FOOTNOTES
*1 Hugh Macdonald recorded the birthdates of all his children in the 1820 edition of his memorandum book.
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*2 A small town, then and now, Dornoch has one claim to fame as the site of the last judicial execution for witchcraft in Britain: in 1727, a court ruled that a Janet Horne had turned her daughter into a pony.
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†3 E.B. Biggar’s Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald, hurried into print in 1891, the year of his death, is the source of most of the best-known anecdotes about him. The first biography of Macdonald, The Life and Times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald, published as early as 1883, was written by J.E. Collins, an expatriate Newfoundlander. By a curious coincidence, Collins also wrote the first biography of Louis Riel as well as a bodice-ripper of a novel, Annette, the Metis Spy: A Heroine of the N.W. Rebellion. He died in New York, of drink, in 1892.
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*4 Immigrants were then commonly referred to as “emigrants,” because the significant point was that they were leaving Britain rather than that they were coming to Canada.
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*5 While Simcoe’s legislation ended the slave system, it did not immediately end slavery: owners of existing slaves were allowed to hang on to their “property,” although almost all were released within a few years. By gaining legal equality, blacks in Canada did not in any way gain social and economic equality.
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*6 To minimize the cost of feeding their passengers, some captains were known to supply them on the first day with large helpings of porridge and molasses, making them so sick that, thereafter, they seldom demanded their full rations.
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*7 The real hero of this feat wasn’t so much Sydenham as a stagecoach operator in Toronto (York), William Weller, who organized the relays of horses needed to maintain an average speed of fifteen miles an hour. For his contributions, Weller received four hundred dollars and a gold watch.
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*8 The source is Fingard’s study “The Winter’s Tale: The Seasonal Contours of Pre-Industrial Poverty in British North America, 1815–1860.”
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*9 In the absence of any zoning regulations, grand houses, shacks, stores and grog shops all jostled against one another.
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*10 This plot was purchased by John A. Macdonald in 1850. The remains of Hugh Macdonald, who had been buried in the old “Lower” Burial Ground, were brought there, but not, apparently, the remains of James Macdonald.
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*11 In 1830 there were only two universities in British North America—Dalhousie and McGill. Sending Macdonald to either of them would have been quite beyond the family’s financial capacity.
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†12 Macdonald, who closely followed news from Britain, would also have been aware that Disraeli eventually commanded advances of an amazing £10,000, more even than Dickens or Trollope—a reflection, naturally, more of his appeal as a celebrity than of his skill as a novelist.
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*13 The stone mill, little changed, still stands in Glenora, Prince Edward County.
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*14 One observation by Smith in The Wealth of Nations of more direct interest to Canadians was that Britain should let go its North American colonies, both to escape from the cost of “supporting any part of their civil or military establishments” and, more urgently, from a cause as sure to be lost, in his view, as had the thirteen American colonies.
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*15 An excellent article on Macdonald’s speech patterns, from which some of this material is drawn, is Ged Martin’s piece of splendid title in the British Journal of Canadian Studies (2004), “Sir John Eh? Macdonald.”
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*16 This house, at 110 Rideau Street, still stands and has been converted into an exquisite small museum about Macdonald by its present owners, Donna Ivey and Norma Kelly. On a wallboard in the attic, the initials “L.M.” have been carved, perhaps standing for Macdonald’s sister Louisa, but more probably for his cousin Lowther Macpherson.
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*17 A prime source for the material in this section has been the excellent master’s thesis “A Dead and Alive Way Never Does,” by William Teatero for Queen’s University in 1978.
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*18 There was always an edge to Campbell’s comments about Macdonald. “He never became in my judgment a good lawyer,” he said, “but was always a dangerous man in the courts.” One cause, despite their long relationship, was very likely Campbell’s resentment that Macdonald dropped him from the plum portfolio of minister of justice in 1885.
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*19 All these surviving letters, together with an excellent introduction, are contained in Keith Johnson’s Affectionately Yours: The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald and His Family.
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*20 The authority on Macdonald’s business affairs is the historian Keith Johnson, most particularly in his “John A. Macdonald, the Young Non-Politician,” Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1971.
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*21 The “all politics is local” aphorism is generally attributed to “Tip” O’Neill, the powerful Democratic House leader in the United States from 1977 to 1987.
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*22 The Canadian Commercial Revolution was published in 1936 by the historian Gilbert Norman Tucker. It was his doctoral thesis.
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*23 A few years after Kingston’s fall from grace, an English visitor noted that the town had “a rather dreary appearance” and that many streets were “over-run with grass.”
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*24 The Maritimes, then quite separate colonies, had both Poor Laws and Poor Houses.
