IN 1987, after eleven first ministers had spent a couple of days negotiating the Meech Lake accord, Premier Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick returned home and called a general election before the accord had been ratified by his provincial legislature. Hatfield and his party suffered a disastrous defeat, and the Meech Lake accord never recovered.
In 1864, after thirty-three bipartisan delegates had spent almost three weeks negotiating the Quebec resolutions, Premier Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick returned home and called a general election before the resolutions had been ratified by his provincial legislature. Tilley and his party suffered a disastrous defeat, and …
The script changes here. Despite the defeat of Tilley’s government, confederation survived to be ratified in New Brunswick a year later. Tilley returned triumphantly to power in a second election, and the constitutional process of the 1860s culminated in the passage and gradual acceptance of the British North America Act. Tilley had made himself the only Canadian politician who has ever faced the voters twice on constitutional issues and survived. Since “everyone knows” that the nineteenth-century makers of confederation excluded the public from Canada’s constitution, Tilley’s experience opens a window on the relations between politicians and voters in the confederation process.
Leonard Tilley has dropped almost completely off the radar screen of Canadian history. The only substantial study of his career is twenty-five years old, an unpublished and almost unavailable academic thesis.1 Standard texts in Canadian history refer to him routinely as “Samuel Leonard Tilley,” though he never used his first name. Even more completely than the other key makers of confederation, Tilley has become almost entirely faceless.
Tilley was hard to make interesting. He had a genial style, but was not witty, drunken, or flirtatious. A widower, he was the devoted single father of seven children, a steady, churchgoing, evangelical Christian, who taught Sunday school and had made his living running a drugstore. As a politician, he was more an administrator than a leader or a crowd-pleaser. He never became prime minister. Even his enthusiasms were muted. Early in his career, Tilley was best known as a crusader against alcohol, but even as Most Worthy Patriarch of the North American Sons of Temperance, he was unfanatical. He went through all the confederation dinners without touching the champagne, but he never complained about its presence either.
At the end of his life, when he was Lieutenant-Governor Sir Leonard Tilley, with fifty years of political success behind him, eulogists would emphasize his United Empire Loyalist origins. But Tilley was never one of the gentlemanly office-holders from the old colonial élite who kept the loyalist flame in New Brunswick. He rarely mentioned his antecedents, who had been part of the anonymous rank and file of the American refugee migration into New Brunswick. The son of small shopkeepers in the Saint John River valley community of Gagetown, Tilley at thirteen moved to Saint John as pharmacist’s apprentice. At twenty he was a partner in a successful retail drugstore there, and he soon moved into local politics.*
His politics reflected his origins. Tilley was another of the heirs of responsible government. He helped achieve the rule of Parliament in New Brunswick in 1854, and it helped him to rise from nowhere to domination of the province. Tilley was for reform: a secret ballot and an expanded voters’ list, more public education, businesslike administration of government, economic development. As a key cabinet minister in the government of Charles Fisher, Tilley delivered on much of that agenda. Tilley was also for temperance when it was a great and highly controversial issue. In fact, his attempt to legislate prohibition in New Brunswick brought down the Fisher government in the infamous “Rummies” and “Smashers” campaign of 1856. Tilley learned a lasting lesson about electoral politics. “Our legislature was at that time in advance of public sentiment,” he said later. When the reformers returned to power, Tilley became more cautious about legislating his own enthusiasms.2
Responsible government had vastly expanded the powers of cabinet government, and Tilley rose on his ability to shoulder the burden. He mastered the details and understood the finances, and he dominated cabinet sessions. He also kept his elbows up. In the schism-prone party politics of mid-century New Brunswick, he made enemies in his own caucus as often as beyond it, but he was rarely outmanoeuvred. In 1861, when Premier Fisher became tangled in a scandal, Tilley ruthlessly organized his removal from cabinet and took over himself. Soon after, the voters gave the reformers a comfortable majority, which was still supporting Premier Tilley in 1864, when he led New Brunswick’s delegations into the discussions of Maritime union and then of confederation. (Fisher, who had remained in politics, was one of the delegates with him at Quebec.)
In all the provinces, legislatures normally met for a month or two early in each calendar year. The plan at Quebec had been to have the Quebec resolutions approved at Quebec, Fredericton, Halifax, Charlottetown, and St. John’s, Newfoundland, early in 1865. The Imperial Parliament would then receive what it wanted: simultaneous requests from the provinces to have British North America united on terms negotiated by colonists and approved by their legislatures. On that timetable, the new nation might have come into being late in 1865 or early in 1866. Leonard Tilley’s New Brunswick election determined it would not happen so fast.
Tilley knew as soon as he came home from Quebec that confederation would be a hard sell in New Brunswick. He personally had put aside his own earlier suspicion that, in a British North American union, “we of the lower provinces would be placed in a less favourable position than we now occupy.” But many of his compatriots still held precisely that view. As soon as the Quebec plan was published, opposition erupted. “The storm that burst upon the delegates from New Brunswick was like the hurricane of the tropics,” wrote Tilley’s fellow delegate John Gray. Tilley soon saw that the New Brunswick assembly, which had been elected in 1861 and would have to face the voters in 1865, was unlikely to approve the Quebec resolutions.3
From the perspective of the 1990s, Leonard Tilley’s inability to have confederation approved in the New Brunswick legislature requires some explanation. Tilley was the undisputed leader of a government with a solid majority, and on the Quebec resolutions he had the support of leading opposition members. In those circumstances, modern premiers and party leaders would simply instruct their backbenchers, and the thing would be done. By late-twentieth-century standards, only remarkable carelessness – or an equally remarkable scrupulousness about consulting the people – would cause an incumbent premier to call an election with such crucial business unfinished. We need not attribute either carelessness or scruples to Tilley, however. He did not choose to have an election. His hand was forced.
In Halifax, Charles Tupper was aghast at the election talk in New Brunswick. “I hope you will assist me in pressing Tilley to push it through without going first to the people,” he had just written to John A. Macdonald. Macdonald seemed to share Tupper’s opinion. “It shakes one’s opinion of Tilley’s statesmanship,” he wrote when he heard the election commitment had been made.4
It is easy to assume that Macdonald was angry because he had been counting on Tilley to ram confederation through the legislature against the will of the population, leaving the frustrated opposition impotent to stop it. In that circumstance, so familiar from late-twentieth-century Canadian politics, one would assume that the government’s rivals would be delighted to see Tilley playing into their hands by calling an election. Oddly enough, however, the New Brunswick opposition shared Macdonald’s view of Tilley’s action.
At the end of 1864, Albert Smith led the opposition to Tilley in the New Brunswick legislature. Smith was a long-time reform champion, more radical than Tilley on most issues, and particularly set against taxpayer subsidies to railway corporations. He had been Tilley’s attorney-general until 1862, but he had objected to Tilley’s generosity to railway promoters and had left the cabinet. Confederation confirmed their rivalry. Smith, who abominated Maritime union, had refused to be a delegate to the Charlottetown conference, and he proved equally hostile to the larger union negotiated at Quebec. Since the leading conservative politicians had joined the confederation movement, Smith became the effective leader of opposition to the Quebec resolutions in New Brunswick. He weighed in against them with all his characteristic fervour – but he did not want a snap election.
