“Lawless Law”: Conservative Political Violence in Upper Canada, 1818–41

Abstract

The Types Riot of June 8, 1826, is the most celebrated episode of conservative political violence in Upper Canada. It was directed against William Lyon Mackenzie, an immigrant from Scotland and a newspaper editor in York (Toronto) who had perfected a style of journalism characterized by scathing personal abuse of the colony's leaders. About a dozen well-connected individuals, most of them lawyers or law students, broke into the offices of Mackenzie'sColonial Advocatenewspaper in its owner's absence. Terrorizing Mackenzie's mother, son, and assistants, the rioters wrecked the press and scattered the types, throwing some of them into the bay nearby. In a harbinger of what was to come, more than one magistrate looked on without interfering. The attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, neither disciplined the lawyers and law students among the rioters nor prosecuted them in the criminal courts.