Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Cartier’s assistant, Joseph Taché (Étienne Taché’s nephew), had, under Cartier’s supervision, prepared thirty-three articles that he published in Hector-Louis Langevin’s Courrier du Canada, which proposed a central government in charge of criminal justice, commerce, trade, public works, navigation, and militia. Cartier, even before Macdonald, believed in the desirability of Confederation as the way to give French Canadians back their legislature, reduce the possibility of absorption by the United States, and confer on his people the political balance of power in an enlarged Canada. Galt favoured Confederation with a strong central government for economic and nationalistic reasons. Edmund Walker Head, on behalf of the Imperial government, encouraged all of this. Cartier declared in the throne speech of August 1858 that his government would pursue federation, and he went to London to put this view to the government and the queen herself in October of that year. The Earl of Derby and Disraeli were then in office and their colonial secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873, author of The Last Days of Pompeii and many other novels, books of verse, operas, and the famous opening “It was a dark and stormy night,” and a friend of Disraeli’s through literary connections) was skeptical and suspected Cartier of trying to assert an advantage over the Maritime provinces. Cartier returned to Quebec chastened but dazzled after a very respectful reception, including three days with Queen Victoria in the bracing atmosphere of Windsor Castle.

  In 1859, the Liberal legislators of Upper Canada had called for a Liberal convention to consider all options to improve the functioning of government and specifically mentioned the federal, dissolution, and representation by population alternatives. Later in that year, the Lower Canadian members of the Opposition met and called for a federal union in which the federal government would deal with tariffs, the post office, patents, and the currency; and the provincial legislatures would deal with education, property, justice, and the militia. When the Liberal convention occurred, it was recognized by everyone that legislative union with the clear predominance of English-speaking people would never be accepted by the French. The leading spokesman for the federal option was future Ontario premier Oliver Mowat, who stressed free access via the St. Lawrence to the oceans of the world, and free trade between provinces. The dissolution alternative was championed by George Sheppard, one of Brown’s editorial writers at the Globe (which had become a daily in 1853). Brown himself favoured a federal option but with very strong provincial rights. He also said, in his peroration at the 1859 convention, “I hope there is not one Canadian in this assembly who does not look forward with high hope to the day when these northern countries shall stand out among the nations of the world as one great confederation.… Who does not feel that to us rightfully belong the right and the duty of carrying the blessings of civilization throughout these boundless regions, and making our own country the highway of traffic to the Pacific.” The convention called in the end for a central authority of very limited powers as well as the separation of the provinces. This was the condition of opinion in the Canadas, and the Upper Canada Conservatives were more federalist than the Liberals, when the American Civil War erupted. With the Americans in a state of total bellicosity and the British demanding and incentivizing Canadian self-help by adopting the structures suitable to self-defence, federalism became an idea whose time had come, from all angles, upon the nervous and fractious Canadians.

  Macdonald, whether deliberately, by instinct, or by accident, whether with Cartier’s concurrence or not, produced the circumstances that would force movement to a solution. In May 1862, he proposed a bill calling for the training and equipping of a militia of fifty thousand men, which would cost a million dollars a year to finance. He rambled intoxicatedly through the first reading of the bill and was absent for the second reading, it was assumed for the same reason. In the midst of consideration of the Militia Bill, the able if mercurial finance minister, Alexander Galt, introduced a budget that revealed expenses of $12.5 million and a deficit of nearly $4 million after a substantial tax increase. The Opposition railed against fiscal ineptitude and strongly suggested that the Militia Bill was really a sinkhole for the satiation of Macdonald’s and Cartier’s alleged addiction to the joys of patronage. Macdonald gave his bill third reading in an apparently hungover condition, and no one uttered a word. It went to a vote and the government lost, almost certainly by design, though Cartier became quite histrionic about being defeated for trying to defend the country. The sobered Macdonald (he had had serious illnesses in his family that naturally affected his mood and powers of concentration) was completely philosophical. The government had to resign, and as Brown could not possibly win a vote of confidence, the governor general was left with no alternative but to call upon the bland and rather ineffectual duo of the Scottish Roman Catholic from Cornwall John Sandfield Macdonald and Louis-Victor Sicotte, a moderate opponent of Cartier without being a soulmate of Dorion, to try to govern. This created a vacuum, which Macdonald and Cartier surely knew would put immense pressure on Brown to try to compromise with them and move toward a grand coalition and a consensus for Confederation.