Since it was generally agreed that opposition to confederation was widespread and growing, an Albert Smith with the instincts of the 1990s would have been invoking the rights of the people and demanding the election that could put him in power. Smith did not see it that way. Instead of pressing for the election, he called Tilley’s decision to call one “an act of tyranny.”5
The explanation for the actions of both Tilley and Smith lies in the way Canadian politics worked under responsible government in the nineteenth century. John A. Macdonald had not, in fact, assumed that Tilley could ram confederation through a tame legislature. When he urged Tilley to meet the legislature, Macdonald knew the outcome would be uncertain. “Tilley should have called his parliament together and, in accordance with the agreement of the conference at Quebec, submitted the scheme,” he wrote after Tilley had gone down to defeat. “Whatever might have been the result in the legislature, the subject would have been fairly discussed and its merits understood, and if he had been defeated, he then had an appeal to the people. As it was, the scheme was submitted without its being understood or appreciated, and the inevitable consequences followed.”6
Macdonald was making the argument (the amazing argument, by late-twentieth-century standards) that legislative debate mattered. Albert Smith, from the opposite side of the confederation issue, believed the same thing. Both denounced the snap election, because it pre-empted the legislative debate. Both asserted that an important public issue should be debated in Parliament, no matter what the outcome. Macdonald did not urge Tilley to use his control of a compliant legislative majority to impose his policy on an unwilling province. He argued instead that the legislature was the best place from which to convince the population. Albert Smith denounced the election call for the same reason, because he calculated the opposition forces could win over the legislature by force of argument – and increase their electability by doing so.
Tilley’s decision to dissolve the legislature depended less on his own calculation, however, than on the reaction of his cabinet and caucus. In the 1860s, as today, government policy required the support of a legislative majority. In the 1860s, however, party policy was subject to the approval of the party caucus. Tilley quickly found neither his ministers nor his backbenchers ready to give confederation the automatic and docile support a modern party leader expects. He had a hard fight with his cabinet over confederation, and one of his ministers, George Hatheway, resigned to join Albert Smith. It was worse in caucus. Many of the reform members who had kept Tilley in power since 1861 refused to endorse the Quebec resolutions.
John Gray, the one-time “weathercock” who had become the strongest supporter of confederation among the conservatives, was also running into dissent in his caucus. Even his fellow delegate Edward Chandler had reservations about the Quebec terms. With revolt brewing in both the government and the opposition caucuses, confederation’s supporters simply lacked the votes to carry it through the legislature. Tilley could either fight and lose in the legislature and be forced to call an election, or he could dissolve the legislature immediately and debate the issue on the hustings instead, where the outcome was less predictable. With his caucus support dissolving, he preferred an election to humiliation in the House, and he agreed to postpone all action on the Quebec resolutions until after the election. By mid-November, Tilley and Smith were busy meeting the people.*
More precisely, they were meeting those people who had a vote. Something close to universal male suffrage prevailed in New Brunswick in 1864, and it was little different in most of the other British North American provinces, despite the widely held notion that there was no little or no democracy in the mid-nineteenth-century colonies. As early as 1810, Sir James Craig, a governor of Lower Canada whose usual inclination was to throw critics of his policies into jail, had complained bitterly that “scarcely one farmer in a thousand” was without a vote in that colony, while in 1832 the assembly he had fought with celebrated the fact that the right of voting remained “nearly universal.”7
When the first legislative assemblies were called in the British North American colonies, a radical choice had been required: either let almost all men vote or let almost none. The choice hinged on the amount of property that a voter would be required to own. Most colonial families owned property, but most were frontier farmers, whose properties had infinitesimal cash value. Setting any significant level of property ownership as a requirement for voting would disenfranchise almost everyone. Instead, a low requirement – “the forty-shilling freehold” – gave a vote to almost every household. Even the tenant farmers on the seigneuries of Quebec and the estates of Prince Edward Island got the vote. By the 1830s, with formal discrimination against Catholic, Jewish, and Quaker voters abolished, male property owners nearly all had the vote.
By the 1850s, the achievement of responsible government meant legislatures with genuine authority over the internal affairs of British North America were elected by an electorate as wide as any in the world. Britain still had a very limited franchise, and few European countries were democracies. The United States had adopted the principle of universal manhood suffrage in 1845, but many groups, most notably the slaves, remained disenfranchised, and significant limits to voter power remained. At confederation, United States senators were appointed by state governments, not elected. As late as 1877, Congress installed a president who had been soundly defeated in the popular vote.
Most British North American colonies still required voters to own a token amount of property, and thereby excluded transients, hired men, and adult sons living at home (though policing of the polls to prevent them from voting was very haphazard). In practice, the right of voting for members of the assembly was not far short of universal for males in most of British North America. In Canada East, where poverty and dislocation of the kind Brother André experienced in his youth had disenfranchised a growing number of men, the proportion had fallen as low as 70 per cent by the 1860s, and opponents of Nova Scotia’s decision to restore a property requirement in that decade claimed that as many as a quarter of voters there might lose their vote. Even those colonies, however, still allowed more men to vote than most countries, and the other British North American colonies were even closer to universal male suffrage.
Oddly enough, it was reformers, the advocates of responsible government and a broad franchise, who were most reluctant to remove the last vestiges of a property requirement. The vote was nearly sacred to reformers; they resisted giving it to those who, they felt, neither earned it nor cared how they exercised it. In 1855, Tilley’s reform colleague Charles Fisher had argued, even as he widened the franchise, that allowing every man to vote would give too much power “to money and multitude.”8 It would enable the rich to cancel out middle-class votes, he said, by buying the votes of desperate poor people.
For the same reason, the great reform crusader Joseph Howe had brought back a property requirement in Nova Scotia after a conservative government had eliminated it. If a county with 5,000 voters had 2,400 men on each side of an issue, said Howe, the balance would be tipped by two hundred impoverished and apolitical voters, who only wished elections were more common so they could sell their vote more often. It was the reformers’ faith in the vote that impelled them to keep access to it from being too easy. George Brown defended token limits to exclude the unconcerned and uncommitted, but he was not far wrong when he declared that everyone in Canada West who seriously wanted a vote could have one, and it was much the same in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
Everyone male, that is. Women could not vote. The property requirement eliminated most of them, and when it was noticed in the 1830s that some women who had property were voting, the colonies enacted laws to disenfranchise all women. Men and women were considered different by nature and destined for different realms: women for the domestic sphere, men for public life. In the reign of Queen Victoria, middle-class men increasingly expected to support their wives and dependents at home, while they monopolized “public” life. The doctrine of “separate spheres,” which disenfranchised women, was getting stronger in the 1860s.
