This is the second of my two-part series of articles on the War of 1812 and its impact on Newmarket.
When the war ended in 1814, several military men and their families, most accustomed to a comfortable life with an established church back in England, began to settle around Newmarket.
Many had forsaken American homes to begin life anew in British territory, having fought in the war to protect Canada. The Gazette of 1799 speaks of these people as “sighing after the government lost by the still recent American Revolution, they had travelled to the area in search of familiar laws and protection. Their expectations fulfilled by new marks of favour from the Crown in grants of fertile land into which they turned their ploughs and an abundant crop reminded them of their gratitude to God and to their King”.
The writer failed to explain that in order to attain this utopia, they first had to make use of their one great weapon, the axe, clearing foot by foot the primeval forest to establish their homesteads. They had to endure flies, mosquitoes, and lonely, smoky clearings. But these people had brought with them a constitutional municipal freedom and independence of spirit.
Following the war, a large influx of immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland began to arrive, quickly pushing back the frontiers of the early settlements. They began to realize that things were amiss in the administration of local public affairs.
The first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe, had been tasked with making the government of Upper Canada “an image and transcript of England”, to support a “respectable aristocracy which would safeguard the monarchy”, and to establish the Church of England, to which most of the Loyalists belonged, as the Church of the Colony. Added to this was the attitude held by the Loyalists that it was they and they alone who constituted the ruling class in Upper Canada.
They had surely sacrificed a great deal, even life itself, and it was due to their courage and loyalty during the recent conflict that the colony was able to repel the invader from the south. The government in Washington had promised restitution for their property losses, then left it to the individual states. Not one dollar was ever paid, as I understand.
Simcoe detested republicanism, or anything that resembled it, refusing to support any sign of independent thinking along democratic lines among members of his government as confirmed by the various correspondence between Simcoe, Lord Dorchester and the Colonial Secretary.
Simcoe had been landed aristocracy in England and it was his hope that a similar society would be set up in this bush country.
The Constitutional Act of 1791, which established Upper Canada, also set up up the British system of magistrates “the Courts of Quarter Sessions inaugurated in 1793 first in Newark and then in 180l held at York”. They continued to decide the affairs of the Home District, of which the Township of Whitchurch was part, for more than 50 years.
It was impossible that the British government could have possibly understood the conditions in this new land 3,000 miles away, a land with an almost indefensible boundary separating Canada from its enemy to the south biding its time to strike. No concessions would be allowed; military rule was deemed necessary and Simcoe was a military man.
The colonists who were arriving in increasing numbers from the U.S. were accustomed to town meetings on a local level, and they expected an established order like that here. Simcoe granted these but their powers were limited, the authority of the magistrates still reigned supreme. They maintained control of all finances and refused to allow any town meeting without their written permission.
The Family Compact controlled all municipal government, which was frequently administered by retired military men, many of them incompetent, haughty and ignorant of local conditions.
Government officials feared any system having its origins in the republic and worried that it might lead to another separation like what had happened in the United States.
But with the end of the war, there was mounting agitation, a feeling that the Constitutional Act was as feudal as it had been in the time of George the Third.
Responsible government, even in England, was a new principle just beginning to take hold. It was inevitable the governor and council should align themselves in the conduct of public affairs; inevitable that friction should occur between the assembly and the council, the latter occupying salaried security and bestowing blatant patronage.
Any office seeker not a favourite and “not a gentleman” was refused. Responsibility of the council to the assembly did not exist.
Until Simcoe named York the capital of Upper Canada, no Loyalists had settled in the vicinity of York. A few began to arrive, and some settled at the lower part of Yonge Street.
A pseudo aristocracy collected about the Governor at York, and the Robinsons of Newmarket were socially connected by the marriages of their two sisters. Included in the ranks of this official society were the leaders of the financial interests, the land agencies, the banking interests, and the companies engaged in public works. Their purpose was to retain prestige and privilege and see that no outsiders intruded.
In a future article, I will delve further into the political turmoil arising post 1812 but for now we will turn our attention to other conditions locally.
The War of 1812 was followed by a serious depression. The scarcity of food and the rapid decline in prices from war levels constituted a major setback to the progress of the country, from which we did not recover for years.
