William Lyon Mackenzie

Canadian journalist and politician

• Born: March 12, 1795
• Birthplace: Springfield, Dundee, Forfarshire, Scotland
• Died: August 28, 1861
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Working to establish for English Canada a political entity independent of British colonialism, Mackenzie devoted his life to a critique of English political authority in Canada and a demand for redress of grievances by English Canadians.

Early Life

William Lyon Mackenzie was the only child of Daniel and Elizabeth Mackenzie. His mother—who had been born Elizabeth Chalmers—an austere, demanding, and strong-willed adherent of the Presbyterian faith, was in her forties when she married. His father was in his mid-twenties, a weaver by trade with a reputation for carousing and pursuing life’s pleasures. They were married on May 8, 1794, at Dundee, and three weeks after the birth of their only child, after having become blind, Daniel died, on April 9, 1795.

William Mackenzie’s mother instilled in her son great pride in his family, tracing it back to the wars of the Scottish clans and participation with Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender) in the critical battle at Culloden that culminated in English domination of Scotland. Both paternal and maternal grandfathers were named Colin Mackenzie, and William Lyon carried with him the belief that his family was specially endowed, but that its fortunes had been denied because of the English dominance following 1745. Throughout his life, he cultivated an attachment to the farmers and working classes while presuming a status equal to the wellborn and wealthy.

The untimely death of Mackenzie’s father pushed his mother into poverty, compelling her to sell personal items from her dowry and the clothing of her late husband. Nevertheless, she sustained a fierce independence and faith in her religion, and strove for the education of her son. The youthful Mackenzie, always small in stature and reckless in nature, became a rowdy while at the same time he was a resolute student. He mimicked his teachers and haunted libraries and bookstalls. He pushed himself vigorously to gain attention throughout his life. From the age of five, when he entered school, until the day he died, Mackenzie found himself fighting the odds.

In his early teens, Mackenzie became a regular in the commercial reading room of the Dundee Advertiser, where he was the youngest member. He began to list by topic, number, and description all the works that he read. This reading continued until he arrived in Canada at the age of twenty. Divinity, geography, history and biography, poetry and drama, science and agriculture, and 352 novels, all were included in his 957-book reading list. Even his mother registered concern that his continual reading might disturb him. Nevertheless, Mackenzie persisted with his eclectic studies throughout his life, and his habit of filing away information and ideas was to sustain him in his newspaper work and in political debate.

At a scientific society, Mackenzie met and became friends with Edward Lesslie and his son James, both of whom were to become associated with him at various times and in various enterprises in Canada. With some help from friends, Mackenzie and his mother operated a store and lending library in the village of Alyth just north of Dundee, but the business failed and they returned to Dundee. Mackenzie also found time to travel to London and to France, where he did some work with newspapers, living a somewhat dissipated life of gambling and drinking and fathering an illegitimate son. The child, named James, was taken in by Mackenzie’s mother, who brought him along when she later joined her son in the Americas. Mackenzie was later to marry a former schoolmate, Isabel Baxter, who would bear him thirteen children, only seven of whom survived childhood. The family, including his first son, was always central to Mackenzie’s life and work.

In 1820, Mackenzie traveled to Canada with the prospect of setting up a business. Mackenzie had sworn off gambling and loose living and served notice to his creditors that he would make good his accounts, a promise that he kept. Arriving in Quebec, he immediately took a job as an accountant in Montreal, where he worked only for several weeks. He proceeded to set up a pharmacy and bookstore with a partner in the town of York and shortly thereafter opened a general store as a second enterprise in the town of Dundas, farther west. This second business also included a circulating library, and Mackenzie felt comfortable enough economically to marry. Given the dearth of women in frontier Canada, the choice of a bride was probably encouraged by his mother, who escorted Isabel to Canada.

Mackenzie’s ambitions were still not realized, however, and he chose to end his business partnership and open a store of his own. His alert, agile mind did not seem suited to the mercantile life, for despite a fetish for efficiency and careful accounting, the mundane demands of a storekeeper’s duty did not satisfy him. Mackenzie decided that his perceptions of society and government needed to reach an audience that could never be reached by a shop owner, despite the material comforts such a business guaranteed.

