by Conrad Black
The Pacific Railway, the National Policy, and the Riel Rebellion, 1867–1896
1. The Launch of the Great Dominion, 1867–1871
Viscount Charles Monck asked John A. Macdonald, the only possible choice, to be the first prime minister of Canada. To remain in the government, William McDougall, though he and his colleague William Pearce Howland had been all but tarred and feathered at Brown’s Reform convention in June, insisted on three cabinet seats for his faction, and that left Macdonald with only one other Ontario cabinet place, which he filled with his old law partner, Alexander Campbell, leaving the old Tories of the MacNab stripe unrepresented. McDougall and his colleagues also insisted on the “rep by pop” (representation by population) gesture of Quebec having one member of cabinet fewer than Ontario. George-Étienne Cartier had no problem with that, as long as three of the Quebeckers were French, and he, Hector-Louis Langevin, and Jean-Charles Chapais had all staked their claim. That left only one place for the English and Irish of Quebec, and Macdonald had planned to name both Alexander Galt and Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Charles Tupper, a future party leader and prime minister of Canada, had agreed to represent Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick would be represented by Samuel L. Tilley and one other. Tupper generously broke the impasse by standing down and recommending the appointment of a Roman Catholic Irishman, Edward Kenny. In the same spirit, McGee, Confederation’s greatest prophet, stood aside. This was the composition of the government. Macdonald had asked that the governor general become a viceroy, but this did not happen, for the same reason that the country was not a kingdom, because of the Earl of Derby’s fear of American republican sensibilities. This really was nonsense, as even Champlain and his successors had had that title.
For many decades Canadians tended to compensate for their own self-doubts and for British deference to the United States with “superior airs – an attempt to ascribe undesirable characteristics to the successful neighbour and to oneself indefinable qualities of refinement, breeding, and moral excellence – the habitual escapist refuge of the weak in the presence of the strong. At bottom it was mainly a simple human lust for the luxuriant fruits just over the garden wall.… After 1865 there was a whole catalogue of reasons for fear.”1
The first election of the new Parliament was in August 1867, and Macdonald won easily. George Brown was defeated in the South Ontario constituency where he stood and would never sit in the Canadian House of Commons, though he did resurface as a senator. John Sandfield Macdonald led the opposition, though he would not stay long and had just been elected premier of Ontario when the new Parliament convened on November 7, 1867. The rising figure in the opposition was Edward Blake of Toronto, whose father, William Hume Blake, had served in the Great Ministry of Baldwin and LaFontaine, and whom Macdonald had challenged to a duel twenty years before. The other opposition notables were the comparative misfit Antoine-Aimé Dorion, the dour and phlegmatic Alexander Mackenzie, and the aging tribune of Nova Scotian separatism Joseph Howe (“that pestilent man,” Macdonald called him), who led all but two of the MPs from his province in opposing Confederation yet was sitting there participating in debates. (This would be a scarcely recognized precedent for Quebec separatists 120 years later.) They claimed to be opponents to the new Constitution and their province’s adherence to it, but “they never relapsed into sullen eccentricity or deliberate obstructionism.”2 Macdonald’s Conservatives won one hundred seats to sixty-two Liberals and eighteen others, and 50 per cent of the vote to 49 per cent Liberal (excluding the anti-Confederation vote).
Early in 1868, Macdonald was advised that the British government would hand over to the Dominion the vast expanses of Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territory, as had been agreed in the enabling legislation, only if Canada compensated the Hudson’s Bay Company or secured a judicial decision that it was not bound to do so. At the same time, the Nova Scotia Assembly empowered Howe and three others to go to London and demand Nova Scotia’s release from Confederation. Galt, a temperamental man, had churlishly resigned as finance minister in the first days of the government (over treatment of the Commercial Bank of Canada), and Macdonald now offered him and the selfless Tupper the mission to go to London and counter Howe’s performance there. Galt declined, and there was some criticism of the choice of Tupper, as sending such a loyal and distinguished representative of the government might appear to legitimize the separatists.
