Yet Macdonald remained an on-again, off-again politician. He had ample personal reasons for his ambivalence. Home was now either a silent house in which the prostrate Isabella waited for him to return to inject life and energy into it, sometimes silently turning accusatory eyes towards him when he arrived late, or, ever more often, the bleak anonymity of a boarding house in whichever city—Montreal, Toronto, Quebec—the legislature had rotated to. He had to worry about his mother, who, as she suffered a succession of twelve strokes, was looked after by his sister Louisa. “Poor Mama has again been attacked with another apoplectic affliction, and only the most prompt and vigorous measures have restored her,” he wrote to Margaret Greene on September 18, 1847. In that same letter he spelled out the range of his personal problems: “Isabella is struggling for strength enough to join me in Canada this winter. I doubt much whether she will be able to muster vigour enough to do so, and I fear that neither Margaret nor Louisa will be able to go to New York to look after matters.” Isabella did come back the following spring; that summer their infant son, John Alexander, died in his crib.
Helen Macdonald in the 1860 s. Hardy and strong, she survived eleven of twelve strokes. Her preferred language was Gaelic.
All that was left to Isabella now was Macdonald himself. Yet the demands of his cabinet portfolio and, at the same time, of ever-mounting difficulties at his law practice kept pulling him away from her. The more he moved away, the more frantically she tried to hold on to him. “She is just putting the finishing stitch to a new waistcoat for me, which I am to sport as a winter vest.” Late in 1848, Macdonald wrote to Margaret Greene to report: “I returned last week from Toronto, my dearest sister, where I had been for the fortnight previous, attending the sittings of the Court of Queen’s Bench,” to find that Isabella “had been practising sitting up for a few minutes daily in my absence in order to be able to surprise me by coming to dinner which she effected. We had our little table brought to her bed room, and there we dined in State.” He would leave the house at nine each morning, returning around six, and he admitted that “her time passes very monotonously out here.”
Isabella did have some duties to occupy herself. “She had as much to do as she is able for, in directing the household affairs, managing her servants etc., and I can assure you, such is her attention and method that confined to the room though she may be, she makes a capital housekeeper,” he told Margaret Greene. Everything was kept neat and tidy, and “my dinner, the great event of each day, about which poor Isa takes the greatest pains, is served up as well as one could wish.” Even when confined to bed day after day, as was increasingly the case, she still struggled to keep connected to him—just. “She is like the ‘Invisible Lady’ that used to exhibit, not ‘show’ herself some years ago,” he told Margaret Greene. “The invisible Lady’s voice orders & behests are heard and obeyed all over the house & are carried out as to cupboards which she never sees & pots & pans that have no acquaintance with her. Not a glass is broken or set of dishes diminished, but she knows of, and calls the criminal to account for.”
Politics, though, kept demanding his attention. He had to go to Montreal, “but not for long,” and yet, “the idea of my going distresses her so much that I would not go, were it not a matter of necessity.”
In a letter Macdonald sent to Margaret Greene in January 1850, he sounds like someone feeling himself pulled apart by horses charging in different directions. “Since September last I have been alone and without a [law] partner,” he wrote. “Isa says I work too hard, & in truth I begin to feel that I do, but like a thief on the treadmill, I must step on, or be dragged.”
Macdonald’s reference to his being without a partner derived from his difficulties with Alexander Campbell.
Macdonald’s constant absences, and the fact that he sometimes dipped into the firm’s funds to cover his political expenses, had made Campbell more and more dissatisfied with their partnership arrangement. Their bank account was overdrawn, and the firm was eighteen hundred pounds in debt. Campbell wrote him crossly, “Your absence from home and your necessities have been I think the main although not by any means the only cause of the annoyances that have arisen.” In reply, Macdonald assured him, “I think I have hit on the only mode by which we can prevent inextricable confusion.” He offered a new arrangement of a fifty-fifty split of all revenues, including those from the Commercial Bank, and the assurance that, “when in Kingston, Macdonald to attend to business.” Campbell initially accepted the arrangement. He wrote reassuringly to Macdonald that he was “anxious that your political career should not be cut short at this point.” Later, Campbell changed his mind. Their partnership was dissolved in September 1849, with Macdonald buying back Campbell’s share for £1,250. Macdonald engaged other partners, but never again one as competent as Campbell. Yet despite their business breakup, Macdonald and Campbell maintained their close political partnership.
