ONE

Lairds Ourselves

Mark my words, John will make more than an ordinary man. Helen Macdonald’s judgment on her eldest son

Where John A. Macdonald was born and when he was born are unknown. Or, rather, are not known exactly. About the essentials of his beginnings, there are no doubts whatever. He was born in the Scottish industrial city of Glasgow in 1815.

There were historical dimensions to both place and date. Glasgow was the lustiest child of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: a sleepy town of only twenty thousand in 1791, its shipyards along the Clyde, its engineering works and factories and its “dark Satanic mills” had sent the town’s population soaring above one hundred thousand by the time of Macdonald’s birth, less than a quarter-century later. As well, 1815 was the year of the Battle of Waterloo. That cataclysmic military clash didn’t so much ensure Napoleon’s defeat (which was inevitable eventually, anyway) as ensure that Britain, its strength multiplied by its long industrial lead over all its rivals, would become the global powerhouse of the nineteenth century. By pure happenstance, Britain’s global reach created a possibility that its leftover colonies in North America, strung across the top half of the continent like widely spaced and oddly sized beads, and having little in common other than their mutual Britishness (for the most part), might yet—just—remain independent from their overwhelming neighbour, the coming hegemon of the twentieth century. For that to actually happen, however, required the arrival of a leader who could cajole and bluff and bully these colonies into becoming a whole larger than the sum of their parts. In 1815, little of this was of the slightest interest to anyone in the British Isles. Yet it was in Glasgow in that year that Canada’s future began to take shape.

The minutiae of Macdonald’s birth need to be cleared up. Throughout his life and for the near century and a quarter that has followed his death, his birthdate has been commemorated as January 11, 1815—as in the joyous celebratory dinner staged each year in Kingston, Ontario, for example, and in the inscriptions on all the plaques and statues that honour him. But this particular day may be a mistake. The January 11 date is taken from the entry for his birth made by his father, Hugh Macdonald, in his memorandum book. The entry recorded in the General Register Office in Edinburgh, though, is January 10.^*1 Similarly, precision about where specifically Macdonald was born, while a matter of lesser consequence, is as difficult to determine. The delivery may have taken place at 29 Ingram Street in Glasgow or, not far away, at 18 Brunswick Street, both on the south side of the Clyde River, because the family moved between these locations around the time of his birth. To pick at a last unknowable nit, Macdonald’s father recorded the moment of birth as 4:15, without specifying afternoon or early morning.

The other defining attributes of Macdonald’s birth are known beyond argument. His parents were middle class, if precariously so. They were Scots, and so of course was he. And soon after his birth, they chose to immigrate to Canada rather than take the advice of Samuel Johnson about the most attractive prospect that any Scotsman could ever come upon and follow the usual road to London.

Immigration always happens for one of two reasons or for both simultaneously: either individuals or families are pushed out from their homeland by poverty, oppression, failure or plain bad luck, or they are pulled towards a new country by the tantalizing promise it holds for new beginnings and new opportunities. Both factors applied to the Macdonalds, but in distinctive ways, when they set out across the Atlantic in 1820. John A. himself was then five years old. An early biographer described him as having “a bright eye, a lively manner and a head of curly brown hair which darkened into black as he grew up.” At least supposedly, he showed early promise of having the gift of the gab, once giving a speech to a gathering of relatives by mounting a table, from which, as his gestures became ever more dramatic, he projected himself to the ground.

As soon as the Napoleonic wars ended, England was gripped by a depression that cut most deeply into its farming counties; the same outwards push existed in Scotland, given force there by the clearances of people from the land to make way for sheep—as often, despite later myth, by Scottish landowners as by English ones. The great migration from the British Isles to both Canada and the United States dates from this period, although it remained relatively small until the 1830 s, later multiplying exponentially through the 1840 s as the Irish fled from the horrors of their Great Famine. To magnify the force of the outwards push, the British governments of the day accepted the thesis of Thomas Malthus that population growth would always outpace the growth in food production. To avoid social unrest, perhaps even the ultimate horror of a revolution of the kind from which Napoleon had sprung, successive governments encouraged the “idle poor” to move elsewhere.

