John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  The new act was approved by the legislature without amendment, with little debate and by a margin of 72 to 1, the single naysayer being the old William Lyon Mackenzie who asked querulously, “Why should we wish to civilize them?” One member, Benjamin Robinson, who had negotiated several Indian treaties, protested that Indian chiefs had not been consulted. He told the legislature members, “At their Council meetings, the Indian chiefs deliberated quite as sensibly as honorable members did in this house, and sometimes even more so.” The Gradual Civilization Act set the stage for the complete handover of responsibility for Indians from Britain to Canada in 1860.

  Macdonald’s own views about Indians were the same as those of most Canadians at this time: they should be protected from whites but assimilated into white society. In two respects he differed from the general opinion. The letter of the law itself and the treaties negotiated with the Indians were of cardinal concern to him. Macdonald consistently rejected requests by individuals, including Conservative supporters, for permission to buy reserve lands that they had persuaded bands to sell them.

  As well, Macdonald had personal knowledge of Indians that was unusual among politicians and officials of the time. While running a law office in Napanee in 1832–33, he had got to know some members of the nearby Mohawk Band in Tyendinaga Township by singing in the choir of the Anglican missionary there. He also knew some members of a band of Mississauga in the Bay of Quinte area. He became friends with the remarkable Reverend Peter Jones (his real name was Kahkewaquonaby, meaning “Sacred Feathers”), who had converted to Christianity and had married an Englishwoman, Eliza Field, a marriage the Kingston Chronicle denounced as “improper and revolting.” By contrast, Macdonald approved of marriages between Indians and non-Indians as a way to speed the process of assimilation.*61

  The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby). He was one of a number of Indians whom Macdonald, as was unusual for the times, knew personally. Highly intelligent, Jones shocked some contemporaries by marrying a white woman.

  Two other aspects of his work as attorney general reveal his particular attitude to the law: sentencing and judicial appointments.

  About sentencing, Macdonald was stern but scrupulous; every now and then, though, he could be remarkably progressive. In nineteenth-century Canada, the criminal law was not only about crime and punishment but also about morality, or at least many people thought it should be. Indictable offences included “sabbath-breaking,” “blasphemy” and the “seduction” of an unmarried female. Upper Canada’s leading criminologist, Israel Lewis, proclaimed that “all Criminal Law should be considered a transcript of the Divine Law.” Macdonald didn’t agree with that view—his opponent, George Brown, probably did—but the notion that the law ought to serve some higher purpose exercised wide appeal.

  At the same time as the law was, at least sometimes, moral, it was often brutal. Executions were public and frequently treated as occasions for a family outing. Children as young as ten years of age were sent to penitentiaries and could be flogged there. Debtors’ prisons and duels continued in Canada long after they’d been proscribed in Britain, and the list of crimes punishable by execution was far more extensive.

  Macdonald’s ambivalence about all these aspects of the law shows in his attitude towards sentencing, that part of the legal system where he had the greatest operational influence. Just a month after becoming attorney general, he wrote to the provincial secretary to declare that a five-year sentence for rape, notwithstanding a plea for mitigation by a member of the legislature, “was altogether an inadequate punishment for the offence.” Not long after, he took the same view about a five-year sentence for horse stealing. He accepted the point that public opinion could be a part of the sentencing process: a six-month term imposed on two soldiers who had attempted to commit sodomy while drunk was too lenient and “would have, in my opinion, a bad effect to have it known among the soldiery and by the public generally that so heinous and demoralizing a crime” should have received only “a punishment often inflicted for mere assault.”

  Still, youth and gender did bring out his kindlier side. When a girl of thirteen was sentenced to three years in a reformatory (her crime is not recorded), Macdonald said this punishment would “only be a means of further contamination,” and he urged that her sentence be reduced. He argued to the provincial secretary that while imprisonment for life was the legally correct sentence to be imposed on a Samuel Ross for the offence of stealing from the mails, yet “this sentence may with propriety be commuted” to three years, because of “the youth of the prisoner…and especially to relieve the anxiety which has injured the health and threatens the life of his mother.” However, in another instance, “the ground of poverty of the petitioner alleged as a reason for the remission of the sentence of her husband [seven years, for manslaughter] is in my opinion insufficient.”

