Mackenzie’s Gazette: An Aspect of W. L. Mackenzie’s American Years
ON DECEMBER 11, 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie, fleeing from his political enemies in Upper Canada, crossed the Niagara River to take refuge in the United States. Years later, he was enabled to return by the passage of the Amnesty Act of 1849. What activities had filled Mackenzie's years in exile, what light do they throw upon him as a reformer, and how did they affect his post-rebellion career in Canada? To answer these questions, a full-scale study of the American years would be needed. This article makes a beginning but is limited to one topic: Mackenzie's Gazette, published first from New York City, later from Rochester. The Gazette makes clearer Mackenzie's position as a Canadian reformer who wanted more than political changes. For him, the immediate practical methods of advancing the cause of social democracy were to restrict severely the note-issuing powers of the chartered banks and to prevent hem using public funds for private profit. In the United States this was again the theme of his writings and the supposed inconsistency, unreasonableness, and apparent dishonesty his critics saw in his support of Van Buren yield when tested against what was for Mackenzie the fundamental question: Van Buren's tand on the Independent Treasury. Why did not Mackenzie choose to publish his Gazette in Buffalo, from which point it surely would have been easier to get copies into Canada than from New York? He did propose it to the Buffalo Committee of Thirteen on the very day the withdrawal from Navy Island was decided upon? Apparently this suggestion was not sympathetically
Political Operatives and Administrative Workers
This article sheds light on the agent, an overlooked participant in newspaper circulation networks in the early 1800s. Based on archival letters from the newspaper agents of Mackenzie s Gazette, which was published in New York state by Upper Canadian rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie, this study shows that agents played key roles in circulation, collection, and feedback. The relationship between editor and agent also was highly political. The Gazette began as a platform to educate Americans about the rebel cause in Upper Canada, attracting agents from both the Whig and Democratic parties, but Mackenzie lost the support of agents as he attacked their parties. This study shows how the agent-editor relationship worked and characterizes the agents’ role as administrative, sparked by personal initiative, interactive, and allegiance to a cause.
The Political Ideas of William Lyon Mackenzie 1
Few public men in Canadian history have so represented the spirit of their age as did William Lyon Mackenzie, and particularly during the pre-Rebellion stage of his career. This was the age of Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Bill, the age of Bentham and Byron, of Cobbett and Edinburgh Reviewers, of O'Connell and Huskisson; the age when the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe triumphed over the last of the Bourbons at Paris, and when “King” Andrew Jackson succeeded the Adams dynasty at Washington. On both sides of the Atlantic the new wine of liberty and democracy was bursting the old bottles of restriction and privilege. Across the Atlantic the new stocks were of the vintage of the French Revolution or from the vineyards of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham; on this side it was largely “home brew” of the frontier. But there was still on hand much of the vintages of 1688 and 1776, neither of which had lost its power to stimulate men. In the 1820's and 1830's William Lyon Mackenzie was the principal purveyor of these various wines of liberty to the backwoods colony of Upper Canada.