In some ways, the conviction that men and women occupied separate spheres could empower women. Nurturing the young was women’s role, and so women could claim substantial influence over education and charitable work. As public schools expanded, women came to dominate the teaching profession throughout British North America. (Leonard Tilley had met his wife when they were Sunday-school teachers together.) Defending and raising society’s moral standards was also women’s domain. Since the boundary between moral suasion and public campaigning was hard to define, women’s moral role sometimes enabled them to enter directly into political activity.
Temperance, a moral issue that became a political crusade, had drawn thousands of New Brunswick women into politics in the 1850s. As a temperance campaigner, Leonard Tilley had long worked closely with women who organized meetings, spoke, marched, and gathered petition signatures in tens of thousands. George Hatheway, the politician who quit Tilley’s cabinet in opposition to confederation, said it was crucial for a politician to have “the good opinion of the fair portion of the community.” He claimed he “would rather have one lady canvasser than a dozen men.”9
Women were also beginning to crack open some of the formal prohibitions on their participation in public life. A few were already going to university and pushing for access to medical schools and professional careers. Emily Stowe, a Canadian trained in the United States, opened a medical practice in Toronto in the year of confederation. A decade later Dr. Stowe would help organize the first Canadian campaigns for woman suffrage. Though women would be denied the vote until the end of the First World War, women’s-rights campaigners would force the generation of politicians empowered by confederation to debate (and vote down) woman suffrage regularly.
Suffragists demanded the vote as a right rooted in the equality of men and women. Men frequently justified male suffrage as providing a “household franchise,” exercised by the (male) head of the household. They argued that wives and daughters deserved the vote no more than hired men or sons who deferred to the authority of the master of the house. There was no justice in giving women the vote, they argued, if that simply gave their husbands or fathers control of extra votes. Women might argue about confederation – and what roles they may have played in influencing the choices their husbands and fathers made remains largely unstudied. But they could not vote.
One reason to deny women the vote was what George Brown celebrated as “the manly British system of open voting.” Until the 1870s, nearly all British North Americans had to vote in public. Brown’s adjective “manly” was carefully chosen, for the tumult and violence that often accompanied “open” voting helped justify the exclusion of women. Even more important was the belief that it was manliness which required a public statement of one’s political convictions. Voting and manliness went together, and advocates of open voting argued that no man who demanded a share of civic responsibility should refuse to declare his allegiance publicly. Only cowardly men would hide in a ballot booth. Advocates of the secret ballot argued that open voting encouraged vote-buying, but their rivals retorted that the secret ballot sacrificed “moral control” of voting; it actually encouraged corrupt behaviour by those who would say one thing and do another.
Open voting prevailed in most of British North America until a decade after confederation, but not in New Brunswick. Leonard Tilley had been in the government that had introduced voting by ballot there in the 1850s. In New Brunswick’s confederation elections, voters wrote the name of their chosen candidate on a slip of paper and delivered it to the electoral officer. The full secret-ballot system, with printed ballots, screened voting booths, and other controls, was introduced to the world by South Australia in 1856, but New Brunswick had already accepted the essence of the process.*
Campaigning in mid-nineteenth-century British North America was direct and personal. Given the independent authority of individual members, voters had reason to assess the man as closely as the party with which he was associated. With only a thousand voters in many constituencies, an experienced local member would know most of his supporters personally, and most of his opposition, too. Long, careful cultivation of personal and communal loyalties was vital. If that did not seem to be succeeding, then persuasion, coercion, and intimidation came into play. The task of a constituency team was to get supporters to the polls, and also to keep opponents away. Early Canadian electoral folklore is filled with doctored voters’ lists, reports of “treating” the voters, intimidation, and discussions of the price of a vote. It was a rough-and-ready process.
Honest elections depended on each individual’s will or ability to reject coercion and stand by his principles. (That is, George Brown might have said, elections depended on the “manliness” of each voter.) It was because individual votes were crucially important that corruption lurked around every polling station. In the late twentieth century, skewing the vote had become almost entirely a wholesale process, where media buys, spin campaigns, and the well-timed release of tailored surveys were the best ways to influence national campaigns. In the 1860s, voting was personal, and the economics of political corruption were still retail. If the parties were equally corrupt and equally funded, corruption might cancel itself out, but it was never eliminated.
In New Brunswick’s 1865 election, “confederation or no confederation” was the overwhelming issue. Tilley, Gray, and other confederation supporters held several big meetings in Saint John in November. Soon Tilley was out on a “stumping expedition through the central counties,” and arranging meetings across the province. Unfortunately for Tilley, the “strong current running against federation” that he had observed in November grew stronger as the campaign progressed. Tilley was popular and persuasive enough that anti-confederate leaders refused to debate him, and he had all the machinery and funds of government with which to tempt the voters. In mid-campaign, he believed he was “making good headway against the suspicions and fears of our opponents.” In fact, confederation was making very little headway at all.10
Confederation was not an urgent necessity in New Brunswick. None of the Maritime provinces faced the political crisis that drove the Canadians to seek a new arrangement, and the Quebec resolutions were a very “Canadian” proposal – from the “oily brains of Canadian politicians,” said Albert Smith.11 Maritimers had experienced years of frustrated bickering with the Canadians on many issues, and felt no incentive to solve Canadian problems. Confederation, with its promise to reorganize all the familiar political identities and commercial ties of each of the colonies, had come up suddenly in the Maritimes, offering little but the sheer ambition of the thing as an incentive.
Confederation’s weakness was compounded by a host of local irritants. Tilley’s government, in office a long time, had lost supporters on a series of controversies even before confederation emerged. Tilley, an evangelical Protestant who had never cultivated Catholic votes effectively, had recruited no Catholics to the Charlottetown and Quebec delegations, and the Acadian and Irish-Catholic minorities of the province regarded both him and confederation warily. Saint John merchants and shippers, normally allies of Tilley, feared new tariffs and fiercer competition (with good reason), and argued that maintaining both federal and provincial governments would require increased taxation. Smith and his allies campaigned against both the details and the consequences of the Quebec resolutions. “Do you wish Canada oats, beef, pork, butter, etc., to come into this country at one half the price you are now receiving? Do you wish the whole revenue of this country to be handed over to … the dishonest statesmen of Canada?” Every issue seemed to go against Tilley and confederation.12
When the results of the New Brunswick election were complete, early in March 1865, only eleven declared supporters of the Quebec resolutions survived in a house of forty-one members, and Albert Smith took over as premier. “We have been pounded, really pounded,” wrote John Gray as the results came in. “I could not believe that the constituency which I have represented for fifteen years could have embraced so many fools or could have been so thoroughly blind to its own interest.”13
Gray had grounds to be bitter, perhaps; he had lost his seat. So had Tilley, but Tilley was remarkably unperturbed. In late-twentieth-century terms, the election should have given Albert Smith an unshakeable “mandate” for four or five years, but in the 1860s parliamentary democracy never put a legislature in such a straitjacket. Tilley had already calculated that Smith’s collection of reformers and conservatives would be hard-pressed to find an alternative to confederation – or to agree on anything else. Already, he was guessing that putting Smith into office might turn out to be the best way to expose his weaknesses and wean away his backbench supporters. “All our friends are plucky, sanguine of early success, and intend fighting earnestly for a reversal,” said Tilley within weeks of his electoral defeat. He calmly foresaw that “the day is not far distant when a majority of the electors of this province will declare in favour of a federal union.”14
In the Canadian legislature, then in the midst of its confederation debate, the rouges and other opponents of confederation used the New Brunswick results to argue that confederation should simply be abandoned, since it was now dead in the Maritimes (the Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland legislatures had already refused to proceed with the Quebec resolutions). Instead, Macdonald moved to force an immediate vote on the Quebec resolutions. Canadian backbenchers were as free as those in New Brunswick to abandon the government if they judged it wise to do so, but the coalition leaders were confident that their members still supported them and the confederation plan. Indeed, the Canadian legislature seemed undaunted by the New Brunswick results. Its members closed the debate and approved the Quebec resolutions with a nearly three-to-one majority.
