Invaded Twice By The United States, Canada Built A Canal For Defence and Defiance
3/4 Third tale of Pattersons of Canada origins
On a warm summer day in 1985 Elmer MacKay, solicitor general of Canada, inaugurated a museum of prison artifacts at Kingston Penitentiary. The reason for opening a display of convict-fashioned shivs, zipguns and stills alongside keeper-issue whips, cudgels and chains was to celebrate the cruel dungeon’s sesquicentennial. I was a guest along with other contributors to a history of KP. A hundred and fifty years before, on June 1, 1835, Matthew Tavender was inscribed as Inmate Number One, sentenced to three years for grand larceny. Tavender and the convicts who followed him inside were forced into labour gangs that would greatly expand the fortress-like prison on the shore of Lake Ontario. But the earliest work on the massive stone building was done by local tradesmen.
(The ancient stone walls would give up their last inmates at the instigation of Elmer’s son, Peter MacKay, minister of justice. KP, which overlooks the harbour where sailing events were hosted during the 1976 Olympics, was one of the oldest prisons in continuous use in the world when it closed finally on September 30, 2013.)
The new pen wasn’t the only lucrative construction contract in those days in Kingston, where the workers who knew best how to work with stone were those who had recently (1832) finished building the Rideau Canal. Fort Henry, which commands the city’s heights and protects the southern entrance to the canal was and remains an imposing fortification. Some of the last Martello Towers ever built are in Kingston. It was a bit late for these defensive forts when they went up — another example of the military preparing for its last war — but they still stand tall for tourists.
These were massive works of construction and times were good in Kingston, which in another half-dozen years would be the first capital of what would become Canada and where the young John Alexander Macdonald was entering upon a legal career, his thought not yet turned to politics. It was a bonanza for stone workers. Good times would come again for their descendants in the 1860s with work on Parliament buildings for the new country then being born. In the meantime they built many great houses along the Rideau corridor between the first Canadian capital (Kingston 1841) to the one we have now (Ottawa 1867), including the official residences on Sussex Drive for prime minister and governor general.
Many of the stone workers were among or had been trained by those who came to work on the canal in 1826. There were two companies of Royal Sappers and Miners sent to assist Lt. Col. John By in his great task of linking the Ottawa River to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Of the complement of a hundred and sixty two men, fifty seven were lost to accident, disease and desertion through the six years of construction. When the canal.. was finished, seventy one of those remaining accepted hundred acre grants of land and settled along the corridor of the canal, planting outposts of settlement where none existed. A lucky few got the land and a job as well. But none were as fortunate as William (Pammy) Fleming, my great3grandfather, who got all of that and the lady too (subscript counts the number of greats).
Pammy was from Old Swinford in Worcestershire, not far from Birmingham, a city that drove the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. His father was a nailer. It had been a decent craft since before Roman times. Nails would always be essential for fastening materials together, for building things. For centuries they had been fashioned by hand, one at a time, and that work had provided sufficiently for a nailer and his family. There were four nailers among the craftsmen counted in the 1665 Canadian census. But by the early nineteenth century those times were over and nailers were pretty well done for in Birmingham, workshop of the world and city of a thousand trades. Now there were machines that spit them out by the hundreds of thousands. With no future in the family craft, Pammy enlisted. The army sent him here to help Lt. Col. John By build the canal. The colonel would prove to be a genius. He was an artist of an engineer who would use muscle and blasting powder to sculpt for the ages a waterscape surpassing nature. Pammy was just a sapper in the ranks. He obeyed orders and kept his mouth shut, angling to come out of it alive. Many wouldn’t.
The canal of which I speak is the canal that gave the Yanks pause. They had jumped Canada twice in thirty years, while it was still a colony. Some Americans thought their manifest destiny was to own and occupy the whole of the continent. At the start of their revolutionary war in 1776, George Washington sent a general to take Montreal, “not to plunder but to protect you.” President Jefferson (1801–1809) boasted they had “only to march” to take over Canada. President Madison (1809–1817) set troops marching to do just that in 1812 and that war wasn’t over until 1815. Twice bitten, Canada had ample reason to be shy.
The Rideau Canal was one of the most spectacular engineering feats of the early nineteenth century. Dug by hand and heart and pick and shovel through miles of wildlands and swamp, at considerable loss of life to work accidents and disease, at an incredibly low cost that nevertheless prompted a parliamentary enquiry, it was a measure of defence and defiance. Meant to provide free passage of troops from Montreal to Kingston by circumventing American cannon looking over the St. Lawrence route, the canal was a sign so visible and emphatic that the United States would have to believe no effort would be spared by England, no cost would be too high, no sacrifice too great, to defend Canada, outpost of empire, if the Americans were to try again their vicious incursions.
No less a military mind than the Duke of Wellington, victor over Napoleon on the field at Waterloo in June 1815, not long after the nastiness in North America had ended, understood this strategy all too well. When the decision was made to proceed with the canal he was serving as Master General of the Ordnance. He picked the man to build it. John By had been with him in the peninsular wars some years before. Wellington became prime minister of England during the years it took the Royal Corps of Engineers to finish the canal.
