Patriot War

The Patriot movement inducted between 40,000 and 160,000 men into a predominantly American and Canadian refugee secret association, the “Hunter’s Lodge”, across the north-eastern states in support of the 1837 Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. The organization arose in Vermont among Lower Canadian refugees (the eastern division or Frères chasseurs) and spread westward under the influence of Dr Charles Duncombe and Donald McLeod, leaders of the short lived Canadian Refugee Relief Association, and Scotland native William Lyon Mackenzie, drawing in support from several different locations in North America and Europe. The Republic of Canada was also short-lived. After heavy bombardment by the British on Navy Island, where the republic had been established, Mackenzie and his force of Canadian militia retreated to Buffalo, New York, where they were captured by the U.S. army and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for violating neutrality between the United States and the British Empire, bringing to an end what the British viewed as an inconsequential and unsupported colonial rebellion. The organizations were made up of grass-roots armed militants whose goal was to overthrow British rule in Canada. Their dispersal involved the largest deployment of U.S. troops against their own citizens since the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.