Burning of The Parliament Buildings in Montreal - Mob Attacks Parliament

Mob Attacks Parliament

On April 25, the cabinet sent Francis Hinks to The Monklands, the governor's residence, to request that Governor Elgin quickly come to town in order to assent a new tariff bill. The first European ship of the year had already arrived in the Port of Quebec and the new law needed to be in force in order to tax its merchandise. The governor left his residence and went to the Parliament the same day.

At about 5:00 pm, the governor gave the royal assent to the bill in the Legislative Council room, in the presence of members of both houses of Parliament. Since he was already in town, the governor decided to also give assent to some forty one other bills passed by the houses and awaiting to be assented. Among those bills was the Rebellion Losses Bill. The assent of this law seemed to take some people by surprise, and the galleries where some visitors were standing became agitated.

When the governor exited the building at around 6:00 pm, he found a crowd of protesters blocking his path. Some of the protesters began throwing eggs and rocks at him and his aides and he was forced to climb back into his carriage in haste and return to Monklands at gallop speed, while some of his assailants pursued him in the streets.

Not long after the attacks on the governor, alarm bells sounded throughout town to alert the population. A horse-drawn carriage traveled through the streets to announce a public meeting to denounce the governor's assent to the Rebellion Losses Bill. The editor in chief of The Gazette, James Moir Ferres, published an Extra which contained a report of the incident involving Lord Elgin, and invited the "Anglo-Saxons" of Montreal to attend a mass meeting to be held at 8:00 pm on Place d'Armes. The Extra read:

When Lord Elgin – he no longer deserves the name of Excellency – made his appearance on the street to retire from the Council Chamber, he was received by the crowd with hisses, hootings, and groans. He was pelted with rotten eggs; he and his aide-de-camps were splashed with the savory liquor; and the whole carriage covered with the nasty contents of the eggs and with mud. When the eggs were exhausted stones were made use of to salute the departing carriage, and he was driven off at a rapid gallop amidst the hootings and curses of his countrymen.

The End has begun.

Anglo-Saxons! you must live for the future. Your blood and race will now be supreme, if true to yourselves. You will be English "at the expense of not being British." To whom and what, is your allegiance now? Answer each man for himself.

The puppet in the pageant must be recalled, or driven away by the universal contempt of the people.

In the language of William the Fourth, "Canada is lost, and given away."

A Mass Meeting will be held on the Place d'Armes this evening at 8 o'clock. Anglo-Saxons to the struggle, now is your time. — Montreal Gazette, "Extra" of April 25, 1849.

Between 1,200 and 1,500 were reported to have attended the meeting (which in the end took place on Champ-de-Mars) to hear, by the gleam of torch light, the speeches of orators protesting vigorously against Lord Elgin's assent to the bill. Among the speakers were George Moffat, Colonel Gugy and other members of the official opposition. During the meeting it was proposed to address a petition to Her Majesty asking her to recall governor Elgin and disavow the indemnification act. In the 1887 account he gave of his participation to the events, some 38 years later, Alfred Perry, the captain of a volunteer corps of firemen, asserted that on that night he stepped on the hustings to speak to the crowd, put his hat on the torch lighting the petition, and exclaimed: "The time for petitions is over, but if the men who are present here are serious, let them follow me to the Parliament Buildings."

The crowd then followed him to the Parliament Buildings, breaking the windows of the offices of the Montreal Pilot, then the only English-language daily then supporting the administration, which were on the route to the Parliament.

When they arrived on site, the rioters broke the windows of the House of Assembly, which was still in session despite the late hour. A committee of the whole House was at that time debating a Bill to Establish a Court having jurisdiction in Appeals and Criminal matters for Lower Canada. The last entry in the journal of the House on April 25 reads:

Mr. Johnson took the Chair of the Committee; and after some time spent therein, the proceedings of the Committee were interrupted by continued volleys of stones and other missiles thrown from the streets, through the windows, into the Legislative Assembly Hall, which caused the Committee to rise, and the Members to withdraw into the adjoining passages for safety, — from whence Mr. Speaker and the other Members were almost immediately compelled to retire and leave the Building, which had been set fire to on the outside. — Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, April 25, 1849.

After breaking the windows and the gas lamps on the outside, a group entered the building and committed various acts of vandalism. According to Perry's account, he, together with Augustus Howard and Alexander Courtney, broke into the building after a first unsuccessful attempt to open the locked doors. Someone ordered a fire truck brought over, and then Perry and a notary, John H. Isaacson, used the truck's 35-foot ladder as a battering ram to break down the doors. He entered with a few followers and reached the House of Assembly. A certain O'Connor attempted to block their entry, but Perry knocked him down with the handle of the axe he was carrying. The mob took control of the room despite the resistance of a few MPPs (John Sandfield Macdonald, William Hume Blake, Thomas Aylwin, John Price) and sergeant at arms Chrisholm.

One of the rioters sat in the Speaker's chair where Morin had been sitting only a few minutes before, and declared the dissolution of the House. The room was turned upside down while other men entered the room of the Legislative Council. The acts of vandalism that were reported included the destruction of the seats and desks, stamping on the portrait of Louis-Joseph Papineau, that had been hanging on the wall next to that of Queen Victoria. Perry claimed to have set fire to the room himself when he hit the gas chandelier suspended on the ceiling with a brick, aiming for the clock that was directly above the Speaker's chair. The clock, whose ticking apparently got on his nerves, was, according to his account, showing 9:40 pm when it happened. Other sources, including newspapers of the time, believed the fire to have been started when rioters outside the building started throwing the torches that some of them had carried from the Champ-de-Mars meeting.

Since gas pipes were broken both inside and outside the building, the fire spread rapidly. Perry and Courtney ran out of the building with the ceremonial mace of the House of Assembly which was lying on the clerk's desk in front of the Speaker's chair. The mace was afterwards brought to Allan MacNab who was then at Donegana Hotel.

The St. Anne's Market building burned very rapidly, with the fire propagating to adjacent buildings, including a house, some warehouses, and the general hospital of the Grey Nuns. The mob did not allow firefighters to fight the flames devastating the parliament buildings, but did not intervene against those who were trying to save the other structures.