Background Information

When Lord Durham arrived to assess the state of the colony after a blaze of
rebellion had swept both Upper and Lower Canada in 1837, he found a country
under the impact of many changes.
The first faint stirrings of a national idea had been aroused by the War of 1812 .
With heroes like Brock and Tecumseh and Laura Secord, this little colony of half
a million had defended itself against invasion by a country eight million strong to
the south.
Though basically a minor chapter in the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 would
become one of the major events in Canadian history, inspiring myth, legend and
song.
England's Industrial Revolution would also have a part in changing life across the
ocean. It created a new middle class whose influence would reform political
thinking on both sides of the Atlantic.
It also created a whole group of people displaced by this structural change to the
economy and many of them made the Great Migration to the New World where
they added to the numbers of discontented here who eventually rebelled against
the monopoly of power held by the Family Compact and the Chateau Clique.
Although the Rebellions of 1837 were quelled fairly quickly, England didn't want
to risk losing another group of colonies.
Lord Durham's solution, drafted as the Act of Union, contained kernels of reform, but
also created a political deadlock that would only be broken twenty-seven years later
by a daring new experiment.