by Conrad Black
John A. Macdonald had done as well as anyone could, and had made his point. Historian W.L. Morton may slightly, but only slightly, exaggerate by writing that there was
indirectly, grudgingly, and ungraciously, American acceptance of the fact that the republic was faced from sea to sea by an independent American nation as free, as well-organized and as stable as itself, but founded on an explicit and final rejection of American institutions and of American manifest destiny. A superficial victory for Grant and Fish, the Treaty of Washington was in fact the greatest diplomatic check the United States had accepted since its foundation. It had agreed to share the continent with a self-governing Canada; the continental imperialism of the past was ended with the ending of British imperial power in America.15
This was not clear to all the parties, though Macdonald had made his point that he was not a puppet of the British, that Canada was obviously setting up a real country bound by an ambitious railway, and that improved relations between Britain and America were of greater benefit as a deterrent to American appetites for Canada than whatever had been lost by straining the Canadian relationship with Britain, aggravated by Gladstone’s skepticism about the Empire generally.
The government had an impressive record to take to the voters, but hanging fire were continuing Nova Scotian discontent, aggravated by the failure to restore reciprocity; Cartier’s problems in Quebec arising from the Red River, even though Wolseley had sent Riel packing without any casualties; and it was recognized from the outset that the transcontinental railway was going to be very expensive. Macdonald did a swift pivot and represented the fishing exportation agreement to the United States as a great triumph and the failure to achieve full reciprocity as the blessing of tariff-protected industry and soaring employment just ahead. John A. Macdonald had led Canada, at least tentatively, to another milestone in the long, steep, treacherous path to nationhood.
2. Fall and Resurrection, the Pacific Scandal, and the Wilderness Years, 1871–1878
The Treaty of Washington, as Jay’s Treaty was in the United States in 1794, was severely criticized by the Canadian nationalists, who accused Macdonald of selling out, oblivious, as the critics of Jay’s Treaty in that young country were, of the unbalanced correlation of forces between the new country and the old. This was an imbalance in this case made more lopsided by the fact that Macdonald was trying to deal with two greater and senior powers, one of which threatened Canada’s independence, and the other the country on whose strength and goodwill Canada’s independence opposite the Americans depended. There was much criticism of the fisheries exchange, though this was eventually addressed by the $5.5 million Canada won in arbitration. It was, at the time, a handsome award, and it says something for Macdonald’s judgment that he achieved it, and something for the United States that, despite flag-waving senators and congressmen empurpling the air with bellicose polemics, it paid the award. To opposition claims that Macdonald had been steamrollered, his colleagues, especially Joseph Howe, denounced “England’s recent diplomatic efforts to buy her own peace at the sacrifice of our interests.”16
Macdonald, in the ratification debate in the House and in the following general election campaign, took the high road and said that the entire agreement, including the resolution of the Alabama claims, had resolved all the serious differences between the English-speaking countries, that they had between them established a procedure of negotiation and arbitration and were setting a new and benign precedent for the world, and that it would have been a horrible mistake, a tragedy, and a suicidal error for Canada to block that process. He said that in this process, Canada had gained a new and unambiguously independent status for itself:
I believe that this treaty is an epoch in the history of civilization … and with the growth of the great Anglo-Saxon family and with the development of that mighty nation to the south of us I believe that the principle of arbitration will be advocated as the sole principle of settlement of differences between the English-speaking peoples, and that it will have a moral influence in the world. And … it will spread itself over all the civilized world. It is not too much to say that it is a great advance in the history of mankind, and I should be sorry if it were recorded that it was stopped for a moment by a selfish consideration of the interests of Canada.17
This proved, of course, optimistic, but he was correct in the extremely important point that it marked the end of any serious threat of recourse to war between the British, Americans, and Canadians (though not entirely to peevish sabre-rattling) and that this would prove a decisive turn in world history. It was also a distinguished beginning of Canada’s capacity and determination to negotiate foreign arrangements for itself.
