TWO
A Boy’s Town
Remember, oh remember, the fascination of the turkey. John A. Macdonald, to a girl he owed a dance
When the Macdonalds came up the St. Lawrence River from the Gulf in 1820, they would have seen the same strangely foreign prospect, at first impressive but after a while depressing, that Catharine Parr Traill described in The Backwoods of Canada a few years later: “I begin to grow weary of its immensity…we see nothing more than long lines of pine-clad hills with here and there white specks that they tell me are settlements.” At long last there was a real town—Quebec City. There, their ship, the small, 600-ton Earl of Buckingham, discharged its six hundred passengers, the Macdonalds included. Behind them, at last, were six weeks of the appalling food,*6 overcrowding, incessant lice and rats and complete lack of privacy that everyone in steerage experienced, along with the constant damp and seasickness that even those in cabin class endured. They must have been delighted to see the end of this decaying vessel—indeed, two years later it drifted into Galway Bay and broke up in pieces.
Quebec City. A thriving port, a British garrison town and the oldest city, by far, in Canada. This view is a steel engraving from a painting by William Bartlett prepared for his book Canadian Scenery Illustrated (1842).
Left on the dock at Quebec City was the small tribe of Macdonalds, as well as their orphaned cousin Maria Clark, who had accompanied them on the voyage. It numbered Hugh and Helen Macdonald, both now in their forties, and their four children: Margaret, the oldest at seven, nicknamed Moll; then John A. and James, one year younger; and lastly two-year-old Louisa, known as Lou. (A fifth child, the first-born William, had died back in Glasgow.) Scots, unlike the English and even the Irish, to a lesser extent, almost never sent a single family member ahead to scout the terrain but moved any distance as a complete family.
They would have been amazed by the scene that greeted them once they entered the port: endless lines of log rafts with a crude shack at their centre, stretching out for miles along the river and waiting to load the pontoons of huge, squared timbers they had brought all the way from the Ottawa Valley onto one of the same sailing ships that had just transported the immigrants. Their stop at Quebec City would have been exciting—lots of familiar redcoats and Royal Navy tars, but also the unfamiliar language of most of the local inhabitants. And they would have taken a little time to look over the sights—the massive hulk of the Citadel, the steep bank soaring upwards from the St. Lawrence over which Wolfe’s Highlanders had scrambled, the imposing churches and nunneries and the low stone houses packed together along narrow streets as in some Breton town.
By now, the Macdonalds had completed barely half their journey. Beyond Quebec City there were no roads, or none that anyone would risk trying by stagecoach. Canada’s entire highway system was made up then of its rivers and lakes. (The one great cross-country trip, undertaken just for show, was Governor General Lord Sydenham’s amazing 1840 journey from Toronto to Montreal in a sleigh with a bed in it, completed in just thirty-six hours, a record that stood until the railways came along.)*7
Their second voyage lasted some four weeks, first from Quebec City to Montreal, then on to Kingston. It would have been as uncomfortable as their ocean crossing. They made their way first in a bateau and then in a Durham boat, each open to the elements, moving slowly up the St. Lawrence, sometimes pushed by sail-power, sometimes pulled by oxen and by oars, but often both pulled and pushed by the male passengers as they jumped into the chill water to squeeze the boat past shallows and between rocks. On August 13, 1820, the family made it to Kingston. In Colonel Macpherson’s house, packed in with his own family, they could at last rest, eat properly, clean their clothes and, most important, begin to learn about their new country.
Of all the towns in early Upper Canada where Hugh Macdonald might have gone, Kingston was perhaps the best possible place for an imaginative boy to grow up. With a population of around four thousand people, it was the biggest centre in the colony, even larger than York (to be renamed Toronto in 1834). Above all, it encompassed within its boundaries an uncommonly wide range of human experience.
It had a military garrison of red-coated British soldiers, who regularly emerged from Fort Henry to march through the streets to the beat of drums and the peep of pipes. It was a port. Tied up alongside its finger piers jutting out from the shore, throughout the summer and into the fall, were thirty to forty sailing ships, from three-masters to fore-and-aft schooners, and, later, steamships belching columns of smoke as they prepared to chug off to York and Montreal, Oswego and Niagara. To the north, the dense, forbidding forest came close to the town’s limits; inside it, almost always hiding out of sight, were Indians. From spring to fall, waves of immigrants arrived in Kingston; after a few weeks’ rest and burdened down by provisions, the newcomers would head on, either westwards to the softer, richer country beyond the town of York or, by turning right at some point along Lake Ontario, plunge northwards into the forests to try their luck at some isolated spot as pioneers—in the manner of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill and their unhardy husbands. Kingston itself lacked a rural hinterland because the Precambrian Shield came right to the town, but farmers did well in the good soil of Prince Edward County some forty miles to the west and supplied the growing town with food.
