following the work of Sylvia Wynter, I argue that these proposals within a supposedly universal system were not contradictory, but an organic production of Ryerson’s educational philosophy. Ryerson’s vision is organized by what Wynter terms Man, a representation for a story of the human that is overrepresented as the human itself. Through this story, claims of universal humanity are produced through the manifestation of categories of difference. In exploring how Ryerson’s universalism is structured by this understanding of what it means to be human, we see how his writings on curriculum for his common schools presage his future proposals for the violent exclusion of those who are excluded from the category of Man. Ryerson’s writings suggest that Ontario curriculum is historically founded in colonialism and imperialism (which construct the category of Man and its overrepresentation), with further implications for curricula throughout Turtle Island. This analysis points to how efforts to reform curriculum of its racist, ableist and classist roots need to rethink the very story of what it means to be human, which is wrapped up in the foundations of public education.

Debt Amongst Friends: Sympathy in Exchange and the Narration of a Transatlantic Credit Network, 1792–1837

Conversations about credit in the transatlantic world were often suffused with accounts of feelings. More than just a warm gloss on the cold calculation of commerce in both merchant and settler economies, emotional exchanges played an integral role in the maintenance of credit relationships. The letters that circulated between John Large and his network of friends, family, and commercial contacts around the Atlantic reveal the importance of sympathy to his commercial relationships. Whether trading in the Caribbean and the United States or settling in Upper Canada, Large’s economic self-interest could never be excised from the wider world of sentimental sociability. As both a creditor and debtor, his economic undertakings were as concerned with hearts and souls as they were with trading balances and investment returns. In the world of transatlantic credit networks, sympathy was a colonial relationship, exchanged in commercial arrangements according to the ideal of friendship. Large’s correspondence, therefore, sits at the crossroads where credit’s moral economies met an expanding colonial capitalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Armstrongs of Manorhamilton and West Gwillimbury: A Study of Settlement and Migration Patterns of Irish Immigrants to Upper Canada

This article considers the land transactions, occupations, and last known residence of three brothers, Protestant landed gentry from Manorhamilton, Leitrim County, Ireland, who arrived in West Gwillimbury, Simcoe County, Upper Canada (Ontario) in 1819, 1822, and 1825, and of their sons, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. At least one aspired to a large estate, but none acquired more land than they needed for themselves and their sons. Most of their children (all born in Ireland) or their husbands farmed in Ontario, most in Simcoe County, but their grandchildren dispersed widely across North America and less than half remained in farming.

Antiquarians and Avocationals from Upper Canada to Ontario

The investigation of Indigenous and European archaeological sites in what is now the Province of Ontario spans a period of nearly two centuries. While much of the earliest work involved “digging for curiosities,” establishment of the Canadian Institute in 1849 resulted in a more scientific pursuit of knowledge. With the creation of a Provincial archaeologist and the staffing of academic positions, the professional and avocational/collector branches of archaeological activity split in the latter decades of the 19th century; however, both remained active. The interplay between them strengthened the still nascent professional branch during the early 20th century, leading to the increased professionalization of the discipline in the second half of the century.

Social media and social change lawyering: influencing change and silencing dissent

The Law Society of Ontario (formerly, the Law Society of Upper Canada) oversees the legal profession in Ontario, Canada, through The Rules of Professional Conduct (‘Rules’). All future lawyers and paralegals must adhere to the Rules. The Law Society sometimes provides guidance on sample policies informed by the Rules. In this article, the author closely examines the Law Society’s guidance on social media. The author argues that this guidance fails to understand how the Rules regulate experiences out of the legal profession and fails to see the positive possibilities of social media to influence social change, especially in ways that conflict with the colonial legal system. The author concludes that the Law Society must take a positive approach and provide some guidance for the legal profession on their social media use, especially around critiquing the colonial legal system. This positive approach is essential to avoid duplicating the systems and structures that perpetuate disadvantage in marginalized communities.

Trinity Western University v The Law Society of Upper Canada

Trinity Western University v The Law Society of Upper Canada

A place to call home: Journeys of Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840)

Abstract In tracing the colonial odyssey of Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840) from Great Britain to Upper Canada, I show her as an immigration success. From her literary life in London as the author of Secresy (1795) and several innovative children’s books, she transformed herself, as a single working mother, and later grandmother, into a school owner, a businesswoman. At the heart of my essay is her search for social and financial security, a place to call home. Her extant – mostly unpublished – letters demonstrate that it was in the welcoming space of Upper Canada that she established a future for her descendants. Lissa Paul’s biography of Eliza Fenwick, Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840): A Life Rewritten, will be published by the University of Delaware Press in their Early Modern Feminisms Series, in early 2019.

Women, Marriage and Property in Upper Canada

This article explores how one illiterate woman in Upper Canada, Elizabeth Sanders, used the few legal tools that were at her disposal to deal with a bad marriage and to protect her property for her daughters. Her social standing, her property and, even more importantly, the support of her family, allowed her to have access to and use the very deficient Upper Canadian justice system to deal successfully with a bad marriage. This study shows that even illiterate women could and did use the law to their advantage.

God & Government

This article focuses on a debate that raged in Upper Canada during the early and mid-nineteenth century over the degree to which civil authorities should assume responsibility for promoting societal virtue. Supporters of state-aided Christianity, many of whom were Tories, clashed with critics of close church-state ties, many of whom were Reformers. The catalyst for this conflict was the Clergy Reserves endowment. Drawing on works that situate British North American affairs in an expansive interpretive framework, this article maintains that the Upper Canadian debate over state-aided Christianity was subsumed within a larger conflict regarding the church-state relationship that originated in early modern England and played itself out across the North Atlantic World.

