Editing Family Compact (section)

===Loyalist ideology===
{{Toryism |expanded=general}}
The uniting factors amongst the compact were its loyalist tradition, hierarchical class structure and adherence to the established Anglican church.  Leaders such as [[Sir John Robinson, 1st Baronet, of Toronto|Sir John Robinson]] and [[John Strachan]] proclaimed it an ideal government, especially as contrasted with the rowdy democracy in the nearby United States.<ref name="Canadian Encyclopedia" />

Not all views of the elite were universally shared, but a critical element was the idea of "loyalty".<ref name="Mills">David Mills, ''Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850'', 1988 {{ISBN|0-7735-0660-8}}.</ref> The original members of the Family Compact were [[United Empire Loyalist]]s who had fled the United States immediately after the Revolutionary War. The War of 1812 led the British to suspect the loyalty of the so-called "Later Loyalists" – "Americans" who had emigrated after 1800 for land. The issue came to a head around 1828 in the "[[Upper Canada Rebellion#The Alien Question|Alien Question]]". Following the war, the colonial government took active steps to prevent Americans from swearing allegiance, thereby making them ineligible to obtain land grants. Without land they could not vote or hold office.

The issue became a provincewide complaint in 1828 when [[Barnabas Bidwell]] was deprived of his seat in the Legislative Assembly. Educated at [[Yale College|Yale]], he practiced law in western Massachusetts and served as treasurer of [[Berkshire County, Massachusetts|Berkshire County]].  He served in the [[Massachusetts General Court|state legislature]], and was the [[Massachusetts Attorney General|state attorney general]] from 1807 to 1810, when irregularities in the Berkshire County books prompted his flight to Upper Canada.  There he won a seat in the provincial assembly, but was denied on account of his status as a fugitive from justice. A provincewide petitioning campaign by these numerically superior "aliens" led the British government to grant them citizenship retroactively. In the minds of the Family Compact, they remained politically suspect and barred from positions of power.<ref>{{cite book |last=Errington |first=Jane |title=The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A developing colonial ideology |year=1987 |publisher=McGill-Queens University Press |location=Montreal-Kingston |pages=168–81}}</ref>