The Macdonalds, though, were not a family of farmers. And although hard up, they weren’t poor, not in the sense of their being malnourished and in rags. The force that pushed them out was failure—quite unnecessary failure, and the product almost entirely of the fecklessness of Macdonald’s father, Hugh.

Before Hugh Macdonald is introduced, it’s necessary to go backwards one further genealogical step to Hugh’s own father, John Macdonald. Although he never left Scotland, John Macdonald set the family on its transatlantic journey. When he came down from the Highlands—pushed out by the clearances implemented by his laird, the Duke of Sutherland—he went first to a little village in the Strathfleet Valley and then on to the Sutherlandshire town of Dornoch, where he set up as a shopkeeper. John Macdonald was widely liked—a contemporary described him as having “a tender nature, full of humour, a quick and winning manner, with a bow and smile for everyone he met.” Many of those qualities would pass to his grandson, as did his longevity, for he died at the age of eighty-six. John Macdonald’s most distinctive legacy to his grandson was his head of abundant but curiously crinkly hair. His most important legacy to his heirs, though, was to get them out of the beautiful but bleak Highlands into a settled community, and to raise them there to at least the lower rungs of the middle class.

Hugh Macdonald squandered the greater part of what had been handed down to him. Born in Dornoch,^*2 he moved in early adulthood to the growing city of Glasgow and there owned and operated a succession of small enterprises—one, for instance, making bandanas. Their common characteristic was that they all failed. Hugh was known as a decent, amiable man, good in conversation and impossible to dislike. This quality served him well: after one bankruptcy, when he was at serious risk of being sent to a debtors’ prison, he was allowed not only to remain free but to keep his library and household effects, later selling them to pay for the tickets for his transatlantic passage. Two attributes that Hugh passed on to his son were that he had a hot, Celtic temper, and that he drank a lot.

Hugh Macdonald’s most considerable accomplishment during his relatively short life was to marry Helen Shaw. It happened in 1811, when she was at the relatively advanced age of thirty-four and he at the comparatively tender one of twenty-eight. Helen was an exceptional woman, the rock upon which the small tribe took its stand facing outwards to the world, arms linked. She kept the family going through thin and thick. A surviving portrait of her, done in at least middle age, depicts accurately her rock-like qualities of strength and determination. “She was a little above the medium height, large limbed, and capable of much endurance,” commented the contemporary biographer E.B. Biggar.^†3 read widely, and as Biggar wrote, “had she possessed the advantages of a high education, and the opportunities some get in life, she would have been a noted woman.”

Helen Macdonald. She was determined that her son would make his mark in life.

While the portrait of Helen Macdonald suggests the depth and liveliness of her eyes, it betrays little hint of the most attractive of her qualities—her capacity for gaiety. She and John A. loved to trade stories and jokes, his being the racier. Biggar commented, “She appreciated a droll saying or a droll situation.” Once, when Macdonald ascended to the social height of being elected president of Kingston’s St. Andrew’s Society, he led a gathering preceded by a piper to her house; when she heard the wail of the bagpipe, Helen came downstairs and danced a jig in the street.

She was wholly Scots, and above all a Highlander. Her preferred language was Gaelic. Her father fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, and afterwards, as did many Scots, joined the British Army. She could be stonily stubborn, a quality that repeatedly taxed Macdonald’s talents once he became the de facto head of the family. She possessed an exceptional memory—a gift she passed on to her son—and functioned as the family historian and the teller of Highland tales.

Of her children—two boys and two girls at the time of leaving Glasgow—there was never any doubt that her favourite was her elder son, John Alexander. “Mark my words, John will make more than an ordinary man,” she said on many occasions.

