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.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of