CHAPTER 13

The Consolidation of the Continent 1870–1871

The Manitoba Act assured Canada of the presence of imperial troops in the Red River expedition and of the acquisition of the Northwest, The decision of Grant and Fish not to intervene in Red River and exploit the embarrassment of Canada there was not less decisive. That is, both Britain and the United States were prepared to have Canada add the Northwest to its territories and become a continental nation. Britain did so at bottom because confederation, made viable by the addition of the Northwest, would release the last of its troops from the interior of the continent. The United States did so because all it desired at bottom was the withdrawal of the British military presence from the continent. That would leave the United States in unquestioned supremacy when no other great power had any military installation on the two Americas, other than Halifax, an adjunct of the British naval supremacy the United States had not yet challenged.

Although the acquisition of the Northwest made confederation viable by balancing eastern with western expansion, and thus ending the likelihood of American infiltration’s outflanking the new Dominion and stopping the expansion that was the condition of its growth, it had not completed confederation. Now that the Dominion had opened the way to the Rockies, there yet remained to reach the Pacific by union with British Columbia. Only the entry of that colony could make the Pacific railway a wholly Canadian line. Only its entry could make Canada a Pacific as well as an Atlantic nation and a continental state.

There, union with Canada had been pretty well taken for granted since Musgrave’s arrival and the publication of Granville’s dispatch of August 14, 1869. As imperial pressure had been used to bring a doubtful and resisting Nova Scotia into confederation, so, it was apparent, it was to be used to bring in British Columbia. Yet, as in Nova Scotia, there was to be resistance. There had been since fur-trade days a sense of separateness and of independence in Vancouver Island and British Columbia, both of one another and of the outside world. As elsewhere in British North America, small communities in vast territories were likely to think that, if they were only left to themselves, the future would take care of itself.

Now, with the possibility of union, this basic independence took more specific form. The old Hudson’s Bay people and the English settlers and civil servants did not as a rule care for the Canadians. Like the Métis of Red River, they found Canadians pushing, aggressive, and cocksure. Amor de Cosmos – not, it is true, a Canadian, but like one in behaviour – they liked no more than the older elements cared for John Schultz in Red River. “Oatmeal Chinamen” or “North American Chinamen” was their derogatory term for the hard-headed people from beyond the Rockies.¹

The same feeling of independence also led to the signing of a petition for annexation in 1869. It was probably inspired, to begin with, with a view to getting the British government to bestir itself.² Certainly it was regarded as a joke, and in any case only forty-two people signed it at first; a second one had more signatures. But it voiced the Pacific colony’s restless independence³ and hinted that it might decide its own future in a way that was simple and obvious.

Nevertheless, Musgrave, despite a serious accident, had laboured to persuade the legislative council, part appointed, part elected, to agree on terms of union to be sought with Canada, and to send a delegation to negotiate on the basis of such terms. British Columbia still had neither full representative government nor responsible government. This was a grievance to the Canadians and unionists, and was to be one of the terms of union sought. But simple and imperfect as British Columbia’s government might be, it was sufficient to consider terms and appoint delegates. There was no need for revolt, nor for an assertion of authority such as the shooting of Thomas Scott. Blessed in so many ways, the Pacific colony was to be blessed not least in the ease of its entry into confederation.

On March 12, 1870, the legislative council agreed to the terms proposed by the executive council. They sought the assumption of the colony’s debt of slightly over one million dollars, a public works program, the immediate construction of a carriage road, and the beginning of a railway to the Pacific within three years.⁴ There was much doubt on the practicability of the last request and of the ability of Canada to undertake and carry out such a work. The railway was the overriding consideration and a promise of its construction would ensure union.⁵

The delegates had this serious and, it was thought, difficult negotiation to conduct. Musgrave gave much care to their choice. Like the Red River convention, he sent a representative group. One was R. W. W. Carrall, the representative of the Canadian interests in the Cariboo. The second was J. W. Trutch, engineer and contractor, representing the British business interests of the lower mainland. And J. S. Helmcken, distrustful and full of doubt with respect to Canada, its people, and its government, embodied the fears of Victoria and its business community that confederation would favour the mainland and hurt the island. The extremists, Amor de Cosmos and John Robson, the advocates of responsible government and confederation at all costs, were left at home.⁶ The three delegates left on May 10 and made their way down the coast to San Francisco, crossed the Rockies by the recently completed Central and Union Pacific railways, and reached Ottawa on June 3. They were welcomed by a government that had just passed the Manitoba Act and dispatched the Red River expedition. It was a government resolved to suffer no further check in the advance to the Pacific.