  Macdonald believed in at least the possibility of rehabilitation. Of a convicted arsonist he wrote, “As he is a young man, six years of compulsory labour may wean him from his degrading habit and make him a useful member of society.” But fundamentally he was skeptical that criminals could be rehabilitated. He warned the Kingston Penitentiary warden, John Creighton, “Your natural kindness of disposition may lead you to forget that the primary object of the Penitentiary is punishment, and the incidental one, reformation,” adding, “there is such a thing as making prisons too comfortable and prisoners too happy.” Always insightful about human nature, Macdonald understood that reformers could be deceived by the behaviour of certain prisoners: “The most brutalized man is commonly the most insensible, or rather insensitive and therefore the most docile,” he once observed to the chief justice, while “the man of quick and sensitive feeling is fully alive to the shame of his position and frets against the prison restraints.” A striking difference remains between Macdonald’s consistent skepticism about reform and rehabilitation and George Brown’s idealistic call that prisons not remain “the moral tomb of those who enter them.” Macdonald may have been a product of his times; Brown was ahead of them.

  If indeed at times stern, he seldom deviated in his scrupulousness. The law itself, in its exactitude, equality and clarity, was Macdonald’s abiding concern. When G.C. Reiffenstein, a confidential clerk in the receiver general’s department, was arrested for forgery, convicted and sentenced to four years in the penitentiary, a great many respectable people lobbied on his behalf for clemency.*62 Macdonald yielded not an inch. “The first duty of a Government is to administer even-handed justice; the second, is to satisfy the public that it has been so administered. Now there are many poor and ignorant men in the Penitentiary who committed no greater crime than Reiffenstein, and should therefore receive no greater punishment.” Reiffenstien served three years of his sentence, was paroled, and to the horror of fellow civil servants went right back to Ottawa. Macdonald’s response, as recorded by Deputy Minister Edmund Meredith, was succinct: “Cut him dead like any other felon.” (In fact, Reiffenstein managed to restore his reputation and made a new and successful career as an insurance agent.)

  Macdonald so revered the law that in one respect he gave it precedence over politics—not always, but with reasonably respectable frequency. Less than a year after becoming attorney general, he had to fill an impending vacancy in the post of chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He wrote to an attractive candidate, “We are satisfied that these requirements are to be found in yourself and that no more worthy successor to Mr. Macaulay could be found.” The candidate was Robert Baldwin, the former premier and leader of the Reform Party, which was now in opposition. In the event, Baldwin turned down the offer.

  “My only object in making Judicial appointments, is in the efficiency of the Bench,” Macdonald informed one cabinet minister. He later told a Nova Scotia supporter that his test was “to consider fitness as the first requirement for judicial appointments…political considerations should have little or no influence.” He was protesting too much, but not entirely. Rich
ard Cartwright, who loathed Macdonald, conceded in his Reminiscences, “Sir John was always anxious, as far as political exigencies would permit, to maintain the dignity of the Bench.” Pope, more predictably, wrote of his “solicitude for the high character of the Bench.”

  A good example of Macdonald’s practising what he preached was his appointment of Samuel Hume Blake to the prime judicial post of vice-chancellor of Ontario. He was the brother of Edward Blake, then the most prominent and effective of his Liberal opponents. To a colleague, Macdonald admitted that “Blake’s politics make his appointment difficult,” but he alone was “of heavy enough metal to preside in the court.” As striking was his promoting William Johnston Ritchie as chief justice of the Supreme Court, a man who not only had been a Liberal but, in Macdonald’s own words, “an anti-confederate and a strong one.” As he had done with Blake, Macdonald justified his choice on the grounds that “the Supreme Court is weak, and we can only feed it from above.”

