One of the earliest Canadian newspaper cartoons (c. 1858 ) mocking Macdonald’s political trickery in the “double shuffle.” Signed “H.R. in Toronto,” it may have been drawn by the English cartoonist John Doyle—whose grandson, Arthur Conan Doyle, created Sherlock Holmes.
All observers now assumed that the same cycle would drag down Macdonald as soon as he attempted to form a cabinet. Macdonald, though, had already found his loophole. He had all his old ministers re-sworn again, but each in a new portfolio. (Macdonald’s new post was postmaster general.) A day later, he switched his ministers back to their original portfolios, thereby avoiding the need for any of them to resign. No Reform lawyer was able to find any specific illegality in this double shuffle.
As Macdonald later said teasingly about Brown, “Some fish require to be toyed with. A prudent fish will play around with the bait some time before he takes it, but in this instance the fish scarcely waited till the bait was let down.” The consequences of this political commedia dell’arte were that Macdonald got Canadians a capital that began its life behind the protection provided by the Queen, Brown got humiliated and Macdonald came away with a reputation for political knavery.*68 While absurd in itself, the incident marked the start of Macdonald’s ascent to the status of a political legend. At this instant he gained another political asset at least as valuable: he secured the most important ally he would ever have: George-Étienne Cartier.
When the paths of Macdonald and Cartier first crossed, Macdonald paid him little attention. In a letter to a friend on January 27, 1855, he mentioned, in a review of his Canadien members, that “[Joseph-Édouard] Cauchon will prove a valuable man from his energy & talent” and that “[François-Xavier] Lemieux brings the whole strength of the Quebec district with him.” Of Cartier, he said only, “He will represent the Montreal section…which was wholly without a representative.” In his next reference, in February, Macdonald was somewhat more positive: he reckoned that Cartier was well suited to his portfolio of provincial secretary, “which only requires industry and method, both of which he has to a remarkable degree.” He still de scribed Cauchon as “the ablest French-Canadian in the House” a few days later, his skepticism returning, Macdonald described Cartier as “active—too much so.”*69 A guess at why they didn’t click immediately would be that Cartier, who could be full of himself, may have failed to give Macdonald due deference in their earlier encounters.
Cartier was exactly what Macdonald needed as French lieutenant: he commanded a disciplined bloc of French-Canadian members and was a national figure in his own right. As important, he quickly became Mac donald’s principal link with Mont real’s powerful community—over whelmingly anglophone—of businessmen and financiers.
George-Étienne Cartier. Macdonald praised him as “bold as a lion.” Their French-English alliance revived that of Baldwin and LaFontaine. It was the foundation on which Confederation was built.
Cartier has slipped to the margins of Quebec historical consciousness: the one-hundredth anniversary of his death, on May 21, 1973, passed almost without notice.†70 It didn’t help that Cartier once described himself as “an Englishman who speaks French.” He bought all his clothes in London; he subscribed to ten English magazines, but none from France. He was a passionate monarchist, declaring that the Conquest “saved us from the misery and shame of the French Revolution” and naming one of his daughters Reine-Victoria. Anglophilia aside, it is a fact of life that Quebecers generally lose their hearts to wounded heroes, such as Henri Bourassa or René Lévesque, rather than to winners—Cartier, Laurier, Trudeau. Yet Cartier was wholly and completely a Canadien. He was never happier than when belting out voyageur songs at his regular and raucous conversations; when introduced to the Prince of Wales, he broke into a French-Canadian chanson. In 1834 he was the first secretary of the new Société St-Jean-Baptiste, of which the slogan was “Nos institutions, notre langue, nos droits.” He was one of the Patriotes during the 1837–38 uprising.
