Archdeacon John Strachan

A real man, alive and powerful in York in 1837. Fifty-nine years old, Archdeacon of York, rector of St James, member of the Legislative Council.

The most consequential churchman in Upper Canada and, depending on who you ask in the tavern, either the province’s finest servant or the reason nothing in it can change.

Why He Matters

He was at Fort York in 1813

Strachan was chaplain to the garrison and to the Legislative Council. When the Americans took York in the spring of 1813 — the invasion that ends with the magazine explosion and General Pike’s death — Strachan was on the ground, helping negotiate the terms of surrender, arguing with the occupiers, trying to stop the looting. He came back and did it again when they returned in July.

That makes him a living, credible, first-hand witness to 1813 who is still in town. He was there, he wrote everything down his whole life, and he is exactly the sort of man who would know what happened at the Stone Powder Magazine and not say so plainly.

He buried a twelfth of York

The 1832 cholera epidemic killed roughly one in twelve people in town. Strachan worked the sick beds, organised the burials, and raised relief money for the orphans and widows. Cholera came back in 1834 and he did it again. Whatever else he was, he did not flinch from the dying.

He does not hold with superstition

Strachan’s religion is rational, ordered, and institutional. He is openly contemptuous of religious “enthusiasm” — he set out early in his career to publicly attack the Methodist idea of sudden divine inspiration, and he has spent decades opposing what he regards as credulous nonsense as a matter of principle.

Bear that in mind before you bring him anything strange. He is a high-ranking cleric with genuine divine power who will need a great deal of convincing.

Strachan in 1837 Specifically

The campaign year catches him at a genuinely bad moment.

• Passed over for bishop — again, this year. Bishop Stewart died in 1837 and the diocese went to George Jehoshaphat Mountain instead of being divided. Strachan had been angling for a bishopric since 1824 and makes no effort to conceal how much this stung.
• Pushed off the Executive Council. He resigned effective 1 January 1836 under pressure from the Colonial Office, clung to his Legislative Council seat, and flatly refused to give that up too.
• Sidelined. He is a Tory figurehead and the reformers loathe him, but he is not actually making policy any more — a lightning rod without a hand on the wheel.
• Founded a newspaper this year. The Church, out of Cobourg.
• Broke. Chronically in debt his whole life. Large house, carriage, servants, generous loans to relatives, bad land speculation. A proud man quietly short of money is a man with pressure points.
• Fighting for King’s College. The university charter he won in 1827 has been under siege ever since; it is amended in 1837 to strip out visible Church of England control.

Lord Elgin later described him as “the most dangerous and spiteful man in Upper Canada” — a useful line for how his enemies talk about him, though the record’s own read is far more sympathetic, and so is ours.

Dealing With Him

Warm in person, immovable on principle. A genuinely gifted teacher who trained a generation of the province’s leaders and kept those friendships for decades. He likes argument, keeps up an enormous correspondence, and worries about other people’s problems in writing. He also believes, without apology, that ordinary people should not be deciding things.

He will be kind to your faces, listen carefully, and then say no — and be genuinely puzzled that you are upset about it. His power is access, authority, paperwork, and the ability to shut a door you need open.

Strachan and Peter Jones

Captain Harris’s real documented collaborator on the Port Credit Harbour Company was Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit — and a Methodist convert and missionary. Strachan spent his career fighting Methodism specifically, dismissing its preachers and denying them any claim on government support.

So the two most useful men in the historical record sit on opposite sides of a real doctrinal fight. Harris works with Jones. Strachan would not. Neither man is villainous; they simply cannot be brought to the same table by anything short of you doing it.

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Source: G. M. Craig, “STRACHAN, JOHN,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9.

Note: no family relation to Captain James B. Harris appears in the record. The Harris who does appear in Strachan’s papers is Joseph Hemington Harris, an Anglican clergyman who published a letter to Strachan in 1833 about the Bible Society — a different man entirely.