The prince’s tour was a huge success, with one exception. In Kingston, the Orange Order massed to greet “their Prince.” Because the Lodge was banned in England, he refused to come ashore and walk beneath their triumphal arch.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 4, 1860, the prince entered Kingston Harbour aboard the steamer Kingston. It drew close to the official landing place, where the Orangemen had massed—some fifteen thousand of them—in their costumes and with their banners. At the last minute, the ship changed course and moved off into mid-harbour. The standoff continued into the next day, with the Orangemen refusing to leave, but making no disturbances other than singing such songs as “Water, water, holy water. / Sprinkle the Catholics everyone. / We’ll cut them asunder and make ’em lie under.” Late in the morning of the 5th, despite last-minute appeals by Macdonald, the Kingston weighed anchor and chugged off to the prince’s next engagement in Belleville, and then on to Cobourg.
The incident earned Canada an international black eye, including the comment in the New York Times that nowhere in Canada could the prince find “a rational population before reaching the American frontier.” The Globe put it all down to Macdonald’s hypocrisy and incompetence. In fact the blame rested principally with the Duke of Newcastle, who, concerned only with domestic British politics, ignored the fact that the Orange Order was a legal organization in Canada. In the United States, where he next went, the prince had no problems: newspapers pronounced him a “heart smasher,” and many of the young ladies at balls and receptions wrestled each other to get near to him. In Philadelphia, a production of La Traviata came to a halt because “the leading ladies on stage could not keep their eyes off the royal youth.”*84
To recover from this fiasco, which had left him furious with British officials at the same time as the Orangemen were angry with him, Macdonald resorted to a political innovation that served as a response to Brown’s mass convention of the summer before, as well as a platform for him to tell his side of what the newspapers were calling “The Siege at Kingston.” He embarked on a cross-country speaking tour.
No one had done that before—except Americans. Stump speeches were exceedingly rare then, as Canadian politicians limited themselves to orations in the legislature, to church congregations and dinners organized by businessmen. Manifestos like Macdonald’s Address were the standard way of spreading the word. In one critical respect, Macdonald was quite unlike most politicians of the time: he was entirely at ease with ordinary people. He dealt with people not by lecturing them or by orating at them but by talking colloquially with them, telling stories, exchanging repartee—all in everyday language.
Not for many decades would Canadians again encounter a politician so completely at ease with ordinary people. Once, after Macdonald had clambered onto a piece of farm machinery to better address a gathering, word was passed to him that he was actually standing on a manure spreader. His instant reply: “This is the first time I’ve stood on the Liberal platform.” When a passerby stopped him on Toronto’s King Street to tell him that a friend had said Macdonald was “the biggest liar in all Canada,” he looked gravely at his interlocutor and answered, “I dare say it’s true enough.” Mostly, people—even those intending to vote against him—clustered around Macdonald at his meetings for the uncomplicated reason that he was fun.
So off he went on his speaking tour, travelling from town to town—first in Brantford, and then in a succession of meetings, from Toronto to Hamilton to St. Catharines, from St. Thomas to London to Guelph, from Belleville to Simcoe to Kingston. At times, the crowds topped eight hundred listeners. Usually there was a dinner or lunch, typically of six or more courses. There were speeches and toasts, jokes and stories, and more speeches—typically eight or ten speakers. Macdonald frequently was funny, but in a way that got across a message. He referred to the “some joint authority” resolution passed at the Reform convention and asked, “Is it a legislature, or is it a bench of bishops?” He set out his case: “I am a sincere Unionist. I nail my colours to the mast on that great principle.” He used the flag to salute two masters at the same time: “I say that next to the Union with Great Britain, next to having our Queen as ruler, I look to the Union of the two Canadas as most essential.” He turned maudlin: “Whatever may have been the antecedents of any man in Canada, whether he has acted with me or against me, if he becomes a disunionist, I disown him; and I don’t care what may have been the antecedents of another, though he may have struggled fiercely against me, if he enters himself as a supporter of the union with England…and of the union of the two Canadas, I hail him as a brother. God and nature have joined the two Canadas, and no factious politician should be allowed to sever them.” The argument didn’t make much sense, but it abundantly served its purpose: Macdonald had put Brown and the Reformers on the defensive as would-be dividers of the nation and of the Empire, and he had positioned himself as the protector of the nation and, better yet by far, of the Queen.
