by Conrad Black
Hincks continued his tussle with the Imperial Protector to the 1852 session, where he gained adoption of his resolution that the Parliament of the Province of Canada had the authority to settle the Clergy Reserves question without reference to Westminster, and the British Parliament did, in fact, repeal the 1841 Clergy Reserves Act, leaving the Province a free hand to deal with secularization of the reserves and reform the seigneurial system. Hincks also gained approval of his expanded plan to build the Grand Trunk Railway from the year-round port of Portland, Maine, to Quebec and Montreal and west to Toronto and on to the U.S. border at Sarnia. This brought Hincks into productive contact with another eminent straddler of the public and private sectors, Alexander Tilloch Galt. Hincks sponsored discussions between Galt and William M. Jackson, a London financier who had returned from Britain with Hincks, and Jackson and Galt, with Hincks’s backing, packaged together a lot of projects, rights-of-way, real estate, and uncompleted road beds and unfinished lines, which formed the base of this spinal railroad of 12,100 miles and financed by an underwriting from Baring Brothers in London. The Government of the Canadas was to guaranty three thousand pounds of bonds for every mile completed, and these measures were passed without significant opposition in bills of 1852, 1853, and 1854.
Another rather inspired measure that Hincks presented and which was adopted was the Municipal Loan Fund Bill, which facilitated municipal participation in railway construction by pledging the issuance of bonds of the Province of Canada on its credit in international financial markets, backed by municipal railway bonds that would not ordinarily have access to those markets. This led to some controversy, as Hincks and the mayor of Toronto, John George Bowes, at Bowes’s suggestion, bought some Toronto debentures from the contractors of the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Railway at a 20 per cent discount. Hincks arranged their resale as sterling debentures, enabling Hincks and Bowes to trouser an almost ten-thousand-pound profit in quick time on an investment of forty thousand pounds. They did not reveal their interest as the City of Toronto and the government of the Province of Canada consolidated debt under Hincks’s Municipal Loan Fund provisions. Bowes’s municipal opponents got wind of the mayor’s windfall, the City sued him, and Hincks’s participation emerged in the ensuing proceedings.
Hincks vehemently denied wrongdoing, but Brown and others were handed an open goal and were able to generate tremendous suspicion and hostility over other episodes where the public interest and that of Hincks himself appeared to have been infelicitously commingled. Brown wrongly accused him of buying St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad shares on insider information, and he was also wrongly accused of profiting from a bond issue by the City of Montreal on the London market that Hincks had tried to help negotiate. There was a great flurry of other allegations, including one of profiteering from land acquisitions adjacent to the canal at Sault Ste. Marie. But the most damaging charge, and the only one that may have had some merit, apart from the non-disclosure of the Bowes arrangement, was that a thousand founders’ shares of the Grand Trunk Railway had been issued in Hincks’s name and the deposit for payment had been made by the contractor. The explanation was that Hincks was holding the stock in trust for distribution to ordinary Canadians, but it had the appearance of a bribe. When Hincks returned in June 1854 from a visit to London and to Washington, where he had led negotiations on a reciprocity treaty, he was met by a hostile Assembly, and he and Morin advised Elgin to dissolve Parliament for new elections. (Elgin sponsored the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, between all of British North America and the United States, as he believed, correctly, “that nothing but entrance to the American markets could save Canada for the Empire.”60) Given the falsity of almost all the allegations against Hincks and the unjust charge that he was deliberately dragging his heels about secularization of the Clergy Reserves and reform of the seigneurial system, Hincks and Morin did well to be returned with the largest parliamentary group, but they were without a majority and tendered their resignations on September 8.
