John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, Scots were regarded generally as rude and crude at best, and at worst as outright savages. They were brave, of course, with the special allure of a fiercely proud, freedom-loving people, but backward, self-enclosed, impossible to comprehend. (Indeed, they were not dissimilar to the Métis of the prairies, with whom Macdonald would later so tragically find it difficult to come to terms.) The Scots all knew how to eat porridge properly (standing up, with salt) and how to position exactly the skein dhu dagger (in the stocking, just below a kilt-clad knee). Suddenly, before the eighteenth century ended, all this parochialism was replaced by intellectualism and internationalism. Of the transformation, Voltaire would declare, “It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.”

  In a transformation that has few national equivalents, a poor, quasi-feudal society turned almost overnight into a society of ideas and creative energy. The catalyst of change was the Scottish Enlightenment, which, during the period from 1740 to 1790, made the small capital of Edinburgh into an intellectual and cultural rival of any other city of the time, only London and Paris excepted. The two superstars of the Scottish Enlightenment were David Hume, the first modern philosopher, and Adam Smith, the first modern economist. At the time, a cluster of others were as well regarded as these two, among them Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, William Reid and William Robertson.

  This extraordinary story has been told lovingly and adroitly by Arthur Herman in his book How the Scots Invented the World, subtitled, with only a slight exaggeration, The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Country Created Our World and Everything in It. Herman’s thesis is that Edinburgh attained “a self-consciously modern view” that is now “so deeply rooted in the assumptions and institutions that govern our lives that we often miss its significance, not to mention its origins.” In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of “deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one’s own heritage and oneself with it.”

  Those Scots were grappling with some of the most intractable of challenges of our own time, such as how to exploit the benefits of capitalism without destroying society’s ethical framework, and how to balance the aspirations of the individual against the needs of the collectivity. Hutcheson decreed that society’s ultimate purpose was “the greatest good of the greatest number.” In The Wealth of Nations, Smith unveiled one of the most liberating of modern ideas—that the interests of the community could be advanced better by the self-interest than by the “benevolence” of the butcher, the baker and all the other upwardly clambering capitalists.*14 Hume decreed that “Liberty is the perfection of society,” but believed equally that “authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom’s] very existence.” Two observations by Ferguson could have been minted as mantras for Macdonald: “Man is born in society and there he remains” and, even more so, “No government is copied from a plan: the secrets of government are locked up in human nature.”

  These Scots were all progressive conservatives. They believed in natural democracy and in meritocracy, and because they were intensely practical men they believed in education. A 1694 law decreed that each parish in Scotland had to have its own school; England wouldn’t catch up until the end of the nineteenth century. Scots’ churches (except for the Catholic ones) elected their own pastors. Yet the people were skeptical about the fashionable new doctrine of political democracy—and they were outright hostile to revolution. More than a fifth of the Loyalists, for example, were Scots, among them Flora Macdonald, the Scottish heroine who hid Prince Charles from the English soldiers after his defeat at Culloden, and who eventually made her way back to the Isle of Skye by way of Nova Scotia. A cause for this skepticism was their disbelief in the perfectibility of human nature. Ferguson warned, “The individual considers his community only so far as it can be rendered subservient to his personal advancement and profit.” Common sense was their golden rule, not least in the Philosophy of Common Sense, which would play such a part in the development of higher education in Canada.

  These enlightened Scots most certainly believed in progress, including technological progress. James Watt developed the steam engine, for example, and John McAdam, hard-surfaced roads. They also believed in the ability of a society to improve itself; otherwise, all that education and that unleashing of enlightened self-interest would be in vain. Yet they were very conservative. As Lord Kames put it, “Without property, labour and industry were in vain.”