Macdonald was missing from the welcome given the British Columbians. Collapse at the time of the debates on the Manitoba bill had been followed by prostration and the need for a long rest. He spent the entire summer on Prince Edward Island, lounging through the long summer days and relaxing in the cool air from the Gulf. In his place Cartier acted as prime minister, and the change gave to Canadian policy the dash and audacity, so often rash, of the genial and headstrong Frenchman. He met the delegates with Hincks and Tilley on June 6. At once the Canadian ministers revealed to the surprised and delighted delegates that they were resolved to build the Pacific railway, and hoped to do it speedily. The British Columbians had had, in fact, no idea of how the whole development of confederation, its basic necessity of reciprocating expansion, had required a Pacific railway as surely as it required the Intercolonial. They had no idea of how the Red River resistance with its danger of American expansion had quickened the need to establish communication with Red River over what might well have proved the most difficult piece of construction, the country of rock and muskeg from Fort William to Winnipeg. From there a railway through the prairies and the lower northern passes of the Rockies might be relatively easy. The railway had to be built and at once, or the work of confederation would crumble. As Helmcken noted in his diary of the negotiations: “With regards to the Railway the Committee…were enthusiastically in favour thereof. They do not consider they can hold the country without it. It was a condition of union with the provinces and they could not see any reason why if agreed on it should not be made a condition with us.”⁷

With this spirit prevailing with respect to the major issue, it was not difficult in the first three days, and in a second session on June 25, to agree on terms. The delegations did not get all they wished; they were refused a delay in applying the Canadian tariff, such as Manitoba had obtained. But they were treated with extreme generosity, the rebound of the government from the casual and penurious approach to the acquisition of the Northwest in 1869. The colonial debt was assumed; a generous estimate of population and corresponding subsidy were allowed, the attainment of responsible government was left to the people of British Columbia; a loan was guaranteed for a dry dock at Esquimault; a belt of railway lands was required but “in trust” from the public lands; finally, a railway was to be begun within two years and completed within ten years from the ratification of the terms. The effect of their terms was well expressed by Musgrave himself in a letter to Judge H. P. P. Crease: “I have the terms agreed on by the Canadian Gov’t, forwarded officially by Sir John Young, and although modified in some respects to suit Canadian reasons [sic], they are outstandingly better – even Helmcken says – than what we asked for. And the Railway, Credat Judaeus! is guaranteed without a reservation! ! Sir George Cartier says they will do that or ‘burst.’ ”⁸

Not surprisingly, therefore, the terms were unanimously ratified in the legislative council on January 18, 1871.⁹ At the same time the legislative council had the representative element increased and preparations were made for complete representative government with a constitution modelled on that of Ontario. As in Red River, confederation was carrying self-government with it.

To complete the story of British Columbian union with Canada, however, it is necessary to note the difficulty Cartier was to have in carrying ratification of the terms in Ottawa in the session of parliament in 1871. The difficulty arose first in the caucus of the Liberal-Conservative party. So great was the opposition that Cartier had to take Trutch, then in Ottawa, into the caucus of the Ontario members to assure them that the terms were necessary to assure the entrance of British Columbia. Trutch did agree that British Columbia would be content to have the railway built by a private company rather than by government, with government borrowing. And “the lightning striker,” Cartier, brought the caucus into line with his usual iron hand. “He told them that if they shrank from their engagement with B.C., he and his friends from Quebec would vote alone in fulfilment of the Treaty [sic] he had made and if defeated in this matter he would dissolve the House – but that the union with B. Columbia on the terms arranged should be carried, and he would see it done.” No wonder Trutch continued: “We must all remember in B.C. that to Sir George Cartier and his followers in Lower Canada we owe the position we are now in and especially the Canadian Pacific Railway.”¹⁰

After the passage of the Manitoba Act, then, Cartier, once said to oppose expansion to the Northwest, was the principal architect, indeed, the rash begetter, of the policy of rapid construction of the Pacific railway as the necessary means of ensuring the work of confederation. It was a strange role, infinitely courageous and definitely rash, for a French-Canadian politician. It was to lead to further trouble. If the Conservative caucus from Ontario was worried, how critical would be the Liberal opposition? In parliament they denounced the terms as being reckless and improvident, and far beyond the resources of the Dominion. The railway would have to be built out of public lands and subsidies by private capitalists. In this lay the germ of future tragedy. Carrier’s daring might stretch the tissue of the new state beyond endurance.

The events of 1870, however, were by no means completed with the annexation of the Northwest and the negotiations with British Columbia. While the eyes of Canada were fixed on Red River, and much of its military strength devoted to it, the Fenian’s struck again.

The Fenian organization had not ceased to be a matter of concern to the government of Canada since the tense summer of 1866. It had been kept under regular surveillance, and its attempts to renew its attacks were checkmated by calling out the militia.¹¹ But internal distractions and lack of funds had made the organization ineffectual for the three summers from 1867 to 1869. The Red River troubles, coupled with the emergence of a new activist leader in John O’Neill, had aroused it anew.¹² It was in regular communication with the American sympathizers in Red River, and Alfred Scott, the American delegate from Red River, called on the Fenian headquarters in Burlington, Vermont.¹³ These reports of Fenian activity were so detailed that on April 14, when the Red River delegates had just arrived in Ottawa, Cartier called out about 6,000 of the militia, manned Canada’s two gunboats and suspended habeas corpus.¹⁴ The danger passed, but in mid May the reports of intended attack multiplied again. On May 22 the militia were once more called out. On May 25 the Fenians invaded Quebec at Freileghsburg. The Canadian intelligence work and the training of the militia now paid rich dividends. The Fenian skirmishers were quickly repulsed at Eccles Hill, and O’Neill was ignominiously arrested by a United States marshall under President Grant’s prompt proclamation of May 25. With the American authorities vigilant, and the Canadian frontier alive with militia from Sarnia to Missiquoi, the Fenians desisted for another year.