Hincks feared that Brown and John Sandfield Macdonald (leader of the Canada West English Catholics and solicitor general) would, if they got control of it, sever the link between the Reform party of Canada East and its French-Canadian allies and destabilize the union, French-English relations, and the entire status of the Canadas as a prospering entity worthy of British protection, and he tried to put together alternative coalitions. He did not directly succeed, but the imperishable Sir Allan MacNab reappeared as a conciliatory figure and proposed a coalition with Morin in which the followers of Hincks would play a prominent role, Hincks himself having determined to withdraw from public life. Hincks endorsed this plan and the program of the new government in waiting, which included secularization of the Clergy Reserves (eliminating Brown’s endlessly and loudly repeated fear that the Province’s various religious denominations would stultify its development by holding vast acreages in permanent mortmain, the cold terror that could only grip a disestablished Protestant); abolition of seigneurial tenure (it was now largely exercised by English-Canadian proprietors to exploit cheap farm labour); and the transition to an elected Legislative Council.
The traditional Tory view of Hincks was recorded a century later by conservative historian and authoritative John A. Macdonald biographer Donald Creighton: “A clever little man – a typical sharp-eyed child of that unpleasantly prolific marriage between railways and responsible government, Hincks had gone about the business of furthering his own personal interests with the direct, uncomplicated ingenuity of a precocious infant. He had presented the public with a scandal so simple, so instantly comprehensible, so wholly malodorous that it brought unmitigated damage to the government.”61 This was an absurdly biased and unjust account, but a faithful echo of the vitriolic partisanship of the era of which Creighton wrote, though Macdonald himself was not overly censorious about it (and did worse himself). A select committee of the Assembly sat for two years looking into Hincks’s conduct and concluded that there were no grounds to accuse him of corruption. Whatever his intentions with the thousand shares of Grand Trunk that he didn’t pay for, he never took possession of them and the only indiscretion was his failure to reveal the deal with Bowes, which the laws and regulations of the time did not require. Bowes had to return his share of the profit but Hincks did not. Francis Hincks retired from the Assembly on November 16, 1855. He had intended to take up the presidency of the Grand Trunk Railway, but while he was in England on a business holiday, Queen Victoria herself offered him the post of governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands. This was a complete vindication of his probity, and he accepted it and served as a progressive and well-regarded governor until moving on to the larger posting of governor of British Guiana (Guyana) in 1861. Francis Hincks did not evidently possess the insight into monetary policy of Alexander Hamilton, but he did possess in full measure Hamilton’s grasp of economics and the likely course of industry. He stands as probably the greatest unifier of the public and private sectors for the greater national good that there was in North America between Hamilton and C.D. Howe, the American-born Canadian economic czar of the Second World War and the postwar boom, a century after Hincks. Hincks had rendered great service, not only as an economic minister, but also as Baldwin’s chief adjutant in the pursuit of responsible government and as a brilliant diplomatic envoy to the Imperial government on several occasions and thorny issues. His service to Canada, when defamatory cant and emotionalism subsided, would be long and gratefully remembered, and he would be back and in a great office in a matured country after his sojourn in the Caribbean.
The first Canadian railway was the sixteen-mile Champlain and Saint Lawrence Railroad line to go round the rapids on the Richelieu River and improve the link from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson. It was a horse-drawn railway for its first year until a locomotive could be imported in 1837. A series of what were called portage lines, linking inland harbours, were built in the following decade: Buffalo to Goderich (on Lake Huron); Toronto to Colling
wood (on Georgian Bay); and Sir Allan MacNab’s Great Western Railway from Buffalo through southwestern Ontario to Detroit. These lines undercut the economic viability of Montreal, which accordingly sought a rail link to an all-season Atlantic port; this was the origin of the interest in Portland, Maine, after the British government dragged its feet on the proposed line to Halifax and Saint John, because that line would have to go down the Saint John River valley and would be too close to the United States to meet British requirements for military security (which were hardly going to be met by a railway whose terminus was in Portland, Maine). Portland was closer to Montreal than was Boston, but both cities sought to rival New York as gateways to and from the interior by a state-assisted and shorter route through Canada and the Great Lakes. This brought Alexander Galt into the equation, as the leading industrialist of the Eastern Townships. Galt was the commissioner of the British American Land Company, of which his father had been one of the founders, from 1843, when he was only twenty-six, to 1855. In this role, he laid out communities, planned and shaped the emerging city of Sherbrooke, and assembled land and assets for a railway. Galt would have an important political career, and then be a successful diplomat, but always seemed more interested in the commercial implications of what he was doing than anything else. (After the burning of the Parliament Building in Montreal in 1849 by English opponents of the Rebellion Losses Bill, he even signed the reactionary petition for annexation by the United States, along with such implausible signatories as the rouge nationalist leader, Antoine-Aimé Dorion.) Galt worked with all comers, including the sponsors of the grandiloquently styled European and North American Railway, and organized the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad to go to the U.S. border and connect there with the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, being laid northwest from Portland.
