Lower Canada Rebellion
| Lower Canada Rebellions | |||||||||
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| Part of the Rebellions of 1837 | |||||||||
 The Battle of Saint-Eustache, Lower Canada. |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Lower Canada Chateau Clique
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 Patriotes
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
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John Colborne, Charles Gore, Lewis Odell, John Scriver, George Augustus Wetherall |
Thomas Storrow Brown, Jean-Olivier Chénier, † Robert Nelson, Wolfred Nelson, Ferdinand-Alphonse Oklowski, Louis-Joseph Papineau |
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| Strength | |||||||||
| 1,380 Regulars, rising to 10,000 by mid-1838 33,000 Canadian militia |
~4,100 Patriotes 25,000 Sympathizer militia |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 32 combat dead, 47 wounded |
73 dead, 1,600 wounded or captured, 29 executed for treason, 58 deported to Australia |
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The Lower Canada Rebellion (French: La rébellion du Bas-Canada), commonly referred to as the Patriots' War (French: la Guerre des patriotes) by Quebecers, is the name given to the armed conflict in 1837–38 between the rebels of Lower Canada (now Quebec) and the British colonial power of that province. Together with the simultaneous Upper Canada Rebellion in the neighbouring colony of Upper Canada (now Ontario), it formed the Rebellions of 1837. The rebellion of Lower Canada continued in 1838 and in Quebec is often called Les rébellions de 1837–38.
The rebellion was preceded by nearly three decades of efforts at political reform in Lower Canada, led from the early 1800s by James Stuart and Louis-Joseph Papineau, who formed the Parti patriote and sought accountability from the elected General Assembly and appointed governor of the colony. The appointed Legislative Council (a type of upper house) was dominated by a small group of businessmen known as the Château Clique, the equivalent of the Family Compact in Upper Canada.
Activists in Lower Canada began to work for reform in a period of economic disfranchisement of the French-speaking majority and working-class English-speaking citizens. The rebellion protested the injustice of colonial governing as such, in which the governor and upper house of the legislature were appointed by the Crown. Many of its leaders and participants were English-speaking citizens of Lower Canada. The French speakers felt that Anglophones were disproportionately represented in the lucrative fields of banking, the timber trade, and transportation industry.
At the same time, some among the Anglophone business elite advocated a union of Upper and Lower Canada in order to ensure competitiveness on a national scale with the increasingly large and powerful economy of the United States. (Some rebels had been inspired by the US' successful war of independence). The unification of the colony was favoured by the British-appointed Governor, George Ramsey, Earl of Dalhousie. In Lower Canada, the growing sense of nationalism among English and the French-speaking citizens was organized into the Parti canadien (after 1826 called the Parti patriote).
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