The attack, however, gave the Canadian government reason to protest once more against the withdrawal of British troops from the St Lawrence Valley, ordered in Granville’s dispatch of June 10, 1869. Cartier had written a strong memorandum on May 19 opposing the withdrawal because the Fenians were, he declared, an imperial, not a Canadian responsibility, and because of the troubles in the Northwest.¹⁵ The government was also greatly irritated by the long and costly task of manning the border against a secret and sheltered enemy who could not be destroyed by Canadian action, or reconciled by Canadian concession. The Canadian irritation might draw soothing comment from the new colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, who succeeded Granville in July, after the latter’s succession to the Foreign Office in place of Lord Clarendon, who had died in June. It was not, he wrote, wise to let irritation with a great power affect one’s relations with it.¹⁶ But the Fenian claims had become another of the inflamed issues between Canada and the United States that called for settlement. Kimberley also refused to consider leaving imperial troops in Red River,¹⁷ or to check the withdrawal of the regulars from the St Lawrence.¹⁸ Cardwell, deep in the implementation of his reform of the army, hoped also to carry out the program of withdrawal in 1870.

While it was possible to recall the Rifles from Red River and all troops from Canada above Quebec, the last stage of the program of 1865, the turning over to Canada of a newly fortified Quebec, proved not to be possible. In the summer of 1870 it was discovered that, despite the funds and work expended since 1866, the refortification of Quebec was not at the point planned for transfer to Canada. Cardwell and Kimberley agreed that they could not expect Canada to accept the fortress in its unfinished state.¹⁹ Kimberley felt that this, together with the uneasiness caused in Canada by the Fenian raid, made it inadvisable to complete the withdrawal that year.²⁰ Thus for one year the redcoats remained in garrison in the key to the St Lawrence and to Canada. But their remaining meant only delay, delay without any change of program.

There could in fact be no change. The Gladstone government had come to power with a program of domestic reform and foreign appeasement. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland with all the implications of that act; the creation of a system of state-supported education; the legal recognition of trade unions; the abolition of purchase in the army – these great changes were matched by the resolve to complete the work of confederation, withdraw imperial troops from the interior of the continent, and settle relations with the United States. This program in North American affairs was its own justification. Behind it, however, was the need to free the hands of Britain to exert its accustomed influence in Europe. And in July 1870 events assumed command. The task of dealing with the repercussions of the Franco-Prussian war that began in July fell to Granville. He, in fact, had to sit by and watch while Prussia wrested the hegemony of Europe from France and unified all the German states but Austria around itself. In this was no necessary affront or loss to Britain, although British sentiment changed from pro-German to pro-French in the course of the war. But Russia seized on the commitment of the other great powers of Europe to assert its intention of repudiating the neutralization of the Black Sea by the Treaty of Paris of 1856. This, one fruit of the Crimean War, was a distinct British interest; and Granville made it clear Britain would go to war if Russia persisted.

The British government, however, had no desire to go to war with Russia while there was no settlement of American difficulties. The prospect of adding an Anglo-Russian war to a Franco-Prussian one was too appalling; not to speak of the possibility of trouble in America, pointed up by Russia’s dispatch of an envoy, Catacazy, to Washington to revive memories of British coldness and Russian friendship in the Civil War. The whole bent of Gladstonian policy was pacific. The government therefore invoked, as it turned out successfully, the concert of Europe to consider the Russian resolution, and to sanction the inevitable. But the concern with Russia made the British government the more disposed to listen to advocates of a settlement with the United States. Grant’s time of opportunity had come, and Britain must pay forfeit for the resentment its conduct during the Civil War had aroused in the United States. One member of the Gladstone cabinet and chief British commissioner at Washington was, at least, to put it that bluntly. This was Lord de Grey, who declared that the Franco-Prussian war and the Russian repudiation of the demilitarization of the Black Sea gave the United States the opportunity to retaliate on Britain for British unfriendliness in the Civil War. Those far-off events, battles in Lorraine and decisions in St Petersburg, made immediately necessary the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Washington.²¹

President Grant and Hamilton Fish were to be as direct in action as de Grey was in perception. The conduct of Canada gave them occasion. That was the enforcement of the licensing of American fishing-vessels in Canadian waters. Not only had the licence fee been increased to two dollars a ton, but it was now being enforced by a fleet of armed vessels in Canadian waters. By the fall of 1870, unlicensed vessels were arrested to the number of sixteen.²² Prince Edward Island’s refusal to police the fisheries, in order to have trade with the American vessels, it is true, aggravated the difficulty of enforcement. But the firm enforcement of Canadian rights against the pertinacious flouting of Canadian law by the New Englanders had a larger purpose. It was a deliberate effort to force the American government to consider some renewal of reciprocal trade. As Canadians put it: “The fisheries are our trump card.”²³ But to play it aroused American anger and British alarm. In his annual message of December 5, 1870, Grant referred to the conduct of the Canadian officials and their government in a singularly disparaging fashion and threatened reprisals. And the British government had the Canadians agree that in 1871 Canadian rights in the fisheries should not be enforced.²⁴ It felt that the Canadian disposition to use American bargaining tactics to bargain with Americans was unwise, particularly when the Canadian action was really based on an assumption of British support.²⁵ And it was recognized that that support was impossible, and that the tone of Grant’s message arose from the fact that the American government knew it was impossible and had indicated that it now demanded a settlement of outstanding difficulties since the beginning of the Civil War.

