John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  He applied the same diligence to the task of sorting out his business affairs. For several years, Alexander Campbell had served him exceptionally well as a law clerk. Macdonald now promoted him to junior partner. Their agreement gave Campbell a third of the profits of the general business, excluding those generated by Macdonald from his own work as solicitor of the Commercial Bank. The deal was well structured: the practice would continue to provide him with a salary, but Macdonald no longer needed to be there all the time.

  He closed the contract with Campbell on September 1, 1843. That same day he entered into another contract, a lifelong one. Macdonald married the woman with whom he’d fallen in love.

  It had happened during his holiday in Britain the year before. It’s just possible that the “very pretty” Margaret Wanklyn who had toured Windsor Castle on his arm had set him to thinking about the pleasures of the permanent company of a woman with whom he “sympathized wonderfully.” On the Isle of Man, he had gone to call on his cousin, Margaret Greene, who was living in a farmhouse near the small capital of Douglas. Born a Clark in the same Highland site of Dalnavert where Macdonald’s mother had been born, Margaret had crossed the Atlantic to live with an uncle in Georgia. There she had married a John Ward Greene, the descendant of a hero of the Revolutionary War, but had been widowed a few years later and retreated back across the Atlantic to the Isle of Man to stretch out her finances. She was living comfortably but carefully with her two unmarried sisters, Jane and Isabella.

  Macdonald and Isabella clicked almost immediately. By the time he left, Macdonald had secured from Isabella a commitment to come to Kingston the following year, ostensibly to visit yet another of her sisters, Maria, now the wife of John Alexander Macpherson, a son of Colonel Macpherson. Isabella made the journey. As was by now inevitable, a proposal was made and was accepted. And so on that September morning, they exchanged vows and matching gold wedding rings in St. Andrew’s Church in Kingston. Right after the wedding, Macdonald hurried over to his law office to sign his agreement with Campbell. By marriage, and thereby the acquisition of respectability, Macdonald had cleared the last hurdle to his political candidacy.

  Isabella Macdonald (née Clark), probably close to the time of her marriage. Her wan, girlish vulnerability helped get her in under Macdonald’s radar screen.

  No election date had yet been announced, but it was now only a year away.

  Because Macdonald would go on to become so successful a politician, it has often been taken for granted that his motive for getting into the game was to get to the top as soon as possible and, once there, to remain at the top for as long as possible. In fact, it’s wholly possible that Macdonald’s principal motive for entering public life was to make money.

  The professions of law and politics are joined at the hip. They always have been: in particular, lawyers are practised in the arts of debating and oratory, two political skills of immense esteem in the nineteenth century. Of the eleven prime ministers back to Louis St. Laurent just over a half-century ago, all but three (Lester Pearson, Joe Clark, and Stephen Harper) have been lawyers. Lawyers are good at spotting loopholes in legislation and regulations, and at attitudinizing—projecting shock and disbelief—at the arguments of their opponents. Lawyers who leave politics can return more easily to their practices than can members of almost any other profession; there are more, and better, post-politics prospects for lawyers, from the bench to boards of public enterprises to commissions of inquiry.

  Two pieces of evidence suggest that short-term practical considerations were indeed Macdonald’s purpose. When asked why he had stood as a candidate, Macdonald answered, “To fill a gap. There seemed no one else available, so I was pitched on.” Many years later, his minister of justice of that time, Sir John Thompson, asked Macdonald if it was proper for a friend to run for Parliament for only a single term. Macdonald replied bluntly, “Those are the terms on which I came into public life.” In this strictly private conversation, he had no reason to dissemble.

  As further evidence that Macdonald’s motivation for entering public life was more to make money than to make a name for himself, not a single companion or friend, nor any member of the family, ever claimed to have heard him say during his early years that he planned to become a great man. By contrast, his closest contemporary British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, proclaimed uninhibitedly, “I love fame. I love reputation,” while Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who comes closest to Macdonald in his hold on the Canadian imagination, wrote in a journal he kept as a youth, “I must become a great man…a future head of state or a well-known diplomat or an eminent lawyer.”

  It’s thus entirely possible that Macdonald initially saw politics as an opportunity to gain a quick under-standing of government and to accumulate contacts that he could then deploy on behalf of old and new clients. Only later, as he realized how good he was at it, would politics become his life, fame his spur, and power his addiction.

  John A. Macdonald as a young man—alert, active and, as so often, very clearly amused.

  As always with Macdonald, little is certain. He prepared himself with the focused rigour of someone girding for a marathon, not a sprint. Once elected, he set out systematically to turn Kingston into a political citadel from which he could sally out knowing he had a secure base to retreat to. And, of course, once in, Macdonald stayed on, and on and on.

  The call came in the spring of 1844. A group of leading Kingston citizens asked him to run in the election that was coming due. They asked him to stand as a Conservative—he being conservative by nature, Kingston being Loyalist, and all those worthy types looking for someone sound and sensible to represent them. Macdonald agreed to their request and then told them exactly what they wanted to hear: that all politics is local—today it’s a cliché, but at the time it came to Macdonald instinctually.*21 He promised he would address “the settlement of the back township district, hitherto so utterly neglected, and to press for the construction of the long projected plank road to Perth and Ottawa.” He also said that he intended to get things done in the way they themselves would do it—by being practical: “In a young country like Canada,” he declared, “I am of the opinion that it is of more consequence to endeavour to develop its resources and improve its physical advantages than to waste the time of the legislature and the money of the people on abstract and theoretical questions of government.”

