Final Years in Canada, 1849–1861
In 1848, the Province of Canada (which had been formed out of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841 upon the recommendation of Lord Durham) received responsible government, with Lord Elgin being the first Governor General of the Province of Canada to accept the Legislative Assembly's advice as to whom to appoint to the Executive Council and hence the cabinet, instead of appointing the cabinet himself. In the elections for the 3rd Parliament of the Province of Canada, the Reformers won, and Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine became Joint Premiers of the Province of Canada. The Baldwin-Lafontaine ministry enacted sweeping reforms in the Province of Canada, which included an amnesty act for the rebels of 1837, which passed the Legislative Assembly in February 1849. Mackenzie wrote to his old friend James Leslie, who was now the Provincial Secretary, asking to be included in the amnesty.
Mackenzie immediately went on a cross-country tour from Montreal to Niagara Falls, though he insisted at the time that he didn't want to move back to Canada and was happy to be allowed to visit. He even briefly accepted a position as the New York Daily Tribune's correspondent in Washington, D.C. By April 1850, however, his desire to return to Canada was too great, and he moved back to Toronto in May 1850.
Mackenzie continued to write for the Tribune, and as for the Niagara Mail and the Toronto Examiner (owned by James Lesslie) and attempted to collect money that he believed he was owed for his public service in the 1830s.
In response to the Indian Mutiny, Mackenzie initially wrote supportive of the rebels. He argued that ‘the inhabitants of Hindostan’ who were as capable of civilisation as ‘the Celt or Anglo-Saxon’, but not the ‘woolyhaired African’. Later he became more even handed writing that ‘here is cruelty on both sides’ and asked ‘Which has the most reason to be cruel? The strangers who seek to trample India for gain, or the natives whose home is there?’.
Read more about this topic: William Lyon Mackenzie
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