John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Kingston was actually better off than other towns in Upper Canada. An 1837 guide for emigrants called it “perhaps the finest-built town in the Province,” while T.R. Preston, an English visitor at around the same time, said it “resembled an English village but somewhat stragglingly built, though it possessed in its substantial parts some very substantial homes.” Kingston possessed one invaluable urban asset: lots of limestone. When the Macdonalds arrived, most houses were constructed of logs or hewn lumber—a motley array of dwellings often destroyed by fire. With the completion of the Rideau Canal, though, a lot of Scottish stonemasons were suddenly looking for work, and by the 1840s Kingston had begun to acquire more substantial buildings made of the local stone.*9

  A few of the leading citizens commissioned remarkable houses in the delicate Adamesque style and began to install beautiful mouldings and chimney pieces in their mansions. Some major public buildings, far grander than the small town itself, were constructed during these years—a hospital, a penitentiary, a lunatic asylum, a courthouse and, later, a superb town hall. Kingston even became important enough for a stagecoach to make a twice-weekly trip between it and Montreal—a bone-shattering experience, for sure, but with the benefit that, unlike in England, highwaymen were rare.

  The Kingston of Macdonald’s day even encompassed some of the finer things of life. It had a lending library and two newspapers. Occasionally, travelling theatre groups performed for a night or two, and in the churches there were organ recitals and, on Sundays, sonorous, scary sermons. Band concerts were particularly popular, and for the active, so were cricket matches, fox hunts and horse races—all made possible by the military garrison stationed in the town. The military, moreover, made one major cultural breakthrough: on the frozen lake, members of the Royal Canadian Rifles developed, by hit and miss and bump and grind, a new game using skates, field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball.

  The most intense competition in Kingston revolved around the sexes, as Dickens would have noted had he lingered. The highest ambition of the wives of successful merchants and farmers was to marry off a daughter to a bachelor English officer. Few fulfilled this aspiration, because, in the cruel comment of one witness, they all “still smelt of bread and butter.” Nevertheless, the young officers praised the way Kingston chaperones were less watchful than those back in England.

  The underside of life flourished here too. One visitor described the streets as “swarming with drunkards and prostitutes”—the inevitable consequence of so many soldiers and sailors and immigrants passing through. Kingston’s Common Council, or town council, reported in 1841 that there was a drink shop for every seven or eight men, ranging from taverns or pubs to “low dram shops” or shebeens. In counterpoint, a local temperance society was started up; it suggested, among other things, the installation of a treadmill as the best way to deal with drunkenness and better “the morals of the lower classes.”

  If Kingston was in many ways a brutal society, so at the time was all of British North America and, indeed, just about the entire world. Drunken soldiers and sailors were easy marks for muggers. Soldiers often deserted across the nearby American border; those caught were flogged at a triangular wooden frame, to the beat of a drum. Punishments everywhere were brutal: inmates in the penitentiary in Kingston included a child of eight who began his three-year sentence with a flogging by the cat; another inmate, ten years old, received 102 strokes of rawhide. Hangings were a public attraction—one steamer brought in two hundred “tourists,” including children, to watch an execution. A man was hanged for stealing a cow.

  After three months of living jammed up in the Macpherson home, Hugh Macdonald moved his family out on its own. He opened a store in the centre of town, and the six of them lived in the rooms above. Besides a mix of foodstuffs and hardware, he offered customers “groceries, wines, brandy, shrub [a cordial], vinegar, powder and shot, English window-glass and putty, etc.” The enterprise failed quickly. Hugh opened another general store in another location. It soon failed too.

  Amid these setbacks, the family had to come to terms with an almost unimaginable trauma: the second son, James, was killed at the age of five and a half by a family servant named Kennedy. It’s impossible to be certain what happened. One day, Hugh and Helen went out, leaving John A. and James at home in Kennedy’s care. The servant was a secret drinker. In one account, Kennedy got angry with James for crying for his parents and lashed out at him with a stick. In another, he lunged drunkenly at him and James slipped, hitting his head on an andiron. Whatever the cause, the young boy died while seven-year-old John A. witnessed his murder or manslaughter. The May 3 issue of the Kingston Chronicle in 1822 carried this sad obituary: “On Monday the 22 ult., James, second son of Mr. Hugh Macdonald, Merchant of this town, aged five years and six months.”

  Hugh Macdonald’s ad in the Kingston Chronicle of July 3, 1821, showed, for him, a rare business sense as the only one in the paper to carry an illustration of his wares.

  That newspaper notice was the family’s entire recorded response. No charge was ever brought against Kennedy. Hugh entered no record of the death in his memorandum book of family events, though John A. later added it to the chronology. No burial place for the boy has ever been identified; he is not listed among those interred in the family plot at Cataraqui Cemetery.*10

  Nor is there any reference to the tragedy in any of the family letters that have been preserved. At the time, the most common reference likely to be mentioned in family correspondence would have been to a locket or brooch containing a circle of the lost child’s hair, commonly worn for years afterwards by a bereaved mother. Yet no surviving letter contains any mention of such a commemorative object.

