We must qualify ourselves to fulfill the spirit of tolerance and forbearance. It is our only means to make a great nation of a small people.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee
Just four months after Canadians came together to create a new nation, a sizeable number—the majority of Nova Scotians—did their best to leave. To magnify the nation-building challenge that now confronted Macdonald, this secessionist threat came at the same time he was trying to double the new nation’s size in the West.
The British North America Act provided for Canada to acquire Rupert’s Land, that vast tract of land given to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670. It encompassed most of the present-day prairie provinces and extended westwards to the height of the Rockies and eastwards, across northern Ontario and Quebec, all the way to Labrador.* In the first session of the first post-Confederation Parliament, the government introduced a resolution to allow it to buy the territory. The minister sponsoring the resolution, William McDougall, who as editor of the North American newspaper had advocated western expansion as early as the 1850s, argued persuasively, “either we must expand or contract.” The resolution passed easily, and Macdonald dispatched McDougall and Cartier to London to negotiate the financial terms of the takeover with the Colonial Office and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In the eastern provinces, Macdonald was on the defensive. Nova Scotians had entered Confederation reluctantly and angrily. Not only had Macdonald and his ally Charles Tupper, the provincial premier, orchestrated events so that the people of this once separate colony had had no say in the matter, but, yet more deviously, they had arranged things so that the provincial legislature, which had achieved Responsible Government, or self-government, even earlier than Canada, never debated the Confederation terms. Further, soon after Confederation, Nova Scotians realized that they were obliged to pay the higher tariffs of the old United Province of Canada, which were now the national standard, and, worse, that all customs duties that were due would now actually be collected. They worried further that Ottawa’s plans for expansion to the West meant that less money would be dispatched down east. A backlash was inevitable.
Retribution came in the fall of 1867, when the first elections for the federal Parliament were held as well as those for each of the four provincial legislatures. Of the fifty-five federal and provincial constituencies in Nova Scotia, anti-Confederates won fifty-two: all but one of the nineteen federal seats, and all but two of the thirty-six provincial seats. The single Confederate survivor of substance was Charles Tupper, fearless and indefatigable but prone to crashing misjudgments and verbal excess in both content and volume. Although a devout Baptist, Tupper was famously known as the “Ram of Cumberland” for his flirtatious attentions to the ladies. The “antis” now not only commanded the provincial government but, because most Nova Scotian merchants feared impending competition from Canada, possessed a fatter electoral war chest. Above all, in Joseph Howe, they had the province’s one politician of genuinely high repute.
To Macdonald, Howe was “the tallest head,” the one who, unless won over to the Canadian side, might actually lead Nova Scotians out of Confederation. Newly elected as one of the “Noble Eighteen” anti-Confederates in the Dominion Parliament, he went to Ottawa and promptly made impassioned speeches against Confederation. He also planned to cross the Atlantic to Britain to plead his cause with the government there. Here, Howe had a weak spot: the son of a United Empire Loyalist, he described himself as a “dear lover of old England” and admitted publicly that, to save her, he would “blow up Nova Scotia into the air, or scuttle her.” Separation, he confessed to Macdonald, might lead to Nova Scotia eventually joining the United States.
Knowing Howe’s doubts, Macdonald, as he often did at the beginning of some crisis, became over-optimistic. He treated the election setbacks philosophically, observing that, whenever “there was a junction between a large and a small Country, the smaller was always more opposed to it.” He confided to supporters that, no matter how much Nova Scotia complained, it was powerless to do any serious harm.
Serious harm was indeed possible. Of the two newcomers to Confederation, Nova Scotia mattered far more than New Brunswick. It possessed a far larger population (some 350,000) and a more developed economy (extensive fisheries, shipbuilding yards and, in Cape Breton, the new country’s only coal mines). Halifax was also the site of a major Royal Navy base. If Nova Scotia left, Canada would, effectively, no longer stretch out to the Atlantic, and so could never become a truly continental-sized nation. Furthermore, New Brunswick might well follow it out of Confederation. Such an unravelling might persuade Britain to abandon the whole project of building a new nation, allowing Washington to pick up the pieces. Indeed, Governor General Monck warned the colonial secretary that the break-up of the union so soon after its creation would make “the maintenance of British power or the existence of British institutions in America … impossible.”