There was every reason, then, both in terms of liberal reasonableness and in terms of power politics, for a general settlement of Anglo-American relations. And such a settlement would be in its Canadian aspect another stage in the completion of confederation. It would signify American acceptance of the new nationality on its northern border and define the working relations between the Republic and the Dominion. Canada was thus intimately involved when in December Granville asked John Rose, Canadian statesman and international banker, a man of infinite discretion and tact, to approach Fish and discover the possibility of seeking a general settlement by means of joint discussion.²⁶ Rose found Fish entirely willing; politics in the United States as well as general conditions in the world favoured an attempt at a general settlement. Fish knew, moreover, that Britain needed one, could not risk trouble in America, and that the United States could approach a negotiation with great hopes of a settlement satisfactory to American interests. Grant was satisfied that the withdrawal of British military power was imminent. Fish, a lawyer of great ability and genuine character, wanted to round out his term of office with a general and satisfactory settlement with the greatest and most intimate of America’s neighbours. And without ever saying so, the Americans, like the British, knew that a general agreement could always be reached at the expense of Canadian interests. Fish therefore replied to Granville through Rose that the American government would welcome the appointment of a joint commission.²⁷

Then arose the two questions, the composition of the commission and the agenda. The American half was made of Fish himself and three senatorial respectabilities. Like all American statesmen of their generation, they were isolationist, that is, they had a firm grasp of American interests and little concern with those of others. The British appointees, Lord de Grey, Sir Stafford Northcote, and Sir Montague Bernard, the first a member of the Gladstone cabinet, the second a leading Conservative, and the last an international lawyer, were Victorian liberals, high-minded, considerate, but determined on a settlement. To these Granville added the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald.

The addition was considerate, right, and even inevitable, in view of Canada’s new stature, and its intimate involvement in the general settlement sought. The appointment was well received in Canada, the more so as Rose, whom Granville had wanted, was disliked.²⁸ But to Macdonald it was an intense embarrassment. He had, of course, no choice but to accept, particularly when Kimberley declared that the Canadian claim to the inshore fisheries was beyond question;²⁹ to have declined would have been to deliver the interests of Canada to the British without right of criticism or even objection. But to go into the commission in a minority was in effect to run the risk, indeed the certainty, of seeing what, on a narrow view at least, would be Canada’s interests sacrificed to the general interests of the Empire, and being held responsible by the Canadian electorate for the sacrifice. He would be called to account for what he could scarcely hope to prevent.

Macdonald’s difficulty was increased by the fact that there must be a general election in Canada before September 1872, within little more than a year of the probable negotiation of a treaty which might well see the fisheries sacrificed for a general settlement. The prospect was not a happy one. His government had been in power almost four years. It had done much, but it had incurred heavy liabilities. It still faced in Nova Scotia the cold hostility of a province better terms had silenced but not convinced. Nova Scotia would be a Liberal stronghold for years after 1869. In New Brunswick the government had had to choose a line for the Intercolonial and to build it. The choice of the route along the north shore did little good in the St John Valley. Only the weight of the loyal Tilley seemed to offset the losses caused by that decision. And both these Maritime Provinces hoped for reciprocity, valued their fisheries, and would be deeply angered by any opening of the fisheries to American fishermen without compensation, such as reciprocity.

In Quebec the prospect was still hopeful. Carrier’s Bleus and the hierarchy still held the province for confederation and the Macdonald ministry. P. J. O. Chauveau still held power at Quebec as Carrier’s local understudy, and the dual system of party control of federal and local government still obtained. But two trends were working to erode the massive strength of the Bleus. One was the struggle Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal had launched against the Institut Canadien as long ago as 1858. Bourget was ultramontane, that is, in French-Canadian terms, he believed the state should serve the purposes of the church and maintain a faithful Catholic society. The Institut was a philosophical and literary society organized by Rouge thinkers and politicians for discussion and reading. It was liberal in outlook, and in these years in Roman Catholic circles in French Canada, as in Europe, liberalism was equated with free thought and irreligion. Bourget had attacked the Institut as such and a running combat between Rouge and ultramontane had threshed through the underbrush of French life ever since.³⁰

The second event was the sharp stimulus given to French nationalism by the resistance of the Red River Métis to anglicization of the Northwest in 1869, and by the refusal of the government, Canadian or imperial, to grant an amnesty to Riel. Despite the victory of the Manitoba Act, nationalist French Canadians like Masson and Bellerose felt that the events of 1870 had betrayed a determination of English and Protestant Canadians to deny to French nationality the right to grow and expand. Both ultramontane Catholic and Rouge anti-clerical felt the nationalist sentiment in common. Here was the possibility of extremes meeting to attack the central position of the Bleus.³¹

In Ontario, Macdonald’s own province, he faced as he had for so many years the propensity of that province, particularly west of Toronto, to vote Grit. There had been a great revival of Liberal strength. Brown, freed from politics by his defeat in 1867, had helped knit together (into what now came to constitute a definite political party) the Grit and Reformer elements his own entrance into the coalition of 1864 had scattered. This party was to control Ontario for thirty-four years.