  This silent reaction can be attributed far more readily to acceptance than to callousness. Then, death was part of life, and as any stroll through any old cemetery will confirm, to be young then was to be close to death. A survey done in Montreal in 1867 found that two out of every five children never reached the age of five. As well, grief may have been generally subdued because it amounted to an expression of doubt about the existence of an afterlife. Religion provided healing; a loved one who had died was often referred to as one who “went before”—to a place where the others would later join the departed.

  The single certain consequence of this tragedy was that, henceforth, the Macdonald family’s entire hopes rested on the shoulders of John Alexander—the last surviving male heir among the original three.

  After his second enterprise in Kingston had failed, Hugh decided to change his location entirely. In 1824, four years after their arrival, he moved the family out to Hay Bay, on the lakeshore to the west of Kingston, where he opened yet another store. Young John, by now nine years old, continued with his schooling in the nearby village of Adolphustown.

  Each day he walked three miles to school and, in the late afternoon, three miles back. This commute was entirely ordinary. His sisters, Margaret and Louisa, made the same walk with him. The three of them played well together, often as soldiers in a game where he was always the officer, and they got into the usual scrapes. As the only boy now, and anyway his mother’s favourite, John was spoiled rotten. Margaret, small and delicate, possessed an aptitude for seeming vulnerable. Louisa, by contrast, was tall, with a stern face and a long, thick nose. At best she could be called plain; in later years she protested that someone had compared her to her brother, “the ugliest man in Canada.” Independent and stubborn like her mother, she was John A.’s pal.

  One of the most surprising comments Macdonald ever made was to his confidential secretary and biographer, Joseph Pope: “I never had a boyhood. From fifteen I began to earn my living.” It is Macdonald’s rare lapse into unguarded bitterness that makes this admission so surprising. More astounding still, his complaint was quite untrue. Macdonald did indeed have to quit school at the age of fifteen, when he began his legal career, but this pattern was almost universal then. The phenomenon of adolescence had yet to be discovered (or inve
nted); a survey done in 1871 found that one in four boys aged eleven to fifteen were working in some kind of a job. Typically for the times, Egerton Ryerson, the great Canadian educator, espoused the proposition that children were small men in need of greater instruction than older siblings. In any case, Macdonald’s boyhood was more agreeable than that of most boys. At home, he experienced no shortage of love, and he benefited from the kindliness of an extended family. While the family was pinched for money, that was not in the least unusual, and of little concern to a boy.

  The explanation for Macdonald’s bitterness may reside in another comment he made to Pope. “If I had had a university education,” he reflected, “I should probably have entered the path of literature and acquired distinction therein.” Looking back from a time near the end of his life, Macdonald may have been expressing an uneasy sense that politics hadn’t stretched his intellect enough and that he had missed out on opportunities to express the creative and imaginative side of his character.*11 Perhaps he was thinking enviously of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, his ideological and physical look-alike, who, amid the grinding pressures of politics, had found time to write no fewer than twenty novels, Tancred and Endymion the best received among them.†12

  While at school—the length of his tenure there being entirely average—Macdonald received an education that was well above the norm. The schools he attended, first in Kingston and then in Adolphustown, were the typical one-room schools where children of all ages sat at a raised board that ran around three sides of the room and served as their desk. They faced the fourth, open side, where the teacher had a smaller desk. The only other pieces of furniture were a pail of water and a stove. Most teachers in the region were Scots, each known as a “dominie”—an apt phrase because of the strap they always carried. Books and paper were rare. For most children, this schooling was their entire education. In Ontario, school was not compulsory until 1874—and then for a minimum of only four months a year—a rule that was regularly ignored by farmers’ sons.

  Macdonald mostly had a grand time at school. Boys liked him because he could tell stories and knew tricks, and because he wasn’t afraid of the masters. They also had a wary respect for his Scottish temper. Girls liked him, even though they teased him as “Ugly John”—as he most certainly was, with his absurdly crinkly hair and outsized nose. But they would have noted with approval, certainly with interest, that he was a bit of a dandy, with a taste in gaudy waistcoats. Wit more than compensated for his lack of looks. At one dance, Macdonald forgot he was due to partner a particular girl in a quadrille. She rejected his abject apologies until he flung himself at her feet, proclaiming manically, “Remember, oh remember, the fascination of the turkey.” With her uncontrollable laughter came forgiveness. He did all the customary boyish things, getting into scrapes and, at the age of thirteen, writing florid poetry to a pretty cousin. Although he seldom took part in sports, he was good at running barefoot, at skating and at dancing. Early on, he showed some skill at mathematics, an unusual accuracy in spelling and an insatiable appetite for reading.

  Two factors pushed Macdonald onto a life’s arc different from that of most of his fellow students: he was a Scot, and he had a mother who was determined that he would be more than an ordinary man.