On the evening of April 7, 1868, the equally public-spirited McGee spoke at length and eloquently in support of Galt, and was assassinated after the debate for his trouble. Macdonald rushed to McGee’s house and helped to carry out the body of his slain comrade, who was six days short of his forty-third birthday. Tupper handled his mission to London effectively, and the new colonial secretary, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, rejected Howe’s advocacy, and the great radical reformer John Bright’s (1811–1889) motion for a royal commission of inquiry was ignominiously voted down. Just before a convention that Howe had organized to take the Nova Scotian repeal movement forward, Macdonald himself went to Halifax to offer to meet privately with Howe and discuss with flexibility and openness Howe’s reservations about Confederation, as he was holding public meetings to arm himself with an enhanced mandate. Tilley had told Macdonald that privately Howe would settle for some financial concessions. Macdonald was accompanied by Tupper, Cartier, and, in a generous gesture, Howe’s friend John Sandfield Macdonald, who was now a convinced federalist.
Macdonald met privately with Howe in the office of the lieutenant-governor after church services on Sunday, August 2. It was clear to Macdonald that Howe’s “big head with its rather coarse features and grey, untidy hair, was heavy with the dull, stupefying realization of final defeat.”3 Howe could not make a third appeal to Westminster and had no way to lead Nova Scotia out of Confederation. His convention orated and fussed and appointed a committee chaired by him to determine a course of action. After a few days, and after his colleagues batted down Howe’s effort to pretend that Macdonald was in Halifax because the Imperial government had asked him to go there, and by casting a tie-breaking vote on his committee, Howe got the authority to negotiate with Macdonald. They agreed that they would wait for prorogation of the Nova Scotia Legislature and then Macdonald would send Howe a letter with minor concessions in it that Howe could use to persuade his repeal-zealous followers that they had won the match and should stand down and one of them (Howe in fact) would join Macdonald’s government.
Macdonald sent Cartier and McDougall to London to negotiate the acquisition of the Hudson’s Bay charter rights and prepared his legislation to establish a Supreme Court of Canada. He got the signal from Howe and sent him a letter that seemed to succeed, but Howe still needed coaxing, as he could not bring the provincial government. Macdonald, as only he could do, flattered Howe’s considerable ego and said that his “will will be law,” because of his stature in his native province. Viscount Monck departed after a very successful term, the third successive full and satisfactory governorship (after Elgin and Edmund Walker Head), and was followed by Sir John Young. The London picture clouded with Gladstone’s defeat of Disraeli, who had finally succeeded Derby. Gladstone was skeptical of the Canadian enterprise, and Bright, who was anti-Empire and very impressed with the American political system and national aspirations, was in his government. Macdonald arranged for the British government to reject repeal by Nova Scotia while he gave Howe, who came to visit him in mid-January 1869, a letter approving increased fiscal subsidies for Nova Scotia and had him sworn to the cabinet as president of the council. It was a complete victory, but Howe had a plausible claim to success also. The negotiations with the Hudson’s Bay Company had proceeded satisfactorily, and Macdonald announced at the opening of Parliament in April that the government would be presenting legislation acquiring for Canada all the territory to the Arctic and the Pacific. (Russia had sold Alaska in 1867 to William H. Seward, as U.S. secretary of state, for $7.2 million, 2.5 cents per acre. The treaty of cession clea
red the U.S. Senate by one vote after the Russian government bribed a number of senators, so eager were they to be rid of the territory.) Macdonald nominated the rather difficult William McDougall (who had handed him and Cartier the 1862 election with his attack on the French Canadians and his flirtation with annexation) to be the governor of Rupert’s Land. To replace McDougall as minister of finance, Macdonald chose his wife’s family’s friend Sir Francis Hincks, the old Baldwinian Reformer, now technically a Liberal, continuing what Macdonald, for his own political convenience, persisted in calling a coalition. The arrival of Hincks caused Richard Cartwright, previously a supporter of Macdonald, to decamp abruptly to the Liberals, but Macdonald got the better of that exchange; the arrival in the ministry of Hincks and Howe provided heavy reinforcements.
