He did so by the classic device of being different. He was clean-shaven at a time when the legislature and the courts were a thicket of muttonchop whiskers, hedge-sized moustaches and full, patriarchal beards. He wore his ties loose, in a carefree Byronic manner; his clothes, colourful, almost foppish, shouted out the message “Notice Me.” A vivid description of Macdonald’s appearance and demeanour at this time was provided by one of his early biographers, E.B. Biggar, in his Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald: “His walk, then, as ever, was peculiar. His step was short, and when he went to a seat, there was something in his movement which suggested a bird alighting in a hesitating way from flight. His quick and all-comprehending glance, and that peculiar jerking of the head, bore out the comparison in other respects.” Shrewdly, another early biographer, J.E. Collins, compared Macdonald’s posture and choice of clothes to those of “an actor.” As a further advantage, Macdonald’s frizzy hair and large, bulbous nose—“qui faisait toute sa gloire,” in the wonderful phrase of François-Xavier Langelier, who for long sat across from him as an opposition MP—made him stand out from the crowd.
Much as is the case with Parliament today, the legislature was essentially a large club. Members hurled insults at each other but behind the curtains turned into convivial friends, because they were all in the same, adrenaline-charged, winner-take-all game. Few, if any, members of that assembly would have been as “clubbable,” in the British phrase, as was Macdonald. People liked him because he liked them. It helped materially that he wasn’t moralistic, whether about drink or anything else, but was a man of the world, unshockable and unjudgmental. Also, he was funny.
Macdonald found his voice during his second session, in 1845. He spoke, in these first efforts, not merely like a voice from the past but like one from an antediluvian past. In February he took part in a debate on a motion calling for reform of the law of primogeniture, which required that, when a property owner died intestate, all his holdings went to his eldest son. Macdonald was appalled that some share of such estates might instead be reserved for younger sons. “The law of primogeniture was the great bulwark between the people and the Crown and the Crown and the people,” he declared. “It was the younger sons of England that had made it great in peace and war. What would have been the younger Pitt or Fox if, instead of being sent forth to seek their fortunes, the estate of their father had been divided: they would have been mere country squires.” He cited the example of the Duke of Wellington, almost penniless, but “left with his sword in his hand.” To pass a motion “merely because it would please the people” would be an “act of madmen,” Macdonald concluded. The motion was defeated.
In May of the following year, Macdonald made an interjection on a bill, moved by Reform leader Robert Baldwin, to change on a trial basis the practice of electors shouting out their vote choices at the balloting stations in Montreal, where there had been violence in some places. Once again, Macdonald was appalled. He admitted that proposals for a secret ballot had been made in the British Parliament, but only to “prevent the landlord’s influence over the tenant.” In Canada, where so many citizens were landowners, there was “no one exercising an illegitimate influence over them.” So, concluded Macdonald, “every man in Canada would, and did, make public his opinion.” The public ballot was retained. That same session, Macdonald also showed that he had a temper. He provoked a member of the High Tory Boulton family to challenge him to a duel. Macdonald refused to back off, but other members intervened and heads, on both sides, cooled down.
Most of the time, Macdonald applied himself to strictly local matters. He introduced a bill to incorporate the Wolfe Island, Kingston and Toronto Railroad Company, and as well a petition for a Catholic college, Regiopolis, to be established at Kingston. He attracted the attention of journalists—one in the Montreal Transcript described him as “very popular…I should say he is ‘a rising man’ and not likely to disappoint the expectations of his friends.” At the very least, he had by now made Kingston into a citadel for himself.
SIX
Going Headlong
The rod cannot always be smiting. John A. Macdonald
In 1843 Margaret Greene, the sister of Macdonald’s wife, Isabella, left the Isle of Man, where she had introduced the couple, and moved back to Georgia—to the ancestral estate of her late husband’s family, which she had now inherited. She and Macdonald exchanged letters, he at times offering her advice on legal and real estate matters. On July 11, 1845, he wrote Margaret a letter utterly different in nature.
