Chronicles of Canada Volume 27 - The Winning of Popular Government: A Chronicle of the Union of 1841

The 1830s were a combustible decade for British North America. Reformers demanded responsible government; others whispered about annexation to the United States; armed rebellions erupted in both provinces. Into this maelstrom stepped the architects of Canada's political future. Archibald MacMechan chronicles the dramatic gamble of the Union of 1841, when Upper and Lower Canada were merged into a single colony, and traces the slow, hard-won victory of popular government over colonial autocracy. The book follows figures like Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, whose unlikely alliance made responsible government possible, even as loyalists and republicans, French and English, battled over the nation's soul. This is the story of how a fractured colony, riven by language, religion, and ideology, stumbled toward democratic self-rule. The Chronicles of Canada series aimed to make the nation's past vivid to ordinary readers, and MacMechan's volume succeeds: it reads less like a textbook than like an argument about who the Canadians are and how they came to be.