Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  I have united the voice of seven-eighths of the House of Assembly … [and] met the wishes of a large majority of the population of Upper Canada and of the British inhabitants of Lower Canada. I have removed the main ground of discontent and distrust among the French-Canadian population. I have satisfied them that the Union is capable of being administered for their happiness and advantage and have consequently disarmed their opposition to it. I have excited among them the strongest feeling of gratitude to the provincial government, and if my policy be approved by H.M.’s government, I shall have removed their chief cause of hostility to British institutions, and have added another security for their devotion to the British crown.… The present crisis has offered the occasion; I have seized it.37

  Bagot was under no illusions that he was scandalizing the Blimpish Imperialist humbug of Stanley and MacNab and their co-reactionaries, but he was largely correct in his claim: he had broken the logjam, though some obstructions remained, and had made it possible for Canada to take another giant step toward permanence and nationhood. Baldwin, speaking in the Assembly on September 17, 1842, spoke the truth (as this righteous man always did): “The great principle of responsibility is formally and solemnly recognized.… From this period dates a revolution effected without blood or slaughter; but none the less glorious.… The connection between this country and the mother country … [is] not a union of parchment, but a union of hearts and of free-born men.”38 Above all, Bagot recognized that “You cannot govern Canada without the French.”39

  Stanley was shaken and considered recalling Bagot, a step for which, of course, there was already much precedent. But the governor had already indicated he was unwell, and Stanley was concerned with the effect of his actions on Parliament and the other major powers, in Europe and the United States; he had no interest in what the Canadians thought of anything. As Bagot had hoped and suspected, Stanley recognized that the die was now cast and there could be no turning all the way back, even under a new governor, after what Durham the Whig and Bagot the enlightened Tory had done. The British could not cope with another rebellion undertaken in pursuit of the policies enunciated by liberal British governors, and if British military guarantees of its North American colonies were ended, those colonies would be snaffled in double-quick time by the United States, whatever the southern slaveholders thought of it. The army of the United States could not be held again on the well-travelled approaches along Lake Champlain and at the Niagara and St. Clair Rivers by Canadian militiamen alone.

  Stanley, with some elegance in the circumstances, replied to Bagot, “We are prepared to support [your policy], and defend you for having pursued it. Only we must rest your defence on the impossibility of your carrying on the government without having recourse to the men whom you have called to your councils.”40 Bagot’s achievement was crowned at the polls. LaFontaine and Baldwin were required to seek re-election after joining the ministry. York North easily returned LaFontaine, but violence and intimidation by the Orange Lodge caused Baldwin to be defeated in his home district of Hastings by forty-nine votes, and his favour to LaFontaine was immediately returned by one of LaFontaine’s followers retiring as member for Rimouski, which district easily returned the unilingual Torontonian Robert Baldwin on January 30, 1843. The complete segregation of French and English Canadians, which had obtained since the arrival of the Loyalists from America sixty years before, could not be more decisively terminated than by the installation of a joint ministry with the leaders representing each other’s co-nationals and co-religionists (though neither, and especially LaFontaine, was a very energetic communicant). Sir Charles Bagot died in his residence in Kingston on May 18, 1843, although he had already resigned and his replacement had just taken up his post. Bagot sadly made it fifteen governors general in a row who did not complete full terms in good official condition, but he must rank as one of the great statesmen in Canada’s history.

