Canada -- Social life and customs; Ontario -- Description and travel
diligent searches. Daniel Conant’s New England descent would very
probably go far to account for Colonel Ferguson’s insane suspiciousness.
In this part of Canada the inhabitants generally were in favor of the
movement. Not to be so was to be singular. That is to say, they were in
favor of having the wrongs committed by the Family Compact redressed,
but not one in 10,000 asked for a change of the political connection of
Canada. To effect such a sweeping change as that would be was not the
object of the agitation, and at this day of writing it seems very hard
that the inhabitants should have been persecuted simply because they
loved their country; but so it was. It would be well to instance another
case of the tyrannous misrule of the Family Compact and their
persecution of unoffending persons. A farmer living near Oshawa, being
the son of a United Empire Loyalist, seemed to have all the Compact’s
hate and suspicion centred upon him, simply because his father came from
Massachusetts. The suspected man had done absolutely no act to place him
in the eye of the law. Like nearly all others, he sympathized with the
patriots, not for a moment supposing it to be a crime to love his
country and its people. But Colonel Ferguson thought differently, and
made a sally to capture the farmer. Now, capture meant almost certain
death, for it would mean being incarcerated during the very cold weather
in unheated guardhouses and gaols here or in Toronto. Knowing this, he
avoided capture by changing his quarters every few days and never
sleeping in a house. Usually he slept in the granary of a barn,
burrowing into the bin of grain until almost or quite concealed, with
the grain effectually covering him. One may rightly conjecture the
terrible hardships of this poor farmer, exposed as he was to the
inclemency of a Canadian winter. Fires in a barn are, of course, out of
the question, and therefore he had no comfort of a house and a fireside
the whole winter long. Such ill-usage could possibly have only one
ending, viz., death, which followed in the fall of 1838. Nor is this an
isolated case, for there were many such, but purposely we follow its
details in order to present a faithful picture of life in Canada during
the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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