  The Scottish Enlightenment had run its course before Macdonald was born, and as a young child he moved thousands of miles away from Scotland. Yet in Kingston most of his teachers were Scots. His mother’s love of reading, which he inherited and which was so rare among his peers in those early years in Canada, came directly from the respect for knowledge that the Enlightenment implanted in all Scots. All kinds of echoes of the ideas initiated in Edinburgh can be found in Macdonald’s own thinking—his disbelief in the possibility of human progress, his belief in the possibility of causing a society to progress (why else throw a railway across a wilderness?), his indifference to political democracy and yet his inherently democratic nature, as you’d expect for someone coming from a society whose national poet laureate had proclaimed “A man’s a man for a’ that.” No less so, Macdonald would have accepted Robbie Burns’s skepticism, so quintessentially Scottish: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promised joy.” Macdonald wasn’t a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, but he was, because of it, an enlightened man.

  Macdonald’s most direct debt to the Scottish Enlightenment was cultural. The Scots who produced all those ideas weren’t solitary geniuses sharpening quill pens in attics. They thought collectively, amid company, and over dinners that ended with lots of broken crockery, or in pubs and taverns amid arguing and shouting and brawling. Even the brainiest among them put on no airs, nor suffered any in others. Their interest in ideas was how to get things done, not to talk about what should and might be done. As them, so Macdonald.

  Benjamin Disraeli once remarked that although he had been in many countries, “I have never been in one without finding a Scotchman, and I never found a Scotchman who was not at the head of the poll”—that’s to say, on top. This outwardness was one of the most remarkable after-effects of the Scottish Enlightenment. Commonly, minorities react to defeat and occupation by turning in on themselves; the Scots, a century after Culloden, burst out all over the world. The men from the Orkneys joined the Hudson’s Bay Company—the joke went—to get warm. Their sheer hardiness as northerners, their conversion to modernity ahead of everyone else, and the excellence of their education (out of a population of 1.4 million at home, twenty thousand people earned their living through writing and publishing) gave them a confidence, a resilience and a distinctive sense of self. So did two other factors. The Enlightenment had changed everyone’s image of the Scots. Any society that could produce a David Hume and an Adam Smith could not be a society of barbarians. Their reputation now went before them and opened doors to them.

  In their own separate ways, a monarch and a novelist presented a second gift to the Scots. Early in the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria and Sir Walter Scott rediscovered the romance of the Highlands, or, more accurately, invented it. In truth, the Highlands were a brutal place; the standard of living there was lower than that of the Plains Indians of North America. But just as the film Braveheart was irresistible, so were Scott’s novels and the tartans that Victoria made everyone wear at Balmoral. One of Macdonald’s distinguishing characteristics among nineteenth-century Canadians was that, whenever he went to London and moved among “the greats” (whether by office or by birth
), he held his own dignity. He never exhibited the least sign of “colonial cringe” or felt any need to apologize for being a colonial.

  The Scots of the nineteenth century were by no means perfect: they were clannish, hot-tempered, parsimonious and they drank an incredible amount—“the most drunken nation on the face of the earth,” according to The Scots Magazine. As the century progressed, Scottish culture turned increasingly inwards, judgmental and holier-than-thou. Macdonald, influenced by earlier attitudes, was a product of Scottish culture at its best.

  For the Macdonalds, when they moved to Canada, the immediate benefit of being Scots was that they weren’t alone in this strange, hard land but were enveloped by a clan. Besides the many Macphersons, the Macdonalds could claim ties of kinship to Shaws, Grants, Clarks and Greenes. In Kingston itself there were institutions like the St. Andrew’s Society and the Celtic Society to provide the young Macdonald with contacts, social connections, insider gossip and information about upcoming business deals. Clannishness could hurt as well as help. As Pope wrote in his biography, Macdonald could never bring himself to trust fully a Campbell, even though one member of that clan, Alexander Campbell, was his later law partner and political organizer, simply because the Campbells had massacred the Macdonalds in the Pass of Glencoe in 1692.