There was no such confidence in Nova Scotia. Charles Tupper had returned from Quebec full of his usual confident bluster. He had always declared that the legislature was the appropriate place for the Quebec resolutions to be ratified or rejected. Since the legislature included a large majority of his supporters, and since the opposition leaders were also with him, he foresaw no elections. He seems to have expected to have the Quebec resolutions quickly ratified.
Instead, Tupper encountered the same surging resistance as Tilley. Nova Scotia felt no more urgent spur towards constitutional change than New Brunswick, and many of its commercial and political leaders were horrified by the terms Tupper had accepted at Quebec. Albert Gilpin Jones, who had organized Tupper’s electoral triumph eighteen months earlier, denounced him and called the financial terms a disaster for the province. Thomas Coffin of Shelburne, Thomas Killam of Yarmouth, and Archibald McLelan of Minas – all sailors and shipbuilders, and all members of the legislature – spoke out for the province’s powerful shipping and trading interests. “Nova Scotia had more ships in the port of Calcutta in any day of the year than … in all the ports of Canada,” McLelan said scornfully, but Canadian tariffs would force Nova Scotia to abandon its free-ranging, low-tariff sea trades.15 Halifax merchant banker William Stairs predicted high taxes and high tariffs to subsidize costly Canadian experiments with railways, industrial development, and westward expansion.
Hearing such arguments, Jonathan McCully fumed about the conservatism of the rich. He accused those who had “money made” of blocking the ambitions of those who were seeking new opportunities. But that kind of counter-attack only seemed to confirm that confederation would force radical economic change upon the province. In fact, Tupper, who had gone to Quebec with four lawyers and no businessmen, had accepted financial arrangements that would make it difficult for Nova Scotia to avoid rapid bankruptcy if it joined the union. Confederation’s critics savaged these terms, and even would-be unionists declared them impossible to swallow.
Not all objections came from the pocketbook. A potent mix of quasi-national pride and Imperial loyalty led many Nova Scotians to fear that confederation would make their province a very junior partner in a new and unwelcome nationality. The old, established province, once the richest of the British North American colonies, still saw itself as the senior colony, the most cultured and best endowed with higher learning. In its newspapers and meeting places, the public men of the province launched a searching critique of the Quebec resolutions, and, by the end of 1864, a consensus against confederation seemed to have formed. Joseph Howe thrilled with pride. “People were told that opposition would be vain,” he wrote. “They had to study the measure, to look for leaders, to cast off the trammels of party, to form new combinations and to defend their institutions from this sudden surprise as they best could. Nothing illustrates more finely the high spirit and intellectual resources of Nova Scotia than the rapidity with which all this was done.”16
Howe had come late to Nova Scotia’s confederation debate. The ex-premier and elder statesman had been busy with his duties on the Imperial fisheries inquiry, and at first Nova Scotian opposition to confederation blossomed without him. But he was only sixty, as assertive as ever, and sure that he understood Nova Scotia and its needs more deeply than anyone. He had often looked forward to uniting the British colonies of North America, but the Quebec resolutions and their strongly “Canadian” emphasis appalled him. From the beginning of 1865, Howe strengthened the anti-confederate cause with his prestige and his phrase-making.
Howe made confederation a question of the rights of Nova Scotians. Responsible government had been his great achievement, and he reminded Nova Scotians of “the great battle by which the appointment of our own officers, the control of our own revenues, the management of our own affairs, was secured to Nova Scotians.” Howe denounced the Quebec resolutions as a scheme to transfer those precious rights to a government answerable to Upper and Lower Canadians, not Nova Scotians. “This crazy confederacy” was not merely misguided, he said, it was illegitimate. It was unconstitutional.17
As resistance to the Quebec plan swept the province, Tupper’s comfortable legislative majority crumbled. One of his cabinet ministers, John McKinnon of Antigonish, resigned rather than endorse the Quebec resolutions. Even Robert Dickey, government leader in the upper house and a delegate to both Charlottetown and Quebec, declared his lack of enthusiasm for the terms. Opposition leaders Archibald and McCully never wavered in their support for the Quebec agreement – they “stood by me like trumps,” said Tupper rather possessively – but most of the reform caucus renounced them. They dumped Archibald from his position as party leader and leader of the opposition and chose William Annand in his place.18
Annand was Howe’s most devoted admirer, nicknamed “Boots” for his devotion, and the editor of Howe’s collected works. A journalist by profession, he had made fellow reformer Jonathan McCully editor of his influential newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. Since Charlottetown, McCully had made the Chronicle a strong voice for confederation. But McCully was only the editor. Annand owned the paper. As soon as Annand committed himself to the anti-confederate cause, he fired McCully, and the Chronicle began to publish Howe’s rush of anti-confederate fury, the “Botheration Letters.” McCully scrambled to start a new newspaper, the Unionist.
In the first days of 1865, Tupper still claimed to believe the Nova Scotia legislature might endorse the Quebec resolutions when it met in February. “I hope we will carry the day,” he wrote to John A. Macdonald. But when Tilley called the election in New Brunswick and went plunging toward defeat, he took the prospects for ratification in Nova Scotia down with him. “Had he waited,” Tupper complained to Macdonald, “by great sacrifices and exertions, we could, I think, have secured a bare majority.” After the collapse of confederation in New Brunswick, however, the Nova Scotia members would not annoy their constituents in a pointless gesture. “A number here who might have been disposed to sacrifice their own position to achieve an important object would not be willing to do so without any practical result to be attained,” Tupper told Lieutenant-Governor Richard MacDonell mournfully.19
Thwarted in the New Brunswick assembly, Tilley had faced a general election. Thwarted in the Nova Scotia assembly, Tupper preferred the strategy of delay. Since Nova Scotia’s assembly could not be persuaded to vote in favour of the Quebec plan, Tupper encouraged it not to vote on it at all. Annand and Howe were endorsing the old dream of rebuilding greater Nova Scotia through Maritime union, so Tupper indulged them. Declaring blandly that “immediate” action on the larger Quebec plan had become “impracticable,” he persuaded the legislature to renew negotiations for a union with New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. When, as he fully expected, Prince Edward Island dismissed the idea as flatly as it had at Charlottetown, the anti-confederates’ claim to have a feasible alternative to confederation was neatly skewered. Almost the entire debate on his “Maritime union” resolution had focused on confederation, but Tupper had avoided a negative vote on it.20
For the rest of 1865, Tupper avoided asking the legislature or the electorate to decide on confederation. Tupper insisted it was all up to the legislature. “If the people’s representatives are satisfied that the country is opposed to this union, they can reject it, or they can obtain a dissolution by asking for it,” he said, promising that the government would “leave its decision to the independent action of the legislature.” But the opponents and doubters also shrank from forcing the issue. Even when by-elections swelled the anti-confederate ranks, they allowed Tupper to pursue his policy of delay. The Quebec resolutions lay on the table, neither endorsed nor rejected, and Tupper remained in power. His optimism revived. “Twelve months will, I believe, find a decided majority in the present parliament in favour of confederation,” he declared in April 1865, and he was prepared to wait.21
At first, delay seemed most likely to compound Tupper’s problems. With confederation blocked, perhaps permanently, in the Maritimes, some Upper Canadian reformers began to urge the achievement of their goal, rep-by-pop, by federating Upper and Lower Canada alone. The coalition held to its commitment to the larger plan, but Upper Canada was unlikely to wait forever for rep-by-pop, when three Maritime provinces were on record against the union proposed at Quebec. Then Leonard Tilley’s prediction began to come true.