This letter, sent less than two years after John and Isabella had married, and one year after he became a member of the legislature, was the saddest and most fateful he would ever write. Although he did not yet know it, his life was about to change totally and irreversibly.
“My Dear Sister,” Macdonald began, “Isabella has been ill—very ill—with one of her severest attacks. She is now just recovering and I hope has thrown off for the time her terrible disease. Still, this is not certain, and at all events it has left her in the usual state of prostration that follows every attack.” Clearly this was not the first “attack” Isabella had suffered. He had planned for them to go to New York, as they had done the previous year—exactly why and for how long, Macdonald doesn’t say—but that was now doubtful. “It may be days—nay weeks—before she has rallied sufficiently to attempt any journey. What to say or do, I know not.”
Margaret Greene, Isabella’s elder sister and Macdonald’s confidante as he tried to cope with his wife’s illness.
Just one day later, Macdonald wrote again to his sister-in-law. His mood had deepened into despair. “Her pain has in a great measure left her, but her debility is in the greatest degree alarming. She is weaker than she has ever been, and there are symptoms, such as an apparent numbness of one limb, and an irregularity in the action of the heart, that made me send for Dr. Sampson, altho’ against Isabella’s wish. He saw her this morning and says he cannot relieve her, and I ought not, my beloved sister, to disguise from you, that he thinks her in the most precarious state.” He praised Margaret Greene for her “strength of mind” and, his despair now bringing him close to the point of abandoning all hope, wrote that “unless God in his infinite mercy works an immediate change for the better, it is impossible for her to remain in her exhausted state for many days.” Isabella in fact didn’t die; neither, though, would she ever recover.
There were a great many bonds between Macdonald and Isa, as Isabella was often called. They were cousins. They both were Scots. She was thirty-three when they married and must have been well aware both of the ticking of her biological clock and of the sparseness of marital opportunities in the rural Isle of Man. For him, on the eve of entering politics, having a wife meant that voters need not worry that he might misbehave and embarrass them. That their ages were inverted—he a mere twenty-eight on their wedding day—wouldn’t have struck Macdonald as unusual, because there was a similar gap between his own mother and father. He was a good catch, although by no means a great one—he was still building his law practice and his background was barely middle class. His looks, to the extent they mattered, were odd, but not alluringly ugly in the manner of, say, his contemporary Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
Isabella, for her part, possessed a certain pale prettiness, but in no way was she beautiful. The first known portrait of her was done around the time of her marriage. A second was done around 1852 by the same Kingston artist William Sawyer who painted the distinctive portrait of Macdonald that is the frontispiece of this book; a locket version of Isabella’s image appears later in this chapter. As well, in 2006 another portrait, either of Isabella or much more likely her sister Margaret Greene, was purchased by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston.*28 The Sawyer portrait shows Isabella with a high forehead, her mouth slim but determined, her hair dark and thick, her nose long and delicate, her eyes a bright, pale blue. Isabella seems not to be wholly there but withdrawn and passive, as though observing herself rather than
being on display for the benefit of observers.
Isabella may have possessed some ineffable quality now impossible to pin down, or she may have been an enigma without a riddle. In the mysterious way of these things, she connected to some romantic core hidden deep within John A., composed in part no doubt of the traditional male urge to protect. Her means for achieving this bond was spontaneity. She was open, vulnerable, breathy: “You know how headlong I ever go,” she wrote in a letter to Margaret. Macdonald was never cynical, but he most certainly was unsentimental and fully capable of being hard. With Isabella, he expanded his emotional range to that of love. The use of that word to describe his feelings for her can only be speculative. The fact is that when Isabella began to reveal the extent of her frailty, Macdonald demonstrated an exceptional tenderness towards her and, a good deal rarer among husbands, a durable tolerance for her weakness.
