Patriot Chronicles: Battle by the Pen-William Lyon Mackenzie’s Letter to the People of St. Lawrence County, Part 1

Introduction:

William Lyon Mackenzie is best known as the leader of the 1837 Upper Canadian Rebellion. Yet his role in the subsequent 1838 Rebellion, or Patriot War, is considered to be less significant. However, Mackenzie was in charge of Patriot activities on Navy Island from December 13, 1837 to January 14, 1838, and it is believed that he helped to plan the Hickory Island incursion on February 22, 1838. After these two events, Mackenzie had a falling out with prominent Patriot leaders. He disassociated himself from these men, and he had no further direct involvement in the planning or implementation of any additional armed and illegal incursions from United States into Upper Canada by Patriot forces.

Instead of using the sword, Mackenzie took up the pen and supported the Patriot cause as the editor of Mackenzie’s Gazette. This weekly newspaper was published in Rochester, New York. From its inception on May 12, 1838 until the printing of its last issue on December 23, 1840, Mackenzie regularly reported on matters related to the Patriot War, and provided a positive bent towards the actions of his former colleagues and comrades in arms.*

Of particular interest to residents of St. Lawrence County then and now, is the following letter which was published in the August 25, 1838 issue of Mackenzie’s Gazette.

The Letter:

“SOCRATIC SKETCHES IN 1838. A LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF ST. LAWRENCE COUNTY, N.Y.

Men of St. Lawrence!

Often I have seen a crafty man of law, when he had undertaken to defend a bad cause and wished the jury to think of any and every thing but the main point they had met to decide, summarily dispose of the true question at issue, and powerfully appeal to them upon such other matters of minor importance as he judged the most likely to captivate their attention and create division among them for the benefit of his worthless client. Such is the case of Socrates Sherman and the nine worthies of Ogdensburgh**, in their epistle formally addressed to me, but in reality meant for you. Of a national bank or independent treasury they say little or nothing – my violated pledge, Stone and Daniels’ attacks, Mr. Buchanan’s frontier bill, Mr. Van Buren’s frontier policy, equal rights to Canada, and Liberty as far north at least as Hudson’s Bay, are, with them, every thing – their patriotism, how strong it is! their zeal for ‘the oppressed Canadians’, how powerful! Read their letter, and read mine. It’s fair play to give you both.

Men of St. Lawrence! Permit me state the question fairly. We have all a deep interest in the issue. Your forefathers, born and bred as I was, subjects of the King of England, shook off his yoke, abjured all allegiance to crowns and sceptres, appealed to the generous and the brave of all nations to aid their nubile designs of establishing government in America founded upon the heaven-born principle of equal rights, justice to all; and after a struggle of many years, in which the generation then living suffered innumerable hardships for your sakes, victory crowned their efforts, the hero who had led them forth in battle against the armies of their ancient tyrant, became their Governor, and their country the asylum of the unfortunate and persecuted throughout the earth.

The nations of Europe, worn out with ages of war and woe and wailing, priestly intolerance and royal rapacity, looked wistfully to the west for a happy home to their children, and Free, Republican, Glorious, Generous America, the land of Franklin and Washington, became in truth and sincerity the glory and admiration and hope of the habitable world. The history of your country was translated into every tongue, and I am but one of Europe’s millions who have delighted to dwell in my earliest and most gladsome days, on the bold and chivalrous deeds of the men of other years, who feared not to grapple with the hosts of Europe’s despots who sought not the spoils which usually appertain to the victor, but strove to rear a home for ‘the poor oppressed honest man,’ in which opinion should be free as his native air, and where the humblest laborer as he looked upon the children of his love could console the wife of his bosom with the prospect before them, and remind her, that ‘If Lords and Dukes had their entailed estates in Europe, the American citizen had a land of brothers, to him and his heirs forever.’

I delight to peruse the records which unfold the principles, hopes and aspirations of the great and enlightened statesmen who were called into the service of the human race by the events of your social revolution – and to picture to myself their deathbed scenes full of confidence that the loved land which they had periled life and all its enjoyments to raise highest in the scale of moral excellence and intellectual enjoyment, would be so justly and worthily ruled and governed by their honored successors, that the Canadas and other colonies on this vast continent would hasten to knock at the portals of your Congress for admission into the Union, while even to repeat  the name of the great republic would cause tyranny to turn pale from end to end of the habitable world, in days when ‘The harsh dull drama would cease And man be happy yet.’

Men of St. Lawrence!

The people of England cry, ‘Give us the ballot that we may overthrow that tyranny of titled rank, monopoly, and associated wealth which is crushing our people to the dust.’ They ask for universal suffrage, that they may be able to concentrate in legislative halls the force of united national sentiment upon those great questions which appertain to the public welfare of their priest-ridden, bank-ridden, hereditary legislation ridden land. The engines of moral power which they seek are unspeakable blessings you already possess. With universal suffrage and the ballot already in your hands, you have only to be united in your wills and the last vestige of tyranny will flee before you. England, Ireland, and Scotland has still to contend against ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal’- you are rid of these. They have to struggle with worldly endowed and established churches or priesthoods, you have something of this kind growing up among you too, but very slowly. Tithes, courts ecclesiastical, a bench of bishops in the Senate of the Union, a people believing one religion and forced at the bayonet’s point to uphold another. From these grievances you are free.

But there is another dividing line between English Despotism and American Freedom, and it is important that I should mention it. You delegate for brief and well defined periods a portion of the power of the State to presidents, Congressmen, and state officers, reserving to yourselves the check of the ballot box if their conduct should appear to you not to have squared with the well defined landmarks of the written and amended constitutions of your most deliberate choice. No so, Great Britain and Ireland. Their chief magistrate may be, and often is, an old and worn out debauchee, trained from his youth upwards in all the vile and deceitful practices of the European Courts - or she may be, as now, a little girl in her teens, anointed with oil, and set up ‘by God,’ as the Archbishop of Canterbury told her, to rule her people - that people a hundred millions of men, women and children, or about a tenth of the whole inhabitants now in the world.