As for the recent royal tour, Macdonald took credit for its overall success: “It had called the attention of the world to the position and prospects of Canada.” He admitted that although the prince’s visit “had been a source of great pleasure to the people, it had been accompanied in some respects with disappointments, in some degree with heart burnings, in some degree with mistakes.” The fault lay with the Duke of Newcastle for interfering in a way that upset Canada’s careful balance between French and English, Catholics and Protestants. It was an adroit defence, and a courageous one, given that he was directly criticizing no less a power than the colonial secretary.
Macdonald delivered his most important speech in Caledonia. There he addressed directly the central issue of the coming election and of the Canadian political system. “It has been said that I and my Upper Canadian colleagues sacrificed the interests of Upper Canada to Lower Canada; and that we hold to our Lower Canadian colleagues simply for the sake of office. They say we are traitors to our race; that we knuckle to the Frenchmen; that we are faithless to our religion; and that we are under Roman Catholic influences.” Then he offered his reply. He and Cartier had attempted, “in our humble way, to advise the head of the Government for the good of the whole country and the equal interest of all.” In itself, his argument was unremarkable. What was remarkable was that Macdonald, in the heartland of English-speaking Protestantism, could tell his audience that much of what they were thinking was wrong in itself and, equally, wrong for the country.
Afterwards, Macdonald told a friend that he had found this pre-campaign swing “wearisome beyond description.” But not so wearisome that he didn’t add jauntily, “I never took to the stump before, & find that I get on capitally.” Macdonald’s legend as a man of the people had begun to take root.
Impending elections focus the minds of politicians as, to all others, the prospect of being hanged is said to do. Any frustration felt by Macdonald or any intimation of attenuated accomplishment immediately vanished. From early 1861 on, he became a whirlwind of energy. He bombarded Hamilton businessman Isaac Buchanan with arguments why he shouldn’t step down as a member (Buchanan stayed on). He dispatched confidential letters to candidates tipping them off to the date of the election. He encouraged (successfully) Sidney Smith, a friend, to remain as a Reformer, so that a shred of substance would adhere to the label Liberal-Conservative. And he wrote to Egerton Ryerson—“No time must be lost in calling on the Wesleyan Methodists in every constituency”—to try to swing those of his faith to come over (quite a few did).
The results of all this activity could not have been better. Through the summer of 1861—elections were then held over several months—Macdonald won his first ever (and only ever) Conservative majority in Upper Canada. The simultaneous loss of a few seats by Cartier’s bleus was, by comparison, a minor setback. Most admirable of all, Brown lost in his own riding.
In fact the election result changed nothing. The Rep by Pop challenge still remained to be dealt with. The double-majority conventi
on still stalled national action. No sooner was the election over than Macdonald was complaining in a letter to a supporter about “violent Tories who are fools enough to think that a purely Conservative Gov-t can be formed. Now I am not such a fool as to destroy all that I have been doing for the last 7 years.”
In fact, Macdonald’s world, as well as Canada’s, had already changed beyond recall.
Four months before that election was held, a single mortar shot fired on the morning of April 12, 1861, had signalled the start of the bombardment of the small federal garrison in an unfinished fort, Fort Sumter, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. A day and a half later, the garrison’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered to the Confederate commander, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard. One of the most bloody, brutal and tragic of civil wars in history had begun. It would go on for four relentless years. Out of it would come a totally different America, pulsating with energy, confidence and drive, never pausing on its way first to industrial supremacy and thereafter to military and geopolitical supremacy. Out of it too would come a radically different Canada. The crisis that could dislodge everyone from their fixed positions had happened at last.