  As Macdonald moved upwards, the circles of Scots ready to let him through their doors kept widening. Among the first directors of the Bank of Montreal—the bank, by a wide margin—eight were Scots; Canada’s entire banking system was modelled on Scotland’s. Almost every member of the original Canadian Pacific Railway syndicate was a Scot, including the founder-president, George Stephen. So was the country’s greatest railway engineer, Sandford Fleming, the inventor of standard time. By 1880, even though numbering just one in seven European Canadians, half of Canada’s industrial leaders would be Scots or the sons of Scottish immigrants. In Montreal, the country’s financial and industrial capital, the city’s business leaders included a McGill, a MacTavish, a Redpath. At the country’s largest corporate enterprise in the nineteenth century, the Hudson’s Bay Company, four in five employees were Scots. The country’s biggest and best newspaper, the Toronto Globe, was owned and edited by a Scot, George Brown. All three of Canada’s first universities—McGill, Dalhousie, Toronto—were founded by Scots; in The Scot in America, published in 1896, Peter Ross reckoned that “the entire educational system of the country, from the primary school to the university, is more indebted to the Scottish section of the community than to any other.”

  As for politics, once Macdonald got there, he would be crowded around by fellow countrymen. Both he and Canada’s second prime minister, Alexander Mackenzie, were Scots; so were the first two premiers of Ontario, John Sandfield Macdonald and Oliver Mowat. Of the “Big Four” among the Fathers of Confederation, all but George-Étienne Cartier would be Scots—Macdonald, Brown and Alexander Tilloch Galt.

  Macdonald naturally played the advantage of Scottishness for all it was worth. When he met his first governor general, he did so wearing the “fine Macdonald Soft Tartan Kilt with Green Riband Rosette…[and] a silk Velvet Highland Jacket” that he’d bought in Edinburgh as part of his trip around Britain in 1842. He would drop Scottish sayings into speeches, such as “He’ll cool in the same boots he got warm in.”

  Yet he didn’t sound much like a Scot. His burr was far less pronounced than that of at least two other Scottish-born political personalities of his time, George Brown and Alexander Mackenzie. Alexander Campbell, who knew him well and was himself from Kingston, wrote in an undated memoir that Macdonald was “in tone of voice & manner as thoroughly a Bay of Quinte boy as if he had been born there.”*15 A complicating factor here is that, as is often the case with good storytellers, Macdonald was an excellent mimic. Yet Campbell was on to something. In speech, as well as in many other ways, Macdonald was far more a Canadian than he was a Scot. One journalist wrote of Macdonald, “It was long a moot question where he was born.” In a couple of substantial ways, he wasn’t that much of a Scot: during all his many visits to England, he went only once to Scotland—on his first trip; also, he never had himself photographed looking like a Scot by wearing his tartan.

  As a politician, Macdonald benefited in one last critical way from his Scottishness. For the most part, the four principal European ethnic groups in nineteenth-century Canada—English, French, Irish and Scot—thoroughly disliked each other, while the Irish (Protestant and Catholic) disliked their own countrymen, if anything, even more. Within these discontents, though, there was one striking exception: the French and the Scots got on exceedingly well. It made a great difference that the man who made us, and who did so primarily by connecting together, politically, Canada’s two great ethnic solitudes, should have been a Scot.

  In the light of what he would achieve as a man, one aspect of Macdonald’s youth is surprising. No one who knew him then recalled his having ever displayed any vaulting ambition or recounted any anecdote about Macdonald describing some hero he planned to emulate or to exceed. True, his mother predicted great things for him, but many mothers say that about their children. Several of his boyhood contemporaries, as well as some of his teachers, expected him to do well. No one, though, forecast that he would do better, by far, than anyone in the country had ever done. They hadn’t misjudged his talents; they had failed to take account of his capacity for growth and, no less, his inexhaustible competitiveness.