It is not long since $600,000 were taken out of the public chest to pay the cost of putting a golden toy, which cost the nation a million more, on the head of one of the worst men that ever lived. George IV., a man whose court was indecency and lewdness personified – he soon gave up the ghost, and his brother William was anointed at an expense of the laboring classes of another million one hundred thousand dollars – William, poor feeble character, held the reins a very few years, and now we have Victoria crowned at an expense, from the treasury of England, of only $342,000. And this goggled-eyed little daughter of a pensioned Duke and pensioned Duchess, is by the grace of God (so they say), defender of the faith, and head of the church by law established. Ruling by divine command, it is alleged that she can do no wrong, and propped by 100,000 hireling bayonets on the hand and the tongues of 15,000 established priests on the other, without any written or popular constitution as a landmark of the people’s rights, her whole life is employed in giving the color of law to cruelty, oppression, tyranny, and persecution.

About one thousand persons, members of parliament, share with her courtiers the plunder of the people, and by farce of an annual vote of the money that upholds the army and the navy, delude the miserable people that some remains of liberty are left them, because, say they, the power of the purse and the sword are not united. The cant phrase has become the watch-word of faction here, and old Recorder Riker, the conservative, when he set up for Mayor to divide the people and help in Clark of ‘the lucky lottery’ to the mayoralty here, was loud in his denunciation  of the union of the power of the sword and of the purse. Doubtless he laughed in his sleeve at the dupes who believed him, few though they were.

The power of the press in England is not free as with you. The paper used by printers is taxed six cents per lb. – it is then taxed a second time by stamps two cents per sheet – and it is yet the third time, thirty to fifty cents to government for every advertisement published, and the tax repeated at every re-insertion of that advertisement. The bulk of the people are very poor – the great brokers, bankers and traders very rich – hence the taxed press of England is used as a means of blindfolding the people, of dividing them into parties, of distracting their attention from the great objects of moral reform they so much need. Hence it is that perhaps a hundred thousand persons leave annually for America, hopeless of their country, and weary of its woes.
And Messrs. Socrates Sherman, A.B. James & Co., of the whig firm in Ogdensburgh, are perfectly willing to receive them.

They have no objections that their country should be ruled by an English Bank of the United States, that every body should wear English clothes, that English editors here should puff foreign ruled and owned banks, that English mercantile firms should swallow up the most profitable commerce of America, and that Irish, English, and Scotch laborers should be the Gibeonites of the land, to dig canals and railroads, cut grain and grass, carry mortar, chop firewood, officate as porters in groceries, or as draymen, or ditchers. But if perchance an editor who has seen and felt what English Government is, should print a letter to his Canadian countrymen, conveying his impressions as to the working of the foul utterances of Europe upon the political system in America, then the whole whig pack set up the whoop and hollow of alien, traitor, and ingrate, and instead of meeting him with argument, yelp out in true federal chorus that whig patronage and whig generosity had induced nine worthies of Ogdensburgh to receive nine papers each weekly for the space of nearly four months, pay $8 for these nine papers, not quite $1 each, and about the end of the term, kindly conclude to insult the editor by the document that I submit to you, because he had stated his sincere belief that the government of Andrew Jackson and the administration of martin Van Buren have been faithful and true to the best interests of the wise and prudent American people whose choice they were, and that upon their measures depend the regeneration of Canada and the salvation of the Union.

Footnotes:

*A whole series of Patriot newspapers sprang up in American border-states during this period. Some of the following titles were paid for or financially supported by local Hunters’ Lodges: The Budget (Conneaut, OH), Freeman’s Advocate (Lockport, NY), The Patriot Friend (Painesville, OH), The Patriot Express (Syracuse, NY), The North American (Swanton, VT), The Spirit of 76 and Theller’s Daily Republican Advocate (Detroit, MI), Canadian Patriot (Derby, VT), Bald Eagle (Cleveland, OH), Lewiston Telegraph, Oswego Bulletin, and the Buffalonian (Buffalo, NY). Other newspapers that had sympathy for and promoted the Patriot cause included; the [Watertown] Jeffersonian, Detroit Morning Post, Detroit Free Press, Buffalo Daily Mercury, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Mackenzie’s Gazette, which was initially established as a newspaper concerned with defending the Patriot cause while providing news from Canada and the United Kingdom, fit into this second category. For more information about Patriot newspapers, see Stephen R.I. Smith, “The Patriot Press and Their Paper Tiger, 1836-1842,” Ontario History (Autumn, 2023), v. 115, # 2.

**The community was known as “the Maple City” and a city form of government was adopted on April 27, 1868. The spelling of the name Ogdensburgh was then changed to drop the 'h', and is known today as Ogdensburg.

End, Part I. Notes and Bibliography follow in Part II.

By John C. Carter

Dr. John C. Carter is a Sauble Beach/East York, Ontario based museologist, historian and author. He has researched and published articles about the 1838 Upper Canadian Rebellion/Patriot War for over 40 years. This is the twentieth article that he has written about the 1838 Upper Canadian Rebellion/Patriot War, which frequently appeared online in Thousand Islands Life Magazine, since 2010. Dr. Carter can be contacted at drjohncarter@bell.net.

[Be sure to click here and here to see that complete list of Dr. Carter's articles on the Upper Canadian Rebellion/Patriot War and links to learn more about the history of Ontario and Northern New York.]