During the early nineteenth century, Canada was not a country that rewarded men of enterprise and ideas; in fact, British Canada was developing the same class structures as those found in Great Britain. Those who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars or the War of 1812 on the British side had been granted land and economic privileges in Canada that set them apart from immigrants such as Mackenzie. The town of York, which was to become the city of Toronto, was the capital of British Upper Canada, and, despite its small size, it was the center of English rule in North America.

The privileged families of Canada were a small and immensely powerful group perhaps best symbolized by the St. James Church and its powerful parishioners, which included the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, Major General Sir Peregrine Maitland. Maitland’s father-in-law was the duke of Richmond, governor in chief of all the colonies in North America. Presiding over the church was John Strachan, the first bishop of Toronto, who took seriously the obligation that the church was the center of Great Britain in Canada. Lands, schools, marriages, customs, and laws were subject to his administrative guidance. The leaders of both court and Parliament in Upper Canada were integral parts of the force of the church in the perpetuation of the Family Compact.

Dissenters from this conservative British contract of vested power did exist. Some, such as Dr. William Baldwin, stood in opposition politically while accepting Anglicanism as their faith. Men such as Mackenzie, a Presbyterian, however, were privy to neither the authority of that faith nor the economic, social, and political power. Had the dominant society of the day accepted him as one of its own, his rebellious career would never have developed. Given Mackenzie’s background and the conditions he confronted in a developing colony that seemed to hold great promise for intelligent, aggressive, and ambitious settlers, his later actions can be understood.

At the top, British rule in Upper Canada, aside from the lieutenant governor, consisted of an appointed Executive Council of leading citizens who held acceptable ideas as to the direction the colony should take and whose advice generally guided their patron in Great Britain. This council was not responsible to the public or to any legislative body. Members were selected carefully and almost never asked to resign. As in Great Britain, British Canada had an upper house called the Legislative Council (modeled after the House of Lords), whose members were appointed by the lieutenant governor for life. Some members, such as Bishop Strachan, were members of both the Executive and the Legislative councils.

The House of Assembly, the lower house, was the forum for the common citizens and encouraged avenues for dissent. This dissent, however, was often negated by the power of the government to distribute funds to various troublesome areas. Though the sympathies of the majority of the people might lie with their elected delegates to the lower house, the conservatives still dominated Canada’s policy. Expenditures were controlled by forces over which the lower house had no control. This condition allowed for the abuse of authority by the dominant Tory elements who were not accountable to any constituency and for the irresponsibility of critics and reformers who could eschew responsibility for promises that they had no power to fulfill. The paternal rule of the governing class became the focus of Mackenzie’s new crusade.

The ending of Mackenzie’s business partnership was not easy, and Mackenzie found it difficult to survive at first when he moved in 1823 to Queenston, in southern Ontario. He again started a store and attracted the help of Robert Randall, a member of the assembly. In Queenston, Mackenzie began the publication of his first and most outstanding newspaper, the Colonial Advocate , on May 18, 1824. The paper sought to influence elections to the assembly by comparing American political practices and institutions with those of Upper Canada.

Although Mackenzie did not challenge the British controls directly, agencies of the government, such as the post office, worked against him. Mackenzie immediately transferred his operations to York, and in November of 1824, he escalated his attacks against the Tory authority. His paper had some immediate success, but a competitive newspaper was begun, Canadian Freeman , which supported a more moderate approach to reform. Some historians believe that this paper was funded by conservative elements hoping to destroy Mackenzie’s influence.

Undaunted, Mackenzie purchased new equipment and continued his forays against the establishment, which in turn escalated its pressure to remove Mackenzie. In the spring of 1826, he left Canada for Lewiston, New York, to avoid arrest for debt. During his absence, a gang of influential Tory citizens dressed as Indians destroyed his office and press in broad daylight. The magistrates did nothing to protect Mackenzie’s property, and Mackenzie returned from New York to file suit and win compensation. With his settlement, he immediately paid off his creditors while capitalizing on his role as a martyr to free speech. The Tories, though chastened, resumed their harassment.

