Upper Canada Rebellion

Upper Canada Rebellion
Part of the Rebellions of 1837–1838
Battle of Montgomery's Tavern
Date December 1837 Location Toronto, Upper Canada Result British Canadian victory
Belligerents
Upper Canada Family Compact	Reform movement Republic of Canada
Commanders and leaders
Francis Bond Head James FitzGibbon Allan MacNab	William Lyon Mackenzie Anthony Van Egmond Samuel Lount

The Upper Canada Rebellion was an insurrection against the oligarchic government of the British colony of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) in December 1837. While public grievances had existed for years, it was the rebellion in Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), which started the previous month, that emboldened rebels in Upper Canada to revolt.

The Upper Canada Rebellion was largely defeated shortly after it began, although resistance lingered until 1838. While it shrank, it became more violent, mainly through the support of the Hunters' Lodges, a secret United States-based militia that emerged around the Great Lakes, and launched the Patriot War in 1838.

Some historians suggest that although they were not directly successful or large, the rebellions in 1837 should be viewed in the wider context of the late-18th- and early-19th-century Atlantic Revolutions including the American Revolutionary War in 1776, the French Revolution of 1789–99, the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and the independence struggles of Spanish America (1810–1825). While these rebellions differed in that they also struggled for republicanism, they were inspired by similar social problems stemming from poorly regulated oligarchies, and sought the same democratic ideals, which were also shared by the United Kingdom's Chartists.^[1][2][3]

The rebellion in Lower Canada, followed by its Upper Canada counterpart, led directly to Lord Durham's Report on the Affairs of British North America, and to The British North America Act, 1840, which partially reformed the British provinces into a unitary system, leading to the formation of Canada as a nation in 1867.