Dismemberment at Windmill Point

Abstract

This chapter analyses events before, during, and after the 1838 Battle of the Windmill in Upper Canada. It explores how masculine imagery informed the manner in which the Irishmen fighting at Windmill Point were perceived by their peers, their enemies, and amongst themselves. It pays particular attention to local Orangemen who fought in the battle and how that hyper-masculinized and often violent Irish fraternity positioned itself within the frameworks of loyalism, social ascendancy, and imperial defence. In trying to prove their loyalty and gain social respectability within the colony, many of the Irishmen fighting at the windmill ended up reinforcing some of the more basic and crude stereotypes about their ethnicity and gender. The chapter includes gendered analyses of the mutilations that occurred during the battle, and closes by comparing how punishments against rebels in 1838 mirrored those from the 1798 Irish Rising.