Hard Labor
On September 24, 1845, a late afternoon sun was lighting the waterfront sandstone warehouses of Salamanca Place, commercial hub of Hobart Town, the capital of Australia’s far south island, Van Diemen’s Land. Linus Wilson Miller, an American citizen, stood alone in the dockyards gazing at whalers and other vessels riding at anchor. The slim, cocky 24-year-old, a native of Stockton, New York, was to sail the next day, a free man returning to his homeland. Seven years earlier, Miller had entered into a desperate enterprise that led to trial, brutalities, and confinement in Canada and England, and finally prison in Australia’s penal colony on the island, better known to its convict population as “Van Demon’s Land.”
Miller’s odyssey started December 5, 1837, with an armed populist uprising in Toronto, in what was then the British Colony of Upper Canada. Rebels, some armed only with pitchforks, wanted more representation in their government, at the time controlled by the lieutenant governor in cahoots with a ruling oligarchy. Amid a dire economic crisis gripping the region as well as the adjoining portion of the United States, Canada’s elite, the rebels claimed, were denying ordinary people, many of them out of work and destitute, a say in land policies, religion, and politics. Upper Canada was split between its haves and its have-nots.
the Toronto uprising. Many rebels and their leader, William Lyon Mackenzie, crossed the Niagara River into the United States, where a privately chartered steam vessel flagged in the United States. Rebel resolve persisted until the night of December 29, 1837, when a Canadian attack sent drifting in flames toward Niagara Falls. One man died. “BUTCHERED IN COLD BLOOD” shrieked the dramatically multiplying the number of casualties. Similar exaggeration by border newspapers from Michigan to Vermont fired and reinforced the emotions of young American men, many as adrift as their Canadian cousins. As young Buffalo diarist Mary Peacock wrote, “The war in Canada has so affected and excited the people in this city that it is a subject of some doubt where it will end and in what manner…”