Alexander Campbell, Macdonald’s first law partner, later his political Mr. Fix-It and then a cabinet minister. No one worked more closely with Macdonald for a longer period, but they were never real friends.
In the meantime, Macdonald found himself increasingly pinched for money. “I am more than usually tight now,” he wrote to a friend, reminding him of a debt of “five pounds for books, besides some interest.” In a later letter to another friend he used the expressive phrase “I haven’t got a shilling to jingle on a tombstone.”
Given all the costs Macdonald was covering—Isabella and her servants, his mother, his unmarried sisters, his own expenses—it was no surprise that he should be financially strapped. But he ought not to have been as short of revenues as he in fact was. As a member of the legislature, he’d made useful new business contacts in addition to the networks he’d already developed in Kingston and Montreal, and extended across the Atlantic to England. His political responsibilities were a major distraction, but the root cause of his money problems was that he simply wasn’t a very good businessman. A friend and fellow Conservative, the Hamilton businessman Isaac Buchanan, once wrote in affectionate censoriousness, “I would not have supposed it possible that a man of so much intellect and general versatility could on this one matter [finance] be such a child.” No doubt he was exasperated as well as amused by Macdonald’s overconfidence in his financial capabilities, as when he wrote to Buchanan, who was himself highly successful, “I thoroughly understand that business and can invest without chance or risk of loss.” In truth, Macdonald never applied himself consistently to the task. There was something of his father in him: he was much the smarter and the more purposeful, but in financial matters he too was dreamy and, in the end, not at all as interested in making money as in spending it.
By this time, Macdonald had undergone one other major change in his circumstances. In the election held early in 1848, he won easily in Kingston, but the Conservatives were voted out of office and lost half their members.*41 A new Reform government took office, run jointly by Baldwin and LaFontaine. Macdonald and his colleagues were beached on the Opposition benches.
For a time, there was a real possibility that Macdonald would never get back to the government side of the chamber, or even to the chamber itself. In August 1849 the Kingston Chronicle ran a story that he had made up his mind to resign, and it went on to speculate about possible successors. Two days later the anonymous author of a letter to the newspaper called on fellow Conservatives to persuade Macdonald to stay. Throughout his long career, Macdonald regularly mused out loud about resigning, and sometimes specifically threatened to do so. Most times he did this to discipline his supporters or to vent his own frustrations. On this occasion, he may well have meant it. Campbell, in a letter written to him several years later, referred to these times: “You will remember that throughout your long and apparently hopeless opposition [1848 to 1854] I always deprecated your retiring from parliament, as you often threatened to do.” A threat made to someone as close to him as Campbell was almost certainly a serious one; it’s entirel
y possible that Campbell leaked the information to the Chronicle to head him off—as it turned out, successfully.
Macdonald’s political letters during this period provide indirect evidence that he was serious about quitting. Almost always, they brim with mischievousness, energy and guile, such as when he recommends arguments that candidates could use on the stump and then dismisses his own concoctions as “bunkum arguments.” But most of the political observations he made to correspondents through the late forties and early fifties are bland and routine. Their tone was that of someone disengaged from what he was doing.
In the end, despite the vacillations, Macdonald decided to remain a full-time politician. Somehow, along with his work, he would juggle both his family responsibilities and his financial obligations. He described his political strategy as playing “the long game.” He was resilient, tenacious, indefatigable. As he said in one speech, “If I don’t carry a thing this year, I will next.” His favourite phrase for minimizing setbacks and miscalculations was the old saying “There’s no use crying over spilt milk.”
