FOURTEEN
The Shield of Achilles
I see within the round of that shield, the peaks of the Western mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves. Thomas D’Arcy McGee
The change in Canada that most affected Macdonald at the beginning of the 1860s was the size of the country. Not literally, of course. The United Province of Canada remained just as it had always been—an elongated oblong extending from the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to just beyond the western edge of Lake Superior, and encompassing only about half of today’s Ontario and Quebec; an oblong, moreover, blocked from the sea except during the near half of the year that the St. Lawrence River was free of ice. Even though it took up an impressive amount of space on any map of the North American continent, it was a strangulated community.
The change in Canada’s size was psychic. In the years immediately before 1860 a consciousness began to stir among Canadians that they were occupying the antechamber of a vast empire. They began to realize that their own United Province was only a part of the territory that existed above the forty-ninth parallel. Elsewhere in the immense, intimidating expanse of land there were no fewer than five other British colonies—to the east, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, and almost an unimaginable distance away to the west, the tiny colony of Vancouver Island, clinging to the edge of a second vast ocean. As well, roughly in the continent’s middle, there was a small settlement out on the prairies in a place called Red River, which was administered—sort of—by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Almost all this land was entirely empty except for Indians. All of it, though, was British.
Macdonald’s interest in this additional territory varied from negligible to non-existent. Between sectarianism and the tensions dividing English and French in the United Province and, most immediately challenging of all, the gradual shift of opinion among his own Conservatives in favour of Rep by Pop, he had more than enough to cope with. About the West, as he later described his sentiments, he was “quite willing personally to leave that country a wilderness for the next fifty years.” As for the Maritimes, although there were occasional proposals for a railway to connect quasi-inland Canada to tidewater at the ice-free port of Halifax, the costs would be horrendous, and no bank or financier in London showed the least interest in advancing the capital needed for such a project.
Yet change was happening in people’s minds. It was very tentative and not at all well informed. But a shift in self-awareness about Canada’s possibilities had begun that would, before many years, cause Macdonald to undertake the single most radical political project of his life.
One catalyst of change can be traced back to Montreal and to the middle of 1857. A new tri-weekly literary journal, the New Era, appeared there. As its opening attraction, it published a series of editorials on the topic “The Future of Canada.” The ideas expressed in these essays were lively and novel. One declared that although Canada possessed the central spine of the St. Lawrence, it lacked the essential “one-ness of political life.” After asking, “Who reads a Canadian book?” and noting that almost no one did, the journal threw out a challenge: “Come, let us construct a national literature for Canada, neither British nor French nor Yankeeish…borrowing from all lands, but asserting its own title.” The journal questioned whether Canadian trade policy should be “unconditionally and absolutely in the hands of the Colonial Secretary” and urged the appointment of a Canadian “representative” in Washington. The solution to the country’s general political problems, it declared, had to be “a Federal compact” within which each province would have its own Parliament while “conceding to the federal authority such powers as are necessary for the general progress and safety.” A new federal constitution, though, was not enough: “The federation of feeling must precede the federation of fact.”
What was happening here, as happened so rarely in the pragmatic, provincial world of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian politics, was original thought and unleashed imagination. The author was a newly arrived immigrant, Thomas D’Arcy McGee. He possessed, as was even rarer in Canada, the voice of a poet or, since the florid verse he scribbled out was scarcely poetry, then at least the voice of a romantic.
Irish, of course, born in 1825 in County Louth and the son of a coast guard, McGee got involved with the revolutionary Young Ireland movement, fled the island disguised as a priest, and made his way to Boston and later New York, earning his living as a journalist. He proclaimed, among a good many other bravura ideas, that the United States would eventually stretch “from Labrador to Panama” and that “either by purchase, conquest, or stipulation, Canada must be yielded by Great Britain to this Republic.” Yet McGee grew restive in that country. Its practice of slavery disgusted him, as did, more personally, the anti-Irish bigotry of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement. McGee came north to Montreal in 1857 and to his astonishment found there, after all his years of fighting the English, “far more liberty and tolerance enjoyed by those in Canada than in the U.S.” Besides his capacity for passion, McGee attracted attention by two qualities: he had great charm, and he was exceptionally ugly. He was short, swarthy, with a sort of squashed-up face. His wife, Mary, when asked whether she ever worried he might stray during his many trips away from home, responded, “Sure, I’ve got great faith in his ugliness.”