As the autumn of 1871 elapsed, the U.S. Senate had not taken up the Washington Treaty, and the British government had not produced its 2.5-million-pound guaranty for the Pacific railroad. Most worrying, the settlement of the final numbers for the Alabama claims seemed almost impossible to agree. Time was slipping by, and Macdonald wanted to clear the current agenda and go to the people in 1872 with a new and imaginative program. The Toronto Mail was founded in 1872 as a Conservative voice in competition with Brown’s Globe, and Macdonald, in preparation for the general election, had its editor, T.C. Patterson, unfurl what he called the National Policy. It was an almost visionary program that emphasized increased tariffs to protect industry and counter continentalism and the swiftest practical construction of the transcontinental railway, and was broadened to include rapid development of the West and the promotion of heavy European immigration for that purpose, and the admission of all the adjacent territories as provinces as soon as practical (Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, and Alberta). The parliamentary session carried over into 1872, but the Washington Treaty finally passed easily, largely because of Macdonald’s suave handling of it, and Ontario was accorded a further six constituencies because of the last census. A rather liberal Trades Union Act was passed and there were no problems with the routine housekeeping matters, and Parliament was dissolved for new elections in the late summer. It was a stormy campaign.
Railway politics had raised their hoary head in a way that would prove immensely controversial. Two companies had been chartered by the Dominion government to build the railway that was committed to in the admission of British Columbia as a province: the Canadian Pacific Railway, led by Sir Hugh Allan (1810–1882) of Montreal, owner of the world’s largest private steamship line (thirty-two ocean-going vessels) and founder and president of the Merchants’ Bank of Canada, which had a number of prominent American investors; and the Inter-Oceanic Railway, headed by Senator David Lewis Macpherson (1818–1896) of Toronto. Macdonald attempted to negotiate a merger, and negotiations to this end were conducted by his friend Sir Alexander Campbell, but they foundered on the issue of which man would be the president. Allan kept raising the pressure and threatening dire consequences, and the strain on Macdonald was such that he uncharacteristically lost his temper in an election meeting with his opponent in Kingston, John Carruthers. The prime minister had to stay in Kingston, where there was a very close battle, even after eight consecutive terms and with all the prerogatives and prestige of the head of the government. Macdonald himself finally effected a corporate coalition headed by Allan, telegraphing Cartier with instructions to assure Allan of that and leaving other considerations until after the election. He had held the line long enough to bring Macpherson on board as a participant under Allan and so had not simply put him over the side. An immense mystique had built up about Allan, as they would from time to time about other Canadian industrialists over the next 140 years. Allan amassed great political influence by the liberal distribution of money among the small constituency electorates of the time, and in central Montreal there were many jobs that were effectively dependent on the leaders of the banking and shipping industries. He was also prepared to finance whole parties with very large contributions.
In the 1872 election, the government’s ability to
prevail in Quebec, as throughout the last twenty years, would depend on the political strength and acuity of Sir George-Étienne Cartier. (He was a baronet, a senior position to Macdonald’s knighthood, and he was named George by his French-Canadian parents after King George III.) And Cartier was infirm, physically and politically. As it turned out, he was suffering from Bright’s disease, a kidney malfunction, and was losing vigour and mobility, and as he was leading the charge against American investors in the national railway, he was not well seen by Allan. On July 30, 1872, in high campaign, Allan told Cartier and telegraphed Macdonald that the presidency of the railway was not sufficient; he must also have the majority of directors and the assurance of government support. It was an outrageous ultimatum to an incumbent government in mid-election campaign, but he was a heavy-handed opportunist. He referred to the government’s wish to be assisted with funds in the pending elections, including “immediate requirements” for Cartier, Langevin, and Macdonald himself, totalling sixty thousand dollars. This was an outright bribe, of course, and Cartier, in his unfit and politically desperate state, urged accepting. Macdonald read Allan’s telegram with, as his biographer Donald Creighton wrote, “amazement and apprehension.” He considered going at once to Montreal, but the voting began the next day, August 1, and he felt he could not leave Kingston. He telegraphed a rejection of Allan’s demands. Allan backed down, and Macdonald won his personal election safely enough by the standards of the times, 735 to 604. This was all a good break for the prime minister, but Allan had not withdrawn his financial offer, and Macdonald distributed the twenty-five thousand dollars Allan had deposited to his account in his own name in the Merchants’ Bank in Montreal among needy Conservative candidates in Ontario. Macdonald asked Allan’s lawyer, John Abbott, for more and more money, wiring on August 26, “I must have another $10,000. Will be the last time of calling. Do not fail me. Answer today.”