  The Sandfield Macdonald–Sicotte coalition was a temporary catchment for all the sundry forces of those fatigued and irritated by the contestation of the last few years, including John Macdonald’s skulduggery with the double shuffle. Thus, D’Arcy McGee, the unseated Dorion, and the blunderbuss McDougall sheltered there while they caught their breath and collected their thoughts. Brown wrote, “A greater set of jackasses … was never got by accident into the government of any country.”76 Even the generally rather temperate Governor General Monck described them to Newcastle, who on Palmerston’s behalf was monitoring Canada very closely, as “a wretched lot [incapable of] rising above the level of a parish politician.”77 Both Brown and Monck were being a bit ungenerous, but it was clearly a stopgap regime while the main players prepared for the concluding rounds in Canada’s long march to statehood.

  On August 21, 1862, Newcastle wrote Sandfield Macdonald demanding a militia of fifty thousand, precisely the issue on which Macdonald and Cartier were defeated. At the same time, via Watkin, the premier was informed that the British government would guaranty a three-million-pound loan to build the Intercolonial Railway linking the Canadas and the Maritimes as long as the line was built well back from the U.S. border. In September, the able premiers of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Joseph Howe and Samuel Leonard Tilley, came to Quebec with large entourages to discuss with Sandfield Macdonald how to take up the British government offer. They were all happy to accept the proposal, but when this was conveyed to Newcastle via Monck, Newcastle came back that the offer was entirely conditional on the acceptance and creation of the required militia. As this government was only installed on the rejection of such a project, the whole issue went temporarily dormant. For the first time in many years, the Imperial government was well ahead of the Canadians in thinking and providing for the future security and good government of the Canadas.

  The government started to disintegrate, as had been foreseen. McGee, one of the most talented and intelligent politicians in British North America, defected to John A. Macdonald and Cartier, and Sandfield Macdonald, in order to hold his Quebec support, had to give the relatively radical rouge Dorion a blank cheque, which caused Sicotte to decamp in 1863, and he soon went to the bench. Cartier and John A. knew that they could push over the Sandfield Macdonald–Dorion house of cards when they chose, but there was no point to it until George Brown was prepared to work with them.

  In January 1863, Cartier went to Washington to probe the U.S. government. At this point, the fortunes of war were very uncertain. The Union had won at Antietam, on September 17, 1862 – one of the bloodiest days of the war, with twenty-three thousand casualties on the two sides combined – when Lee invaded the North and tried to envelop Washington, but Lincoln fired his commander, General George McClellan, for not following up on his victory. Lincoln had purported to emancipate the slaves on New Year’s Day 1863,
but the proclamation only applied to Confederate territory, little of which had been occupied by the Union at this point. The Union was concerned to have stable relations with the British at this changeable point in the war, and both William H. Seward, now secretary of state, and Lincoln himself received Cartier with great cordiality and respect. Cartier, though leader of the Opposition, was treated like a head of state, and ten thousand Washingtonians turned out to hear him speak at an outdoor banquet arranged in his honour by the British minister, Lord Lyons.78 Never before or since has the United States been so seriously in extremis, and not for 125 years would a Canadian visitor be received so respectfully.

