CHAPTER II

THE MODERATE REFORMERS AND THE

CANADIAN REBELLION

(UCH was the environment in which Robert Baldwin and his future colleagues in the Reform ministry of Canada, entered upon political life. The Baldwins were sprung from an Irish family resident on a little property called Summer Hill, near Carragoline, in the county of Cork. The father of Robert Baldwin had come out to Canada with his father (himself a Robert Baldwin) in 1798. The family settled on a tract of land on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the present county of Durham, where Robert Baldwin (senior) set himself manfully to work to clear and cultivate a farm to which he gave the name of Annarva.1 His eldest son, William Warren Baldwin, did not, however, remain upon the homestead. He had already received at the University of Edinburgh a degree in medicine and, anxious to turn his professional training to account, he went to the little village of York. Here he took up his abode with a Mr. Wilcocks of Duke Street, an Irish friend of his family, who had indeed been instrumental in inducing the Baldwins to come to Canada. In a pioneer

1 The details which follow are taken from the Memorial of the Baldwin Family, (Archives of Canada, M. 393) and from the Canadian Portrait Gallery, published at Toronto, 1881.

colony like the Upper Canada of that day, the health of the community is notoriously sound, and Dr. Baldwin soon saw that the profession of medicine at York could offer but a precarious livelihood. He determined, therefore, to supplement it with schoolteaching and inserted in the Gazette an announcement of his intention to open a classical school:"Dr. Baldwin, understanding that some gentlemen of this town have expressed an anxiety for the establishment of a classical school, begs leave to inform them and the public that he intends on Monday, the first of January next [1803], to open a school in which he will instruct twelve boys in writing, reading, classics and arithmetic. The terms are, for each boy, eight guineas per annum, to be paid quarterly or half yearly; one guinea entrance and one cord of wood to be supplied by each of the boys on opening the school." It is interesting to note that among the earliest of Dr. Baldwin's pupils was John Robinson, distinguished later as a leading spirit in the Family Compact and chief-justice of the province.

School-teaching with the ambitious Irishman was, however, only a means to an end. The legal profession, then in its infancy in the colony, offered a more lucrative and a more honourable field, and for this in his leisure hours Baldwin hastened to prepare himself. Indeed no very arduous preparation or profound knowledge was needed in those days for admission to the legal fraternity of "Muddy York." A

ROBERT BALDWIN

summary examination, conducted in person by the chief-justice of the province, was all that was required of Baldwin as a candidate for the bar, and on April 6th, 1803, he was admitted as a duly qualified practitioner. His entry upon his new profession was signalized by his marriage in the same year with Miss Phoebe Wilcocks, a daughter of the family friend with whom he had lived. The newly married couple took up their quarters in a new house on the corner of Frederick and Palace Streets,' the latter a street running parallel with the shore of the bay and receiving its grandiloquent name from the expectation that it would presently become the site of a gubernatorial "palace." In this house Robert Baldwin, eldest son of William Warren Baldwin was born on May 12th, 1804.

Little need be said of Robert Baldwin's youth and school days. By no means a precocious child, he was distinguished at school rather for a painstaking diligence than for exceptional natural aptitude. He received his education at the Home District Grammar School, at the head of which was Dr. John Strachan, then rector of York and subsequently distinguished as Bishop of Toronto and champion of the Anglican interest. Baldwin's conscientious industry presently made him "head boy" of the Grammar School, from whose walls he passed with credit to enter upon the study of the law (1819). After spending some years in his father's office, he was called 1 Palace Street is the present Front Street.

to the bar in Trinity Term, 1825, and became a partner in his father's business under the firm name of "W. W. Baldwin and Son." The fortunes of the elder Baldwin had in the meantime rapidly improved. Not only had he met with success in his dual profession, but he had the good fortune to fall heir to the property of a Miss Elizabeth Russell, a distant connection of the Baldwins, and sister to a certain Peter Russell, a bygone magnate of the little colony whose extensive estates she had herself inherited and now bequeathed to William Baldwin. Desirous to use his new found wealth for the foundation of a family estate,' Dr. Baldwin purchased a considerable tract of land to the north of the little town on the summit of the hill overlooking the present city of Toronto. To this property the name "Spadina was given, and the wide road opened by Dr. Baldwin southward through a part of the Russell estate was christened Spadina Avenue.

Both father and son were keenly interested in the political affairs of the province. The elder Baldwin was a Liberal and prominent among the Reformers who, even before the advent of William Lyon Mackenzie, denounced the oligarchical control of the

1 "His purpose was to establish in Canada a family whose head was to be maintained in opulence by the proceeds of an entailed estate. There was to be forever a Baldwin of Spadina." H. Scadding, Toronto of Old, p. 66. The same work contains many interesting details in reference to the Baldwin residences and some account of the "closing exercises" of Dr. Strachan's school (Aug. 11-12, 1819) at which Robert Baldwin delivered a "prologue." Op. cit. Index. Art. Baldwin.

BALDWIN'S POLITICAL VIEWS

Family Compact. But he was at the same time profoundly attached to the British connection and averse by temperament to measures of violence. While making common cause with the Mackenzie faction in the furtherance of better government, Dr. Baldwin and his associates were nevertheless separated from the extreme wing of the Reformers by all the difference that lies between the Whig and the Radical. The political aims were limited to converting the constitution of the colony into a real, and not merely a nominal, transcript of the British constitution. To effect this, it seemed only necessary to render the executive officers of the government responsible to the popular House of the legislature in the same way as the British cabinet stands responsible to the House of Commons. This one reform accomplished, the other grievances of the colonists would find a natural and immediate redress. Robert Baldwin sympathized entirely with the political views of his father. Moderate by nature, he had no sympathy with the desire of the Radical section of the party to abolish the legislative council, or to assimilate the institutions of the country to those of the United States. The Alpha and Omega of his programme of political reform lay in the demand for the introduction of responsible government. His opponents, even some of his fellow Reformers, taunted him with being a "man of one idea." Viewed in the clearer light of retrospect it is no reproach to his political insight