Besides his editorials in the New Era, McGee developed a set speech that commanded ever-larger audiences. It was a hymn to a wider, bolder Canada: “I see in the not remote distance, one great nationality bound like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of the ocean…I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs but all together by free institutions, free intercourse and free commerce. I see within the round of the shield, the peaks of the Western mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves…I see a generation of industrious, contented moral men, free in name and in fact.” McGee was Canada’s first nationalist.
D’Arcy McGee. Passionate, eloquent, hard-drinking, he was Canada’s first nationalist, and, effectively, Confederation’s poet laureate. His wife expressed her “great faith in his ugliness.”
Nationalism was enough to put him at odds with Macdonald, so suspicious of any innovation that might weaken the British connection. Even more irritating was that McGee, when he got into politics, did so as a Reformer. In the New Era, he damned Macdonald’s government as “one of expedients, a succession of make-shifts.” McGee took a ministerial post in George Brown’s two-day “double-shuffle” government, and afterwards enraged Macdonald by writing articles accusing Governor General Head of having colluded with Macdonald to oust Brown. Macdonald was annoyed enough to declare, “Never did a man throw away a fine career as he [McGee] has by his violence, falsehood & folly.” From their first encounter, though, Macdonald and McGee saw something in each other. After McGee made his maiden speech in the legislature damning Macdonald’s “timid, makeshift policy,” Macdonald ambled over, extended his hand and congratulated him. McGee remarked afterwards how “ready and dextrous” the older man was, and how “good humour is his most apparent characteristic.” No doubt that was just Macdonald’s “soft sawder.”
Over time, though, their early recognition of a connection between them would blossom into a partnership, both of political allies and of drinking buddies. Perhaps Macdonald saw in McGee, ten years younger, the kind of protege men in power often like to have around to mentor. Perhaps Macdonald responded to the romantic in McGee, aware in his inexhaustibly subtle way that a dreamer is as much a part of public affairs as is a doer. It is tempting to call Macdonald, Cartier and McGee the three musketeers of Confederation, but it would not be true: Cartier never liked McGee, perhaps because, with his quick wit and marvellous singing voice, he was more popular at parties.
With McGee, the idea of Canada as something larger than the sum of its parts entered the public discourse. It was an idea, moreover, that all those who crowded in to hear McGee’s speeches applauded wildly, no matter whether they were Conservatives or Reformers or Grits, or entirely indifferent to all politics.
Another voice addressing itself to the possibility of a wider Canada also began to be expressed at about this same time—from Alexander Tilloch Galt. Its nature was quite different from McGee’s, more precise, less flowery, more attuned to accounting than to poetry. But still, it was a voice able to inject credibility and solidity into the vague notion of a wider Canada.
One of Macdonald’s most glaring political weaknesses was that, while he had many members in the legislature, the ranks of his ministers were conspicuously thin in the vital ingredient of talent. Galt was an obvious potential new recruit for the cabinet, except that he displayed great wariness about Macdonald. Luring Galt to his side now became Macdonald’s principal project.
Born in 1817, just two years after Macdonald, and like him a Scot, Galt was the son of John Galt, a writer who once travelled with Byron through Asia Minor. He was well educated and exceptionally bright. He grew up tall, lean and hardy, once walking thirty-six miles in six hours. His father immigrated to Canada to manage a British-financed scheme for colonization in the area of Sherbrooke in Lower Canada. Galt joined his father, who soon returned to Britain. The young Galt rose quickly in the business: when he was just twenty-six he was sent back to London to become commissioner of the Canadian operations of the British American Land Company. He returned to Sherbrooke, did well and, as was common at the time, went into the legislature, as an Independent.
Once Macdonald had become premier, he was in a position to place an alluring bait in front of Galt. Cannily, he offered nothing at all; instead, he engaged in tantalizing teasing: “You call yourself a Rouge. There may have been at one time a reddish tinge about you, but I could observe it becoming by degrees fainter. In fact you are like Byron’s Dying Dolphin, exhibiting a series of colours—‘the last still loveliest’—and that last is ‘true blue,’ being the colour I affect,” Macdonald wrote in a letter to Galt in 1857. “So pray do become true blue at once: it is a good standing colour and bears washing.”
Alexander Galt. The fourth of the four “Super-Fathers” of Confederation and its financial brain, he shared Macdonald’s fear that Britain wanted to rid itself of Canada.