  Inevitably, Macdonald did not always practise what he preached about judicial appointments. As he explained to one supporter, the fact that Judge Ross of Toronto was a well-known Liberal made him highly desirable: “He is a Grit and it would be a good answer to the allegations of our opponents that only Tories are appointed.”

  Macdonald could also be concerned about the dignity of the bench. Post-Confederation, after appointing Lewis Wallbridge, a Liberal, to be chief justice of Manitoba, he commented, “He will be a good judge…. It is so seldom one can indulge one’s personal feeling with due consideration for public interest.” Macdonald remained concerned, however, that the new appointee’s blackened and stumpy teeth would impair his gravitas, and he asked a colleague to prevail on Wallbridge to get himself a new set of teeth.

  Macdonald’s interest in the law never slackened, and it extended to just about every aspect of it. He was particular about the details of the law. “Certainty of punishment, and more especially certainty that the sentence imposed by the Judge will be carried out, is of more consequence in the prevention of crime than the severity of the sentence,” he advised his friend, Warden John Creighton. He was as particular about the generality of the law. During the 1865–66 invasions of Canada by Fenians, or Irish Americans, public pressure developed for individuals to be arrested on mere suspicion of supporting the Fenians. Macdonald rejected the demands: “This is a country of law and order,” he said, “and we cannot go beyond the law.”

  Without question, Macdonald loved the law. Politics, though, he worshipped. And that is where his thoughts and talents now turned.

  ELEVEN

  The Double Shuffle

  Ah John A., how I love you. How I wish I could trust you. Reform-Liberal member during conversation with John A. Macdonald

  To clamber the political ladder’s last, short rung, Macdonald needed to ease his own leader, Sir Allan MacNab, from the top spot. His challenge, though, was a good deal more complicated than that. Given the rule that whoever commits regicide almost never succeeds to the throne, Macdonald needed to dispatch MacNab while leaving no impression of his own footprints on his departing leader’s back.

  MacNab, “the Gallant Knight,” had the round, red face and white whiskers of Charles Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick. He was also a proud man, certain to react strongly against any suggestion of betrayal. Macdonald’s solution was to get others to do the deed for him. In the spring of 1856, all three Reform ministers in the Liberal-Conservative cabinet resigned, claiming that the government no longer commanded their confidence. Shortly afterwards, Macdonald and the single other remaining Conservative minister resigned, ostensibly to maintain solidarity with their former colleagues. MacNab was left with no choice but to resign himself. Racked by gout and in acute pain, he had himself carried into the chamber on a stretcher to cast his vote against his own demise. Immediately afterwards, a new Liberal-Conservative ministry was formed. Nominally, its premier was a Canadien, Étienne-Paschal Taché. Beside him, still in the attorney general portfolio he had held since 1854, was Macdonald. No one had any doubt that Auditor General John Langton had it right when he described Macdonald as “the recognized leader.”

  Premier Allan MacNab, the Conservative leader whom Macdonald eased out so he could get to the top. He was famous for declaring, unapologetically, “all my politics are railroads.”

  Macdonald protested his innocence. “Heap as many epithets and reproaches on me as you like,” he told the House, “but this I contend, that having performed my portion of the contract, having stuck to my leader, having tried every means of keeping the cabinet together, I had a right as a gentleman and a man of honour to go into a new government with a Speaker of the Legislative Council, or anyone else.”*63 Taché, by creating the illusion that a new government had been created, had allowed Macdonald to switch leaders with a certain, minimal, decency. In a letter to Henry Smith, though, Macdonald dropped the pretence: “I might, as you know, have been Premier, & insisted on Taché’s claims lest it be said that in putting McNab [sic] out I was exalting myself.”

  However he had got there, Macdonald was now at the ladder’s top.

  The heights suited Macdonald. He performed there with a political skill never seen before on the Canadian political stage. It was from this time on that he set out systematically to develop the kind of organized centrist party that he had sketched out in his letter to John Strachan two years earlier about the need for a “material change” in the party to bring in “‘progressive’ Conservatives” and Canadien members. By today’s standards, the Liberal-Conservative Party was neither organized nor disciplined, and the tripod on which it rested—of Conservatives, bleus and fair-weather Reformers—was decidedly wobbly. Yet it was a genuinely centrist party and, by its interweaving of French and English, a genuine national party, the first since Baldwin and LaFontaine.

