John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Macdonald was by no means without sin himself. While he deplored sectarian strife with a vigour few other English-Canadian politicians matched, he also exploited it. In a letter to education reformer Egerton Ryerson, after mentioning a grant to the university that Ryerson favoured, Macdonald urged, “The Elections will come off in June, so no time to be lost in rousing the Wesleyan feeling in our favour.” He wrote to Sidney Smith, a Reformer he was trying to lure into his cabinet, “We must soothe the Orangemen by degrees but we cannot afford now to lose the Catholics.” It was in this letter to Smith that Macdonald laid down his often-quoted maxim of how to rule: “Politics is a game requiring great coolness and an utter abnegation of prejudice and personal feeling.”

  Two solutions existed. One was Macdonald’s policy of compromise, endlessly and exhaustingly pursued by guile, skill, outright deviousness and a sizable portion of self-interest. He still had Gowan on his side, and he had bought off the bleus, a great many them right-wing ultramontanes, by patronage. Despite its patches and outright holes, the Liberal-Conservative Big Tent still stood.

  A second solution existed. Known as the “double majority,” it amounted to a mechanical device for keeping Upper Canadians and Lower Canadians apart from each other politically. Up to a point, this system could work for regional matters, but national or province-wide measures became virtually impossible to put into effect. The solution merely papered over the problem, at the cost of making government paralysis all but inevitable and permanent.

  Macdonald began by refusing to accept the double-majority rule. Gradually, he came to apply the rule he himself had spelled out in his legislature speech of 1854, of “yielding to the times” rather than engaging in “affected heroism or bravado”—and, also, of saving his political skin. He now proclaimed, “In matters affecting Upper Canada solely, members from that section claimed the generally exercised right of exclusive legislation, while members from Lower Canada legislated in matters affecting only their own section.” This compromise ceded the double majority in fact, if not officially. It worked, but at the cost of making the legislature largely unworkable.

  Paralysis was never absolute, of course. Work began in Ottawa in 1860 on the construction of a complex of Parliament Buildings of exceptional grandeur—and cost. In 1859 Macdonald’s finance minister, Alexander Tilloch Galt, enacted higher tariffs on British imports to preserve Canada’s vital Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. British manufacturers protested furiously, but the Colonial Office endorsed Galt’s schedule. Effectively, London thereby added full economic self-government to the political self-government already ceded to Canada. And the term “world class” began to be applicable to Canada. Besides the Grand Trunk as the world’s longest railway, the Victoria Bridge, spanning the St. Lawrence at Montreal and a marvel of tubular iron, was the world’s longest; completed in 1857, it was opened officially in 1860 by a visiting royal prince.

  The Parliament Buildings under construction, c. 1862. They were huge, dramatic and extraordinarily ambitious for so small a colony. They were also the one thing in Ottawa that everyone liked.

  But the dominant, all-consuming issue in Canadian public life remained sectarianism. To increase the tension, Brown’s call for Representation by Population had become unanswerable. The census for 1861 showed that Upper Canada now had 285,000 more inhabitants than Lower Canada. More and more Conservatives were coming to accept that Upper Canada had to be given more seats in the legislature, in proportion to its population. Cartier—naturally—was adamantly opposed to any change in the balance of seats between Upper and Lower Canada, and Macdonald had to stand in solidarity with him or lose his bleu supporters. Yet rejecting Rep by Pop only magnified the fury in Upper Canada.

  A yet-more-radical solution now began to be proposed—to disassemble the Province of Canada and recreate its two original provinces. Each province could then have whatever number of constituencies it wanted, because the two legislatures would be quite separate. But Canada itself would be no more.