  There was a new Canadian election in July 1863, and the Conservatives effectively gave Brown a pass in his district and he returned to Parliament. Cartier and McGee defeated Dorion in Quebec, but Brown’s Liberals gained against John A.’s Conservatives in Canada West. Cartier was eagerly entreating Brown, and they had a number of private meetings, with some sponsorship from Monck. Brown wished to displace John A., who didn’t mind being sidestepped but was not prepared to be eliminated. On March 14, Brown moved in Parliament for the creation of a parliamentary committee to consider the problems of the union and a memorandum Cartier had written about federation in 1858. In the ensuing debate, Macdonald spoke for a stronger federal government than Cartier favoured, covering his position in English Canada opposite Brown, but somewhat straining his popularity with Cartier’s followers in Canada East. Brown was very strong in Canada West but hated by the French; Macdonald held much of Canada West and was fairly well regarded in French Canada, and Cartier was thought the lesser of French evils in Upper Canada but was always forced to manoeuvre and dodge to retain adequate support in Lower Canada against Dorion and the more radical French.

  By this time, the war in the American states was reaching a climax. Lincoln had changed commanders after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the bloody sequels to Antietam and the last two Confederate victories of Robert E. Lee. On July 4, 1863, the eighty-seventh anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Lee was defeated at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, northwest of Washington; and the great fort of Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered after a fierce siege to Union general Ulysses S. Grant. The two battles cost a total of dead, injured, and prisoners of more than one hundred thousand men, 60 per cent of them southern.

  Grant was appointed commander of all the Union armies, later known as the Grand Army of the Republic, and William Tecumseh Sherman was appointed commander of the Union armies of the West; the Union proceeded down the Mississippi to New Orleans, cutting off Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana from the Confederacy, and in the spring of 1864 Sherman began an advance through Tennessee and Georgia that would sever those states, as well as Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, from the Confederacy, while Grant’s army (whose name and size and quality of troops and officers evoked Napoleon’s Grand Army of sixty years before) moved directly against the Confederate capital of Richmond with overwhelming force. The last chance of the Confederacy was to defeat President Lincoln in the November 1864 elections. These developments, and contemplation of a triumphant and united America with a vast army, a prospect that had never existed before, motivated Newcastle, on behalf of Palmerston, to intensify pressure, via Monck and Watkin, who were plying the Canadian leaders, on Cartier, Brown, and the other players to compose their differences and get back to nation-building.

  John A. Macdonald and Cartier pretended there was a division between themselves to assist in the recruitment of Brown to a pro-federal common front, Macdonald continuing to profess a much more centralized and English-dominated federation than the French Canadians could possibly endorse. This had the desired effect of pulling the rug from under Sandfield Macdonald, who invited Étienne Taché to join him in government in March 1864, but excluding Cartier in order to keep Dorion in the tent. Taché declined, but someone from the Macdonald–Cartier camp leaked the overture, Dorion and his followers, who were never content with Sandfield anyway, walked out and the government collapsed. Sandfield had one more try, with Taché, who was standing in for Cartier, as Cartier and Macdonald waited for Brown to join them in a federal coalition. Brown met with Galt and John A. Macdonald at the St. Louis Hotel in Quebec on June 17, 1864. The next day, Cartier joined the discussion and it was agreed to join forces and ratify the previous day’s agreement to pursue “a federative system, applied either to Canada alone, or to the whole British American provinces.”79 Macdonald had stuck to his preference as long as it was an academic and tactical issue, but was prepared to compromise and have representation by population in the federal Parliament, and the protection of local and minority interests, under a new division of powers, by the provincial Parliaments; so was Brown, and so were all the factions except the Quebec quasi-separatists and the detritus of the English rednecks.

