Isabella’s death made Macdonald a middle-aged widower—and therefore once again a bachelor. From now on, he lived in boarding houses or in apartments. Often he roomed with other legislature members and with his principal civil servant, Hewitt Bernard. Inevitably, he drank a great deal more than before, spending longer hours in the Smoking Room of the Legislative Assembly. From this point on it becomes more difficult to know what Macdonald actually meant when he reported to his sister Margaret, as in a March 1858 letter, “I was very unwell last week so as to be confined to bed for three days and was hardly able to crawl to the House.” Most likely he was afflicted with some combination of both illness and inebriation.
In some ways, Macdonald’s personal life improved. He could go places when he wanted to, and no longer needed to feel guilty for having invented some excuse to avoid hurrying back to Isabella’s side. His mother, Helen, continued to suffer strokes, yet she remained indomitable. She now lived with the Williamsons, but in her stubborn way she insisted on paying Macdonald rent, including a small sum for the use of the garden and yard and a share of the cost of the male servant. At the same time, Macdonald’s law practice seemed to be in exceptionally good shape under his energetic young partner, Archibald Macdonnell.
Macdonald even managed to survive unscathed a near-death experience. In July 1859 he boarded the steamer Ploughboy for an excursion to Sault Ste. Marie. The ship’s engine failed and the vessel began drifting towards the rocky coastline amid ever-rising wind and waves. Only when it was near shore did the anchors finally catch, after having dragged for close to twelve miles. “None of the party will be nearer to their graves until they are placed in them,” Macdonald wrote to Louisa, adding, “The people behaved well, the women heroically.”
Without Isabella and without Hugh John, Macdonald no longer had anything to distract him from “the long game.” From now on, his personal life provided him with so few emotional demands or outlets for affection that he was free to apply all his abundant energy and passion exclusively to politics.
THIRTEEN
Double Majority
Is it a decree of destiny that Mr. Macdonald shall be the everlasting Prime Minister? We must face issues.
The Colonist, June 19, 1858
As the decade of the 1850s drew to its end, Macdonald was approaching a political peak. He had outmanoeuvred Brown over the “double shuffle” with all the ease of a feral cat toying with a mouse. The bloc of bleu members who followed faithfully behind Cartier assured him of a semi-permanent majority in the legislature. His Liberal-Conservative Party, while shaky in several places, hugged the vital centre of the political spectrum, with the Tories in its ranks lapsing into sullen silence. As the de facto premier since 1854 and as co-premier in title since 1856, he’d held that post longer than had anyone in the life of the United Province of Canada. He’d deployed his tactics of compromise and accommodation to dispose successfully of long-standing issues such as the Clergy Reserves, the seigneurial system and separate schools, and had managed to select a single capital for the nation. Encomiums about Macdonald that floated across the Atlantic from the upper reaches of the Colonial Office described him as “a distinguished statesman” and “the principal man” in Canada. It’s always easier, though, to stumble when standing on a peak than on flat ground.
The warning to Macdonald came from an inconsequential source. On June 29, 1858, a small newspaper, the Colonist, ran a startling editorial titled, “Whither Are We Drifting?” After citing examples of national drift, it asked, “Is it a decree of destiny that Mr. Macdonald shall be the everlasting Prime Minister? We must face issues. Worse can happen than a ministerial defeat.” What was truly startling was the fact that the Colonist was a pro-Conservative newspaper—and that it was on to something. A disconnection had opened up between the governed and the governing; a disconnection, that is, between reality and politics.
Early in 1858, a letter proposing an extravagant idea crossed Macdonald’s desk. In it, Walter R. Jones of Kingston suggested that the government should encourage the formation of a company to build a railway “through British American territory to the Pacific.” The next step should be “a line of steamers from Vancouver Island to China, India, and Australia.” Although the historical record contains nothing more about Jones, his letter catches perfectly the spirit of the times.
