The Rebellions of 1837 were a pair of Canadian armed uprisings that occurred in 1837 and 1838 in response to frustrations in political reform. A key shared goal was the allowance of responsible government, which was eventually achieved in the incident's aftermath.
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The rebellions started in Lower and Upper Canada. The Lower Canada Rebellion was a larger and more sustained conflict by French Canadian and English Canadian rebels against British colonial government. The Upper Canada Rebellion was an abortive uprising in Upper Canada against Upper Canada oligarchy, the Family Compact, followed by a series of raids, skirmishes, and other small actions over the next year, many of them launched from the United States.
The rebellion in Lower Canada began first, in November 1837, and was led by many leaders such as Wolfred Nelson, Louis-Joseph Papineau, and Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan.
The Lower-Canada rebellion probably inspired the much shorter rebellion in Upper Canada led by William Lyon Mackenzie in December. In addition, there were other grievances in Upper Canada. Settlers resented the gifts of land and official status to the Anglican Church to the exclusion of Roman Catholics, Methodists, and other religions. In addition, there were tensions caused by mass immigration from the United States, particularly in the western areas.
While the initial rebellion in Upper Canada ended quickly with the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern, many of the rebels (including Mackenzie) fled to the United States. They used it as a base for launching further raids into Canada, in cooperation with American Hunters' Lodges. The raids did not end until the rebels and Hunters were defeated at the decisive Battle of the Windmill, nearly a year after the first defeat near Montgomery's Tavern.
Those rebels who were arrested in Upper Canada following the 1837 uprisings were put on trial, with most being found guilty of insurrection against the Crown, and several of the ring-leaders were publicly hanged; most notably Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews. Almost as severe was the sentencing of 100 Canadian rebels and American sympathizers to transportation for life in Australia's prison colonies. Their sufferings and adventures are dramatized in the fact-based book, "JEREMY KANE: A Canadian historical adventure novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion and its brutal aftermath in the Australian penal colonies." http://www.asid.info The root cause of resentment in Upper Cananda was not so much against distant rulers in Britain, but rather against the corruption and injustice by local politicians -- the so-called "Family Compact." However, the rebels were not really convicted because their views aligned with the liberalism of the United States, and thus caused some kind of offense to the Tory values of the Canadian colonies. Rather, as revealed in the ruling of Chief Justice Sir John Robinson, a Lockean justification was given for the prisoners' condemnation, and not a Burkean one: the Crown, as protector of the lives, liberty, and prosperity of its subjects could "legitimately demand allegiance to its authority." Robinson went on to say that those who preferred republicanism over monarchism were free to emigrate, and thus the participants in the uprisings were guilty of treason.[1]
After the rebellions died down, more moderate reformers, such as the political partners Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, gained credibility as an alternative voice to the radicals. They proved to be influential when the British government sent Lord Durham, a prominent British reformer, to investigate the cause of the troubles. Among the recommendations in his report was the establishment of responsible government for the colonies, one of the rebels' original demands. Durham also recommended the merging of Upper and Lower Canada into a single political unit, which became the nucleus for modern-day Canada. More controversially, he recommended the government-sponsored assimilation of French Canadians to the English language and culture.
In 1937, exactly one century after the Rebellion, the names of William Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau were applied to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion or the Mac-Paps, a battalion of officially unrecognised Canadian volunteers who fought on the Republican side in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In memory of their heritage, the group fought to the rallying cry "The Spirit of 1837 Lives on!"
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