John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  There was another, seldom-appreciated reason why Macdonald understood French Canadians so readily. He wasn’t an English Canadian himself. He was a Scottish Canadian.

  Macdonald himself was a member of a small, threatened people. Between Scots and French there had been the Auld Alliance of the two of them against the English; but that was now history. Current, though, was the fact that the Scots, like French Canadians, had their own religion, their own educational and legal systems, and even, if growing weak, their own language. So they were at ease in each other’s company. French-Scottish marriages were common, in contrast to their scarcity among the English and the Irish. André Siegfried, who came over from France to survey Canada much as de Tocqueville did in America, wrote in his 1907 work, The Race Question in Canada, “They [Scots] manifested a real goodwill towards the French, and the latter were the first to recognize it.” And Wilfrid Laurier once said, “Were I not French I would be honoured to be a Scot.”*45 It’s hard to doubt that when Macdonald looked at Lower Canada, he sometimes saw Scotland.

  About Macdonald’s personal command of the French language itself there is uncertainty. The evidence is mixed. George-Étienne Cartier’s assistant, Benjamin Sulte, wrote in his memoir that “Macdonald was fond of reading French novels—he always kept them close at hand.” No supporting evidence for this claim exists, and Sulte may have chanced upon a French novel on Macdonald’s desk that actually belonged to his second wife, the creditably bilingual Agnes. The historian Ged Martin has reported that a unilingual Canadien member, François Bourassa, claimed to have had a number of conversations in French with Macdonald while the two whiled away the time in the legislature.*46 Yet the Montreal lawyer and journalist François-Xavier-Anselme Trudel commented in an article published in 1887 that Macdonald knew not a word of French. The probability is that Macdonald in fact spoke very little French (the Bourassa story may just have been family myth) but could read it comparatively well—not to the level of being able to enjoy French novels but sufficiently to comprehend the letters that, for instance, Étienne-Paschal Taché, twice his co-premier, regularly sent him in French.

  The Big Tent that Macdonald was out to erect was thus to be held up by four supports: Conservatives willing and able to be reasonably progressive; Reformers looking for a sanctuary; a dependable bloc of Canadiens; and Macdonald himself, as master builder and circus barker. Once set up and shown to be durable, this became the political edifice that almost every one of Macdonald’s successors down to today would attempt to emulate.

  In the fall of 1853, the Hincks-Morin government entered its death throes. Hincks became the subject of press stories that he and the mayor of Toronto had refinanced the city’s debt by a private manoeuvre that earned them each ten thousand pounds. The press hounds kept on sniffing and came up with reports about railway stock that Hincks had picked up for a song and some bargain-priced government land he had profited from.

  The inevitable election finally came in June 1854, after Hincks had lost two successive confidence votes in the legislature. In the election, Macdonald, for the first and only time in his career, made the corruption of his opponents his central theme, coining the phrase that Hincks and his ministers were “steeped to the lips in corruption”—an exercise in verbal cleverness he would come to regret because it would be quoted back at him. He won handsomely in Kingston. Across Upper Canada, though, the Conservatives did comparatively poorly, in part because Macdonald was known to be friendly towards the French—the Orange Order, had, by this time, turned against his key Orange ally, Ogle Gowan. As an additional handicap, the Conservative leader for whom people were actually being asked to vote was not Macdonald but Sir Allan MacNab—a decent old duffer and military hero of the 1838 Rebellion, but indiscreet enough to say “all my politics are railroads” at the same time that he was president of the Great Western Railway and leader of the opposition. MacNab was a figure out of the past. “The party is nowhere, damned everlastingly,” Macdonald wrote despondently to Alexander Campbell after the election. At that very point, Hincks lost yet another confidence vote and suddenly resigned.*47

  MacNab was now called in by the governor general to form a new government. A lot of baling wire went into its assembly. All the Canadien ministers who had served under Hincks were kept in their posts. There were six newcomers—three Conservatives, with MacNab at their head, and three Reformers, to give some credence to the Liberal-Conservative label. Macdonald, as the new attorney general for Upper Canada, held the cabinet’s most important portfolio. And of these two principal figures, MacNab was for show and Macdonald was for real.

