Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  On March 4, Riel summarily executed Thomas Scott, who had taken up arms against Riel’s provisional government, was captured, and struck one of his guards. This created an immense clamour in Canada, and English Canadians were now screaming for suppression of the insolent Métis while French Canadians still had some sympathy for their original grievances. One Gilbert McMicken, who had access to Fenian information but was opposed to their tendency to violent attacks on Canada, warned the Canadian government that a large Fenian assault on Canada could be expected for April 15. The day before that, Macdonald wrote the colonial secretary, the Earl of Carnarvon, out of office, and reproached the Gladstone government for taking this moment to pull all British garrisons out of Canada in an economy measure. “We greatly distrust the men at the helm in England,” he wrote, and added that American officials “connived at” Fenian outrages and “yet this is the time [Gladstone and his colleagues] choose to withdraw every soldier from us, and we are left to be the unaided victims of Irish discontent and American hostility.” It was implicit that the Irish discontent had been entirely created by the British.7

  Macdonald had mobilized the entire militia, which bristled at every possible crossing point and effectively faced down the Fenians. More complicated was the turmoil in intra-Métis politics, where Riel was a clever but dictatorial personality. He sent his representatives to Ottawa, though two (Father Ritchot and Alfred Scott) were immediately jailed and charged with complicity in the murder of Thomas Scott. Macdonald had them released after a few days, and conversed extensively with the third delegate, “Judge” John Black, recorder of Rupert’s Land. Black was fairly sensible, but Riel wanted to rule absolutely and sent the delegates with a list of demands that far exceeded what the convention, half composed of English-speaking, mainly Protestant Métis, had approved. One of the demands was admission of Assiniboia as a province, and in this Riel was joined by the Roman Catholic leadership, including Macdonald’s emissary, Bishop Taché. The French and Catholics wanted another French province to bracket Ontario and assure that their language and religion shared in the growth of the West. By demanding a province, Riel had dampened the possibility of American intervention and given Macdonald the opportunity to start to ease tensions by the already traditional Canadian formula of patient and more-or-less good faith negotiations. The English provinces were demanding military suppression of Riel, and Cartier’s followers were restive and hostile to such a recourse, as they too wanted a French province around Lake Manitoba and the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Macdonald could carry the country by crushing the Riel uprising, but he would shatter his party and split the country entirely on English-French lines, which would be the negation of his entire central ambition to build a transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary federation.

  Macdonald was concerned at the foot-dragging of the British and worried that the Americans might prevent him using the jointly operated canal at Sault Ste. Marie for the passage of the expeditionary force he was going to send to the Red River, whether the British participated or not (although Canada had never disturbed the movement of soldiers or munitions through its canals during the late Civil War). The British sent Sir Stafford Northcote (1818–1887), Disraeli’s closest associate in the House of Commons but now the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company (as the British Conservatives were out of office), to Ottawa to conduct reconnaissance for the government and the company. The Americans sent special State Department officer J.W. Taylor to Ottawa to assess the temper of men and events in Canada’s capital. Macdonald met with the three delegates from Riel’s regime on April 24, and Ritchot, their chairman, was adamant about Riel’s post-convention escalated list of demands, and about being treated as officially recognized representatives of an established jurisdiction. Macdonald, detesting every minute of it, slogged through the negotiations, resigned to giving them their province and happy enough to entrench French rights as long as the English and Protestants were protected too, while the military mission, to be led by the rising star of the British Army, Colonel (future Field Marshal) Garnet Wolseley, prepared to embark for the Red River. Macdonald was almost through on April 27, and then “broke out,” as his entourage put it. He became too affected by liquor to function rigorously and from April 29 to May 1 was subject to the process thus described by Northcote to Disraeli: “His habit is to retire to bed, to exclude everybody, and to drink bottle after bottle of port. All the papers are sent to him and he reads them, but he is conscious of his inability to do any important business and he does none.”8 The Conservatives in the House of Commons became fractious, as Brown’s Globe proclaimed the prime minister’s shameful drunkenness and the Tory press said he was indisposed. He returned to the House on May 2, pale and not in the best voice, but master of the facts and of Parliament and gave the agreed Manitoba Bill first reading. Except for an adjustment to the new province’s borders to include the home of the pro-Canadians at Portage La Prairie that Riel had tried to redistrict out, the bill went through easily and was about to be adopted on May 6 when the prime minister, waiting in his parliamentary office, was laid low by an acute attack of gallstones. Macdonald was incapacitated for two months, and departed in July for a convalescence in Prince Edward Island, where he was kept informed but also much badgered for decisions. By mid-September, when he left Charlottetown, he was almost completely recovered.