Mackenzie next took up the cause of American immigrants in Canada who sought the same rights as English settlers. Randall carried Mackenzie’s petitions to London in 1827, an act that influenced the Colonial Office to order the upper legislature to guarantee full rights to Americans living in Canada. In the same year, Mackenzie joined forces with a Methodist leader to protest attempts by Strachan to use funds from the sale of clergy lands to build his proposed King’s College.

Mackenzie declared his candidacy for the assembly and engaged in direct correspondence with reform elements in both England and Lower Canada. Mackenzie used his newspaper effectively, publishing what he called a “black list” of his opponents. He won election on the Reform ticket that controlled the assembly but missed being elected Speaker. He now had a forum from which he could attack monopoly and vested interests. He argued against corporations dependent on public monies, against the practice of having an Anglican as chaplain of the assembly, and against the increasing indebtedness of the government.

In 1829, Mackenzie found time to go to the United States, where he observed at firsthand the enthusiasm surrounding the election of Andrew Jackson and the anticipation for an enlarged democracy. Mackenzie was struck by the economy of government in the United States and even admired the use of party patronage, which he hoped might be a means to revamp the Family Compact. He met Jackson personally and was intrigued by the twin ideas of hard money and antibanking monopolies. The success of a radical politician such as Jackson seemed to represent encouraged Mackenzie.

Life’s Work

After Mackenzie visited the United States, his career took a new direction. Upon his return to Canada in 1830, he soon found that the legislature was dissolved because of the death of King William IV. A new governor of Upper Canada had replaced Maitland, and this new English leader, Sir John Colborne, worked to increase the numbers of English by financed immigration. He used the upper house to block legislation sought by the assembly that in turn weakened Mackenzie’s reform group. During the 1830 elections, the Mackenzie forces lost their majority, gaining but twenty of the fifty-one seats.

Dismayed by what he regarded as tampering with the democratic process, Mackenzie gave up any pretense of association with conservative tradition. He challenged the church-state relationship while joining St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, which ironically had been established by Presbyterian Tories who also attended St. James, as was expected of members of the government. Mackenzie constantly attacked the government, which was in some disarray internally because of the governor’s attempts to change the upper house without the support of either the Executive Council or Strachan. Mackenzie was joined by other reformers in trying to gain control of certain revenues.

Attempts were made to remove Mackenzie while he traveled throughout Upper Canada with petitions listing grievances against the government, communicated again with reform elements in Lower Canada, which enraged Upper Canadian Tories, and encouraged the participation of new immigrants—especially the Americans and the Irish, who were enthusiastic about the attention he brought to them. His Colonial Advocate attacked conservative privilege; the Tories countered with petitions of their own and voted to expel him from the assembly. Hundreds of people stormed the assembly demanding that the governor dissolve Parliament. They were refused, but the people gained their revenge in a by-election that gave Mackenzie an overwhelming victory in January of 1832.

Five days later, the Tories expelled Mackenzie again, and the province was in civil disarray. Opposing groups clashed physically in the streets, meetings were disrupted, religious groups clashed openly, and in Hamilton a band of hoodlums was hired by a magistrate to attack Mackenzie. He decided to travel to Great Britain in the spring of 1832 to present his view of the situation to British authorities. While there, he wrote several articles for the London Morning Chronicle and drew up a document called Sketches of Canada and the United States (1833) for presentation to the people of Great Britain.

Mackenzie had once again been returned to the assembly, and while he was abroad, the Tories again expelled him for a third time. This time he was reelected by acclamation, much to the rage of his enemies. Their anger was heightened further when Lord Goderich, British colonial secretary, sent the governor a dispatch advising financial and political reform and an end to the Tory crusade against Mackenzie. The upper house refused to receive the dispatch, placing them in the difficult position of rejecting their superiors.

In the assembly, a close vote on the issue was approved, but Mackenzie was deprived of his vote and a call for a new election was refused. Learning of this, the colonial secretary dismissed both the attorney general and the solicitor general over Governor Colbourne’s objections. The Mackenzie family now left London in triumph to tour Scotland, England, and France. It was a short-lived victory, however, for in April, 1833, a more conservative colonial secretary came into power and all that Mackenzie had accomplished was undone. Frustrated and in despair, he dropped the word “colonial” from his newspaper’s title. He returned to Canada in late summer and in December he was again expelled from the assembly, only to be returned later in the same month.