To heighten this risk, a disturbing political change had just taken place in London. Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative government had been defeated. In the new Liberal government, many of its ministers, including the foreign secretary and the colonial secretary, and even Prime Minister William Gladstone himself, were suspected to be “separatists” who doubted the value of maintaining colonies. American annexationists took notice: General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts congressman, made a flying visit to Prince Edward Island, reporting back—inaccurately but damagingly—that everyone there was talking about joining the United States.
All was not lost, by any means. It was one thing for Nova Scotians to want to leave, but quite another for them to find somewhere to go. The once-mooted alternative of a Maritime Union was a chimera: the anti-Confederates sent emissaries to their neighbours but got only evasive replies. Britain had indicated clearly in the lead-up to Confederation that it wanted to withdraw from its commitments in North America, so was most unlikely to accept Nova Scotia as a reborn, separate colony. Heady talk in the province of annexation forced Canadians to pay attention, but most Nova Scotians were scared of it themselves, and the United States was highly unlikely to offend Britain for so minor a territorial gain.
One real threat did exist, which Macdonald spotted immediately. While the chances that Howe’s mission to London would succeed were slight, Macdonald realized, as he told Jonathan McCully, a leading local supporter, that the separatists in the British government might be “weak enough” to tell Howe “to give the new system a fair trial for a year or two.” Such temporizing would encourage the anti-Confederates to redouble their efforts.
Macdonald’s strategy was the exact opposite of the one he had deployed to haul Nova Scotia into Confederation. He put no pressure on Nova Scotians either directly, by threatening a cutback in funds, or indirectly, by trying to incite London once again to apply “the imperial screw.” And he avoided any confrontation with the “antis.” His objective became not to herd the Nova Scotians back into Confederation but to get them to walk themselves back in. As he explained to Ambrose Shea, a Newfoundland ally, it was important “to the Dominion that this state of perpetual ‘sulk’ in which the Nova Scotians indulge” should come to an end. He wanted them in, but contentedly so—more or less.
He had in mind the bigger picture. Pacifying Nova Scotia and acquiring Rupert’s Land weren’t the only items on his nation-building agenda. Macdonald was also eyeing Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, and he was even looking all the way west to the Pacific, to the Crown colony of British Columbia. If he could haul in all of these, the new nation would gain the coherence of a state bounded on three sides by salt water and, even more important, would become a continental-sized state like the United States.
Macdonald’s agenda could scarcely have been more ambitious. By wretched ill-timing, he had also to deal with a personal problem that distracted his thoughts and wore down his energies.
Before his marriage to Agnes, Macdonald had drawn up a prenuptial agreement that transferred to her a sizeable share of his assets. This arrangement had probably been suggested by Agnes’s brother, Hewitt Bernard, who, as Macdonald’s deputy minister, knew him well and worried that his drinking might leave her a pauper. As a side benefit, these assets, once transferred to her, could not be seized if he ever tumbled into debt.
Right after Confederation, Macdonald’s finances improved considerably. His prime ministerial salary was $5,000. He could also count on some $2,000 a year in profits from his law practice, which he still maintained in Kingston; as well, Agnes kept a far closer eye on their spending than he ever had.
In 1864, Macdonald’s law partner, Archibald Macdonnell, had died suddenly. Absorbed as he was in grand political affairs, Macdonald took some years to realize that Macdonnell, acting on his own, had used the firm’s cash to engage in some highly risky investments—in some instances, very possibly, criminal ones. By May 1867, Macdonald came to the shocked realization that he and the Macdonnell estate owed jointly some $64,000 (around $1 million today).* His principal creditor was Kingston’s Commercial Bank of Canada, which charged a steep interest rate of 7 per cent. When this bank failed the following year, it was taken over by the Merchants’ Bank of Canada, owned by Hugh Allan, the country’s wealthiest man. A February 1868 letter from Macdonald reveals some of the frantic attempts he was making to stay afloat. He had tried to sell some of the land he owned but had been offered only $300 instead of the $500 he thought the lots were worth. He was considering selling off his best asset, “the Guelph property, at a good price.” By early 1869, Macdonald’s debt had risen to $80,000 (worth close to $1.5 million today). Another bank, the Bank of Upper Canada, began an action against him to recover debts. In a September 1869 letter to his principal creditor, Allan, Macdonald pointed out that if this bank took him to court, “I shall be unable legally to carry out the proposition I have made to you.” This carefully judged pressure prompted Allan’s bank to reach a settlement with him for his outstanding debts. In one remedial action, Macdonald took out a $12,000 joint mortgage with Agnes against property he owned in Kingston.