  Brown, who had begun to assert his authority over both the moderate Reformers and the radical Grits, took up this notion of sundering the nation. An editorial in the Globe threw down the gauntlet: “The disruption of the existing union” was needed to remove Canadien influence over Upper Canada. This would satisfy Lower Canada by giving it “a position of comparative independence.” The alternative would be to “sweep away French power altogether.”*75

  Macdonald’s response was defiant. “I am a sincere unionist,” he declared. “I nail my colours to the mast on that great principle.” There had to be both union with Britain and “union of the two Canadas,” he said. “God and nature have joined the two Canadas and no faction should be allowed to sever them.” He had an obvious self-interest in keeping a Canadien bloc onside to compensate for the paucity of Conservative members in Upper Canada. His problem was that a call for compromise and accommodation had none of the mobilizing power of Brown’s war cry for Rep by Pop.

  There was only so much that Macdonald—or anyone—could do about sectarianism itself. Any real solution would have to wait for the time when Canadians cared less deeply about their religion, and about the religion of others. On a personal level, though, there was something that Macdonald could do about his sense of malaise, of being unfulfilled, of feeling he was making no mark that he would leave behind: to find a woman to marry who could fulfill him.

  In no way did Macdonald take advantage of his widowerhood to gain a reputation similar to that which would later earn his cabinet colleague Charles Tupper the nickname “the Ram of Cumberland.” In the engagingly eccentric book Kingston: The King’s Town (1952), Queen’s University professor James Roy declared flatly that Macdonald “was known to have an amorous disposition,” but provided not a scintilla of proof. As for sex specifically, Macdonald’s prevailing attitude appeared to be that of worldly amusement. Apprised of one minister’s marital misdemeanours, Macdonald responded by quoting the maxim, “There is no wisdom below the belt.” As could be expected, the evidence of Macdonald’s amorous activities as a widower is scanty. Most accounts pass over it in silence. Enough evidence exists, though, to suggest that during this period Macdonald may have had some kind of a relationship with at least five women, and in one instance to have come very close to an offer of marriage.

  There’s no question whatever that Macdonald liked women and, as is considerably less common, that he was entirely at ease in their company. In the very practical and rather prosaic Canadian society of the mid-nineteenth century, this alone would have made him a considerable catch. About that society, the visiting Englishwoman Anna Jameson observed, astutely and tartly, “I have never met with so many repining and discontented women as in Canada…. They seem to me perishing of ennui, or from the want of sympathy which they cannot obtain.”

  To any woman of spirit, Macdonald, by contrast, would have been catnip. There was his Windsor Castle companion of 1842, Miss Wanklyn, with whom he “sympathized wonderfully.” Later on that same trip, he spent the considerable sum of seven pounds fifteen shillings on a riding whip as a present for an unnamed lady, very likely the same Miss Wanklyn. In 1845, while taking Isabella to Georgia, he sent one letter to Margaret Greene that captures his delight in female company: “I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Robinson, a sweet pretty woman, called on Saturday & I went to find her out today, but the directory was vague & I was stupid and & so did not see her again, much to Isabella’s delight, who says she does not like me taking so much to your lady friends.” That confidence committed to paper, Macdonald became bolder. “I always considered you a Charming Woman, but I did not calculate for all your friends being so. From those I have seen, I have only to say that you will confer a great favor*76 on me by sitting down & writing me letters of credence to every one of your Yankee friends, and it will go hard but I [will] deliver most of them.” It would appear that Isabella had good reason to be glad that Macdonald had failed to say “Hey” to Mrs. Robinson.

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sp; That Macdonald understood how to charm women is confirmed by the extraordinary St. Valentine’s Day ball that he organized for February 14, 1860, while living in Quebec City. It was held in the Music Hall of the St. Louis Hotel, the city’s grandest. The chamber was packed with large garlands of roses and graced by busts of Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales (who was booked to visit the colony later in the year). The walls were adorned with new mirrors everywhere and thirty small wreaths of artificial flowers stitched by the Sisters of Charity. A fountain splashed out eau de cologne. The bill for food and drink came to an incredible $1,600, and the list included sparkling Moselle, sherry, port, ale, porter, and both red and white wine. Close to one thousand guests were invited, and on arrival each lady was presented with a valentine on which Macdonald had penned “very, pretty remarks.” There was music throughout the evening, and dancing far into the night. As a highlight, when an exceptionally large pie was carried into the centre of the room, four and twenty blackbirds flew out from it once it was opened. Macdonald never organized another gala like it again. He was premier, after all, and he had no need to stage an extravaganza to impress local society. In this instance, given the day he chose for the party, it’s entirely possible that he was trying to impress a particular woman.