Galt preserved his virtue for another year and then joined the cabinet—but at a high price to Macdonald. By this time Galt had become convinced that the only solution to Canada’s governmental inertia was to form a federation of all the British American colonies. He sketched out his idea in impressive detail, including a supreme court to settle jurisdictional disputes. In fact, neither Macdonald nor Cartier was in the least persuaded by Galt’s ideas, but they both accepted fully the political credibility he could bring to the government. They offered him the finance portfolio, and he joined the cabinet in July 1858. Galt then exacted his price. In a long speech to the House, he set out on behalf of the government his idea for a federation of British North America. The response made right afterwards by Macdonald and Cartier was striking: after Galt had finished speaking, neither of them said a word.
As a further part of his price, Galt had secured from Macdonald approval for him to go with Cartier to London that October to try to sell his federation idea to the Colonial Office. The response of the colonial secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton,*78 was dismissive, principally because of London’s skepticism that Canadian politicians were up to so ambitious a task, but also because the reaction to the idea in the Maritimes was negative.
Galt and Macdonald were never close. Macdonald once described him as “unstable as water, and can never be depended upon to be of the same mind for forty-eight hours together.” This assessment wasn’t off the mark; before advocating Confederation, Galt had advocated annexation with the United States. Nevertheless, he succeeded for the first time in actually discussing a possible federation with the Colonial Office and, however nominally, secured a commitment for that notion to be added to the grab bag of policies that belonged to the Liberal-Conservative Party. As important for the way the future would unfold, Galt, with his well-known competence for accounting on a grand scale, was now working alongside Macdonald.
A third voice could be heard musing out loud about the need for a wider Canada. It was that of the Toronto Globe owner and publisher, George Brown. A grand federation held few charms for him. Instead, the catalyst for Brown’s interest was his realization that, with the new immigrants having settled on the last “wild” land in Upper Canada, this province—Brown’s province—needed new worlds to conquer. The Globe expressed this expansionist concept best in an epistle to its Toronto readers on December 26, 1856: “If their city is ever to be made great—if it is ever to rise above the rank of a fifth-rate American town—it must be by the development of the great British territory lying to the north and west.”
The Globe’s reference was to the North-West Territories, stretching out all the way from Lake Superior to the Rockies. It was bald, empty prairie, except for the Indians and a small cluster of Métis and a few Canadian settlers at the bend in the Red River. The rest of the territory served as a gigantic trapping ground for the fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company and as a killing ground of the buffalo. Commonly called the North-West, it was also known as Rupert’s Land—after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the dashing cavalry general and cousin of Charles II, who in 1670 had secured a monopoly charter over the territory for himself and a group of British financiers and businessmen.
By the late 1850s the members of the governing board of the Hudson’s Bay Company had come to realize that their exercise of absolute rule over a land that was now desired by nearby British North Americans was anomalous and ultimately unsustainable. They continued to protest that the land of the North-West was arid and useless. At Red River, though, as the settlers there knew well, the soil was black and deep. One of Macdonald’s ministers, Joseph-Édouard Cauchon, the commissioner of Crown lands, wrote a memorandum to cabinet arguing that the “Red River and Saskatchewan Country” could attract to Canada many of the immigrants now passing straight through to the United States.
Another possibility—a distinctly alarming one—was that the Americans might come into the North-West first. In fact, they were almost there already. By now a railway line had reached St. Paul, Minnesota. From there, by oxcart and by boat along the winding Red River, it was incomparably easier to send goods to and from the settlement of Red River than it was for Canadians to make the long, brutal slog westwards across the Pre-Cambrian Shield above Lake Superior. To heighten the threat, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, Lorin Blodgett, issued a report in 1857 describing the land beyond the forty-ninth parallel as “perfectly adapted to the fullest occupation by a civilized nation.” In response, two surveying expeditions to the West were dispatched from Canada the following year, one headed by Captain John Palliser, a Britisher, and the other by Henry Youle Hind, a graduate of Cambridge who had settled in Toronto as the professor of chemistry and geology at Trinity College. To heighten the sense of cross-border rivalry and threat, Minnesota was elevated from a territory to a state in 1858.
Macdonald’s response to all this expansionism was cautious to a degree. About a possible federation he said nothing at all. About territorial expansion he said as little as possible, influenced by the warning of his friend John Rose, a Montreal lawyer, that it would be expensive to protect “such an extent of territory, even if it is given up to us for nothing.”