  FOUR

  Horse Dealing, Tavern Keeping and the Law

  Say nothing on business without receiving a fee in advance. Fellow lawyer’s advice to John A. Macdonald

  The suggestion that Macdonald should aim for a career in law had actually come first from his father. Hugh Macdonald pointed out that “the province was yet only in its infancy, was rapidly growing, and would soon need a horde of professional men.” For Hugh, such acuity in financial matters was rare, but this time he was absolutely right. Although clearly unusually intelligent, Macdonald had no money, so the attraction of a legal career was obvious: law required no start-up capital and no training at a university. Once the apprenticeship was served, the profession guaranteed at least modest prosperity to all but the indolent or the inebriated. As John Langton, Canada’s first auditor general, remarked, “I know of no money-making business in Canada except the law, store keeping, tavern-keeping and perhaps I might add, horse-trading.”

  Practising law came as easily to Macdonald as breathing. He soon showed himself deft at mastering briefs, remembering and using detail to good effect and, most effective of all, having a talent for reading judges and juries. By the age of twenty-three he was already defending men on trial for their lives against some of the best-known counsels in the province. A few years later he was well on the way to establishing himself as a leading commercial lawyer. Had he stayed with the law, Macdonald would surely have made a great deal of money and, as did others, eventually used it to buy himself a knighthood and retire to leisurely comfort in England.

  When George Mackenzie took Macdonald as an apprentice in 1830, Mackenzie specialized in corporate law, handling the accounts of local farmers, businessmen and merchants. Intelligent and amiable, he was one of Kingston’s leading lawyers and would soon be nominated as the Conservative candidate for Frontenac. As a mark of his special regard for his clerk, Mackenzie invited Macdonald to board at his own house in Kingston. There the young man began to learn something about the graces in life, such as the joys of a fine dining room and an ample library.

  From Mackenzie, Macdonald picked up two of the most valuable of all legal lessons. The first was to “say nothing on business without receiving a fee in advance.” The other amounted to an admonition to remember that, in law, personality counts for a good deal more than knowing the statutes. Mackenzie, after hearing that his junior was acting in a standoffish manner with clients, warned him, “I do not think you are so free and lively with people as a young man eager for their good should be. A dead-and-alive way with them never goes.
” Later, in a third gift to his junior, Mackenzie sent Macdonald to the countryside to open a branch office for him in the town of Napanee, thereby providing independent responsibility and experience.

  Hallowell (later Picton) is the Prince Edward County town where Macdonald filled in at the law practice of an ailing relative.

  To a remarkable extent, good luck quickened the pace of Macdonald’s advance as a lawyer, one of the comparatively few occasions in his career when he didn’t have to create most of his own good fortune. Its source was the bad luck of several other lawyers. Macdonald’s first stint on his own occurred when he temporarily replaced his sick relative, Lowther Macpherson, returning to Mackenzie’s office when Macpherson died at sea after receiving treatment in England. In 1834 his own employer, Mackenzie, was struck down by the cholera epidemic of that year. Once he had set up his own shingle, Macdonald took over some of Mackenzie’s accounts. Lastly, the sudden death in 1839 of another prominent Kingston lawyer, Henry Cassady, would enable Macdonald both to take over much of his business and to succeed him to the prime post of solicitor of the Commercial Bank of the Midland District.

  Mostly, he advanced in his own way. From Mackenzie he had acquired the ambition to become a corporate lawyer. To do that, Macdonald opened his own office in Kingston in 1835. He posted a notice in the Kingston Chronicle that “John A. Macdonald, attorney, has opened his office…where he will attend to all the duties of the profession. Kingston, 24 August, 1835.” At the time, he was only twenty years old, still a year short of being entitled to claim to be an attorney. He achieved that rank the next year when, after passing the necessary examination in Toronto, he was called to the bar. Soon afterwards, Macdonald himself took on two students of law. They were a remarkable pair. One was Alexander Campbell, later a cabinet minister under Macdonald and eventually lieutenant-governor of Ontario. The other was his one-time schoolmate Oliver Mowat, later a member of the legislature and, several years on, Macdonald’s most relentless and effective political opponent as premier of Ontario. Macdonald came to loathe Mowat, remarking, in a reference to their school-days together, “The one thing I have always admired about Mowat is his handwriting.”