  St. Louis Hotel, Quebec City. It was here, in 1860, that Macdonald staged the splendid, if extravagant, St. Valentine’s Day ball that featured a huge pie from which twenty-four blackbirds emerged.

  In fact, after Isabella’s death, Macdonald wouldn’t have had to work hard to impress. His looks remained odd, but he was growing into them. He was self-assured, clever, funny, a delight for any woman to find seated beside her at a dinner table. He also possessed the aphrodisiacal allure of power. His one glaring defect was that he drank far too much—and this may have deterred the woman he came closest to proposing to during this period. She was Susan Agnes Bernard, the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican sugar planter and the sister of Hewitt Bernard, Macdonald’s own top civil servant. They met once by accident in Toronto, then by Bernard’s design in Quebec City, where Susan Agnes was living with her mother. They met there several other times, and it was reported that Macdonald asked her to marry him. Nothing came of it in the end, but Susan Agnes will make another appearance in these pages.

  The most intriguing case of a might-have-been involves Elizabeth Hall, herself a widow. Macdonald and her late husband, Judge George B. Hall, had become friends when both of them were freshmen legislature members after the 1844 election. Hall died in 1858, and as a favour Macdonald wound up his estate and set up a trust fund for his children. Macdonald described Hall as “a warm, personal friend,” and Hall, just before he died, wrote to Macdonald to say, “Have had a hard tussle with grim death…. If I don’t see you again may we meet in Heaven.” While settling his friend’s legal affairs, Macdonald saw Elizabeth Hall often. Their relationship continued, and on December 21, 1860, she wrote him a letter that, between some bits of business information, positively aches with her longing for him.

  “My loved John,” she began, and then discussed the sale of some of her effects, the progress of the railway being built to Peterborough and the condition of the mails. She used this point to reach right out to Macdonald: “No hope now till I return from the backwoods where I only intend to stay a week & you will have no letter for that time—if that is a privation to you what must I feel if a fortnight without hearing from you. I cannot bear to think of it.” Next came a description of a visit to neighbours, with her added comment: “A lady who was there made a set at me to find out if I was to be married in [the] Spring & I told her it was rumour, & my mother advised me when setting out in life to believe ‘nothing I heard & only half of what I saw.’” Finally, she noted that the horses were being readied to take her for a drive, followed by a confident—or perhaps an overconfident—“Goodbye my own darling—love from loving Lizzie.”

  Unquestionably, something was going on between Macdonald and Elizabeth Hall. Most commentators have assumed that it was principally in Elizabeth’s mind and that she made the mistake of pressing Macdonald too hard and lost him. Perhaps not, though; perhaps the opposite happened. What is truly fascinating about Elizabeth’s letter is that it should exist at all. Macdonald kept very few personal letters, and none at all from either of his wives or from his mother. That he should have kept this one, hanging on to it for more than a quarter-century, suggests some recognition of a lost chance. Perhaps nothing happened because, with several children to bring up, Elizabeth Hall had too many dependants for him to cope with. She would, though, have already been well aware of his drinking “vice,” and she possessed the invaluable asset of experience as the wife of a public man. So perhaps Macdonald let happiness slip through his fingers out of ineptitude or timidity.

  Two of the other women are only wraithlike figures. There were rumours that the sister of a Prince Edward Island politician might marry him, but nothing came of the affair. And, at the close of a routine October 29, 1861, letter to one Richard William Scott, Macdonald added the tantalizing postscript: “P.S. You can make love to Polly.” Here, Macdonald appears to have been telling Scott that whatever may once have passed between him and the semi-anonymous Polly, the way was now open for Scott to press his own suit.

  Then there is Eliza Grimason.