Britain, in the person of the colonial secretary, Henry Labouchere, nevertheless felt that something had to be done to regularize the situation in the North-West. At Westminster, a select committee of the Commons was set up to recommend on the future of the Hudson’s Bay Company charter, including whether the territory should be offered to Canada and at what price. The company adroitly countered with an offer that it would accept a takeover in return for a payment of one million pounds. To present Canada’s case to the Commons committee, Macdonald established a commission headed by his former leader William Draper, now a judge.
Very little came of any of this. Draper told the select committee that Canada “must assert her rights” in the North-West, but in the absence of clear instructions from Macdonald his presentation to the British MPs was vague and legalistic. The committee made only one innovative recommendation—for a second Crown colony to be established on the Pacific Coast, to be named British Columbia. By oversight (or perhaps by design), the Hudson’s Bay Company charter was allowed to lapse of its own accord in 1859. A group of British businessmen bought up the company, calculating shrewdly they would make an easy profit once they were forced to resell it to Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company continued to rule over its land, but less and less to govern it. Among those who came increasingly to control their own lives were the Métis of Red River, a change in their sense of themselves that no one outside the settlement took any notice of.
For the first time, though, ordinary Canadians had become aware of the open territory to their west. Indeed, because of a gold rush at the Fraser River, they appreciated now that this immense territory stretched all the way to the Pacific. An eventual takeover seemed more or less inevitable, if in no way imminent. Canada’s own version of Manifest Destiny beckoned.
That expansionary thought precipitated others. If Canada were to be extended to the Pacific, then logically it should be extended as well to the east, to the Atlantic. Yet if Canada proper were to be augmented by both the North-West and the Lower Provinces (as the Maritimes then were called), the population balance would tilt decisively against the Canadiens—everyone taking it for granted that the West would be colonized by settlers from Upper Canada and by new immigrants from the British Isles. The Canadiens, though, would oppose any such radical change in Canada’s demographic character as a violation of the agreement between the two groups when the United Province had been formed; more to the point, they could forestall it by exercising the de facto veto they possessed through the double-majority convention. When Cartier and Galt went to Britain for their meetings in 1858, Cartier warned Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton that, if forced to, he would exercise this veto. Nothing was resolved, but for the first time politicians were giving thought to the kind of problems that would emerge as soon as any serious attempt was made to add to Canada some or all of the other pieces of British North America.
Here, Macdonald allowed himself for the first time to express some views about a possible wider Canada. In the debate that followed the announcement that Draper would represent Canada’s views on the North-West to the British Parliament, Macdonald made an intriguing comment quite different from his earlier cautious utterances on the topic of Canada’s future. “The destiny of this continent,” he told the House, could depend on the results of the parliamentary inquiry in London. “Upon that action may depend whether this country remains confined to its present boundaries or swells to the dimension of a nation; whether we are to be annexed to the neighbouring Republic or extend the boundaries of this country itself.”
Macdonald was allowing the wheels of his mind to turn in public. Earlier he had dismissed the western territory as useless, and on one occasion expressed concern that Canada could be weakened by spreading out its settlers too thinly. Now he was declaring that adding the West to Canada could transform what was still only a province into something resembling a nation. While the word “federation” had not yet crossed his lips, Macdonald was here using the word that had always held talismanic importance to him—“annexation”—in the sense of stressing the need to make certain it never happened.
Proposals for a federation of the British North American colonies, or for a confederation of them—the terms were used interchangeably at this time—were not in themselves in any way new. The number of different proposals made for some form of federation or confederation before McGee and Galt took up the cause has been estimated at eighteen in all. The first person to advocate it—three-quarters of a century earlier—was Major Robert Morse, a British army engineer who, after surveying the Bay of Fundy in 1784 for possible settlements following the loss of the American colonies, suggested that all the colonies still remaining under the Crown should be banded together for their own protection. The same thought was expressed a few years later by two leading Loyalists, William Smith, later chief justice of Quebec, and Jonathan Sewell, who, in 1807, published a pamphlet about his idea: Plan for a General Legislative Union of the British Provinces in North America.*79 In the late 1830s in Britain, a Canadian-educated British MP, James Roebuck, proposed it at Westminster; Lord Durham came very close to recommending it in his famous report; and the Colonial Office later drafted a report on how it might be constructed.
