That risk did exist. The New York World pronounced, “The simple fact is, Canada hates us.” More threatening still was the Cleveland Leader’s declaration that, in a reference to the vast Northern Armies, “six hundred thousand men will want something more to do” once they had done with the South. To placate his public, Lincoln ruled that all visitors to the United States would henceforth have to carry passports, a rule that hit Canadians by far the hardest. Fortunately, American public opinion cooled quickly, and the passport regulation was quietly lifted.
On first hearing the news of the Trent crisis, the British cabinet had decided that a show of force had to be made. Some eleven thousand additional redcoats were rushed out. By the time the ships had reached the St. Lawrence, the freeze-up had begun. The boats hurriedly swung round to Saint John, where the soldiers disembarked. Using a kind of snowshoes called “creepers,” they marched over the snowbound, hilly roads of New Brunswick to the St. Lawrence River. Britain had done its bit; it was now Canada’s turn.
Responsibility for the defence of Canada rested at the time not with its premier and his government but with the governor general. Responsibility for Canada’s doing what it could to help rested with its minister of militia. It was a new portfolio, created by Macdonald on December 18, 1861, in the midst of the Trent crisis. He appointed himself to the position, thereby making himself, already attorney general and premier, a triple minister.
In some ways Macdonald’s assumption of this role was questionable. He had no military experience whatever, other than in 1837, when, as a member of the Sedentary Militia, he took part in the attack on Montgomery’s Tavern in the countryside north of Toronto which crushed William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebellion. Macdonald never fired a shot himself, claiming only to have “carried my musket.” More intriguingly and reflective of his attitude towards the military, a half-century passed before Macdonald mentioned to anyone that he had actually seen action.*90 He learned from the brief experience that a soldier’s lot was not an easy one. As he recounted, “The day was hot. My feet were blistered. I was but a weary boy and I thought I would have dropped with weight of the old flint musket which galled my shoulder, but I managed to keep up with my companion, a grim old soldier who seemed impervious to fatigue.” More surprisingly still, unlike many in public life, Macdonald had never sought a commission as an officer in the militia for the sake of the status. If anything, he was actively suspicious of the military; Macdonald would later discourage his son, Hugh John, from following a military career. And he wrote back to an inquirer, “There is no chance of there being any such thing in this country for a long time as a Profession of arms.”
This indifference is a bit puzzling, given that the military was British and hierarchical—two of Macdonald’s favourite qualities. He seemed to have a distaste for warfare itself. In no way was he a pacifist (as, then, almost no one was), but he never evinced any interest in the lives of heroes like Caesar or Napoleon. Although he loved the Empire, he was in no way an imperialist, and he later rejected appeals from London for Canadian troops to be sent to this or that patch of Imperial sand or rock.
In other respects Macdonald’s self-appointment was well merited. He knew more about British politics, as was now of critical importance, than anyone else in Canada. He was also well regarded by Britain’s representative—Lord Monck, who had just succeeded Head as governor general, was an admirer of Macdonald, although far from an uncritical one. Macdonald had already acted as virtual militia minister before creating the portfolio, sending regular memorandums to Monck suggesting, for instance, an increase in militia strength from 5,000 to 7,500 and proposing that railway workers be excluded from militia service, because “the withdrawal of any of them would weaken our lines of communication.” Once minister, Macdonald poured out memorandums on all kinds of militia topics and early in 1862 set up a high-level commission with himself as chair to recommend ways to improve the country’s defences.
For Canadians in the early 1860s, defence meant resisting any cross-border incursion. Yet, as few people had begun to recognize, the real threat was not that vast numbers of blue-uniformed Union soldiers might one day march across the border and, in the words of the New York Herald, “overrun the Province in three weeks”—as, most certainly, they could have done. It was, instead, that as soon as the Civil War was over, a transformed and powerful United States would emerge from the carnage.
The first appearance of this new United States was in its military guise. On the eve of the opening cannon-shot at Fort Sumter, the total U.S. army strength was nominally about thirteen thousand, but effectively was a good deal less, because the desertion rate was high and many soldiers were tied down by wars against the Indians. By comparison, there were then about four thousand redcoats in Canada, incomparably better trained and experienced. The odds were pretty even, particularly since more redcoats could be dispatched from elsewhere in the Empire. Less than two years later, the Federal Army had grown to more than eight hundred thousand—larger than any of Napoleon’s armies. It would grow eventually to more than two million men, well provisioned and with excellent weapons. Militarily, this United States was unbeatable within North America. And that was only the start. Given the power and energy it was displaying in the Civil War, the new United States would not only rearrange the geopolitical order on the North American continent but extend its reach far overseas. A new world order was taking shape, and Canada was going to be the first country to have to figure out how to accommodate itself to it.