The years from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s were either the best that Canadians experienced throughout the entire nineteenth century or a close second-best.*73 Everything was booming. The economy was benefiting triply: from the Reciprocity Treaty (a free trade deal) with the United States, a general upturn in world trade, and the special demands created in Britain by the Crimean War and the closing of the rival lumber trade from the Baltic. Immigration was booming, at the same time as outmigration to the United States had slowed substantially. Towns such as Toronto and Quebec were acquiring some of the characteristics of cities, while Montreal, with close to one hundred thousand inhabitants, was not that far behind Boston. Promising new manufacturing towns were taking shape, including Hamilton and Brantford; London, in just the last half decade of the fifties, tripled its population to fifteen thousand.
The word “progress” was on almost everyone’s lips. In The Shield of Achilles, edited by W.L. Morton, the historian Laurence S. Fall is notes that there was “an almost total absence of a literature of pessimism in the Province of Canada.” Optimism was generated by the abundance of jobs and by rising wages. By no coincidence, a great many of the country’s finest and boldest buildings, most spectacularly the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, but also churches, cathedrals and public halls such as Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall, date from this period. One other agent of change affecting Canada more decisively than any other country in the world was the steam engine, and the parallel lines of steel that stretched out beyond the horizon.
Initially, Canadians went timidly into the Age of Railways. In 1844, a decade and a half after George Stephenson’s famous Rocket made its first run in England, there were just fifty miles of track in the entire country. Then Canadians embraced the new age of transportation totally and extravagantly: by 1854 there were eight hundred miles of track; by 1864 there would be more than three thousand, including the Grand Trunk, reputedly the longest line in the world, stretching all the way from Quebec City to Sarnia. Soon, there were lines all over the place, built by the Great Western, the Northern Railway, and the St. Lawrence and Atlantic. In fact, almost all these companies lost money and had to be subsidized by government. Often the railways disappointed; their underpowered locomotives repeatedly broke down and could be halted by even minor snowdrifts.
Poster for the Grand Trunk Railway, the longest railway in the world. The illustration shows the tubular iron Victoria Bridge, which spanned the St. Lawrence River. It was completed in 1859 and, the next year, was opened officially by the visiting Prince of Wales. Both railway and bridge reflected the emerging expansionist and confident Canada.
Railways were by no means the only catalyst of change. Canada’s Pioneer Age was beginning to pass. The last parcel of “wild land” in the Bruce Peninsula was sold in 1854; the first “macadamized” roads were being built; and a few towns even boasted street lights. In some homes, parlour organs broadened the means of entertainment beyond fiddles and squeeze boxes. People had begun to realize that each new mechanical advance was not a fluke but the product of a system that would forever produce more and more marvels, from the mechanical harvester and the sewing machine to the telegraph. Many of these inventions brought further radical changes, such as the division of labour and the elimination of distance. During this period, no change would be more transformational than the publication in 1859 of a massive, near-unreadable tome—Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Decades would pass before the melancholy, long withdrawing roar”*74 of the loss of faith would reach Canada, but a defensive response came early when the curriculum of the required courses at the University
of Toronto was altered to incorporate natural theology and “evidences” of the validity of Christianity.
One Canadian sage compared the transformational effect of the railways to that of the invention of printing. They made a huge difference, although the small-engined locomotives had a hard time pushing through the snow on the Grand Trunk rails.
Nothing, though, changed Canada more than did the railways. In 1849 the Montreal engineer Thomas Coltrin Keefer, a kind of nineteenth-century Marshall McLuhan, published a pamphlet, Philosophy of Railroads, in which he proclaimed, “Steam has exerted an influence over matter which can only be compared with that which the discovery of Printing has exercised upon the mind.” A century later, the historian Michael Bliss revisited this idea in his book Northern Enterprise: “Steam conquered space and time. It seemed to liberate communities from the tyrannies of geography and climate…. Steam changed the land itself, for wherever the rails went, they gave the land value.” From now on, Canadians were less and less immured in their villages and small towns. They could reach out to each other to exchange everything from goods to ideas. Newspapers—the Toronto Globe most particularly—ceased to be purely local; business, from nail-makers to insurance companies, began to operate on a province-wide basis. Goods became more diverse and more competitive, and food became fresher and more varied. Mrs. Beeton’s monumental cookery book became available in 1860. Time became standardized—by Sandford Fleming. In short, Canadians began to become a single community.