A major obstacle—one common to most transformational ideas—was that potential losers could count their losses before they experienced them, while gains for likely winners were futuristic. The Maritimes, all of which were separate colonies that had already won Responsible Government for themselves, had little interest in giving up London as their protector in favour of Ottawa. Upper Canada had little interest in offering the one lure Maritimers might respond to—a railway to Halifax—because it would be the principal payer of the scheme, while Montreal, where the headquarters of this intercolonial railway would be located, would be the chief beneficiary. As for the Canadiens, it was difficult to offer them any greater protection than the virtual veto over Canadian national affairs they already exercised.
This combination of indifference and skepticism among so many of the British North Americans had been more than enough to convince Bulwer-Lytton to give Galt and Cartier a dusty, evasive answer when they came looking for British support for Galt’s federation concept. Further, the colonial secretary was sharp enough to guess that Macdonald’s real motive for sending over the mission was “the convenience of the present Canadian administration”—in other words, to make certain that Galt joined his cabinet.
Yet again, inertia won the day. What was needed to make something actually happen was a crisis, one that would shake everyone from his own fixed position. Also needed at that moment of opportunity would be a political leader who knew how to herd cats.
Some commentators, the most influential among them Donald Creighton, have attempted to situate Macdonald among the early advocates of Confederation, as if to mingle his lustre with that of the cause of union itself. The weight of evidence is otherwise: even the inclusion of support for Confederation in the Liberal-Conservative policy from 1858 onwards was strictly tactical. The most persuasive negative evidence comes from Macdonald himself—in his own words.
In advance of the impending next election—it actually happened in the summer of 1861—Macdonald published an Address to the Electors of the City of Kingston of some three thousand words in which he set out his policies on all the central issues of the day, including a bankruptcy law, university reform, the Grand Trunk Railway, law reform and Representation by Population. About this last, controversial, topic, Macdonald penned the evasive phrase “This is not a party question, and ought not to be made one.”
About his thoughts on Confederation as he held them in mid-1861, Macdonald wrote, “The Government will not relax its exertions to effect a Confederation of the North American Provinces. We must however endeavour to take warning by the defects in the Constitution of the United States, which are now so painfully made manifest, and to form (if we succeed in a Federation) an efficient, central government.” That was all he had to say. To have said less would have been difficult. His disinclination to commit himself to any “vision thing” came out of the policy of governance he was committed to. Back in 1844, in advance of his first election, Macdonald had promised Kingston’s voters that he would not “waste the time of the legislature and the money of the people on abstract and theoretical questions of government.”*80 After two decades of practical political experience, the abstract and the theoretical still left him cold.
About constitutions, Macdonald was at all times particularly wary. They should not be fiddled with, he believed, unless “the people are suffering from the effects of the constitution as it actually exists,” as he had said in a legislature speech in 1854. Anyway, the substance of constitutions could be changed without an i or a t of them being amended. Canada had, after all, gained Responsible Government, although its constitution had been drafted specifically to exclude it; and the double-majority principle had entered into legislative life without any legal sanction. Britain, Macdonald’s political ideal, had won and was now administering the world’s second-greatest empire on the foundation of no written constitution at all. Put simply, Confederation at this time was, to Macdonald, an impractical irrelevancy.
But that left him with no governing principle at all—at the time when Brown’s governing principle of Rep by Pop kept gaining ever more legitimacy and support. Even Antoine-Aimé Dorion, the leader of rouges, who were loosely allied to the Reformers, felt compelled to suggest in the legislature a possible trade of his agreement to Rep by Pop for disentangling the United Province of Canada into a loose federation of two provinces with some minimalist central government.
Macdonald was reduced to advising Conservative candidates who supported Rep by Pop how best to express their opinion without appearing to be splitting from the party. He wrote to a sitting member, George Benjamin, to “go for Rep by Pop as strongly as you like, but do not say that it must be granted if a majority of U.C. members say so. Say that the principle is so just & equitable that it must prevail and that you have no doubt it will eventually.” He went on to urge Benjamin, “As you are situated, do not put yourself in opposition to the French.…The French are your sheet anchor.”
Macdonald was being forced to perform like a gymnast edging his way along a high wire that someone else was jiggling. Of the six Upper Canada ministers in his government, all but one would eventually go public as supporters of Rep by Pop—the lone exception being Macdonald himself. At the same time, his French Canadians were becoming increasingly concerned that Macdonald could not forever forestall Rep by Pop. So, some bleus began to wonder, why not switch over to the winning side—that of Brown and the Reformers—and thereby keep hold of the perks of patronage? Moreover, while Macdonald had spotted the possibility that he might be reduced to an opposition rump by a loss of bleu support, so had Brown.