Interior of the badly damaged Fort Sumter by John Kay ( 1863 ). From out of the Civil War came a transformed United States and also a transformed Canada.
FIFTEEN
Canada’s First Anti-American
Long may that principle—the Monarchial principle—prevail in this land. Let there be “No Looking to Washington.” John A. Macdonald
For the premier of a country whose next-door neighbour had just been convulsed by a murderous domestic conflict, Macdonald’s reaction to the start of the American Civil War was remarkably calm. Through the balance of 1861, he made no comments about the war in any of his letters. For quite a time, his principal concern was only the war’s potential effect on Canadian politics. In his June 1861 Address to the Electors of the City of Kingston, Macdonald put forth this analysis: “The fratricidal conflict now unhappily raging in the United States shows us the superiority of our institutions and of the principle on which we are based. Long may that principle—the Monarchial principle—prevail in this land. Let there be ‘No Looking to Washington,’ as was threatened by a leading member of the opposition.”
As was by no means always the case, there was actually some validity to Macdonald’s accusation. In the legislature, a leading Grit, William McDougall, had blurted out that unless Rep by Pop was enacted, he and other populists might look southwards for support. A jugular having been offered up to him, Macdonald went straight for it. During that summer’s election, a crowd of six hundred Conservatives at Whitby burned McDougall in effigy, as the figure’s straw-filled hand held up a placard reading, “Look to Washington.” The Conservatives hurried out a pamphlet warning of “Clear Grit treason.”
The start of hostilities at Charleston came as no great surprise to Macdonald. Close observers of the U.S. scene—so far as Canadians were concerned that really meant the British ambassador in Washington—had long regarded Southern secession as all but inevitable, particularly since the Supreme Court’s famous, and infamous, 1857 Dred Scott ruling in favour of the legality of slavery. Overwhelmingly, Northerners refused to accept this judgment. The remaining issue became whether the North would allow the South to secede. This choice was determined by the victory in the November 1860 presidential election of the comparatively little-known Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, who, although not prepared—yet—to free the slaves, was committed to an “indivisible union.” Soon after Lincoln’s election, Southern senators and congressmen streamed out of Washington. The new Southern Confederacy was proclaimed on February 11, 1861. Lincoln dismissed the secession as “legally void” and declared that the federal government would maintain control over all military installations throughout the country. Lincoln’s policy was blown to pieces by the Confederate guns at Fort Sumter.
William Seward, U.S. secretary of state. A strong annexationist, he believed that Canada would sooner or later join the United States peacefully and passively, like a “ripe fruit.”
During this period, Macdonald expressed no opinions about Lincoln in his private correspondence. (In a later letter, of November 1864, he referred to Lincoln as “a beast,” but in a jokey way, his full comment being that, for Canada’s sake, “Abe Lincoln, beast as he is, should be elected.”) The prevailing Canadian view about Lincoln was conveyed by the Globe’s dismissal of him as “a fourth-rate lawyer.”*85 Canadian insiders, though, regarded Lincoln as a plus. That wasn’t because of Lincoln’s as yet-untested qualities, but rather those of William Seward, the politician who, most unexpectedly, had lost the Republican presidential nomination to Lincoln. Seward, a former New York senator, able and supremely confident, a man likened to “a huge bird chiseled in stone,” now became secretary of state rather than president.
He was also an unabashed annexationist—and an astute one. He espoused the “ripe fruit” doctrine, which held that Canada would fall naturally from Britain’s grasp into the handily available and incomparably more attractive basket of the United States.†86 coded telegram to Governor General Head warning that “a sudden declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain appears to me by no means impossible.” The New York Times declared that Canada’s union with the North was a certainty, and the New York Herald reassured readers there would be “no necessity for hostilities,” because Canadians themselves overwhelmingly favoured annexation. Offstage, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, talked up the advantages to the North of letting go the South in exchange for getting Canada. Ambiguous evidence exists suggesting that, in London, William Gladstone, then the chancellor of the Exchequer, may have been considering the same kind of swap to head off a possible war between Britain and the United States.*87 The ire of Americans had been raised by Britain’s declaration of neutrality, meaning that it treated the South as a legitimate belligerent.
