This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 (review)

This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880. By Norman N. Feltes (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999) 208 pp. $40.00

Early on February 4, 1880, a vigilante group invaded the farmhouse of James Donnelly, on the 6th Concession Line Road, or "Roman [Catholic] Line," in Biddulph Township, Middlesex County, Ontario. The intruders killed Donnelly, his wife, a son, and a niece, and later murdered another son living nearby. The elder Donnelly had served time for killing a man in a drunken quarrel, and neighbors blamed him and his seven sons for incidents of arson, theft, and livestock mutilation. Efforts to convict Donnelly's alleged murderers failed. Historians have told a complicated story of a rough Irish-settler culture in which the Donnellys were also sinned against, and Old Country feuds provided the social foundations of the tragedy. James Reany placed the Donnellys securely within the Canadian literary heritage when his plays based on their story won the Governor General's Award in 1975.

Feltes does not offer new facts specific to the murders, depending for this information on the secondary accounts. Instead, he attempts to rearrange, or re-place, "this tale in the history of . . . Canada . . . according to the particular understanding of that history that I share with other marxists, and other historians, presenting a different idea of that story" (xii). Instead of a narrative "of local social disorder," Feltes attempts to "go beyond the local and immediate emotions and actions of individuals to consider critically the degree that these were historically determined" (xiv-xv). In doing so, he analyzes the region's physiography and geography, the processes of survey and settlement, community ideologies, transportation routes and their implications, and the development and legacy of the "wheat staple" in Ontario.

In his final chapter, Feltes focuses particularly upon Biddulph Township, "the social formation that these particular historical structures determined," defined as "a particular articulation of . . . economic, political, and ideological levels, an overlapping of geographic, modes of production, technology, culture" (xv, 126). He describes the significance of the grain merchants and their relation to the farm economy and culture in Biddulph. Along the Donnellys' road, he suggests, households, once properly characterized as engaged in independent household production, were moving toward "fully capitalist, market conditions." The Donnelly household, however, he argues, is out of step, "an anomaly in an agricultural order that is changing not only its products but the form . . . of its production--a farm economy in close relation to a mercantile order that is itself increasingly needing to change" (137, 143). Feltes also suggests that the issue of tariff revision in the 1878 federal election reoriented local politics to the detriment of the Donnellys' role in the Liberal party and strengthened ties between the petty bourgeois merchants and conservative farmers. The latter development encouraged the vigilantes to believe that members of the local power structure would support their actions.

In developing most chapters, Feltes typically introduces and discusses the relevant ideas of authorities from various disciplines and backgrounds, as well as the activities of illustrative individuals. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, G. P. de T. Glazebrook, Harold Innis, R. M. McInnis, Karl Marx, Harriet Friedman, and William Cronon, among others occupy the first category. Erudite and well written, Feltes' book is a first-rate introduction to middle-of-the-road marxian analysis of Ontario's agricultural development. Not all readers will agree that translation of the latter story into marxian terms satisfactorily explains events on the Roman Line in early 1880, particularly in its description of the Donnelly farm business. But Feltes has written a fascinating book that all North American agricultural and social historians, and many general readers, will find illuminating.

Allan G. Bogue
University of Wisconsin, Madison

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