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*25 The first legislation in British North America to establish free education was in Prince Edward Island in 1852. Nova Scotia followed in 1864, and Ontario only after Confederation.
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*26 No official Hansard record existed during these years. In an inspired project, the Parliamentary Library has assembled a “virtual Hansard” by collating the near-verbatim reports of debates as published in the newspapers of the time on the basis of accounts sent in by shorthand reporters. The post-Confederation series is all but complete; that for the pre-Confederation Legislative Assembly, though, extends only up to 1856. One editorial challenge is that newspapers often gave short shrift or no shrift at all to members of parties they opposed.
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†27 His actual name was De Bleury.
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*28 This portrait is of the correct period—the 1840s—and comes from the Kingston area. The woman in it has dark eyes, though, rather than the light-blue eyes Isabella was known to have.
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*29 The paucity of surviving letters by Isabella is striking because, being frequently away from Macdonald for extended periods, she must have written often to him and to other family members.
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*30 Opium was widely available in the mid-nineteenth century and a common ingredient in patent medicines, such as Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Godfrey’s Cordial and McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, all of which could be bought without a prescription at drugstores. In its most common form, especially favoured by women, it was sold as laudanum.
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*31 Macdonald’s use of Shero poses a tantalizing mystery, perhaps an insolvable one. None of the standard etymology dictionaries consulted by the author cite any uses of the word in the nineteenth century; rather, “shero” is a modern neologism (s-hero) minted by the feminist movement. It seems that Macdonald either invented it as a tease or overheard it, perhaps from his strong-minded and highly intelligent mother.
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*32 Stewart, an expatriate Scot, teaches at Michigan State University.
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*33 The only serious competitor for the title of “most important” would be the Rowell-Sirois Report of 1940, from the commission established originally to equip the federal government with the tools to cure the Great Depression of the previous decade. When this mission was fulfilled anyway by the economic boom generated by the Second World War, the commission’s report was used to justify transferring jurisdictional responsibilities and revenues to the federal government in order to transform Canada into a welfare state.
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†34 Durham’s use of the word “race” will strike contemporary ears as odd. It was used then to describe people now usually referred to as “ethnic groups.”
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*35 Officially, Upper Canada now became Canada West, and Lower Canada became Canada East. In fact, almost everyone continued to refer to the new sections by their old titles, and for simplicity’s sake this older terminology to describe today’s Ontario and Quebec is used throughout this text. (In fact, the legislature relegalized the use of the old Upper and Lower Canada terms in 1849.)
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*36 A parallel exists with the publication in 1965 of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, predicting Canada’s inevitable absorption by America. In response, English-Canadian nationalists suddenly stood on guard for their country.
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*37 The term ultramontanism meant “over the mountains” to Rome. The movement began as a reaction, led by Pope Pius IX, to the ascendant liberalism sweeping across Europe; it was defensive but also reformist.
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*38 The initiation of the new legislature of the United Province of Canada was accomplished through the swearing in of Sydenham as governor general in Montreal on February 10, 1841. Proclamations in both languages were posted on the main streets, but they were all ripped down overnight.
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*39 Lord Elgin was the son of the British ambassador in Athens who spirited away the Elgin Marbles to the British Museum.
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*40 In the nineteenth century, the customary term for patronage was the much more descriptive one of “jobbery.” It had, in fact, an honorable intellectual parentage. Adam Smith, in his great Wealth of Nations, argued that the loss of the American colonies might have been prevented had only some of their leaders been offered “the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state-lottery of British politics.” Perhaps what the Founding Fathers were really after was less liberty than patronage.
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*41 Macdonald’s patron, Draper, had managed to avoid the firing line ahead of this debacle by getting himself appointed to the bench.
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*42 The most approving comment about Britain’s adoption of free trade came from across the Atlantic, from Andrew Carnegie, the Scot expatriate now well on his way to fame and fortune in the United States. Trade didn’t follow the flag, declared Carnegie; rather, “trade follows the lowest price current. If a dealer in any colony wished to buy Union Jacks he would order them from Britain’s worst foe if he could save sixpence.”
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*43 William Draper, Conservative leader and premier when Macdonald entered politics, made some attempts to reach out to Canadien members, but he lacked the skills to make it happen.
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*44 The first, modern-style, organized political party in Britain can be dated to Gladstone’s Liberals of the 1880s.
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*45 Laurier actually spoke English with a slight Scots accent, having learned the language in the Lower Canada settlement of New Glasgow—an area originally settled by Scots.