The Kingston of those days was rude and rowdy and raunchy rather than scrubbed and neat and dignified as today. It was also exceedingly dangerous. Immigrants often arrived riddled with disease, touching off a typhoid epidemic in 1828, a cholera epidemic in 1832, a truly terrible typhus epidemic in 1847 (during which 1,200 immigrants and townsfolk had to be buried in a mass grave) and yet another cholera outbreak in 1849. Soldiers and sailors brawled with each other and with the locals in incomparably rougher versions of the occasional town-gown confrontations of today.
Kingston’s one constant has always been its history. Whoever occupied it commanded the entry point to the chain of Great Lakes as well as the exit point from the interior, on down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic. The French built Fort Frontenac as far back as 1673. The Loyalists arrived in 1784, laid out a plan of streets and housing plots, and drew lots for the best of them. The town’s importance as a transfer point for cargo and people would soon be enhanced by the construction, eastwards, of the Lachine Canal to Montreal and, northwards, of the Rideau Canal, snaking its way up to Bytown (later Ottawa). The starting point was the mouth of the Cataraqui River, which formed Kingston’s harbour.
Kingston. When the Macdonalds arrived in 1820, it was Upper Canada’s largest town, with some four thousand people. It was also an important transshipment point for goods going up or down the St. Lawrence. Again, a view by William Bartlett.
Later, a major share of Kingston’s historical aura would derive from its association with Macdonald. No other Canadian leader has ever been as intimately connected to any place as he was to Kingston. A boy when he arrived, he was educated and established himself in business there; he represented the town for the greater part of his political career, winning thirteen elections there; and he is buried in its Cataraqui Cemetery. Kingston still commemorates him on two occasions each year—the anniversaries of his birth and his death. Above all, Kingston provided Macdonald with the raw material for the greatest of his political gifts—his matchless understanding of life as it is actually lived and of people as they actually live it, with all their faults and follies, interspersed with occasional spasms of altruism and even idealism. Charles Dickens, who came through in 1842, dismissed Kingston as “a very poor town” had he stopped for a while, Dickens would have found it a microcosm of the human condition.
Cows and sheep, pigs and chickens ran freely through Kingston’s streets, which, when it rained, were deep in mud, dirty and pungent from the leavings of animals—and sometimes of humans too. The only means by which a pedestrian could make it from one planked sidewalk to the opposite side of the road without sinking into the gummy, stinking mass was by using the occasional narrow crosswalk of flagstones or cobbles. The Precambrian Shield lay just below the surface, so the sewer system was primitive, with shallow and odiferous “privy pits.” In winter, workers carried the night soil onto the ice in the harbour, to slide to the bottom once spring arrived. Of course, all these things were standard in British North American towns in the early nineteenth century, their one aesthetic advance over today being the absence of any overhead tangle of telephone and hydro wires.
Rural Canadians, who made up more than four in five of all Canadians, lived lives that for a great many were nasty, brutish, short and bitterly cold. Alexander Tilloch Galt, who would work alongside Macdonald in the battle for Confederation, provided a first-rate summary of country life in a report to his London bosses in a British land-settlement company: “A settlement in the backwoods of Canada, however romantic and pleasing may be the accounts generally published of it, has nothing but stern reality and hardship connected with it,” he wrote. “Alone in the woods in his log cabin with his family, tired from his day’s work and knowing that the morrow brings but the same toil, the migrant will find but few of his fancies realized…for the first years, the emigrant to succeed must work as hard and suffer perhaps greater privations than had he remained in Great Britain.”
