"It did not take John Beverly Robinson long to conclude that, in the aftermath of the Rebellion, oligarchic authority now rested on a fragile and increasingly unstable foundation. He bemoaned the fact that the scruples and first principles of his beloved gentrified order seemed to have vanished in the conduct of public affairs. The old values and loyalties, indeed the British connection to Empire and its stabilities of governance, seemed to count for less and less among what remained of the Compact layer of patriarchal rulers. If Robinson would indeed oppose the drift of the times, he often privately despaired about the seeming inevitability of the displacement of a way of life, a style of paternal rule that demanded what could no longer be secured, acquiescence and unquestioning loyalty. In the face of Lord Durham’s report, which he judged “highly injurious” to “the state of public feeling in Upper Canada,” he worried about the fate of “men of judgment and right feeling.” The theatrical politicization of life in Upper Canada, culminating in the drama of reform and reaction in the 1830s, helped write finis to the undisputed right to rule of Robinson and those for whom he harboured a regard that, in its convictions and honour, could not be reproduced cavalierly. A way of political being, constituted in a particular kind of economy and lived in the vise-grip of patriarchal expanse and limitation, ended forever with the 1830s. The John Beverley Robinsons of Upper Canada knew it.
Allan Napier MacNab, staunch Tory defender of King & Country in 1837, provides an ironic comment on this passing of the ancien régime, one in which loyalty and honour figured forcefully, at the very moment that its time had both been successfully defended and historically defeated. Awarded with a Knighthood in recognition of his gallant defence of Her Majesty’s colonial interests, MacNab appeared, in the aftermath of 1837–38, to have reached the paternal pinnacle of influence and reverence. When his militia men paid him homage, presenting MacNab with a sword valued at 100 guineas, the old commander responded politely with patriarchal gratitude: “While living I shall cherish this Gift, among the richest prizes of my life – and dying, shall bequeath it, as the most venerated heir loom which a father could transmit to his Children.” But behind the public façade of familial grace lay the private recognition of the new realities, put to popular doggerel by Charley Corncobb, “poet laureate of reform”:
Toryism’s sun is set Tis down, tis gone forever Some say that it will start up yet, But will it? Nonsense, never.
As MacNab was feted by the Upper Canadian Assembly, he scrawled on the back of its printed testimonial the terse comment, “Not worth a fart.”
The ways in which that harsh judgment were lived by those who saw patriarchal authority undermined to the point of inevitable defeat have not really registered with historians, but the wounds were deep, and they cut across lines of class in ways that complicated the politics of alternative in Upper Canada in the 1830s. There is perhaps no more dramatic an indication of this than Robert Baldwin. Moderate and judicious in his politics, he recoiled from much of the popular theatre of antagonism to authority, just as he rebelled against the aribitrariness of oligarchy and compact rule. His was, ironically, one of the voices that would be heard loudest in the emergence of modern political institutions and the procedures of civil society, Baldwin’s name linked unmistakably with Responsible Government and the respectable reform of political life that flowed out of the defeat of the Rebellion, channeled in reasoned constitutionalist direction. Yet Baldwin, too, lived within the bounds of a disintegrating patriarchy, albeit of an extreme, personalized sort. By 1851 he had come to question where all the agitation of the 1830s had led. He complained bitterly of the “reckless disregard of first principles” that he judged to be running rampant in the seismic political shifts of his time. He was apprehensive about “widespread social disorganization with all of its fearful consequences.” “If the sober mind of the country is not prepared to protect our institutions,” he reflected, there was little hope for the future. As he made his exit from the political stage, a Reformer from the district of Sharon, represented in the legislature by Baldwin, wrote to the chastened Radical, William Lyon Mackenzie, offering a prescription for success in the changed political times of the 1850s: “The watchword is to be no lawyers, more farmers and machinists.” It would not quite work out that way – barristers would remain commonplace in politics – but that the matter could be articulated in such a counterposed language of class spoke tellingly about the accelerating pace of socioeconomic change.
Baldwin stood astride the class divisions of the epoch, and their uncertain outcome troubled him greatly. One critical institution – patriarchy – was obviously centrally placed in Baldwin’s appreciation. It cut deeply into the political and social relations of Upper Canada, and while it affected women, the young, and those incarcerated in the dependencies of class most adversely, it registered elsewhere as well. Baldwin was predeceased by his wife, who was also his cousin, and throughout the last years of his life he carried a written memorandum in his waistcoat pocket. It stated that should he be carried away suddenly, he was not to be buried before an incision was made into the cavity of his abdomen. It was Robert “Responsible Government” Baldwin’s last wish that he should go to his grave, his God, and eternity bearing the same surgical wound as his wife, the scar of a Caesarian section.
The power of patriarchy left its mark, then, on the bodies of those who lived within its defining authority, in the terror of loyalist repression as well as in the theatrics of dissent. It scarred the politics of popular radicalism, which never quite shed its indebtedness to the politics of a civil authority rooted in understandings of familial duty. In the hybrid, transplanted world of Upper Canadian politics in the 1830s this meant that the aspirations of those who so often staged a counter-theatre of insurrection and rebellion were destined in the short run to be thwarted. But in the longer unfolding of Canadian political culture, the blows against patriarchy and paternalism, first struck on the ambiguous anvil of class, did indeed sound the death knell of the ancien régime. Popular radicalism made history in the 1830s, if not in ways that it either entirely understood or proved able to articulate with political precision."
- Bryan Palmer, "Popular Radicalism and the Theatrics of Rebellion: The Hybrid Discourse of Dissent in Upper Canada in the 1830s," in Nancy Christie, Transatlantic subjects: ideas, institutions, and social experience in post-revolutionary British North America. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. p. 427-429