About the Civil War itself, Canadian public opinion was deeply divided. Taverns became meeting places for either pro-Northerners or pro-Southerners. (One bar in Montreal served mint juleps.) Anti-slavery sentiments were strong, led by George Brown, who penned denunciatory editorials in the Globe and donated generously to organizations that looked after runaway slaves. The historian Sidney Wise has observed astutely that Canadians didn’t so much favour one side or the other, but rather were either anti-South or anti-North. The South was slave country, yet it had a British social quality to it and was a safe distance away. Canadians knew the North quite well, many had worked there, and some forty thousand enlisted in the Northern armies, for the pay or for the excitement.*88 It was the North, though, that threatened Canada. A song sung by Union soldiers to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” included the lines: “Secession first he would put down / Wholly and forever, / And afterwards from Britain’s crown / He Canada would sever.”
As a conservative and a believer in hierarchy, and one who was always silent on the slavery issue, Macdonald appears to have favoured the South. At the war’s start, he expected the South to succeed in its attempt to break away: “If they [Americans] are to be severed in two, as severed in two I believe they will be,” he said in the legislature in his first post–Fort Sumter speech on April 19, 1861, “they will be two great, two noble, two free nations [that] will exist in the place of one.” And his principal concern was always the North. He wrote to a friend that all the Canadians who had joined the Northern armies “will return to Canada sadder and wiser men, with a good deal of military experience that they may perhaps be able to use hereafter against their teachers.” His public stance, though, was always strict neutrality. When, early on, some Conservative members cheered the news of the Southern victory at the First Battle of Bull Run, Macdonald angrily silenced them.
By the fall of 1861, it appeared that the cross-border threat had passed. The North, now losing engagement after engagement, could not ris
k a wider war. As well, Britain that summer hurried over an extra two thousand troops, deliberately doing so in the most public possible way by transporting them in Great Eastern, the world’s largest steamship.*89 As always, the unexpected then happened.
On November 8, 1861, the U.S. warship San Jacinto came upon the Royal Mail steamship Trent in the Bahamas Channel. On information received from federal spies in Havana, its last port of call, but without any orders from Washington, the San Jacinto’s commander, Captain Charles Wilkes, forced the Trent to stop and sent marines aboard; they found there, and brought back to their own ship, two Confederate officials who were on their way to England to order supplies and arrange for them to be brought back by blockade runners. This action was outright piracy on the high seas. The Northern newspapers, delighted to have even a small victory to report, cheered, and Wilkes was celebrated at public dinners. Canadian newspapers, naturally loyal to Britain, answered with outrage. Even if limited in itself, the affair was the most serious diplomatic incident between the United States and Britain since the War of 1812. As the giants glared at each other, Canadians, caught in between, could only blink nervously.
Sometimes, bad communications can lead to good decision making. The news took three weeks to reach London. Another three weeks passed before the British government’s official response—a demand for the release of the prisoners and for a formal apology—reached Washington. By this time, heads in the White House had begun to cool. After fierce cabinet debates, Lincoln ruled, “one war at a time.” With deft timing, the Confederate pair was released around Christmas, when the newspapers were distracted; just as deftly, the Imperial government “forgot” that it had ever called for an apology. By luck, Alexander Tilloch Galt, Macdonald’s finance minister, was then in Washington to discuss trade matters; he got an unexpected call to come to the White House; there, Lincoln reassured the visiting Canadian that he and the Northern government had no hostile intentions towards their neighbour. The assurance only partially reassured, because both Macdonald and Galt remained worried that public opinion might yet force Lincoln to take precipitate action.
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