  Events had moved benignly in his absence, with Cartier as acting prime minister. Wolseley’s mission occupied Assiniboia without incident and Manitoba became the fifth province (Prince Edward Island was still aloof, with Newfoundland), and Macdonald’s terms for British Columbia had been accepted and all had been agreed except by the federal and B.C. parliaments. Under these arrangements, Macdonald had taken another mighty step of nation-building by pledging to start a railway to the Pacific within two years and finish it within ten. As 1870 ebbed away, there was restored domestic tranquility, though the question of amnesty for Riel and his henchmen had the potential for trouble, and the Americans were still capable of being difficult, though they had missed the opportunity to strike with maximum effect during the Red River crisis.

  In his annual address to the Congress, Grant, in remarks presumably composed by Fish, opined that “the Imperial government is understood to have delegated … [much] jurisdiction … to the colonial authority known as the Dominion of Canada, and this semi-independent but irresponsible agent has exercised its delegated power in an unfriendly way.… It is hoped that the government of Great Britain will see the justice of abandoning the narrow and inconsistent claim to which her Canadian provinces have urged her adherence.”9 This was chiefly, though not exclusively, a reference to fisheries. Grant, who was less belligerent than his secretary of state, wrote, in respect of Canada’s law providing for the seizure of American vessels “preparing to fish” in Canadian waters, that “should the authorities of Canada attempt to enforce [this law], it will become my duty to take such steps as may be necessary to protect the rights of the citizens of the United States.”10 He had already stated how altruistic it would have been for the United States to have done the people of the Dominican Republic (“San Domingo”) the favour of annexing that country. It would have been, but the Senate balked, and he didn’t push it, and didn’t really push the Canada issue too far either. (Conditions in Canada and the Dominican Republic were hardly comparable, other than in their ability to tickle America’s ravening territorial appetite.) Collision was avoidable, but the tenor of the relevant parts of his message was a completely unacceptable semi-non-recognition of Canada, as Britain prepared to propose a joint commission designed to compose all differences between the British Empire and the United States. This commission was established, as the rise of Germany motivated Britain to compose its differences with other great powers, and especially the United States, which, though it eschewed any interest in European affairs in the Monroe Doctrine forty-five years before, was now rivalled only by Great Britain and Germany as the greatest power in the world.


  In 1870, the Prussian army had captured the French emperor, Napoleon III, who followed Charles X, Metternich, and Louis-Philippe into exile in London. France was defeated by a vast coalition in 1814 and 1815, after Napoleon I had defeated every power of Europe singly and in groups and occupied the whole continent from Lisbon to Moscow. But in the end Paris was occupied, and now France had been defeated by Prussia, which was about to occupy Paris again by itself and had surpassed France as continental Europe’s greatest nation. The bloodbath of the Paris Commune, and the showdown between the forces of radical and moderate change that followed all abrupt French institutional changes, finally produced a close division between the monarchists and the republicans that was only resolved when the imbecilic Bourbon pretender, the Duke of Chambord, rejected the compromise proposal of a constitutional monarchy with a national flag that had the bleu-blanc-rouge tricolour of republicanism on one side and the Bourbon fleur-de-lys on a white field on the other. It was out of the question for the lily to be inserted in the middle white bar of the republican flag, and the absurdity of a flag with different designs and colours on each side was rejected by Chambord as conferring too much legitimacy on the republicans. And thus did republicanism prevail in France. The failure of the absolute monarchy of Champlain’s patron, Richelieu, in less capable hands than his, weighed oppressively on the French 250 years later. Yet the Third Republic would preside over an implacable spirit of revenge and recovery, and the greatest cultural flowering in French history. France lost two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, to Germany, and in its desire for a favourable rematch with the Germans would celebrate republicanism with the other great republic and revolutionary country, America, prefabricating and sending the Statue of Liberty to New York, and would even rediscover its long-lost brethren in New France.

  The leading Western powers all went through immense changes between 1865 and 1871. The United States suppressed its insurrection, abolished slavery and ended the special constitutional and electoral status of slave-holding states, and emerged from its ordeal unbound before a limitless horizon. The numerous German principalities, duchies, city states, and mini-kingdoms created by Richelieu and Mazarin at Westphalia in 1648 were united into Bismarck’s German empire at the Palace of Versailles, over the prostrate French. The kingdom of Italy was welded together from constituent kingdoms and provinces in Cavour and Garibaldi’s Risorgimento. France returned to republicanism with a burning national purpose. Japan, traumatized by the American opening of its ports in 1853, restored the absolute Meiji monarchy on the Chrysanthemum Throne and began a massive modernization and aggressive naval and colonial program that soon spread into Siberia and across the western Pacific. Not the least significant and durable of these events would prove to be the Confederation of Canada, which even as that fledgling lineal patchwork of regions laid out a transcontinental railway and began to populate a half-continent, was still, for a little longer, disdained by an American president as a quasi-colonial upstart. Of the late twentieth century’s G7 countries, only Great Britain did not have a profound political metamorphosis, as a succession of talented moderate reformers that we have glimpsed (Peel, Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury) moved the country and its mighty Empire steadily forward through social and franchise reform for most of the nineteenth century, in the name of a strong-minded, constitutional queen-empress (as Disraeli would make Victoria). Radical institutional change was in vogue, Canada’s was bloodless and effective, and eventually made a difference to the world.