After the humiliation of the double shuffle—and the taunt that he had headed “His Excellency’s most ephemeral Administration”—Brown’s career had gone into decline. He seemed even to have lost power at the Globe, where the editorials were being determined by the editor, George Sheppard. The anti-French Sheppard repeatedly called for an end to “French domination” and demanded that the problem be solved by an outright dissolution of the Union that would release Upper Canada from “Romish” and “Jesuitical” scheming.
Brown began his march back to leadership by organizing a huge Reform convention for the fall of 1859 in Toronto; its six hundred delegates made it easily the largest Canada had seen. Sheppard delivered a powerful speech and moved a resolution calling for the “unqualified dissolution” of the United Province of Canada. Brown’s turn came a day later. He agreed with Upper Canada’s complaints about the dominance of its smaller partner,*81 admitted that dissolving the union might resolve the problems, but then offered a brighter alternative: “What true Canadian can witness the tide of immigration now commencing to flow into the vast territories of the North West without longing…to make our own country the highway of the traffic to the Pacific.” The one way to achieve this was to keep the United Province together, so that it “may at some future date readily furnish the machinery of a great confederation.” Brown had found for himself a new voice as a moderate advocate of Confederation.
Brown, though, was no politician. After the convention, one Reform member recalled meeting his leader several times and never being recognized; a few days later, he had encountered Macdonald, who grasped his hand, slapped him on the back and declared how glad he was to see him. Brown’s ideas remained remote, abstract—and confusing. The resolution eventually passed by the Reform convention called for a federation composed only of the two existing “sections” of the United Province, Upper and Lower Canada, each separating to form new provinces, with, over them, “some joint authority.” The populist Grits rejected such a scheme as tame, and, far worse, as failing to be certain of ridding them of the French Canadians. By the summer of 1860, Brown’s hold on the party had weakened again, and he began to talk about resigning.
At the same time as Brown was losing control over his own party, so was Macdonald over his group. Besides having to tug back into line the ever-growing number of Conservatives now openly supporting Rep by Pop, he had to cope with rising disaffection with his leadership among the Orange Order, which had always provided him with a large number of his electoral foot soldiers. The divisive force here was that, in the summer of 1860, a spectacular royal tour of Canada—the first ever of its kind—had been made by Queen Victoria’s son Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, at the request of Macdonald’s government. While the prince’s progress had been overwhelmingly successful, it had been marred by one jarring confrontation involving the Orange Order.
The young Prince of Wales, Canada’s first royal visitor. On the far left is Governor General Sir Edmund Head, a great admirer of Macdonald’s. John Rose organized the prince’s tour.
Only eighteen years old, Prince Edward was generally judged to be handsome in the way, then as now, a special indulgence is always extended to royal princes. He had the reputation of being a good dancer and a stylish dresser—too stylish perhaps, because Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, complained that his eldest son took “no interest in anything but clothes. Even when out shooting, he is more occupied with his trousers than with the game.” But no matter—parades, pageantry and pomp always please the masses. For the colony to put on its best show—as Macdonald observed, “Our administration is more familiar with cocktails than cocked hats”—he picked his friend John Rose, at this time the minister of public works. And it went splendidly. The colonials were ecstatic and awed. There was one terrible gaffe, in London, where an overeager citizen had the audacity to “seize the hand of his Royal Highness and shake it like a pump-handle.” More generally, as the Ottawa Citizen reported, “Ottawa appeared lovely and anxious as a bride awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom to complete the joy.” Everywhere, there were triumphal arches, red, white and blue bunting, patriotic banners, fireworks and illuminations achieved by the new marvel of gas. And there were newly minted ditties: “For hark, the trumpets / hark, the drums / The Princely Heir of England comes!”*82
Then it all unravelled in Macdonald’s hometown of Kingston. It was the most loyal town in the country, not only because of the Loyalists but even more because the Loyal Orange Order was so strong there. To greet their prince who had come over the water, Kingston’s Orangemen built two large arches of firs, which they covered with their own regalia and symbols. Then they gathered en masse to await him. Premonitions of trouble came from complaints by Kingston’s Catholics that the prince should not and could not be welcomed by a sectarian political organization that was banned in England itself. To stir things up, the Globe pointed out that when the prince began his tour in Quebec City, he had not only been greeted in French but visited Roman Catholic institutions such as Laval University and the Ursuline Convent. To head off a confrontation, Macdonald met with the colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, who was accompanying the prince.*83 Macdonald argued that Upper Canadians felt that the Catholics “had had it all their own way in Lower Canada” and that the same courtesy should be extended to Upper Canada’s Protestants. Newcastle replied that there was no comparison between the Catholic artifacts in Quebec City, “which were emblematical of a faith,” and the paraphernalia of Orangemen, “which were those of a rancorous party.”