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*46 Ged Martin unearthed the François Bourassa story in Roger Le Moine’s 1974 book, Napoléon Bourassa l’homme et l’artiste. The French novel Macdonald supposedly was reading was Le Diable boiteux[The Devil on Two Sticks] by Alain-René Lesage. It’s about romantic misadventures involving greybeards marrying young girls, and bankrupt heiresses marrying fortune hunters. It’s hard to believe it would be to Macdonald’s taste.
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*47 Apologists claimed that Hincks had clung to office only to prevent Brown from replacing him with a ministry from which all French Canadians would be excluded. This effort may account for his being rewarded in 1856 with an appointment by the British government as governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands. He later returned to Canada as Macdonald’s post-Confederation minister of finance.
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*48 Macdonald actually missed the wedding because he was detained in Quebec City on legislature business. He got Louisa to buy his present for the couple: “I wish that Moll should have a good kit, & I wish you to spend £25 for her on such things as you like. Don’t say anything to her about it.”
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*49 Brown condemned the slavers with the vivid phrase “men-stealers,” describing them as “a disgrace not only to Americans but to the whole world.”
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*50 “Rep by Pop” was a most persuasive slogan, although what Brown really had in mind was rep by section—namely, that Upper and Lower Canada should have seats in proportion to their respective total populations. As was most curious, throughout the long Rep by Pop debate, little notice was ever taken of the fact that Upper Canada’s own constituencies were even more unbalanced, varying as widely as from 4, 100 for Brockville to 80, 000 for Huron-Bruce.
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*51 One of the might-have-beens in the development of Canadian intellectual life is Thomas Huxley, the great champion and popularizer of Darwin’s theory of evolution, who applied for and almost secured in the mid-1850s the post of professor of natural history at the University of Toronto. The slot was filled, instead, by the brother of Premier Sir Francis Hincks.
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*52 Before Confederation and after it for several decades, premiers and prime ministers functioned at the same time as a regular cabinet minister. The practice eventually died out, although John Diefenbaker was both prime minister and minister of external affairs for a time in the years 1957 to 959. A rough contemporary equivalent would be that deputy prime ministers, largely a symbolic title, always hold a departmental portfolio.
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*53 Before Drinkwater, R.A. Harrison, later chief justice of Upper Canada, and Hewitt Bernard, later his brother-in-law, functioned as Macdonald’s private secretary while also performing other departmental duties.
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*54 Sowby’s master’s thesis, an exceptional one, was written in 1984 for Queen’s University.
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*55 Langton developed a system of reporting the budget accounts in the 1850s that remained Ottawa’s standard system down to the 1970s.
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†56 He did not keep all copies of his own letters or of incoming ones. At the end of an 1856 letter to Brown Chamberlain of the Montreal Gazette in which he had made some frank political observations, Macdonald advised, “I hope you burn my letters. I do yours.” In fact, Chamberlain kept the letter.
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†57 Even his bitter opponent, Sir Richard Cartwright, admitted that Macdonald could “generally lay his hand on any document he wanted, even after a long lapse of years.”
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*58 Officially, their titles were those of attorneys general for Canada West and Canada East, or for each of the new “sections” within the United Province of Canada, but the old Upper and Lower Canada titles were widely used.
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†59 Archy Lanton was an escaped American slave who had made it across the border.
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*60 Much of the material for this section is drawn from the research done by historian Donald Smith of the University of Calgary and reported in his long article “John A. Macdonald and Aboriginal Canada,” published in Historic Kingston, 2002.
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*61 Macdonald was friendly also with John Cuthbertson, the son of a Scottish fur trader who had married a Mohawk woman.
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*62 Reiffenstein’s actual arrest, in 1869, was the talk of Ottawa, primarily because the police came to his house and arrested him at his own dinner table.
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*63 The Legislative Council, of which Taché was a member, was the pre-Confederation equivalent of the Senate.
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*64 In Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791–1896.
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*65 As is the case with most early newspaper reports of parliamentary debates, the language of this quotation is curiously stilted, with Macdonald appearing to have spoken in the past tense. No Hansards were published before Confederation.
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*66 That Lower Canada’s agricultural productivity was at most one-fifth of that of Upper Canada was widely attributed to its antiquated seigneurial system.
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*67 The capital by this time rotated between Toronto and Quebec City, Montreal having lost the honour as a result of the burning of its parliament buildings in 1849 by a Conservative-organized mob.
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*68 Many years later, when Macdonald was sent a copy of Collins’s 1883 biography of him—the first—he didn’t bother to read it but “turned,” as he put it in a letter to a friend, to just two sections: one, understandably enough, was the Canadian Pacific Scandal; the other was the “double shuffle.”
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*69 Cauchon eventually crossed the floor to join the Liberals, becoming a minister in Alexander Mackenzie’s government.