  Stanley chose Sir Charles Metcalfe as the next governor general of Canada: a distinguished colonial official in India and Jamaica, a rather stern and inflexible traditionalist unaccustomed to give-and-take with colonial leaders, though a good-natured and liberal-minded man. Unfortunately, Stanley could not help himself and gave Metcalfe the secret mission to prevent the inclusion of the French and the triumph of the Reformers from leading to the full-blown installation of responsible government as irreversible orthodoxy. It was an impossible task. A coolness soon arose between the ministers and the governor over the issue of patronage, which LaFontaine made it clear to Metcalfe’s secretary, Captain James Higginson, should be approved by the ministers and not just arbitrarily determined by the governor. In the 1843 session, the main ingredients of the Baldwin–LaFontaine agenda were Baldwin’s bill to curb the Orange Lodge, especially in its tendency to intervene violently in elections (including his own late defeat in Hastings), with the Secret Societies Bill, and his University Bill, designed to wrench King’s College out of the bejewelled episcopal hand of John Strachan and create a secular and multi-denominational University of Toronto. Metcalfe, with no warning, reserved the Secret Societies Bill after it had passed, for review by the Imperial government (and after he had had a clandestine meeting with the head of the Orange Lodge, Ogle Robert Gowan, in which the grand master of the Grand Orange Lodge later said Metcalfe had predicted the early departure of Baldwin, Hincks, and Harrison 41). The University Bill was so beset that the ministry suspended pursuit of it pending review and possible amendment. The agitation was led by Strachan (who subscribed himself “John, by Divine Permission, First Bishop of Toronto”42) and petitioned that (his former student) Baldwin’s bill “is in its nature atheistical, and so monstrous in its consequences that if successfully carried out … it would utterly destroy all that is pure and holy in morals and religion, and lead to greater corruption than anything adopted during the madness of the French Revolution.… Such a fatal departure from all that is good is without a parallel in the history of the world.”43 It was a feisty session, with all the French- and English-speaking legislators mixed together. Baldwin described the French-Canadian members as “sitting at the feet of the honourable Knight [Metcalfe] as a political Gamaliel.”44

  The ministers then pushed the patronage issue and demanded Metcalfe’s approval that the ministry be consulted on all appointments to public office. Metcalfe refused, and the entire ministry resigned, except for Dominick Daly (1798–1868), a likeable veteran placeman who was provincial secretary for Canada East. Metcalfe eventually prorogued and reconstituted the ministry under the returning Draper, with Denis-Benjamin Viger (1774–1861), an old Patriote who had been a member of the Quebec Assembly from 1810 to 1838, when he was briefly imprisoned, as co-premier with Draper. They also recruited Papineau’s somewhat less excitable brother, Denis-Benjamin Papineau. Durham’s old sidekick Edward Gibbon Wakefield made a cameo reappearance in Canada, well-paid by the North American Colonial Association of Ireland, and got himself elected to the Assembly, but he resigned after a few months, following the death of his brother in England, and departed Canada forever. He was a strong supporter, and even confidant, of Metcalfe while he was present, and was regarded as a traitor by the Durhamite Reformers. Wakefield and Francis Hincks engaged in a fierce and entertaining exchange about Canadian matters in the London press for some months, as Hincks submitted columns to the Morning Chronicle and Wakefield moved around the Tory press like a pollinating bee. Wakefield grossly misrepresented the state of opinion in Canada, and Hincks, a greatly more substantial character, won the exchange, but it enlivened the subject and raised interest in it in the Imperial capital.

  Nothing more occurred legislatively, and Metcalfe dissolved the Assembly for new elections in September 1844. They were the most violent in Canadian history. The Irish navvies who were working on the canals that Sydenham had laid down intimidated voters in many constituencies but were bipartisan, depending on which side paid them. Metcalfe and his followers pushed loyalty and the avoidance of a French takeover in Cana
da West, while the followers in Canada East tried to exploit Patriote resentment of the rise of LaFontaine. It was in some respects an unholy alliance between old Upper Canada Tories and old Lower Canada quasi-rebels. William Draper himself took a high road oratorically and stuck with Sydenham’s old benignities and prevarications, but without Sydenham’s disdain for the French Canadians. The ministry won a paper-thin victory in the Assembly, after a very doubtful exercise of a free franchise. Baldwin and LaFontaine were returned, but Hincks was defeated. There were too many contradictory factions supporting the ministry for it to accomplish much, and Draper and Viger essentially kept a caretaker regime going with some dexterity until 1847. Draper tried a university bill almost identical to Baldwin’s, but the Tories would not let it come to a vote. Overtures were made to LaFontaine by the agile Draper, cunning in tactics but a principled Tory, but LaFontaine would only return to office on his terms. Baldwin was not approached but would have had nothing to do with it if he had been. He wrote LaFontaine after the talks, conducted through the Speaker of the Assembly, René-Édouard Caron (1800–1876), of which Baldwin was kept fully advised, that Draper’s design to unite a Tory majority in Upper Canada with a Reform majority in Lower Canada would ultimately facilitate “the schemes of those who looked forward to the union as a means of crushing the French-Canadians.” Baldwin believed that a coalition of ethnic majorities would inevitably lead to the suppression of the French by the English and the collapse of any notion of a viable Canada, and that Tories and Reformers must both seek support among both groups. An English Party and a French Party, in initial cooperation, he wrote, “will not be injurious to the French Canadian portion of our population alone. It appears to me equally clear that it will be most calamitous to the country in general. It will perpetuate distinctions, initiate animosities, sever the bonds of political sympathy and sap the foundation of public morality.”45 In taking the position that the English and French Canadians had to collaborate in governing Canada, and that Canadian political parties had to have representation among both French and English Canadians, Baldwin and LaFontaine made Canada possible. If there were an English-Canadian party and a French-Canadian party, nothing but perfunctory or superficial collaboration between the two Canadas would be possible, and French Canada, if union were perpetuated on a reformed basis, would always be subject to the imposition of the tyranny of the majority. Only a country and political movements based on a fusion of legitimate English and French interests would be able to function durably. Baldwin showed himself not only to be a seeker of colonial rights and autonomy, but a statesman whose vision of the Canada of the future was extraordinarily clear and accurate, presciently arrived at and courageously pursued. He awaited confidently the collapse of this final stand by the flat-earth imperialists.

