Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [83]
John Moodie had a direct role to play in the elections in which Robert Baldwin was running because he was the returning officer, responsible for ensuring that voting was free and fair. This was a tough job in the early 1840s. Intimidation and bribery were rife. Each candidate had his own ballot box, and a voter would cast his ballot in full public view. Everyone could see who voted for whom. Rival candidates marched their supporters to the hustings “like the men-at-arms of two medieval private armies,” in the words of Donald Creighton. John had to oversee two elections within his first two years in Belleville: one in March and April, 1841, and the next in October 1842. In both, Baldwin ran against Edmund Murney, a local lawyer. Anyone who ran into Murney on the street would have thought he was a pleasant and civilized fellow, but on a soapbox he was a fiend. He ranted against responsible government as a revolutionary plot, and he accused mild-mannered Robert Baldwin of being a Papist and a rebel.
Murney had the serried ranks of Tory Belleville behind him, including Thomas Parker, all the members of Belleville’s Orange Lodge and George Benjamin, outspoken editor of the local newspaper, the Intelligencer. Both elections verged on riots. Baldwin was accused by his enemies of hiring a “large body of armed shanty-men, bullies and ruffians, armed with bludgeons, clubs and sticks” who prevented Murney supporters from reaching the hustings by their “threatening language and gestures.” It is not clear whose supporters screamed the loudest and rudest insults, but there is no doubt that many voters on both sides were too scared to cast their votes at all. Baldwin was acknowledged to be the victor in 1841, and Murney in 1842. But the person most damaged by the turmoil and tension each time was Sheriff Moodie, who had failed to keep the peace. He was also accused by the Murney gang of showing bias towards Baldwin. George Benjamin charged him with “intimidation, perjury and partiality.” He was summarily removed from the position of returning officer.
John and Susanna churned with outrage at the way they were being treated. John’s letters to Robert Baldwin are littered with indignant references to the “low cunning and artful misrepresentations” of local enemies. He fulminated against Edmund Murney in 1842, and commented that, “Anything like fairness or straight forwardness with him is out of the question.” But John and Susanna saved their most savage remarks for “the little Jew,” as John referred to George Benjamin. Benjamin was probably no more hostile to Sheriff Moodie than most of Belleville’s Tory establishment, but his criticisms had greater impact because he promoted them in the Intelligencer. There, according to John, he regularly “opined a lot in fine style” against the sheriff. Every Saturday, John’s heart was in his mouth as he picked up the paper, wondering what slanders against him were contained in the weekly “smut machine” (as it was characterized by its rival, Kingston’s British Whig). The editor of the British Whig had already noted that Benjamin did not tolerate any dissenting views on Belleville politics in his newspaper or his community “as he regards that field as entirely his own.”
George Benjamin was one of the more intriguing characters in nineteenth-century Canada. He was born in Brighton, England, where his father, Emanuel Cohen, was the leading member of the town’s Jewish community. The Cohens had twelve children: George’s eldest brother, Levy, was founder and editor of the Brighton Guardian; two brothers emigrated to Australia; and one brother went to New York and became a physician. It is not clear why Moses Cohen, the second son, changed his first name to George and adopted his mother’s maiden name as his surname, but it is clear that he was an ambitious lad, with a taste for adventure. He worked for a time on his brother’s newspaper, but he quickly moved to Liverpool to engage in “commercial pursuits.” By the time he