  As attorney general, Macdonald now had a quite comfortable income of £1,250 a year. He was able to sort out without strain many of the responsibilities that fell to him as head of the family. In 1852 a most unexpected family event had occurred: his sister Margaret, aged thirty-nine, married James Williamson, a professor of science at Queen’s University.*48 It was a successful marriage, and Macdonald developed a high regard for Williamson, who, although bookish and humourless, was well liked by colleagues and students. Macdonald’s nickname for Williamson, an ordained Presbyterian minister, was the affectionately teasing term “the Parson.”

  Margaret’s marriage left Louisa isolated as the remaining unmarried sister. Macdonald arranged for her to move into the Williamson household with their mother, Helen, for whom she had been caring. Showing the Macdonald streak of stubborn independence, Louisa insisted that she not go there as a dependant. Macdonald’s solution was inventive and perhaps unique. He rented the house—Heathfield—that the Williamsons owned, naming Louisa as his representative. This arrangement ensured that, technically, the Williamsons were now boarding with Louisa in their own house. Louisa was entitled to sit at the head of the table, except when Macdonald visited and she moved to one side. As the “tenant,” Louisa had the right to invite friends to visit, rather than merely joining gatherings arranged by the Williamsons. She also rented (again with Macdonald’s financial aid) a portion of the garden, where she grew her own flowers and vegetables; Professor Williamson had his own vegetable plot and charged the general household for any produce consumed by the group. The real hero of this arrangement was Margaret: she understood, as few chatelaines would do, Louisa’s fierce determination not to become a kind of paying guest in her sister’s house.

  Margaret Macdonald. To everyone’s surprise (not least to Macdonald, who missed her wedding), she suddenly married a Queen’s University professor, James Williamson. They became the de facto parents of Hugh John.

  James Williamson, dour and humourless, yet well liked by his students, other professors and Macdonald. (This photo, as well as the photos of Margaret and Louisa, is from Lady Macdonald’s personal album.)

  Nothing, though, could change the state of Macdonald’s own marriage. There was one small ray of hope. In 1855, when the government moved from Quebec City to Toronto, the national capital for the next four years, Isabella decided to join him, and she made the journey from Kingston by train that October. They rented an apartment in a boarding house on Wellington Street, near the city’s western outskirts. Hugh John, now five years old and living more often with his surrogate parents, Margaret and James Williamson, than with the invalid Isabella, was brought up to Toronto to join his father and mother.

  By this time, Toronto had suddenly taken off as a community. New immigrants poured into the city, swelling its population to forty thousand. (Kingston’s population, meanwhile, remained unchanged at five thousand.) Toronto’s own manufacturing plants and the success of the farmers to the southwest brought it prosperity. Substantial buildings such as the St. Lawrence Hall, the Mechanics’ Institute and St. James’ Cathedral had been completed, while the University of Toronto was starting to grow. The city itself stretched in long blocks from the Don River to Bathurst Street and north all the way to Gerrard Street.

  Louisa Macdonald. Difficult, fiercely independent, a lifelong spinster, but also Macdonald’s favourite sist
er.

  Yet, sadly, the three Macdonalds could not turn themselves into a real family. Most of the time, Isabella remained secluded in her darkened sickroom, constantly complaining about the light and the noise. Macdonald’s reports to family members about her condition continued through the depressing cycle of “Isabella has been very, very ill,” then, hopefully, that “she is evidently on the mend,” then, mournfully, that she was “desperately ill all last week.” Only rarely could Isabella even leave her bed to play with her son. Hugh John was regularly sent off to stay at the homes of friends and relatives in the new city. The ever-optimistic Macdonald reported to his mother that in these houses “there are young people, well brought up, so that he has the advantage of a good companionship.” When back home again, Hugh John would play with his father. “He and I play Beggar My Neighbour,” Macdonald wrote, “and you can’t fancy how delighted I am when he beats me.” In another letter to his mother, Macdonald made, perhaps intentionally, perhaps by accident, a most revealing comment about his son’s reaction to the stress being imposed on him: when he asked Hugh John where he would prefer to live, in Toronto or in Kingston, the child replied, “I like Kingston best because my Grandmother lives there.” Effectively, the boy had told his father that he would be happier living away from his permanently sick mother.