Mackenzie now took advantage of the incorporation of York as the new city of Toronto by leading a slate of reformers to victory in the city elections. Elected as alderman and gaining a majority over the Tories, the redoubtable Mackenzie was chosen as the first mayor of Toronto. The Tory opposition sought to unseat him from that post and succeeded in early 1835, but meanwhile, in the fall of 1834, Mackenzie and the reformers again won a majority in the assembly, despite his publication of a letter that all but called for colonial independence.

In November, Mackenzie stopped publication of the Advocate, turning over its assets to a fellow reformer in the assembly. He then took on a committee assignment and in three months compiled a devastating record of grievances against past government administrations and a list of proposed remedies. A larger problem was a new lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, whose conservatism was a throwback to the 1820’s. He clashed openly with reformers in the assembly, dissolved the legislature, and openly campaigned on the issue of loyalty to the Crown. In July, 1836, Mackenzie met defeat at the polls.

Enraged at the injustice and corruption that he discovered following the election, Mackenzie immediately started another newspaper, called the Constitution . Given the circumstances, this paper was not overly radical, as it called only for specific constitutional change in Canada. This moderation was to change dramatically during the early months of 1837. Great Britain had begun to tighten its grip on Lower (French) Canada with new resolutions that took away all powers that the assembly in that region had over the executive authority of the governor. Mackenzie foresaw the same thing happening to Upper Canada and now began an outright protest. He moved about the province making speeches, raising funds, rallying people against the tyranny of the government, and proposing an alliance of the two Canadas in a common front. Some of his adherents began military training, while the Tories and the Orange Order to which many belonged harassed and physically attacked Mackenzie and his growing constituency.

Mackenzie counted on two things to work in favor of a successful revolution: the absence of the military, which had been sent to Lower Canada, and the belief that the mere threat of a massive assault on the government would avoid hostilities and bring capitulation. Lower Canada’s rebellion was successfully under way, but Mackenzie had little communication with their movement. Nevertheless, he suggested a common rebellion against Great Britain.

The date was set for the march on Toronto, and on November 15, Mackenzie published a constitution for the new government. He hired a former colonel, Anthony Van Egmond, to head the revolutionary army and wrote a declaration of independence to be distributed prior to the march. It was not lost on Mackenzie that Upper Canada was far more conservative, despite the general dissatisfaction with conservative rule, than Lower Canada. He planned to use large demonstrations of possible force to compel the government to capitulate. His plans began to unravel on the eve of the march because of a lack of communication with the various groups. Unanticipated resistance from conservative riflemen also threw the movement into disarray. In the end, the grand citizen rebellion dissipated into the countryside and many participants made their way to the United States.

After an abortive attack by the regrouped forces failed, despite some American help, Mackenzie was joined by his wife in Buffalo, where he was arrested for violating American neutrality. Seeing the futility of further hostilities, he brought the rest of his family to the United States and settled in New York. Old friends sent him what money they could, but poverty haunted his family at every turn. In 1839 he was found guilty on the neutrality violation and sentenced to a fine of ten dollars and a term of eighteen months in prison. He was still in the newspaper business, having founded Mackenzie’s Gazette, and tried to run the paper from his Monroe County prison cell. The death of his mother while he was in prison was especially difficult. He believed that he had lost a guide and an anchor. He was pardoned in the spring of 1840 and gave up his paper.

Mackenzie’s fierce independence demanded that any return to Canada be on his terms, and his old associates kept him informed of the changing conditions in the province. He took advantage of the new amnesty extended to the rebels of 1837 by the reform-minded government of Robert Baldwin in 1851. He wrote for his old friend James Lesslie’s paper and also for the Niagara Mail while trying to make up his mind about returning permanently. Mackenzie took up residency, and in the spring of 1851 he was elected to the provincial parliament. He defeated one of the future powerbrokers in Canadian politics, George Brown . In office, Mackenzie was still effective in galvanizing attention against patronage, corruption, monopoly, sales of church lands, and use of public monies for church colleges. Ironically, his investigations forced the fall of the Baldwin government and he joined Lesslie in an attack on phony reformers. He alienated associates by exposing their culpability in passing legislation that increased debt. He even broke temporarily with Lesslie over attempts to edit a critical letter dealing with Crown Lands policy.

