True Loyalty’s to Motherland
And not to Canada,
The love we bear is second-hand
To any step-mama.
British Colonist, Victoria, BC
Throughout the greater part of May 1870, the Ottawa Times kept a six-column obituary of Macdonald set in type so it could be used at any time. In his first report to Governor General Lisgar, Macdonald’s doctor, James A. Grant, confided that he saw “little hope” the prime minister would survive. Parliament adjourned for the day and a huge crowd gathered at the entrance to the East Block, where Macdonald remained in his office. They were admonished to be very quiet.
Macdonald’s condition was exceedingly serious. In Grant’s diagnosis, he had passed a gallstone—a “biliary calculus”—of unusual size. The excruciating pain inflicted by the stone’s descent caused him to pass out and fall to the floor.* The pain reoccurred several times, and he was treated with morphine. The passing of a gallstone, however, is not in itself lethal. From early on, Macdonald seemed to know he was going to survive: when Lady Macdonald, attempting to ease his discomfort, rubbed some whisky onto his chest, Macdonald quipped, “Oh, do it again, it seems to do me good.” When his doctor limited his lunch to a half oyster on the grounds that the country’s future depended on him, Macdonald retorted, “It seems strange that the hopes of Canada should depend on half an oyster.”
Globe report of May 13, 1870, of the medical bulletin on Macdonald’s condition after he passed a “biliary calculus.” For a time it was feared he might die. (photo credit 11.1)
Right across the country, the response to the medical crisis was massive and deeply personal. Macdonald had come to be seen as Canada’s champion, and as its first celebrity. Dr. Grant issued bulletins every morning and evening. The biographer E.B. Biggar compared the extent of national anxiety and sympathy to that of Americans after Lincoln’s assassination. It was during this period that Macdonald’s friend David Macpherson learned how close to bankruptcy Macdonald was and set out to raise a “testimonial fund” to protect him and his family in future.
Lady Macdonald rose to the challenge of restoring him to full health by her exceptional powers of organization and decision. When he could not be moved initially from the East Block, his office there became a sickroom. All the clerks in the building were ordered out so there would be no noise to disturb his rest. Agnes was at his side every day and through every night. Once Macdonald began to recover, she moved him to the more comfortable quarters of the Speaker’s office, and on good days had him taken out to the clifftop behind the Library of Parliament to breathe in the fresh air and enjoy the splendid view out over the Ottawa River.
The long illness gave Agnes the opportunity to nurse Macdonald back to health—and to bring them close together again. It’s possible she may have exaggerated the risks to Macdonald’s life to give herself this role. Even before he collapsed, she had worried about his health. Earlier in the session, she realized he was working so hard on the Red River file that he often ate nothing between the breakfasts and suppers she provided for him at home. So she arranged for a light lunch to be brought to his office every day.
Once his recovery was well under way, Agnes arranged a holiday for Macdonald, something he needed desperately after years of intensive nation-building but had not been capable of arranging for himself. In mid-June the government steamer, Druid, took them down the Ottawa River to Montreal, then chugged on down the St. Lawrence towards the cooler breezes of the Gulf.* At Charlottetown, on July 8, Macdonald was carried ashore in an easy chair and taken by carriage to a house that had been prepared for their arrival. Within a week, he began taking short walks in the grounds. Agnes allowed few visitors to call, and almost no official papers to be sent to him. The holiday stretched out to seven weeks, until they returned to Ottawa by train on September 22.
The next day, Macdonald wrote to his sister Margaret, promising, “I shall not do much work for some months but act in the Govt. as a Consulting Physician.” In fact, within a few days he sent off a long letter to the governor general complaining about President Grant’s decision to pardon the Fenian commander John O’Neill, who had led a cross-border raid back in 1866. Macdonald predicted that O’Neill, once free, would organize another raid—which indeed he did, a year later in Manitoba. Before long, Macdonald told a friend that the gallstone attack had given him “a new lease on easier terms.” Rather than the government’s consulting physician, he was already back to performing as its brain surgeon.
