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1812: Bishop Strachan: John Strachan, minister and teacher, arrives in York in 1812. In a few short months he will earn his place as York's spiritual father, and remain an enduring object of love and loathing by his fellow townspeople.
The son of a humble Scottish quarryman, Strachan re-invents himself in York, becoming one of the leading aristocrats, and an Anglican. He proves courageous protecting his flock during the War of 1812, and uses his hero status to establish a ruling class, post war. His clique of powerful businessmen, called the "Family Compact", rule Upper Canada from York with privileged obliviousness and self interest.
Strachan becomes rector of the most prestigious parish in the province and is its first Anglican Bishop. He founds hundreds of little schools across the province; is instrumental in the founding of Montreal's McGill University and King's College, which later becomes Trinity College. During the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1834, he is untiring in his efforts to minister to the sick, arrange burials and to stop panic in the streets.
Cast in his most favorable light, writer and Dean of Massey College, John Fraser says, "He was typical of the kind of rough and ready Scots that came out here and made Toronto such a sturdy place." But Strachan is an extremely aggressive politician holding elitist Tory ideological values that are discreditable even in his own age. He has trouble distinguishing between dissent and disloyalty. In this regard, another contemporary historian, Carl Benn of Fort York, sees him more as " the bald headed, manacled Nazi of Upper Canada."
Reformer William Lyon Mackenzie would agree. When Strachan erects a grand brick home at York and Simcoe streets for the whopping sum of 6000 pounds, about $30,000 today, Mackenzie is appalled and dubs it "John Strachan's Palace". "It adds to the pleasures, mean and groveling as they are, of such a man as Doctor Strachan, to have a hundred poor miserable wretches humbly attending at his gate or in his 'soup kitchen' begging for a morsel. Their poverty form an agreeable and striking contrast with the coach, the palace, the liveried footman... ".
John Strachan remains the eminence gris in most of Toronto's affairs. Though the influence of the Family Compact fades with the arrival of newer immigrants, Strachan remains its favoured member. His funeral is the biggest attended event in Toronto history. Thousands turn out to mark his passing in November 1867.
1813: Penelope Bleikie: There are some tough cookies living in York in the first part of the century. During the War of 1812, when the Americans land in York and ransack homes, Penelope Bleikie stands up to them. Bleikie, the wife of a soldier who has gone to war writes in her diary: "I kept my castle when all the rest fled; and it was well for us I did so... Every house they found deserted was completely sacked. Will you believe it? I had the temerity to frighten, and even to threaten, some of the enemy"?
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1824: William Lyon Mackenzie is a feisty Scottish immigrant who establishes the first real opposition to the Family Compact. He's is a ridiculous looking character: short and square with flapping hands and mouth; and a mop-like red wig, which slides down on his head.. (His baldness is a result of childhood illness.) But Mackenzie is as determined as he is ugly, to press for responsible government. In 1824 he opens the Colonial Advocate newspaper and immediately starts lobbing invectives at the ruling class. Though always on the brink of bankruptcy, he has a ready audience in the disgruntled citizens of York. He thinks the men surrounding the lieutenant governor are using the colony to their own benefit and describes them as "a reptilian group of men who are in league with the devil..." Mackenzie mocks them so fiercely that the sons of the ruling class, disguised as Indians, ransack his printing shop. It's a blinding tactical error that works to Mackenzie's advantage. The hefty fine they have to pay keeps his business running.
It is Mackenzie who dubs the ruling class the "Family Compact".. And his continued attack on them wins him great popularity. When York is finally incorporated as Toronto in 1834, Mackenzie is elected its first mayor on a frothy wave of reform. Three years later, Mackenzie leads the failed rebellion of 1837. He pulls a band of a couple of hundred scruffy followers together at Montgomery's Tavern, north of Toronto, and prepares to march on the city. They meet the defenders of the city, fire a few shots, and disperse. Mackenzie then scarpers off to the United States, some say disguised in women's clothing, to avoid prosecution.
Rebel Thomas Sheppard, has left us a first person account of why he became a rebel in 1837 "We thought we could break the Family Compact by sending the right sort of men to parliament, but the last election before the rebellion they drowned us with crooked votes. After that Mackenzie used to tell us we would have to shoulder muskets to get our rights."
Thomas Anderson, another rebel adds: "My father was a Tory, but ...... any one who wanted to see the country happy had to be a reformer in those days. Why, you couldn't collect a cent of debt from any of the Family Compact crowd if they didn't want to pay you. You could sue and get judgment all right, but you had to pay your own costs, for no matter how good the man was, if he belonged to any of the Family Compact houses, the judgment would come back from the sheriff's officer marked nulla bona.
"All along we expected to straighten things out at the poll until Sir Francis and his crowd swamped us at the election in the summer of 1837. Why, his men distributed tickets giving titles to farms on the land shore road and the bush that no one ever knew were farms. There were no such farms... but with these tickets in their hands the hired men would go to the polls and swear that they got four dollars a year off farms that they did not own nor no one else ever did own. But these ticket holders swore enough votes through to beat us Reformers who had property in the country, and after that we saw that there was nothing before us but a fight..."
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