Mackenzie was still a figure to be reckoned with, and reformers sought him out to lead a true reform party. Mackenzie insisted on independence of thought and action, even turning down general editorship of his paper, the Message , with two others because stock ownership would be shared with investors who might compromise him. His work was an inspiration to his colleagues, who began to raise a Homestead Fund in his honor. Thomas D’Arcy McGee called him “the oldest living sentinel of public liberty in Canada.” Mackenzie’s newspaper began to take on a more conciliatory tone in his old age as he turned away from the idea of creating an independent constitutional state. He resigned his seat in the legislature, declined offers to run for the Legislative Council, and further refused to run for the mayor’s office of Toronto. He began to renew friendships with old adversaries and shortly before his death, on August 28, 1861, entertained the notion of running again for the legislature.

Significance

William Lyon Mackenzie stood as the conscience of a country that was not ready to realize the independence of people, place, and political institutions. The things Mackenzie sought for Canada would have reordered the status of Canada and perhaps accomplished an eventual unity of British and French regions. Mackenzie was a radical in every sense of the word. Within him there was a curious admixture that might be regarded as the birthright of the Scots—a durable distrust of the British, an intense devotion to Scotland, and a detached view of Europe.

It is not certain whether Mackenzie ever shared his countrymen’s concern for the United States. Mackenzie trusted the spirit of democracy that he observed in the age of Andrew Jackson. Mackenzie’s identification with the American politics of democracy was generally unacceptable, despite the real concerns for the corruption and the venality of the colonial administration and the Family Compact system. Mackenzie’s words and actions struck at the heart of the issue of national identity. Being American to him meant more than mere geography. His life was consumed with the matter of what it meant to be a Canadian. Mackenzie was an important and even uncomfortable presence in Canada’s struggle from colony to nation. He will endure as one of its true giants of democracy.

Bibliography

Craig, Gerald. Upper Canada: The Formative Years. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963. One of the first serious studies of the Family Compact and English colonial tradition. Critical of Mackenzie while praising conservative principles.

Dent, John Charles. The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion. 2 vols. Toronto: C. B. Robinson, 1885. Particularly harsh on Mackenzie; a debunking of all that Mackenzie represented.

Flint, David. William Lyon Mackenzie: Rebel Against Authority. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971. Provides the broad chronology of Mackenzie’s career but does not develop much of the politics or philosophy of the man. Has a useful bibliography.

Kilbourn, William. The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada. Toronto: Clark Irwin, 1956. Perhaps the most readily available work on Mackenzie. Centers on interpreting the character of the protagonist rather than assessing all areas of controversy surrounding the man and his times.

Le Suer, William Dawson. William Lyon Mackenzie: A Reinterpretation. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979. Harshly critical of Mackenzie’s career. Le Suer was a conservative in the Victorian tradition who opposed representative government as being nothing but partisan party-oriented and antithetical to the national concerns of Canada.

Lindsey, Charles. The Life and Times of William Lyon Mackenzie. Toronto: P. Randall, 1862. Defends Mackenzie, portraying him as a valiant reformer and promoter of an independent Canadian tradition.

Mackenzie, William Lyon. 1837: Revolution in the Canadas. Edited by Greg Keilty. Toronto: N. C. Press, 1974. Both protagonist and editor join to establish that the Rebellion of 1837 was more than a passing phase in Canada’s history. Views the rebellion as a joint struggle of Lower and Upper Canada against both the privileged entities of property and patronage and oppressive British colonial rule.

Sewell, John. Mackenzie: A Political Biography of William Lyon Mackenzie. Toronto: J. Lorimer, 2002. Generally sympathetic biography written by a former mayor of Toronto. Sewell argues that Mackenzie may be Canada’s best model of a responsible politician.