Canada was no longer situated next door to a larger, richer neighbour. It was huddled alongside a colossus in the making—a colossus of unprecedented dynamism which, while waging the largest civil war in history, could still take in vast numbers of immigrants and begin to build a transcontinental railway. Soon after the war ended, all this dynamism would be applied to extending the country westwards to the Pacific, and a few decades later to building it up towards the sky. All this energy, much of it generated by a new entrepreneurial form of capitalism, would never flag: within half a century, the United States would be the world’s leading industrial power.
Macdonald was slow to appreciate the scale of the change. Unlike other Canadian leaders such as Brown and McGee, he had never worked in the United States. As a young lawyer, he had gone on holidays in northern New York State with clients, and he had carried Isabella on that long pilgrimage to Savannah. But all his political, commercial and social contacts were in London rather than in Washington or New York.
This orientation was the real limitation to Macdonald’s southwards gaze. He saw the United States through British eyes. During that 1845 trip south with Isabella, he went to a political meeting in Savannah at which a U.S. senator spoke. Afterwards he recounted to Margaret Greene, “He is evidently an able man, with great fluency and force of expression, but has the great fault of American speakers…of being too theatrical in his manner and turgid in his style.” Consistently, he saw just about any bottle south of the border as half-empty. As he commented to a friend, “one soon tires of Yankee humour—except in a book when you can lay it down if it wearies you.” About major matters, Macdonald could be crashingly wrong—as in his view of the presidency: “By the election of the President by a majority and for a short time, he is never the sovereign and chief of the nation,” he declared. “He is never looked up to by the whole population as the head and fount of the nation. He is at best but the successful leader of a party.”
By comparison, the British (and Canadian) system was near perfect, to Macdonald: “We shall have a Sovereign who is placed above the region of party…. Representatives of the Sovereign[the governors general] can act only on the advice of his ministers, those ministers being responsible to the people through Parliament.” He took for granted that just about anything British had to be the best: “I do not think there is anything in the world equal in real intellectual pleasure to meeting the public men of England. Their tone is so high and their mode of thinking is so correct
that it really elevates one.” As for the equivalent Americans, “the standard of excellence is far lower than the English one.”
Macdonald did sometimes look clearly across the border. From the start of the Civil War onwards, he repeatedly described the U.S. Constitution as “defective” because it was so decentralized, treating its member states as if they were sovereign and thereby giving legitimacy to the South’s secession. But he also appreciated that something out of the ordinary was being attempted there. “It has been said that the United States is a failure,” he said in one major speech. “On the contrary, I consider it a marvellous exhibition of human wisdom. It was as perfect as human wisdom could make it, and under it the American states prospered until very recently; but being the work of men, it had its defects.” Yet he could not help noticing all the defects below the border. American conventions to elect party leaders were “immoral” and “horrid,” resulting in presidential candidates being chosen “by cliques of the lowest politicians.” To reinforce his conviction of British superiority, many of the recent presidents produced by that system during his time—Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan—had indeed been nonentities.
To Macdonald, the United States was Canada’s “other”—the alien, the threat, or to put it most simply, the enemy. To him, Britain was Canada’s elder brother, at once protector and role model.
To appreciate the magnitude of what was happening south of the border required an observer with the imagination of a poet, or at least with the trend-spotting capabilities of an alert journalist. D’Arcy McGee saw straight into the future: “It is not the figures [of soldiers] which give the worst view…. It is the change which has taken place in the spirit of the people of the Northern states themselves. If we do not desire to become part and parcel of this people, we cannot overlook this, the greatest revolution of our times…. We run the risk of being swallowed up by the spirit of universal democracy that prevails in the United States.”
Macdonald and McGee disagreed on the way Canada could best accommodate itself to the challenge of living and surviving beside a colossus. McGee was now calling for “a new nationality,” or for common social and cultural characteristics that would make Canadians a distinct people. Macdonald’s solution was more narrowly political: Canada should remain as British as possible.
This disagreement was about means, not about the end they sought. Macdonald and McGee, who had started out as opponents, were now well on the way to becoming political allies and personal friends. Politically, they were both anti-Americans. Macdonald, because of his incomparably greater power, merits the title of Canada’s first anti-American; before Macdonald, lots of Canadians had disliked and feared the United States, but none, like him, raised it to the level of his principal political policy. What is really striking about Macdonald’s anti-Americanism was that the overwhelming majority of Canadians agreed with him.
In the mid-nineteenth century, anti-Americanism was one of two forces that held this “crazy-quilt” country together. The other, to be discussed later, was the mirror-image force of loyalty to Britain.
Anti-Americanism was one of the very few things that Canadians then agreed on—English Protestants no different from Canadien Catholics.*91 Its comprehensiveness defied common sense. A great many in Upper Canada were in fact Americans, not just the Loyalists but the ordinary settlers who early in the century constituted three-quarters of the province’s population. There were also many Irish, whose only pre-Canadian experience of the English had been of them as oppressors and occupiers. Yet the loyalty of these Americans and French and Irish never wavered—not even among the Green Irish, many of whose kin across the border were enlisting in the Federal Army to acquire military skills to be exercised later, either in Ireland or in Canada. At the same time, the idea of Canada uniting with the United States attracted astonishingly little support, given that it would obviously benefit Canadians economically. Only in the extremities, in British Columbia and in New Brunswick, was there any substantial support for annexation, and even there only by a minority.