So capable and wily a veteran as Macdonald must have been in a terribly distracted condition to write such an indiscreet message. When the election was over, Macdonald had taken $45,000, though nothing for himself, and Cartier and Langevin had taken the utterly outrageous total of $117,000 from Allan. The government was re-elected with a reduced majority, and was put across, ironically, by the efforts of Howe and the able young Tupper in Nova Scotia, where four years before, the province, led by Howe, was seething with anti-federal sentiment. The only greater factor in the government’s success was Allan’s money. Cartier lost his own district and held only a bare majority of the Quebec MPs, but without the cash infusion from Allan the government would have been defeated. The result was very close: one hundred Conservative MPs and 49.9 per cent of the vote to ninety-five Liberals and 49.1 per cent. There were five other MPs. The government lost a number of districts in Ontario, and Francis Hincks was defeated personally. This was the end of the political careers of Cartier and Hincks, two of the greatest founders of Canada as a federal state. The country owed them a great deal, including a more dignified end to their political careers. Cartier soon departed for medical treatment in England under Dr. Bright’s professional successor. He and Macdonald, close partners for seventeen years, fifteen at the head of the government, were not to meet again.
Macdonald turned at once to trying to settle the railway dispute, but Macpherson’s position had hardened. He declined to join with Allan and demanded a greater public revelation of Allan’s accounts. Strong foreign participation in the national railway was an issue of great emotional strength in Canada at the time, especially where the foreigners were Americans. Macpherson’s research made it clear that Allan had not removed but merely disguised the presence of the Americans in his group, and the whole arrangement between the two railroad companies had unravelled amid mutual recriminations.
Macdonald must have known that any revelation of the Allan campaign contributions and the conditions for them would blow his government apart. The matter appeared to be settling down as 1872 ended, but on New Year’s Eve Macdonald received an unscheduled visit from George W. McMullen, who owned the Chicago Evening Post and was the leader of Allan’s American associates in the railway project. He came heavy-laden with correspondence from Allan that made it clear Allan had, in Donald Creighton’s words, been “transformed [from] a sober, inhibited, Scottish merchant into a Roman emperor, free of restraint and drunk with power. Ambition, cunning, vanity, incredible indiscretion and duplicity … without reserve” were revealed in the two-hour conversation. Allan had even had “the sublime impertinence” to try to collect from McMullen the $343,000 he had spent to buy himself the presidency of the railway.18 Allan had barely begun to stand down the Americans, contrary to his pledges to Macdonald. The prime minister tried to fob off on his unannounced visitor the theory that McMullen’s grievance and recourse were against Allan, but McMullen wasn’t having it and said that either the government must now, re-elected, enforce the original agreement, with a full American presence, or dispose of Allan entirely, and that any attempt to allow Allan to get away with the eviction of the Americans would oblige him to ensure that “the Canadian public … be promptly put in possession of all the facts.”19 Macdonald, outwardly composed but shaken, played for time and professed a need to get to the bottom of Allan’s skullduggery.
Lisgar had departed – a well-regarded, successful, if unflamboyant governor general – and been replaced by the grander and more florid and colourful Lord Dufferin, with whom Macdonald quickly developed an excellent rapport. Truncated terms and seriously unpopular or erratic viceroys were now almost as unimaginable as flexible and politically worldly sympathizers with Canadian ambitions had been in the pre-Elgin years. The opposition was now in the hands of the stolid Alexander Mackenzie and the more intelligent and articulate, but somewhat erratic, Edward Blake, as well as the perennial Antoine-Aimé Dorion, an anomalous quasi-separatist in a federal House, a formula to which Quebec would have recourse again from time to time. At least the fierce and pugnacious George Brown, though still a spirited editor, had not returned to public life. As this volcano silently heated up, Macdonald scored another victory and enlisted Canada’s seventh province, Prince Edward Island. The status of the Dominion was good, if the railway could be settled, even if the condition of the government was being undermined, invisibly to the public.
