That summer, Macdonald’s mother suffered a third stroke. He wrote encouragingly to her that “such attacks are not uncommon in aged people.” He then switched to some role-reversing nagging: “These illnesses should have the effect of inducing you to be more particular in keeping your system in order, and conquering your antipathy to medicine.”
But soon it was time for an exultant letter. On August 2, 1847, Macdonald was able to write to his mother from New York that Isabella had gone into labour and a specialist, a Dr. Rodgers, had come to administer “the Lethean or somnific gas,” although able to risk only a small dose because of her weakness. “She suffered dreadfully all night and about 8 this morning was so weak that the Doctors determined to use the forceps, as she was quite unable to deliver herself. They succeeded to a miracle, and I am delighted to tell you that she was delivered of a healthy & strong boy.” The child instantly dominated their lives. Macdonald reported triumphantly to Margaret Greene that “his eyes are dark blue, very large & nose to match. When born his length was 1 foot 9 inches & very strong and healthy, though thin, but as Maria told Dr. Washington, that was not to be wondered at, seeing he had been living on pills for so long.” Isabella, at the end of her “headlong” letter to Margaret Greene, for once found the words to express what she truly wanted to say: “My very soul is bound up in him. God pardon me if I sin in this. But did I not purchase him dearly?” They named their baby son John Alexander.
By September, Macdonald was back in Canada—and back in politics. “Our poor Isabella was a good deal agitated at my leaving her,” he tells Margaret Greene in a letter written from Montreal. “The Boy is flourishing like a Green bay Horse so writes Margaret [his own sister Margaret, who’d gone down to New York], and that he is becoming strong & fat.” Isabella remained in New York that winter, cared for by her sister Maria, while Macdonald’s sister Margaret returned to Kingston to look after their mother. Macdonald himself was now alone, in Montreal, where the government had moved. He told Margaret Greene, “I feel quite solitary & miserable living in lodgings alone. I would spend a pleasant winter if Isabella were only here.”
In the late spring of 1848, Isabella came back from New York to join Macdonald in Kingston. They moved to Bellevue, an airy Tuscan-style villa with large, well-landscaped grounds. Its usual nickname was the Pekoe Pagoda, but Macdonald called it the Eyetalian Willar. (It is now a National Historic Site of Canada.) A particular attraction of the house for Isabella was its distance from the noise of the town, which always upset her. A far greater attraction, of course, as Macdonald wrote to Margaret Greene, was “the society of her boy. At first he was shy and uncomfortable in her room, which is to some degree darkened and as she could not handle him, or toss him about, which the young gentleman insists upon from all who approach him.” But “he is now however great friends with her, and sits most contentedly in the bed with her, surrounded by his toys which he throws about, much to her inconvenience I am sure, tho’ she will allow it.”
A miniature of an oil portrait of Isabella by William Sawyer, dated 1852.
If the spirit was now willing, the flesh was soon assailed again. On August 1, 1848, Macdonald informed Margaret that Isabella was consistently coughing. “On her route & after her arrival [home], there were occasional appearances of blood from her lungs…. [Dr. Hayward] discerns no symptoms of ulceration or permanent affection—but I fear, I fear.” A few days later, he confirmed the alarming new symptom. “The chief cause of uneasiness is the occasional appearance of blood in her handkerchief when she coughs.” A fortnight later, Dr. Hayward told him that “the cough & the blood of course indicate something wrong, some cause of irritation. And yet she has none of the evidence on which a medical man could state there was any ulceration.” Still, the baby John Alexander was there to lift her spirits: “He sits by the hour now with his Mother as contentedly as possible, and smiles & crows away from one end of day to the other.”
Three weeks later, a nurse went to check on John Alexander in his room next door to Isabella’s on the ground floor. He was still and cold in his cot. “Convulsions” was the explanation given; it may have been sudden infant death syndrome. He was buried in the Garrison Burial Ground near the grave of the grandfather he’d never seen, Hugh Macdonald.
In those days, the death of young children was common. This infant, though, had been brought into the world amid excruciating pain, and during his brief life he had given to his mother and father a joy they had never dared imagine they might possess. He was never forgotten.
In 1865, the remains of the infant John A., as well as those of Hugh Macdonald, originally interred in the old Garrison Burial Ground that was by now in a state of disrepair, were removed to the new Cataraqui Cemetery (of which Macdonald was a founding subscriber) and there placed in the family’s burial plot. Many years later, Macdonald’s second wife, Agnes, came upon a small dusty box while cleaning the attic of Earnscliffe, their house in Ottawa. Inside it were some odd wooden objects. When she showed them to her husband, Macdonald explained they were John Alexander’s toys; through all the many moves he had made from city to city and from house to lodging house to bachelor quarters and back again to a house, Macdonald had kept with him these relics of his lost son.
Thereafter, Macdonald’s marriage became “a grey, unrelieved tragedy,” in the fine phrase of his principal biographer, Donald Creighton. From then on, and until his life was over, he applied all his passion to politics.