As opposition in the provincial legislature, it had gained a brilliant new leader in Edward Blake. It had had the magnificent political issue of the shooting of Scott to exploit; the reward of $5,000 for Riel still stood. It could attack the payment of £300,000 for a Northwest the Hudson’s Bay Company had never really owned. It could denounce the exploitation of Ontario to pay for an Intercolonial railway longer than it need be and a Pacific railway to be built faster than the resources of the country allowed. It was, in fact, a party rapidly gathering support. To add to its list of grievances a failure to obtain reciprocity would be to give it votes in all the rural counties of Ontario.

Finally and over all there was the belief, openly held in the United States, secretly admitted in Canada, and never more strongly held than in the last half of 1870, that there was a strong and growing party, or body of opinion, in Canada in favour of annexation to the United States. Such were the reports to Fish.³² Such was the fear of Canadian politicians.³³ This also was the ground of Grant’s hope, and the hope of other Americans, that Canada, practically cast off by England, would soon seek annexation.³⁴ It was a good reason for denying the reciprocity treaty all Canadians wanted, and in which few in the American administration were interested. If British readiness to end the connection and American coldness to Canada were visibly to increase, that body of opinion, it was both hoped and feared, might increase to the point of demanding independence and then, acting on the general agreement that independence was impossible, apply for admission to the American union.

It was with this preoccupation that Macdonald agreed to go to Washington. He could scarcely hope to win and, for every loss, he might expect to pay with loss of power in his country. Small wonder that the precise and impatient British were to find him reserved and difficult; small wonder that the Americans, more aware of the political sensitivity of a North American politician, were to inquire if he were separate from, or a part of, the British delegation.³⁵ Only his strong sense of Canada’s need of the British connection made it possible for him to be part of the British delegation in any real sense. The delicate relationship with his colleagues was irritated by their failure to appreciate the simple fact that how Ontario voted in 1872 was nearly as decisive an issue for Macdonald as whether or not they settled with America in order to deal with Russia was to the British.

The commission once agreed on in January, both governments moved quickly to constitute it and to set it to work. The British members arrived in Washington in late February, to find Fish and his colleagues eager to welcome them, and to begin negotiation. The Americans and the British were both anxious for settlement, the Americans for a settlement they hoped would be advantageous and leave them without a rival in America, the British for any reasonably honourable settlement they could obtain. But the Canadian was late. Macdonald was delayed by business – he was, after all, the only member of the joint commission who was a prime minister – by instinctive procrastination, and by reluctance to begin what he could hardly hope to finish advantageously. The settlement Canada needed was a settlement that included reciprocity with the United States. The fisheries were all it had to offer in exchange, these could not be offered until actually closed to American fishermen, and the British had refused to allow the Canadians to close them. Macdonald’s only strong card had been snatched from his hand before the play began. Small wonder he was late.

When the commissioners finally began their sessions on March 3, their respective positions began to be defined. The agenda, it had been agreed, would include the Alabama claims, the fisheries, the San Juan dispute, the navigation of the St Lawrence and its canals, and reciprocity, but not the Fenian claims of Canada.³⁶ The American position was first to stick to the agenda, and not allow the British and particularly Canada to widen the range of settlement beyond the topics of the agenda. They were quietly resolved not to yield to the Canadian request for reciprocity, for they knew it was politically impossible except over a range of articles so limited as to be derisory. One concession they had it in mind to make, but as they knew the British delegation wanted it, they were determined to sell it at a price. That was the principle of arbitration, particularly the arbitration of the Alabama claims.³⁷ In this way the Americans were able to have a decision on how the Alabama claims were to be put in the way of settlement, a matter not of Canadian concern, and tied to other items of the general agreement. Thus Canada was to be made to pay in part for imperial policy in the Civil War, its part of the price of what the British called “an Imperial settlement.” Finally, the Americans were fully aware of their opportunity to make the settlement a confirmation of their supremacy in America.

The British position was very different. Their task was not to confirm the attainment of a new imperial position, but to liquidate the remnants of Empire left after the catastrophe of 1783. They operated with an acute sense of the world equilibrium of power, and behind their backs Prussia was rising to supremacy in Europe and Russia breaking the chains of 1856. But they came prepared, with British North America organized and united, and their task included not only the settlement of direct Anglo-American relations, but also the winning for Canada of working relations with its great neighbour that would allow it a practical independence and the chance to grow.