  The deal was struck quickly and cordially. Rumours were rife, and when Parliament met on June 22, Macdonald and Cartier, each in his own language, referred to the emergence of a consensus. Brown rose and told a silent House, haltingly at first, but with rising fluency, volume, and emotion, that all should work for Confederation “as a great national issue,” and he very graciously praised Cartier and Taché for working with him. He resumed his place, and the Speaker of the House stood, and the whole chamber exploded in applause and joyous relief, only Dorion and his followers feeling excluded. A bottleneck of a decade had been cleared, and the strongest government in the history of Canada emerged, led by Taché, John A. Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Galt, McGee, Mowat, Langevin, and McDougall. Monck wrote, later that day, to the governors of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, asking that a delegation from the Canadas be permitted to attend the conference that was about to take place to discuss the federation of the Maritime provinces. The request was cheerfully agreed to, and Cartier, Macdonald, Brown, Galt, Langevin, and McDougall all sailed to the Charlottetown Conference on placid waters under clear skies at the end of August.

  8. The Road to Confederation, 1864–1867

  There was a visiting circus in the pleasant, white-painted Prince Edward Island capital of Charlottetown, which attracted large crowds from around the province while the delegates met. The Maritimers agreed to defer their own discussion of union and invited the Canadians to join them to discuss an agenda of full union. Cartier opened with a magisterial address on the virtues of federation. He said French-Canadian nationality would be preserved, as would other regional concerns in the other jurisdictions, by provincial legislatures. But a federal union was the manifestly best way to exploit the vast potential of the whole country, including all the territories between the United States and the Arctic (except Alaska). Cartier and Galt in particular, and the other Canadians, made an impassioned plea for the necessity of federation to defend against the United States, achieve a financial settlement that the Imperial government would assist, and that would cause it to supervise and facilitate railway construction. Macdonald, Brown, Cartier, and McGee all dazzled the Maritimers with their different but effective and persuasive styles of oratory, particularly at a sumptuous banquet that stretched from mid-afternoon to midnight on the Canadian vessel that conveyed its delegates, the Queen Victoria. An itinerant celebration now unfolded, in Halifax, Saint John, and Fredericton.

  The delegates adjourned to Quebec in October, where in seventeen days of intensive discussion they hammered out details and achieved a high degree of agreement. Macdonald gave the key address on October 11, the second day of the Quebec Conference. “It was the speech for which he had been consciously preparing for the last five years, for which indeed, his entire career had been an unconscious preparation.”80 His basic points were that a strong central government was necessary to assure success, avoid the sort of terrible fragmentation that had occurred in the United States, and that British and not American institutions had to be emulated. He held the residual powers clause giving unallocated jurisdiction to the States and people to be the severest flaw in the U
.S. Constitution, but he thought in terms of one level of government versus another, not the citizens versus government in general. He favoured equality of regions and not provinces. Macdonald was the leading figure of the Quebec Conference and carried the entire issue, with some compromises, and the federal government would control all interprovincial matters including foreign and defence policy, money, and banking and the criminal law, and the provinces would control property, civil rights, and education. The federal government could tax as it wished, but direct taxes were a concurrent jurisdiction. It was all summarized in seventy-two resolutions. George Brown, as fierce a combatant as any against much of what had been approved, wrote his wife at the end of it of what had been agreed: “On the whole, it is wonderful – really wonderful. When one thinks of all the fighting we have had for fifteen years and find the very men who fought us every inch now going far beyond what we asked, I am amazed, and sometimes alarmed lest it all goes to pieces yet.”81

  At the end of the conference, Edward Cardwell (1813–1886), Palmerston’s colonial secretary, who would be best known as Gladstone’s reforming war secretary almost a decade later, sent the conference a warm assurance of the complete agreement and support of the British government. The government in London had warmly debated Canadian policy after the dispatch to Canada and report of Colonel Sir William Jervois the previous autumn. Jervois found Canadian defences lacking and called for an increased local effort. Cardwell supported this and Gladstone suggested, as he would from time to time over his public career of over sixty years, that the colonies were more trouble than they were worth. Palmerston closed the debate with the statement that “There may be much to be said for the theory put forward by some, that our colonies are an encumbrance and an expense, and that we should be better without them, but that is not the opinion of England and it is not mine.”82