During 1865, Tilley’s decision to go to the people, even at the price of being driven from office, began to seem brilliant. By throwing confederation’s critics into office, New Brunswick had made them display how unprepared they were, and their alternatives to confederation began to seem threadbare and incoherent. Albert Smith and George Hatheway (who after abandoning Tilley’s cabinet had joined Smith’s) held views not far removed from those of Hector Langevin or Oliver Mowat. They suspected the Quebec terms because they feared the rights of the provinces had been inadequately secured against federal interference. But Robert Wilmot, Smith’s government leader in the upper house, and his attorney-general, John Allen, opposed the Quebec resolutions for the opposite reason. Closer to John A. Macdonald than to their own leader, Wilmot and Allen spoke for a faction that feared the Quebec terms had not given the central government enough strength to hold the new nation together. The fiery Saint John journalist Timothy Anglin, meanwhile, had delivered much of the Irish-Catholic vote to the anti-confederate cause and could not be denied a cabinet seat, despite the discomfort he caused to patrician Anglicans like Wilmot.
Events conspired dramatically against the Smith government. By the fall of 1865, railway policies, religious antagonisms, disputes over patronage, and cabinet bickering had discredited the new government. London was emphasizing its desire to see confederation ratified, and Lieutenant-Governor Gordon, whose open dislike of the Quebec resolutions had helped undermine Tilley late in 1864, had now accepted his orders from the Colonial Office and began to harass Smith. Robert Wilmot, one of the pillars of the Smith government, was drawn into negotiations with the Canadian government over trade and came to recognize, as the Quebec delegates had, that a tightly centralized union would always be unacceptable to Lower Canada. His opposition to the Quebec resolutions faded as he abandoned legislative union as an impractical will-of-the-wisp, and he left Smith’s cabinet.
In 1865, as the American civil war ended, Fenian raiders began to attack the British North American colonies as a way to punish Britain for its control of Ireland. The raids, by Irish-Americans who had learned soldiering in the Northern armies, would prove to be small, disorganized, and easily contained. But they were a boon to confederation supporters, who could preach unity in the face of external threat much more plausibly than their opponents. As Irish raiders menaced New Brunswick, a brutal smear campaign, questioning the loyalty of Irish Catholics who opposed the Quebec resolutions, drove Timothy Anglin from Smith’s cabinet. Such attacks also helped persuade the leaders of New Brunswick’s clerical hierarchy, who had been dubious about confederation, to affirm their loyalty by calling for approval of the Quebec plan.
When a by-election was called in York County, the region surrounding Fredericton, Charles Fisher, who had been a delegate to Quebec and had been defeated in the general election, ran again. It was a hard-fought campaign. Tilley told John A. Macdonald it could be won – “with the expenditure of eight or ten thousand dollars.” While his backers poured drinks and promised favours, Fisher made extravagant commitments, exploited Protestant bigotry against Anglin, and mocked the government’s decisions. With anti-confederate funding from Halifax, Smith’s supporters fought back just as hard. They, even more than Fisher, insisted that confederation was the central issue. Fisher won by a large majority. Barely six months after the New Brunswick general election, the death watch on the Smith government began.22
As the coalition against confederation crumbled, Tilley, confederation, and the Quebec resolutions re-occupied the moderate middle ground. Indeed, it began to seem likely that, if Smith’s government did not endorse confederation, the members elected as anti-confederates just a few months earlier would put in a new cabinet that would. Smith actually agreed to endorse confederation in principle but, pushed hard by Lieutenant-Governor Gordon to accept the Quebec resolutions themselves, he resigned. Robert Wilmot formed a government, but the anti-confederates remained strong enough to defeat it and force a second general election.
The second New Brunswick election was a great confederation triumph – and a famously corrupt campaign. Thousands of dollars of “the needful” (as Tilley called it in a letter to Macdonald) flowed in from Canada to support the confederates, and thousands more came from Halifax to shore up the anti-confederates. Anyone whose vote was for sale could expect a record price. Sober analysis of the Quebec resolutions was almost drowned out by Fenian scares, accusations of disloyalty, and appeals to religious bigotry and crude self-interest. But, after a year in which confederation had been the dominant issue of New Brunswick politics, the voters endorsed it even more decisively than they had rejected it a year earlier. Having fought two elections in one year on constitutional issues, Leonard Tilley was back in power. New Brunswick’s legislature, quickly recalled for a rare summertime session, endorsed his resolution in favour of confederation thirty-one to eight. Just in case the upheavals had strengthened New Brunswick’s hand at the bargaining table, however, the House approved not the Quebec resolutions, but confederation “upon such terms as will secure the rights and interests of New Brunswick.”23
In barely a year, New Brunswick’s voters had twice determined their province’s confederation policy. Yet the very completeness of the pro-confederate victory in 1866 encouraged a black legend that democracy had been suborned rather than sustained. Anti-confederates insisted their enemies had bought and bullied the unwilling province into submission. Canadian and British observers, inclined to condescend to hayseed Maritimers – as if money, patronage, and corruption were unknown in their own elections – hardly bothered to contest the accusation. And historians who saw in confederation proof of the need for strong central authority would long be content to emphasize local corruption – as another argument against local autonomy.
But in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, all hard-fought elections spawned corrupt practices. Had the 1866 confederation victory been simply a question of buying votes, Tilley should have been just as able to buy the 1865 election – in which he and confederation had been routed. The issue of union mattered, too. The demonstrated inability of Tilley’s rivals to form a coherent anti-confederate program probably did more to sway voters than the infamous sacks of money shipped in by John A. Macdonald.