Macdonald became a father again at age fifty-four (of a girl, who proved soon to be significantly mentally handicapped), and the pressures of his life were further sharply increased when in January 1869 he was advised by Sir Hugh Allan, the prominent ship owner, in his capacity as chairman of the Merchants’ Bank, that Macdonald owed the bank $79,590.11.4 Macdonald managed to scrape together all his savings, put a mortgage on his main asset, a residential land development in Guelph, Ontario, and stabilized his finances, but now, after having held high political office for over eleven years, he had a net worth of approximately zero. Having almost stopped drinking in the first two years of his second marriage, he started again under the pressures of these personal events (he assumed he could manage the political vagaries all right). Macdonald was working to induce both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland into Confederation, and was planning to offer provincial status to British Columbia. But in November 1869, as McDougall went to take up his new post, Macdonald learned from American newspapers that Métis rioters and squatters were preventing his new governor from being installed, and had captured the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), and had taken control of the Red River settlement. It came to light that some Canadian settlers had sorely provoked the Métis, who had overreacted, under, it was feared, the influence of missionary priests from France and large American commercial interests. Jay Cooke, the promoter of the Northern Pacific Railway, seemed to be subsidizing unrest as a pre-emptive harassment of a competing Canadian transcontinental railway. The role of the Hudson’s Bay Company in stirring up the Métis was also questionable. The American newspapers were playing these problems as a tremendous humiliation for the young country, and the truth is that it was a serious embarrassment. Macdonald adopted the cunning tactic of refusing to hand over the agreed three hundred thousand pounds and taking over the territory until Canada could be promised peaceful possession. It was up to the vendor to clear the area, and Macdonald represented the McDougall fiasco as an embarrassment to the British government, not Canada. The British would have more success at deterring the Americans and placating the natives than he could.
Macdonald had a sharp exchange with Gladstone’s colonial secretary, Lord Granville, and explained that a military expedition was impossible in the winter, and that open disorder “would … completely throw the game into the hands of the insurgents and the Yankee wire-pullers.” Direct American interference could not then be ruled out.
At this point, another of the remarkable builders and pioneers of Canadian history puts in his first appearance: Donald Smith, later Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal (1820–1914), who was a veteran of about twenty-five years as a factor in Hudson’s Bay and Labrador, who was Hudson’s Bay Company’s principal representative in Canada, and who called upon Macdonald and pledged support for whatever he chose to do. He was given a joint mandate by the government of Canada and the company to go to the scene of the problems and try to sort them out. Unfortunately, McDougall had not lost his capacity for extreme impetuosity, and without cooler minds to supervise him, he flew off half-cocked, unaware of the delay in the handover which had been scheduled for December 1, 1869, and issued a proclamation of his own authority in the queen’s name. He pronounced himself lieutenant-governor of Rupert’s Land and commissioned the former surveyor Colonel John Stoughton Dennis to raise and outfit a force to subdue and discipline the Métis rebels. Dennis began what Macdonald later called “a series of inglorious intrigues,” and a number of incidents occurred, culminating in the surrender of McDougall and Dennis’s force to a much larger group of armed Métis. The Métis leader, Louis Riel (last seen here as a law junior to Rodolphe Laflamme in the St. Alban’s Vermont incident), then proclaimed a provisional government at Red River, precisely what Macdonald had feared and what he thought might be a prearranged pretext for American interference. (General Ulysses S. Grant was now president of the United States, on a rather nationalistic platform, though he was a man of moderate conduct, and he made no secret of how agreeable it would be to subsume Canada into the United States as a sorbet after victory in the Civil War.) Smith and two other co-emissaries, Grand Vicar Jean-Baptiste Thibault and Colonel Charles de Salaberry, would just be reaching Fort Garry as the year ended.
