Our 2nd cousin 5x removed, Pascal Pinsonneault (born around 1812), a farmer from La Prairie, was a patriot who participated in the “Lower Canada Rebellion,” and an attack on the house of David Witty, La Tortue (Saint-Constant), during which Aaron Walker was killed on November 3, 1838.
Pascal was one of several sentenced to death for murder by the Court Martial on January 10, 1839, but his sentence was later commuted to exile to Australia. He was tried starting January 3, 1839, alongside others including Joseph Robert, Ambroise Sanguinet, Charles Sanguinet, F.X. Hamelin, Theophile Robert, Joseph Longtin, and Jacques Longtin, in a trial that lasted seven days. Two relatives, L. Pinsonnault and R. Pinsonnault, were also among those transported to Australia.
He left the prison Pied-du-Courant on September 26, 1839, and went to Quebec where he embarked aboard the ship “Buffalo” to Australia. The HMS Buffalo departed Quebec on September 28, 1839, sailed via Rio de Janeiro, and arrived in Sydney, New South Wales, on February 26, 1840.
Pascal was one of 58 French-Canadian political prisoners from Lower Canada transported as part of this group, who were interned at the Longbottom Stockade near present-day Concord, NSW. This location led to the naming of nearby areas such as Canada Bay, French Bay, and Exile Bay. These prisoners were generally treated better than other convicts, received wages (around 3/6 per week with monthly savings deposits), were liberated sooner, and assisted in returning home.
He was pardoned in 1843 and returned to Canada in 1845. He died about 1865 in La Prairie.
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.
The rebellion was preceded by nearly three decades of efforts at political reform in Lower Canada 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.
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