So he continued to play the long game. Macdonald remained an active local member, lobbying for legislation to benefit home-town institutions such as Queen’s University, Regiopolis College and the Kingston Hospital. His reward was a repeat victory in the 1851 election, his third in a row, not only for himself but this time also for three other Conservative candidates in the surrounding Mid land District. He had earned, now, not just a local but a regional base. That the Reformers continued their hold on power, and the Conservatives did poorly elsewhere, only increased his stature.
At this same time, he began gathering around him one of the most useful of all political assets—a stable of close friends who would be reliable, long-term allies. Campbell functioned as Macdonald’s local campaign manager and as a general “fixer” throughout Upper Canada, recruiting candidates, handling election funds, distributing patronage to pro-Conservative newspapers. Another member of Macdonald’s Kingston mafia was Henry Smith, a fellow lawyer who had helped him found Kingston’s Cataraqui Club “for the discussion (under proper restrictions) of the various subjects which ought to interest society.” They were so close that Macdonald asked Smith to intervene for him in an “affair of honour” arising from a nasty exchange in the House with an opposing member—an episode that could have led to a duel between them.
The most important member of the network that Macdonald was building systematically was a fellow Scot, John Rose. After earning a degree at the University of Edinburgh, he had immigrated to Montreal in 1836. There, Rose quickly became one of city’s leading corporate lawyers; later he moved to London, England, where he became an insider in financial and political circles, serving on two royal commissions, and, as a friend of the Prince of Wales, a society leader. Although fascinated by the political game, Rose was only twice, briefly, an active politician in Canada, as a junior minister in 1857 and, for two years, as Macdonald’s first post-Confederation finance minister. They respected each other’s intelligence and enjoyed flouting convention; once, while young, they crossed the border and pretended to be strolling entertainers, Rose as a bear and Macdonald playing some instrument. Mac donald’s secretary, Joseph Pope, reckoned that of all his intimates, “personally, he was most attracted to Rose.”
John Rose, a highly successful Montreal lawyer who became a substantial financial and social figure in London. He and Macdonald were exceptionally close, intellectually as well as personally.
Ogle Gowan was another important member of the network, though in a very different way: with him came votes. Gowan was the grand master of the Orange Lodge. In hindsight, those Orangemen are seen today as anti-Catholic and anti-French fanatics. Many were. Many, though, joined only for the business and social contacts the lodge provided. Gowan himself was a moderate. He forged an alliance with Irish Catholics in Upper Canada and lost his position when hard-liners decided he had “sold out to the Pope.” It was only after Gowan’s defeat as grand master that the organization took on its full anti-French colour. He and Macdonald became friends in the mid-1840s when they were working together to replace Family Compact Tories with moderate Conservatives, largely because the old Tories looked down on Orangemen as not respectable. Nevertheless, Macdonald always held Gowan at a certain distance and never gave him the high-level government posts he sought. Their friendship ended in 1862 when Gowan was charged with the rape of a serving girl: although he was acquitted, his political career was ended. Macdonald’s last contact with Gowan was to appoint him to the minor post of inspector of money orders in the post office.
Ogle Gowan. As grand master of the Orange Lodge—a moderate later pushed out by hard-liners—he brought to Macdonald the greatest of all political assets: votes.
Quite different was another Gowan, James Gowan, a cousin, who, when appointed to the bench in 1843, was the youngest judge in the British Empire. Sophisticated, intelligent and an outstanding judge, although refusing all promotions (during his long career on the bench only two of his judgments were overruled), Gowan exchanged letters with Macdonald over the decades on everything from politics to literature. Near the end of his life, Macdonald appointed Gowan to the Senate, where, although nominally a Conservative, he functioned as an independent.