SEVEN
New Guys with New Ideas
The British people of the North American Colonies are a people on whom we may safely rely, and to whom we must not grudge power. Lord Durham, in his report of 1839
By luck, Macdonald began his political career in 1844, at the best possible time for a newcomer to arrive at least in the wings of the political stage. Shortly before he got there, the Canadian political system had been decisively shaken up and had set off in an entirely new direction. Shortly afterwards, the system was galvanized by the introduction into it of a new, almost revolutionary, idea in governance. The decisive change was caused by a new constitution that joined the two previously separate colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (today, Ontario and Quebec) into the United Province of Canada; for the first time, the country’s two European peoples, French and English, were brought into direct political contact. The almost revolutionary idea was that of Responsible Government: it called for the colony’s government to be responsible to the elected legislature, not, as before, to the governor general. Under the old system, the governor general exercised unchallengable authority as the personal representative of the monarch; he selected and appointed all the ministers, who then functioned as his ministers rather than as those of the legislature and the voters. Transferring responsibility to elected ministers who commanded a majority in the legislature effectively ceded to the colony full self-government in domestic affairs. Only Confederation, still two decades away, would change the country as radically as these two measures.
For the politicians, whether Macdonald or anyone else, the effect was like that of a comprehensive spring cleaning. As Creighton observed in The Young Politician, almost all the leading political figures of the era before Responsible Government “failed, with astonishing uniformity, to survive very long in the new political atmosphere.” Macdonald thus joined the system at the very moment when it was time for new guys with new ideas. Except that Macdonald did not—yet—have any new ideas. He survived, nevertheless, because he was street-smart and a quick learner. Still, he contributed nothing to the transformational changes themselves, and it took him time to figure out how to take advantage of the extra space at the top that had just been opened up for someone like him.
Macdonald also had to cope with practical constraints. During his first term, from 1844 to 1848, he was a backbencher, literally as well as figuratively, because he chose to sit in the very back row. His appearances on the actual stage itself were in the junior cabinet posts of receiver general and commissio
ner of Crown lands, in each instance briefly. During his second term, from 1848 to 1852, he sat in opposition, because the Conservative government had lost to the Reform Party. Mostly what he did during this time was to listen and learn, to make useful contacts and to acquire insider know-how, all of which would be highly useful, whether he chose to give politics up for the law or try clambering up the ladder.
As an even more practical constraint, Macdonald was having problems with his law practice. Campbell complained, justifiably, that he was being underpaid, particularly because Macdonald was often absent on political business. In 1846 they rewrote their original agreement, this time dividing the general profits equally between them, giving Campbell a third of the Commercial Bank business and allowing him a lump payment of £250 a year to compensate for Macdonald’s absences. This arrangement tightened Macdonald’s finances at the very time he had to look after a permanently invalided wife as well as his mother, who kept suffering strokes even while recovering from the latest, and provide for the financial needs of his unmarried sisters, Margaret and Louisa.
Before we carry on with the chronicle of Macdonald’s career, it’s necessary—anyway, it ought to be useful—to describe the new political environment within which Macdonald now found himself operating.
Here, all readers to whom this mid-nineteenth-century period of Canadian politics is a well-annotated book should jump ahead to the next chapter. However, their ranks may be relatively thin. A great many Canadians have come to assume that their country began on July 1, 1867, not least because we celebrate each year that anniversary of Confederation. But Confederation wasn’t the starting point of all that we now have and are. It developed from its own past, and that past, even if now far distant from us, still materially affects our present and our future.
The most explicit description of the continuity of Canadian politics across the centuries is made by historian Gordon Stewart in his book The Origins of Canadian Politics. There he writes, “The key to understanding the main features of Canadian national political culture after 1867 lies in the political world of Upper and Lower Canada between the 1790s and the 1860s.”*32 His argument, one shared fully by this author, is that all Canadian politics, even those in our own postmodern, high-tech, twenty-first-century present, have been influenced substantively by events and attitudes in the horse-and-buggy Canada of our dim past.
One key example would be the role of political patronage in Canadian politics. Except on rare occasions, our two mainstream parties have either no ideology at all or only fragments of it. Their distinguishing difference is not in their titles, Liberal and Conservative, but in the fact that, at any one time, one party is in and the other is out. Without patronage, it would be just about impossible for either organization to function as a national party. Other motives, of course, attract individuals to join one or other of the mainstream parties, which alternate, rather irregularly, in office: idealism, the attraction of public service and, no less, the adrenaline high that is generated by the fierce competitiveness of the political game. But the prospect of good, high-status jobs matters as critically—in effect, no patronage, no national political parties. (Regional parties have in their very regionalism a substitute for ideology, as do the rarer ideology-driven parties like the New Democrats and the Greens.) Two international comparisons may confirm the point: in Britain, from which we originally copied a great deal, there is relatively little patronage but a considerable difference in ideology between Labour and Conservative; in the United States, always our principal comparison, there is about as much patronage as there is north of the border, but Democrats and Republicans differ in their ideology or, perhaps more particularly these days, in their cultural assumptions. Patronage really is as Canadian as maple syrup.