This was the environment, optimistic and expansive and ever more agreeable, in which a great many Canadians lived during the last years of the 1850s and the first of the 1860s. Keefer proclaimed, “Ignorance and prejudice will flee before advancing prosperity.” The magazine Canadian Gem and Family Visitor told its readers: “Canada is destined to become one the finest countries on the face of the globe.” The geologist and surveyor of the west, Henry Youle Hind, in his book Eighty Years Progress of British North America predicted “a magnificent future…which shall place the province, with the days of many now living, on a level with Great Britain herself, in population, in wealth, and in power.” That the nineteenth century would belong to Canada seemed obvious; the politicians, though, were talking quite differently.
The changing circumstances did effect political change. Railways gave politicians a whole new range of power: they could decide who would win a charter to build and operate a company, and where its line should go. It could also give them personal profits—Premier MacNab as president of the Great Western; Cartier as solicitor for the Grand Trunk; and Hincks, the ex-premier, as a major shareholder in the same company. A British lobbyist for the Grand Trunk remarked, “Upon my word, I do not think that there is much to be said for Canadians over Turks when contracts, places, free tickets on railways or even cash was in question.” Put simply, there was now incomparably more money than ever before rattling around inside the Canadian political system. Keefer described the period as “the saturnalia of nearly all classes connected with railways.” Surprisingly, Macdonald himself never seems to have benefited personally from this first railway boom, and the only shares he appears to have bought were a modest number in the Great Southern Railway. But Canadian politics had undergone a sea change from its glory days of fighting for Responsible Government.
Macdonald ought to have been thoroughly enjoying himself. The boom made people happy, and happy voters are grateful voters. Yet time and again, Macdonald’s naturally sunny nature seemed clouded by an undertone of dissatisfaction—as if he himself was wondering, “Is that all there is?” The frustration came through in comments he wrote to friends: “I find the work and annoyance too-much for me,” and, “Entre nous, I think it not improbable that I will retire from the Govt.” He even let down his guard enough to allow some of his pessimism to creep into letters to his family. To his sister Margaret, he wrote, “We are having a hard fight in the House & will beat them in the votes, but it will, I think, end in my retiring as soon as I can with honour” and to his mother, “We are getting on very slowly in the House, and it is very tiresome.” In 1859 the rumour spread that Macdonald intended to retire. Joseph Pope wrote of Macdonald, “I believe, [he] had fully made up his mind to get out.” The entreaties of Conservatives eventually kept Macdonald at his post, but, as Pope wrote, “sorely against his wishes.”
Macdonald expressed much the same sentiments in public. At a formal dinner given for him in Kingston in November 1860, he lapsed into quite-out-of-character self-pity. “When I have looked back upon my public life,” he said, “I have often felt bitterly and keenly what a foolish man I was to enter into it at all (Cries of ‘No, no’)…. In this country, it is unfortunately true, that all men who enter the public service act foolishly in doing so. If a man desires peace and domestic happiness, he will find neither in performing the thankless task of a public officer.”
One factor exacerbating Macdonald’s pessimism was sheer loneliness. He lived in boarding houses, as, for example, jointly with a Mr. Salt on Toronto’s Bay Street. In 1861 he wrote to his sister Margaret about his new apartment-mate, an Allan McLean: “He is a very good fellow but rather ennuyant and I will be glad when he goes. I am now so much accustomed to live alone, that it frets me to have a person always in the same house with me.”
His natural optimism was rubbed down further by the progressive weakening of his beloved mother, Helen. She died on October 24, 1862. Alerted by Louisa, Macdonald was at her side through her last days. She too was buried in the family plot at Cataraqui Cemetery. Of his own family, only Margaret and Louisa remained; also Hugh John, but by now he had become a detached son. From this time on, Macdonald had less and less reason to go to Kingston, and, inevitably, he became increasingly distanced from his own childhood and youth.