  3. Reform at Last, 1846–1851

  It was an illogically protracted debate, and the central fact of it was that almost nobody in the British Parliament, government, or Opposition, knew anything about conditions in Canada. In general, they waffled between such indifference to the castaway colonists that they were prepared to abandon them to the Americans and, on the other hand, a generally stronger and more frequent apprehension that the Americans not seize British North America by infiltration and border skirmishing by irregulars. (It continued to be generally recognized that the United States had even less enthusiasm for war than the British government did, reflecting the might and prestige of the British Empire and the growing American preoccupation with slavery.) On February 2, 1844, Stanley declared in the House of Commons, “Place the governor of Canada in a state of absolute dependence on his council, and they at once would make Canada an independent and republican colony.” The colonial secretary, in his effervescent imperialism, overlooked that a republican colony is practically impossible. Responsible government, as Baldwin, LaFontaine, Hincks, Durham, and Bagot understood it, overlooked “altogether the distinction which must subsist between an independent country and a colony subject to the domination of the mother country,” Stanley said.46 It was hard to believe that the holder of such obtuse opinions would, in the next twenty-five years, be the prime minister three times, albeit briefly. In domestic matters, he was a sensible (if often flustered) ally of Disraeli.

  What Stephen Leacock describes as the “magnificent stupidity” of Stanley’s view was captured in his rhetorical Manichaean division of Canadians between “rebels” and “honest men,” and his assertion that the Crown must dispense patronage only to those “who, in the hour of peril, had come forward to manifest their loyalty and to maintain the union of Canada with the Crown of England.”47 Of course, this was simply nonsense, and formulating the issue like this assured that there would be no possibility of a successful resolution of Canadian problems. Stanley concluded by referring to Baldwin and LaFontaine, specifically, as “unprincipled demagogues and mischievous advisers.” They were leaders of the opposition in a kindred, if less sovereign, Parliament, and this was a shocking breach of parliamentary etiquette, as well as a complete misreading of the individuals. Stanley effectively repeated Russell’s Ten Resolutions of reply to Papineau. To avoid another severe defeat in North America, the British Empire would have to be protected locally from the stupidity, on these issues, of its leaders in both major parties. They had learned little in the seventy years since the American troubles began, and there had been few Americans then to warn them except Benjamin Franklin, and his advice was rejected, despite the support of Chatham, Burke, and Fox. Now, there was no such eminent support in Westminster, but Baldwin, LaFontaine, and Hincks, and some younger men such as John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, could deliver popular support for sane policy if the British would listen to it. As Baldwin had told a large gathering of supporters at Toronto on May 12, 1844, “This is not a mere party struggle. This is Canada against her oppressors. The people of Canada claiming the British Constitution against those who withhold it: the might of public opinion against faction and corruption,” and, though he deemed it inadvisable to say so, against the antediluvian stupidity of those overseas protectors who alone assured, by their positions and not their qualities as statesmen, the comparative passivity of the ravening, but unabashedly democratic, Americans.48 The debate continued in Canada through the mid-1840s in all the florid hyperbole of Victorian prolixity.