Unlike today, though, conditions in the towns were, if anything, worse than those in the countryside—except, perhaps, for women, who suffered terribly from the loneliness of pioneer life. In towns and villages, women at least had companionship and some kind of support networks. But townies were much more likely than their country kin to succumb to diseases caused by everything from epidemics to poor or non-existent sanitation. Unlike pioneer settlers, they were self-sufficient neither in food nor in wood for winter fuel. In the towns, a great many jobs ended in early November; the ports closed because of ice, and all public works and construction were halted. At the same time that the price of food and firewood soared, the wages of those still at work in small manufacturing plants, stores and offices were often cut by a third or even half. As the winter wore on, workers spent as much as a fifth of their miserable wages on wood to keep themselves warm. The cost of bread typically went up by as much as 50 per cent. Commonly, those who had jobs went straight to bed when they returned to their barely heated lodgings. Some practical types even committed crimes so they would be sent to a partially heated jail. The late spring, when food and fuel prices were at their highest, was known as “the pinching season.”
Yet, as historian Judith Fingard has noted, there was a conspicuous “absence of mass demonstrations and violent crime amongst the poor during the winters of greatest suffering.”*8 The poor were kept quiescent by exhaustion, by the bitter cold and, far from least, by a deep and seldom-questioned respect for the law. Macdonald learned all about this real, unromantic, urban Canada while he grew up in Kingston, and from his boyhood stays with his roving family in nearby Prince Edward County he gained an understanding of rural Canada as well.
Kingston was actually better off than other towns in Upper Canada. An 1837 guide for emigrants called it “perhaps the finest-built town in the Province,” while T.R. Preston, an English visitor at around the same time, said it “resembled an English village but somewhat stragglingly built, though it possessed in its substantial parts some very substantial homes.” Kingston possessed one invaluable urban asset: lots of limestone. When the Macdonalds arrived, most houses were constructed of logs or hewn lumber—a motley array of dwellings often destroyed by fire. With the completion of the Rideau Canal, though, a lot of Scottish stonemasons were suddenly looking for work, and by the 1840s Kingston had begun to acquire more substantial buildings made of the local stone.*9
A few of the leading citizens commissioned remarkable houses in the delicate Adamesque style and began to install beautiful mouldings and chimney pieces in their mansions. Some major public buildings, far grander than the small town itself, were constructed during these years—a hospital, a penitentiary, a lunatic asylum, a courthouse and, later, a superb town hall. Kingston even became important enough for a stagecoach to make a twice-weekly trip between it and Montreal—a bone-shattering experience, for sure, but with the benefit that, unlike in England, highwaymen were rare.
The Kingston of Macdonald’s day even encompassed some of the finer things of life. It had a lending library and two newspapers. Occasionally, travelling theatre groups performed for a night or two, and in the churches there were organ recitals and, on Sundays, sonorous, scary sermons. Band concerts were particularly popular, and for the active, so were cricket matches, fox hunts and horse races—all made possible by the military garrison stationed in the town. The military, moreover, made one major cultural breakthrough: on the frozen lake, members of the Royal Canadian Rifles developed, by hit and miss and bump and grind, a new game using skates, field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball.
The most intense competition in Kingston revolved around the sexes, as Dickens would have noted had he lingered. The highest ambition of the wives of successful merchants and farmers was to marry off a daughter to a bachelor English officer. Few fulfilled this aspiration, because, in the cruel comment of one witness, they all “still smelt of bread and butter.” Nevertheless, the young officers praised the way Kingston chaperones were less watchful than those back in England.
The underside of life flourished here too. One visitor described the streets as “swarming with drunkards and prostitutes”—the inevitable consequence of so many soldiers and sailors and immigrants passing through. Kingston’s Common Council, or town council, reported in 1841 that there was a drink shop for every seven or eight men, ranging from taverns or pubs to “low dram shops” or shebeens. In counterpoint, a local temperance society was started up; it suggested, among other things, the installation of a treadmill as the best way to deal with drunkenness and better “the morals of the lower classes.”
If Kingston was in many ways a brutal society, so at the time was all of British North America and, indeed, just about the entire world. Drunken soldiers and sailors were easy marks for muggers. Soldiers often deserted across the nearby American border; those caught were flogged at a triangular wooden frame, to the beat of a drum. Punishments everywhere were brutal: inmates in the penitentiary in Kingston included a child of eight who began his three-year sentence with a flogging by the cat; another inmate, ten years old, received 102 strokes of rawhide. Hangings were a public attraction—one steamer brought in two hundred “tourists,” including children, to watch an execution. A man was hanged for stealing a cow.