  Two writers, Patricia Phenix, the author of Private Demons, and more tentatively Lena Newman, the author of the excellent 1974 coffee-table book The John A. Macdonald Album, have suggested that a physical relationship may have existed between Macdonald and the lady. Eliza Grimason was a remarkable woman, and there’s no question she adored Macdonald. No beauty by even the most generous estimate, but strong and confident, she owned and managed Grimason House, Kingston’s leading tavern.*77 She performed this role with such aplomb that, having started as an illiterate Irish immigrant, she went on to own properties with the handsome value of fifty thousand dollars. When they first met, she was just sixteen and he had turned thirty. Her husband, Henry, bought the property that became the tavern from Macdonald; when Henry died eleven years later, Macdonald did not press her for the balance of the payments, knowing she had three children to bring up.

  Eliza Grimason, owner of the tavern in Kingston that Macdonald frequented. Rumours of a relationship between them were almost certainly untrue, but, even though they were from totally different social backgrounds, they were lifelong close friends.

  Under her management, Grimason House became the most popular place in the town. It also became Macdonald’s unofficial campaign headquarters. In one description, admittedly from the suspect source of James Roy, it was “the shrine of John A.’s worshippers with Mrs. Grimason as high priestess.” The place was crowded, raucous, rowdy and raunchy. Macdonald went there regularly, bantering with the customers (mostly Conservatives), watching the cockfights (though not himself betting on them) and drinking a great deal. Election nights were his night. Eliza Grimason reportedly controlled one hundred votes, and she made her van available to take Conservatives to the polls, held “open house” for workers and voters and contributed to his campaign funds. According to Macdonald’s early biographer Biggar, “when the returns were brought in, she would appear at Sir John’s committee room, and walk up among the men to the head of the tables, and, giving Sir John a kiss, retire without saying a word.” On the one occasion he lost, she was devastated. “There’s not a man like him in the livin’ earth,” she said.

  Many years later, Eliza Grimason came to Ottawa as Macdonald’s guest at the opening of Parliament. He toured her round the buildings. Then she went to Earnscliffe to have tea with Lady Macdonald, whom Eliza judged “a very plain woman” but doing the job that needed to be done, because “she takes very good care of him.” It’s just not credible that Macdonald would have taken a former mistress around Parliament and then handed her on to have tea with his wife. The kiss she gave him in his committee rooms after he won each election must have been innocent, or the half-tipsy Conservative ward-he
elers would have been shocked and, incomparably worse, they would have talked.

  Macdonald’s character, though, gave his friendship with Eliza Grimason a dimension that was far less common and far more interesting than any illicit relationship between them would have been. Their friendship was an extraordinarily democratic one. Macdonald, the nation’s most powerful man, and a highly intelligent and well-read one to boot, was the true friend of a rough countrywoman who earned her living running a grungy tavern. Their friendship was so close, and so unaffected, that Macdonald in later years kept a framed photograph of Mrs. Grimason on his desk, beside one of his mother. It was because Macdonald knew people like Mrs. Grimason and her customers that he knew Canada better than any succeeding premier or prime minister ever did.

  Maybe, post-Isabella, Macdonald could not allow himself to be close to another woman. One chronicler, the historian Keith Johnson, has written that Macdonald seemed to have a “central, emotional dead spot.” That’s too strong an assessment; all his life he could be extraordinarily tender with children and wholly at ease with them. But except for Isabella during their first few years together, he never again really let down his guard with a woman.

  Here, as always with Macdonald, there is a glaring contradiction—although perhaps only an apparent one. Women adored him. That was the judgment of that sophisticated observer Sir John Willison, the editor of the Globe, who wrote in his Reminiscences that “because women know men better than they know themselves and better than men ever suspect, there was among women a passionate devotion to Sir John A. Macdonald such as no other political leader in Canada has inspired.” (Since Willison was a confidante of Laurier, this was high praise indeed.) Willison ends, with the gallant flourish, “No man of ignoble quality ever commands the devotion of women.”