Cartier’s near disappearance from the memory of his own people isn’t justified by the legacy he left them. Montreal in the mid-nineteenth century was Canada’s most important city—really its only one. Nevertheless, Toronto posed a substantive threat to Montreal’s dominance. It had an incomparably richer hinterland in the dark soil of southwestern Ontario, attracted many more immigrants and was close to booming American cities such as Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. Yet Montreal would keep ahead of Toronto as Canada’s metropolis for a full century after Cartier’s death—until the 1970s, when the respective population counts of the two cities at last switched around. This lead was based on a political-industrial alliance, for which Cartier largely created the template. In his fine biography George-Étienne Cartier: Montreal Bourgeois, Brian Young writes that “his career demonstrates the power of railways in 19th century Montreal,” and he goes on to describe Cartier as playing a leading role “in the transformation of Montreal civil society and in the imposition of fundamental social, economic and legal institutions.”
Intuitively—he was in no way an intellectual—Cartier understood that the Empire of the St. Lawrence no longer depended on the great river and chain of inland lakes but on the newfangled railways, those slim, arrow-straight, year-round transportation systems. “The prosperity of Montreal depends upon its position as the entrepôt of the commerce of the West,” he said. “We can only maintain that position if we assure ourselves of the best means of transport from the West to the Atlantic.” The Grand Trunk, then the world’s longest railway line, had its headquarters in Montreal. The company was there, bringing with it Canada’s first wave of industrialization, because Cartier was the Grand Trunk’s solicitor for eighteen years. During most of that time, he was also a senior cabinet minister. Cartier piloted the Grand Trunk’s charter through the legislature in 1854; later, he functioned as the company’s lobbyist, protecting it from what were called “the evils of competition.” As a result, Montreal became the country’s industrial and financial centre, with the Bank of Montreal as its fiscal fulcrum. Above all, it had Ottawa as its patron. It would take separatism to turn Montreal into a second-tier city.*71
Born in 1814, a year ahead of Macdonald, Cartier came from a family, for three generations, of merchants. He himself became a lawyer. He had excellent connections (including in the Catholic Church) and considerable charm. He drank enough to be convivial but with none of Macdonald’s escapist intensity. He could also be intimidating: he was known to bully servants and he issued several challenges to duels. On one occasion, he and his opponent actually fired shots, both missing—almost certainly deliberately.
Cartier was a force of nature. He was short (five foot six inches), stocky, immensely strong, indefatigable (he often put in fifteen-hour days, and one of his speeches lasted seven hours in English, after which he repeated it in French). His self-confidence was boundless. When a Conservative member criticized him for not consulting widely, he answered, “That is quite correct, I do not consult anybody in making up my mind.” When another member observed that Cartier “never sees a difficulty in anything,” he answered, “And I have been generally pretty correct.” He was fastidious about his dress, usually wearing a long black Prince Albert coat and a silk hat. He flirted a lot. “Feo” Monck, the sister of the governor general, recorded in her diary that when she asked Cartier his favourite occupation, he answered, “The activity of the heart.” His mistress, Luce Cuvillier, a smoker of cheroots and, even more daringly, a wearer of trousers, was a great admirer of Byron and George Sand. She and Cartier lived openly together and travelled together, most often to London. In his will, he praised Luce’s “sagesse et prudence” and left her six hundred dollars—a sizable sum—in his will.*72
First elected in 1848, he joined the cabinet in 1855. After Taché retired, the government became the Macdonald-Cartier administration, with Cartier as attorney general for Lower Canada. As part of the contortions that ended the 1858 “double shuffle,” the supposed new government was title
d the Cartier-
Macdonald ministry. Macdonald described the bloc of Canadien members who kept him in power as his “sheet anchor.”
Character drew Macdonald and Cartier together. Both were bold—“as bold as a lion” was Macdonald’s own description of Cartier. Neither was daunted by difficulties or defeats. Both loved Britain: Cartier’s retirement plan was “to settle myself in London.” Both feared the United States. About patronage and election funding, their views were identical, with Cartier being the less restrained of the two by a wide margin. He was well known for paying ten dollars for a vote, although for Irish votes he offered “a barrel of flour apiece and some salt fish thrown in for the leaders.”
