The Riot That Never Was: The Military Shooting of Three Montrealers in 1832 and the Official Cover-up (review)

Reviewed by: The Riot That Never Was: The Military Shooting of Three Montrealers in 1832 and the Official Cover-up Dan Horner The Riot That Never Was: The Military Shooting of Three Montrealers in 1832 and the Official Cover-up. James Jackson . Montreal: Baraka Books, 2009. Pp. 358, $29.95 paper The back cover of The Riot That Never Was pitches James Jackson's account of the 1832 election riot in Montreal as a 'historical "whodunit" ' with the author assuming the role of 'a one-man investigative commission,' and the book certainly does measure up to its publisher's billing. With lively prose, Jackson examines the events surrounding the closely contested by-election in Montreal's western ward in May 1832. While sometimes limited in its reach, The Riot That Never Was is an engaging micro-history that demonstrates how a small Tory clique of public officials exercised power in the years leading up to the rebellions of 1837 and 1838. The contest pitted Daniel Tracey, an Irish Catholic physician and newspaper editor, against Stanley Bagg, a wealthy and well-connected Tory merchant. The feisty Tracey had successfully bridged the cultural divide between Montreal's upstart Irish community and the city's Patriotes. As the publisher of the Vindicator, he had been briefly jailed only months before the election for his withering critiques on the autocratic tendencies of the Legislative Council. Tracey's candidacy was particularly threatening to Montreal's commercial elite because of his efforts to foster popular opposition to the British American Land Company, a venture in which many prominent anglophone Montrealers were heavily invested. Not only did this enterprise promise to generously line the pockets of those with close connections to the colonial authorities, but it also aspired to shifting the balance of power in Lower Canada by flooding Montreal's southern hinterland with Anglo immigrants. This set the scene for a turbulent electoral campaign [End Page 553] marked by furious editorials and daily fistfights and ended with three French-Canadian men lying dead on the street. How was it that three apparently innocent Montreal men were felled by soldiers' bullets and that nobody was held accountable for their deaths? This question prompted Jackson to pore over the records from the investigations made in Parliament, the courts, and by the coroner with forensic precision. Jackson details the issues and personalities that shaped the state's response to the shooting, thus providing valuable insights into the way that power was nurtured and wielded in early-nineteenth-century Montreal. Jackson is critical of several generations of historians who have written about the 1832 by-election without pausing to challenge the central tenets of the Tory narrative of events. The military intervened, this account maintains, to extinguish a bout of serious rioting that broke out in the vicinity of the polling station. The three men who were killed were simply assumed to be engaged in the violence. Jackson makes a solid case that had these historians taken the time to examine the parliamentary and judicial records relating to the incident, they would have reached a conclusion closer to his own: That despite possibly engaging in some of the customary public revelry associated with elections during this period, the victims were innocent bystanders forced to pay the ultimate price for opposing Montreal's powerful Tory elite. As the title of the book suggests, Jackson argues that Anglo magistrates and other powerful public officials with Tory leanings and close personal and commercial links to Bagg manufactured the threat of a violent disturbance upon realizing that Tracey was going to carry the election. A close reading of testimonies describing the moments leading up to the soldiers' firing the fatal shots suggest that the whole idea that the troops were breaking up a riot was a ruse. Even witnesses loyal to the Tories inadvertently described walking the streets entirely unscathed shortly before the shots rang out, which Jackson argues would have been impossible during a riot serious enough to warrant military intervention. When pieced together, the evidence suggests that, at most, the violence surrounding the election was minor and sporadic, as was often customary during urban elections throughout this period. Jackson argues that calling...

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