The Intercolonial Railway had been much bandied about as a project to link Quebec and Halifax, but it failed to gain the official tangible support required, and was followed as the chief project by the Grand Trunk. This was founded by vote of Parliament on the motion of its counsel, George-Étienne Cartier, leader of the French-Canadian bleus (as opposed to Dorion’s Liberal rouges), long-serving chairman of the Parliamentary Railway Committee, and, next to John A. Macdonald, the most important Canadian politician of the next twenty years. As this was a project which linked Montreal with the U.S. border at Sarnia and Detroit, as well as Buffalo, it satisfied the leading Canadian centres but did nothing for the Atlantic provinces. Galt had already built his line to Portland from Montreal and had a permit to extend to Kingston, and further additions to Toronto, and from Toronto to Guelph, with a group led by the Polish-Canadian financier Casimir Gzowski. The young and thinly populated provinces were in danger of being overbuilt with railways. Hincks put through legislation that would effectively combine the Grand Trunk and St. Lawrence and Atlantic, as well as encouraging the rationalization of other lines. Galt was a more efficient builder, and the Grand Trunk was extravagantly built by British contractors who went bankrupt in the mid-1850s, requiring further substantial infusions of provincial and municipal grants, thirty-five million dollars by 1867. Francis Hincks was better off governing the placid and temperate Barbados than presiding over the railway he had vitally helped to conceive. All that can be said is that there was even greater financial chaos in the railways of the United States, where there was less government involvement and no regulation of the securities issues floated to lay the track and buy the rolling stock. This led to some severe turbulence in the financial markets intermittently through the rest of the nineteenth century in the United States.
5. The MacNab–Morin Government and the Rise of John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, 1854–1858
Sir Allan Napier MacNab was one of the great swashbucklers of Canadian history. He was born at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1798, the son of a lieutenant in John Graves Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers, and his first career was as a soldier. He enlisted on the outbreak of the War of 1812, aged only fourteen (surpassed as the youngest soldier in this narrative only by Andrew Jackson, who enlisted in the American Revolutionary army at the age of twelve). MacNab fought at Sackets Harbor, Plattsburgh, Black Rock, and Fort Niagara, and was mustered out of service as a sixteen-year-old ensign. He became a lawyer and moved to Hamilton, where he thought the opportunity greater and more egalitarian than at York (Toronto). His first prominent case came in 1827 when he defended the men accused of tarring and feathering George Rolph (a brother of Mackenzie’s close associate Dr. John Rolph, who had been exiled for five years but returned and was in the Hincks–Morin government as commissioner of Crown lands). George Rolph had been accused of adultery and was represented as counsel by William W. Baldwin, Robert Baldwin’s father. MacNab made himself a Tory and Imperialist hero by refusing to testify in 1829 before an Assembly committee chaired by the elder Baldwin investigating the hanging in effigy of Sir John Colborne at Hamilton by a mob of Tories. On the basis of Mackenzie’s insistence that MacNab be sent to prison for ten days for his refusal, which he was, MacNab was elected to the Assembly in 1830, where he remained for twenty-seven years. He succeeded in returning the favour to Mackenzie by having him banned on spurious grounds from the Assembly’s proceedings a total of five times. Through the 1830s, MacNab became one of the greatest and most prescient landowners in the province of Upper Canada, and was generally very successful as a developer and land speculator. He was widely thought guilty of unscrupulous practices, and while many of the allegations made against him were politically motivated, it seems likely that his ethics, even by the rumbustious standards of the place and times, were not unimpeachable. By 1837, he was a successful local banker (the Gore Bank), railway owner (the Hamilton and Port Dover and the Great Western Railways), steamship owner, builder, and even tavern owner, as well as land speculator. He built a formidable seventy-two-room house, called Dundurn Castle, that survives preserved in its original state on Burlington Heights.