In fact, he was never fully the same again. He was close to sixty now, and his heavy drinking and neglect of himself while a widower had taken their toll. That October, he informed an inquirer, “I have now, thank God, quite recovered from my very severe attack.” A year later, though, he admitted to his friend Judge James Robert Gowan, “Of course the severe attack I had last year has left its mark on me for life.” He had lost some of his resilience, and his furious bursts of energy lasted for shorter periods. References to illnesses such as colds, influenza, a “touch of cholera,” an attack of “catarrah of the stomach” and an unnamed “disease” that kept him confined to the house for eleven days began to occur much more frequently in his correspondence. He allowed himself breaks and ever-longer holidays. The lion wasn’t yet in winter, but he was well into the fall.
In Macdonald’s absence, Cartier successfully piloted the Manitoba Bill through Parliament. After its passage, Father Noël-Joseph Ritchot stayed on in Ottawa trying to secure from Cartier and Lisgar a written commitment to a comprehensive amnesty, only to be told yet again that, while the matter looked exceedingly promising, the decision had to be made in London. Finally, to satisfy Ritchot, Cartier composed a long petition to the Queen that, under the priest’s signature, urged her to “exercise Your Royal Prerogative of mercy by an act of amnesty.”
Signs of the strain on Macdonald can be seen in this photograph, taken a year later at William Notman’s studio in Ottawa. (photo credit 11.2)
By the end of June, Ritchot was back in Red River, where he presented a balanced report on the constitutional and land allocation agreements reached in Ottawa but expressed more confidence in the imminent arrival of a comprehensive amnesty than the facts warranted. Riel had a twenty-one-gun salute fired in the priest’s honour, and the provisional government formally accepted the Manitoba Act. His duty done, Ritchot retired to his parish at St. Norbert, where he lived for the rest of his life. Bishop Alexandre Taché, however, was uneasy at the continued absence of a written commitment to a comprehensive amnesty. He went to Ottawa, met with Cartier, and asked him to arrange an audience with the governor general. Lisgar was dismissive and harsh, pointing out that Thomas Scott had been “murdered in cold blood,” making the issuance of an amnesty at this time “injudicious, impolitic and dangerous.” Offstage, Macdonald’s stance was that no action should be taken on any amnesty “until the election is over.”
By this time, the military expedition was making its slow and determined way towards Red River. Its commander was Colonel Garnet Wolseley, one of Britain’s ablest officers, later leader of the expedition up the Nile to Khartoum in a failed attempt to rescue General Charles Gordon, where he used the skills of some three hundred Canadian voyageurs to get the troops over the Nile cataracts. He ended his career as a field marshal and a viscount* but is remembered best as the model for Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Very model of a modern major-general.” For the expedition to Red River, Wolseley commanded twelve hundred men, four hundred of whom were British regulars and the rest Canadian militia from Ontario and Quebec, mostly anglo-Quebecers. Militarily, Wolseley’s performance was exceptional: he took his mini-army, its cannon and supplies, across the tortuous, mosquito-infested portages and bare rock westward from the Lakehead without losing a man.†
Macdonald, still recuperating in Prince Edward Island, had a personal connection to the expeditionary force. His son, Hugh John, had long aspired to a military career and pleaded to be allowed to go. Macdonald refused, no doubt because of his lifelong skepticism about military life. Hugh John, by now twenty years old and in the militia, took his case to Cartier, arguing that, if he didn’t go, he would be accused of being a coward. Cartier persuaded Macdonald to relent, and Ensign Macdonald joined the 16th Company of the First Ontario Rifles. Hugh John showed some aptitude for military life. He was indifferent to hardship and soon acquired an ability to “swear a little” and bawl out the ditty then popular among young men: “Mary, mother, we believe / That without sin you did conceive / Teach, we pray thee, us believing / How to sin without conceiving.” The son’s views about Riel were far harsher than his father’s: he got into a “violent debate” with Macdonald, “pitch[ing] into the whole policy of the government on the Red River matter.”
Hugh John Macdonald, aged 22, at this time alienated from his father and seeking a military career rather than the legal one his father insisted on. (photo credit 11.3)
Hugh John saw no action, but on his return still hoped for a military career. His father dashed his hopes. He told his sister Margaret that Hugh John “has had his ‘Outing’ & must now go to work.” When the young man returned to Toronto, he discovered that his father had arranged for him to article with Robert Harrison, a prominent lawyer. He responded by having “a great battle about smoking downstairs” with his father at their Ottawa house, winning, so he boasted to a friend, by threatening to take his books upstairs and do all his reading in his bedroom.