Lord Durham, known as “Radical Jack.” He found “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state” and set out to assimilate the second one—les Canadiens.
Another example, this one unique to Canada, is the effect on our political system of the ongoing alliance of convenience between the French and the English, or now, more accurately, of francophones and English-speaking Canadians. No less so before Confederation than after it, whichever party has been able to forge a partnership with francophone Quebecers has almost automatically become the government and remained in power for a long time. Few of Macdonald’s political insights were as perceptive as his recognition early on that a stable national government would be impossible without abundant amounts of patronage and a close, mutually self-interested apportionment of the spoils (including that generated by government spending) between the French and the English.
Now to go back to our future, this of course being also Macdonald’s present.
The catalyst of fundamental change in pre-Confederation politics were the rebellions in 1837–38 by the Patriotes in Lower Canada led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, which was a serious uprising, and by the rebels in Upper Canada led by William Lyon Mackenzie, which was more of a tragicomedy. Both uprisings provided a warning to London that, as had gone the American colonies a half-century earlier, so the colonies of British North America might also go. To deal with the crisis, the Imperial government sent out one of its best and brightest.
John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, arrived accompanied by an orchestra, several race horses, a full complement of silver and a cluster of brainy aides, one of whom had achieved celebrity status by running off with a teenage heiress and serving time briefly in jail. Still in his early forties, “Radical Jack” was cerebral, cold, acerbic and arrogant. After just five months in the colony, he left in a rage after a decision of his—to exile many of the Patriotes to Bermuda without the bother of a trial—was countermanded by the Colonial Office. Back home, he completed, in 1839, a report that was perhaps the single most important public document in all Canadian history.*33 Lord Durham himself died of tuberculosis a year later.
Parts of Durham’s report were brilliant; parts were brutal. The effects of each were identical: they both had an extraordinarily creative effect on Canada and Canadians. The brutal parts of Durham’s diagnosis are, as almost always happens, much the better known. He had found here, he declared, “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state…a struggle, not of principles, but of races.”†34 The French Canadians, les Canadiens, had to lose—for their own sake. They were “a people destitute of all that could constitute a nationality…brood[ing] in sullen silence over the memory of their fallen countrymen, of their burnt villages, of their ruined property, of their extinguished ascendancy.”
In fact, Durham was almost as harsh about the English in Canada. They were “hardly better off than the French for the means of education for their children.” They were almost as indolent: “On the American side, all is activity and hustle…. On the British side of the line, except for a few favoured spots, all seems waste and desolate.” He dismissed the powerful Family Compact as “these wretches.” Still, he took it for granted that Anglo-Saxons would dominate the French majority in their own Lower Canada. “The entire wholesale and a large portion of the retail trade of the Province, with the most profitable and flourishing farms, are now in the hands of this dominant minority.” All French Canadians could do was “look upon their rivals with alarm, with jealousy, and finally with hatred.”
The only way to end this perpetual clash between the “races,” Durham concluded, was for there to be just one race in Canada. The two separate, ethnically defined provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada should be combined into the United Province of Canada. As immigrants poured in from the British Isles, the French would inevitably become a minority. To quicken the pace of assimilation, the use of French should cease in the new, single legislature and government. To minimize the political weight of Lower Canada’s 650,000 people, compared with Upper Canada’s 450,000, each former province, now reduced to a “section,” should have an equal number of members in the new legislature.*35
Montreal. Place d’Armes, with a view of Notre Dame churc
h, c. 1843. It was Canada’s only real city, the first to install such technology as gas lights and the horse-drawn omnibus.
Durham’s formula worked—but backwards. Quebec’s commitment to la survivance dates less from Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm (after which the Canadiens’ religion and system of law were protected by British decree) than from 1839, when Durham told French Canadians they were finished. The consequence of this collective death sentence was an incredible flowering of a national will to remain alive.*36
In the years immediately following 1839, a sociological miracle occurred in Lower Canada: a lost people found themselves. Historian François-Xavier Garneau, the poet Octave Crémazie, and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, author of the patriotic lament Un Canadien Errant, created the beginnings of a national literature. Étienne Parent, a brilliant journalist, wrote a long series of articles calling for sweeping social, educational and religious reforms. The Instituts canadiens were founded as a means of generating intellectual inquiry and speculation and as a form of adult education. Montreal’s Bishop Ignace Bourget, an ultramontane,*37 or right-wing Catholic, attracted major orders of priests—the Jesuits and the Oblates—and four orders of nuns to staff the new collèges classiques, from which a new and educated middle class would soon graduate. In 1840 there was just one priest for every two thousand parishioners; by 1880 there was one for every five hundred. As historian Susan Mann Trofimenkoff wrote in The Dream of Nation, “the clergy was as much a means of national unity as the railroad.” The culmination of this new surge in national self-assertiveness, the Société St-Jean-Baptiste, was established in 1843.
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