“Your Daughter and I Are Not likely to Quarrel”: Notes on a Dispute between Joseph Workman and William Lyon Mackenzie

On the first day of March in 1857, William Lyon Mackenzie stormed out of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto—he was a very angry man. Anger was nothing new to Mackenzie. He was a passionate person; all his life he had felt strongly about almost everything. A Scot who had emigrated to Upper Canada in 1820, founded a controversial newspaper in 1824, and served as a Legislative Assemblyman and as Toronto’s first mayor, Mackenzie, was most famous—or infamous, depending upon one’s point of view—as leader of the ill-fated 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion. After 12 years as a refugee in the United States, Mackenzie returned to Toronto in 1850, was re-elected to Parliament the next year, and started up another newspaper—Mackenzie’s Weekly Message. He had thus resumed his former role of caustic government critic, albeit this time with no suggestion of rebellion.