Macdonald struggled on in this way for another year. Then, in 1870, a wealthy Toronto friend, D.L. Macpherson, realizing how close to penury the prime minister had become, organized a private subscription among businessmen which raised $67, 000 and placed the money in a trust fund from which Macdonald could draw sums to cover his living expenses, but with the principal reserved for the use of his wife and family. “He relinquished the profits of his profession,” Macpherson explained, “and in the service of his country became not a richer but a poorer man.” The stress and humiliation of this financial crisis, coinciding with his vast exercises in nation-building, caused Macdonald to relapse again into heavy drinking late in 1868, despite Agnes’s prayers and ministrations.
No other Canadian prime minister has ever had to cope with such personal financial pressure; Sir Joseph Pope wrote in his Memoirs that “in the autumn of 1869, I do not think [Macdonald] was worth one shilling.” Yet Macdonald never showed the least sign of depression, self-pity or loss of confidence. His lifelong attitude, as expressed in his wonderful advice to the financially strapped Toronto Mail editor T.C. Patteson, was, “Why, man, do you expect to go through this world without trials or worries? … As for present debts, treat them as Fakhreddin in Tancred treated his—He played with his debts, caressed them, toyed with them—What would I do without those darling debts, said he.” Later, Macdonald supplemented this advice: “As to debts and troubles, these come to us ‘as Sparks fly upward’ … but they disappear like summer flies and new ones come. Take things pleasantly and, when fortune empties her chamber pot on your head—Smile and say, ‘We are going to have a summer shower.’ ”
In the late 1860s, fortune had not yet finished emptying her chamber pot on Macdonald’s head: he was about to lose a close friend and an invaluable ally.
Macdonald’s lost ally, and Confederation’s lost bard, was Thomas D’Arcy McGee. By the time of Confederation, McGee was no longer the spirited charmer he had once been. Heavy drinking and declining health had reduced him, at the age of forty-three, to a shadow of the vital elf he had once been.* He had become politically reckless, lashing out at Fenian sympathies among Catholic Irish communities in Ontario and Montreal, and ignoring warnings, including from Macdonald, that he was risking violent retaliation. McGee was not among the cabinet ministers announced on Confederation Day, principally because of the new rules of regional balance, but also because he no longer carried his old political weight. That fall, he received no party funds to help him in his election campaign, and he won his seat in Montreal very narrowly. His future now depended on patronage. Macdonald promised him the position of commissioner of patents, a job with light duties and a salary of three thousand dollars. Though repelled by the thought of taking such a “subordinate office,” McGee was drawn to it, because he would no longer have to “devote myself to those infernal gods, the publishers.”
McGee could still sing. One of his late writings included the uncanny perception that “In a sense we are all foreigners to America: European civilization is foreign to us; the Christian religion is foreign to us.” One of the verses he composed during this period ascends towards poetry:
Give me again my harp of yew,
In consecrated soil ’twas grown—
Shut out the day star from my view,
And leave me with the night alone.
Ugly enough to be compared to a monkey but with a gorgeous voice, D’Arcy McGee gave the nation what it most needed—poetry and a sense of soul. (photo credit 4.1)
His real song remained Canada. In the spring of 1867, returning from London once the British North America Act was passed, McGee was met at the station in Montreal by a welcoming crowd. He told them, “Other politics that have been preached in British North America will grow old and lose their lustre, but the conciliation of class and class … the policy of linking together all our people … of linking order to order, of smoothing down the sharp and wounding edge of hostile prejudice—this policy will never grow old.” At the Ottawa railway station, where an even larger crowd had gathered to greet him, he gave his recipe for Canadian greatness: “We must qualify ourselves to fulfill the spirit of tolerance and forbearance. It is our only means to make a great nation of a small people.”