  That same stress, a compound of guilt, repressed anger and bleak hopelessness, applied no less to Macdonald. As attorney general, he often had to work late or go on trips, duties that gave him an excuse to absent himself from the gloomy apartment. One letter to his mother in January 1856 captures the magnitude of the strain between him and Isabella: “I get lots of invitations here. I was asked out for every day last week, but declined of course on account of Isa’s illness. Next week, or rather this week, is the same thing. But I am obliged to refuse.”

  In all his letters to his relatives, Macdonald seldom strayed beyond family matters into politics. The letter he wrote to his mother on March 17, 1856, contains a striking exception. After news about Isabella and Hugh John, Macdonald suddenly exploded into rage: “I am carrying on a war against that scoundrel George Brown and I will teach him a lesson that he never learnt before. I will prove him a most dishonest, dishonourable fellow.”

  In all of Canada’s political history there has never been a personal contest like that between Macdonald and Brown. No other two rivals were so clearly above the ordinary. They were at odds about the fundamentals of the country itself and about the nature and purposes of politics. Their personalities and styles were near opposites, except that each was combative, competitive and quick to anger. On one occasion they came close to blows in public, and for eight years they said not a word to each other, even though they crossed paths regularly in the legislature building. Yet it would be their joint partnership during the critical years of 1864 to 1866, teeth gritted and tempers tamped down, that would bring about Confederation.

  Brown is the great might-have-been of nineteenth-century Canadian politics. He possessed the intellect, charisma and strength of character to match Macdonald’s more subtle talents. The difference between them was, in the strictly political realm and in the famous formulation of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, that one of them was a hedgehog and the other a fox. Brown was Berlin’s hedgehog: he was seized of one great idea—Representation by Population, the basic democratic principle that each person’s vote should be equal. Macdonald, the fox, was at ease with a multiplicity of ideas, some contradictory, as he constantly changed course and doubled back (including on himself), never accepting defeat as permanent or regarding victory as anything but temporary. Above all, Macdonald was almost infinitely adaptable: “The great reason I have always been able to beat Brown,” he wrote, “is that I have been able to look a little ahead while he could on no occasion forgo the temptation of a temporary triumph.”

  Despite Brown’s exceptional talents, Macdonald would forever dance ahead out of his reach. “A campaign,” Globe editor Sir John Willison remarked astutely in his Reminiscences, “is George Brown in the pulpit and John A. making merry with the unrepentant on the outskirts of the congregation.” (By an uncanny coincidence, almost exactly the same kind of contest between two out-of-the-ordinary political leaders was in progress in Britain at the time, where the rivals were William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Again, moralist contended with worldly-wise realist, professor of ethics with student of human nature, hedgehog with fox, and, least consequential of all, Liberal with Conservative. The transatlantic difference was that, in Canada, it would be Macdonald who trounced Brown, while in Britain the outcome in terms of longevity in office—the only measure that counts in politics—would be Gladstone over Disraeli.)

  Brown was a formidable and attractive figure. His most obvious attribute was sheer physicality. Six foot two, large and immensely strong, he had flaming red hair and radiated energy: he ate fast, rode fast, took steps two at a time—and sometimes four. He was intellectually capacious and fearless. He immigrated to New York with his father to help him run a newspaper. In 1843 he came north to edit a Free Kirk paper. Soon after settling in Toronto, Brown leaped into publishing on his own. The first edition of the Globe appeared in 1844, the same year Macdonald was elected to the legislature. Its editorials were forceful and trench-ant, its news up to the minute, and its pages were printed on the new, highly efficient Hoe rotary press.