In 1865 and 1866, Nova Scotia moved almost in lockstep with New Brunswick – but without the elections. In New Brunswick, elected members and the electorate had opposed confederation early in 1865. Members and voters had both changed their mind early in 1866. The second election proved it, but that election had only been held because the elected members had already lost their anti-confederate passion. In Nova Scotia, the voters went unconsulted, but the legislature, which had been unwilling to endorse confederation in 1865, also began to have second thoughts.
Opposition remained strong, but Nova Scotian opposition to confederation was neither total nor unconditional. Anyone intrigued by the possibilities of railways and manufacturing saw promise in union, and the coal and mineral regions of eastern Nova Scotia looked forward to gaining a large national market. John Bourinot, a conservative member from Cape Breton Island, famous in the House for complaining of Halifax’s neglect of his region, began to argue that the island might do better in confederation than it had as part of Nova Scotia. Even the argument from pride cut both ways. When Tupper declared, “No intelligent man … can feel for a moment that, as a Canadian, he does not occupy a far higher status than he ever could have done as a New Brunswicker, a Prince Edward Islander, or a Nova Scotian,” he infuriated many Nova Scotians – but he touched latent ambition in many others.24
Even among the “antis,” opposition was not absolute. Joseph Howe himself had often preached the benefits of colonial union -though not on the terms proposed at Quebec – and many Nova Scotians held out for better terms rather than no union at all. As early as the summer of 1865, William Annand had floated the idea of another confederation conference at which the Quebec terms could be improved. Howe swiftly reined him in, but the idea that the Quebec terms should be improved rather than rejected continued to float in the Nova Scotia air. As in New Brunswick, the failure of anti-confederates to construct a plausible alternative to confederation influenced Nova Scotia opinion, and the Fenian raids provoked alarms about defence and suspicions about loyalty which the confederates exploited skilfully.
In the spring of 1866, Charles Tupper gambled that a majority of Nova Scotian legislators might now be ready to approve a union resolution, even against the still-hostile mood in the province. William Miller, a liberal member from Cape Breton, who until then had condemned the Quebec terms, gave him the opportunity. Two years earlier, when the Charlottetown conference had first been proposed, Miller had declared that Maritime union should be a side issue and confederation the real objective. It was the terms negotiated at Quebec, not confederation itself, he had opposed in 1865. In the spring of 1866, his unionist convictions reasserted themselves. On April 3, Miller declared in the legislature that he would support the government if it would propose sending delegates to London to help the British government draft a confederation bill with terms more favourable than the Quebec resolutions. A week later, on April 10, Tupper staked his government on a bill that called on the British Parliament to pass “a scheme of union which will effectually ensure just provision for the rights and interests of this province.”25
The Nova Scotia legislature began its second confederation debate. It lasted only a week, and the official record of the speeches, now a very rare volume, has been almost entirely neglected, but it was a remarkable airing of two urgent issues. Did the House believe confederation was the right answer in Nova Scotia’s present circumstances? And did the House have the right to decide the issue, or did confederation have to go to the people?
The debate began with a slanging match between William Annand and Charles Tupper, in which each impugned the other’s honesty and patriotism. Tupper was more skilful than Annand at this kind of parliamentary abuse. He provoked Annand into making unprovable accusations, then forced him into embarrassing withdrawals. But neither’s performance was edifying. “Webster says a traitor is one who deceives, who betrays his country, and I say, taking that sense, there are men here who deserve the appellation,” said Annand. “I think the honourable member is safe in making that assertion,” Tupper retorted. It was other members from both sides who gradually gave the debate substance.26
On confederation itself, the “antis” conceded from the start that they were now a minority in the House. They also proved themselves as disunited as Albert Smith’s New Brunswick government had been. Few of them bothered to support Annand’s implausible proposal that, instead of joining confederation, Nova Scotia should abandon its own independent status to federate with Britain and gain a couple of seats at Westminster. “Canadians are disloyal,” cried anti-confederate John Locke in a speech rich with Nova Scotian patriotism, but pro-confederates cited the frankly pro-American speeches of other anti-confederates, notably Yarmouth member William Townsend, who said, “The interests of the people do not lie in the direction of connection with Canada.… My people would prefer annexation to confederation.” Archibald McLelan gave vigorous economic arguments for an autonomous Nova Scotia, but Tupper’s cabinet colleague James McDonald was just as passionate about the economic benefits of confederation. “Give us the population of four million that union will give, strike down the hostile tariffs, … and you will have the market for manufactures that is now wanting. Why should not Halifax be the Boston of British North America?”27
On one issue there was consensus. Few speakers on either side took seriously the “better terms” proposed in the resolution. McLelan quoted George-Étienne Cartier giving his word of honour to the Canadian House that the British Parliament would vote on a confederation bill in which there were no significant changes from the Quebec terms. McLelan declared that this showed that the terms were most unlikely to be improved. But confederation supporter Adams Archibald readily agreed with him. Archibald said he was perfectly willing to vote for accepting better terms in case they somehow became available, but he said he expected none, and he still stood four-square behind the Quebec resolutions he had helped to negotiate. William Miller, who had raised the hope of “better terms,” also declared union itself was the essential thing. Improvements should be made, said his seconder, Samuel Macdonell, but “union we must have!” By the end of the debate, it was evident that most members would accept the Quebec terms if they had to, and the speaker had to restrain the rambunctious pro-confederate spectators who cheered them on from the legislative gallery.28
The hardest-fought issue in the debate, however, was not confederation itself. It was who should decide on confederation.
The question of an appeal to the people had been around from the start. In January 1865 (when he still believed the Nova Scotia legislature would never endorse confederation), Joseph Howe had insisted that confederation could not be made legitimate “without submitting it fairly to the constituencies.” Eighteen months later, he stuck to that opinion. “Let the people accept it or reject it. If they voluntarily abandon their institutions, they will sincerely support the union.” Howe had a hundred objections to the Quebec resolutions, but the one that resonated most deeply was his insistence that only a general election could settle confederation in Nova Scotia.29
In late-twentieth-century Canada, when legislative debate had been reduced to ceremonial posturing and “elections” and “democracy” were assumed to be synonymous, it was hard to imagine that anyone would debate this point. Charles Tupper’s willingness to see confederation ratified without an election has consistently been portrayed as unjustifiable and all too typical of the anti-democratic instincts of the confederation-makers.
