Editing Family Compact (section)

== Levers of power ==

In the absence of a landed elite, these men believed that the law should be the basis of social preeminence. Bound by the ideals of public service and a spirit of loyalty to king, church and empire, solidified in the crucible of the [[War of 1812]], they used the [[Law Society of Upper Canada]] as a means of regulating entry to elite positions of power.

===Government position===

==== Executive and Legislative councils ====
The Executive Council was composed of local advisers who provided the colonially appointed lieutenant governor with advice on the daily workings of government, and especially with appointments to the administration. Members of the Executive Council were not necessarily members of the Legislative Assembly but were usually members of the [[Legislative Council of Upper Canada|Legislative Council]]. The longest serving members were James Baby (1792–1833), John Strachan (1815–1836), George Markland (1822–1836), and Peter Robinson (1823–1836).

The Legislative Council of Upper Canada was the [[upper house]] governing the province of [[Upper Canada]]. It was modelled after the British [[House of Lords]]. Members were appointed, often for life. The longest serving members were Baby (1792–1833), [[Jacob Mountain]], Anglican Bishop of Quebec (1794–1825), Strachan (1820–1841), Markland (1822–1836), Peter Robinson (1823–1836), Thomas Talbot (1809–1841), Thomas Clark (1815–1841), William Dickson (1815–1841), John Henry Dunn (1822–1841), and William Allan (1825–1841).

====Magistracy and courts of Quarter Sessions====
Justices of the peace were appointed by the lieutenant governor. Any two justices meeting together could form the lowest level of the justice system, the Courts of Request. A [[Quarter Sessions|Court of Quarter Sessions]] was held four times a year in each district composed of all the resident justices. The Quarter Sessions met to oversee the administration of the district and deal with legal cases. They formed, in effect, the municipal government ''and'' judiciary until an area was incorporated as either a police board or a city after 1834.<ref>{{cite book |last=Craig |first=Gerald |title=Upper Canada: The Formative Years 1784–1841 |year=1963 |publisher=McClelland & Stewart |location=Toronto |pages=30–31}}</ref> The men appointed to the magistracy tended to be United Empire Loyalists or "[[half-pay]]" military officers who were placed in semi-retirement after the Napoleonic Wars.

====Law Society and Juvenile Advocate's Society====
The Law Society was created in 1797 to regulate the legal profession in the province. The society was headed by a treasurer. Every treasurer of the society before 1841 was a member of the Family Compact with the exception of [[William Warren Baldwin]].

The control that the Family Compact exerted over the legal profession and the corruption that resulted was most clearly demonstrated in the "Types Riot" in 1826, in which the printing press of William Lyon Mackenzie was destroyed by the young lawyers of the Juvenile Advocate's Society with the complicity of the attorney general, the solicitor general and the magistrates of [[Toronto]].

Mackenzie had published a series of satires under the pseudonym of "Patrick Swift, nephew of [[Jonathan Swift]]" in an attempt to humiliate the members of the Family Compact running for the board of the Bank of Upper Canada, and Henry John Boulton, the solicitor general, in particular. Mackenzie's articles worked, and they lost control. In revenge they sacked Mackenzie's press, throwing the type into the lake. The "juvenile advocates" were the students of the attorney general and the solicitor general, and the act was performed in broad daylight in front of William Allan, bank president and magistrate. They were never charged, and it was left to Mackenzie to launch a civil lawsuit instead.

There are three implications of the Types Riot according to historian Paul Romney.  First, he argues the riot illustrates how the elite's self-justifications regularly skirted the rule of law they held out as their Loyalist mission. Second, he demonstrated that the significant damages Mackenzie received in his civil lawsuit against the vandals did not reflect the soundness of the criminal administration of justice in Upper Canada. And lastly, he sees in the Types Riot "the seed of the Rebellion" in a deeper sense than those earlier writers who viewed it simply as the start of a highly personal feud between Mackenzie and the Family Compact. Romney emphasizes that Mackenzie's personal harassment, the "outrage", served as a lightning rod of discontent because so many Upper Canadians had faced similar endemic abuses and hence identified their political fortunes with his.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Romney |first=Paul |title=From the Types Riot to the Rebellion: Elite Ideology, Anti-legal Sentiment, Political Violence, and the Rule of Law in Upper Canada |journal=Ontario History |year=1987 |volume=LXXIX |issue=2 |pages=114}}</ref>

===Church of England===
[[File:Johnstrachan.JPG|left|thumb|John Strachan]]