In January 1870, the American minister in London, John Lothrop Motley, closely interrogated officials of the Hudson’s Bay Company and evinced what was reported as an unseemly interest in the Red River. (Motley had been a student in Germany with the young Otto von Bismarck, and he remained the closest personal friend of the Prussian minister-president, who was soon to become the chancellor of the German empire he was about to create. Motley was an unusually worldly diplomat.) Macdonald was now considering a military expedition as soon as the weather would permit one, probably in April. He wrote to his former minister of finance, Sir John Rose, now resident in England and well-connected there, on January 26, 1870, that it was “a fixed idea in Washington that England wants to get rid of the colonies, indeed, Mr. Fish [President Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish] has not hesitated to say so.” Fish had made inquiries of the British minister in Washington, Sir Edward Thornton, about a free vote in Canada on the question of annexation.5 Archbishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché of St. Boniface (1821–1894), who had long been a moderate champion of the Métis, was recalled by Macdonald from Rome, where he was attending the First Vatican Council. After extensive discussion with the prime minister, Taché hurried west to join Smith, Thibault, and Salaberry as emissaries to the disaffected followers of Riel. McDougall, “very chop-fallen and at the same time very sulky,” wrote Macdonald, returned to Ottawa, unemployed.6
The 1870 parliamentary session opened with much ceremony attending the presence of Prince Arthur, Victoria’s third son (who would become Duke of Connaught and governor general of Canada in the First World War). There was debate about the tense condition of Rupert’s Land, and by this time McDougall, with infinite predictability, had worked out an elaborately falsified version of events that imputed to the incompetence and malice of others every aspect of the shambles for which he was, himself, chiefly responsible. Alexander Galt, a restlessly talented man but an impulsive politician, was now confecting policy initiatives like a hyperactive child, and inflicted on Parliament a discussion about the assumption of full treaty-making powers for Canada and a complete economic union with the United States. The first idea would be timely before too long, but complete independence from Britain in foreign policy while awaiting that country’s military assistance to assure Canadian control of the vast centre of the country before American intervention under a president who recently was the victorious commander of the greatest army in the world was not the optimal occasion for Galt’s latest hobby horse. And economic union with the potential defiler of the emerging dream of Canada was a perversely untimely nostrum. Like an indulgent uncle, Macdonald ignored McDougall and Galt as he worried about the gnawing vulnerability of his new country stretched between the caprices and whims of its two larger and not wholly cordial national relatives. Though suffering the distress of sadness in his family and of an acute personal financial crisis that could conceivably end his career, he kept his nerve and his judgment and did not allow alc
ohol to affect his perceptions or serviceability.
Smith had made great inroads with the Métis and had addressed a large assembly to explain his mandate and offer reassurances on behalf of Macdonald. The English Métis now came forward, and they considerably diluted the anger and venom of the French, as they had no cultural or religious grievances. The whole group informally chose Riel as their leader, which limited the licence he would have to unleash a revolution, but it also gave him a higher degree of legitimacy. A committee of forty people, representing twenty French and twenty English parishes, was struck, which produced a list of concerns and grievances that Smith could bring back to Ottawa, and Taché, Thibault, and Salaberry were all working to settle things down. The local Hudson’s Bay operative well beneath Smith and outside his authority, John MacTavish, resented the change and threw his lot in with the Métis, and was a fifth column for Riel, who was also being encouraged by one of the Fenian leaders, William Bernard O’Donoghue, who became the treasurer in Riel’s provisional government. Unfortunately, the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, an apparently unrelated William MacTavish, foolishly took the word of John MacTavish, his namesake, and, believing that the transfer to Canada was deferred, he conferred some level of recognition on Riel. If Grant had been as aggressive as Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt, lesser military commanders but more astute politicians, he would have snaffled the Red River up, paid off the Hudson’s Bay Company, and made sufficient placatory noises to hose down the British, who would have gone to war if Quebec and Ontario had been invaded, but not over a shadowy frontier Gilbert-and-Sullivan farce like this. Jackson had less firm legal ground to seize Florida in 1818, and Roosevelt would have less legal cause to seize Panama in 1903.
As usual with Gladstone, there was great uncertainty about deploying force in faraway places for fuzzy causes (this was the tamest prelude to the Siege of Khartoum, from 1884 to 1885), but Granville prevailed with his opinion that there was “no alternative to standing by the Canadians.… The prompt assertion of authority is probably the safest.” As long as the British and Canadians could get their forces there before the Americans got down to serious infiltration or the powder keg blew up, the situation could still be managed. Smith, Taché, and the others had to keep Riel talking for another month. The British pledged military assistance on March 6, conditional only on completing the transfer from the Hudson’s Bay Company and generous treatment for the aggrieved minority; neither was a derogation from what Macdonald intended. Granville saw, even if his chief needed a little tutorial on geostrategy, that the occupation of all North America west as well as south of the Great Lakes would make the United States an even more overpoweringly strong country than the Union victory in the Civil War had assured it would soon become.