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†70 There is a bust of him (in a Roman toga) in the Quebec City legislative building, and in Montreal, besides parks and schools, he is commemorated with an eighty-seven-foot-high statue inscribed with his cry, “Avant tous, je suis Canadien.”
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*71 Over succeeding years, a succession of transportation and communications enterprises, all either government agencies or dependent on government support, would locate in Montreal—Canadian National Railways, the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, Telesat Canada.
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*72 His wife, Hortense, was deeply pious. A family friend remarked that she would have been happiest as a nun—provided she was the Mother Superior. After Cartier’s death she moved to Cannes with her two daughters, dying there in 1898. One daughter, Hortense, lived on in Cannes until 1940, when she left hurriedly as the Germans approached. She died in London in 1941 at the age of ninety-three.
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*73 The rival time span occurred near to the century’s close and continued into the next, prompting a new prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, to predict that the twentieth century would belong to Canada.
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*74 From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” published in 1867.
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*75 This near declaration of race war was written not by Brown but by his able and extremist chief editorial writer, George Sheppard.
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*76 Macdonald’s spelling of “favour” in the American style of “favor” was unusual; he may have picked it up osmotically because he was writing from south of the border.
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*77 The tavern, now called the Royal Tavern, still exists, at 344 Princess Street in Kingston.
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*78 In his day, Bulwer-Lytton was far better known as a popular writer—as of the romantic novel The Last Days of Pompeii—than as a politician. Today, he’s best known as the inspiration for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing, which takes off from his famous opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” This association is a bit unfair, given that Bulwer-Lytton also minted the aphorism that writers love to quote, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
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*79 The most unorthodox version of confederation, submitted to the legislature of Upper Canada in 1825 and advocating a loose federation, was by Robert Gourlay, who turned out to have written it while in a lunatic asylum in England. Gourlay was an engaging eccentric and an agrarian radical. His most considerable accomplishment was, at the age of eighty, to contest a riding in Upper Canada and to marry his twenty-eight-year-old housekeeper. However, he lost both.
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*80 Creighton’s case for Macdonald as an early champion of Confederation rests primarily on a speech he gave in the House in April 1861 calling for “an immense confederation of free men, the greatest confederacy of civilized and intelligent men that has ever had an existence on the face of the globe.” All those golden phrases, though, were simply Macdonald at his “buncombe” best.
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*81 The imbalance wasn’t simply one of political representation in proportion to population. About three-quarters of all Canada’s tax revenues came from the Upper Canada “section.”
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*82 In his Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States, from which much of the material in this section is drawn, Ian Radforth observes that one problem for the tour’s organizers was that the towns and cities of then underdeveloped Canada lacked any of the “grand avenues and parade grounds” so necessary for ceremonial spectacles.
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*83 Newcastle thus became the first colonial secretary to visit the most important of the colonies he was responsible for, and the only one to do so during the nineteenth century.
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*84 Years later, the Prince of Wales encountered a Canadian MP in London who answered the prince’s inquiry by saying that he came from Kingston. “Ah,” replied Edward in a deft reference to his aborted visit, “it looks very well from the water.” Later still, on Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, he succeeded to the throne as Edward VII. Throughout his life, he remained exceptionally close to a great many ladies.
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*85 The unofficial official British view of Lincoln was even wider of the mark. Lord Lyons, the ambassador (minister) in Washington, informed London that Lincoln was “a rough westerner of the lowest origin and little education.”
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†86 Seward had formed this view as a result of an extensive trip he made in 1857 across the British North American colonies, even north to Labrador.
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*87 The evidence is questionable. In a book published in 1904, Goldwin Smith claimed that Gladstone had written to him during the war proposing that “if the North thought fit at this time to let the South go, it might in time be indemnified by…Canada.” Smith said that he had later destroyed Gladstone’s letter because it might “prove embarrassing.”
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*88 More than half of these Canadian volunteers were Canadiens. Mass migration from Quebec to the United States during the nineteenth century dates from the Civil War years, in large part because of the classic “pull” factor in migration—those who’ve already gone to or already know a new country always attract others to follow them.
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*89 Great Eastern raced across the Atlantic in a new record of eight days and six hours, going full speed through icefields—as would, less successfully, another “world’s largest ship” a half-century later.
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*90 Not until 1887, in a conversation with his friend Judge Gowan, did Macdonald disclose for the first time his front-line experience, or, more accurately, his near to the front-line adventure. His company was placed safely behind the artillery that levelled the tavern and killed eleven of the hapless rebels.
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*91 The most powerful expression of Canadien sentiment about Americans was Premier Taché’s famous prediction that “the last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French-Canadian.”