====Established church====
In 1836, as he was preparing to leave office, Lt Governor John Colborne endowed 44 Church of England rectories with about {{Convert | 300 | acre}} of land each ({{Convert | 21638 | acre | km2}} in all) in an effort to make the church more self-sufficient and less dependent on government aid.<ref>{{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Alan |title=The Clergy Reserves of Upper Canada |year=1969 |publisher=Canadian Historical Society |location=Ottawa |pages=17}}</ref>

====Clergy reserves====
The Clergy Corporation was incorporated in 1819 to manage the Clergy Reserves. After [[John Strachan]] was appointed to the Executive Council, the advisory body to the Lieutenant Governor, in 1815, he began to push for the Church of England's autonomous control of the clergy reserves on the model of the Clergy Corporation created in Lower Canada in 1817. Although all clergymen in the Church of England were members of the body corporate, the act prepared in 1819 by Strachan's former student, Attorney General [[Sir John Robinson, 1st Baronet, of Toronto|John Beverly Robinson]], also appointed the inspector general and the surveyor general to the board, and made a quorum of three for meetings; these two public officers also sat on the Legislative Council with Strachan. These three were usually members of the Family Compact.<ref>{{cite thesis |last=Wilson |first=George A. |title=The Political and Administrative History of the Upper Canada Clergy Reserves, 1790–1855 |degree=PhD |year=1959 |publisher=University of Toronto |location=Toronto |pages=133ff}}</ref>

====Upper Canada College and King's College====
{{main|History of Upper Canada College|University of Toronto}}
[[File:Upper Canada College -- by James Pattison Cockburn.jpg|thumbnail|Upper Canada College, 1835]]
Grammar schools provided a classical education and were preparation for higher learning and entry into the law or the ministry. Entrance was limited by high tuition fees, even though they were government supported. Common schools for teaching basic education received little support or regulation in comparison at this time. Working class education was trades based through the Master-journeyman-apprentice relationship.

[[Upper Canada College]] was the successor to the Home District Grammar School taught by John Strachan, which became the Royal Grammar School in 1825. Upper Canada College was founded in 1829 by Lieutenant Governor Sir [[John Colborne]] (later Lord Seaton), to serve as a feeder school to the newly established King's College. It was modelled on the great public schools of Britain, most notably [[Eton College|Eton]].<ref name="How">''Upper Canada College, 1829–1979: Colborne's Legacy''; Howard, Richard; Macmillan Company of Canada, 1979</ref><ref name="UCCHist">[http://www.ucc.on.ca/podium/default.aspx?t=7292 Upper Canada College: History] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120213084128/http://www.ucc.on.ca/podium/default.aspx?t=7292 |date=2012-02-13 }}</ref> The school began teaching in the original [[Jarvis Collegiate Institute|Royal Grammar School]] and for several years the two organizations were essentially unified.

On March 15, 1827, a [[royal charter]] was formally issued for King's College (now the [[University of Toronto]]). The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by [[John Strachan]], who took office as the first president of the college.<ref name="charterStory">{{cite web |url=http://content.library.utoronto.ca/utarms/researchers/Charter/Charter |title=The story of the University of Toronto's original charter |access-date=November 2, 2008 |publisher=University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services }}{{dead link|date=September 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref><ref name="friedland_2002">{{cite book |title=The University of Toronto: A History |last=Friedland |first=Martin L. |year=2002 |publisher=University of Toronto Press |isbn=0-8020-4429-8 |pages=4, 31, 143, 156, 313, 376, 593–6}}</ref> The original three-storey [[Greek Revival architecture|Greek Revival]] school building was constructed on the present site of [[Queen's Park (Toronto)|Queen's Park]].<ref name="historyQA_kingsCollege">{{cite web |url=http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bios/02/history11.htm |title=What university was founded 175 years ago? |access-date=November 2, 2008 |work=History Q & A |publisher=University of Toronto Department of Public Affairs |year=2002 |archive-date=May 27, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200527145537/https://www.utoronto.ca/news/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> Upper Canada College merged with King's College for a period after 1831. Under Strachan's guidance, King's College was a religious institution that closely aligned with the [[Church of England]] and the Family Compact.<ref name="strachanBiography">{{cite DCB |title=Strachan, John |first=G. M. |last=Craig |url=http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/strachan_john_9E.html |volume=IX}}</ref>