MacNab, though a loyal Imperial Tory, was also pro-American and operated businesses there, conducted financings in New York, and sought closer commercial relations with the United States. He was ostensibly an Anglican, but as there was no Anglican church in Hamilton for many years he attended a Presbyterian church. His second wife (his first wife died) was a Roman Catholic, and MacNab ended his life as a convert to that faith and long opposed the leader of the Orange Lodge, Ogle Gowan, the arch-foe of MacNab’s adversary Robert Baldwin. Upper Canada was young and underpopulated, but it still had a very contentious political atmosphere. MacNab was elected Speaker of the Assembly in 1837, but the rebellion of that year was the occasion for his most energetic military activity. As was touched upon earlier in this chapter, he “hastily collected” approximately sixty men and sped on one of his boats to Toronto, where a shaken Governor Francis Bond Head, who had sent all his regular forces to Kingston to be able to assist Colborne in seeing off Papineau, invited MacNab to take over the defence of York. Under the nominal command of a retired colonel, MacNab led a thousand men on December 7 to Montgomery’s Tavern and put the rebels to flight. Head then entrusted MacNab with the command of a force to subdue rebels in the village of London, which MacNab did in rather disorganized fashion with, as he later acknowledged, “six times as many men” as he needed. MacNab was generous with the rebel prisoners, and wound up this derring-do by helping to organize and command the seizure and burning of Mackenzie’s supply ship, the Caroline, at Mackenzie’s base on Navy Island in the Niagara River, from which he was conducting raids on Upper Canada. Despite criticism from General Colborne, Conservative leader William Draper, and the still formidable John Beverly Robinson, MacNab received a knighthood. He had in fact, by his loyalty, spontaneous leadership, and courage, earned it.
MacNab opposed responsible government, as it would, he claimed to fear, sever ties with Britain, and he didn’t much like the look of union of Upper and Lower Canada, though the reason was that he feared excessive French influence in the regime designed by its creators t
o subsume and anglicise the French. MacNab tangled with Sydenham (though they could have had a lot in common as businessmen), and when the governor persuaded Draper’s associate Samuel Bealey Harrison to run for the Assembly in Hamilton, MacNab ran against Harrison and defeated him. MacNab had been a pioneer in the technique of rushing to London with his coattails trailing out behind him to lobby the susceptible British overlords, but he eventually found that they were less responsive to his blandishments and importunings, and he imposed the customary course correction to reopen civilized discourse with Baldwin and Draper and discovered the demographic (that is, political) virtue of the French Canadians. MacNab, in the mid-1840s to early 1850s, was also very distracted by the railway industry, which he was determined would not depart the station without him; with typical and commendable forthrightness, he said, after downing “one or two bottles of good port … [that] all my politics are railroads.” He chaired the Assembly’s railway committee seven times between 1848 and 1857, and Brown, predictably, accused him of gross improprieties in the same scattergun and unsubstantiated manner that he and the Globe levelled allegations at Hincks. MacNab promoted his Great Western Railway by denigrating the competition as an American Trojan Horse in one case and an heirloom from the avaricious stuffed shirts of Old York on the other, while rather shamelessly, but not as corruptly as Brown claimed, using his influence in the Assembly for his own gain. MacNab’s slippery hyper-selling of watered stock, as well as his slipshod administrative methods and egregious use of his political position, reduced his standing, and he was removed as president of the Great Western in 1849, though he continued as a director. He was ousted by Baldwin and LaFontaine as Speaker of the Assembly in 1848, though not without a generous resolution of thanks, in favour of Morin, at the start of the Great Ministry.