  This Big Tent party would soon demonstrate that it possessed a quality then exceedingly rare in Canadian politics—durability. The Liberal-Conservative Party had this attribute because it was a distinctively Canadian political party. It was, that is to say, a party of compromise, of endless accommodation between its constituent groups, of wheeling and dealing, horse-trading, temporary alliances and pacts, disagreements and splits, and broken deals—most of which unravelled at some time or other and then had to be reassembled laboriously.

  In this sense, what was most remarkable about Macdonald’s achievement was not that he should have become Canada’s first prime minister, on July 1, 1867. It was, rather, that long before then he should have become the country’s first truly Canadian prime minister (or premier, as he was called then). Macdonald fashioned a mould into which almost all successful Canadian political leaders have fitted themselves and their parties.

  At the time, very few people appreciated the magnitude of Macdonald’s achievement in keeping together, and maintaining on a more or less even keel, a party that encompassed such disparate elements as Conservatives and Tories, French and English, Orange Irish and Green Irish, Catholics and Protestants (and among the latter, the Anglicans who believed they were, and certainly should be, the established church, as well as grittier denominations like the Methodists). Most who followed politics in those days loathed “partyism,” or the notion of an organized, impersonal and bureaucratic political machine. Few appreciated then that in so inchoate and dispersed a country a national political party was one of the few instruments available to give it a spine. The journalist Goldwin Smith understood what was going on: while he abhorred what he saw as Macdonald’s corruption of Canadian politics, he could not hide his admiration for Macdonald’s irreplaceable skill in keeping together what Smith called a “crazy-quilt” of a country. (Wilfrid Laurier also understood, which was why, when his time came, he governed like a francophone Macdonald.)

  Patronage; abundant and endlessly inventive political deviousness and guile; an exceptional understanding of human nature; a natural tolerance for the inescapable intolerances of groups and individuals—these were Macdonald’s es
sential operating tools. Add to them another quality as critical as any of the rest: likeability. Some opponents—Brown, Cartwright, later Edward Blake—hated Macdonald with a ferocious intensity. But a vast number of people of all kinds—supporters and opponents, legislature members and rank-and-file Conservatives, voters and non-voters—liked him and gave him the benefit of the doubt even when he didn’t deserve it. Other politicians were admired and looked up to: Robert Baldwin, George Brown and the Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau. But Macdonald alone was widely liked, and by quite a few was loved.

  A great many people never called him “Macdonald.” Rather, it was “John A.”—even to his face—a signal of ease, familiarity, trust. Maybe he was a rogue, but he was their rogue. Among other Canadian leaders, only Diefenbaker gained the same familiarity, as “Dief,” and in his case the diminutive came almost as often from anger as from affection.

  Macdonald worked hard at being liked, most especially by his own supporters. “I dare say you are very busy from night until morning, and again from noon ’til night,” Alexander Campbell, his ex-partner and now political crony, wrote to him. “That drinking with the refractory members is in your department, I take for granted. Another glass of champagne and a story of doubtful moral tendency with a little of the Hon. John Macdonald’s peculiar ‘sawder’ are elements in the political strength of a Canadian ministry not to be despised.” Macdonald distributed his “sawder” to all points of the compass. The best anecdote involves a passerby noticing Macdonald and a Reform-Liberal sitting together outside the chamber, with the opposition member’s head resting on Macdonald’s shoulder, as he remarked mournfully, “Ah John A., how I love you. How I wish I could trust you.” The best description of Macdonald’s seductive allure was made—later—by a Liberal MP, W.F. Maclean, who, in a magazine article, wrote that Macdonald “had a wonderful influence over many men. They would go through fire and water to serve him, and got, some of them, little or no reward. But they served him because they loved him, and because with all his great powers they saw in him their own frailties.”