What Evil Felled the Duke?

Charles Lennox, the 4th Duke of Richmond, was Governor-in-Chief of British North America from 1818-1819. His death in Richmond (Upper Canada) is usually attributed to rabies contracted from a tame fox that he had encountered two months prior to his death. Though rabies may have been the cause of his death, the sources of information for most historical writings on the subject are limited to official accounts and give no insight into the known character of the Duke. This article provides an alternative explanation for the death of His Grace.

Upper Canadian Thermidor

This article challenges the notion that the Family Compact was a self-interested clique who stunted Upper Canada’s political, social, and economic development. It argues, instead, that members of the group articulated a dynamic vision for the colony premised on the “balanced” British constitution, state-aided Anglicanism, and a vibrant agrarian economy led by a paternalistic elite. Of central importance to the Compact’s vision for Upper Canada was a longstanding conservative tradition that had its roots in late-seventeenth-century England, and was reinforced a century later by a multifaceted counter-revolutionary phenomenon that manifested on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Kingston Hospital

By the mid-nineteenth century, the major population centres in Upper Canada had built the first hospitals and a small number of British trained physicians provided care. The admission and death records of the Kingston Hospital for 1853-1866 provide insight into those admitted to hospital and the nature of their ailments. Infection based on the admission diagnosis of fevers, venereal disease and inflammatory lesions in the general and organ system categories was the major illness occurring in these patients, highlighting the importance of infection at a time when there was a growing understanding of its nature and cause. The remaining patients were more frequently diagnosed with cardiac and neurological lesions and cancers that would later become more important as lifespans increased. Hospital mortality was similar to that in the established voluntary hospitals in Britain.

The Ballygiblins

Drawing on interpretations and reactions to the violence of the 1824 Ballygiblin riot in the Bathurst District of Upper Canada, this article examines the local reception of assisted Irish Catholic immigrants to the region. In their reaction to the new arrivals, Bathurst District residents demonstrated the extent to which local priorities for settlement were at odds with that of British emigration policy. The reception of the Irish was conditioned by the legacy of the so-called “old world” in real and expected patterns of violence; by a local culture that prized loyalty, Protestantism, and pioneer manhood; and by the immediate context of British emigration policy and the process by which that policy was applied, interpreted, and experienced.

“The varieties and unsettled habits of this new land”

This article argues that Mary O’Brien’s journals highlight her family’s strategy to achieve economic and social security by establishing long-term goals, identifying an advantageous and socially superior position amongst neighbours, and making everyday choices which furthered these goals and advantages. Her account of her life in Upper Canada demonstrates the hidden workings of an agrarian household in a way that is much more personal than a census or tax record. The use of primary sources such as Mary’s journals enables location specific generalizations to be made while examining a larger historical experience. This article is, therefore, concerned with placing the experiences of a farm wife within the context of settlement, class, and labour in the first half of the nineteenth-century.

Contesting the Protestant Consensus

This article challenges the premise that a Protestant consensus emerged in Upper Canada by the mid-nineteenth century by examining the persistence of politically influential, dissenting evangelical voluntarists who advocated the secularization of the clergy reserves. State- Chruch efforts were strongly contested by evangelicals who had come to believe that the purity of their faith was marked by its independence from the state as well as its revivalism. Using the Toronto-based Christian Guardian, this article traces a clash between the British Wesleyans and the generally voluntarist Upper Canadian Methodists as they sought to claim the legacy of Methodism in the colony. Overall, this article seeks to highlight the persistence of an early dissenting evangelical culture, not as an exception to the rule of consensus, but as a significant influence in colonial public policy and a vital force in Upper Canadian Protestantism that calls into question the consensus model.

“A journey undertaken under peculiar circumstances”

When his 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion came to a sudden end with the routing of rebels at Montgomery’s Tavern on 7 December, William Lyon Mackenzie was forced to run for his life. With a price on his head, travelling mostly by night—west toward the Niagara Escarpment, south around the end of Lake Ontario and then east across the Niagara peninsula—the rebel leader made his way from a village north of Toronto to safety across the Niagara River in the United States. His journey of more than 150 miles took five days ( four nights) on foot, on horseback, and on wagon or sleigh, was aided by more than thirty different individuals and families. At great personal risk, they fed him, nursed him, hid him, advised him, accompanied him. This article maps Mackenzie’s exact route, identifies those who helped him, and reflects on the natural hazards and human perils he encountered.

Light houses in Upper Canada, 1803 – 1840

Light houses in Upper Canada, 1803 – 1840

Building the Burlington Bay Canal

This article examines the construction of the Burlington Bay Canal, Upper Canada’s first government-financed internal improvement. Designed in 1824 to create an entrance to a natural harbour at the head of Lake Ontario, the canal was an engineering, financial and political fiasco. Using a staples thesis approach, this study explores the reasons for the canal’s problem.

Dismemberment at Windmill Point

Drawing on personal letters, published memoirs, and court martial records, this article investigates the gendered and ethnic implications of the Battle of the Windmill in November 1838. While this invasion of Upper Canada by the Hunter Patriots has often been seen as the final chapter of the 1837 Canadian Rebellions, it was also an episode imbued with Irish fraternal societies, Irish politics, notions of Irish manliness, and the attempts of Irish settlers to earn their place within “respectable” Upper Canadian society. The scandalous castration of an Irish officer and the mistreatment of dead soldiers’ bodies stood in direct contrast to the value each force placed on heroic martial manliness. Despite the relatively small size of the battlefield, the legacy of the battle itself significantly impacted how Irish settlers were treated in Upper Canadian society at the end of the 1830s.