The prince’s tour was a huge success, with one exception. In Kingston, the Orange Order massed to greet “their Prince.” Because the Lodge was banned in England, he refused to come ashore and walk beneath their triumphal arch.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 4, 1860, the prince entered Kingston Harbour aboard the steamer Kingston. It drew close to the official landing place, where the Orangemen had massed—some fifteen thousand of them—in their costumes and with their banners. At the last minute, the ship changed course and moved off into mid-harbour. The standoff continued into the next day, with the Orangemen refusing to leave, but making no disturbances other than singing such songs as “Water, water, holy water. / Sprinkle the Catholics everyone. / We’ll cut them asunder and make ’em lie under.” Late in the morning of the 5th, despite last-minute appeals by Macdonald, the Kingston weighed anchor and chugged off to the prince’s next engagement in Belleville, and then on to Cobourg.
The incident earned Canada an international black eye, including the comment in the New York Times that nowhere in Canada could the prince find “a rational population before reaching the American frontier.” The Globe put it all down to Macdonald’s hypocrisy and incompetence. In fact the blame rested principally with the Duke of Newcastle, who, concerned only with domestic British politics, ignored the fact that the Orange Order was a legal organization in Canada. In the United States, where he next went, the prince had no problems: newspapers pronounced him a “heart smasher,” and many of the young ladies at balls and receptions wrestled each other to get near to him. In Philadelphia, a production of La Traviata came to a halt because “the leading ladies on stage could not keep their eyes off the royal youth.”*84
To recover from this fiasco, which had left him furious with British officials at the same time as the Orangemen were angry with him, Macdonald resorted to a political innovation that served as a response to Brown’s mass convention of the summer before, as well as a platform for him to tell his side of what the newspapers were calling “The Siege at Kingston.” He embarked on a cross-country speaking tour.
No one had done that before—except Americans. Stump speeches were exceedingly rare then, as Canadian politicians limited themselves to orations in the legislature, to church congregations and dinners organized by businessmen. Manifestos like Macdonald’s Address were the standard way of spreading the word. In one critical respect, Macdonald was quite unlike most politicians of the time: he was entirely at ease with ordinary people. He dealt with people not by lecturing them or by orating at them but by talking colloquially with them, telling stories, exchanging repartee—all in everyday language.
Not for many decades would Canadians again encounter a politician so completely at ease with ordinary people. Once, after Macdonald had clambered onto a piece of farm machinery to better address a gathering, word was passed to him that he was actually standing on a manure spreader. His instant reply: “This is the first time I’ve stood on the Liberal platform.” When a passerby stopped him on Toronto’s King Street to tell him that a friend had said Macdonald was “the biggest liar in all Canada,” he looked gravely at his interlocutor and answered, “I dare say it’s true enough.” Mostly, people—even those intending to vote against him—clustered around Macdonald at his meetings for the uncomplicated reason that he was fun.
So off he went on his speaking tour, travelling from town to town—first in Brantford, and then in a succession of meetings, from Toronto to Hamilton to St. Catharines, from St. Thomas to London to Guelph, from Belleville to Simcoe to Kingston. At times, the crowds topped eight hundred listeners. Usually there was a dinner or lunch, typically of six or more courses. There were speeches and toasts, jokes and stories, and more speeches—typically eight or ten speakers. Macdonald frequently was funny, but in a way that got across a message. He referred to the “some joint authority” resolution passed at the Reform convention and asked, “Is it a legislature, or is it a bench of bishops?” He set out his case: “I am a sincere Unionist. I nail my colours to the mast on that great principle.” He used the flag to salute two masters at the same time: “I say that next to the Union with Great Britain, next to having our Queen as ruler, I look to the Union of the two Canadas as most essential.” He turned maudlin: “Whatever may have been the antecedents of any man in Canada, whether he has acted with me or against me, if he becomes a disunionist, I disown him; and I don’t care what may have been the antecedents of another, though he may have struggled fiercely against me, if he enters himself as a supporter of the union with England…and of the union of the two Canadas, I hail him as a brother. God and nature have joined the two Canadas, and no factious politician should be allowed to sever them.” The argument didn’t make much sense, but it abundantly served its purpose: Macdonald had put Brown and the Reformers on the defensive as would-be dividers of the nation and of the Empire, and he had positioned himself as the protector of the nation and, better yet by far, of the Queen.