===Bank of Upper Canada===
The [[Bank of Upper Canada]]'s principal promoters were Strachan and Allan. Allan, who became president, was also an executive and [[legislative councillor]]. He, like Strachan, played a key role in solidifying the Family Compact, and ensuring its influence within the colonial state. Boulton, the solicitor general, author of the bank incorporation bill, and the bank's lawyer, admitted the bank was a "terrible engine in the hands of the provincial administration".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Schrauwers |first=Albert |title=The Gentlemanly Order & the Politics of Production in the Transition to Capitalism in the Home District, Upper Canada |journal=Labour/Le Travail |year=2010 |volume=65 |issue=1 |pages=22–25}}</ref> The government, its officers, and legislative councillors owned 5,381 of its 8,000 shares. The lieutenant governor appointed four of the bank's fifteen directors making for a tight bond between the nominally private company and the state.  Forty-four men served as bank directors during the 1830s; eleven of them were executive councillors, fifteen of them were legislative councillors, and thirteen were magistrates in Toronto. Furthermore, all 11 men who had ever sat on the Executive Council also sat on the board of the bank at one time or another. Ten of these men also sat on the Legislative Council. The overlapping membership on the boards of the Bank of Upper Canada and on the Executive and Legislative councils served to integrate the economic and political activities of church, state, and the "financial sector". These overlapping memberships reinforced the oligarchic nature of power in the colony and allowed the administration to operate without any effective elective check. Despite these tight bonds, the [[receiver general]], the reform-leaning [[John Henry Dunn]], refused to use the bank for government business.<ref>{{cite book |last=Baskerville |first=Peter |title=The Bank of Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents |year=1987 |publisher=Champlain Society |location=Toronto |pages=lxxii}}</ref> The Bank of Upper Canada held a near monopoly, and as a result, controlled much of the trade in the province.

===Land and agriculture===
{{main|Agriculture in Upper Canada#Gentlemanly farming}}
The role of speculation in the vacant lands of Upper Canada ensured the development of group solidarity and cohesion of interest among the members of the Family Compact. Of the 26 largest landowners in Peel County between 1820 and 1840, 23 were absentee proprietors, of whom 17 were involved in the administration of the province; of these 17, 12 were part of the Family Compact. Society and politics in Upper Canada were dominated by interest and connection based on landed property, and only secondarily affected by ideologies and personalities.<ref>David Gagan, "Property and 'Interest'; Some Preliminary Evidence of Land Speculation by the 'Family Compact' in Upper Canada 1820–1840", ''Ontario History'', March 1978, Vol. 70 Issue 1, pp 63–70</ref>

Members of the Family Compact were interested in building up estates in which they imitated the "improved farming" methods of the English aristocracy. "Improved farming" refers to a capital-intensive form of farming introduced by the "improving landlords" of Great Britain on large estates that were beginning to be farmed as capitalist enterprises. These improved farming methods were introduced to Upper Canada by the half-pay military officers from aristocratic background who tended to become magistrates in Upper Canada and build large estates. "Mixed or improved farming was one part of a total life-style&nbsp;... As well as permitting them to practice improved farming and to develop a reasonably elegant life-style, their financial independence allowed them the leisure time necessary for them to act as 'leaders' of their community."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Kelly |first=Kenneth |title=Notes on a type of mixed farming practiced in Ontario during the early nineteenth century |journal=Canadian Geographer |year=1973 |volume=17 |issue=3 |pages=215 |doi=10.1111/j.1541-0064.1973.tb00088.x|bibcode=1973CGeog..17..205K }}</ref>

The city of Toronto was surrounded by the estates of the Family Compact.  One of these estates, the Grange, was owned by Boulton and was one of the chief centres of the Family Compact. Although many meetings took place at the Grange, [[John Ross Robertson]] noted the small dining room, which could not hold more than 14 people, probably meant that many of the stories about the Family Compact gatherings were probably exaggerated.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Peppiatt|first1=Liam|title=Chapter 19: A Sketch of the Grange|url=http://www.landmarksoftoronto.com/a-sketch-of-the-grange|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180927125237/http://www.landmarksoftoronto.com/a-sketch-of-the-grange|url-status=dead|archive-date=2018-09-27|website=Robertson's Landmarks of Toronto Revisited}}</ref>

<gallery>
File:TorontoMossParkEstate.jpg|"Moss Park", 1889, the estate of [[William Allan (banker)|William Allan]]
File:The Grange.JPG|The Grange, estate of D'Arcy Boulton Jr.
File:DundurnCastleSummer.JPG|Dundurn Castle, Hamilton, estate of Sir Allen McNab
</gallery>