Here McGee was articulating what his friend and political leader Macdonald was trying to do—to weave together all the disparate elements within the new nation into a kind of peaceable kingdom. Their perspectives were not the same—McGee always looked directly at Canada, while Macdonald kept a close eye on Britain and America—but their objectives were identical.
On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1868, a dinner was held at Ottawa’s Russell House hotel to honour McGee, where Macdonald and Cartier praised him fulsomely. A short time later, on April 7, he lingered late in the Commons, gossiping and chatting with Macdonald about political matters. When the debate finally ended after midnight, McGee and another MP, Robert MacFarlane, put on their coats, lit up cigars and walked out into the clear, sharp night, the ground covered by a light fall of new snow. At the corner of Sparks and Metcalfe streets they exchanged goodnights, McGee continuing alone on Sparks Street to Mrs. Trotter’s boarding house. At the door, he took out his key just as Mrs. Trotter opened it from the inside. At that moment there was a loud explosion.
All day, Agnes Macdonald had experienced a sense of foreboding. Macdonald didn’t get home until after two in the morning. Waiting up for him, she wrote later, “a sort of dread came upon me, as I looked out into the cold, still bright moonlight, that something might happen to him at that hour coming home alone.” But then she “heard the carriage wheels & flew down to open the door for my Husband.”
Shortly afterwards, Agnes heard a frantic knocking on the door. “Springing up I threw on a wrapper & ran into my dressing-room, just in time to see John throw up the window & to hear him call out, ‘Is there anything the matter?’ ” “McGee is murdered, lying in the street. Shot thro’ the head,” the messenger shouted back. Macdonald, accompanied by Hewitt Bernard, immediately raced into town by carriage, where they found McGee still lying where he had fallen outside the boarding house. Macdonald cradled McGee’s head in his arms and held him until a doctor arrived to confirm that he was dead. Only then did Macdonald and the others carry his body to a couch inside. Back home, his overcoat sodden with blood, Macdonald collapsed. As Agnes wrote, “He was much agitated, for him whose self command is so wonderful … his face a ghostly white.”
That night, Macdonald slept for just two hours, then went to the office to fire off telegrams demanding that those involved—Fenians, as was assumed universally—be arrested and brought to justice. In the Commons, Macdonald began his tribute: “His hand was open to everyone. His heart was made for friends. And his enmities were written in water.” He faltered, stopped and had to begin again: “He was too good, too generous to be rich. Yet he has left us a sacred legacy.” He went on to declare that McGee’s widow and two young daughters now “belong to the state” and would receive a government annuity.*
In a letter written to Bishop Connolly of Halifax, Macdonald wrote that McGee “was just in the beginning of his usefulness.” Out of politics and into a sinecure, he could have “devote[d] himself to literary pursuits.” In fact, McGee’s true gift was as a speaker, and it’s likely his words would not have translated well onto a blank page without the magic he invested in them through his wonderful voice. What is certain is that post-Confederation Canada missed him. So did Macdonald, as he continued on without the bard beside him to challenge and tease him—and perhaps to stretch him further than he might otherwise have gone.
The assassinated McGee was given a full state funeral, and people crowded the streets to mourn him. In his eulogy delivered in the Commons, Macdonald said, “His heart was made for friends. And his enmities were written in water,” faltered, then added, “He has left us a sacred legacy.” (photo credit 4.2)
The trial of McGee’s alleged killer, Patrick Whelan, a twenty-eight-year-old tailor, was close to a shambles. Whelan confessed to being involved in the affair but denied firing any shots, and he named no accomplices. Proof of a Fenian connection to the murder has never been uncovered. At the trial, Macdonald displayed rage at the death of his friend and a capacity for revenge as he sat beside the presiding judge. In the spectators’ gallery, Agnes watched with a sharp eye as Whelan “munched apples … and watched the flies creep on the ceiling and laughed when the Constable’s foot slipped.” Then, with a softness amid the sharpness, she wrote about Whelan’s solitary wait for the jury’s verdict: “They tell me he cannot feel.… But how can a living healthy man, young and active, in whose veins the blood bounds quick and strong, [how] can he know he shall be sentenced to hang by the neck until his body be dead, and not feel!” Whelan was found guilty. Although he possessed a revolver of the same kind that fired the lethal bullet, he never admitted guilt. He was hanged on February 11, 1869, after speaking his final words: “God save Ireland and God save my soul.”