In the end, however, the issues between the Americans and the British were settled, and those between the British and the dogged Canadian remained to be solved. One was payment for the Canadian claims for damages caused by the Fenian raids. The Gladstone government finally assumed these. The other was, of course, the fisheries, to be traded for reciprocity, which the British refused to attempt. A stiff struggle ensued. Finally, Macdonald was coerced into agreement and, de Grey wrote, “his delight was almost ludicrous.”³⁸ The pertinacious and clever Canadian had won; he had alienated his colleagues, but he had a story to tell the Canadian government. He had signed, but under duress, a treaty he need not try to have ratified except for a consideration, a consideration already taking shape as a guarantee for a Pacific railway.³⁹ Had the British members had to seek re-election from a more extensive democracy, they would have understood him without a sense of superiority, and perhaps even with admiration for his courage and his accomplishment.

For Macdonald had done much more than outlast the British; he had averted disaster for Canada and saved a viable future for the Dominion. The great danger had been that this would not be possible. The British had no intention of lightly sacrificing Canadian interests, but they were even more determined to get a settlement. They knew they would have to pay for one in cash and in Canadian concessions. They might well have been pushed by the American negotiators, indifferent when not hostile to the future of Canada, into making concessions of such extent or in perpetuity that Canada at a later date would not have been able to recover from them. Macdonald’s achievement was that by a narrow margin he kept the door open for a transcontinental and independent Canada.

Reciprocity itself had simply been dropped. A protectionist United States, inclined to think annexation would come sooner or later with the obvious fraying of the British connection, had little interest in granting, and some in denying, reciprocity to Canada. There was no place in American thought for the idea of Canadian nationality, nationality which in that generation they thought must be born of revolution. But if they denied reciprocity, they were, in effect, to accept Canadian nationality in the Treaty of Washington.

The Americans, moreover, were admitted in perpetuity to the free navigation of the St Lawrence and the Canadian canals. In compensation the Canadians were granted the free navigation of Lake Michigan for the term of the treaty, and in perpetuity that of the Yukon, the Porcupine, and the Stikine in Alaska. Apart from the navigation of Lake Michigan, the compensation was of little use at the time, and has remained so. The best that can be said is that the principle of reciprocity was recognized in this use of international cessions of sovereignty in perpetuity, and that in any case the navigation of the St Lawrence was really a proper Canadian reciprocity for the bonding act and the use of American communications by Canadian persons and goods. In the case of the Alabama claims and the San Juan dispute, each was referred to arbitration. The San Juan award was to be wholly in favour of the American claim, and thus unsatisfactory to Canada, but the issue was closed.⁴⁰

Much more important than the actual terms of the treaty were its underlying assumption and implicit effects. It rested on the withdrawal of British military power from the St Lawrence Valley and the interior of the continent. The military supremacy of the United States in America asserted in the march to the sea and the capture of Petersburg, was tacitly recognized. The remaining naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt were not yet challenged by the naval power of the United States. Thus Canada ceased to be a military threat to the United States, and came to cease to be, as Franklin and Sumner had sought to make it cease by annexation, an irritant in American-British relations. The way was thus open for American acceptance of Canadian nationality, however slow, reluctant, and ungracious that acceptance might be.

The partition of the continent, begun so tentatively in 1783, pushed on in 1818 and 1846, could now be completed. Not one American empire, but two independent states shared the continent north of the Rio Grande. This was not an easy thing for American pride and ambition to accept. But accept this it did in 1871, partly because Americans were not convinced that the Candian experiment would last, but still with their strong sense of obligation to honour a commitment freely accepted. Accept it, in any case, they could because the existence of Canada, as modified by the Treaty of Washington and doubtful as it was in its novelty and inherent weaknesses, did not challenge the fundamental premise of the treaty, the supremacy of the United States in America. After 1871 Canada could be independent in America because it could not be a rival of the United States.

Moreover, while British power might withdraw from America, British capital did not. Both the United States and Canada greatly needed London capital to float their planned expansion. Now the continental settlement removed any doubt that London capital might have had about entering Canada or the United States. Both remained, the one in all its power, the other in all its hope within the informal empire of Britain.⁴¹

The terms of the treaty were published in early May. There was thus ample time for them to be considered by both the government and the country before they were to be submitted to Parliament for ratification. The strategy of Macdonald and his cabinet was that of separating the collective signature of the imperial commissioners from ratification by a Canadian parliament. The prime minister and government kept entirely quiet until the opposition press should have committed itself to opposition to the treaty.⁴² Once this was done, to reveal the government’s opposition to the treaty also would deprive the opposition’s hostility of effect, and blunt the edge of the opposition’s attack. The practical problem for the Canadian cabinet was not to refuse ratification, but to carry it in such a way as to put the responsibility for concession on the British, and to insist on compensation, such as a guarantee for the Pacific railway.

When Macdonald returned to Ottawa from the early heat of a Washington summer to resume his office in the East Block, the office he had seen little of since his collapse in early May of 1870, it was to find the work of confederation rounding to the close of the phase of territorial expansion. In his absence Cartier had fought through, against strenuous Liberal opposition to the terms of construction, the terms of union with British Columbia. Now that colony was to become part of Canada on July 20, 1871, and carry the Dominion to the Pacific. It was a magnificent crescendo of expansion and a triumph of politics.