The full nature of their relationship can only be guessed at. Just two of Isabella’s letters survive, both of them to her sister. We thus have no record of Macdonald’s and Isabella’s voices when they were talking to each other.*29 Her own voice comes across as, well, “headlong”: people and subjects are all jumbled together. The first of these letters was written on June 11, 1845, a month before Macdonald’s anguished letter. She is a bit cross, because Margaret had apparently delayed a planned visit to Kingston: “I have of course countermanded yr bonnet dearest sister. But it was to have been lovely. An exquisite lavender satin & blonde but you will do penance in yellow stockings for it as I thought we have been so becoming & sweet. Jane shall shall [sic] wear her purple if it were at night—for I wont let her off. Bye the way, Mama has bought a London cap to send you. Mrs. Abbott had just received it when M. saw & pounced on it. But I’m so mad about that bonnet I won’t tell you what it is like, & I don’t think I’ll be satisfied till I get a red petticoat for you to wear with the yellow stockings.” The rest of the letter continues this girlish, gushing tone.
Isabella’s second extant letter, of 1848, also written to Margaret, is even gushier. “Gush,” though, is a misleading descriptor. What we are reading now is the cry of someone sensing that she is drowning. By this time indeed Isabella was struggling, growing ever weaker, against an illness that was reducing her to a hollow shell. This letter begins by referring to one of Margaret’s friends, a Mrs. Biddle: “I sincerely sympathize in your leaving dear, dear Mrs. Biddle & most precious Husband. Full well I know your spirit must be born down by the hourly yearning for her society…. My dear, dear Mrs. Biddle. How I reverence her! How my weary, weary, spirit bows before her. May God’s holiest, richest mercies rest, now & ever, abidingly, on her and hers.” She names another of Margaret’s friends: “I rejoice you are with Mrs. Field. Dear beautiful, Porcelain Mrs. Field, so different from the gilt delf of every day life. I really would dread seeing her often, my own darling precious sister, you know how headlong I ever go & I much fear I would love her but too fondly.”
She was, surely, writing far less about Mrs. Biddle and Mrs. Field than about herself.
John and Isabella Macdonald were married for fourteen years. For the first two years or so, they were wholly happy. For another dozen she was a bedridden invalid, struck down by an illness no doctor could diagnose or cure, interspersed initially by occasional brief and unpredictable respites that, over time, became rarer and briefer. Her doctors could prescribe just one effective medicine. It was opium, in ever larger quantities.*30 It brought her relief, but it also took her ever further from her husband and from real life. During this long, empty period, Macdonald would hurry home from the legislature or his law office, often to dine alone because she was too weak even to accompany him by sitting up in bed. The house was silent most of the time because the noise of guests would give her a headache. Inevitably, they had less and less to talk about, and less and less in common. Also inevitably, he took to drink.
The first two years of his marriage to Isabella would be the single span of time in John A. Macdonald’s entire adult life in which he experienced a normal marriage and family life. In place of the small daily epiphanies of any couple, whether they are in love or are merely companionable, Macdonald’s entire life would be politics. This was one reason—the tragic one—why he became so good at it.
There was a particular cause for Macdonald, in his letters to Margaret Greene of July 11 and 12, 1845, to be so close to utter despair. In the previous few months his mother had suffered two strokes. As hardy Highlanders do, she recovered, but for the rest of her life she would need permanent care. As head of the family, Macdonald was now responsible for ensuring that his mother was looked after, for making similar arrangements for his wife as she too became an invalid, and for the financial and other needs of his two unmarried sisters. While doing all this, Macdonald was at the same time trying to advance his career in politics and to maintain his law practice, now under the strain of his many absences on personal and political business.
Isabella’s downstairs bedroom at Bellevue House in Kingston. It was from here, while bedridden, that she ran the household like “the Invisible Lady.”