In fact it had not been much more than a calculated bluff or delaying tactic. England was stretched thin with European wars and colonial commitments. In only a few years it would be desperate to pull out of colonies that were costly to govern from across an ocean. Delay proved a winning strategy. Before long Americans would be consumed with their civil war catastrophe. The bluff would never be called. As I write, in 2016, there have been no shots fired over the Canada-U.S. border in more than two hundred years.
The Rideau Canal became instead a key lifeline in the fast growing colony about to become a country. A triangular pattern soon emerged. Imported British manufactures were transferred from ocean-going ships to barges in Montreal, then towed up the Ottawa River, through the canal and transshipped to lake schooners at Kingston. (The turnaround saw bulk staples for export to Europe reloaded from schooners to barges and run directly down the St Lawrence to Montreal, shooting rapids on the way.) Two years after the canal’s opening, three quarters of westbound traffic was using the route. It was clear that it had become the vital link in inter-provincial trade. The canal also carried hordes of European immigrants fleeing famine and oppression for a better life in Canada.
After 1847, when work on the St. Lawrence River canals was completed and rail lines were snaking everywhere, the Rideau system gradually lost its commercial prominence. It long remained a gracious and comfortable route for passengers on the Rideau Queen and Rideau King that plied regularly between Kingston and Ottawa, the capital that came to be because of the canal. Today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Rideau Canal remains a destination for boats and yachts from near and far in summer and, never forget, the largest skating rink in the world in winter.
Canal building was dangerous work. John MacTaggart was there as clerk of works and gives a vivid description of the hazards. “Even in their spade and pickaxe business, the [men] receive dreadful accidents; as excavating in a wilderness is quite a different thing from doing that kind of labour in a cleared country. Thus they have to pool in, as the tactics of the art go — that is, dig beneath the roots of trees, which not infrequently fall down and smother them. . . Some of them . . . would take jobs of quarrying from contractors, because they thought there were good wages for this work, never thinking that they did not understand the business. Of course many of them were blasted to pieces by their own shots, others killed by stones falling on them. I have seen heads, arms and legs, blown in all directions . . .”
Unusual as it was for any of these heads to belong to the men of the Royal Sappers and Miners, the soldiers were not totally immune. Six men of the seventh and fifteenth companies died in the work on the waterway. Another twenty two died of malaria or cholera, which at times came on so violently that whole camps and villages were decimated. A blasting accident at Newboro on May 29, 1830, killed Pammy Fleming’s friend and fellow bricklayer of the seventh company, Jim Simmons.
Everything Jim Simmons owned was sold and the return from his wardrobe and kit and ‘necessaries’ went to provide some relief to his family. Pammy bought a pair of Jim’s regimental trousers for twelve shillings. Elizabeth Simmons, mother of seven year old Jim Jr., received thirteen pounds, eight shillings, ninepence. Not a fortune but a tidy sum and with a widow’s pension from the military Elizabeth could bide her time. There was no shortage of suitors. There were many more men than women in Upper Canada. Elizabeth could be choosy.
Once built the canal problem became one of operations. By’s final task before departure was to ensure that key posts along the waterway were filled with the best candidates available. Literacy was a prime requirement for a lockmaster, but not the only one. “What were the qualifications to be a lockmaster,” Ed Bebee asks in his Invisible Army: Hard Times, Heartbreak and Heritage?
“First, military experience, generally as a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO), either Corporal or Sergeant; second the ability to read and write, because of the flood of written orders and the extensive record-keeping; third, basic arithmetic and some sense of book-keeping to be able to manage the accounts of tolls and local rents; fourth, robust good health; fifth, ‘steadiness’, which could mean anything. Sobriety was not a requirement, as soon became evident.”
Elizabeth waited two years, until it was certain that the colonel would give Pammy the lockmaster’s position at Chaffey’s Lock. He wasn’t a big man, just five and a half feet tall, but strong. (It wasn’t a time of tall men, then or for a long time after. The mean height of a company of British soldiers en route to India in 1865 was 5’5. Winston Churchill, who was almost a teenager when Pammy died in 1887, was well short of 5’7.) Sergeants and corporals were getting preference for canal jobs. Pammy was made an acting corporal before discharge. He was one of the few who could read and write.
Lockmasters initially got housing (or materials to build their own) and permanent lock labourers had smaller houses or dormitories at larger stations. Garden plots were also provided. Lockmasters and workers were strictly admonished to avoid political partisanship and even voting. They were front line public servants and expected to behave as such. Patronage was endemic in the early days of colonial semi-self-government. The Rideau Canal was a major generator of jobs and contracts in Ontario. Politicians were very much aware of the opportunities. The local MP, or the defeated candidate if his party happened to be in power, would provide a list of acceptable candidates.
Canal jobs were the pick of the province. England’s army built the canal. The army owned the canal. There was nothing more stable in all of Canada in those days than the army. The pay was not bad and it came in cash, a rare perk in an economy that operated almost entirely on barter and long-term credit. Pammy was a lucky man and knew it the year the widow and the colonel said yes. It was 1832.
4/4 Fourth tale of Pattersons of Canada origins, A Century Standing By, is freely available at Cannections on MEDIUM