It was politics, of course, not art. He and Cartier dealt with the possible, not with perfection. Prince Edward Island still remained obstinately aloof, an irritant during the policing of the fisheries and because of the fears caused by the Butler mission, and a vexation as long as there was hope of Newfoundland’s coming in. He had not yet abandoned hope of that, though renewed trouble over the French Shore was to increase the island’s doubts of any real advantage in union. Be that as it might, Prince Edward Island was a wary fish, which had twice refused Canadian bait. But the self-sufficient little island had begun to bedrape itself with a narrow gauge but genially winding railway. To carry it out might yet need the help of the Atlas shoulders of the Canadian treasury.

The assemblies of the united provinces meanwhile had completed their legislative terms, and had been dissolved. New Brunswick’s government under Premier W. King had been safely re-elected. This was no indication that politics had come to an end in confederated New Brunswick. The new legislature had at once ensured a lively time in politics by amending the Schools Act in such a way as to deprive the Roman Catholic and Acadian schools of the slender basis of existence they had had since 1860 as “separate” parish schools teaching French and giving religious instruction.⁴³ This was to undo the work of Connolly and Langevin at Westminster and to deprive Roman Catholics of a right enjoyed, if not precisely “by law,” at the time of union. The New Brunswick schools question was sure to raise controversy at Ottawa. More important, perhaps, it finally brought the Acadians once more into the stream of the national life.

The government of New Brunswick, if it had stirred up trouble for Macdonald, had changed neither for better nor for worse, as far as his political fortunes were concerned. In Nova Scotia his fortune was much better. Annand continued in office, but the needy Wilkins had accepted a legal office, and the province had prospered despite confederation. The great political issue was still repeal versus confederation, but the confederates were almost certain to increase from their exiguous two of 1867. In fact in the midsummer election of 1871 the government was nearly overthrown.⁴⁴ Annand was to survive for another four-year term, and the anti-confederation sentiment was to become a tradition in Nova Scotia, but the flat rejection of 1867 had been ended. Conciliation could become reconciliation.

In Quebec, the partnership of Cartier and Chauveau still held firm. Neither ultramontane nor Rouge had yet shaken their supremacy. In that province, moreover, dual representation still continued, and Cartier was returned to the provincial assembly for Montreal Centre in June of 1871. He returned with plenty of ministerial company. Only the first vote in the new House would reveal Chauveau’s strength, but La Minerve estimated that there were fifty-one ministerialists, eleven opposition, and three independents.⁴⁵

If provincial results forecast national elections, Macdonald could take heart as he watched the returns come in after the terms of the Treaty of Washington were known. But in his own province of Ontario which had eighty-two out of one hundred and ninety-five seats in the Commons, the outlook was by no means so cheering, just as the fiercest attack on the Treaty of Washington was coming from that province also. Sandfield Macdonald and his “patent combination” had indeed governed the province well, or at least economically. One result had been a large provincial surplus. This the premier proposed to use to subsidize railway construction in the province. The opposition led by Edward Blake proposed that it should be distributed at so much a head among the municipalities. Their amendment carried a schedule showing how much each county would receive under their plan.⁴⁶

The amendment was defeated in the Assembly but had a great effect on the electorate in the elections in 1871. The government won, but by a very narrow margin and, when the Assembly met in late 1871, Macdonald was defeated when his treasurer, E. B. Wood, resigned. The premier fought on, but in the end had also to resign, and a Liberal ministry was formed under Blake. As a number of supporters of the coalition now gave him their support, there was no need for a fresh election. The Assembly, however, passed an act early in 1872 to prohibit dual representation in Ontario. Blake and Alexander Mackenzie chose to sit at Ottawa, and a new ministry was formed under Oliver Mowat. John A. Macdonald had lost provincial control of Ontario to the old friend who was to prove his most formidable opponent.

Westward from Ontario, political life had not yet taken shape. But while the ardent politicians of Halifax and Toronto, of Quebec and Ottawa, made their fine calculations and sought to catch the shifts of wind, Manitoba saw the last flare-up of the Fenian menace. It is scarcely to be doubted that these raiders had hoped for the support of workers on the Northern Pacific, should it be needed, even if they had not been promised it.⁴⁷ The American government might have accepted the existence of Canada, but American interests did not necessarily do so. Manitoba, it is true, was exposed to attack; the failure to grant an amnesty had left the Métis uncertain in their loyalty. There the Fenians might gain the lodgement they had so long sought in the east, and the hoped-for American recognition might follow.