If Macdonald and Brown were a pair of rivals for whom few, if any, equivalents exist in Canadian history, Macdonald and Cartier were a pair of allies with few peers. They fought together for just under twenty years, 1854 to 1873; had they not stood side by side, there could have been no Confederation.
Politics, though, had not, yet, become Macdonald’s whole life. His other life, his personal one, was dipping down now to one of its lowest points.
TWELVE
Isabella, Hugh John and Daisy
Tell Hugh that I am extremely pleased at the report of Mr. May [his teacher]. John A. Macdonald’s rare praise for his son
The “grey, unrelieved tragedy”—in Creighton’s phrase—Macdonald had been living through for twelve years came to its final, inevitable end in the very last days of 1857. He’d long given up any hope, or pretence, that Isabella might recover. He no longer sent out letters that said, as they once had, “Isabella is not worse than she was yesterday.” He no longer composed elaborate explanations to family members or to the increasingly comatose Isabella about why he had to stay late at the office or leave for some trip on political business.
In the summer of 1857 Macdonald went to England as part of a delegation seeking to raise capital for a new railway to the Maritimes. (The mission failed.) There, in his spare time he ordered a Highland dress outfit for Hugh John, to enable him to “bare his bottom with due Celtic dignity.” Once back, Macdonald went first to Kingston, where Isabella was being looked after by his sister Louisa, and then on to Toronto, the seat of the government. Late in December (which meant he’d skipped spending Christmas with Isabella), Macdonald hurried back to Kingston, either because he had been warned or because he had a premonition that the ultimate crisis had arrived. For three days he sat beside Isabella’s sickbed. On December 28 she died. No cause was given, but she was by then so weak that almost any ailment would have been enough.
On December 29 a notice in the Kingston Daily News invited “friends and acquaintances” to attend a funeral at the house his mother now lived in with Louisa. Isabella was buried in the family plot in Cataraqui Cemetery alongside her father-in-law, Hugh, and her infant son, John Alexander.
The exact nature of Isabella’s prolonged ailments cannot be identified with any certainty. An argument can be made that many of them were located in her head.
The most extensive examination was that made by Dr. James McSherry, reported in two articles in The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History and the magazine Historic Kingston. His basic diagnosis was that “the probabilities are Isabella had pulmonary tuberculosis, a hysterical personality, complicated migraine and opiate dependence.” He wrote that everything that is known about her “does not fit any recognizable medical pattern.” And he added, “One can only wonder at John A. Macdonald’s patience and kindness.”
The “tic” to which Macdonald often referred was not a facial tic, as the term would be understood today, but, McSherry believed, “a generalized pain in the head.” Much of her weakness may have derived, as might not have been fully appreciated at the time, from atrophy caused by prolonged bed rest. In one letter, Macdonald described how, following an attack, “her bed had not been made for ten days, but this evening I managed to have her shifted to the sofa & she has now got back, much fatigued by the change, but is now, of course much more comfortable.”
As is inevitable when the evidence is so old and so fragmentary, some of the medical puzzles do not yield to easy explanations. Isabella was weak, obviously; yet she remained strong enough to give birth twice and suffered no reported miscarriages. In frank puzzlement, McSherry writes, “It is difficult to imagine any medical condition which would produce such gross deterioration in physical well-being while preserving menstrual function and fertility.”
The diagnosis of tuberculosis—then known as “consumption”—seems highly persuasive. Tuberculosis, though, can be transmitted by intimate contact, and she and Macdonald engaged in conjugal relations; as well, neither of her sons suffered from the disease. A medical friend of the author, Dr. Bryon Hyde of Ottawa, agrees with McSherry’s primary diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis but reckons that the more likely cause was either of two comparable diseases, bovine tuberculosis or brucellosis; these, while similar to tuberculosis, are much less readily transmittable between humans and were prevalent in Georgia, the state where Isabella lived for several years. Hyde makes another interesting point. From today’s perspective, the quantity of opium prescribed to Isabella is shocking, but, in fact, it made substantial sense because it significantly reduced her coughing and so minimized her loss of blood.