At the end of February 1873, Charles M. Smith, an associate of McMullen in Chicago, wrote Macdonald that his group effectively saw no distinction between Allan and the government and demanded satisfaction. Allan was about to go to London to try to raise money from the British to replace the Americans, and Macdonald sent the just involuntarily retired Hincks to prevent him from leaving and try to broker a deal with McMullen, who was prepared to come to Montreal. It was becoming clear that Allan, so successful a ship owner and banker, had made an unspeakable shambles of the national railway and behaved completely dishonestly. Macdonald now regarded him as “selfish, unskilful, and unreliable,” and he was correct.20 Allan assured Hincks that all was being composed, but Macdonald didn’t believe it, with good reason.
The next blow fell on April 2, when the Opposition member for Shefford (Granby, Quebec), Lucius S. Huntington, rose in the House and proposed the creation of a select investigative committee of seven MPs to inquire into the circumstances of the granting of the railway charter to Allan’s company. Huntington asserted that Allan was in fact fronting Americans whose existence in the consortium had been falsely concealed and denied, and that Allan had made very large donations, some of them of American-sourced funds, to government ministers and candidates in exchange for improper preferments, including the granting of the charter. He did not elaborate, and Macdonald improvised the strategy of simply ignoring him and imposed silence on his benches. Huntington’s motion, technically a confidence vote, was defeated comfortably. To quell concerns, on April 8 Macdonald moved appointment of a committee of five, three of his men and Blake and Dorion, with John Hillyard Cameron, fractious Conservative, as chair. An Oaths Bill was then hastil
y passed, empowering this committee to take evidence under oath. Macdonald doubted the constitutionality of this measure, since the Imperial Parliament had not granted such rights, and as usual in such matters he was correct, as the colonial secretary, Earl Kimberley, confirmed on May 8. (Kimberley’s chief interest at this point was a discovery of large diamond reserves in South Africa, and the site was named after him.) Macdonald had outsmarted his foes, and his proposal of a committee of inquiry had to be accepted. He was still playing for time and planned to adjourn or prorogue for an extended holiday, while making all sorts of compassionate noises about allowing Cartier and Allan’s counsel, Abbott, time to come back from overseas to testify. The railway at this point, with an elaborate board of directors, no capital, and under siege from its principal candidate shareholder, was “a pompous fraud.”21 The publicity of the controversy in London, and the bandying about of the phrase “Pacific Scandal,” which sounded to British ears like Robert Walpole’s South Sea Bubble, coupled to Allan’s blustery and inept negotiating tactics, sank the proposed financing in the City of London, as Barings and Rothschilds and the other houses refused unequivocally to consider it.
On May 20, 1873, Sir George-Étienne Cartier died in London, aged fifty-nine. He was widely eulogized on both sides of the Atlantic as co-father of the country with Macdonald, who profoundly mourned the passing of his forceful and brilliant comrade through a tremendous chapter of the country’s history over nearly thirty years. Cartier received an immense funeral in Montreal on June 13.
Macdonald was intermittently drinking to serious excess, sometimes at unadvisedly public places and occasions. His committee on the Pacific Scandal began sitting on July 2. Macdonald personally cross-examined the witnesses on behalf of the government and with his customary skill. All Lucius Huntington seemed to have was the McMullen-Allan correspondence, and Huntington, Blake, and Dorion failed to produce Allan’s letters to McMullen purporting to break off relations with the Americans. Allan’s reputation was in tatters and his career as an aspiring railway baron was over, but his financial condition was solid. His brief dazzling moment as Canada’s great political kingmaker ended in abrupt disgrace. Macdonald felt confident and unwell enough to take a holiday at his modest farm near Rivière-du-Loup in mid-July, and was just settling in when McMullen, with the connivance of the opposition, opened the kimono wide in the Toronto Globe, the Montreal Gazette, and the Quebec L’Événement. Macdonald and Cartier’s desperate requests for money at the end of the election campaign a year before were jubilantly trotted out. Macdonald said to Dufferin, in whom he confided quite wholeheartedly, “It is one of those overwhelming misfortunes that they say every man must meet once in his life.” The prime minister again wallowed in alcohol for a couple of weeks while Parliament was adjourned. In such times, as Sir Stafford Northcote (Disraeli’s close associate and a Macdonald-watcher) said, Macdonald “excludes everyone.” He rallied sufficiently to go privately from Rivière-du-Loup to Lévis, and after a few days the opposition began circulating word that he had committed suicide,22 a rumour that only ceased and was instantly forgotten when he returned to Ottawa on August 10.