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*92 Polk’s name still lingers among Canadians as the author of the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight,” meaning that the border should be pushed way up north from the forty-ninth parallel.
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*93 In 1793 Governor Simcoe prohibited the importation of slaves into Canada. Existing owners were allowed to retain their slaves, but most were freed not long afterwards.
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*94 There was a small reverse flow, mostly of Northern draft dodgers, or “skeedadlers” as they were called, but most of them returned home once the Civil War was over, as did most of the runaway slaves. Late in the century, after the Midwest was filled up, American farmers moved north in search of land, particularly in Alberta.
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*95 A further defence problem revealed by the Trent crisis was that the telegraph line from Halifax to Montreal was being tapped by the Americans.
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*96 The Globe’s first reference to Macdonald’s habit, in February 1856, was in the correct, coded form of describing him as speaking in the legislature “in a state of wild excitement.”
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*97 Even the term “alcoholic,” applied to a person, didn’t exist then. It was not coined until 1891, the year of Macdonald’s death.
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*98 The first to make this observation was Frank Underhill. In a paper he presented to the Canadian Historical Association in 1927, Underhill, in the terminology of those less-evolved times, described Anne Brown as “perhaps the real father of Confederation.”
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*99 In counterpoint to whatever credit Britain gained by its abolition of slavery in the Empire in 1833, it incurred the off-setting discredit of initiating the Opium Wars at about the same time, employing the Royal Navy to blast open China’s ports to the opium trade.
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*100 Accident played a large part in determining that nineteenth-century Canada was among the blotches of red on the map. In the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris of 1763, Prime Minister Pitt the Elder came close to handing Canada back in exchange for France’s sugar-rich islands of Guadeloupe. In the end, he held on to Canada largely out of fear of public outrage at the abandonment of the conquest for which the dauntless hero General James Wolfe had given his life.
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†101 In 1872 Disraeli made imperialism the central tenet of Conservative Party policy. He was drawn to this stance because he had realized that working-class Britons, newly enfranchised by the 1867 Reform Act, were strong supporters of the Empire, perhaps as a source of colour in their hard lives.
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*102 Cobden could lay a claim to be the father of the “Narcissism of small differences,” that practice whereby some Canadians stare intently across the border to identify differences between themselves and their neighbouring Americans. After a tour of the two countries in 1859, he proclaimed that Canadians “looked more English than those on the other side of the American frontier—they are more fleshy and have ruddier complexions.”
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*103 The accused was a runaway slave charged with murder in the United States whom the British Anti-Slavery Society was seeking to protect from being extradited from Canada.
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*104 The Times went on to comment sourly, “We put no great trust in the ‘gratitude’ of colonies.”
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†105 The earliest first-rate colonial secretary—to everyone’s amazement, and even more so because he had insisted on the portfolio—was Joseph Chamberlain—but he didn’t take office there until the post-Macdonald year of 1895.
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*106 Trollope had his finger on the public pulse. He had Phineas Finn go on to say that the British did care “that Canada not go to the States because although they don’t love the Canadians, they do hate the Americans.”
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*107 Back home, Newcastle gave a level-headed analysis of the implications of what he had said to Seward: “The injury to our own trade of burning New York and Boston would be so serious we ought to be as reluctant to do it as to destroy Liverpool and Bristol,” he reported. He added, though, “but they know we must do it if they declare war.”
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*108 A rough precedent existed in the creation of Brazil, which broke away from Portugal in 1822 and remained an independent kingdom, under Pedro I and Pedro II, until it became a republic in 1899.
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*109 A rough translation, provided by a bilingual friend, would be: “Certainly no one would have dreamed of Brown walking hand in hand with Macdonald, Cartier and Galt.”
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*110 In one article, MacDermot criticized Macdonald for failing to show any awareness of having read, among others, “the Fabians.” Since the Fabian Society was formed only in 1884, this seems a critical reach too far. In fact, the Fabian leaders Sidney and Beatrice Webb did come to Canada, in 1897, and didn’t much like what they saw: a “complete lack of thinking” about social problems in a “nation of successful speculators in land values.”
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*111 During the century and a half since, Maritime Union has remained a topic of academic interest, but of none whatever to Maritime people and politicians.
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*112 In fact, the Intercolonial enabled Canadian manufactures to capture the Maritime market from local companies. At the time Macdonald spoke, though, the Reciprocity deal with the United States had made east-west traffic incidental to the huge flow of north-south traffic.
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*113 As a consequence of the 1982 Constitution Act, the BNA Act was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.
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†114 To improve his own knowledge, Macdonald in this letter asked for a copy of a standard work, G.T. Curtis’s History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States.