Once on the prairie, the expeditionary force moved quickly. At last, in pouring rain, it neared the Red River settlement and made straight for the stone hulk of Fort Garry. It was deserted. As one British officer recorded, the soldiers were “enthusiastically greeted by a half-naked Indian, very drunk.” Only at the last minute had Riel realized how precarious was his position. Accompanied by his annexationist friend William O’Donoghue, he fled just before the troops reached the fort, leaving behind the warm remains of his breakfast (which soldiers promptly ate). From the comparative safety of St. Boniface, Riel watched the contingent march through the settlement, remarking to O’Donoghue, “He who ruled in Fort Garry yesterday is now a homeless wanderer with nothing to eat but two dried fishes.” The two men set out on the long journey to the border, initially on horseback and, after losing their horses, on foot. Riel was safe, but he had lost his country.
The British troops left within a week. The Canadian militiamen in Red River, particularly the Orangemen, began a long reign of terror. Two Métis were killed in suspicious circumstances, and there were constant brawls. Blame rested with the local commanders, British and Canadian, and more so with the government, which, during Macdonald’s convalescence, failed to issue clear directions for maintaining peace and order or to ensure that the incoming lieutenant-governor, Adams Archibald, made it to Red River and established civilian rule before the troops arrived.
In his seminal book The Birth of Western Canada, historian George Stanley wrote of Red River, “The serpent in this Eden was progress.”* Progress—railways, the telegraph, mechanized farming, immigrants from Ontario and later Europe, and an organized government, police and legal system—was inevitable, and neither the Métis nor the Indians could continue to live in their traditional ways. The creation of the province of Manitoba, though only “postage-stamp sized,” might benefit the Métis for a time, with its official bilingualism and separate schools provided for in the Manitoba Act, but within a few years the population balance in the province would tilt against the francophones as Ontario settlers poured in. Quickening this process was the decline of the buffalo and disputes over land claims. As early as 1874, the Manitoba Free Press was calling for an end to bilingualism and separate schools. Despairing of their future, many Métis took scrip (a title to land) and promptly sold it to speculators. Red River’s Métis and francophone character eroded rapidly, and Riel’s people moved farther west in the hope that, there, they could still be gens libres. The place many of them chose, on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, was called Batoche.
Two issues now faced Macdonald. One was that Riel, still in the United States, wanted to come back—as he did secretly, several times. In response, the Orangemen bellowed that if Riel showed himself, they would arrest him, some threatening that a bullet would end the need for any trial. The simultaneous issue was that Riel and his supporters were demanding an amnesty to exonerate him—a demand echoed overwhelmingly by the press and the public in Quebec.
Whether Macdonald ever promised an amnesty to Bishop Taché or Father Ritchot or any Riel representative was a contentious question at that time, and has been so ever since. Beyond question, Macdonald and Cartier allowed both these emissaries to believe that a general amnesty from Britain would be forthcoming. But whether one was ever actually promised is quite another matter. The two governors general who studied the matter closely—Lisgar and Dufferin—concluded that no such promise had been made. Murdoch, the senior British official involved, who discussed the matter with Ritchot, thought likewise. The evidence is often confusing: although Ritchot recorded in his diary that Murdoch had told him the British government wanted to “pass the sponge” over the matter, Murdoch later told a parliamentary inquiry he had never made “any promise or expectation of an amnesty to Riel.” Cartier and Ritchot also remember their conversations quite differently. Macdonald perhaps captured what was going on by explaining to Dufferin that, in their talks, these two negotiators had been “moving in different planes: Sir George referring to the amnesty exclusive of the persons charged with the death of Scott, and Father Ritchot always including them.”