As for the recent royal tour, Macdonald took credit for its overall success: “It had called the attention of the world to the position and prospects of Canada.” He admitted that although the prince’s visit “had been a source of great pleasure to the people, it had been accompanied in some respects with disappointments, in some degree with heart burnings, in some degree with mistakes.” The fault lay with the Duke of Newcastle for interfering in a way that upset Canada’s careful balance between French and English, Catholics and Protestants. It was an adroit defence, and a courageous one, given that he was directly criticizing no less a power than the colonial secretary.
Macdonald delivered his most important speech in Caledonia. There he addressed directly the central issue of the coming election and of the Canadian political system. “It has been said that I and my Upper Canadian colleagues sacrificed the interests of Upper Canada to Lower Canada; and that we hold to our Lower Canadian colleagues simply for the sake of office. They say we are traitors to our race; that we knuckle to the Frenchmen; that we are faithless to our religion; and that we are under Roman Catholic influences.” Then he offered his reply. He and Cartier had attempted, “in our humble way, to advise the head of the Government for the good of the whole country and the equal interest of all.” In itself, his argument was unremarkable. What was remarkable was that Macdonald, in the heartland of English-speaking Protestantism, could tell his audience that much of what they were thinking was wrong in itself and, equally, wrong for the country.
Afterwards, Macdonald told a friend that he had found this pre-campaign swing “wearisome beyond description.” But not so wearisome that he didn’t add jauntily, “I never took to the stump before, & find that I get on capitally.” Macdonald’s legend as a man of the people had begun to take root.
Impending elections focus the minds of politicians as, to all others, the prospect of being hanged is said to do. Any frustration felt by Macdonald or any intimation of attenuated accomplishment immediately vanished. From early 1861 on, he became a whirlwind of energy. He bombarded Hamilton businessman Isaac Buchanan with arguments why he shouldn’t step down as a member (Buchanan stayed on). He dispatched confidential letters to candidates tipping them off to the date of the election. He encouraged (successfully) Sidney Smith, a friend, to remain as a Reformer, so that a shred of substance would adhere to the label Liberal-Conservative. And he wrote to Egerton Ryerson—“No time must be lost in calling on the Wesleyan Methodists in every constituency”—to try to swing those of his faith to come over (quite a few did).
The results of all this activity could not have been better. Through the summer of 1861—elections were then held over several months—Macdonald won his first ever (and only ever) Conservative majority in Upper Canada. The simultaneous loss of a few seats by Cartier’s bleus was, by comparison, a minor setback. Most admirable of all, Brown lost in his own riding.
In fact the election result changed nothing. The Rep by Pop challenge still remained to be dealt with. The double-majority convention still stalled national action. No sooner was the election over than Macdonald was complaining in a letter to a supporter about “violent Tories who are fools enough to think that a purely Conservative Gov-t can be formed. Now I am not such a fool as to destroy all that I have been doing for the last 7 years.”
In fact, Macdonald’s world, as well as Canada’s, had already changed beyond recall.
Four months before that election was held, a single mortar shot fired on the morning of April 12, 1861, had signalled the start of the bombardment of the small federal garrison in an unfinished fort, Fort Sumter, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. A day and a half later, the garrison’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered to the Confederate commander, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard. One of the most bloody, brutal and tragic of civil wars in history had begun. It would go on for four relentless years. Out of it would come a totally different America, pulsating with energy, confidence and drive, never pausing on its way first to industrial supremacy and thereafter to military and geopolitical supremacy. Out of it too would come a radically different Canada. The crisis that could dislodge everyone from their fixed positions had happened at last.
Interior of the badly damaged Fort Sumter by John Kay ( 1863 ). From out of the Civil War came a transformed United States and also a transformed Canada.