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
Paul Romney explains this failure of historical imagination as the outcome of an explicit strategy adopted by reformers in the face of charges of disloyalty to Britain in the wake of the Rebellions of 1837. In recounting the “myths of responsible government”, Romney emphasized that after the ascendancy of Loyalism as the dominant political ideology of Upper Canada any demand for democracy or for responsible government became a challenge to colonial sovereignty. The linkage of the "fight for responsible government" with disloyalty was solidified by the Rebellion of 1837, as reformers took up arms to finally break the "baneful domination" of the mother country. Struggling to avoid the charge of sedition, reformers later purposefully obscured their true aims of independence from Britain and focused on their grievances against the Family Compact. Thus, responsible government became a "pragmatic" policy of alleviating local abuses, rather than a revolutionary anti-colonial moment.