Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

Hume mounted his horse and rode up the river road alone to reconnoitre. As he passed an orchard he was fired upon by the misguided patriots and fell dead in the road.

This lawless act brought serious reprisals, for the Canadian militia, hearing the shots, came rapidly up the road and encountered the patriots in François Baby's orchard. One volley from the militia took all the fight out of the patriots and they broke and fled toward the site of Walkerville, closely pursued by the militia. Twenty-one of them were killed and four were captured. Col. Prince stood these four against the fence of the orchard and had them shot. The patriots who escaped made their way up the shore and began crossing in canoes and boats. In one of the boats was Capt. James B. Armstrong, of Port Huron, whose arm was badly shattered by a bullet. When Armstrong's arm was being amputated by Dr. Hurd, of Detroit, he remarked that he would gladly give his other arm to the cause of liberty. This was the last battle of the Canadian rebellion and it was watched by a great throng of Detroiters who gathered along the river front.

In the old churchyard in Sandwich lie the remains of Surgeon Hume, who was killed. His monument is a massive slab of stone supported on short pillars bearing the following inscription:

SACRED

To the memory of

John James Hume, Esquire,

M. D.

Staff assistant surgeon,

Who was infamously murdered and his body afterwards brutally mangled by a gang of armed ruffians from the United States styling themselves

PATRIOTS

who committed this cowardly and shameful outrage on the morning of the 4th of December, 1838: having intercepted the deceased while proceeding to render professional assistance to Her Majesty's gallant militia engaged at Windsor, U. C., in repelling the incursion of this rebel crew more properly styled

PIRATES!

The Canadian rebellion was in itself a puny affair in which the insurgents accomplished nothing of importance in a military way. It did serve, however, to command the attention of the home government in England and was really a petition presented on bayonets. A systematic investigation followed. The Earl of Durham was sent over to Canada as Lord High Commissioner and Governor-General. At the end of five months he was able to make a report which is still one of the most notable documents of the colonial office. The old régime, so firmly entrenched in power and influence for 35 years, was not to be shattered at once, but gradually reforms were introduced in spite of the opposition of the family compact element. The way was paved for the establishment of a government which would be responsible to the people of Canada, and in 1849 a fully responsible government was introduced by Lord Elgin.

To express its spite toward the reform movement "The Family Compact" now became mildly insurgent. Its members burned the parliament building in Montreal and bombarded Lord Elgin very liberally with rotten eggs and stones, but that was the last expiring struggle of a decadent political organization.

T

CHAPTER LXIV

THE PANIC OF 1837

HE people of Michigan were forced to wait several years before they could begin to realize on their own.

wealth. President Andrew Jackson's political machine found it could not control the distribution of the Government money as it pleased among the banks of the country. The men who were in control of the United States Bank were more interested in the financial ability and solvency of trustees of Government funds than in their political party allegiance; so the choleric President, believing that the bank was hostile to him, set about destroying the bank by withdrawing from its custody all Government funds. This immediately destroyed the machinery which had been controlling the distribution of available money without substituting another and an equally efficient machine for the same purpose.

The result was that real money virtually disappeared from circulation, and without the common medium of exchange business of every sort languished and died. President Jackson was neither a financier nor a literary man. He might have read with profit Dean Swift's epigram:

"Money, the life-blood of the nation,

Corrupts and stagnates in the veins
Unless a proper circulation

Its motion and its heat sustains."

Banks in New York and other eastern cities began to close their doors and the epidemic of business failure rapidly spread all over the country. Hundreds of bubble land schemes and town promotions burst. The United States Bank, established in 1816, had become a power in the land in 1830. It was the common resort for loans and it is quite possible that some of the accusations that the bank officials had used their influence of

money control for their own enrichment were true, for such was—and still is the way of some in the financial world.

Presently the Government money was shifted to various state banks. The Bank of Michigan and the Farmers & Mechanics Bank of Detroit were loaned $1,500,000 of Government funds at an interest rate of 2 per cent. State banks about the country began paying the Government interest in bills of their own issue, but this money was regarded as of doubtful value,

[graphic][merged small]

so President Jackson ordered that all money paid for Government land should be coin money. He did not realize that the supply of coin money was not sufficient for this purpose, and when people could not get coin money on any terms, land sales stopped. Presently manufacturing stopped and business stopped. Thousands of men were thrown out of work. Farmers could not get acceptable money for their crops. Only the people of continental Europe can fully realize the consequences which followed the general panic of 1837, which reduced the people of the United States to the necessity of trading by barter for a time.

During that brief period when Michigan was a state, but still outside the Union, the people were planning and dreaming of great achievements. They proposed to show the other states

how a real, live, enterprising state should be developed by the concentrated energies and enthusiasm of its people. They proposed to perform in a decade or less what would have been a worthy achievement for a quarter of a century. Were they not rich in land, in lumber, in copper, in iron, in salt, gypsum and many other things? Could not these possessions be utilized at once as a basis of credit upon which millions of money could be borrowed for building railways and canals, opening mines, building mills and other things which would soon earn the money with which to pay off the loans? On paper it looked as simple as a sum in addition. The wealth of the state was here. It could not be taken away. Its value could not be affected by bank failures or money shortages. Having thus assured themselves, they plunged recklessly and came down with a crash. It did not occur to them that railways, canals and other great enterprises can only be profitable when they have the sure patronage of a settled country of large population. That is where their calculation failed and became a dream promotion.

Mirabeau, one of the greatest men France has produced, once made this epigrammatic statement: "The two greatest inventions of the human mind are writing and money-the common language of intelligence and the common language of self-interest."

Detroit had two distinguished visitors in the summer of 1837. One was Mrs. Annie B. Jameson, the English authoress, who has already been mentioned. The other was Daniel Webster. Both arrived the same day, July 8. Mr. Webster was 55 years old. He had been a political leader and statesman and a public idol, but had accumulated only a modest fortune. His farm at Marshfield, Mass., was his home and resting place, but it was not a large producer of revenue. Public lands in the West had been selling at $1.25 to $3 an acre and, realizing that they would soon become valuable, Mr. Webster looked about for investments in the West.

Distrustful of the land boomers and town promoters, he wanted dependable information and sent his son, Daniel Fletcher Webster, to Detroit to look the situation over. Fletcher

« ZurückWeiter »