Many would have buckled. Macdonald just got down to doing what he could. He conceived the idea—presumably on the advice of doctors—of taking Isabella to Savannah in the Deep South, where she might better regain her strength by escaping the long blast of a Canadian winter. Before leaving, he had to sort out a family dispute caused by his own sister Margaret (Moll) refusing to accompany Isabella partway southwards, as she’d undertaken to do, because she had to remain behind to watch over their mother. Eventually, Margaret agreed to go with them as far as Oswego, New York, and Macdonald then set off. It was a nightmare journey. Transportation systems were rough and ready; accommodation for travellers was spartan. On July 18 he wrote to Margaret Greene from Oswego: “We arrived here this morning at about one o’clock my dearest sister. The exhaustion produced by carrying Isabella down to the boat was dreadful to witness. We thought she would die on the dock…. The weather was so stormy, that all our party were sick, Isabella dreadfully so, and yet strange to say her health and strength seemed to return to her.” They went on to Syracuse, and then, by train, to Philadelphia, where “her fatigues were very great and she was obliged to subdue pain by opium, but still she kept up her spirits & at about four o’clock we arrived at this House. Only think what a journey she had. First to be carried down a narrow stair at Jersey & over to the cars; 2nd a journey in the cars for about 70 miles to Bristol; 3rd To be carried in a chair from the cars to a steamboat, 4th a voyage of 22 miles to this city, and lastly and worst of all a quarter of a mile’s drive in a hack over rough streets…. She from fatigue and opium combined slept from 10 o’clock last night until the morning and is now easy and in good spirits. She never speaks of it, but I am perfectly conscious of how much she suffers.”
A few days later, still in Philadelphia, in another letter to Margaret, Macdonald recounted, first, that Isabella “exerted herself too much, so that in the evening she was a good deal exhausted, and was threatened by tic, so that she had recourse to opium,” and then reported, “She has had a good day today, has walked a good deal & eaten pretty well.” In early November they reached Baltimore, where they had reserved rooms in a hotel near the railway station, but finding them wholly unsatisfactory they moved to another establishment. “The consequence of all this was great exhaustion and great suffering by Isabella. She was in great agony all night, and was obliged to have recourse to opium, externally and internally in great quantities.” On a brighter note, Macdonald reported that “Isa…says she does not anticipate suffering from our today’s journey, as the weather is calm.”
At the small town of Petersburgh, he wrote, “The house we stayed in was dirty, the food badly dressed and the beds overrun by ants.” They hurried on the 160 miles to Wilmington: “She bore it like a Shero*31 as she is, but as you may well believe dreadfully exhausted by the exertion. She passed a miserable night and continues today to pay the penalty for her extra exer
tions.” On a cheerier note, Macdonald reported they had passed their time reading a “strange mélange” of books, among them The Bible in Spain, Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Schiller, Bishop Moore’s Sermons, and were about to “take up Lord Mahon’s History of England.”
They pressed on, by steamer, reaching Savannah on November 20 after a calm journey—“There was scarcely a curl on the sea.” There they rented two “quiet” rooms. Isabella, though, “has been very miserable since our arrival. The tic encouraged by her weakness from fatigue has made a furious attack upon her which she is manfully resisting with the assistance of the blister and the pill-box.” Now that he was in the Deep South and it was late November, Macdonald appreciated the benefits of being there. “The weather here is so fine & warm that I cannot fancy it winter at all.” He would have loved to stay, rather than going back “among the frosts & snows of Canada, sucking my paws like any other bear.” Political duties compelled him to return, though. He made an adroit appeal to Margaret Greene to enable him to slip away: “I need not say however that it would afford me great pleasure to reflect that you were near her, when I am far away.”
Macdonald’s manipulation achieved its purpose. In a letter sent from Kingston on February 27, 1846, he told Margaret, “I am sanguine in my hopes and belief, that in the fine climate she [Isa] now enjoys, and under your affectionate and judicious care she may yet be restored to me, in health, strength and spirits.”
No such recovery occurred. Instead, a miracle did. After a reunion late in 1846, Isabella let Macdonald know that she was pregnant. He moved her to New York, where medical standards were higher (and a great deal more expensive). On April 5, 1847, he wrote to Margaret Greene from New York—“this American Babylon”—to report: “Doctor Washington still says she is in very critical condition arising from the continued attacks of uterine neuralgia. These attacks, he apprehends, may bring on a premature confinement…. Still he is not without hopes of being able to prevent an abortion. She is quite calm & resolute, and is much encouraged by Maria’s presence.” (Maria was yet another of Isabella’s sisters, of whom there were four in all.)
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