McSherry opens up an important non-medical aspect of Isabella’s tribulations. He writes of “the frankly manipulative appearance of much of [her] behaviour. Any time Macdonald was about to leave, her condition worsened; as soon as he returned, it improved. Her calmness and courage while he was around would certainly have encouraged him to linger.” McSherry speculates that Isabella may have capitalized on a genuine illness as a way of putting distance between herself and the intimidating, female-dominated Macdonald household—his two sisters and most particularly his formidable mother. Separated from her own relatives and in a strange land, Isabella may have been suffering a form of “culture shock.” It’s easy to guess that these hardy, practical Scots women would have regarded her as soft and gushy, not at all the right chatelaine for their John A.
It’s impossible to know whether Macdonald actually loved Isabella. Most likely he did, at least in the earliest years of their marriage, and it may have been her flightiness and fragility that initially attracted this unsentimental, worldly man to her. The emotional cost to Macdonald of seeing his gay, girlish wife turn into a pain-racked, stupefied wreck of a human being, and then linger in that condition for a dozen years, can only be guessed at.
All that can be said with reasonable confidence is that if Macdonald did once lose his heart to Isabella, he never lost it again—or never again in the same way. Many years later, his son, Hugh John, fathered a daughter who was always known in the family by her nickname Daisy. These Macdonalds lived in Winnipeg, but as a young girl Daisy stayed with her grandfather in Ottawa while she went to school there, and she spent several summer vacations with him. They adored each other. Daisy’s real name was Isabella.
Isabella’s great gift to Macdonald was to give him a son and heir, Hugh John. Yet Macdonald all but “lost” him. When Hugh John was born, Macdonald’s cry had been, “We have got Johnnie back again, almost his image.” Hugh John would never know this, of course, but as he grew up he must have sensed that he was competing with an opponent he could never beat—his own, long-dead, infant brother. The relationship between father and son was never relaxed or close, and quite often it was strained.
There was the practical fact that the demands of politics on Macdonald made him a virtually absent father. He did try: he sent Hugh John that Highland dress, arranged for a tutor to come to the house when the child was ill and bought him a Shetland pony and a “waterproof” to wear while he was out riding; later, Macdonald sorted out the complications when Professor James Williamson’s servant balked at having to look after the pony and its sleigh and harness. And once, early in 1861, Macdonald sent to Hugh John, by way of Louisa, the kind of message any son would ache to hear from
his father: “In the first place, tell Hugh that I am extremely pleased at the report of Mr. May [his teacher].” Macdonald then added, “Tell him that I am quite proud of it and that I have shown it to all my friends.” No doubt Hugh John would have far preferred to have heard those words directly from his father.
Hugh John. By now a young lad, he regarded Macdonald’s sister Margaret and her husband, James Williamson, as his surrogate parents. (This photo is also from Lady Macdonald’s album.)
By then, Hugh John had become, all but formally, the son of Mac donald’s sister Margaret and her husband. They had brought him up at their home in Kingston from his earliest years, with occasional exceptions, such as when he joined his family in Toronto. It’s not quite true, though, that Hugh John was a surrogate son to a comparatively elderly couple who could not have a child themselves. True for Margaret, who had married on the cusp of forty, but not for Williamson. Before coming to Canada, he had been a minister in Scotland with a wife and son. When his wife died, soon after giving birth, Williamson decided to immigrate to Canada. He left behind the boy, James, to be brought up by his sister-in-law. In Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of John A. Macdonald, Patricia Phenix describes how young James tried frantically to maintain contact with his father, writing him pleading letters to be allowed at least to visit, but almost never getting a reply. The dereliction may have been more Margaret’s than Williamson’s. She, having come to regard Hugh John as her own son (he was after all her nephew), may well have feared that James, once in Kingston, would have competed with Hugh John for the attention of the man who was in fact his biological father. It’s also possible that Macdonald himself was secretly glad to have so easy an out from the responsibilities of single fatherhood.
John A Page 16