By this time, Nova Scotians had started to walk themselves back into Confederation. The turnaround began in London, when Gladstone, the new prime minister, and Lord Granville, his colonial secretary, made it clear to Joseph Howe that Nova Scotia’s request to be released from Confederation was unthinkable.
Howe was now living on what he called “old savings of one kind or another”—loans from supporters that they, and he, knew he could never repay. On his return from his disappointing mission to England, he was finally ready to hear what Macdonald had to propose.
In fact, Macdonald had almost botched his first attempt to reach out to Howe. As he explained to Tupper, he had thought of “writing him a letter to greet him on his arrival” in Ottawa in 1867, offering such plums as “a seat in the Cabinet, a Railway Commissionership, a vacant Senatorship,” but he did not follow through because he was concerned that his “letter might be misunderstood and looked on as an attempt to offer him personal advancement.” He decided, instead, to deal with some of Nova Scotia’s specific grievances. To placate public discontent over the new dominion tariffs, he made imports of corn, corn meal and flour duty free and lowered the rate on sugar.
All along, Macdonald was well aware that federal patronage was the best way to connect him to Howe. It had to be offered, though, in a decorous way. In September 1868, he confided to Howe his concern that there was no Nova Scotian on the Railway Commission, which had been set up to oversee the Intercolonial Railway, the Quebec City—Halifax line pledged in the constitution. He hoped “you will speedily see your way to the nomination of a Nova Scotian of standing.” * A few weeks later, he advised Howe that, with great regret, he had had to fill three penitentiary director vacancies after having “held these appointments open as long as possible.”
By delaying making patronage appointments, Macdonald was angering his own supporters. Tupper protested, saying that local supporters were “completely paralyzed” by the scarcity of appointments and contracts, but Macdonald reminded him that he was playing a game “that was settled between you and myself.” At this game, Macdonald was the master. The favours he distributed to his supporters reminded wavering anti-Confederates of what they were missing. And the occasional plums he granted to the “enemy” signalled to them that he was serious about making a deal. Soon, hardline “antis” began to suspect that Howe was at least thinking of getting into bed with the enemy, if not yet sleeping with him. Macdonald was beginning to isolate Howe from his own supporters.
In parallel, the Colonial Office, clearly with Macdonald’s knowledge if not at his instigation, advised Howe it had “confidence” the dominion might be ready to “relax or modify any arrangements … which may prejudice the peculiar interests of Nova Scotia.” This gentle turn of the Imperial screw informed Howe that he might be able to get what were known as “better terms” for his province—in other words, more money than had been provided for in the BNA Act. When Howe boarded a ship to return to Canada, he found that Tupper and Leonard Tilley were also aboard. Tilley, the former New Brunswick premier, now one of Macdonald’s ministers, joined him at breakfast one morning; as Tilley later reported to Macdonald, Howe let on during the meal that he was ready to “abandon our opposition to Confederation if some concessions are made.”
Immediately, Macdonald moved from the wings to centre stage. In August 1868 he accepted an invitation from Howe to go to Halifax. The anti-Confederates, led by Premier William Annand, refused to talk to him. But after he met Howe privately in a church, Macdonald knew that the repeal cause was lost. Howe agreed to arrange a meeting between him and some moderate anti-Confederates, and the encounter went comparatively well.
