Lower Canada Rebellion
When news of the arrest of the Patriote leaders reached Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie launched an armed rebellion in December 1837. In the meantime, filibusters from the United States, the Hunter Patriots, formed a small militia and attacked Windsor, Upper Canada, to support the Canadian Patriots. This resulted in the declaration of martial law by the Lower Canadian government.
Upper Canada Rebellion
Both before and after the War of 1812, the government of Upper Canada continued to fear what it suspected might be a growing interest in American-inspired republicanism in the province. Reasons for this can be found in the pattern of settlement across the province over the previous half-century. Although the British had originally hoped that an orderly settlement in Upper Canada would inspire the former American colonies to abandon their republican form of government, demographic realities intervened. After an initial group of about 70,000 United Empire Loyalists were thinly settled across the province in the mid-1780s, a far larger number of American settlers came after Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe offered cheap land grants to promote settlement. Although these settlers, known as "late-Loyalists," were required to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown in order to obtain land, their fundamental political allegiances were always considered dubious. By 1812, this had become acutely problematic since the American settlers outnumbered the original Loyalists by more than ten to one. It was this reality that led American legislators to speculate that bringing Upper Canada into the American fold would be a "mere matter of marching." Following the war, the colonial government took active steps to prevent Americans from swearing allegiance, thereby making them ineligible to obtain land grants. Relations between the appointed Legislative Council and the elected Legislative Assembly became increasingly strained in the years after the war, over issues of immigration, taxation, banking and land speculation.