Family Compact was a small closed group of men who exercised most of the political, economic and judicial power in Upper Canada from the 1810s to the 1840s.
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13 Facts About Family Compact
2.
Family Compact did not mean relations by marriage, but rather a close brotherhood.
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3.
Origins of the Family Compact lay in overlapping appointments made to the Executive and Legislative Council of Upper Canada.
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4.
Family Compact exerted influence over the government through the Executive Council and Legislative Council, the advisers to the Lieutenant Governor, leaving the popularly elected Legislative Assembly with little real power.
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5.
The original members of the Family Compact were United Empire Loyalists who had fled the United States immediately after the Revolutionary War.
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6.
Family Compact served in the state legislature, and was the state attorney general from 1807 to 1810, when irregularities in the Berkshire County books prompted his flight to Upper Canada.
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7.
Control that the Family Compact exerted over the legal profession and the corruption that resulted was most clearly demonstrated in the "Types Riot" in 1826, in which the printing press of William Lyon Mackenzie was destroyed by the young lawyers of the Juvenile Advocate's Society with the complicity of the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and the magistrates of Toronto.
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8.
Mackenzie had published a series of satires under the pseudonym of "Patrick Swift, nephew of Jonathan Swift" in an attempt to humiliate the members of the Family Compact running for the board of the Bank of Upper Canada, and Henry John Boulton the Solicitor General, in particular.
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9.
He, like Strachan, played a key role in solidifying the Family Compact, and ensuring its influence within the colonial state.
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10.
Family Compact was one of many, distinguished primarily by its access to the offices of state.
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11.
Mackenzie's frustration with Family Compact control of the government was a catalyst for the failed Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837.
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12.
Family Compact began to reconfigure itself after 1841 as it was squeezed out of public life in the new Province of Canada.
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13.
The conservative values of the Family Compact was succeeded by the Upper Canada Tories after 1841.
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