  Macdonald and his supporters (all men of property, they being the only ones with the right to vote) were as one. That curious but occasionally insightful book The Canadian Commercial Revolution, 1845–1851 contains a good description of the typical Canadian voter of the time: “They were energetic, progressive and materialistic…they were strong and shrewd men, disdainful of theories, and interested chiefly in the material realities of life.”*22 In one respect, these unsentimental types might have wondered just what they were getting into. Part of Macdonald’s reply to his petitioners had a decidedly teasing, over-the-top quality to it: “With feelings of greater pride and gratitude than I can express…[t]he mode in which I can best evince my high sense of the honour you have done me is, at once, to lay aside all personal considerations and accede to your request.”

  For the actual election, in the fall of 1844, Macdonald issued his own proclamation in the Kingston Chronicle. It repeated his local ambitions and dealt with a topic that concerned most voters in the staunchly Loyalist town, no less so than Macdonald himself: “I, therefore, scarcely need state my firm belief that the prosperity of Canada depends upon its permanent connection with the Mother Country and that I shall resist to the utmost any attempt which may tend to weaken that union.”

  The balloting—each elector casting his vote not by marking an X on paper but in the “manly” manner of shouting his choice out loud—took place on Monday, October 14, and throughout the next day. Macdonald won easily, by 275 shouts against just 42 for his opponent, Anthony Manahan. As was far from always the case, the casting of the votes and their counting were con
ducted “in a most peaceful and orderly manner,” according to the Chronicle.

  But one thing had gone wrong for Macdonald. He had always assumed he would be serving as a member in a legislature that met in his home town of Kingston. Lord Sydenham, the first governor general of the new United Province of Canada, which had just replaced the separate provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, had announced in February 1841 that Kingston would be the capital of his domain. This town of some five thousand souls had gone into an instant and ecstatic boom—as had Macdonald’s law practice. Civil servants streamed in, along with the governor general and his mini-court. Construction was soon under way for at least four hundred new houses. Town officials took delighted note of the fact that a grand new town hall was being constructed which just happened to have, in its second storey, two high-ceilinged chambers ideal for the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council, or upper chamber. Until this building was completed, the Assembly met in a newly built but empty hospital, with eighty-four overstuffed armchairs equipped with an attached writing tablet hurried in for the eighty-four legislators.

  Kingston, c. 1863. Some fine three-storey buildings by now, and horses and carriages, but still a street of deep, foul-smelling mud.

  If Kingstonians were pleased, few others shared their enthusiasm. French-Canadian members complained loudly that, compared with Montreal or Quebec City, this new capital was dull and, worse, homogeneously English; one of the French members referred to “cet enfer de Kingston.” The demands of the French, headed by the emerging leader Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, could not be denied. In September 1843 a new governor general, Sir Charles Metcalfe, announced that Kingston’s brief hour of glory was over and, perhaps initiating the tradition of resolving national problems by displeasing everyone more or less equally, that the seat of government would henceforth rotate every three years from Montreal to Quebec City to Toronto.*23 Macdonald’s inaugural appearance in the legislature thus was in its new temporary quarters in St. Anne’s Market in Montreal. There, he would begin to learn for the first time about the “other” Canada.

  In nineteenth-century Canada, the observation that all politics is local would have been treated not as an insight but as a banality. With occasional exceptions, such as the campaign to achieve Responsible Government or, later, Representation by Population, almost all politics was about local issues. Debates that engaged the general public were almost always those inspired by sectarianism—French versus English, Catholic versus Protestant, and sometimes Protestant versus Protestant, as between Anglicans and Methodists. Just about the only non-religious exception to the rule of the dominance of localism was the issue of anti-Americanism; it was both widespread and, as was truly rare, a political conviction that promoted national unity because it was held as strongly by the French as by the English.

  Almost all politics was local for the simple reason that almost everyone in Canada was a local: at least 80 per cent of Canadians were farmers or independent fishermen. Moreover, they were self-sufficient farmers. They built their own houses. They carved out most of their implements and equipment. They grew almost all their own food (tea and sugar excepted) or raised it on the hoof. They made most of their own clothes. They made their own candles and soft soap. Among the few products they sold into commercial markets were grain and potash. Few sent their children to school. They were unprotected by policemen (even in the towns in Upper Canada, police forces dated only from the 1840s). For lack of ministers or priests, marriages were often performed by the people themselves. Even the term “local” conveys a false impression of community: roads were so bad and farms spaced so far apart that social contact was limited principally to “bees”—barn and house raising, stump clearing and later, more fancily, quilting.