No all-knowing referee exists, but there is an acceptable alternative: the Globe, the newspaper owned by George Brown. In 1874, when the new Liberal government established a Special Commons Committee to investigate the Red River affair, the Globe, though severely critical of Macdonald for his handling of the crisis, reported that he had “evidently committed himself to nothing that could be laid hold of.” Rather, Macdonald’s and Cartier’s talks with Taché and Ritchot had fallen “short of pledging the government to grant an amnesty.” For Brown’s paper to conclude that Macdonald was telling the truth in so vital a matter is persuasive. In Quebec, the pro-Liberal Le National also reached the same conclusion.*
Macdonald’s solution was to bribe Riel to stay safely out of the country. Improperly using money from the secret-service fund (so it wouldn’t appear in government records), augmented by six hundred dollars contributed by Donald Smith from the Hudson’s Bay Company, he got Bishop Taché to pass the funds on to the fugitive. Riel was now out of reach, both of Canadian justice and of Orange retribution. One bit of evidence suggests strongly that an amnesty was part of this arrangement. A telegram exists, disappointingly undated, in which Macdonald tells Bishop Taché: “If you can succeed in keeping him out of the way, I will make his case mine, and I will carry the point.” Riel’s “case” has to have been an amnesty, although Riel then broke his side of the bargain by sneaking back across the border. However inelegant, this solution worked—for a time.
The important matters were that the Red River resistance was over, that Manitoba was now a fact, and that it and the North-West were now Canadian. The way was open, perhaps, for Macdonald’s major nation-building feat—a transnational railway.
During Macdonald’s extended convalescence, Canada completed its expansion all the way to the west coast. This huge addition to the nation happened with unexpected ease. A serious problem did exist, as the lines at the opening of this chapter show: the loyalty of these people was to their British motherland, not to Canada. One leading citizen, Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, expressed it vividly during a debate about Confederation in the BC legislature in the spring of 1870. “No union on account of love need be looked for,” he warned. “Love for Canada has to be acquired by the prosperity of the country, and from our children.” Indeed, British Columbians called Canadians “North American Chinamen,” on the grounds that they too came, made money and left with all they had earned. Canada had one fragile asset to offer: it constituted the only way British Columbians could avoid becoming American Columbians, as very few wanted to do.
In the 1860s, British Columbia consisted of Victoria and of small groups of miners, prospectors, loggers, farmers and fishermen scattered through the rest of its vast territory. Of the total European population of around twenty thousand, four thousand lived in Victoria. It was a town of some substance: its streets were macadamized and illuminated by gaslight. It was a rather somnolent place: a visiting railway engineer noted that its shopkeepers “hated to be bothered with business, especially if there was a cricket match on, and they would all shut up shop in the event of a horse match.” It was intensely British, with all the paraphernalia of a governor surrounded by a quasi-court.* Yet the only regular steamship service to the outside world was operated by Americans; outgoing letters carried American stamps; and for urban shopping, its citizens had to go to San Francisco.
On the eve of Confederation, the junior minister for the colonies had concluded that it seemed impossible “we should long hold B.C. from its natural annexation” to the U.S. Yet the next year, a Confederation League was formed in Victoria, with the self-styled Amor de Cosmos as its leader. An engaging eccentric who never entered an electric streetcar for fear he would be electrocuted, de Cosmos injected energy into the Confederate cause through his newspaper, The British Colonist, and his passionate speeches.† More decisive yet was Macdonald’s success in 1869 in persuading the Colonial Office to appoint Anthony Musgrave as the colony’s new governor. Earlier in Newfoundland, Musgrave had mobilized opinion for a time in favour of Confederation, and he set out to do the same on Canada’s opposite side. As in Red River, there were local annexationists, and some 150 of them signed two petitions to President Grant asking him to accept the colony into the Union. Grant, however, took no action. Macdonald had also learned an important lesson in Red River. There, he had neglected to curry favour with HBC officials; in Victoria he made certain their equivalents could look forward to jobs or pensions. And so it happened that, during the spring session of 1870, the BC legislature agreed to send three delegates to Ottawa to negotiate terms for Confederation.