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†115 In the published edition of Feo Monck’s journal, Macdonald’s name was left a discreet blank, but her original page contains the handwritten note “Macdonald afterwards Premier.”
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*116 Within a year, as the government moved to the new, permanent national capital in Ottawa, Quebec City would lose even its temporary parliament building.
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*117 The term used then was Legislative Council, but for simplicity’s sake, Senate and senators are here used throughout.
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*118 Today, the equivalent share of government spending on education, health and social programs would be around 70 per cent.
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*119 To confirm the indistinguishable interconnectedness of law and politics, of the thirty-three Fathers, two-thirds, or twenty-one, were lawyers, but, like Macdonald, lawyers who had learned the trade on the job.
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†120 The interest the delegates took in the Senate would have reached fever pitch had they known that serious consideration would be given later to granting to all the Confederation senators “the rank and title of Knight Bachelor.” Macdonald scotched this idea by pointing out to the colonial secretary that quite aside from the possibility of an errant senator lowering the tone of knighthood, it “would entail a title on his wife, which might not in all cases be considered desirable.”
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*121 No protection was provided for French Canadians as such or for any ethnic group, Aboriginal people excepted. The protections were all to religion and to language.
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*122 This revealing letter is reproduced in full in Alastair Sweeny’s George-Étienne Cartier: A Biography.
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*123 Macdonald was exaggerating for effect. Tupper, Nova Scotia’s premier, denounced the “absurdity” of provinces claiming any sovereignty and said that Confederation would instead make Nova Scotia “a large municipality under the Central Government; but just as clearly a municipality as the City of Halifax now is under our Provincial Government.”
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†124 Brown so doubted the usefulness of provincial governments that he said they “should not take up political matters.”
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*125 A nine-foot-long oak-and-basswood table in the Saskatchewan Legislative Library at Regina may be the same one around which the Quebec City delegates bargained for the resolutions. It was used in the Privy Council at Ottawa from 1865 to some date in the 1883–92 period, when it was brought to Regina. It probably came to Ottawa from Quebec City, and so may have been used at the Confederation conference, but no certain connection has been established.
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*126 To further mollify the Americans, the Canadian government compensated the St. Albans banks for their losses with thirty thousand dollars in banknotes and forty thousand in gold.
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†127 In June 1864, the value of the Canadian dollar reached $2. 78, a peak never even approached since.
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128 In his report on the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences, published in 1865 under the title The Union of the British Provinces, the pro-Confederation Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Whelan dealt delicately with Macdonald’s performance: “Illness induced by fatigue from assiduous devotion to public affairs, compelled him to curtail his observations.”
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†129 It’s possible there was a concealed brace behind Macdonald, as was often used to enable a client to last out the minute and a half or more of motionlessness required for the exposure.
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130 That Hugh John should have gone to university at the age of fifteen was not in the least unusual. Some undergraduates then were a year younger. No high schools existed until the 1870s, and bright students were prepared for university entrance exams in special schools. See A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951.
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†131 As must have galled Macdonald, Brown at this time made himself wealthy for life by selling his farm and lands in southwestern Ontario for a handsome $275, 000.
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132 Macdonald had received his first honorary degree in 1863 from Queen’s University; it was also the first honorary degree awarded by Queen’s, which he had helped to found.
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133 Before his speech, Macdonald had already rejected a suggestion by Brown that he should move a series of resolutions on the scheme.
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†134 This purely tactical use by Macdonald of the term “treaty” was later seized on by advocates of the “Compact Theory” of Confederation. They held that it was a compact or treaty negotiated between the provinces, with the federal government set up by them to perform certain functions. But the provinces, as colonies, had no power to negotiate anything. Further, Ontario and Quebec didn’t exist before Confederation and had no one to negotiate on their behalf. A supposed compact or treaty that no one signed, and whose two largest participants (representing four-fifths of the population) didn’t exist, is difficult to take seriously.
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†135 Although democracy, as a grand theory, had few supporters in Canada, the country’s political system was quite respectably democratic in practice. While the franchise was limited to property-owning males, as in Britain, there were many more of them here than there, and the vote was extended to Roman Catholics and Jews much earlier here. Walter Bage hot, the great British political analyst, wrote in The English Constitution (published in 1867) that while “the masses in England are not fit for elective government,” because too little educated, “the idea is roughly realized in the North American colonies.”
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†136 O’Halloran’s speech is quoted in that excellent source book Canada’s Founding Debates, edited by Janet Ajzenstat. One chapter, “Direct Democracy: Pro and Con,” contains an extended analysis of both sides of the argument. O’Halloran himself suffered one serious handicap as an advocate of democracy: he had been educated at the University of Vermont and had served in the U.S. Army, all of which put him under severe suspicion.