By November, Macdonald had escalated his attentions to Howe to the level of unashamed flattery. Howe was “the sole means, but the certain means” of resolving the crisis, Macdonald wrote. “You are the Nova Scotia Mirabeau,” he said, comparing Howe to Honoré Mirabeau, the moderate French revolutionary who conducted secret negotiations with Louis XVI which might have saved the king’s life and saved France from the Terror. Later, he emphasized to Howe how important it was that he “gain the prestige of extracting from the Dominion Government some important concessions for Nova Scotia.” The way to do this would be for Finance Minister John Rose to go to Halifax to negotiate with Howe. But Rose would then have to talk to Annand’s provincial government and cede it a share of the credit. Macdonald’s solution was for Howe and the Canadian representatives to meet on neutral territory, outside the province. Once Howe agreed to this plan, Macdonald wrote triumphantly to Rose: “Nova Scotia is about to take the shilling and enlist in the Union, though I’m afraid it will consider itself for a time as a conscript rather than as a volunteer.”
On January 15, 1869, Howe and Rose met secretly in Portland, Maine. They readily reached a two-part agreement: Canada would assume all of Nova Scotia’s provincial debt of close to $2 million and increase its annual subsidy to the province by $85, 000 a year. The federal cabinet quickly ratified the agreement. On January 30, 1869, Howe joined Macdonald’s cabinet.
Before he could do so, Howe, as the rules still required, had to resign his seat and win a by-election as a Conservative candidate. The campaign was bitter, nasty and exceedingly expensive: all told, Howe and his anti-Confederate opponent spent an incredible $50,000.* Howe won by just 313 votes, down from his margin of 2,141 in 1867.
As a cabinet minister, Howe made the news headlines only once, as a result of a speech he delivered to the Young Men’s Christian Association in Ottawa on February 27, 1872. There, he unloaded all his hurt feelings towards Britain, claiming that the Mother Country no longer cared about the colonies and describing its recent dealings with Canada in trilateral negotiations in Washington as an attempt “to buy her own peace at the sacrifice of our interests.” Macdonald hastily reassured the governor general that Howe’s outburst had been “inexcusable … and disloyal.” More realistically, he told a supporter that Howe’s indiscretion proved that “the veteran should not lag superfluous on the stage.” In 1873, Macdonald appointed Howe lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, but he died a few weeks later. As a rebel against Confederation, Howe’s great weakness was to be too loyal to Britain.
It took Nova Scotians some time to see themselves as anything more than Confederation conscripts. In August 1869, when Governor General Lisgar made his first visit to Halifax, not a single provincial cabinet minister attended the official welcoming reception. And in advance of a provincial election in 1871, the anti-Confederate provincial government barred federal civil servants from voting. The real source of this rancour was economic hard times. Once conditions improved, particularly in the form of the record fish catches from 1869 on, so did relations between Nova Scotia and Canada. Most of the MPs who had come to Ottawa as anti-Confederates eventually joined the Conservative Party.
The story did not end there. In a Commons debate on the “better terms” Macdonald had promised to Nova Scotia, the Opposition and even some Conservatives from other provinces argued strongly that Ottawa should never have been so generous. So began the federal-provincial haggling about money and jurisdiction that has dominated Canadian political debate ever since.
* The territory was named after the dashing Royalist cavalry general Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who secured the charter for his Company of Adventurers from Charles II, his cousin.
* Financial figures in this section are taken from the detailed account provided by J.K. Johnson in his and Peter Waite’s joint profile of Macdonald in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
* Sometime in 1867, McGee did take the pledge, and from then to the end drank not a drop.
* Macdonald, in a later letter to Joseph Howe, said the amount was intended to be $2,000 a year, but the Opposition demurred and it was reduced to $1,200, with additional money being raised by public subscription. In addition, McGee’s two daughters received a lump sum of £1,000 each.
* The commission’s sole purpose was to distribute patronage and limit construction costs. Sandford Fleming, the railway’s chief engineer, fought manfully to keep patronage down and construction standards up, but he had only intermittent success.
* The two sides also taught Canadians lessons in the black arts of electoral fraud. The safe way to bribe voters was to overpay for staple supplies such as flour, pigs and transportation. No system was ever perfect, though; one voter, pressured by a creditor to mark his ballot against Confederation, refused to do so and ended up in a debtors’ jail.