  Government’s reach in Canada was markedly more stunted than in England. While there had been a Poor Law there from 1597, the first statute of the Legislature of Upper Canada provided specifically that “Nothing in this Act…shall introduce any of the laws of England concerning the maintenance of the poor.”*24 The churches were responsible for charity, and in some areas for education.*25 It was the same for that other form of social activism, the Temperance Societies, commonly brought into being by the Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches. The unemployed were “the idle poor,” and no government had any notion that it should be responsible for their succour. Governments collected taxes (almost exclusively customs and excise duties) and were responsible for law and order, maintaining the militia, and running the jails, where the idea of rehabilitation as opposed to punishment was unknown. But without any income tax, there was comparatively little the government could do even if it wished. Consequently, the total spending on public charities, social programs and education amounted to just 9 per cent of any government’s revenues. To most Canadians in the middle of the nineteenth century, government was as irrelevant to their day-to day lives as it is today to the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish.

  Because Macdonald was an avowed conservative, he was little different from almost everyone else; the other major party, the Reform Party (which changed its name over time to the Liberal Party), was at least as conservative as the Conservatives. Later, the populist Clear Grits arose in Upper Canada to advocate such disturbing American notions as the secret ballot and direct democracy. In mid-to late-nineteenth-century Canada, though, conservatism was as widely held a political attitude as liberalism would become a century later. It took a long while for things to change. In one post-Confederation debate, in 1876, held during an economic depression, a Liberal MP argued that the government should assist the poor. Another MP rounded on him to declare, “The moment a Government is asked to take charge and feed the poor you strike a blow at their self-respect and independence that is fatal to our existence as a people.” The shocked second intervenor was also a Liberal, as was the government of the day.

  Amid this emphasis on the local, there was, nevertheless, one broad national dimension. Governments were remarkably ready to go into debt—proportionately more deeply than today—to build up the nation itself. Here, Conservatives were actually greater risk-takers than the Reformers. Bishop John Strachan, a leading member of the arch-conservative Family Compact, held that “the existence of a national debt may be perfectly consistent with the interests and prosperity of the Country.” In the early and middle part of the century, mostly Conservative governments bankrolled major public projects—first canals, such as the Welland, the Lachine and the Rideau—and then a spiderweb of railways, nearly all of them money-losing. These Conservatives were, of course, undertaking projects that benefited their supporters, but they were also building the country.

  Politicians performed one social program of vital importance—patronage. When Macdonald first entered the legislature, though, relatively little patronage was available for politicians to distribute. Purity wasn’t the cause: impotence was. In the early 1840s, patronage was allocated almost entirely by the governor general. The fight through the decade for Responsible Government, or for the transfer from London to Canadians of responsibility over almost all internal or domestic matters, would really be a contest between the governor general and Canadian politicians over who should get to dish out patronage.

  Although they did a good deal less than today’s politicians do, nineteenth-century legislators performed with a good deal more flourish. Speeches, delivered in the long, declamatory cadences of high rhetoric, could last two, three, even five hours. Among epithets used commonly in the province’s Parliament were “poltroon,” “blackguard,” “traitor,” “infamous traitor,” “coward,” “cur,” “jackal.” Here, as recorded by newspaper reporters,*26 are the exchanges in a debate on May 8, 1846:

  Mr. Deblurey†27 : “Mr. Chairman, if you are absolutely unable to keep the hon. Member in order, I will cross the floor and make him observe the respect due to a member addressing this House.”

  Mr. Aylwin, (clenching his fist and extending his arm over his desk): “Take care. Take care
. Take care.” (Great excitement). Later,

  Mr. Aylwin again (shaking his fist): “Come over here, if you dare, your scoundrel.” (Mr. Deblurey attempted to go over but was prevented by two of the members).

  Mr. Hall: “Are we in a Canadian legislature to be bullied and browbeaten?” (The whole house was on its legs in a moment. Some cried, “Leave the chair,” some, “Call the Speaker,” others “Clear the gallery,” and several gentlemen went to the gallery to tender assistance to the ladies, who were, of course, greatly alarmed).

  Macdonald then intervened, declaring: “He would pull Mr. Aylwin’s nose.”

  The newspapers did a great deal to raise the political temperature. The Toronto Globe once described one member, Dr. John Rolph, as “a sleek-visaged man with cold grey eyes, treacherous mouth and lips fashioned to deceive,” and as “dark, designing, cruel, traitorous.” The assaults went beyond the verbal to the physical, particularly during the evening sessions as the intake of liquor increased. During an 1849 debate on an especially contentious issue, Macdonald first denounced a speech by a Reform minister, William Blake, as “most shameful,” then sent him a note challenging him to a duel. Blake accepted, but the sergeant-at-arms managed to head them off. George-Étienne Cartier and a Lower Canada (Quebec) member followed up a comparable shouting match by actually arriving at a duelling ground; nothing happened, because their seconds had “forgotten” to bring any ammunition.

  Macdonald came into the legislature quietly. During his first session he made not a single speech, asked not a question, made not a single interjection. He spent a great deal of time in the Parliamentary Library, boning up on the rules and precedents, reading speeches, figuring out the jousting techniques involved in asking questions of ministers and responding to their replies. He sat in the back row—and he still got himself noticed.