  The radicals who opposed Stanley, such as Mackenzie’s friends Joseph Hume and John Roebuck, did so to harass a Tory minister and from a visceral liberality that required greater local autonomy, not from any knowledge of the facts. Only Baldwin and LaFontaine and Hincks and their supporters had a realistic alternative to the choice between either continued complete subordination to the lofty and often pretentious whims of British governors or instant assimilation into the sprawling American republic. The French Canadians generally liked American republicanism but knew that joining the United States would be the end of the French language other than as an historic relic. The English Canadians had no problem with the Americans culturally, as an English-speaking country, but they did not like what they generally regarded as chaotic, corrupt, and boastful American republicanism, tainted by the evil of slavery. The smart Canadians were effectively playing a game of chicken, using revolutionary agitation to push Britain into realistic concessions of autonomy without it becoming so exasperated that it withdrew the protection that kept British North America from being swallowed whole by the Americans.

  As the 1845 Canadian session ended in March, having achieved nothing except new heights of acrimony, it was announced that Sir Charles Metcalfe would be elevated to the peerage. Thomas Cushing Aylwin (1806–1871), a Reform member from Quebec City, though a Harvard University graduate and former solicitor general for Canada East, infelicitously declared in the Assembly that “it would be more fitting that Metcalfe should be recalled and put on trial.”49 These sentiments, which were expressed by an unseemly number of Reformers, were particularly inappropriate in the light of Metcalfe’s deteriorating physical condition. He h
ad had a bout of cancer before taking up his post in Canada, and by the summer of 1845 he was in agonies compounded by near blindness, and requested his recall. He departed Canada in November 1845, the sixteenth consecutive governor general of Canada not to finish his term at its normal end in good political and physical condition. Lord Metcalfe of Fern Hill died on September 5, 1846, a brave and dedicated man who had been sent on an impossible mission.

  The acting governor general was Charles Murray Cathcart (1783–1859), the director of military forces, a doughty general who had slogged all the way through the Napoleonic Wars, had three horses shot out from under him at Waterloo, and had been the governor of Edinburgh Castle before coming to Canada. Lord Cathcart was sent to deal with an anticipated crisis in relations with the United States. The Rush–Bagot Agreement of 1818 had extended the Canadian–American frontier to the Rocky Mountains. Beyond was the Oregon Territory, which stretched from California to Alaska (then a Russian territory) and it was agreed that it should be subject to joint government by Britain and the United States. By 1844, this had become an issue in America. The British had proposed extending the Rush–Bagot line to the Pacific coast and Canada receiving all of Vancouver Island, but they also wanted navigation rights to the mouth of the Columbia River in the United States. In the piping days of manifest destiny, this became a political issue for the Democrats, who adopted in the 1844 election the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” meaning that the United States would take the whole territory right to Alaska and shut Canada off from the Pacific Ocean. The winning candidate in the election, James Knox Polk, America’s first “dark horse,” who had not been a contestant at the start of his party’s convention, was a colourless but very astute former Speaker of the House and governor of Tennessee. The convention was hung between former president Martin Van Buren and General (his military career was mainly spent fighting the native people) Lewis Cass (1782–1866), and so historian George Bancroft suggested Polk, who very narrowly defeated the Whig candidate, former Speaker, secretary of state, and giant of the U.S. Senate, Henry Clay, who had been seeking the presidency for the third time. (Polk rewarded Bancroft with the posts of secretary of the navy and minister to Great Britain.) Polk was a protégé of the fierce and still influential former president General Andrew Jackson, and campaigned on a platform that also included the annexation of Texas. This implied the admission of Texas as a slave state, although Mexico had abolished slavery, including in Texas, some years before. Admitting Oregon as a free state would balance new admissions of states to the union between slave and free states. In fact, Polk had no intention whatever of going to war with Britain; exactly the reverse. He used the sabre-rattling of his campaign to win a compromise close to what Britain had been proposing over Oregon with the additional ingredient that Britain would cease to support Mexico in resisting the American annexation of Texas. Britain and France had both been trying to contain American expansion southward, and the Americans were not prepared to tolerate their interference.