Tupper, however, argued that it was Howe and not himself who was unorthodox. Indeed, demanding an appeal to the people against the verdict of the legislature was out of character for Howe. As Nova Scotia’s premier in 1861, Howe had declared, “If Parliament were to be dissolved whenever a gentleman changed sides, or a discontented constituency petitioned, free institutions would become an endless distraction, and no man would ever dare to deliberate or run the risk of being convinced.”30
Later that year, he had been even more explicit. “It is the undoubted principle of the British constitution that a member once returned by a constituency has to consider what he believes to be the interests of the whole country and not the simple wishes of his own constituency. He is elected a representative and not a delegate.… [His constituents] have no right … to expect that the royal prerogative [to hold a new election] should be used because they are dissatisfied with the choice they have made.” In 1862, when the colonial secretary informed the colonies that Britain would want the colonial legislatures to approve any plan for colonial union, Premier Howe never suggested a popular mandate would be required.31
Tupper happily cited these views when Howe, seeing his side losing in the legislature, redoubled his demands for an appeal to the people. Indeed, Howe was being inconsistent – but he was not simply being opportunistic. Since his first newspapering efforts in the 1820s, Joseph Howe had lived by the belief that, by educating and informing the people, he would eventually see Nova Scotia reaping “a harvest of reform.” In decades of writing, speaking, and travelling, he had built a remarkable rapport with Nova Scotia’s people. He was not boasting when he said he had linked his “name and daily labours with the household thoughts and fireside amusements of our countrymen, aye, and countrywomen.… We stepped across their thresholds, mingled in their social duties, went with them to the woods … or the fields.” Howe loved and trusted his fellow Nova Scotians and had a deep faith in their wisdom. The principles of representative government were sacred to him, but the Quebec resolutions touched the national existence of his beloved Nova Scotia. Howe could not bear to see his people’s wishes unconsulted – particularly when they seemed to match his own.32
In the legislative debate, the anti-confederates fought desperately for an election or a plebiscite. William Annand pleaded with the pro-confederate majority in the House to consider the nine-tenths of Nova Scotians who he said were against it. “You must carry with you the sentiment of the people,” he said. “Even if they are entirely wrong, you must defer to their prejudices and give them time to consider the subject calmly and deliberately.” Dr. Brown of South Kings accused Tupper of stifling the people to save the rulers of the people. “We may establish what will be called a union, but will it be a union of the heart?” asked Mr. Blackwood. “The people are able to judge.”33
Far from wilting under these charges, confederation supporters confronted them. Attorney-General William Henry was one of several who challenged the nine-tenths estimate. Many Nova Scotians objected to the Quebec resolutions, he acknowledged, but some wanted to change a few details, some wanted legislative union, and some wanted other modifications. “Nearly all,” he insisted, “wish union of some shape or other.” Several other members predicted public opinion was shifting to confederation, and they noted the meagre numbers of signatures on the petitions anti-confederates were presenting almost daily. Mostly, however, the pro-confederate members argued precedent and principle against their opponents’ insistence that the people and not the legislature must decide. They challenged anti-confederates to support their demand with a single example from the history of representative government or British constitutionalism. “Opponents of union are not in a situation to challenge the right of this house in the exercise of its legitimate functions,” said Tupper bluntly. There would be an election only if the House showed it wanted one – by rejecting the government’s confederation bill.34
Many members proudly proclaimed the rights of parliamentary representatives. Liberal Hiram Blanchard declared that a free people settled its affairs through its deliberative assemblies. “The people were here present by their representatives,” he said. Attorney-General Henry backed him up: “The constitutional doctrine prevails that the gentlemen within these walls represent the feelings of their constituents.” Members, said Alexander McFarlane, were “untrammeled by pledges and free to exercise an independent judgment on the question.” Several members from both sides declared they had come to exercise a representative’s duty to make up their own minds. To say they should do otherwise, said James McDonald, was to strike at “one of the highest privileges of this legislature.” 35
These arguments prevailed. Stewart Campbell’s motion to postpone a decision until the people had voted was soundly defeated. After hours of passionate appeals, the House passed Tupper’s better-terms resolution on April 18, at two-thirty in the morning, with thirty-one in favour and nineteen opposed. Four of Tupper’s conservatives remained opposed, but Archibald and four other reformers supported confederation. Confederation had its ratification in Nova Scotia. A year later, when the final text of the British North America Act was published, and it was clear no “better terms” had been offered, the anti-confederates made one last attempt to have confederation put to the people. With growing confidence, the House voted it down with a two-thirds majority on the confederation side.
In April 1866 and again in March 1867, Nova Scotia ratified confederation because a substantial majority of its elected representatives wanted it so. Had they all been bought?
Anti-confederates insisted they had been. They launched a furious assault against the “thirty-one traitors” who had sold their country “at black midnight,” and their accusation would long endure. William Miller, who did receive a Senate appointment in 1867 (along with Robert Dickey, John Bourinot, and other crucial vote-changers), sued the Morning Chronicle in 1874 over the allegation that he had sold his vote. Even Tupper’s respectful 1916 biographer declared, “it is not necessary to dwell upon the methods by which Dr. Tupper got a majority, [or] to affirm that all these influences were addressed solely to the judgment and conscience of the men with whom he was dealing.” Many historians of confederation have readily assumed that, given the endemic corruption of Maritime politics, bribery must have determined the outcome.36
Closer analysis, however, has demolished the notion that confederation was ratified in Nova Scotia simply by bribery. Money and promises were important in elections, but corruption was not the basis of Maritime politics in the 1860s. Whatever side they were on, politicians hoped to be remembered if their side won, but, on an issue as divisive as confederation, no one could predict the winning side at the time Miller and the others decided the need for union overrode their dislike of the Quebec terms. Resistance to – and support for – the confederation plan in Atlantic Canada was rooted in both principles and practicalities. “No external pressure,” wrote the Maritime historian Phillip Buckner in an influential 1990 re-examination of the issue, “could have compelled the Maritimes to join confederation if, ultimately, they had not been convinced that it was in their own interests to do so.” It seems fair to conclude that the Nova Scotia legislature ratified confederation in Nova Scotia because most of its members believed it was the right decision and that it was their right and duty to decide.37
Their answer was orthodox by all the rules of parliamentary representation. The pro-confederates stood on solid ground when they insisted they were following the legitimate working of representative government under a parliamentary constitution. John A. Macdonald had said it eloquently in the Canadian House, in arguing down an election proposal from ultra-tory John Hillyard Cameron, “If we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here. But if we do represent them, we have a right to see for them, to think for them, to act for them; we have the right to go to the foot of the throne and declare that we believe it to be for the peace, order, and good government of Canada to form of these provinces one empire, presenting an unbroken and undaunted front to every foe, and if we do not think we have this right, we are unworthy of the commission we have received from the people of Canada.”38
To an uncomprehending twentieth century, where legislators bound by party discipline never made up their own minds and parliamentary debate was an empty ritual, such arguments came down like light from a dead star. But the legislators of Nova Scotia, in a parliamentary regime where the government really was responsible to a legislature capable of independent decisions, had hold of a great truth.
But Joseph Howe had hold of a great truth, too. Confederation had raised a problem without a simple answer: at what point does a representative mandate give way to the need to seek the verdict of the people? Even if it were not the doom of Nova Scotia (as one anti-confederate cried out in the House), confederation proposed a fundamental and controversial change in the province’s circumstances. Whatever the justifications, Tupper had erred in treating it as if it were a problem to be managed by parliamentary debate and parliamentary guile. His eighteen months of manoeuvres towards a pro-confederate vote in the House may have had constitutional sanction, but to many Nova Scotia voters they looked like trickery more than honest representation.
Nova Scotia finally went to the polls two months after confederation, in September 1867. The results were spectacular. Tupper was the only supporter of confederation among nineteen members sent to Ottawa. In the simultaneous provincial election, anti-confederates took thirty-six of the thirty-eight seats. Nova Scotia was perhaps not quite so unanimous against confederation as those results suggested. Many races had been closely contested, and confederates held up to 40 per cent of the popular vote. But almost every single member who had argued so firmly that it was up to the legislature to decide on confederation lost his seat.