In Manitoba, however, Archibald had organized the government and begun the reconciliation of the French with the new Ontario elements. In Ottawa Gilbert McMicken and his dozen Dominion Police were well informed of the Fenian plans. When “General” O’Neill set out for Manitoba to make connection with W. B. O’Donoghue, Riel’s lieutenant of 1869, and, it was hoped, the Red River Métis, he was raced and beaten by McMicken. In Winnipeg, McMicken warned and advised Archibald.⁴⁸ When the Fenians crossed the border at Pembina, the Canadian militia began to march south to the border. The French parishes organized as in 1869, and the “soldiers” offered their services to Archibald. He accepted, and shook hands with their leaders, carefully unnamed but including Riel, at a parade in St Boniface. To him it was a timely and decisive demonstration of French loyalty. To the suspicious it was an attempt at a coup d’état in the absence of the militia, and changed into a profession of loyalty only when news of the arrest of the Fenians by United States cavalry was received. It was, in fact, a careful demonstration calculated to be grounds for the grant of an amnesty. It failed of its purpose, however, and ended Archibald’s career and inflamed the issue of the amnesty.⁴⁹

The Fenian raid had been made on a Canada defended at last only by its own militia. In September the last units of the British garrison of Quebec had marched down to the Grand Allée through the St Louis Gate to the wharfs and the waiting troopships, the bands playing Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye through the echoing streets and Auld Lang Syne at the wharf. The withdrawal, planned since 1869, and delayed only because the fortifications of Quebec were incomplete, now went ahead, and the transports moved heavily downstream by the Isle of Orleans, smoke tumbling from their funnels to roll across the chilling waters. It was a hundred and twelve years since the Battle of the Plains, and now Quebec was left to the Canadians to man it as they could. The Empire of Britain had ended in America, and the United States was left without a military rival in the Americas. Canada was left as a residue of empire, which might grow in nationality, but only as part of the American hegemony established in Appomattox.

The withdrawal of troops, however, and the Fenian raid could not alter the course of events. The former was part of that course, and with the latter Manitoba held firm in confederation, and the Canadian route for the Pacific railway still lay open. To complete the political union with British Columbia, there must be “an iron way” across the prairies and mountains. Rashly as it had been promised, it had now as urgently to be carried out. Macdonald, as he recovered from the ordeal of Washington, had to begin to take up the railway question, gingerly as was his wont, but decisively. One decision had in fact been made. That was that the railway would be built by a private company. Trutch had agreed to this, and the struggle in parliament ensured it must be the mode employed.⁵⁰ Construction by a company would involve the risk of commercial failure, but would decrease the demands on the credit of the government.

By what company, however, was it to be built? The Grand Trunk, which under Watkin had worked so hard to advance confederation and the Intercolonial, had withdrawn from the competition for railway expansion. A report by H. W. Tyler in 1867 had shaken Watkin’s hold on the company, and in 1868 he was replaced by Richard Potter. Under his management the Grand Trunk struggled to reorganize its affairs and to develop the traffic of the American middle west. It ceased to be interested in the Intercolonial; it ceased to be able to try to obtain the right to build to the Pacific, particularly by an all-Canadian route. The Grand Trunk had in fact ceased to be a Canadian railway charged with national purpose, and had become a bondholders’ obsession. A new vehicle of national purpose must be found.⁵¹

The prize of the Pacific railway charter was the greatest the government would have to award. With the Grand Trunk eliminated, Canadian capitalists could begin to indulge hopes they had not previously dared to entertain. With such a prize, they could hope to raise in London the needed capital. When the Northwest was incorporated, the continent in the way of settlement, and with British Columbia within the union, the period of waiting was over. The government had to turn to them to find the company that would bind the new union together with iron.

At once they came up against the hard realities of Canadian life. Sectional interests sought to achieve national purpose for their own ends. Canada might have one political capital in Ottawa but it had two commercial ones in Toronto and Montreal. As Lower and Upper Canada had been rivals for the acquisition of the Northwest, so their two chief cities were for the charter to build the Pacific railway. In Montreal Sir Hugh Allan, president of the Allan Steamship Lines, headed a group that sought to obtain the charter. In Toronto Senator David MacPherson headed a similar group. To give the charter to one would be to alienate support, both financial and electoral, in one province or the other. Here was an obstacle that had to be removed before the work could go forward; railways were still politics in Canada in a most literal and realistic sense.

Moreover, if the railway were to be a national undertaking serving political as well as commercial ends, the company building it must be not only commercially sound but politically reliable. Behind Allan were American interests that led back to Jay Cooke and the Northern Pacific.⁵² Cooke had dabbled in the Red River troubles. Any part he or his agents might play in the building of a Canadian Pacific railway would not be helpful to any political or national interest. It would on the contrary be made subordinate to the interests of the Northern Pacific and the ambitions of St Paul. At best, it would substitute an “international” railway for an all-Canadian one.

To bring about the formation of a company that would be a reliable instrument of national policy, then, the Americans had to be eliminated. To be politically advantageous, such a company must combine the interests of Montreal and Toronto, of Quebec and Ontario. Macdonald therefore began to toil at these purposes in the fall and winter of 1871.⁵³ It was slow work, and ran on through the winter, with a diminishing hope of success. Business rivals did not combine readily in the national interest.

The year was ending then, in a search for means to end the phase of expansion and to begin a phase of consolidation. To find a sound Canadian company to build a commercial line for political purposes; to ratify the Treaty of Washington without playing into the opposition’s hands; to win the inescapable election of 1872 – these were Macdonald’s preoccupations as 1871 drew to its close by the ice-bound Ottawa, across which the snow-white shoulders of the Gatineau Hills were etched on the northern skyline. They were his preoccupations, but also the new Dominion’s. For its greatest weakness was that, while it had achieved a national government, it had still to achieve a necessity even greater – the coherence of a national state.