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1837: Cornelia De Grassi is the teenage daughter of Italian born Phillipe De Grassi, a British Officer, who rides through the bitter winter to spy on the rebels. She leaves Government House where her father volunteers his services, and goes to the wheelwright's shop beside Montgomery's Tavern. She's caught, takes off and races back to town on her horse, musket balls raging around her. Wounded in one leg, she gets back and warns the others of the size and gun power of the rebels.
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1838: Mr. And Mrs. Samuel Lount are two of the casualties of the Rebellion. Samuel Lount, one of the rebel leaders alongside Mackenzie is hung on April 12, 1838. He marches up the creaky steps to the scaffolding and tells the crowd that he regrets nothing. His wife writes after her husband's death, describing her efforts to save her husband's life. Before he is to be hanged, she acquires 35,000 signatures on a petition asking for her husband's release from the so-called "crimes" he has committed in the rebellion of 1837. But Tory Governor John Beverly Robinson is insistently deaf to her pleas.
"...The sad morning came - the victim was led forth - and the endearing husband and father fell a martyr in the cause of Canadian reform... was it fear..... that the Governor refused a defenseless woman the corpse of her murdered husband? Why then when upon my bended knee I begged the body of my husband, did he send me from his presence unsatisfied? My husband, just before his tragic death, said "That he freely forgave them (the Tories) for their cruelty, and that he was prepared to meet his God in peace."
Several years later, the government declares an amnesty. William Lyon Mackenzie returns to Toronto, is elected mayor again and helps to erect a monument to his fallen comrades. It stands today in Toronto's Necropolis.
1841: Robert Baldwin is the quiet, moderate political leader of the Reformers - a sharp contrast to Mackenzie's firry oratory and compulsiveness. Baldwin is a sad and private man, mourning the death of his beloved wife. He's a reluctant politician, but he despises the privileges of political appointment and makes heroic efforts to bring in responsible government. England sends out Lord Durham, who recommends uniting Canada as an English nation. Robert Baldwin forges a friendship with Quebec's Louis Lafontaine; together they create the foundations of a bi-cultural nation through the Bill of Union, which unites Upper and Lower Canada in 1841.
"If we all combine as Canadians to promote the good of all classes in Canada, there cannot be a doubt that under the new constitution, worked as Lord Durham proposes, the only party which would suffer would be the bureaucrats."
Toronto's Robert Baldwin sets the pattern that establishes responsible government in the entire British Empire. But through all his years of nation building, he is haunted by his dead wife - by the guilt of watching her die from a caesarian in childbirth. He carries her letters, forever caressing them in his breast pocket. Nearing his own death, he asks his doctor to perform a caesarian on his body, in order to assuage his guilt by carrying her scars into the next world. Though historians debate whether the doctor performed the procedure, the coffins of Robert Baldwin and his wife are chained together in the mausoleum.
1825: Francis Collins is the first Irish Catholic journalist in Upper Canada. In 1825 he establishes his own newspaper, The Canadian Freeman, attacking the administration of Lieutenant Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland and his Tory advisors. Like Mackenzie, Collins offers a critical voice against "petty tyranny and servility."
Collins also speaks passionately for the Irish and for other destitute immigrants huddling in slums. He connects poor living conditions with disease, and is one of the first journalists to sound the alarm about growing pollution. He asks how
"...the Magistrates can allow the horrible nuisance which now appears on the face of the bay. All the filth of the Town- dead horses, dogs, cats, manure, drop down in to the water, which is used by almost all the inhabitants on the shore."
Collin's nagging pays off - within months the city directs "scavengers" to begin garbage collection in the poorest areas.
Collins stands firm on freedom of the press. While he's no fan of Mackenzie's, when the Scotsman's printing house is ransacked, Collins defends him. "Atrocious Outrage - total destruction of the Printing Office of the Colonial Advocate. On Thursday last, a set of men holding high and honorable situations under the Colonial Government formed themselves into a conspiracy against THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS...."
It is an act of courage to criticize a government that exercises such stinging vindictiveness. The authorities indict Collins on four counts of libel, but the public supports him and he's acquitted. Two more charges are laid and Collins is finally dragged to jail to serve 45 weeks. Collins returns to the Freeman and continues denouncing the government and religious partisanship, particularly between the Orangemen and the Irish Catholics.
"...This, thank God, is a land of civil and religious liberty, where ... some of our pious country men have attempted to butcher each other, for the sake of religion... But we call upon every Irishman, be him Orangeman or Green to put down such folly as party processions, party quarrels, and religious animosity, which has been the bane and ruin of our native land, and the reproach of Irishmen all over the world.."
It is for the Irish that Collins works most vigorously. In the horrible Cholera epidemics of 1832 and '34, he nurses the immigrants in the fever sheds, and rallies around their cause with pleas of compassion. Collins himself contracts the disease. He dies in August along with his wife and eldest daughter. He is buried in St. Paul's churchyard, without a monument, tablet or inscription.
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