What the elections may have shown most conclusively was Nova Scotian voters’ resentment at not being entrusted with the decision on confederation. With the decision kept out of their hands until it was too late to make a difference, the voters eagerly punished those who had prevented them from expressing an opinion. The members who ratified confederation in Nova Scotia discovered that they had committed the rarest act of independent legislators. They had committed political suicide for the sake of a measure in which they believed.
In the years that followed, many of the “antis” of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick accommodated themselves to confederation. “Better terms” had been the demand of many Nova Scotians, and better terms for Nova Scotia became a political necessity immediately after confederation. “There is no use crying peace when there is no peace,” was Leonard Tilley’s perceptive advice, and Prime Minister Macdonald finally agreed to negotiate better financial terms for Nova Scotia. In doing so, Macdonald won over Joseph Howe himself. Shelving his argument that only the mandate of a general election could legitimize the union, Howe joined the federal cabinet in 1868.
William Annand, who became premier of Nova Scotia, continued to resist confederation, even at the price of estrangement from Howe, his lifelong mentor. As Howe had pointed out, however, the anti-confederates could have paralysed Nova Scotia’s government in 1867 by refusing to accept office under a lieutenant-governor appointed by Ottawa. Premier Annand was not willing to go that far. Other prominent anti-confederates made their own accommodations. Archibald McLelan went to Ottawa with Howe in 1868 and received a seat in the federal cabinet. Thomas Killam, one of the Yarmouth members who had considered annexation to the United States better than confederation, became one of many Nova Scotian anti-confederates who, like the Quebec rouges, eventually became provincial-rights federalists. Killam eventually became a Ottawa cabinet minister, as did his Shelburne counterpart Thomas Coffin.
But the resentment persisted. The historian Peter Waite reports the case of Nova Scotia Premier W. S. Fielding, who, when visiting London in 1892, refused to attend a dinner marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of confederation. Even Fielding was a future federal cabinet minister, but the conviction that Nova Scotians had became Canadians against their will remained deeply rooted and hard to refute. The thirty-one Nova Scotian legislators of April 18, 1866, may have been perfectly sincere, but their action was remembered, and execrated, as an effort to negate the will of the province. Charles Tupper would remain a political powerhouse for another thirty years, and he was always able to cite sound constitutional arguments for the course he had taken in 1866, but on this issue his reputation would never entirely recover. By avoiding an election, he had left a permanent scar over Nova Scotia’s entry into confederation.
Leonard Tilley had not actually wanted either of New Brunswick’s two confederation elections, but he had been more willing than Tupper to let the voters sort out the crisis of confederation. Tilley accepted a shattering defeat in one election and organized an even larger triumph in the second. He got little credit for his willingness to accept the verdict of the voters – New Brunswick’s black legend, that Tilley bought the second election, matched Nova Scotia’s black legend, that the legislature’s decision to hold no elections was a crime. But in the aftermath, it was Tupper’s statesmanship, not Tilley’s, that was questionable. Tilley could claim that, in New Brunswick at least, the union had been negotiated by a bipartisan delegation, ratified by an independent legislature, and endorsed by the voters as well. Tupper only had two out of three.*
Historians and political scientists have consistently declared that the makers of confederation were not democrats. They can cite George-Étienne Cartier telling the Canadian legislature that the Americans had “founded federation for the purpose of carrying out democracy on this continent, but we … felt convinced that purely democratic institutions could not be conducive to the peace and prosperity of nations.” They can cite George Brown condemning universal male suffrage as “evil” or John A. Macdonald urging the Quebec conference to lay the groundwork for “constitutional liberty as opposed to democracy.”39
These seem like damning admissions. If they meant nineteenth-century Canadian politicians were an autocratic élite who hated and feared the electorate and concocted schemes to exempt themselves from responsibility, then we should dismiss the legacy of confederation. But Cartier, who equated “democracy” to “mob rule,” fought every election of his political career under conditions not far short of universal male suffrage. He never held a safe seat and lost almost as many elections as he won. George Brown, insisting on the principle of a propertied franchise, meant one which in practice provided votes for virtually all men. When Macdonald spoke against “democracy,” he usually evoked the spectre of a president elected by a simple majority and thereafter wielding despotic authority unfettered by legislative review.
The “constitutional liberty” that Macdonald, and in effect all the confederation-makers, distinguished from “democracy,” was itself hardly distinguishable from what we would call parliamentary democracy. As the experience of Leonard Tilley shows, the governments of the confederation-makers were closely answerable to broadly representative and strikingly independent legislatures, whose members’ seats depended on the votes of a broad, lively, and engaged electorate. To dismiss that is to dismiss parliamentary democracy itself.
Leonard Tilley may never have been so dull as he seemed. At the London conference, one flash of personality preserved for him some place in Canadian memory. When an appropriate title and motto were being sought for the new nation, Tilley, the devout evangelical, remembered a phrase that had probably popped up in his Bible-reading during the years of debate: “And he shall have dominion from sea even unto sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.” Tilley’s contribution of the title “dominion” was not recorded until fifty years after confederation, but the story seems to be authentic.40
Three months after confederation, after five years as a widower, Tilley married Alice Chipman, the daughter of a friend. They were married almost thirty years. Several of his children migrated westward in the new nation. His son Harrison Tilley became a prominent Anglican clergyman in Toronto, and his daughters migrated to Manitoba and British Columbia. Tilley himself, the reformer drifting towards the centre, became a powerful minister in John A. Macdonald’s Ottawa, probably the most skilful finance minister Canada had in the nineteenth century. Still a believer in state activism, he drafted much of the “National Policy” that became Macdonald’s flagship in his later years. He ended his career in the 1890s as lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, and Macdonald kept him in the office when he was too ill to discharge it very effectively, because the Tilleys could not live on his pension. Money had flowed generously in New Brunswick politics throughout his career, but apparently not into Leonard Tilley’s pocket.
* The most famous statement of loyalist pathos – “I climbed to the top of Chipman’s Hill and watched the sails disappearing in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness came over me that, although I had not shed a tear through all the war, I sat down on the damp moss with my baby in my lap and cried” – was attributed to Leonard Tilley’s great-grandmother by loyalist historian W. O. Raymond. Tilley never mentioned it, or her, to his authorized biographer.
* Tilley later claimed Lieutenant-Governor Gordon forced the election on him, and that interpretation has often been repeated. Carl Wallace, however, in “Sir Leonard Tilley,” authoritatively discounts Gordon’s influence and explains why Tilley made the claim.
* Despite its sacred status in the twentieth century, the secret ballot became largely theoretical once the buying of individual votes became uneconomic. Today, survey researchers and canvassers expect to predict consumer and voter preferences within three percentage points, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
* Tupper and Tilley might point out that the Meech Lake accord and other late-twentieth-century constitutional initiatives met none of these criteria.