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*137 Macdonald used the phrase “peace, welfare and good government” rather than the now familiar “peace, order and good government.” See Chapter 22 for a fuller explanation of this iconic phrase.
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†138 Macdonald—predictably—could switch his arguments against democracy to suit his political convenience. In one letter he denounced constituency nominating conventions as “immoral and democratic,” but then went on to advise his preferred candidate that “if a respectable and influential body of delegates is likely to be called together, you must exert every energy to have your friends chosen.”
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*139 As noted earlier, Dunkin predicted that the constant cry of the provinces would be “Give, give, give.” On defence, he commented with equal acuity, “The best thing Canada can do is to keep quiet and give no cause for war.” Dunkin joined Macdonald’s cabinet in 1869.
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†140 Howe himself on one occasion argued that “deadly weapons, so common in the streets of Montreal, are rarely carried in Nova Scotia, except in pursuit of game.”
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*141 Over time, as may be only a coincidence, there has been a displacement of one nationally unifying virtue by the other. In the nineteenth century, there was little tolerance in Canada—hence the sectarianism and open religious hatreds. Today, there is little loyalty to institutions, from marriage to employers.
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*142 Brown very generously contributed five hundred dollars to the by-election fund and wrote, “[I] will not be behind if further aid is required.”
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*143 The militia’s adjutant general, Colonel Patrick MacDougall, later wrote that the Fenians had functioned as “invaluable, though involuntary, benefactors of Canada” by giving its people “a proud consciousness of strength.”
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†144 The Fenian who had actually proposed the raid was accused of being a Canadian agent and expelled from the movement.
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†145 Anti-Confederates argued that a referendum should be held before any final commitment to Confederation was made, but Tupper retorted that the same legislature had approved negotiations to create a Maritime Union—with no provision for a referendum.
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†146 New Brunswick’s Governor Gordon, as so often, summed up the electoral chicanery perfectly: “Confederation has hardly any friends here, but it will be carried by large majorities nonetheless.”
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*147 This first version of the BNA Act contained only twenty-two clauses and, unlike the Quebec Resolutions and the final act, did not specify the powers of the central government, relying instead on its general enabling power to make laws for “the peace, order and good government.”
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*148 This crashing fall from grace is reported in the biography by Elisabeth Batt, Monck: Governor General, 1861–1868. She hedges her bets by saying that although this story is told by Monck’s descendants, it should be remembered that “the Irish were ever loath to spoil a good story for lack of a ha-porth’ of exaggeration.”
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*149 An apt description of what Macdonald was doing would be “ragging the puck,” except that hockey was then so new that the phrase had yet to be minted.
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†150 In fact, the Globe got hold of a summary of the BNA Bill and published it in late February 1867, fiercely attacking the shifts in jurisdiction to favour Ottawa and the increase in subsidies to the Maritimes. By that time, though, it was all too little, too late.
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*151 One of the particular attractions of the Westminster Palace Hotel was that it had been equipped with that new technological marvel, an elevator.
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*152 Hewitt Bernard did keep some scanty minutes.
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*153 Macdonald was wearing so many garments in bed simply because British buildings in those days were heated only by open fires, windows were single paned and doors gaped.
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*154 The British authorities insisted on adding a provision authorizing the cabinet to appoint extra senators under exceptional circumstances. This power was first used by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1990 to secure passage of the Goods and Services’ Tax Bill through a Liberal-dominated Senate.
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*155 Feo Monck, in her diary about the 1864 Quebec Conference, recalled Macdonald telling her teasingly that the new nation might be called “Canadin” and, as might well have actually happened, that “in some speeches he had said that, to please the Nova Scotians, it should be called ‘Acadia.’” She concluded, “John A. is very agreeable.”
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†156 At the time, it was widely assumed that the likeliest sibling to be sent to rule Canada as its King was the third son, Prince Arthur. He did in fact make it, although in a lesser role. In 1911, Prince Arthur, by then the Duke of Connaught, was appointed governor general, serving until 1916. He died in 1942, at the age of ninety-one.
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†157 Quite different, though, was the first draft of the British North America Bill as sent from the Colonial Office to the delegates at the Westminster Palace Hotel. To the fury of the Canadians, this version used the word “colony” throughout, declaring that the provinces were to be “united into one colony.” The offending word was struck out and never used again.
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*158 A problem with the chosen title, “Dominion,” overlooked by the London Conference delegates, was that no ready translation for the term exists in French. The one most often used, “La Puissance,” is hardly satisfactory.
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†159 Carnarvon reached this judgment despite Monck’s counter-argument that “Kingdom” would meet “the natural yearning of a growing people to emerge…from the provincial phase of existence.”