After three months of living jammed up in the Macpherson home, Hugh Macdonald moved his family out on its own. He opened a store in the centre of town, and the six of them lived in the rooms above. Besides a mix of foodstuffs and hardware, he offered customers “groceries, wines, brandy, shrub [a cordial], vinegar, powder and shot, English window-glass and putty, etc.” The enterprise failed quickly. Hugh opened another general store in another location. It soon failed too.
Amid these setbacks, the family had to come to terms with an almost unimaginable trauma: the second son, James, was killed at the age of five and a half by a family servant named Kennedy. It’s impossible to be certain what happened. One day, Hugh and Helen went out, leaving John A. and James at home in Kennedy’s care. The servant was a secret drinker. In one account, Kennedy got angry with James for crying for his parents and lashed out at him with a stick. In another, he lunged drunkenly at him and James slipped, hitting his head on an andiron. Whatever the cause, the young boy died while seven-year-old John A. witnessed his murder or manslaughter. The May 3 issue of the Kingston Chronicle in 1822 carried this sad obituary: “On Monday the 22 ult., James, second son of Mr. Hugh Macdonald, Merchant of this town, aged five years and six months.”
Hugh Macdonald’s ad in the Kingston Chronicle of July 3, 1821, showed, for him, a rare business sense as the only one in the paper to carry an illustration of his wares.
That newspaper notice was the family’s entire recorded response. No charge was ever brought against Kennedy. Hugh entered no record of the death in his memorandum book of family events, though John A. later added it to the chronology. No burial place for the boy has ever been identified; he is not listed among those interred in the family plot at Cataraqui Cemetery.*10
Nor is there any reference to the tragedy in any of the family letters that have been preserved. At the time, the most common reference likely to be mentioned in family correspondence would have been to a locket or brooch containing a circle of the lost child’s hair, commonly worn for years afterwards by a bereaved mother. Yet no surviving letter contains any mention of such a commemorative object.
This silent reaction can be attributed far more readily to acceptance than to callousness. Then, death was part of life, and as any stroll through any old cemetery will confirm, to be young then was to be close to death. A survey done in Montreal in 1867 found that two out of every five children never reached the age of five. As well, grief may have been generally subdued because it amounted to an expression of doubt about the existence of an afterlife. Religion provided healing; a loved one who had died was often referred to as one who “went before”—to a place where the others would later join the departed.
The single certain consequence of this tragedy was that, henceforth, the Macdonald family’s entire hopes rested on the shoulders of John Alexander—the last surviving male heir among the original three.
After his second enterprise in Kingston had failed, Hugh decided to change his location entirely. In 1824, four years after their arrival, he moved the family out to Hay Bay, on the lakeshore to the west of Kingston, where he opened yet another store. Young John, by now nine years old, continued with his schooling in the nearby village of Adolphustown.
Each day he walked three miles to school and, in the late afternoon, three miles back. This commute was entirely ordinary. His sisters, Margaret and Louisa, made the same walk with him. The three of them played well together, often as soldiers in a game where he was always the officer, and they got into the usual scrapes. As the only boy now, and anyway his mother’s favourite, John was spoiled rotten. Margaret, small and delicate, possessed an aptitude for seeming vulnerable. Louisa, by contrast, was tall, with a stern face and a long, thick nose. At best she could be called plain; in later years she protested that someone had compared her to her brother, “the ugliest man in Canada.” Independent and stubborn like her mother, she was John A.’s pal.
One of the most surprising comments Macdonald ever made was to his confidential secretary and biographer, Joseph Pope: “I never had a boyhood. From fifteen I began to earn my living.” It is Macdonald’s rare lapse into unguarded bitterness that makes this admission so surprising. More astounding still, his complaint was quite untrue. Macdonald did indeed have to quit school at the age of fifteen, when he began his legal career, but this pattern was almost universal then. The phenomenon of adolescence had yet to be discovered (or invented); a survey done in 1871 found that one in four boys aged eleven to fifteen were working in some kind of a job. Typically for the times, Egerton Ryerson, the great Canadian educator, espoused the proposition that children were small men in need of greater instruction than older siblings. In any case, Macdonald’s boyhood was more agreeable than that of most boys. At home, he experienced no shortage of love, and he benefited from the kindliness of an extended family. While the family was pinched for money, that was not in the least unusual, and of little concern to a boy.