  But the greatest immediate difference in this contemporaneous series of national reawakenings was caused by the sudden emergence of Germany as the continent’s greatest power. Disraeli, whose sublime cunning was sometimes obscured by the raw cynicism of his wit, made a prophetic warning speech from his place as leader of the Opposition on February 2, 1871, that would resonate across the next three generations: “The [Franco-Prussian] war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution. I don’t say a greater, or as great a social event,” which was unknowable. “Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition that has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown dangers and objects with which to cope.… The balance of power has been utterly destroyed, and the country that suffers most, and feels the effect of this great change most, is England.”11 Gladstone did not think in these terms, but Disraeli and his foreign affairs critic and successor, the Marquess of Salisbury, who between them would rule for twenty of the next thirty-one years, did. When the furor Teutonicus Bismarck unwittingly created would finally be subdued, seventy-five years later, tens of millions of Europeans would have been slaughtered, America would rule the world, and Canada would be perhaps its most reliable ally.

  Secretary of State Fish proposed to Lord Granville a joint commission to resolve the fisheries issues that arose after the lapse of the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty with Canada, continuing the pretense that Canada was just a delegate of the British. Granville proposed that the scope be broadened to embrace all outstanding issues between the countries, including the American grievance that the British had allowed the Confederate raider Alabama to sail. Fish accepted that concept, and Granville covered the problem of Britain representing Canada by inviting Macdonald to be one of the five British commissioners on the ten-man panel. The talks opened in Washington in early March 1871. Hamilton Fish led and dominated the American delegation and opened with a proposal to buy the Canadian fishing rights. Macdonald declined this, and held his corner well with the British, but it was obvious that the British wanted to settle any difficulties with the United States, as they had with Jay’s Treaty in 1794 after the French Revolutionary War broke out in Europe. The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War was now clear, and it was equally clear that British notions of how to maintain and manipulate the balance of power in Europe would have to be recalibrated, as Disraeli had been the first to note. But under any scenario, Britain could not carry any baggage of American ill will. Macdonald was seeking a less grudging recognition from the United States and a revival of as much as possible of the trade relaxation of the lapsed Reciprocity Treaty. The British commissioner, Earl de Grey and Ripon, wrote to Granville that he expected a great deal of difficulty with Macdonald.12

  Much horse-trading went on, and slowly shifting incentives were offered as Macdonald struggled to retain British solidarity for a much tougher line than Fish had any intention of accepting. Fish made it clear to the British that he could not, for political reasons, resuscitate reciprocity. Starting on March 9, he did sweeten his cash-for-fisheries offer with some tariff concessions. The British immediately claimed the Americans could not be moved farther, but Macdonald disagreed. Macdonald and the British commissioners both waved about telegrams of support they had elicited from Granville and one of his officials, and Macdonald, with great skill, managed to keep the British more or less onside for a more aggressive game of poker, though their instructions were to make a deal, and no one in their delegation or in Whitehall was much concerned with the consequences to Canada. The Americans raised the ante to free entry into the United States of Canadian fish, coal, salt, and lumber. It was significant movement, and the British again lobbied Macdonald intensively to accept, but he did not. Macdonald sent a lengthy message to London that captured Gladstone’s sense of fair play, and the prime minister told Granville on behalf of the whole cabinet “to hold a little with Macdonald.”*13 Macdonald sometimes used the governor general of Canada as a conduit, and Young, who was now Lord Lisgar, was very cooperative in assisting Macdonald in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Foreign Office with the appeasers on the British delegation to the talks.

  On April 15, Fish said that he had to retract and water down his previous offer, and the British all very knowingly reproached Macdonald for pushing the Americans too far. Macdonald still
would not be moved, and the British then offered him the inducement that Britain would pay compensation for the damage done by the Fenian raids. This was a personal flourish of Gladstone’s. Macdonald still did not budge, and Gladstone declared him to be “rampantly unreasonable.”14 Finally, it was agreed that the Alabama claims would be settled by international arbitration, the emperor of Germany would be arbiter of the boundaries in the Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver Island and the American mainland, catches of Canadian fish would enter freely into the U.S., and American fishermen would have full access to Canadian waters. Freedom of navigation of the St. Lawrence was granted in exchange for freedom of navigation on the Yukon, Porcupine, and Stikine Rivers and for ten years to Canada on Lake Michigan, and Canada would receive a substantial cash payment to be determined by a commission. The Treaty of Washington was signed on May 8, 1871. The British did compensate Canada for the Fenian raids, and guaranteed the first 2.5 million pounds for the Pacific railway.