Added to this was the continued bitter resentment of the U.S. and “1816, the year without a summer”, a series of cold years that had begun in 1812. They were connected to a series of volcanic eruptions: Soufrière on St. Vincent in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines in 1814 and Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815, estimated to have been the most violent eruption in historical times. It lifted between 150 and 180 cubic kilometers of dust into the high atmosphere.
In the spring of 1816, April and May were extremely cold months with frost frustrating spring planting. Flowers were late to bloom and many of the fruit trees had their budding leaves and flowers killed by a hard frost. The beginning of June was warm but severe cold on June 5 reduced the temperature drastically and from the 6th to the 9th severe frost occurred every night from Canada to Virginia.
Montreal had snow squalls on both the 6th and the 8th and 30 cm of snow accumulated near Quebec from the 6th to the 10th of June. During the rest of the summer reasonable warmth alternated with severe cold so that replanted crops were killed off.
Severe cold in the middle of August, killing frosts at the end of the month and in the middle of September put a finish to any remaining crops. Whatever had been planted decayed in the ground.
Throughout the long winter that followed, there was no wheat for flour and there were no vegetables. The daily diet consisted of fish, venison, even porcupine and groundhog. It was said that because of the deep crust over snow, the deer were easy prey for hunters, which aided the survival of many locals.
There was no hay to feed the livestock, so the cattle were slaughtered, and the scant supply of fresh beef provided a measure of variation in the diet. Flour rose to an even higher price than during the war, to about $70 a pound.
Although the spring of 1817 brought some promise of a good yield, conditions only gradually improved over the next few years. Historians related tales of the hardships of ‘that year without a summer’. This severe cold of 1816, incidentally, was not felt only in North America but equally in Britain and across Europe.
As a consequence of all the interruptions consistent with constant calls to service, there was difficulty in raising enough food to supply the people and the army. As soon as the fighting ceased, England stopped sending provisions.
Live hogs sold at 25 cents a pound, although pork was mostly unobtainable by the ordinary people as the military commandeered it.
Several local families joined together to send a Newmarket man to the Genesee River for a schooner of flour that would cost $13.50 a barrel when it was finally delivered to Newmarket.
This would not tide them over until the next harvest, so the new crop was cut before it matured. It was cleaned and pounded, boiled, and eaten with milk, when milk was obtainable, and maple sugar. Average prices were wheat at $3 a bushel, flour at $15 a barrel, and butter at 75 cents a pound.
All salt was brought in from England via Montreal and it was hard to get even a peck of salt, which sold for as high as $25 a bushel and was $120 a barrel at York (Toronto).
John Bogart noticed that in his woods in Bogarttown, just east of the Newmarket settlement, the deer visited a certain spot and that they licked the natural salt from the ground. He found that the water from this spring had a salt-like taste, so he decided to boil the water down providing sufficient salt for ordinary purposes and it proved strong enough to cure the winter’s meat.
He cribbed the spring with pine slabs and, as late as 1895, Sterling Chappell discovered that these slabs were still in as good condition as when installed. Credit for this story of the yearly days in Newmarket is attributed to Alexander Muir who had got it from Nelson Gorham.
In February 1813, the Legislative Council of Upper Canada passed an act to prohibit the export of grain and to restrain distilling. The latter was objected to by several farmers who at the time manufactured their own whisky and were unwilling to stop even though a war was being fought and a food shortage existed.
There was no market and precious little money, so they adopted this method to provide extra cash. At the time, there were no doctors, the country was still savage and any wounds that incurred were bloody, so whisky was the only ready means to which settlers turned in such emergencies.
Cases have been cited that it had also saved men from freezing to death. Few travellers would enter the wilderness without a flask of spirits with them.
Sources: The History of Newmarket by Ethel Trewhella; The History of Canada by Castell Hopkins; Ontario History – The Evolution of Local Government by Professor Fred Landon; The Canadian Historical Review, Provincial Archives; The Colonial Advocate, May 18, 1824, Provincial Archives; The Settlement of York County by John Mitchell.
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NewmarketToday.ca brings you this weekly feature about our town's history in partnership with Richard MacLeod, the History Hound, a local historian for more than 40 years. He conducts heritage lectures and walking tours of local interest, as well as leads local oral history interviews. You can contact the History Hound at [email protected].