The explanation for Macdonald’s bitterness may reside in another comment he made to Pope. “If I had had a university education,” he reflected, “I should probably have entered the path of literature and acquired distinction therein.” Looking back from a time near the end of his life, Macdonald may have been expressing an uneasy sense that politics hadn’t stretched his intellect enough and that he had missed out on opportunities to express the creative and imaginative side of his character.*11 Perhaps he was thinking enviously of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, his ideological and physical look-alike, who, amid the grinding pressures of politics, had found time to write no fewer than twenty novels, Tancred and Endymion the best received among them.†12
While at school—the length of his tenure there being entirely average—Macdonald received an education that was well above the norm. The schools he attended, first in Kingston and then in Adolphustown, were the typical one-room schools where children of all ages sat at a raised board that ran around three sides of the room and served as their desk. They faced the fourth, open side, where the teacher had a smaller desk. The only other pieces of furniture were a pail of water and a stove. Most teachers in the region were Scots, each known as a “dominie”—an apt phrase because of the strap they always carried. Books and paper were rare. For most children, this schooling was their entire education. In Ontario, school was not compulsory until 1874—and then for a minimum of only four months a year—a rule that was regularly ignored by farmers’ sons.
Macdonald mostly had a grand time at school. Boys liked him because he could tell stories and knew tricks, and because he wasn’t afraid of the masters. They also had a wary respect for his Scottish temper. Girls liked him, even though they teased him as “Ugly John”—as he most certainly was, with his absurdly crinkly hair and outsized nose. But they would have noted with approval, certainly with interest, that he was a bit of a dandy, with a taste in gaudy waistcoats. Wit more than compensated for his lack of looks. At one dance, Macdonald forgot he was due to partner a particular girl in a quadrille. She rejected his abject apologies until he flung himself at her feet, proclaiming manically, “Remember, oh remember, the fascination of the turkey.” With her uncontrollable laughter came forgiveness. He did all the customary boyish things, getting into scrapes and, at the age of thirteen, writing florid poetry to a pretty cousin. Although he seldom took part in sports, he was good at running barefoot, at skating and at dancing. Early on, he showed some skill at mathematics, an unusual accuracy in spelling and an insatiable appetite for reading.
Two factors pushed Macdonald onto a life’s arc different from that of most of his fellow students: he was a Scot, and he had a mother who was determined that he would be more than an ordinary man.
After a couple of years of making the long daily walk to the school in Adolphustown, John was sent by his parents to Kingston to attend the Midland District Grammar School. It was run by a graduate of Oxford University, the Reverend John Wilson. Annual tuition fees were seventy pounds, representing a steep sacrifice for the family. Here, Macdonald learned Latin and French as well as English and mathematics. (His French grammar book, dated May 28, 1825, still survives.) He stayed with the Macphersons, where he was thoroughly petted and spoiled. Years later, his nephew, John Pennington Macpherson, recalled in a slight biography of his famous relative how Macdonald would read compulsively, quite untroubled by the noisy antics and quarrels of the large family around him. In the summers he went back to the Bay of Quinte area—to Glenora, where his father had moved to run a grist mill. It, again, soon failed.*13
In 1829, the fourteen-year-old Macdonald moved to a new establishment for “general and classical education” run by a recent newcomer, the Reverend John Cruickshank. There were some twenty pupils, from six to sixteen years old; among them was Oliver Mowat, later a Father of Confederation along with Macdonald and later still premier of Ontario. The school’s standards were high, the local Scots having decided that the Midland District School was inadequate to give their children a quick start in life. What really set this grammar school apart was that it was coeducational, one of the first in Upper Canada. At the risk of reading too much into it, Macdonald’s coeducational experience, reinforced by the female-centred household he grew up in, may explain one of the qualities that set him apart from most men of his day—and of a good many still. In the company of women, Macdonald was always wholly at his ease. He was never awkward or shy or predatory with them. He could flirt and play the gallant, but he never patronized women.
As is common enough, Macdonald was his own principal teacher. He read omnivorously—history, biographies, politics, poetry, geography. His most remarked-upon scholastic skill was his handwriting—clear, large, even and fluid. (His letters would be a delight to later scholars.) Cruickshank was always proud to show Macdonald’s compositions to new students, and he kept them for years afterwards as models of penmanship.
Macdonald’s preparation for life ended in his fifteenth year. From then on, he began to live it. But he’d already learned a great deal about life’s essence—the ways and the whys of how people behave.