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Provincial Justice: Upper Canadian Legal Portraits
1992 
edited by Dr. Robert Fraser. Published with the University of Toronto Press, 1992.
This is an important reference guide and a highly entertaining book. In association with the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, which has published twelve monumental volumes dealing with Canadian lives from the year 1000 to 1900, we have selected some sixty biographies of Upper Canadian officialdom (both the judiciary and Crown officers), members of the bar, critics of the judicial system, and those who stood before it. Among those included are: Chief Justice William Campbell, William Warren Baldwin, a lawyer who claimed in 1821 that “there was no Society (referring to the Law Society of Upper Canada) for which the country should feel so deep an interest …. Without it, whose property was safe?,” Jacob Overholser (convicted of treason in 1814); Mary Osborn (the first woman executed in Upper Canada); Cornelius Burley (convicted of murder, his skull is now exhibited in a museum); Mary Thompson (whose conviction for infanticide in 1823 led to the reform of a notorious law), and many more. The volume is introduced by DCB editor, Dr. Robert Fraser, who places the biographies in their larger social and economic context. Fraser’s essay stands alone as a brilliant and often devastating analysis of the legal landscape of early Ontario.
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Contents
Contents
FOREWORD xi
GENERAL INTRODUCTION xiii
PREFACE xv
‘All the privileges which Englishmen possess’:
Order, Rights, and Constitutionalism
In Upper Canada xxi
Officialdom: The Judiciary and Crown Officers
Henry Allcock 3
Robert Baldwin 8
D’Arcy Boulton 39
Henry John Boulton 43
Sir William Campbell 51
William Henry Draper 64
John Elmsley 76
William Firth 79
Robert Isaac Dey Gray 83
Christopher Alexander Hagerman 85
Robert Sympson Jameson 100
Jonas Jones 104
Sir James Buchanan Macaulay 115
John Macdonell (Greenfield) 121
Archibald McLean 127
William Osgoode 129
William Dummer Powell 135
Sir John Beverley Robinson 153
Peter Russell 175
Thomas Scott 182
Levius Peters Sherwood 185
Robert Thorpe 188
John White 192
John Walpole Willis 195
The Legal Profession
William Warren Baldwin 201
Donald Bethune 222
Marshall Spring Bidwell 225
Robert Easton Burns 234
James Clark 236
George Mackenzie 239
William Birdseye Peters 243
Thomas Mabon Radenhurst 247
George Ridout 250
Walter Roe 253
John Rolph 256
James Hunter Samson 270
Robert Baldwin Sullivan 272
Simon Ebenezer Washburn 283
William Weekes 285
The Accused
Elijah Bentley 289
William Brass 293
Cornelius Albertson Burley 296
Joshua Gwillen Doan 301
William Kain 303
James Owen McCarthy 306
Edward McSwiney 310
Peter Matthews 314
Mary Osborn (London) 316
Jacob Overholser 320
Angelique Pilotte 327
George Powlis 332
Nils von Schoultz 337
Joseph Seely 340
Shawanakiskie 344
Henry Sovereene 346
Daniel Sullivan 348
Mary Thompson 351
Jack York 355
The Critics and the Causes Célèbres
Barnabas Bidwell 361
Francis Collins 370
Reuben Crandall 375
Bartemas Ferguson 378
William Forsyth 382
Charles French 392
Benajah Mallory 396
John Matthews 404
Peter Perry 410
Robert Randal 420
Joseph Willcocks 432
John Willson 443
CONTRIBUTORS 449
INDEX 453
Reviews
Provincial Justice is a huge success: the book really works as both an introduction to and an analysis of the legal culture of Upper Canada. Sidney L. Harring, Canadian Historical Review, vol 75, 1994. p. 291.
Jamie Benidickson, Ottawa Law Review, Vol 28, 1997, p. 438.
Henri Pallard, Canadian Book Review Annual 1992, 1993, p. 390.