  After a couple of years of making the long daily walk to the school in Adolphustown, John was sent by his parents to Kingston to attend the Midland District Grammar School. It was run by a graduate of Oxford University, the Reverend John Wilson. Annual tuition fees were seventy pounds, representing a steep sacrifice for the family. Here, Macdonald learned Latin and French as well as English and mathematics. (His French grammar book, dated May 28, 1825, still survives.) He stayed with the Macphersons, where he was thoroughly petted and spoiled. Years later, his nephew, John Pennington Macpherson, recalled in a slight biography of his famous relative how Macdonald would read compulsively, quite untroubled by the noisy antics and quarrels of the large family around him. In the summers he went back to the Bay of Quinte area—to Glenora, where his father had moved to run a grist mill. It, again, soon failed.*13

  In 1829, the fourteen-year-old Macdonald moved to a new establishment for “general and classical education” run by a recent newcomer, the Reverend John Cruickshank. There were some twenty pupils, from six to sixteen years old; among them was Oliver Mowat, later a Father of Confederation along with Macdonald and later still premier of Ontario. The school’s standards were high, the local Scots having decided that the Midland District School was inadequate to give their children a quick start in life. What really set this grammar school apart was that it was coeducational, one of the first in Upper Canada. At the risk of reading too much into it, Macdonald’s coeducational experience, reinforced by the female-centred household he grew up in, may explain one of the qualities that set him apart from most men of his day—and of a good many still. In the company of women, Macdonald was always wholly at his ease. He was never awkward or shy or predatory with them. He could flirt and play the gallant, but he never patronized women.

  As is common enough, Macdonald was his own principal teacher. He read omnivorously—history, biographies, politics, poetry, geography. His most remarked-upon scholastic skill was his handwriting—clear, large, even and fluid. (His letters would be a delight to later scholars.) Cruickshank was always proud to show Macdonald’s compositions to new students, and he kept them for years afterwards as models of penmanship.

  Macdonald’s preparation for life ended in his fifteenth year. From then on, he began to live it. But he’d already learned a great deal about life’s essence—the ways and the whys of how people behave.

  THREE

  The Right Time to Be a Scot

  A man’s a man for a’ that. Robert Burns

  John A. Macdonald placed his first foot on life’s ladder by apprenticing to an established Kingston lawyer. To qualify for this post, he had first to go to Toronto, to the offices of the Law Society of Upper Canada, and, before a panel of benchers, sit an exam that involved some Latin and some mathematics. He passed, paid the fee of fifteen pounds, and returned to Kingston as he had come, by steamboat. There was then no formal training for lawyers or any law degree. Now just short of sixteen, he worked long days as a law clerk, running errands and putting newly written letters through a letter press to squeeze out copies on onion-skin paper before the ink was dry; at night he crammed through textbooks.

  To become a clerk to an established lawyer constituted a substantial step forward. The one taken by Macdonald was more like a leap. No matter how junior his post, he had gained entry to what was probably the most sought-after legal premises in Kingston—the office of George Mackenzie. Although only thirty-five, Mackenzie was already one of the town’s most successful and highly regarded lawyers.

  The crucial introduction to Mackenzie had come to Macdonald as a gift from the family’s patron, Colonel Macpherson. Mackenzie would also have been well aware of the quality of the education his clerk had received at Reverend Cruickshank’s school. A couple of years later, Macdonald’s budding legal career benefited from his being asked by another relative, Lowther Macpherson, to fill in temporarily, with Mackenzie’s permission, in his Prince Edward County law office while he himself was away trying to recover from an illness; Macdonald thereby gained management experience at the earliest age. While in Kingston, he made his first adult friendships, most particularly with a bright and attractive young man called Charles Stuart. The preceptor of St. Andrew’s Church there took a liking to Macdonald and, while teasing him as “a free thinker of the worst kind,” engaged him in biblical discussions that gave the young law clerk valuable practice in how best to organize his arguments. Moreover, around this time, Hugh Macdonald was rescued from his uninterrupted business failures by a relative, Francis Harper, who slipped him into a secure if lowly sinecure post as a clerk in Kingston’s newly established Commercial Bank of the Midland District.

  To all these individuals who enabled Macdonald
to make his first career steps a good deal more quickly than he would have otherwise, and to others like them who later provided similar assistance as his trot quickened into a canter, there was one obvious and defining characteristic. Each of them was a Scot. Had Macdonald not been a Scot himself, he wouldn’t have moved up nearly as fast. His own talents mattered a great deal, of course. But it mattered critically that other Scots were prepared to help him because he was one of their own; it mattered as much that they themselves were doing well enough to be able to provide real help. Before Macdonald’s ascent is tracked, it’s necessary first to place him in the context within which he operated. As he moved upwards, he did so as a member of a distinct and uncommonly successful ethnic group.

  Macdonald came by his Scottishness through his parents, of course. The benefits of this gift to him were multiplied many times over by another happenstance—one of timing. Macdonald was a Scot when it was the best time in history to be a Scot.

  Early in the nineteenth century, the Scots exploded outwards from a small, poor, backward society to become, collectively, one of the most admired and respected of all societies of the day; more remarkable yet, a great many of them had gone on to become the first “citizens of the world.” Through the greater part of the century, Scots accomplished more in more places around the globe than did any other people. Nowhere was this more true than in British North America, the country to which Macdonald’s parents had just brought him.