Besides the push of failure at home, there were more positive attractions pulling the Macdonald family to Canada. Of these, the most apparent was that Hugh Macdonald, unlike the great majority of immigrants,^*4 possessed the priceless asset of connections. In and around Kingston, the town where they were headed, there was a cluster of Macdonald relatives and cousins. That most were distant relatives mattered not the least; they all belonged to the same clan. The most important person by far was Colonel Donald Macpherson, who was married to Helen Macdonald’s stepsister. The colonel, who twice fought for King and Country against the Americans (during the War of Independence and the War of 1812), retired afterwards to the garrison town of Kingston, built a large stone house called Cluny (meaning “meadow”) and settled down as one of the community’s principal citizens. Before leaving Glasgow, Hugh Macdonald knew that Colonel Macpherson would find space in his house for him and his family for at least a transition time, and that afterwards Macpherson would help with advice and contacts as Hugh set up his first business.

How much Hugh Macdonald knew about Canada before he left is unknowable. Information was available, however, in booklets such as The Emigrant’s Guide to the British Settlements in Upper Canada and the United States of America, published the same year that the Macdonalds left. In some ways, Canada was distinctly unappealing. Its total population was only a little more than half a million, the great majority being French-speaking Canadiens. The particular part of Canada where they were headed—Upper Canada (now Ontario)—had fewer than two hundred thousand people; mostly, the land was untouched, primeval forest broken here and there by the crude log shacks of pioneer settlers. All of Canada was incomparably poorer and less developed than any of the thirteen American colonies.

Yet Canada possessed two considerable attractions. Land itself was free to most settlers. To the Macdonalds, this bounty was irrelevant, since they were headed for a town and not for a clearing in the wilderness. The country’s second general attraction, that there were no class divisions, was a derivative from the first and exactly fitted the ambitions, however muddled, of Hugh Macdonald. As the Scottish settler George Forbes wrote to his brother back in Aberdeenshire: “We in Canada have this glorious privilege that the ground we tred is our own and our children’s after us.” And he went on to describe the fundamental difference between Canada and any part of Britain, or indeed anywhere in Europe. “Here, we are lairds ourselves.”

Had John A.’s parents moved from Glasgow to somewhere else in the British Isles, the upwards drive that Macdonald eventually undertook would have butted sooner or later against the steel ceiling of the British class system. In Canada, by contrast, there was no aristocracy at all other than a few fragments within the Family Compact—the small clique who, as politicians, public officials and judges, ran the country on behalf of the governor general. (Lower Canada, or Quebec, was markedly more hierarchical.) Instead, the vast majority of Canadians were either middle class or believed that they could become middle class, or, since the term “middle class” wasn’t yet used, they were “respectable” citizens—law-abiding, churchgoing, debt-free, or attempting diligently to be all three.

The idea of classlessness was lodged deep in the Canadian consciousness from its very beginnings. In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie noted crossly of her servants, “They no sooner set foot upon the Canadian shores than…all respect for their employers, all subordination is at end.” She went on to record, though, that “with all their insolent airs of independence, I must confess that I prefer the Canadian to the European servant.”

In fact, a respectable claim can be made that in one vital respect, the country Macdonald’s parents were taking him to was more democratic even than the United States, that great experiment in egalitarianism. In the South and in parts of New England, there was an aristocracy, and, in the North, a class of self-made millionaires who cascaded their wealth upon their heirs. Above the border there was virtually no over-class, but no under-class either. There were no slaves in Canada, they having been liberated by Governor John Graves Simcoe’s decree of 1793,^*5 and there was no equivalent of the proletariat now developing rapidly in the great northern cities of the United States. Almost all Canadians were indeed “lairds,” in possibility and in self-perception, if not in actual fact. They could rise as high as their talent, ambition and luck might take them.

It’s unknowable whether Hugh and Helen Macdonald had any idea of the benefit they were conferring on their elder son by bringing him to a society where, compared with almost any other society in the world, there were fewer barriers to whatever upwards rise he might attempt. But that’s what they did by not taking the well-travelled road down to London and, instead, taking a ship to a far away country in which there were just about no roads at all.