The historic roots of anti-Americanism were straightforward. The Americans were revolutionaries who had rebelled against their King. They had tried twice to tear Canadians away from their loyalty to the Crown—in 1775, at their start of their Revolutionary War, when armies led by Generals Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery invaded Quebec, capturing Montreal and besieging Quebec City; and again, and within living memory, during the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson never entirely accepted the drawn outcome of the 1812 war, holding out in the peace negotiations for annexation to “liberate” Canada. Memories of the 1812 War had a powerful effect on Canadians’ consciousness. In the 1820s, soon after the Macdonald family arrived, strong public pressure developed to designate all American immigrant settlers, even those who had fought on Canada’s side during the war, as “Aliens” ineligible to run for office or to hold property. A watered-down Naturalization Act was finally passed in 1828, granting citizenship to all Americans who had settled in the country before 1820 but requiring an oath of allegiance from all newcomers.
The increased confidence in the loyalty of Americans living here wasn’t matched by any waning of suspicions about the intentions of America itself. The most forceful expression of this view was McGee’s: “They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and purchased it; and then picked a quarrel with Mexico, which ended by their getting California. They sometimes pretended to despise these [British North American] colonies as prizes beneath their ambition; but had we not the strong arm of England over us, we should not have had a separate existence.”
Some of the sources of mid-nineteenth-century anti-
Americanism in Canada would surprise and disconcert those in the twenty-first century who harbour the same views. Then, few felt any need to justify their attitude by attributing it to the doings of a particular president. Few felt any need to deny being anti-American themselves—particularly at a time when public debate was so decidedly ungenteel that explicit accusations of “traitor” were hurled routinely across the floor of the legislature.
One of the root sources of the shock and horror on this side of the border was Canadians’ concern about Americans’ lack of religiosity. Many Canadians—especially the Canadiens—regarded with deep misgivings the absolute division of church and state in the United States. There, no public money could be used to support faith-based schools. Deeply unsettling, further, was the fact that several of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson among them, had expressed doubts about the divinity of Christ. Most shocking was the discovery of the questionable Christianity of President James Polk.*92 On Polk’s death in 1849, the New York press reported that he had received a last-minute baptism. The Church magazine of Toronto commented: “For four years the neighbouring republic was governed by an unbaptized President…. The anomaly must bring disgrace with it, and possibly something worse, to a nation professing to honour Christianity at all…. What would be thought of the Monarch of the British Empire, if he or she had never been baptized? Could such a thing happen in our Monarch, or in any other Christian Kingdom in the world? No!” Then there was Archdeacon A.N. Bethune of York, who declared in a sermon that republicanism meant “the extravagant wanderings and never-ceasing cravings of an unbridled ambition,” while monarchy meant “the inestimable blessings of law, order, quiet and true religion.”
There was also lively concern in Canada about the experiment in multiculturalism being attempted south of the border. The Nova Scotia humorist Thomas Haliburton, author of the highly successful Sam Slick series, put into the mouth of one character a complaint about the “human refuse” in American cities. And, near the century’s end, the popular historian George R. Parkin wrote in disgust about “those pouring into the United States. Who were they? Icelanders, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, the Latin races of the South. People unaccustomed to self-government.”
As is more familiar, Canadians worried that Americans were inherently
violent. Canadians were aghast at the gangs in U.S. cities, at the lynchings of Negroes, at the wars against Indians. It was widely held by Canadians that Americans were licentious, the far greater frequency of divorce there being blamed on an excess of female independence. The cross-border differences were real; on its northern side there was no equivalent, even remotely, to the slaughter by the U.S. Army of forty-five thousand Indians during the nineteenth century; nor was there any equivalent to the slave system. (In Canada’s early years there had been some slaves, brought in by Loyalists or held over from the French regime, but the system was abolished in 1793,*93 two-thirds of a century ahead of the United States.)
The cardinal attitude of Canadians towards Americans in this century was crystal clear: they took for granted that they were morally superior. They also took for granted that their political and legal systems were superior. About other matters, from commerce to trade to education to scientific invention to the arts, they talked rather less. Not that all the talk north of the border was glib: the journalist Nicholas Flood Davin wrote shrewdly that, in an egalitarian democratic community, “where there is nothing to differentiate one man from another but wealth, nothing to aim at but wealth, character becomes materialized.”
This Canadian conviction of moral superiority is the answer to one of the most puzzling questions about nineteenth-century Canadians. It was posed by Sydney Wise and Craig Brown in their book Canada Views the United States. In it they described as “a seeming contradiction of nature, environment and proximity” the fact that “the bulk of Canadians, standing on the very threshold of liberty, were so little susceptible to American institutions.”
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