Macdonald gave at least one strong signal that he still wasn’t really committed to politics. At the close of the 1840s, Canadian politics were dominated by a crisis that touched directly on the subject that most commanded Macdonald’s heart—Canada’s connection to Britain. Yet he had almost nothing to say about this defining issue.
In the mid-1840s, the British prime minister, Robert Peel, adopted free trade. One objective was to reduce the cost of importing food, so as to help the starving Irish through the potato famine. The main reason was that Manchester free-traders such as Richard Cobden and John Bright had won the argument that Britain, as the world’s leading economy, would gain by opening wide its doors to raw materials while exporting its cornucopia of manufactured goods.*42 No nation was more affected by the abandonment of Imperial Preference than Canada. Within a few years, all the protective tariffs that subsidized its exports to Britain—principally of lumber and flour—vanished. A few years later the Navigation Laws, which gave an advantage to colonial shipping, were repealed. Wheat exports dropped by more than 50 per cent, and flour exports by 40 per cent. Cheaper and better wood began to be shipped to Britain from the Baltic. In 1849 Governor General Elgin estimated that “property in most Canadians towns, and most especially in the capital [Montreal], has fallen 50 percent in value…three-fourths of the commercial men are bankrupt.”
Across Canada there was widespread anger and a sense of abandonment. To magnify this discontent, the Imperial government had refused the demands of Tory Conservatives to disallow a Rebellion Losses Bill introduced by the co-premier, LaFontaine. The bill provided compensation for property damaged during the Rebellion of 1837–38, and many of the beneficiaries would be those Lower Canadians who had actually rebelled against the Crown. On April 25, 1849, riots instigated by local Conservatives broke out in Montreal. That night, the rioters (all of them English-speaking) broke into the Parliament Buildings and put them to the torch; the buildings were burned to the ground, and almost all the books and collections in the parliamentary library were destroyed.
In response, Montreal businessmen and financiers organized a petition condemning British policy. Eventually, the document carried more than one thousand signatures, among them two Redpaths, three Workmans, two Molsons, a future prime minister (John Joseph Abbott) and three future cabinet ministers of Canada. In October, a mass meeting in Montreal approved a manifesto calling for “a friendly and peaceful separation from the British connection and a union upon equitable terms with the great North American Confederacy of Sovereign States”—in other words, for annexation.
Macdonald kept almost completely silent about this direct challenge to the British connection, though he helped to organize a meeting in King
ston of a new British America League. After roundly rejecting annexation, the league argued instead for some form of reciprocity pact or cross-border free-trade deal with the United States to replace the lost British market. The Kingston meeting attracted few other leading politicians, excepting Macdonald, a home-towner. He did not make a speech or play any role in drafting the communiqué. By the time the league ceased to function, towards the end of 1850, Macdonald had already cut his association with it.
In fact, with the ending of a worldwide depression in 1850, most of the lost prosperity quickly returned. Montreal businessmen and financiers abandoned their temporary interest in protest and transferred their allegiance to the cause of reciprocity with the United States. Elgin exercised some brilliant diplomacy to arrange a pact between the two countries in 1854. The real political significance of what had happened was that during the turmoil Macdonald had scarcely stirred.
Two factors may have caused Macdonald to make up his mind sometime in the early 1850s that politics, and not the law, would be his life’s work. The first was that, late in 1849, Isabella told him a second miracle was about to occur in their married life: although now forty years old, she was pregnant again. On December 9, 1849, Macdonald informed Margaret Greene, with mixed hope and fear, that “Isa views her coming trials with great fortitude & from her courage & patience I have every hope of a happy issue. Still she prepares for the worst.” A month later, he reported that “all arrangements have long been made, and she now awaits for the issue with patience and fortitude. She has given me many directions about herself and her offspring, which any evil happen, & having done all that she can do, is now content.” But Macdonald was not able to focus only on his wife and unborn child. A fortnight earlier, he told his sister-in-law in another letter that his mother, following yet another couple of attacks, was “perfectly resigned to her probable fate and sudden exit.”
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