While Macdonald was subject to occasional depressions, this general mood of listlessness and pessimism was alien to him. His usual philosophy of life is set out in a reply he wrote to a friend who had complained about financial problems. “Why man do you expect to go thro’ this world with trials or worries. You have been deceived it seems. As for present debts, treat them as Fakredden [sic] in Tancred treated his—He played with his debts, caressed them, toyed with them—What would I have done without those darling debts said he.” Macdonald then described his creed: “Take things pleasantly and when fortune empties her chamberpot on your head—Smile and say ‘We are going to have a summer shower.’”
Not until later did Macdonald—by now without any real confidante—reveal a major cause of his sense of alienation and purposelessness. The occasion—to cite it here requires slipping out of the straitjacket of chronology—was a dinner in Halifax in September 1864, right after the close of the first Confederation conference in Charlottetown. During his speech, Macdonald turned confessional in a way that was most unusual for him. “For twenty long years I have been dragging myself through the dreary wastes of Colonial politics,” he told his audience. “I thought there was no end, nothing worthy of ambition, but now I see something which is worthy of all I have suffered in the cause of my little country.” By that vivid phrase—“twenty long years…through the dreary wastes”—Macdonald was coming very close to saying that his entire career had been an exercise in pointlessness.
Macdonald loved power for its own sake, and he loved the political game for itself, so it would be far too sweeping to conclude that he meant literally what he was saying. But there is hard truth in that analysis. Macdonald had not come into politics with any grand goal or vision, and after two decades in politics, a good half-dozen of them at the top of the ladder, he had yet to accomplish much that would linger after he left. During this time he had missed out on several chances to make real money or to have a normal family life. Most particularly, Macdonald was failing in politics itself. Rather than the national harmony that should have resulted from his turning the Conservative Party into a centrist group, by forging a French-English alliance and by settling long-standing disputes, what had grown strong
er over these same years was disharmony, division and sectarianism.
Religion was the “other” of these times. Almost every topic of public debate was dominated by and deformed by sectarianism. It was Canada’s equivalent to the division then rapidly taking hold in the United States between the slave-owning South and the anti-slavery North. The Orange Order, its membership constantly augmented by new Irish Protestant immigrants, was becoming ever more explicitly anti-Catholic, and the moderate Ogle Gowan was steadily losing ground to the hard-liner John Hillyard Cameron. At the same time, the Catholics in Lower Canada were becoming ever more ultramontane, or authoritarian. In Toronto, Bishop Armand-François Charbonnel declared that any Catholic who possessed the vote but failed to use it to elect candidates committed to expanding separate schools was guilty of a mortal sin. Differences in religion multiplied those of race, and the reverse equally.
In particular in Upper Canada, there was an ever-rising anger at the political power exercised in the national legislature by Lower Canada’s Canadiens, this in important part because of the very alliance that Macdonald had forged with Cartier and his bloc of bleus. As was rare, Macdonald’s political antennae failed to function. He dismissed Representation by Population as “too abstract a question [for the public] to be enthusiastic about.” Rather, and as always in politics, appearance mattered far more than fact, and the appearance here was that the minority—a defeated one, moreover—was now in charge.
The responses went far beyond mutterings in the various Orange Lodges. The Globe laid it out explicitly: “Our French rulers are not over particular, we are sorry to say, and we are powerless. Upper Canadian sentiment matters nothing even in purely Upper Canadian matters. We are slaves…. J.A. Macdonald may allow his friend to buy an office, he may even take a thousand pounds of plunder, if he likes; so long as he please Lower Canada, he may rule over us.” George Brown was even more intemperate: he railed in the Globe against “a deep scheme of Romish Priestcraft to colonize Upper Canada with Papists…a new scheme of the Roman hierarchy to unite the Irish Roman Catholics of the continent to a great league for the overthrow of our common [public] school system.”
John A Page 17