Remarkably, the terms the delegates brought to Ottawa contained no mention of a railway to connect British Columbia to Canada, but only of a telegraph line and a wagon road across the Rockies. As the delegates travelled eastwards over the Union Pacific Railroad from San Francisco, however, they came to realize that the line Macdonald had been talking about could actually be built. When they finally arrived in Ottawa and began their talks with Cartier, he urged them to ask for a railway, the whole way. In his impulsive, confident way, Cartier pledged that the entire 2,700-mile line would be built in just ten years. (So extravagant an offer could only have been made with Macdonald’s approval.)
Conservative MPs all but rebelled at the financial implications of the commitment Cartier had made. Macdonald, though, was by now back in Ottawa. He asked Joseph Trutch, the delegation’s leader, to come to a meeting of the Conservative caucus to assure members that the explicit terms of the railway agreement would not be insisted on. As a reward, Trutch was promised lucrative railway construction contracts and the position of lieutenant-governor. By including Aboriginals and Chinese workers in the total, Macdonald also calculated British Columbia’s population at a grossly exaggerated 120,000, thereby qualifying the province for six federal seats—far larger than its Representation by Population share—and for higher payments from Ottawa.
When the House of Commons came to debate the railway commitment, the criticism from the Opposition was intense. Liberal house leader Alexander Mackenzie described the promise as “insane.” To get the legislation through, Cartier had to promise that no taxes would be raised to pay for the railway; this commitment reduced the government’s subsidy options to those of generous land grants to the company and, as would come at a far higher cost politically, a commitment to the CPR that it would enjoy monopoly status in the West. Macdonald’s contribution was to engage in some political deviousness. He persuaded Governor Musgrave to call the BC legislature to a special session at which he asked members to approve the terms of union immediately, without any discussion. Macdonald then claimed the BC legislature’s decision amounted to “a treaty,” so that “any alteration [of the terms] by Canada would be almost equivalent to a refusal to admit the Colony into the Union.” Faced by a fait accompli, the opposition fell silent. On July 20, 1871, British Columbia formally entered Confederation as its sixth province. Macdonald had built a nation coast to coast. Only on a map, though, did it look impressive. Everything depended on a railway to give the attenuated entity a spine. As Macdonald explained later, “Until this great work is finished, our Dominion will be little more than a ‘geographical expression.’ ” Until the railway was completed to the west coast, “We have as much interest in B. Columbia as in Australia”; only once the line was finished could Canada become “a great united country with a large inter-provincial trade and a common interest.”
Before that could happen, however, Macdonald had to leave for Washington, and there fight for the nation he had created.
* E.B. Biggar included a detailed account in his Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald: “The stone would not come away, and his nervous force was exhausted by the pain. His utter prostration left the muscles relaxed, and this relaxation let the stone pass away.” In fact, it may not have been a gallstone but a kidney stone, larger and thus more painful.
* Macdonald had actually received an alternative offer—to recuperate on the other side of the continent. While he was recovering and absent from public duties, three delegates from British Columbia came to Ottawa to negotiate the Crown colony’s entry into Confederation. Their mission accomplished, they suggested that Macdonald go back with them to Victoria. The long rail trip to San Francisco, though, was judged too demanding for him.
* Late in his life, Wolseley made the uncannily accurate prediction that the eventual dominant powers in the world would be the U.S. and China, the latter only needing a “Peter the Great or Napoleon to make them so.”
† The U.S. government at first allowed only one of Wolseley’s ships to use its canal at Sault Ste. Marie, but ended its obstruction when word was passed to Washington that the Canadian government was thinking of retaliating by barring American ships from using the Welland Canal.
* Published in Britain in 1936, Stanley’s book sold only a few hundred copies in Canada. It took a second edition, published in the 1960s, for western Canadians, gaining confidence as their economy progressed, to appreciate the magnitude of this first survey of their history.
* The most intensive studies of the issue, Philippe Mailhot’s doctoral dissertation, “Ritchot’s Resistance,” and Jane Graham’s master’s thesis, “The Riel Amnesty … 1869–75,” reach contrary conclusions.
* One visitor waxed so enthusiastic about the local scene that he wrote that the “keen intelligence and zeal in public affairs” of Victoria’s citizens “suggests a parallel in the history of some of the minor states of ancient Greece and Italy.”
† De Cosmos was noted for his fondness for using the first personal singular: a newspaper had to abridge one of his speeches when its compositor ran out of the letter “I.”