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†160 Tilley’s authorship was confirmed by his son, also called Leonard, in a letter he wrote on June 28, 1917, on the eve of Confederation’s half-century, to the High Court registrar in Toronto. He recounted that his father had told him how he came upon the phrase in his daily Bible reading, and, “When he went back to the sitting of the convention that morning,” he had suggested the title, “which was agreed to.”
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*161 Waite included this sentence in his 1953 doctoral thesis, “Ideas and Politics in British North America, 1864–66.”
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*162 Not until January 23, 1867, does the familiar “Peace, Order and good Government” triad appear in a draft. This version reappears in the later drafts of January 30 and February 2 and then in the actual BNA Act.
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†163 One of the very few substantial references during the entire Confederation process to the phrase “Peace, Order and good Government” was made not by any Father of Confederation but by its godfather, Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon. In his speech in the Lords introducing the British North America Bill, he said that the powers of the federal government “extend to all laws made for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of Confederation”—a term he described as having “an ample measure of legislative authority.”
The author has been able to find only one early use of “peace and order” in its contemporary descriptive sense. The anti-Confederate Howe once described the Maritimes as “accustomed to peace and order,” in contrast to the belligerent, boastful Canadians. And he made this remark back in 1849.
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*164 The phrase’s origin is most probably in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government of that same year of 1689, where Locke described government’s purpose as “the Peace, Security and publick good of the people.”
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†165 The form used in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the earliest appearance of the phrase in Canada, was “Public Peace, Welfare, and good Government.”
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*166 To appreciate why Morton’s insight should have had such a consciousness-raising effect, it should be remembered that right afterwards—in 1965—George Grant published his seminal Lament for a Nation, which itself had so powerful an effect among Canadian nationalists.
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†167 Much of the material for this section was provided by the research staff of the Library of Parliament. A number of the facts are drawn from a groundbreaking article by the historian Stephen Eggleston in the Journal of Canadian Studies.
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*168 Lady Macdonald’s diary covers the years 1867 to 1869 with some regularity, but later entries are few and far between. Her diary is the only known one kept by a Canadian prime ministerial spouse.
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*169 Marriage contracts of this kind were quite common—most particularly when the woman was bringing property into the union and would immediately lose control over it to her husband—until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1887.
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*170 Her ancestry, through her mother, was Scottish.
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*171 The details about Macdonald’s self-designation as “Honourable” and of the other distinguished marriages at St. George’s Church were uncovered by the journalist Arthur Milnes on a research trip to London.
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†172 Disraeli once paid his wife, Mary, the highest-possible matrimonial compliment by telling her she was “more a mistress than a wife.” At the end of a long day in the Commons, Disraeli returned home to find Mary had stayed up waiting for him with a bottle of cooled champagne and a pork pie from Fortnum and Mason.
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*173 Earlier, Carnarvon, for the same purpose of limiting debate, had called the bill “in the nature of a treaty.”The Daily News commented tartly that it was, in fact, “merely an inter-colonial project.”
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*174 British MPs were famously uninterested in colonial affairs. On one occasion a debate was held in the Commons to determine why this should be so: few attended, and the debate ended inconclusively.
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*175 That Agnes’s mother and brother lived with her at the start of her marriage prompted historian Keith Johnson to write one of the niftiest footnotes in Canadian historiography—“Macdonald had in-laws the way other people had mice.”
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*176 When the diary was published in 1873, Feo Monck’s “beastly” was toned down to “horrid.”
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*177 This was by no means a failing only of Ottawa. Anna Jameson, in her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada of 1838, noted, “A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated…. The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom associated here even with the most magnificent timber trees.”
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†178 Smith was in fact anticipating things. In 1867, the entire new dominion civil service numbered just 2, 660. As for the “professional politicians,” only a few dozen actually lived in Ottawa. Most members of Parliament got by in boarding houses during the three months or so that Parliament met each year. Not until after the Second World War did Ottawa become a politics-obsessed, one-industry town.
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*179 Kenny’s career continued in anonymity, but of a most agreeable kind. After resigning from the cabinet in 1870, he was appointed a senator and later gained a knighthood.
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*180 The super winner of the Confederation senatorial lottery had to have been New Brunswick’s David Wark. Called to the Upper House in October 1867, Wark remained a senator for forty years, leaving the chamber only by death in 1905, at the age of 101.
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*181 The celebrations staged by Canadians were outclassed, inevitably, by the great Exposition Universelle held in Paris in that same year of 1867. It attracted ten million visitors. Several Canadian companies even won prizes for their goods; the prize that mattered, though, was the victory by a crew from Saint John, NB, at the World Rowing Championships held on the Seine.
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