  Brown published the paper first as a semi-weekly, then a tri-weekly, and, in 1853, a daily. Its circulation soon topped an amazing twenty thousand, as the new railways extended its reach. It was easily the largest, most influential and most profitable newspaper in the country.

  Intellectually and morally, his most attractive cause was the abolition of slavery. One of his speeches on the subject attracted praise from the great philosopher John Stuart Mill.*49 As well, and far ahead of his time, he called for reforms in penitentiaries, urging that convicts be treated as human beings who might be capable of change. Although not a textbook democrat—no different from Macdonald, Brown opposed universal suffrage, fearing it would lead to American-style demagoguery—he staged Canada’s first mass political convention.

  George Brown, founder/publisher of the Globe, easily Canada’s most influential newspaper, and a Reform leader. The rivalry between him and Macdonald has no equal in Canadian politics. He had a fine mind, but was narrow and bigoted.

  Yet there were flaws in Brown of narrowness, intolerance and intellectual and moral arrogance. One of the ablest journalists of the time, Edward Farrer, wrote of him, “He was a good, and in his way a great man, but Scotland never sent forth a more bigoted son of the manse.” Another exceptional journalist, George Sheppard, an editorial writer with the Globe, similarly judged, “Take him on the ground of abuses…and he is the strongest public man in Canada…. But off this ground he is an ordinary man.” Brown personally, and the Globe on his behalf, railed regularly against “French domination” and “Priestcraft.” He could never understand that his campaign for Representation by Population (Rep by Pop) was at one and the same time self-justifying and destructive: it would fulfill the individual rights of English Canadians by matching their representation to their ever-increasing numbers, but it would do so at the cost of threatening the collective rights of French Canadians. Brown could not understand that, while for one people the issue was justice, for the other it was survival.

  Brown contested the 1851 election in two constituencies, as was then permissible, losing one to William Lyon Mackenzie but winning the other. He soon emerged as the effective leader of the Reformers. The battle between him and Macdonald was quickly joined. In his first speech, in September 1852, Brown argued for the separation of church and state on the basis of the “voluntary principle,” which decreed that separate schools should be supported by their own faithful rather than by the state. Macdonald responded with the kind of wilful exaggeration he knew would drive Brown to sputtering fury: if the rule was to be that “every man should support his own religious teacher by his o
wn means,” he declared, then this surely had to mean that “the Indians and heathen ought to support their own missionaries.” It was a glib, if temporarily effective, response to Brown’s essential argument that “the law shall know no man’s religion.”

  The angriest confrontation between them was not about principle. It was a squalid affair, revealing on Macdonald’s side a capacity for narrowness and vengefulness, magnified in this instance by sheer hot-headedness. Back in 1849, Baldwin, as premier, had set up a commission to inquire into allegations of mistreatment by Henry Smith, the warden of Kingston Penitentiary. He had chosen Brown as secretary of the inquiry, and the resulting report was largely Brown’s work. Its findings were devastating. As many as forty men and women were being flogged each morning; one had received 168 lashes in twenty-eight days; boys as young as ten had been lashed for laughing and whistling; and the convicts were perpetually half-starved. The commission, on Brown’s urging, recommended a series of reforms. In the event, other than Smith’s dismissal, few recommendations were implemented—principally because Macdonald repeatedly denounced the report. He took this position because Warden Smith was the father of his friend and fellow Conservative Henry Smith; mostly, though, because Brown was the principal author of the report.

  Over the next half-dozen years, Macdonald four times raised the commission report in the legislature, twice moving a resolution for it to be made the subject of a legislature inquiry—unsuccessfully, both times—and repeatedly accusing Brown of personal bias. On the last occasion, in 1855, Macdonald flatly accused Brown of having fabricated evidence, shouting out “Liar” when Brown rejected the charge. For a time it seemed that the two men would come to blows on the House floor. Brown called for a legislature committee to investigate Macdonald’s allegations. While the evidence was overwhelmingly against Macdonald, the committee’s Conservative majority found words to exonerate him. The affair petered out, leaving a residue of unrestrained hatred between the two men.